31 August 2009
Punchy
(USCG Seaman 2/c John “Punchy” Cullen, 1942)
It is cool outside, for the last day of August, and if you had not noticed, it's Monday. I feel a little punchy. Not enough sleep, I fear.
It was a nice enough weekend, but the Blackberry kept buzzing right through and there was never a moment when I was not supposed to be doing something different. I found a solution for a couple hours on Sunday; I put the Blackberry in the cargo pocket of my shorts and climbed into the sleek German-engineered Hubrismobile and put the top down.
I roared with Teutonic fury down to Brandy Station with the Beatles #1 hits on the CD player at full blast. There is no cell coverage down at the farm, and I was off the grid.
The Germans make great machines, and I while I was screaming along with old music as the rolling green fields flashed by, I thought about all that efficiency put to such awful uses.
I could launch right into the tale, all linear and factual, but that is not how life works. Sometimes you cannot understand it until it is all done, and you can look back and put all the parts together in a pretty package. While it is happening, it is neither neat, nor pretty, nor do you even know that it is over when it is done.
That sums up the first year of the war for the American people. The shock came at Pearl, with the demonstration of the marvelous Japanese technology at the end of the first week of December. Things began to roll immediately, though it took some time for action to meet veiled dread.
Hitler declared war on the United States on the 11th; he ordered Admiral Donitz to dispatch submarines on combat patrol to the waters from New York to the Gulf Coast. The first five U-Boats- the big guys, the long-range Type IX boats- arrived on-station in the second week of January, 1942.
Now remember, the U-boats had been merrily sinking ships in the mid-Atlantic since September of 1939; our Amero-centric view of history has a bit of an imbalance here. The Germans were ready, and we were not. Not even close.
When the battle-tested Kriegsmarine skippers raised their periscopes to seek prey, they were amazed to see the dark outlines of their targets brightly outlined by the lights of the cities, and the cargo ships were sitting ducks to the swiftly efficient German torpedoes.
That is when the war for the Atlantic began, and six months later 397 merchant ships amounting to two million tons displacement had raised the level of the ocean not one bit as they sank to the bottom.
If the Germans were amazed at the complacent posture of America, you must imagine what it was like to look out to sea from Long island and see the fires raging on the ships so close to shore, and see the oil and wreckage and bodies wash up in the gray surf.
See, this is the part where the dry history of the great conflict needs to be put aside. The memories of the time, unwrapped from those who lived it, make for better context.
My uncle Jim used to tell me of watching the death of the ships at sea. He was old enough that he remembered the curiosity of the U-boats from the First War, but the scenes from 1942 were much more vivid and frightening. America had been struck in the Pacific and now right off New York, this was something bigger and much more intimate and scary than the war against the Kaiser.
Hundreds of thousands of young men and women dropped what they were doing and put on the uniform. A pal told me the story of his family this way:
“My mother was one of the first commissioned women Coast Guard Reserve officers. They were called “SPARS,” which was derived from the Coastie motto “Semper Peratus.” His dad had been a practicing lawyer before Pearl Harbor, and he enlisted and rose to become a Chief Petty Officer and special aid to the Admiral who ran Coast Guard District THREE in New York.”
“My mother was also assigned to that district, and the whole rational behind the SPARS program was to free up the men from shore duty so they could get to sea. Of all things, she was assigned to be the officer for the District Motor Pool.”
“The Motor Pool was where they “buried” guys unfit for regular duty, or politically influential sailors whose families didn’t want them in combat. My father placed several such scions’ sons in the Motor Pool, and the Coast Guard (part of the Navy during wartime) placed its Section 8, and battle-fatigued crazy-type guys in the motor pool where they could do little damage.”
“One of the Pool sailors was “Punchy,” or Seaman Deuce John Cullen. Mom said he was in fact punchy and a little mental. The USCG and Navy suspected the Germans were landing spies around Long Island with some regularity. There was a story that some U-Boat commanders who had been educated at Columbia used to come down the Long Island Sound, come ashore in rubber boats at night in Cold Spring Harbor, take the Long Island Railroad down from Oyster Bay into the City, and take in dinner and a show on Broadway.”
“Now, German records captured after the war did not show that ever happened. But it is certainly what people thought at the time, and I don’t suppose a real German U-boat commander would have put it in his war report.”
“Anyway, as a TAD- temporary additional duty- USCG Motor Pool sailors were assigned to walk the desolate beaches of Long Island, day and night, to patrol for German interlopers.”
“My mother’s Motor Pool assigned Punchy to the Amagansett, Long Island Atlantic Ocean beach walk patrol, where he could do no damage to himself or anyone else. I don’t think they even allowed him to carry a .45 on patrol. He had some flares and a flashlight, and that was about right for his six mile walk on the beach.”
“It was late in the evening when he set off, and it was not until just after midnight that he caught a whiff of diesel fuel in the air, and heard the sound of a laboring precision-made engine out in the fog.”
Punchy did not know that Kapitan-Lieutnant Hans-Heinz Linder had inadvertently grounded the U-202 in a sand bank in process of getting his special cargo up on deck with their boxes and rubber raft. He was pretty frantic to get his boat out of the sand, and was lucky he had that he had that Krupp Germaniawerft AG engine to pull him off."
“The smell and sound was suspicious. Punchy’s walk on the beach was about to get pretty strange He wound up getting the Legion of Merit for it, which is not bad for a Seaman Deuce armed only with a flashlight.”
I’ll tell you more about that, and how he met the Nazis tomorrow. It is Monday, remember? I have to get back to work on the god-damned proposal.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra and NILO Ha Tien
www.vicsocotra.com