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Chapter 5. HMS Sturmer 1942

H.M.S. Sturmer, a British destroyer escort, rose and fell in mild summer seas while pouring out a long, thick banner of black smoke from her single stack. A thirty-year-old U.S. naval officer and, by turns, his top secret Huff Duff equipment, sailed unceremoniously through the air in a bosun’s chair from a U.S. destroyer. A young clockmaker and trainee teacher from New England, he’d never been farther from home than a two-hour train ride to New York City or Boston. He’d been commissioned in the U.S. Navy only a year ago, and found global warfare a breathtaking adventure. Bloody and scary though it be, the war took him far from his land of quiet village greens and white-steepled churches. It also took him from a future he found stifling, with a beautiful but root-bound high school sweetheart and a choice of equally grim careers—either continuing to make clocks in a brick, Victorian-era factory on a Dickensian-turgid river, or teaching science and engineering in a similar building once he finished his four year degree at Teacher’s College. The future yawned before him, dark and mysterious, and he somehow felt there must be something more than what New Haven had to offer.

Wearing a yellow oilcloth jacket and boots over his dark blue uniform, Tim gripped harsh canvas straps as sailors on both sides guided him on his perilous path. More than 100 feet below were the foam-laced waters of the Atlantic. Lieutenant (j.g.) Tim Nordhall was a good swimmer, having grown up lobstering and oystering in the groins and coves of his native New Haven. He didn’t fear the water but regarded with alarm the steep gray-rusty iron sides and rails of the two ships rocking in close proximity to each other on a sea that seemed to snort and buck like a nervous mustang. One hit against those steel plates, and he was as good as gone. But the ordeal was over in less than five minutes as he stepped on board and saluted the ship’s colors, requesting permission to come on board in time-honored etiquette.

H.M.S. Sturmer was a 306-foot long River Class frigate—one of hundreds hastily riveted together at John Brown shipyard as U-boot kills reached frightful proportions. She was a destroyer escort, a smaller and slower version of the destroyer, intended to escort convoys through treacherous waters. Capable of making 20 knots, she carried two paired three-inch deck guns, one fore, one aft, and twin torpedo launching tubes.

The British officers welcomed Tim with grins and handshakes. Their grizzled beards and sun-reddened cheeks revealed rough humor and camaraderie. They wore tan loden overcoats and navy-gray shallow helmets, as well as binoculars and web gear. Tim’s sea bag followed across. A sailor carried it below to Tim’s cabin. The Brits were seasoned warriors, always looking for the slightest edge against their merciless U-boot adversaries. They pumped Tim for information about the new class of Huff Duff coming across in wooden crates. Royal Navy sailors swarmed around the equipment, and several bearded warrant officers already had technical manuals in hand as they directed the crates to be moved amidships for mounting on the small deck platform.

Tim found his hosts most congenial. A bosun’s mate saw him to his small cabin near the captain’s. It was something of an honor to have one’s own niche in a ship this small, with 140 men jammed on her in every oily nook and cranny. The ship was a coal-burner, and when cruising at full steam she laid down a long black plume of smoke that left soot and tar on every surface.

Within a day, the warrants had Tim’s new Huff Duff in its final operational shakedown phase. Tim found them to be highly competent technicians, while he himself was a two-year college man with a rudimentary engineering background that he found barely matched theirs. They were a grinning, feisty lot, these Brits. There was always someone with a joke, or a harmonica, or a story about home. The working hours were endless, and sleep came in small bursts here and there, but the men were young and would just as soon stop for a game of cards. The daily grog ration lightened things a bit, though Tim wasn’t much of a drinker or smoker. He ended up telling about girls back home, particularly Sally Levesque who taught English at Hillhouse High School and lived in Hamden. Tim related his dissatisfaction with life as it appeared to be laid out for him—pretty redhead and all. Sometimes, he dreamed of joining a theater company and performing or writing or at least managing stage props—but that, and writing original plays or novels, was entirely outside his social class and framework. Growing up, he would have been ridiculed and hounded had he strayed from the norms—so his theater ambition would probably forever remain a deflected dream. He substituted for this with a love of movies—and taking pretty girls to them turned out to be quite pleasurable. Still, in his blood was that raw, industrial scenery that was today the latest craze—the stage play of the imagination, played with few or no props, left only to words, gestures, and imagination while the audience sat around in a circle, as if at a Stone Age campfire. Several men were from London, a city of history and theaters. They knew of New York City, and Broadway—and New Haven’s famous off-Broadway Schubert Theater, where many a famous stage production went through its pre-New York sea trials. New Haven, furthermore, home of Yale University, was a city of high culture if a person could step across the divide between town and gown. Tim’s compromise, dished out by life and circumstance, had been to attend teacher’s college. Maybe after the war he’d teach. But the Navy had given him a whole new set of options. The clock maker of New Haven was now a technical intelligence expert in the U.S. Navy, with breath-taking new possibilities for growth and advancement. He was trapped in a never-land between land and sea, between Sally and a cold bunk, between life and theater, between fact and fiction, between war and peace, betwixt and between. In a way, it was exciting to live from moment to moment. War did that to a man’s life. It also took life, and rarely gave it back. The Brits, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Manx, even an Indian and a South African, and two Canadians of no discernible ‘accent,’ all had their stories to tell as well. If nothing else, he was learning that it was a small world, and that people everywhere had about the same hopes and dreams. Even, probably, the Germans and the Japs, one supposed, though one never got to talk to one, and vice-versa. There was a lot to wonder about. Many a man lay awake late at night, even dog tired after working a long watch with little relief or even decent grub. The twilight bunks were lit with a reddish glow here, there, as a man lay with one arm behind his head and looked into the blackness above, pondering his place in the universe. Whatever one might say about being at sea during a shooting war, it made you think. It made you reconsider everything, and wonder a lot.

Tim learned about Jerry Harris’s blonde Edna in Manchester, who had a cage full of finches that enjoyed sitting in the window twittering to the Sunday morning church bells on a sunny day. And Ben Meyer’s Shula who was already assistant bookkeeper in the family carpet business in Southwark. Or Harvey Kinnan’s red-haired Nuala who was a nurse at Guy’s Hospital and had lost a hand in the Blitz but was still a lovely bird in her whites. “Do you plan to go back and wed your Sally then?” Harvey would ask, his young freckled face wide with innocence and his mouth agape to reveal a missing middle tooth. Dark-bearded Jerry Harris seemed a more dour man who tended to stare, but Tim imagined Edna with her finches must keep him in line, like a sunbeam across his glowering stare. About Sally Tim did not have an honest answer, either for himself or Harv. When you got away from home, Tim was discovering, you started to change, and the ones you left behind often did not change with you. His letter exchanges with Sally had begun to wane after the first year away.