Although he was no longer in the navy, or even on the reserve list, Adm. John Brentwood, retired, felt that his job as one of the managing directors of the New York Port Authority inextricably linked him with two of his three sons and his daughter. The connection with his son Robert on the Roosevelt was obvious to anyone familiar with the U.S. Navy’s “rollover” policy. This “sea lift” of men and materiel to reinforce Western Europe depended heavily on both the day-to-day administration of the U.S. home ports as well as on the protection afforded the convoys by submarines like the Roosevelt.
It was not a glamorous job at the Port Authority — not much media coverage. It was visual, all right, with the scores of ships passing through, but once you’d shot that, the real bureaucratic work of the Port Authority disappeared into overcrowded offices and banks of computers spewing out availability of loading cranes, tonnage, union liaison status boards, availability of docks, tide changes, and the other thousands of seagoing craft that had to be kept clear of the convoy-marshaling areas, where everything from condoms and microchips to yeast, sugar, and howitzer shells had to be crated, stored, counted, loaded, and transported as fast and efficiently as possible — while at the same time taking care to vary the departure times and convoy routes as much as possible to confuse any enemy sub packs lying in wait in the deep Atlantic trenches off the eastern seaboard.
It wasn’t glamorous work for John Brentwood and his staff, their responsibilities disproportionate to the pay and the virtual lack of recognition. Yet for every dozen ships they managed to load and send off without a hitch, one mistake could make the news, and if the navy censor cut the story it would quickly get around the docks anyway, making the Port Authority a butt of more jokes about bureaucratic inefficiency.
One ship, the MV Nagata, a fifty-thousand-ton “Combo” or multipurpose oil/bulk cargo/container vessel, its bridge and stack in a stern housing and co-owned by a Japanese-U.S. conglomerate, was a case in point. The ship left New York harbor as part of Convoy 24 on the night of October 2, bound for Antwerp. Thirty-two hours and 461 miles later, the Nagata was off New England. While maintaining radio transmission silence, she received word from ACLANT— Allied Command Atlantic — that Russian and East German divisions, thrusting west from Hanover and wheeling on Osnabruck, had driven a wedge between the westernmost perimeter of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp. While the ports had not yet surrendered, it was believed this would only be a matter of time, so that now the convoys would have to head to Ostend seventy miles farmer west on the Belgian coast, to Dunkirk twenty-seven miles farther south, just over the Belgian-French border, or to Calais, another thirty-odd miles southwest of Dunkirk.
By this time, the MV Nagata was no longer over the relatively shallow Georges Bank but had passed over the divide between the continental shelf and the continental slope, and was now over the continental rise. In two hours she had passed from water no more than five hundred feet deep to the nine-thousand-foot depths of Heezen Canyon. While their sudden passage from shallow to deep water beneath them was unknown to most of the crew, on the bridge the watch knew, their silence palpable as they waited anxiously to reach the more powerful current of the Gulf Stream. This would aid the thirty-ship convoy as it passed over the undersea mountains that lay before the Sohm Abyssal Plain, where the greatest danger was a submarine that could be lying undetected for weeks, even since before the war started, sonar pulses from any convoy escort vessel looking for subs scattered by the natural obstruction of the undersea mountains.
Before joining Convoy 24, the Nagata had hauled electronics and assorted containerized cargo from Japan to the United States. But on this trip it was carrying replacement nine-thousand-pound-thrust GE-100 turbofan engines and other spare parts for the close-support A-10 Thunderbolt antitank aircraft, together with a million rounds of thirty-millimeter ammunition for the Thunderbolts’ multibarrel Gau cannon. In addition, its cargo consisted of five hundred MK-84 electro-optically guided bombs, and, in several “dry-maintained” holds, bulk goods and foodstuffs, from condoms and toilet paper to bread mix, flour, yeast, sugar, and freeze-dried combat rations.
As well as dispersing such cargo throughout the entire convoy so that if one ship was hit, the entire stock of any one item would not be lost, great care had been taken by John Brentwood and his staff with the loading of the bombs and ammunition on each ship. Wherever possible, the 6.06-by-12.19-meter containers of bombs and ammunition had been placed either side of the Nagata’s center line, the containers’ sides almost flush with her gunwales. Some low-flash-point bunker C oil, as well as highly flammable jet fuel, was being carried in wing tanks and tanks at both ends of the segmented cargo space. Oil tanks nearest the stern were well insulated by cofferdams, or double-watertight bulkheads, against the possibility of fire spreading from engine and pump rooms.
The Nagata’s problems began as Convoy 24 began encountering increasingly rough seas off Newfoundland. A small fissure had developed at the bottom of the Nagata’s five and six bulk cargo tanks on the starboard side, abaft the starboard beam. Though seawater was coming through and none of the crew could see how long it had been flowing in, it wasn’t viewed by the captain as a major problem as the pumps were easily handling it. However, because of the warm, dry air being continuously circulated throughout the dry bulk cargo tanks and other storage areas to keep dry everything from electronics and ammunition to yeast, a massive oven effect had been created, part of the fissure in the hull having penetrated the starboard walls as well as the bottom of tanks five and six, containing sugar and yeast.
It was a disaster that any housewife might have predicted but which the New York Port Authority, beset by a multitude of other problems, had, not surprisingly, overlooked. By 4:00 a.m. enough of the huge tanks of damp sugar and yeast had combined in the dry, warm air to create enormous pressures. And by the time the bridge sensed the buckling of the plates under the pressure within the tightly sealed tanks, it was too late; the longitudinal steel stiffeners reinforcing both the inside and outside plates retained their integrity, but the seams were stressed beyond their limit.
Soon, high-pressure pipes burst and there was a low whoomp from down below in the engine room, the needles of the “explosimeters,” or gas-pressure gauges, for tanks five, six — and now tank four, buckling under the abnormally high “back” pressure of tanks five and six — moved into the red. Then, in the pitch darkness, there was a sound like a rocket taking off, but no flame, as one of the Butterworth fuel tank covers whistled high into the night and everything began shuddering, the Nagata listing hard astarboard, its four tank developing a deck blister on the starboard side of the ship.
“She’s about to blow!” the starboard lookout informed the master. “Her weight’s shifting like a beanbag.”
The fuel tank didn’t blow, but its seams gave way, the high octane spewing into the sea. The captain could do little, for like most of the big Combo carriers, which relied on shore-based suction pipes for loading and unloading bulk cargo, the Nagata had derricks only midships and at the forecastle, and these were surrounded by stacked and lashed containers. Helpless to do anything about the mountain of yeast and sugar now growing like some enormous amoeba, or vast cake overspilling its pan, shifting the ship’s center of gravity dangerously, all he could do was try to vent some of the bunker C and more of the octane to compensate for the starboard list.
Twenty minutes later, at 0426, the Nagata’s master gave orders for his crew of thirty to abandon ship and, refusing to break radio silence, alerted the convoy leader by signal lamp, allowing only one repeat of his SOS, and then, opening all cocks, he scuttled his ship rather than run the risk of leaving her afloat as a half-sunken hazard to the other convoys en route to and from Fortress Europe. In obeisance to the ancient and unwritten law of the sea and the traditional precepts of the Japanese code of honor, he remained aboard, after seeing all his men safely off in the Beaufort rafts, and went down with his ship.
The loss in equipment was enormous, for while there were other spare parts for the A-10 Thunderbolts in the convoy, the Nagata had been carrying the lion’s share of A-10 replacements — engines, ammunition, bombs, and electronic “boards.” Enough to have reequipped seventy of the tank-killing Thunderbolts, which, coming in low at four hundred miles an hour, often no more than two hundred feet above the ground and loaded with six and a half tons of bombs with three-second BPSM — best possible safety margin — had proven critical in slowing the Soviet surge through the Fulda Gap.
Although they had managed to take out only two thousand Russian tanks, a third of the Soviet force, the Thunderbolts held a special place in the affections of the half million men in the British Army of the Rhine, the American Fifth, and the German Twelfth. Though the NATO soldiers had been pushed back almost a hundred miles from the prewar NATO/ Soviet line, and though they were fighting for their lives in one of the fiercest combats ever recorded in modern history, they owed what life they had to the bravery of the Thunderbolt pilots and the astonishing maneuverability of an aircraft which, swooping down with its two high-mounted rear engines, could absorb the kind of punishment that would have downed the “supersonics” on the first pass.
The loss of the Nagata was a hard lesson for everyone, from John Brentwood at the New York Port Authority to the naval planners in Norfolk, Virginia. Reams of new instructions regarding the loading of mixed cargo were issued along with an order to all NATO and “associated merchant marine” ships that ship’s masters were not required to die with their ship. Captains, like pilots, were in short supply.
The consequence of this order would be a spread of what, ironically, became known as the “Nagata defense” in courts-martial where it was charged ships could have been saved had the captain and crew remained. It was an argument the counsel for the defense planned to use in the ongoing inquiry into the sinking of the fast guided-missile frigate USS Blaine off Korea. Ray Brentwood, however, refused to consider it, arguing that this defense would require him admitting that he gave the order to abandon ship when in fact he said that, to his recollection, he had not. The defense counsel, once again, had to resume the task of trying to find a witness who would corroborate Ray Brentwood’s stand. It was thought at least six other men, including the OOD who thought he’d been given the order, were on the bridge when the North Korean missile had hit, but three of them had been killed outright, two dying later of burns to 80 percent of their bodies; the remaining sailor and ensign, Mahler, was still fighting for his life in Honolulu’s Veterans’ Hospital, having been judged too ill to be flown on to La Jolla’s Veterans’ burn unit.
Another outcome of the Nagata incident was that despite the heroic efforts of the convoys, the frontline soldiers, though representing only one-tenth of the total force, nine out of ten men required to support one soldier at the front, could no longer be guaranteed the regulation six pounds of food per man per day. And much of the bread the Western armies would be eating from now on would be flat. The loss of the Nagata also meant that the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket would shrink further without the vital resupply for the tank-killing A-10s.
The other lesson from Convoy 24 was a reminder to all NATO commanders that any man guilty of self-inflicted wounds would not only be court-martialed, but his next of kin would forfeit receipt of all military pensions. The rule, of course, was already on the books of NATO’s armies, but it was the most diplomatic way that ACLANT could think of conveying to their Japanese allies that choosing death rather than withdrawal or a surrender was not in the defensive interest of the Allied cause. The more enemy troops that the Allies could tie up with either delaying tactics or surrender, the better.
The difficulty of getting this message across, however, was compounded by the fact that, following a failed counterattack by the German Second Army and the American First against the Soviet’s southern flank ninety miles west of Prague, 321 American and West German prisoners of war had been summarily executed by the Stasi—the supposedly disbanded secret police of what was formerly East Germany, many of its members still working for Moscow.