WWII Navy vet recalls 46 days lost at sea

Lost at sea

After a night on the run, they saw dawn break — but it didn’t bring them much to be thankful about. They ransacked the lifeboat, taking an inventory of the available food rations and emergency supplies. They banked on getting picked up in two or three days.

Immediately, it became clear that the mix of Navy Armed Guardsmen and workaday merchant mariners would create two factions aboard the ship. Many of the merchant marines were foreign, and not all of them spoke English.

“We didn’t take too much of their talk, because there were five of them and six of us — and we had the pistol. The Armed Guard had the ammunition. We told them, ‘We are going to run this boat, and we’re going to run it the right way,’” Becker said. In hindsight, the Navy men probably had less seagoing experience than the other faction. “Not being a bunch of sailors, we didn’t know right from wrong, I don’t think.”

A Norwegian merchant sailor ended up keeping the peace onboard. “He knew what he was talking about. He knew the ocean, and he’d worked on the ocean all his life. And he saw that we had no sail on that lifeboat. We had no way to steer. We had no rudder — nothing.”

Becker credits the Norwegian with saving their lives. Without much thought, the sailor fashioned a rudder, anchor and a sail out of scraps, boards, rope and old canvas on the lifeboat. He made the dinghy into a functioning, navigable sailboat.

Those two or three days came and went. They hadn’t seen anything to give them hope.

“We sailed for probably three weeks before we saw anything. And then, this one day we sitting just doing nothing, and we saw a ship — a cargo ship. We fired our very pistols up in the air, trying to get their attention, shooting and hollering and what have you. They paid no attention to us — none whatsoever — and kept right on going.”

Becker still doesn’t know why that first ship abandoned them. During wartime, people were cautious to the point of paranoia on the open seas. He thinks that ship thought they were a German decoy or bad guys looking to board. “That ship was not stopping.”

Already more than 21 days at sea and skipped over on their first chance of rescue, the City of Flint survivors headed into terrible storms. “This was right in the middle of winter, and the North Atlantic is real rough at that time of year. We went through storms that were ungodly.”

At this point, when hope seemed the dimmest, the mood darkened and they lost a man. “He’d been torpedoed twice before. He wasn’t much help to us, but we had to take care of him. We were all in the boat, bailing the boat or steering the boat, doing what you could do, and this guy just stood up and overboard he went. We never saw him again.”

Becker still isn’t sure exactly why the guy did it — if he’d lost hope and committed suicide. “He’d either just given up or was scared to death. He just disappeared.”

The struggle for survival

When the storms calmed in the morning, the men reassessed the situation. They looked at their food. After almost a month, they didn’t have much.

“We could get water, because we used to catch water off the sail and dump it in the water tank. So we had plenty of water,” he said. “Then the Norwegian said, ‘Another way you can get water is when we see seaweed, if we see it (and we didn’t see much of it) you should capture it and get it in the boat. Because it has little berries in it, and if you take those berries off and eat it they’re full of fresh water.’

“After that, no seaweed got by us. That boat would look like a hay wagon at times.”

They had limited solid food — a dwindling supply of Pemmican, which was dried, canned pork used for emergency rations. Around them the abundant fish teaming in the ocean started to look inviting — even if they couldn’t cook it. What should have been easy wasn’t. They had to relearn how to fish in a survival scenario.

“We tried like crazy,” said Becker. “The first thing we caught was a big barracuda. The thing was about three foot long, and you don’t mess with a barracuda. Between all the guys, we got the stupid thing in the boat — and it was thrashing around in the boat,” he said. “We couldn’t kill it, because if we hit it with anything and missed we could knock a hole in the bottom of the boat.”

Barracuda have elongated, missile-like bodies and razor teeth. They’re a ferocious saltwater parallel to the musky. Under the best of circumstances, barracuda tend to jump and thrash when brought into the boat, biting at the fishermen who haul them in. With no way to stop the fish, the men had to hold it down for the better part of a day — until the barracuda died in their arms — before they could eat it raw.