War Stories III (27 page)

The USS
Menges
, DE-320, was one of more than 500 destroyer escorts built in U.S. shipyards between 1943 and the end of the war. Captained and crewed by the U.S. Coast Guard, the
Menges
—with Lt. (JG) Ed Nash aboard as gunnery officer—was assigned to convoy escort duty shortly after she was commissioned in the autumn of '43. The experiences Nash and his shipmates had aboard the
Menges
were typical of the perils faced by merchantmen and the crews of the little ships that protected them.

Nash was a green young officer just out of OCS and advanced training at the Navy School in Miami. He joined a crew of the newly commissioned USS
Menges
in late fall of 1943, and took the ship for its shakedown cruise
out of Bermuda during the next two months. By early April 1944 he was still getting used to the rigorous life of a seaman on the
Menges,
doing convoy escort duty from the Norfolk to Gibraltar and back.

The USS
Menges
was eventually towed back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where the stern of another damaged DE was welded to her hull. She finished the war as she had started it—doing convoy duty in the Atlantic. Ed Nash was reassigned to an 83-foot Coast Guard cutter and participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

The German U-boat fleet that had been such a prominent threat to the survival of Britain earlier in the war was slowly ground down by Allied convoys, long-range patrol aircraft, and eventually, by the introduction of escort carriers and “hunter-killer” units—dispatched not to defend convoys, but to hunt down and destroy enemy submarines.

Though the U-boats sent to sea by Admiral Dönitz would attack combatants like the USS
Menges
when necessity or opportunity arose, their preferred targets were merchant ships. By the end of the war 4,786 merchant vessels flagged to the nations of the British Empire would lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, along with 578 U.S.-flagged merchant ships. More than 80,000 Allied Merchant Mariners were missing, dead, or prisoners of war. The carnage was horrific—but it was the only way to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

There is one other sad footnote to the blood-sacrifice made by the American Merchant Mariners. When the war was over, the survivors who had “delivered the tools of war” weren't accorded the status of veterans. Though they had been subject to all the hardships, dangers, and privations of any man in uniform, they were denied the benefits afforded veterans—including the GI Bill. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan finally awarded the recognition that the World War II Merchant Mariners deserved—forty-three years after the war.

CHAPTER 10

WAR ON THE HOME FRONT 1941–1945

W
hen Hitler started World War II by invading Poland in the summer of 1939, America was lagging behind the rest of the western world in emerging from the chronic, decade-long economic upheaval that had begun with the stock market crash of 1929. The worldwide “Great Depression” had created massive unemployment, bank failures, and the collapse of market value for nearly every commodity. Millions of Americans lost jobs, homes, farms, and businesses as banks foreclosed on loans and mortgages in an effort to survive.

In the United States, the effects of the global economic collapse were aggravated by a severe drought that ruined agricultural productivity in the southwestern plains. Hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families lost everything in the “Dust Bowl.” By the mid to late 1930s, many of these farm families had migrated west, searching vainly for jobs and a homestead.

The Roosevelt administration's response to the economic crisis may well have exacerbated and prolonged the crisis in the United States. FDR's National Recovery Administration, colossal federal spending—and debt—along with make-work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps,
the Works Projects Administration and “New Deal” social programs were far less effective in stimulating the U.S. economy than more conventional, market-based initiatives undertaken in Britain and France. And unlike Britain and France—which both initiated economically invigorating military build-ups as Hitler became more threatening in 1936—the U.S. made no such significant investments.

In Germany, Hitler applied his National Socialist theories to mobilize the nation to his grand design. Like Roosevelt, he too created massive public-works projects—the
Autobahn,
upgraded railways, new bridges, and enormous stadiums and parade fields to showcase his Third Reich. As with military conscription, most of these projects—like the industrial expansion necessary for the production of weapons, munitions, aircraft, and ships—had an almost immediate, positive effect on the German economy.

In the U.S., Roosevelt's public works projects—the Tennessee Valley Authority being the largest—had the effect of creating upwards of 40,000 jobs. But the full economic and military benefits of these colossal endeavors on the broader population would not be realized until the 1940s.