The Gwendolyne
By Harry Buschman
The "Gwendolyne" was a net tender, not really a fighting ship. It slept three. But no one had ever spent a night on it. It had a small galley and a radio that none of the crew could get to work. Except for three WW I Colt revolvers, similar to those used in the Spanish-American War, it carried no armament.
During World War II, many harbors were protected
by tiny boats like the
Gwendolyne. A swinging net or gate was drawn across the access to the ocean
and prevented the entrance of enemy submarines. They were effective only if
the entrance was narrow, major harbors were too wide so they were limited to
places like Portsmouth Harbor up in New Hampshire for instance. Tech Sergeant
Lee McNamara was the 'Captain' of the Gwendolyne and tended the net across the
mouth of the Piscataqua River at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor.
If, through inattention on the part of the
crew, an enemy submarine gained
entrance to the Piscataqua river, it would have to negotiate 15 miles of rock
lined and rock bottomed waterway. Rocky shoals, and right angle turns made passage
up to the naval base a tricky course for any mariner -- it would have been a
nightmare for the underwater crew of a submarine. Even if they were successful
and fulfilled their mission, they would have to fight their way back out again.
But, leaving no stone unturned, the Allied Command thought it necessary to station
Sergeant McNamara, his crew, and the good ship Gwendolyne on net duty. In addition
to keeping German submarines at bay it succeeded in infuriating the local fishermen,
who could not sail in and out with their catches as they pleased.
Sergeant McNamara was pushing sixty. He was
a World War I veteran and lived
in nearby Kittery, Maine. He and his wife, Martha, had six children and ran
a two acre root vegetable farm. He knew the waters of the Piscataqua as well
as any man thereabouts. Colonel Watt, from the Harbor Defenses of Portsmouth
showed up at his door shortly after Pearl Harbor and asked him to re-enlist.
It was a Machiavellian business. The war would
be over before a man could be
trained for such a job. Trawlers and lobster fishermen had to continue operations
outside the net as far as Cape Neddick to the north and Cape Ann to the south.
They had to come and go, war or no war, and Lee McNamara knew
all of them. If the navy took over they would have assigned some dumb ensign
Pulver to the job and the fishing industry would grind to a halt. Seafood restaurants
from Portland to Boston could not exist without their cod, striped bass, and
lobsters. An enemy submarine in the harbor would have been
preferable.
McNamara was not a particularly patriotic man.
He was a Yankee, a staunch
defender of human rights, and looked with a Yankee's eye at any hint of
government restraint -- allied or axis. But Colonel Watt had sold insurance
to tougher men than McNamara and by invoking the "old boy" technique,
he
broke him down. If McNamara could help, he would, and since he could earn a
Master Sergeant's pay and another army pension without risking his family and
himself, he saw no reason to refuse. He signed up -- all five feet four and
275 pounds of him.
The Harbor Defenses issued him two young crewmen,
(sons of New Hampshire
Democratic Congressmen) and a newly painted boat of doubtful bloodline. It
was rechristened the "Gwendolyne." Each of the two young crewmen men
were
issued a .45 caliber revolver, a firearm neither of them had seen before --
they were given a week's target practice at the Harbor Defense post, and although
each received credit on his service record for qualifying satisfactorily with
the weapon, neither had hit a target during the week's practice. Both of them
returned to ship with numb forefingers.
For nearly three years Tech Sergeant McNamara
and his crew pushed off from
the dock at Fort Foster in Kittery at the crack of dawn and headed for the net's
gate. The lobster boats and fishing trawlers would already be waiting for them
impatiently, and choice Yankee expletives would be hurled at them as McNamara
and the Gwendolyne's crew fumbled with the complicated lock mechanism. They
would open it a crack, and the fishing fleet would scuttle through. The Gwendolyne
would then stand watchfully by all day until their return in late afternoon.
Then the process would be repeated in reverse.
The Nazi "Wolf Pack" paid little
heed to the goings on in Portsmouth Harbor.
Their assignment was to raid convoys far out at sea. A thirty foot lobster boat
is not a prime target unless it's cargo can be captured and eaten. Alternatively,
the prospect of sailing up the Piscataqua to destroy the shipyard and getting
back out again was not on its agenda. McNamara's three long years, therefore,
seemed a waste of time and money.
In the local Portsmouth barrooms McNamara and his crew were often belittled by the hard working fishermen of Portsmouth. The lonely days at the Piscataqua gate and the growing hostility of his old neighbors in town alienated him from the people he used to know as friends, so he spent his nights at home. His crewmen were quartered on the Gwendolyne, and although they sneaked into town occasionally disguised as local fishermen, they would often spend the evening with the McNamara's. Lee McNamara's two oldest daughters were of marriageable age, and with Congressmen for father's-in-law it would have pleased him no end to play Cupid. Unfortunately, both sisters were short and fat like their father and inherited their mother's sharp tongue.
But, as history tells us, fighting men and material became exhausted, and the war in Europe ground to a conclusion. When it did, many U-boats were stranded at sea. Their Fuhrer was dead in a Berlin bunker and supply ships would no longer seek them out to refuel them and replenish their dwindling provisions. Hans Ottermann von Freiberg was one of these. Hans and his crew were fresh out of everything and if they were not to starve at sea they decided to throw themselves at the mercy of their cursed Yankee conquerors. Portsmouth harbor was just twenty nautical miles southwest of them.
So Hans Ottermann surfaced on a warm August
afternoon at the entrance to the
Portsmouth Harbor gate almost in the face of Technical Sergeant Lee McNamara
and his stalwart crew of two. Ottermann's three-inch cannon was pointed backward
at his own conning tower and the last of his nearly white T-shirts was hastily
run up the mast. McNamara was not prepared for such an event, and he quickly
unholstered his revolver and squeezed himself through the cabin door. Why had
they not prepared him for such an eventuality! Training for active duty always
omits the unthinkable possibility of peace. Captain Ottermann himself was as
unprepared as Captain McNamara and the two of them faced each other like strangers
at a cocktail party with nothing to say.
Captain Ottermann with the wind behind him,
bellowed, "Ich gebe mein Schiff
und Mannschaft uber." in the downwind direction of the Gwendolyne, hoping
for a sportsmanlike acceptance from his former adversary. Instead, he was
astonished to see Captain McNamara draw his service revolver, and point it in
his general direction in an attempt to sink his submarine.
The revolver would not fire. It had been in McNamara's holster for three years, and exposed to the salt spray of Portsmouth harbor. It was as deadly as a water pistol. The situation had its dangerous aspect -- who knows, like a smoldering brush fire, another war could well have started again. While both men were aware that the present war had played itself out, neither of them knew how to make a peaceful gesture to the other.
Moreover, the lobster fishermen had completed
their day's work, and they were
gathering at the gate anxious to beat each other to the many hotels and seafood
restaurants that have made Portsmouth and Kittery famous for food in both war
and peace. There were fourteen of them with Captain Ottermann jockeying in the
tricky tidal currents for a prime position when the gate opened and Sgt. McNamara
was trying vainly to keep things under control. He had long since put his useless
revolver away and was now trying to raise someone on his equally useless radio.
That, too, had not been used in the three years he'd been at sea and even though
he beat on it with the butt of his useless revolver, he couldn't get it to work.
The colorful obscenities voiced by Yankee seamen and Teutonic submariners were
thick as broadsides in the August air.
To the vast relief of Sgt. McNamara and the future peace of the world in general, the situation was spotted by the Harbor Defenses of Portsmouth personnel and the Coast Guard forces in Fort Constitution. Had they been on the ball earlier, their sophisticated underwater sonar would have informed them of the submarine's presence in their area before the unpleasantness began. But -- better late than never.
Reinforcements were dispatched to the scene
-- an armada of outdated and
unseaworthy craft were sent to the aid of Sgt. McNamara. The Gwendolyne was
told to "give way," (the precise words were more in the form of language
used by taxi drivers in the pick-up lane at Kennedy International Airport).
Captain Ottermann along with the gaggle of overloaded lobster boats were escorted
to the Portsmouth Navy Yard. It made a memorable tableau, one that elderly residents
at that end of the Piscataqua River still recall with warm affection.
Captain Ottermann and his crew had undoubtedly
sent many ships to the bottom. He may have widowed many wives and destroyed
much needed allied war material. But looking back on it after fifty years a
reasonable person might say it was his duty to do so. Cest la guerre! Those
tragedies of war have faded and are set aside in the dusty bins of history.
But on that one warm summer afternoon, Captain Ottermann and his submarine was
of far less importance to
the people of Portsmouth and Kittery than the loaded lobster boats that chugged
along by his side.
© Harry Buschman 1996
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