There Will Still Be Minnesota: A Tale of Convoy PQ-17 

by Larissa Sprecher

He will tell his wife that he doesn’t dream about it anymore. Doesn’t wake up at night and still listen for the mutter of the Blohm & Voss 138 circling overhead, running its constant recon. It won’t be true. But it will be what she needs to hear, and after forty odd years of marriage he’ll learn that is enough. Perhaps someday it will be true, though he will eventually stop counting on it. 

He won’t be marked, like some of his friends—like hundreds of thousands of other young men emptied into the same beast—and he will feel both guilty and grateful for this. Grateful mostly, because he will be able to pass as normal at the tennis club still. Will never terrify Alice, as other men he knows and hears of will terrify their wives, with their silence, their reactionary watchfulness, their violence. He will water George the English Ivy, plant the clippings where he thinks they will grow, and polish his wooden Old Town canoe until she practically throws back the light from any of the northern lakes, and every day he will remember. 

Hvalfjörður, Iceland: June 1942

The sun never sets at this latitude; that has been the hardest thing to get used to. Well, not the hardest, but one of the most constant. The days all feel the same, the sunlight never ending in late June. Just the sun dipping down towards the horizon, slowly sinking to a glowing red ball, before swooping up the sky again. Jeremiah is used to the long late June days on what will later become the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area, where some shade of light lingers till nearly ten, the gloaming twilight sinking through a dozen slow shades of deepening bronzes and blues and greys before releasing to the soft black of night. But this 24-hour daylight is disorienting. 

Nothing ever feels done—his body wired and strung-out, his skin itchy and tight from the watchful, wakeful presence of the sun and the longing to be anywhere but the deck of this creaking, heavy-laden merchant ship, which is not nearly as exciting as the slim, bristling destroyers that dart here and there looking important and dangerous. The merchant ships being essentially the pack donkeys of the naval world: humble and useful only in as much as they can carry, and their capability of getting said cargo to some distant Russian port. 

The North Atlantic convoys seem like a rotten business any way Jeremiah can look at them. And he is normally one to keep a fresh outlook. But he’s only made it to Iceland and already is cursing his luck, him and everyone else on the American ships that came across with the U.S.S. Ironclad, a small merchantman with part of an AA battery from an updated WWI cruiser slapped on just weeks before the trip across the Atlantic. All the American Merchant Marine ships carrying, from what he can tell, a truculent mixed crew of mercenaries, professional seamen, and (to put it diplomatically) cut-throat nomads. The only ones he trusts are the other Naval armed guard like himself, sent along to man the AA batteries on the merchant ships, which thankfully have not been entrusted to said truculent mercenaries and nomads. 

Jeremiah somehow still does not know how he ended up here. He does not particularly love the sea—should one love the sea to be in the Navy? Probably. He loves lakes, but that is different. He imagined himself flying planes when he decided to join the Navy. That seemed as though it could be exciting. Apparently that is a different branch. Either way, he was not supposed to be sent anywhere—certainly not across the damn Atlantic Ocean. 

“And you’re certain this won’t backfire?” Alice had asked when he told her his decision. “That you don’t actually be sent anywhere?” 

“We’re not at war, Al,” he’d said so confidently last summer, that final glowing summer of 1941. The two of them floating on Ojibway Lake one late May morning, watching two otters play in a reedy inlet. “Where on earth can they send me?” 

“Well if you’re on a ship or in a plane quite far I imagine.”

“If it comes to that.”

“Yes. If it comes to that.” 

He dipped a paddle in the water, turned the canoe to drift along silently through the reeds.

“I wish you’d just join the Coast Guard,” Alice had said. 

“Uh-huh. Then I’d definitely have to do things. They’d send me out to rescue people. War or not.” 

“It might be nice, to rescue people.” 

He’d given her a look of exaggerated long-suffering. “Al.”

“I know, I know.” She leaned down and flipped a spray of lake water up at him. “You aren’t the sort.” 

She knew that he didn’t care about saving people, which he will only realize later possibly indicated some fundamental character flaw. He didn’t care about defending a country too massive for him to feel any responsibility for protecting. Didn’t crave justified violence in the name of defeating a genuine madman it seems some older, wiser European country should have stopped long ago. Didn’t need glory or to have anyone know his name. Except maybe at the tennis club, for finally beating Bill Murdoch. 

Alice knew that he cared about her, his canoe, his plants, and a bit of tennis. And he had accepted a long time ago that only he would ever appreciate Evangeline, his Old Town canoe with the mahogany gunwales he’d redone himself. Because was there anything quite like well-loved and oiled mahogany in the sun? (He is careful who he asks this question to. People care about strange things, and relatively few care if a canoe’s gunwales are ash or oak or well-oiled mahogany.)

And really, would anyone care about George, the English Ivy, except for him? 

The point being, Alice had tried to warn him what could happen, even if she hadn’t in as many words said, but what if you are sent all the way to Russia? So how was he supposed to know that he would be sent clear across the damn Atlantic? And it is so much further than he ever wanted to think about going. The only good thing he has seen so far that might come of this is that he will have more appreciation for Evangeline and the existence of even cracked tennis courts and beds that don’t move under you at night. And water that is not briny and cold and endlessly deep.

* * *

June 27, 1942 is a beautiful day in the middle of a stretch of unusual calm weather. The water in the harbor at Hvalfjörður, Iceland looks like a mill pond. Like Jasper Lake up in the northern Minnesota wilderness on a still summer morning when there is nothing to disturb the surface but the loons gliding along beside his canoe. Still things can be deceiving though—growing up close to the Mississippi has taught him that. Granted, the Mississippi along the Minnesota border is not very wide or as slow-heaving and massive as it is further south, but he imagines the principle is still the same: don’t trust still water. 

The convoy trundles out of Hvalfjörðurin the late afternoon at 1600 with the outgoing tide, and as much as he wants to see it as a majestic site, it is only majestic in scale, with close to forty merchants and freighters and escorts all heading out in their mostly orderly rows. But for all that, he can only see them as waddling out, sagging in the water from the weight of their cargo, grungy and dumpy-looking from their general age and wear, like so many dirty ducks. 

He says as much to his friend Curtis, who has been puttering around the AA guns, practically cooing over them and complaining about the lack of ammunition they’ve been given and the inadequate ordnance lubricant that he says will gum up when it gets cold. 

Curtis is examining the 3”/50’s breech, swiping his finger across the working surfaces and examining it, covered in what Jeremiah assumes is the inadequate lubricant. “Wouldn’t say that too loud, especially not when our friends are in earshot.” 

“Say what?” 

“The thing about the dirty ducks. This is a big deal to them. Diesel fuel will work.” 

Jeremiah stares at him; the non-sequiturs still take him a moment to catch up with. “To clean it? Well, yeah.”

“Nah—it’ll be a better lubricant when the weather turns.” 

“Okay, well, maybe let’s not talk about it getting that cold. It’s June.” 

Curtis does the snort/chuckle thing he does when he thinks something has been particularly silly. “It’s the North Atlantic,” he says. 

Which Jeremiah imagines is also the reason the metal on these ships is never just the right temperature. As if the steel absorbs the deep cold of the ocean and holds on to it for dear life, through all the traces of warmth the North Atlantic days might offer. So unlike his canoes. But he thinks he probably should not compare mahogany and damp steel. Evangeline is in Minnesota with Alice and George, and the long-awaited tennis rematch with Bill Murdoch. The Ironclad is here and he is on the Ironclad and he will have to make do with that. 

* * *

By June 29 the dirty ducks have cleared the Denmark Strait. At a certain point as they were passing the Strait, Curtis pointed confidently and said, “That’s where she went down you know.”

Curtis is obsessed with the story of the German battleship Bismarck, which attempted to make her escape to the North Atlantic the previous May to prey on convoys very much like theirs. Supposedly the most advanced warship ever launched, she had sent down the venerable flagship H.M.S. Hood in less than five minutes of salvos in the Battle of the Denmark Strait before being sunk days later by the vast majority of a vengeful Royal Navy. It had been a big deal in Naval and some non-Naval circles, and Curtis, who is mildly obsessed with battleships and put out about being assigned to a mere armed merchantman, has made it into an even bigger deal. 

Jeremiah thinks it is good for people to have interests, so he does not discourage this as much as he could. “Mm-hm,” he murmurs. “Seen the logs then, did you?” 

Curtis sniffs. “I did my research.” 

The Bismark’s sister ship, the Tirpitz, is what Curtis does not talk about. What no one is talking about, though probably most of them have thought of it once or twice, or possibly all the time. Luftwaffe and U-boats aside, the Tirpitz is the boogeyman out here. 

But that’s not why they have such heavy escort: six Royal Navy destroyers and four corvettes under Commander Jack Broome, along with three minesweepers, four armed trawlers, two AA ships, all sonar equipped—all for the U-boats and bombers that will stalk their route. A more distant escort of four heavy cruisers make a path some twenty miles ahead of the main convoy, and battleships H.M.S. Duke of York and U.S.S. Washington lurk a day or two away. 

They all know, though, that the expensive and valuable battleships are too far away to protect them should Hitler’s second super battleship slip her moorings in the Trondheim fjord to head off the lumbering convoy as it goes by. With the range of a 15-inch main armament being close to twenty miles, and the legendary accuracy of German gunnery that allowed Bismarck’s one-ton shells to pick off the Hood at thirteen miles, the Tirpitz could stand beyond the range of the near escort and pick off every merchant ship in the convoy with complete impunity. 

In the end it will take only the whispered rumor of Tirpitz moving from her berth, a single reconnaissance photo that does not include the battleship moored where it once was, to catalyze the whole catastrophe. Tirpitz herself will never have to move past another safe Norwegian harbor—only her phantom traipsing towards the cowering convoy will be enough to spur the admiralty to their devastating call. But Jeremiah and those on the Ironclad will not learn that until well after. 

They are spotted by a Blohm & Voss 138, one of the big recon planes with floats, on July 1st. It mutters just above the shreds of clouds that have parted enough today to allow the sighting. 

The plane (or one like it) is back circling the convoy on July 2nd, and so they are ready when a loose formation of Heinkel-115 torpedo planes comes at the port side of the convoy early that afternoon. The main 3”/50 AA gun on the Ironclad is in decent shape, having been stored for some ten years after being taken off the U.S.S. Missouri. Its barrel ought to have been replaced and the bore is badly eroded, so Jeremiah knows it will not be as accurate as he might like. Nonetheless, he and his crew can get twenty shots a minute out of it, which is not at all bad. The two .50 and .30 caliber machine guns are somewhat useful against airborne targets, but in his opinion more for boosting crew morale than much else. 

One of the American destroyers with a 5” AA armament shoots down a Heinkel down right in the middle of the convoy. The wreck is burning, but just kind of floating there—one of the benefits of attacking in a float plane—and they can see one of the pilots trying to get out through the busted door and another already in the water. The Ironclad is not close enough to do anything, but the AA gunners nearest the Heinkel are still firing at the downed pilots.

“No way. You see what these Krauts are about to do?” 

Jeremiah jumps at Curtis’s voice over his shoulder. He has just been thinking that the Heinkel’s tracers were close enough for him to have lit a cigarette from them. He really could use a cigarette though he doesn’t smoke, which is an odd feeling. Now through the constant pop of the ack-ack fire he catches the snarl of another engine coming in. Another Heinkel is skimming in right through the center of the convoy, the big floats throwing up sea spray as it comes to a hard landing and skims to an almost stop not ten yards from the burning wreck. 

“Can you believe the balls?” Curtis hollers in his ear.

Jeremiah cannot. Somehow in the midst of the absolute wall of flack from the half dozen nearest ships, the Germans pick up the two pilots from the water, and with a whine and roar the engines gun the plane forward again. It’s the enemy, and it’s one of the bravest things he has ever seen, and those two things have to co-exist in his head. 

* * *

The morning of the 4th of July he thinks of Alice and her surprisingly tolerable younger brother Gabe, and wonders if they will be up at her parents’ cabin watching the sun rise from the edge of the lake. If there will be fireworks, or if the war has already blotted out the desire for something so superfluous. The convoys will forever blot out his own desire for fireworks, something he will never tell his excitable sons, or Alice, who will so love to see them happy. He will have many 4th of July mornings, watching Alice feed their ravenous boys, fielding questions about if they can help with the fireworks. No. If he got more fireworks than last year. Always, for them. For Alice. He will treasure these mornings, and gladly bear the fireworks that pop like AA fire and spread the smell of ash and gunpowder over the sparkling lake. 

Of course there is no morning on the convoy, only the sun pausing by the horizon before making its inexorable climb back up the sky, keeping the convoy always in broad daylight. Brutal. He has never before known how brutal the sun can be. 

He thinks perhaps he should have been more specific when Alice said, Well, you do like the water at least, so I think that will be some comfort to you. Imagine the sorts of places they could send you if you were in the Army—anywhere on land. And that’s so many places.

And she knew as well as he did that there was a vast amount more ocean than land on the globe, but he supposes she meant that perhaps the ocean is more or less the same, and if one likes water then one has the potential to like the whole ocean. Only of course that is not really the truth, that he likes all water. 

He likes fresh water. He should have said so. Quiet, northern lakes, specifically. The kind with boundaries you can always see: a restful shoreline of pine and firs with the whisper of wind softened through needles. The kind where, if a wind does whip up, it doesn’t have enough runway to push up the water into anything but maybe two or three-foot piles, baby whitecaps. Not the kind you enjoy paddling in a canoe but also not the kind you think, my god if I come out of this boat I will be dead before I even drown.

The American crew’s fireworks this 4th of July come in the form of the explosion and flash of the 3” and 5” shells thrown at the incoming waves of Heinkels, the red streaks of tracers, the boiling walls of water thrown up from the bombs. 

The Stuka dive bombers are back, using the bright sun to their advantage. They come down from the sun, making them invisible but for the sirens, and the flack gets thrown at the sound more often than the sight of them. The first warning of a Stuka’s dive is a thin, high-pitched scream that rises to a piercing howl from the wind-driven sirens on the front of each landing gear leg. It doesn’t matter that they all know the shriek is manufactured, man-made, artificial, it is unnerving every time. The rising shriek crawls under his skin and slivers it away from his muscle and bones. If there is one thing that will stick with him, scar him, as he will think of it only when he is feeling dramatic, it will be that scream of the diving bombers. 

Ranking perhaps second is the swish of falling bombs through heavy fog they encounter occasionally. Jeremiah always imagined that not being able to see would prevent enemy bombers from dropping their payloads. But the Junkers-88s still fly above the fog bank and drop their bombs at random. There is no warning apart from the broken drone of the engines, which you get used to when there seems to always be a recon plane drifting here or there. Just the faint shhh of the bombs splitting the air on the way down – and though Jeremiah knows he can only hear the bombs when it is particularly quiet, and maybe not even then, he imagines he hears it all the time. Always the bombs dropping. 

When the Russian tanker, Azerbaijan, gets hit, it is odd because it is such a tiny catastrophe. But in the midst of the inexorable order and forward movement of the almost forty ships, it is also a small, disorganized blip that they must move around, while one or two of them pause and break formation to send out lifeboats for the survivors.  

And as a blip the oil tanker makes quite a mess, the black of the oil leaking from her split hull like blood, a shocking black stain far and wide on the pale North Atlantic. The glistening pool spreads, sloshing glossily up the side of green marble waves, seeping a bitter stench beneath the lingering scents of gunpowder and scorched paint. The heated steel of the gun barrels, still clicking as they cool. The indecipherable yells and sobs of wounded men carrying over the water the way sound cruelly does.

In moments like this, sometimes all he can do to calm his mind is to close his eyes and hold his breath to shut out the smell of the North Atlantic—of grease and wet steel and diesel and cordite and damp men and clothes too long unwashed, and all the other bitter, manmade smells of war—and force himself back to Minnesota. To the early summer evenings where the air is full of perfume; honeysuckle and black locust tree blossoms lacing the air with their fragrance. Red-winged blackbirds chirruping in the fields, their wings a dark blur with a spot of color. The whistle of nuthatches and early evening chorus of frogs in the ponds. Occasionally the distant, muted drone of a boat motor drifting in over the shir of air moving through pine needles and tall grass. 

He has to go back there, even for a moment and even just in his head, to remind himself that somewhere the natural world exists and is kind. Is made up of more than steel and ice and endless awful sunlight and lingering, damp fog. That water is somewhere soft and clear. 

* * *

When he will later try to describe the rest of that day, the 4th of July 1942, Jeremiah knows it sounds woefully inadequate. That he can never invest the event with the appropriate amount of solemnity and impact that it had for all the sailors there that day. That any attempts to give it the right weight, the right punch in the gut, will only succeed in making it sound melodramatic, a paltry thing he is trying to jazz up for whoever is listening. And after enough years he will stop trying altogether. 

Eventually he will just tell any new acquaintances who want to know the story (and really, at his age does he still need to be making many new acquaintances? He will not think so. Alice will say differently, but she is always the social one, so that will make sense. Anyway) he will at some point begin telling anyone who asks, that the higher-ups (better to not place blame specifically, isn’t it?) decided to disband the convoy. Pull back its escort. To scatter it. Theoretical approaching surface forces (phantom Nazi battleships, the nemeses of all great convoys), etc… And that was it. The end, essentially. 

The acquaintances who asked will blink and nod and ask, what convoy was this? 

* * *

Around 2215, Jeremiah is just thinking that at this hour in his normal life he would be in bed reading. If not still out in the shop working on one of his canoes, although Alice would have probably brought him in by now. It would be properly dark out, as it ought to be at 10:15 at night, and not still the sun up, just swooped low on the southern sky. 

He is wondering what Alice is doing now when a signal is run up the Commodore’s signal halyard. “Haven’t seen that one yet,” Jeremiah says. The red pennant with a white cross in the center looks both familiar, like the reverse of a Red Cross sign, and also somehow vaguely ominous. Like a sign that they will all soon need aid. “I think the bridge is even having to sort that one out,” he says, “though I don’t have a great—” he stops when he sees Curtis. 

The man with the encyclopedic knowledge about everything Navy has his mouth pinched together, nostrils flared. “You’re not going to like this.” 

“Will I need to know eventually?” 

“In about, oh, a minute.” Curtis’s standard dry expression has returned. “You’ll start to see it.” 

Not thirty seconds later, the first blinker starts flashing. 

“I’ll save you trying to track that,” says Curtis. “That was pennant eight, and it means, Scatter fan-wise and proceed independently to destination at utmost speed.” 

In two minutes, blinkers from across the convoy are signaling a mile a minute. Every ship seems to be demanding explanation and instructions. The final signal, rapidly following pennant eight, Convoy is to scatter, creates further consternation and more frantic pleas for information. And they don’t all get answered as the Commodore’s ship, the River Afton, begins moving out of position at the center of the front line, the first ship to break formation. Others begin to hesitantly follow, creeping out of formation and turning the neat rows into a slowly spreading, jagged edged fan shape. 

Curtis makes an odd scoffing, moaning sound. “Jesus, they look like a bunch of dogs cringing apart. Look at ’em.” He crushes his cap in his hand, twisting it into an indistinguishable lump before hurling it to the deck with a low growl, and Jeremiah thinks that if one is prone to histrionic displays, then this is the time for it. “What on God’s green earth kind of high Command do the Brits have? What is the goddamn escort for? We have fucking battle wagons as our distant escort. This fine show of force is just for what? Show?”

“I hear you,” Jeremiah says and wants to agree that it seems the Brits should have more experience than this—or at least enough to know what is about to happen to the very large and expensive and juicy convoy they have just strewn to the far corners of the North Atlantic, all now no better than targets drawn clearly on a cavernous white backdrop. The urgency created by the final inexplicable signal has left even him feeling lightheaded, and he finds himself scanning the horizon for the Tirpitz, sure to see her bristling bulk charging into the view, or more likely hear only the whistle of salvos of two-thousand-pound shells bracketing the right range. 

Jeremiah catches the Troubadour, another small 37 mm American gunship, signaling either them or the converted British trawler Ayrshire on the other side of them. “Where are you going?” 

He looks over to see Ayrshire blinking back, “To hell. And the first one back hopefully. Tag along?” 

“You know,” he says. “They’ve got sonar.”
“Great minds,” Curtis says, as the Ironclad begins to make the same turn as the trawler and gunship. 

Above them, the German recon plane flies in increasingly wide, thunderstruck circles.

* * *

This is where the demarcation line is for Jeremiah. A before PQ-17 was scattered, and an after PQ-17 was scattered. He has learned to accept the blinks of incomprehension from strangers and friends at this. Maybe only Alice seems to get it, as Curtis would, were he still on the soil’s proper side. Had the devil-may-care bug that already haunted him not turned into one of bitterness and barely stifled fury. Had he not taken up any adrenaline seeking line of entertainment and distraction he could, post 1945. An edge of daring and rage frozen onto his personality in the North Atlantic, which never melted when they both finally escaped the grinding sea and ice at the end of the war.

It will be years before Jeremiah can answer honestly when someone asks him if he served and where. He will not want to be known for any part of that war. He wants people to marvel at the solidity of his marriage, his mastery on the tennis court, the laudable size and long life of George the ivy, and the beauty of his wooden canoe. He will just want to be known for the life he will live when he gets off his final merchant ship. 

It will be years later that he finally gives up telling people where he served at all. Will get tired of the questions. Of saying he was in the Merchant Marine. 

Of hearing, What? Where was that? 

The North Atlantic. 

What happened there? 

We helped the Soviets win Stalingrad. 

Only by then, Soviets will be a curse word, so frightful some of them will have forgotten what they were all fighting against in 1942. 

Stalingrad—I know that one. That was a big one. 

The costliest battle in human history. 

The costliest convoy in human history. 

Are they so different? Yes, of course. 

Also, no. 

He will hear his twelve-year-old son one day, in conversation with a friend as they “fix” one of their bikes in the driveway, in answer to the question Your dad fought in the war, didn’t he? say, I guess, maybe a little. I think he was just on a boat somewhere. And Jeremiah will not mind. Will find it if anything a strange sort of relief. 

And a decade later when his sons, at 20 and 22, come to him at the start of the Vietnam War with their outrage—their excellent minds and fine spirits and still youthful ignorance—asking him in not so many words to back their rejection of the war, saying, I know you didn’t really fight in a battle, Dad, but surely you agree this kind of travesty shouldn’t be supported. He will just nod and agree they should do as they believe, and that wars should ideally be fought for good reasons. Though sometimes that does not make any difference. Does he feel better that Curtis lost everything that mattered about himself in the effort to defeat Hitler, versus in some jungle on the other side of the world? He supposes yes. 

But also, no. 

* * *

On that 4th of July night in 1942, the one that will forever take the gloss and sparkle out of Independence Day celebrations for Jeremiah, it takes no time at all for the Germans to realize that their quarry is scattering and glaringly unprotected. A slow, lumbering beast split up into convenient, snack-size portions like sitting ducks now on still water.

They are a herd of tasty prey animals, each one of them suddenly the old or infirm one that cannot keep up, alone without the protection and distraction of the rest of the pack. Isolation is bad for a herd animal.

Jeremiah had not realized how much security he actually drew from the sheer spreading bulk of the convoy, the forty-odd ships taking up so much ocean, the swift, aggressive destroyer screen, the idea of heavy cruisers churning twenty miles ahead to clear a path. Now they have just the Ayrshire’s sonar, so they can know where the U-boats are but do nothing about it. At least a duck can always choose to fly off if startled. 

The radioman beats a path to the bridge with a continuous stream of distress calls to the south of them. When he catches their eye, where they are always at general quarters by the 3”/50, he’ll mouth, “Another sub,” or “air strike.” Jeremiah imagines he can hear the ether filling with distress signals, invisible waves of panic pulsing in and out with no one of consequence to receive or respond.

Every once in a while he sees tiny, innocuous piles of smoke on the horizon as the U-boats or Luftwaffe find another sitting target in their wide-open shooting range, the small puffs of black like some miniature funeral pyres. 

Jeremiah will see many ships sunk on many North Atlantic convoys. He will tell people he does not care to remember how many ships or convoys. Both will be lies, but he learns that a quick lie is kinder on him than a drawn-out story. People do love a story, but they expect them to be colorful and thrilling. To provide something they are missing in their civilian lives. The ships are not Evangeline, but every ship he sees sunk hurts in a different way. The way so many of them wallow on the water like a wounded animal, the groan and shriek of metal giving way, welds splitting, hulls caving in, the clatter of tanks breaking free of their lashings to trundle down slanted decks into that marbled green-grey turbulence and the inevitable and horrible waste and necessity of it all. 

It is breathtaking and vile and only Alice will ever know more than the broadest strokes. And Curtis, who of course experiences it all with Jeremiah, and who will go back again and again and again, until there is nothing left and some essential part of him has also trundled off the deck. Been left maybe somewhere on a hallowed piece of ocean floor, and only after the war is over will he realize it is missing and spend the rest of his short life looking for it. 

* * * 

By late the next day, the day after the 4th, they are in the ice fields with Troubadour and Ayrshire, pushing into the ice flows until they begin to get thick enough to impede progress. Here the ice flows are laid out in oddly tidy rows: gently following capricious, invisible currents and waves into sweeping curves so they look almost appealing. As appealing as Jeremiah imagines ice can look. They remind him of hay raked for drying, thick, clean double windrows laid out by a farmer that knows his business. 

“You’re looking at that ice like it owes you something,” Curtis says. 

Jeremiah opens his mouth, but suddenly cannot figure out how to explain it in a way that will make it seem anything close to as important as it feels to him right now. He did not grow up on a farm, but every summer as a kid he helped put up hay to earn extra money and because something about the smell of just dried hay being baled is what he hopes heaven will smell like. So he cannot explain to Curtis how the very thought that these ice rows look like windrows of drying orchard grass and alfalfa makes something inside him swell and burst past some inner seam and begin leaking deep into the base of his throat, weighing on his chest and lungs. He clears his throat. “Owes me a June at home, I guess.” 

“Ah, you’ll have plenty more Junes on your lakes. There will still be Minnesota when this is all over. And think of the stories you’ll get.” 

* * *

There are stories. Only two really worth telling, or that he cares to tell. The first story: At one point, Jeremiah found himself hanging over the side of the Ironclad, a paint brush roughly fastened to a mop handle, slopping white paint on the ship’s aging, discolored hull, along with every other free seaman who had been able to locate a painting instrument. Curtis would say until the day he left for his final ill-fated adventure that he came up with this idea. And Jeremiah knows it was a seaman on Troubadour who first discovered the stores of white paint and had the idea of turning the three ships into icebergs. But he’ll also never disagree with Curtis’ version of the story.

There was no glory ever associated with the North Atlantic convoys. Let a man take it where he could. Let his war story be that he stripped sheets off cots and pulled tablecloths from laundry hampers to weigh them down on the deck with the spare fire bricks used to repair the boiler fire box, so the rogue Junkers-88s hunting a northern loop over the ice would see only smudgy white spots that could have been any smudgy iceberg. Pray they would not see a glint of metal in the sun, a reflection too sharp for nature to create. 

Let his story be that he tied a broom to a paint brush and painted a masterpiece on the side of a merchant ship as old as he was, though with a lot more mileage. Let that masterpiece be three ships that disappeared into the icefields so that in the sun’s glare with the white camouflage they could barely see each other, even a hundred yards apart. 

Let the disappearing ships in the most horrible game of hide-and-seek any of them ever played be the reason that they were three of twelve ships to straggle into Arkhangelsk, battered and shell-shocked, shuffling in to unload a fraction of the plushest convoy ever sent to Russia. Tens of thousands of tons of tanks, planes, vehicles, ammunition, food—enough supplies to arm 50,000 men—most of it sent to the bottom of the North Atlantic. The worst loss of supplies in the war. The worst convoy disaster in history.

And yet. A drop in the bucket of wartime industry. 

* * *

The second story from their stint in the ice fields will make him wonder in future decades if he is a poor father. Or perhaps just not the one his brilliant and funny sons deserve. And for their sakes he will wonder if his standards were set to inaccurate levels, or just levels unattainable by any society’s standard teenagers in a time without war. 

There were two AA gunners on the Ironclad; even then he suspected they were under the legal age. But they were fearless, superb gunners, lightning reflexes and always first-rate instincts and fast friends. He can still picture the two of them hopping in a canoe they’d made one day in the ice fields, a wooden frame covered in heavy, waxed canvas and tossed together with the eager, accurate haste that characterized the two. It was no sort of ideal canoe shape and the bits of excess canvas stuck up like alarmed tufts of hair around the edges, but the two of them launched off with paddles borrowed from the life boats, whooping as if on a ride at a county fair instead of paddling around an ice field just inside the perpetual fog bank that hung over the water a few hundred yards from the edge of the ice. 

He thinks of what eighteen-year olds think to be “cool” now, and he wishes they could see those two gunners, just scrappy kids, in their canvas canoe in the ice fields. Fiercely talented. Fiercely brave. Fiercely carefree. Fiercely dead. Not then. Another convoy. It does not matter which one—at least not to most, society’s memory being short and specific and oddly preferential.  

But when his brilliant and funny sons mope about not being able to take the truck out on the weekend, or histrionically throw themselves on the couch after a “brutal” track workout, Jeremiah wonders will he always want to correct their perception, as though every eighteen-year-old should live with the howl of the dive bombers, see men burning like wicks in spreading pools of oil, watch ships sink till it haunts their dreams. 

He will watch his animated boys laugh and run and sulk in their safe and blissful lives and be intensely grateful and remember with intense clarity the two seventeen-year-old gunners paddling a wobbly trail through the slushy ice water, knocking aside the smaller burgs and pushing themselves off bigger floes. Their bare hands shining white and their laughs bouncing off the sides of the circled merchant ships, echoing forever off the fields of ice.

About the author

Larissa is an English Professor with an affinity for writing exploring different places and times, and a particular penchant for historical fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Arkansas and has recently moved back to Wisconsin to teach at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. While she genuinely loves teaching, she continues to (slowly) work on her major project to research and write a World War II novel about the battleship Bismarck, when she is not looking for new trails to run or to ride her horse, Princess Ari. She has had historical short fiction published in The Greyhound Journal and Culterate, and her work has appeared in Equus Magazine, None of the Above (NOTA), and is forthcoming from The Woven Tale Press and Glint Literary Journal. 

About the illustration

The illustration is "80-G-24824: The covering forces of the PQ-17 Convoy (British and American ships) at anchor in the harbor at Hvalfjord, Iceland, May-June 1942. The convoy left Iceland on June 27, but a large part of the convoy was wiped out by German aircraft from July 1 to 10." The National Museum of the United States Navy. In the public domain.