Reuben James A Casualty Before War Began

Tell me, what were their names?

Tell me, what were their names?

Did you have a friend, on the good Reuben James?

- Woody Guthrie -----------------------------

WASHINGTON - There are those who think World War II began for the United States on Dec. 7, 1941. Don't tell that to the 10 old sailors who gathered in the autumn sunlight at the Navy Memorial this month.

Fifty years ago a German torpedo blew their destroyer apart in the North Atlantic. It was 5:25 a.m. on Oct. 31, 1941, and to most of the nation the fact that the USS Reuben James had been sunk and 115 men dismembered, incinerated or drowned by the Nazi war machine was something scary but not quite real.

Few people worried much about it.

"There was a sort of tacit understanding among Americans" at the time, wrote playwright-historian Robert E. Sherwood, "that nobody was to get excited if ships were sunk by U-boats because that was what got us into war the last time."

People like Norman Hingula, of course, had no such discretion. Hingula, then a 25-year-old Navy fireman first class from Brooklyn, asleep after his midnight-to-4 shift in the Reuben James' engine room, had awakened to the explosion, scrambled topside to find "the lifeboats blown up, the No. 3 stack toppled forward and just no ship at all forward of that. Midships was now the bow."

Hearing the call to abandon ship, he jumped overboard in his life jacket, but thought better of it once into the icy, oil-choked sea. "The stern kept floating for about five minutes, and I thought maybe I'd better stay with her. But just as I grabbed on to reboard her, she started down. The suction was taking me with her, and I was struggling against it when underwater I heard this "CLINK!' It was a depth charge from one of the stern racks arming itself. The arming lanyards had pulled loose, and it was set to explode at a depth of 50 feet."

The tremendous blast blew him into the air with a huge column of water. "The fall sent me back under again, and just as I'm fighting my way toward the surface, all dazed, I hear another "CLINK!"

The second depth charge, set to explode at 150 feet, sent him skyward again. When he regained his senses, he said, "I was sure I was injured. I felt like I'd been hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat." But when he was pulled from the water by one of two other destroyers in the Britain-bound convoy, "I was covered with oil, but they couldn't find anything wrong with me. I was OK."

Hingula appears OK today, after a half-century of making fighters for Douglas Aircraft and working as a Health Department engineer for the state of California. He's now retired in Yucaipa, Calif.

For him and the other nine survivors of the Reuben James (20 are living in all), the reunion was an emotional pilgrimage in time.

Most had lost touch with each other until their first reunion in 1985. "We were just too busy buying houses, raising kids and making a living," explained George F. Giehrl of Clarence, N.Y., the reunion-association president.

At the recent gathering they were still sorting out their thoughts and feelings about the Reuben James, which unwittingly has become a kind of talisman of World War II.

The United States was technically neutral and determinedly isolationist when President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the old World War I destroyer seaward in 1941 as part of an Atlantic command ostensibly patrolling a U.S. "Defense Zone" the president had quietly expanded until its eastward border was barely 400 miles off Scotland.

Roosevelt was clearly trying to provoke an incident with Nazi Germany, which had conquered almost all of Europe, and was nearly strangling Britain with a U-boat blockade. By extending U.S. naval protection to virtually the entire route of Britain's vital transatlantic supply convoys, Roosevelt was daring Hitler to risk an incident that would arouse a somnolent America.

Hitler risked plenty.

On Sept. 5, 1941, a German bomber sank a U.S. freighter south of Suez, and on Oct. 19 a U-boat claimed another U.S. freighter off West Africa. In both cases the crews were rescued. On Oct. 17, the year-old destroyer Kearny was torpedoed on North Atlantic convoy duty. It made port safely, but 11 men were killed.

Said chief of naval operations Adm. Harold R. Stark: "Whether the country knows it or not, we are at war."

"We knew the U-boats were there, and we knew we were supposed to attack them wherever we found them," said Giehrl. "But we were so young we didn't think of the consequences."

The night of the sinking the Reuben James was part of a four-ship escort for HX-156, an eastbound 44-ship convoy then about 600 miles west of Ireland. She was on the flank of the formation turning to investigate a suspicious contact on her direction finder when a torpedo from U-562 struck the forward part of the ship, apparently igniting the forward magazine. The blast lifted the entire forward part of the hull from the water, severing it behind the third of the ship's four smokestacks.

So covered with oil their rescuers said they looked like seals, the Reuben James' survivors were pulled from the water within three hours by the sailors of the destroyers Niblack and H.P. Jones, who, according to Giehrl and other, defied orders not to leave the convoy for rescue missions.

Surprisingly, most of the survivors hadn't heard the song, Reuben James, until the Kingston Trio recorded it in the late 1950s. It was written by Woody Guthrie immediately after the sinking, however, while most of America was still shrugging off the loss. Guthrie couldn't, and in December 1941 he performed it for the first time at a seaman's union hall in Newark, N.J. Folk-singer Pete Seeger has written of rehearsing it with Guthrie on the subway en route to the performance. Seeger insisted the song had too many verses, so eventually it was cut.

Guthrie felt bad about that. Originally, it seems, he'd included the names of all 115 crewmen lost.

Everyone on the Reuben James, he said, should be remembered.