By Will Dabbs, MD
I came of age in the 80’s. My world was dirty with WW2 veterans. The local bank president had flown B17s, the car salesman at the Chevy place crewed PT boats, and the guy who owned the shoe store had jumped into Normandy with the 82d. We took them all for granted. They were just background clutter.
That extended to my local high school. My senior math teacher humped a Browning Automatic Rifle across Europe. The guy who taught me physics was a former Navy officer. We’ll call him Mr. B. On occasion, when we were caught up on our course work, he would deign to tell us stories of the war. I’d struggle to calculate much angular momentum these days, but I remember those war stories like it was yesterday. My favorite concerned a spy monkey.
The Setting
Mr. B had been the XO on a destroyer cruising the South Pacific in late 1944. When not partaking in sundry invasions, escorting convoys, or joining task forces, his nimble little ship was on counter-submarine patrol or standing by to retrieve downed aviators bobbing about in tiny little life rafts. They typically got their encoded operational orders via radio. The radio operators would take down the message, and then the captain would decode it using a codebook. That codebook was the most protected piece of kit on the ship.
The codes changed regularly according to a schedule. If that book fell into Japanese hands, it would allow the enemy to determine the location and missions of US Naval assets across the Pacific. Keeping track of that thing was important. It had a lead weight in the spine so you could toss it overboard in the event of imminent capture.
The Daily Grind
Mr. B’s destroyer sported five-inch guns, state-of-the-art radar, and powerful steam turbine engines. However, its day-to-day operation was not fundamentally different from that of British ships of the line operating on the frontier generations before. When underway for long periods, food got stale and life got tedious. In an effort to combat the inevitable tedium, the skipper kept a weather eye out for opportunities to spice up both the fare in the mess and the daily routine.
At one point, the ship’s patrol route took it within reach of some uninhabited island. Taking advantage of the situation, the ship’s captain sent a landing party ostensibly to forage for fresh fruit. Mr. B and his away team spent most of a day exploring the exotic space.
He said that the place was as fascinating as one might imagine. The ship’s cook did indeed score a decent supply of exotic natural fruit. Along the way, one of the chiefs also somehow caught a small monkey. As the beast had apparently never before seen a human being, it did not offer undue resistance. Mr. B’s team returned to the destroyer with the adorable little guy in tow.
The Shanghaied Primate
The captain was skeptical, according to Mr. B. However, once he saw how everyone’s eyes lit up over the new addition, he acquiesced. The little monkey was formally inducted as part of the crew.
In quiet moments, all military mariners aspire to a life of piracy. Pirates of old purportedly often kept pet monkeys. In short order, the little primate became an integral part of the warship’s personality. His duty station was on the bridge alongside the combat watch.
Trouble in Paradise
The South Pacific is reliably hot, swelteringly thus. One typical day in the war zone the tin can was steaming along looking for trouble with the bridge windows propped open to enhance ventilation. Radar was clear, as was the horizon. The monotony was broken by the presence of the ship’s monkey scampering about the place.
Without preamble, the mischievous little scamp suddenly snatched up the codebook off of the chart table and threw it out the window. The compact tome just cleared the deck and splashed into the limitless azure waters of the Pacific Ocean, sinking immediately. For a moment no one breathed.
The damage was done, and there was no undoing it. The codebook was irretrievably gone. There were three full days remaining in that book’s cycle.
The captain is responsible for absolutely everything onboard his ship. Losing the codebook was a court martial offense. Combine that with the fact that keeping pilfered wildlife onboard a warship surely violated a few Navy regulations as well. This was a mess.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
You don’t just fall off the turnip truck and find yourself in command of a US Navy warship. The captain took stock of the situation and ordered the helm to steam the ship in broad slow circles for the next three days, all the while hoping that some hapless downed aviator would not drown because of the actions of the ship’s larcenous monkey. At the end of that interminable 72 hours, the new codebook took effect and the ship was back in action.
As far as Mr. B could ascertain, there was no lasting harm done. He did say that was a seriously long three days. There had been a great deal of praying aboard ship during that time. The next time the vessel neared land, the captain dispatched a small boat to give the diabolical spy monkey his freedom.
I suppose there is a lesson buried there someplace. My wife would say it is to forever obey the rules and avoid adopting itinerant monkeys. However, the allure of piracy runs deep in the American male. Were it me, even with the benefit of hindsight, methinks I’d just tie the codebook to the chart table with a dummy cord and hang onto the monkey. I might even train it to sit on my shoulder and wear an eye patch.
