Warship Wednesday, June 26th Hems Subchaser
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, June 26th
Here we see the converted motor yacht Pilar as she appeared just before WWII. This boat had a very colorful history.
Bought by the great bearded man-card holder Ernest Miller Hemingway April 1934 from Wheeler Shipbuilding in Brooklyn, New York, for $7,495, the 38-foot two-engined Wheeler Playmate was delivered to Miami, Florida later that year. Pilar had a 70-hp Chrysler Crown gasoline engine reportedly capable of generating a cruise speed of 8 knots and a top speed of 16 knots. Coupled with six bunks, double rudders, and, with 300 gallons of water, 2,400 pounds of ice, and cruising range of 500 miles, it was a pretty capable boat. To this, Hemingway added a separate, straight-shaft Lycoming four-cylinder gasoline engine for trolling at 5 knots (with an economical fuel burn of 3 gph); flying bridge with steering/control station, bridge ladder, and bottle-stowage rack; and the set of outriggers and a fighting chair. In addition, there was a livewell with valves for filling and emptying; extra fuel-carrying capacity in four, 75-gallon galvanized tanks; two copper-lined fishboxes in the cockpit sole; and a long wooden roller mounted across a cut-down transom to facilitate hauling big fish aboard.
Old Hem used her to win just about every fishing rodeo across the Caribbean from 1935-41, only taking time off to go to the Spanish-Civil War. Named after his second wife, it was on the Pilar that Hemingway did the research into big game fishing that later came out in The Old Man and the Sea and other works.
It one incident in 1935, Hem took a Thompson submachine gun out and riddled a school of sharks who were eating on a 1000-pound marlin that he and painter Mike Strater were struggling to pull aboard. This only created an epic feeding frenzy that left the marlin ‘apple-cored’ with its entire back half eaten down to the spine.
Well when WWII rolled around, Hem, living in Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, at the time, sprang into action. He organised friends and acquaintances, some of the notorious nature, into an intelligence gathering organization in Cuba he dubbed the ‘Crook Factory’– with the US ambassador’s blessing. Not content with his ad hoc intel work, Hem cooked up another plot.
With the permission of the ambassador and the loan of some HF/DF radio equipment, Hem outfitted the trusty Pilar as a sub chaser. The idea was to float around offshore as an innocent fishing vessel, tracking German U-boat radio communications, until said Nazi sub was spotted.
Hem never did catch that Uboat….(image by Gina Sanders from a 1934 picture of Hem in the JFK collection)
Then, wait til the dastardly submersible came close enough to unleash tommy guns and grenades on her boarding party and deck crew. If he got close enough, a short fuze explosive charge thought capable of scuttling a sub was to be thrown down the hatch of the U-boat.
His crew included his sons Patrick and Gregory as well as other volunteers. While the government supplied some equipment, Hemingway was using his own boat, filled with his own gas, and risking the lives of both himself and his family to bring the war to the Germans.
From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, although the Pilar did actually set out on U-boat patrols, and possibly even spotted one of them, Hem never did catch one. He did, however, drop a grenade down the throat of a mako shark caught during one of the patrols. Failing at grabbing a German by the coat at close range, he left Cuba for the European Theater of Operations as a war correspondent, going ashore just after the Normandy Invasions.
The original Pilar has been landlocked in Cuba for the past fifty years
The Pilar remained Hem’s pride and joy until he left Cuba in 1960, leaving it to one of the boat’s local captains, Carlos Gutierrez, who promptly donated it to the Cuban government. Today she sits as a shrine to Hemingway in Cuba and is a popular tourist attraction. Another Wheeler Playmate dressed up to look like the Pilar is on display at the Bass Pro Shop in Key West.
a mock up of the Pilar is at the Bass Pro Shop in Key West, adrift on tshirts
In the end, Hemingway, after losing the love of his life (Pilar) tripped both barrels of his favorite Boss shotgun into his head just a year later. Gutierrez, the inheritor of the beautiful woman, lived to be 104.
Boats have a funny way of doing that.
Specs
Length: 38 ft (12 m)
Beam: 12 ft 0 in (3.7 m)
Height: 17.5 ft (5.3 m)
Draught: 3 ft 6 in (1.1 m)
Installed power:
Main Engine – 70 HP Chrysler
Trolling Engine – 4 Cylinder Lycoming
Speed: 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph)
Armament : At least one M1921 Thompson submachine gun, a Colt 22 Woodsman pistol and a cut-down .30 Krag rifle (all in the Pilar‘s regular small arms locker owned by Hemingway) . An unmounted .50 caliber Browning on loan, ‘a handful of grenades’, scuttling charges, and some sources state, ‘a bazooka’.
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