MUSIC NOTE: Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976), written by Gordon Lightfoot
3274. From FOSGF/RCN in Ottawa and DCNO/SG in Washington: Please remember there are over SIX THOUSAND shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. When visiting the ports of the Great Lakes on tours, do NOT do anything that might summon the spirits of those wrecks as shipgirls without authorization from our offices AND the commanders of Canadian Joint Operations Command in Ottawa and United States Northern Command in Colorado Springs. The Royal Canadian Chaplain Service and the chaplain corps of the American armed services do NOT need the extra work!
"I, Yamato, like the peace of these lakes..."
Hearing that pronouncement from the greatest of Japan's battleships, the smiling American Coast Guard icebreaker serving as her personal "host shipgirl" chuckled. "Aye, they can be peaceful, ma'am," the living spirit of USCGC Mackinaw stated as she crossed her arms. "But as you know after you got a taste of those mists Cape Scott and Cape Breton developed for the Canadians..."
That made Yamato blush right to her bilge tops as she remembered how out of control she had been after even a brief exposure to those soothing mists after a visit to the Royal Canadian Navy/Royal Canadian Mounted Police/Canadian Coast Guard base at Nanisivik on Baffin Island in the wake of a harsh battle against the Abyssals in the Beaufort Sea a month ago. In response to having a group of foreign shipgirls literally get drunk on those mists, Rear Admiral Harlan immediately suggested a Great Lakes tour, the first ever to be carried out by shipgirls in the wake of the start of the Abyssal War. The commanders of the other shipgirls affected by those mists gladly agreed to that, then arranged to have a large show of force to drum up support on both sides of the Great Lakes for the continued prosecution of the war. It certainly helped that Abyssals hadn't been spotted in the Lakes since the way began. Theories as to the "why" were still unproven, ranging from the fact that Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario were freshwater bodies to the fact that the lakes were bordered by the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada, nations that had been at peace since well before the latter became a self-governing polity in 1867.
"True, you are right," Yamato stated as she scanned around with radar. The large division of shipgirls - including carriers from Japan and America, battleships from Japan, America, Britain and Germany, plus escorting destroyers and host corvettes from Canada and America, not to mention Mackinaw - were sailing parallel to the international border in Superior east-southeast of Thunder Bay, heading towards Sault Sainte Marie. "Still, Mackinaw-sensei, please allow us the tranquility of the moment. It is unwise to anger the Kami of Superior even if it is not November..."
The veteran icebreaker chuckled. "Aye, ma'am!"
"These lakes don't look so tough...!"
Shocked gasps escaped all the battleships, then they spun around to redefine the concept of "glare" at Akatsuki, who instantly tried to sink under the waves as her countermeasures picked up all their targeting scanners. "What?! What, Sempai-tachi?! What?! It's just a LAKE!"
A cold chuckle echoed from off to the shaggy purple-haired destroyer's port, which made her spin around to gaze upon the smirking corvette there. "You just jinxed us, you dumb tin can!" Algoma cackled as she glared wrathfully at Akatsuki, who instantly turned pale. "After all, the Witch doesn't always have to come out during the gales of November...!"
That made all the Japanese destroyers gulp. "W-w-witch...?!" Ikazuchi stammered.
"There are no witches, nanodesu! There are no witches, nanodesu...!" Inazuma instantly chanted as she drew out Buddhist prayer beads and began to whisper prayers to make the bad Kami go away.
"Well done, idiots!" Kongō snarled out, her voice dripping with scorn before she stared at the four little destroyers. "You just angered the Kami of Gitche Gumee...!"
All four yelped. "Wh-wh-what is G-g-Gitche G-g-Gumee...?!" Hibiki sputtered out.
"We're sailing on her right now!" one of Algoma's American sister shipgirls, Brisk, snarled as she pointed straight down to the calm waters they were sailing on.
That made all four destroyers scream out in horror as they rapidly looked around. Given the lake's massive dimensions, there was little in the way of land in sight save for the foreboding cliffs of the Canadian shore to the north and east; the American shore to the south was just appearing on the horizon. Watching her younger half-sisters all panic like that, Fubuki sighed. "You guys! Didn't you hear the song that Yamato-sempai, Musashi-sempai and the others learned when they visited Nanisivik?!" she snapped at them. "How dare you be so disrespectful to Superior-sama?! Her strength is so great, even the North Atlantic bows to her!"
"IT'S JUST A LAKE!" Akatsuki screamed out, waving her armaments in wild fright.
Seeing the four react like that, the Flowers that were serving as their host shipgirls could only exchange knowing looks and nasty smirks on seeing that panic attack from the visiting Japanese destroyers. Eyes then locked on Orillia, who nodded in understanding before she reached into her cargo bay to pull out a beautiful six-string guitar. Seeing that made the other Flowers all grin in understanding; when she was normally on Atlantic convoy duties, the shipgirl that had been one of several of their class born at the shipyards in Collingwood on the shores of Georgian Bay would serenade the merchant ships she was escorting with songs from the man born in her namesake town who was often seen as Canada's answer to Bob Dylan...
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee"!
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
"N-N-N-NEVER GIVES UP HER DEAD...?!" Hibiki screamed out in horror.
What type of Kami forsaken place was she sailing in...?!
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the Gales of November came early...
Akatsuki turned as white as a sheet as that moaning tone echoed over the lake while Hibiki was holding her umbrella over her foretops to prevent gale force winds from swamping her and both Ikazuchi and Inazuma moaned as they hugged each other tight, making Hiei and Kirishima move to separate them before they joined the over six thousand now spending their eternal rest in the Great Lakes. The other battleships quickly trilled the tune as Orillia carried on...
The ship was the pride of the American side,
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned.
"We're WARSHIPS!" Ikazuchi then snapped. "We're tougher than some old freighter!"
Faint nods from her sisters...
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship's bell rang,
Could it be the North Wind they'd been feelin'?
The Akatsuki sisters all yelped as they scanned both north and south, turning their meteorological suites on full power to sense the movement of the winds...
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing.
And ev'ry man knew, as the captain did too,
'Twas the Witch of November come stealin'!
"No! No! No! I'm sorry...!" Akatsuki wailed out as Haruna came to comfort her...
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the Gales of November came slashin'!
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind.
That made the four panicking destroyers scream out as they looked immediately west to see if something was blowing in from the Great Plains to swamp them stern-over-bow...
When suppertime came the old cook came on deck
Sayin', "Fellas, it's too rough t'feed ya."
At seven PM, it grew dark; it was then he said,
"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"
As of now, the four sisters were nearly insensate as they imagined what happened to the crew of that particular freighter on the night of Monday 10 November 1975...
The captain wired in, he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald!
Screams of mortal terror escaped the Akatsuki sisters before Yamato's deep voice jumped in, that accompanied by Musashi, Bismarck, Hood and the Iowa sisters...
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind 'er!
"Whitefish Bay! Whitefish Bay! Flank ahead all engines!" Akatsuki screamed out.
"STAY WHERE YOU ARE, YOU RECKLESS MORONS!" Mackinaw snapped.
They might have split up or they might have capsized,
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters!
That made the four sisters gulp in horror as they instantly did internal damage control drills.
They were not sinking...!
They were not going to be victims of the Witch...!
Yeah, it was summertime, but they weren't taking chances, not HERE of all places...!
Seeing that, Wisconsin could only shake her head before chiming in...
Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below, Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the Gales of November remembered.
That made the four destroyers perk up before Orillia gave them knowing looks as the other Flowers all reached up to draw off their black berets (for the Canadians) and sailor caps (for the Americans). Seeing that, others all drew off their headdress as the final verse was sung...
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral.
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee".
"Superior," they said, "Never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early!"
"Damn it, Fitz...I knew you ran aground on the Shoals...!"
Everyone gasped on hearing that grunting Rust Belt accent from ahead of them, then they looked up to see a struggling shipgirl about a nautical mile ahead of the formation. Seeing that, Mackinaw snarled as she put her engines to the limit, breaking ahead of formation as she moved to fall in alongside the other shipgirl. Said girl was a rusty-haired, slender beauty with stormy grey eyes; her clothes were composed of red dungaree trousers and a black-trimmed grey button shirt. Her equipment marked her as a self-unloading laker, with the stack behind her head trimmed in the colours of United States Steel and the boom that was used to load and unload grain and taconite ore from her hull now sticking up into the sky over her head in a mast-like structure, her bow-end pilothouse forming a sort of buckle on her waist. As she tried to make her diesels force her on towards Whitefish Bay as her radar scanned for the larger laker she had been accompanying from Duluth to the Soo decades before, she then blinked on hearing a big fog horn sound off from starboard aft. Turning to look, she then blinked as Mackinaw came up beside her. "Mackinaw! Oh, thank God! You Coasties are out...!"
She then stopped herself as she gazed up and down the beautiful shipgirl sailing beside her now. Like all icebreakers reborn as shipgirls, Mackinaw was a short woman built like a fireplug, with her white superstructure and black-topped gold funnel with the USCG badge on it behind her head of short-cropped silver hair, dark eyes peeking out of a weathered face. Her icebreaker bow had been replicated into the keel boots she wore as a shipgirl; with those, she could still smash her way through the levels of lake ice she had been able to do while as a ship. Her uniform was the skinsuit design the Royal Canadian Navy had adopted for all its shipgirls, though in the rust red-and-white of United States Coast Guard icebreakers, the eagles of a captain on her shoulders. Her old hull classification symbol number 30 was on her trousers, that over the white-and-blue racing stripes always painted on Coast Guard cutters. "What the hell...?!" the reborn laker beside Mackinaw gasped. "How...?"
"You're a shipgirl now, just like me, Andy," Mackinaw stated. "And it's not November of 1975. It's mid-June; you should know the year. Where the hell were you when you woke up here?"
That made Arthur M. Anderson blink before she scratched her head...then blinked as she gazed on her hand. "Docked in Buffalo! But...I thought only warships could be reborn as shipgirls...!"
"This is Superior, remember."
That made the veteran laker wince. "Right...!" She then gasped. "FITZ!"
"What...?!"
"Contact, dead ahead!" Kongō called out from astern of Anderson. "Almost at the entrance of Whitefish Bay! She's returning on my radar the same way Anderson's returning!"
"FITZ!" Anderson screamed out. "Damn it, Mack! You're faster than me! Get out...!"
The laker then yelped as four fast-moving destroyers raced past her and Mackinaw to hurl themselves towards Whitefish Bay and the reborn laker struggling to get there...
"Gotta...make it...!"
The panting shipgirl with the ice-laden curly strawberry blonde hair and the pale eyes moaned as she tried to push her diesel onward, feeling the water surge into her compartments amidships as she hoped the seas wouldn't swamp her before she got into the lee of Whitefish Bay. "Stupid...got too close to the Shoals...!" she grunted...before blinking. "Huh...?"
The seas were...calm?
What the HELL...?!
Blinking, she straightened herself, then scanned around with Mark One eyeball; her radar got blown down when the gales of November began smashing into her hull just as she had turned east-southeast parallel to the border to get to the Soo. The cliffs of the Canadian Shield cut out by the glaciers of the Ice Age were to her north, the shore of the Upper Peninsula to her south and Whitefish Bay was dead ahead at about thirty nautical miles. Even stranger, the surface of the lake was almost as smooth as glass, not like the raging tempest she had faced when...
When the wave caught her astern, driving her bows right into Superior's bottom...
When the wrenching feeling of her hull being ripped apart by the force of the waves overcame her...
When, with her last breath, she whispered to the spirit of Superior to save her crew...
They deserved to go home to their families for Christmas...
They...
When...
What...
What the HELL...?!
"FITZGERALD-SENSEI!"
"Huh...?" the reborn laker gasped before she looked aft...
...then gaped on seeing four young girls with destroyer-like weapons in some sort of military-like webbing racing towards her on what looked like miniaturized keels of ships on their shoes, bones in their teeth as they came at her; they had to be doing at least thirty knots! "Hey! Slow down, you stupid tin cans!" she bellowed out. "You'll swamp pleasure boats if you move that fast! This isn't the open ocean, you reckless...huh?!" she then gasped.
Wait a minute...
How the hell...?
What...?
"It's alright, Fitzgerald-sensei!" one of the girls - destroyers? - came up to wrap an arm around Edmund Fitzgerald's red dungaree shirt-covered starboard arm, giving her a smile that would knock even Bugs Bunny down! "We'll get you to the bay! You'll make it this time!"
"FITZ!"
That made the reborn laker balk before she looked aft. "ANDY!"
She slowed herself to allow the other laker - girl? - to come alongside, she accompanied by a shorter woman - Was that Mackinaw? - with a flock of girls - warships? - moving to catch up...!
But...
How on Earth...?
She then looked down on herself. "I'm a woman...?"
"You're a shipgirl, Továrišč Sensei," the pale-haired girl - destroyer of some type? - said as she pulled up to Fitzgerald's port, her voice a weird mix of Japanese and...was that Russian?! "The spirit of SS Edmund Fitzgerald brought back in the form of a human woman, as we have been brought back! We were on a tour of the Great Lakes when they sang your song...!"
That made Fitzgerald blink before she remembered someone diving on her wreck some years ago. A mixed team had come down to her pilothouse to cut off her ship's bell, replacing it with one that had the names of her last sailing crew embedded on it. And they played a song...
Wait...wasn't that the Canadian singer who did the song about the railway...?
He actually made a song for her...?!
But...!
"Wh-why...?" she then sputtered out.
"Továrišč Sensei...?" the pale-haired destroyer to her port urged.
The reborn laker shook her head. "But...Superior never gives up her dead...!"
On the Ontario shore of Whitefish Bay, hours later...
"This is where they found one of your boats, Fitz..."
Shuddering as tears of grief flowed down her cheeks, Fitzgerald shook her head. "No one...?"
"No one," Mackinaw stated as the shipgirls all sat around a campfire, relaxing after they joined up with the reborn laker and helped pull her ashore to give her the explanation of what had happened to her. "The waves were far too big for you to take. You got caught in one big one, had your bow driven into the mud of the lake floor, then the force snapped your keel."
Fitzgerald shuddered as she collapsed on herself. "No one...!"
"They're still alive as long as you live, Sensei..."
That was Akatsuki, who was warmly hugging one of the laker's arms. Seeing the tear-filled eyes of the reborn destroyer as she gazed up on the taller shipgirl, Fitzgerald smiled as she reached up to rub Akatsuki's dark hair playfully, which made the smaller shipgirl blush. By then, Wisconsin had come over. "We called in both to the Pentagon and National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, not to mention the headquarters of the Coast Guard districts on both sides of the borders, Miss Fitzgerald," the pony-tailed blonde battleship representing the state whose lake ports Fitzgerald had often sailed from in the past calmly reported. "Padres from the Navy Chaplain Corps and the Royal Canadian Chaplain Service are on their way to the Soo to help you recover from this...not to mention prepare you to meet your crew's relatives..."
That made the reborn laker shudder, then she sighed. "Why was I reborn, ma'am? Why was Andy changed?! She was still sailing for U.S. Steel! Don't tell me those Abyssals Miss Akagi and Miss Kaga described to me have got into the Lakes! After all, zebra mussels have got in...!"
"Do not panic about that, Mademoiselle Fitzgerald."
Everyone gasped before they spun to look upon the lake...
...where a regal shipgirl floated a couple metres off shore, her dress matching that of one of the famous voyageurs who had explored North America in centuries past, the rigging behind her head of flowing dark hair indicating she had been a sailing ship in her first life. Seeing her, all the Canadian Flowers gasped in shocked awe. "Le Griffon...!" Port Arthur croaked.
"Who?" Kongō asked.
"The first ship to sail the Lakes, ma'am," Anderson answered.
"And the first shipwreck," Algoma finished.
That made all the Japanese shipgirls gasp in stunned awe before they bowed deeply to the new arrival. "Please forgive us, Griffon-sama, but why was Fitzgerald-sensei...?!" Yamato asked.
An amused titter escaped the reborn two masted sailing ship that had been used by explorer Robert de La Salle in his expedition to find the passage to the Orient through the upper Great Lakes in the late 1670s. "Do not fret about such things, Mademoiselle Yamato," she replied, her voice flecked with the noble lilt of the court of Versailles during the Ancien Régime. "The fresh water and the magic of the noble tribes on both side of les Grands Lacs keep those disgusting creatures free from ravaging the ships of these waters, forcing the brave warrior ships of le Confédération and les États-Unis to bring war to this place..."
"Why was I brought back, ma'am?!" Fitzgerald demanded. "I'm a cargo ship, not a warship! And why was Andy turned into a shipgirl?! She's still an active ship with U.S. Steel...!"
That made le Griffon laugh. "Mademoiselle Fitzgerald, it's quite simple." She then pointed out to a point just beyond Whitefish Bay. "They heard the call when les petites Fleurs were summoned back to duty." She nodded to the American and Canadian corvettes in the crowd of shipgirls around the campfire. "Even if you are of the laquiers des Grands Lacs, you can teach them many things. Including surviving le Sorcière de Novembre...for she has sisters all around the world, non?" With that, she tipped her wide-brimmed felt hat with the eagle feather sticking up from it...then she vanished.
That left a group of gaping shipgirls behind...
The Pentagon, a day later...
"This is a joke, right?!"
Vice Admiral Donald Williams was DCNO/SG, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Shipgirls in the United States Navy. The administrative commander of all shipgirls serving the Union was now hosting his Canadian counterpart, Rear Admiral Francis Harlan, in his office in the "E" ring of the Pentagon. "No joke," the Canadian admiral moaned before he nodded thanks as Sackville handed him a cup of coffee laced with pusser's rum. "I got the flash message as I was travelling down here to meet with you to coordinate the transfer of all info concerning the healing mist tech to Vestal and the other repair shipgirls at Norfolk, San Diego, Kitsap and Pearl Harbour. The Fitzgerald...!"
"As a girl?" Williams asked.
"Aye, sir. Ditto with Anderson. Not like when Titanic and his brothers came back..."
"Thank God! If we ever got more shipboys...!"
The Canadian officer nodded...
Fin...!
