The sirens woke them at one o’clock in the morning. Seventeen-year-old Robert Henderson threw the bedclothes off, trapping the sleeping cat. His father barked from the doorway, “Close them curtains.” The cat scrambled out from under and dashed between his feet.
The searchlights rotated through the window and transformed the little room where Robert had slept his entire life into an unfamiliar stage set. Briefly, the light picked out the large wall map of the North Atlantic bristling with the colored pins Robert attached following news reports of sea battles—white for Canadian, red for British, blue for American, yellow for rest of world, and black for German.
Frantically pulling the window closed and the blackout curtains to, Robert whipped around and knocked two ship models off the shel
