Tyler Fields
WHEN AND IF, which takes the breezes of Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound in stride, is a 63′5″ LOD schooner designed by John G. Alden for ocean passages envisioned by George Patton before he achieved fame as a four-star general during World War II. She was launched in 1939. WHEN AND IF nears completion in the F.F. Pendleton boatyard in Wiscasset, Maine, where the future general George Patton closely supervised her construction and launching in 1939
There is a small, faded photograph tacked to the wall at Ballentine’s Boat Shop in Cataumet, Massachusetts, on the Buzzards Bay shore of Cape Cod. It is covered with layers of wood dust, and the edges are a bit torn. The photo—small, grainy, and black-and-white, as if from an old postcard—captured a white-hulled schooner in light air, flying every sail she could without much to show for it. The photo is easy to overlook amid the maybe 75 on the wall. For more than a decade, I walked past the image daily—often more than once. But something about that schooner kept me looking again. Finally, my curiosity grew enough to dig out a magnifying glass with which I could barely make out her nameboard: WHEN AND IF.
The schooner, commissioned in 1939, had been the pride of George Patton Jr., the career U.S. Army officer who achieved fame as a World War II full general. He died after a motor-vehicle collision in Germany shortly after the war’s end without achieving his longtime dream of sailing around the world with his wife, Beatrice, and family. Before the war, Patton had made clear his wishes for the cherished schooner should he not survive the war: The family could keep her, donate her for educational purposes, or scuttle her. Beatrice chose to keep the schooner and sailed her extensively. After she died in 1953, the yacht passed to her brother, Fred Ayer, and later to his son, Fred Ayer Jr.