At All Costs (15 page)

Kapitan Rosenbaum died in the war in a plane crash. His widow gave Amyes a handmade book that a journalist had put together on her husband’s naval career; it included the U-73 log and heretofore unknown details on the sinking of the
Eagle.
Amyes met also Rosenbaum’s daughter, who was five when her father was killed. “I’m so sick and tired of hearing what a hero my father was,” she told him. “I just wish, one time, somebody would tell me something bad about him, so that I could know he was human.”

He met the man who as a teenager had sent the four torpedoes on their way. “I remember he called them ‘my torpedoes,’ not Kapitan Rosenbaum’s or the U-73’s, but ‘my torpedoes,’” said Amyes. “He asked me, ‘How much damage did my torpedoes do, how many men were killed?’ When I told him upwards of two hundred, he went pale. He gasped, ‘Oh my God,’ and crushed his heart with his hand. I thought he was going to collapse. He never knew until then. It was the first time he had come in contact with anyone who had actually experienced the situation.”

The story in
The Daily Telegraph
ended, “Then came a mighty rumbling as the sea poured relentlessly into the Eagle, forcing out the air. The water threshed above her in a fury of white foam and then subsided. She had gone.”

“It was as simple as that,” said Captain Thomson, who watched from the bridge of the
Santa Elisa.
“No fuss, no excitement, not even much noise. The carrier just sank. It was hard to believe then, and it’s harder to believe now, but we saw it happen. And we had to keep on going, zigzagging back and forth and wondering if we would be next.”

CHAPTER 24 •••

DIVE-BOMBERS AT DUSK

E
very sailor in the convoy was stunned by the sudden sinking of the

Eagle.
U-boats were not supposed to be able to penetrate the defense at all, let alone strike at the heart of the convoy. In Admiral Syfret’s two previous convoys to Malta, none of his warships had been lost, but now he could see that he’d been lucky. The Axis was paying attention this time. He tightened the destroyer screen and sent out a message saying that the standard of vigilance had bloody well improve.

Five Italian and two other German submarines had missed the convoy when it passed between Algiers and Majorca, and they now began chasing it down. There were another eleven Italian submarines ahead, strategically divided into three zones off the coast of Algeria. The zigzagging convoy was like a roaming herd of wildebeest, and the subs were stalking lions, hidden by tall grass.

“During the next few hours several vessels reported submarines in the vicinity, and I sighted the periscope of a submarine on our starboard beam,” said Captain Mason of the
Ohio.
“It appeared to be on the point of surfacing, but several ships opened fire and the submarine immediately dived. We could not use our own guns owing to other ships being in the line of fire.”

The convoy was also being followed in the air. Four Junkers Ju 88s, flying from Sardinia and carrying cameras as big as garbage cans, tracked the ships with near impunity, because the Sea Hurricanes couldn’t climb to the 32,480-foot ceiling of the Ju 88 spy planes. The supercharged engines of the Hurricanes were tuned for power at sea level, to lift off the aircraft carriers, and as a result were weak in the thin air of high altitude.

“Our fighters competed manfully at great height against the snoopers, but the speed and height of the Ju 88s made their task a hopeless one,” said Syfret.

Malta was sending out spy planes too, from its Photo Reconnaissance Unit. “A heavy call was made on P.R.U. Spitfires, in order to determine the position and strength of enemy air forces, and of enemy surface forces,” said Malta’s RAF commander, Air Marshal Keith Park. Malta never stopped looking for the Italian battleships and heavy cruisers—or worrying about them.

There were some 540 operational Axis aircraft on Sardinia and Sicily, not counting those that British intelligence believed had been brought in from Greece and Crete. Altogether there might have been 1,000 planes intended for the obliteration of Operation Pedestal.

Syfret sent a message from his battleship,
Nelson,
to the ships in the convoy: Prepare for an air attack at dusk. It should be considered a certainty.

On the
Santa Elisa,
Fred Larsen checked his Oerlikon and made sure there were plenty of ammunition magazines, each holding sixty cartridges and loaded by two British soldiers. Lonnie Dales tested the red light pinned to his life jacket. Jack Follansbee asked the captain if he could fill four empty Scotch bottles with Jamaican rum from the keg and hide one in each lifeboat.

“Make sure no one sees you,” said Thomson, knowing that if anyone did, the rum would disappear as fast as a tracer from the barrel of an Oerlikon.

Lookouts squinted into the hot pink sun on the western horizon, knowing that dive-bombers attacked from the rear, because there were fewer guns that could be trained aft. At 2045, radar detected Axis aircraft. A flag was raised from the stern of the
Nelson
that told the ships to expect the attack in seven minutes.

Thirty Junkers Ju 88 bombers came out of the clouds at 2056, while six twin-engine Heinkel 111s, each carrying two torpedoes under the fuselage, came skimming low over the water.

“By the time the attack developed, the sun was setting in a big red glow,” Anthony Kimmins told his BBC radio audience. Kimmins had been a Royal Navy officer before the war and would become an actor, playwright, and filmmaker during and after it; Operation Pedestal was one of his early dramatic performances. He described the scene from the bridge of the cruiser
Nigeria,
where he had been standing alongside Admiral Burrough and trying to stay out of his way.

“The barrage put up by our ships was one of the most staggering things I have ever seen,” he said. “Tracers screaming across the sky in all directions, and overhead literally thousands of black puffs of bursting shells. The din was terrific, but through it all you could hear the wail of sirens for an emergency alteration of course to avoid torpedoes, and the answering deep-throated hoots of the merchantmen as they turned in perfect formation. Then suddenly, a cheer from a gun’s crew, and away on the port bow a Ju 88 spinning vertically downwards with both wings on fire and looking like a giant Catherine Wheel [fireworks pinwheel]. More cheers, and over to starboard another 88 was diving headlong for the sea, with smoke pouring out behind. At about 500 feet the automatic pullout came into action, and she flattened out and crashed on her belly with a great splash of water. Against the sunset you could see the parachutes of her crew as they drifted slowly downwards.”

“It is impossible to describe the massive antiaircraft barrage that was put up by fourteen well-armed merchant ships and about fifty major warships, and it is equally impossible to understand how the enemy were able to survive,” said Frank Pike in 2005. At the time of Operation Pedestal, he was a nineteen-year-old British Army corporal being transported to Malta on the
Santa Elisa.
Because he had artillery experience, Captain Thomson assigned him a battle station at the Oerlikon on the forward starboard bridge wing.

“In asking some of the soldiers to help man the Oerlikons,” said Pike, “I think that the captain was probably trying to find a useful employment for us and at the same time give his crew some assistance. It was a service that we took on most willingly. The third officer, Mr. Larsen, spent some time instructing us in the loading of magazines, as well as the loading and operating of the gun, and dealing with stoppages.”

The battleships and aircraft carriers had water-cooled, eight-barreled pom-pom guns, which recoiled with each shot; each barrel could fire 90 rounds per minute, and the gun spat out empty shells as if it were drooling brass. With 720 pumping strokes per minute, the pom-pom got the name “Chicago piano” because the barrels bounced like the keys of a boogie-woogie piano. There were at least ten of them in the convoy, sending thousands of pretty white puffs of shrapnel high into the sky.

“Crump-crump-crump-crump-crump they went, belching forth flame, death and destruction all over the sky,” wrote Dag Dickens. It was a “picturesque barrage,” reported the liaison officer on
Brisbane Star.

If the pom-poms sounded like the rhythmic fast beat of a drum, the battleships’ sixteen-inch guns were like hand grenades going off in the orchestra pit. It was the
Rodney
’s guns that had sunk the German battleship
Bismarck,
killing 1,946 out of 2,065 men. Now they were loaded with special shrapnel shells, for the first-ever attempt to use the big guns to shoot down airplanes.

“
Nelson
’s and
Rodney
’s main armament were spectacular morale boosters to have in company,” said Hector Mackenzie, a Fleet Air Arm officer on the aircraft carrier
Indomitable.
“Our fighter pilots reported that even thousands of feet above these shell bursts, they were lifted about 500 feet, if over one when it burst.”

The shrapnel shells made the guns louder than ever, and the barrels puked huge clouds of brown smoke when they burst, as pieces of hot metal scattered over any nearby ship. “It was unnerving, to say the least,” said Lonnie Dales. “And, believe me, those guns were deafening.”

“The din was unholy,” said Ed Randall, chief engineer on the
Santa Elisa.

“That was the most noise I’ve ever heard, and I’ve just come from Dunkirk,” said a British gunner on the
Santa Elisa,
loading the Oerlikon on the after port bridge wing for Dales.

Ensign Suppiger, who led the U.S. Navy Armed Guard on the
Santa Elisa,
assigned himself to the four-inch low-angle gun on the stern, which wasn’t used against aircraft. This gave him time to watch as the bravest of the Ju 88 pilots twisted through the flak and dived on the ships from about 8,000 feet.

“A tiny spot would appear high overhead, then it would start to dive,” he said. “Thousands of tracers would be seen going in that direction. The plane would maneuver from side to side to avoid the gunfire, but would keep on coming and not break out of its dive until it had released its stick of bombs at about 700 yards.

“I noticed that it seemed as if most of the bombers were aiming at our ship. Bombs were falling uncomfortably close, with some sticks straddling the ship. I thought they were sighting on the black-and-yellow checkerboard deck of the RAF crash boat we were carrying as cargo. At my suggestion, Chief Mate Englund instructed some of his deck hands to cover this launch with a tarpaulin and thereafter our ship was not singled out.”

“Circling maybe 5000 feet above us, the dive bombers look casual, almost contemptuous,” said Ed Randall. “Then, two or three of them peel off and dive, usually toward the carriers and other warships. They figure they can wait around like vultures and pick off the cargo ships at leisure. As they roar down, you can make out the swastikas on their wings, and you can see the sticks of bombs drop out. At first they look as if they’re floating down, distant, impersonal, harmless. Then they start zooming right at you, and you realize they’re 500-pounders. Down in the engine-room, every near miss sends tools crashing to the floor as the ship lurches. And you keep your ears cocked for the telephone order from the bridge to abandon ship, because you don’t want to get caught like a rat in a sewer. But up above there are ships sinking and men dying, and you’re powerless to do a damned thing about it.”

“Those babies were not easy to discourage,” said Captain Thomson. “They came over us 15 or 20 at a time, paying no attention to the ack-ack barrage the convoy was sending up. They had all the guts in the world, and they seemed to be able to do what they liked with their planes. Maybe it sounds wrong to say I admired them, but that’s the only word that will fit. I mean, I wasn’t only afraid of them. I could see they were doing a beautiful job, the way our gunners were doing a beautiful job. As far as we were able to judge in the sweat and confusion of the attack, our gunners brought down three German planes. One plane, before we shot it down, dropped a string of bombs athwart our ship, two bombs falling on the port side and three on the starboard side. Thank God none of them landed anywhere near the Number 1 hatch.”

“I was constantly on watch with the captain on the flying bridge, or on my gun station, port forward flying bridge wing,” said Fred Larsen. “Whenever we had close misses, the generators would temporarily conk out. This would knock out our gyro compass which was located on the lower deck practically in engine-room one. The repeaters which were essential to our station were on the flying bridge. Since I was also in charge of the gyro compass, I would go down and reset the master gyro and balance it off to the correct heading.

“I was on my way up to my station when I heard the phone ringing on the lower bridge wheelhouse. I answered the phone and it was my friend the chief engineer Ed Randall, calling from the engine room wanting to know what was going on, since his tools were falling from the peg board. I told him it was just a near miss, and to put the tools back on the board and to switch the engine-room phone to the flying bridge so that I could keep him informed.”

Three of the aircraft carriers had left the convoy:
Argus
had been along just for Operation Berserk,
Furious
was on her way back to Gibraltar after flying off the Spitfires, and
Eagle
was now on the bottom. That left
Indomitable
and
Victorious.

Indomitable
carried twenty-four Sea Hurricanes, fourteen Albacore biplane bombers, and ten new Grumman Martlet fighters, the American answer to the Japanese Zero, enjoyed by pilots for its steep climb rate.
Victorious
carried six Sea Hurricanes, fourteen Albacores, and sixteen two-seat Fairey Fulmars, which weren’t much faster than the Gladiator biplanes they replaced but carried eight .30-caliber machine guns in the folding wings.
Victorious
was also the flagship of the Fleet Air Arm commander, Admiral A. L. Lyster, the Fifth Sea Lord, who had planned Operation Pedestal with Admirals Syfret and Burrough in London.

The Fleet Air Arm fighters had a difficult time seeing the gray bombers in the gray sky. Worse, the convoy gunners couldn’t tell the friendly fighters from the enemy bombers. “They were firing at anything that flew,” cursed one Hurricane pilot, landing after dark.

“It is evident that the dusk attack must be met with either Anti-Aircraft guns or fighters,” reported Admiral Lyster. “Both cannot operate together.

“I am particularly impressed by the failure to hit by the Anti-Aircraft guns, both long range and short range, high and low,” he added. “That the gunfire is a deterrent to the attacking torpedo aircraft is evident, and perhaps it may deter some of the more timid bombers and dive bombers. The fact remains, however, that the dividend paid for a tremendous expenditure of ammunition is remarkably low. I have the strong impression that not only is it inaccurate, but also undisciplined.”

On the
Indomitable,
the premature explosion of a shell from one of the guns had blown out the flight deck landing lights and killed the flight deck’s first officer, so the second officer brought the planes in with a flashlight in each hand and one in his mouth. Few of the pilots had any night landing experience. One crash-landed on
Victorious
while she was in the middle of a zigzag. “I saw a great sheet of flame rise from the flight deck,” said Captain Thomson.

“So it went on, right up to darkness, the gunfire never easing up for a moment, the great columns of water as bombs dropped between the ships,” continued Anthony Kimmins on the radio. “My last impression of that evening was a Ju 88 who made an attack astern of us. He found himself committed to making a getaway over the fleet, and he started making steep turns this way and that in a frantic effort to avoid the tracers which were screaming up at him from all directions. For a short time, by some miracle, he got away with it, but before long we were steaming past a burning patch in the water, where he had crashed in. As the terrific gunfire suddenly subsided, the comparative silence of the night was almost uncanny. There had been no damage to any of our ships from this attack.”