At All Costs (22 page)

“They were playing
The Star Spangled Banner
for us,” said Dales.

With the delivery of the
Ohio’s
oil to Malta, the 10th Submarine Flotilla had diesel fuel again, and was able to resume its attacks on Axis convoys supplying Rommel in North Africa. The Royal Malta Artillery had kerosene for the generators that powered the anti-aircraft batteries. And four freighters with aviation fuel got the RAF bombers airborne again.

Without the Operation Pedestal convoy, Malta would have fallen into Hitler’s hands and become a base for the Luftwaffe; Rommel’s drive toward the oil in Iraq and Iran might have been unstoppable. That’s what it was all about. Three months later, with supplies cut, Rommel was on the run, and General Eisenhower was able to lead the Allied invasion of North Africa.

COLLECTION OF MRS. M. LARSEN

While Larsen was steaming in convoy he was unaware that his wife, Minda, and son, Jan, were crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Lisbon to New York on a Red Cross mercy ship. His two years of diplomatic efforts to free them from Nazi-occupied Norway had been successful. The day after the
Ohio
arrived in Malta, he was told that this cablegram (
above
) was waiting for him.

T
HE
P
RESIDENT OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
T
AKES
P
LEASURE IN
P
RESENTING THE
M
ERCHANT
M
ARINE
D
ISTINGUISHED
S
ERVICE
M
EDAL TO

FREDERICK A. LARSEN, JR.
J
UNIOR
T
HIRD
M
ATE ON
SS
S
ANTA
E
LISA
AND
FRANCIS A. DALES
D
ECK
C
ADET
-M
IDSHIPMAN ON
SS
S
ANTA
E
LISA
For heroism above and beyond the call of duty

UNITED STATES MERCHANT MARINE ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER 30 •••

SCREAMS ON THE WATER

F
red Larsen spent almost all of his time on the
Santa Elisa
’s flying bridge, on top of the enclosed bridge and open to the sky, a protected parapet between the Oerlikon gun tubs standing like castle towers on the port and starboard bridge wings. “There was very poor visibility from the lower deck, so we controlled the ship from the flying bridge, where we could see what was going on,” he said. When he was able to leave his gun, he usually stood in the center of the flying bridge with Captain Thomson.

They were standing there as darkness crept in, when the
Clan Ferguson
was hit by a torpedo dropped by a stealthy bomber.

“A signalman on watch saw the torpedo approaching from our starboard beam,” reported her second officer, Mr. Black. “He shouted, ‘Hard to starboard!’ but the ship did not swing quickly enough.”

The
Clan Ferguson
had survived other Malta convoys, and her experienced master, Arthur Robert Cossar, wasn’t afraid to fight. She was the smallest freighter in the fleet, but she carried the most armament: two Bofors instead of one, eight Oerlikons instead of six, four FAMS, four PAC rockets, two pig troughs, and extra machine guns. She also carried 2,000 tons of aviation fuel and 1,500 tons of ammunition and high explosives. She went up in a gigantic fireball and down in seven minutes.

“One minute there was this fine vessel, the next a huge atomic-like explosion, and she had gone, disappeared with just a bluish ring of flame on the water and a mushroom of smoke and flame thousands of feet into the sky,” said a sailor on the cruiser
Kenya.

As Larsen and Thomson watched the
Clan Ferguson
burn, they believed they were witnessing the incineration of fellow Americans, because they thought she was the
Almeria Lykes.

“There were screams, quite a lot of screams, and we assumed that people were getting burned,” said George Nye, one of the British soldiers on the
Santa Elisa.
He’s tried to forget them for sixty-three years. We could hear screams for half an hour. You know how sound travels over the water.”

“It was a ghastly funeral pyre of burning petrol on the water,” said the liaison officer of the
Brisbane Star,
whose turn at the sharp end of a torpedo would soon come.

Some accounts say there were no survivors, because it was assumed that there couldn’t have been. None of the nearby destroyers stopped to look for unlikely survivors because it was dark and their orders were to keep zigzagging toward Malta unless survivors were evident. Protecting the cargo was the highest priority.

However, the explosion observed by witnesses had occurred some minutes after the torpedo had hit between the engine room and number four hold, igniting the fire that spread before it burst skyward. In those minutes Captain Cossar had given the order to abandon ship and men were able to release one intact lifeboat and three rafts that they paddled with their steel helmets. More men dived over the side and swam frantically, chased over the water by silent blue flames. When the fire on the ship reached the number five hold where the 1,500 tons of ammunition were stored, she blew sky high.

“The oil on the water around the position in which my ship had sunk blazed furiously for about 48 hours,” reported Mr. Black. “Cans of petrol kept floating to the surface and catching fire, and at one time there was dense black smoke rising which I think must have been caused by the fuel oil which was ignited on coming to the surface.”

Mr. Black’s surreal story goes on for five days. There were sixteen men on his raft. At daybreak they thought they saw a signal and paddled toward it, but it was one of their own lifeboats, burning with no one in it. They found the other rafts with 48 more survivors, accounting for 64 out of 114 men now. The sea was flat and spooky, the sky overcast with the smoke of burning ships. Two dead bodies floated by. At high noon under the blazing sun, they thought they saw a corvette on the hazy horizon so they raised red sails, but it was an Italian submarine with an image of Pinocchio painted on the conning tower. The
Bronzo
came alongside, and one of its crewmen asked them if they were in distress before it chugged off. Then a flying boat landed on the water near the raft, nearly crashing in the flotsam; a German ordered thirty-two men at gunpoint to board the plane. Mr. Black sent the most seriously injured men, in unimaginable agony as the sun seared their burns. The Germans handled them gently.

The next morning they tried to sail to Zembra Island, expecting to be interred by the Vichy French. The wind turned offshore and they paddled for fourteen hours as the rafts were separated. That evening an Italian Red Cross plane landed and took on seven more injured men. At daybreak on August 16 they were about one mile from the island. “We could see the telephone wires and I thought we could perhaps use the telephone if we were able to land,” said Mr. Black.

They had come within a hundred yards of their destination when the wind blew them back. An Italian E-boat came and took three officers off the raft. Some Vichy French authorities watched from shore, furious that the Italians were trying to take British prisoners inside their territorial waters; they sent out gendarmes who wrestled the three Brits back.

The men on the raft paddled toward a small village down the beach, but the village turned into an Italian destroyer as they approached. They tried to surrender but the destroyer morphed into a ghost ship, piled up on the rocks. They beached in a cove. Italian fishermen took them to a farm, where they were given food, wine, and cigarettes. French authorities arrived and carried the injured men away on donkeys. They reached a French village where many of the two thousand locals came out to welcome them. “All the women of the village joined together to give us a good meal from their rations,” said Mr. Black, the second mate.

The
Clan Ferguson
survivors were questioned by French Army and Navy officers, who hid them from the Italian authorities. The next day they were taken to a camp where they were reunited with their shipmates who had outraced the flames in the lifeboat and been picked up by the submarine
Alagi.
Captain Cossar was among them. They were all taken to another camp, where the Italian commandant was pro-British. They were there for some time, apparently escaping their loose incarceration during Operation Torch in November. Mr. Black wrote his report in December. “I do not know how many men are missing,” he said.

Mr. Black didn’t report how they had gotten out of Africa. It seems to be a miracle enough that they survived.

Three sticks of bombs, a total of eighteen, rained down on the
Empire Hope
from three Ju 88s. Near misses blew a fifteen-foot hole in her side and knocked out the engines, pumps, and cooling system. While she was dead in the water, a direct hit penetrated the afterdeck and exploded in the number four hold, which contained ammunition and kerosene. Another two bombs burst in a 200-ton pile of coal stacked on the decks. The ship was smothered by coal dust, as a tower of orange flames shot through the top of the black cloud. “The fire by this time was spreading rapidly and the decks were red hot, so I gave the order to abandon ship,” said Captain Gwilym Williams.

The destroyer
Penn
took the survivors aboard, many of them badly burned and screaming, and sank the
Empire Hope
with a torpedo.

The
Brisbane Star
had been steaming so close to the
Empire Hope
that she had to make an emergency maneuver to stay out of the fire. She turned into the path of a torpedo dropped from an He 111, which blew a hole through her bows big enough for a speedboat to race through. But she could still make 5 knots, so she steered toward the Tunisian coast and the ostensibly neutral Vichy waters, which were open to ships in distress.

“We turned south, and proceeded along close inshore,” reported the
Brisbane Star
’s liaison officer. “We were passed by all the remaining ships in the convoy, including, to our surprise, the tanker
Ohio.
”

Captain Mason and his engineering officer, James Wyld, had gotten the
Ohio
going again. She could make only seven unsteady knots, and she was ten miles behind the other ships, but at least she was moving toward Malta. As liaison officer Lieutenant Barton said, “The sea was washing in and out of the hole in the hull, and the decks were nearly white hot, but we were still floating.”

CHAPTER 31 •••

MOSCOW

A
s the destroyer
Ithuriel
was ramming the submarine
Cobalto
that afternoon, Winston Churchill was landing in his Liberator bomber at an airfield at the edge of Moscow. He’d flown there from Cairo, in order to personally inform Stalin that he and President Roosevelt had decided to invade North Africa before Europe. It was a secret mission, and FDR had authorized Churchill to speak for him in telling Stalin that there would be no second front in 1942. “It was like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole,” said Churchill, who had never met Stalin.

He had no illusions about the spiritual depth of Stalin’s commitment to freedom. “We had always hated their wicked regime,” he said, “and, till the German flail beat upon them, they would have watched us being swept out of existence with indifference and gleefully divided with Hitler our Empire in the East.” But now their relationship was shackled to their survival.

Churchill was driven from the airfield to Stalin’s villa, which the Soviet premier had lavishly prepared for his guest. White-jacketed servants roamed the rooms, and in the dining room, a long table was “laden with every delicacy and stimulant that supreme power can command,” said Churchill. But he seemed more impressed by the separate hot and cold water taps in the bathroom.

As always, the prime minister’s entourage included his personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson, and his valet, Sawyers. They were in the foyer when Sir Charles heard loud shouts coming from upstairs. He ran up the steps two at a time and found Churchill in the bathtub, shivering and cursing. “The water is bloody cold and I don’t know which is the hot tap!”

“Their taps do not work like our taps, and the Russian lettering did not help,” explained Sir Charles. “I took a chance. There was a sudden big gush of icy water under terrific pressure. It caught the P.M. amidships. He gave a loud shriek, and when he got his breath he cursed me for my incompetence. I flew to get help.”

About ninety minutes later, as the
Indomitable
was being buggered by Stukas, and fifty men were dying in the explosions and flames, Churchill was breaking the news to Stalin that there would be no forthcoming Allied invasion to draw German troops out of the Soviet Union.

The first two hours were bleak. He explained with maps and arguments why there could be no second front. “If Stalin was bitterly disappointed, he listened patiently to my explanation,” said Churchill. “He never once raised his voice, never once lost his temper. When I had told him the worst, we both sat in silence for a little.”

At ten in the evening, Moscow time, as fifty-two men were dying from the torpedo hit on the
Nigeria,
chunks of steel and sailors were flying hundreds of feet into the sky from the
Cairo,
and merchant seamen on the SS
Ohio
were fighting to keep the wall of burning kerosene from becoming the mother of all infernos, Churchill was still sitting across the table from Stalin. He was drawing a picture of a crocodile, which represented Nazi Europe.

Churchill loved to use crocodiles as metaphors. The British Army had a flamethrowing tank that he had nicknamed the “Crocodile.” He said that Communists were like crocodiles. German historians have long wondered how Churchill managed to persuade Stalin to join the Allies. It started with this sketch of a crocodile. But he still needed Operation Pedestal and Malta to close the deal.

“I explained to Stalin with the help of this picture how it was our intention to attack the soft belly of the crocodile as we attacked his hard snout,” said Churchill. The soft belly was Sicily and Italy, and the hard snout was northern France and western Europe. Stalin’s interest was now piqued, and Churchill continued, describing the military advantages of freeing the Mediterranean. “In September we must win in Egypt, and in October in North Africa, all the time holding the enemy in northern France,” he told Stalin.

As Churchill was dissecting his crocodile and describing the military advantages of freeing the Mediterranean to Stalin, Fred Larsen was doing his part to deliver Malta to Churchill: at that moment, he was at his Oerlikon on the bridge of the
Santa Elisa,
shooting down the Stuka from a thousand yards.

“At this point Stalin seemed suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages of Torch,” continued Churchill.

He recounted four main reasons for it: first, it would hit Rommel in the back; second, it would overawe Spain; third, it would produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in France; and fourth, it would expose Italy to the whole brunt of the war.

I was deeply impressed with this remarkable statement. It showed the Russian Dictator’s swift and complete mastery of a problem hitherto novel to him. Very few people alive could have comprehended in so few minutes the reasons which we had all so long been wrestling with for months. He saw it all in a flash.

As the
Clan Ferguson
was going up in a fireball and down in seven minutes, and eighteen bombs were raining down on the
Empire Hope
from three Ju 88s, and the
Brisbane Star
was getting a hole blown in her bows big enough to for a speedboat to race through, Churchill was back at his villa eating a huge evening meal. He put his half-finished cigar across a wineglass, rose, and stretched.

“Tired as I was,” he said, “I dictated my telegram to the War Cabinet and the President after midnight, and then, with the feeling that at least the ice was broken and human contact established [with Stalin] I slept soundly and long.”

As Churchill slept soundly in his spacious bedroom, the Operation Pedestal convoy steamed deep into the flaming jaws of Hell in the Sicilian Narrows.