At All Costs (29 page)

CHAPTER 41 •••

NOWHERE TO HIDE

A
s Captain Mason slept, his sinking ship inched toward Malta without him, dragged by the
Penn.
The minesweeper
Rye
was trying to steady
Penn
’s bows, connected by two minesweeping wires. The destroyer
Bramham
had returned from the coast, weaving back at 23 knots through splashing bombs, and now steamed in slow circles around the
Ohio,
screening against submarines and bombers.

“At 2024, twelve bombs fell within 20 yards of
Rye,
covering her with spray and splinters, but doing no effective damage,” reported her Captain Pearson. “At 2042 H.M.S.
Penn
cast off
Rye
’s and her own tow, due to heavy bombing.”

The survivors on the decks of the
Penn
had nowhere to hide from the dive-bombers. “There was no shelter,” said Allan Shaw. “There was nowhere to sit down. All you could do was stand there.”

When the dive-bombers came from the port side, the survivors ran around to the starboard side of the superstructure; and when the dive-bombers came from starboard, the survivors ran to port. The wardroom had been turned into a sick bay, but there wasn’t enough room for the injured. Men with bandaged eyes were led by others, and men who couldn’t walk were dragged. Larsen and Dales carried a survivor from the
Empire Hope
whose legs had been broken by shrapnel.

Between the attacks, Dales sat with the engineering officer of the
Penn,
on top of the engine room hatch. Born leader or not, Dales was eighteen and scared.

“The chief engineer smoked his pipe and talked to me,” said Dales. “I think he sensed that I was uneasy, and he tried to make me feel better by telling me that the plating was so thin on the decks of a destroyer that a bomb would probably pass right through. He told me if you could hear the bombs, don’t worry about them, because they’re going to miss you. This is a matter of physics, sound going out in concentric circles. He said you’ll never hear the bomb that kills you.”

They were all scared. Men cowered in bunches and curled up in the fetal position in dark corners, covering their ears, closing their eyes, and waiting to die. Guns crashed over their heads, and near misses pounded the hull—they could feel the steel concussion in their bones. After a near miss comes a direct hit. Everyone knew that.

“During these attacks, the second mate Logan and I found a hiding place in the torpedo repair room just forward of the
Penn
’s torpedo tubes,” said Follansbee. “The thin shell of the overhead gave us a feeling of security, even though we both knew that a bomb could crash through it like paper. Our nerves were almost completely shot now. Nothing to do but lie in the corner of a torpedo room and hold your ears to try to eliminate the whistle of the bombs and the deafening detonations of the guns.”

I looked at Logan. The blood had run out of his face and his hands shook as if he had the palsy. I buried my face in my hands and started to pray, repeating a prayer I had learned in my youth at Sunday School.

I looked at my watch. Fourteen past eight. The general alarm bell rang.

I shivered and broke out in a cold sweat.

A gunner at a 20 millimeter Oerlikon pointed astern. “’Ere comes

Jerry now! Two points on the starboard quarter!”

The towline was cut.

With all of her guns blazing, the Penn leapt forward again.

An inferno of flame and shattering noise. The whistle of bombs and the thud of near misses.

The Penn circled the tanker and threw everything she could throw up at the planes. Then at last the enemy had exhausted its ammunition and its supply of bombs and disappeared over the horizon in the direction of Sicily.

The towline was made fast again and we continued towards Malta at four knots.

Malta suddenly seemed very far away.

By 2052, the last bombing attack of the evening was beaten off. Rye took over the tow, with
Penn
serving as stern tug. By 2330 the ships were making about 4 knots, but at 0107 the
Ohio
suddenly sheered, and the hawsers to the
Rye
and the
Penn
were parted.

“
Bramham
then suggested that the destroyers should secure either side of the tanker,” reported the
Penn
’s Captain Swain. “We did so.”

Captain Eddie Baines of the
Bramham
was a young lieutenant who played by the book—he called Roger Hill a “ragamuffin,” for the way he dressed at sea. But Baines wasn’t afraid to step outside the box, and he was willing to do whatever needed to be done. “He was a very good seaman, mind you,” said Reg Coaker, who worked alongside Baines on the bridge. “A bit of a ruffer, quite outspoken to those above him, but he knew what he was doing.”

Captain Swain of the
Penn
saw the brilliance of Baines’s plan, to lash the two destroyers to the sides of the tanker; that would not only keep her under control but help keep her afloat, because the three ships would be like a trimaran. “Towing the
Ohio
like that was our Captain Baines’ idea, but Swain was senior to him, and he took over the idea,” said Coaker.

“We went alongside of the tanker’s starboard side with the
Penn,
” said Fred Larsen, “while another destroyer [
Bramham
] managed to come alongside on the port side.”

This was Larsen’s chance to get back into action. He’d been in a passive position on the
Penn—
useless—and it didn’t much suit him.

“After we tied up, some men from the
Penn
went aboard the
Ohio,
” he said. “As soon as they went aboard, I went aboard, to see where the guns were. Because I figured if I can get some of these guns working, I can protect the
Ohio.
”

He never said anything to anyone. He just climbed aboard. As if he owned the ship.

“I went aboard the
Ohio
because I was basically a tanker man. I had been bosun on the sister ship, the
Louisiana.
It was very familiar to me.”

While men from the
Penn
were aboard the
Ohio
inspecting her damage and Larsen was seeing if he could fix her guns, Captain Swain grew uncomfortable with the fit of the tanker sandwich.

“In the darkness it was not possible to secure and fender the ship properly, and we could not see what under-water and above-water projections there might be,” he said. “I was afraid of doing serious damage to the destroyers’ hulls, so we cast off.”

It was about 3
A.M.
Larsen remained on the
Ohio,
watching the
Penn
steam off. The tanker was adrift and dead in the water, but it was where he wanted to be. There were maybe twenty men on the
Ohio,
including Allan Shaw. Lonnie Dales remained on the
Penn—
for now.

“Some of the crew of the
Ohio
was there,” said Larsen, “and they were securing an air compressor. All the lifeboats were gone, all the floats, the flotation equipment was all gone out of the racks. Most of the guns were inoperative, the engine was disabled, the steering gear had been torpedoed, and the rudder couldn’t operate any more. We tried to get it to work by hooking up emergency steering gear. I was down there in the steering gear room with flashlights, and we tried to hook up the emergency steering gear. I think it was already rigged. But it was not enough to be able to steer her without the propulsion of the ship’s propeller.

“I examined the armament and found some of the Oerlikons in operating order. The five-inch gun on the stern was not repairable, as a Stuka had crashed on it and totally destroyed it. There was debris from the bomb that landed near the funnel all over the place, asbestos powder and junk. But the only thing wrong with the Bofors cannon was a shell jammed in the breech.”

“The merchant navy’s not like the Royal Navy, where you have to be told what to do,” said Allan Shaw. “Everybody just knew what they had to do on the
Ohio.
It’s a case of just getting on with the job. There wasn’t anybody really in charge, it was just a crowd of men doing the job.

“I volunteered because it was my ship, and it was something to do. You couldn’t sleep on the
Penn
anyhow, because there wasn’t any room. You could doze off, but whenever someone walked past, they kicked your feet.”

It’s true there was no one in charge, but some men carry themselves with more authority than others. Larsen didn’t need any props, but the .45-caliber pistol stuffed in his belt didn’t hurt. This was the gun that had gotten away from Ensign Suppiger when he had dived out of his lifeboat in an attempt to get into another; the gun that Larsen had already used to restore order in the boat. The ensign had demanded its return when they were on the
Penn,
because it belonged to the U.S. Navy. But Suppy had lost it while abandoning ship in a hurry, if not a panic. Larsen told him he could have the gun back when he learned how to use it.

Back on the
Penn,
the men from the
Santa Elisa
noticed that Larsen was gone. There was only one place he could be.

“Several said that Larsen is so brave, having volunteered to man the tanker, etcetera,” said Suppiger. “The truth of it is that he has a fanatical hatred for the Germans. His wife, who hasn’t been seen for nearly three years, and his child whom he has never seen, are being held in German occupied Norway.”

“The wording was to bring the
Ohio
in at all costs,” said Larsen, making his motives sound simple. “The leader of Britain, Winston Churchill, sent a message to the Mediterranean Command that said to bring her in at all costs.”

“The oiler remained stationary until 0420,” reported Captain Pearson, “when
Rye
again took the whole in tow using a 10-inch manila found on board
Ohio,
which she secured to her sweep winch and led one part to a wire from
Ohio
’s forecastle and the other to
Penn
’s cable,
Penn
being still alongside
Rye.
”

Larsen and Shaw worked elbow to elbow securing the towlines, but to each other they were just foreign accents in the darkness. “You hear voices, you think, ‘He’s a Yank, he’s an Aussie,’ you know,” said Shaw. “We spent all night putting wires out and lashing them together, and when she broke them you just dumped ’em and put some more wires out.”

The
Penn
came alongside
Ohio.
“I could hear the captain of the
Penn
on the loudspeaker saying he needed more volunteers,” said Larsen. “So I called over to the destroyer for the officer in charge of the stern, and told him I wanted some volunteers to help me man the guns. I was in charge of the guns on the
Ohio.
In no time at all, there came my cadet from the
Santa Elisa,
his name was Francis Dales. He was one of the first volunteers that came with me. He stayed with me back aft.”

It’s almost eerie how similar the lives of Larsen and Dales were. Their pasts met on the crossroads between coincidence and fate. They were Gary Cooper and John Wayne, with moments when it was the other way around. They were two of a kind, separated only by experience and accents. It was as if God had created them as one, complementing halves to a diverse whole, making the warrior He needed to stop Hitler.

Dales and more volunteers were shuttled over to the tanker by ML 121, one of the two motor launches that had come from Malta.

“My biggest reason, I think, for volunteering with Mr. Larsen to go aboard the
Ohio,
was I felt much more comfortable having something to do than just sitting on the deck of the
Penn
and watching the bombs fall,” said Dales, forgetting his broken arm. “At no time did I feel that I was being brave. I really didn’t think about it that much.

“I had great respect and admiration for Mr. Larsen’s ability and leadership. He realized that the
Ohio
had some fine antiaircraft guns, which we needed badly, so he asked for volunteers to man them.

“There was an ordinary seaman from the
Santa Elisa,
I don’t recall his name, who went with us, and two of the Royal Marines, making a total of five to man the 40-millimeter Bofors on the
Ohio
.”

“The British Army sergeant in charge of the gun crew and several of his men also came,” added Larsen, referring to the men with Dales. “Also, several of the U.S. Navy gun crew came, barefooted and bandaged up and covered with purple burn ointment, so they looked kind of strange. They were burnt from the fire on the
Santa Elisa.
I sent them forward to the bridge to cover the Oerlikons on the bridge. All those guns needed was to have the barrels removed, because the barrels had been fired so much they were useless. So they take the old barrels out and put the new barrels in, so two of the guns that were up there could start firing.

“The other Oerlikons, one on each side of the poop deck, was also manned by volunteers. We changed the barrels on those guns too. They were a mix of people who had left the
Ohio
and other ships that had been torpedoed in the convoy, and they had been picked up by the destroyers.”

Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer on the
Santa Elisa
, manned one of the forward Oerlikons. But Ensign Suppiger was not among the volunteers. “All through the night we attempted to tow the
Ohio
through submarine and E-boat infested waters,” he said as he continued to find flaws. “That night I learned from one of the
Penn
’s officers that her submarine sound detection device was not operating.”

“After we cleared the ventilator and all kinds of rubbish from the Bofors gun placement,” said Larsen, “the British sergeant handed me a steel shield used for releasing the spring tension of the gun. I straddled the gun and pressed down with the shield and managed to get the bent and jammed shell free, and tossed it over the side. Then we changed the barrel. With the four Oerlikons we got working, we now had five guns going.”