At All Costs (36 page)

The astonishing story of the Air France flying boat begins in Chapter 22, with a quote from the journal of Desmond “Dag” Dickens, a descendant of Charles; his purplish prose is sprinkled around a bit. The end of the French airliner story comes in Chapter 26.

Explaining the balzupped Operation Bellows was especially challenging, because all the available accounts were vague, contradictory, or improbable. After weeding out the impossible, this version prevailed. Geoffrey Wellum should know, because as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant he led a group of eight Spitfires off the
Furious
; his wryly hilarious anecdote comes from his wonderful memoir,
First Light,
which he waited sixty years to write.

The brief story of the ramming of the Italian submarine
Dagabur
by the destroyer
Wolverine
(originally an entire chapter) came from the LOP of
Wolverine
’s twenty-nine-year-old captain, Lieutenant Commander Peter Gretton, a Royal Navy golden boy who went on to become an admiral and Fifth Sea Lord. It was years before Gretton learned that it wasn’t a German U-boat he rammed that night, because the Italians never acknowledged the sinking of their submarine and records were chased by Italian historians only long after the war.

The veteran George Amyes contributed much of the exclusive information that’s in Chapter 23, on the sinking of the venerable
Eagle.
When I visited Amyes in the industrial city of Hull on the North Sea, he handed me the log and journal of the famous U-boat captain Helmut Rosenbaum. Amyes believed this was the only copy in Britain, having been given to him by Rosenbaum’s widow. Amyes later mailed me his “Memories of Eagle,” along with a manuscript he had written about his time at sea, “Trampship,” which revealed arcane things about life at sea that made their way into the book elsewhere.

His friend and former
Eagle
shipmate Les Goodenough, whose story about the “toboggan team” also appears in Chapter 23, told me about the rats glaring down from the beams, adding a gruesome description of his lip after it was bitten by one of these rats as he slept in his hammock. Goodenough also directed me to the Inverness Library in Scotland, which sent biographical material on Captain Mackintosh of the
Eagle,
adding to that which appears on Web sites of Scottish clans.

Chapter 25 opens with comments from Keith Park, the RAF commanding air officer on Malta during Operation Pedestal. The broken promise of the Liberators was a very big deal and might have blown the whole thing. Park’s bold complaint in his LOP was a message to Air Marshal Tedder, the chief of the RAF, who was in Cairo with Churchill during the early days of Pedestal. The “shootup” of the airfields on Sicily was actually more of a balzup; Park puts a positive spin on it.

Admiral Da Zara wrote his own book,
Pelle d’ammiraglio
(“Admiral’s Skin”), which hasn’t been translated into English, but an Italian-speaking journalist friend skimmed relevant parts of it for me. Another Italian book he looked through was Gianni Rocca’s
Fucilate gli ammiragli
(“Shoot the Admirals”).

The stories about the
motobombe
and the remote-controlled flying buffalo, like others, came from about half a dozen sources—a piece of information here, a piece there.
Malta at War
usually got me started on these puzzles.

Mark Whitmore, director of collections at the Imperial War Museum, made it easy to see what was needed there. Like Peter Riva forty-three years before, I sat in a dark room in London and viewed footage shot during Operation Pedestal, of screaming Stukas diving absolutely vertically at ships. The description in the opening of Chapter 26 of the depth charge being launched from a destroyer comes from one of these films.

The IWM sound archives turned up dozens of segments of relevant interviews on cassette with war veterans; Richard McDonough’s IWM program to conduct and record as many interviews as possible before we lose these men is an important unsung project, deserving of recognition and support in Britain.

The LOP of Lieutenant Commander Maitland-Makgill-Crichton, commanding officer of the destroyer
Ithuriel,
which rammed the Italian sub
Cobalto,
might have been the most entertaining; he called the rescued Italians “scared stiff” as they were kept out on
Ithuriel
’s decks during attacks by Italian dive-bombers, and his description of balzups on his ship were wild, at least by Royal Navy standards of prose. As these Letters of Proceeding were all addressed to Admiral Syfret, his LOP might have been part of the reason he was scolded by Syfret, while Lieutenant Commander Gretton, who rammed a sub with his destroyer
Wolverine,
was praised; both young destroyer captains had immediately made the decision to ram, but for a number of reasons, Gretton’s was correct and Maitland-Makgill-Crichton’s was not.

The profound book
Observations,
written by
Indomitable
airman Hector Mackenzie, included his firsthand descriptions of the result of the direct hits on
Indomitable.
Captain Tom Troubridge’s LOP offered a bit more. Troubridge had served at the Admiralty in 1940, as an expert on the German Navy; he had been the naval attaché in Berlin from 1936 to 1939, and knew Admiral Raeder, its commander in chief, quite well. He said that Raeder had never believed in Hitler’s war, nor that U-boats could ever be a decisive factor.

At the end of Chapter 26, the Air France flying boat lands in the sea. Most of the rare references to this incident, including from veterans, were brief, only suggestive, and confused. However,
Malta: The Spitfire Year, 1942
tells the story, including a photo of the plane in the water.

In Chapters 27 and 28, the excerpts from Captain Ferrini’s log came from
The Naval War Against Hitler
by Donald Macintyre. The quote from Alfred Longbottom appears on the BBC Web site, on a link called “warmemories.” Captain Mason’s comments come from his report to Eagle Oil and Shipping, as well as his journal, the
Ohio
’s log, and one clip that Peter Riva tracked down of a piece by Movietone News, which was shown in theaters in 1942; it was especially good because his voice was there. He did seem to be unflappable, as others had described him. As he smoked a cigarette with one bandaged hand, he discussed his George Cross medal matter-of-factly, almost abstractedly, without any indication of chagrin for having received the medal despite having abandoned his ship.

Ray Morton’s quotes come from the transcript of an interview that’s been floating around for some time. I phoned him in Australia, but the interview told his story with more detail.

PART VI

HELL IN THE NARROWS

On the first page of Chapter 29, it seems fair to wonder here if the attack by
Axum
might have been less successful, or even prevented entirely, if Admiral Syfret had sent
Charybdis, Eskimo,
and
Somali
with Admiral Burrough’s Force X when the fleet had first split up, especially since Force Z made it back to Gibraltar without needing them. But because Syfret never wrote his memoirs, there’s no indication he ever second-guessed himself.

The instructions from the young gunner on the
Almeria Lykes
was one of the best lines in
Malta Convoy.
The fact that it was probably made up makes it no less fun, or likely.

I used some license myself in describing Larsen’s shooting down the Stuka. But the motive was confirmed, the kill was confirmed, and that’s how it was at the trigger of an Oerlikon.

The stories in Chapter 30 all come from the Letters of Proceeding. Mr. Black’s story was not only surreal, it was also long and vivid and weird—there could be a movie in it. Although Mr. Black doesn’t say how they got back, they appeared to have escaped from their camp and been towed to Algiers, hiding in the back of a railroad ore car.

Chapter 31 was constructed from the writings of Churchill and Sir Charles Wilson, or Lord Moran as he would become. The juxtaposition of moments and events between Moscow and the Mediterranean is accurate, give or take a few minutes and allowing for the difference in time zones.

Allan Shaw and I talked a lot on the phone, in order to get straight what happened on the
Ohio
after they put out the fire and got the ship going again, in Chapter 32. He also sent me a twenty-eight-page handwritten letter.

My statement in Chapter 32 that Commodore Venables ran from the fight is supported by quotes from the LOPs. His actions have been overlooked or glossed over in previous historical accounts.

I met the veteran Reg Coaker, who was the ordinance artificer on the destroyer
Bramham,
in a hotel near Bournemouth where he was attending a reunion of the survivors of the sinking of the twin battleships
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
(three days after Pearl Harbor), of which he was one. He told me the story about passing the
Port Chalmers
in the night, as it was headed back toward Gibraltar. Coaker’s mind is precise; he’s the other veteran who’s comfortable with e-mail, and he has written a lot about his war experiences, some of which material is in the Imperial War Museum.

Chapter 33 is the crux of this story. It might be going too far to suggest that World War II was decided the moment Mussolini made the middle-of-the-night decision to turn his fleet of warships back to Sicily, but maybe not. Follow the dominoes.

The Wellington airman Dennis Cooke mailed me his written account of that night, and afterward we spoke on the phone a couple of times, to get the rest of his fascinating firsthand story.

Admiral Burrough’s final succinct word came from the source notes in
Pedestal
by Peter Smith.

The beginning of Chapter 34 feels like the scene in
Apocalypse Now
after Captain Willard goes down the river to find only insane chaos and spectacular explosions in the night sky. My description of an E-boat is a generic one, because there were many different types. Some of the information about the E-boats being hit came from Francesco Mattesini’s book
La battaglia aeronavale di mezzo agosto,
which is what the Italians call Operation Pedestal; passages were translated for me by Matthew Riva and Milena Di Tomaso.

The quote from petty officer Cunningham, and the postscript to the scuttling of the
Manchester,
came from the 2004 documentary
Running the Gauntlet,
produced and directed by Crispin Sadler and narrated by the actor Freddie Treves, who appears in Chapter 37 as a seventeen-year-old cadet on the merchant ship
Waimarama.

The tale of the
Almeria Lykes
in Chapter 35 is told in and between the lines of the LOPs, and a bit more. Patrick Osborn, in Modern Military Records at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, tracked down a number of casualty records, including those of the
Almeria Lykes
and
Santa Elisa.
Bill Chubb, chief of the Mariner Records Branch at the U.S. Coast Guard National Maritime Center, found more, including a slim file on the
Almeria Lykes,
which included one note on a little piece of paper about the fate of the junior engineer Henry Brown. I left it at that.

PART VII

SURVIVORS

The account in Chapter 36 of the E-boat attack on the
Santa Elisa
is taken from sources previously mentioned, except for Dales’s quote about the bodies and blood, which comes from
The End of the Beginning,
an excellent book whose coauthor Phil Craig interviewed Dales. The rest of Dales’s quotes come from his report to the merchant marine. Many of the quotes are passages from John Follansbee’s manuscript.

I interviewed George Nye at his home in Dartford, near London, after he had just come in from a round of golf with his wife. He said he could remember Dales standing up in the lifeboat and taking control as clearly as if it had happened that afternoon on the eighteenth fairway. He said it had changed his life, because he had been so affected by the fact that Dales, this born leader with such presence and authority, was just a teenager like him. It made him realize possibilities within himself.

In Chapter 37, my description of the
Waimarama
on fire came from viewing clips at the Imperial War Museum. John Jackson’s words came from his LOP. The moving interview with Freddie Treves was conducted at his home in Wimbledon. After the war he began a long and rich career as an actor. The poem at the end of his story is from the beginning of a play he wrote about Operation Pedestal, which was presented more than fifty years ago on the BBC’s
Saturday Night Radio Theatre.

When the
Waimarama
went up in flames, Admiral Burrough mistakenly believed it was the
Clan Ferguson.
The LOPs contain many such errors. “What ship?” was a signal often passed in the night. But mostly the question wasn’t asked, because it rarely mattered.

The passage that follows is from Roger Hill’s
Destroyer Captain.
And finally, in Chapter 37, the interview with Charles Henry Walker is resumed.

In Chapter 38, I edited the report by the
Ohio
’s engineer, James Wyld, for the sake of brevity, omitting some parts but changing no words. And I enjoyed putting together the story about the
Ledbury
pirates drunkenly raiding the bushes of the Tunisian coast, as told mostly by Roger Hill.

Ron Linton, who tells the story in Chapter 39 about his ship actually getting close enough to Malta for him to see it, died without ever learning that it was his own captain who had turned the
Dorset
back to rejoin the convoy, where it was promptly dive-bombed and sunk. His candid quote about the instructions received by the gunners explains a lot about the convoy’s frequent fire on friendly aircraft.

The brief description of the dogfight by the RAF ace “Buzz” Beurling came from his own book,
Malta Spitfire: The Diary of a Fighter Pilot.