Twelve Desperate Miles (17 page)

Browne stayed with the car, bending his legs, stretching his back. Still the long-distance traveler unwinding at the end of a hard journey. He focused on the three men standing in the light of the office and lit a cigarette, watching them looking down at his and Holcomb’s papers.

Full darkness had come to the scene. It was so quiet now that he could
hear the dog’s light footsteps on the hard-packed road. Maybe it was the fact that they stopped that made Browne turn his head toward the trailer, just to make sure the Frenchman remained safely hidden. What he saw there made him take a quick, frightened suck of air.

The old dog was poised in a perfect point aimed right at the curled body of René Malevergne beneath the tarp. Browne took an anxious glance at the office to see if anyone was spying the same thing he was. The heads of the three men inside continued to bow over the passports. Browne made a low, guttural sound, a kind of hissed “get” at the dog, but the pointer didn’t move a muscle. He looked back again at the office and then squatted down, searching for a good, stinging pebble to chuck at the dog. He quickly found one at his feet and made a nice sidearm throw, as if he were skipping a rock on a placid lake. The gravel caught the dog squarely in the ribs. Unfortunately, the pointer was only temporarily distracted. The dog took a couple of quick prances and glanced briefly over at Browne, as if he were noticing him for the first time. Then back he went to his overriding duty: pointing out that something peculiar was tucked into this trailer.

Kicking the dog, giving it a shove down the road, would surely make the sort of yelping commotion that Browne didn’t want, but he was sorely tempted to do just that. He stood up from his crouch and glanced once again into the station. They were still ignoring the vigilant mutt outside.

It was then that Browne remembered the ham inside the Chevy. A little scrap of meat, a little juice left over in the tin, might do the trick. He opened the back door of the car, eyeing the dog, still standing at attention. Browne quickly found what was left of their roadside meal and pulled it out, hoping the scent of good American tinned ham would be a treat the pointer couldn’t resist. Slowly he waved the tin in the air in the direction of the dog, and slowly the pointer’s nose and eyes rose toward him. Browne remained focused on the dog and his lure, resisting a temptation to look back at the guardhouse. A second later, the dog’s jaw dropped and Browne saw his muscles relax. The pointer was his or, more precisely, the ham’s. He set the tin down for the dog, who
immediately left his post and headed over to more closely inspect the good smell. Soon his tongue was lapping at the four corners of the tin, slurping up whatever drop of juicy fat it could.

Not only was the Frenchman forgotten, but the guards themselves were appreciative of his generosity toward the old dog. They smiled and thanked him for treating their companion.

The pointer at the border turned out to be the most alarming moment on the way to Tangier. All five checkpoints in Spanish Morocco were gone through without incident. Back in the trailer Malevergne noted that Browne was driving with what seemed to be an achingly light foot on the gas going up and down the hills. It was only later that he learned that the Chevy was nearly out of gas and that, to preserve what was in the tank, the Americans were coasting down every mountain on the way to Tangier. Despite the pace and despite being knocked about in his nest, Malevergne maintained a sense of humor and spirit the whole way.

“
We passed all the controls without undue difficulty,” Browne would later write in his report of the trip for OSS offices in Washington, “including the sometimes tough one at the International River. I drove slowly over the bad spots, every jounce, and there were big ones, hurting me mentally as much as it did Malvern [
sic
] physically. We pulled up finally and arrived at Holcomb’s house on the hill behind Tangier, opened up the trailer and helped Malvern out. We asked him how he liked his journey. He replied, ‘It’s all right for the “type sportif.” ’ ”

O
blivious to her coming role in the great operations being hatched in London, Washington, and Morocco, still just a made-over banana boat from New Orleans drafted into service and doing her duty for the war, the
Contessa
was once again at sea, again heading for Bangor in Northern Ireland with a contingent of 190 troops, now in the company of convoy HX 208 out of New York, at the same time René Malevergne was making his way out of French Morocco.

She had landed back in Brooklyn in early September from her initial transport voyage and made a quick turnaround. Fifty-some ships sailed in this new convoy in eleven columns of five,
stretched out to a distance of about six and a half miles. They steamed at an average of ten knots for the first two days, then dropped to a snail’s pace of eight knots to accommodate the slowest ship in the convoy, which was soon ordered off to Halifax when she proved incapable of keeping up.

Commodore Lennon Goldsmith of the Royal Navy headed the group from the
Cairnvalona
, which, he was disgusted to report, was the only ship in the convoy to smoke badly, due to a “
filthy load of coal obtained from a colliery that wasn’t likely again to get the business of the Royal Navy anytime again soon.”

Aside from an assortment of essentials for the population of Great Britain, ranging from steel to grain and molasses to timber, the convoy carried a number of supplies that would be used in the upcoming and still secret—to those who were carrying the goods—invasion of North Africa. A number of tankers carried various forms of fuel, ranging from paraffin to highly combustible airplane gasoline. As it traveled, the convoy was escorted by a rotating group of four destroyers, which relieved one another at three intervals through the course of the
journey. Aside from the
Contessa
, only three other ships were transporting troops.

A week into the voyage, Goldsmith received an order to steer his convoy forty degrees to starboard. Unfortunately, the ships were in a thick fog and had to be guided by sound signals. “
The result,” Goldsmith reported, “would have been laughable if it had not been so painful.” Perhaps not realizing there was at least one former officer of the Royal Navy in the contingent, Goldsmith illustrated something near contempt for the commercial captains in his group. As an explanation for the chaos that ensued from this attempt at redirecting the convoy, Goldsmith reported: “
All Masters of merchant ships sleep soundly every day after their lunch. Any sudden awakening brings them on deck almost blind and completely sodden. One blunderer is apt to disorganize the convoy entirely.”

Later in his report, Goldsmith confessed that trying to get so large a convoy to change course in the midst of thick fog presented a serious and vexing problem. While sound commands worked in theory—the signal was simply repeated from one ship to the next behind it, down a column of eleven vessels—in practice it was like playing the parlor game “Telephone.” There was no certainty whatsoever that the ship at the tail end of a line stretched out for six and a half miles could repeat what had been said at the beginning. “
I lost none of the Leaders of the Columns,” Goldsmith reported, “but the repeating ships in no single case repeated the signals. The young mates on watch may not have heard—they may well have been far astern of station.” By the time the fog lifted in the wake of the forty-degree maneuver, Goldsmith discovered that twenty ships in his convoy were no longer there.

Among these was the
Contessa
. In his report at the end of the voyage, the commander of the armed guard unit on board, Lieutenant William Cato, told briefly of losing the convoy. The only allusion Cato made to the difficulties described by Goldsmith was when, in that same report, he requested “
at least two Signalmen when traveling,” plus additional personnel for keeping good lookout when traveling singly.

The basic contingent aboard the
Contessa
was a group of longtime Standard Fruit Company sailors, primarily based out of New Orleans, who had sailed with her north to New York back in June and were now transporting their second load of troops across the Atlantic to service in Great Britain. Another group of seamen, mostly deckhands, had signed up through the maritime unions in New York for the individual voyages to England and back. In all, the crew numbered sixty-nine sailors, counting the captain.

The
Contessa
’s crew exemplified the global economy of the day. Eventually there would be Filipinos, Danes, Estonians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Mexicans, Peruvians, Belgians, Brazilians, Finns, an Australian, and, soon to come on board, a group of Arabs from the Gulf of Aden. In terms of age, sea experience, and international flavor, the merchant crew could hardly have been more different from the fourteen-member naval armed guard that was ostensibly protecting them within the convoy. These were young U.S. Navy recruits, most in their late teens and early twenties, many of whom had never been at sea.

Adding to the sense of disparity was a traditional discord that existed between the U.S. Navy and the merchant fleet. To put it bluntly, the U.S. Navy command lacked respect for its merchant marine counterparts. It’s also fair to say that merchant seamen, a far more independent breed of sailor than was found in the U.S. Navy, tended to be “
resentful of the gold braid,” as naval historian of World War II Samuel Eliot Morison put it.

Morison, whose sympathies lay decidedly with the U.S. Navy, described the difficulties faced by the commander of armed guard units, usually an ensign or junior-grade lieutenant: “
These lads had an unusually difficult task. They had to train the men to become a well-knit gun crew and maintain naval discipline in the unbuttoned atmosphere of a merchant ship, without any superior officer to support them or
C.P.O. to help them. They had to achieve a working relationship with the master and officers of the vessel, and at the same time prove a ‘good guy’ to the merchant seamen in order to obtain their assistance in passing ammunition, or as substitutes for bluejackets in case of casualty.”

The navy was far from alone in its negative assessment of the merchant marine. The popular perception was that these crews were composed of outcasts and slackers, when they weren’t fellow travelers and communists recruited from around the globe. Rather than adding color and an international flavor to the enterprise, the multinational cast of characters on a merchant ship simply represented the dregs of many societies, not just America. One only had to wander down to some dockside tavern in any harbor town from Norfolk to New Orleans to get a sense of the riffraff and rough customers. And the maturity of the group—what might seem like solid job experience and accrued wisdom to a merchant crew—was generally viewed as another example of commercial shipping’s willingness to take all comers, including those far over the hill.

For their part, merchant seamen were generally happy to have some form of defense units on deck but could hardly feel a deep sense of camaraderie with the boys with the firearms. The merchant marines were wage earners whose past relationship (prior to the war, at any rate) with their ship, its owners, and the demands of their labor had been a different beast from the relationship of seaman to command that was found in the U.S. Navy.

Hard-won union fights through the 1930s had improved the lot of most merchant seamen by the time World War II began. Able seamen (ABs) were earning twice as much at the end of the decade as they’d earned at the start (up from about $32.50 per month to around $82 in base pay). But the relationship between ship owners and crew was always somewhat adversarial, which could make the chain of command in the merchant marine more complex than it was in the U.S. Navy.

On the sea, a good ship’s master maintained discipline and controlled a vessel with the same mastery, whether in the navy or the merchant service. But like the ordinary seamen, he served the ship’s owner, its cargo,
and his own interests, not the interests of a nation. In other words, money mattered. Due to his lengthy experience, the quality of ship at his command, and his duties as an ambassador to Standard Fruit’s paying steamer clients, Captain John was a well-paid ship’s master. He earned in the neighborhood of $450 a month, while typical merchant masters earned a hundred dollars a month less.