Twelve Desperate Miles (24 page)

Sent back to Washington after the war began, Craw was assigned to command the air section of Semmes’s tank force, an assignment that brought him to this moment off Solomon’s Island. As seen, he wasn’t the type to take no for an answer.

Craw contacted Truscott, who arrived on the ship to try to reason with the recalcitrant captain. What Truscott discovered was that the captain was at wit’s end. He had been given this convoy assignment with a
ship that he claimed was in no shape to sail, crewed by half-trained men who simply did not know how to lower a boat to practice an amphibious assault. None of his officers had any experience either, yet here they were, expected to take part in exercises in preparation for an invasion that would simply be suicidal, according to the captain, who refused to take responsibility for what was to come.

Truscott calmly explained the bottom line here: In fact, the captain’s circumstances were not unlike those of many others who were preparing to sail in the convoy of the Western Task Force. If he refused to participate in these exercises, Truscott told him, “
navy authorities would have no difficulty in finding some officer willing to do his best under the circumstances.”

The training proceeded with the captain’s assistance, if not his goodwill.

T
hough he was glad to be in the company of the American staff officer once again, Malevergne still felt an iciness coming from the British assembled in Gruenther’s office on his second visit. Surprisingly to him, this meeting came just a day after the first. Again it seemed to him that the air was filled with rigid formality. He was asked to explain the circumstances that brought him to London, and Malevergne, feeling as if he were somehow doubted, proceeded to tell the gathering of his journey in the Chevy and its trailer from Casablanca to Tangier. The letter from Eddy had apparently arrived here after all, because one of the officers made mention of it.

Despite the British lack of warmth, Gruenther had had an apparent change of heart about René Malevergne’s circumstances. Or at least someone in the command had. Whether this came on the heels of news that George Patton was behind his escape from Morocco and still wanted him in Washington or simply through discussions about what to do with the Port Lyautey river pilot at headquarters in London didn’t matter. Eisenhower’s chief of staff was far more accepting of the Frenchman the second time around. He even offered Malevergne a ride back to the hotel after the meeting.

The constant presence of an interpreter had inhibited Malevergne from the moment he touched down in England. Though his English was not very good, he felt that he could convey his sentiments and desire to assist the Americans if only he were given an opportunity to speak alone with the general. That moment finally was afforded him in the ride back to the hotel. “Colonel,” Malevergne said in a confidential tone, soon after they were alone. “
English methods are not pleasing to me. I will say nothing in their presence.” Malevergne thought that Gruenther’s eyes lit up at this slight castigation of their hosts, that a bond had been formed
between them. Unfortunately, he understood little of what the general said in response. However, he told his diary later, “
his handshake on parting was significant.”

Perhaps even more significant was the loosening of restrictions on Malevergne after the car ride. The interpreter disappeared, and though the Shark continued to be vetted by officers from the combined staffs, he soon understood that he was not going back to Colonel Eddy in Tangier. Instead, he was taken to a home in the English countryside and told that he would soon resume his trip on to Washington. From Washington, presumably, he would head back to Morocco. Though he continued to be visited and quizzed by headquarters staff, Malevergne was able to relax and actually appreciate what were, for him, given the circumstances of these last two years, quite sumptuous surroundings, replete with beautiful English gardens.

There in the country, Malevergne learned that he was to be given yet another identity for his future travels. He was no longer the Shark in this clandestine world, but Viktor Prechak. How this name was arrived at no one bothered to tell him. Soon after, however, as if to confirm his baptism, from George Patton’s office in Washington came a letter referring to him by that name and informing anyone viewing its contents that “
no difficulty should befall M. Prechak.”

So now Victor Prechak waited for word of his next journey, this time to Washington.

T
he phones at the office of Colonel Cyrus J. Wilder, executive officer of the Port of Hampton Roads, were ringing, one colonel after the next, from the late morning onward on October 17. After Brigadier General Kilpatrick, who was commander of the port, Wilder was the go-to guy at that three-ring circus that was Hampton Roads in mid-October 1942. All the loadings and requests; all the coordination of supplies; the ordering of troops and ships and longshoremen, went through his offices.
So it wasn’t surprising that the desperate-sounding calls coming from the headquarters of the Army Air Force—first a Colonel Gordon and then a Colonel Howe—were routed in his direction. Each of them had essentially the same straightforward request: they needed more airplane gasoline to be shipped with the convoy.

The problem was, as Wilder immediately pointed out to them, the convoy was scheduled to head out in just five days. Wilder wasn’t sure where the gasoline was supposed to come from if the Army Air Force didn’t have it itself. Even more important, he didn’t have a clue as to how it was supposed to be shipped. Every spare tanker and cargo ship on the East Coast was accounted for and already employed in the effort to supply the convoy.

Gordon and Howe had tossed more clinkers into the request. It turned out that the air force didn’t want just any sort of vessel: it needed one that could haul a couple thousand drums of gasoline, was fast enough to keep up with the convoy, and, oh, by the way, had at most a seventeen-and-a-half-foot draft. For what reason they needed these specifications they could not say; but to make the point that nothing about their request was frivolous, they said that it had the endorsement of the highest levels of the task-force command and if Wilder had trouble accommodating them, they would take the matter up the chain of command of
the SOS. Starting at the top, that meant General Somervell; followed by the chief of transportation, General Charles Gross; followed by Wilder’s boss, General Kilpatrick; followed by Wilder himself.

Precisely how this request was born is uncertain, but it came with a deep sense of urgency. Probably someone in the Army Air Corps doing calculations on the needs and requirements of the Port Lyautey airfield in the first hours after it was taken by Allied forces determined that in order to aid General Patton’s assault on Casablanca, planes flying onto the field would need gasoline. While Truscott and his staff had mapped out a means to take the airport quickly with the help of the destroyer
Dallas
and the team of Army Rangers who would be collected on its decks; and while the Port Lyautey airport would be open for arrivals as soon as it was in Allied hands, the problem lay with subsequent departures.

The army P-40s, which were to be the first planes landing at Port Lyautey to aid Patton’s assault on Casablanca, were land-based planes being launched from the converted carrier
Chenango
. The
Chenango
was the only ship carrying planes in the Western Task Force’s northern group—Truscott’s sub–task force. Prior to the war she had been the
Esso New Orleans
, an oil tanker. The ship had been transformed so that it could carry planes but was only able to launch them, not bring the P-40s in. Once those planes set down in Port Lyautey, without access to more fuel they would essentially be as land-bound as emus.

The captains and majors doing the calculations on the gasoline requirements of the P-40s, and where fuel was coming from, no doubt hurriedly took their concerns to the colonels. The colonels passed them on to the commanders, who wound up sending them back to the colonels with make-it-happen speed. If these planes were useless due to lack of fuel, the whole airfield would be useless. The plans for using Port Lyautey as both a base to support Patton’s invasion of Casablanca and a solidifying anchor to control the air above northwest Africa were in jeopardy. So, too, would be the focus of Truscott’s sub–task force Goalpost. All had suddenly become dependent on getting a vessel that seemingly didn’t
exist up a river that no one but an unknown French river pilot knew how to navigate.

Enter Colonel Wilder at Hampton Roads, who knew only that the ship and the gasoline were needed for the convoy. Like everyone else who was not a part of the invasion strategy sessions, he had no idea what its purpose was, nor where exactly it was going.

Regarding the gasoline, Wilder got busy and got lucky. After several fruitless calls, he got in touch with the navy and asked its supply depot in Norfolk about the possibility of drumming enough gas to meet the air corps’s needs, and one other thing, might they have a ship available? He got half a loaf. While the commander at the depot had the gasoline and agreed to drum it for him, the navy was not ready to take on any extra cargo in its convoy. Nor did it have a ship available to haul it. In other words, if the army wanted to ship more gasoline, it would have to find its own means to do so.

Wilder contacted the War Shipping Administration, which managed and theoretically knew the whereabouts of all U.S. convoy and merchant shipping. The WSA quickly informed Wilder that every available vessel on the East Coast was already invested in the Western Task Force or steaming supplies to England or the Soviet Union. Furthermore, as the navy had already indicated, the convoy didn’t have the time to wait for another ship to be found, let alone to wait to find one with the shallow draft, cargo, and speed capabilities required of this vessel.

Even so, as was indicated by the Army Air Force colonels’ initial passing mention that they would bring it to the chief of transportation if nothing happened, this request had the weight of high command behind it. George Patton himself had been made aware of the needs of the Army Air Corps at Port Lyautey, and since its needs were his needs, something was going to happen on the request, come hell or high water.
As later documents indicate, the need to locate a ship to haul gasoline up the River Sebou soon went to the highest office in the SOS, as well as the highest office of the Office of Transportation, each contact made under Patton’s command, if not his explicit order.

Months after the fact, a writer for the
Saturday Evening Post
envisioned the moment when the need for the
Contessa
’s involvement in Operation Torch was discovered. He saw it as occurring above a large map “
where the ranking strategists of the United Nations” were looking over plans that detailed the invasion: an “immense British and American armada carrying troops, tanks, planes and guns … to spill the raw materials of victory over Rommel.” One key post, an African airfield, needed to be supplied with gasoline to ensure the success of the invasion. The problem was that the field lay “a dozen miles up the shallow, almost un-navigable Sebou River in French Morocco, where known facts about the river were few and best guesses were vague.” The river was assumed to have a channel that might be only seventeen feet deep. “Where was a ship big enough to haul the supplies essential for this segment of the invasion which drew so little water she could taxi explosive material through seventeen feet of water without disaster?”

Not only that: If the ship wasn’t already in Norfolk or vicinity—and, as the navy and the War Shipping Administration had already explained, it wasn’t—this vessel would have to be near enough to Virginia so that it could arrive in time to ship out in less than a week. It also had to be fast enough to keep up with the convoy, sailing at an average clip of about twelve knots to make it across the three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean to the shores of Morocco in time for the invasion.

While the “ranking strategists of the United Nations” didn’t exactly start the search for the
Contessa
overlooking a large map of the invasion, in fact the need began with those strategists, and the search ultimately included the United Nations. While C. J. Wilder waited anxiously in Hampton Roads for news of a vessel that fit the bill, and the Army Air Corps did likewise in Washington, the War Shipping Administration sent word to the offices of the Royal Admiralty across the ocean in England. Had any American shipping recently arrived in Great Britain that might accommodate the needs of this air corps request?

A day and a half later, a cable arrived in Wilder’s office at Hampton Roads. Colonel Norman Vissering, who worked with Eisenhower’s staff
in London in the overseas Transportation Corps, wired that the ship that everyone was clamoring for had been found and was on its way to Virginia. Her name was
Contessa
. She was “a reefer” belonging to the Standard Fruit Company out of New Orleans and capable of carrying over seven thousand barrels of fuel with the draft requirements stipulated by her destination. Vissering wasn’t certain about the time of her arrival at the Hampton Roads port, but she had sailed from Avonmouth on October 8 and was very near New York when she’d been contacted by the Royal Admiralty. The
Contessa
ought to be arriving in Virginia soon.