Twelve Desperate Miles (4 page)

Through the early months of 1942, few measures were taken by the
U.S. military to prevent this carnage. Merchant shippers and marines pleaded with the navy to supply them with arms. More patrol boats and air patrols were needed to scour the East Coast for German subs. Shipping convoys surrounded by military vessels had been used to good effect by the British for almost two years: why weren’t they being employed here? Likewise, shoreline blackouts along British coasts had prevented the sort of stage-light backdrops that made the killings easy for U-boat commanders. Couldn’t we at least dim the lights?

Despite the pleas for action from the shipping industry and the public, it took the sinking of more than three hundred ships along the East Coast and in the Gulf and Caribbean before Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, finally took measures to protect the sea-lanes. Air and boat patrols were gradually increased and the navy agreed to provide armed guards to merchant shipping.

Coastal lighting restrictions were a thornier issue. It turned out that despite the hazard to ships, shoreline businesses—resorts, amusement areas, restaurants, and others—were less than thrilled at the prospect of going completely black for the duration of the crisis, and the navy acceded to their requests for something less than a pitch-dark coast line. A “dim out” was ordered instead, and the shielding of lights, rather than the extinguishing of them, became standard operating procedure.

The hardest nut to crack, for those trying to persuade King to specific action, was the implementation of the convoy system. For a man who was predisposed to dislike anything British, the positive effect of the system on wartime England’s shipping industry was not persuasive in its favor. King and a number of World War I veterans of the U.S. Navy argued that because convoys had to sail at the speed of their slowest members, they prevented faster vessels from performing to their utmost capabilities. King and others also felt the convoy system taxed already overcrowded ports upon arrival, resulting in delays and backups that slowed the process even further. And there was a confirmed belief in the U.S. Navy that there simply weren’t enough warships available in the fleet to provide protection for groups of merchant ships, to wage
war against the Axis, and to meet the needs of the naval war in the Pacific.

The staggering number of vessels lost to U-boats, however, was putting such a severe strain on American shipping capabilities that an alarmed George Marshall became involved in the discussion. He sent a note to King, writing, among other dire warnings, that “
the losses by submarines on our Atlantic Seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort.” Marshall acknowledged that escort ships were at a premium but wondered if King was searching in every nook and cranny for vessels. “
Has every conceivable … means been brought to bear on this situation?” Marshall asked.

The man who was recently named by Marshall to head American forces in the European theater and who was a day away from flying to England to take that command, Dwight Eisenhower, was far more blunt in his assessment of the admiral, at least to his diary. “One thing that might help this war,” Eisenhower wrote, “is to get someone to shoot King.”

By the end of spring, the U.S. Navy had acquiesced, if grudgingly, to the convoy system. Transatlantic merchant and transport shipping would be protected by escorts in full beginning in July. This was the principal reason why New York Harbor was so brimming with ships being readied for the war on June 22, 1942, when the SS
Contessa
rounded Sandy Hook, sailed through the Narrows and into the upper bay, pointed toward pier 1, Bush Terminal, on the south end of Brooklyn.

Painted a bright white with a “V” on its single smokestack, the
Contessa
cut a weary but still handsome figure as she sailed through the waters of the harbor. Requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration in April and directed in May to New York, where “
defense work” was to be undertaken to convert her into a transport ship for service on behalf of the army, the
Contessa
was arriving from La Ceiba in Honduras, a standard stop on her usual Caribbean cruises.

Owned by the Standard Fruit Company New Orleans but registered
out of Honduras, she was what was commonly called a “banana boat,” a steamer that made her trade by hauling loads of fruit and sightseers between the United States and various ports in the Caribbean. She had been plying the waters of the Gulf and Atlantic seaboards for a dozen years, ever since she was built and christened in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1930.

Named after the Italian village from which the founders of the Standard Fruit Company (the Vaccaro family, whose name also supplied the “V” on her smokestack) had emigrated, the
Contessa
was an oil-burning vessel, 397 feet long and 5,500 tons, with a triple-reciprocating engine, similar to the Liberty ships that had just begun to be churned out for merchant service in the war. Above the water she was roomy enough for up to sixty first-class passengers, who could dine in spacious comfort as well as enjoy the wicker-chaired lounge, a music room, a smoking room with game tables, deluxe cabins, and even an outdoor swimming pool. But it was her shallow draft and good size that allowed her to gather large loads of fruit from riverside plantations without getting trapped in stream muck. She’d grown accustomed to negotiating river ports in her many years of Caribbean service.

The
Contessa
was no
Queen Mary
, but as Standard Fruit declared in company brochures advertising her charms, she was “
large enough for every element of comfort, and not too large to permit delightful social relationships with fellow vacationists.” For a hundred and ten bucks and up, passengers found hot and cold running water in every stateroom; “Punkah Louvres [to] ensure warm and cool air as desired”; recreation that included shuffleboard and quoits; and even musicians to entertain the passengers at sea and on the shore.

Beyond the defense work for which she was coming to Brooklyn, the
Contessa
was here to pick up a load of troops to take to England, to learn what her convoy assignment would be for the voyage across the Atlantic, and to be boarded by one of the U.S. Navy armed guard units that were now being assigned to each of the merchant ships in the WSA fleet.

Not the
Contessa
, her crew, her master, Captain William Henry John, nor the Standard Fruit Company were innocents as far as wartime
dangers were concerned. Not only had they been sailing in the dangerous waters of the Caribbean and the American seaboard for the past several months, including this trip up the East Coast to New York, but many within the company had intimate knowledge of war’s perils. In fact, three of Standard Fruit’s own ships, including two that John knew intimately, had already been sunk in the spring of 1942 by German U-boats.

The
Amapala
, built in 1924, was a 4,148-ton steamer that worked, like the
Contessa
, between New York, Havana, and Honduras, hauling passengers and bananas between ports. The
Ceiba
was an older and smaller ship, built in 1911 and hauling 1,698 tons. In March 1942, the
Ceiba
was sunk by a U-boat off the coast of North Carolina on its way to New York. Almost home on its way from Honduras to New Orleans, the
Amapala
was attacked a month later—a couple of weeks before the
Contessa
sailed for New York.

The third Standard Fruit vessel lost in the first months of the war, the one that John had not sailed on, the
Miraflores
, had been sunk in February 1942. She disappeared with all thirty-four hands and no trace, on her way from Haiti to New York, sometime after the middle of the month.

John was a forty-nine-year-old Welshman who had come to New Orleans in 1919, immediately after serving in the British Royal Navy during World War I. He spent four years working as port captain for a sugar company in New Orleans before signing up with Standard Fruit Company in New Orleans in 1923.
His first ship was the
Ceiba
, upon which he served as second and then first mate, before becoming master of his first ship for Standard Fruit, the
Morozan
. In quick succession he moved up the company ladder, serving as master on a series of ships of ascending value to Standard Fruit: the
Gatun
, the
Granada
, the
Tegucigalpa
, the
Cefalu
, the
Amapala
, and finally the
Contessa
.

A straight-backed and trim sailor, John stood five feet ten and weighed 175 pounds. He had thick eyebrows and kept a crisp part to his wavy salt-and-pepper hair, which he combed back in Clark Gable style. Any movie-star appeal was sabotaged, to some extent, by his mustache.
Salt and pepper like the top of his head, it sat abbreviated beneath his nostrils, giving him less the look of Gable than that of a clerk prone to crisp pronunciation and a clipped manner of speech.

Neither image quite suited him. There was nothing supercilious about him, but he was no dashing hero either. John was a soft-spoken man with a gentlemanly polish that made him excellent company for his ships’ captain’s dinners. He was comfortable in his position and seemingly so natural to it that
even members of his own family referred to him as “Captain John.”

Born in 1893 in Pembroke, Wales, not far from Cardiff, Captain John joined the British merchant marine as a cadet in an officers’ training program at the age of fifteen. He spent four years learning the ropes on steam-powered, coal-burning freighters before matriculating to the Nautical Academy in Portsmouth to study for his second mate’s papers. After a couple more years in the merchant navy, he had his master’s rating as well, then wound up in the Royal British Naval Reserve, with which he served through the First World War.

Postwar Britain offered limited opportunities for relatively inexperienced officers in the merchant marine, so John decided to try his luck elsewhere. With his new wife, an attractive Welsh girl named Bessie Sigsworth, and the first of two daughters, Peggy (a second daughter, Betts, would be born in the United States in 1925), John moved to New Orleans in 1919. As it turned out, John had something of a flair for the American South. Though he kept his Welsh accent, he liked the exotic flavor of New Orleans. He donned panama hats and drank scotch and ginger ale when he was off the bridge and resting at his new home in New Orleans. The family was so comfortably ensconced in Louisiana culture that by the time the war had begun, daughter Peggy was a sorority sister and beauty queen at LSU, with the daughter of Huey Long as a housemate. Wife Bessie had brought her mother, father, and brother over from Wales to join the family in New Orleans.

None of this, of course, made the onset of war and the move of the
Contessa
to New York in 1942 any easier. It was safe to say that Bessie, if
not Captain John himself, wondered if it wasn’t time for this old sailor to call it a career. Though John was still a man who stood tall and straight on the bridge, still a man whose orders were issued and taken with confidence and alacrity, his salad days were long gone.

New York Harbor was a familiar sight to Captain John. Standard Fruit had delivered fruit to, and booked cruises out of, Manhattan for years and kept an office on Broadway. As captain of both the
Contessa
and the
Amapala
, John had sailed to and from the port with regularity in the 1930s. Steering toward Bush Terminal in Brooklyn was, however, a new experience.

Stretching into the harbor beneath Sunset Park and the sprawling Brooklyn army base, the terminal was a busy warren of warehouses, designed by Cass Gilbert, with multipaned windows and arched bridge skyways connecting one building to the next. The terminal was the largest point of embarkation for army personnel and equipment in the city, and it was hopping on that June day. Outside, dockworkers and cranes loaded one ship after another, as a long line of trains and trucks were backed up waiting to deliver supplies to the docks,
including munitions so dangerous that a twenty-five-dollar fine for smoking at the piers was judged not steep enough by the mayor of the city. Within the buildings, a sea of clacking typewriters were manned by straight-backed clerks and junior officers, holding checklists and clipboards, monitoring the comings and goings of newly minted infantrymen waiting to ship off to England.