Twelve Desperate Miles (40 page)

“
You are going to be released,” Malevergne said to them, with obvious satisfaction, “and you can tell the police commissioner that Malevergne, who has been forbidden to live in Port Lyautey, bids him good day.”

It was not the last American request of the river pilot. Early that afternoon a radio message arrived on the bridge. A cargo ship carrying materials—“indispensable for the commandos” is how it was presented to Malevergne—was waiting out in the transport area to make a run up the river. It needed to catch the next high tide at 1400. A launch would soon be pulling up to the
Dallas
to take him out to the ship. Would he be willing to guide it to the airport, just as he’d done with the
Dallas
?

P-40s had already achieved fame in the war in Asia, fighting the Japanese under the air group nickname “The Flying Tigers.” They were single-engine fighter planes capable of carrying 1,500 pounds of bombs that could be attached in three fixed locations, two on the wings and one directly beneath the cockpit. The munitions came in three sizes: 250-, 500-, and 1,000-pound bombs. All types were carried in the holds of the
Contessa
, but the majority were of the 250-pound variety. It’s not known exactly how many shells the
Contessa
carried but at a minimum—filled only with thousand-pound bombs in a nine-hundred-ton load—it would
have held 1,800 projectiles. At a maximum—carrying only 250-pound bombs—the number would have been 7,200. No doubt the
Contessa
’s munitions load was somewhere on the high end between these numbers.

Paired with the bombs were two thousand four-hundred-pound drums of high-octane airplane fuel (four hundred tons) stowed in separate holds. In all, the load constituted about a quarter of the tonnage that the
Contessa
could typically carry, if she were hauling bananas in Honduras and not trying to navigate a river whose depth at high tide barely matched her draft. More pertinent to the crew of the ship than tonnage numbers, however, was the simple fact that if that mix of bombs and gasoline was pierced and exploded, they and their vessel would be an instant memory.

Exactly when Captain John and Lieutenant Leslie learned that they would have the use of the Port Lyautey river pilot is uncertain, but they were surely glad at the news. It had become obvious to them since the day they arrived off the shores of Mehdia that the deepest hazards of the final leg of their journey would be found in navigating the
Contessa
’s load against the pounding shores of Morocco and up the River Sebou, not among the French defenses.

Captain John and Lieutenant Leslie also knew that the tide at Mehdia was shifting. Its height along the Moroccan shoreline would diminish each day after the tenth of November, until later in the month. The
Contessa
’s draft was not going to shrink with it. If she did not go up this day, she would not be able to enter the River Sebou for days to come. George Patton, on the brink of assaulting Casablanca to the south and still expecting help from those P-40s, would not countenance further delay.

Neither, it turned out, would Lieutenant Leslie (or “
Leslay,” as René Malevergne pronounced and wrote the name). When the Frenchman came aboard the
Dallas
from a launch at nearly 1500, Leslie insisted, in Malevergne’s words “
that the impossible be done.” That they head immediately up the river.

For his part, Malevergne still didn’t know exactly what sort of load
he was piloting up the Sebou. He saw a ship of about six thousand tons, flying the flag of Honduras (
Malevergne thought it was Panamanian), and continued in his belief that the
Contessa
was carrying
a load essential to the commandos at the airport. That and that alone.

He learned from Captain John that the ship drew only seventeen feet of water or five meters fifteen, but that she could move at a solid speed of fourteen or fifteen knots. He also knew, as the high tide had already passed, that there was not a minute to lose in getting the ship to the bar.

The weather for the voyage was fine, and visibility now, at midafternoon, made entry into the jetties not nearly the problem it had been that morning with the
Dallas
. Far more troubling—and dangerously so—was the combination of the diminishing tide, the depth of the bar, and the load the
Contessa
carried.

They were no big guns pounding from the
Texas
or any of the destroyers or cruisers behind them. There was no rat-a-tat of machine guns or reports of rifles coming from near the beach at Mehdia; but ongoing efforts at clearing the area of supplies made the village a busy scene. A number of landing craft were still inoperable; and others continued to arrive from the transport area as the
Contessa
headed for the bar. Her merchant marine deckhands—the Brazilians, the Arabs, the Danes, the Italians, and all the others—now lined the rail, watching for land in the waters below and getting their first close-up views of the beaches of Morocco. They saw the same yellowish water that the
Dallas
crew had viewed that morning, the same surf pounding against the rocky quay.

Gun crews from the armed guard, manning stations on a deck where tourists like William Bendix, Leo Carroll, and Miss New Orleans had first seen the harbors of tropical seaports in the Caribbean, were now looking at a blue African sky. Beyond the entrance to the river, they could see the Sebou pouring down from the interior. To the north of the river were high sand cliffs and dunes beyond them. To the south stood the stucco-colored village of Mehdia and just beyond it, the old Portuguese bastion, the Kasbah, which they knew had been taken just a few hours
earlier. Despite the dominant presence of the American army near the shore, they knew they were not pulling into Havana, Ceiba, Norfolk, or Brooklyn. All aboard assumed—or prayed, in the case of the steward, Mario Violini—that the army and the destroyer
Dallas
had made the way safe for them, but who could be certain? Gunner Hakie McLaughlin would remember for years to come a feeling of isolation and a sense of being “
a sitting duck” as the ship neared the mouth of the jetties.

They entered one hour after high-water slack. The timing could have been better, but currents were not yet strong. Malevergne guided them in at half speed, looking for the channel near the south jetty, as he had done with other ships a thousand times before. The
Contessa
was carrying enough weight to make a fairly steady course into the channel. The pilot hoped there might be enough water in the ebb tide and beneath her keel to give her a boost over the bar, but the ship scraped heavily on the sand and took a sharp sheer toward the south jetty.

Malevergne immediately rang for full speed ahead in the hope of correcting her, but the
Contessa
didn’t respond quickly enough against the yaw. She shuddered violently going over the bar, but instead of veering away from the rocks at Malevergne’s turn of the wheel, she skidded more sharply toward them, like a car caught in a skid. Everyone on deck, all the armed guard members at their stations, all the crewmen from their various nations, all the recent inmates of the Norfolk County Jail, and all the officers on the bridge, took deep breaths and waited as the
Contessa
slammed headlong into the rocks on her port bow.

It is safe to say that the only person on the vessel who didn’t think their time had come at that moment was the man at the wheel. Malevergne, of course, was the only one who didn’t know precisely what the ship was carrying in her holds. The crash of the
Contessa
was violent enough to send her foremast twanging forward so heavily that Leslie felt certain it would come snapping out of the deck. From top to bottom of the ship, crew members went flying. The number one hold was staved in, and water instantly began gushing in the bowels of the vessel. In the midst of the crash, all the way through its reverberating conclusion,
everyone on board but Malevergne paused and waited for one of those cans of fuel to slosh open and pour toward a spark; or waited for a rack of those cradled bombs down below to bust free; waited for the explosion that would blow them all to kingdom come.

It didn’t happen. Water poured so heavily into the hold that it reached thirteen feet in a matter of two minutes. Captain John sent his old shipmate, carpenter Harry Haylock, to assess damages, but there was little that could be done except try to get as much water as possible out of the hold as quickly as possible. The utility crew, heavily staffed by Norfolk inmates, got the pumps going, and the water level was soon maintained. Most important, the ship did not blow.

Luckily, too, it did not get hung up on the rocks. The impact of the
Contessa
against the jetty actually created its own rebound. She heaved back against the crash, aided by the river current and the ebb tide. Malevergne guided her away from further damage in the channel and ordered the engines up. Like a fullback heading once more toward the goal line, she put her head down and plowed forward. Over the bar she went “
churning up mud and sand … with all the grace of a hog going over a mudbank.”

On the other side, she was floating again, but barely. With her draft six feet deeper than the
Dallas
’s, and now with thirteen feet of water in her front hold adding to her weight, she became less a vessel than a plow. She had no momentum and moved strictly on the strength of her engines and their ability to propel her keel through the bottom of the river.

Down among the catwalks and stifling air of the engine room, the pounding of cylinders was deafening. John rang for as much steam as she could safely muster, and chief engineer John Langdon and his crew responded. The firemen monitored the boiler gauges; the oilers raced around the machinery, checking bearings, pistons, and valve stems for overheating and lubrication. The possibilities for disaster were a long list: a neglected water gauge could shut down the boiler; a burned-out bearing could stop the engine; an order implemented too slowly could cause the propeller to grind to a jerking halt. In the tight confines of the
walkways in and out and around the engines, wipers, engineers, and firemen pirouetted and plied, oilcans and wrenches at the ready, in time with the ungodly din of the engines. And still she inched forward at a rate no quicker than a fast walk.

On deck, the members of the armed guard continued to man their stations, eyeing the hills to the right and left of them as the
Contessa
inched past the Kasbah—sightlines strained upward at the crenellated walls—and then headed northeast toward the top of the first bend in the river, where elements of Toffey’s Third Battalion were tucked in and secure. Occasionally a landing craft or two would whiz by, now able to bring supplies inland from the beach to one battalion or another in the interior. But having a little company on the river turned out to be no comfort. There was still sniping going on from the hills between the Kasbah and the airport. Shots pinged around the banana boat and her highly explosive load as the navy gunners looked out from their stations, trying without success to find something to shoot at. The
Contessa
inched along so slowly that she couldn’t help but draw attention to herself. In contrast to the landing craft that were zipping by, she was in a slow-motion war. Time had never ticked by with such difficulty for the men on board as she climbed up the river.

The men on deck could plainly see American troops moving along the hillsides; they could see half-tracks and jeeps rushing over open ground. There was a clear sense that the battle had been won, yet it was impossible not to consider how exposed they remained to some uncoordinated attack from the enemy. The sensation intensified as the
Contessa
inched her way through the northeastern bend of the river and traveled by the swamp that had mired the Third Battalion the evening before. A single strafing run from a French Dewoitine rushing in from the airport at Meknes would place them in dire circumstances. A lost French battery zeroing in on the
Contessa
could blow them to kingdom come. One of the mines in the river nudging past the recently baked degaussing coils and against her hull could precipitate the biggest explosion witnessed at Port Lyautey in those three days of action. And still there was
no way to speed the mission of this polyglot contingent of merchant seamen.

From entry into the river to the second bend in the Sebou, where the
Batavia
and
Saint Emile
lay scuttled in the river, it took more than four hours. The
Contessa
could see those sunken steamers coming from miles away, in late afternoon sunshine and in dusk. There they sat like a part of the landscape, unavoidable and immovable. While navigating the
Dallas
, Malevergne had been able to ring for full speed at the bend, using the ship’s mobility and momentum to bite into the corner as he took the destroyer through. He had been able to swing her stern around the ships quickly, to keep her moving forward and pointed toward the airport. Now, with the
Contessa
, he had no momentum for the same maneuver, though once again Malevergne rang for full speed. The banana boat could only respond with a moderate surge that pushed her between the scuttled ships, and she simply wasn’t able to swing around into the bend and head to the south. Instead, the tired ship kept plowing forward with a resigned inevitability into the far bank of the river. Though she was trapped and finding soft ground on the shore, the
Contessa
’s engine continued to force its way into the muddy soil of Morocco to a distance of fifty feet. Unlike at the hard rocks at the river’s entrance, she came to a cushioned halt in the slop. If she wasn’t going to explode at the rocks on the jetty, she wasn’t going to explode here. Nonetheless, it was 1830 and she was hard aground.