Twelve Desperate Miles (41 page)

As the airfield at Port Lyautey continued to be repaired, a column of French trucks carrying reinforcements headed toward the region from Meknes. Spotter planes saw them coming and sent a range to the battleship
Texas
, which opened fire with her main battery at about seventeen thousand yards.
Soon gaping holes from the fourteen-inch high-explosive shells began appearing in the highway, and the trucks turned around.

Through the day and into the night, the beaches continued to be cleared of wreckage and cargo. More and more launches began speeding
up the river to deliver supplies to companies that had progressed toward Port Lyautey. Disorganized units of French infantry drifted back in the same direction through the course of the day.
Occasional sniper fire continued, which the French military would later blame on native troops.

As night came to Port Lyautey, the First Battalion entered the city and captured the French commander and most of his remaining troops. The French colonel asked to arrange an armistice with Truscott, who replied that he would do nothing until Major Pierpont Hamilton was released. It was well after dark when the French took Hamilton to the airfield, where, by a tank radio, he was able to contact Colonel Semmes at another tank radio down at the beaches.
Semmes relayed Hamilton’s message to Truscott: General Mathenet had arrived in Port Lyautey and wanted to
parlez
the next morning at the Kasbah. Hamilton sent a similar message to the
Dallas
, which radioed Admiral Kelly about the next day’s meeting.

On the
Contessa
, there was nothing to do but wait for the next tide to come in and raise the level of the river and the ship with it. The pumps continued to do their job on the number one hold, draining the water that had accumulated there since she was holed at the south jetty; but the engines were shut down. The exhausted engine department could finally get some rest, and on deck it was possible to hear a stillness in the Moroccan night.

There was plenty of uneasiness on board in the night.
Rumors of enemy troops moving twenty miles north and east of Port Lyautey surfaced. George Patton was still poised with his central task force at the edge of Casablanca, fully intending to attack the city in the morning. French forces remained in Meknes and Marrakech. Truscott had ordered Semmes to prepare to move the next day on Rabat with his tanks; and who could say with certainty what lay out there in the quiet hillsides above the
Contessa
? But it would be another day before the P-40s would be receiving any of the gasoline or munitions she carried.

For René Malevergne, still lingering on the
Contessa
after its run was over, the fight was out of him. He wanted to go home and see Germaine and the boys. Leslie had the
Dallas
radioed, and a launch from that ship arrived midevening. Malevergne first went back to the destroyer, where he asked Captain Brodie if it would be possible for him to go home that night. Brodie gave him a handwritten pass and the operative passwords—“Georges,” as Malevergne recorded it, and “Patton”—that would enable him to travel safely to Mehdia and back to his cottage.

For all the while it had taken him to travel up the river that day in both the
Dallas
and the
Contessa
, his trip downriver in the launch felt almost as long. Up through the bend in the Sebou above Port Lyautey; downriver in the northern loop; the dip down toward the Kasbah; and then the darkened profile of Mehdia, its lights blacked out to protect it from stray bombing runs. Malevergne was deposited at a dock just above the village, where he was able to bum a ride on a jeep to the beach. It was 2200 hours, 10:00 p.m., when the guards at the entrance to his hometown examined his pass from Captain Brodie and allowed him entry into Mehdia.

He could see no lights on at his home as he approached the stucco wall that surrounded the property. Malevergne shared the call, “Georges,” and response, “Patton,” with a sentry posted outside the gate and was allowed inside his own courtyard. Some sort of shell had obviously wounded the veranda. Tiles were smashed, and a tree had fallen. The nearness of the explosion to his home suddenly stopped Malevergne as he considered the possibility that his wife and children might have been right here when the bomb came. But sandbags covering the approach to the cellar door reassured him, and he hurried in that direction, where he saw a light filtering outward from the door.

“Georges,” he called outside the door.

“Patton,” came the response from inside.

There were a group of American soldiers and Mehdian villagers sharing the protection of his darkened cellar. Its only illumination was two flickering candles. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, Malevergne
could see astonishment in the faces of his neighbors as he entered the room.
Where had he been? Why was he here now with the Americans?
Malevergne suddenly felt a pair of arms grab his legs at the knees.

“Papa! Papa!” cried his son Claude, who recognized his father in spite of his strange uniform and the many weeks it had been since he’d seen him last. René and Germaine were there to hold him too. They clung together in the candlelight. His long journey finally over, René Malevergne was home at last.

I
t was 0130 on November 11 when the tide began to sweep up the River Sebou and boost the
Contessa
out of her riverbank. Captain William John had the wheel of his ship once again that morning and was faced with an immediate difficulty. As the tide came in, it lifted the first part of the
Contessa
that it touched, her stern, and swept it south toward the airport, rather than downriver toward the sea. With the two scuttled French steamers directly behind her, Captain John simply didn’t have enough room to turn his ship back upriver and point his bow toward Port Lyautey. He made a quick but dangerous determination: he would back the
Contessa
upriver to the airport, leading with her stern. With engines full speed to the rear, John eased his ship off the mudbank and into the stream. In the darkness of that early morning, the
Contessa
was now being led up this shallow river by her propeller.

The maneuver was precarious, to say the least. Not only would John have to feel his way upriver, trying to sense a navigable channel through the shifting sands at the river’s bottom, and without a pilot to aid him, but the propeller shaft, which is one of the most vulnerable parts of any ship, needed to be protected. The
Contessa
’s was connected directly to the engine through a bearing tube that, in her case, was made of a Caribbean hardwood called lignum vitae. Lignum vitae is so densely tough that it is heavier than water. The wood also carries within it a supply of its own oil, which makes it
a self-lubricating bearing. Lignum vitae had been popular among seamen for many years.
Ernest Shackleton, for instance, used it to frame the
Endurance
on his famous Antarctic voyage. Its strength and ability to protect the propeller shaft from seawater made it a popular bearing-tube material on steamships too. It was an expensive shipbuilding item but one that Captain John was happy to have in the
Contessa
.

As she had the day before, the banana boat churned her way up the
Sebou, raking the bottom as she trembled backward toward the airport. Her load made her heavier in the front end, which helped keep the propeller up and away from obstacles, but steaming blind on a river that he’d never seen before left John and everyone aboard uneasy about what lay ahead. He felt his way along the slow-motion journey, waiting to hear the thud and abrupt conk of his propeller running into the sand and his engines coming to a grinding halt.

The end came, however, as it had the night before: less a violent stop than a sigh of utter exhaustion, as the
Contessa
’s keel eased slowly and deeply into the river bottom. There was no going backward, no going forward. She was hard aground once again, and her trip was over. The
Contessa
had made it as far as she needed, however; the airport rested just eight hundred yards off her starboard side.

Lieutenant Leslie ordered the cargo gear rigged and the hatches opened, but no landing craft appeared from the
Allen
to aid in her unloading, as had been promised before the
Contessa
’s run. Leslie wound up commandeering several local barges, as well as a pair of fishing boats, for the job. He had to enlist army troops as longshoremen, had to go three miles upriver to the docks at Port Lyautey to find cranes capable of unloading the
Contessa
’s cargo from the lighters, and, once in the port, had to arrange the opening of a rail line back to the airport in order to deliver the munitions and ga s to the P-40s. “
Working twenty-four hours a day was able to finish discharging in three days, although it may have been four—for the passage of time at this point was beyond recall,” Leslie wrote in his final report on the trip.

“
It should not be omitted to say that, although there were twenty-six nationalities comprising the crew of the vessel, no trouble was had with them at any point,” Leslie added, regarding the entirety of the voyage. “Action of the Navy crew was exemplary; also Captain John, an ex–Lieutenant Commander in the British Navy,… showed himself more than willing to handle his ship into whatever dangers may have been a part of the operation.” Without John’s presence, Leslie continued, “it is doubtful if the show could have been carried off. He is, in my opinion,
most deserving of official recognition of his contribution to the opening of shore based air operations at this point.”

Despite numerous requests, Leslie was never able to get help from the
Allen
; and in fact he found out later that, because of the dangers of the load, transports were purposely being diverted from the
Contessa
.

Though the
Dallas
and the
Contessa
were crucial instruments in the rush to open and supply the Port Lyautey airfield in support of George Patton’s assault on Casablanca, none of the munitions or gasoline that the
Contessa
carried up the Sebou were used in Operation Torch. Not a single P-40 got into the air before hostilities in French Morocco came to a conclusion.

At 0800 on November 11, just as Lieutenant Leslie was scrambling to find help in unloading the
Contessa
, forces were gathering at the Kasbah. General Lucian Truscott, in the company of Harry Semmes’s tanks “
to lend something of a military display to the event,” approached French general Mathenet in the shadow of the high walls of the Kasbah. He also brought his aide Ted Conway along to translate. Mathenet was in full dress uniform, complete with a blue cape, lined in scarlet, tossed over his shoulder. Elsewhere “
a brightly colored pageant of varied French and colonial uniforms, Arab costumes, and flags” greeted the Americans. Truscott felt “battle-stained” in contrast.

Truscott and Mathenet saluted each other, and the French general said that he was authorized by Admiral Darlan to terminate all hostilities in the Port Lyautey area. Truscott told Mathenet that his troops would be allowed to keep their weapons if they promised to remain in the barracks until the final cessation of fighting in Morocco. In addition to giving up the immediate area, Mathenet agreed to the surrender of the airport in Salé, near Rabat, which obviated Truscott’s plans to march on that city.