Twelve Desperate Miles (43 page)

Accolades for the ship had already begun to arrive. In a November 22 letter to SOS commander Brehon Somervell, George Patton heaped praise on Somervell for his and his staff’s hard and good work in supplying the Western Task Force. He also made special note of the banana boat. “
Please tell [General] Gross that the little Contessa, which he secured for us at the last moment, did the trick,” Patton wrote. “She crossed the Atlantic alone and delivered the ammunition and gas at the airport. I have recommended the civilian captain of this vessel for a Legion of Merit Medal.”

Captain William John never got that medal. He did, however, receive commendations from Patton, Admiral Hewitt, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. “
By his outstanding professional ability and courage, Captain John of the Merchant Marine set an example worthy of the traditions of American seamanship,” read Patton’s tribute. “Alone and without naval escort of any kind, Captain John, with a dangerous cargo, successfully took his ship from an American port to … the French Moroccan coast, delivering essential war matériel to the combat troops, in time for operations of November 8–11, 1942. The waters through which Captain John passed were infested with enemy submarines and the nature of the cargo was such that complete annihilation of the ship and crew would have resulted from enemy torpedo action.”

Lieutenant Albert Leslie of the naval armed guard was similarly honored. Admiral Monroe Kelly recommended Leslie for the Silver Star, and
he was promoted to lieutenant commander. His first assignment was at Port Lyautey, where he was appointed port commander in the wake of the fighting.

John, Leslie, and the crew of the
Contessa
wound up achieving a measure of fame back in the States. In August 1943, the
Saturday Evening Post
published an account of the ship’s voyage to Morocco and up the Sebou by writer Bertram Fowler. Called “Twelve Desperate Miles,” the article offers an exciting version of the
Contessa
’s trip but neglects the role of the
Dallas
and René Malevergne in the operation. The story was picked up by the popular CBS radio program
Cavalcade of America
later that fall. Under the same title, it was produced as a half-hour drama starring Edward Arnold.

The
Contessa
’s star power was limited—at least as far as the ship was concerned. After she returned to New York in December 1942, her war service continued for more than three years. By February 1943, she was back making the New York–to–England transport run, with Captain John once again at the wheel and much of the same crew still on board. By the end of the year, the
Contessa
had shipped out to the Pacific, where she continued to serve as a merchant ship through the end of 1945. The hard-used vessel was finally sailed back to New Orleans in early 1946, where it went into dry dock for some much-needed repair work and refurbishing.

Captain John did not sail with it to the Pacific. He’d seen enough service. In the fall of 1943, he took a job as port captain of the Standard Fruit Company in New Orleans. The minor celebrity that washed over his former ship splashed a little bit on him, too, back in his hometown. The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
did a story on his adventure, and the
New York Times
called him about his past association with Admiral Doenitz of U-Boat fame.

Aside from his new position at Standard Fruit, John had other things on his mind. The fact that he had been master of a ship registered in a foreign country for all these years had precluded his ability to become a citizen of the United States. Now that he was retired from the
Contessa
,
Captain John could join his wife and daughters as an American citizen. He was naturalized by a U.S. district judge in New Orleans in September 1943.

In February 1943, Major Pierpont Hamilton was awarded the Medal of Honor by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A month later, the widow and ten-year-old son of Colonel Demas T. Craw received a similar honor at the White House. Along with Colonel William Wilbur, who served with Patton at Casablanca, they became the first recipients of the Medal of Honor in the European theater.

Two months earlier, Brigadier General Lucian Truscott had recommended that the French river pilot of Port Lyautey, René Malevergne, be awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action. The citation read in part:

Malevergne became the first Frenchman in World War II to be awarded an American Silver Star. He also became the first Frenchman to be awarded the Navy Cross, “For extraordinary heroism as pilot of the USS DALLAS during the assault upon and occupation of the Port Lyautey Airfield.” Malevergne received the navy medal at the very same airfield, along with Captain Brodie of the
Dallas
, who was similarly honored. General Truscott himself pinned the Silver Star on Malevergne’s chest in a ceremony in a grove near the Kasbah in the spring of 1943.

Malevergne was already back in Mehdia, readjusting to life in his old village. In the months immediately after the invasion, he worked as a translator and unofficial cultural liaison with the Americans at Port Lyautey, which became (and would remain for many years) an important military base for the United States in northwest Africa.

Eventually, Malevergne opened a little waterfront café in Mehdia called Jack’s Bar, which continued to support Germaine and the boys after his death in the mid-1950s. A few years prior to his passing, Malevergne sent his war diary to William Eddy, his old OSS boss in Tangier. An ironic choice, perhaps; if Eddy had known Malevergne was keeping a diary of his activities leading up to the invasion, Malevergne surely would have been removed from any further work with the OSS.

Correspondence between the two, however, shows their enormous respect for each other. Eddy tried and failed to find a publisher for the work. Unfortunately, the manuscript itself was lost or misplaced in
the process. After a long and circuitous journey, it was rediscovered and wound up in the hands of a scholar, Leon Borden Blair, who had served in the U.S. Navy at Port Lyautey in the 1950s and had known René Malevergne. Blair, now teaching French colonial history at the University of Texas–Arlington, got permission from Germaine to translate his story into English.

Blair, too, was unable to publish the manuscript. He died in 1990, passing his work on to an old friend from Morocco, Ben Dixon, the president of the American Friends of Morocco Society. The copy of the manuscript of
The Exfiltration of René Malevergne
, which has been so vital to this book, was found in the library of that organization in Washington, D.C.

Spiffed up and restored to prewar condition and better, complete with mahogany furniture, her swimming pool, and newly added air-conditioning, the
Contessa
returned to duty in the Caribbean after the war. It wasn’t long before Captain William John returned to take the wheel of her too.

She sailed for Standard Fruit to all the old ports and began a new regular run up to New York as well. She had some good years and some bad until a fire in 1956 gutted her forward holds—including the one that had been smashed in by the Sebou. In weighing the costs of repairing and keeping her against giving her up, Standard Fruit chose the latter. The fact of the matter was that
Contessa
was getting old, and the sort of combination ship that she was—part passenger, part cargo—was being supplanted on both ends of the equation by more luxurious tourist ships and larger, more efficient cargo carriers. Standard Fruit sold her to a Dutch firm, which renamed her the
Leeuwarden
.

Captain John retired in 1957. After fifty years at sea, more than thirty-six of them with Standard Fruit in New Orleans, he had had enough of sailing—but not enough of the sea. He and Bessie moved to a home on the Gulf of Mexico in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. As a memento of his
years with
the company and on the
Contessa
, Captain John was presented with the wheel of the ship upon his retirement.

In August 1969, Hurricane Camille was in the Gulf of Mexico and bearing down on Bay Saint Louis. William John had been through countless storms, including hurricanes, during his years at sea and had ridden them all out. He was in his late seventies and had cataracts. He didn’t want to leave, and neither did Bessie. They decided to ride this one out together.

When the storm came in, followed by the rising water, it is assumed they climbed to the highest reaches of their retirement cottage, but the structure was swept completely away. When their bodies were found near each other after the water had returned to the Gulf, Captain John and Bess were found clutching photographs of themselves to their chests, presumably so that their identities would be known to those who found them.

The
Contessa
came back to the Gulf in the early 1960s, purchased by Tropicana. She never did much work for this new fruit company owner, however, and by the end of the decade wound up rusting at a dock in Tampa, where it was reported that “a band of ‘hippies’ ” had occupied and were now squatting on her decks. At about the same time that Hurricane Camille struck the Gulf, she was purchased by an Italian company, which towed her on a final trip across the Atlantic, where the
Contessa
wound up in a ship “boneyard,” her history complete.