Twelve Desperate Miles (5 page)

The
Contessa
was to berth at pier 1 for a full month as it was prepared for its first convoy voyage at the end of July. Here it would be painted battleship gray and receive “splinter protection”—steel plates—on the bridge and at newly installed gun mounts to prevent the wooden deck from splintering under fire. It would be outfitted with a fire-control communication system, a magazine for ammunition storage, and nine guns fore, aft, and bridge: eight 20-millimeters and one 4-incher. Fourteen members of a navy armed guard would join the crew, which would
number sixty-nine, counting Captain John. In addition, one hundred troops bound for Ireland would board the
Contessa
before she sailed.

John and the crew could be forgiven for any sense of melancholy as they steered toward Bush Terminal. Gone now were the swimming pool and passengers playing quoits on deck. Gone were the parties, the musicians, and the elaborate captain’s dinners on the last night of the cruise. Gone were the warm-water ports of La Ceiba, Caracas, Havana, and Veracruz and the smell of bananas wafting from the refrigerated holds. Hard to believe, but the
Contessa
was soon going to be a ship of war, sailing purposefully, just beyond the harbor, into the teeth of those menacing German wolf packs lying in wait in the chilly North Atlantic waters.

John, who had already experienced his share of conflict, didn’t have to be warned that global war was a horrific thing. To enter it twice in a lifetime, as were so many others, was certainly a surreal thing. Adding to that sense for John was a personal connection to what was happening in the ocean between New York and the ports of Great Britain.

As a twenty-five-year-old navigation officer on HMS
Snapdragon
, a convoy destroyer sailing in the Mediterranean between Malta and Port Said in October 1918, John was on duty when a German U-boat sank a cargo ship within the
Snapdragon
’s group. As the rest of the convoy sailed on, the
Snapdragon
was ordered to stay behind to search for and punish the German sub. After four hours of fruitless sniffing in the ocean, the destroyer was just about to give up the hunt when the U-boat suddenly broke the surface of the water, at point-blank range right in front of her. The
Snapdragon
swung its guns toward her and sent five 4-inch shells pounding into her hull. Like a dead fish, the U-boat slowly turned belly up in the water before beginning its descent to the bottom. As the sub disappeared, the German crew soon emerged in life rafts, bobbing on the surface of the ocean, and the
Snapdragon
sailed near to haul the sailors aboard.

Among the survivors was the ship’s commander, a cocksure German lieutenant, as John remembered him, far more insulted at the fact that
he’d lost a ship and had been captured than grateful that his life had been saved.
When John asked how things were in Berlin—this was just a month before the long and horrible war would come to a close—he was told, again with arrogant self-assurance, that the only difference between the Germany of October 1918 and the Germany of July 1914 was that the public houses now closed at midnight.

The lieutenant’s name was Karl Doenitz, the man who was now Rear Admiral Karl Doenitz, the
Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote
, commander of the submarines in the German navy. The cocky lieutenant had become leader of Project Drumbeat on the shores of North America; he was the dark knight who’d sunk hundreds of Allied and merchant ships, including two Standard Fruit vessels that William John had known like the back of his hand.

Quite frankly, Captain John wished that Karl Doenitz had gone down with his U-boat twenty-four years earlier. Instead, John was faced with a private sense of irony: what if one of this man’s submarines drew a bead on the
Contessa
?

I
f Captain William John was a hesitant enlistee in the cause, the man dozing in the four-engine Stratoliner flying high above the Atlantic on its way from Washington to Nova Scotia, and then to London, was his exact opposite: a man born, bred, and absolutely ready for this war. For General George S. Patton Jr. the prospect of battle ahead couldn’t have been more exhilarating. He shared the cabin with a group of staffers and recently promoted Brigadier General James Doolittle, whose air raid of Tokyo in April had made him the first genuine hero of World War II. All were seated comfortably in the cushioned seats of this novel airliner and cruising at twenty thousand feet above the ocean on a flight that would take most of August 6 and into the morning of August 7, 1942, before it landed in London.

A little more than a week earlier, Patton had been stuck in the deserts of California southeast of Palm Springs, training a newly created American armored command designed to offer an answer to the German’s Panzer divisions currently wreaking havoc in the North African terrain. Away from the center of U.S. military command in Washington, Patton worried that despite his longtime friendship with Eisenhower, the new commander of the European Theater of Operations United States Army (ETOUSA), and despite the respect that Chief of Staff George Marshall had for his ability, he was too far from the heart of what was happening to be assured that he would be an integral part of the first battle in the European theater.

In fact, Marshall had recently sent him hustling back to California after an initial summons to Washington in June. The rebuke had come after Patton had essentially questioned a decision Marshall had made about the deployment of American armored forces to aid the British, just defeated at Tobruk. Patton had asked not once but twice for
another division to help with the fight, after being pointedly told that there simply were not the resources for such a demand. In response, the chief of staff had sent his commander back to the desert, posthaste, fully intent on making sure Patton understood who was in charge of U.S. military efforts in this war.

Marshall had let Patton stew in California for a full month, uncertain whether his future role in the army would offer him the sort of field command that he knew he deserved and craved. Patton was not a man skilled in headquarters politics, to say the least. He was also—as would soon be exhibited—a general who would pursue with a bullish stubbornness what he felt was needed for his command. These traits, along with his blunt and profane style, had won him at least as many enemies as friends during his long army career. And Patton knew that those who disliked him tended to do so with a vengeance.

Then a second call came from Marshall’s office; then had come the order for him to fly to Washington; then had come news that he was to be an integral part of the first American attack on Axis forces in the war; and now all was right with the world. Once he’d arrived in Washington, he had gotten the order to fly to London to discuss the assault with Eisenhower and the European command. And here was the flight itself.

The first fully pressurized aircraft ever built and one of only ten in the air at the time, the Stratoliner had been requisitioned by the federal government for use by VIP travelers when the war began. It could fly five to ten thousand feet higher than the standard nonpressurized airplanes in the arsenals of both Allied and Axis forces and actually had
curtained sleeping compartments with spring mattresses. The flight gave Patton such a sense of comfort, as he and the others cruised in darkness over the Atlantic, that after some brief chitchat with his companions—“
all talk was of fishing and shooting,” Patton later told his diary—he was actually able to adjourn to one of those bunks and take a lengthy nap on the plane. Good to be able to relax in the clouds.

For those who knew Patton well, snoozing was an unfamiliar posture
in which to find him. This was a man of action, a man of combat, a man accustomed to barking commands in language so blue and in a tenor so surprisingly high-pitched that everyone commented on both. “
I sometimes wondered if [Patton’s] macho profanity was unconscious compensation for his most serious personal flaw,” wrote General Omar Bradley, “a voice that was almost comically squeaky and high-pitched, altogether lacking in command authority.”

Patton had a well-known predisposition for not suffering fools or mistakes gladly. Those close to him usually forgave his temper, knowing most of his outbursts—at least in the field—were the soundings of an overly passionate man whose central intention was to improve his soldiers. Those who didn’t like him thought he was intemperate, unwise, and impulsive to a fault.

His colorful style had already drawn the attention of the media. He’d been featured on the cover of
Life
magazine in the summer of 1941, after he’d made a splash in war games held that spring in Louisiana. One of the anecdotes reported told of Patton, a licensed pilot, grabbing a plane in the midst of the games to get a better sense of how his tanks were performing in the field. He was worried in particular that they guard against bunching, which would make a thick and plentiful target for the enemy. When he spied a logjam of armored vehicles halted at a crossroads, he buzzed his own troops, as close as safety would allow, screaming down at the transgressors, “
Get those goddamn tanks off the roads and into the bushes.” Good stuff for the reporters.

At age fifty-six, if he wasn’t quite as fit as he’d been thirty years earlier when he was an Olympic teammate of Jim Thorpe in Stockholm, Patton was nonetheless in trim shape. Just that past spring, while training armored forces for desert fighting in California, he’d insisted that his officers prove their fitness by running ten miles a day in the oppressive heat. Patton
led them on their jogs.

In contrast to his crusty exterior, Patton was imbued with a deep sense of style and was a romantic at heart. He was a writer of poetry, dressed with gallant flair, and was prone to dramatic words and gestures.
When he bid adieu to his beloved Second Armored Division before heading off to California to train the desert armored forces in the spring of 1942, Patton raised his glass to his colleagues and their spouses at his going-away party. “
Here’s to the wives,” he said. “My, what pretty widows you’re going to make!”

George Patton was the sort of character who collected nicknames easily.
His soldiers called him “The Green Hornet” or “Flash Gordon” for his heroic mannerisms and splashy style of dress. He had essentially given himself his most famous moniker while delivering yet another impassioned speech to officers in the Second Armored Division in the very early days of the conflict. The war, he told them, “will be won by blood and guts alone.” So “Blood and Guts” he became, though Patton himself despised the name. To friends and family, who saw more of his charm than others, he was simply “Georgie.”

Patton was raised in a home of comfort and privilege in Los Angeles. His father served for a time as district attorney for the county, was a successful businessman, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress and the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. His mother came from a wealthy family whose patriarch had arrived in California as a fur trapper in the days of Spanish rule and hacienda living. Benjamin Davis Wilson subsequently became one of the earliest mayors of Los Angeles and was the owner of a vast ranch bordering the city. It was here, romping through the hills and valleys that would one day be modern Pasadena, that Georgie grew up.

Patton’s father came from Virginia, and his ancestry included a whole passel of soldiers of the South. George’s grandfather, a colonel in the Confederate Army and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, was killed at Cedar Creek. A great-uncle died in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Two other great-uncles served Virginia in the Civil War, and Patton’s father, like his father before him, graduated from VMI and steeped his own son in military history and the legacy of the Lost Cause.
Georgie wanted to be called, and fully intended to be, “Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.” from his earliest days forward.

His education was unique and curious. Patton’s father believed that the learning process should consist almost entirely of a child “soaking in” the classics by having them read aloud. From his toddlerhood all the way to adolescence, young Georgie’s ears and mind were given a steady diet of legends and epics, poetry and Scripture. It was said that he could recite whole passages of
The Iliad
as a seven-year-old boy and liked to play with his sister as Hector and Achilles outside the gates of Troy on the grounds of the Patton estate in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles. He didn’t go off to school until he was twelve. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was a notoriously bad speller for his whole life.

Like his forebears, George Jr. went to VMI, but he left after only a year to take an appointment at West Point. There, Patton excelled in all subjects but math, won points for deportment and discipline, was a star hurdler on the track team, and won the high honor of being appointed corps adjutant in his last year of school.

He married Beatrice Ayer, the daughter of a wealthy Massachusetts manufacturer, a year after graduating, and together they began an army life in the cavalry. Stationed first in Illinois and then in Fort Myer, Virginia, where Patton served as aide-de-camp to General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army, George Jr. was spotted as a rising star from his earliest days. He combined the physical traits and style of a nineteenth-century cavalry officer, with a blunt aggressiveness that would serve him well in twentieth-century warfare. While in Illinois, Patton took up polo at a Lake Forest club and became an accomplished player and excellent horseman. Later, while in Europe, he studied fencing and became a master swordsman and would wind up instructing the skill at Fort Riley, Kansas.