At All Costs
Page 32
In October 1942 Admiral Cunningham, Britain’s greatest admiral since Nelson, returned to London as naval commander in chief of Operation Torch, the successful invasion of North Africa by the Allies, which he planned and led with General Eisenhower. One year later Cunningham was named first sea lord, replacing the dying Dudley Pound.
Three weeks after Operation Pedestal, Admiral Syfret was knighted for “bravery and dauntless resolution.” He commanded the primary Royal Navy invasion force during Operation Torch. Admiral Burrough commanded a separate large fleet.
Lieutenant Commander Roger Hill was awarded the Distinguished Service Order Medal for his actions at the helm of the destroyer Ledbury during Operation Pedestal. He pressed the British government for salvage money for himself and his crew for their part in towing the Ohio, which was a thorny issue because a ship can’t be salvaged unless it’s recognized as abandoned. But the salvage was finally acknowledged, with Admiral Leatham’s approval on the request. Hill’s emotional stability soon began to waver and he removed himself from the Ledbury. He recovered to command another destroyer during the Normandy invasion but continued to struggle with his mental health and left the Royal Navy after the war. In 1965 he moved his family to New Zealand, where he worked as a laborer on the docks and wrote his memoir, Destroyer Captain. He died in 2001 at ninety years of age.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel returned to Germany in late September 1942, exhausted and sick; his Afrika Korps was soon crushed by General Montgomery at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Hitler’s insane orders at Normandy in 1944 caused Rommel’s defeat there. After he was accused without evidence of supporting a failed assassination attempt of Hitler, the Gestapo gave him the option of a trial and almost certain execution or suicide by ingesting cyanide. His death was called a brain seizure resulting from war wounds, and he received military honors at his funeral. “The name of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa,” Hitler wrote to Rommel’s widow, a truth decried for its “despicable hypocrisy” by Rommel’s son.
President Roosevelt visited Malta on December 7, 1943, the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor. He presented a scroll that included these words: “Under repeated fire from the skies, Malta stood, alone but unafraid in the center of the sea, one tiny bright flame in the darkness—a beacon for the clearer days which have come. Malta’s story of human fortitude and courage will be read by posterity with wonder and gratitude through all the ages.”
On August 23, 1942, eight days after the Ohio reached Grand Harbour, Captain Dudley Mason was lionized by the London Sunday papers. GREATEST DRAMA OF THE YEAR! screamed one headline. THEY SAILED INTO HELL; HE DEFIED THE NAZIS’ BOMBS AND WON THROUGH. The next day Mason pardoned the seaman who had thrown his dinner dishes over the side: “Owing to the subsequent good behavior of A. Byrne Messman the entry’s [sic] made on page 30 & 31 are hereby cancelled.” It was Captain Mason’s final entry into the Ohio’s log.
He was awarded the George Cross Medal, along with Charles Henry Walker, who swam the backstroke into the flames around Waimarama to rescue survivors. They were the only men from Operation Pedestal to receive Britain’s highest civilian honor. Mason resumed his career as a master for Eagle Oil and Shipping a few months later.
After the oil in the Ohio was off-loaded in Malta, she sank to the bottom of the shallow harbor; it was the oil that had kept her afloat. She was dragged to a dock in a far corner, where she was used for storage and barracks by the Yugoslavian Navy for the rest of the war. In 1946 the rusty hulk was towed ten miles out to sea, her back finally broken. She was scuttled by charges placed in her holds and sank in two pieces on an undersea shelf. She cries out to be raised and restored.
Fred Larsen nearly died the week after he rode the Bofors into Malta. He was hospitalized in Gibraltar for six days, suffering from severe stomach ills as well as his fractured spine. He steamed back to New York on the Queen Mary and took a taxi to his sister, Christina’s, house, where he saw his son, Jan, for the first time. Minda was at the movies, so he went to the theater and found her. He sat in the seat behind her in the dark, put his hands over her eyes, and whispered the lyrics to “You Are My Sunshine,” as if they had never been apart.
LIST OF SHIPS •••
The most heavily defended and heavily attacked naval convoy in history.
FOURTEEN MERCHANT SHIPS
Ohio
Torpedoed by an Italian submarine; bombed repeatedly; two shot-down Stukas crashed on her decks; suffered one direct hit and many near misses; lost engines and rudder; towed by destroyers, minesweepers, and tugboats into Malta; scuttled offshore in 1946.
Santa Elisa
Torpedoed by two E-boats; afire, abandoned, sunk by direct hits from a dive-bombing Junkers Ju 88.
Almeria Lykes
Torpedoed by an E-boat, down by the bows; American crew took to lifeboats, refused to reboard; ship was assumed to have sunk.
Waimarama
Two thousand–plus tons of aviation fuel ignited by four bombs from a Ju 88, quickly sunk; all but about twenty men burned to death in the inferno.
Deucalion
Holed by a near miss, later torpedoed and set afire by a phantom bomber in a dead-stick dive; abandoned, survivors boarded a destroyer, which left the ship in flames.
Empire Hope
Three direct hits and many near misses from an attack of Ju 88s, afire, abandoned, scuttled by a torpedo from the destroyer Penn.
Clan Ferguson
Torpedoed by a bomber; up in ferocious flames and down in seven minutes.
Glenorchy
Torpedoed by an E-boat in the middle of the night; flooding, abandoned except by the captain; sunk in the morning by an explosion aboard, believed to be the captain scuttling her and going down with his ship.
Wairangi
Torpedoed by an E-boat; flooding, abandoned, presumed to have sunk.
Dorset
Ahead of the convoy, within sight of Malta, turned back and rejoined convoy; attacked by fourteen Stukas; afire, abandoned, attacked by Ju 88s; direct hit, more fire, sunk by a torpedo from U-73.
Port Chalmers
Turned back toward Gibraltar; chased by a destroyer and ordered to rejoin the convoy; arrived in Malta undamaged.
Melbourne Star
Arrived in Malta charred after being caught in the flames of Waimarama, missing thirty-three men who jumped overboard into the fire.
Rochester Castle
Damaged by an E-boat torpedo; bombed; fire in the hold carrying ammunition, extinguished; arrived in Malta.
Brisbane Star
Holed in the bows by a torpedo dropped from a Heinkel He 111; arrived in Malta after limping along the coast of Africa.
FOUR AIRCRAFT CARRIERS
Indomitable
Attacked by a hundred bombers; three direct hits and many near misses; fifty men killed; returned to Gibraltar, listing and in flames.
Eagle
Sunk in eight minutes by three torpedoes from U-73; 231 men killed.
Furious
Flew off thirty-eight Spitfires to Malta; returned to Gibraltar.
Victorious
Returned to Gibraltar with Force Z.
TWO BATTLESHIPS
Nelson
Flagship of Admiral Syfret; returned to Gibraltar with Force Z.
Rodney
Returned to Gibraltar with Force Z.
SEVEN CRUISERS
Nigeria
Torpedoed by Italian submarine Axum; fifty-two men killed; returned to Gibraltar listing and afire.
Cairo
Stern blown off by two torpedoes from the same salvo by Axum; twenty-six men killed; abandoned; scuttled by torpedoes from destroyers.
Kenya
Damaged by an E-boat torpedo; returned to Gibraltar with Force X.
Manchester
Disabled by two torpedoes from two E-boats; fifteen men steamed to death; abandoned; scuttled with depth charges; her captain court-martialed.
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br /> Phoebe
Returned to Gibraltar with Force Z.
Sirius
Returned to Gibraltar with Force Z.
Charybdis
Returned to Gibraltar with Force X after being sent forward from Force Z.
THIRTY-TWO DESTROYERS
Ashanti
Flagship of Admiral Burrough after cruiser Nigeria was damaged; returned to Gibraltar with Force X.
Ledbury
Towed Ohio into Malta.
Penn
Towed Ohio into Malta.
Bramham
Towed Ohio into Malta.
Foresight
Disabled by dive-bombers; scuttled by depth charges from destroyer Tartar.
Tartar
Towed Foresight until scuttling her; returned to Gibraltar.
Wolverine
Rammed and sank submarine; returned to Gibraltar.
Ithuriel
Rammed and sank submarine; returned to Gibraltar.
Plus a fifth aircraft carrier for exercises, as well as oilers, corvettes, minesweepers, motor launches, tugboats, and nine submarines on patrol.
SOURCE NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •••
PART I
FATE IN THE CONVERGENCE
The seed of At All Costs was sown in 1963, when a small boy in a dark theater in London watched in awe as Stukas dived straight down from the sky at ships of the Operation Pedestal convoy, in battle footage used in the movie The Malta Story. Thirty years later, living in New York, he learned that two American merchant mariners and a U.S. tanker had played the pivotal role. It took him another decade to put it all together to bring their story to these pages, and more. The boy was Peter Riva, and in 2003, together with Random House editor Bob Loomis, he and I began working on At All Costs.
In the spring of 2004 I traveled to Malta and spent seven days with Jan Larsen, the three-year-old boy in this book. We explored the island and dug for its history, in particular during the siege of 1940–43. We met Simon Cusens, whose efforts to track down veterans for the Operation Pedestal reunions in 1992 and 2002 have brought closure to those men, along with some good times over grog. Cusens opened his library to me, as well as some pages of his painstakingly acquired address book, cooperation that got the research off to a rolling start.
All the material accumulated during more than two years of researching and writing, including some forty hours of recorded interviews with the convoy’s veterans, will be contributed to the Operation Pedestal museum that Cusens plans to build on Malta.
The three volumes of Malta at War, coffee-table books edited by John Mizzi (who was a boy during the siege) and Mark Anthony Vella, provided insight, illumination, and details in Chapter 1 and throughout the book. They include hundreds of black-and-white photos, articles, and items written in and about Malta during the war years, many of them from The Times of Malta daily newspaper. Their publication is a priceless contribution to world history; nowhere else can such a comprehensive picture of Malta during that period be found.
Quotes in the first chapter and subsequent comments by Admiral Cunningham come from his 674–page autobiography, A Sailor’s Odyssey, which was one of the two hundred books that squeezed all others out of my office for those two years, including seventy-eight books from the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, and another seventy-one that were purchased—often used, because they were long out of print. The analysis and opinions of Admiral Weichold, commander in chief of the German Navy in the Mediterranean, appear in an essay he wrote at the direction of the Allies while awaiting trial for war crimes at Nuremberg. Winston Churchill’s quotes are from various writings and speeches, most notably the fourth volume of his World War II memoirs, The Hinge of Fate. Governor-General William Dobbie’s quote is from an obscure softbound book he wrote after the war, A Very Present Help: A Tribute to the Faithfulness of God, which reveals his religious fanaticism that led to his replacement by Churchill. More but not all Dobbie quotes come from this book.
In Chapter 2, The Great Influenza by John Barry contained the information on the flu pandemic of 1918. At Minda Larsen’s home in New Jersey, I began a series of interviews and a friendship with her, amazed by the way she frequently sprang up from a chair in the living room to answer the phone in the kitchen and by how she enjoyed being outside in the cold winter air. Minda emptied the file cabinet containing records of her flight from Nazi-occupied Norway, as well as those of the career of her husband, Fred, including the folder he had labeled “Bad.” He never talked about bad things, so the folder was thin, although it might easily have been substantial. He was a quiet, positive man.
Some information in Chapter 3 came from the book Operation Drumbeat, a remarkable event about which relatively little has been written, save this definitive work by Michael Gannon. Other details came from Hitler’s U-Boat War, a Random House book researched for nearly a decade by its author, Clay Blair.
Frank Dooley, currently serving his second term as president of the American Merchant Marine Veterans and a shipmate of Fred Larsen in 1959, helped to explain the story of the collision between the Santa Elisa and San Jose and cleared up many other technical mysteries. Frank introduced me to Toni Horodysky, whose Web site www.usmm.org is a comprehensive reference about the American Merchant Marine at war. Toni’s research ability and initiative cracked open the door to more Internet discoveries. Toni also read the manuscript to catch technical errors, for which I’m especially grateful.
Visits to the New York Public Library turned up microfilm clips from The New York Times pertaining to both Operation Drumbeat and the Santa Elisa/San Jose collision, while Grace Line documents and some merchant ship records were found at the National Maritime Museum Library in San Francisco, by Bill Kooiman, another ex-mariner who sailed with Grace Line and author of The Grace Ships, 1869–1969. And Miriam Devine at the tiny Amenia, New York, library found some books that even the NYPL didn’t have. Miriam was a very young girl in Malta during the siege; more than the bombs, she remembers the hunger.
Theodore Roosevelt Thomson appears in Chapter 3. His daughter, Peg Thomson-Mann, born on the day the Santa Elisa was sunk, mailed me a gold mine, a nineteen-page report full of ship’s details, written by her father after the fire. Later quotes come from a 1943 article in The New Yorker written by a young Brendan Gill, a wordsmith even then; Gill apparently chose Thomson because the master was only thirty-three. More personal information about Thomson and Fred Larsen was provided by Captain Warren Leback, a Grace Line master for many years and U.S. Maritime Administrator in the Bush, Sr., administration.
Much of the dialogue that takes place on the Santa Elisa, and details such as the keg of Jamaican rum kept in Captain Thomson’s head, came from an unpublished manuscript, “Swans in the Maelstrom,” written by the ship’s purser, John Follansbee, who was Larsen’s close friend and who died in 2002. After much searching, I located his son John, who provided the only existing copy of this memoir, as well as a rare copy of a spiral-bound, self-published work by Ensign Gerhart Suppiger, titled The Malta Convoy. The descriptions of Suppiger’s thoughts and actions come from this work.
I spoke on the phone to Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer on the Santa Elise, who calls Larsen a “square-head,” and has sharper things to say about Ensign Suppiger. “I know them like it was yesterday,” he said. “I think of that ship a hell of a lot. I know how lucky I was.”
Larsen’s sextant hangs on the office wall of his engineer grandson, Scott Larsen, who contributed the sextant story as well as more insight into the character of his grandfather.
That summer, I spent a steamy five days in Augusta and Waynesboro, Georgia, getting to know the Dales family. Marjorie Dales, Lonnie’s widow, covered her kitchen table with five towering scrapbooks and spent the next two days answering my questions with unwavering patience and grace. It’s easy to see why Lonnie left the sea for her.
PART II
THE SECOND GREAT SIEGE
On Malta, Jan Larsen
and I spent time with Louis Henwood, a veteran of the Royal Navy and merchant navy, and former mayor of the city of Senglea. Mr. Henwood is also a diver and believes he knows where the Ohio lies. His Web site, www.louishenwood.com, has more information about Malta than any other, and some of it appears in Chapters 6 and 7.
Jan and I saw as much as we could in one week. We stood on the bastions surrounding Fort St. Elmo in Valletta, where thousands of Maltese had cheered and cried when the Ohio came in and where the cannons of the Knights of St. John had fired the Turks’ chopped-off heads across the harbor. We sidled into the dank caves around the docks, where families had lived during the war. We walked around the towers and pillboxes at the edge of cliffs over the sea and through a cemetery with the tombstones of too many children, as well as those of Axis airmen shot down over Malta. We gazed in silence at the prehistoric Tarxien Temples. We spent an afternoon at St. John’s Cathedral, raided by Napoleon, and were chilled by an all-too-real display deep in the caves under the cathedral, where Maltese had been tortured during the Inquisition.
We took a bus to the ancient walled city of Mdina, where off-duty RAF pilots and Maltese farmers had watched dogfights in the sky. We visited the National War Museum and spent an afternoon at Takali airfield, now the site of the Malta Aviation Museum, where we examined a restoration of one of the original Gladstone Gladiator biplanes. We spent a fascinating few hours with Ray Polidano, director of the museum foundation, who worked in a hangar in back; he walked us around and told stories of the men and planes at Takali.