At All Costs (10 page)

Two FAMs, or fast aerial mines, were mounted port and starboard near the funnel. The FAMs were shot high into the sky by a rocket, which popped open to release 1,000 feet of piano wire, with a big parachute on top and a smaller one on the bottom, just above the small mine. The wire was meant to catch the wings of dive-bombers, and the mine would be yanked upward until it contacted the plane and blew it out of the sky. It was a top secret British weapon, but its effectiveness soon blew its cover. Ironically, it wasn’t the mine that downed the planes, it was the piano wire, which tangled in propellers and snarled engines to a standstill, followed by a splash into the sea.

A pneumatic launcher for four PACs, or parachute and cables, was bolted onto Monkey Island, the thrilling open platform on top of the bridge. The PACs were a lot like barrage balloons around a harbor. The launcher shot a floating parachute four hundred feet up, trailing a steel cable attached to Monkey Island. It could slice the gull wing of a Stuka clean off.

Finally, a DEMS officer attached a buoy with a long coiled rope to Monkey Island.

“What’s that for?” asked Follansbee.

“That’s so we’ll know where you’re at when you get sunk,” replied the officer.

It was better than what the
Melbourne Star
had. She carried a hundred pigeons to fly off desperate messages to Malta. There was a rating they called “Sergeant in Charge of the Pigeons.”

Captain Thomson, lacking a master’s experience, went to wartime navigation school while the ship was in Newport and learned “tricks like zigzagging and so on,” he said. But he still hadn’t been told where they would be going.

“From the look of the guns, the crew and I had a pretty good idea that we might expect some excitement,” he said. “But the only thing I knew for sure was that if a bomb or torpedo came anywhere near that number one hold, the ship was done for.”

CHAPTER 15 •••

SS
OHIO,
JUNE 23

O
n June 23, as the
Santa Elisa
was being loaded with bombs and aviation fuel, Prime Minister Churchill was riding the rails into the wilds of South Carolina. They were screaming for his head over the fall of Tobruk, in the House of Commons at home, but he had accepted an invitation from General Marshall to inspect the troops at Fort Jackson, and he wasn’t going to let political attacks or military defeats change his plans. He wouldn’t give his enemies the satisfaction. Damn the crises, full speed ahead on the Southern Express.

As the train rolled to a stop at the army camp, Churchill and his entourage were greeted by a military band and a mass of reporters. There was an empty seat in the back of one of the convertibles, and General Marshall invited along Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, a character remembered for his missing teeth and the way he fussed over the prime minister. “His gestures combined with his lisp made him very funny indeed,” wrote Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Layton Nel, in a sweet memoir.

All day they watched the army do its thing in the blazing sun, stirring up steamy red dust. There were hundreds of tanks, thousands of soldiers, and field exercises with live howitzers. Fat airplanes flew overhead, leaving a trail of parachutes filling the blue sky like snowflakes. “I had never seen a thousand men leap into the air at once,” said Churchill, proving he was able to see the glass half full when he wanted to. “Only three casualties, one leg broken, one sprain, and one suspected skull fracture,” added General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff and Churchill’s top military adviser.

Twice, Roosevelt had cautioned Churchill’s doctor—FDR correctly called him “Sir Charles”—to keep a close eye on his friend the prime minister, under the summer sun. This was not June in England. The doctor was glad that the prime minister had brought his Panama hat. The heat, dust, and terrain reminded Churchill of the plains of India, where he had fought as a young man and played polo when he wasn’t fighting.

It’s a wonder that he didn’t have another heart attack. “All the long morning, we stood in the open, enveloped in dust, sweating in the sun, which beat down on the sandy stretch, as devoid of shelter as Salisbury Plain,” said Sir Charles. “All afternoon, still standing, we watched a battle between two mechanized forces until my eyes watered with the glare and my feet seemed too big for my shoes.

“Winston, so easily bored by most things, can spend hours, apparently with profit, inspecting troops,” he marveled.

They flew back to Washington that evening. The prime minister was quite pink by now and was still wearing the Panama hat as they landed.

“The brim of the Panama was turned up all round and he looked just like a small boy in a suit of rompers going down to the beach to dig in the sand,” said Brooke.

His valet, Sawyers, blocked him in the aisle and wouldn’t let him get off the plane. “The brim of your hat is turned up, and it does not look well,” he scolded. “Turn it down, turn it down!”

On June 23, as the prime minister was happily sweltering in the South Carolina sun, the SS
Ohio
was moored in Stobross Quay along the River Clyde. She had just arrived from Port Arthur, Texas, with a quick stop at Key West, where she had picked up an escort from the navy base there, a single destroyer that had followed her for twenty-four hours. After that she had been insanely all alone, out on an ocean full of U-boats, carrying 107,000 barrels of 104-octane Texas Company gas for the RAF. That was 3,745,000 gallons.

Her arrival in the Clyde was celebrated. She was the first American tanker to bring fuel across the Atlantic to Britain since the war began. There was a letter of appreciation waiting for Captain Sverre Petersen from Lord Leathers, the all-powerful minister of war transport.

The Master
U.S.A. Tanker “Ohio”

Clyde Anchorages

Dear Sir,

It is with great pleasure that I have been requested by Lord Leathers, Chief of the Ministry of War Transport, to send you from his Lordship his personal message of welcome at your safe arrival in the Clyde with the first cargo of oil carried in a United States Tanker. This special United States assistance in the rebuilding of United Kingdom oil stocks is greatly appreciated and valued. I have, on his Lordship’s behalf, to thank you and your Officers and Crew for the safe carriage of this first cargo.

In sending you this, his Lordship’s personal welcome, I trust your stay on this side may be a pleasurable one. I can assure you all at the ministry here and elsewhere will gladly lend you any assistance which you may call on them to give.

I remain, Sir,

Yours faithfully

The
Ohio
was big, fast, and sweet. She could carry more fuel than any other tanker on the water. Long and lean, at 514 feet and 9,264 gross tons, she had the bow of a schooner and the stern of a cruiser, with an elegant sheer and bold prow. She was fitted with the latest Westinghouse steam turbine engines that churned out 9,000 shaft horsepower, spinning a single screw of solid bronze whose four blades spanned 20 feet. During her standardization trials off the Delaware Capes, four days before she was delivered to the Texas Company, she had hit a fantastic top speed of 19.23 knots in the measured mile, fully loaded with seawater ballast.

When she was launched by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania, there was no ship like her. She was built like a battleship. Her sisters, the
Oklahoma
and
Kentucky,
had come along since then, but they had been sunk; so now she was again the only tanker on the high seas with a welded hull. Neat wide seams bonded her bulkheads and hull, where hundreds of thousands of rivets were used on lesser ships. Two thick bulkheads made up her backbone, and twenty-three transverse bulkheads, strengthened by girders, sectioned her into thirty-three honeycombed cargo tanks. There were nine fat tanks down the middle and twenty-four smaller wing tanks, with a sophisticated pumping system that discharged oils from each tank quickly and cleanly.

Inside the living quarters, she was like a luxury liner. The cabins of the master, chief mate, and chief engineer cascaded with mahogany, and even the ordinary seamen had single cabins. There were a large smoking room on the upper deck and separate mess rooms for the officers and men. The pantries were full and the coolers huge, and a sailor could get everything from grapefruit to ice cream. Best of all, there were big percolators that brewed rich coffee twenty-four hours a day.

The
Ohio
had been conceived by Torkild “Cap” Rieber, the Norwegian-American chairman of the Texas Company, soon to become Texaco. Sun Shipbuilding had given him a four-foot-long model of the new tanker, which he displayed on a table outside his office in the Chrysler Building in New York and proudly showed off to visitors. He’d been a tanker man all his seafaring life. He had sailed from Oslo at fifteen and by twenty-two was an American citizen and captain of his own tanker, carrying crude away from Spindletop, the oil field that changed the shape of Texas.

Rieber went to work for the Texas Company, and for the next thirty years he punched and cursed his way to the top like a pirate captain, wheeling and dealing in tankers. When he became chairman in 1935, President Roosevelt encouraged him to build more tankers. He bought oil fields around the world the way he collected tankers, including a place for the Texas Company in the Persian Gulf.

He sold oil to anyone who could pay for it, including the Fascists building up for the Spanish Civil War. When FDR found out and threatened to charge him with treason, Rieber began smuggling the oil through Italian ports, discharging it there for Spain to get later. Sometimes the orders to Rieber’s tankers were so secret that their masters didn’t even know where they were going until they were at sea.

“We have the clearest possible evidence that T. Rieber, Chairman of the Texas Company, has himself made arrangements with the manager of his Italian company to do everything possible to assist Spain to charter neutral tonnage and accumulate stocks of oil, part of which from information received seems to be intended for Italian account,” said an internal memo at Britain’s Foreign Office dated June 14, 1940, three days after Italy attacked Malta.

So the Axis bombers over Malta might have had Texas Company fuel in their tanks. But that wasn’t all.

U.S. Exports of Oil to Spain Increase

Fear Expressed in Washington Diplomatic Circles That It May Be Going to Hitler

WASHINGTON, July 19, 1940—Fear that oil being sent by American companies to Spain may seep through to feed Chancellor Hitler’s war machine was expressed in diplomatic circles here today. Gasoline and oil have been going to Spain not only from Texas but from fields in Venezuela and Colombia…. Much of this oil, it is claimed, went to Italy directly and indirectly from the United States and American-owned fields in Latin America before Italy entered the war…. Diplomatic sources assert that the Texas Corporation, of which Torkild Rieber is chairman of the board, has a contract to supply the Spanish oil monopoly with most of its gasoline and petroleum products.

And it wasn’t just Spain. Rieber was accused of assisting in the smuggling of arms and oil in 1940 to the Fascist-backed Mexican revolutionary Juan Andre Almazán. The Mexican government had claimed the oil fields of American companies, which were not above secretly supporting a revolution to get them back.

When Fred Larsen left Norway after graduating from the Farsund Mates and Masters College and marrying Minda, his first job was as bosun on the Texas Company tanker MS
Louisiana.
He had heard of Torkild Rieber—every sailor had heard of this larger-than-life sea captain/executive—and admired the accomplishments of his fellow Norwegian American. The
Louisiana
sailed out of Wilmington, Delaware, mostly to the depots in Port Arthur, Texas, but sometimes she delivered fuel deeper into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Scuttlebutt moves around the decks of ships at sea as quickly as mice. Larsen listened a lot more than he talked, and as bosun on the
Louisiana,
he heard it all. And he didn’t like what he heard. He heard about tankers being sent from Port Arthur with fuel for Fascists in Mexico or Spain. He hadn’t become a merchant mariner in order to run guns to revolutionaries, in Mexico or anywhere else. The
Louisiana
hadn’t been sent on such a mission yet, but she was operating in the area, and it appeared to be just a matter of time. So in the spring of 1940, after about eight months as bosun on the
Louisiana,
he left the ship.

He was lucky to get off when he did. She was later torpedoed off the coast of South America by U-108, which chased the wounded tanker for seven hours before finishing her off with two more torpedoes. There were no survivors among the forty-nine men who were swallowed by the flames from 92,514 ignited barrels of gasoline.

If the
Ohio
had been built much sooner, she might have been caught up in these midnight missions. She might even have carried oil to the German Navy. Maybe that’s what she had been intended for. Rieber had twice traveled to Germany to cut oil-trading deals. During his second trip he had met with Hermann Göring, second in command of the Third Reich, chief of the Luftwaffe, and creator of the Gestapo. Göring introduced Rieber to Admiral Raeder, commander in chief of the German Navy.

Torkild Rieber was in far deeper than he realized—and FDR told him so when they talked in the White House in January 1940, after Rieber’s meeting with Göring. Rieber had placed a high-profile German lobbyist on the Texas Company payroll, giving him an office in the Chrysler Building, an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria, a house in Scarsdale, and a new Buick for his flashy blond wife. The Texas Company also retained a German patent attorney who turned out to be a spy, using patent numbers to send secrets to Germany. The tip of this iceberg was exposed in the
New York Herald Tribune
that August, and public outcry forced Rieber’s resignation.

But he had squeezed in a final larger-than-life act, one last blast to end his seafaring career. On July 24, he had put on his master’s cap and pushed his old buddy Sverre “Snowy” Petersen aside at the helm of the
Ohio,
which had just discharged a load of Sky Chief at the Bayonne, New Jersey, terminal. Rieber had received his letter of instruction as an internal memo within the Chrysler Building: “As arranged verbally, the Enrollment of the S.S. ‘Ohio’ should be taken by you to the Custom House during the forenoon of July 24th, and you should be endorsed as Master, replacing Captain Sverre Petersen…who will proceed with ship to Port Arthur as passenger.”

Rieber had followed the
Ohio
’s standardization trials, and he had charted the progress of Petersen’s fast run delivering the ship from Sun shipyards to Port Arthur, so he knew what the big tanker could do. His final turn as master wasn’t a farewell cruise, it was a flat-out record run. If Howard Hughes could do it—he had set a speed record for airplanes of 352 mph in 1935—so could Cap Rieber.

The Ohio’s thirty-three empty tanks could take seawater ballast on the run back to Texas, so she could be tuned for speed. A perfect balance could be found, using the ship’s sophisticated pumping system to shift seawater around.

Rieber and Petersen were both on the bridge, and they had more than 10,000 steam turbine horsepower in the engine room. No tanker captains had ever been blessed with so much power to play with, let alone a mission to use it all.

In his final run as a sea captain, Rieber wound the big tanker out and broke all records, covering 1,882 nautical miles in four days and twelve hours. The
Ohio
averaged 17.4 knots, arriving at 1
A.M.
on July 29, 1940, nearly a day early, with Cap Rieber laughing at the helm all the way.

Twenty-three months later, at daybreak on June 27, 1942, the prime minister’s flying boat splashed down in the mouth of the River Clyde. Churchill called the return flight from Washington uneventful, although he had especially enjoyed a “tummy time” breakfast of fresh lobster and champagne while the big Boeing was refueling in Newfoundland in the wee hours. He was less pleased by the foiled apparent assassination attempt, the previous night in Baltimore, by one of the agents hired by the U.S. government to guard him—“turned out to be a lunatic,” he said.