At All Costs (25 page)

Four lifeboats were blown up by the explosion, but survivors filled two lifeboats, each towing a raft. Eight men were never found, including the chief mate. Captain G. Leslie refused to abandon ship. The third mate reboarded and tried to persuade him, but Leslie tricked him into getting back into the lifeboat.

Mr. Skilling returned to the ship three times, trying in vain to get the captain to board the lifeboat. He kept both boats near the
Glenorchy
that night, and at daybreak they rowed three miles, close to shore, because they didn’t want to be near the
Glenorchy
when enemy planes showed up. When an Italian bomber circled the ship ten feet over the water, they rowed to the beach.

“At 0800 we could still see the ship, which was well down in the water,” said Mr. Skilling. “She turned over on her side and sank, and two minutes later there was a heavy explosion which set fire to the oil in the water.”

Captain Leslie was presumed to have gone down with his ship as he had wished. He might have scuttled her himself, lighting the fuse to two depth charges that were strapped to a bulkhead in the engine room, and waiting. Or he might have died screaming in the burning oil on the water.

CHAPTER 35 •••

HELL IN THE AFTERMATH

B
etween manning his Oerlikon and standing watch at the helm, Fred

Larsen had scarcely left the bridge of the
Santa Elisa
for more than two days. But he wasn’t alone; few of the ships’ gunners had gotten much sleep in the previous sixty hours. Doctors were handing out Benzedrine, and some sailors flipped the little white bennies down their throats like popcorn, although not Larsen. “I didn’t care for those things,” he said. “I never even tried one. They made guys jumpy. They were shooting at seagulls.”

“The captain told me to rest for a while,” he continued. “Shortly after, a British cruiser or destroyer came alongside and with a bullhorn called us to follow him, and he would sweep the minefields. It was dark and we did not expect any air strikes before daybreak, so I laid down with my life preserver on the sofa in the deckhouse.”

As the
Santa Elisa
steamed in the wake of the antiaircraft cruiser
Charybdis,
the freighters
Waimarama
and
Wairangi
began tagging along. The four ships zigzagged in the dark at nearly top speed, praying their paravanes would catch the mines—the Axis had placed more than a thousand fresh mines around Pantelleria in the previous two weeks. “Sometimes the mines came so close you could see their horns, when there was enough light,” said Larsen. With no light at all, it was like Russian roulette with cannonballs full of TNT. Captain Thomson kept the
Santa Elisa
directly behind
Charybdis,
reducing the odds that a mine would find them.

Two E-boats watched the
Charybdis, Santa Elisa,
and
Waimarama
pass.
Wairangi
was in the dreaded “tail-end Charlie” position, and she was picked off by a shot from 500 yards. There was no fire, but the engine room flooded. “Fearing further attack on the now stationary ship,” said Captain Richard Gordon, “I ordered the crew to lower the boats, and suggested in a message to the escort ships that the ship should be sunk by gunfire.”

Captain William “Willie” Henderson, of Galveston, Texas, master of the American freighter
Almeria Lykes,
was the most experienced master in the convoy. Born in London in 1883, he’d spent most of his life at sea. He had been a Royal Navy officer before he had moved to the United States, become a citizen, and joined the merchant marine to be a skipper for the Lykes Brothers Steamship Company.

He wasn’t having much luck with his crew of old Yankee salts. There were only three fellows under the age of twenty-six among the crew of fifty-one. Some wanted four eggs for breakfast and talked about demanding more pay when they got to Malta because they weren’t eating well enough on the ship.

“They were a mixture just labeled American,” reported the British liaison officer, Lieutenant Commander H. S. Marshall, as if that said it all. “To me they did not seem to realise properly that there was a war on—let alone that they were in it.”

Captain Henderson thought it was a good idea to keep his men from mingling with the liaison officer at mealtime, so Marshall sat at a separate table with the other British officer, a midshipman. Marshall said it was just a precaution, “as the Captain was afraid some of his crew were not very pro-British.”

When the cruiser
Manchester
had been torpedoed by E-boats, Captain Henderson had gotten the hell out of there, as he had said. “The Captain then wished to make a bee-line for Malta at top speed,” said Marshall. “However, after a bit of discussion, he did agree to follow the course laid down for the convoy, and we then steered down the coast, but at least one mile to seaward.”

Between Henderson’s beeline for Malta (it was more than a wish) and the “bit of discussion,” which was evidently lengthy, the
Almeria Lykes
lost ground, and the
Ohio
caught up to her as they passed Kelibia Light at 0200. The destroyer
Ledbury
was still leading the
Ohio,
and Captain Roger Hill tried to rein in
Almeria Lykes.

“
Almeria Lykes
was told to follow,” he reported, “but she went off on her own. I could not leave the tanker, so I had to let her go.”

Almeria Lykes
zigzagged at 13 knots. Twenty-one lookouts, brain-numbed by lack of sleep and propped up by pills, struggled to spot E-boats in the choppy black sea. The unseen, smaller MAS554 launched two torpedoes from 550 yards, with one hitting the freighter’s forepeak.

“Time was about 0420,” reported Marshall. “The Captain ordered ‘Abandon ship.’ This was, in my opinion, entirely justified as (a) the bows were going down rapidly and (b) the crew would most certainly have gone anyway.”

The destroyer
Pathfinder
arrived, but her captain, Commander Gibbs, refused to pick up the
Almeria Lykes
’ crew.

“The ship appeared to be perfectly all right,” he reported. “I persuaded her ship’s company to return to her and endeavor to steam her to Malta.” It was a gentle way of saying that he told them to get the hell back on their ship where they belonged.

“The ship itself, though well down by the bows, did not seem to be going further,” said Marshall. “With some trouble, the Captain got his reluctant crew to put him on board. Three of his younger officers went with him.”

Henderson and the three men examined the ship and returned to the lifeboats.

“The ship’s engines were undamaged,” reported Marshall, “but owing to the damage forward, it would not have been possible to go at any speed, and the Bofors gun, our main A.A. weapon, which was right forward, had been put out of action. The Captain said that the crew would not go back to the ship. It would not have been possible to work the ship with a volunteer crew, because although she is driven by steam turbines, in every other way she is all electric and so needs a specialised staff.

“Considering the state of affairs, I decided to scuttle the ship. We were under observation by the enemy and possibly also the French, so I decided to sink her before I was prevented.

“I went to the ship with the Captain and his volunteer crew. The feelings of the ship’s crew seemed to be that while the boats were very likely to be machine-gunned anyhow, they were certain to be if they went near the ship. The only engineer officer from the ship who would come with me was the most junior one.”

Henderson, Marshall, and the first assistant engineer, Henry Brown, rowed back to the ship, and Henderson set the depth charges in the engine room. The charges went off, but the ship didn’t sink.

At 0900 the destroyer
Somali
came by, picked up the
Almeria Lykes
’ crew, and steamed east to Gibraltar.

In the five pages of Admiral Syfret’s orders to the convoy, stamped
MOST SECRET,
only one sentence is underlined:
No ship is to be scuttled if she is capable of steaming and there is no immediate risk of capture.

“The
Almeria Lykes
was hit before the bulkhead of No. 1 hold and could well have continued steaming to Malta,” Syfret said. “The tale, as recorded in the report by her Naval Liaison Officer, of the abandonment of this ship is one of shame.”

The merchant mariners of the
Almeria Lykes
steamed back to New York on a cargo ship. They had survived their night of hell in the narrows. But one man failed to survive the hell of the aftermath. On September 5, the ship’s first assistant engineer, Henry Brown, the most junior one, jumped out of the window of a New York hotel and killed himself.

PART VII •••

SURVIVORS

CHAPTER 36 •••

SANTA ELISA

F
rancis Alonzo Dales was the youngest man on the
Santa Elisa.
When he joined the merchant marine after high school he was made for heroism, if not hell-bent on it. Lonnie had always done the right thing, because that’s how he was raised. Like Fred Larsen, he didn’t need rum for the jitters or little white pills to stay wired for battle. The other kids hadn’t called him “Admiral” for nothing.

The third mate Larsen was twenty-seven years old and the cadet-midshipman Dales was eighteen, a Norwegian American who had seen the world and a kid from the Deep South who hadn’t. Fate had brought them together to form a perfect union in time of war.

At the gunnery school in Cardiff, where they had shot virtual Stukas diving from the ceiling of a dome, Dales had emerged as a sharpshooter. At the artillery range on the coast, manning a Twin Marlin that fired blanks at a plane zooming 50 feet overhead, he’d proved himself cool, outscoring all of Ensign Suppiger’s navy gunners.

Larsen had told Captain Thomson that he wanted Dales at the Oerlikon near his own on the bridge. “Mr. Larsen and I had been placed in charge of the 20 mm anti-aircraft guns on the port side of the vessel, Mr. Larsen being in charge of the forward gun, and I the after one,” Dales wrote in his report to the supervisor of the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps.

Jack Follansbee manned the port Oerlikon on the main deck below the bridge. He dozed off at his gun, with a blanket over his shoulders.

Six bells (3 a.m.) was striking when I felt someone’s hand upon my shoulder. I opened my eyes and stretched my cramped legs.

“Sorry to wake you again sir, but some bloke says ’e ’ears what sounds like ’undreds of aircraft.”

“He must be nuts,” I replied. “Who thinks he hears them?”

“One of your Navy gunners on the four-inch on the stern. I can’t ’ear a bloody thing, can you, sir?”

I listened. Only the whine of the turbine and splash of our bow wave met my ears.

“Wait a minute, sir!” the Britisher said excitedly. “I ’ear what he means now. Don’t you ’ear it?”

A new sound had joined the noises of the night. It was a low roaring sound, and it did remind you of aircraft engines. It seemed to be coming from the port side.

“Everybody’s ’eard it now,” the Britisher said. “They think it must be motor boats. Maybe motor torpedo boats!”

I strapped myself into the gun. I shivered.

Lonnie Dales had first heard the E-boat engines at midnight, when he had begun the midwatch at his Oerlikon on the port bridge wing. Their powerful low rumbling carried for miles over the sea, crossing the water in threatening murmurs. He’d been anticipating an attack for more than four hours, as the
Santa Elisa
steamed along its shortcut to Malta. In just thirty more minutes it would be daybreak, and the E-boats would return to the caves where, it was whispered, they lived.

“We were alone again, as the escorting vessels were trying to get the other ships back in formation,” reported Dales. “The night was very dark with visibility poor. The enemy planes and torpedo boats were trying to locate us by the use of flares.”

There are at least five versions of what happened next, each one clouded by the fog of war and colored by time. About all that can be said for certain is that the man standing next to Lonnie Dales went down with a bullet through the neck, dying in a pool of blood at Dales’s feet, and the
Santa Elisa
was hit by a torpedo in the number one hold, the hold that scared them, because it carried the aviation fuel.

Captain Giovanni Battista Cafiero, piloting the small and fast MAS557, had played a hunch and disobeyed orders, leaving the other E-boats from his Trapani, Sicily, squadron and moving to a point about forty miles southwest of Pantelleria. He shut off his engines and waited for a merchant ship that he hoped would be steaming alone. He heard the
Santa Elisa
but she was out of range, so he refired his engines and began chasing her.

Lieutenant Commander Barnes, the
Santa Elisa
’s liaison officer, spotted the MAS557 first. “It had barely started to get light,” he reported. “Through binoculars, I sighted an E-Boat coming up astern about a cable [600 feet] away, and crossing from starboard to port. The alarm was passed to the guns, but they did not sight the boat until she was about level with the stern and about ½ cable distant.”

“We had an Oerlikon on the bridge, but it couldn’t be depressed sufficiently to hit anything at close range,” said Captain Thomson, who thought the E-boat had come around the bow. He saw the phosphorescent wake of a torpedo racing over the water toward the
Santa Elisa
at 50 mph, and ordered the big freighter hard to starboard. “Fortunately, that torpedo missed its mark, passing astern of us.”

If Lonnie Dales saw the torpedo, he never mentioned it in his report. But he believed there were as many as four E-boats. “They attacked, each from a different angle,” he said. “Since we were unable to see them for the darkness, one was almost alongside when the Captain from the bridge wing spotted it. He personally ordered me to open fire.”

Thomson’s personal order went like this: “See that sonofabitch! Get him!”

“I began firing,” said Dales.

The MAS557 fired back. The rattle of the E-boat’s machine-gun bullets against the steel bulkheads of
Santa Elisa
woke Fred Larsen, dozing on the couch in the deckhouse behind the enclosed bridge. He snapped up, looked out the porthole, and saw flaming onions—that’s what they called the enemy’s green tracers—whizzing over the water at 2,000 mph. The first thing that entered his foggy mind was that the
Santa Elisa
’s tracers were red and gold. “Oh, brother,” he said, and ran up the ladder on the starboard side to his Oerlikon.

Bullets from the guns of MAS557—“I believe they were .50 caliber,” said Dales—bashed against the small steel shield that stood between death and Dales’s square jaw. His Oerlikon loader dropped with a bullet in the throat, his blood streaming onto the deck.

It all happened so fast. Two more British soldiers were killed on the bridge, and another was gunned down at the Bofors on the main deck. “The bullets made a steady clattering sound a few inches in front of my eyes,” said Captain Thomson, who dived face-first onto the hard steel of the flying bridge along with the liaison officer, Barnes.

“All my gun crew were dead,” said Dales. “I didn’t notice until I ran out of ammunition. No one would pass me the drum. When I ran out and hollered for ammunition there wasn’t any, just bodies and blood everywhere.”

He loaded the gun himself and kept shooting. “A seventeen-year-old [
sic
] American cadet took charge of the gun and despite his exposed position kept it firing,” said Thomson.

“Mr. Larsen’s gun, my gun, and the other guns on the port side of the vessel all fired at the enemy torpedo boat,” added Dales. “It burst into flames.”

The flames were seen by two other distant ships, but the fog of war apparently obscured them from the eyes of the liaison officer. “Fire from the port Oerlikon and Bofors appeared to be accurate,” reported Barnes, “but it was too dark to observe what effect was caused, if any.”

Nor did Barnes see the second E-boat, if there was one. However, said Captain Thomson, “At almost the same moment, a torpedo, fired from the second E-boat, which had approached from the opposite side of the ship, struck the starboard bow. Water gushed up over the bridge.”

Said the engineer Randall, “What’s happened is this: That first E-boat turns out to be a damned decoy. While we’re blasting her, another slips up on the other side and sends a torpedo into us.”

The torpedo might have been a second shot by the MAS557; the account in the book
La battaglia aeronavale di mezzo agosto
makes this claim, although it’s a work riddled with contradictions and omissions of Italian losses. But if MAS557 did survive the
Santa Elisa
’s fire, she might have sheered off to port and circled behind the
Santa Elisa,
whose starboard side would have been exposed after Thomson had turned hard-a-starboard to dodge the first torpedo. That’s what Barnes believed happened.

The book
Pedestal
states that after the attack by MAS557, the
Santa Elisa
was hit by a torpedo fired at point-blank range from the Pantelleria-based MAS564, a version which appears to have been taken from more confused Italian reports.

Wherever it came from, “The torpedo struck the starboard side of our number-one hold, igniting the high-test gasoline and setting our entire ship afire,” said Dales. Blue and yellow flames rose for 600 feet. The Italian report called the fire “incandescent.”

“We’d better get out of here!” shouted one of the British loaders. “She’ll blow sky-high any minute!”

“The guns’ crews at the forward gun platform were unable to get past the burning hatches, and either jumped or were blown into the sea by the explosion,” reported Barnes. “In view of the highly explosive nature of the cargo and the extremely small chance of controlling the fire, the Master decided to abandon ship.”

“The ship began to settle at the head,” said Captain Thomson. “In spite of my fears the aviation gas didn’t explode, although it did catch fire. It ran out slowly over the surface of the water and lay there burning. I ordered the engines stopped, since the ship had settled so rapidly that our propeller was already out of the water. Then I rang to abandon ship. It was a hell of an order to have to give. It was my first ship. But I had the crew to think about.”

“There was fire everywhere,” said Larsen. “Two British Army radio operators were running up and down and couldn’t get out, because fire was all over the deck. I grabbed an emergency light and led them up to the wheelhouse. It was a mess. Windows broken and water on the deck. I think I heard the abandon ship signal, and I grabbed my sextant and went to my boat station. I was in charge of the number two boat on the port side.

“The two Army soldiers got out on the starboard wing of the bridge deck and tried to get in the number one lifeboat, but the tackle wasn’t released correctly, and she dumped over in the water. Some fool had tied the pelican hook with a knot.”

Larsen saw that the captain was having trouble launching the fifty-man number four lifeboat on the deck below him, so he ran down a ladder to help.

“Someone in the confusion had cranked the davits back in, after they had been cranked out and ready for lowering,” he said. “Someone else had commenced lowering the boat and it landed in the gutter. With the help of some men we managed to tighten up the tackles and get the boat clear.”

Captain Thomson shouted to Larsen that he had forgotten about his dog, so Larsen ran to the skipper’s cabin. “I think he was already gone,” he said. “The water was a foot deep in the captain’s quarters. I tried like hell to find him but it was too late. I think he had already drowned.”

Larsen scrambled back up to his lifeboat, where he found that the men from the balzupped launch of the number one lifeboat had climbed up the slippery slope of the listing bridge and jumped into his number two boat.

“The whole boat was loaded with people, and nobody was doing anything about lowering it. So I unlashed the trapping gear and started to lower the boat. An ordinary seaman showed up and helped me, and we released the scramble net and climbed down it into the lifeboat.

“When I got down in there, soon as I got in the boat, the two radio operators, with their heavy army boots on, they had come from the other side because their boat got tangled up and tossed everything in the water; and they were coming down the scramble net, and they figure the boat’s gonna leave without them, so they jump from the scramble net and landed right on top of me. Shoved me right down in the bottom of the boat. I was bending over to release a lever at the bottom of the boat, and these two guys drop on top of me. Luckily I had my steel helmet on, because they would have knocked me silly. So I’m laying in the bottom of the boat with guys on top of me, and I hear someone say, ‘Hey, isn’t the deck officer in this boat?’

“‘I’m down here! Here I am!’”

Larsen’s back had been fractured by the impact of the soldiers in their heavy boots, but there was no time for pain. Nor was there time for Ensign Suppiger’s problems. Suppy had dropped his .45-caliber pistol, and the second engineer had picked it up, but Larsen took it from the engineer.

Said Larsen, “I held the .45 automatic up in the air and I said, ‘Calm down! Let’s get this show on the road!’ And we took off. So with a few orders and waving the pistol, we got the lifeboat away.”

According to Suppiger, the number two lifeboat had been lowered into the water directly under the overboard discharge from the ship, and it was rapidly being flooded; he and some others tried to push it away, but it wouldn’t move.

“Then some people jumped out of the boat into #4 boat, which had been successfully launched astern of us,” he said. “I jumped out and attempted to reach #4 boat, but could not leap far enough and fell into the water.”

Said Larsen, “My boat was so heavy loaded, I had at least twenty-eight men aboard a twenty-two-man boat, so I rowed toward the captain and asked him if he had room for some of my men. They all wanted to get in the captain’s boat. I had to control them by holding the pistol at them. I said, ‘Hey: you, you, you and you go into the Captain’s boat. Everybody else stay here.’ A couple of guys jumped anyway, but I let them go.”

Larsen used Suppiger’s own pistol to order him back into the lifeboat, but Suppy swam on. He furiously stroked to escape the burning gasoline as the ship’s propeller, spinning slowly and skimming the water, missed his head by about two feet, he said. He drifted away and found himself 1,000 yards astern of the ship. “I shouted as loud as I could, and in about an hour’s time number four lifeboat, which contained Captain Thomson, made its way toward the direction of my voice and picked me up.”

“The water wasn’t calm but it was no big sea,” said Larsen, commanding the unflooded number two boat. “We were picking up crew members. The Navy gun crew was all covered with fuel and shit. And they had been on fire. Some of the gasoline had dropped down on top of them from the number one hatch, and they had been burned very badly, some of them. We picked those guys up out of the water. We couldn’t do much for them. We had loaded hidden whiskey beside the water tanks in the lifeboats, and gave that to them.”