At All Costs (26 page)

“When we lifted one Navy gunner aboard, I saw that his face and neck were badly burned,” said Follansbee. “He sat for a while without speaking, then slowly and deliberately, without seeming to address anyone in particular, said, ‘We got cut off when the fire started back aft. Couldn’t get up to the lifeboats. Finally decided to jump. But the gasoline on the water caught fire.’”

“As the men rowed, I heard a strange sort of whisper starting among them,” said Captain Thomson. “I had never heard anything like it before. I guess it was what you’d call panic. Usually I keep my voice to myself, but this time I stood up in the bow of the boat and said, ‘Listen, you men. If anybody opens his yap, I’ll clout him.’ I guess the men were surprised to hear that kind of talk from me. Anyhow, after that there was silence.”

The number three lifeboat was the only one to get away without problems, but it too was overloaded. It carried men from the aborted number one boat, as well as Dales, Follansbee, and Randall, and had also picked up some of the burned men in the water. “Suddenly,” said Randall, “we hear a shout: ‘Help! Sharks are after me!’”

It was Frank Pike, the British gunner, who had been sleeping on the stern and had leaped overboard with some others because they were separated from the lifeboats by the wall of flame. “The day before we were torpedoed, we had seen several sharks on the surface, and I was reminded of these when I felt something brush against my leg,” he said. “The next time I felt it, I took a swipe at it with my jack knife—and speared a submerged cardboard carton, to my great relief.”

The chief mate, Englund, a Swede, was in charge of number three lifeboat. “Row like hell!” he had shouted as it was released. “She could blow up any minute!”

A sense of panic followed the chief mate’s lead and swept over the boat. The British soldier George Nye remembers the panic ending when Cadet-Midshipman Dales took charge.

“It was every man for himself,” said Nye, at home in Dartford in 2005. “We’d have tipped the boat over, the way we were going. I don’t remember any of the crew of the
Elisa,
because I had only been on the boat for a few days, having boarded at the Clyde. The only one that stood out in my memory was this lad who stood up in the boat and brought order to chaos. And I thought, what a brilliant young lad of eighteen or nineteen, the same age as me, what a brilliant leader of men he was going to be. He calmed everybody down, including his senior people, officers senior in age and rank. I didn’t know his name, but as long as I live I’ve got a picture of him standing up in the boat and raising his voice—not nasty or anything, but masterly, and everybody did more or less what he told them to do.”

The destroyer
Penn
had been helping the destroyer
Bramham
keep Commodore Venables and the
Port Chalmers
on the path toward Malta. From a distance, the
Penn
had seen the flaming E-boat that Lonnie Dales had shot up.

“At 0430 Oerlikon fire was seen ahead, and then an explosion,” reported the captain of the
Penn,
Lieutenant Commander J. H. Swain. “Shortly afterward the engine of an E-boat was heard proceeding away from the scene of the explosion. I steered for this point, and as it became light the
Santa Elisa
was seen to be stopped and on fire.”

The three lifeboats from the
Santa Elisa
were rowing away from their sinking ship. “We had decided we were closer to Pantelleria than any other place, so we started rowing to Pantelleria,” said Larsen.

Said Follansbee:

The sun was just climbing above the horizon as one of the men in my boat suddenly pointed astern. “Look you guys! Here comes a warship, or something!”

A vessel was rapidly bearing down on us from the north.

“Holy Christ!” another man shouted. “It’s probably a Wop coming out of Sicily!”

“Looks like a destroyer,” said the Navy gunner with the burns on his face.

“Maybe they’ll fire on us!” someone exclaimed.

“Shut up, goddammit!”

The British Lieutenant Commander who was our Liaison Officer stood up in the lifeboat and watched the approaching vessel intently.

“It’s a destroyer, all right,” he announced finally. “I can almost make out her flag now…Yes, I believe…Yes, by God, she is…she’s one of ours!”

The
Santa Elisa
survivors scrambled up the nets that were lowered over the side of the
Penn,
as an officer on the bridge shouted through a megaphone, “Make it snappy down there! We can’t sit here any longer!”

As the last man boarded the destroyer, Captain Swain said to Captain Thomson, “We’ve got to cut your boats loose now. Is there anything else you want out of them?”

“No,” said Thomson, “cut them loose.”

The destroyer leaped forward, and the lifeboats twisted and turned in its wake. Follansbee suddenly remembered the rum he had hidden in the biscuit tins and kicked himself for leaving it behind.

“As the
Penn
was steaming away from the
Santa Elisa,
down in the bows and burning fiercely, the dawn bombing attack came in right on schedule,” said Follansbee. “One of the
Penn
’s gunners shouted into his phones, ‘Enemy aircraft coming in on the starboard quarter!’

“There’s one now! Right over the
Elisa
!” shouted another crewman.

A Ju 88 dived on the abandoned
Santa Elisa.
The Italian pilot had been saving a 500-kilogram bomb for her. “We could see the ship with its propeller partially out of the water,” said Larsen. “The airplane came in and dropped a bomb on the foredeck and she blew up. She was fully loaded with explosives. We were about a half a mile away. Pieces from the ship’s explosion rained all around us.”

“The ship was seen to blow up in a cloud of smoke and sink almost immediately,” reported Barnes. “The officers and men behaved excellently under a very trying ordeal and did everything possible to get the ship to her destination.”

“The smoke cleared away,” said Follansbee. “The
Santa Elisa
had disappeared completely.”

“There wasn’t a smear left of her,” said Larsen.

CHAPTER 37 •••

WAIMARAMA

I
n the four hours after midnight, E-boats had sunk one cruiser (
Manchester
) and four freighters (
Glenorchy, Wairangi, Almeria Lykes,
and
Santa Elisa
), while damaging another cruiser (
Kenya
) and a fifth freighter (
Rochester Castle
). The previous evening, bombers had sunk three freighters (
Deucalion, Clan Ferguson,
and
Empire Hope
) and damaged the
Brisbane Star,
while the submarine
Axum
had sunk one cruiser (
Cairo
), blasted another back to Gibraltar (
Nigeria
), and crippled the
Ohio.
The aircraft carrier
Eagle
had been sunk by U-73 the previous day, and the carrier
Indomitable
was mortally wounded and staggering home.

From the bridge of the destroyer
Ashanti
at daybreak, Admiral Burrough could see just three merchantmen.
Rochester Castle
was in front despite flooding in the number three hold, with
Waimarama
and
Melbourne Star
right behind.

Ohio
was five miles back, still following the destroyer
Ledbury
at 12 knots—“I consider the greatest credit is due to her Master for this magnificent effort,” said Burrough.
Port Chalmers
was another five miles back, with Commodore Venables finally lifting his eyes from the rearview mirror, while
Dorset
was on her own course farther north.
Brisbane Star
was hugging the coast, south of Point “R,” where the rest of the convoy had turned southeast, making slow progress with the hole through her bows.

The RAF flew off Beaufighters from Malta at dawn. On the
Ashanti,
radio operators had worked all night to patch a system to reach the pilots, and a lieutenant nicknamed “Flags” repeatedly called out in code for nearly an hour, listening intently all the while. Flags was excited by a cryptic answer, until he realized he was talking to the cruiser
Charybdis,
steaming alongside. A torrent of blue words spouted from his mouth as he slammed down the receiver. Meanwhile, Admiral Da Zara’s warships—three heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and eight destroyers—were on their way back to Italy. But the submarine HMS
Unbroken,
under Lieutenant Commander Alastair Mars, had anticipated their course and was waiting for them near the island of Stromboli. Mars was a submarine ace. He launched four torpedoes, badly damaging the heavy cruiser
Bolzano—
she was towed aground and burned until the next day—and blowing the bows off the light cruiser
Attendolo,
knocking them both out of the war. The destroyers dropped 105 depth charges and kept
Unbroken
submerged for ten hours, but Mars surfaced that evening and returned a hero to the “Fighting Tenth” at Malta.

At 12,843 tons,
Waimarama
was the biggest of the thirteen freighters—half again the size of the
Santa Elisa,
at 8,379 tons. She was also carrying the most aviation fuel. Flimsies were stacked on the afterdeck by the tens of thousands, on top of number six hold, where there were another two or three thousand tons of high-octane gas in more flimsies.

The cardboard containing the flimsies on deck had been ripped off by the saltwater splashes of near misses. The silver cans sparkled in the morning sun, calling to the bombers, which had arrived right on time. There were twenty-four Ju 88s flying at 5,000 feet, and three of them answered the call of the flashing flimsies.

First one Junkers dropped into a dive, then another, and then the third, with about 500 feet between them. They zoomed at the pile of flimsies at 300 mph from 60 degrees. The Bofors boomed without result, and the Oerlikons’ tracers snaked past the planes as if their target were the sun. The pilots’ focus on the bridge of the
Waimarama
was absolute. The first Junkers dived to 1,000 feet and missed with three bombs.

The second Junkers dived lower, and let go five 500-pounders. Two bombs landed abaft the bridge, and a third fell on the hatch of hold number four, which contained torpedoes and mines. The fourth bomb landed on the stack of flimsies.

The German in the third Junkers was still diving, and his plane was blown away by the blast.

John Jackson was a radio operator on the forward bridge of the
Waimarama.
“The ship was immediately enveloped in flames and on looking to the starboard I could see nothing but a solid mass of flames,” he said. “I looked across to the port side and could not even see the gun mounting which was about two yards away, owing to the solid wall of flames.”

Jackson ran through the bridge deckhouse, down a ladder and over debris and dead bodies and pieces of bodies, through the flames and past the burning and screaming men, and jumped into the only patch of sea that wasn’t on fire. He wore a life vest but couldn’t swim. There were about twenty men in the water. They were the only survivors. More than a hundred men were dead or soon would be.

The bridge crumbled as if imploded. The tips of the funnels could be seen in the smoke as they collapsed and fell into the fire. Flaming flimsies shot into the air like skyrockets. Thick black smoke rose into the blue morning sky and took the shape of some giant grim-reaping spider, as if rising over the Mediterranean from the world of Earthsea.

Freddie Treves was scarcely seventeen years old, a cadet like Lonnie Dales. He had entered the Pangbourne Nautical College at thirteen, graduated in June, and reported to the
Waimarama
on July 27. His total time at sea was sixteen days. Operation Pedestal was his baptism by fire.

The ship’s master, Captain R. S. Pearce, had teamed his youngest sailor with the oldest salt, Bowdory. “Bowdory was a pantryman,” said Treves, “he worked in the kitchen. He was sixty-three, a lovely old man, he looked after me. His two sons were fighting in the war, and he had rejoined the merchant navy against his wife’s wishes. He said, ‘If my sons are going to this war, I’m going too.’

“He and I were put in the only part of the ship which had no explosives in it, in the fo’c’sle. It was the safest part of the ship, for the oldest man and the youngest man. It was full of bags of lime. When the bombs came down, Bowdory fell on me to protect me. We were both blown through a hatch onto the bags of lime. I don’t know what happened next, except I forgot the rule about jumping over the side that’s listing and closest to the water, so I jumped off the wrong side. Bowdory must have jumped too. It was a long jump. About sixty feet, maybe forty feet, I don’t know. I looked up at the ship. The flames were rising into the sky. I have a photograph that shows the smoke going up about six thousand feet. It was a pretty big explosion.”

Treves was wearing a special lining inside his coveralls called kapok, supposedly the latest thing in flotation. His mother had bought it in London and made him promise he would wear it at all times. Which he did, despite the heat and the merciless teasing of his shipmates because he looked like a little boy in a stiff snowsuit.

As Treves swam away from the burning
Waimarama,
he saw John Jackson.

“He was struggling, he couldn’t swim. He had come down from the bridge in some way, I never found out how, and he couldn’t swim, so I got him over to a bit of wood. I had a whistle, because I was in charge, as the officer, part of the fo’c’sle group, and I tried to calm people down, and gave him a bit of wood to hold onto. He said he was okay then, and I said just kick your feet, hold onto the log.”

“I am quite sure that I definitely owe my life to this cadet,” Jackson reported.

Treves looked up and saw Bowdory on a Carley raft.

“I went towards Bowdory. His arms were outstretched, like this. And he was being pulled into the flames, by the ship going down, the water, sucking towards the ship. And he was yelling and screaming, and…”—he fumbles over words—“…the flame.”

Treves is asked how far away Bowdory was. It’s not a simple question. It’s been haunting him for sixty-three years. Too far for me to save? Or not? Could I have swum into the sucking water of the 13,000-ton sinking freighter, wearing my waterlogged kapok, into the flames that were closing around Bowdory’s raft, and tied a line from the raft around my chest and swum with all my might, towing the raft and Bowdory to safety, against the powerful pull of the sinking ship, before the flames closed on us? Could I have talked the nonswimming and panicked Bowdory into diving into the water so I could drag him kicking and screaming away from the closing flames to safety?

It’s the question that haunted him through his breakdown afterward, still seventeen years old, and through his service on a destroyer, after he joined the Royal Navy the next year, until the war ended. Never mind the clear impossibility of reaching Bowdory. The question still haunts him, as he sees Bowdory on the raft through his glistening eyes, from the couch of his home in Wimbledon.

“Quite a way,” he answers, his voice drifting quite a way back, “…but not too far. I think I could have made it, I got medals for swimming at school. But I…turned back. Just…swam away.”

He swallows. “They decorated me, which is nice.” The king gave him the British Empire Medal at Buckingham Palace, for saving Jackson. “At least I got Jackson.”

Only Treves considers that swimming into the fire in an attempt to save Bowdory might have been the better thing to do. Only he would.

All the world is old, my friend

Yet all the world is new.

And all the dead are dead, my friend

Saving me and you.

And all the dead are me, and you

And all the future too.

The
Waimarama
blast was so intense that the crew of the
Melbourne Star,
four hundred yards behind, thought it was their own ship that had been hit. Thirty-three jumpy men leaped over the side, mostly army gunners at the six-inch and Bofors aft. “Mad bastards, they were,” said a sailor who watched them go. “The gunners around me just disappeared overboard. It was 50 bleedin’ feet down to the water.”

They were mad, yes. All night at the guns they had watched the funeral pyres and listened to the screams of burning sailors carrying over water. “No one could say he was not frightened by now,” said Dickens. “We had seen too much.”

“It was impossible to avoid going through
Waimarama’s
flames, although the Captain, who was conning ship from Monkey Island above the bridge, ordered helm hard to port,” reported the liaison officer. “The Second Officer, who was in the Wheelhouse with the helmsman at the time of the explosion, rang on full speed, and this undoubtedly in my mind saved the ship.

“Remainder of men onboard tried to find the best means if any of escape, but ship came through the burning oil of
Waimarama
which was spreading rapidly, and men returned to the forecastle and so back to their action stations, the whole episode taking about three minutes.

“On coming out of the flames, a destroyer was seen to be attempting to rescue the men who went overboard, and at the time I thought it was a hopeless task. Subsequently it was found that this destroyer was H.M.S.
Ledbury.
”

Roger Hill had just rescued the
Ohio
by leading her through the narrows and back to the convoy with his destroyer
Ledbury,
but his next job was what he was there for.

Admiral Burrough had known Hill for a long time and was well aware of how he felt about having been ordered to abandon the merchantmen during PQ17. Burrough knew that the
Ledbury
was near
Waimarama
and that Hill would rescue any survivors whether or not he was told to, so he sent the signal with some resignation. “
Ledbury
was ordered to pick up any survivors from the
Clan Ferguson
[
sic
], although it seemed unlikely that there could be any,” he reported.

“The Admiral made [signaled] to me, ‘Survivors, but don’t go into the flames,’” said Hill. “It was the biggest explosion I have ever seen. It was terrible. The flames were hundreds of feet high, and a great expanse of sea was covered in rolling smoke and flames. I took the ship to the edge of the flames but did not think anyone could have survived. As we approached, there were heads bobbing about in the water, waving arms, and faces blackened with oil.”

Hill could hear the cries of the ghosts of the PQ17 sailors whom the
Ledbury
had left to die in the Arctic Sea. His soul had gone down with theirs, as he felt the doom and despair of their voices over the radio. Now he could hear the screams of the men in the fire around the
Waimarama,
and he could see their mucky heads, as if these were the PQ17 sailors risen from the bottom of the sea for a second chance to be saved. But it was more the chance for Hill to save himself.

He whipped his destroyer around as if it were a Jet Ski plucking fallen surfers away from big waves. “I can not speak too highly of the sheer guts of these men,” he said. “They were singing and encouraging each other, and as I went through them explaining by loudhailer that I must get the ones nearest the flames first, I received cheerful answers of ‘That’s all right, sir. Go and get the other chaps.’”

Mines were falling from the sky under parachutes, and a few Junkers continued to attack. Said Freddie Treves, “I remember Bunny Hill shouting through his loudhailer, ‘Be back in a minute, I’ve just got to shoot this bloody German down!’”

Because Hill had leaped off the bridge of the
Ledbury
on the way to Gibraltar in his failed attempt to rescue the crew of the
Sunderland
downed by friendly fire, the
Ledbury
men now felt free to copy their captain’s style. “All sorts of people were jumping over the side with lines and bringing survivors, some seriously burned, to the landing nets,” said Hill. “The flames were spreading outward all the time—even to windward—and at one time spread the whole length of the ship, picking up two men close to the after nets. I had to take the ship after, and these men were supported by my rescuers who themselves were clinging onto the nets.”