At All Costs (28 page)

CHAPTER 39 •••

JUST A MIRAGE

W
inston Churchill slept late that morning, in his luxurious suite in Stalin’s villa. The weather was lovely, so he took a walk around the gardens. He fed some goldfish out of his hand and toured a bomb shelter ninety feet underground—“the latest and most luxurious type,” he said, although he added that he had been more attracted by the goldfish.

As the morning sun was making the goldfish glisten at Churchill’s fingertips in Moscow, it was rising over the Mediterranean, where the freighter
Dorset
found itself a stunning thirty miles ahead of the convoy. Her Captain Tuckett had cut a sharper corner than the others and steamed without zigzagging all night. When he looked around and realized that his ship was all alone in broad daylight, he got spooked.
Dorset
was now within range of the Spitfires from Malta, so he requested air cover; but Admiral Leatham thought the signal could only have come from the
Brisbane Star,
because no other ship was supposed to be on such an independent course.

“At 0730 as no fighter escort arrived, I decided to turn back and rejoin the convoy,” reported Tuckett. He was a mere fifty miles from Malta.

“It was quiet, and there wasn’t another ship in sight,” said Ron Linton, a
Dorset
gunner. “Somebody said, ‘Look, that’s Malta!’ I reckon we were about thirty miles away. It was so clear; if you know the Mediterranean air, you have unlimited visibility.”

But Malta was just a mirage.

“Suddenly, the
Dorset
turned around, 180 degrees,” said Linton, recalling the unfortunate U-turn from the couch of his home in Brixham on the Devon coast. “We said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ We figured somebody had ordered us back to join the remains of the convoy. Why that order wasn’t disobeyed, I shall never, ever know.

“We steamed back and made it in two hours. We got in the tail-end Charlie position. That was where the dive-bombers came from, the stern, so they didn’t have to face all the antiaircraft fire.”

The Malta Spitfires had arrived to provide air cover and were chasing away Stukas. The
Dorset
promptly shot down a Spitfire.

“We opened fire with our Oerlikons,” reported Captain Tuckett. “These guns were placed round the ship and were not fitted with any means of communication, hence it was impossible to establish any sort of control. The Officer on the bridge saw Spitfires overhead but was unable to communicate with the gun’s crew, and within a few minutes one of our Spitfires was shot down.”

“When friendly aircraft is mistaken for hostile, and fire is opened, I think it would reassure the gunners if the aircraft turned away from the ship,” reported the
Dorset
’s liaison officer. “On one occasion, after a very heavy attack, 3 Spitfires flew over the ship and some of the gunners opened fire. The Spitfires continued over the ship in a steep bank and, although several officers, including myself, ordered ‘Cease Fire,’ we had the great misfortune to shoot one down.”

If the Australian pilot had lived to tell the story from his side of the bullets, he might have said he simply couldn’t bloody believe they wouldn’t recognize a Spitfire on the tail of a Stuka.

“We were told if you see a plane, it’s the enemy, so shoot it,” said Linton. “Friendly planes would not fly over the convoy. We believed we had no air cover, so any planes that came over had to be enemy. So we just blazed away as soon as a plane appeared, and that was that.”

The
Dorset
paid for her lack of discretion. Fourteen Stukas attacked her, and eleven near misses did her in. “I think probably one of the bombs had penetrated into number four hold,” reported Captain Tuckett. “As the fire was un-get-at-able owing to other cargo being in the way, and was in close proximity to the high-octane petrol, also as the engines and pumps were out of commission, I decided to abandon ship immediately. This was done and the whole ship’s company was taken on board H.M.S.
Bramham.
”

“We’d seen what happened to the others, so the order didn’t take long to abandon ship,” said Linton. “It seemed like it happened about five minutes after we had made it back to the convoy. I was in the lifeboat with the second mate and the bosun. One of them said, ‘If I could find the bastard that gave the order to come back, I’d shoot him.’”

“The
Dorset
’s crew abandoned ship at once and had no desire to go back to her,” reported Captain Baines of the
Bramham.
He tried to tow the
Dorset
with his destroyer but stopped when a Ju 88 attacked. Later four more Junkers attacked, and a direct hit put
Dorset
afire. Along came the U-boat of none other than Kapitan Rosenbaum, who had been tailing the convoy for fifty-four hours after sinking the
Eagle.
Rosenbaum’s log claims the
Dorset
for U-73, with a torpedo at 1848.

“Gradually a majestic looking ship went lower and lower, and by 1955
Dorset
was no more,” said Dickens. “What a pathetic sight that was. She went down with colors flying, the red duster had done its best. There now remained
Ohio.
By hook or by crook she must be brought in.”

Spitfires and Beaufighters from Malta, four or five at a time, had taken over the defense of the convoy; they were flying on fuel that had come from Alexandria in minesweeping submarines. The merchant gunners now knew that friendly fighters were in the sky, but they were hopelessly jumpy and beyond exhausted, and had seen too much to take chances. And because the ships still had no VHF radio contact with the fighters, the pilots kept their distance; they were able to engage enemy bombers only before the bombers moved in on the ships to attack.

The morning sky was full of dogfights. Admiral Burrough said the Malta fighters “performed a magnificent job of work throughout the day,” and Admiral Leatham called it “a very remarkable achievement.” Stukas, Ju 88s, and Messerschmitts, as well as Thunderbolts and Flying Buffalos, fell flaming and smoking from the sky, nose-diving, spiraling, and floating gently into the water.

All the stars came out from Malta, both RAF and Fleet Air Arm pilots. The veteran Dickie Cork, a Hurricane ace who had flown off the
Indomitable,
shot down six enemy planes, either alone or with other fighters, and earned a Distinguished Service Order Medal to go with his Distinguished Flying Cross. Adrian Warburton, DSO, DFC (U.K.), DFC (U.S.), the baddest of the bad boys and rock-star reconnaissance pilot, a hero of Taranto, searched for enemy planes between Sardinia and Cape Bon, his fifth recon flight in two days—Alec Guinness would play a character like him in the movie
The Malta Story,
but it could have been James Dean. There was also Group Captain Walter Churchill, DSO, DFC, who would be shot down and killed over Sicily two weeks later. And the inimitable Canadian George “Buzz” Beurling, DSO, DFC, DFM, Malta’s top ace by a mile, with 26
¹
/
₃
kills during his ten months there in 1942.

“We tussled it out with the Jerries and the Eyeties,” said Beurling, who shot down a Ju 88 with two others, at 18,000 feet. “That’s where we found our lonely Ju, cruising around all by himself.”

“I yelled into the mike: ‘Look out! Here I come!’ and whizzed down, putting a two-second burst into the starboard engine as I went past. The engine fell off. The bomber burst into flames and down it went. Not one of its four-man crew got a chance to bale. We sure had let daylight into the Ju!”

A Beaufighter with an American pilot and Scottish observer was hit, and the men bailed out. The American was lost—the only pilot killed on the day, by the enemy—but the Scot floated in his Mae West until dark, when he was picked up by two Italians who had bailed out of their Stuka and inflated their backpack dinghy. The trio drifted together for sixty hours, sharing food, water, and pantomimed stories. A German flying boat picked them up, and the Scot, Jock McFarlane, was taken captive. Forty-five years after the war, he and Nicola Patela, the Italian gunner from the Stuka, met again in England.

As the
Ohio
was being bombed that morning, the destroyer
Penn
was skipping along in the sunny sea at 30 knots with the
Santa Elisa
survivors on board. They had to compete for deck space with the survivors from the
Empire Hope.
The injured were treated for burns with an ointment containing gentian violet, slathered on by the sick bay doctors, who sent their patients back out in the sun because there was nowhere else to put them. The decks were clogged with moaning masses of purple ooze.

“The ointment was pretty unsightly,” said the
Ledbury
’s Dr. Nixon. “It made them blue. They looked like Indians that had been painted in their warpaint. Poor devils.

“There’s a limit to how much your body can be burned and survive, and it was too much for some of them. But it’s amazing, really, how much men can stand. Some of them must have been in terrible pain. All one could do was keep them full of morphine.”

“The crew of the
Penn
did everything they could to try to make us comfortable,” said Lonnie Dales, whose broken forearm was a slight injury compared to others’. “But when you have a couple hundred survivors on board a destroyer, there isn’t much room to turn around. I don’t think anybody who was picked up by the
Penn
got any rest, because there wasn’t any place to rest, except to sit on the steel deck.”

Like hurricane victims in a bread line, the survivors stood in a long, winding queue for a plate of porridge, a biscuit, and a cup of tea to wash it down. “All the whiskey, and the food and everything was left behind in the lifeboats,” said Larsen. “We didn’t get much to eat on the destroyer.”

Follansbee suddenly remembered that he had also left behind his briefcase containing $2,000 of the ship’s cash, which they would need for food if they ever got to Malta. Larsen changed the subject to the speed of the
Penn
before the others stuffed Follansbee into a depth-charge launcher and fired it.

“Thirty knots is really moving,” he said. “It would take a pretty lucky shot to hit this baby.”

“You spoke too soon,” said Captain Thomson. “We’re slowing down.”

The
Penn
approached the
Ohio,
which was dead in the water.

“What in the hell?” said Larsen. “How did she get this far? I thought she was hit.”

The tanker’s paint was scorched and blistered, her superstructure scarred by shrapnel, her funnels riddled with bullet holes. There was a cavern in her foredeck, and daylight glared through the hole in her hull. “A dive-bomber had crashed on her foredeck, and we could make out the wreckage of the plane even from our distance,” said Follansbee.

The
Penn
circled
Ohio
for two hours. “Suddenly the loudspeaker system blared forth a startling announcement,” said Follansbee. “‘Survivors will stand by aft to assist with towlines.’

“‘Holy Christ!’ I exclaimed. ‘That doesn’t mean…’

“‘Yes, it does,’ replied Larsen. ‘We’re going to tow that tanker into Malta.’”

“We gave the
Penn
a 10-inch manila tow rope from forward,” said Captain Mason, “but the attempt to tow from ahead was hopeless, as the ship just turned in circles, finally parting the tow rope. I signaled the
Penn
that the only hope of towing the
Ohio
was from alongside, or with one ahead and one astern to steady the ship.”

“It seemed impossible under the present conditions that any progress could be made unless some other ships could assist in the tow,” said Lieutenant Barton, the liaison officer. “It seemed that the ship was nothing more than a sitting target.”

“We were still being bombed whilst stopped,” reported Mason. “As it was useless the crew staying on board and risking life, I called up the destroyer to ask if he would take off my crew until more assistance was available, to which he agreed, and at 1400 HMS
Penn
came alongside and took off the whole crew.”

The
Ohio
was abandoned.

CHAPTER 40 •••

LAME DUCK OFF LINOSA

I
f Captain Mason hadn’t met Captain Thomson at the skipper’s meeting on the day Operation Pedestal left the Clyde, he met him now, in the wardroom of the
Penn.
Lord knows what they might have said to each other. They’d scarcely slept for three days. They were stubbled, scorched, smoky, and oily. Mason’s hands were freshly bandaged—his first stop on the
Penn
had been sick bay, to have his own burns treated. Their ships had been bombed and torpedoed, and flames had swallowed large parts of them. The
Santa Elisa
had been obliterated, and the
Ohio
was slowly sinking. They’d heard the harrowing screams of men dying in the burning water. They’d been deafened by days and nights on the bridge with guns going off in their ears, and half choked from inhaling smoke and fumes from burning oil, kerosene, and aviation fuel. Eleven days earlier they’d been bragging about the power and grandeur of their new ships, and now they had abandoned them.

One of the
Penn
’s junior officers came into the wardroom. “Captain Swain would like to see you sir, if you don’t mind,” he said to Mason.

Swain had sent a message to Burrough at 1350 that said, “Can not tow by myself. She will not steer.” He received a reply from Admiral Leatham at 1552 that said, “You must make every endeavor to tow.”

But the
Penn
was only a 1,500-ton destroyer, and the
Ohio
was drawing thirty-seven feet and adding another foot every two hours. “The
Ohio
was damaged so badly where the torpedo hit,” said Larsen. “She was still taking on water, and she had a big steel plate sticking out the port side, so you couldn’t steer.”

Mason and Swain agreed that struggling along at 3 knots while being dive-bombed and stalked by submarines, with the destroyer lashed to the target by the towline, wasn’t a great call.

Swain told Mason that the towline hadn’t exactly parted; at the arrival of a dive-bomber, the
Penn
had parted it. There was no sense in having his destroyer blown up too. If the tanker were hit in the wrong place, she would go up big. Her oil and kerosene were less explosive than aviation fuel, but there was six times as much of it.

And destroyers were meant to attack and shoot. The
Penn
couldn’t do much shooting without movement. She could hardly protect the
Ohio
from ahead.

The ocean minesweeper
Rye
and two motor launches were on their way from Malta, and they could help tow. The
Penn
could screen the
Ohio
until those three ships got there. Mason hoped his men could get some rest on the
Penn
and reboard after dark, when the bombers would be done for the day.

The steel decks of the
Penn
were scorching under the afternoon sun, and nearly two hundred survivors from the
Santa Elisa
and
Empire Hope
were already sprawled or curled up in every corner and cranny, desperately seeking shade. There wasn’t much water or space to sit down. Many of the men were barefoot, in ragged, oil-soaked clothes. Some were in pain. The air attacks continued. Each buzz from the sky stirred terror.

“The after gun’s crew of HMS
Penn
behaved wonderfully,” said Captain Williams of the
Empire Hope,
who would earn the DSC for his actions. “They were stripped to the waist and were fighting at their guns throughout the attacks. In between the attacks they had a quick cigarette and were laughing and joking among themselves, but immediately the alert was sounded, they were back at their gun, firing with grim determination.”

There were three merchant masters on the
Penn:
Captain Williams, Captain Thomson, and Captain Mason. Allan Shaw was standing next to one of them—he won’t say which one—and heard him say, “Why doesn’t the old scow sink, so we can all get ashore.” A crewman from the
Ohio
had to be restrained to keep from throwing this captain over the side.

Ensign Suppiger had a similar story. “One of the captains of one of the ships tried to go to the bridge of the
Penn
and tried to get Captain Swain to take them ashore,” he said. “They all wanted to get off the ship. And Swain said, ‘Get the hell off this bridge! My mission is to bring this tanker in, and that’s what I’m going to do!’”

“The commanding officer of the destroyer had been ordered to bring the
Ohio
in at all costs, and he therefore intended to tow her in,” explained Lonnie Dales.

“Captain Swain was a much respected man,” said Able Seaman Andrew Forrest, the Leading Torpedo Operator on the
Penn
. “Hard but fair, with a good sense of humor.”

It was a short sleep for the
Ohio
’s men. The minesweeper
Rye
and two motor launches arrived early, at 1740, and Captain Swain sent the
Ohio
crew back to their ship to be towed.

Mason:

6 P.M. APPROXIMATELY:

I called for a small number of volunteers to return to the Ohio to make the tow ropes fast, but the whole crew voluntarily returned. The towropes were made fast to HMS Penn and Rye, both towing ahead. Steering arms were disconnected and chain blocks connected to port and starboard sides of quadrant to assist steering.

Between 4 and 7
P.M.,
twenty-six Ju 88s and seven He 111 torpedo bombers had been sent out after the
Ohio,
as well as five Italian Stukas escorted by twenty-four MC.202 fighters. At least six of the lot were shot down, but some of them got through the fighters. Eight Junkers came at the
Ohio
from astern. A near miss caused more damage to the rudder, and a 500-pound bomb landed near the funnel.

6.30 P.M. APPROXIMATELY:

Enemy plane dropped bomb at the fore end of the boat deck, probably delayed action, which exploded on the boiler tops, blowing all the crew out on deck blinded and choked with asbestos lagging and powder. The engineroom boilers and after accommodation were wrecked. The engineroom ventilator and fallen debris fell on Bofors gunner P. Brown, causing numerous internal and external injuries.

Fearing such an event, Mason had ordered Wyld and the other engineers abovedecks. If they had been below, they would have been killed.

“I did not see any use in remaining on board the
Ohio
with the consequent risk to life when stopped, from continuous air attack,” said Mason. “As the attempt at towing was proving hopeless with the assistance available, I ordered the crew to the boats, from which they were divided between the motor launches and destroyers, and I lost touch with them.”

When he lost touch with his crew, he lost command of his ship.

Captain Mason is careful not to use the word “abandon” in any of his reports. He only “ordered the crew to the boats.” And in the ship’s log, written after the fact, he distances himself more, saying only, “All crew took to the boats.” If there was a distinction between taking to the boats and abandoning ship, the crew missed it.

“The Chief Engineer and Master both considered that the ship was now sinking and she was therefore abandoned, the crew getting away in the lifeboats,” reported the liaison officer, Lieutenant Barton.

“About 6.45 the Captain gave orders to abandon ship,” reported Chief Officer Gray to Eagle Oil and Shipping.

“Approx. 8.00 p.m. Order given to abandon ship,” reported Chief Engineer Wyld. The clocks in the engine room were all smashed.

Reported Captain Swain, “There was an attack by about 8 Ju 88 at 1915, and the tanker was hit; her crew abandoned her.”

“We slid down the lifelines into the lifeboats,” said Allan Shaw. “I think there were only two of them. Under normal circumstances of abandoning ship, people would go to their assigned lifeboat stations, but in this case it wasn’t as if the ship was sinking or on fire or anything, so we just assembled at the nearest boat. We were all sixes and sevens—all mixed up, haphazard. But there was no panic, just a leisurely walk to the lifeboats. The first boat went over to one of the motor launches, but the other motor launch came alongside the lifeboat I was in, so we really only used the lifeboat like a step between the two ships, and climbed up the ladder to the motor launch.

“Captain Mason was in my lifeboat. He was the last to leave. He did think about staying aboard, I think, but the skipper of the
Penn
shouted, ‘You might as well come aboard, we’ve got hot cups of tea!’ and things like that.”

The motor launch ML 121 took the men over to the
Penn.
It’s unlikely that Swain made Mason cocaptain in the towing operation. There was nothing more Mason could do. He was spent. He crashed in the wardroom, while the determined attempt to save the
Ohio
continued without him.

Larsen helped some men from the
Ohio
carry aboard the tanker’s Bofors captain, British Army bombardier Peter Brown, who had been crushed by the blown-off engine room ventilator, which was about six feet square and located in the tight space between the funnel and the Bofors.

The Bofors was out of commission, but Larsen knew he could fix it. He could fix anything. And he could shoot it; he and his cadet Dales had been to the school. And now the Bofors needed a gun crew.

“On the destroyer they told me they got orders to bring the
Ohio
in at all costs,” said Larsen. “Never mind what it costs, never mind anything, bring the
Ohio
in.”

He figured he was the man to do it.

As the bomb was landing near the Bofors on the
Ohio,
blinding and choking a dozen or more men with asbestos, thousands of Maltese cheered from the battlements around Grand Harbour. The
Rochester Castle, Melbourne Star,
and
Port Chalmers
steamed into Valletta, escorted by minesweepers under a rainbow of Spitfires flying figure eights. They carried more than 30,000 tons of food, ammunition, and aviation fuel.

The
Rochester Castle
had been hit again, with three near misses sending hot bomb splinters through the hull and starting two fires in the fo’c’sle; men climbed into burning ammunition magazines and extinguished the fires while the master sped on. “The whole of my crew behaved magnificently throughout the many sustained and violent attacks,” reported Captain Richard Wren, who was awarded the DSO.

The
Melbourne Star
was missing thirty-three men who had leaped overboard into the
Waimarama
fire, ten of them run down and killed by the flames they thought they were avoiding. “The fighting spirit of the ship was magnificent,” reported the liaison officer. “Every single man on board made all effort throughout to fight off the enemy; the hotter the battle became, the stouter, if possible, were their efforts. I cannot say too much for the officers and crew.”

The
Port Chalmers,
carrying Commodore Venables, had had a number of close calls, including a torpedo that passed under her hull and a parachute mine that tangled in her paravanes—“What shall we do with this?” Venables had signaled Admiral Burrough, who told him and guided
Port Chalmers
through the extraction. She was the only ship to arrive unscathed.

As the trio of merchantmen arrived in Grand Harbour, most of the warships of Force X steamed at full speed back to Gibraltar, led by the
Ashanti
with Burrough aboard. They steered clear of
Ohio.

“Course was shaped to pass 12 miles South of Linosa Island in order that enemy aircraft shadowing
Ohio
might be avoided,” reported Captain Onslow of
Ashanti,
as the 500-pound bomb was landing on top of the tanker’s boilers.

“The lame duck off Linosa” is what Admiral Leatham called the
Ohio
in his report.

“Proud to have met you,” Admiral Burrough signaled to the
Ohio
as he steamed off into the sunset.