At All Costs (4 page)

Thomson and Larsen each donned an OBA—oxygen breathing apparatus—which consisted of a rubber mask and an oxygen tank strapped to the wearer’s back, and they scrambled toward the hold, the rubber soles of their shoes melting on the burning paint as they struggled with the bucking brass nozzles of 2½-inch hoses. A hatch in the mast house led down to the hold, but they couldn’t get near it. “Throughout this time, there were several small explosions in the hatch,” said Thomson.

The fire burned through the cold black night until 5:40
A.M.
, with the SS
Wellhart
and SS
Charles O’Connor
arriving and training more hoses on the
Santa Elisa
’s foredeck. Twice the captain went full ahead on the engines in order to flood the hold with seawater. At daybreak the foredeck was awash, and 37 of the ship’s crew of 54 men were placed on the
Wellhart
and
Charles O’Connor
by U.S. Coast Guard boats. Just before noon on Sunday, the tugboats
Relief, Resolute,
and
Wabla
began towing the
Santa Elisa
back to Bay Ridge Flats in Brooklyn, where she was run aground on the sandy bottom, to be unloaded and towed off later. She would smolder for three more days.

Kapitan Hardegen headed south to Hatteras, again steaming in daylight, within sight of the shore. He broke silence to send a gloating message to Dönitz when he passed the naval base at Norfolk. That night he sank three more ships, killing forty-four of forty-seven on the
City of Atlanta,
and shot up a fourth. On the way back to France he got two more ships in the Atlantic, for a total of nine. Hitler draped the Iron Cross around Hardegen’s neck.

As the attacks against merchant ships along the coast continued, the U.S. Navy got away with hiding them. Merchant mariners were ordered not to talk about it. Keeping a journal aboard ship was a violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act, punishable by ten years in prison.

When President Roosevelt finally installed the convoy system with destroyer escorts in the summer of 1942, the U-boats were forced to find victims elsewhere. But 609 ships had been sunk in the Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Sea Frontiers, and thousands of merchant mariners had lost their lives. Eleven U-boats were sunk.

The
Santa Elisa
was repaired at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that spring. Her Grace Line colors, black hull and green funnel with a white band, were covered by a drab coat of “gull gray” warpaint. Four new Oerlikon cannons, effective against dive-bombers and fast torpedo boats, were installed on the corners of the bridge in the empty gun tubs. A three-inch antiaircraft gun was mounted in the tub on the bow, and a four-inch low-angle gun was bolted to the afterdeck. The four-inch had been used against tanks in World War I, and could blow a very big hole in a thin-skinned U-boat.

Fred Larsen was promoted to senior third officer. With his previous experience as a cargo officer, he was asked by chief mate Thomson to help supervise the loading of cargo for the
Santa Elisa
’s next voyage. On May 5, at the Brooklyn Army Depot, stevedores began loading her holds with ammunition and war stores, including bombs, mines, and about 5,000 drums of kerosene and diesel fuel, in hold number one. Tanks and heavy trucks were shackled to her foredecks. Fourteen new U.S. Navy Armed Guard joined the ship’s crew, and forty soldiers—searchlight specialists, headed for duty in Britain, Egypt, and Malta—came aboard as passengers. It took one week to load all the equipment, fuel, and ammo.

On May 12, 1942, Larsen cast off the lines that held the stern of his ship to the pier. The
Santa Elisa
was going to war.

CHAPTER 4 •••

TO BELFAST AND OSLO

A
lthough the Department of State had told Fred Larsen that “there is no action that can be taken at this time” regarding his visa application for Minda, he had refused to accept it. Maybe the government couldn’t take action, but he could.

He learned that the International Red Cross in Switzerland was arranging exchanges between American noncombatants and German prisoners, with details being handled by the American Red Cross. With the help of his sister, Christina, who lived in Brooklyn, he wrote a letter to the Red Cross explaining the situation, and received a reply with forms that he completed. The Red Cross continued the process, and on May 15 the State Department sent a promising letter, which Christina received as the
Santa Elisa
was steaming across the Atlantic.

With reference to the inquiry in your letter of March 24, 1942, as to the possibility of your wife and son coming to the United States, I take pleasure in informing you that the S.S. Drottningholm is expected to sail shortly from Goteberg, Sweden for New York in connection with the exchange of official and non-official persons between the United States and the Axis Powers. It is understood that the German authorities may permit Americans to return from Norway and Denmark on the S.S. Drottningholm and that those desiring to proceed from these countries to Goteberg to embark may accordingly be granted exit permits.

On the
Santa Elisa
’s first night at sea after leaving New York, Captain Vladimir Cernesco came down with a case of the shingles. Given the cargo of ammunition and fuel, the fire in January, and the U-boats known to be lying in wait in the North Atlantic, his shingles might have been triggered by nerves. The
Santa Elisa
had to make an unscheduled stop in Boston, where he was hospitalized and declared unfit for further duty.

The
Santa Elisa
’s chief mate, Tommy Thomson, had been an officer with Grace Line since his graduation from the Maritime Academy of New York State University ten years earlier. He held his master’s license, although because there weren’t many Grace Line ships, promotions to master had been scarce. But now his time had come.

“It was all a fluke,” said Thomson. “This is an ocean-going war, and the bosses needed a man who’d seen a ship’s bridge. There I was. No one could figure out where to dig up another captain.”

Thomson’s overnight promotion made him the youngest master in the U.S. Merchant Marine, at thirty-three. He was tall and soft spoken, with platinum hair and sharp blue eyes. He had proved his bravery, having fought the fire in hold number one alongside the third mate, Larsen. His full name was Theodore Roosevelt Thomson, but the link to TR had little to do with political values. When Roosevelt was New York City police commissioner, he had granted a request by Thomson’s father, a Brooklyn cop, to be placed on the bicycle squad.

Thomson and Larsen had now worked together for nearly a year. They liked, respected, and trusted each other. They each had young sons, although Larsen had never seen his, and they shared Danish blood. Thomson knew he could count on Larsen, and relied on his experience and skills. When a new chief mate came aboard in Boston, bringing unknown chemistry and introducing an awkward element to the chain of command, little changed between them. But Thomson told Larsen that he would now need him more than ever.

The ship’s departure from Boston was delayed until 5
P.M.
by the sighting of a possible U-boat outside the harbor. So as soon as it got out to sea, the crew tested the guns. “Tried several times to fire 20mm Oerlikons guns but jammed each time,” reported the U.S. Navy ensign whose fourteen-man crew had been assigned to man the guns. Ensign Gerhart Suppiger, Jr., was fresh out of one of the Navy’s hastily established armed guard schools, which hadn’t included training in the Oerlikons. His shock at the imperfection of war was just beginning.

“He was a hell of a nice boy,” said Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer. “But that’s what he was, a boy. He should have taken his mama with him. I knew more about the guns than he did.”

The
Santa Elisa
steamed thirty-six hours to Nova Scotia and anchored at dawn in Halifax Harbor, where there were about thirty ships waiting for convoys. An Oerlikon expert with a DEMS—Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship—rating came aboard and said it was no wonder the guns hadn’t fired; “They gave you the wrong grease for the shells in Brooklyn,” he told Suppiger. He gave the gun crew some cans of the correct grease, along with six smoke floats, to be used if the ship were torpedoed and sunk. “Make that ‘
when
’ the ship is sunk,” the DEMS rating said with a smirk.

They swung at anchor in Halifax Harbor for six uneventful days. The only place to go at night was the Green Lantern bar, where a couple of the guys met two local girls, who got them drunk and took them home and grilled them. How many ships were in the convoy? Where was it headed? What was its speed? The boys ran back to the ship, believing they were lucky to have survived such a close call with German spies.

Twenty-six freighters escorted by two Canadian corvettes and two destroyers left Halifax on a foggy Sunday morning, with church bells ringing them good-bye from shore.

The convoy system was new, and few of the masters had any experience at running so close together, let alone zigzagging to make their ships harder for U-boats to hit with torpedoes. It was especially difficult for the speedy
Santa Elisa,
because the convoy moved at the pace of its slowest ship, in this case 9 knots. “You don’t know how jumpy it makes you to have a fast ship throttled down by a lot of tubs,” said Thomson.

It took the convoy thirteen days to cross the Atlantic, creeping through extended fog, which made navigation difficult but was a blessing because it hid the ships from U-boats. Larsen worked in the wheelhouse a lot, navigating and taking readings with his sextant when he could see the sun or stars. He had bought the sextant secondhand in San Pedro, and it was his most treasured possession, after a pewter-framed photo of Minda and Jan. On the clear days, lookouts often spotted what they believed were torpedo tracks, although to a scared seaman, every bubble on the water looked like the trail of a torpedo zooming past. Wind over the swells made “white horses,” which dashed past the lookouts and blurred any periscope feathers. One night they got a radio message that a ship had been torpedoed about twenty miles from their course.

There was a small poker game in the wardroom each night, and sometimes the officers tapped the keg of Jamaican rum that the purser had bought in Halifax and stowed in the head (toilet) in Thomson’s cabin. The new chief mate was a hard-drinking Swede, and the mix with the rest of the crew, most of whom had been together since the ship’s launch, was already growing edgy. Larsen, especially, had to take a deep breath. He couldn’t forget that the Swedes had allowed the Germans to sneak across the border into Norway during that invasion; and he didn’t approve of heavy drinking. He avoided the wardroom at night, retreating abovedecks to the wheelhouse, where he worked on his nighttime navigation and took extra watches at the helm on the bridge, steering in the dark.

In the lingering Irish twilight of June 5, 1942, Fred Larsen let go the anchor of the
Santa Elisa
in Belfast Lough. At almost the same moment, Minda’s train from Kristiansand screeched to a stop at the station in Oslo, Norway. Belfast and Oslo, seven hundred miles apart, were as close as they’d been to each other in three years.

When Larsen had left Brooklyn twenty-five days earlier, he had known that the
Santa Elisa
was headed to war, but not where. Minda’s journey had begun that morning at her home in Farsund. She hoped that it would end in her husband’s strong arms in America. She was traveling on faith, with a vague itinerary that made no promises. She only knew that when she and her child got off the train in Oslo, the Gestapo would be there to watch them.

She had received a telegram from an Oslo attorney that morning that said, “Have just received instruction that you and your son have received traveling permission to America.” She would have to leave that day, and, for all she knew, it would be for forever. She didn’t know if the lawyer, who had been retained by the Red Cross, was even real.

Again, her friends and family all wanted her to stay; in Farsund they could look after her. Her sister Alice begged her not to go; it was a trick by the Gestapo, she said, and the train from Kristiansand would take them straight to Grini, the concentration camp that the Germans had established near Oslo. “But what would the Germans want with a three-year-old?” Minda asked, with reasonable naiveté.

The previous September, when she had feared to take the flight to New York on the Pan Am Clipper, Norway had been an occupied country, but life had still been livable. Since then, the United States had entered the war. Now her son, an American citizen, was the enemy of the Nazis. The first whispers and rumors about the Grini concentration camp had grown into horrible stories. She had second thoughts about what the Germans might want with a three-year-old.

So she quickly packed one suitcase with clothes and one with food, as the cable instructed. Her pink quilted satin robe, which Fred had sent her, filled half the suitcase for clothes. Her girlfriend’s father fired up his old London cab, which had been converted to burn wood for fuel, and off they went to Kristiansand. She was racing to catch a train to the unknown, on the belief that it had been sent by her husband to get her.

The Oslo station was full of German soldiers. Plainclothes Gestapo agents watched the passengers get off the train and asked for identification and travel papers from those whose looks seemed suspicious to them. She clutched Jan in her arms as she disembarked, and to her great relief she wasn’t challenged. Another passenger carried their suitcases off the train, and for a few fearful minutes she stood by the tracks, alone with her child and all their worldly possessions, worrying that the Gestapo would notice them and question her. “They were all over the place, but you didn’t really know who they were,” she said.

Then the mysterious lawyer appeared. His name was Mr. Nansen, and he told Minda that she and Jan would be traveling to America, with other Norwegians. But first they had to pass through Nazi Germany.