At All Costs (8 page)

“At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive!” cried a delighted Churchill when the British advance began. “Wars are won by superior willpower. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.”

But Churchill had had to take most of the Western Desert Force out of Libya and send them to Greece. Unfortunately, the withdrawal had begun on the same day Rommel had arrived in North Africa. Since then, Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been steadily pushing back what was left of the Eighth Army.

The Luftwaffe blitz over Malta continued, neutralizing the RAF and enabling an even higher percentage of supplies to reach Rommel, by both land and sea. Axis aircraft flew nearly nine thousand sorties in April, dropping 6,730 tons of bombs on the three airfields as well as the cities around the harbor.

The lack of fuel meant that the Hurricanes and Spitfires couldn’t patrol; they had to wait for an enemy attack and then scramble up to meet it, which was a deadly disadvantage. Fighters were grounded for lack of rivets to repair their shot-up skins. Radio operators directed make-believe squadrons in the sky, hoping that the listening Axis would send their fighters to 20,000 feet to chase nonexistent planes.

Pilots with time on their hands manned the Bofors antiaircraft guns on the cliffs around Takali, but they still couldn’t do much because ammunition was rationed to fifteen shells per day. Soldiers with Browning machine guns hid in the trees, to defend against raiding enemy aircraft.

The bombing was so focused that sailors with the 10th Submarine Flotilla at Lazzaretto were ordered not to wear their white caps during the day, because the caps could be targets. The five remaining submarines were spending their daylight hours at the bottom of Marsamxett Harbor, along with the skeletons of many dead warriors. But that wasn’t safe either, because the water was shallow and a bomb on the surface would still be destructive.

But hiding was futile. With great despair, the last of the “Fighting Tenth” was sent off to safe harbor in Alexandria, resulting in the cessation of its attacks on Axis convoys in the central Mediterranean. At least the submarine flotilla had run out of fuel oil anyhow. The submarine P-35 got in a parting shot off Pantelleria, sinking a 4,200-ton freighter with two torpedoes fired from 11,000 yards.

With little resistance from Malta, Rommel received 237,000 tons of supplies out of 244,000 tons shipped in April, tripling the March amount. That was 97 percent.

“Kesselring was setting a cruel pace,” said AOC Lloyd. “By the end of April we were back to seven serviceable Spitfires. By July 1, we calculated, we should be out of business.

“For us, the siege of Malta had taken an ugly turn. The specter of famine stalked the island.”

PART III •••

ALLIES

CHAPTER 11 •••

OUT OF NORWAY

O
n the evening of June 11, 1942, exactly two years after the beginning of the siege on Malta, Fred Larsen made fast the
Santa Elisa
to the Newport pier. The ship had steamed down from Belfast in a small convoy protected by Spitfires, through the Irish Sea, and deep into the Bristol Channel to the busy and secure port of Newport, Wales.

She’d been sent there to load coal from the Welsh mines, much to the dismay of Captain Thomson, because the coal was so dirty and his ship so clean. But at least coal wasn’t explosive, and it was a cargo often carried on the homeward journey, so the crew was happy to see it.

Then they heard that coal was usually taken to London, which burned some 30,000 tons a day. If the
Santa Elisa
were going to London, she’d have to curve around Land’s End and run east into the English Channel through “E-boat Alley,” where German torpedo boats could race out of French ports at 40 knots and blow them to smithereens; and if they got through E-boat Alley they’d have to pass Cape Gris-Nez, where the German shore batteries, twenty-two big guns that could fire all the bloody way across the channel to Dover, were waiting to blow them to smithereens; and if they got past Cape Gris-Nez they’d have to round Hell-fire Corner and navigate the Goodwin Sands, 11 miles of shallow water and wide sandbars that had trapped some two thousand ships over centuries. More E-boats lurked in these shallows, along with Stukas diving out of the clouds to blow the merchantmen to smithereens.

Larsen listened to the gripes and fears of the men on his deck crew and said he didn’t care where they were going, it was all the same to him. He just hoped that wherever it was, there would be Germans.

After meeting Minda and Jan at the Oslo train station, the Red Cross lawyer, Mr. Nansen, walked them through more paperwork and presented a travel itinerary to Lisbon. Minda learned that they weren’t alone; they would be traveling to New York with seventy-six others, all of them with American roots or connections—like Minda and Jan, they were noncombatants being exchanged by the Red Cross for German prisoners of war.

The group was under the control of the Gestapo, watching at every turn. Minda wouldn’t let go of Jan, in fear that he would be snatched away. A fellow exchangee named Erling Andersen offered to carry her two suitcases, and for the rest of the way he looked after the two of them, in addition to taking care of his own family, including a child about Jan’s age. He was American-born, like Fred Larsen, but had been unlucky enough to be in Norway on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, working as an engineer. When the Germans had declared war on the United States, they had arrested the Americans in Norway and put them in Grini, the concentration camp near Oslo. Andersen was used as a cook in the camp, so at least he didn’t go hungry like the others. His wife, Johanna, had gotten him out after six months, using the same kind of perseverance that Larsen had used to get Minda and Jan out of Norway.

At least twenty thousand Norwegians were made prisoners at Grini during the war. It didn’t take much to get arrested: a radio, a rumor, a glance, being Jewish. Grini was infamous for its high-voltage and barbed-wire fences. The camp’s SS commander believed in “exercise” as punishment for offenses, such as failure to snap to attention with your hands clasping your thighs when an SS officer passed. Some died with their faces in the dirt. Some froze. They all starved.

“We tried to beat the pigs to their troughs,” said Odd Westeng, a Resistance leader who was held in Grini. “We listened into the stillness of night, and heard heartbreaking screams coming from the interrogation chamber.”

Westeng escaped through the fence and helped Norwegian Jews get out of the country before they were sent to Grini. It’s not known how many Jews went to Grini, but about 750 were moved from Grini to Auschwitz, and 12 survived. Another 850 were led by the Resistance through the forest to Sweden. Children were hidden in carts and told to pretend that they were potatoes under a tarp. Jan might have been one of them, if Larsen had succeeded in joining the Resistance when he tried.

Minda Larsen and the other fleeing Norwegians took an all-night train from Oslo to Trelleborg, Sweden, with their Gestapo escort. There was only one of them on that train, at least only one that the Norwegians knew of, and he sat in the forward row while they ignored him. In the morning they looked out the windows; Minda remembers the vivid yellow flowers in the sweet Swedish sun.

From the Trelleborg station they were taken by bus to a ferry that crossed the Baltic Sea. The sky was blue and the water smooth, and the boat might have floated on the sighs of relief of its passengers, except they knew they were going to Germany. But it was an easy landing at the small port of Sassnitz, where there were no warships and few soldiers. The group was shuffled straight to a train to Berlin, 150 miles south. They arrived after dark, their blacked-out train squeaking spookily into the blacked-out city. For nearly four hours they were stuck at the station while bombs fell over Germany, as Britain had begun raids with hundreds of RAF planes at a time. When the bombers droned back to England, the train sped southwest across the dark heart of Germany, all that night.

Over the next two days, another train took them across France and Spain. At nine in the evening on June 11, at the same time that Fred Larsen made fast the
Santa Elisa
to the Newport pier, Minda arrived safely in neutral Lisbon with her son and their seventy-six new friends. The hard part of her journey was over. She’d had her two years of hell with Hitler.

CHAPTER 12 •••

OPERATION HARPOON

O
n that same moonless night of June 11, about three hours after Fred Larsen had docked in Newport and Minda had arrived in Lisbon, the SS
Kentucky
steamed away from Gibraltar. She was the queen bee of a convoy called Operation Harpoon, which included one battleship, two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, seventeen destroyers, four minesweepers, an oiler, a minelayer, two corvettes, and six motor patrol boats, all to escort the
Kentucky
and five freighters 996 miles to Malta. Heavy enemy attack was predictable, and the mission was critical.

Admiral Cunningham had scanned the American merchant fleet looking for tankers, and the SS
Kentucky,
owned by the Texas Company (soon to become Texaco), was the clear choice. She was one of the biggest and fastest tankers in the world, and was state of the art—her hull was welded, rather than riveted. She had only recently been launched and had made just one brief run, Philadelphia to the Delaware Capes and back.

Britain had been getting some of the best freighters America could sacrifice, although not always willingly and too often to the sea. The
Kentucky
hadn’t earned the Texas Company a dime before the U.S. government claimed her for the British, after the request from Cunningham came through channels. Some on the American side weren’t happy about it—most notably Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet—but it was understood that FDR wanted to do all he could for Churchill.

The
Kentucky
was the third welded-hull tanker built for the Texas Company by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, of Chester, Pennsylvania. The first was the SS
Ohio,
followed by the SS
Oklahoma,
which had recently been torpedoed and sunk off Savannah, Georgia. Kapitan Reinhard Hardegen, whose U-123 had claimed nine freighters off the U.S. coast in January, had returned for a second unchallenged raid in April.

The
Kentucky
was sent to Gibraltar with 103,000 barrels of aviation fuel, steaming across the Atlantic without an escort, an astonishing risk. She used her powerful new steam turbine engines to average 15.8 knots, despite a four-day gale. In Gibraltar she was unceremoniously transferred to the Ministry of War Transport. The Yanks were yanked and put on a tub back to New York, and a crew from the British Merchant Navy moved into the luxurious quarters on the new tanker.

The
Kentucky
’s aviation fuel was off-loaded in Gibraltar, and she took on 2,000 tons of diesel, needed for the generators that drove Malta’s antiaircraft guns; 2,000 tons of kerosene, needed for heat and cooking by the suffering islanders; and 9,000 tons of fuel oil, most desperately needed so the 10th Submarine Flotilla might return to Malta and resume its attacks on the Axis convoys supplying Rommel in North Africa.

Governor Dobbie had cabled the War Department that there were 920 tons of black and white oils left, good enough for five weeks. That had been nine weeks earlier—before he had been replaced by Gort. Now Malta was down to the sludge in its storage tanks.

If the Axis didn’t know that all it had to do to force the surrender of Malta was keep a tanker from delivering oil, it should have. Thanks to the American attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers, Axis commanders sometimes knew as much as Churchill himself.

Fellers reported to General George C. Marshall, President Roosevelt’s chief of staff, who was looking ahead toward American infantry combat in Europe and wanted to learn all he could. Because Churchill wanted to keep FDR and Marshall happy, the British Eighth Army was encouraged to open its gates for the diligent Fellers. He attended staff meetings; he drove to the front in a camouflaged van he called the Hearse and greeted British officers with bottles of Johnnie Walker; he moved in social circles in Cairo and milked contacts for information.

From the embassy in Cairo, using a secret code, Fellers sent radio messages with descriptions of military actions and plans in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and North Africa. He also sent details about Malta’s dire straits to Marshall, indicating that surrender was imminent.

Unfortunately, the Axis had the code. It was called the Black Code, and had been stolen by an Italian spy. Eager to flaunt the coup, Mussolini had shared some of Fellers’s early messages with the Germans, who used them to break the code themselves. For about nine critical months, everything Fellers told Marshall and FDR, he unwittingly told Rommel and Hitler as well.

Hitler appreciated the messages—“our good source,” he called Fellers—but it was Rommel who studied each word. The information from Fellers was “stupefying in its openness,” said one of Rommel’s staff officers after the war, and it “contributed decisively to our victories in North Africa.”

“Any friend of Bonner Fellers is no friend of mine,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower later told a beautiful British socialite who was enamored with Fellers, before turning his back to her at a Cairo dinner party.

Thanks to Fellers’s messages, the Axis knew that Operation Harpoon was coming, and that Malta needed the oil from the tanker to survive. Regia Aeronautica lined up eighty-one fighters, sixty-one bombers, and fifty torpedo bombers, and the Luftwaffe added another forty bombers.

In the first attack, at daybreak on Sunday, June 14, the
Kentucky
shot down one bomber. “One of the destroyers picked up three German airmen who stated that they knew all about the convoy sailing, and had been waiting for us,” reported Captain Roberts, the
Kentucky
’s new master. “Personally, I had not known until two hours before sailing where or when my ship was to proceed.”

In the second attack, a torpedo bomber came in at 200 feet, half a mile off the
Kentucky
’s port beam. “I saw three splashes in the water,” said Roberts, “and could faintly see the wakes approaching the convoy. I immediately altered course hard to starboard and managed to avoid them. The cruiser HMS
Liverpool
and the Dutch merchant vessel
Tanimbar
were both struck by these torpedoes.”

The
Tanimbar,
which was carrying ammunition and aviation fuel in five-gallon cans, sank in seven minutes, with thirty men killed. The second torpedo blew a huge hole in the new cruiser
Liverpool,
and she had to be towed back to Gibraltar. Volunteers were given an extra tot of rum for retrieving the bodies of the twelve men who were steamed to death in the engine room.

After the
Illustrious
disaster, the Admiralty had stopped sending its most valuable ships into the treacherous Sicilian Narrows, which pinch the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and the island of Pantelleria. Stukas flew into the narrows from the nearby North African airfields that Rommel had taken back, U-boats gathered just inside the mouth of the narrows, and fast E-boats lurked in the dark shallows in the middle of the night.

At dusk, as planned, the battleship, both aircraft carriers, three of the four cruisers, and seven destroyers turned back to Gibraltar. The remaining ships maneuvered from two columns to one as they steamed into the narrows, with the
Kentucky
last in the line of five merchantmen, moving at 12 knots and zigzagging to dodge torpedoes.

As Operation Harpoon was steaming in blackness toward Malta, Admiral Cunningham was in London, packing for his new job behind a desk in Washington, and he wasn’t happy about it. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, had insisted to a reluctant Churchill that he needed Cunningham as head of the Admiralty delegation there. It didn’t help that Cunningham felt that the man replacing him as C in C of the Mediterranean, Admiral Henry Harwood, was not up to the job.

“So as to free our naval forces if the convoy is cornered,” Harwood had cabled Churchill before Operation Harpoon began, “I intend to arrange for the merchant ships to be scuttled, as by doing this they will release the warships for offensive purposes against the enemy, or, if this is impossible, for a rapid return through the bombing areas. What I particularly want to avoid is the loss of both escorts and convoy.”

What Churchill wanted to avoid was the loss of Malta. The whole point of the warships was to protect the merchant ships, not attack the enemy. And how could a man like Churchill read the words “rapid return” without hearing “run from the fight” ring in his ears like the boom of a fifteen-inch gun?

The dark night in the Sicilian Narrows passed without any attacks on Operation Harpoon. But as the sun rose on the
Kentucky,
shells from six-inch guns started flying from the east, as if El Sol were spitting bullets at her bow. Admiral Alberto Da Zara had raced overnight from Palermo on the north side of Sicily, with two cruisers and five destroyers, to stand between the convoy and Malta.

Captain C. C. Hardy, commanding Operation Harpoon in the antiaircraft cruiser
Cairo,
sent his five largest destroyers ahead to fight off the Italian warships. The leading destroyer took twelve hits, and
Cairo
was hit twice as she tried to hide the merchant ships behind a smoke screen.

Then, in perfect coordination with the shelling from the warships, the Italian bombers arrived.

A Stuka dive-bombed the MS
Chant,
a 5,600-ton Danish freighter with an American crew carrying aviation gas, ammunition, and coal. All but three men jumped overboard before her superstructure collapsed from the explosions, and she quickly sank. Another merchantman, the
Burdwan,
was disabled and abandoned.

From “Monkey Island,” the platform over the bridge, Captain Roberts watched a Ju 88 dive at the
Kentucky
and drop two bombs that “straddled the poop,” said the third mate. Giant columns of water crashed on deck.

The chief engineer reported that the main generator steam pipe was fractured and that without electricity, he could neither fill the boilers nor raise steam. He was overwhelmed by the complexity of the
Kentucky
’s engine room, having had just three days in Gibraltar to learn the Westinghouse steam turbine engines, the Brown-Curtiss water tube boilers, and the elaborate electrical system. The fracture in the steam pipe was repairable, but he didn’t have the know-how. He desperately needed the help of the Texas Company’s American engineer, who had been with the
Kentucky
for nearly a year, all during its construction and trials, and had wanted to stay with the ship to Malta. But when the Ministry of War Transport took over a ship, it became an all-British affair. Politics and protocol doomed the
Kentucky
and threatened the survival of Malta.

The minesweeper
Hebe
began to tow
Kentucky
but could make only 5 knots, so Captain Hardy sent back a destroyer to help. Then, he reported, “I reconsidered and cancelled this order as I came to the conclusion that I could not afford to immobilise one of the three remaining fleet destroyers for this purpose, while the threat from enemy surface vessels was considerable.”

True to Admiral Harwood’s intentions, the convoy left the disabled
Kentucky
behind, “like a stranded whale,” said the third mate.

It appears from Captain Hardy’s report, a rambling jumble of sixty items full of contradictions and impossibilities, that he changed his mind about orders to the convoy three times in three hours. He finally took a page out of Harwood’s manual and ordered the
Kentucky
’s master, Captain Roberts, to scuttle his ship.

But there were no explosive charges in any spaces for scuttling, because there hadn’t been time in Gibraltar to install them. The
Kentucky
had a strong honeycomb structure with welded seams. The minesweepers
Badsworth
and
Hebe,
sent by Captain Hardy to sink her, didn’t have the firepower for the job.

Meanwhile, Admiral Da Zara had sent a cruiser and two destroyers around to the rear of the convoy, where the
Kentucky
drifted, abandoned. The British minesweepers cut out when the mast of the Italian cruiser
Montecuccoli
appeared on the horizon, leaving the
Kentucky
and her load of precious fuel to the enemy. Except for a few scorches, a broken steam line, and some destroyed wiring, there wasn’t a scratch on her. All Da Zara needed to do was hook up the two destroyers to
Kentucky
and tow her back to Pantelleria. Captain Hardy had effectively handed Malta to the Axis.

But Admiral Da Zara dropped it. “Arriving at the scene, the Italians saw the sea strewn with debris, and all over the horizon were the burning ships and those left behind to help them,” reveals the official Italian history. “The tanker
Kentucky
had only a small fire aboard, but several shells from the
Montecuccoli
and then a torpedo from the
Oriani
caused her to explode in flames like a huge funeral pyre, and shortly thereafter she sank.”

The irony was “most convenient,” said Hardy. Admiral Da Zara was given a medal by Mussolini.

The remains of the convoy reached Malta in the middle of the night. Just outside the harbor, four ships struck mines; one destroyer sank, two were damaged, and the fourth and biggest of the five freighters, the 10,400-ton
Orari,
was holed and lost much of her cargo just outside the breakwater. Glistening waves of oil lapped ashore in the morning sun.

The Admiralty said that Captain Hardy’s decision to scuttle the
Kentucky
had been justified by the safe arrival of one and a half freighters. The Royal Navy said that he had “acted throughout with conspicuous courage and resource in the handling of his force for the protection of the convoy.”

There’s no record of what Churchill might have said about the abandonment, botched scuttling, and ultimate loss of the
Kentucky
to Italian guns. He must have believed the sorry story would have been different if Cunningham had been there, but at this point he didn’t care who was at fault. He knew one thing: a tanker had to get through to Malta or the island was lost. There was one more moonless period before Malta would have to be evacuated.