by Sam Moses
Larsen applied to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for immigration visas for Minda and Jan. He received a letter granting Minda’s visa, but it was stamped “Approval was not given your son, Jan F.”
Jan was caught in a Catch-22. The letter stated, “Through your birth in the United States, your child Jan Frederick is apparently a citizen of this country, and, if so, he is entitled to an American passport. Therefore, you should forward to him documentary evidence of birth here, which he may present to the nearest American consul abroad.”
That wasn’t so easy, with Larsen at sea so much and the German Gestapo controlling the mail to and from Norway. It took months, and each day that his family was in the hands of the Germans, Larsen grew less patient.
As quartermaster on the City of Norfolk, his duties at sea included shifts at the helm as the ship crossed the North Atlantic. When he wasn’t on watch, there was too much time to think about Minda and Jan, and their safety. He came up with a plan.
He thought he could take a fishing boat from Liverpool and motor north through the Irish Sea, then around Scotland and the Orkney Islands to the Scandinavian-speaking Shetland Islands, about two hundred miles off the western coast of Norway, where the North Sea meets the Norwegian Sea. He remembered those rough waters; his uncle John Tonnessen had taken him to Zetland when he was a boy. And he knew the rocky coves around Farsund. He believed he could anchor there under cover of darkness, slip into Farsund in a dinghy, steal away his wife and child, and race back to Zetland in the fishing boat.
He applied for a furlough from U.S. Lines and stayed in Liverpool to plan the escape. But everyone he spoke to told him the scheme was insane; between the vicious sea and the German planes and boats, the chances of survival were nought, they said. He couldn’t do it alone, so he reluctantly steamed back to the United States on the next ship, and returned to the bureaucratic paper trail.
He began writing letters to Washington and traveling there on the train from New York whenever he could, knocking on doors at the Department of State, aggressively using diplomatic channels, trying to get his family out of Norway. He spent much of his small salary on cables, phone calls, and travel expenses. By the time he finally got the passport for Jan, Minda’s immigration visa had expired. He couldn’t reach them by mail and had no idea what was happening to them under the Nazi boot in Farsund. He was left with little but his fears.
When an opportunity arose to work for the Grace Line, whose fleet of modern freighters in New York City made it the best steamship company in the country, he quit the City of Norfolk. Larsen had been driven by the desire to command his own ship ever since his first day at sea as a seventeen-year-old, and Grace Line was the place where he could achieve that dream. Hard work and intelligence were rewarded at Grace Line.
Larsen held an officer’s license with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, but that didn’t carry weight in the U.S. Merchant Marine; he still needed to take the exam to get a U.S. license. With eight years of experience at sea—from the engine room of the Attila to the helm of the City of Norfolk—and two recent years of mariners’ college in Norway, he didn’t need to go to school to prepare for the difficult three-day test, but he enrolled in a private crash course in Connecticut anyhow, because he was always hungry to learn. Grace Line was pleased when he passed the exam easily and it was able to make him an officer.
In early 1941, Larsen sailed as cargo mate on the freighter SS Nightingale, which was chartered by Grace Line. It was a busy job with heavy responsibility, including some functions of the chief mate, supervising the loading and off-loading of cargo. The Nightingale sailed to Valparaíso, Chile, stopping at every little port on the way back to load strategic metals from South American mines, coffee from Colombian plantations, and fruit, which was good moneymaking cargo, carried home in the Nightingale’s refrigerated holds in the ’tween decks.
After three months on that run, he got sweet duty as junior third mate on a spring cruise to the Caribbean with the SS Santa Rosa, a 225-passenger ocean liner advertised as being “sexier than Rita Hayworth.” He served two more months as junior third mate on the SS Siletz, another chartered cargo ship sailing out of New York.
He was making nearly $100 per week, and saving it all because he had no living expenses; and unlike other sailors, he didn’t go out to bars when his ship was in port. He knew he would need cash to get Minda and Jan to the United States, although he still didn’t know how he could. He wasn’t counting on the State Department.
In Norway, German officers had taken over the Heskestad farmhouse, located six miles from Farsund. Minda’s aged father and mother were moved into an upstairs bedroom, while Nazis ate the harvest from Heskestad farm. Minda and Jan, who was about eighteen months old at this time, lived in a small apartment in town.
Their bedroom window was against the sidewalk, which was traveled by goose-stepping soldiers whose barracks were just down the street in a school building. The daytime marching was intimidating, but the nights were downright scary, as the soldiers often staggered home loud and drunk. Minda said it was like having Nazis in her bedroom. She held her son, stroked his cornsilk curls, and told him his father would protect him.
She supported herself by cutting hair in the front room of their apartment. “One time a Nazi officer came right in and took off his cap and his gun belt, and told me to give him a haircut,” she said. “I got so angry. I said, ‘I don’t do men’s hair.’ He insisted, but I refused, and I held the door open for him. He took his cap and his gun and left.”
The other girls there were terrified, but Minda was too firm to be afraid. She was more worried that the Nazis would find the radio her brother kept in the barn, where he listened to the BBC. The penalty for having a radio was death.
Fred wrote dozens of letters to Minda during this time, but she received few of them. The mail to Norway was opened by the Gestapo and read by “little quislings,” said Minda. She clung to her favorite funny memory of their courtship, the time Fred had ridden his bicycle a hundred miles from his aunt’s house along the coast to visit Minda in Farsund one weekend, sleeping overnight in the woods. When he got there, she was out on a ship with her sister until Monday, so he had turned around and ridden back.
But she did get one package from her husband. “There were some clothes for Jan and a pink satin robe for me,” she said. “It was beautiful, and I treasured it for a long, long, long time. It was quilted, and it fit me perfectly. Oh, I was happy. I thought I was a queen.”
Larsen had heard that the Norwegian Resistance was recruiting, and he wanted to join. Other Norwegian mariners had told him about the Lingekompani, a group of commandos led by Kaptein Martin Linge, called “ice cold” and “heroic” by his men. Since his scheme to take a fishing boat from Liverpool to the western coast of Norway wasn’t possible, he now wanted to go to Farsund on a commando mission, and rescue Jan and Minda by sneaking them through the forest across the border to Sweden. The Siletz sailed to England, where it was easy for any Norwegian mariner to find the Resistance; but when he volunteered, the Resistance wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t a native Norwegian. The betrayal by Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who had sold out his country to the Nazis, burned in the hearts of Norwegians and kept their suspicion high.
In May 1941, Larsen was assigned to the ship that would take him to war: the shiny new SS Santa Elisa. She was launched that month from the shipyards in Kearny, New Jersey, and in July joined other Grace Line ships running military stores to South America, with ports of call in Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Mostly, she brought back copper and other metals from Chile and coffee from Colombia.
In September he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was commissioned an ensign; it was a requirement by Grace Line that all its officers belong to the USNR, although it didn’t change their status in the merchant marine.
He also finally succeeded in getting the travel documents for Minda and Jan. For $525, he bought
them tickets on a Pan American Clipper, scheduled to fly from Lisbon to New York on Minda’s twenty-fifth birthday. But getting from Farsund to Lisbon with a toddler—Jan was nearly three years old now—was the hard part. There were half a dozen legs in which anything could go wrong, with trains and ferries to Berlin, a flight from Berlin to Madrid, and another train to Lisbon. The Gestapo stood at every corner and doorway along the way. And even if Minda and Jan made it to Lisbon, the flight over the ocean in a monstrous “flying boat” was a scary step for a farm girl who had never been away from home and family.
“My friends talked me out of it,” she said. “It was tempting, but I didn’t want to take a chance like that.”
Three months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. Larsen heard the news over the radio on the bridge of the Santa Elisa, anchored in the harbor of Valparaíso. After that, his attempts to get his family out of Norway grew in desperation. But the replies from the government weren’t very promising.
Department of State
Washington
My dear Mr. Larsen:
The Department of Justice has referred to this Department your letter of January 5, 1942 regarding the visa case of your wife, Minda Heskestad Larsen, and your son, Jan Frederick Larsen, who are residing at Farsund, Norway.
Because of the withdrawal of the Department’s representatives from enemy-controlled territory, there is no action which can be taken at this time with a review to providing Mrs. Larsen with an appropriate visa for admission into the United States or passport facilities for your son, who, it is understood, is an American citizen.
While the possibility of American citizens proceeding from enemy-controlled territory is being investigated, no assurance can be given that it will be found possible to arrange for American citizens to come to the United States from Norway. You will be properly informed should the Department be able to make such arrangements.
CHAPTER 3 •••
FIRE DOWN BELOW
At twenty-eight, Lieutenant Reinhard Hardegen, a German U-boat captain, was a loose cannon. He carried unchecked ambition and relentless intensity along with his war wounds—a short leg and bleeding stomach—from the aviation crash that had ended his previous career as a naval pilot. He had concealed the injuries in order to qualify for command of U-123, and then began an impatient rampage of sinkings with the neutral Portuguese freighter Ganda. The 4,300-ton ship didn’t go down after two torpedo hits, so Hardegen surfaced U-123 and sank her with its four-inch gun. When the attack became an international incident, Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, claimed it was a British sub that had sunk Ganda.
Dönitz chose U-123 to be among the first five U-boats with orders to attack the eastern seaboard of the United States. He had begun planning the attack four days after Pearl Harbor, on instructions from Hitler to destroy merchant ships from New York to Cape Hatteras. Five 1,050-ton Type 9B U-boats, with a range of 12,000 nautical miles cruising at 10 knots on the surface, left their pens at the port of Lorient in France on separate dates around Christmas 1941. Dönitz called the operation “Drumbeat,” for the effect he expected it to have.
The Submarine Tracking Room at the Operational Intelligence Centre of the British Admiralty in London, Royal Navy headquarters, had located the U-boats crossing the surface of the ocean, and their positions were passed on to the U.S. Navy and charted on the wall in the headquarters of the Eastern Sea Frontier in New York City. But a vicious winter hurricane hit the Atlantic with winds of 100 mph, tossing the subs like surfboards off the lips of big waves, and enabling them to lose the Americans tracking them.
The Eastern Sea Frontier, commanded by Admiral Adolphus “Dolly” Andrews, didn’t have much of a fleet: Coast Guard cutters with wooden hulls, turn-of-the-century gunboats, and converted yachts with a machine gun and maybe a few depth charges on deck. The boats were often broken down in port. The day before the first U-boat left France, Admiral Andrews complained in a memo to Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy: “It is submitted that should enemy submarines operate off this coast, this command has no forces available to take adequate action against them, either offensive or defensive.”
Early on the morning of January 12, 1942, off the coast of Nova Scotia, U-123 sank the 9,100-ton British freighter Cyclops. Ninety-eight men died, almost all of them freezing in lifeboats. Operation Drumbeat was supposed to be a sneak attack off New York, coordinated with the other U-boats, and by attacking the Cyclops, Hardegen had disobeyed Dönitz’s orders and blew the element of surprise; not that it mattered, because the Eastern Sea Frontier was so unprepared.
The New York Times ran a two-paragraph story, picked up from a boast by Radio Berlin, but the story didn’t attract much attention. The U.S. Navy issued a lying press release claiming to have “liquidated” U-boats off the coast, adding that national security prevented the disclosure of more information. “This is a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American should enter enthusiastically,” said the navy’s statement, printed by the Times. The release added that the media and civilians could make the same “great, patriotic contribution” by not mentioning what they might see with their own eyes.
The next day, U-123 traveled south from Nova Scotia, steaming at 18 knots in broad daylight. It submerged a couple of times when aircraft flew over, but the ESF’s Fleet Air Arm was no more of a threat to U-boats than its bathtub navy. U-123 had traveled more than 3,300 nautical miles from France, only 55 of them submerged, without being challenged. The big U-boat passed south of Nantucket late in the afternoon, and that night was beckoned down the coast by Montauk Point Lighthouse.
Kapitan Hardegen was excited by the glow from the lights on shore, exposing his targets. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?” he asked his chief mate. The U.S. Navy had suggested cities and towns along the coast to black themselves out, but merchants declined because business would suffer.
After midnight, Hardegen spotted the Norness, a 9,600-ton Norwegian tanker, and split her apart with three torpedoes. He continued to New York and submerged at sunrise in the harbor. U-123 spent the day on the bottom, ninety feet down in the mud.
The New York Times was still on the street with a headline now shouting TANKER TORPEDOED 60 MILES OFF LONG ISLAND when Hardegen surfaced after dark, awed by the dome of white light rising almost religiously into the black sky above Manhattan. He knew the moment was profound. “We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out upon the coast of the U.S.A.,” he said.
Later that night, during an icy nor’easter, he torpedoed the 6,800-ton British tanker Coimbra, whose 80,000 barrels of oil exploded in a giant fireball, killing thirty-six. Witnesses saw flames from the beach at Southampton. Admiral Andrews told the press that the navy knew nothing about it, which was almost the truth. His feeble fleet was grasping at the wisps and ghosts of ocean spray in its lame attempt to find U-123.
Fred Larsen’s Irish grandfather, the woodcarver Christopher Melia, and William Russell Grace, who founded Grace Line after emigrating from Ireland, were about the same age and had the same eye for beauty. Had they lived long enough to see the Santa Elisa, Melia might have carved her, and Grace would have been proud of her.
A flurry of shipbuilding was triggered by the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, passed in order to increase the size of the U.S. merchant fleet. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared for the growing possibility of war, the pace increased. The Santa Elisa was one of 173 freighters built between 1940 and 1945 to Maritime Commission designs for the class called C2. She was 459 feet from bow to stern, 63 feet at beam, and 40 feet between main deck and keel bottom, with a loaded draft of 26 feet and freeboard of 14. Her five holds gave her a gross weight of 8,380 tons, with the ability to stow 8,620 tons of cargo.
Because she was specially built for Grace Line, she had some custom touches shared by only her sister ship, the Santa Rita. Her bridge was e
nclosed, keeping the helmsman out of the weather and providing protection against shrapnel from bombs. Powered by a double reduction General Electric turbine making 6,000 horsepower and driving a single screw, she could run all day and night at 17 knots.
Larsen was junior third officer on the Santa Elisa, in charge of the lifeboats and lifesaving equipment, but the chief officer also assigned him to supervise the fire equipment. He did much more than the manual described for a third mate, simply because he could. At twenty-seven, he had done it all. He’d been a teenage prodigy in the engine room of his first ship, the Attila, working with diesel, steam, and hydraulic systems. He could navigate and operate radios. He’d been a quartermaster, purser, bosun, and cargo mate; he was certified in firefighting and lifeboats, and liked guns. He’d even been a stevedore on the San Pedro wharf in California. He could speak English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Spanish, and was beginning to study German, although he despised it.
He acted with a natural sense of authority based on experience, and carried himself with conspicuous self-discipline. When he stepped into territory that was not a third mate’s, other officers could usually see that his involvement was driven by efficiency, not ego, but his rigidity could be difficult. “He was a square-head all the way,” said Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer who maintained the deck machinery. “A real sonofabitch. He was only the third mate, but he acted like he owned the ship.”
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Santa Elisa had returned to Brooklyn, where she was armed by the War Shipping Administration, primarily with two .30-caliber Browning machine guns on the afterdeck. Armor plating thirty-six inches high was added to the bridge, on each wing just outside the wheelhouse door. A steel visor projecting downward at 45 degrees was welded to the top of the wheelhouse, and a crow’s nest with a telephone to the bridge was built between the two fifty-foot-tall king posts at the forward end of the number one hatch. Steel gun tubs were welded to the bow and four corners of the bridge, intended for 20-millimeter Oerlikon rapid-fire cannons, but the tubs were empty, because the guns weren’t available so early in the war.
