by Sam Moses
Churchill’s mind was armed with Malta, in particular the next convoy, for which the Ohio was needed. They met after lunch on Saturday the twentieth and settled the main issues of development of the atom bomb, basically conceiving the Manhattan Project; so they didn’t get to many of Churchill’s subjects. They had planned to take the president’s train to Washington the next day, but they didn’t have the day to lose, so they left that night.
When Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to use code names, they called themselves “Colonel Warden” and “Admiral Q,” like little boys playing soldier, as Eleanor Roosevelt once observed uncomfortably. Maybe they sat up late on the train and talked, in which case it would have been a good time for Admiral Q to raise the subject of the SS Ohio. A master of manipulation and sweet talk when he needed to be, Churchill would have started with a compliment: there was certainly no tanker in the British fleet with the speed, strength, and majesty of the Ohio. Maybe the fate of Malta was decided then and there, over cigars and brandy, on a railroad car rumbling through the night.
Or maybe it wasn’t decided until the next day. There was a whirlwind of meetings at the White House that Sunday—Father’s Day, 1942. The father generals were all called at home and told to come to work. The day blurred, especially after the red-eye train. There was a meeting in the president’s office. A telegram was handed to FDR. He handed it to Churchill without a word. Tobruk, the symbol of British will, had fallen. The land battle in the Mediterranean was now on Egypt’s doorstep.
“This was a hideous and totally unexpected shock, and for the first time in my life, I saw the Prime Minister wince,” said General Ismay.
Another cable arrived from Admiral Harwood in Alexandria, announcing that he was sending the Royal Navy fleet through the Suez Canal and south into the Red Sea, because the Alexandria Harbor was within range of Luftwaffe bombers that would soon be in Tobruk. Harwood’s move would trigger a civilian exodus, with Egyptians and others jamming the trains for Palestine.
The prime minister was not happy with Admiral Harwood. One of the messages that had been waiting for him when his Clipper had landed in Washington was a postmortem on Operation Harpoon from Harwood, and Churchill must have winced—and raged—at these defeatist words: “Everybody naturally has the desire to help Malta, but the trouble is the feeling of impossibility.”
As the news of the fall of Tobruk ricocheted around the White House like machine-gun bullets on the bridge of a destroyer, Churchill retreated to his room, blown away. But, said Sir Charles Wilson, “In a man of Winston’s temperament, defeat is never final. There is never any danger of his folding up in dirty weather.”
Impromptu meetings were held late into the night, as the Allies’ warrior chiefs moved into and out of rooms in the White House, discussing and debating how to defeat Hitler. General Eisenhower was called, and he was introduced to Churchill, who would come to call Ike “my prairie prince.” But it was Admiral King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, whom Churchill had to persuade on this night, even though he likely already had FDR’s permission to borrow the SS Ohio.
King was a first-generation Irishman who didn’t like either the British or the Royal Navy. He was tall and hard, with intense brown eyes, a sharp nose, and a cleft in his chin under teeth that were usually clenched. His daughter said he was even-tempered: always in a rage. President Roosevelt said he shaved with a blowtorch. “Not content with fighting the enemy, he was usually fighting someone on his own side as well,” said Admiral Cunningham, who would soon arrive in Washington to deal with him.
King wasn’t impressed by Churchill’s argument that the war would be won or lost in the Mediterranean, and that Malta was the crux. But Churchill needed King’s support for another convoy to Malta. Directly or indirectly, King had to sign off on the transfer of the SS Ohio from the Texas Company to the Ministry of War Transport. Churchill couldn’t go running back to FDR over King’s head, especially not after the Kentucky loss.
King had just received a memo from General Marshall that began, “The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort.” It ended, “I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters to exercise a determining influence on the war.”
This had been Churchill’s relentless theme since before the war began—in fact, his opening act when he was made First Sea Lord in 1939 was to begin arming Britain’s merchant fleet. But in the United States, Admiral King had been slow to do the same, with tragic results. Now, with King being so freshly chastised by Marshall, he wasn’t inclined to resist Churchill. After the war, General Ismay would write Churchill, reminding him that on this day in the White House, “You successfully pressed King to start the convoy system.”
They debated in the president’s room, long into the night. When FDR suggested sending American troops to Egypt to assist the British Eighth Army, Marshall got so mad he walked out. He might have echoed what another general had complained: “The Limeys have his ear, while we have the hind tit.”
Churchill was sixty-seven years old. He was on his fourth day of travel and meetings, with the world in the balance. The trip had begun with a twenty-seven-hour flight in a thundering flying boat, followed by long hours of eating, drinking, and debating. Add ten cigars a day, and don’t forget the minor heart attack he’d had in the White House six months earlier, and one might think only God was propping him up. Or maybe it was the brandy. Or the opportunity, or maybe just the adrenaline.
The prime minister was in his element. He had the floor in the president’s smoke-filled room. Everyone there knew about the loss of the Kentucky, if not the lapses that had led to its shameful sinking. It would have taken a great deal of cheek to argue that the British now had to have the best U.S. tanker, the SS Ohio, which was even faster than the Kentucky, for another convoy to Malta—and it must be right away, in the next moonless period, or Malta would fall, right on top of Tobruk.
The next morning, as the British Eighth Army streamed back toward Alexandria in disarray, Admiral King signed the order that led to the release of the Ohio for Operation Pedestal.
CHAPTER 14 •••
SS SANTA ELISA, JUNE 23
On June 23, the day Hitler promoted Rommel to field marshal for taking Tobruk, British Army stevedores began loading the Santa Elisa with high explosives.
The freighter’s five holds were accessed through wide hatches that ran down the center of the main deck, three forward of the superstructure and two aft. The biggest booms were located at the forward corners of the hatch over hold number three, the largest and most stable, being nearest the center of the ship. These big booms lowered the heavy bombs and mines down into hold number three, as well as into number four, located just aft of the superstructure. The stevedores stacked the antiaircraft shells on top of the bombs and mines, the crated aircraft parts on top of the shells, and finally the tons of sacked flour and grain on top of the crates.
Smaller booms were located at the base of fifty-foot-tall king posts, forward and aft of the hatch over number two hold. Pallets of coal, needed by Malta’s power plant, were swung into that hold.
Hold number five was near the stern, just forward and under the platform for the four-inch gun. One thousand tons of kerosene in 55-gallon drums were loaded in there.
But it was hold number one that scared the crew. It was the deepest hold, located just aft of the forepeak. It was being loaded with 1,300 tons of 104-octane aviation fuel, in five-gallon cans made of tin. They were called “flimsies,” and there were 90,000 of them. They were crated in cardboard and stacked on a pallet, swung from the pier to the hold by the ship’s forward boom, and lowered into the hold through the gaping hatch, 25 feet wide and 50 feet long.
The seals around the spouts of the cans were made of cork, and they leaked. Men working in the hold tied bandannas over their faces t
o filter the fumes, and they wrapped their shoes in cotton rags to stifle sparks from hobnails on the steel deck. “Those cans made perfect Molotov cocktails,” said Larsen.
The crew of the Santa Elisa was told by the Ministry of War Transport that they could get off the ship while it was still in Newport if they wanted to, although they weren’t exactly free to. If they chose not to volunteer for the upcoming dangerous secret mission, they would be confined to an army barracks until after it was over, six weeks without pay, maybe more if the Santa Elisa didn’t make it back. So everyone stayed aboard.
The ship’s Royal Navy liaison officer boarded, and luckily he got on well with Captain Thomson, but not even he knew where the ship was going. The crew was betting in dread on Murmansk, until a man from the Ministry of War Transport gave Captain Thomson a top secret packet, containing an envelope addressed to the RAF commander in South Africa. Thomson hinted to the crew that it didn’t look as though they were headed to the Arctic.
But then the ministry dropped off some boxes in his cabin. He showed them to the purser, Jack Follansbee.
“Jesus, that’s suicide!” cried Follansbee, his eyes bugging in fear at the fur hats and long underwear.
“Two days ago they gave me a Russian flag,” said Thomson. He had thought it was a joke, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Thomson and Follansbee had sailed together on the Santa Lucia and were good mates. The captain allowed his purser to buy whiskey, as long as he kept it under control, so for the next six weeks Follansbee ordered two cases of Johnnie Walker per week, one Red and one Black; at $12 and $12.50 a case it was so cheap he could hardly turn it down.
A taxi driver told them that the Santa Elisa was the first American ship to dock at Newport in three years; there were Yank soldiers up north, but American sailors in Newport were something new. The whole crew was invited to a church dance where they were greeted with red, white, and blue flowers—roses, delphiniums, and gladioli. Two girls teamed on the piano and accordion for a few rounds of “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” The Yanks taught the Welsh girls how to jitterbug, and the girls taught them the hokey cokey, which at least one of the salty dogs turned lascivious.
Larsen himself was not the kind of man to do much dancing. He was Norwegian. When the father of one of the church girls asked him what ailed him, he stuttered that he just hadn’t found the right girl yet. “Blimey, aren’t these Yanks particular?” the man declared. But he and Larsen had a good talk. Mr. Jones had lived in Swansea during the Blitz, and his family had been bombed out twice. There were no days like that in Newport, but he still had to hang black curtains over the windows each night and wait in long queues for half a dozen plums. He’d been living like that for three years now, and he was sick of it.
Ensign Gerhart Suppiger, Jr., twenty-three years old and a skinny six feet four, with no experience at sea but boasting a college degree in business administration, commanded the U.S. Navy Armed Guard on the Santa Elisa, and he didn’t like some of the things he’d seen so far. The new chief mate and the second mate had staggered home drunk together the previous night and then behaved badly after they found the purser’s scotch. In particular, they had thrown a seabag full of Suppiger’s laundry out a porthole. “The chief mate and second mate were drunk very much of the time we were in Newport,” said Suppiger.
Now Suppiger was watching the loading of the aviation fuel into hold number one, and it smelled pretty sloppy to him. Too many flimsies were leaking too much fuel. When he sent two of his navy men down into the hold to catch the leaking flimsies, things got a little touchy. The chief mate, a salty old Swede, wasn’t inclined to take orders from the ninety-day wonder with a diploma. This wasn’t the navy. He told Suppiger to get his skinny ass off the deck; loading cargo was the chief mate’s job, not the clueless new ensign’s.
Suppiger told him that keeping the ship from exploding was precisely his job.
Larsen was helping with the loading of the drums of kerosene in hold number five. He too had an interest in the ship not exploding. He didn’t have an interest in drinking, or in Swedes. Sweden had allowed the Nazis in the back door of Norway during the German invasion. His three-year-old son was in the grip of the Nazis thanks to help from the Swedes.
The spark that now threatened to set off the Santa Elisa wasn’t going to come from hobnails. Resentment flew in all directions among the three men. But Larsen was a leader. “He had that old seamanship about him,” said Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer. “He had that boss instinct. He’d say jump, and you’d ask how high.”
Larsen knew that the volatile atmosphere could be bled only by solving the mechanical problem. An electrical fan to ventilate the hold was out of the question, because of the possibility of sparks. But Larsen told Suppiger and the chief mate that he could rig up a mechanical ventilation system with a fan and a crank, and that defused their anger. He also volunteered to run the steam ejectors. “Twice a day for an hour I pumped the gas out,” he said.
After the hatch cover was bolted down on the 90,000 leaking cans of gasoline, more coal was stacked in hundredweight sacks on the deck over the hold, to protect it from penetration by shrapnel. A 500-pound armor-piercing bomb dropped from a Stuka would be another matter, to say nothing of torpedoes punching into the hold through the ship’s hull.
Ensign Suppiger found flaws in other places. He and his crew of nine young enlisted men had come to the Santa Elisa straight from basic training together, and on the first day there were no life jackets for them—and none of Suppy’s new shipmates seemed to be worried about it. Then a gunnery chief came to provide instruction in the firing and maintenance of the Oerlikons, but he didn’t know anything about them.
The Oerlikons hadn’t been covered in Officer Candidate School, so Suppy signed up his crew for the two-day antiaircraft gunnery school in Cardiff, to learn how to tear down, repair, maintain, and fire the Swiss-made 20 mm close-range Oerlikons, as well as the longer-range Swedish 40 mm Bofors. Larsen and his young protégé, the cadet-midshipman Lonnie Dales, joined them, even though both of them had already been to the British Merchant Navy antiaircraft gunnery school in Belfast.
They learned how to identify enemy aircraft, and they practiced simulated shooting. There was a darkened room called the “Dome,” like an IMAX theater six decades ahead of its time. A Bofors simulator was bolted to the floor in the center of the room, and it rocked and rolled as if it were on the deck of a ship at sea, while firing a beam of tracers at a Stuka dive-bomber falling from a movie screen on the ceiling. The scene included sound effects: the thrump of the Bofors cannon at 120 rounds per minute and the scream of the Stukas that terrorized civilians all over Europe.
They moved to a shooting range in a deep green pasture along the Cardiff coast and manned a Marlin machine gun. A Spitfire zoomed from over the water and buzzed them, as they fired blanks from their Marlins at him. “He was a crazy Polish pilot,” said Larsen.
Lonnie Dales had the highest score in the drill, better than Suppiger or any of his nine navy-trained gunners. Lonnie was always quick. The British instructor had never come across any boys from the Deep South before, and he went home wondering if they were all natural shooters like that.
While others chased Newport nightlife—and there wasn’t much until the Yanks started coming—Larsen and Dales pursued learning. They took practical courses such as firefighting, although Larsen already knew something about fires from his experience with the fire in number one hold off Atlantic City in January.
Larsen and Dales also went to navigation school. Larsen was already doing much of the navigating on the Santa Elisa. He had brought his own sextant onto the ship, and always said that if the ship ever went down, the one thing he’d grab (after the photo of Minda and Jan) would be the sextant. It looked like a small crossbow, and he kept it safely stored in its walnut case. He had found it at a secondhand shop in San Pedro in the winter of 1938, before he had gone back to Farsund to go to the Norwegian academy. He was between s
hips at the time, working as a stevedore on the docks, so he had free nights to study navigation and practice using the sextant by sighting the stars over the dark ocean.
Navigation was usually one of the second mate’s duties on a merchant ship, but Larsen had the task on the Santa Elisa. He was good at it, and Captain Thomson trusted him. It was a gift for a captain to have a third mate like Larsen, with his versatility, reliability, sobriety, and self-discipline.
The third mate was in charge of one of the four lifeboats. Larsen had worked with his twenty-two-man lifeboat in Belfast, when he and Lonnie Dales had rowed across the lough to visit Dales’s relatives, but now there was more time for drills with the men assigned to the boat. They raced to lower it and learned to maneuver it; some of the men were British soldiers, nonswimmers who didn’t even know how to row a boat. Dales was assigned to another boat, but he helped Larsen. There wasn’t much about rowing a boat that the eighteen-year-old didn’t know.
They rode the train together to London, where they met a couple of Royal Australian Air Force pilots, who flew Sunderland flying boats on U-boat patrols out of Plymouth Harbour. The Aussies invited Larsen and Dales along one night, and although they didn’t spot any enemy submarines, the Aussies showed them the drill. They cut their engines and glided the big plane, then shined the spotlights on the water. “If there were a U-boat down there,” said one of the Aussies, “I’d pull on this cable and release those depth charges under the wings, and hope to straddle it with the splashes. A perfect shot would crush the sub like a tin of peaches.”
Larsen also visited the American consul in Cardiff and got some good news. Five hundred and twenty-five dollars had been deducted from the account he had established for the purpose of getting Minda and Jan out of Norway; a ticket had been purchased for the passage of one adult and one child on a ship to New York. That was all he could find out. It didn’t mean they were really on their way, but it was reason for hope, at least.
