At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  The flying boat landed just downriver from where the Ohio was moored in Stobross Quay. Churchill rushed off to catch his waiting train, in a hurry to get back to London and go straight to work, but he should have asked for a motorboat to take him to the Ohio so he could plant a good-luck kiss on her sweet, shapely bow. The fate of Malta, and maybe the free world, was riding on the American tanker.

  PART IV •••

  OPERATION PEDESTAL

  CHAPTER 16 •••

  MASTER DUDLEY MASON

  On the Fourth of July, Fred Larsen and Lonnie Dales were sent by Captain Thomson down to the Newport police station to bail some of the crew of the Santa Elisa out of jail. After an excellent lunch of filet mignon and blazing plum pudding on the ship, a few of the men had been led to believe by a flammable mix of patriotism and pub hopping that it would be a good idea to replace the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes on the mast of a destroyer that had once been American and was now British. Not surprisingly, the bout between the Royal Navy and the drunken American merchant mariners on the Welsh pier did not end with a win for the Yankees.

  As Larsen and Dales were dealing with the delicate details of the release, Larsen’s sister, Christina, was waiting on the South Street Pier in New York City for Minda and Jan to come down the gangway of the SS Drottningholm, which had just berthed. But they didn’t get off the ship.

  In the Clyde, the SS Ohio had been taken by tugboats up the narrow river into Glasgow, where she was berthed at the King George VI dock, in a state of political limbo. FDR had agreed to loan the Ohio to the British, and Churchill had successfully persuaded Admiral King to go along with the deal, but the issue of whether the Ohio would sail under a U.S. or U.K. flag had not been addressed in the haste of that weekend in Washington. The crux of the matter was that the American crew knew how to operate the tanker’s sophisticated systems, and if a British crew were to take over, they would have precious few days to learn. The Americans were housed in Glasgow hotels while diplomats dickered and officials of the U.S. War Shipping Administration and British Ministry of War Transport exchanged cables.

  The Texas Company’s top operating executive, T. E. Buchanan, wrote a memo to company president Rodgers saying, “I am sure the War Shipping Administration agent feels the same as we do about changing flag, but it is the Navy’s wish that the British handle this particular problem for which the S.S. ‘Ohio’ is needed.” Meaning that both the Texas Company and the British preferred the experienced American crew to stay with the ship but Admiral King wouldn’t go along with it: if the goddam Brits wanted the Ohio so badly, let them crew it.

  Meanwhile, the Ohio’s Norwegian-American master, Snowy Petersen, was clinging to the helm. He had been at sea for nearly half a century, since the day he had left Norway on a square-rigged sailing vessel in 1896, and had been with the Texas Company for thirty-two years, most of them as a master. He’d been waiting for a ship like the Ohio all his seafaring life, and he wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. He told the Brits they’d have to pry his cold dead hands off the wheel, as only a man who’d been washed overboard by a hurricane and swum three miles to shore can. It didn’t matter where she was going—Murmansk, Malta, wherever—he insisted on commanding her. He demanded to know upon whose authority the Ohio was being turned over to the Brits.

  “I’m afraid it’s the highest authority possible, Captain,” replied the agent for Lord Leathers, adding that a deal had been made between the president and the prime minister, so changes to the scheme were not bloody likely.

  The controversy was finally settled after three weeks, on July 10. The disappointed American crew was told to pack up and board the SS Monterey, a troop transport ship bound for New York.

  “There was quite a scramble, considering the amount of gear a person can collect in two years on board ship,” said the second assistant engineer, J. T. Murphy. “Not having enough bags, the chief mate turned the deck department to making canvas seabags. There was no formal ceremony in turning the ship over to the British. The American flag was hauled down and replaced with a British flag.”

  On July 15, a “Hush Most Secret” message from the Admiralty made it official: “It is intended to run a convoy of 13 merchant ships and one tanker to Malta from the U.K., leaving about the 2nd August, arriving about the 13th August.”

  The convoy would be called Operation Pedestal. The merchant ships were to be escorted by two Royal Navy battleships, four aircraft carriers, seven cruisers, and twenty-five destroyers, along with support ships such as oilers, corvettes, and minesweepers. The thirteen freighters would carry aviation fuel, and the tanker Ohio would carry fuel oil, diesel, and kerosene. Operation Pedestal must succeed at all costs. Malta might be lost to the Axis if Pedestal failed, and if Malta were lost, the Persian Gulf oil would be within Hitler’s reach.

  “As you know we live a hand-to-mouth existence and our future, indeed our fate, depends on the success of the next convoy,” Governor Gort wrote to General Ismay in late July. “Aviation spirit remains our Achilles’ Heel and the Middle East Defence Committee consider it vital that aircraft operating from Malta should attack ships crossing the Mediterranean…. If we run out of aviation spirit and can no longer operate fighters, the chances of getting another convoy into Malta will be very doubtful.”

  Dudley William Mason, age forty, the new master of the SS Ohio, carefully cocked his master’s cap at a jaunty angle over his right eyebrow, like a listing ship. He often wore a bemused little smile, tilted up toward the brim of his hat, like an accessory to balance the look. His dry sense of humor kept his children in stitches. Nothing about him was dark except his eyes, shadowed as if something kept him up at night. He was shy but firm and was said to have a quick and instinctive decisiveness, sharp attention to detail, and a record for making the right calls.

  Mason had been a merchant seaman for twenty-two years, all of them with the Eagle Oil and Shipping Company, whose fleet included about thirty tankers; the Ministry of War Transport had assigned the Ohio to Eagle, on a what was called a “bareback charter.” But Mason didn’t have much experience as a master. He was listed in the ship’s records as “First Mate (master),” as if it were a pending or temporary thing, until he proved himself.

  He had fallen for the sea as a teenager living on the north Devon coast, at the edge of the Atlantic. He had joined the British Merchant Navy at eighteen, with enough education thanks to night school to be an officer apprentice. He had risen to first mate by age thirty, but his career had stalled at that rank for ten years, until he was made acting master of the Empire Pearl, being built at the Sunderland shipyard on the North Sea. His humor had been challenged by his debut as a master. After the champagne bottle smashed against the Pearl’s bow at her launch, she slipped off the cradles as she slid down the ways and was wedged for three weeks.

  The Empire Pearl was nearly as big as the Ohio, but she could do only 12 knots. On her second run, from Edinburgh to Aruba for a load of fuel, Mason had gotten mixed up in the middle of Operation Drumbeat. Off Cape Hatteras on January 24, 1942, he had heard the distress call of Empire Gem, a sister ship carrying 10,600 tons of gasoline. A torpedo from U-66 had set off an inferno that only two crew members survived.

  The Empire Pearl’s owners had sold her to Nortraship, the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission—the government in exile in London, more or less—so Mason had been sitting at home in Surrey since spring, waiting for his next assignment. A more experienced master had been scheduled to take the Ohio, but something had happened, and at the last minute Mason was called.

  “Captain Mason was specially selected for this job, despite the fact that he is our most junior master, on account of his proven initiative and efficiency, and splendid fortitude,” said Eagle Oil and Shipping.

  Mason was told to hurry up to Glasgow, but nothing more. He left on a train from London that afternoon, having no idea of the importance of the mission awaiting him.

  J. T. “Jimmy” Murphy
, a young American and former second assistant engineer of the Ohio, had volunteered to stay behind in Glasgow to orient the new chief engineer, James Wyld. For three days, Murphy gave Wyld a crash course on the operation and maintenance of the steam turbines and boilers, with all their pipes, pumps, gauges, and controls. Wyld had been an engineer with Eagle Oil and Shipping for more than half his forty years, but he’d never seen anything so complex and dazzling as the vast engine rooms of the Ohio.

  The Royal Navy had studied all the things that had broken on the Kentucky but shouldn’t have, and a senior engineer came aboard Ohio to make modifications. Both of the steam turbine engines—a 6,000-rpm high-pressure and a 4,500-rpm low-pressure engine—were mounted on rubber bushings to absorb the blow of a near-miss bomb. The steam lines were supported by lumber and cushioned with springs, and their brittle cast-iron fittings were replaced by softer steel ones. Another generator was installed to provide emergency lights and power to the engine room.

  “It was a bloody monster,” said Allan Shaw, at the time a wiry nineteen-year-old ordinary seaman. “It was mounted in the middle of a passageway in the crew’s quarters aft, just over the engine room, so we always cracked our shins on it when we scrambled to battle stations.”

  Sixty-three years later, Shaw would be one of the last two living survivors of the Ohio’s crew. The other would be in a mental institution, to which he was committed soon after the horrors of Operation Pedestal.

  The ship’s most radical upgrade, designed by Eagle Oil’s chief engineer, was a life support system intended to keep the big tanker afloat even if she had holes in her hull. Using the two big compressors in the engine room, plus a new four-cylinder diesel compressor mounted in a forward hold, air could be fed at 120 pounds per square inch into a 1.5-inch line that ran along the ship’s backbone. Branching off this main line were .75-inch flexible hoses with quick fittings, which could be connected to feed compressed air into the holds. Seawater could be forced by air pressure back out the bomb or torpedo hole it had gushed through. The engineer had invented the system as a salvage technique, to be installed by divers in sunken ships to float them up like a big steel balloon, but using it proactively in the Ohio was a new idea.

  After the modifications in the engine rooms were complete, more guns were added to the existing Oerlikons on each of the two bridge wings: a three-inch, high-angle antiaircraft gun on the bow and a five-inch low-angle gun on the stern. Another pair of Oerlikons was bolted to the port and starboard sides of the poop deck, just forward of the funnel. Two Browning machine-gun placements were put on the foredeck, and a pneumatic launcher for four parachute-and-cable rockets was installed on Monkey Island, a third level welded over the bridge.

  Finally, a big new Bofors 40 mm antiaircraft cannon was placed on a steel platform over the poop deck, aft the funnel. Dive-bombers always attacked from the rear, so the Bofors was the most important gun.

  For nearly a month, as her identity changed conspicuously, speculation over Ohio’s mission stirred debates over pints in pubs all over Glasgow. On the sunny summer afternoon of Friday, July 24, as thousands of people were getting off work and heading for the pubs, tugboats came for the Ohio at the King George VI pier and towed her to the Bowling oil wharf. Half the city of Glasgow was watching as she moved down the River Clyde.

  On July 25, Admiral Weichold, the German commander in chief of the Mediterranean, received an intelligence report that said “A large-scale Allied operation is about to break into the Mediterranean. Large merchantships and fleet units are being fetched from far and wide in preparation.”

  And in London, the Admiralty received a secret message from its spy in Tangier: “Reliable contact reports Germans know about convoy Glasgow to Malta and have detailed aircraft and warships for interception in Mediterranean.”

  None of the captains of Operation Pedestal ships had been informed yet. There were probably more Germans than British who knew about Operation Pedestal to Malta.

  CHAPTER 17 •••

  THE CLYDE

  On July 31, as the Santa Elisa steamed out of the Irish Sea and into the

  Firth of Clyde, Fred Larsen and Lonnie Dales watched the hills of Scotland roll past the pink summer sky, in shades of green and gray. The ship slowed to a stop in Loch Long, and as they let go the anchor, they could see the Ohio moored off the Santa Elisa’s port bow.

  “I know that ship,” Larsen told Dales. “She’s the Ohio. I was on a Texas Company tanker a lot like her, the Louisiana, when she was launched. They made a big deal about her. She’s got a welded hull and big steam turbine engines. That’s a fast, beautiful tanker. I wonder if she’s going to be in a convoy with us.”

  The Ohio lay long and low in the water, silhouetted by the setting sun. Splashed with battleship gray paint and bedecked with guns, she looked little like the shapely, colorful tanker she once had been. Her dull sides slowly got lost in the long dusk and she was soon swallowed by night. But the sweet shape of her bow came back as a full moon rose over the water.

  No one on the Santa Elisa had ever seen a tanker so conspicuously armed. Sailors came on deck for a smoke and a look and wondered aloud what the Ohio might mean to them. They were certain she was there for the same reason they were, whatever that might be. Between the moonlight and flashes from Cloch Point Lighthouse, which had been guiding ships through the Clyde since 1797, they could see other armed freighters anchored nearby, as a dozen more merchantmen had come from Newport, Belfast, and Liverpool.

  Dudley Mason had been master of the Ohio for two weeks now. He had taken care of some details that evening, chores that he believed needed his attention and that he duly entered into the ship’s log:

  6 PM

  A. Byrne (Messman), when questioned concerning not returning dishes to the Galley, freely admitted he intentionally threw those aluminum dishes over the ships side because he did not want to wash them. He stated he was willing to pay for them. The cost of these dishes was 21 shillings each. The Eagle Oil Shipping Co. reserve the right to take any legal proceeding they think justified at a future date in the civil court.

  8 PM

  The entry concerning A. Byrne (Messman) was read over to him & he had no reply to make except he questioned the price of these dishes.

  On the Santa Elisa, Ensign Suppiger was still having trouble with the ammunition. He’d been given the wrong kind of shells for the Oerlikons in Newport, so he had to try to straighten it out while the ship was in the Clyde. The next day a DEMS officer came aboard to inspect the guns, and when Suppiger complained about the ammo, the DEMS officer suggested he go ashore and tell the U.S. Navy liaison officer his problem. When Suppy found the liaison office, he felt compelled to take notes:

  Office consisted of: 1 Lieutenant Commander, 1 Ensign, 3 CPO’s, 1 station wagon, 3 Lt. JG’s, 2 motor launchers, 15 ratings, 1 convertible Packard, and Lots of women and liquor.

  The lieutenant commander was in Edinburgh that Saturday afternoon, but the ensign told Suppiger they could find him at a party later that night, so after a few hours hanging around in the office with Lots of women and liquor, they piled in the station wagon with the three petty officers and went to the party, where they found the lieutenant commander with a girl, and he wasn’t exactly interested in hearing about ammunition problems.

  But on Sunday morning a small barge came alongside the Santa Elisa and loaded 500 rounds of 40 mm shells for the Bofors, 6,000 rounds of .30-caliber for the Browning machine guns, and 3,000 more rounds of the wrong kind of 20 mm shells for the Oerlikons.

  The Royal Navy crew of eight boarded next, led by the ship’s new liaison officer, Lieutenant Commander Barnes. A fifty-foot-long RAF rescue boat came alongside and was lifted out of the water by a boom and loaded onto the forward cargo deck. Otherwise known as a “crash boat,” it would be needed in Malta to pluck shot-down pilots from the sea.

  At 1600 hours that Sunday afternoon, the masters, Royal Navy liaison officers, and radio officers of Operation Pedestal’
s fourteen merchantmen were summoned to a meeting on the heavy cruiser HMS Nigeria, the flagship of Admiral Harold M. Burrough. Burrough had planned Operation Pedestal with Admirals Neville Syfret and A. L. Lyster at the Admiralty, after studying Operation Harpoon and attempting to solve each of the problems that had led to the loss of the Kentucky.

  The masters and officers climbed the Nigeria’s ladders and took seats in the empty aircraft hangar, a big steel box located high amidships that stored the cruiser’s antisubmarine patrol plane. The craggy Burrough introduced himself, tossed a stack of papers on a table with a thump that rang in the metal room, and said, “Gentlemen, it is our great privilege to be chosen to go to the aid of Malta.”

  “For a moment, none of us said a word,” said Captain Thomson. “We knew Malta was at the end of its endurance, and this was the last, desperate attempt to get through. The Admiral might as well have said it was our great privilege to commit suicide. But we all nodded our heads, accepted our orders, and said, ‘Thank you, sir.’”

  For the next two hours, Burrough explained the mission. The thirteen freighters and one tanker would leave the Clyde at 2000 hours that evening, August 2, escorted by a few destroyers, and on the way to Gibraltar they would be joined by about fifty more warships, plus four oilers, two tugboats, and eleven fast minesweepers and motor launches coming from Malta to meet them. It was every fast ship the Royal Navy could scare up, he said, and they had come from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, to see that the merchantmen made it to Malta. The destroyers would rescue the survivors of sinkings, which should be expected. No merchant ship was permitted to slow down for survivors.