At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  Roger Hill lay on his back on the hot steel bridge of the Ledbury, wearing his striped rugby shirt and studying the dive-bombers in the sky. When a Stuka pitched down at his destroyer, he would shout to the helmsman, “Hard over port!” or “Hard over starboard!” or “Full for’ard!” or “Full back!” It was a deadly game of dodgebomb, as the destroyer danced between the splashes and heaved on the swells of the explosions.

  It was also a quick-draw contest, mano a mano between destroyer captain and dive-bomber pilot. The pilot moves first, and it’s the captain’s duel to lose. He needs to watch the falling black bombs long enough to judge their trajectory, but not so long his ship can’t respond to avoid them. If his shouted order is quick enough and correct, and the destroyer breaks sharply enough, he can dodge the bomb with the ship’s name on it. Winning is defined by survival and rewarded by the chance to dodge the next stick of bombs.

  Under the falling bombs, the gunner at an Oerlikon virtually wears the cannon. He raises and lowers the long barrel with his shoulders, which are pressed into C-shaped supports, and moves it from side to side by pushing and pulling on a bar with hand grips. “The controls were like the handlebars on a motorcycle,” said Lonnie Dales, “and the trigger was like the brake lever, which you squeezed with your right hand.”

  “The gun was mounted on a trunnion, allowing an elevation of some eighty-five degrees and only limited by the gunner’s ability to crouch low enough in his buckled-in position,” added Frank Pike. “If the gunner was tall enough, he could get on tiptoe to depress the barrel below horizontal, aiming at an E-boat. The gun was rotated by the gunner moving his feet sideways, and there were stops fitted to the turret to prevent the gun being aimed inboard. Sighting was through a ring sight consisting of concentric circles with the outer circles giving a guide for deflection shooting at a plane crossing in front.”

  Sixty rounds filled a magazine, with each cartridge greased by human hands and inserted into the cannister in alternating order: tracer, armor-piercing, incendiary, and solid. The shells were as thick as a deck ape’s thumb and twice as long, and were squeezed onto a spiral track. The magazine weighed thirty pounds and was lifted onto the shoulders of one loader by the other, then clipped into the breech by both of them. Because the Oerlikon fired at a rate of 450 rounds per minute, an excited gunner could use up a magazine in eight seconds, so they were instructed to fire in bursts of no more than three seconds. Any longer than that, and the barrels got red hot anyhow. According to the manual, loaders wearing asbestos gloves were to swap hot barrels for cool ones, which were kept alongside the gun. But reality was different. “We never had time to replace the barrels,” said Dales.

  As the Oerlikon fired away, the brass casings streamed out of the gun and clattered onto the bridge, making a golden pile that rolled over the deck like flaming oil on water. When the spent shells got so thick the loaders couldn’t walk around anymore, they were shoveled up and tossed over the side.

  Stuka pilots were sometimes teenagers, like many of the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots. They were all daring, but if the British boys were dashing, the Italians were wild and the Germans steely. It took one trait or the other to fly a Stuka. They tried to get as close to their target as possible. They squirmed their Stukas through silent streams of red and gold tracer from the Oerlikons and Bofors and dodged bursts of flak from the pom-poms that rattled their planes and ripped holes in them. The steeper the dive, the lower the exposure to antiaircraft fire, because guns from the target ship couldn’t point straight up. And the other ships’ guns couldn’t easily hit a plane falling at more than 350 miles per hour.

  Thirty Ju 88s and twelve Stukas were over the ships now. “Personally, I found this the most unpleasant moment of the whole operation,” admitted the BBC’s Anthony Kimmins. “The combination of recent events, the fact that it was nightfall, and the determination of these dive-bombers made it all rather eerie.”

  “Down they came, lower and lower,” wrote Dickens, on the Dorset. “The convoy put up an absolutely terrific barrage of fire, but still the swine came on, screeching louder and louder; when they let go their bombs, one could even see them coming straight for us. The roar and rattle of ack-ack guns, the incessant whistling of bombs and aircraft, the ghastly rending of crashes of torpedo hits made the whole thing like a bad dream.”

  “This was the most concentrated attack of all,” said Ensign Suppiger on the Santa Elisa. “Three more merchant ships were hit by bombs. One ship astern of us was hit, exploded violently, and burst into flames. A Junkers 88 dropped a stick of bombs on us, again straddling the ship.”

  “A bomber drops a stick of 500-pounders so close to our port bow that I can almost reach out and touch them,” said the engineer Ed Randall. “As he cuts away from us, a seaman picks up a monkey wrench and lets fly at him with a beautiful side-arm delivery. I feel like telling him not to be a damn fool, throwing away equipment like that, but I know how helpless he feels, and I say, ‘Nice try.’ He grins sheepishly.”

  The gunners on the bow and the bridge of the Santa Elisa got soaked by the splashes, cooling them off under their woolen antiflash hoods and long gloves. “Thanks!” they yelled at the Huns in the Junkers, as the hot barrels of their guns hissed clouds of steam.

  Apparently, the gunners on the Santa Elisa had a reputation. “They enthusiastically blazed away at everything that crossed their sights,” according to one report. The Santa Elisa’s shooters were hardly alone on that score, but because the ship was American, their eager trigger fingers seemed to be the typical Yank thing.

  The other American freighter, Almeria Lykes, was also doing some serious shooting. Her Bofors gunner had shot down two enemy planes, and the gun’s barrel had been worn smooth from all the firing. A twenty-year-old manned one of the Oerlikons on the bridge and in the middle of this dusk attack had shouted these memorable instructions to his loader: “Get a bucket of water, Bud, the barrel’s melting and there’s more of the bastards coming!”

  Larsen was at his Oerlikon on the forward port bridge wing of the Santa Elisa, his two loaders hefting the magazines and snapping them into the breech. He’d been at the gun for most of the day, from the first attack at dawn until this one at dusk, despite the strain on his legs, back, shoulders, and neck, as well as the heat under his feet and assault on his eardrums. But he wasn’t about to leave the gun tub. He’d been hungry for kills from the moment the ship left Brooklyn.

  “Fred, one of my closest friends aboard the Santa Elisa, had good reason to seek revenge against the Germans, in addition to self-preservation,” said Jack Follansbee. “His wife and small son had been in Norway when the Nazis invaded that country, and they were still there. He kept a picture of his beautiful wife on the desk in his cabin.

  “I asked him why he spent so much time at the gun, and he said, ‘Jack, I am just so mad at those damn Germans. They have my Minda.’”

  A mile above the Santa Elisa, a German spotted her bridge through the large greenhouse canopy of his Stuka. There were ten items on his checklist, things that had to be done before he began his dive. Landing flaps, elevator trim, rudder trim, and airscrew pitch all had to be set in the cruise position. The contact altimeter had to be switched on and set to the bomb-release altitude. The supercharger had to be set to automatic. Then he had to pull the throttle back, close the cooler flaps, and open the dive brakes.

  This final step nosed the Stuka over into its dive toward the Santa Elisa.

  “In order to judge the steepness of the dive, there were lines marked on the starboard side of the canopy, which when aligned with the horizon indicated a dive angle of up to ninety degrees,” said Captain Brown of the RAF. “Now, a dive angle of ninety degrees is a pretty palpitating experience, for it always feels as if the aircraft is over vertical and is bunting. But as the speed builds up, the nose of the Ju 87 is used as the aiming mark. All this while terra firma is rushing closer, with apparently suicidal rapidity.”

  If the German had any such
thoughts of death, they were misplaced. His threat was not terra firma, nor the sea, nor the cold steel deck of a ship. It was an angry Norwegian gunman who was taking the war personally. If the fight between freighter and dive-bomber got down to mano a mano, this time the pilot didn’t have a prayer.

  Larsen stared the Stuka down, through the concentric circles of his scope, as the 500-kilo bomb on the plane’s belly raced toward his bull’s-eye. Tracer fire streamed from the other ships and slipped beyond the Stuka, disappearing in diminishing gold streaks into the darkening sky, like hundreds of shooting stars traveling in reverse. The young pilot watched them whizzing past his wings, his heart beating like the thump of a Bofors as he desperately waited for the red light on the altimeter to flash so he could whack the knob that would release his bombs and pull his plane out of the dive that seemed as though it would never end.

  Larsen held his fire until he was sure he couldn’t miss. He never went off half cocked about anything. The Stuka kept diving. Larsen kept waiting.

  When it was time to shoot, he was calm and cold. He squeezed the trigger in his right hand.

  This one’s for Minda.

  He watched his tracers silently speed between the circles in his sight. It was nearly night, and the small dark Stuka in the scope looked more like a bat than a bomber. As the tracers met their target at top dead center of the concentric circles, the Stuka flashed like a bulb in an old camera. Chunks of German steel scattered into the evening sky, and red flames streamed like blood over the fuselage, charring the swastika on the Stuka’s tail.

  “Third Mate Fred Larsen, stationed at a 20mm Oerlikon gun amidships, shot down a Stuka at about 1,000 yards range,” reported Ensign Suppiger. “It crashed into the sea on our starboard beam, about a ship’s length off.”

  The dive that the pilot thought would never end had ended, about five hundred feet short of his target.

  COLLECTION OF MRS. M. LARSEN

  When Fred Larsen was three years old, he lost his father, mother, a sister, grandfather, and grandmother to the global flu pandemic. He was sent to Norway to be raised by an uncle, who died when Larsen was ten. He went to sea at seventeen, and never looked back.

  COLLECTION OF MRS. M. DALES

  Lonnie Dales, an all-American boy from rural Georgia, was born brave. He boarded the SS Santa Elisa at eighteen, fresh out of the new U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, and was assigned to an Oerlikon rapid-fire cannon on the bridge, under the mentoring eye of Third Officer Fred Larsen.

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  Larsen attended mariners’ college in Norway, where he married Minda, the farm girl who stole his heart. He returned to sea in the summer of 1939. On April 9, 1940, their first wedding anniversary, Germany invaded and occupied Norway. Nazis came by sea, their ships looming off Norway’s rugged coast. Minda and Jan—the infant son Fred had never seen—were trapped.

  COLLECTION OF MRS. M. LARSEN

  The Gestapo issued Minda an ID. German soldiers filled the streets outside her small apartment. They staggered back to their quarters late at night, loud and drunk, just outside her bedroom window. She held her son to her breast, and whispered in his ear that his father would bring them to America.

  BILL KOOIMAN COLLECTION

  The attack on Pearl Harbor put the U.S. at war with Germany, and U-boats soon began sinking merchant ships along the Atlantic Coast. The Santa Elisa was the target of U-123. In a mystery at sea, the Santa Elisa’s hull was ripped open, and her cargo of fuel ignited. Larsen and the chief mate led the firefight for nearly five hours. When lives were at stake, Larsen was the first to arrive, and the last to leave.

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  More bombs fell on Malta in April and May 1942 than on London during the entire Battle of Britain. Axis planes came in hordes from nearby Sicily. Limestone rubble filled the streets, and Maltese lived in caves as enemy submarines and bombers kept Allied merchant ships from bringing in supplies. With no natural sources for food or water on the arid island, some 270,000 people starved.

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  For the first two weeks after the siege on Malta began, the island’s entire air force consisted of these three overachieving Gloster Gladiator biplanes, called Faith, Hope, and Charity.

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  Night bombing raids were frequent, and the Royal Malta Artillery painted the sky with streaks of white light from antiaircraft fire. The guns could be controlled by one man in a bunker, like a wizard showering the sky with shrapnel and big bangs.

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  The tanks of the RAF planes were filled by cans of aviation fuel carried to Malta at great risk by merchant ships. Enemy pilots often buzzed the airfields and bombed the planes as crews frantically serviced them.

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  Hitler planned an invasion of Malta with Admiral Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German Navy. But at the last minute, he canceled it. “I am a coward at sea,” he said. “It was the greatest mistake of the Axis in the whole war in this theater,” said Admiral Weichold, the German commander in the Mediterranean.

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  The Ohio steamed from Texas to Glasgow, where she was turned over to a British crew, and a new master, Dudley Mason, was assigned.

  With Malta facing capitulation to the Axis, Prime Minister Churchill met with FDR and borrowed the SS Ohio. The Texas Company ship was the biggest and fastest tanker in the world. She was Malta’s last hope, because there was no survival without the 107,000 barrels of oil carried in her thirty-three honeycombed tanks for antiaircraft generators on Malta and the Royal Navy submarines hunting Rommel’s supply ships.

  THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE, KEW

  The Operation Pedestal convoy sometimes stretched ten miles wide at sea. The Ohio, the Santa Elisa, and twelve more freighters were defended by five aircraft carriers, two battleships, seven cruisers, and thirty-two destroyers, plus oilers, corvettes, minesweepers, motor launches, tugboats, and nine submarines patrolling nearby waters. As the ships passed from the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea, Admiral Neville Syfret, commander of the fleet, sent them a message: “Remember that the watchword is: THE CONVOY MUST GO THROUGH.”

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  Operation Pedestal was top secret, but it was too big to hide. This Italian reconnaissance photo, taken after the convoy passed into the Mediterranean Sea, has ships marked for attack.

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  Warning communication is soon given, urgently flashed from ship to ship….

  THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE, KEW

  The aircraft carrier Eagle, serving the British Empire since 1918, was blindsided by three torpedoes from U-73. She listed to port, dumping the planes off her flight deck, and sank in eight minutes, taking 231 men down with her. Larsen and Dales watched from their battle stations on the bridge of the Santa Elisa—the same point of view as this photo, taken from a destroyer. “It was a pathetic sight to see as the Eagle rolled over. In a matter of minutes she was gone,” said Dales.

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  Then the air attacks began on the freighters. There were at least 540 Axis bombers and fighters on Sardinia and Sicily, all focused on sinking the fourteen merchant ships carrying vital fuel, ammunition, and food to Malta. The enemy planes attacked at all times of the day, as hundreds of guns from the convoy fought them off. “The din was unholy,” said the Santa Elisa’s engineer.

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  The Junkers Ju 87—Stuka for short—was capable of diving vertically at the ships, and sometimes did so. This Stuka is dropping its total payload of 700 kilograms: two 50-kilo bombs from each wing, and one 500-kilo bomb from the fuselage.

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  Larsen and Dales each triggered a 20-millimeter Oerlikon rapid-fire cannon on the port brid
ge wing of the Santa Elisa. Larsen shot down a Stuka dive-bomber from 1,000 yards.

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  A bomb landing near a freighter could blow a hole in its steel hull. The merchant ships were often surrounded and sometimes obscured by huge explosive splashes. Here, a freighter is near-missed; later she would be sunk by a direct hit.

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  A twin-engine Ju 88 heavy bomber passes over a cruiser after having dropped its bombs on the convoy.

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  Near the Sicilian Narrows, Italian submarines waited; the Axum fired four torpedoes and hit two cruisers (sinking one) and the queen bee of the convoy, the tanker Ohio. This photo was taken at the moment of impact. At their battle stations on the port bridge wings of the Santa Elisa, Larsen and Dales got a face full of the torpedoed, flaming Ohio. “A tremendous black cloud rose on our port beam,” said Dales. “We could feel the heat. I saw men on deck and the black smoke swallowed them up.” This torpedo explosion blasted a 24-by-27-foot hole in the hull. The Ohio fell behind the convoy, but the smoldering tanker resumed steaming toward Malta, ever so slowly.

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  In this enemy photograph of the convoy under attack, the Santa Elisa is seen in the center, guns blazing, as an Italian SM.79 torpedo bomber keeps its distance.

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  Nighttime E-boat ambushes shattered sleepless sailors’ nerves. Spooked gunners fired into the blackness. The loader of Lonnie Dales’ Oerlikon was shot through the neck and killed by an E-boat machine gun; Dales loaded the gun himself and blew up the E-boat. But a second E-boat put a torpedo into the Santa Elisa.