At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  “There was fire everywhere,” said Larsen. “Two British Army radio operators were running up and down and couldn’t get out, because fire was all over the deck. I grabbed an emergency light and led them up to the wheelhouse. It was a mess. Windows broken and water on the deck. I think I heard the abandon ship signal, and I grabbed my sextant and went to my boat station. I was in charge of the number two boat on the port side.

  “The two Army soldiers got out on the starboard wing of the bridge deck and tried to get in the number one lifeboat, but the tackle wasn’t released correctly, and she dumped over in the water. Some fool had tied the pelican hook with a knot.”

  Larsen saw that the captain was having trouble launching the fifty-man number four lifeboat on the deck below him, so he ran down a ladder to help.

  “Someone in the confusion had cranked the davits back in, after they had been cranked out and ready for lowering,” he said. “Someone else had commenced lowering the boat and it landed in the gutter. With the help of some men we managed to tighten up the tackles and get the boat clear.”

  Captain Thomson shouted to Larsen that he had forgotten about his dog, so Larsen ran to the skipper’s cabin. “I think he was already gone,” he said. “The water was a foot deep in the captain’s quarters. I tried like hell to find him but it was too late. I think he had already drowned.”

  Larsen scrambled back up to his lifeboat, where he found that the men from the balzupped launch of the number one lifeboat had climbed up the slippery slope of the listing bridge and jumped into his number two boat.

  “The whole boat was loaded with people, and nobody was doing anything about lowering it. So I unlashed the trapping gear and started to lower the boat. An ordinary seaman showed up and helped me, and we released the scramble net and climbed down it into the lifeboat.

  “When I got down in there, soon as I got in the boat, the two radio operators, with their heavy army boots on, they had come from the other side because their boat got tangled up and tossed everything in the water; and they were coming down the scramble net, and they figure the boat’s gonna leave without them, so they jump from the scramble net and landed right on top of me. Shoved me right down in the bottom of the boat. I was bending over to release a lever at the bottom of the boat, and these two guys drop on top of me. Luckily I had my steel helmet on, because they would have knocked me silly. So I’m laying in the bottom of the boat with guys on top of me, and I hear someone say, ‘Hey, isn’t the deck officer in this boat?’

  “‘I’m down here! Here I am!’”

  Larsen’s back had been fractured by the impact of the soldiers in their heavy boots, but there was no time for pain. Nor was there time for Ensign Suppiger’s problems. Suppy had dropped his .45-caliber pistol, and the second engineer had picked it up, but Larsen took it from the engineer.

  Said Larsen, “I held the .45 automatic up in the air and I said, ‘Calm down! Let’s get this show on the road!’ And we took off. So with a few orders and waving the pistol, we got the lifeboat away.”

  According to Suppiger, the number two lifeboat had been lowered into the water directly under the overboard discharge from the ship, and it was rapidly being flooded; he and some others tried to push it away, but it wouldn’t move.

  “Then some people jumped out of the boat into #4 boat, which had been successfully launched astern of us,” he said. “I jumped out and attempted to reach #4 boat, but could not leap far enough and fell into the water.”

  Said Larsen, “My boat was so heavy loaded, I had at least twenty-eight men aboard a twenty-two-man boat, so I rowed toward the captain and asked him if he had room for some of my men. They all wanted to get in the captain’s boat. I had to control them by holding the pistol at them. I said, ‘Hey: you, you, you and you go into the Captain’s boat. Everybody else stay here.’ A couple of guys jumped anyway, but I let them go.”

  Larsen used Suppiger’s own pistol to order him back into the lifeboat, but Suppy swam on. He furiously stroked to escape the burning gasoline as the ship’s propeller, spinning slowly and skimming the water, missed his head by about two feet, he said. He drifted away and found himself 1,000 yards astern of the ship. “I shouted as loud as I could, and in about an hour’s time number four lifeboat, which contained Captain Thomson, made its way toward the direction of my voice and picked me up.”

  “The water wasn’t calm but it was no big sea,” said Larsen, commanding the unflooded number two boat. “We were picking up crew members. The Navy gun crew was all covered with fuel and shit. And they had been on fire. Some of the gasoline had dropped down on top of them from the number one hatch, and they had been burned very badly, some of them. We picked those guys up out of the water. We couldn’t do much for them. We had loaded hidden whiskey beside the water tanks in the lifeboats, and gave that to them.”

  “When we lifted one Navy gunner aboard, I saw that his face and neck were badly burned,” said Follansbee. “He sat for a while without speaking, then slowly and deliberately, without seeming to address anyone in particular, said, ‘We got cut off when the fire started back aft. Couldn’t get up to the lifeboats. Finally decided to jump. But the gasoline on the water caught fire.’”

  “As the men rowed, I heard a strange sort of whisper starting among them,” said Captain Thomson. “I had never heard anything like it before. I guess it was what you’d call panic. Usually I keep my voice to myself, but this time I stood up in the bow of the boat and said, ‘Listen, you men. If anybody opens his yap, I’ll clout him.’ I guess the men were surprised to hear that kind of talk from me. Anyhow, after that there was silence.”

  The number three lifeboat was the only one to get away without problems, but it too was overloaded. It carried men from the aborted number one boat, as well as Dales, Follansbee, and Randall, and had also picked up some of the burned men in the water. “Suddenly,” said Randall, “we hear a shout: ‘Help! Sharks are after me!’”

  It was Frank Pike, the British gunner, who had been sleeping on the stern and had leaped overboard with some others because they were separated from the lifeboats by the wall of flame. “The day before we were torpedoed, we had seen several sharks on the surface, and I was reminded of these when I felt something brush against my leg,” he said. “The next time I felt it, I took a swipe at it with my jack knife—and speared a submerged cardboard carton, to my great relief.”

  The chief mate, Englund, a Swede, was in charge of number three lifeboat. “Row like hell!” he had shouted as it was released. “She could blow up any minute!”

  A sense of panic followed the chief mate’s lead and swept over the boat. The British soldier George Nye remembers the panic ending when Cadet-Midshipman Dales took charge.

  “It was every man for himself,” said Nye, at home in Dartford in 2005. “We’d have tipped the boat over, the way we were going. I don’t remember any of the crew of the Elisa, because I had only been on the boat for a few days, having boarded at the Clyde. The only one that stood out in my memory was this lad who stood up in the boat and brought order to chaos. And I thought, what a brilliant young lad of eighteen or nineteen, the same age as me, what a brilliant leader of men he was going to be. He calmed everybody down, including his senior people, officers senior in age and rank. I didn’t know his name, but as long as I live I’ve got a picture of him standing up in the boat and raising his voice—not nasty or anything, but masterly, and everybody did more or less what he told them to do.”

  The destroyer Penn had been helping the destroyer Bramham keep Commodore Venables and the Port Chalmers on the path toward Malta. From a distance, the Penn had seen the flaming E-boat that Lonnie Dales had shot up.

  “At 0430 Oerlikon fire was seen ahead, and then an explosion,” reported the captain of the Penn, Lieutenant Commander J. H. Swain. “Shortly afterward the engine of an E-boat was heard proceeding away from the scene of the explosion. I steered for this point, and as it became light the Santa Elisa was seen to be stopped and on fire.”
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  The three lifeboats from the Santa Elisa were rowing away from their sinking ship. “We had decided we were closer to Pantelleria than any other place, so we started rowing to Pantelleria,” said Larsen.

  Said Follansbee:

  The sun was just climbing above the horizon as one of the men in my boat suddenly pointed astern. “Look you guys! Here comes a warship, or something!”

  A vessel was rapidly bearing down on us from the north.

  “Holy Christ!” another man shouted. “It’s probably a Wop coming out of Sicily!”

  “Looks like a destroyer,” said the Navy gunner with the burns on his face.

  “Maybe they’ll fire on us!” someone exclaimed.

  “Shut up, goddammit!”

  The British Lieutenant Commander who was our Liaison Officer stood up in the lifeboat and watched the approaching vessel intently.

  “It’s a destroyer, all right,” he announced finally. “I can almost make out her flag now…Yes, I believe…Yes, by God, she is…she’s one of ours!”

  The Santa Elisa survivors scrambled up the nets that were lowered over the side of the Penn, as an officer on the bridge shouted through a megaphone, “Make it snappy down there! We can’t sit here any longer!”

  As the last man boarded the destroyer, Captain Swain said to Captain Thomson, “We’ve got to cut your boats loose now. Is there anything else you want out of them?”

  “No,” said Thomson, “cut them loose.”

  The destroyer leaped forward, and the lifeboats twisted and turned in its wake. Follansbee suddenly remembered the rum he had hidden in the biscuit tins and kicked himself for leaving it behind.

  “As the Penn was steaming away from the Santa Elisa, down in the bows and burning fiercely, the dawn bombing attack came in right on schedule,” said Follansbee. “One of the Penn’s gunners shouted into his phones, ‘Enemy aircraft coming in on the starboard quarter!’

  “There’s one now! Right over the Elisa!” shouted another crewman.

  A Ju 88 dived on the abandoned Santa Elisa. The Italian pilot had been saving a 500-kilogram bomb for her. “We could see the ship with its propeller partially out of the water,” said Larsen. “The airplane came in and dropped a bomb on the foredeck and she blew up. She was fully loaded with explosives. We were about a half a mile away. Pieces from the ship’s explosion rained all around us.”

  “The ship was seen to blow up in a cloud of smoke and sink almost immediately,” reported Barnes. “The officers and men behaved excellently under a very trying ordeal and did everything possible to get the ship to her destination.”

  “The smoke cleared away,” said Follansbee. “The Santa Elisa had disappeared completely.”

  “There wasn’t a smear left of her,” said Larsen.

  CHAPTER 37 •••

  WAIMARAMA

  In the four hours after midnight, E-boats had sunk one cruiser (Manchester) and four freighters (Glenorchy, Wairangi, Almeria Lykes, and Santa Elisa), while damaging another cruiser (Kenya) and a fifth freighter (Rochester Castle). The previous evening, bombers had sunk three freighters (Deucalion, Clan Ferguson, and Empire Hope) and damaged the Brisbane Star, while the submarine Axum had sunk one cruiser (Cairo), blasted another back to Gibraltar (Nigeria), and crippled the Ohio. The aircraft carrier Eagle had been sunk by U-73 the previous day, and the carrier Indomitable was mortally wounded and staggering home.

  From the bridge of the destroyer Ashanti at daybreak, Admiral Burrough could see just three merchantmen. Rochester Castle was in front despite flooding in the number three hold, with Waimarama and Melbourne Star right behind.

  Ohio was five miles back, still following the destroyer Ledbury at 12 knots—“I consider the greatest credit is due to her Master for this magnificent effort,” said Burrough. Port Chalmers was another five miles back, with Commodore Venables finally lifting his eyes from the rearview mirror, while Dorset was on her own course farther north. Brisbane Star was hugging the coast, south of Point “R,” where the rest of the convoy had turned southeast, making slow progress with the hole through her bows.

  The RAF flew off Beaufighters from Malta at dawn. On the Ashanti, radio operators had worked all night to patch a system to reach the pilots, and a lieutenant nicknamed “Flags” repeatedly called out in code for nearly an hour, listening intently all the while. Flags was excited by a cryptic answer, until he realized he was talking to the cruiser Charybdis, steaming alongside. A torrent of blue words spouted from his mouth as he slammed down the receiver. Meanwhile, Admiral Da Zara’s warships—three heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and eight destroyers—were on their way back to Italy. But the submarine HMS Unbroken, under Lieutenant Commander Alastair Mars, had anticipated their course and was waiting for them near the island of Stromboli. Mars was a submarine ace. He launched four torpedoes, badly damaging the heavy cruiser Bolzano— she was towed aground and burned until the next day—and blowing the bows off the light cruiser Attendolo, knocking them both out of the war. The destroyers dropped 105 depth charges and kept Unbroken submerged for ten hours, but Mars surfaced that evening and returned a hero to the “Fighting Tenth” at Malta.

  At 12,843 tons, Waimarama was the biggest of the thirteen freighters—half again the size of the Santa Elisa, at 8,379 tons. She was also carrying the most aviation fuel. Flimsies were stacked on the afterdeck by the tens of thousands, on top of number six hold, where there were another two or three thousand tons of high-octane gas in more flimsies.

  The cardboard containing the flimsies on deck had been ripped off by the saltwater splashes of near misses. The silver cans sparkled in the morning sun, calling to the bombers, which had arrived right on time. There were twenty-four Ju 88s flying at 5,000 feet, and three of them answered the call of the flashing flimsies.

  First one Junkers dropped into a dive, then another, and then the third, with about 500 feet between them. They zoomed at the pile of flimsies at 300 mph from 60 degrees. The Bofors boomed without result, and the Oerlikons’ tracers snaked past the planes as if their target were the sun. The pilots’ focus on the bridge of the Waimarama was absolute. The first Junkers dived to 1,000 feet and missed with three bombs.

  The second Junkers dived lower, and let go five 500-pounders. Two bombs landed abaft the bridge, and a third fell on the hatch of hold number four, which contained torpedoes and mines. The fourth bomb landed on the stack of flimsies.

  The German in the third Junkers was still diving, and his plane was blown away by the blast.

  John Jackson was a radio operator on the forward bridge of the Waimarama. “The ship was immediately enveloped in flames and on looking to the starboard I could see nothing but a solid mass of flames,” he said. “I looked across to the port side and could not even see the gun mounting which was about two yards away, owing to the solid wall of flames.”

  Jackson ran through the bridge deckhouse, down a ladder and over debris and dead bodies and pieces of bodies, through the flames and past the burning and screaming men, and jumped into the only patch of sea that wasn’t on fire. He wore a life vest but couldn’t swim. There were about twenty men in the water. They were the only survivors. More than a hundred men were dead or soon would be.

  The bridge crumbled as if imploded. The tips of the funnels could be seen in the smoke as they collapsed and fell into the fire. Flaming flimsies shot into the air like skyrockets. Thick black smoke rose into the blue morning sky and took the shape of some giant grim-reaping spider, as if rising over the Mediterranean from the world of Earthsea.

  Freddie Treves was scarcely seventeen years old, a cadet like Lonnie Dales. He had entered the Pangbourne Nautical College at thirteen, graduated in June, and reported to the Waimarama on July 27. His total time at sea was sixteen days. Operation Pedestal was his baptism by fire.

  The ship’s master, Captain R. S. Pearce, had teamed his youngest sailor with the oldest salt, Bowdory. “Bowdory was a pantryman,” said Treves, “he worked in the kitchen. He was sixty-three,
a lovely old man, he looked after me. His two sons were fighting in the war, and he had rejoined the merchant navy against his wife’s wishes. He said, ‘If my sons are going to this war, I’m going too.’

  “He and I were put in the only part of the ship which had no explosives in it, in the fo’c’sle. It was the safest part of the ship, for the oldest man and the youngest man. It was full of bags of lime. When the bombs came down, Bowdory fell on me to protect me. We were both blown through a hatch onto the bags of lime. I don’t know what happened next, except I forgot the rule about jumping over the side that’s listing and closest to the water, so I jumped off the wrong side. Bowdory must have jumped too. It was a long jump. About sixty feet, maybe forty feet, I don’t know. I looked up at the ship. The flames were rising into the sky. I have a photograph that shows the smoke going up about six thousand feet. It was a pretty big explosion.”

  Treves was wearing a special lining inside his coveralls called kapok, supposedly the latest thing in flotation. His mother had bought it in London and made him promise he would wear it at all times. Which he did, despite the heat and the merciless teasing of his shipmates because he looked like a little boy in a stiff snowsuit.

  As Treves swam away from the burning Waimarama, he saw John Jackson.

  “He was struggling, he couldn’t swim. He had come down from the bridge in some way, I never found out how, and he couldn’t swim, so I got him over to a bit of wood. I had a whistle, because I was in charge, as the officer, part of the fo’c’sle group, and I tried to calm people down, and gave him a bit of wood to hold onto. He said he was okay then, and I said just kick your feet, hold onto the log.”

  “I am quite sure that I definitely owe my life to this cadet,” Jackson reported.

  Treves looked up and saw Bowdory on a Carley raft.