At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  Most of the information on the Malta Gladiators, both the men and the machines, came from this visit and the book Faith, Hope and Charity by Kenneth Poolman, an old paperback found, like so many, after searching the Web sites of rare-book sellers. More material in Part II came from Michael Galea’s Malta: Diary of a War and Raiders Passed, by Charles B. Grech, one of the Maltese boys who collected shrapnel like arrowheads during the siege.

  Chapters 8, 9, and 10 were by far the most challenging to write, because they span two years, and there are three or four more unwritten books in there, in particular regarding the bombing of the Illustrious, Admiral Cunningham’s biggest (and maybe only) blunder, which historians have yet to address.

  In using so many sources and voices, it was difficult to reconcile the differences and contradictions, which demanded choices about credibility and probability. These chapters include quotes from autobiographies, memoirs, or diaries by Admirals Cunningham and Weichold and General Dobbie; Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary leader of the Afrika Korps; Admiral Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the German Navy; Admiral Karl Dönitz, the U-boat commander; Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister of foreign affairs; Air Marshal Sir Hugh Lloyd, the RAF’s commanding officer on Malta; Admiral G.W.G. “Shrimp” Simpson, commander of Malta’s 10th Submarine Flotilla; General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff; General Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke), chief of the Imperial General Staff and Churchill’s closest military adviser; Sir Charles Wilson, Churchill’s personal physician, who wrote his memoir as Lord Moran; Elizabeth Layton Nel, Churchill’s young and resolute Canadian secretary; and of course Churchill himself.

  There were also biographical books in the pile, for example of Admiral Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, and of the 10th Submarine Flotilla. And The Italian Navy in World War II by Marc’Antonio Bragadin, the official Italian history, along with The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1940–1943 by Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani—a British and an Italian historian, allies in accuracy. Another invaluable reference was Captain Arthur R. Moore’s A Careless Word…A Needless Sinking, a heavy encyclopedia of all the American merchant ships lost in World War II.

  Among five memoirs by fighter pilots, two were particularly evocative, and they found their way into Part II. Insight and beauty float off the pages of Tattered Battlements by Tim Johnston, DSC, and War in a Stringbag is unique because its author, Charles Lamb, DSO, DSC, bombed Taranto and lived to tell about it and witnessed the brutal bombing of the Illustrious from the air as Stukas swarmed around his shabby biplane and paid him no mind.

  The statement in Chapter 9 from the Luftwaffe pilot who flew into the Royal Malta Artillery box barrage and dropped his bombs prematurely was taken from a letter he wrote after the war to The Times of Malta. With all the aircraft action in Part II, technical books on the planes, such as Aircraft of WWII and Jane’s Fighters of World War II were used. But my favorite was Wings of the Luftwaffe by Captain Eric Brown, the RAF’s chief test pilot, who flew captured German planes and wrote about them as if he were doing road tests for a British car magazine.

  There were many discrepancies in the reports of the number of Axis aircraft involved in the various attacks. But the books Malta: The Hurricane Years, 1940–41 and Malta: The Spitfire Year, 1942 by Christopher Shores and Brian Cull with Nicola Malizia solved most of them. These reporters worked more than ten years to acquire the accurate documents.

  PART III

  ALLIES

  From Malta I flew to London and spent two weeks researching in England, beginning at the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives, where I pored over documents: books, films, audiotapes, cables, and especially Letters of Proceeding, the action reports written by Royal Navy officers and masters of merchant ships. The plot thickened. With each report, questions arose that added two or three more reports to the list. There was far too much information at the National Archives to note or even photocopy during four days there, so I recruited a researcher, Tim Hughes, who caught the detective bug and continued to dig for documents at my request. Tim found pieces of the puzzle into the final chapter.

  Many of the documents we found and examined were declassified by the British government only in 2002. If the reader wonders how the full story of such a significant World War II battle could have been untold for so long, this is part of the answer; also the fact that Tim Hughes looked in places historians had apparently missed, in response to my wondering what was under every rock and my being struck by the heretofore undrawn connections between events.

  Beginning in Chapter 12 with Operation Harpoon, it was those intriguing and often mysterious Letters of Proceeding that defined the convoy stories. They weren’t always accurate, because they were written after the battle and colored by the fog of war; but when there were four or five of them to compare incidents and times and places, reality usually emerged. There were times when I had charts on my desk full of Xs and arrows, a deductive process to find the common fact and reach a small conclusion to complete one sentence. It was slow going.

  The LOPs from Operation Harpoon are an excellent example. Most of the story lies between the rambling lines in the reports of Captain Hardy in the cruiser Cairo, who commanded the convoy; the direct lines of Captain Roberts, master of the tanker SS Kentucky; and the misguided lines of Admiral Harwood, the new C in C of the Mediterranean—with the bottom line coming from the Italian history. Harpoon has been called the “forgotten convoy,” but a better name might be “disowned convoy.” Somebody should write a book about this dramatically balzupped naval action.

  Speaking of balzup, a word that first appears and is explained in Chapter 22 with Operation Bellows, that’s my spelling for “balls-up.” It’s a word that might have been used to death. This is a war story, after all. Balzups are the nature of the beast.

  And speaking of untold stories, there’s a lot about Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers that’s untouched in this book; maybe someday someone will find and tell the whole story. Some of my information on Fellers in Chapter 12 and later came from TNA documents that were secret until 2002, and there were more bits in the books The Battle of Alamein, Trading with the Enemy, The War in the Mediterranean, and The End of the Beginning by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig.

  Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning An Army at Dawn, about Operation Torch, set the stage for the others. In some ways, At All Costs might be seen as a prequel, although decidedly narrower—Pedestal as prequel for Torch. An Army at Dawn provided background for Chapter 13, which was probably the most entertaining chapter to write. What a day that Father’s Day in the White House must have been!

  I read a number of accounts of Churchill’s trip to Washington and Hyde Park in June 1942, and with the messages Tim Hughes found in TNA pertaining to the SS Ohio, in particular the cable cited in Chapter 13, it all fell into place. There’s no record of the points of discussion that Churchill verbally listed with Harry Hopkins and that Hopkins passed on to President Roosevelt, but there’s little doubt that the SS Ohio was among them. Regarding the final sentence of Chapter 13, the order signed by Admiral King, the powerful man behind the scenes in so many World War II naval actions stretching in both directions around the globe, involved more than just the Ohio.

  This version of the rest of that trip to Washington comes primarily from the writings of Churchill, General Brooke, General Ismay, and Sir Charles Wilson, who were all intensely there.

  Still sitting here on my desk are two remarkably detailed six-inch scale models of the SS Santa Elisa and SS Ohio, which I examined so many times that teeny merchant mariners began to appear on their decks. Further descriptions in Chapter 14 of the equipment, weapons, and guns on the Santa Elisa came from her Royal Navy liaison officer’s LOP, as well as the record of Ensign Suppiger, who headed the U.S. Naval Armed Guard.

  Neither Larsen nor Dales wrote a
bout his life, but they passed on a few oral stories to their families. About five years before his death, Larsen had reluctantly sat down for an interview with a fellow from his local New Jersey chapter of the American Merchant Marine Veterans; many of his quotes came from this transcript.

  And in the final year of his life, when he was eighty, he penned a reply to a letter from another veteran, a British Eighth Army soldier named Leonard Fisher, who had been stationed on Malta during the siege and who had read about Larsen and wrote to thank him. “We all felt that this was the end of the road,” said Mr. Fisher. “But when the tanker came into Grand Harbour, you could feel the love that was poured toward you and the crews and those who gave their lives. Today in Malta they still talk of the Santa Marija miracle convoy, and the story of your part in bringing the Ohio home is legend.”

  Larsen never finished his handwritten reply, which ended at twelve pages. Some of what he wrote appears in this book.

  There were fewer words from Lonnie Dales to work with. Marjorie Dales found one good letter, and there was a brief taped telephone interview with Simon Cusens when Dales was quite ill; more of Dales’s quotes came from the two reports he wrote for the merchant marine after the convoy—the first was a required report of the Santa Elisa sinking, the second was requested after the commandant of the Cadet Corps heard from Captain Thomson about Dales’s heroism. Dales hadn’t mentioned it himself.

  Elizabeth Layton Nel’s 1958 memoir, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, offered an inside look at the prime minister. She worked closely with Frank Sawyers, Churchill’s valet, and enjoyed his company. Between her description of Sawyers, as well as General Brooke’s, a discreet but clear picture pops up. When General Marshall invited Sawyers into that convertible in South Carolina, it must have been with a sense of mischief, to shock the class-conscious Brooke. After the war, there was an issue with Sawyers’s homosexuality; Churchill spoke for him, and the issue went away. “The nation will get over this nonsense one day,” he said.

  A piece of the story of the Norwegian tanker king Torkild Rieber, the father of the Ohio and a larger-than-life character, is told in Chapter 15. There was just one dramatic degree of separation between Rieber and Fred Larsen. The trail of the Rieber story began with documents from the Chevron Texaco archives, sent by historian John Harper, which led to the University of Texas Center for American History archives, which had a Rieber interview, although, not surprisingly, he didn’t address his trading oil to the Axis while Britain was at war with it and while Nazi soldiers were occupying his homeland. Much of that information, from the British perspective, came from TNA documents that were secret until 2002. The American side of the story came from the New York Times microfilm pieces and the New York Herald Tribune. As for Rieber’s last blast, his run in the Ohio from New Jersey to Texas, I simply put the little facts together. After Rieber resigned in disgrace from the Texas Company, he went to work for a Guggenheim company building secret ships for the U.S. Navy. “I want to beat the hell out of those Nazi bastards,” he said.

  There’s one intriguing thing that’s not in the chapter, mostly because it roams away from Fred Larsen. Days after Rieber cut his first deal with the Gestapo’s Hermann Göring to sell oil to the Germans, his Norwegian wife committed suicide by jumping out the window of their penthouse apartment on Central Park South in Manhattan. It would have been stretching too far to peer into that dark tunnel for a moral about love and happiness, or money and values, and find Fred and Minda in the light at the other end.

  Some of the technical information on the Ohio came from the archives of the old Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pennsylvania, and the book The Ohio & Malta by Michael Pearson. Useful line drawings of the inboard profile and deck plans appeared in Steamboat Bill magazine in the fall 1994 issue.

  PART IV

  OPERATION PEDESTAL

  Leaving London, I drove 1,600 miles over the next five days to interview eleven Operation Pedestal veterans in all four corners of England; Volvo Cars of North America supported this mission by arranging the loan of a turbocharged five-speed S40 sedan. I drove at night on the high-speed motorway and interviewed a vet in the morning; drove more miles on narrow twisty roads between towns and interviewed another vet in the afternoon. My conversations with these men remain the most rewarding and memorable part of writing At All Costs. I’m privileged to have met them. They were the eleven best veterans for this story—the right minds with the right experiences from the right ships.

  Going all the way north first, to Blyth on the North Sea, near Glasgow, I spoke to Allan Shaw, who is the only living veteran from the original crew of the Ohio, except for one other, who has been in a mental institution since shortly after Operation Pedestal. Shaw told me that this fellow has never spoken about the attacks on the convoy and has said he never will; he didn’t reply to my letter. The nineteen-year-old Shaw is introduced in Chapter 16 and becomes an important presence, providing details about what happened on the Ohio and making observations about her master, Dudley Mason.

  Captain Mason’s journal is buried deep on the Internet, on a site devoted to the tankers of the Ohio’s owners, Eagle Oil and Shipping Company, Ltd.; and Tim Hughes found records of the movement of Mason’s prior ship, which revealed his near miss with the U-boats of Operation Drumbeat off the Atlantic coast. There was also a wildly inaccurate 1960 story in The Saturday Evening Post that offered some color.

  The official log of the Ohio is kept in a humidity-controlled room with precious maps on the top floor of the National Archives. The entries about the aluminum dinner plates that appear in Chapter 17 and the Afterword, intriguing for their pettiness and their indication of Captain Mason’s focus, reflect the kinds of things that the log was used for. There aren’t many entries between the Clyde and Malta; Mason was too busy dodging torpedoes and fighting fires to do much writing.

  Admiral Burrough’s comments to the captains and liaison officers at the Clyde came from his own LOP and various journals. Surely Captain Mason and Captain Thomson of the Santa Elisa met at that meeting, and in the first draft of this manuscript I made up a conversation between them; they had so much in common, including being rookie masters of state-of-the-art ships who were stalked by U-boats on the Caribbean run. Their imagined conversation was fun, and funny, and it might even have been close to reality, but it didn’t work in this nonfiction book.

  It took scores of hours of reading and searching for books to get the events in Chapter 18 reduced to 820 words; small parts of Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, 1941–1945 by Martin Gilbert helped. Churchill’s multilayered reasons for firing General Auchinleck had to be reduced to a sound bite and his adventure-filled trip to Cairo squeezed down to a few symbolic moments. But there were so many other wonderful pieces, including a sweet and romantic letter from Clementine Churchill to her husband, after she watched him fly off into the night in the Liberator bomber. The quote describing Churchill with his cigar sticking out of his oxygen mask came from The Sky Belongs to Them, by Roland Winfield, an RAF officer on the Liberator, whose pilot was a young American hot dog whom Churchill instantly liked.

  The quotes from the chief engineer of the Santa Elisa, Ed Randall, beginning in Chapter 19, came from an article he wrote for The American Magazine of January 1943; the piece avoided certain military specifics, but it was still controversial because of what it revealed about convoys, which were still a new thing. He’s quoted in the present tense, as it appears in his story.

  Captain Mason’s words to his men were taken from the pioneering Pedestal work, Malta Convoy, by Peter Shankland and Anthony Hunter, published in 1961. Pedestal, by Peter C. Smith, followed in 1970. Both books were very useful. I envied their authors’ opportunity to interview so many of the Pedestal sailors (in particular Captain Mason and Admiral Burrough), as they might envy my discovery of documents that were unavailable to them thirty-five and forty-five years ago.

  Frank Pike was one of the two veterans who liked to use e-mail, and his quotes
came from e-mail correspondence with him from Auckland, New Zealand, where he now lives.

  Admiral Syfret didn’t leave behind memoirs, nor has his biography been written, but he was one of the subjects of the obscure 1945 book Seven Sailors by Royal Navy Commander Kenneth Edwards, and there were eighteen appetite-whetting pages about him.

  Roger Hill’s memoir, Destroyer Captain, provided many of his quotes in Chapter 20 and the rest of the book; and his Letter of Proceeding was long, because his actions during Operation Pedestal were so expansive. I spent a moving afternoon with his mate on the destroyer Ledbury, the brilliant Dr. Nixon, who took me out to his local pub near Salisbury for chicken and chips. He was over ninety at the time and passed away before I ever got to speak to him again. He said he had sometimes been criticized for treating burned or wounded Axis airmen the same as he did Allied seamen, but that there had never been any question in his mind about doing so.

  I drove from Salisbury to the southeast tip of England, near Dover, to visit with Don Allen, a retired osteopath and widower, who’s quoted in Chapter 20 and more significantly later on.

  During dinner at the home of Charles Henry Walker, GC, his daughter Anne, who cooked for us, kept teasing her father about his “birds,” during and after the war and until that day. I had a couple of pints with him but couldn’t manage the malt whiskey. He was exceptionally sturdy at ninety (and still going strong at ninety-two), and it was easy to imagine him being the toughest of seamen. He revered Roger Hill, his commanding officer on the Ledbury. Walker reappears in Chapter 38, when all humor is lost.

  PART V

  INTO THE MEDITERRANEAN

  Beginning in Chapter 22, the reader can use the eyes and ears of correspondents on Royal Navy warships. First comes Norman Smart of the London Daily Express; in Chapter 23 we hear from Arthur Thorpe of the Daily Telegraph; and in Chapter 24 the BBC commentary by Anthony Kimmins begins.