At All Costs (12 page)

CHAPTER 18 •••

CAIRO

A
s the Operation Pedestal convoy steamed away from the Clyde at dusk on August 2, Winston Churchill took off from a Gibraltar airfield in the “Commando,” a converted Liberator bomber with a couple of mattresses thrown into the back on shelves where the bomb racks had once been. He had spent the day in Gibraltar after leaving from London the previous midnight and flying all night, sitting for the first couple of hours in the copilot’s seat as the plane flew low over the south of England, with its young American pilot hoping that word had reached the antiaircraft guns not to shoot them down.

Now they were headed off over enemy territory in Africa toward Cairo, with Churchill again riding shotgun, his oxygen mask modified so a cigar could fit between the nosepiece and chin rest. “He looked exactly as though he was in a Christmas party disguise,” said the officer in charge of oxygen.

General Brooke had left England one day earlier, so he could stop in Malta and visit Governor Gort. His Liberator took a more dangerous route over the Mediterranean, risking the nearly full moon, and landed before dawn between the bomb craters on Hal Far airfield. Brooke was concerned about Gort, who insisted on living on reduced food rations, “in spite of the fact that he was doing twice as much physical and mental work as any other member of the garrison. Owing to the shortage of petrol he was using a bicycle in that sweltering heat, and frequently had to carry his bicycle over demolished houses.”

“The conditions prevailing in Malta at that time were distinctly depressing, to put it mildly,” said Brooke. “Shortage of rations, shortage of petrol, a hungry population that rubbed their tummies looking at Gort as he went by, destruction and ruin of docks, loss of convoys just as they approached the island, and the continual possibility of an attack…without much hope of help or reinforcements.”

The next morning at sunrise, Churchill and Brooke landed in their separate Liberators on an airfield near the Egyptian pyramids. Churchill had flown to Cairo to find out what was wrong with the Eighth Army and fix it.

He thought he already knew the problem: General Claude Auchinleck. Rommel was stalled without supplies outside El Alamein, and Churchill wanted Auchinleck to begin moving west again. More immediately, he wanted the Axis airfields between Alamein and Tobruk neutralized for Operation Pedestal, and he wanted Auchinleck to stage some sort of diversionary attack so the Axis bombers would be drawn away from the convoy’s ships.

Auchinleck, “the Auk,” was a tall, rugged Scot, red-headed, square-jawed, and stubborn. He didn’t believe his Western Desert Force could resume the offensive for another six weeks, and he was resistant to having his soldiers used as decoys for bombs for the sake of a distant merchant convoy.

“The bloody man does not seem to care about the fate of Malta!” Churchill shouted to Sir Charles Wilson about Auchinleck.

“The plight of Malta had become an obsession with him,” said Sir Charles of Churchill.

“Rommel, Rommel, Rommel! What else matters but beating Rommel!?” Churchill ranted, pacing the floor of his air-conditioned room at the British Embassy in Cairo.

Churchill felt that Auchinleck couldn’t see the direct connection between the strength of Malta and the success of the Eighth Army. Couldn’t he see that Operation Pedestal was critical to the defeat of Rommel? Where did the Auk think the attacks on Rommel’s supply lines and convoys were coming from, if not from the RAF bombers and Royal Navy submarines, which were needed so badly back on Malta?

“We’re going to lick Rommel!” Churchill told everybody he met in Egypt, so often that “Lick Rommel” soon became the slogan of the visit. The prime minister wore a Bombay bowler that looked like a pith helmet, brandished a big black horsehair fly swatter, and was never without a cigar despite the heat. He had taken a new code name for this trip, Mr. Bullfinch, and those around him spoke mysteriously and reverentially about how Bullfinch had done this, gone there, or said that.

He climbed into a new Dakota, the RAF version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner, and flew over the North African desert to the front, El Alamein, to research the situation and have a word with Auchinleck. Upon his return to Cairo, he fired the Auk and replaced him with Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, who was “quick as a ferret and almost as likeable,” said Brooke. But, said Churchill, “If he is disagreeable to those about him, he is also disagreeable to the enemy.”

The prime minister ended his trip with a directive intended for Montgomery that couldn’t have been more clear:

1. Your prime and main duty will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field-Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt and Libya.

CHAPTER 19 •••

ADMIRAL NEVILLE SYFRET

A
t sunrise on August 3, as Winston Churchill and General Brooke were landing in separate Liberators on an airfield near the pyramids, the incipient Operation Pedestal convoy was steaming south off the coast of Ireland. The merchant ships were formed in four columns separated by six cables, about 3,650 feet, or six-tenths of a nautical mile, long. The
Santa Elisa
was in position 42, fourth column and second in line; and the
Ohio
was off the
Santa Elisa
’s port beam in position 32. Larsen was at the helm of the
Santa Elisa,
standing the watch from 0400 to 0800. “Our course took us about 300 miles out into the Atlantic, seemingly to pretend that we were not going into the Mediterranean,” he said.

Captain Thomson had told Larsen and a few others that they were headed to Malta, but he hadn’t announced it to the crew. “A knot of us starts debating our destination,” said the chief engineer, Ed Randall. “‘Dakar,’ says somebody. ‘A second front,’ says another, pointing to the warships all around us. Others argue for Alexandria, East Africa, and Madagascar, and some of them put cash on the line to back up their theories.”

Admiral Burrough had left the Clyde in the cruiser
Nigeria
at midnight, and by steaming at 33 knots had now caught up. He commanded the convoy to merge from four columns into two, just for practice. The complicated maneuver would need to be rehearsed many times on the way to Gibraltar, because there would be no time or room for error at the entrance to the Sicilian Narrows, when it would need to be done for survival.

“Practicing zigzag courses on the way down to Gibraltar was pretty easy,” said Allan Shaw, the ordinary seaman on the
Ohio.
“Ships doing sixteen knots are easier to handle and quicker to maneuver than slow-moving ones.”

But not everyone found it so simple; some of the freighters had trouble staying in position and staying out of the way of other ships. “Station keeping at this stage was naturally very poor, but I was confident that these fine ships could with training be moulded into a well disciplined team,” reported Admiral Burrough.

At 0845, Captain Mason called the crew of the
Ohio
into the petty officer’s mess and told them where they were going. He opened the envelope labeled “Not to be opened until 0800/August 10” and read them a letter from the First Lord of the Admiralty wishing them Godspeed and good luck.

“I addressed the whole crew, explaining the object of the voyage, nature of the escort, and what was expected during the voyage,” he reported to Eagle Oil and Shipping. “A considerable amount of what had passed at the Conference the previous day was told, and I advised them I would be only too pleased to answer any questions they might like to ask.”

“You men have been specially chosen for this voyage,” he told them. “Just remember that. You are chosen men. I want no dodgers, no questions asked when an order is given. If you’re called upon to do extra duties, remember that this is a special voyage, and one of enormous importance. I don’t expect it’s going to be a picnic. But we will have a massive escort. There might be a raid or two, but we’re not going to have any trouble getting there. We will get to Malta.”

“I concluded my remarks by telling them that I had no doubt whatever that they would all do their utmost as and when the occasion demanded, and that I had absolute faith in them all. The loud cheers that followed were spontaneous, and it seemed to start the voyage in a friendly atmosphere which existed throughout the whole operation.”

At 0930 the heavy metal arrived, steaming up on the convoy at 23 knots. “I was on watch, and I was able to see what looked like a battle fleet approaching us from the north,” said Frank Pike, a British Army corporal on the
Santa Elisa
being taken to Malta to work on the radar. “Two battleships were clearly visible, along with several more cruisers, two aircraft carriers and a lot more destroyers. Fortunately, they turned out to be on our side.”

Acting vice admiral Neville Syfret, a lean and hungry South African, squinted into the sun from the bridge of the battleship
Nelson,
his flagship. His teeth gripped the tip of the stem of his pipe, which smoked like the barrel of a rapid-fire cannon and dangled dangerously toward the armor-plated deck of his battleship, much like the way he lived. He liked to hang it out there. He was the right man for a ship with so many guns, because guns were in his blood. He’d been a young gunnery officer on a cruiser in World War I, roaming the vicious North Sea. After the war he had been fleet gunnery officer for the Mediterranean Fleet and later had commanded the Naval Gunnery School at Devonport.

Admiral Cunningham said Syfret was “a tower of strength, a man of great ability and of quick and sound decision with a brilliant war record. His great knowledge and charm of manner made him a delightful comrade.”

Churchill had made Syfret an admiral when Syfret was secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Churchill was that lord. He fit the prime minister’s mold, with the right stuff in his résumé for a mission like Operation Pedestal. He knew a lot about running to Malta, having commanded the cruiser
Edinburgh
on two previous convoys. He had taken six out of six freighters to Malta with Operation Substance; and, working with Admiral Burrough on Operation Halberd, had charted a daring course along the island of Pantelleria to deliver eight of nine.

Syfret was fresh from victory in Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, the first major amphibious assault of the war. Lying just off the southeast coast of Africa, Madagascar was a steaming 900-mile-long island with strange wildlife living in the mountains and rain forests and a beautiful mix of French-speaking Afro-Asians walking the streets. In Napoleon’s time, those streets were roamed by more than a thousand pirates of English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and American bloods.

At the northern tip of the island lay the port of Diégo-Suarez, which the Vichy French had controlled, the Japanese coveted, and the Allies needed, because of its position along shipping lanes flowing around the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa, through the Red Sea, and into the Suez Canal. The French hadn’t been attacking Allied merchant shipping, but if the Japanese were to take Madagascar they would use Diégo-Suarez as a submarine base. An invasion was deemed necessary by Churchill.

Syfret had planned Operation Ironclad in a matter of days and commanded the mission from his flagship, the battleship
Ramillies.
He had sent in two decoy invasions, with planes dropping dummies from parachutes on one side of the island and a cruiser firing dummy shells on the other. The merchant navy had carried in soldiers and Royal Marines to the dark west side of the island, which the French had mined and considered impenetrable. The marines had transferred to a destroyer that dropped them at a jetty, and, with air support from two aircraft carriers, had fought their way to the harbor and captured it in two days.

Immediately after Ironclad, Syfret had put on his civilian clothes to travel incognito and hopped a train west across the southern tip of Africa, from Durban to Cape Town. From there he had boarded the armed merchantman
Canton
to get back up to Freetown, 3,500 miles from the Cape of Good Hope. He had been lounging on the deck of the freighter reading a book in the tropical sun when the message had come from the Admiralty that he was needed in London to plan and lead another top secret mission. The
Canton
had dropped him at the Takoradi base, and he had flown the rest of the way, a grueling trek on available military aircraft.

The battleships
Nelson
and
Rodney,
now steaming within sight of the
Santa Elisa,
were close sisters like the cruisers
Nigeria
and
Kenya,
though not nearly so young and quite a bit heavier. They were the biggest warships in the Royal Navy: 710 feet long, 106 feet wide, and displacing 34,000 tons. A camouflage paint scheme floated like gray clouds over each hull, and forty-five gun barrels stuck out like hedgehog quills. They carried nine sixteen-inch guns in three triple turrets mounted forward of the bridge tower and twelve six-inch guns in six double turrets aft. There were also six five-inch guns, eight two-pounders (so called for the weight of the projectile), two 20 mm Oerlikons, and eight .50-caliber machine guns.

The battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers were escorted by the destroyers
Ashanti, Pathfinder, Eskimo, Somali, Tartar,
and
Quentin,
making a dozen destroyers in the convoy so far, with many more to come.

Jack Follansbee came onto the bridge of the
Santa Elisa
and said to Captain Thomson, “What an escort!”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” replied Thomson.

“It looked to me as if the whole British fleet was escorting us,” said Larsen.

“Maybe that escort should have made us feel better, but in a way it made us feel worse,” said Thomson. “It was so terribly big that the crew realized, for the first time, that we were heading into something deadly.”

CHAPTER 20 •••

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ROGER HILL

B
efore he left Scapa Flow to join up with Operation Pedestal, Lieutenant Commander Roger Hill, commanding officer of the destroyer
Ledbury,
got drunk one night and stole a chicken on his way back to the ship. At thirty-two, he was one of the youngest destroyer captains in the war, although he was not inexperienced, having been in the Royal Navy for fifteen years. He had a scraggly black beard and wore a striped rugby shirt at sea, so he looked a bit like a pirate, but he also played the piano and could be quite high-strung, so his crew never knew what to think about him.

“The
Ledbury
had been adopted by an American heiress, who sent them lots of goodies,” said a jealous sailor from another ship. “They did nothing but play Glenn Miller and Harry James records, which this heiress had sent. She got Captain Hill his little piano, too, which he somehow squeezed into his quarters.”

On the night of the stolen chicken, Hill and the ship’s doctor had been pub hopping on his motorcycle, a thumping 500 cc single-cylinder Norton whose rear tire was squashed flat against the cobblestone streets—Hill had stuffed grass into it, for want of a rubber patch. The doctor boasted he could sneak up on a chicken and wring its neck before it squawked. And he succeeded—until they staggered up the gangway and the chicken got a second wind under the captain’s coat and squawked like only a half-strangled chicken can, said Hill.

Hill had been assigned to command the
Ledbury
while she was being completed at the Southampton shipyard. He rode up on the Norton on an ugly January night and climbed to the unfinished bridge, where he imagined he was shooting down Stukas: ack-ack-acking with an invisible Oerlikon at the drizzly sky. He also had the capture of a U-boat and its crew all worked out in his mind. After forcing it to the surface with depth charges, the
Ledbury
’s gunners would hold down the sub’s hatch with tracer fire while a boarding party would scramble onto its deck, open the hatch, and herd the surrendering Germans with machine guns. Hill would climb down into the sub himself and claim its Enigma decoding machine, the ultimate trophy. “I peopled the
Ledbury
with lusty, happy sailors ripping out the shells at an unprecedented rate of fire,” he said.

Hill’s third fantasy was ramming a German battleship. It was an especially daring dream because the little
Ledbury
was only a 1,010-ton
Hunt
-class destroyer, although she was being used for the work of a larger
Tribal
class, because so many
Tribal
s had been sunk.

“He wasn’t very popular with the ship’s company, you know,” said the doctor, John Nixon. “The crew called him ‘Phyllis.’ It wasn’t a term of endearment, and I’m not going to say any more than that. But that was in Scapa Flow, a very dreary place. He used to get very worked up, as many a captain did, trying to maneuver a small destroyer in that place. He used to get tantrums, swearing at the ship’s company and the gunnery officer, Musham. That doesn’t go down very well. It’s better for a ship’s captain to keep his cool, if he can.”

“Still, he possessed the element of luck in full measure, and the men knew it,” said Robin Owen, his cadet.

It may have been true that there were times when Hill’s heart flopped onto the sleeve of his woolen peacoat, but that’s because it was like a lion’s and it needed some room. As the
Ledbury
steamed to meet Operation Pedestal, he was both depressed and angry.

One month earlier, the
Ledbury
had been part of the infamous PQ17 convoy to Murmansk. Tracking the convoy from London, First Sea Lord Dudley Pound had incorrectly and singularly believed it was about to be attacked by the German battleship
Tirpitz
—he had seen phantoms, possibly a symptom of the brain tumor that would kill him. So he ordered the Royal Navy escorts to scatter, leaving the merchantmen to be slaughtered by German bombers and U-boats that the warships could have fought off.

“The dismal tale of each ship or little group of ships, some of them accompanied by one or more of the smaller escort vessels, became a saga in itself,” said Churchill. “Of the 34 ships which left Iceland, 23 were sunk, and their crews perished in the icy sea or suffered incredible hardships and mutilation by frostbite. Fourteen American ships in all were sunk. This was one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war.”

The disaster of PQ17 made Operation Pedestal all the more important to Churchill. His use of the word “melancholy” is suggestive—and profound. He was plagued by bouts of depression he called “marauders” or the “Black Dog”; the main reason he kept Dr. Sir Charles Wilson by his side was to keep the demons away. After the consecutive devastating defeats of Operation Harpoon, Tobruk, and PQ17, Churchill knew that one more loss might mean a vote of “no confidence” from the House of Commons. The prime ministership was riding on Operation Pedestal.

When the warships returned to Scapa Flow after PQ17, the Royal Navy sailors were met with hostility. Some of the
Ledbury
’s men got drunk and had a fight with some Yanks from a cruiser who called them yellow Limeys. “The feelings of the Americans from the cruisers and destroyers which had been on PQ17 ran high, and there were some serious fights ashore,” said Hill. “In fact, there were some deaths, I heard.”

Before the
Ledbury
left Scapa Flow to join Operation Pedestal, Hill had told his men that he intended to disobey any order to leave the survivors of a sunken merchant ship in the water. But he doubted that such an order would come, this time. He knew that Admiral Syfret was a fighter, having years earlier served under Syfret’s command on the cruiser
Caradoc,
based in China, eight hundred miles up the Yangtze River.

But PQ17 wasn’t the only reason Hill’s emotions were raw. His kid brother, a twenty-one-year-old Royal Marine officer, had been killed in November when the battleship
Barham
was torpedoed in the Mediterranean; she had capsized within five minutes and been on her side when she blew up, killing 862 men.

It was easy for a man of Hill’s emotion and imagination to program himself to leap into the ocean to rescue survivors, as if the seawater would get the bitter taste of PQ17 out of his mouth. That’s what he did when a Sunderland flying boat crashed into the water near the
Ledbury
out in the Atlantic.

The
Ledbury
was one day ahead of Operation Pedestal, escorting another convoy. The pilot of the antisub Sunderland had made the rookie mistake of flying low over the convoy in a fog; three of the merchantmen had failed to recognize the friendly aircraft and opened fire. The Sunderland passed over the
Ledbury
with one engine on fire, diving toward the sea. Hill raced through the fog and found the crashed plane on the water with the crew sitting on one wing. The Sunderland sank, and there was an underwater explosion.

The Sunderland’s depth charges had been set to explode at fifty feet, and the pilot had failed to eject them before the plane hit the water.

“When the spray from the explosion had settled, leaving a bubbling circle of foam, the crew of the plane were scattered all over the place. I thought the quickest way would be for me to fetch the most distant man, since I was a fast swimmer,” said Hill.

He turned to his cadet and declared, “Take the helm, pilot, I am going after that man!” And he leaped off the bridge, thirty or more feet into the water, furiously stroking toward the man, whom he saved.

Eight of the nine Sunderland airmen died from the concussion of the depth charges. “It looked like their buttons had been pressed in by a thumb,” said Don Allen, a radar operator on the
Ledbury
bridge. The dead airmen were sewn up in hammocks, weighted down with boiler bricks, and buried at sea.

Captain Hill knew that his superiors wouldn’t approve of his diving overboard and leaving his ship in the hands of a cadet. The words “Take the helm, pilot, I am going after that man!” sounded more foolish than gallant to the Royal Navy.

Charles Henry Walker, still built like a bull at age ninety, was the cook on
Ledbury
and captain of its water polo team. He dived into the water behind Hill to make sure his captain didn’t drown. “Afterward, the captain looked me close in the eye and said, ‘Walker, you didn’t see nothing, did you?’ and I replied, ‘No sir.’

“The navy never did like Roger Hill’s ways,” he adds. “He was still a lieutenant commander when he got out. They should have made him a ‘Sir.’”