At All Costs (18 page)

Like the
Eagle,
the
Cairo
had been gallantly serving the British Empire since 1918. But she had used up the last of her luck, after surviving an unexploded bomb in the engine room during Operation Harpoon and escaping the guns of Admiral Da Zara.

Captain Hardy transferred his men to the destroyer
Wilton.
With more than two hundred survivors aboard,
Wilton,
along with
Bicester
and
Derwent,
followed
Nigeria
back to Gibraltar.

The new destroyer
Pathfinder
was armed with eight torpedoes, so Captain Hardy asked her to finish off the
Cairo,
which was going down at the stern.

“Captain Hardy sat on the bridge, chin in hands, and watched the destroyer wheel about,” wrote Norman Smart. “A torpedo hit
Cairo
amidships and she went up in a cloud of smoke. It was a heartbreaking sight after getting so far towards Malta.”

After the
Pathfinder
took her shots at
Cairo,
she raced away at full speed. Her captain had just received a message: “A force of Enemy Cruisers was now being reported on a course and at a speed which would enable them to reach the convoy during the middle watch,” he explained.

It was Admiral Da Zara’s fleet. The Italian warships were closing in.

CHAPTER 28 •••

CAPTAIN FERRINI’S AMAZING HAT TRICK

A
lthough Captain Dudley Mason had only been master of the
Ohio
for twenty-eight days, he had established a reputation with the crew for carrying himself with a great deal of equilibrium, even in stormy seas. “He didn’t have a great lot to say,” said the ordinary seaman Allan Shaw, who was then nineteen and is now eighty-three, living in Blyth on the North Sea and nearly as nimble as he was back then.

Before the Italian submarine’s strike at sunset, Captain Mason hadn’t appeared to be very excited by the day’s activity. In fact, he didn’t have much to say about it.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12TH.

The day passed fairly uneventfully. One or two isolated planes got through the outer screen and kept the gunners in action, and some bombs were dropped. Continuous salvoes of depth charges and emergency turns to port and starboard every few minutes. Several vessels reported submarines, and I believe two were accounted for this afternoon. The signal had been given that a concentration of submarines were expected inside a given area (approximately our position for dusk). We were then 75 miles north of Cape Bon, on the edge of the 100-fathom line.

But when
Nigeria
and
Cairo
were torpedoed, Captain Mason’s “uneventful” day suddenly ended, and the long night in the narrows began. Lieutenant Barton, the
Ohio
’s young liaison officer, was on the bridge with Mason when the two cruisers were hit. “I saw great bits of
Cairo
flying for 400 yards,” he said. “Then, while we were still looking at
Cairo,
there was a tremendous sheet of flames just about on the bridge, and we too had been hit.”

Captain Ferrini of the
Axum
had scored an amazing hat trick: four torpedoes fired, three ships hit. Force X had lost two of its four cruisers—its heavily armed flagship
Nigeria
and antiaircraft specialist
Cairo—
and the crux of the convoy, its raison d’être, the SS
Ohio,
was aflame. One sweet salvo of Italian torpedoes was all it took to radically tilt the balance of Operation Pedestal.

“There was a bright flash, and a column of water was thrown up to masthead height. There were two seconds of absolute quiet, and then flames shot into the air,” said Mason, who was blown to the deck by the blast. He crawled toward the chart room, where he bumped heads with the third mate, who was crawling out. “The vessel heeled over and shook violently. We were struck amidships in the pump room on the port side, halfway between the bow and stern.”

The freighter
Empire Hope
was in formation behind
Ohio,
which suddenly veered;
Empire Hope
came so close to the tanker that her seamen threw fenders over the fo’c’sle to cushion the crash they thought was coming. From the bridge of the
Ohio,
behind the wall of flames and over its roar, Captain Mason heard the
Empire Hope
ring for hard astern, and a collision was avoided by mere feet.

“Some of us were standing on the poop deck when the torpedo hit,” said Allan Shaw. “We all thought this was it—when a tanker goes afire, you haven’t got a great lot of chance. There was the flames, and there was an awful big goosher, which seemed to put some of the flames out. A lot of water, it went up like a big geyser. Then someone shouted, ‘Get the fire extinguishers.’”

Because the ships were in the middle of their formation change, the
Ohio
was close off the port bow of the
Santa Elisa
and moving nearly twice as fast. The
Santa Elisa
had slowed to 8 knots, to allow
Ohio
to move to starboard and slip in ahead of her, in the change from four columns to two. If the torpedo had missed the
Ohio,
it would have hit the
Santa Elisa.

At their battle stations on the port bridge wings of the
Santa Elisa,
Larsen and Dales got a face full of flaming
Ohio.

“A tremendous black cloud rose on our port beam,” said Dales, watching from his gun. “The tanker
Ohio,
with its cargo so vital to Malta’s existence, had just been torpedoed! We could feel the heat. I saw men dragging fire hoses across her deck. The black smoke swallowed them up.”

Shaw, who’s a wee five feet, six inches and the same 147 pounds he was back then, continues. “We grabbed some big fire extinguishers at the after end, and ran along the flying bridge and lowered them down to some lads who were fighting the fire. It’s good the sea was washing in and out; that was helping keep the fire down.”

“The
Ohio
did not list,” said Mason, “but the deck on the port side was torn up and laid right back inboard, nearly to the centerline. There was a hole in the hull on the port side twenty-four feet by twenty-seven feet, reaching from the main deck to well below the waterline. The large Samson derrick post fell over to an angle of forty-five degrees, the flying bridge was damaged, and the pump room was ablaze and completely open to the sea. Four kerosene tanks were opened up to the sea on the port side; their lids were blown off, and flames were coming up through the hatches. The steering gear telemotor pipes were carried away by the explosion, also the electric cable and all steam pipes in the vicinity of the pump room.

“I had the crew mustered on the deck at boat stations provisionally, but engines had been kept running. I had previously told the chief engineer that he was not to stop the engines whatever happened, until I gave him the order to do so, but now I rang, ‘Finish with engines.’ I gave the order now, in order to get the men out of the engine room for the time being. I had been forced to stop, not only to fight the fire, but because our steering was out of order and we were turning in circles, making us a danger to the other ships which were lying stopped near us, including the
Nigeria
and the
Cairo.
”

Mason joined the firefight, facing the searing heat, directing the hoses, and shouting for more fire extinguishers.

“It was then a case of fighting the pump room fire,” he continued. “I thought it was a forlorn hope, but we set to work with foam extinguishers and managed to put out the flames much more easily than I expected. We also put out the flames in the kerosene tanks and replaced the tank lids, although these could not be screwed down as they were badly buckled.”

The destroyer
Pathfinder
circled
Ohio,
dropping depth charges, as the rest of the convoy left the burning tanker behind, dead in the water at dusk.

On the
Axum,
Captain Ferrini had no time to enjoy his success.

1955: 4 min 30 sec after firing, while at 65 meters depth, the hunt begins with a pattern of depth charges; dive to 100 meters and stop all machinery. The hunt continues with deliberate attacks for two hours, patterns of depth charges being fired. It is noticed that each time the boat rises to between 80 and 90 meters the transmissions of the asdics are clearly heard, followed immediately by depth charges. Decide to remain between 100 and 120 meters.

While the
Axum
was hiding at 300 feet and the
Ohio
was smoldering on the water, the dive-bombers arrived, right on schedule.

“Whilst we were fighting the fires,” said Mason, “enemy planes commenced attack at masthead height. Near misses were many and frequent, throwing deluges of water over the vessel. I sent for the chief engineer to ask him how long it would take to raise steam, as the steam had dropped back whilst we were stopped, and fortunately, owing to being fitted with a diesel generator, we were able to raise steam again within ten minutes, instead of the usual three or four hours.”

From Mason’s log:

Apparently Gunners (Army Ratings) E. Smith & W. Hands also Galley Boy M. Guidotti paniced [
sic
] & attempted to lower no. 5 Boat. This overturned throwing these men into the sea. They were not seen again. At approx the same time vessel was bombed & R. Morton (Asst. Steward) was found to be missing. It is assumed he was washed overboard with the deluge of water as he was assisting at Gun on the port side.

Ray Morton, alive and living in Australia, isn’t sure how he ended up in the water that day, from his position at a Browning machine gun. “I remember the ship being torpedoed,” he said. “Tank lids, flames, and oil shooting mast high, probably even higher. And the oil coming down on us, on the boat deck. I was soaked in it. I know that. But then there’s a big gap and I just can’t remember what happened at all. I’ve been given various stories about what happened, and all I can say is, it could be any one or all of the above. I just don’t know. But I found myself in the water. Had a lifejacket on, and I was just bobbing about in the water and then I realized there were three others there with me, and we just drifted around and hoped to God somebody would see us. You could see other merchant ships steaming past, and nobody on board them even gave us a wave. We knew they weren’t allowed to stop to pick up survivors, because that was putting their ship and crew at risk.

“We’d probably just about given up hope of getting picked up. Pilots came over, German pilots, and machine-gunned us while we were in the water. Fortunately they missed, and Mario, the fifteen-year-old galley boy, is yelling, ‘You stupid bastards, you couldn’t hit a barn door!’ And I’m yelling out to him, ‘For God’s sake shut up, they’ll hear ya and they’ll come back!’ We were there for about three hours when a destroyer came and circled round toward us, and we all sort of heaved a mental sigh of relief.”

It will never be known why the dive-bombers didn’t finish off the
Ohio.
Maybe it was fate, maybe it was an act of God, maybe it was sharpshooting by the gunners manning the Bofors on the stern. Or maybe it was just because there were more targets, farther ahead. The convoy was miles away by this time, and the enemy planes flew on, pursuing the other ships.

Captain Ferrini:

2250: Surface. 3,000 meters ahead is a big ship in flames. On starboard bow another burning with much smoke. 70 degrees on port bow a third ship already burnt out from which still comes, however, the characteristic dense grey-black smoke. The flames of the first ship clearly illuminate me and immediately afterwards I see two destroyers in motion and signaling; since it is essential for me to replenish air bottles and recharge batteries, I submerge to avoid being further hunted, and leave the area.

It would appear that these three burning and smoking ships were the
Nigeria, Cairo,
and
Ohio.
But no, three hours had passed. More likely, they were the next three ships in the convoy to get blown up.

PART VI •••

HELL IN THE NARROWS

CHAPTER 29 •••

THIS ONE’S FOR MINDA

T
he commanding officer of the cruiser HMS
Kenya,
Captain A. S. Russell, according to the ship’s doctor, was “the ideal type of captain—handsome, humorous, and a very brave and wonderful man.” He was also the type of man to take charge when he believed it was necessary. “I immediately assumed control of the convoy,” he reported after the
Nigeria
was hit and while Admiral Burrough was transferring his flag to the destroyer
Ashanti.
Russell had sent a signal to Burrough that wasn’t answered, and that was enough for him.

As the convoy steamed away from the disabled
Nigeria, Cairo,
and
Ohio,
Captain Russell sounded
Kenya
’s siren to order the ships to make two emergency turns to starboard and signaled for an increase in speed. Then he ordered a turn back to port, another turn back to the original course, and then a reduction in speed. “By this time the formation of the convoy was chaotic,” he reported, not surprisingly. Admiral Syfret later objected to Russell’s use of the word “chaotic”; at least the ships that hadn’t been hit were still headed more or less east, he pointed out.

Captain Russell might have been handsome, humorous, brave, and wonderful, but that didn’t keep him out of the doghouse with Admiral Syfret. In fact, Syfret didn’t accept that Russell had been in charge. “The Commanding Officer, HMS
Kenya,
reported by emergency signal [to all the ships] that he was in command of Force X,” said Syfret. “This statement, as it proved incorrect, did not help to improve an already confused situation.”

Syfret was getting the picture by radio, and he could see that it was ugly, if not chaotic. He pulled the antiaircraft cruiser
Charybdis
and the big
Tribal-
class destroyers
Eskimo
and
Somali
out of Force Z and sent them racing back to help Force X.

Air support was also on its way to Force X. Four Beaufighters had left Malta before the convoy had been torpedoed, without being sure where it was. But
Nigeria
and
Cairo
had been the only ships with high-frequency radios to communicate with the fighters. The pilots managed to find
Kenya,
leading the scattered convoy just west of Skerki Bank, but she opened fire on them, not knowing they were friendly. They turned and flew back to Malta.

And there were still submarines in the water, converged near the mouth of the narrows, licking their chops for a fat target like the
Kenya
to come along.

“At 2111, Kenya was hit in the fore-peak by a torpedo,” reported Russell. “Another torpedo passed under the ship, about abreast the bridge, and two more narrowly missed the stern, passing down the port side. The main machinery and all communications were found correct, but the maximum available speed was not known. I joined [the heavy cruiser] Manchester, and hoped the convoy would get reformed.”

It was now about thirty minutes past sunset. As the remaining two dozen ships in the convoy ran in helter-skelter zigzags from the unseen wolf pack, thirty Ju 88s came in high, hiding themselves from the convoy’s gunners in the gray area between sea and stars. While the antiaircraft guns were pointed skyward into the dull buzzing void, seven He 111 torpedo bombers zoomed in low. It was the gunners’ turn to be swamped by confusion. They didn’t know where to aim: up, down, left, right, hell if they did, hell if they didn’t.

And then a dozen Stukas, flying like deadly dark vectors in formations of three, approached the leading ships from four directions. The
Santa Elisa
was among them, with Larsen and Dales at their battle stations.

Even the shape of a Stuka is scary. Anything so aggressively awkward must be lethal. It flaunts its ugliness with cranked wings and wheel spats sharpened at their trailing edges, making the plane look like a monster bird of prey, a nightmare from the sky, like the mythical Roc that Sinbad encountered on his Fifth Journey in the Grimm Brothers’ story:

The two Rocs approached with a frightful noise, and carried between their talons stones of a monstrous size. When they came directly over my ship, they hovered, and one of them let fall a stone so exactly upon the middle of the ship that it split into a thousand pieces.

The North African Stukas were especially weird, with camouflage paint that looked like leopard skin. The Italians called their Stukas “
picchiatelli
”—“strikers”—and painted them a sinister black. The German Stukas wailed like banshees when they dived at their human targets, particularly Russians and Europeans or fleeing people pushing carts along roads, such as the Maltese. The evil machines carried wind-driven sirens called “trombones of Jericho,” which were mounted on each strut, canisters with propellers looking like two baby airscrews flying along under their mother. The sirens were meant to strike fear on the ground, or on the decks of a ship at sea, and they succeeded.

Like the Roc carrying a stone under its belly between its talons, a Stuka could carry a bomb of monstrous size, 1,800 kilograms. But its normal total payload was 700 kilos: two 50-kilo bombs dangled from each wing, and under the fuselage hung one bomb of 500 kilos. The weight made the Stuka sluggish in any direction but down.

“The Ju 87D did not appear to find its natural element until it was diving steeply,” said Captain Eric Brown, chief test pilot for the RAF, who got some seat time in a captured Stuka. “It seemed quite normal to stand this aircraft on its nose in a vertical dive, with the speed climbing up to 373 mph. During the dive it was necessary to watch the signal light on the contact altimeter, and when it came on, a knob on the control column was depressed to initiate the automatic pullout, with forces on the pilot reaching 6 g during completion of the manoeuvre.”

Among all the dive-bombers, including Japanese and American, only the Stuka could dive vertically, taking bombing accuracy to new levels. The pilot released the bombs, and the plane began to pull out of the dive at 1,475 feet, using a system tested in 1938 by a famed female pilot, Melitta Schiller. But it didn’t level off until it was sometimes as low as 100 feet. That’s when it was most vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, but by then the bombs had often hit home. At sea, the line between a Stuka and a kamikaze could be fine.

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.