Twelve Desperate Miles (10 page)

Meals were prepared and served by the steward’s department and could be elaborate affairs. The Sunday dinner after Captain John’s daughter’s wedding included hors d’oeuvres like pickled walnuts and crabmeat
cocktails, turtle soup, fillets of trout and sliced cucumber, sautéed kidney, chicken liver and shrimp à la Newburg, and, for entrees, stuffed Vermont turkey and prime rib. These were followed by salad, cheeses, fruits, nuts, raisins, and a plum pudding in brandy sauce.

All of this was history by the time the
Contessa
sailed from Brooklyn’s Bush Terminal a little more than a month after its arrival.
Stripped of its swimming pool and its mahogany; the rattan furniture and built-in berths gone; the cabins partitioned into jam-packed sleeping quarters with pipe-framed beds for the troops crammed aboard; and the gleaming white paint and the distinctive “V” on its smokestack, the banana boat was now just another gray military ship hauling troops overseas. The
Contessa
had been turned from a pleasant cruise ship into a functional military transport.

She sailed singly from pier 1 to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to join convoy HX 201. From Halifax she would sail in this, her first convoy, across the Atlantic to Belfast, where she would deposit her load of troops. Then it was on to Swansea in Wales, not far from Captain William John’s hometown, Cardiff, where the remainder of her cargo would be unloaded.

There was a one-day stop in Boston for a convoy conference en route to Halifax, where orders were given by the commodore on how the voyage would proceed, including orders detailing signal instructions, setting a convoy speed, and creating an order and stations for the ships.
HX 201 was composed of thirty-three vessels, primarily of American and British registry but with a handful of Dutch and Norwegian ships in the mix. The
Contessa
was the only ship of Honduran registry. The convoy sailed in a rectangular pattern, four ships north to south and nine ships east to west. Four destroyers were to escort the convoy at all times during the crossing. They cruised, roughly speaking, on the four corners of the ships’ formation.

On August 2, the commodore’s vessel, the
Manchester Port
, left the Halifax harbor and was followed in a succession spaced a few minutes
apart by each ship in the convoy. The
Contessa
was the eighth vessel out and, as the convoy formed, took her place in the third column (north to south) and second row of ships. She was distinguished in the group by the “V” on her stack and a horizontal awning visible behind the stack. To her port side was a British ship, the
Torr Head
. Off her stern was the
Holyhead
, also out of Great Britain. Off her bow was an American ship, the
Santa Isabel
, which flew a flag with the letter “B,” signaling that she was carrying explosives.

The American experience with the convoy system was new in August, but the learning curve would be quickly climbed in those last months of 1942. One of the earliest realizations was that not only did individual ships not want to be carrying ammunition; they didn’t want to be in the vicinity of ships loaded with explosives. The SS
Mary Luckenbach
, a cargo ship sailing just a month later than the
Contessa
in a convoy on its way to Murmansk (what would become the most dreaded merchant sea route in the war) and carrying a load of TNT, virtually vaporized when she was hit by a torpedo in the North Sea. Not only was she gone in an instant, but reports detailed damage to eleven ships around her caused by the explosion.

There were other, more immediate, hazards for the ships in the convoy to consider, beyond being blown to smithereens. Perhaps chief among these was collision with the other ships in the convoy. The likelihood of such a crash was enhanced considerably when ships were sailing at night or were ordered to zigzag, change course, or maneuver to avoid torpedoes. For seamen accustomed to plying the oceans on their own, being thrust into packs of dozens of ships could make for adventurous sailing, especially when they were asked to maneuver like a squad of Zor Shriners.
Collisions would turn out to be one of the leading causes of damage to and sinking of merchant ships during the war.

Straggling was also hazardous. Living up to their wolf-pack nickname, German U-boats would mimic the behavior of their lupine models and linger at the heels of convoys, waiting for weak members of the herd
to fall behind, unable to keep up with their fellows, at which time the subs would attack, and pity the merchant crew that was left lagging.

U-boat strategies changed as the American convoy system developed, and
the numbers of German submarines deployed to North Atlantic and Atlantic Seaboard routes by Admiral Doenitz increased through 1942. The Germans used spies and intercepted radio messages to suss out ship movements. Then the U-boats would form a line, spaced at approximately fifteen-mile intervals, perpendicular to suspected convoy routes. The first to spot a group of Allied ships would let them pass and fall in behind, signaling the location to its compatriots. The pack would form and trail, waiting for limping prey to fall behind. Another means of attack was to stage simultaneous assaults on a convoy from multiple directions. There was also a sharklike approach in which a U-boat would stay submerged as a convoy’s escorts sailed by, only to rise to periscope depth right in the middle of the clustered ships behind, ready to fire its deadly torpedoes.

To the
Contessa
and many of the American ships of HX 201, all of this convoy/U-boat lore was new and being collected as they left the Halifax harbor and assembled out in the ocean. There was a light fog off the coast of Nova Scotia, and the commodore, a British vice admiral with the singular name Wion de Malpas Egerton, ordered that the ships in the group trail railroad ties on cables behind them, in order to better hold position within the group.
These ties sent up a phosphorescent spray of water as they skimmed over the ocean, which helped illuminate the path of the leading ship even in fog and nighttime travel.

As Admiral King well knew, convoys sailed at the pace of their slowest vessel, which in the case of HX 201 meant a rate of just under nine knots on the first day. For the
Contessa
, which steamed at sixteen knots full speed, this was achingly slow, and like others in the group, she had to be aware of her station to avoid crowding the stern of the
Santa
Isabel
ahead.
Even at this pace, however, one of the convoy members was unable to maintain speed and had to head back to Halifax unescorted.

The third day out, one of the escort destroyers, a British ship, spent a morning dropping depth charges, which rocked and alarmed convoy vessels in her vicinity, including the
Contessa
.
The destroyer also blasted “Hail Britannia” through her loudspeakers at the end of the exercise, prompting some in the group to assume that she’d sunk a U-boat with the charges. Instead, she was just churning waves.

The morning of August 5 broke in a thick fog that would last all day. To compound difficulties for ships trying to maintain their stations, the commodore received an order to divert the convoy route at noon. Adding tension to the maneuvers was the fact that explosions were heard at 1250 and again at 1400 hours. By the time the exercise was over, the explosions had stopped, and the fog had cleared at 1700, the commodore’s log noted the absence of five ships from the convoy, including the
Contessa
.

A straggler now in the vast Atlantic with German U-boats out there somewhere, trying to hunt them down, Captain William John and the 260 men on board, including the crew, the armed guard, and the 190 troops on their way to Ireland, were probably of various opinions about their status. For John and many in the crew, there was no doubt some relief that the close quarters and constricting pace of the convoy were temporarily relieved. As night passed, however, and the morning came with yet another fog and still no sight of the convoy, the green troops on board—mostly newly enlisted men, some in, some barely out of their teens—must have felt very lonely traveling without the strains of “Hail Britannia” being piped from a crackling loudspeaker system nearby.

As experienced and independent as the
Contessa
crew was, they, too, would have felt jangled nerves as the day progressed and the vessel continued to travel singly across the ocean. It would have been natural for William John to think of Doenitz and company, lurking in the waters before them. It would have been easy to think, too, of the
Amapala
, which he’d captained in the mid-1930s and which now lay at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Her April sinking had occurred just outside the mouth of the Mississippi River, soon after her captain, Master Harold Christiansen, had spotted a submarine after entering the gulf. The
Amapala
had begun zigzagging at full speed but couldn’t shake the sub. Christiansen radioed an SOS to the U.S. Coast Guard and waited for the U-boat to close. The German ship stayed on the surface and started blasting the fruit boat with its two deck cannons and a machine gun. For twenty minutes the defenseless
Amapala
was lambasted. A fireman, José Rodriguez, was wounded, along with a radio operator named Ira Rubin. Christiansen had to finally order the Standard Fruit vessel abandoned. When its four lifeboats were lowered, however, the Germans continued to fire, sinking one of the safety vessels. Thankfully, all hands were picked up by the remaining boats.

Two hours after the SOS, a U.S. plane emerged out of the sky and scared the Germans off. Still, there were no ships to gather the crew of the
Amapala
, and the men had to spend a night in the lifeboats before a coast guard vessel came to save them. Poor Rodriquez died of his wounds and was buried at sea. The
Amapala
was still floating, but a wreck, after the action. The Coast Guard wound up sinking her where she’d been attacked.

Within the Standard Fruit Company, the fate of the
Amapala
was
linked to an incident that had happened when John had been captain of the ship six years earlier. At that time, the vessel was sixty miles from New Orleans, carrying a couple dozen passengers, who were celebrating the ship’s last night at sea. A pair of honeymooners at the party won a black umbrella as a door prize, and the bride committed a cardinal sin of sea travel: she opened the umbrella in the dining room. The steward quickly insisted that she shut it, but superstition held that the ship would sink by dawn.

In fact, that night the
Amapala
was rammed by a tanker on its way from New Orleans to New Jersey. The lifeboats were lowered and a gaping hole was made in her bow, but the
Amapala
stayed afloat. No passengers were injured and, as it turned out, the lifeboats were hauled back
aboard unused. The ship wound up beached, however, and there were some at Standard Fruit who linked her ultimate fate, the sinking at the hands of the U-boat, to what had happened that night in the dining room.

Captain John was respectful of sea lore but not the sort of man to be cowed by its superstitions. Forty-nine years old as the
Contessa
sailed to Ireland, and with a career at sea that stretched back to his boyhood in Wales, he’d already experienced enough of a sailor’s life to be able to sort out its real dangers from those that were engendered by active imaginations.