Twelve Desperate Miles (18 page)

As a licensed officer, John was represented by the Master, Mates, and Pilots Association (MMPA). There were also unions representing engineers, cooks and stewards, and radio operators. The two largest unions, representing both deck and engine departments, were the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), based on the West Coast, and the National Maritime Union (NMU), centered on the East Coast.
All had emerged from the Depression and labor wars of the 1930s as well-run, well-advised organizations with their own newspapers and pamphlets produced by accomplished writers and with millions of dollars in the bank. They were also thought to be lairs of communists and sympathizers with the Soviet Union.

At the start of the war, and through the first few months of the “Second Happy Time” for German U-boats, there was a movement to have the U.S. Navy assume command of all merchant marines. Morison suggested that at the root of this movement was a lack of trust in the merchant seamen due to the basic economic, rather than patriotic, relationship that existed in the merchant service: “
Any ship in which a bluejacket serves is his ship, his country’s ship, to be defended with his life if need be. But to the union-indoctrinated merchant seamen the ship is the owner’s ship, his class enemies’ ship, to whom he owes nothing and from which he is morally entitled to squeeze all he can. The navy principle ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship’ did not appeal to merchant seamen.”

While Morison acknowledged that the NMU had done a far better job than the U.S. Navy in “
abolishing the color line and encouraging Negroes in every way” (it was claimed that 20 percent of all merchant seamen were African American) and that it scrupulously policed against “performers”—the term given to drunks, brawlers, and other sorts of
troublemakers aboard—and avoided strikes during the course of the war, he never fully bought into the idea that the merchant marine should be independent from the navy in times of war. He would write later that it was his “
emphatic opinion that if and when another war occurs, the merchant marine should either be absorbed by the Navy or man an auxiliary service under military discipline, like the Naval Construction Battalions, the famous Seabees.”

The idea of a takeover was bandied about by honchos in the U.S. Navy as early as February 1942 and reached the desk of the president that spring, but FDR never sanctioned it. Instead, the convoy system was instituted, along with the assignment of the naval armed guards to the ships of the merchant marine. Just how the guardsmen and the merchant seamen would blend together was a work in progress in the middle of September as the
Contessa
set off from New York Harbor on its second trip across the Atlantic.

The war and its massive shipping needs brought with them a demand for merchant seamen as well. Despite the dangers of U-boats lurking seemingly everywhere in the North Atlantic, union halls in port cities like New York were filled with men looking for berths. Skilled seamen, however, were at a premium.

A few years earlier, in 1938, the U.S. Coast Guard had instituted a school for merchant marine cadets at Kings Point on Long Island (two others would eventually be built at Pass Christian, Mississippi, and San Mateo, California), but its first graduates didn’t emerge until 1942. It took four years to train qualified deck and engine officers. These two designations—deck and engine, along with steward—constituted the basic departments of the ship.

The officers in the deck department of the
Contessa
included chief, second, and third mates. The chief mate was second in command to John and was in charge of cargo operations and seeing to the safety and security of the ship. The second mate was the ship’s principal navigation officer.

Unlike an army quartermaster, who is charged with distributing
supplies and provisions, a merchant marine quartermaster usually steered the ship under the command of the watch officer on the bridge.

Serving beneath the officers in the deck department were a dozen ABs, who were unlicensed but able to communicate in navigational terms with officers and to serve as helmsmen and lookouts. The part of the crew most apt to be rotated in and out of particular voyages were the ordinary seamen, called “utility crew” on the
Contessa
lists.

The steward’s department on the
Contessa
was overstaffed compared to a typical peacetime trip. On the September voyage, as on the previous journey to England in August, the ship held an extra 190 mouths to feed in the form of the troops being transported to the war effort. The
Contessa
’s dining and food-preparation facilities were busy and cramped operations centers. The
Contessa
carried three bakers, a butcher, six messmen, a pantry chief, and six stewards, along with the chief steward and his two assistant stewards. They did a seemingly perpetual ballet of food preparation and service for the length of the trips.

The engine department was charged with overseeing the maintenance and operation of the ship’s engines. Aside from chief and second engineers, the
Contessa
had third and fourth engineers to oversee the constant attention necessary to maintain the ship’s power. The
Contessa
carried four boilers pumping steam to four quadruple-expansion engines. These could produce 5,600 horsepower at her top speed of sixteen knots.
Sailing at that rate for a full day, the
Contessa
swallowed almost three hundred barrels of oil.

The chief engineer was in overall charge of all engineered equipment on the vessel, including boilers, main engines, refrigeration systems, electrical systems, and secondary engine units like pumps and windlasses. The second engineer served a supervisory function, overseeing the donkeyman, the firemen, the wipers, and the oilers, who toiled over the machinery itself.

The engine department was without doubt the most technically sensitive operation on the ship. Hot, cramped, loud, and often dangerous, this area was the beating heart of the ship. Like that organ, it was
located right in the solid trunk of the
Contessa
’s body. When working smoothly, the ship’s engines thrummed in a familiar rhythm of pistons and cylinders, crankshafts and rods. While modern ships have a bank of computerized sensors to inform the crew of trouble in the engine department, those who worked around these gigantic machines—almost 150 tons apiece and as big as a pickup truck—used their eyes, ears, nose, and touch to determine if a problem had arisen or was in the making. Servicing the machinery was a full-time occupation for many hands. Oilers walked around in fifteen-minute rounds with a can of oil in their hands to make sure shafts and pistons were well lubricated; firemen made sure the pressure was up but not too high. And every few minutes someone had to stick his hand into a space between the top of the engine and a pounding piston attached to a huge rotating cylinder as it hit the bottom of its cycle. That hand had to get back out before the engine cycled the piston back up, or it was, simply put, a mass of flesh and crushed bones. It was the only means available to test the temperature of the space to make sure it wasn’t overheating. “
That wasn’t no fun neither,” was the understatement of a sailor assigned the task on a Liberty ship’s reciprocating engine.

It was September 26 when Captain John’s ship emerged from the soup to discover that she was once again on her own. But by now the
Contessa
was so near her destination in Northern Ireland that John ordered her to “romp,” the terminology for continuing the voyage on her own. Traveling at an increased speed of fourteen knots, without the strictures of the convoy surrounding her, she was able to make her harbor and deposit her troops by September 28 with no untoward incidents.

That soon changed, however, after she set out for Avonmouth, just outside Bristol, her destination in England. While sailing across the Irish Sea, Cato ordered the gun crews on the
Contessa
to open fire on what turned out to be two British bombers, which appeared low on the horizon and flew within a thousand yards of the ship early on the twenty-ninth.
The very next day, two more friendly bombers appeared around noon, coming from the north and again flying within a thousand yards. Once more, the nervous gun crews on the
Contessa
took potshots. Thankfully, in both instances, no hits were made on the targets.

On the thirtieth, the
Contessa
arrived at Avonmouth and dispensed with her cargo. Cato reported one more interesting bit of news regarding her stay in Bristol: “
Attention is called to the show of hostility between the negro troops at Bristol, England and the Naval gun crews from ships in port there,” he wrote later. “Several naval gunners have been severely injured.” Cato offers no details of these “hostilities,” nor does he mention whether any of the
Contessa
’s crew was involved.

Just eight days later, the
Contessa
was done with her business in Great Britain and once again at sea, sailing home for a much-needed and highly anticipated rest in New York. Counting up the trips she’d made early in the year in the Caribbean, plus the initial trip to pier 1 in Brooklyn and the back-and-forth journeys between New York and England, Captain John noted in his log that this was the ship’s twelfth voyage of the year.

Her thirteenth would be the most memorable.

I
n August 1942, Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood was beginning the editing of and preparing the marketing campaign for a war movie that had finished shooting late in July.
Casablanca
had begun its life at Warner the previous December, when a play called
Everybody Comes to Rick’s
crossed producer Hal Wallis’s desk the day after Pearl Harbor. A melodrama involving an expatriate American who owns a café in Morocco, the story emanates from the sudden arrival at Rick’s Café of a woman with whom owner Rick Blaine had an affair in Paris. The play interested Wallis because its themes revolved around the war in Europe and questions of what Americans should do and think about it. Blaine exemplified a certain kind of national attitude about the conflict. As it seemed more and more likely that the United States was going to be drawn into world war for the second time in the century, his cynicism about the ways and means of global politics fit neatly into the smaller universe of Casablanca—a city swarming with a host of spies and scoundrels, as well as European refugees desperate to escape the ever-expanding clutches of Nazi Germany.

It’s only when his former lover from Paris, the beautiful Ilsa Lund, shows up at the café with her husband, a heroic Czech underground fighter, that we learn that Rick has a more human side. Or at least had one in the not-too-distant past when the two met and fell in love as
the war approached France. The tensions between the lovers, the exotic setting in North Africa, and the moral and political dilemma placed in Rick’s lap—will he or won’t he give the couple two letters of transit that will allow Ilsa and her husband, Laszlo, to leave Casablanca, and will he or won’t he choose sides in the coming war?—suggested to Wallis that there was a film in this play, and he quickly authorized Warner’s story department to buy rights and assign scriptwriters to the work. Never mind that that key plot device, the letters of transit signed by Charles de Gaulle, were a remarkably fanciful means of escaping Morocco, and that, in fact, holding any papers signed by de Gaulle was more likely to get a person thrown in the Rabat prison with René Malevergne than grant him passage to Lisbon. That was an inconsequential matter to Wallis.
He ordered the rights purchased and quickly renamed the project
Casablanca
, after a place few people in the United States could find on a map but that, Wallis thought, would suggest another recently made popular film called
Algiers
, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr.

Wallis asked a pair of brothers, Julius and Philip Epstein, to do the script for the movie. They specialized in turning plays into films and had recently done so for Frank Capra’s movie
Arsenic and Old Lace
. Capra had just been hired by the federal government to produce and direct a series of documentary films called
Why We Fight
and had asked the Epstein brothers to come to Washington to help him with their writing. All of which meant that though the Epsteins had agreed to write
Casablanca
for Wallis, they had to take a break in the middle of the job to head to Washington to work for a month with Capra. During that interim, Wallis hired another Warner writer, Howard Koch, to work on the
Casablanca
script.

After some fishing around for a director, Wallis settled on a Hungarian immigrant named Michael Curtiz, who had arrived in Hollywood from Austria, where he’d directed scores of films in the silent era. To the acting community in California, he was known as an autocrat, prone to treating his cast and crew like petulant children; but he’d had a number of successes in Hollywood (including a string of Errol Flynn features:
The Charge of the Light Brigade
,
The Sea Hawk
, and
The Adventures of Robin Hood
). He had Wallis’s respect and, perhaps more important, made movies that “
were brought in on time, rarely went over budget, and almost always made money.”