Twelve Desperate Miles (2 page)

Walter Cronkite
—United Press reporter assigned to the battleship
Texas
. He had just finished an assignment in which he’d reported on the experience of traveling in a convoy between New York and England.

U.S. Navy armed guard—
In June 1942 a fourteen-man naval armed guard unit was assigned to the SS
Contessa
prior to its first voyage to England. Among the members of the guard who would sail with the
Contessa
to North Africa were Lieutenant William Cato, who commanded the unit for its first two voyages on the
Contessa
; the New Jersey contingent of Patsy Lambusta of Newark, Paul “Slick” Manganaro of Glassboro, and Adolph Krol of Camden; Bill Pottiger from Michigan; Hazelton Gilchrest “Hakie” McLaughlin from Bar Harbor, Maine, who was one of the few members of the guard who had experience on the sea; Wally Mason of Quincy, Massachusetts; and Ambrose “Kid” Schaffer of Ohio, a former professional prizefighter.

Lieutenant Albert Leslie
—Leslie assumed command of the armed guard unit on the voyage of the
Contessa
to Morocco. He was also appointed a cocaptain of the vessel by the U.S. Navy through the duration of the trip. Leslie was a World War I navy vet who had stayed in the service for a number of years afterward and had also worked for the U.S. Coast Guard. He was living in Pittsburgh at the start of World War II.

The
Contessa
crew—
The crew included the chief engineer, Englishman John Henry Langdon, a longtime employee of Standard Fruit; the second engineer, Arthur Baumgart, a native of Poland who, like Langdon, was a naturalized citizen of the United States and long an employee of Standard Fruit; the chief mate, Alexander Vallerino, and chief steward, Mario Violini (nicknamed “The Unsinkable”), natives of Italy but now citizens of the United States; Harry Haylock, the ship’s carpenter, who had sailed many times under Captain John and was originally from Honduras; second officer Jan Norberg, from Norway; and quartermaster Ture Jansen, a Swede. The chief radio officer, Alfred Turner, was one of the few native-born Americans on the
Contessa
crew.

Bill Sigsworth
—Captain William John’s brother-in-law, a last-minute addition to the
Contessa
’s crew. He was drafted aboard in Hampton Roads and was to make his first voyage as a seaman to North Africa.

Norfolk County Jail
—Among the eighteen crew members taken aboard the
Contessa
from the Norfolk County Jail were Ahmed Ali, Ali Salik, Ahmed Mohammed, Said Mohammed—all British nationals from Gulf of Aden ports—Henry Drummond, a young Australian, an American sailor named John Riccio, and a Finn named John Sutinen.

W
hen war came to France and the nation was lost to Hitler and the collaborationists, people in French Morocco acknowledged their feelings in sad and quiet gestures. A shrug here. A meaningful squeeze of hands there. Those who had a hard time accepting the Axis-aligned Pétain government—and they were many—went about their business in a haze of unease, uncertainty, and largely unspoken opinions.
The authorities in Port Lyautey, where retired merchant marine sailor René Malevergne worked, were initially indulgent of the distrust they felt around them, but soon the forgiving manner of the police was replaced by sidelong glances and open suspicion. At the same time, the feelings of the resisters grew more defiant as the weeks and months of Vichy governance stretched from summer into fall. There were soon opportunities for people like Malevergne to secretly defy the regime.

By October 1940, repercussions of the war’s fearful and disastrous effects on the populations of Europe came to inhabit North Africa. Refugees from France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Europe were thick in Morocco, crowding Casablanca and Rabat but also evident in smaller cities like Port Lyautey. There were food shortages, not so much caused by the increase in population in the region, but because local farmers were withholding their produce, disturbed that it was being shipped to France to be consumed by les Boches—the German occupiers. Tensions between those who aligned themselves with the Vichy regime and those who entered the nascent and secretive world of the Free French Resistance began to escalate.

For the most part, Germany stayed out of French Morocco, but its
gaze and interest in the country was sensed by everyone from refugees to French colonials to Moroccan natives. The realization that the Nazis were a power that could overwhelm a nation with remarkable speed was, by this time, ingrained in the populace. In Casablanca, something called the German Armistice Commission set up shop on the Boulevard de la Gare in the heart of the city; its members—as arrogant as a goose step—strutted presumptuously around town with a keen eye on the ways and means of Vichy.

It was in this atmosphere, several months into the new regime, that an old friend of Malevergne’s named Ravel found him strolling through the Port Lyautey market one day and pulled him aside, asking a simple yet dangerous question: “
Are you a Gaullist or Pétainist?”

For a patriot like Malevergne, who not only had fought against the Germans in World War I but had a brother who had been critically wounded and left handicapped at Verdun, it was absurd to think of any sort of alliance with the Nazis. “
Even if de Gaulle did not exist,” Malevergne told his friend, “I think I would be a Gaullist.”

Born in Limoges in 1892, René Malevergne served in the French navy during the war and came to Morocco soon after the conflict’s end. He used his naval experience to earn a job in the French civil service, working in a maritime post at the port, about seventy miles north of Casablanca. Within a few years, he was promoted to its chief pilot. His job was to offer his navigational skills and guidance to ocean ships entering the waters of the River Sebou through the hidden shoals and pounding surf of the Atlantic that marked the river’s entrance. It was a highly skilled post. The Sebou was the second-longest river in Morocco, running all the way down from the Atlas Mountains in the interior out to sea, but at its deepest it allowed for a draft of just seventeen feet for all the oceangoing vessels that sailed up its dozen winding miles from the Atlantic to the Port of Lyautey. To navigate both the fearsome entrance to the Sebou and its shallow, bending path to the port was the work of an expert.

Malevergne’s position was highly regarded in the region. He was
also a handsome man, with an easy smile, a dimpled chin, and dark hair that swept back from his brow in rippled waves. Malevergne stood just five feet four inches tall and carried himself with his shoulders thrown back—facts that tended to accentuate the small paunch that had come to him in middle age, making him appear slightly heavier than he was. He was a solid citizen of Mehdia, and he added to this sense of establishment in 1930, when he married a local girl, Germaine Martin. In a few years’ time, she gave birth to two young sons, René and Claude, and the family built a white cottage in Mehdia in the shadow of an old sixteenth-century Portuguese fort known locally as the Kasbah. René, Germaine, and the boys were happily ensconced in this world when the troubles of 1940 arrived.

A man who knew an Atlantic port like Lyautey as well as Malevergne did could be a very valuable commodity to the secret causes of the Free French—a fact that was understood not only by Ravel and his cohorts but also by Vichy authorities and Malevergne himself. In times like these, the fact that he was middle-aged, was married, and had two young boys did not constrain those who might want his help. He was, after all, the harbor pilot. Malevergne was not terribly surprised, then, to hear Ravel, in a quiet voice over cigarettes, tell him in somewhat vague terms of the group to which he belonged in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, about 21 miles southwest of Mehdia.

Malevergne decided not to tell his friend that he’d had an invitation just three days earlier from the other side. A captain in the French navy had asked Malevergne to stop by his offices in Port Lyautey. There, he had given the river pilot his telephone number and asked that Malevergne call if he was contacted by anyone from any of the “
clandestine organizations [that] are even now preparing all sorts of escapes.”

Despite this oblique warning that he was being observed by the authorities, Malevergne was receptive to Ravel and the Resistance, and when yet another old friend, Jean Claude Paolantonacci, the chief customs inspector in Lyautey, paid him a visit in Mehdia a few weeks later, Malevergne listened intently. This time the message was more concrete:
We are meeting in Rabat next month
, Pao said.
There is a plan to facilitate a passage in England. You are needed
.

In late November, Malevergne bade his wife, Germaine, and his two young boys good-bye and made the journey to the capital to learn more about the plans. He rode his bicycle through the cork oak forest between Mehdia and Rabat, watchful for both the local police and the unsavory nomads who still occasionally camped in the woods. In Rabat, he met with the Gaullists, who included Paolantonacci and Ravel; a Belgian proconsul from Port Lyautey named Allegre; Brabancon, the Belgian general consul; and a businessman named Brunin, who was the leader of the group.

As it turned out, the conspirators had already been plotting with British undercover agents to foster the escape to England of forty Belgian aviators currently trapped in Morocco. A vessel would be coming from Lisbon to Casablanca and then Port Lyautey sometime toward mid-December. Could Malevergne pilot the ship to and from the port and then arrange for the embarkation of the Belgian fliers at a predetermined inlet on the Atlantic shore, one that would be feasible for getting the Belgians to the ship in the rough seas?

To Malevergne, it all seemed slightly hypothetical and unreal. He was a river pilot, not a secret agent. And yet to all of the questions, all of the
if
s,
and
s, and
but
s that came out of that meeting, his answer was always the same: if the ship arrived safely at Mehdia, yes, he could pilot it to and from Port Lyautey; if all went well in the port, yes, he could steer the ship back out to the ocean; and once the ship was out of the river, yes, he could guide it toward a safe rendezvous with the pilots on the Atlantic coastline.

As a parting aid, the group gave him an assistant to help with his tasks, a man named Rocca who was said to have been a French war hero, a winner of the Légion d’Honneur in the First World War, and to have “
a grim hatred of the Nazis.” Rocca’s cover was that he would be Paolantonacci’s newly hired customs agent working with Malevergne in Mehdia.

Malevergne went home to await the arrival of the Portuguese ship, but almost immediately he became suspicious of Rocca. Something indefinable in his manner was just wrong. It was a feeling Malevergne could not shake.