Twelve Desperate Miles (26 page)

“
Darling Bea,” he wrote, “I must have been considerably upset to have started to leave without saying good-by—I guess I was. It will probably be sometime before you get a letter from me, but I will be thinking of you and loving you.”

In the midst of this last note, Patton saved room for one last piece of news that was obviously weighing on his mind and that he’d obviously shared with his wife on the eve of his departure. “We are going to sleep on board [the
Augusta
] tonight and leave this place on shore at 0230,” he wrote. And then, as if the knowledge would relax Bea as well, he added, “The
Contessa
finally showed up.”

F
or the stevedores and staff at the port of embarkation in Hampton Roads, it was hard to discern the special nature of the banana boat that pulled into the port. In fact, her six months at sea, the last three in the North Atlantic, had given the
Contessa
such a battered appearance that subsequent descriptions of the vessel almost universally described her as long in the tooth and run-down, when in fact the
Contessa
had been a relatively modern ship prior to the war. Long gone was the steamer that had proudly cruised the Caribbean with well-heeled passengers sipping drinks in deck chairs as they were serenaded by musicians beside a mahogany bar.

A pilot had guided Captain John’s ship through the submarine net by Fort Monroe at the entrance to the harbor at about the same hour that George Patton and Admiral Hewitt were meeting with the commanders at the army warehouse in Newport News on the morning of the twenty-third. He steered her toward pier X, the same loading facility that had embarked Truscott’s sub–task force Goalpost. It was here that the port crew got their first peek at the once-proud steamer.

In an ideal world, the
Contessa
would have been loaded with her cargo and would have turned around and joined the convoy that was about to sail from Hampton Roads. But as soon as he was informed of this outline, John quickly disabused port authorities of the notion. Not only was there simply no way that she could immediately go back to sea, but even if she could, it would have been impossible for her to keep up with a convoy in her current state. After describing to port authorities the measures he’d taken to make it through the almost weeklong storm that he and the crew had just faced in this last crossing, John said the
Contessa
had to go into dry dock for repairs.

At a minimum, she needed rivets tightened and some leaking seams
closed; her number four hold had to be pumped out, as did the after-hold, which had been filled with seawater to stabilize her during the crossing; she needed pump repairs and to have her degaussing coils replaced or dried—“baked,” in the dock vernacular.

The port authorities would have to make their own assessment of what was needed, but while they did so, the
Contessa
was ordered to stand by at pier X until a space opened up in the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, hopefully the next day. It appeared that despite all the efforts to find her and get her to Norfolk, the
Contessa
would not be heading off with the Western Task Force convoy to North Africa in the next twenty-four hours. And Captain John, who still had no idea what his special mission might be, assumed that in the best case his ship would be several days in repair. He granted liberty to a number of his crew, allowing them the time to travel to family and friends who had planned to greet them in New York, or to head into the pleasures of the Hampton Roads Port. He himself contacted Bessie in New York and asked her to come down to Norfolk to the Nansemond Hotel for their long-awaited reunion.

Meanwhile, Wilder let all interested parties—army, Army Air Force, SOS, navy, and War Shipping Administration—know that the
Contessa
was in dock and being inspected.

When the air force received word of her arrival, it added an additional request to her payload: along with the airplane gasoline, they asked that she be loaded with bombs. Like the gasoline, it was determined that munitions were needed to aid in the mission of the P-40s flying support for Patton in Casablanca. The combination of volatile gasoline and high explosives, of course, added to the ship’s potential combustibility, but in the midst of all the other activities surrounding the
Contessa
, it seemed just another difficult request that needed filling before she steamed out of the harbor.

Though the ship was sailing at the special request of the army, the navy, by order of the Joint Chiefs, commanded all convoy vessels at sea.
Due to the unique nature of the
Contessa
’s mission,
Admiral Kent Hewitt ordered Lieutenant Albert Leslie U.S.N. to take charge of the guard unit on the
Contessa
. He was also to assume the role of cocaptain of the ship itself. Convoy orders would be addressed to him to be passed along to the
Contessa
’s civilian master, Captain John.

Leslie had had a diverse career. A World War I naval vet from Pittsburgh, he had continued in the service after the war, twice sailing around the world and serving, among other duties, in relief efforts in Japan in 1923, aiding survivors of the Yokohama earthquake. He’d moved into the Coast Guard during the late 1920s and served as a boatswain’s mate in the fight against rum runners on the Eastern Seaboard during the height of Prohibition. By the early 1930s, Leslie had seemingly retired from the sea to take a position in a Pittsburgh bank, where he’d risen to vice president by the time World War II began. He had reenlisted in the navy as a lieutenant and was assisting with the amphibious assault training on Solomons Island near Norfolk when the assignment to join the
Contessa
came from Admiral Hewitt’s office. Some sense of the navy’s distrust of the merchant ship and her crew, as well as the dangers of the mission itself, was evinced in the orders given to Leslie. Part of his instructions ordered him to take over the ship if the
Contessa
’s crew refused to obey orders, and to use his heavily armed guard to enforce that command if need be.

It took several hours of inspection for a full assessment of the
Contessa
’s damages and needed repairs. The final count of her leaky rivets reached twenty-five; these and two seams, as well as the degaussing coil, all needed fixing, just as John had indicated. Trouble began when word of the extent of these problems reached U.S. Navy authorities. They were adamant that the
Contessa
not sail with the convoy. They simply could not have a banana boat limping along for this ride, potentially slowing the speed of the whole group.

That news was delivered to Wilder in the form of a Saturday telephone call from the chief of staff of the Amphibious Fleet, Captain Lee
Johnson. Johnson had consulted directly with Admiral Ingersoll, who was commander of the Northern Group. Ingersoll had stated flatly that he would not have her.

It was left to Wilder then to call the army with this latest development. The U.S. Army, of course, had none of the navy’s qualms: the
Contessa
would go with the convoy come what may, said General Gross, commander of the army’s Transport Division. He asked Wilder plainly if the port could get the ship ready in a reasonable amount of time. Not knowing for certain whether “reasonable” meant reasonable for the army’s needs or the navy’s, Wilder hemmed. Not the pause that Gross wanted to hear. He ordered Wilder to get in touch directly with General Patton for a final answer. Meanwhile, Gross would try to convince the navy that this ship was desperately needed. Gross further put the screws to his man in Hampton Roads:
“If you have the will, you can find a way,” he told Wilder.

If Wilder wondered at any point in the process about what made this ship’s mission so important to the convoy, he didn’t voice his question in a public manner and certainly wasn’t going to do so to General Patton. Wilder no doubt took a deep breath before dialing the task force commander at the Nansemond Hotel in Norfolk. He no doubt exhaled deeply when he discovered that Patton had already gone to sea on the
Augusta
the day before. Nonetheless, he continued to try to get in touch with the general through Captain Johnson, who, as fate would have it, was on the
Augusta
as well. Wilder soon discovered that the future of the
Contessa
had already been discussed and determined on that very ship.

In his notes from that wild day, Wilder recorded that at 1725 hours on Saturday, October 24, he “called Captain Johnson who told me that the AUGUSTA had gone and that Patton was on board; that [Patton] had just talked to the Navy Department … [He] insisted that the CONTESSA go, even if she had to run alone.” Johnson said further that “the Navy would let her go if we could get her out of dry dock by 1000 tomorrow [Sunday, October 25] and have her loose [i.e., loaded with her airplane gasoline and bombs and ready to sail] early Monday morning.”

Wilder’s night was far from over. He called Gross back just before 6:00 p.m. with word that the navy had acquiesced on the
Contessa
. He was also able to impart the good news that she would indeed be out of dry dock in the morning with fingers crossed that the degaussing coils—baked, rather than replaced outright—would hold up for the duration of the crossing. Now all he had to do was get in touch with the captain of the steamer to let him know that he would be leaving the port sooner, rather than later, and that he might have to make the transatlantic run alone.

At seven stories high, the Hotel Warwick had dominated the Newport News skyline for many years prior to World War II. Built primarily to help entertain businessmen with ties to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, it had been
the
center of social activities in the city since its construction in the 1880s. Its age was beginning to show by the fall of 1942, but it was here in the still elegant hotel dining room that Colonel Wilder’s call reached William John. Captain John was having dinner with his wife, Bess, who had just arrived from New York. Bess was traveling with her brother, William Sigsworth, a thirty-year-old salesman who had emigrated from Wales with Bess’s mother, father, and sister thirteen years earlier and lived with the extended family in New Orleans.

Though the Johns were accustomed to absences in their marriage—he was, after all, a man of the sea—they’d never had one as long as this in more than twenty years as a couple. Wilder was the agent of an even further extension. With apologies over the phone, he asked that the
Contessa
’s captain come to the offices of the port of embarkation. They needed to talk about the timing of the special mission on which his ship was being asked to sail. It was important that he come immediately.

A half hour after Wilder’s phone call, John was in the colonel’s office learning that he would be returning to the
Contessa
in a matter of hours, not days, and that he might have to run her alone across the Atlantic in
pursuit of the convoy. Furthermore, his cargo was to be a highly explosive mix of airplane fuel and bombs, to be loaded as soon as she got out of dry dock.

Many years later, his brother-in-law, Sigsworth, would describe Captain John as first and foremost a military man, “accustomed to saying yes when service called.” Whether it was this stiff upper lip or some other motive that drove him, John was quick to respond. He let the colonel know “that he was perfectly willing to run free, in fact, anxious to run alone.”

But
Wilder had something crucial to learn too. There might be a hiccup, Captain John informed him. It turned out the
Contessa
“was short a considerable number of crew, twenty-nine having been allowed time off … when [John] thought the ship would be in dry dock five days.”

Some had no doubt run up to their homes in New York for a quick visit with family; some were no doubt roaming the wild streets of Norfolk. In either case, Wilder knew, this was not good news.

H
ampton Roads was officially designated a port of embarkation by the War Department in June 1942, but its history stretched all the way back to the first days of English settlement in the colony of Virginia in the early seventeenth century. One of the largest natural harbors in the world, Hampton Roads is doubly guarded from the Atlantic. Twin capes, Henry and James, named by those first Virginia colonists for the monarch of England and his son in 1607, mark the twelve-mile-wide inlet into Chesapeake Bay. Once inside the bay, the harbor at Hampton Roads is found through a second inlet to the southwest, just a few miles from the ocean. Here fifty miles of sheltered shoreline are available to ships arriving from the Atlantic in a sweeping harbor as fine as any on the Eastern Seaboard.

The area is steeped in American history. Virginia’s colonial capital, Williamsburg, just up the James River from the port, piqued the interest of John D. Rockefeller about a dozen years prior to the start of World War II. He began to finance its restoration, and tourists soon followed, visiting the site in substantial numbers in the 1930s. Nearby, too, was Yorktown, site of the siege that ended the Revolutionary War.