Twelve Desperate Miles (27 page)

At the outset of the Civil War, the federal government torched the ships housed at the navy yard that had existed in Portsmouth since the eighteenth century. Rather than see them in the hands of the Confederate state of Virginia, Union forces abandoned the yard until 1862, when George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac began its futile peninsula campaign and reoccupied the region. Naval history was made out on the waters of Hampton Roads that same spring, when the famous battle between the world’s first two ironclad ships, the
Monitor
and the
Merrimac
, was waged.

“Hampton Roads” is the name given to both the body of water
that forms the harbor and the metropolitan region that surrounds it. The area is composed of several cities, including Norfolk on the southeast side of the harbor; Virginia Beach, which is to the east of Norfolk on the Atlantic Ocean; Portsmouth, just to the west of Norfolk across the Elizabeth River; Newport News, to the northwest of the harbor in the fork between the James and York rivers, which run from the bay; and Hampton, which lies on the same inlet beside Newport News. Docks, piers, and shipping yards are located in all of the cities in the area.

Hampton Roads was a critical point of embarkation in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Hundreds of thousands of troops embarked for Europe in the second of these conflicts, along with millions of tons of supplies. The port specialty in World War I was the shipping of horses, mules, and forage, and large corrals for the animals were erected near the docks.

The growth of the Hampton Roads Port began during the First World War and would continue dramatically through World War II. Airfields, specialty training camps for army personnel about to join the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, and a huge naval training camp sprang up in the area in 1917 and 1918, along with warehouses and supply depots. The navy yard had remained active at Norfolk all these years, and private shipping interests were plentiful as well.

At the beginning of World War I, there was a dispute between the cities of Norfolk and Newport News over which community should house the port of embarkation headquarters. Both cities had fine facilities and were well positioned to house the command; and all of the communities in the region would ultimately house various components of the port; but the winner turned out to be Newport News because of its proximity to interior railroad lines. A similar conflict over placement of the headquarters arose in the spring of 1942, and once again Newport News was named port headquarters. The port commander took control of offices in the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company in May; but instead of the “Newport News Port of Embarkation,” as the harbor had been
designated during World War I, it became the “Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation” during the Second World War.

Despite their experiences in global conflict, nothing could have prepared regional resources for the onslaught of military and civilian personnel that arrived after war was declared in 1942. Employment opportunities in the defense industries brought people from all over the country to Hampton Roads looking for work. Shipbuilders and dry-dock workers were needed, stevedores and clerks. The workforce at the Newport News shipyards jumped from around 6,000 in 1939 to more than 31,000 in April 1943; during the same period at the navy yard in Norfolk, the number of workers escalated from 6,520 to 43,000. The number of military installations in the region jumped from ten in prewar years to twenty-six by war’s end. So many construction workers were needed to keep pace with all of the building projects in the area that by the last half of 1942, 34,135 workers had been hired in the construction trades, while only 2,175 had been similarly employed before the war.

Population growth in the area, both civilian and military, was equally phenomenal. For the military, the numbers rose from 15,715 in 1940 to 158,024 in 1943. The civilian population jumped from around 390,000 before the war to 576,000 in 1943. In a matter of months, Hampton Roads had morphed from a manageable group of municipalities into the most congested and overwhelmed metropolitan region in the nation.

Finding housing instantly became a problem. Schools, hospitals, and public transportation were overcrowded. And despite the huge influx of population, there were war jobs that were still going unfilled in the fall of 1942. “
Demand is far beyond supply in almost everything bearing upon life in a whirling, confused war town,” said a writer in a profile of the city for the
American Mercury
.

There was also an explosion in crime. The city of Newport News saw an increase in arrests from 6,353 in 1939 to an astounding 38,377 by 1942; similarly, apprehensions in the city of Portsmouth jumped from around 5,500 to nearly 25,000. Perhaps not surprising, given the huge
numbers of single young men who had come to the region, prostitution was the offense most increased by the war; other related problems like open operation of speakeasies, “nip joints,” and gambling houses and numbers running also became prevalent.

Seamen and army personnel heading out for an evening on the town in Norfolk would head down to East Main Street, which, according to at least one account, held the most solid block of beer joints in the world. Jukeboxes played “Pass the Ammunition” and “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” Miss Rose La Rose, described as “
a poor man’s Gypsy Rose Lee,” danced at the one burlesque joint in town.

The Hampton Roads area had long been in the business of entertaining rowdy sailors on leave from long weeks at sea. From Norfolk to Newport News, these were not cities given to deep blushing. But what happened with the onset of World War II was another matter. The local police were simply swamped by the situation, and even the institution of a large shore patrol, created by the navy in October 1942, did little to alleviate the basic problems. A massive raid of houses of ill repute in the second week of the month, encouraged by military authorities to scare soon-to-depart soldiers away from partaking in the Norfolk nightlife, was only partially effective.

The huge influx of army troops to be loaded onto the transports in early October only exacerbated problems. These 34,000 soldiers were supposed to have been quarantined from the temptations of Norfolk and environs during the process; in fact, thousands escaped the provisions intended to keep them in line. Public telephones near the wharves were disconnected and fences ringed the docks. Military police patrolled the railroads and bus depots, on the lookout for deserters. Though the troops had no idea where they were going, they were pretty certain that the war awaited them on the other end of the voyage, and they were not going to be
denied a last fling in the haunts of Hampton Roads.

Of deep concern to local authorities was the fact that jails in the area were proving inadequate to the needs of the police. There were not nearly enough detention facilities, which prompted a revolving-door
justice system, through which prostitutes were brought but then quickly released for lack of cells to put them in. Typical of the region’s lockup facilities was the one in Portsmouth that consisted of five cells, each with two bunks. During the war, an average of fifty prisoners a day were crammed into these pens, segregated only by gender.

Even so, the Norfolk County Jail was the worst of the worst—so bad that it would be closed during the course of the war by the State of Virginia, which wrote in a report that of all of its jails, Norfolk’s was the dirtiest and most corrupt. Money was not returned to prisoners; at least one prisoner was held for fifteen months without trial; and the Norfolk County Police were discovered to be holding occasional all-night orgies with the prostitutes confined in the jail.

A number of national publications sent reporters to the area, some to describe the rampant vice, others to reassure folks back home that despite all the rumors and stories surrounding the Hampton Roads area, things were not as bad as they seemed. In the former category, both the
American Mercury
and
Collier’s
magazine reported on what the
Mercury
called “
Our Worst War Town” in its headline. Both described as the nadir of the community “stockades” set up outside the city limits containing “girlie trailers,” to which visitors were steered by local cabbies who would hang out by their cars smoking cigarettes as their fares were entertained inside. In contrast, the
Woman’s Home Companion
reported on the more innocent activities available to the workers, including “
dances, movies, sports, roller-skating, the USO, and the YMCA.”

Stifling a sense of panic at the news that almost half of the
Contessa
crew was missing, Colonel Wilder tried to rationally assess the circumstances. The good word was that work on the ship, miraculously, would be finished by midnight. She would be out of dry dock and loading would begin as soon as she was moved to pier X. Two thousand cans of aviation fuel, each weighing four hundred pounds, were already drummed at Craney Island and awaited the
Contessa
in loading barges. An additional nine
hundred tons of munitions were likewise ready to be stored in the vessel’s holds.

The bad news was there were virtually no sailors to be found in this great harbor. The twenty-nine crew members missing from John’s original group were either up in New York or out in Norfolk, likely enjoying the gyrations of Rose La Rose down on East Main Street. The just-departed task-force convoy had already sucked up every available hand in the area, and the War Shipping Administration, which Wilder had called soon after he heard the bad news about the crew from John, had no one available.

Captain John had given Wilder the name, number, and address of Standard Fruit’s personnel man in New York, but when Wilder called up to the city, the Standard rep was extremely doubtful that any crew there could be contacted in time to sail from Hampton Roads in less than two days. He told Wilder that despite the problems in Virginia, he would have better luck searching for crew members in Hampton Roads than in New York, and he volunteered to fly down to help with the hunt.

Meanwhile, that Sunday morning Wilder entertained a string of calls from interested parties wanting to get progress reports on the
Contessa
. His immediate superior at the Hampton port, General Kilpatrick, checked in, as did the task force’s Captain Johnson, who informed Wilder that he was sending the new armed guard commander, Lieutenant Leslie, to the port to see if he could be of any assistance in getting the ship out of port. Wilder neglected to inform Johnson of the missing crew, an oversight—or safeguard—that he would later regret.

At about 11:00 a.m., Wilder got a call from pier X. The stevedores were up in arms about loading the cargo. Safety rules prevented them from stowing both gasoline and munitions at the same time; one mishandled bomb would not simply blast a giant hole in the
Contessa
; it would obliterate the ship, pier X, and probably a chunk of Newport News, as well. The union insisted the gas and bombs be loaded separately. Once again Wilder hit the phones. It took twenty minutes of pleading and cajoling for Wilder to arrange for the navy to declare an emergency situation, which would allow for the contiguous loading.

The Standard Fruit agent from New York arrived and was joined by local Standard Fruit reps, two based in Newport News and one from Norfolk. They scratched their heads, checked their rosters, called other shipping agents, and tried to reach their missing sailors, but by the middle of the afternoon had located just one of the seamen, who would be arriving in the morning from New York.

Lieutenant Albert Leslie arrived too, to see what help he could supply, but, unfortunately, he didn’t have twenty-nine seamen in tow, so there wasn’t much he could do either.

At a little after 3:00 p.m., Johnson called, steaming. He’d just learned from Kilpatrick that twenty-nine men were missing from the
Contessa
crew. In his public notes, Wilder failed to supply the color of the conversation that followed, but the implication is that it was blue. When he was able to get a word in edgewise, the colonel gave Johnson an update on the search, and it appears that there was some discussion between the two about the possibility of the navy supplying the missing crew members. That hope was shot down an hour later when a lieutenant commander from the naval operating base in Norfolk called to say that no one was available.

The one bright spot in the hunt occurred when word arrived in Wilder’s office that a navy tanker, the
Gloria
, had arrived in port and that recruits from it might be had the next morning. But by the end of the day on Sunday, the only additional seaman they could rely on was the
Contessa
crew member coming in from New York and a cadet recruited from the War Shipping Administration. There was some brief talk of “Shanghai-ing” sailors from the
Gloria
to serve on the voyage, but that seems to have been more late-in-the-day desperation than a real option. Sunday, the twenty-fifth, ended as it had begun: with the search for twenty-nine sailors for the
Contessa
still up in the air.