Twelve Desperate Miles (31 page)

Along with the man who commanded the fourteen-member guard contingent on the
Contessa
, thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant j.g. William Cato, Schaffer was the old-timer in the guard crew at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. He was also one of the few midwesterners.

There were a handful of guys from Jersey, including Patsy Lambusta of Newark and Paul Manganaro, a seventeen-year-old kid born and raised in Glassboro and nicknamed “Slick.”

Wally Mason of Quincy, Massachusetts, had spent his first year out of high school working for the Civilian Conservation Corps before he signed up with the U.S. Navy in May. A good-looking, happy-go-lucky kid, Mason had to creep up on tiptoes to make the minimum height requirement for service. He was a gunner’s mate.

So was Hazelton Gilchrest McLaughlin—“Hank” or “Hakie” to his friends (after the breed of fish that was so prevalent in the waters off the Maine coast). McLaughlin was born and raised not far from Bar Harbor. He had uncles who were lobstermen, and Hakie had spent some time on
the sea with them. Prior to enlisting, however, he’d graduated from the North Yarmouth Academy, where he’d learned the machinist’s trade.

Bill Pottiger came from a small town in Michigan; Adolph Krol was another of the Jersey guys, being from Camden; seventeen-year-old Harman Thomas, along with Lieutenant Cato, was a Virginian.

There were four teenagers in the group, four twenty-year-olds, and four more who were less than twenty-five years old. Aside from Cato and a couple of the East Coast boys, including McLaughlin, what they knew about the sea was not much. Like so many of the American naval forces heading to war that fall, they were as green as algae and offered a stark contrast to the merchant crew who had sailed with Captain William John out of New Orleans.

Like John and Leslie, the officers on board the
Contessa
were experienced hands of a similar age to the cocaptains. Chief engineer John Henry Langdon was a naturalized citizen of the United States, born in Plymouth, England. He’d worked with Standard Fruit for a number of years, serving on the
Gatun
and the
Ceiba
, as well as the
Contessa
. Like John, he was approaching his fiftieth birthday.

The second engineer was a native of Poland, Arthur Baumgart, who, like Langdon, was now a naturalized citizen of the United States and lived in New Orleans. He had sailed for Standard Fruit for more than twenty years and had served under John on the
Amapala
through the late 1930s.

The chief mate was a native of Italy, Alexander Vallerino. Like Langdon and Baumgart (and carpenter Harry Haylock and steward Mario Violini), he had acquired U.S. citizenship. Fifty-two years old that fall, he’d shipped with Standard Fruit for a number of years, but these—the first and second voyages of the
Contessa
to England in August and September and now this trip to Africa—were his first journeys with John.

Haylock and Violini, by contrast, had served with the captain for many years, on both the
Amapala
and the
Contessa
. Haylock was born
in Honduras in 1894; Violini was baptized in Italy half a dozen years later. Violini had dark, hooded eyes and a prominent nose. He was just five foot four and 130 pounds when soaking wet, wore striped scoop-necked T-shirts in the style of a Mediterranean sailor, and was
nicknamed “The Unsinkable” for his fervent belief that his faith would see him through any troubles that might befall any ship on which he sailed. He made his home in New York, while Haylock was based out of New Orleans.

A Norwegian sailor, Jan Norberg, was the second officer on the
Contessa
, and a Swede, Ture Jansen, was an able seaman who had been promoted to quartermaster for this voyage, as the
Contessa
’s original quartermaster, Eden Wood, was one of the seamen who had left the ship in Norfolk.

The chief radio officer was Alfred Turner, one of just a handful of native-born Americans in the crew and a former roommate of Haylock’s in New Orleans.

Bill Sigsworth, John’s brother-in-law, had been hired as part of the steward’s department under the occupation of “writer”—a nontypical post on a merchant ship. In Sigsworth’s case, it was probably akin to the position of purser—he helped with and kept track of the ship’s administration for the captain. Sigsworth was one of the tallest men aboard and lanky: at six feet two inches, he carried just 150 pounds. Like his brother-in-law, he wore a dapper mustache and swept-back hair. He’d always wanted to go to sea and had done so for the first time as a seventeen-year-old in 1929, when he escorted his parents from Wales to New Orleans. There the Sigsworth family took up residence with Captain John, his wife, Bess, and their two children in a home off Charles Street. Circumstances had never allowed Bill Sigsworth his wish of getting back on the ocean. Until his voyage on the
Contessa
, he had worked in New Orleans for a lumber company, appraising and reclaiming the wood, mainly cypress, from old homes that were being torn down in the city.

He made good company for John, as did Leslie. The latter two shared
many hours on the bridge with no apparent difficulties between them concerning the divided leadership. Both had spent many years at sea, both had served in the First World War, and both were accustomed to and respectful of command. John accepted that the U.S. Navy was in charge of the direction of this ship and her mission; Leslie understood that John knew the
Contessa
better than anyone else.
Despite his twenty-some years in New Orleans, not only did Captain John keep his Welsh accent, but “bloody” was his most frequent adjective when he was irritated. They both liked early-morning hours. John liked his Winston cigarettes and tea. Like everyone else on this ship, they were bound together in a mission that was hardly of their own making, but one that they were now pledged to carry out.

The weather stayed fine for a full week out of Hampton Roads, and the
Contessa
made good time in her crossing, continuing to average above fifteen knots during daytime steaming and close to fifteen under the light of the moon. She was a full twenty-four hours ahead of her schedule as she neared the Azores. The submarine jitters continued, but no genuine sightings occurred. Still, tensions on the voyage began to rise as the
Contessa
neared the far side of the Atlantic. Here were the waters leading toward the Mediterranean and the coast of Africa; here they were nearing the convoy itself; and the prospects of bumping into U-boats were growing. Leslie ordered a series of test firings of the weaponry on board.

Leslie soon became concerned, too, about a piece of intelligence that had not been given to him in all of the material that he’d reviewed before climbing aboard the
Contessa
. It turned out that the ship had not been provided with an identification code, nor had he been given challenge and reply signals. It also lacked the proper radio frequencies to hear command communications. In other words, aside from its lack of physical contact with the convoy, the
Contessa
had no signal contact either. It was doubly isolated, and few commanders attached to the invasion force
even knew of its existence. It also continued to fly the Honduran flag of its national registry. All of which made it an odd duck.

The boxer Kid Schaffer, along with Harman Thomas and Bill Pottiger, wore the crossed semaphore flags of signalmen in Leslie’s armed guard unit. In addition to lookout duties, signalmen were responsible for transmitting, receiving, encoding, decoding, and distributing messages obtained via the visual transmission systems of flag semaphore, visual Morse code, and flag-hoist signaling. Leslie called this group together to give them their orders. If challenged, in addition to raising the Honduran flag they were to signal the ship’s international call letters, as well as the position the
Contessa
had been originally assigned to (but had been unable to assume) in the convoy. They were also to signal the code “blind mice”—a prearranged message within the navy meaning, “I have been unable to complete my mission.” He might have also added, “And then cross your fingers,” to these instructions.

Ten days into the ship’s voyage, a plane coming from the northeast emerged from the sky above and did a slow circle overhead. As it neared, watchers could tell it was a Sunderland, a large British float plane, flying, no doubt, out of Gibraltar. The Sunderlands, manufactured in the city of the same name in England, were originally used as long-distance rescue planes to aid in picking up the crews of ships that had been attacked by Nazi U-boats. As the war progressed, they were given fighting capabilities as well and armed with a pair of nose-turret guns and depth charges. In other words, the Sunderland circling above was a potentially dangerous adversary, if it had no clue what was the intention of the
Contessa
. Leslie ordered his signalmen to hang the ship’s “laundry” but the Sunderland continued to circle above. For two tense hours, this pas de deux continued, until finally the plane flew off, presumably convinced the ship was harmless.

Captain John had sounded almost eager to run solo across the ocean a few days earlier, on that wild Saturday when he first learned from Colonel Wilder that he’d have to immediately return to sea. He’d doubtless grown disenchanted with the congestion and snail’s pace of
convoy travel that he’d experienced on the
Contessa
’s two transport trips to England that summer and fall. Now, as the ship neared its destination off the Azores and the prospect mounted of increased interest from German U-boats, as well as friendly yet dangerous craft who had no idea who they were, the confines of a destroyer escort seemed as snug as a safe harbor.

A
s October came to a close and the date of the invasion of North Africa neared, the Western Task Force continued its zigzagging course across the Atlantic ahead of the
Contessa
, first in a generally southeast direction, heading vaguely toward Dakar; then, after pausing midway across the sea for refueling, taking its zigs and zags in a more northeasterly course toward Gibraltar, still with the object of confusing any observers about where exactly it was heading.

Allied intelligence had estimated that
about forty U-boats were hunting along the trade routes of the Atlantic Ocean as the convoy sailed, but its journey was passing with a remarkable calm given its size and the potential for violence that surrounded it. The weather was holding nicely; one hundred ships tiptoed across the ocean seemingly without disturbing anyone. Radar on the
Augusta
picked up a single unidentified aircraft flying from port to starboard on November 1, but it soon disappeared and was not heard from again. As they neared the African coast, they were now in the thick of submarine waters, but no attacks had yet occurred, nor would they.

On November 2, Admiral Hewitt called his commanders to give his instructions on the deployment of the three separate groups in the task force. The southern group would detach from the main body of the convoy on November 7—D-day minus one—and head to a point fifty-five miles off the coast of French Morocco at Safi. The central and northern groups—carrying the forces of Patton and Truscott—would remain concentrated until noon on D-day minus one and continue to head in the general direction of Gibraltar until that time, when the northern group would veer off slightly toward Port Lyautey.

On board the old World War I destroyer USS
Dallas
, preparations
were under way for the special mission that awaited her. Unlike the seamen on the
Contessa
, her crew knew that she was headed up a river in Morocco and that trouble awaited her if the French put up a fight. The ship had already been shorn of her masts in order to drop weight for her journey up the shallow Sebou. The crew knew that an airport on the river was their ultimate destination and that they would soon be taking aboard a contingent of Truscott’s Army Rangers, whom they were to deposit at the field. Beyond the fact that the river was shallow, they knew nothing about its other parameters or the lay of the land around it. Aside from the officers, who’d been briefed in greater detail about their mission, they knew nothing of the
Contessa
, which was to trail them up the Sebou.

The crew, like the rest of the U.S. Navy in this first action against the Axis, was a mix of veterans and men who were at sea for the first time in their lives. The
Dallas
was captained by a talented young officer, Robert Brodie Jr., and had spent the past year escorting convoys both in the North Sea and along the Eastern Seaboard. The ship itself was hardly impressive; in fact, when the old World War I four-piper had been refueled by a carrier just a couple of days earlier, sailors from the huge ship looming above the
Dallas
had teasingly
tossed candy bars and oranges down to the seamen on the deck, like they were boys diving for trinkets around the ships in a foreign port.

As the
Dallas
neared its destination, tensions naturally increased. Each man on board was issued a gun—a Thompson submachine, a Browning automatic rifle, or a Springfield—and each spent his spare time learning how to clean and use it. They were told that the guns were necessary in case they had to abandon ship and go ashore in the middle of the fighting.