Twelve Desperate Miles: The Epic World War II Voyage of the SS Contessa

Book by Brady Tim

9780307590374|excerpt

Brady / TWELVE DESPERATE MILES

CHAPTER 1

New York, June 1942

As much as any place in the country in late June 1942, World War II was being waged in New York Harbor. Fanned out on shorelines that stretched from Perth Amboy and Elizabeth in New Jersey to the Bronx and South Brooklyn in New York and thick along the southern end of Manhattan rested “docks, piers, and wharves of every conceivable size, condition, and state of repair,” all preparing ships for the duties of a nation at war. The bay was thick with vessels too. Scores lay anchored and waiting for their turn at the docks. Warships and merchant vessels, transports and tugs (up to 575 employed by the Port of New York) plied the waters of the upper bay while the Statue of Liberty looked silently on and the sounds of heavy machinery mixed with the deep blast of ships’ horns to echo around the basin.

More than three dozen shipyards, including the giant Navy Yard in Brooklyn, also rimmed the harbor. Destroyers, cruisers, and battleships from the U.S. Navy sat suspended in dry docks being feverishly overhauled, outfitted, repaired, and scrubbed. The flashing arcs of welding torches could be seen day and night, while the pounding echoes of hammers smashing against steel hulls reverberated around the bay. Scores of merchant vessels were in the process of conversion to defense-­capable ships by order of the War Shipping Administration (WSA). Other boats, commercial to pleasure craft, trawlers to yachts, were being turned into sub chasers mounted with three-­inch guns and loads of depth charges. Brand-new PT boats, the speedy little darlings of naval action in the Pacific, zipped around the harbor in test runs conducted from Bayonne, New Jersey, where they were being manufactured by the score.

The yards and docks were punctuated by skeletal derricks and cranes, radio antennae, conning towers, and ships’ masts of every size and description, all standing outlined against the skylines of Manhattan, Newark, and Brooklyn. Upwards of a thousand warehouses, set just back from the shorelines and capable, within the whole sweep of the harbor, of storing a combined forty million square feet of goods and matériel, thrummed with the comings and goings of railroad cars and trucks. Here is where the tools of war, the machinery, the weaponry, the dry goods and hardware, the canvas, cotton, and wool, the matches, batteries, boots, and cigarettes, arrived from the factories in the interior of the nation. Here they were stored, and here they were loaded onto those waiting ships, along with the young men who would use them.

Thousands of members of the army’s II Corps, the first large contingent of the long-­promised American invasion force, which was scheduled to sail to England at the end of the month, had arrived in New York in preparation for the trip and waited in Brooklyn to be shipped from Bush Terminal. They were far from the only military in the city: “90 day wonders,” the nickname given to college boys drawn from mostly dry lands all over the country, who were given three months to learn the ropes of a midshipman’s life in the U.S. Navy, were housed up at Columbia; army brass and navy officers in dress whites, overseeing the comings and goings in the city for the U.S. Department of War, took the best tables at the Copa; but thousands of sailors—­merchant marines, coast guard, and U.S. Navy—­had their own good times, wandering the streets of Manhattan, wondering what war would bring them even as they gawked skyward at the Empire State and Chrysler buildings and soaked in the neon lights of Broadway. Caps pushed back on their heads to reveal a hint of hairline, they took big, galumphing strides through the city, eyeing the young women of New York and being eyed in return, like the happy-­go-­lucky crooners in wartime movies yet to be made.

For all the excitement and anticipation in New York, however, few in the city slept peacefully. While it was apparent that the nation’s involvement in the war in Europe was about to begin in earnest, no one knew for sure where or when that action would start. For those millions here and across the country who were uneasy about what the war in Europe would bring (and who wasn’t?), the fact that New York was full of soldiers, sailors, ships, and the supplies of battle, standing on the brink of war but not yet in it, deepened the sense of anxiety, even as it gave them something akin to relief that the United States was about to engage the enemy.

Ever since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, now more than seven months ago, there had been such a constant stream of bad news that many in New York and the rest of the country were demoralized. Just the day before—­on Father’s Day—­the guest pastor at Riverside Church had sermonized against the “spiritual defeatism” that seemed to be consuming the intellectual set on the Upper West Side. The fury and destructiveness of war in Europe and in the Pacific was so bad that a malaise had settled over many in the country. Would there ever be beauty and grace in the world again?

Dean Charles Gilkey of the University of Chicago Chapel tried to buck up the Riverside congregation by reminding them that Beethoven created some of his greatest music and Keats his greatest poetry dur- ing the darkest days of the Napoleonic Wars. The American Civil War produced Abraham Lincoln, he told them, adding: “The best things are so constantly in conflict with the worst things around us, that it is all the more important in bad times for every one of us to ‘hold his own end up.’ ”

Despite these bolstering words, it would have been hard to criticize congregants who left the pews and returned to the city streets with their spirits less than soaring. Not only was New York in the midst of hot, sticky weather—­eighty-­five degrees and humid—­but gas shortages inhibited exits out of the steaming metropolis to upstate or Long Island resorts.

There was some tentative-­sounding good news on the war in the Pacific. At a place called Midway, the Japanese fleet seemed to have been dealt a hard blow by the U.S. Navy and its aircraft; but in Europe, it was difficult to find anything to cheer about. The Germans were readying a new offensive against the Soviet Union that threatened to topple the Russians, leaving only the United States and Great Britain to maintain the fight against the Nazis. In France, Jews had just been ordered by the Vichy government to wear yellow stars. In North Africa, the latest news had it that Tobruk had fallen to General Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” leaving all of Egypt wide open to his Panzer divisions. Elsewhere, there were rumors, so awful that they were hard to credit, of Nazis using gas to exterminate Jews sent to camps on the eastern front.

For all this, perhaps the most debilitating aspect of war to the citizens of the New York and the rest of the East Coast was how near it seemed to the very harbor that sheltered this mass collection of ships and humanity. For months now, German submarines had been terrorizing the coastal waters of the eastern United States, sinking merchant ships with a vengeance just beyond the Narrows.

Under the command of Admiral Karl Doenitz, Germany had, at the start of the war in Europe, sent out forty-­six U-­boats to prey on British shipping. Initially, they were dispatched into the Atlantic as individual vessels, but in September 1940, Doenitz began sending out these sub- marines in groups that came to be known as “wolf packs.” Their numbers were increased into the hundreds, and their successes in sinking ships led German commanders to dub the early phase of the operation the “Happy Time.”

An increase in British protection of Allied convoys began to curtail the numbers of ships going to the bottom, but as soon as the United States entered the war in December 1941, Doenitz initiated an operation called Paukenschlag—­Drumbeat—­which sent U-­boats to the very shores of the United States to begin a brutal mauling of American shipping. The German command had been genuinely surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was only prepared to send half a dozen of its subs to American coastal waters in December 1941. But the fact that shipping traffic was so thick along the Eastern Seaboard, and that the United States was so ill prepared to deal with attacks, allowed this handful of U-­boats to destroy ship after ship in the region.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean Sea, and tight to the coast all the way from Florida to Nova Scotia, the German subs wreaked havoc on defenseless ships. They lurked so close to American shores that one of their principal means of locating targets was to use the backdrop of city lights to outline and illuminate their prey. So successful was the enterprise that the Germans resurrected the nickname of their first successful operation and labeled this one, with a decided lack of creativity, the “Second Happy Time.”

A Norwegian tanker was sunk off the coast of Nantucket in early January 1942, two days later a British ship was sunk off of Long Island, and four days after that a Standard Oil tanker went down off the coast of North Carolina. In late February, near Barnegat Light in New Jersey, a torpedo plowed into the port side of the tanker R. P. Resor so close to the Jersey shore that an able seaman on watch could see the outline of the retreating U-­boat against the individual lights of homes and docks along the coast. Earlier in the month, the SS Lemuel Burrows was torpedoed and sunk just off Atlantic City, with twenty crewmen killed in the process. The second engineer on the ship wrote that it was the resort itself that doomed the ship. “We might as well run with our lights on. The lights [of Atlantic City] were like Coney Island. It was lit up l...