At All Costs Read Online Free PDF Page A

seconds there is a mighty detonation and a huge, pitch-black explosion column,” he wrote in his diary and shooting report. “The hit was under the bridge. With its high speed, the steamer ran itself under water. When the smoke lifted, only the mast tops were still visible and shortly afterwards they disappeared, too.”
    As U-123 raced from the scene of its shot, the
Santa Elisa
began listing to port and her mast tops dropped behind the large swells as black smoke belched from the fire. Water rushed into the forward hold, and the ship’s bow dipped so steeply that her rudder rose out of the water. Flames spouted thirty feet out of the holes made by the blown-off hatch covers, painting vertical orange stripes over the black horizon. The fire’s glow could be seen from the Atlantic City boardwalk as the ship burned.
    When lives were at stake, Fred Larsen was the first to arrive and the last to leave. He and his friend Thomson led the firefight in hold number one.
    “I gave orders for all hands to come forward and fight the fire,” said Thomson. “I shouted up to the captain and suggested that he back the ship up into the wind to keep the fire and smoke forward of No. 1 hatch so we could get at the flame with the hose. Hoses were being brought into position from the amidship superstructure and the after deck. In all, 8 streams of water were playing on the fire within ten minutes. The deck on the starboard side was red hot to a distance of approximately 7 to 8 feet aft of No. 1 after hatch. The port side was also hot, but it was not red hot.”
    Thomson and Larsen each donned an OBA—oxygen breathing apparatus—which consisted of a rubber mask and an oxygen tank strapped to the wearer’s back, and they scrambled toward the hold, the rubber soles of their shoes melting on the burning paint as they struggled with the bucking brass nozzles of 2½-inch hoses. A hatch in the mast house led down to the hold, but they couldn’t get near it. “Throughout this time, there were several small explosions in the hatch,” said Thomson.
    The fire burned through the cold black night until 5:40 A.M. , with the SS
Wellhart
and SS
Charles O’Connor
arriving and training more hoses on the
Santa Elisa
’s foredeck. Twice the captain went full ahead on the engines in order to flood the hold with seawater. At daybreak the foredeck was awash, and 37 of the ship’s crew of 54 men were placed on the
Wellhart
and
Charles O’Connor
by U.S. Coast Guard boats. Just before noon on Sunday, the tugboats
Relief, Resolute,
and
Wabla
began towing the
Santa Elisa
back to Bay Ridge Flats in Brooklyn, where she was run aground on the sandy bottom, to be unloaded and towed off later. She would smolder for three more days.
    Kapitan Hardegen headed south to Hatteras, again steaming in daylight, within sight of the shore. He broke silence to send a gloating message to Dönitz when he passed the naval base at Norfolk. That night he sank three more ships, killing forty-four of forty-seven on the
City of Atlanta,
and shot up a fourth. On the way back to France he got two more ships in the Atlantic, for a total of nine. Hitler draped the Iron Cross around Hardegen’s neck.
    As the attacks against merchant ships along the coast continued, the U.S. Navy got away with hiding them. Merchant mariners were ordered not to talk about it. Keeping a journal aboard ship was a violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act, punishable by ten years in prison.
    When President Roosevelt finally installed the convoy system with destroyer escorts in the summer of 1942, the U-boats were forced to find victims elsewhere. But 609 ships had been sunk in the Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Sea Frontiers, and thousands of merchant mariners had lost their lives. Eleven U-boats were sunk.
    The
Santa Elisa
was repaired at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that spring. Her Grace Line colors, black hull and green funnel with a white band, were covered by a drab coat of “gull gray” warpaint. Four