At All Costs Read Online Free PDF Page B

with political values. When Roosevelt was New York City police commissioner, he had granted a request by Thomson’s father, a Brooklyn cop, to be placed on the bicycle squad.
    Thomson and Larsen had now worked together for nearly a year. They liked, respected, and trusted each other. They each had young sons, although Larsen had never seen his, and they shared Danish blood. Thomson knew he could count on Larsen, and relied on his experience and skills. When a new chief mate came aboard in Boston, bringing unknown chemistry and introducing an awkward element to the chain of command, little changed between them. But Thomson told Larsen that he would now need him more than ever.
    The ship’s departure from Boston was delayed until 5 P.M. by the sighting of a possible U-boat outside the harbor. So as soon as it got out to sea, the crew tested the guns. “Tried several times to fire 20mm Oerlikons guns but jammed each time,” reported the U.S. Navy ensign whose fourteen-man crew had been assigned to man the guns. Ensign Gerhart Suppiger, Jr., was fresh out of one of the Navy’s hastily established armed guard schools, which hadn’t included training in the Oerlikons. His shock at the imperfection of war was just beginning.
    “He was a hell of a nice boy,” said Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer. “But that’s what he was, a boy. He should have taken his mama with him. I knew more about the guns than he did.”
    The
Santa Elisa
steamed thirty-six hours to Nova Scotia and anchored at dawn in Halifax Harbor, where there were about thirty ships waiting for convoys. An Oerlikon expert with a DEMS—Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship—rating came aboard and said it was no wonder the guns hadn’t fired; “They gave you the wrong grease for the shells in Brooklyn,” he told Suppiger. He gave the gun crew some cans of the correct grease, along with six smoke floats, to be used if the ship were torpedoed and sunk. “Make that ‘
when
’ the ship is sunk,” the DEMS rating said with a smirk.
    They swung at anchor in Halifax Harbor for six uneventful days. The only place to go at night was the Green Lantern bar, where a couple of the guys met two local girls, who got them drunk and took them home and grilled them. How many ships were in the convoy? Where was it headed? What was its speed? The boys ran back to the ship, believing they were lucky to have survived such a close call with German spies.
    Twenty-six freighters escorted by two Canadian corvettes and two destroyers left Halifax on a foggy Sunday morning, with church bells ringing them good-bye from shore.
    The convoy system was new, and few of the masters had any experience at running so close together, let alone zigzagging to make their ships harder for U-boats to hit with torpedoes. It was especially difficult for the speedy
Santa Elisa,
because the convoy moved at the pace of its slowest ship, in this case 9 knots. “You don’t know how jumpy it makes you to have a fast ship throttled down by a lot of tubs,” said Thomson.
    It took the convoy thirteen days to cross the Atlantic, creeping through extended fog, which made navigation difficult but was a blessing because it hid the ships from U-boats. Larsen worked in the wheelhouse a lot, navigating and taking readings with his sextant when he could see the sun or stars. He had bought the sextant secondhand in San Pedro, and it was his most treasured possession, after a pewter-framed photo of Minda and Jan. On the clear days, lookouts often spotted what they believed were torpedo tracks, although to a scared seaman, every bubble on the water looked like the trail of a torpedo zooming past. Wind over the swells made “white horses,” which dashed past the lookouts and blurred any periscope feathers. One night they got a radio message that a ship had been torpedoed about twenty miles from their course.
    There was a small poker game in the wardroom each night, and sometimes the officers tapped the keg of Jamaican