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purposefully, just beyond the harbor, into the teeth of those menacing German wolf packs lying in wait in the chilly North Atlantic waters.
    John, who had already experienced his share of conflict, didn’t have to be warned that global war was a horrific thing. To enter it twice in a lifetime, as were so many others, was certainly a surreal thing. Adding to that sense for John was a personal connection to what was happening in the ocean between New York and the ports of Great Britain.
    As a twenty-five-year-old navigation officer on HMS
Snapdragon
, a convoy destroyer sailing in the Mediterranean between Malta and Port Said in October 1918, John was on duty when a German U-boat sank a cargo ship within the
Snapdragon
’s group. As the rest of the convoy sailed on, the
Snapdragon
was ordered to stay behind to search for and punish the German sub. After four hours of fruitless sniffing in the ocean, the destroyer was just about to give up the hunt when the U-boat suddenly broke the surface of the water, at point-blank range right in front of her. The
Snapdragon
swung its guns toward her and sent five 4-inch shells pounding into her hull. Like a dead fish, the U-boat slowly turned belly up in the water before beginning its descent to the bottom. As the sub disappeared, the German crew soon emerged in life rafts, bobbing on the surface of the ocean, and the
Snapdragon
sailed near to haul the sailors aboard.
    Among the survivors was the ship’s commander, a cocksure German lieutenant, as John remembered him, far more insulted at the fact thathe’d lost a ship and had been captured than grateful that his life had been saved.When John asked how things were in Berlin—this was just a month before the long and horrible war would come to a close—he was told, again with arrogant self-assurance, that the only difference between the Germany of October 1918 and the Germany of July 1914 was that the public houses now closed at midnight.
    The lieutenant’s name was Karl Doenitz, the man who was now Rear Admiral Karl Doenitz, the
Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote
, commander of the submarines in the German navy. The cocky lieutenant had become leader of Project Drumbeat on the shores of North America; he was the dark knight who’d sunk hundreds of Allied and merchant ships, including two Standard Fruit vessels that William John had known like the back of his hand.
    Quite frankly, Captain John wished that Karl Doenitz had gone down with his U-boat twenty-four years earlier. Instead, John was faced with a private sense of irony: what if one of this man’s submarines drew a bead on the
Contessa
?

CHAPTER 2

Airborne to London
    I f Captain William John was a hesitant enlistee in the cause, the man dozing in the four-engine Stratoliner flying high above the Atlantic on its way from Washington to Nova Scotia, and then to London, was his exact opposite: a man born, bred, and absolutely ready for this war. For General George S. Patton Jr. the prospect of battle ahead couldn’t have been more exhilarating. He shared the cabin with a group of staffers and recently promoted Brigadier General James Doolittle, whose air raid of Tokyo in April had made him the first genuine hero of World War II. All were seated comfortably in the cushioned seats of this novel airliner and cruising at twenty thousand feet above the ocean on a flight that would take most of August 6 and into the morning of August 7, 1942, before it landed in London.
    A little more than a week earlier, Patton had been stuck in the deserts of California southeast of Palm Springs, training a newly created American armored command designed to offer an answer to the German’s Panzer divisions currently wreaking havoc in the North African terrain. Away from the center of U.S. military command in Washington, Patton worried that despite his longtime friendship with Eisenhower, the new commander of the European Theater of Operations United States Army (ETOUSA), and despite the respect that