Chapter 4: Fire Down Below

2006-12-10 17:19:44

Fred Larsen’s Irish grandfather, the woodcarver Christopher Melia, and

William Russell Grace, who founded Grace Line after emigrating from Ireland,

were about the same age and had the same eye for beauty. Had they

lived long enough to see the Santa Elisa, Melia might have carved her, and

Grace would have been proud of her.

A flurry of shipbuilding was triggered by the Merchant Marine Act of

1936, passed in order to increase the size of the U.S. merchant fleet. As

President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared for the growing possibility of

war, the pace increased. The Santa Elisa was one of 173 freighters built between

1940 and 1945 to Maritime Commission designs for the class called

C2. She was 459 feet from bow to stern, 63 feet at beam, and 40 feet between

main deck and keel bottom, with a loaded draft of 26 feet and freeboard

of 14. Her five holds gave her a gross weight of 8,380 tons, with the

ability to stow 8,620 tons of cargo.

Because she was specially built for Grace Line, she had some custom

touches shared by only her sister ship, the Santa Rita. Her bridge was enclosed,

keeping the helmsman out of the weather and providing protection

against shrapnel from bombs. Powered by a double reduction General Electric turbine making 6,000 horsepower and driving a single screw, she

could run all day and night at 17 knots.

Larsen was junior third officer on the Santa Elisa, in charge of the

lifeboats and lifesaving equipment, but the chief officer also assigned him

to supervise the fire equipment. He did much more than the manual described

for a third mate, simply because he could. At twenty-seven, he had

done it all. He’d been a teenage prodigy in the engine room of his first ship,

the Attila, working with diesel, steam, and hydraulic systems. He could

navigate and operate radios. He’d been a quartermaster, purser, bosun,

and cargo mate; he was certified in firefighting and lifeboats, and liked

guns. He’d even been a stevedore on the San Pedro wharf in California. He

could speak English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Spanish, and was

beginning to study German, although he despised it.

He acted with a natural sense of authority based on experience, and

carried himself with conspicuous self-discipline. When he stepped into

territory that was not a third mate’s, other officers could usually see

that his involvement was driven by efficiency, not ego, but his rigidity

could be difficult. “He was a square-head all the way,” said Peter Forcanser,

the junior engineer who maintained the deck machinery. “A

real sonofabitch. He was only the third mate, but he acted like he owned

the ship.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Santa Elisahad returned to Brooklyn,

where she was armed by the War Shipping Administration, primarily

with two .30-caliber Browning machine guns on the afterdeck. Armor

plating thirty-six inches high was added to the bridge, on each wing just

outside the wheelhouse door. A steel visor projecting downward at 45 degrees

was welded to the top of the wheelhouse, and a crow’s nest with a

telephone to the bridge was built between the two fifty-foot-tall king posts

at the forward end of the number one hatch. Steel gun tubs were welded

to the bow and four corners of the bridge, intended for 20-millimeter Oerlikon

rapid-fire cannons, but the tubs were empty, because the guns

weren’t available so early in the war

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, 1942, Kapitan Hardegen and

his U-boat were lurking off the New Jersey coast as the Santa Elisasteamed

south from GravesendBay in Brooklyn after loading ammunition for her

machine guns. She was headed for Cristobal, at the mouth of the Panama Canal, where an attack by the enemy was feared, and then to Arica, Antofagasta, Valparaíso, and San Antonio, Chile.

There were 552 cases of safety matches in wooden crates stowed on the starboard side of the upper ’tween deck level of her number one hold, the most forward of five. In the

lower ’tween deck of that same hold there were 1,900 drums of highly explosive

carbide crystals. Such drums had been used during the Spanish Civil War like rolling depth charges; republican forces sent them barreling down steep hillsides onto rebel encampments.

Word of the U-boat sinkings had moved over the merchant fleet’s radios.

Small craft hugged the coast, but the freighters still ran offshore. At

about 7:15that evening, the Santa Elisawas steaming at 16 knots in

choppy seas and big swells, running without lights, approximately ten

miles off Atlantic City. The chief mate, Tommy Thomson, was decoding a

message with the master in his cabin next to the bridge as Kapitan Hardegen

peered into the periscope of U-123, searching the icy blackness and

hoping to light it up with flames.

“I heard a loud crash and the vessel listed to starboard,” reported

Thomson. “I immediately ran out of the captain’s room by way of the after

door, and up the fore and aft alleyway into the wheelhouse, followed by the

captain. I ran to the telegraph in the wheelhouse and put the engine full

astern.

“Just as I put the engine telegraph full astern, there was a heavy explosion

forward, followed by flame. Then almost immediately followed by a

second explosion and more flame. About this time the master arrived on

the bridge and remarked that it was a torpedo.”

“There was a rocketing explosion on the Santa Elisathat blew half-ton

hatch covers twenty feet into the air,” reported The Grace Log, a Grace Line

magazine. “The rush of all hands to meet the emergency was immediate.

Along tilted passageways, ladders now inclined at an illogical angle, as the

crew fought its way to the outer decks. A gutting fire tore through her forward

cargo holds. Her steel hull was ragged and rent, and searing flames

threatened to buckle her bulkheads.”

As the Santa Elisalisted to starboard, Thomson saw green and red lights

drifting eerily past the port bridge wing. He saw the lights again, about

four hundred yards away, as Larsen followed the captain’s orders and lowered

a lifeboat to stand by what appeared to be another ship. It was the last

time anyone saw the lights.

An old banana boat, the 3,400-ton freighter SS San Jose—a pioneer

“reefer,” with refrigerated holds—had been chugging north from Guatemala

in the same waters. The New York Times reported that the San Josehad

rammed the Santa Elisaand then sunk. The Grace Log said that the Santa

Elisa had rammed the San Jose“with such fury as to send her abruptly to

the bottom.”

Kapitan Hardegen claimed that U-123 had torpedoed and sunk a ship

that could only have been either the San Joseor Santa Elisa. All thirty-nine

crewmen of the San Josemade it to lifeboats and were rescued by ships in

the area that had received an SOS sent by Thomson on the Santa Elisa.

There were many dark mysteries during the war. Unexplained explosions

in the dead of night—a mine, a torpedo, a collision—were all the

same to the men. Sometimes they never knew. Sometimes a torpedo aimed

for one ship hit another. And through a periscope at night, one freighter

can look like any other.

Whatever hit the Santa Elisablew a twenty-foot hole in her hull at the

waterline, and set off the 1,900 drums of carbide.

Hardegen said he had fired at a heavily loaded freighter with a stern torpedo

from six hundred meters. “After 57 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 Elisabegan 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 21⁄2-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 Elisawas 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 new Oerlikon cannons,

effective against dive-bombers and fast torpedo boats, were installed

on the corners of the bridge in the empty gun tubs. A three-inch antiaircraft

gun was mounted in the tub on the bow, and a four-inch low-angle

gun was bolted to the afterdeck. The four-inch had been used against

tanks in World War I, and could blow a very big hole in a thin-skinned

U-boat.

Fred Larsen was promoted to senior third officer. With his previous experience

as a cargo officer, he was asked by chief mate Thomson to help supervise

the loading of cargo for the Santa Elisa’s next voyage. On May 5, at

the Brooklyn Army Depot, stevedores began loading her holds with ammunition

and war stores, including bombs, mines, and about 5,000 drums of

kerosene and diesel fuel, in hold number one. Tanks and heavy trucks

were shackled to her foredecks. Fourteen new U.S. Navy Armed Guard

joined the ship’s crew, and forty soldiers—searchlight specialists, headed

for duty in Britain, Egypt, and Malta—came aboard as passengers. It took

one week to load all the equipment, fuel, and ammo.

On May 12, 1942, Larsen cast off the lines that held the stern of his ship

to the pier. The Santa Elisa was going to war.

END

Sam Moses

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