SS Ohio Inducted into National Maritime Hall of Fame

2008-03-14 15:36:39

The legendary tanker SS Ohio, whose wooden decks are the stage for some of the scenes in my book “At All Costs,” was inducted into the National Maritime Hall of Fame at a luncheon ceremony in New York on Saturday, January 26. The Hall of Fame only takes one ship a year, and the Ohio made it on the first vote, which almost never happens. I’m told it was due to the attention this gallant ship received in my book.

I was invited by Captain Charles Renick, director of the National Maritime Museum, to speak at the induction, and afterward do a book signing. The event took place at the Officers Club of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, Long Island—a 30-minute train ride from Penn Station in Manhattan.

I flew up from Baja, where I spend much of each winter with my two sons. Didn’t have any New York induction-ceremony clothes, just a three-week beard and a sun-weathered face.

“I feel a bit underdressed for such a prestigous occasion,” I said. “And there’s nothing more prestigious than heroism. But if I look like an old salt, it’s because I just came off the sea—the Sea of Cortez, where I was windsurfing on Thursday afternoon.”

In 20 minutes at the podium, I read two passages from “At All Costs.” Four pages about the SS Ohio, from the chapter titled “Captain Ferrini’s Amazing Hat Trick,” including the description of the first hit on her, a torpedo from an Italian submarine that blew a 600-square-foot hole in her hull that started an inferno. The dynamic reading was well received; kind compliments afterward made the long trip worthwhile.

Here is the actual photo of that torpedo hit, from the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

And I sold nearly every book that had been shipped there to sell. I really enjoy signing books, talking and listening to people—especially this book, because I meet so many WW2 vets with stories of their own.

Here’s the excerpt from “At All Costs” that went over so well, about the SS Ohio. It begins on June 23, 1942, with her reaching the River Clyde, Britain’s main military seaport during the war.

The arrival of the SS Ohio at the Clyde was celebrated. She was the first American

tanker to bring fuel across the Atlantic since the war began. She had come from Port Arthur, Texas, with a quick stop at Key West, where she had picked up an escort from the Navy base there, a single destroyer that had followed her for twenty-four hours. After that she had been insanely all alone, out on an ocean full of U-boats, carrying 107,000 barrels of 104-octane Texas Company gas for the RAF bombers on Malta.

The Ohio was big, fast, and sweet. She could carry more fuel than any

other tanker on the water. Long and lean, at 514 feet and 9,264 gross tons,

she had the bow of a schooner and the stern of a cruiser, with an elegant

sheer and bold prow. She was fitted with the latest Westinghouse steam

turbine engines that churned out 9,000 shaft horsepower, spinning a single

screw of solid bronze whose four blades spanned 20 feet. During her

standardization trials off the Delaware Capes, four days before she was delivered

to the Texas Company, she had hit a fantastic top speed of 19.23

knots in the measured mile, fully loaded with seawater ballast.

When she was launched by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of

Chester, Pennsylvania, there was no ship like her. She was built like a battleship.

Her sisters, the Oklahoma and Kentucky, had come along since

then, but they had been sunk; so now she was again the only tanker on the

high seas with a welded hull. Neat wide seams bonded her bulkheads and

hull, where hundreds of thousands of rivets were used on lesser ships.

Two thick bulkheads made up her backbone, and twenty-three transverse

bulkheads, strengthened by girders, sectioned her into thirty-three honeycombed

cargo tanks. There were nine fat tanks down the middle and twenty-four smaller wing tanks, with a sophisticated pumping system that discharged oils from each tank quickly and cleanly.

I jumped the story to August 12, with the Operation Pedestal convoy now at the mouth of the Sicilian Narrows in the Mediterranean Sea.

Although Captain Dudley Mason had only been master of the Ohio for

twenty-eight days, he had established a reputation with the crew for

carrying himself with a great deal of equilibrium, even in stormy seas.

“He didn’t have a great lot to say,” said the ordinary seaman Allan Shaw,

who was then nineteen and is now eighty-three, living in Blyth on the

North Sea and nearly as nimble as he was back then.

So far, Captain Mason hadn’t appeared to be very excited by the day’s activity. In fact, he didn’t have much to say about it. From his log:

wednesday, august 12th.

The day passed fairly uneventfully. One or two isolated planes got

through the outer screen and kept the gunners in action, and some

bombs were dropped. Continuous salvoes of depth charges and

emergency turns to port and starboard every few minutes. Several

vessels reported submarines, and I believe two were accounted for this

afternoon. The signal had been given that a concentration of

submarines were expected inside a given area (approximately our

position for dusk). We were then 75 miles north of Cape Bon, on the

edge of the 100-fathom line.

But when Nigeria and Cairo were torpedoed, Captain Mason’s “uneventful”

day suddenly ended, and the long night in the Narrows began.

Lieutenant Barton, the Ohio’s young liaison officer, was on the bridge with

Mason when the two cruisers were hit. “I saw great bits of Cairo flying for

400 yards,” he said. “Then, while we were still looking at Cairo, there was

a tremendous sheet of flames just about on the bridge, and we too had

been hit.”

Captain Ferrini of the Axum had scored an amazing hat trick: four torpedoes

fired, three ships hit. Force X had lost two of its four cruisers—its

heavily armed flagship Nigeria and antiaircraft specialist Cairo—and the

crux of the convoy, its raison d’être, the SS Ohio, was aflame. One sweet

salvo of Italian torpedoes was all it took to radically tilt the balance of Operation

Pedestal.

“There was a bright flash, and a column of water was thrown up to

masthead height. There were two seconds of absolute quiet, and then

flames shot into the air,” said Mason, who was blown to the deck by the

blast. He crawled toward the chart room, where he bumped heads with

the third mate, who was crawling out. “The vessel heeled over and shook

violently. We were struck amidships in the pump room on the port side,

halfway between the bow and stern.”

“Some of us were standing on the poop deck when the torpedo hit,”

said Allan Shaw. “We all thought this was it—when a tanker goes afire,

you haven’t got a great lot of chance. There was the flames, and there was

an awful big goosher, which seemed to put some of the flames out. A lot of

water, it went up like a big geyser. Then someone shouted, ‘Get the fire extinguishers!’ ”

Because the ships were in the middle of their formation change, the

Ohio was close off the port bow of the Santa Elisa and moving nearly twice

as fast. The Santa Elisa had slowed to 8 knots, to allow Ohio to move to starboard

and slip in ahead of her, in the change from four columns to two. If

the torpedo had missed the Ohio, it would have hit the Santa Elisa.

At their battle stations on the port bridge wings of the Santa Elisa,

Larsen and Dales got a face full of flaming Ohio. “A tremendous black cloud rose on our port beam,” said Dales, watching from his gun. “The tanker Ohio, with its cargo so vital to Malta’s existence, had just been torpedoed! We could feel the heat. I saw men dragging fire hoses across her deck. The black smoke swallowed them up.”

Shaw, who’s a wee five feet, six inches and the same 147 pounds he was

back then, continues. “We grabbed some big fire extinguishers at the after

end, and ran along the flying bridge and lowered them down to some lads

who were fighting the fire. It’s good the sea was washing in and out; that

was helping keep the fire down.”

“The Ohio did not list,” said Mason, “but the deck on the port side was

torn up and laid right back inboard, nearly to the centerline. There was a

hole in the hull on the port side twenty-four feet by twenty-seven feet,

reaching from the main deck to well below the waterline. The large Samson

derrick post fell over to an angle of forty-five degrees, the flying bridge

was damaged, and the pump room was ablaze and completely open to the

sea. Four kerosene tanks were opened up to the sea on the port side; their

lids were blown off, and flames were coming up through the hatches. The

steering gear telemotor pipes were carried away by the explosion, also the

electric cable and all steam pipes in the vicinity of the pump room.

“I had the crew mustered on the deck at boat stations provisionally, but

engines had been kept running. I had previously told the chief engineer

that he was not to stop the engines whatever happened, until I gave him

the order to do so, but now I rang, ‘Finish with engines.’ I gave the order

now, in order to get the men out of the engine room for the time being. I

had been forced to stop, not only to fight the fire, but because our steering

was out of order and we were turning in circles, making us a danger to the

other ships which were lying stopped near us, including the Nigeria and

the Cairo.”

Mason joined the firefight, facing the searing heat, directing the hoses,

and shouting for more fire extinguishers.

“It was then a case of fighting the pump room fire,” he continued. “I

thought it was a forlorn hope, but we set to work with foam extinguishers

and managed to put out the flames much more easily than I expected. We

also put out the flames in the kerosene tanks and replaced the tank lids, although

these could not be screwed down as they were badly buckled.”

The destroyer Pathfinder circled Ohio, dropping depth charges, as the

rest of the convoy left the burning tanker behind, dead in the water at dusk.

Sam Moses

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