CHAPTER 5 •••
LONNIE DALES
T
he
Santa Elisa
docked at the Belfast pier, off-loaded the tanks, trucks, and military equipment, and began waiting for orders. Fred Larsen and the rest of the crew could only guess where they would be sent next. Maybe back to New York if they were lucky, or Australia or Africa, but a convoy to Murmansk or Malta was more likely. The thought of a run to Murmansk was especially worrisome, because if the ship were torpedoed and sunk in the Barents Sea at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, it meant certain death in the frigid water. Malta sounded better, because you could survive a sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, with its calm water and balmy air; but the possibility of being attacked in the Med was greater, because the fighting around Malta was intense. Like so much of war, it was hell if you did, hell if you didn’t.
With so many soldiers and sailors passing through Belfast, news from the corners of the war moved like stray cats along the cobblestone streets, sometimes with the same stealth. Rumors and secrets were whispered in the bars and hangouts, which were haunted by operators and spies. Merchant mariners were plied for information, because they passed through so many ports around the world.
It had been one year since Larsen had tried to join the Norwegian Resistance but been rejected because he wasn’t a native of Norway. The commando leader, the heroic and cold-as-ice Kaptein Martin Linge, had been killed in a raid in December, and the Resistance needed fresh blood. There was a new commando unit being formed called “Inter-Allies,” with men from the occupied countries of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Norway. Larsen’s American citizenship was no longer a barrier. The Resistance found him in Belfast, and this time it tried to recruit him.
But the only way he could now join the Resistance would be to jump ship, and that was out of the question. He was now an officer, and had signed ship’s articles, a binding contract between the crew and the captain. He was committed to the
Santa Elisa
and his shipmates. His friend Tommy Thomson needed him.
However, there was another possibility. Larsen’s allegedly insane previous plan, to take a fishing boat from the Shetland Islands onto the shore of Norway and pick up his family in the night, was now an actual operation. It was called the “Shetland Bus” and was led by a Norwegian Navy captain named Leif Larsen, who had trained with the commando Linge and the Lingekompani. Fred heard about the Shetland Bus in Belfast and was excited by the idea, but faced two problems: he had only a few days in Belfast, and in that brief time it would be impossible to organize passage for Minda and Jan on the Shetland Bus; and if anyone was going to rescue Minda and Jan in a fishing boat by sea, it would have to be Fred.
But anyhow, Larsen didn’t know that his efforts to gain their release through the Red Cross had succeeded. He wasn’t aware that Minda and Jan were already on their way to America.
There was a lot to do in Belfast. Larsen also wanted to find his Irish roots. His Irish grandfather, the woodcarver Christopher Melia, had been born about 250 miles south of Belfast along the Irish Sea, where he had married Fred’s grandmother, Maria Mooney. Larsen wanted to know more about his grandparents. But it would have taken at least two days to travel that far, and the crew was required to return to the
Santa Elisa
each night, so he had to let it go, knowing only what little he had been told about his Irish background.
Captain Thomson was informed that the British Merchant Navy was making its Anti-Aircraft Gunnery Course available to any interested seamen. He went straight to Larsen, knowing that his third mate would welcome the opportunity to learn more about the
Santa Elisa
’s weaponry—and that there was no one better to know the ship’s guns. Larsen chose five men and signed up for the course, which qualified them for the firing and maintenance of the Oerlikons.
The first man he chose was his protégé, an all-American boy named Francis Alonzo Dales. Larsen and Dales had met just two weeks before the
Santa Elisa
left New York. Dales was a cadet-midshipman, fresh out of the new U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, and he strode up the gangway of the
Santa Elisa
with his seabag over his left shoulder, so he could salute smartly with his right hand. He was sent straight off to report to Larsen, because he was a deck cadet.
“Lonnie” Dales was a handsome boy, almost pretty, with wavy hair, full lips that curved into a smile beyond his years, and a cleft chin that made the girls say he looked like Cary Grant. He had weighed ten and a half pounds at birth and the baby fat had turned into a fine physique, but he still had the baby face, except for penetrating eyes. He looked as if he were studying the future and thinking about what he should do about it.
Lonnie and his older brother, Bert, had been raised by their mother in Augusta, Georgia. It wasn’t easy being a single mom with two boys in the rural South during the Depression, not that it ever is, especially when you’re deaf. Evelyn had lost her hearing before Lonnie was born, and she slept with her hand on his chest so she could feel when he cried.
She was twenty-one and a schoolteacher when she had her June wedding. According to the announcement in the
Augusta Herald,
Evelyn Denning Dales was “a very charming and most attractive woman, with a dainty winsomeness that is most typically Southern. That she will win the hearts of all who meet her is a foregone conclusion.”
Her husband, Bertram Dales, didn’t win so many hearts, but the paper found nice things to say about him. “Mr. Dales is the older son of Mrs. Florence Burdell Dales and is a splendid young man in every way. The marriage is the culmination of a romance that has been going on for several years and which reaches its happy climax now that the groom has attained his majority and his fortune.”
Straight from the wedding they set out to spend part of that fortune, which came from Irish linen in Belfast. They caught a train from Augusta to Atlanta to Boston, where they boarded the magnificent new Royal Majesty’s Steamship
Aquatania,
the only four-funnel ocean liner in the world, and steamed to Belfast. But World War I broke out while they were there. They explored Ireland a bit, and hurried home.
When Lonnie was young, his father fled home, into the swamps of Florida to build roads and bridges, never to return and never to explain, at least not to Lonnie. Evelyn and the boys traveled to see him just once. What remains of their visit is a photo of them all looking uncomfortable—a smirk clenching the stub of a cigar is almost all that Bertram Dales left of himself. He spent the rest of his life there, dying of a heart attack just after the war, alone on a sidewalk in Dade City.
He sent a couple of postcards to Lonnie after that one visit. “Remember the Gators last summer. Daddy.” And later, “Indians in the Everglades. Daddy.”
In the first grade, Lonnie was learning to write in cursive, and he practiced his chosen word:
Dad, Daddy, Daddy,
he wrote, again and again.
When Lonnie was eight, the other kids called him “Admiral.” His uncle Reggie was a tugboat captain, pushing barges loaded with bales of cotton, bundles of tobacco, and bricks of red Georgia clay down the languid Savannah River; sometimes he took Lonnie with him, and allowed the boy to take the helm. But that wasn’t the reason the other kids called him “Admiral.” It was because of his attitude.
Larsen and Dales clicked from the beginning. The new cadet-midshipman was a “slow-talking but hard-slugging native of the Cracker state,” as the
Augusta Herald
had said in reporting his assignment to the
Santa Elisa,
and that suited the taciturn third mate just fine. Dales respected Larsen’s knowledge and authority, and looked up to him as he looked up to his own brother, Bert, who was the same age as Larsen and who was now serving on General George Patton’s staff.
Dales was a lot like Larsen. He displayed a seriousness and work ethic beyond his years, and carried himself with an unspoken sense of authority. His focus on self-improvement was intense. He could fix almost anything, using his gift for mechanics, which apparently came from his maternal great-grandfather William Walker Hardman, who had emigrated from England in 1845 to work on the Georgia Railroad, repairing steam locomotives, and who was said to have invented the cowcatcher.
“Lonnie was smart, for sure, I’ll tell you that,” said a shipmate who worked in the engine room of the
Santa Elisa.
“He had a photographic memory. He read my engineering book in about two nights, and then he coached me. A really likable kind of guy.”
As Larsen and Dales got to know each other in Belfast, they discovered they had more than personality traits in common. They had both lost their fathers when they were young, and spent formative time at sea with uncles. And they both had Irish grandfathers.
Lonnie’s paternal grandfather, Hugh James Dales, had left Belfast on a cargo steamship when he was twenty-three, sent to Georgia by his wealthy father to learn about growing cotton for their Irish linen company. But the boy learned about love with a southern belle and died at thirty-two, before Lonnie was born. Lonnie’s father might have received some of the Irish linen fortune—Evelyn did have a car and black driver, in the beginning—but if so, it never made its way into Lonnie’s bank account.
Lonnie had relatives in Belfast, a family with three daughters. So on the days that he and Larsen weren’t in gunnery school studying the Oerlikons, they rowed a lifeboat across the water to visit the relatives, bearing chocolate bars and cigarettes. Dales learned how to handle and command a lifeboat. He might have been just eighteen, but he was an officer. Larsen gathered a crew and put Dales in charge, and they trained with the lifeboat by releasing and lowering it against the clock, before rowing away as if they were escaping a burning ship.
Larsen and Dales also shared stories about the uncles who had molded them. Larsen told Dales about his uncle John in Sandessjoen, and Dales replied with Uncle Cliff in Waynesboro. The two places were worlds apart and the uncles spoke different languages, but the values were the same.
As a role model, Cliff Hatcher was as solid as an island of rock. He’d been an army lieutenant during World War I and returned to active duty as a major in 1940, organizing the selective service system in Georgia. But when Lonnie was growing up, his uncle Cliff was a small-town lawyer and the mayor of Waynesboro, a gentle man who lived by the Golden Rule and held strong beliefs. Every morning at sunrise he raised the American flag on the tall flagpole next to his prolific pecan tree, in the yard along Liberty Street. He was committed to physical fitness and University of Georgia football, where he’d been a 165-pound end, in the days before the forward pass—a Bulldog’s bulldog. No smoking, no drinking, no cursing, and Methodist church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, with meetings in between. Much of Uncle Cliff—Major Hatcher to the rest of Waynesboro—had rubbed off on Lonnie.
Hatcher’s wife, Mattie, was Evelyn Dales’s sister. Cliff and Mattie had lost their only son in infancy, so it was a natural fit. Lonnie spent summers and vacations and even some school time with the Hatchers in Waynesboro, thirty miles from Augusta, where Evelyn began teaching hard-of-hearing children in the public school system after she had taken a lip-reading course.
The Hatchers had a summer house about fifty miles south of Savannah, near a community nestled along the connected creeks, canals, marshes, and sounds at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The area was full of romance, with a rich history of pirates and Indians, including Black-beard and the Cherokee. Lonnie and his big brother would paddle a canoe out to Wolf Island, now a wildlife refuge and national wilderness area, at the mouth of the Altahama River, flowing from the heart of Georgia. Sometimes they would stay out for hours, returning under a pink sky after sunset.
Lonnie loved the water. He and his friends would swing from the vines and leap shrieking into the tidal pools and creeks, sometimes under a full Georgia moon. There was an old cabin on a piece of dry land surrounded by marsh, and some nights they would sleep on the floor, under a big mosquito net draped from the rafters.
Like his great-grandfather, grandfather, uncle, brother, and his grandfather’s friend and baseball teammate Woodrow Wilson (who argued for the establishment of a strong merchant marine), Lonnie attended the Richmond Academy High School in Augusta, an all-male institution with ROTC training. Cliff Hatcher saw to his schooling. Lonnie had just begun his senior year when World War II broke out in Europe. He had to wait until he was eighteen to sign up for service, but then he wasted no time. Three days after his eighteenth birthday and one day before Pearl Harbor, he took the entrance exam for the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps. He completed the eight weeks of basic training at the cadet corps temporary base at Fort Schuyler, in the Bronx. The four-year program had been squeezed into an emergency cram course because the War Shipping Administration needed to feed more mariners to the ships, if not the sea.
Cadet-Midshipman Dales got his orders to the
Santa Elisa
on early graduation day, April 27, 1942. Sixteen days on the water between Brooklyn and Belfast were the sum of his seagoing experience. But at least he had a mentor in Fred Larsen. They were soul mates destined for battle at sea as a team.
PART II •••
THE SECOND GREAT SIEGE
CHAPTER 6 •••
THE FORTRESS
F
or nearly three thousand years, because of her sheltered ports and strategic position as a natural stone fortress between Europe and Africa, Malta had been fought over by the world’s most powerful navies. The island was discovered in about 800
B.C.
by Phoenician traders, the ancient Mediterranean’s best navigators, who came from Syria and Lebanon in galleys rowed by slaves and convicts. They named the island Malat, or “safe haven.” Little did they know that the safety offered by the harbor would bring perpetual conflict over the centuries to come.
The Phoenicians were followed by the Greeks, who developed the Phoenicians’ galleys into sleek trireme warships, 100 feet long and only 15 feet wide, powered by as many as 170 professional rowers who trained like athletes. A trireme could hit 12 knots and turn at full speed within its own length. It was designed for ramming an enemy’s vessels broadside and sinking them, a tactic that would be used by destroyers against submarines in World War II.
The Carthaginians came from Africa in hundreds of ships and used Malta as a naval base during the Punic Wars from 264 to 146
B.C.
Hannibal was born a Carthaginian on Malta in 247
B.C.,
and Maltese babies are still given his name.
According to the Book of Luke, the apostle Saint Paul was shipwrecked on Malta for three months in
A.D.
60 and began the conversion of the island to Christianity.
Malta was part of the Roman Empire for seven hundred years, although Roman culture didn’t leave much of a mark. Arabs later ruled for 220 years, and their influence remains, most heavily on the Maltese language and the physical features of the Maltese people, a beautiful blend of Arabic and Italian. The Sicilian Normans had their hundred years with Malta next, followed by the Germans, French, and Spanish.
In 1530 the Maltese archipelago was given away by Spain’s King Carlos I, who was also the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V. For the price of one Maltese falcon per year, he turned Malta over to the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, a monastic order that had been founded in Jerusalem as a hospice for pilgrims at the beginning of the Crusades. But the Knights of St. John had turned toward militancy, as the Ottoman Turks threatened western Europe and Christianity with the expansion of their Islamic empire.
From Malta, the Knights sent their warships after the Muslim corsairs, the privateer pirates who roamed North Africa’s Barbary Coast. Malta’s first Great Siege occurred in 1565, when 40,000 Turks in 181 ships attacked the 9,000 Knights.
“If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom,” said Queen Elizabeth I. It was an historical comment that Winston Churchill might have echoed, except four centuries later the threat came from the Nazis.
The Great Siege lasted 114 days. With Spanish reinforcements, the Knights prevailed, using their cannons to fire the Turks’ severed heads back across the harbor.
Thousands died in the bloody fighting, but the duration and firepower of the first Great Siege was nothing compared to the assault by the Axis during World War II. The second siege of Malta lasted ten times as long, with one-ton bombs replacing the cannonballs.
Having saved the Christian world from Islam, the Knights’ fame spread around the world. They became known as the Knights of Malta and ruled for 268 years. This was Malta’s golden age, as the Knights built churches, gardens, cathedrals, and palaces. Cities rose out of the rock and dust, revealing a timeless architecture in their walls, bastions, battlements, and vaults.
By now the Knights had been warriors for five centuries, but they didn’t abandon their roots, building one of Europe’s best hospitals in Valletta, the city they created. Eventually, inevitably, they grew decadent, and the Maltese rebelled against their rule, feeling they owed the Knights nothing anyhow, as the Knights had been forced upon them. So when Napoleon arrived in 1798, the islanders supported his takeover. He rewarded them by declaring an end to the Inquisition and the use of judicial torture.
But the illusion of Napoleon as liberator died overnight, as he immediately looted the magnificent rococo churches and palaces in order to finance his next conquest, Cairo. France was at war with Britain, and Napoleon wanted Egypt for a base to drive the British out of India. He loaded his great three-decker flagship,
L’Orient,
with the Knights’ gold and diamonds and other treasures, and within two weeks he was gone from Malta, leaving a garrison to govern the island with guns.
Enter the British Royal Navy. The young Admiral Horatio Nelson, commanding fourteen ships, sailed all over the Mediterranean that summer, searching for Napoleon’s fleet, obsessed with finding Napoleon and frustrated by his elusiveness. He finally located seventeen French ships in Egypt’s Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile on August 1; attacking immediately and decisively, he destroyed them in the brutal Battle of the Nile, which lasted two nights and a day.
Napoleon himself was already gone, but the 120-gun
L’Orient
was there. Her magazine exploded when she was hit by British cannons, blowing blazing bits of wood, gold, jewels, and bodies high into the night sky and raining them down on the other ships. The burst was seen as a flash of orange light twenty miles away. A hunk of
L’Orient
’s mast landed on one of the British ships, and its captain had it carved into a coffin, which he gave to Nelson as a trophy to remind him of his victory, as well as his mortality. Nelson kept it propped open against the bulkhead in his cabin, to remind his officers of his humor.
Napoleon’s garrison on Malta was later evicted by Nelson’s fleet, with the help of the Maltese people, mostly illiterate peasants led by priests, who this time were the besiegers instead of the besieged. As the Knights had achieved glory by fighting the Turks, the Maltese were admired for their fortitude in rejecting Napoleon and standing up to his soldiers, those mighty conquerors of Europe. Showing that they could be revolutionaries when they needed to be, the Maltese barricaded the French garrison in Valletta until they surrendered and were sent home.
In 1800 the Union Jack flew for the first time over Malta, which accepted formal colonization in 1814. As a British officer said when Malta became part of the empire, “Brave Maltese, you have rendered yourselves interesting and conspicuous to the world. History affords no more striking example.”