At All Costs Read Free

of Nazis weren’t much of a gift for Minda. Larsen was quartermaster on the
City of Norfolk,
a 1918 freighter converted to carry passengers, steaming between New York and Liverpool. He immediately petitioned the ship’s owners, United States Lines, to carry his wife and baby son back from Liverpool, if he could get them there. There was family in New York waiting for them, including his sister and brother, whom he had scarcely seen in the years since influenza had ripped them apart.
    Larsen applied to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for immigration visas for Minda and Jan. He received a letter granting Minda’s visa, but it was stamped “Approval was not given your son, Jan F.”
    Jan was caught in a Catch-22. The letter stated, “Through your birth in the United States, your child Jan Frederick is apparently a citizen of this country, and, if so, he is entitled to an American passport. Therefore, you should forward to him documentary evidence of birth here, which he may present to the nearest American consul abroad.”
    That wasn’t so easy, with Larsen at sea so much and the German Gestapo controlling the mail to and from Norway. It took months, and each day that his family was in the hands of the Germans, Larsen grew less patient.
    As quartermaster on the
City of Norfolk,
his duties at sea included shifts at the helm as the ship crossed the North Atlantic. When he wasn’t on watch, there was too much time to think about Minda and Jan, and their safety. He came up with a plan.
    He thought he could take a fishing boat from Liverpool and motor north through the Irish Sea, then around Scotland and the Orkney Islands to the Scandinavian-speaking Shetland Islands, about two hundred miles off the western coast of Norway, where the North Sea meets the Norwegian Sea. He remembered those rough waters; his uncle John Tonnessen had taken him to Zetland when he was a boy. And he knew the rocky coves around Farsund. He believed he could anchor there under cover of darkness, slip into Farsund in a dinghy, steal away his wife and child, and race back to Zetland in the fishing boat.
    He applied for a furlough from U.S. Lines and stayed in Liverpool to plan the escape. But everyone he spoke to told him the scheme was insane; between the vicious sea and the German planes and boats, the chances of survival were nought, they said. He couldn’t do it alone, so he reluctantly steamed back to the United States on the next ship, and returned to the bureaucratic paper trail.
    He began writing letters to Washington and traveling there on the train from New York whenever he could, knocking on doors at the Department of State, aggressively using diplomatic channels, trying to get his family out of Norway. He spent much of his small salary on cables, phone calls, and travel expenses. By the time he finally got the passport for Jan, Minda’s immigration visa had expired. He couldn’t reach them by mail and had no idea what was happening to them under the Nazi boot in Farsund. He was left with little but his fears.
    When an opportunity arose to work for the Grace Line, whose fleet of modern freighters in New York City made it the best steamship company in the country, he quit the
City of Norfolk.
Larsen had been driven by the desire to command his own ship ever since his first day at sea as a seventeen-year-old, and Grace Line was the place where he could achieve that dream. Hard work and intelligence were rewarded at Grace Line.
    Larsen held an officer’s license with the Norwegian Merchant Navy, but that didn’t carry weight in the U.S. Merchant Marine; he still needed to take the exam to get a U.S. license. With eight years of experience at sea—from the engine room of the
Attila
to the helm of the
City of Norfolk—
and two recent years of mariners’ college in Norway, he didn’t need to go to school to prepare for the difficult three-day test, but he enrolled in a private crash course in Connecticut anyhow, because he