At All Costs Read Free Page B

to England, where it was easy for any Norwegian mariner to find the Resistance; but when he volunteered, the Resistance wouldn’t take him because he wasn’t a native Norwegian. The betrayal by Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who had sold out his country to the Nazis, burned in the hearts of Norwegians and kept their suspicion high.
    In May 1941, Larsen was assigned to the ship that would take him to war: the shiny new SS
Santa Elisa.
She was launched that month from the shipyards in Kearny, New Jersey, and in July joined other Grace Line ships running military stores to South America, with ports of call in Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Mostly, she brought back copper and other metals from Chile and coffee from Colombia.
    In September he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was commissioned an ensign; it was a requirement by Grace Line that all its officers belong to the USNR, although it didn’t change their status in the merchant marine.
    He also finally succeeded in getting the travel documents for Minda and Jan. For $525, he bought them tickets on a Pan American Clipper, scheduled to fly from Lisbon to New York on Minda’s twenty-fifth birthday. But getting from Farsund to Lisbon with a toddler—Jan was nearly three years old now—was the hard part. There were half a dozen legs in which anything could go wrong, with trains and ferries to Berlin, a flight from Berlin to Madrid, and another train to Lisbon. The Gestapo stood at every corner and doorway along the way. And even if Minda and Jan made it to Lisbon, the flight over the ocean in a monstrous “flying boat” was a scary step for a farm girl who had never been away from home and family.
    “My friends talked me out of it,” she said. “It was tempting, but I didn’t want to take a chance like that.”
    Three months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. Larsen heard the news over the radio on the bridge of the
Santa Elisa,
anchored in the harbor of Valparaíso. After that, his attempts to get his family out of Norway grew in desperation. But the replies from the government weren’t very promising.
    Department of State
    Washington
    My dear Mr. Larsen:
    The Department of Justice has referred to this Department your letter of January 5, 1942 regarding the visa case of your wife, Minda Heskestad Larsen, and your son, Jan Frederick Larsen, who are residing at Farsund, Norway.
    Because of the withdrawal of the Department’s representatives from enemy-controlled territory, there is no action which can be taken at this time with a review to providing Mrs. Larsen with an appropriate visa for admission into the United States or passport facilities for your son, who, it is understood, is an American citizen.
    While the possibility of American citizens proceeding from enemy-controlled territory is being investigated, no assurance can be given that it will be found possible to arrange for American citizens to come to the United States from Norway. You will be properly informed should the Department be able to make such arrangements.

CHAPTER 3 •••
    FIRE DOWN BELOW
    A t twenty-eight, Lieutenant Reinhard Hardegen, a German U-boat captain, was a loose cannon. He carried unchecked ambition and relentless intensity along with his war wounds—a short leg and bleeding stomach—from the aviation crash that had ended his previous career as a naval pilot. He had concealed the injuries in order to qualify for command of U-123, and then began an impatient rampage of sinkings with the neutral Portuguese freighter
Ganda.
The 4,300-ton ship didn’t go down after two torpedo hits, so Hardegen surfaced U-123 and sank her with its four-inch gun. When the attack became an international incident, Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, claimed it was a British sub that had sunk
Ganda
.
    Dönitz chose U-123 to be among the first five U-boats with orders to attack the eastern