Episode 148: Safe Passage

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

It had looked like it would be safe until the boats started blowing up.

German warships and air assaults had wreaked havoc in the North Atlantic for nearly four years.

And the U-boats, the submarines, made every crossing since the war broke out in the fall of 39, a deadly game of chance.

More than 2,500 ships had sunk, Navy, civilian.

More than 5,000 sailors and seamen, cooks, radio operators, passengers had been killed in open combat or by torpedoes, slipping up through the depths while they slept.

But by the spring of 1943, it looked like the Allies had taken back control.

American shipyards had been launching vessel after vessel at astounding speeds, new naval escorts for civilian ships, with the Royal Canadian Air Force keeping watch from above.

The British had put their best scientific minds in the task of freeing the Atlantic, breaking codes in Bletchley Park, developing radar that could find the U-boats in the dark of the deep blue sea.

But after a quiet summer, September was aflame.

Two dozen ships sent to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Hundreds of people dead.

drowned, blown up in their bunks.

And so that November, there was nothing to suggest it would be easy sneaking the president across the ocean.

But Roosevelt was needed in Tehran.

The future of the war needed to be decided.

And no amount of encoded cables or envoys secreted across borders in the dead of night could bring about a decision about the final assault.

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

The three powers in one room.

It was the only way.

At 10.30 p.m.

on November 11th, 1943, an unmarked car arrived at the Marine Base in Quantico, Virginia.

Only the base commander and the general overseeing the operation knew that FDR was in the back seat.

The President was met with a wheelchair and pushed up the gangplank onto a Coast Guard cutter, which cast off her lines and slipped into the Potomac River under a full moon toward the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where the black silhouette of a battleship awaited.

The cutter pulled up beside it before dawn and FDR was hoisted aboard.

There was no fanfare, no hail to the chief, no raising of the presidential flag.

No one who wasn't on board should know he was aboard.

Just the crew of the USS Iowa, codenamed Lion for this operation.

Generals Marshall and Arnold and Leahy, Admiral King, and the President's diplomatic entourage, members of the Secret Service who had already swept the Iowa for potential threats.

And they set out to sea, zigzagging, tacking back and forth in a defensive maneuver, flanked by two aircraft carriers and two destroyers, charged with protecting the president at all costs.

The fate of the war.

Maybe the world depended on it.

There was a third destroyer yet to join them.

Brand new, one of the 1,200 or so ships Rush ordered for the American fleet since the attack on Pearl Harbor two years before.

Manned by some 300 of the more than 3 million men who joined the Navy during the war.

The ship had been christened in Texas, had been broken down, had its systems and weapons tested and retested in the warm waters off Guantanamo Bay, while its crew, so many fresh recruits, former farmers and factory workers and schoolboys, got their sea legs and then got their first assignment, protecting the commander-in-chief.

Their ship, the USS William D.

Porter, set out from Norfolk, Virginia on its secret mission.

with orders to meet up with the convoy as quickly as possible while maintaining strict radio silence.

But during that setting out, right at the beginning when they untie and pull up anchor and all that,

the new guys in charge of pulling up those anchors didn't pull them up the whole way, and instead of the anchor safely settling into that indentation in the side of the boat that probably has a name, but I don't know it, instead the anchor kind of stuck out and tore the railings and the lifeboats off another destroyer and the slipped beside it as they passed.

Which as you can imagine is no small thing.

There are repairs and paperwork, maybe even an inquest, some demotions.

But the USS William D.

Porter, under strict and secret orders as it was, had to keep going.

Couldn't even radio an apology.

In its defense, it was the president's defense.

Though it was lucky in its way, they had not quite reached the presidential convoy yet when the very next day, the depth charge, a bomb for submarines, fell off the back of the boat and blew up.

But within a few days at Fullstein,

the William D.

Porter, or the Willie D.

as the new crew had started to call the new boat, had taken its position alongside the Iowa and its fellow defenders as they attempted to cross the Atlantic.

Whether it was this show of force, the two aircraft carriers, the three destroyers, the 45,000-ton battleship itself, or whether it was good timing or planning or just plain luck, the USS Iowa did cross the Atlantic unscathed.

It was all pretty smooth, actually.

Roosevelt and his entourage watched movies in his quarters every night.

He even bathed in a specially built bathtub, the only one in the the fleet.

And when it was being installed back in Virginia, it was the only clue any of the crew had that a VIP might be joining them on their next mission.

And out of danger, in friendly waters off the coast of Gibraltar, relaxed and bathed, the commander-in-chief wanted to see what all of these impressive ships under his command could do.

So he asked for a demonstration.

Weather balloons were inflated on the deck of the Iowa.

and sent up into the clear sky.

And then guns roared.

The 50-caliber cannons in the battleship.

The anti-aircraft battery.

When the balloons would drift into range, the destroyers would join in.

And so the crew of the Willie D did too.

New sailors, never seen combat, who'd been on a secret, silent mission for the past several days, seized the opportunity to get some shots off, as the President watched from his wheelchair on the deck of the Iowa.

And down in the torpedo room on the Willie D,

the torpedo commander decided to run through a drill too.

They wouldn't launch any, all of the torpedoes were disarmed anyway.

Just wanted to take this opportunity to make sure his men were battle ready.

So he had them line up the nearest target, which in this case happened to be the USS Iowa, about 6,000 yards off port, and started to go through the motions.

There were all sorts of safety measures when it came to the torpedoes, to prevent both accidental launches and sabotage.

They even had a phrase the commander had to say exactly so before each launch.

If he didn't, he would reveal himself as some sort of imposter.

But he was no imposter, and so he said, if I wasn't a torpedo officer, I wouldn't be here.

Which is pretty dry as code words go, but he says this little phrase, presses the button for torpedo 1, maybe makes a little whooshing sound for his imaginary torpedo.

Says, again, if I wasn't a torpedo officer, I wouldn't be here.

Presses the button for torpedo 2, whoosh whoosh.

If I wasn't a torpedo officer, I wouldn't be here.

Presses the button for torpedo 3.

But this time there is a whoosh.

A real one.

There is a live torpedo carrying 500 pounds of TNT cutting through the water at 40 miles an hour, heading straight toward the boat carrying the President of the United States, who is on his way to figure out how D-Day is supposed to work.

Torpedo guy is freaking out.

Calls up to the bridge.

The Iowa needs to know.

They need to get out of the way.

There may not be enough time to get out of the way.

But they need to do something.

But they can't radio.

They're not supposed to radio.

So the signal officer, a newly minted signal officer, starts flashing a coded message, you know, a light on a mirror, fast as he can.

And so they see this in the Iowa and start reading.

Torpedo accidentally in the water, traveling away from the Iowa.

Well, That's good.

It's better than traveling toward the Iowa.

But, but wait.

The signal officer has just signaled that the last signal was a mistake.

Now they're signaling something about the Willie D turning to get out of the way.

Maybe?

But that doesn't make any sense.

At this point, the captain of the William D.

Porter realizes that you cannot trust anyone on the William D.

Porter to get anything right.

So he throws the radio silence out the window and says, lion, lion, lion, there's a torpedo coming right at you.

The USS Iowa jumps into action.

Engines at full steam.

Helmsman turning the wheel like he's playing roulette.

But it turns out that turning a battleship is exactly like turning a battleship.

And the best they can do is try to angle it away from the torpedo and hope that it won't be a direct hit.

Hope that the Iowa won't blow up all at once.

And Franklin Roosevelt is on the deck.

Now there is a room off the bridge that is heavily armored that might survive an explosion.

But it is several flights up.

And Franklin Roosevelt is in a wheelchair.

So he asks his Secret Service detail to push him closer to the railing.

He has always wanted to see a torpedo in the water.

And if he's going to die, he might as well take it off the list before he does.

And the ship is groaning, straining against the waves.

The propeller is turning.

The Secret Service has their pistols aimed at the water, hoping to shoot out the torpedo, which is not going to work at all, but let them try.

And

it will not surprise you that FTR doesn't get killed here.

You know that.

But in this moment, he doesn't.

No one does.

He is the President of the United States and all that entails.

But he is also just a 61-year-old man stuck in a wheelchair because his legs don't work.

A man who is terrified of being caught helpless in a fire.

A man who would regularly practice dropping from his bed and crawling out the door just in case.

He sat there helpless,

wondering if the ship was about to explode.

And in this same moment, moment, the new sailors, the former farmers and factory workers and schoolboys on the Willie D.

Porter, are just there helpless, thinking they just killed the president.

The torpedo broke up in the chop kicked up by the Iowa's propellers,

as they were straining to turn the ship to safety.

And then the Iowa turned its guns on the Willie D.

Porter, because clearly some German spy had gotten on board.

It couldn't just be gross incompetence.

It took a while to figure out that, yeah,

that was it.

One of the torpedoes was accidentally armed when it wasn't supposed to be.

Once the President was delivered safely to allies in Algeria, the rest of the convoy escorted the Porter to Bermuda, where each member of its crew was arrested, a first in U.S.

naval history, though everyone but the torpedo commander was let go.

The captain was stripped of his command and remanded to desk duty.

Meanwhile, FDR had a fun anecdote to lighten things up at his meeting with Stalin and Churchill.

He even pardoned the torpedo commander, though he didn't seem to have any problem with the USS William D.

Porter's next assignment, patrolling Alaska's Aleutian Islands

in January.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in September of 2019.

As I announced in the last episode,

I am spending a little bit of extra time focused working on this book that I am writing for Random House that it collects existing memory palace stories and some new stuff.

And as I've been going through it, I have noticed that there's a bunch of stories that just don't work in the page or they don't work as well.

And this one was one of them.

I thought it'd be fun to give this one another spin.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent podcasts.

from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you want to drop me a line, you can do so at nate at thememorypalace.us.

You can follow me on the social media, which basically for me means Facebook and Twitter at the Memory Palace.

I'll talk to you guys again.

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