At All Costs by Sam Moses Read Free Book Online

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