At All Costs by Sam Moses Read Free Book Online Page A

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