TWELVE DESPARATE MILES

The Epic WWII Voyage of the SS Contessa

In November of 1942, the US prepared its first military action of WW II, an invasion of North Africa. Operation Torch, as it was called, had more than 100 ships carrying over 30,000 soldiers, amounting to the largest cross-ocean invasion force in the history of the world. But trailing this convoy was a naval oddity, a banana boat called the Contessa, picking its way gingerly across the Atlantic at General George Patton's insistence. Packed full with combustible airplane fuel drums and 900 tons of bombs, it was "crewed by a polyglot cast of international merchant seamen and a gang of inmates yanked in Dirty Dozen-style from the Norfolk County jail." Charged with delivering it's payload to the Port Lyautey airfield, 12 miles up the winding, shallow, and well-defended Sebou River, and a short flight from the city of Casablanca - which the Allies were prepared to bomb if necessary - the banana boat was a veritable powder keg and the only vessel in the entire Atlantic Ocean with a draft shallow enough to make it up the river. But first she'd have to get to the river, and the Allies would have to deliver Rene Malevergne, a French harbor pilot known as the "Shark," to safely navigate the Contessa up the Sebou.