21 year old Able Seaman on the HMS Opportune, William Leonard Phillips was on the lower rung of the scrambling nets, picking up refugees and crew from a lifeboat of the doomed SS Henry Bacon on February 23, 1945. “A bundle of clothing was given to me,” said Len Phillips. “I wondered why the first thing these starving and destitute people did was to handle me a bundle of clothing. But then I heard noises from the bundle and found a baby girl wrapped inside,” he said.
The little girl was then two-year old Sofie Pedersen, now 62. For the first time in 60 years she was reunited with her rescuer last week, on the Liberty Ship John W. Brown in Baltimore, one of two remaining Liberty Ships. “This is only my second time on a Liberty Ship,” Pedersen said, entering the John W. Brown, recounting how her life and the life of her two sisters were saved on a stormy day 60 years ago.
During the winter of 1945 many Norwegian civilians fled the horrors of Nazi rule in Finnmark. An estimated 502 Norwegians were picked up from the Norwegian island Sørøya by British destroyers and brought to Murmansk, Russia, where they were transferred to merchant ships in a convoy headed for Scotland.
The icy waters of the Arctic Sea, separated the SS Henry Bacon from the rest of the convoy and left it an easy target for the Germans. The crew did not radio for help because they did not want to risk revealing the convoy’s position, and instead fought alone in the gale force winds. “The barometric pressure dipped to a low point of the entire war that day, signifying the low point of our lives,” said radio operator Spud Campbell at a ceremony at the U.S. Naval Memorial on March 4, 2005. “In the stormy weather 23 Nazi torpedo bombers attacked the SS Henry Bacon and her precious cargo of Norwegian children, their mothers and father,” he said.
The gunner and last survivor of the navy crew, Jerry Gerold, shot down the first Junker JU-88 bomber. Four more planes were downed by the gunners before the Henry Bacon succumbed to the overwhelming force of the German Luftwaffe. Then five-year old Monrad Pedersen observed the battle from the deck: “I saw several of the crew being hit by machine gun fire from the planes, before I was whisked off the deck by my parents,” recalls Pedersen, now 65. When it was clear that the ship was sinking, Captain Carini ordered five crew members to man a life boat carrying 19 Norwegian refugees. With two of the ship’s four lifeboats damaged by storm and battle, there was not enough space for the entire crew, which bravely gave up their seats for the Norwegian civilians.
“I was only five years old, but still remember the whole thing as very dramatic,” Pedersen said about getting in the lifeboat with his parents. “When the lifeboat was lowered, my baby brother got tangled in the ropes,” said Sigvald Mortensen, then nine years old. “The boat was tilted to one side and partly under water. My three younger brothers and I were sitting in water up to our knees when my dad picked up the fire axe and cut the ropes, which released the lifeboat from the ship” he said. “When we pulled away from the Henry Bacon, Captain Carini was saluting us as the ship went down. As a nine-year old I found it very strange,” Mortensen said. “In those days it was an honor for the captain to go down with his ship.”
With a crew of five Americans and 19 Norwegian refugees, the lifeboat drifted through the waters a few houndred nautical miles off the Norwegian coast In gale force winds. “The weather was incredibly bad, with 30 foot tall waves,” Pedersen said. ”We barely survived.”
The British destroyer HMS Opportune came to the rescue and picked up the survivors from the lifeboat. Able Seaman Len Phillips was on the lower rung on the scrambling nets on the side of the ship, receiving the refugees. “It was a total mess of dead bodies and debris,” said Phillips, who later would participate in the D-Day landing in Normandie. The Brit picked up crewman Chuck Reed who had made it onto a make-shift raft after spending some time in the icy water. “The refugees did not have proper clothing, so I gave my sea boots to Chuck,” said Phillips at the U.S. Navy Memorial ceremony. “He still has my boots. I wonder if he brought them back today,” Phillips said jokingly.
Although Phillips got the Norwegians and some members of the crew safely aboard the British destroyer, he remembers being unable to save everybody. “We saw a chap on a raft and threw the life line towards him. He tried to grab it but just missed. He was apparently injured, because he slid off the raft and we never saw him again. He was so close to being saved and in a flash he was gone. I’ve thought about it my entire life. What happened that day has lived with me ever since,” the 81-year old said.
Captain Carini, the naval guard commander and nine Naval Armed Guard gunners, two Navy signalmen and fifteen Merchant Marine crewmen were lost at sea. Ironically, the SS Henry Bacon was the last ship to be sunk by the Germans, on the same day as the U.S. marines raised the flag on Iwo Jima.
“I hope you understand how terrible real war is," Len Phillips said. "This was a tragedy, but at least we came out saving some lives.”