Twelve desperate miles

Operation Torch was the beginning of the liberation of Europe during World War II. It's goal was to capture the port city of Casablanca and an airfield sixty miles northeast of the city, thereby allowing General George Patton to give the Allies a base on the Mediterranean for the coming invasion of southern Europe. To do this, supplies had to be brought in and a large convoy set sail from Virginia to North Africa in November 1942. Unfortunately, the airfield was located a dozen miles up a twisting river which was too shallow for any available transport ship in the entire Allied fleet. A desperate attempt to find a boat resulted in the last minute location of the Contessa, a rust-stained Hondurian-registered civilian freighter that hauled bananas and honeymooners from New Orleans to the Caribbean. The ship was found too late to join the convoy and sailed on her own for North Africa through U-boat infested waters with a crew from twenty-six different
nations and eighteen sailors pulled from the Norfolk Virginia county jail carrying a load of highly volatile airplane fuel and nine hundred tons of bombs.