Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  It was obviously too heavy for us to lift, even together, and push up through the manhole fifteen feet above. So very gingerly, while Jess tilted the bomb a bit so I could get under it, I slung it in a manila bridle kept well clear of the firing mechanism in its head, and looped the slack fuse in a small coil on top of the detonator to get it out of harm’s way.

  Then while half a dozen men heaved slowly from the topside, Jess and I, down in the hold, carefully guided it upward and out through the manhole, with our lives staked on our care in seeing that in that lift we kept both fuse and whatever type of firing mechanism the Italians had installed in that bomb, clear of any contact that might detonate it.

  We got it safely out of the hold, through the manhole, and into the Lord Grey, where it went immediately ashore to be turned over to the Royal Navy’s torpedo specialists. They took it some five miles inland into the desert, where from a respectful distance they fired it. In spite of having been submerged over thirteen months, it went off with a roar that shook distant Massawa so badly as to cause all the natives and Italians to rush for air-raid shelters, thinking Massawa was being bombed again from the air, this time by Rommel’s planes.

  We worked in the muck and the slime covering the floor of the dock. In diving rigs when it was necessary to get inside some of the still-flooded hold compartments to plug bomb-damaged bulkheads, but mostly half naked when we could work out of the water, divers and salvage crew struggled night and day to make the dock bottom watertight enough so it could float without the continuous running of the air compressors to hold it up.

  We built a number of moderate-sized wooden cofferdams which we slid under the bottom of the dry dock to seal off temporarily the holes blown in the steel bottom of the dock. This turned out to be not as hard a job as I had anticipated, for invariably we found that the holes in the bottom plating of the dock, while large, were still smaller than the holes torn in the steel floor overhead. To help us even further, we ran into the odd situation that in every case, the bottom plating, instead of being blown down as might have been expected from an internal explosion, was blown up and into the dry dock. This freak of explosive effect was a godsend. It left no protruding steel below the smooth bottom of the dock to interfere with the quick installation underneath the dock of our wooden cofferdams—a very great blessing. I had in Massawa then none of my underwater cutting torches needed to burn away the interfering steel had there been any.

  And so we came to the end of our salvage job on the evening of May 19, nine days since we had started.

  In nine days the large Italian dry dock was fully and safely afloat from end to end, all salvage work concluded. As salvagers, we were through with it. One American officer, two American supervisors, and thirteen other American divers and mechanics, with only two old diving rigs and nothing else brought from America, had lifted that impossible to salvage dry dock in nine days. To have lifted it in nine months would have been considered a remarkable performance by any salvage officer. With only such equipment as had been lying around Massawa for long months, available to anyone who had the vision to try, that “long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful” operation was ended in nine days, the shortest salvage job I had ever tackled.

  It proved to be a nine days’ wonder in the Middle East (and in some other places).

  CHAPTER

  29

  MAY 20, THE DAY FOLLOWING THE completion of our salvage job on the large Italian dry dock, turned out to be a red letter day for us in Massawa in many ways, not all of them pleasant.

  I had spent the previous night ashore in my own bed, the first night since May 11. When I turned out on the morning of the twentieth, the two Cable and Wireless managers seized the opportunity (the first they had had to get hold of me in over a week) to serve an eviction notice on me. I and all the other Americans must get out of Building 108 by June 1. Where we went, or whether there was anywhere we could go, was none of their concern; on June 1, Cable and Wireless wanted the whole of Building 108, though it had no more men in Massawa than it had had seven weeks before when I had first moved in.

  I went to see Captain Lucas of the Royal Navy about that immediately; there wasn’t a place in Massawa available to us as quarters. Captain Lucas knew of the situation, I found; he was terribly distressed over it and had objected on his own. But the Cable and Wireless men had insisted; the building had been promised them, they wanted it June 1 to start rearranging it into suites for themselves.

  All Captain Lucas could do, he said, was to recommend strongly and immediately to his superiors that the building be given to the Americans, with some other provision made for the two Cable and Wireless men there then and such others as might ever come later. What would happen, he didn’t know. But I knew by then that Cable and Wireless was a powerful British corporation with excellent government connections in London; I feared the worst in spite of Captain Lucas’ recommendations.

  Somewhat down in the mouth over this scandalous reward for our efforts, I rode from the Royal Navy headquarters to my own office. Mrs. Maton greeted me there with news of a different nature. She had just had a telephone call from up in the hills. Major General Russell Maxwell, commanding all American forces in the Middle East, was in Asmara. About 11:00 A.M., accompanied by various high ranking officers of the British Army, by Colonel Chickering, his Chief of Staff, and by Colonel Claterbos, he would visit Massawa for his first inspection of the Naval Base.

  Immediately on hearing that, I looked out the windows over the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula and the array of ex-Italian buildings covering it. The scenery didn’t suit me; it never had since first I had seen the place. To the south, floating high above everything, was a British White Ensign, the only flag in sight; there wasn’t an American flag anywhere.

  I had tried previously to rectify that situation by getting a large American flag suitable for flagpole use, from the Army with the usual Middle East results—there was none available. I had refused to hoist as a flag over our Base, one of the little handkerchiefs I could get. Within sight of that large British ensign, it would only serve to make the United States look ridiculous in the eyes of both Eritreans and Italians.

  Now something had to be done; I couldn’t let General Maxwell on his first visit to one of his posts gaze on a situation where that British flag seemed to be covering everything in sight.

  There happened that morning to be an American freighter, the S.S. Oregon, unloading in the commercial harbor; one of the first to reach Massawa. I seized on Herman Weinberg, sheetmetal foreman, a very forceful person, ordered him posthaste to Massawa in my car to present my compliments to the captain of that freighter and beg of him, as a patriotic favor to us orphaned Americans, to lend us for that day only the largest American flag he had on his ship.

  Then I got hold of Austin Byrne, told him to gather up my Maltese riggers, and erect immediately on top of the highest building we had (the three-storied end of the electric shop) the longest pole or substitute thereof he could find in the Naval Base. He was to approximate in height above the ground that flagpole, ex-Italian, which the British were using. I warned him he had only a few hours in which to get results. Meanwhile, once he had that job started, he was to canvass the multitude of American workmen the contractor had on his construction work and see if he could find anybody who knew how to blow a bugle. I would borrow the bugle from the Royal Naval Base, on which errand Commander Davy immediately departed.

  In less than an hour Weinberg was back with the flag—a large ensign, fine for my purpose, which Weinberg told me was not a loan. The merchant ship’s captain had insisted on making me a gift of it; he had another for ship’s use.

  In less than two hours, Byrne had the flagpole up—a real flagpole which he had found in the dust alongside the carpenter shop. It wasn’t so long in itself (which was fortunate when it came to securing it in place) but on top of the building, it stood about as high as the British pole a quarter of a mile off. And he had a bugler, a young American, not so long be
fore a Boy Scout, whom I sent into a closed room to do some practicing on the British bugle till I wanted him.

  At 10:00 A.M., I shut down all the naval shops briefly and mustered all hands I had ashore—Americans, Eritreans, Arabs, Somalis, Sudanese, Maltese, Italians, and all the diverse races we had—on the hot baked plain in front of our highest building.

  There with the few American and British officers present at “Salute,” and all the others in such attitudes of respect as their various customs dictated, our American flag was first unfurled to the Massawa breezes. As the bugler feelingly sounded “Colors,” it was swiftly run up to the masthead. It floated out beautifully—to those Americans who had struggled along with me in torrid Massawa to make a naval base of the sabotaged junk we had found beneath where that lovely flag now streamed out, a thrilling sight. It was the first American flag to fly over an American naval station in Africa; perhaps the first to fly over an American naval base on former enemy territory anywhere in the world in this war.

  As the last note of “Colors” faded away into silence and our hands came down from “Salute,” we felt very proud of it. Our American Naval Base now looked American, ready for its Commanding General’s inspection.

  About 11:00 A.M., four dusty Army cars bearing General Maxwell and his party from Asmara hauled up at the Naval Base. As we had neither any guard, any band, nor any means of firing a salute, the military formalities of receiving him and the two British Major Generals accompanying him had to be reduced to hand salutes on the part of myself and Captain Plummer.

  But General Maxwell was little interested in military formalities. He and Colonel Claterbos, together with his British guests, Major General B. O. Hutchinson, commanding His Majesty’s Forces in the Sudan; a South African Major General, representing Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Premier of the Union of South Africa; Brigadier Stephen Longrigg, who had just taken over as British Military Governor of Eritrea; and their staffs were interested only in seeing what was going on in Massawa which might be of use in helping to stop Rommel.

  Before lunch, I escorted them through all the naval shops, every one of them humming with activity with all the lately sabotaged Italian machines busily engaged on war materials with which to smash the Axis. (I thanked Heaven our strike had ended some days before or I shouldn’t have had a machine running.) In each shop as we entered it, I introduced General Maxwell and the accompanying British generals to its American shop foreman.

  I couldn’t help laughing inwardly as in shop after shop, that group of generals raised their eyebrows in puzzled astonishment over the heterogeneous collection of P.O.W.s and assorted natives that they saw running the machines. At last they asked me where were all the Americans they had heard of who had rehabilitated that Naval Base? I had to tell them there might be plenty of Americans elsewhere in Eritrea, but they had already seen all the Americans who had ever had anything to do with making good the sabotage in Massawa; you could count the lot of them on the fingers of two hands and have some fingers left over. Austin Byrne, James Lang, Paul Taylor, Herman Weinberg, Pierre Willermet, Fred Schlachter, and myself—that was the whole story.

  We had lunch, served in a sweltering atmosphere that I knew even General Hutchinson from the Sudan was not accustomed to, and which nearly melted away the others acclimated only to the Egyptian and Libyan Deserts, and even cooler spots in Africa. After lunch, I packed everybody into the Lord Grey, by no stretch of the imagination any admiral’s barge, and took them out on the water to cool them off a bit as well as to show them what was going on afloat.

  The major object of interest, of course, was the salvaged Italian dry dock, salvaged only the day before. Its vast bulk, standing out now above the harbor waters like the Great Pyramid over the desert, completely dwarfed the Persian dry dock on its starboard side. General Maxwell insisted on boarding the newly raised dock, undeterred by the barnacles, the mud, and the miscellaneous wreckage littering the dock floor, and the British generals went with him. There were some startled gasps as they saw the huge holes, twenty feet across, some patched with wood, some still unpatched, which gaped in the floor of that dock, now a major repair job in any shipyard. Gingerly they skirted the keel blocks scattered about the dock, ducked under the traveling crane lying a barnacle-crusted wreck in the middle of the dock where the Italian saboteurs had dumped it from the starboard side wall above, and finally threaded their way to the bow of the dock.

  To save them the very messy journey back over 200 yards of still muddy deck, I had the Lord Grey run around the dock to the bow end to pick them up.

  I had to admit they weren’t as good-looking a set of generals when they left the dock as when they had boarded it, but they certainly seemed impressed. That dry dock, still considerably festooned with barnacles and covered with mud, with startling evidences of Violent explosions all over its floor, looked like a mountain which had suddenly been spewed up from the ocean floor by an eruption. It was enough to impress anybody.

  From the salvaged Italian dock, we moved over to the Persian dock, where one of Admiral Harwood’s Mediterranean armed supply ships, a British vessel for a change, was lifted out of the water, the seventh ship we had taken on that dock in thirteen days. Here our visitors were more than impressed; they were incredulous. That a good salvage man could have lifted that Italian dock in a hurry they were willing to believe, having seen it; that anybody could get Eritrean natives to work the way those Eritreans before them were working was more than anyone who knew Eritreans could believe even when he thought he was seeing it. Brigadier Longrigg and General Hutchinson, who knew Eritreans best, opened their eyes wide in astonishment at those dancing natives, and wanted to know what I had done to them. But I was non-committal. Longrigg, as Military Governor of Eritrea, was the last word on native wage scales. I had no desire at all to do other than let that sleeping dog, my incentive wage plan, keep on sleeping. I laughed it off with the statement that it was so damnably hot in the dry dock, they were just trying to stir up a breeze under the ship, and we all moved on. It was hot in that dry dock.

  We got back into the Lord Grey and ran out of the harbor to give everybody a good look at the wrecks lying at the entrance of the naval harbor, in the commercial harbor, and in the south harbor. As we left the south harbor on our way back, having seen them all, the South African Major General, with what I thought was at least no overstatement, observed,

  “Messy lot of wrecks the bloody Eyties left you, old chap. Likely to keep you hopping a while yet, eh, what?”

  It was a long ride back in the slow Lord Grey from the south harbor. The Major General from South Africa, ruminating on what he had seen, again commented after a while,

  “Blessed lot of work here yet. Any way I might help you, Commander?”

  “General,” I assured him earnestly, “there are lots of ways. But what I need worst now is men, mechanics; and when it comes to mechanics, what I need worst is some ironworkers. I haven’t got a damned one! You saw the wreck of that dry dock; she’s salvaged now, but if I’m ever going to repair her, I need ironworkers. Where I’m going to get any, God knows!”

  “Ironworkers, eh? Well, I’m on my way to our army in Libya; when I get there, I’ll see what I can do about it.” He relapsed into silence. I promptly forgot it; Libya was a long way from South Africa where alone he could get workmen. A very polite gesture on his part, but what good could a general on his way to join the fierce fighting west of Tobruk, do me?

  The Lord Grey, once more manned by her regular Italian crew, lumbered along on her journey over the Red Sea. I was having a rest, anyway; it was the first day in seven weeks I was not wrestling, afloat or ashore, with some part of the work in my dual command. We rounded Sheikh Said Island. Then in the open sea again we were shortly passing on our port side the entrance to the commercial harbor. Standing prominently out in the narrow entrance was the wreck of the S.S. Crefeld, a German steamer, lying on her side where in an attempt to plug the bottleneck entrance, she had been scuttled. Fort
unately the Nazis and the Fascisti between them had bungled the task; she had swung round enough in capsizing to leave a narrow but workable channel into the commercial harbor for even the largest ships entering.

  The wreck of the Crefeld drew all eyes as we passed. The conversation in that boatload of Army officers became quite animated, the topic, naturally enough, being the sabotaged condition in which the Fascisti had left all Massawa on the surrender. Major General Hutchinson, of the Sudan forces, whose Sudanese troops had helped to take it, remembered well its depressing state when first they had entered Massawa to find everything apparently an irretrievable wreck. He better than anyone else present was in a position to judge what had happened since. Leaning aft toward me on the thwart on which he sat, he said, “Commander, I know of no one who is doing as much to help win the war as you.”

  That, I thought, was laying it on a bit thick, but it was a pleasant compliment anyway. That General Hutchinson really meant it, however, I soon found out, for in an official letter which he sent to General Maxwell that night, he repeated his statement in practically the identical words.

  Soon we were back at the Naval Base pier with the afternoon nearly gone and all hands disembarked. It was time for the inspection party to start back for Asmara if they were not to traverse that hazardous mountain road in the darkness.

  General Maxwell, who had had very little to say all day long, apparently too busily engaged in observing everything to talk much, now drew me aside for the first discussion I had had alone with him since he arrived.

  “Commander,” he said crisply, “there’s too much required here for any one man to handle alone without breaking down. You need naval help. Tell me what officers you need and I’ll have them ordered here from Washington.”

  “Thanks, General,” I replied, “I agree with you, but there’s no use asking Washington. I was told in the Navy Department when I was ordered here that I was the only officer who was going to be sent; I wasn’t going to get any assistants. They said they had no officers to send; I wasn’t to expect any later. No use your bothering over it; I’ll do the best I can alone.”