Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Actually I was confronted for a while with their flat refusal to move at all—if Cable and Wireless wanted them out, let it try throwing them out by force and see what happened. Short of bayonets, and perhaps even in spite of them, they were perfectly willing to wait and see who possessed Building 108 when the fight was over—themselves or Cable and Wireless.

  But I was undesirous of having what would undoubtedly have been a bloody riot between British and Americans furnished to Goebbels’ propaganda mill. There were troubles enough for the Allies that month, especially in the Middle East where the British were in hasty retreat to El Alamein with the siege of Tobruk by Rommel just beginning. Still all my arguments to move out peaceably would have gone for nought had not a vessel arrived in Massawa the day before moving day with a consignment of portable room air conditioners for us. With these we might make our new rooms in Building 35 livable when we could get them installed there; it was worth a try. So finally, muttering threats and curses, all hands packed their few belongings into bags and the houseboys carted them down to a waiting truck for the move. Nevertheless, I had to warn the two Cable and Wireless managers to keep themselves well away from Building 108 and not show themselves again till everyone was completely out or I would not answer for their personal safety. They prudently disappeared completely on moving day.

  In Building 35, my new room contained only a desk for me to work on, a chair, a flimsy wooden wardrobe, and an even flimsier apology for a narrow wooden bed, either of which I could have kicked to pieces with ease. Bare as a prison cell, there were no curtains, no carpets, no pictures; there never was anything else except the air conditioner which was later installed. Being far from the sea, it was hotter than hell and as dusty as the desert. It did have a shower in one corner and a tiny alcove for my bags.

  I promptly stripped and got under the shower, then twice as promptly got out again—the water from the solitary valve to the shower head came out steaming—scalding hot!

  With my skin blistered where the spray had struck it, I looked in dumb amazement into that shower. What was the matter? There couldn’t be any heater on the water line; there never was anywhere in Massawa, but that water seemed practically boiling to me. I knew a completely new water supply system had been installed for the building, but something must be wrong with it. I hastily drew on a bathrobe and some slippers and went out on the veranda to locate the trouble.

  The trouble showed up plain as day. To provide the pressure in that forsaken locality to force water for Building 35 up to the second floor where I was, the pipefitters had installed a vertical steel pressure tank three feet in diameter and eight feet high, together with an old Italian automatic pressure pump to force more water into the tank when the level got low. There out in the sun on the hot coral fifty feet from Building 35, stood the bare steel water tank, soaking up heat from the sun like a boiler exposed to a fire!

  I pulled on a few clothes, my sun helmet and my sun glasses and went to sick bay to see what Captain Plummer could do for the blisters overlaying my prickly heat. On the way back, coated with salve, I stopped in at the pipefitter shop to tell the foreman, “Frenchy” Willermet, that he should have known better than to expose a water tank in Massawa. But he protested there wasn’t any place else he could have put it and still provide for it the suction he needed and the required accessibility for servicing of its ancient Italian automatic pumping equipment. In that, after some reflection, I concluded he was right.

  Still, something had to be done or our water system was useless. No one could use steaming water for a shower bath, and even for flushing a toilet, it had drawbacks. A solution was finally reached by coating the entire steel tank with a three-inch-thick insulating jacket of magnesia block and asbestos cement—a paradox if there ever was one. We had heavily to insulate a water supply tank, not to keep the heat in as in all civilized climates, but to keep the heat out!

  After the insulation went on, things weren’t so bad. The water thereafter ran merely very warm in the showers, instead of scalding hot, except on the frequent occasions when the decrepit Italian pumping mechanism broke down, when there wasn’t any water at all. That usually happened when I came back in the evening before dinner after a terrible afternoon in the sun, feeling that unless I had a shower immediately, I couldn’t live another minute. At that time, it ordinarily took an hour or more to locate a pipefitter (all of whom by then had quit for the day) to get the damned contraption going again.

  All this, borne by my fellow occupants of Building 35 as poorly as by me, did little to alleviate the bitterness caused by our eviction from Building 108, which for months thereafter remained mostly unoccupied. To the end of my stay in Massawa, there never were one quarter as many British occupants as when we Americans had lived in it. Never could I pass Building 108 without cursing.

  CHAPTER

  33

  IT TOOK NO VERY KEEN OBSERVER from the middle of June onward to note a marked change in the attitude of our P.O.W.s and other Italian workmen. The British Eighth Army under Ritchie, outmaneuvered and defeated west of Tobruk, was in headlong retreat toward Egypt. All Libya was swiftly reconquered by Rommel and his Afrika Korps; only in vital Tobruk was a British garrison left to deny to Rommel the use of that harbor as a supply port for his army. Making no attempt at a stand before Tobruk itself to stop Rommel there, Ritchie and his battered troops not only evacuated Libya but also most of western Egypt, not pausing in their flight for anything till finally they came to El Alamein, only forty-five miles from Alexandria and not much further from Cairo.

  With this retreat, gloom descended everywhere in the Middle East, lightened only by the fact that instead of continuing in hot pursuit of Ritchie’s beaten Eighth Army, Rommel had paused before Tobruk with his whole force to besiege it. Instead of by-passing Tobruk as he easily might have done, and continuing eastward to give Ritchie the coup de grâce before the shattered Eighth Army could pause for any effective stand in defense of Egypt, Rommel had elected to break off the pursuit while he took Tobruk.

  All hands breathed a little more freely at that. Tobruk was left well defended; its British garrison was now the largest in Tobruk’s war history. With lesser forces, Tobruk had held successfully the year before against an Axis siege for nine months till relieved by a British advance. Even though Rommel himself was now its besieger, it was confidently expected it would hold a long time, if not indefinitely. That was the sole gleam of hope amid spreading disaster.

  This depressing situation was reflected by my Italian working force as by a barometer. Never a reticent crowd, where before in the shops I used to hear denunciations of Mussolini and his Fascisti and praise of American democracy, now those I had suspected of Fascist sympathies were openly exultant; the remainder were keeping their mouths shut lest they be soon the victims of reprisals from their triumphant Fascist associates. And the events leading up to the strike of the month before were trumps in the Fascist hands—if the vaunted Americans couldn’t even manage a payroll, why should anyone ever fear they could win a war?

  I got further light on the probable future from my new South Africans, only recently arrived from the desert west of Tobruk. I didn’t have to ask them for information; I received it involuntarily. One after another, all ten of those South African ironworkers came individually to see me, pleading to be permitted to rejoin for the last battle their comrades, now in desperate straits in their flight past Tobruk into Egypt. I refused each man’s request; I needed him too badly as an ironworker where he was to let anyone go. But in their urgent entreaties, I learned a great deal. Every man of them, having fought back and forth in the Libyan Desert for two years, had great respect for Rommel—he was smart. Of the men of his Afrika Korps they had no fear; they were as good soldiers themselves as any Nazis. The trouble lay in the generalship so they felt; neither Auchinleck, top commander, nor Ritchie, field commander, could compare with Rommel—he outsmarted them every time. But all the same, outsmarted generals or not, each man entreate
d me to let him go back-he felt like a coward who had deserted his comrades in their most desperate hour. He just had to get back into the fight. For God’s sake, wouldn’t I release him?

  I wouldn’t, but while we were talking about the desert war, how about Tobruk? How long could it hold out? I got varied opinions, none optimistic. Some thought a month or so; some only a few weeks. I got my most decided answer from the youngest of them, a fair-haired boy of twenty from Johannesburg who had been in the Libyan fighting since he was eighteen.

  “Rommel’s only playing with Tobruk a few days yet; he hasn’t attacked it. When Rommel hits Tobruk, Captain, he’ll knock it over in a few hours. You wait and see.”

  I didn’t have long to wait. On the morning of June 21, 1942, Rommel opened a heavy artillery and air bombardment on the rings of concrete pillboxes, wire entanglements, and vast fields of defensive land mines encircling Tobruk. In the early afternoon he moved his tank columns up for the actual assault. Through the narrow lanes, which under cover of his artillery fire, his low flying fighter planes with light bombs to avoid cratering had plowed in the mine fields, went the tanks—a very smart trick. Passing down those safe lanes, within four hours his tanks had broken through, Tobruk and its entire garrison of 25,000 men had surrendered, and the British vessels, naval and merchant, trying to escape from the harbor, found themselves under the pointblank fire of armored tanks enfilading them from the quays as they fled the port!

  Complete gloom instantly fell on all Allied hopes in the Middle East at this disaster. If Tobruk, a naturally defensible and heavily defended fortress, could not last a day against Rommel and his triumphant Afrika Korps, what hope now for stopping him anywhere? Headlong for Suez on came Rommel, in swift succession by June 29 occupying Sollum, Sidi Barrani, Mersa Matruh, to bring up finally against El Alamein where the Eighth Army had at last paused in flight, thanking God for the week the too-smart Rommel had given it to dig itself in there unmolested while he paused to prepare his brilliant assault on Tobruk.

  Once more Rommel halted to organize his assault on the British position, not so good naturally this time as that of Tobruk, but the last possible point short of Suez where any defense at all could be attempted. General Auchinleck, British Commander-in-Chief of the land forces, relieved Ritchie, his field commander, to take personal charge himself. But the situation looked hopeless; already short-range Stuka bombers flying hardly twenty minutes from fields in Rommel’s rear, were dropping bombs on the British Naval Base at Alexandria, making it untenable.

  Auchinleck sent word to Alex and to Cairo that when the assault came (which might be any day now) he could promise to hold only for twenty-four hours. What happened after that was in the laps of the gods. If Rommel then broke through, in two hours his tanks would be in the streets both of Cairo and Alexandria—El Alamein was that close.

  A wild exodus, inelegantly termed “the flap,” of all Americans and British started from both cities, by air, by truck, by sea. By nightfall, Asmara airfield in Eritrea was swamped by the American personnel, civil and military, of the North African Mission and of our Egyptian Ambassador’s staff. Nobody but General Maxwell himself, Ambassador Kirk, and a handful of their staffs remained in Cairo.

  The British evacuation situation was worse. The Naval Base at Alexandria was hastily shut down, all vessels there, naval and merchant, hurriedly got under way for Suez jammed with British refugees, men, women, and children. But Admiral Harwood, aside from that, had a terrible problem on his hands. On the large dry dock still lay the battleship Queen Elizabeth, her bottom amidships a vast open hole with repairs to it uncompleted. For weeks the frantic British had been trying to get some haste out of their Egyptian workmen and Egyptian contractors ashore so they could get the Queen Elizabeth plated up and away before the worst happened.

  But why should the Axis-minded Egyptians hurry? It wasn’t their battleship; shortly Rommel in person would be welcomed by their king to thank them for not hurrying. They didn’t; the hole in her bottom remained wide open.

  Admiral Harwood made a desperate decision. Hole or no hole in her bottom, the Queen Elizabeth must go immediately if she were not soon to be sunk by bombs from the planes day and night now attacking her. Her bottom was a wreck, but there was nothing the matter with her guns. Spouting fire like a volcano, the Queen Elizabeth had so far successfully fought off all air attacks, but would her luck long hold out? Still, even if by some miracle she continued to avoid destruction from the air, nothing could prevent her falling a welcome prize into Rommel’s hands when he entered Alex.

  So on the Queen Elizabeth, all watertight doors and hatches to the boiler rooms beneath which that hole gaped, were once again tightly closed. The floating dry dock was flooded down, with the sea once more freely entering the stricken battleship amidships. Waterlogged, heavily convoyed, the wounded Queen Elizabeth moved slowly out of abandoned Alexandria towards Port Said on her long voyage (with a stop at Durban to finish patching that hole) to America where she was finally to be repaired. With her departure, the last British Naval Base in the eastern Mediterranean shut down and resigned itself to awaiting imminent occupation by the Nazis. In the deserted base, only Admiral Harwood and his staff remained, prepared to demolish everything when they had to.

  It was against that situation in the Middle East that events in Massawa now moved. I had the only remaining Naval Base and dry dock in the Middle East; I kept it busy. But we were sitting on a powder keg. What might our Italian workmen, ex-soldiers, most of them, do to force the issue now that their Axis forces were on the verge of breaking through and flooding all the Middle East?

  There were scant British troops left in Eritrea, only a few battalions. East or west, most of the Indians and Sudanese had been drawn off to the battle fronts. Orders came down from the Army headquarters in Asmara to organize all the American civilian workmen who cared to volunteer into militia companies, arm them with rifles, drill them. Many men joined; Captain Morrill and another Army lieutenant sent from Asmara started to drill them.

  For the first time also, another order came down from Asmara permitting officers to wear side arms, loaded .45 Colt automatics. The Colts were issued, but as the order was not mandatory, I never wore any. I had no intention of indicating to the Fascisti in Massawa that the Commanding Officer of the Naval Base was any more afraid of them now that Rommel was at the gates of Egypt than I had been when he was on the other side of the Libyan Desert west of Benghazi.

  But there was no use blinking my eyes to the seriousness of our situation. If the El Alamein line cracked, Eritrea would be swiftly overrun, with Rommel’s planes, operating from Jibuti in the hands of his satellites, the Vichy French, available to him at once as a base, blocking to all ships the narrow exit from the Red Sea. There would be no place for anyone in Massawa to go to escape immediate capture except southward into Ethiopia. I took a look at the moldy pair of heavy leather mountain boots I had brought from New York and wondered whether they would last me over that 500-mile trek to Addis Ababa.

  CHAPTER

  34

  JUNE 30, THE DAY AFTER ROMMEL came up to the El Alamein position and paused to gather his forces for the final assault which was to overwhelm the Middle East and bring the war everywhere to a swift conclusion, my salvage crew on the Intent completed all the underwater work on the scuttled Liebenfels and we were ready to start raising her. What salvage pumps the Intent had, four four-inch pumps and one six-inch pump, were rigged on platforms over the amidships and after water-filled holds and cofferdams. In addition, I had two British-made six-inch pumps (much heavier and clumsier than our American pump of the same size) which Captain Lucas to help us out had obtained for me from McCance’s stock of British salvage equipment. These two pumps were rigged over the number one hold forward to give us maximum pumping capacity from that damaged compartment, sealed off now with a heavy concrete filling where it had once been blasted open.

  As all the pumps, American and British, were driven by gasoline engi
nes, I had a dozen fifty-gallon drums of gasoline standing by for refueling. Those seven pumps, running night and day, would eat up huge quantities of gasoline. With all of them running, we could expel 6000 gallons (22 tons) of water a minute from the Liebenfels’ holds. On the estimate that the weight of the empty Liebenfels was 6000 tons, it would take from four to five hours to start the ship up, assuming no leakage into her, which assumption was, of course, ridiculous. There would be plenty of leakage, both through our crude concrete patch and nearly everything else on the ship till we got her main deck above water, and even after that still a considerable amount.

  The pumps, all started by hand cranking with magneto ignition to fire their engines, were put in operation early in the morning. The American pumps, all new Jaeger self-priming machines, started easily and immediately began shooting beautiful streams of water overboard from the Liebenfels’ holds. We had more trouble getting the British engines to fire and still greater difficulty in getting their complicated self-priming pump mechanisms to pick up a suction, but finally we achieved both objects and the British pumps also began ejecting water at a great rate.

  Watching those streams of water flowing overboard made me forget the battle line at El Alamein and everything else from then on. My job, everybody’s job on the Intent from that moment on, was getting water overboard from the Liebenfels. Hoping for the best, we left the war, both on land and sea, to General Auchinleck and Admiral Harwood till the Liebenfels was up. To keep those pumps running and get that scuttled Nazi ship off the bottom and back into Allied service was for the time being our war job.

  All our pumps ran smoothly enough, and from bow to stern what little of the Liebenfels showed above the sea looked like an enormous fountain, gushing water in glistening streams at seven points. Rainbows, lovely in their iridescence, glittered in gorgeous arcs over every pump as the sun shined through the clouds of spray, and in ever widening circles little trains of ripples chased away over the calm Red Sea from the foaming vortex where each stream cascaded into the ocean.