No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Now at last had come the offensive to which we had looked forward in the midst of our agonies, to afford us sure release, our solitary hope of escape other than on a stretcher or in a coffin from Massawa. And that hope had come to nought. Nobody needed us elsewhere, nobody wanted us, nobody cared. After the lifting of that scuttled crane, we went dully and lifelessly about our routine salvage of the vast array of remaining wrecks, a labor of Sisyphus to which there could be no end now, till the sun sent us to join our shipmates who were already laid away in superheated graves in the powdered coral of the burning desert fringing Massawa.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE DREARY DAYS DRAGGED ON. Remotely, as if from another planet, we listened occasionally to news of the war, news now of victories which might cheer others more fortunately located, but left us apathetic. Even with those victories, the war would last some years yet. We knew we would not last through even one more year. But still we listened.

  Montgomery smashed Rommel’s front at El Alamein and was chasing him completely across Libya, with Rommel and his broken Afrika Korps no longer retreating but fleeing westward in rout. Eisenhower (I knew now who he was) consolidated his grip on Morocco and Algeria and was moving eastward toward Tunisia to close the other jaw of the trap on Rommel.

  Massawa’s day was done. The war had moved elsewhere from the eastern Mediterranean.

  The second week since Eisenhower’s landings faded away, the third began, and still not the slightest sign of any call for us in Massawa or of need for any. A miracle must have occurred in the occupation of North Africa—there were apparently no wrecks and no sabotaged harbors requiring attention. The radio reports characterizing the French military resistance as token only, must have been true. “We had come as friends,” and the friendly French had evidently taken our troops to their bosoms after a few shots in the air to satisfy their honor in resistance. All was going well in North Africa.

  Late on November 24, when I had long since ceased expecting any such thing, came a dispatch to me from our War Department, transmitted by General Maxwell in Cairo, commanding all American Forces in the Middle East. With trembling fingers I slashed apart the envelope, read the paraphrased version of what had come in secret code from Washington:

  “Referring to instructions issued by the War Department, Captain Edward Ellsberg is detached from the Middle East Command and will report immediately to General Eisenhower, Headquarters, Algeria, for duty in connection with urgent salvage work required in all North African ports. This action has been approved by the Navy Department. Air transportation has been arranged by the War Department via Khartoum and Accra. Proceed at once.

  “MAXWELL.”

  As if emblazoned in letters of gold, the words of that dispatch danced before my dazzled eyes. My reprieve. Come now what might in the new war zone, I was at least saved from Massawa! Apparently Eisenhower’s reception in North Africa had been not so friendly as advertised. That phrase “urgent salvage work required in all North African ports” had ominous implications.

  The next few hours were a fury of packing what little I could take with me by air, of ordering all salvage work in Massawa belayed and my little salvage squadron to start loading salvage gear at once preparatory to circumnavigating Africa via the Cape of Good Hope so they might join me in the western Mediterranean.

  At 3 A.M., with a native driver at the wheel, I raced away into the night beneath the burning tropic stars from the dusty peninsula on which stood the naval base which we had rehabilitated. Across the waters of the Red Sea gleamed the lights of a harbor full of ships which I had salvaged. Silently I gazed on them as my car sped by. I was leaving much of what had once been myself in exchange for them. Massawa had left scars on me I should carry the rest of my life.

  Swiftly the car drew out of the ancient town and went roaring away through the darkness across the hot desert toward the mountains where lay Asmara and the airfield from which I should take off at dawn. Shortly we were climbing rapidly a steep mountain road. Long before we reached its top at 8000 feet, both the Red Sea and the Red Sea heat had faded away below us. It was November again, such a November as I had grown up to consider normal everywhere. I drew my long-disused overcoat over my sweat-soaked khaki. North Africa, in the midst of a savage campaign on land and sea, might possibly turn out to be more hectic than Massawa, but at least it would certainly be cooler. I turned up my overcoat collar, looked forward to it hopefully.

  CHAPTER

  3

  FROM ASMARA, CAPITAL OF ERITREA, to Algiers where I was to report to General Eisenhower, was some 5500 air miles over the route designated by the War Department which was then the only air route open to us. I must go practically due west, south of the Sahara across Africa to Accra on the Atlantic, then north from there across the Sahara itself in one long jump-altogether a very roundabout route. This was to dodge the enemy which held Tripoli and Tunisia, and the quite as unco-operative Vichy French who still held Dakar and all French West Africa and were as likely then to shoot down American planes as were their Nazi and Fascist associates.

  My first and shortest hop was to Khartoum. In the chill of the early morning of November 25, I took off in a small plane from the airfield on the high plateau outside Asmara and with no regrets kissed Eritrea goodby forever.

  At 4 A.M. on Thursday, November 26, Thanksgiving Day in America but in the Sudan just another weekday, I took off again in a twin-engined Douglas army transport for the 2600-mile jump across Central Africa to Accra. In the darkness the plane roared down the dusty strip of desert sand which formed the runway and lifted off into the hot dry air over the Sahara. The Nile, a gleaming strip of silver imbedded in the barren sands, soon faded astern of us into the night and the dawn broke to find us well out over the desert. Back in Massawa this day I knew I was missing a real Thanksgiving Day dinner, for which our British friends had spent weeks in assembling from far and wide the proper materials, to honor us on our national festival for our aid. My Thanksgiving Day dinner was, however, only a few dried sandwiches eaten amidst the scorched sands near the edge of dismal Lake Chad where about noon we came down briefly to refuel. But I had no regrets. Not for worlds would I have traded those stale sandwiches in the middle of the Sahara for the turkey in Massawa I was missing.

  I had to lay over two days in Accra. From Accra to Oran in Algeria on the Mediterranean it was 2300 miles due north over both French West Africa and the heart of the Sahara. For both these reasons it had to be spanned in a single jump with no landings possible en route, and only a four-engined plane could safely do it. Till the third day after my arrival, there would be no four-engined plane available in Accra for that trip.

  Once more in the dense tropic darkness before dawn, I was underway again, this time in the biggest plane America had, a B-24, a huge four-engined Liberator bomber. This one was fitted for the trip with a large extra gasoline tank inside its flat-bellied cabin with us. Stripped of everything of which it could be stripped but still heavily overloaded with gasoline and jammed with urgent supplies for Eisenhower which had come boxed by air from America, that Liberator lifted only after a very long run. I held my breath lest the runway prove too short and we crash still not airborne with some thousands of gallons of highly volatile gasoline aboard to do a thorough job of incinerating us.

  But between pilot and plane, we made it safely, and the laboring engines with their superchargers glowing, round masses of red hot iron standing startlingly out in the darkness beneath the wings, slowly gained altitude and the lights of Accra dropped away from us.

  And again the dawn found us over the desert, this time going due north over the heart of the Sahara to hurdle the vast hump of Africa. Only far to the west of us along the coast where lay Monrovia, Freetown, and Dakar, were there any signs of civilization, but most of that coast was in unfriendly hands. That we were far away from it was a comfort—here over these wastes we need have no fear of airfields below from which Vichy French fighters (for we were ov
er their territory) might rise to shoot us down.

  But the law of compensation was working here in the desert as well as elsewhere. We paid for our immunity from fighter attack by having below us only such endless stretches of barren, hot, and waterless sands as to insure our perishing there should we have to make a forced landing. One look downward at the limitless desert made that plain.

  However, it was wartime and war soon brings its own philosophy of fatalism or one cracks up hurriedly. After that single look downward, I pushed the Sahara out of my mind, leaving it to the pilot and co-pilot to worry about getting us over those 2300 miles of desert to Oran without any involuntary let downs. As for myself, I picked out the top of the softest of the wooden crates filling the cabin abaft that ominous extra gasoline tank in our belly (there were, of course, no seats inside nor any unincumbered deck space) and stretched out to sleep my way as comfortably as I might through our monotonous flight over the hump of Africa.

  CHAPTER

  4

  BY LATE AFTERNOON OF NOVEMber 29, we were over Tafaraoui Airfield outside Oran, circling for a landing. The tropics and the arid Sahara with their eternal heat were far in our wake; both vanished abruptly the instant we had crossed the Atlas Mountains near the north coast.

  Algeria and the coast of North Africa lay below us now, in about the same latitude as the Chesapeake Capes from which I had departed the winter before for Africa and no more summerlike in appearance that late November day. Even from the air as we descended, it was pleasingly obvious that not superabundance of heat but the absence of a satisfactory quantity of it would henceforth be one of my problems in this war theater. I had no winter clothing at all, save for my navy overcoat, and here I was on the edge of winter. Although it felt comforting to be in a cold climate again, I shivered in spite of my overcoat as we came about after rolling down the long runway at Tafaraoui, and taxied to the other end where I disembarked with my two bulging airplane bags to meet for the first time the chill dampness of Algeria in approaching winter.

  A navy jeep was waiting to take me to my temporary billet in Oran, some fifteen miles off, till I should continue to Algiers. The sailor driving it waved as I descended from the belly of the Liberator to indicate my conveyance. I looked the situation over distastefully. Between me on the runway and that jeep lay over a hundred feet of something I had not seen for nearly a year—mud, good substantial gumbo mud, ankle-deep at least, and probably deeper. Evidently in Algeria it rained copiously and continuously. I motioned the driver to bring his jeep close up alongside me on the runway under the Liberator’s starboard wing to take me and my baggage aboard.

  The sailor acting as coxswain of that jeep did not concur. Availing himself of the centuries old right of a coxswain to decide for himself where he could safely take his craft in treacherous waters, he shook his head vigorously in dissent and shouted,

  “No can do, Captain!” and pointed down to his wheels. I looked. Those wheels were already axle-deep in the mud where he was on what passed for an airfield road. He waved me again to come to him. As it was obvious that either the jeep or I must undertake the hazard of bogging down completely in the mud that lay between us, and even more obvious that I could more easily be extricated in such an event than could the jeep, I cast dignity to the winds. Floundering well over my shoe tops through sticky mud of which even Kansas might be proud, I struggled, ballasted down with my two bags, to the jeep.

  “Sorry, Captain,” apologized the bluejacket as I tossed my bags aboard and dragged my feet, now two heavy clumps of Algerian mud, into the seat alongside him, “I didn’t dare get off the road to get any closer to you or this jeep would’ve submerged completely!”

  I looked around, and had to agree with him. Except for the runways, the whole field was everywhere a mass of deep mud churned into bottomless furrows by innumerable heavy vehicles. Dozens of our twin-engined transports and scores of fighters were parked off the runways all around, every one with its landing wheels sunk deeply into the clinging mud.

  Here was certainly a serious military problem. If those fighters particularly had to take off in a hurry for combat, it was dubious that they could ever get to the runway except with the help of a tractor dragging them one by one through the mud, and even that would not be done in any hurry. In an air raid, they would all be strafed to shreds on the ground. And this on Tafaraoui which had been the major French airfield protecting Oran which was the major French naval base in all Africa! Our air force was in for something if it had to fight this campaign against Rommel (not the half-hearted French) off Algerian fields such as this one, or worse.

  My bluejacket began manipulating the to me unfamiliar multitude of levers on his jeep, throwing in his four-wheel drive and the lowest low of his eight speed gears. He needed everything that jeep had in pulling power and all his skill besides before we finally churned our way out of the mud to the paved highway outside the field leading to Oran.

  By then I had observed plenty more. Our army had foreseen the mud problem long before I had and had made such provision against it as was allowed by the shipping space for supplies it could get across the ocean and into Oran. G.I.s sunk knee deep in mud and plastered all over with it, were busily engaged in laying a wide mat of interlocked steel sheets over the airfield gumbo to make a workable parking space for the planes and some approaches to the runway. I grinned. The Air Force boys were always talking about winning the war all by themselves. But here it was plain that unless the Navy first hurriedly got ships enough across the U-boat infested Atlantic and safely into harbor to give them something to pave innumerable airfields, the Luftwaffe would shortly smash them before the Air Force ever got its planes out of the Algerian mud and into the air.

  The jeep started for Oran. For some distance the highway skirted the edge of the airfield. Evidently there had been a fight for that airfield when our first wave of infantry rushing inland from the beaches had hit it on D-day morning. Fringing the edge of the field were the wrecked remains of French fighters, shot full of holes. Between the fact that the French planes were mostly obsolete types anyway, and the probability that few of them ever had opportunity to lift themselves out of the mud to meet our swift attack by strafing from the air, it could only have been a most unequal battle that gave us quick possession of Tafaraoui. But judging by the condition of those planes, the seizure of Tafaraoui certainly had been no token affair so far as the French forces were concerned.

  We rolled some fifteen miles to the north along a good highway. As evening fell, we came from the landward side into Oran, a sizable city. Oran I found to be in no sense either African or exotic. It was just an everyday seaport about as exciting to the eye as we threaded our way down its nondescript streets as Jersey City, save that here there was no Manhattan skyline across the way with its fairyland of lights glowing in the dusk to enchant the newcomer from the hinterland. Neither the harbor nor the sea was visible as we headed for the center of the city.

  But if Oran itself was commonplace, what was going on in it wasn’t. As my jeep swung for the last turn into its main square, the Place de la Bastille, facing which lay the Grand Hotel d’Oran, American headquarters and my billet for the night, an M.P., an American G.I., held up his hand and stopped us.

  “Wait here, sailor,” he curtly ordered my driver. “Colors.”

  We waited, of course. It was about sunset, time for “Colors” in all areas of civilized war, but something I had almost wholly forgotten. Over our wrecks in the Red Sea we had never paused at dusk for any such ceremonies.

  Round the corner on the opposite side of the Place de la Bastille d’Oran came now the blare of martial music, “Over There.” In a moment there swung into view an American band leading a company of grim-looking G.I.s in battle dress of olive drab, very businesslike in deep-drawn tin hats and fixed bayonets. What followed was the second surprise North Africa had in store for me.

  Behind our troops came a French band, playing with a verve peculiar only to French military
bands, also enthusiastically hammering out the strains of “Over There.” Behind that band, marched another company of soldiers, but this time, bearded French, very odd-appearing in gaily colored baggy trousered uniforms but with strange tin hats and the longest and wickedest-looking bayonets I ever saw.

  Here evidently was something new in fraternity. A few weeks before all these men had been shooting at each other. Now as I watched them from the jeep, the marching columns deployed into the square, drew up in line side by side, Americans to the right, French to the left, with their respective bands in front of them. There was a moment of silence as “Over There” came to an abrupt end. Then some sharp orders in French and in English and the bayonet-tipped rifles of all hands flashed to “Present Arms.”

  Then came the most striking “Colors” ceremony I had ever witnessed. Both bands, American and French alike, burst simultaneously into “The Marseillaise.” All spectators round that crowded square—Arabs, French, Senegalese, Americans—bared their heads or came to salute. Looking upward in the Place de la Bastille, I saw that from two tall poles side by side in front of the massed troops the flags of France and of America were slowly starting down together. The flaming battle song which, for a century and a half had called out to all men to rise against despotism, rang out again in the still evening air of French North Africa.

  Very slowly the Tricolor of France and the Stars and Stripes of America dropped together till at about halfstaff, the final stirring bars of “The Marseillaise” crashed out. With no pause then, instead of the conventional notes of the bugle call for “Colors” as I had always listened to it played at sunset, both bands broke into what I had not heard in Africa for a year, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” another battle song, though younger than “The Marseillaise,” conceived like it in combat, sounding the same urgent call of resistance to tyrants.