No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Commander Stewart in desperation gave up trying to drive out the locking pin in the frozen shackle, ordered his bosun to get some cold chisels and more sledges and cut a chain link apart instead. Obediently the bosun got the chisels and went to work with them and the sledges on one of the more than inch-thick links in the cable. But in the darkness, what ensued was terrible. The men holding the chisels could hardly see the chain they were trying to cut; the men trying to swing the heavy sledges had even worse luck in seeing the chisels. The results were only fiery oaths, smashed fingers, and hardly perceptible nicks in the chain. Stewart had to give that up also, and as a last resort send for his carpenter and all the hacksaws and hacksaw blades he had in his locker. Hacksawing that iron cable apart would be slow, but at least if the supply of hacksaw blades held out till the chain link was sawed in two, it would be sure. The hacksawing started while the bleeding bosun’s gang lay below to the forecastle momentarily to bandage and splint their smashed and broken fingers and as swiftly as possible get back into safer positions on the open deck again.

  The rest of us, well over a hundred men, buckled into our life-preservers, of necessity stood idly by about the darkened topsides, in our mind’s eye reviewing over and over again the invisible obstacles in our paths to the scramble net if we had to abandon ship, speculating on our chances of swimming that last mile to the shore ahead if we survived to swim it. On the forecastle, a few dark figures one after another relieved each other at feverishly plying the hacksaws.

  A cigarette would have done a lot to relieve the tension. But on deck, lighting a match or even having a lighted cigarette might be the flicker which would give us away. It was not to be thought of. And the idea of voluntarily closing oneself below long enough for a smoke was even more repulsive; those engineers, our late shipmates, had been below when the first torpedo struck—and they still were. I wondered if it wouldn’t be a fine idea to have the skipper broach the rum locker again and serve out more rum? About twice as much this time as the first time would be just about right. But regretfully I gave the idea up. The skipper was himself now down on the forecastle with his carpenter and the hacksaws-he was entitled to be let alone.

  I had heard plenty of how it felt to be a marine on Guadalcanal, cowering in the jungle night in a foxhole, listening for the crackling of some twig, the rolling of some pebble, which meant a Jap snaking along on his stomach toward you to cut your throat. Was it any worse, I wondered, than being trapped in the dark in the open sea on a dead destroyer, futilely scanning the black water for some sign of a Nazi U-boat smoothly swimming along below, ready any instant to loose another torpedo which should send you to join your shipmates submerged in the wreckage beneath your feet? At least against the Jap you had a chance. If you were swift enough you might cut his throat instead as he took the final plunge into your foxhole; but against the U-boat, what could one do?

  There was nothing at all to be done except to stand silently in the darkness on the sloping deck, listen to the water lapping up the awash side, hang tightly to something to avoid sliding overboard, keep in mind the way to the scramble net, and—try your damnedest to keep your imagination off the image of a U-boat somewhere near getting set to fire again, and your mind off the ghastly figures of those dead engineers just below you. It was all as simple as that.

  Time seemed to have stopped. Caught in an agonizing situation, we and the Porcupine hung there helplessly, seemingly endlessly, while up forward a few of our shipmates slowly with tiny saws ate their way through the thick iron link which kept us trapped. They at least could work; we had to take it in anguished idleness.

  To top off all, that day, December 10, happened to be my wife’s birthday. A hell of a way for me to celebrate it, I reflected bitterly. We weren’t young any more. The war had caused her heartsickness and distress enough over me already. I was not sure even that she knew I was in North Africa, no longer in Massawa …

  A rattle and a banging forward, followed by a heavy splash in the water, brought blessed release at last. The chain link had parted, the towline had gone overboard, we were free!

  Hardly had the severed chain splashed into the sea than I heard Commander Stewart’s voice bellowing out from our forecastle,

  “Trawler there! Get under way!” and an instant later a signal flashed from us to our sister ahead to start heaving in and get herself clear. I looked at the illuminated hands of my watch. It was 10 P.M. We had been hung up by that frozen shackle over two hours!

  The trawler’s towline tightened, we started slowly to move again. She put on more power, then all she had. The short towline stretched taut, no sag in this one, and at five knots we soon were swiftly on our way again, eating up that last mile. The trawler was as anxious as we to get the hell out of there.

  In fifteen minutes we were being dragged between the breakwaters through the narrow entrance into Arzeu harbor. The submarine defense net which had been swung aside to let us pass, was closing again behind us. With the closing of that gate, like several tons of lead all my agonies dropped suddenly from my mind, leaving me light-headed and slightly giddy. Our dangers were passed—H.M.S. Porcupine hadn’t sunk or capsized, she hadn’t broken in two, somehow she had escaped being torpedoed again. We were in harbor with the rescued Porcupine, safe at last!

  CHAPTER

  13

  ONCE WELL INSIDE THE HARBOR and illuminated by the harbor lights, to us dazzling symbols of our escape, for the second time the tow was reformed. But this time it was done more quickly. The trawler heaved in on her short towline, secured herself to our high port bow. A tiny French tug nosed gently up to our port quarter. Between the two of them, the helpless Porcupine was cautiously turned 90°, then very tenderly pushed broadside, starboard side to, toward the main quay.

  Everybody in the naval base at Arzeu seemed on that quay waiting for us,’but I had eyes for only a few of them. There, thank God, was Ensign Aldrich and all his salvage party, ready and waiting to take over! He even had a diver all dressed up to his helmet, ready to go overboard in a couple of minutes if necessary.

  We were breasted in toward the quay, heaving lines flew aboard, hawsers swiftly were made fast, and Ensign Aldrich, seizing a starboard boat davit, scrambled down to our awash deck, some five or six feet beneath the coping of the stone quay towering over us.

  Swiftly I pointed out to him what was required. In next to no time, the King Salvor’s gasoline-driven salvage pumps (four-inch and six-inch units which seemed like monsters compared to the Porcupine’s solitary little two-inch electric pump), already placed on the quay abeam the destroyer’s fantail, had dropped their ponderous suction hoses, looking for all the world like the tentacles of a huge octopus, down into the Porcupine’s wardroom and started to suck. Three heavy streams of water, well over 1000 gallons a minute, beautiful fountains to watch, started to splash into Arzeu harbor, pumping out the flooded stern of the Porcupine.

  Once that was begun, I explained to Aldrich what further he was to do. As soon as the water inside the stern was low enough to expose the starboard staterooms, his men were to find and caulk tightly up with oakum or anything else that leaking airport, and stop the inflow of water through the ship’s side. There would be no need for the diver unless they were otherwise unable to get to that airport.

  Then when they had the wardroom dried down to its deck, they must further solidly shore down and caulk up those bulging manhole covers from the shaft alleys to stop completely those two leaks also.

  With all that done, the ship should be well up out of water again and a fair part of the list to starboard gone. Aldrich could then clean up whatever other stray water he found inside and any other leaks that exposed themselves.

  Finally, he was then to take the Porcupine’s small electric pump (which already had saved the ship) off the main deck, down below, and drag it forward from the wardroom up the passage to the storerooms over the main fuel tanks. There he was carefully to open the manhole covers to those fuel tanks, and if then
they were no more full than when I had sighted them, he was to pump oil from starboard to port to counterbalance the weight of the vanished port engine, till the ship had straightened up or the port tank was full of oil, whichever happened first. After that, if there was anything left of the night, he was to keep careful watch till dawn, with some pumps always running, to take care of all eventualities.

  By then it was nearly midnight. All the Porcupine’s crew and officers had long since turned in and were dead to the world.

  “I’m all washed up too, Aldrich,” I confessed wearily. “I guess I can’t take it any more the way I used to. You’ll find me if you need me, stretched out on the transom in the chief petty officers’ quarters forward in the forecastle, port side. The Porcupine’s all yours now. Call me if you need me, but be damned sure you need me before you call,” I concluded, and started my oil-smeared and bedraggled form forward up the slippery deck.

  “Aye, aye, sir!” acknowledged Aldrich cheerfully. “Don’t you worry, Captain; rest yourself. We’ll take care of this baby now. You’ll not be called.”

  I wasn’t.

  It was around seven in the morning when, stiff and aching from seven hours in my wet clothes on that hard and cramped transom, I was waked at last by a petty officer, the same who had given me the rum, offering me another cup but this time actually full of steaming coffee. I drank it gratefully, went out on deck, looked aft.

  I hardly recognized the Porcupine any more. Aldrich and his men had done a beautiful job during the night. Gone was that terrible list—the decks now were level and easy to walk on. But the most startling change was in the ship herself. I had never seen the Porcupine save with her bow high in the air, her stern awash, and her starboard gunwale buried in the sea. Now she was properly trimmed, her stern was some four feet clear of the water all around, about flush with the stone coping of the quay so one could easily step ashore, and her starboard gunwale stood as high above the sea as did the port one. She looked like a destroyer again—that is, she did if you didn’t lean over the port side to gaze into the cavern there, and if you kept your eyes off the bulged and broken deck amidships.

  The salvage task was done. Whatever more H.M.S. Porcupine now required to put her back again on the fighting line, was somebody else’s business. I left aboard Ensign Aldrich, a few of his men, and a salvage pump to lend a hand for a few days if they were needed, and started everybody else loading the rest of the gear to go back by truck that afternoon to the King Salvor to be ready for the next job. Then saying good-by to Commander Stewart and to Lt. Comdr. Bartley, his Chief Engineer, I rounded up my jeep and my colored sergeant and got hold of Jock Brown. Still in our oil-soaked khaki, we two started back immediately by road for Oran, only more slowly this time.

  CHAPTER

  14

  JOCK BROWN AND I WERE BACK IN Oran alongside the King Salvor by 11 A.M., hardly twenty-three hours since we had left her. Somehow it seemed longer. I had purposely returned to the ship rather than to my billet at the Grand Hotel d’Oran, because on the King Salvor I could at least get a hot bath. Very soon, both of us were under the shower heads, scrubbing tarry black fuel oil off our itching hides.

  Captain Harding loaned me one of his khaki uniforms, which fitted nicely (neither of us happened to be very tall and the war had already worn both of us down equally to rather gaunt figures). Rigged out in Harding’s clothes, revivified by ship’s chow shortly after with Harding and his officers, and accompanied then by Harding, I stepped out on deck to be taken in one of the King Salvor’s boats to the float in the harbor entrance from which Ankers and his men were working on the Spahi.

  I met the usual diving scene—a portable air compressor with its gasoline engine throbbing steadily as it hammered the diver’s air down to him, a stream of air bubbles rising through the water like huge clusters of grapes to burst on the surface some yards away, tenders, dressers, and mechanics all intently watching the bubbles and the diver’s lines in the water before them.

  “Red Gatchell’s down now, plugging a ventilator on her foc’s’le,” Ankers explained casually, then asked eagerly, “What happened on the Porcupine, Captain? Did you get her in?”

  I said we had and briefly told how, adding that both Jock Brown of the King Salvor and Vic Aldrich of his gang had certainly shined in their parts. Then I got down to more important matters.

  “How’re you coming on the Spahi, Ankers?” I countered.

  “Better’n I’d expected, Captain,” answered Lieutenant Ankers. “I’d figured a week from the time both of us first went over it, to seal her for blowing out, but now it looks as if Gatchell and Lynch and a few of the other boys’ll have her ready day after tomorrow. That’ll be only six days.”

  That sounded fine. I turned to Lieutenant Reitzel who was on the float also, to inquire of him what luck he had had in scouting up more air compressors. He had located several. Under Army orders, they could all be commandeered for the job. The French owners would be paid, of course, for their use (and I might add, knowing our policy and having some inkling already of French owners, quite handsomely, I was sure).

  It seemed on adding up capacities, between the King Salvor’s own air compressors and those we could hire, we should have about 1000 cubic feet of compressed air a minute. That was air enough to expel the sea from the Spahi at the rate of about 12 tons a minute or 720 tons an hour—if she didn’t leak any, which of course she would. It wasn’t any wealth of compressed air, but it would do. I told Reitzel to make arrangements to have the compressors delivered next day on the quay alongside the King Salvor, which would take them all aboard, and when we were ready, come out over the Spahi to handle the whole air compressor job from her decks.

  Meanwhile, looking round from the nearly awash float which was all Ankers had been able to find to work from, I tried to visualize the situation in the water below me.

  Two hundred feet farther out toward the northern breakwater forming the sea side of the artificial harbor, rose the masts and the stack of the Pigeon, sunk right side up, with her hull wholly submerged and her stern toward us. The tip of the Pigeon’s flagstaff aft on her very stern, barely protruding from the water, accurately marked where her stern lay, the obstacle on the far side to entering the harbor.

  Beneath my feet as I stood on the float, lay the Spahi on her starboard side, the obstacle on the landward side of the harbor, her bow toward the Pigeon’s stern and clear of it by about thirty feet.

  Ankers had found by diving and by careful sounding, that a semi-channel, usable for light draft vessels, still existed into Oran harbor. It existed by virtue of the peculiar way the Pigeon and the Spahi lay with regard to each other. The thirty foot clear gap between the two was, of course, much too narrow to permit any vessel to pass. The average freighter has a beam of about sixty feet, and for safety needs some side clearance in addition, no matter how carefully handled.

  However, the Spahi, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on what purpose one was aiming at) lay flat on her starboard side, not right side up. And because she lay on her side, her stem, now horizontal and only thirty feet from the Pigeon, was only half as far from the bottom of Oran harbor as was her high port side amidships where she was broadest of beam. Over the low horizontal stem of the Spahi, there still was water enough for any ship to pass. Somewhere on her curving port side, widening out and rising toward the surface between stem and midships line, there was a point deep enough to allow a lightly loaded freighter, drawing not over twenty feet, to pass without touching the Spahi’s capsized port side. The question was, was that point also far enough away from the Pigeon’s stern to take the full beam and a few feet more for clearance of a Liberty ship, which class formed most of our freighters?

  Ankers’ diving examinations and his soundings before my arrival, had proved that it was. He had buoyed both sides of that channel, the Pigeon side and the Spahi side, by two markers between which with great care a half-loaded Liberty could be brought in without stranding herself
either on the Spahi or on the Pigeon. Of course, after complete unloading in the inner harbor, she could get out to sea again even more easily.

  That was the existing condition at the entrance to Oran’s inner harbor. As a consequence, fully loaded Libertys, drawing some twenty-eight feet of water as they approached Oran after their ocean crossing from America, had to anchor in the outer harbor. There, with great delay and no proper facilities for freight handling, they had first to unload and lighter onto barges perhaps half their cargoes of urgently needed munitions, equipment, and supplies for Eisenhower’s troops. When they had lightened themselves thus down to around twenty feet, they could be cautiously piloted over the stem of the Spahi into the inner harbor, where the remainder of their cargoes could then swiftly be unloaded by the harbor quayside cranes and the excellent cargo handling equipment and labor battalions our Army had brought to Oran.

  With shipping scarce and U-boats doing a highly successful job in 1942 in making it even scarcer, the tie-up in the outer harbor and the delay in unloading at Oran amounted to having a sizable additional number of freighters sunk each week. Consequently getting the Spahi clear of the entrance was vital; getting her swiftly clear was urgent. I felt happier over the prospect of getting the Spahi out of there in two more days than I had over seeing the Porcupine come safely into harbor—it was of greater importance to the whole war effort. And I told Ankers so.

  Leaving Ankers with his divers, Harding, Reitzel, and I went ashore, where Harding boarded his ship and I started to leave myself to go back to my billet. Reitzel stopped me, handed me a typewritten report he’d written, asked if I’d mind looking it over.