No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  The morning of the fifth day, Reitzel came to me with more bad news. He had been keeping an eye on the Ardois at her new berth in the inner harbor. He had learned that about the middle of that morning, the French were going to move her from there, were, of all things, preparing to take her back to her former berth in the outer harbor! Who was to pilot her out, he didn’t know.

  I practically exploded. How could they think of such a thing, when it was well known all over Oran that in a few days we should be ready to lift the Spahi? Certainly this time the Ardois could wait. Had I had time and some decent means of quick communication, I should have wasted no more breath on anyone in Oran, but gone immediately with the news to Admiral Cunningham or General Eisenhower in Algiers. They would stop it. But there was next to no time, and the communications between Oran and Algiers were heart-breakingly slow.

  Once again I did what I could. Practically with tears in my eyes I pleaded with the American high command in Oran that this time they stop it, no matter what it took. The results were nothing. After more conversation, couched I suppose in the friendliest of diplomatic phrases, the French authorities informed us that the Ardois would be moved, and on top of that, to show their complete faith in him, by the very pilot who had handled (or rather, mishandled) her the first time! And such were the lengths to which they were willing to go in maintaining Allied cordiality, the American top authorities took it. even to the pilot! I was informed shortly that the Ardois would move again, piloted as before.

  My diving crew all looked at me incredulously as I came back, completely broken in spirit, to inform the men on the float that the Ardois, in charge of the same pilot, would be along in about an hour. And incredulity was not the only thing evident in their eyes. What sort of salvage officer could I be to ask them to wear themselves out, risking their lives below, and then hazard the fruits of their dangers to satisfy the stupidity or the vanity or worse of some pigheaded, gold-laced ex-saboteurs and their tool of a pilot? But nobody said anything. Silently, though unquestionably boiling inwardly, the seamen set to work to cast the diving float, all ready with its cement mixer to pour the cement, adrift and haul it clear from its working position towards the shore.

  Nearly a mile away, up toward the head of the harbor, we could see the stern of the Ardois slowly coming clear of her berth. Since on this occasion her run to the entrance was much longer than before, so correspondingly was our period of suffering as we watched her approach. But, I thought, there is one gain. The pilot will have time to gather greater speed before he has to run the tight channel, and that will give him better steering and better control of his ship. This time, if he’s any good at all, he has a better chance to make it on the first try. I started to pray.

  Closer came the Ardois and the tugs ahead. Being a little to one side of the channel, I was not in a very good position with the ship far off to judge exactly of her course, when every single foot one way or the other was important. A half mile off, there was still no telling. A quarter of a mile away, and in spite of the chilly air I began to sweat. She was again, I was sure, too far to starboard; too far over, that was, toward the Spahi once more. But possibly the pilot intended soon to swing her more to port; there was still room. An eighth of a mile now, and she showed not the slightest sign yet of swinging to port toward the Pigeon; it was getting late. The last hundred yards and there was no longer any question—it was too late now to swing to port, the Ardois was, if anything, farther off course and away from the center of the channel than she had been five days before, she was coming straight on at higher speed to smash into the Spahi a second time!

  I couldn’t stand it. I cupped my hands, shrieked out toward the pilot clearly visible on the high bridge approaching me,

  “God damn you! STOP HER! STOP HER!”

  Of course he couldn’t hear me, nor so far as I knew, would it have made any difference to him if he had. On came the Ardois, crashed into the submerged Spahi again to come to a sudden stop amidst the high scream of rending steel to which the first time was nothing.

  Not a sound came from the float—no curses, no nothing. We were all completely beyond the power of speech to express anything. In silence we stood on the float rocking in the wash of the straining tugs, looking helplessly up at the high sides of the Juggernaut which twice now had crushed our hopes.

  Once again the pilot was blowing his whistle, waving his arms, signaling his tugs to haul him astern and clear. But this time they couldn’t; he was hard aground on the Spahi and nothing the tugs could do would free him.

  If it had been only for the pilot and the Ardois, they could have remained stranded there till hell froze over so far as anyone in the salvage forces was concerned. But they were stranded on the Spahi, and the longer the Ardois remained resting on her, the more damage to the Spahi was certain to result, especially if the Ardois swung appreciably. So in a few minutes, when it became clear the tugs were making no progress, Captain Harding went racing ashore to cast loose the King Salvor and take a hand.

  Shortly the King Salvor, with her powerful engines specially designed for heavy towing, was also secured to the stern of the Ardois, throttles full out, aiding the tugs. With that added pull, the Ardois dragged free, and the King Salvor let go. At that point, the pilot straightened out his ship again, came on once more, and as if it were no trick at all, passed clear between the Pigeon and the Spahi to the outer harbor, where the Ardois was remoored in her old berth, there to remain motionless for weeks after.

  The listless salvage party hauled the diving float back to its working position, dressed a diver, watched him go overboard to the Spahi. Shortly he was back on the float again, helmet off, to make his report. Apathetically we listened.

  All trace of all our work on the patch—the reinforcing steel, the laboriously built wood form—was gone. There wasn’t a sign left of any of it. Where it had been, there was now a real hole in the Spahi’s steel side, twenty feet or more across each way, big enough to drive a General Sherman tank through without touching anything. The Ardois this time had done a thorough job.

  No one was surprised, no one said anything. What else was to have been expected?

  Ankers, whose huge hands were twitching as if he were aching to take that pilot in those paws of his and break him in two, ended the silence at last.

  “There’s only one way to take care of this, Captain. Get me a machine gun and lend me your jeep. I’ll get right down to that French office and clean out the nest of ’em so this’ll never happen to us again!”

  But I had no machine gun.

  CHAPTER

  15

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, I RECEIVED some reinforcements to lighten my gloom. My advance salvage party arrived by air from Massawa.

  With little previous notice, the special army twin-motored Douglas transport which Admiral Cunningham had procured for the task, set down at Tafaraoui Airfield, bringing my men from the Red Sea. The same plane had carried them all the way across Africa from Eritrea to Oran. They weren’t many, only eight men all told, but I welcomed them as long lost brothers. It was hardly over three weeks since I had left them in the burning heat of Massawa. It seemed three centuries.

  There was Captain Bill Reed, my best salvage master; Lloyd Williams, salvage master mechanic, and a tower of strength in a pinch; little Buck Scougale and lithe Al Watson, two of the finest divers I ever saw; youthful Ervin Johnson, chunky Muzzy Bertolotti, and reserved Lew Whitaker, all hard-working divers and capable mechanics but not in a class with the other two; and Jim Buzbee, ace pump mechanic. I had specifically asked that Bill Reed and Lloyd Williams be sent by air; the others were all volunteers for immediate service in North Africa, but they were the best of the lot in Massawa. Reed could have had more, but eight men (with their equipment and the 60 cubic foot portable diving air compressor which I had enjoined Reed to bring in the plane with him and under no conditions to get separated from in transit) were all the army transport could lift into the air for the trip.

&nbs
p; After practically kissing each man on both cheeks, I was that glad to see all of them, I looked inquisitively around for the portable diving air compressor, a gem for the job. I saw nothing of it. Bill Reed, with his leathery countenance and his one good eye (for he had lost the sight of the other in a diving mishap) following my searching gaze, correctly interpreted the cause, and, blushing so fiery a red it showed even through his tanned cheeks, beat me to the punch.

  “Cap’n,” he said in much embarrassment, in a melodious voice contrasting oddly with his rugged physique, “that compressor ain’t with us. But it’ll be along soon,” he added hastily. “I practically slept with that compressor in my arms all the way across Africa, just like you ordered, so nobody’d steal it from us. And I got it as far as Yum Dum. But at Yum Dum, the pilot had to take aboard so much extra gas so his plane could make the next long hop north across the Sahara, that he said we just had to leave the compressor behind or he couldn’t lift her off the sand. I said to him, ‘No soap,’ just like you ordered, but he said, ‘Then I guess we all stay here,’ and we did.

  “Well, after a while, seeing as we weren’t getting anywhere, the pilot and I went to see the air force colonel commanding that field at Yum Dum and we laid our troubles before him. I said I wouldn’t budge without the compressor and the pilot said his plane couldn’t budge with it. So the colonel went to take a look at the compressor inside the plane, and then came right up with the answer. He said if I’d go without the compressor, he’d promise faithfully to see to it himself that compressor went north to you in Oran in the very next plane, no matter what else or who else had to be bumped off to make room for it. So seeing as he’s a colonel, I took his word for it, and here we are without the compressor. It’ll be along in a day or so.”

  I looked reproachfully at Reed. He was over sixty and had seen lots in his time.

  “Bill,” I said mournfully, “this is the first time you ever let me down. I thought you’d lived long enough to have more sense than to leave a beautiful compressor like that one where anybody in the air force could snap it up. Those birds just live on air in the air force, and that compressor’s right up their alley; light enough for ’em to cart around in a plane from field to field, wherever they need compressed air. And that’s everywhere. We’ll never see it again. You could sooner’ve trusted that colonel alone with your best girl friend than with that air compressor! Where in hell is Yum Dum and what’s the name of that colonel? I’m going to radio General Eisenhower himself to get on the job right away to try and keep that colonel honest! And I’ll bet you anything, Bill, even he fails on it!”

  But Bill Reed couldn’t help me much. He didn’t know the name of the air force colonel, and all he knew about Yum Dum was that it was somewhere in the Senegalese sands of French West Africa, to the north of Roberts Field at Monrovia in Liberia, which was the last stop they had made before Yum Dum, and far to the south of Marrakeck in Morocco, which was where they had next come down. (Vichy French West Africa was now available to our planes, having joined the Allies at Darlan’s orders since I had come to Algeria. Consequently Reed’s plane had taken that longer semi-coastal West African route, rather than straight across the hump as I had, a route completely impossible to a twin-motored transport.)

  With a sigh I turned the party over to the billeting officer to get them quartered somewhere in Oran. Next I got Reitzel on the job, first to locate Yum Dum, then to get the top brass hats in the Air Force working on the safe delivery of our air compressor.

  Some strange things resulted. Reitzel couldn’t locate Yum Dum on any map of Africa; neither, I am sorry to say, could anybody else in Algeria, whether American, French or British. And in spite of a diligent search of their air maps by Air Force Headquarters in Algiers, the Air Force (so they said) couldn’t find any trace either of Yum Dum or of their field there so they could start tracing the compressor. Yet Reed and every man in his party solemnly swore it was no mirage—Yum Dum was real, so was the airfield, most of all the helpful colonel.

  I may say here, we never saw the air compressor again. Often in the weeks to come, as I ached for that lovely diving air compressor, my pride and joy in every salvage job in Massawa, small enough to be rushed in a hurry to any emergency job, big enough when it got on the job to handle it, I began to wonder myself if Yum Dum wasn’t a mirage in the Sahara after all and everything in connection with the vanishing of my air compressor something out of the Arabian Nights. The only answer I received to my weekly needlings of Air Force Headquarters in Algiers about their inability to find their own airfields, let alone my lost compressor, was given with increasing asperity each time, that they hadn’t found Yum Dum yet and thought anyway that a place with a name like that was just my perverted idea of a joke. Finally I gave up.

  Long afterwards, in the last hour of my last night in Africa, I found myself at Roberts Field, Monrovia, to take off in sixty minutes for the Atlantic jump to Natal in Brazil. Talking casually with the Roberts Field Commandant over what was going on in the North African fighting, it came suddenly back to me that this was the last field from which Bill Reed claimed he had taken off going north, still in possession of that air compressor.

  “Colonel,” I asked, “is there a place anywhere to the north of here by the name of Yum Dum?”

  “Why, certainly, Captain,” he replied. “We’ve got a small airfield there. It’s about 700 miles to the north of here.”

  So Yum Dum was real! Bill Reed (and all his gang) had been neither lying, drunk, nor hopped up on hashish after all.

  “How’re your communications with Yum Dum?” I inquired eagerly.

  “Excellent! We’ve got a radio flight control circuit so we can get ’em in a minute.”

  The Roberts Field Commandant led me through the darkness to his communications room, reminded me that I had only fifty-five minutes left till the take-off of the four-engined Liberator, in which I was to depart, and to be sure to give myself time enough to get out on the field again and aboard. With that, he left me. He needn’t have worried though about the time. I wasn’t missing that plane home for all the air compressors that ever disappeared in Darkest Africa.

  The wireless communications gadget was something you couldn’t talk over, but messages went back and forth over it as on a teletype. The operator got Yum Dum in no time flat; but it took forty minutes after that to locate the colonel and get him to the machine at the other end. I must talk fast.

  “Are you really the Commanding Officer at Yum Dum?”

  He assured me he was. He was at Yum Dum and he was commanding officer.

  There was final confirmation! So I proceeded.

  “Do you remember a diving air compressor left in your charge at Yum Dum about the middle of last December by some divers on their way by air from Massawa to Oran?”

  There was a delay of some minutes while the colonel 700 miles away at the other end evidently digested all the implications of that one. Then the machine started to spell out the answer.

  Yes, he had a vague recollection of some such piece of machinery. What about it?

  “Where is it now?”

  Another long delay while the colonel apparently racked his brains. I kept my eye glued to my watch.

  He didn’t know, but he’d have Yum Dum searched. Where should he inform me as to the results?

  I had time for just one more comment before I left Africa and I gave it to him.

  “I’m the man you stole that compressor from. You’d damned well better find it and ship it now to my old outfit at Allied Salvage Headquarters in Algiers where they’re beginning to lose all faith in Air Force colonels. And if you know where Algiers is, for Christ’s sake let your Headquarters there know where Yum Dum is so they can take your hide off. Good-by. Signed, Ellsberg.”

  I shoved that into the operator’s hands, told him to send it as was, and dashed out of the communications office bound for my waiting plane and America.

  Whether that wireless operator bowdlerized it or sent it
intact, I never knew. What I did learn long afterward was that neither the air compressor nor any word of it ever showed up at Salvage Headquarters.

  I doubt that the Air Force yet knows where Yum Dum is, or that it even exists or ever existed.

  CHAPTER

  16

  THE MORNING AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL, Reed and his whole gang were waiting for me, shivering in the chilly lobby of the Grand Hotel, when I came down.

  “Say, Cap,” announced Buck Scougale immediately on sighting me, “this is certainly one cold spot. I never dreamt any place in Africa could get like this. If I could only ship a plane load o’ this refrigerated air here back to Massawa, I could sell it to the poor Eyties there for enough so’s I’d never have to make another dive!”

  I grinned. When I had first arrived from Massawa, Oran had felt to me exactly like something next door to the North Pole. Now it was even colder. I sympathized with my shorn lambs from the Red Sea who had no winter clothing to temper the blasts for them. Nor had I either.

  “Boys,” I said, “I’ve been thinking of it myself for some time and now we’ll all do it together. We’ll go up to the army small stores near here and buy ourselves some woolen O.D.s, some of that heavy ankle length wool underwear, and a load of wool socks. After that, we’ll all look like G.I.s, but we’ll feel warmer, so what’s the odds?”

  We did, and what was more, we stripped to our skins and put the outfits on right in the army small stores before we emerged again to meet the wintry wind. I came out dressed in a suit of thick woolen underwear reaching from my wrists to my ankles, something I had no recollection of ever having worn since I was a small child, if then. And to complete the picture, I was cased in wool O.D. trousers, a woolen O.D. shirt and jacket, a wool-lined army windbreaker, and heavy tan G.I. shoes. There wasn’t a thing navy left about my rig except the crossed-anchor insignia on my khaki-covered brass hat; even the silver eagles on my collar were similar to army ones. From then on, every G.I. I ever ran into, wholly ignoring my cap insignia, addressed me as “Colonel.” But as I was at least warm and more comfortable at last, and as apparently they didn’t take me for an air force colonel, I took it as philosophically as possible and went my way.