When the last of the crowd was padded sufficiently to his taste or to the thinness of his blood, and we had all drifted out to the street, the little knot of men looked inquiringly at me.
“Well, Captain,” asked Lloyd Williams, “where do we go from here?”
“Boys,” I answered, “it’s only about a week now till Christmas and I’ve been saving up something very special here as a Christmas present for you. I’ve got a scuttled floating dry dock for you to raise!”
“Another scuttled dry dock?” Bill Reed’s one good eye lighted up like a lighthouse. “I ain’t raised a scuttled dry dock for a couple o’ months now. Oh, boy, lead me to it! Is it a big one, Cap’n?” he finished eagerly.
“Twenty-five thousand tons, Bill!” I answered. “This one is a honey. Bigger’n both of those dry docks put together that you raised in Massawa. This’ll be a job you can tell your grandchildren about!”
From all around, eager questions flew at me. How deep down was she? What was her damage? Where was she lying? What did I think about how long it’d take? And finally, what did I have in Oran for them to work with? For every man of them was as excited as Bill Reed over the prospect of another dry dock. They had raised two terribly blasted but badly needed dry docks from the bottom of Massawa harbor in miraculously short time with next to no equipment to work with; tasks which British salvage experts had declared impossible. But they had done it, and it was heartwarming to see the faith they had in themselves to do the like again.
I shrugged off all the questions, merely telling them we’d all get a boat and go out over her and they could see. With five of us crowded into my jeep, leaving four for a second trip, we started for the waterfront.
The scuttled dry dock situation in Oran was very scrambled. There had been three floating dry docks before the surrender—the Grand Dock, of 25,000 tons capacity, a monster of a dock; the Moyen Dock, of 4200 tons capacity; and the Petit Dock of 2000 tons capacity. All three had been scuttled by orders of Capitaine de Frégate Duprès, but no two in the same way.
The Petit Dock must have been scuttled first, simply by opening its flood valves, as the French were then doing on all the ships being scuttled, and letting it go down. But to the dismay of the French saboteurs, when the Petit Dock hit bottom and quit sinking, the water under her at her quayside berth was so shallow it let her sink only a few feet more than her normal submergence in dry docking operations, leaving the tops of all her side compartments with the pump control gear still above the surface. The Petit Dock, in spite of their efforts at scuttling it, was no worse off than if it had been submerged a few feet more than usual to take aboard an extra deep draft vessel.
I can imagine Duprès gnashing his teeth over that unexpected set-up. He couldn’t sink the Petit Dock any farther; there just wasn’t water enough under it. And he hadn’t time, with Fredendall’s troops about to burst into Oran, to pump it up again and blast holes in its bottom, really to damage it. He had to let it lie.
About all Ankers and his men had to do (once matters in Oran had settled enough for them to look around at something else than the ships blocking the entrance) to raise the Petit Dock, was to reconnect the electric cables for power from the shore, start up the Petit Dock’s own electric pumps, and pump her up, all of which took only a few hours. Since then the Petit Dock, which could lift nothing larger than a destroyer, had been continuously in use. In fact, that very morning it was occupied by the torpedoed Porcupine. After we had finished salvaging her, she had promptly been towed around heavily convoyed, from Arzeu to Oran and dry docked.
Capitaine de Frégate Duprès, having been baffled in the scuttling of the Petit Dock, had immediately changed his tactics in scuttling the other two. It was obvious that the Moyen Dock, just offshore from the Petit Dock and a trifle east of it, was also in water too shallow to make its sinking a sure job. For successful sabotage, it couldn’t simply be sunk either. So instead, with fiendish ingenuity, Duprès and his assistants had flooded only one side of the Moyen Dock and not the other, so that it had capsized nearly 90° and gone down on its port side. And to make matters worse, the French submarine Danaë which some weeks previously had been dry docked for overhaul in the Moyen Dock, had promptly rolled off the keel blocks when the latter capsized, and capsizing itself, had gone down with the dry dock, rolling to port. So there we had two wrecks, one on top of the other; the Danaë sunken and capsized nestling against the capsized and sunken port side of the Moyen Dock which was nestling in the mud below. The Commandant du Port must have rubbed his hands in glee over that bit of sabotage—it was a veritable gem.
With that achievement to his credit, Capitaine de Frégate Duprès had evidently turned his attention next to the 25,000 ton Grand Dock, by far the biggest dry dock in all North Africa. Where it lay, across the harbor from all the piers, clear of everything, and not far from the breakwater forming the seawall on the deep north side of the artificially enclosed main harbor, it was in water deep enough to have sunk anything afloat without any qualms over the results. The harbor there was over twelve fathoms deep, very deep water for any harbor in the world. But in view of his fiasco with the Petit Dock, Duprès wasn’t taking any chances on sinking the Grand Dock for a full due. To the success of the Allied cause this was unquestionably the most important floating object in all North Africa, infinitely more valuable than any superdreadnought or superliner. So aside from opening all the many huge flood valves in the dry dock for swiftly sinking it, he exploded several charges of TNT against its port side, possibly with the thought of capsizing it as well as sinking it.
Whatever the intention, the Grand Dock had promptly submerged completely in the deepest water in Oran harbor with several holes blasted in its port side, but still right side up. And there it lay on the bottom, waiting for us, a Christmas present for my men from Massawa. I had not actually let it wait for them; that was the task on which I had turned to Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard and all his French salvage outfit when I had so abruptly broken them off la Bretagne about ten days before. But they weren’t making much progress; it was a big job and the war in the Mediterranean would be over at the rate they were going before they ever raised the Grand Dock. We needed it much sooner if we were to keep up with the larger vessels torpedoed in the Mediterranean, for which there were no other docking facilities anywhere in North Africa.
When all eight of Reed’s little salvage party had been collected on the quay, I took them out in one of the King Salvor’s boats. We passed over the wreck of the Hartland and close by the diving float, where I waved to Lieutenant Ankers and his men, just starting again to build another reinforced steel concrete patch, a vastly bigger one this time, over the enlarged hole in the Spahi. The patch now would have to be about as big as the side of a house and would take much longer to install than the first one. The new divers gazed curiously at the scene; Al Watson asked me if they were likely to have to lend a hand on that job also.
“No, Al,” I informed him. “Red Gatchell and George Lynch, who are doing most of the diving on her, know that Spahi like a book by now. All they and their shipmates need in the way of help at present is a battleship to sink that bucket there” (I pointed to the Ardois lying in the outer harbor) “if she starts again to come within a mile of ’em.” And as we chugged along down the harbor, I explained why.
“Twice already, you say, Cap?” exclaimed wiry little Buck Scougale in surprise when I had finished. “And they ain’t shot that French pilot yet? Don’t they know there’s a war on? What’re they waiting for?”
I was unable to say, unless it was to give him a third chance at the Spahi, should that be necessary. That pilot’s case, I knew, was once more up before Capitaine de Frégate Duprès and I feared the worst—with Duprès as sole judge, the result would most likely be only another slap on the wrist. And that was exactly what resulted; the pilot even this time was given only a thirty day suspension. When I learned of it that afternoon, I warned Ankers that the battered Spahi, come hell or high w
ater, must be patched up and out of there before that thirty days suspension was up.
We continued on across the inner harbor till well over on the far side. There, about half way down towards the Môle Millerand, was the largest spot of water in Oran harbor uncluttered by any masts or stacks sticking up through the surface. I told the coxswain to stop the boat. Beneath us, with nothing showing above water to mark it, lay the largest wreck of all—the Grand Dock. Eagerly all hands leaned over the gunwales to peer into the water below, but nothing was visible, she was too far down.
Instructing the coxswain to get underway again dead slow, so as not to roil the surface, I had him go along over where I estimated the port side of the dock should lie. There were some control room superstructures on top that side; they might be close enough to the surface to be visible. So it proved. Soon we made out in the water ahead the tip of a flagstaff rising from the deckhouse about amidships of the high port side. In fact, the ball on the top of that tall flagstaff was so close to the surface we had to sheer the boat sharply out to avoid hitting it. Coming to rest again close by, some fifteen or twenty feet under the surface we could vaguely see the top of the deckhouse itself, seeming to dissolve into the deeper water below as we tried to follow its outlines further down. That was all we ever saw from the surface of the Grand Dock.
I broke out a blueprint of the dock, which I had obtained from the French. Huddled amidships over a thwart in the boat, all hands scanned that blueprint. It was a vast dock, 720 feet long, 140 feet wide, 60 feet high—long enough to take aboard two full-length football fields placed end to end, wider than the widest ship ever built, from top to bottom as high as a six story building. That was what we had to raise from the bottom of the deepest hole in Oran harbor.
After everyone had examined that plan to his heart’s content, at somewhat higher speed we got the boat underway again and made several trips back and forth over the wreck below, but without being able to make out any more of it anywhere. Then with all hands in the boat decidedly more sober, we started back for the quay at Môle Ravin Blanc. It was a big dock; it would be a big job. Ordinarily all the salvage resources of a nation and dozens of divers backed up by hundreds of mechanics would be thrown in on it to insure its accomplishment.
Nobody spoke. Each man of the eight from Massawa, comprising practically all the divers and skilled mechanics available for the task, seemed sunk in his own thoughts, pondering how it might be tackled. I took that moment to answer the question I had ducked when it had been thrown at me a few hours before in front of the army small stores—what did I have in Oran for them to work with?
“I’m sorry to say, boys, there isn’t really anything at all to work with here. It’s lucky you brought your own diving suits with you in the plane from Massawa—I couldn’t even fit you out with suits here. What we’ll do for a diving air compressor for your air, now we’ve lost your compressor at Yum Dum, I don’t know. I’ll try to steal something off the King Salvor that’ll serve. And as for the shiploads of salvage equipment we ought to have for this job, there just isn’t any at all in Oran. And what’s worse, they won’t give us any from home because the Mediterranean is an area of British responsibility; we can’t get any from the British because they just haven’t got it; and as for the French—well, the Nazis have so thoroughly looted everything portable in North Africa in the way of machinery and tools, the poor Frenchmen here have got hardly a screw left, let alone a screwdriver. You’re going to have to do this job with next to nothing but your wits. Don’t fool yourselves it’ll be any way else. You mustn’t even expect much help from the King Salvor over there. She’s a standby for the Spahi job, but I can’t tie her up on this task; she’s got to be free to go to sea on a minute’s notice when a ship gets torpedoed off here, and I can’t load anything more on her. So that’s the story about your Christmas present, boys. She’s all yours now.”
“Well, Captain,” said Lloyd Williams laconically, “hell itself is better’n Massawa, and this place at least has got something on hell. When do we start?”
“Tomorrow morning, Lloyd. Bright and early.”
CHAPTER
17
THAT AFTERNOON WAS SPENT IN salvage conferences, two of them, one after another, in the King Salvor’s wardroom.
The first was on the Spahi situation, though attended also by Bill Reed and Lloyd Williams, whom I introduced for the first time to Ankers, Harding, and Reitzel. From opposite sides of Africa, the strong men of salvage from the East and from the West had met at last. The two little groups studied each other intently, wondering, no doubt, how good these strangers really were. Then we got down to brass tacks on the Spahi, still our major headache.
Ankers figured it would take him two weeks to build the much larger and more complicated patch now required, and a few days more after that for the cement in the patch to harden sufficiently so we could dare subject it to compressed air. After that, we could try to lift the Spahi.
I nodded in approval. It would be fine if Ankers could do it that swiftly. Then I proceeded to pour a little sand into the gears of his time schedule. I had estimated before that we might float the Spahi off the bottom by expelling the water from the upper third of her down to the line of the upper edge of her now vertical cargo deck hatches, at which point air would escape to the sea and we could trap no more. That much buoyancy, I had figured, would take care of her deadweight and the cargo of hogsheads of wine with which she was loaded. But I had previously overlooked something in my calculations; the fault was mine.
I had figured the cargo as really of no weight at all to be lifted, because at all stages of the operation, the Spahi would remain practically wholly submerged even when lifted, and so of course would her cargo inside. And submerged, the buoyancy of a hogshead of wine practically equaled its weight—in other words, each hogshead of wine was floating its own heft down there in the Spahi. That was all right so long as the hogsheads were submerged, which, so far as about two thirds of her cargo was concerned, would always be the case in lifting the Spahi till her port side barely showed on the surface. But it decidedly wasn’t going to be so respecting the remaining third of her cargo, and the weight of that third was enough to prevent us from lifting the Spahi off the bottom at all as I had hoped. I should have seen that originally but I hadn’t.
For it had recently dawned on me that as we pumped air into the upper third of the Spahi and trapped it there to provide buoyancy to lift her by forcing the water out of her through the cargo hatches lower down, all the hogsheads of wine in that upper third would no longer be in water but would be in compressed air, even though the Spahi as a whole was still completely submerged. And being surrounded only by air, those hogsheads would once again be exerting their full weight downward on the still submerged casks below them in the holds, so that we should have to lift them as a dead weight if we ever lifted the Spahi even an inch off the bottom. And there wasn’t possibly enough extra buoyancy obtainable in the upper part of the Spahi to lift that extra load. So, of course, she wouldn’t lift at all, patch or no patch—unless first we stevedored with divers all the casks in the upper third of the holds out of the ship before we pumped any air at all into her.
Ankers’ face fell at that. He saw it, all right. But it was a tough jolt. For it meant a terrific amount of diving labor on the bottom of the sea, jockeying those huge hogsheads sideways out of the ship’s holds to the cargo hatches in her vertical deck, then sending them up to the surface. All that on top of the herculean task he had already in making the patch. It was enough to make anybody sick.
“How many of those hogsheads d’ye figure there’ll be, Captain?” he asked soberly.
“Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand, I think. It depends on how big they are. We can tell better after we get a few of ’em up and measure them,” I answered. “I’m damned sorry, but there’s no other way out.”
Lieutenant Ankers heaved a deep sigh. He was as big as a couple of horses and could stand a lot,
but this on top of all else he’d gone through on the Spahi was almost too much. But he took it like a Trojan, though I could see him trying mentally to visualize what a thousand hogsheads might be like.
“Aye, aye, Captain; I’ll start on it right away. Anything else?”
“No, Ankers; that’s all for now.”
Ankers left.
The rest of us—Reed, Williams, Harding, Reitzel, and I—started the second conference on the Grand Dock. We were joined in that by Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard, who had had no part in the Spahi discussion.
I introduced him to Reed and to Williams, informed him that Captain Reed would act as Salvage Master for the Grand Dock operation; he and his men would serve under Reed. Reed, I assured him, was practically a superman when it came to raising dry docks. Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard could consider himself most fortunate; not every young man coming up in salvage was blessed with such a mentor. And Reed would carefully observe all the amenities so as not to undermine either Perrin-Trichard’s prestige or his authority with his own force—no orders would be given to any of them by Reed save through Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard who could pass them on as his own. I hardly felt called on to mention that this last situation was inescapable—Bill Reed knew no more French than I did and if he didn’t give his orders through Perrin-Trichard, he couldn’t give any at all to the French seamen, none of whom spoke any English.
No Banners, No Bugles Page 15
