The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  Centrifugals! I stared in dismay at those centrifugals, placed so far down inside that schuit, at their long suction lines running far up overhead, at the tough suction problem the Royal Engineers had created for themselves, and my heart sank. Captain Clark’s doubts began to seem much more soundly based.

  If there is one thing above all others that a good salvage pump needs, it is the ability to pull a very high suction at its intake. And if there is one thing that even the best centrifugal pump lacks, it is the ability to pull any appreciable suction at its intake—ordinarily, it just won’t lift any liquid high enough for you to notice it. A centrifugal must have a continuous downhill gravity flow from the surface of the liquid being pumped to its suction.

  With great difficulty, I smothered my thoughts. Flanigan would murder me should I reveal to these Engineers in Selsey what I thought about this set-up of which they were so proud. So, for as long as I could, I stood mute. But as it became more and more evident that some comment was expected of me by my host, I let my gaze travel slowly over those huge centrifugal pumps and their electric driving motors and finally asked mildly,

  “Those are certainly big centrifugals you’ve got there. What were they ever built for?”

  “Sewage pumps.”

  “Sewage pumps?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  It turned out they really had originally been built for sewage pumps—as part of some vast sewage project roundabout London, on which job construction had been suspended for the duration. As a matter of fact, all the new equipment I saw in that schuit had initially been built for something else—the oil-fired boilers, the turbo-generators, the pumps—all originally designed to suit various other jobs suspended now because of the war, all commandeered lately by the Royal Engineers for these new purposes.

  I looked with renewed interest at those centrifugals. Sewage pumps, eh? Of the whole varied breed of centrifugals, centrifugal pumps designed for handling that mass known as sewage would be the least suitable—such pumps would have no suction lift at all. Had the Royal Engineers deliberately started out to find the worst pumps possible for the task in hand, they could not have chosen better.

  It began to look as if Operation Mulberry were in for it now. But I couldn’t say so. And it might still be that, after all the criticism levelled at them by American skeptics, the Royal Engineers might have reviewed their initial installation for shortcomings, and provided something somehow to cope with that suction difficulty.

  I let my eyes roam over the massive suction pipe rising from the pump to the deck overhead, forming there the hump over which the water from inside the Phoenix must in some manner be coaxed to get to the pump, and commented, still innocently enough,

  “There’s a lot of air in that suction main. How are you going to get your pump to sucking water through it?”

  My mentor informed me the Royal Engineers had indeed thought of that. He would show me. We started to climb. Far up under the hatch coaming at the point of maximum height of the suction line, where it turned outboard to port to go out on deck and over the rail, he indicated a trifling pipe connection tapped into the top of the suction line.

  “That,” he announced, “is a pipe leading to the vacuum system on our condenser. We’ll pull a vacuum through that, which will exhaust the air in the suction main, and that’ll lift the water up from the Phoenix and flood the pump suction.”

  “So?” I questioned, but only inwardly. Condenser vacuum systems are intended to handle only trifling quantities of air, and here there was going to be lots to deal with, both originally present and continuously leaking in afterwards. The Royal Engineers were certainly the world’s most optimistic optimists if that was what they felt was going to happen. But I did not say so. There was still Flanigan and his gag on my freedom of expression. What Flanigan had done to me in my youth when I was only a plebe in Annapolis would be as nothing to what he’d do to me now, even though a captain, should I open my mouth in dissent. I evaded completely expressing even a wisp of a doubt, though I could see the set-up was hopeless.

  “I suppose,” I did say finally, “you’ve given this set-up a performance test, floating up a Phoenix to make sure everything works?” though actually I supposed nothing of the sort—I knew perfectly well no such trial had ever been staged.

  He shook his head. No, there never had been any. But he had no objection to offer to a friendly suggestion he stage such a performance test. Simply he’d have to get his Colonel’s permission first. Should I care to come back aboard about ten next morning he felt sure he’d have it, would have his schuit alongside a Phoenix, ready to pump, and I could watch the operation.

  With all the pumping capacity he had in that schuit, he continued, he’d have the Phoenix pumped out and floating up in no time at all. Quite frankly, his only problem in such a test would be to hold the Phoenix, once it was afloat again, from drifting off in the strong tidal currents prevalent there, and damaging itself and its still sunken neighbors. He had no tugs with which to handle so bulky an object as an adrift Phoenix. Could I help him there?

  I assured him that on that score, he need not worry. I had influence with Lieutenant Barton—I could guarantee the presence of a couple of American tugs to avoid catastrophe from a floating Phoenix. And meanwhile, since there were obviously no accommodations for me ashore in Selsey Bill, could he fix it up with the captain of that Dutch schuit for me to spend the night aboard? He nodded—he was sure it could be arranged.

  CHAPTER 7

  Captain Clark was right.

  It didn’t work.

  Next morning, in spite of everything inside that converted schuit going round so ferociously as to make its ancient Dutch sides quiver like a hula dancer, not a gallon of water rose up out of the sunken Phoenix. The Royal Engineers, from their Captain through his sergeant down to the least of his privates, all sweating profusely in the heat below, hovered over their machinery like a flock of mother hens over their chicks—they had the boilers boiling, the generators generating, the switchboards crackling with electricity, the condenser vacuum system sucking furiously on the pump suction line as well as on the condenser, and their motor-driven sewage pumps themselves whirling madly round, trying to pump something.

  But in spite of all that machinery working toward only one end, the water in the Phoenix alongside obstinately persisted in refusing to rise up over that hump in the suction main between it and the schuit, and then to flow downward into the spinning pumps below.

  That Captain in the Royal Engineers tried everything he knew to build up a suction and get some water over that hump. He primed his pumps endlessly directly from the sea. He checked and rechecked the vacuum line going to his ejector system to make sure it was wide open. He went painstakingly over every gasket and joint in the pump suction main and in his vacuum line, swabbing them liberally with shellac in his efforts to seal any air leaks which might be destroying his suction to the pumps.

  But nothing helped. The hours went steadily by and the water continued not to flow. The Phoenix, placidly disdaining the shaking schuit tied up close aboard it, continued to rest solidly on the bottom. Completely controverting its name, that stubborn Phoenix refused to rise for any kind of reincarnation, whether from its ashes or from its bed in the mud. And from the distant beach, Aldis lamps finally began to flash across the water inquiries from Barton as to when I might release the stand-by tugs. He needed them.

  I left my vantage point on the narrow concrete ledge halfway up the high side of the Phoenix where through a manhole I was watching the water levels inside those flooded compartments for any sign of their receding, and sought out my hard-pressed engineer. I found him down in the hold with his sewage pumps, soaked in perspiration, smeared with grease and shellac, looking haggard and wan in spite of his youth, from his interminable trips up and down ladders seeking out leaks. And completely nonplussed at his total lack of results. On that score, I might have enlightened him a bit, for I had been struggling wit
h the idiosyncrasies of salvage pumps while he was still learning his ABC’s. But there were my orders to keep my mouth shut in Selsey.

  So I could only tell him I was sorry I could hold the tugs no longer; I was releasing them. And further, that so far as I myself was concerned, he might discontinue the test. I was going ashore on one of the tugs. Though, of course, if he so desired for his own purposes, he was free to keep on pumping as long as he wished.

  Expressing sympathy at his lack of success but prudently staying within my cautions, I bade him farewell, making no comments other than as a fellow officer to wish him better luck next time.

  I boarded one of the departing tugs and headed inshore, to be ferried from the tug to the beach for the last lap of that trip, on a Dukw. I’d seen enough.

  Barton, togged out as usual in his sweatshirt, met me on the sands as I descended from the Dukw.

  “How’d it go, Captain?” he asked eagerly.

  “Not so well. She didn’t lift.” I was not anxious to discuss the subject in Selsey, and the sooner I got away from there, the less chance for getting myself into any trouble. “I’ve got to get back to London, Lieutenant, four bells and a jingle! Can you get me a jeep to Portsmouth? And will you phone Portsmouth to have a staff car ready there to take me the rest of the way to London?”

  Barton could, and he would. Barton was certainly an energetic officer. In a few minutes, with another of his Seabees for chauffeur, I was on my way via Chichester to Portsmouth in Barton’s navy jeep. And within an hour more, transferred in Portsmouth from the jeep to a substantially more comfortable conveyance, a big American sedan, I was headed north for London. In that car, no longer, as when in the jeep, compelled to center my attention wholly on the problem of how to avoid suddenly finding myself on my ear on the hard pavement instead of continuing on the hard seat alongside the driver, I began to concentrate my thoughts on how best to report what I’d deduced from what I’d observed. But in spite of the comfortable cushions on which I now reposed while I cogitated, I could not relax.

  The situation was distressing. It hadn’t worked out at all the way Admiral Stark had anticipated when he sent me on that morale-building mission. No matter how I phrased my report, the bad news I had to impart was bound to make me persona non grata in invasion circles with all hands (except Captain Clark) both at Grosvenor Square and in Whitehall.

  I should, I ruefully reflected, have chosen the other war theater alternative offered me a few weeks before in Washington, and gone to the Pacific. In the Pacific, the war situation was quite normal—that is, we were fighting only amongst ourselves and against the enemy, with no allied susceptibilities to be wary of. But in the Atlantic Theater, we were circumscribed by allies, all very touchy. From here on out, I was going to be looked on as poison by our major allies, the British. And even on the American side, I could hardly expect either of my immediate superiors, Flanigan or Stark, to be exactly overjoyed at my placing them in the position of having to twist the British lion’s tail.

  But however I looked at it, there was no primrose way out for me. Somebody’s toes were going to have to be stepped on—hard. There, less than a month away now, loomed D-day, and with it the specter of a million men hitting the Normandy beaches with the indispensable Mulberry harbors still frozen fast to the bottom at Selsey Bill, refusing to rise to support those men in the assault. Whatever must be done to avoid that catastrophe had to be done.

  It was late evening before my car rolled into Grosvenor Square. I worked my way past the outer sentries, past the inner guards, went upstairs. The top command at Com Nav Eu had left—the offices of the Deputy Chief of Staff and of the Commander-in-Chief, European Theater, were both darkened. Just two captains, Neil Dietrich, junior to me, and, Nelson Pickering, quite a bit senior, were still at their tasks—hard and brilliant workers both, as usual struggling with the ever-mounting pile of logistic conundrums involved in the rapidly approaching invasion. Otherwise, on that normally busy floor, only the communications room seemed to be humming as usual—even twenty-four hours a day very evidently weren’t enough to keep abreast of the flood of words required to mount an invasion.

  I felt grateful for my late return—there could now be no call on me to make an oral report to anybody. I should have time to write one—something I much preferred. I planked myself down at my desk, seized a pencil, began on that report. It ought to be brief, it should be accurate, but it must be decisive. The one thing it didn’t have to be was diplomatic—Flanigan, and if necessary later, Stark, could handle what diplomacy they felt was required in all presentations beyond them. All I had to do was to make one point—irrefutably—an immediate change at Selsey Bill was imperative. Never would I write a more important document. And nothing, I believe, that I have ever written received such a going over as that short report before finally it went to one of the night watch yeomen for typing.

  I said what I had to say (and it wasn’t very much) as concisely as it could be stated:

  The sunken Phoenixs at Selsey Bill were far and away the biggest salvage job of the war—up to now. The Royal Engineers had failed wholly to realize that, and to provide the needed salvage equipment. What they had provided was pitifully inadequate and unsuited to the task.

  An immediate change at Selsey Bill was imperative. The task must be taken from the Army and put into the hands of those who knew what salvage was all about, the Navy—and preferably the American Navy.

  And there must be transferred to Selsey Bill at once the total facilities in salvage men and proper salvage equipment that could be mustered in any and every seaport round about Britain—dozens of salvage vessels, hundreds of salvage men.

  Or the Mulberry harbors would never rise on D-day to be transported to the Normandy beaches, with such resulting effects on the success of the invasion as the Supreme Command could itself best estimate.

  I read the typed draft over carefully when shortly it came back to me, then gloomily signed my name to it. There was going to be a battle now. The Royal Engineers would not take kindly to any suggestion, least of all an American’s, that they be thrown out as incompetent. They would certainly fight back—it was going to depend on what weight Flanigan or Stark could put behind my reputation as a sound salvage officer, as against the weight of some centuries of British worship of their Royal Engineers as infallible. And unfortunately, with the British War Office and Cabinet officials before whom the complaint must be placed already solidly committed to the support of the Royal Engineers on this very question. Nobody likes to reverse himself, even less so those in high places accustomed to having their pronouncements accepted as beyond argument. It was going to be an interesting struggle. But however it came out, I was bound to end as loser.

  I signed the typed report, saw it locked in the “Secret” file till morning should come. Then I nodded a “Goodnight” to both Dietrich and Pickering, and sallied out into the evening quiet of Grosvenor Square. But in spite of the late hour, it wasn’t yet really night. Between British double summer time and London’s far northern latitude, it was still light enough to read a paper in the Square.

  However, light enough or not, I didn’t want to read a paper. All I wanted was some sleep. And for that, what I most needed at the moment was a taxi to get me behind those blackout curtains in my London billet at the Hotel Göring, hard by Victoria Station. For, as I sprawled out inside the taxi, it came to me even more forcefully than ever, that between the Dukw ride in which I’d started the morning before from Selsey beach out to the Phoenixs, and this ride in the antiquated London taxi taking me along Pall Mall to the Hotel Göring, I’d had two very trying days.

  CHAPTER 8

  Next morning, I retrieved my typed report from the safety file and bore it personally to Commodore Flanigan. He read it over—twice. The second reading, I guess, was to make sure that what he’d thought he’d seen the first time, he’d really seen. Then he eyed me soberly for a time, giving me a chance, I suppose, to comment. But I made none; all I had t
o say was already down on that sheet of paper.

  “Wait here a moment,” he ordered. “I must show this to Admiral Stark.” Clutching that typewritten report of mine, he strode from his office to Stark’s at the end of the corridor, only a few steps off.

  I didn’t have long to wait there. In a few minutes, Flanigan was back with me, no longer now in possession of that report. But to whatever extent he (or Stark) might have been upset by so unexpected an outcome of their sending me to look at the Mulberries, Flanigan showed no sign.

  “Admiral Stark says he’ll handle this personally and directly. And he says for you to get back at once to Selsey Bill and wait there for what happens,” he informed me brusquely.

  I looked at Flanigan in astonishment. Me? Back to Selsey Bill? To wait for what?

  “But there’s that Quiberon Bay job you gave me!” I pointed out. “You said it was urgent!”

  “Quiberon’ll just have to wait awhile, that’s all. Get on back to the Channel!” he ordered. “I’ll get a car for you.”

  So back again I started for the Channel. This time, with no immediate task there on my mind, and having to a degree got over the subconscious urge each minute to sing out to the driver to get back on the right side of the road before we had a head-on collision, I began to observe the scenery of southern England. It was getting along toward the middle of May, spring had arrived, the English countryside was truly verdant, a pleasure to contemplate as we rolled on down the ninety miles through the counties of Surrey and of Hampshire to Britain’s major seaports, Southampton and Portsmouth.