The World War II Chronicles Under the Red Sea Sun, The Far Shore, and No Banners, No Bugles Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg
CONTENTS Under the Red Sea Sun Dedication Perface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36
Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Epilogue
Image Gallery
The Far Shore Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19
Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Glossary
No Banners, No Bugles Dedication
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22
Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Historical Note About the Author
Under the Red Sea Sun
To MY WIFE whose love and faith, and whose constant letters reflecting that love and faith, were all that kept me going in the Red Sea
PREFACE T HIS IS THE STORY OF A FEW AMERICANS who at a desperate time early in the war were by their country thrown into the worst hell hole on earth, and then promptly forgotten at home. There at a strategic port on the Red Sea, they were to do what little they might to assist the British, who were hanging on by their fingernails only, to keep the war from being lost till America might disentangle herself from her peacetime follies and get ready to fight. This is no story of high strategy, of valor on the field of battle, of thundering guns either naval or military. It is the tale of men in the war zone just behind the lines, never themselves given the satisfaction of firing a gun, who fought under and over the sea against the unseen enemy in a naval base already captured from him, to make that naval base usable again as the last spot from which the crucial war in the Mediterranean might be supported when all else was lost under Rommel’s attack. This is the story only of that naval base and of the men in it. It makes no pretense of covering the record of what was achieved by others, American Army officers in the Middle East, who together with me of the Navy, all of us under the command and skillful leadership of Major General Russell Maxwell, U.S.A., fought in support of the British to help stave off defeat till our country was ready to fight offensively. It will be observed that in this book, some Englishmen (mostly civilians) figure who failed to measure up to the high standard set by most of their countrymen in that time of crisis. Let no one jeer at Britain for this. For every such Englishman, there was one American at least in Eritrea who never saw beyond the dollar sign, his personal comfort, or his personal aggrandizement; so that the rest of us, struggling in desperation to carry through in Massawa what must be done if disaster were not to overwhelm us all, often had good cause to reflect bitterly that if these, our countrymen, had actually been in the pay of Hitler or of Mussolini, they could not have served them more effectively. Some passages in this book may seem bitter. They probably are. Those days
of 1942, save for our few brief moments of triumph, were with us always lived in bitterness and torture, and often in despair that we should ever survive to see our homes again. Some of us didn’t; others came back broken men. This book is written in the spirit in which it was lived. Men stewing in the caldron that was Massawa in the summer of 1942, facing in addition the terrors of unseen enemy mines and bombs placed below the sea for our destruction, were little given to tolerant acceptance of the interferences of those others who from the cool comfort and safety of the high hills, threw monkey wrenches into the works in Massawa. Bitterly we flung them back into the teeth of those who hurled them. We weren’t liked for it. But I had no apologies then for our lack of calm acceptance of those interferences, and I have none now. For the little handful of Americans (mostly civilians) who loyally and selfsacrificingly struggled and suffered at my side in a critical moment in history, I have the deepest affection and regard. I have here attempted to set down some little part of what they achieved and what they suffered. For the others (grossly overpaid) who in the luxury and cool comfort of the high hills inland in Eritrea, far above Massawa and the steaming Red Sea coast, enjoyed themselves free of all restrictions and taxes of wartime America, while they interfered with us, I had and have the utmost contempt. So had my men in Massawa. Lest anyone be led astray, I must say here that this is a story written almost wholly from memory four years after the events set down. I kept no diary then. I had neither the time nor the energy left for one, and besides, keeping personal diaries was strictly forbidden to any of us. But my memory is good and what happened is indelibly burned into it. A few names among hundreds of all nationalities, to my great regret, I do not now recall. To those few who are not here mentioned by name for that reason, I humbly apologize. It is further possible that some of the minor conversations attributed to one man may have taken place with another instead. All dates have been carefully checked against such data (as would pass the censorship rules) in my letters home as might serve to date the event. I believe there are few errors there. As regards the conversations, I make no claim that they are verbatim reports of what was said. There were no stenographers in Massawa to take them down. The more vivid statements, especially those at critical moments, made such an impression on me that till I die, I shall not forget them. They are correctly set down. As regards the other conversations, they faithfully record the gist of
what was said, set down here in such words as best suit the situations involved. That this story is wholly free from errors, I cannot believe. That to others in Eritrea some things may have seemed different, is wholly natural. Their point of view was not mine. But this is the story of those days, of that place, and of the men (and a few women) of many nationalities as seen through the eyes of the American Commanding Officer who lived himself through every minute of it and was in as good a position to observe as anybody, and far better able, on the spot, to judge than those who were not. A final word concerning the title of the author. The title “Commander” is here used on this book because every other book he has written has appeared under that title, first conferred on him by special act of Congress in recognition of earlier service to the Navy. The author fought through the late war in three separate campaigns overseas as a Captain, U.S.N.R. EDWARD ELLSBERG
CHAPTER
1 T HE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 7, 1941, I was on a train bound for Washington. Early next morning found me camping on the doorstep of the Navy Department, seeking to be re-enrolled in the Navy for active service. After nearly thirty years in the regular Navy and in the Naval Reserve, I was a civilian at that moment. I had the year before resigned my commission as Commander in the Naval Reserve that I might be free to speak for armament against the Axis without compromising the then official efforts of the Government to preserve its neutrality, which involved situation need not be gone into here. Being just over fifty and therefore in that physical group whose services were, to put it mildly, not much sought after, I was not in a very good position to get the chance I craved to hit back at the Axis, now that war had started, with something more than words. Fortunately for me, on that Monday morning of December 8, 1941, Admiral Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships, shocked by the reports pouring in of the wreck that Japanese bombs and aerial torpedoes had made of our battleships in Pearl Harbor, decided that regardless of age, any former officer versed in salvage might still be useful. So on his flat order to that effect and to expedite matters, escorted by my classmate, Captain Rosendahl of lighter-thanair fame, I was soon circulating through various offices, medical and otherwise, on my way towards being sworn in again as an officer of the Navy. Here came a technical hitch. I had last resigned from the Navy as a commander, which rank had been bestowed on me some years before by special act of Congress as a reward for earlier salvage efforts. But under the law, no one coming from civil life could be first enrolled in the Navy in a higher rank than that of lieutenant commander. Would I take that lesser rank, or did I prefer to wait a possible change in the law, now that we were actually at war?
So far as I was concerned, with that burden of my fifty years weighting down my chances, I was willing to take any rank which offered a possibility for an active part in helping to roll Hitler, Hirohito, et al. into the gutter. Before any red tape experts might have opportunity to tie knots in Admiral Robinson’s orders, I said, “Yes, any rank at all.” So before the gloomiest day the Navy Department had ever witnessed came to its close, I was sworn into the service again. For the fourth time in my naval career I became a lieutenant commander, which rank I had first temporarily achieved in my youth in World War I, nearly a quarter of a century before. I took the oath amidst a flood of disastrous confidential reports pouring in from Hawaii on the haggard top command: “Battleship Arizona completely destroyed by magazine explosion under bomb attack.” As an ensign long years before, I had assisted at the Arizona’s launching. “Nevada sunk.” Well I remembered her first commissioning. “West Virginia sunk.” I had taken part in her first trials. “California sunk.” “Oklahoma capsized and sunk.” “Tennessee badly damaged, blazing from bow to stern.” As a lieutenant, years before, I had helped build the Tennessee and had ridden that superdreadnought down the ways on her first dip into the sea. Only Pearl Harbor itself, cluttered with the sunken hulks of torpedoed battleships and with the skies blotted out under a pall of smoke rising from the blazing hulks of those bombed warships still afloat, was a more dismal spot than the Navy Department as I held up my right hand and somberly swore to defend the United States against all its enemies. With a global war tossed suddenly into its unready lap, with its major fleet a funeral pyre for my old shipmates, now treacherously slaughtered, the United States had enemies enough on every sea to warrant the gloom on each face, from admiral to ensign, I saw about me there in Washington. What next for me? An odd situation immediately developed. The obvious assignment for anyone as a salvage officer was Pearl Harbor. But by a freak, there was in Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning of December 7, a senior salvage officer of the Navy on his way by air to the Middle East, due that very morning to continue his journey by Clipper westward to the Red Sea. Naturally enough, the Clipper, in the face of a sky full of Japanese bombers, had not taken off. And the Navy with one of its few experienced salvage officers providentially on the spot, hastily canceled by radio his orders to the Middle East and assigned him the sunken mass of wrecks still blazing all over Pearl Harbor.
But that reassignment left what the day before had been the Navy’s major salvage problem, hanging in the air. It was into this vacuum, so to speak, that I had thrust myself as a volunteer for active service, and the task was promptly offered me. Would I go to the Red Sea, where the greatest mass of wrecks in the world (not excluding Pearl Harbor) then lay? Or, considering my age, might I prefer a colder climate, Iceland, where a much smaller but still important salvage problem due to U-boat warfare existed and would, no doubt, grow? I chose the Red Sea.
CHAPTER
2 T HE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE HECTIC ones. While what scant resources the Navy and the nation had in the way of divers, equipment, and repair materials were being rushed to California for work at Pearl Harbor, I had to organize a salvage force to go to the Middle East. There were now no salvage ships available for my task. There were no divers, there was no salvage personnel, there was no equipment. To top off all, I learned there was a further handicap. As the project had been originally authorized while the country had been at war with nobody, it had been laid out under Lend-lease conditions. The intention was to have the work done, not by men in the armed forces of the United States, thus compromising our neutrality, but by civilians hired by a civilian contractor under naval direction for the salvage work. This particular task was part only of a gigantic Lend-lease operation. Under overall Army supervision, civilian contractors and their employees were to cover the entire Middle East with airfields, ordnance depots, and support bases, both land and sea. These were intended originally to back up British arms afloat, ashore, and in the air, in their desperate struggle in the Libyan Desert to throw back Rommel and the combined German-Italian effort to isolate Russia from the world on its southern border, to lay India and the East open to Axis land attack from the west. Now with Japan assaulting from the opposite side and threatening to form a junction through rebellious India with its Axis partners, the strategic importance of the area suddenly was intensified enormously. But with what slight forces we had under MacArthur already facing overwhelming Japanese strength in the Philippines, with the British and Dutch empires in the Far East crumbling like houses of cards, and with our fleet battered into impotence at Pearl Harbor, the situation had undergone a sharp transformation. Dazed Washington awoke suddenly to the bitter realization that it was unable to
furnish to the Middle East the men and materials it had so confidently contracted, out of its seeming abundance, to supply short weeks before. Under these conditions, we of’ the Middle East project were ordered to proceed as before laid out, with civilian personnel, in spite of all the drawbacks involved in their use under war conditions. In the holocaust which had so unexpectedly enveloped us, our trifling existing armed forces, whether on sea or land, were already being mobilized to save Hawaii and even America itself from threatened invasion. We did the best we could. Under the overall direction of Major General Russell Maxwell already in Egypt (who commanded the entire project and to whom I was ordered to report for duty), those involved, both Army and Navy, proceeded to gather up what scraps they could obtain for the work in hand. My part got under way under particularly depressing circ*mstances. I was informed by the Navy Department that other than my own assignment, the Navy was in no position now to lend aid to the Middle East task. No other naval officers, trained or untrained in salvage, were available for assignment to me as assistants. No naval enlisted personnel, salvage or otherwise, were available for detail then, nor were any to be expected later. For help, if any, I must look to the Army, where naturally enough it did not exist, or to such civilians as I might hire before the Navy, badly pressed itself for salvage men, snapped them up for its own overwhelming problems. In the Navy Department I was handed my orders. I was directed to report in Egypt to General Maxwell, commanding the North African Mission, to act as Officer in Charge of the Red Sea salvage operations and as Commanding Officer of such naval bases as might be established there. With that piece of paper as the solitary aid the Navy was able to lend then or ever to the project, I left the Navy Department and reported myself to the Army for duty. One thing only lightened the gloom of my complete lack of any naval assistance. Rear Admiral Bruce, giving me my orders, informed me that in view of the importance of my double assignment, the Navy Department was promoting me immediately to my former rank of commander. This, he thought, might help me somewhat in my dealings both with the Army and with the British, where, no less than in the Navy itself, rank was not wholly ignored. What was intended? I learned quickly enough from my Army associates in the Mission. Prime Minister Churchill, master of Allied strategy, had put his finger on the Middle East as the crucial area in this war. There a century and a half ago, Napoleon, in an earlier effort to make
himself ruler of the world, had sought to crash through Egypt and Syria to India until Admiral Lord Nelson had crushed his fleet and his hopes at Aboukir Bay. There in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Turks combined had sought the same object till stopped by Lawrence in Arabia and Allenby in Palestine. There Hitler and Mussolini now, with their joint forces under Rommel, ace commander and military idol of the totalitarians, were preparing to drive eastward through Libya toward Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the overland route to India and the East. Britain, already strained to the breaking point by Dunkirk and the aerial blitz of England by Goering’s bombers, by her disastrous rout in Greece, and her bloody defeat on land and sea at Crete, was fighting now in the Libyan sands a last-ditch battle. At all hazards, she must avoid the certain ruin that would follow the irruption into Egypt and then into Iran and India of Rommel’s legions and all that would ensue. For that meant making of the Mediterranean an Axis lake. It meant the loss of the priceless oil fields of Irak and Iran to the Nazis who most of all needed oil for their war machines, and would no longer have to stage a major campaign to wrest Baku from Russia to get it. It meant the severance of the solitary supply line into southern Russia via the Persian Gulf, through which both we and Britain were pouring aid through Iran to the hard-pressed Russians fighting desperately to stem the Nazi armies driving on Moscow, and that severance meant the collapse of the Soviets. Lastly, it meant the loss of India, the loss of all contact with the Far East, the loss of all possible bases and routes for the supply of China which was holding in combat and away from us, the bulk of the Japanese army. Briefly, the loss of the Middle East meant the swift loss of the war and it meant a totalitarian and Axis world. To back up Britain for the coming blow in the fall of 1941, and to save Russia, Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s agent, had arranged as a Lend-lease project the North African Mission which was intended first only to provide the bases from which hard-pressed Britain might fight. But now that we were in the war, these were bases from which we also might fight when the day came that we had mustered some land and air forces to fight with, provided meanwhile we could keep Britain hanging on by her fingernails till that day came.
CHAPTER
3 SPECIFICALLY, MY JOB WAS TO create a naval base at Massawa in Eritrea on the Red Sea and to salvage the wrecks there. The salvage was partly to clear the harbor of Massawa, partly to recover the priceless ships the Axis had scuttled, for further Allied use. Massawa, thoroughly sabotaged by the Axis, lay two-thirds the way down the Red Sea from Suez toward Aden. It had the best harbor in all the Red Sea and practically the only one suitable for a naval base able to support operations in the eastern Mediterranean. Ancient Massawa lay on the hot Red Sea coastal desert, athwart the traffic stream passing via Suez between Europe and Asia. The north coast of the Red Sea bordering Arabia has no harbors at all. The south coast has only two, Port Sudan in the Anglo-Egyptian condominium of the Sudan, and Massawa in Eritrea, far superior to Port Sudan in natural facilities, in strategic location, and in protected berthing space for large ships. In 1881, Italy had bought a foothold on the arid Eritrean coast line from the impoverished Turks who saw no value in it at all. This was the first step in the crack-brained Italian dream of building up again an African empire. Suffering even then from the delusions of grandeur which later were to flower fully under Mussolini, Italy had then set out from Massawa to conquer the hinterland, Ethiopia. However, at Adowa, in 1896, the spears and guns of Ethiopian warriors had slaughtered King Humbert’s army and put an abrupt period to Italian ambitions in East Africa. Not again for forty years did Italy venture away from the barren Eritrean coast line. But in the early 1930’s, Mussolini, deluded by the screaming mobs before the Palazzo Venezia that he was Caesar reincarnated, destined to revive the glories of vanished Rome, started again on the path of East African conquest. Italy was bled white to provide the gold poured into the ancient slave-trading Arab village of Massawa to convert it into a modern port from which a new
Ethiopian campaign might be launched and supported. And even more important, from Mussolini’s viewpoint, to build in Massawa a strong Italian naval base. From that, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and novel fast motor torpedo boats could dominate the vital Red Sea route. It was Mussolini’s belief this would blackmail Britain into keeping her hands off while Ethiopia was being overrun. Otherwise she ran the risk of having her exposed lifeline to the East severed by that well-protected Italian hornets’ nest planted in the north harbor of Massawa, invulnerable behind extensive mine fields, reefs, and sheltering islands to any attack from seaward by Britain’s fleet. The scheme had worked. After years of preparation, during which Italian matrons had been stripped even of their wedding rings to get the gold to pay for it, Massawa had blossomed into a modern harbor. Everywhere sprouted massive stone quays, electric unloading cranes, substantial naval shops, warehouses packed with naval stores, airfields, submarine piers, mine and torpedo depots, coast defense guns, and—most sinister of all—a magnificent automobile highway leading inland over the mountains toward the Abyssinian frontier. In the fall of 1935 came a three-pronged attack. First, in Geneva, Fascist orators poured out poisonous sophistries to benumb the conscience of the world. Next, from Massawa, Italian submarine flotillas straddled the trade routes to the East to point up the unwisdom of British interference. Then in Ethiopia Mussolini’s cowardly legions assaulted the natives with poison gas from planes against which the guns, the spears, the shields of Haile Selassie’s valiantly resisting warriors were no defense. So Mussolini (though not without great difficulty due to Fascist incompetence even in so unequal a battle) had conquered. And after the conquest, in preparation for the economic exploitation of Ethiopian resources, Massawa, the solitary Italian outlet to the sea from that rich plateau, had been developed even further as a port. Thus matters stood when Adolf Hitler, in 1939, thrusting unceremoniously into the background Europe’s first loudspeaker for totalitarianism, started World War II. Promptly into Massawa harbor had rushed for sanctuary such German vessels in Red Sea or Indian Ocean waters as could get there. In Massawa, safe under the neutral and friendly Italian flag, they were to await the overthrow of Britain. In the spring of 1940 came Dunkirk. Mussolini, fearful that he might miss
even the crumbs of the French and British debacle, plunged uninvited by Hitler into what was left of the conflict, lest he get no glory or loot at all in the death of world democracy. Put pending the dying gasp of Britain, which at sea was still potent, every Italian vessel east of Suez had rushed also for the protection of the mine fields of Massawa before Mussolini took the plunge. There in safety they awaited the swift capitulation of the defeated French and British. France surrendered. But to the incredulous amazement of both dumbfounded dictators, the irrational British not only refused to recognize their crushing defeat and the hopelessness of further resistance to Fuehrer and Duce, but even, where they could, took the offensive. Churchill, true to his 1940 promise to Mussolini that if Italy came into the struggle Britain would tear Italy’s empire to shreds, started in to make good his words by attacking in East Africa. Ethiopia and Eritrea were most vulnerable to British assault, and so long as Britain held Suez, incapable of support from Italy. And, therefore, it came about while England itself was being bled to death and burned to ashes by Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, that Britain herself was setting the grand pattern for later victory in the Pacific islands and North Africa by isolating a given body of enemy troops from its home forces and then concentrating on them the necessary strength to wipe them out. The soldiers of Britain’s empire, South African, East Indian, Sudanese, Scotch, and the English themselves, aided by a Free French legion, attacked East Africa from west, from south, from east, while Britain’s navy blockaded from the north on the Red Sea. At Cheren, the gateway to Eritrea from the Sudan, Scotch, Bengalis, and Sikhs, scaling unscalable heights at night guarding the rocky pass, in one of the most brilliant assaults in all military history, swept the Italians from the heights and smashed a path into Eritrea. The badly routed Italians fled southward into Ethiopia, soon to surrender there, while the British swept forward into Asmara, capital of Eritrea, and looked down from its mountain plateau onto coastal Massawa, forty airline miles away and 7000 feet below. As a military measure, the Italians on the coast, with the mountainous terrain between favoring them, could have put up a fierce defense of Massawa. But there was no fight left in the cowardly Fascisti; sabotage was more in keeping with their character. While they parleyed for surrender terms with the British advancing slowly through fields of land mines, they carried through the most widespread program of organized destruction yet seen in any war. In the three harbors of Massawa and in its off-lying islands lay a fleet of
some forty vessels, German and Italian. Freighters, passenger ships, warships, crowded every berth, while in addition, in the north harbor were two irreplaceable floating steel dry docks. A tornado of explosions swept the Massawa waterfront as exploding bombs, strategically placed far below their waterlines, blew out the sides and bottoms of ships by the dozens. The priceless floating dry docks received special attention, fourteen heavy bombs being planted in them to insure not only their sinking but their total destruction. The invaluable machinery in the naval shops was smashed with sledge hammers. Electric cranes were tipped into the sea. Everything in the way of destruction that Italian ingenuity could suggest to make Massawa forever useless to its approaching conquerors was painstakingly carried through. Finally, placed as carefully as possible, bow to stern, strings of large ships were scuttled in rows to block the harbor entrance. When the last bomb had gone up and the last ship had gone down, the Italian admiral commanding rubbed his hands in satisfaction over such a mass of scuttled ships as the world had never seen before. Then he surrendered Massawa and its smashed naval base as being not worth even one shot fired in its defense. Massawa fell in April, 1941, useless to the entering British. Such was the situation in far-off Massawa when, in the autumn of 1941, the threat to Alexandria from Rommel’s Afrika Korps attacking from Benghazi made it imperative to get another naval base from which British Mediterranean forces could operate in case Rommel immobilized Alexandria as a base by air attack. Massawa, smashed as it was, was still the only possible large harbor close enough for support, far enough away to be safe from short range Stuka bombers. Britain badly needed Massawa in operation. But Britain, with its own coasts strewn with wrecks and struggling to keep its home harbors open against constant German aerial mining, had not the men nor salvage ships to spare for Massawa. Neutral America assumed the obligation. But hardly had we assumed it than we found ourselves at war and in worse case for men and ships than Britain herself, if that were possible.
CHAPTER
4 MY FIRST NEED WAS DIVING GEAR AND salvage equipment to work with, and machinery to replace the sabotaged outfits of the Massawa naval shops. My second was divers. My third was salvage mechanics and salvage masters. And my fourth was salvage ships from which to work. With America mobilizing for its own defense, getting these things for the Red Sea, remote from any theater of war on which American eyes were fixed, was a nightmare. Aided by W. E. Flanagan, a small package of pure TNT, I started in. Without Flanagan’s fiery activities, little would have been procured at all. Naturally enough all the salvage gear and salvage equipment already in stock in America was moving toward Pearl Harbor. All I could do, even with the high priority I had, was order what I needed from overburdened manufacturers, to be delivered at seaboard in two to four months (if I was lucky), ready for shipment to Africa, which would take several additional months. So I made up long lists of diving gear, air compressors, tools of all kinds, underwater cutting torches—thousands of items—and had the purchase orders placed for the best possible delivery. When it came to getting machinery to replace that the Italians had smashed in the Massawa naval shops, I was in as bad case. There was none, and every existing shipyard in the United States, plus the dozens of new ones, were all screaming for shipyard machinery for instant use. Here also there was nothing to be done except to order a complete set of machinery for shipyard shops to be fabricated and trust to my priority to give me my share of what was turned out, when months later, the swamped manufacturers completed some. Next came divers. Diving is a peculiar trade, and divers are scarce animals even in peacetime American economy. What few the Navy had as enlisted men, whom I had once worked with, were en route to Pearl Harbor, barred to me. Via every possible channel I proceeded to track down all known civilian divers in the United States.
I found that practically every one was already employed on America’s prewar defense plans, mostly on underwater work in connection with new naval dry docks being excavated on all our coasts. Not even the seductive inmates of Oriental harems were more jealously guarded by their lords and masters from predatory males than were these civilian divers from any contact with seekers after their services elsewhere. Just for an attempted discussion with their contracting employer as to whether two divers out of over a dozen working on a pair of dry docks at the New York Navy Yard, might not be released for a navy job elsewhere, I was violently denounced and threatened with a court-martial by the Navy captain in charge. In the ensuing fiery tête-à-tête, regardless of the justice of my cause, my new three gold stripes cut only a sorry figure as against his four. I got no divers there. Still nothing daunted by this rebuff, from Maine to Florida, from New York to California, I wrote, telephoned, telegraphed, and rushed across the country to interview any civilian who claimed to be a diver not already working on a naval project. On the whole Atlantic Coast I got one. But in Hollywood, of all places, comparatively speaking I hit the jackpot. There, working for various movie studios, I found four men with records as divers, who, apparently only because the prospect I had to offer seemed even more outlandish than what they were then doing in the world of make-believe, signed up with me. So I had five divers. Not many, compared to the minimum of thirty or forty needed to cover my task effectively, but at least something to start with. Salvage mechanics were just as non-existent, but there, at any rate, I could hope to train any good mechanic for the task. The Army’s Middle East contractor thoroughly searched the entire field, hired thirteen for me and promised to get at least fifty more. Salvage masters, to direct the individual operations on each ship, were even harder to find. Those few unemployed but qualified by experience and able to make the physical grade, the Navy was swallowing. The rest were already under Navy control by a salvage company to which the Navy had given a contract for all war salvage along our own coasts. In all America I was able to locate only two competent prospects for salvage masters, both rugged individualists once employed by large salvage corporations, but now lone wolves. That both were unable, due to age or other physical causes, to get by the Navy’s medical officers, was the only reason they were left to me. I snapped them up before the Navy might lower its physical
standards, and snatch even these two. Bill Reed, getting far along in years and blind in one eye from diving, and Edison Brown, younger but with a weakened pair of legs probably from the same cause, were my sole recruits. Then, while I was struggling to get men, there was always before me the problem of getting salvage ships. This turned out to be the most hopeless of all. What I needed was three or four vessels, small enough to work handily over and alongside sunken wrecks, big enough to make the voyage of 13,000 miles around Africa to the other side of the world. Large ocean tugs would suit best, but there were none available. My acquisition of Brown as a salvage master eased one of my problems, and for a brief time looked as if it might also ease the salvage tug problem. Brown owned his own salvage vessel, an old converted tug called the Retriever, which had voyaged some thousands of miles in the Pacific. Practically his whole crew of eleven men, including one good diver, Buck Scougale, volunteered to ship with me, and were all promptly engaged. Brown offered to sell me the Retriever also for the job, and as I urgently needed ships, I agreed to buy her for his use at Massawa, subject only to one condition: Brown had to deliver the Retriever in the Red Sea before he got paid for her. Brown thought that over a while, then shook his head. He doubted he could keep the old Retriever afloat till she got to the Red Sea. So he sold her locally in Los Angeles and I agreed that the first suitable tug I got, he and his crew were to have. Then hastily departing from Los Angeles, I continued my search for salvage ships. In my travels, I scanned every piece of floating junk offered, from Cuba to Newfoundland and in the Pacific, which from its size gave even a scant hope of use. Ancient trawlers serving as molasses boats in Cuba; ancient yachts, converted to houseboats in Florida; ancient lighthouse tenders long since condemned and sold out of service—all these I examined, in spite of the fabulous prices asked, for nothing else was remotely obtainable. But all had to be rejected. Either the rusty hulls would certainly disintegrate once they hit the open sea, or the decrepit machinery could by no stretch of the imagination last out a thousand miles of ocean voyaging, let alone the 13,000 miles required. One vessel I had, though it gave me slight comfort. My predecessor on the assignment, before there was any war and before he had set out by air for the Red Sea only to end his trip at Pearl Harbor, had contracted for a small Pacific Coast lumber-carrying steamer, the W. L. Chamberlin Jr., of 3000 tons
displacement. She was suitable (after radical changes) for a base supply ship and a floating repair shop, but she was much too big and unwieldy for salvage work herself. This white elephant was in San Diego, being outfitted for the purpose, and I had about concluded that we should have to work from rowboats and rafts based on the Chamberlin, when Providence at last lent a hand. I received a telephone call from Rear Admiral J. W. S. Dorling, Royal Navy, Chief of the British Naval Mission in Washington, to see him there. He knew, of course, better than anyone else, that I was seeking salvage ships for the Middle East, and how urgently they were needed there. Dubiously he offered me a ship for the job, such as it was. It seems that months before, he had been ordered from London to contract for half a dozen small harbor tugs of a standard American design to be built at Port Arthur, Texas, for emergency salvage service in England. The first one was rapidly approaching completion; it had been scheduled to be finished in late January, 1942. But the British crew, sent over to take this first ship back to England, looking now at their tiny craft actually in the water, had decided they could never safely get across the stormy north Atlantic with her, especially in winter time, and the whole lot were rejected. That left Admiral Dorling with six tugboats in various stages of completion on his hands and no longer any use for them. If I thought I could use one, he would make me a gift of the first tug completed. I looked at the blueprints. The tugs certainly were small, of only 78 tons net register, about the size of the tiny caravels in which Columbus had discovered America. They were just under 100 feet long, but because of their harbor design, their freeboard was trifling, much less than that of Columbus’ caravels —the squat decks of these tugs were hardly three feet clear of the waterline amidships. But they had General Motors diesel-powered electric drives of 1200 horsepower and stout welded steel hulls. Tiny they certainly were, even for harbor work, but they were powerful and they were new. After the mass of rusting junk fit only for the scrap heap, the paper-thin hulls and the antediluvian machinery I had been inspecting, these new tugs positively intoxicated me. Could I use one? I was desperate. Hastily I assured Admiral Dorling they were exactly the right size (which was true, for if they had been any bigger he would never have been able to offer one to me, and if they had been any smaller, hard up as I was, even I should never have dared attempting to send
one on a 13,000-mile voyage over the open sea). But while I had any luck, I determined to press it hard. Certainly I could use one. Still, while he was giving them away, why stop at taking one? Promptly I told Admiral Dorling I would take three. Dorling was willing enough but he had already half promised the other five to our Navy for use as tugboats in American harbors. He would see what he could do. Finally, he was able to effect a compromise, giving me the first and third tugs done, and our Navy the rest. So I came into possession of two co*ckle-shells, already named by the British the Intent and the Resolute, titles which I hoped might prove good augury on their coming odysseys. Hurriedly I despatched a telegram to my new salvage master, Brown, in Los Angeles, saying I had a ship for him, and directing him to proceed immediately with his crew to take over the nearly finished Intent and sail with her the moment she was outfitted, probably in late February. I scanned again the blueprints of the two tiny tugs that now were mine, then the map. Thirteen thousand miles by sea from Port Arthur, Texas, around the Cape of Good Hope to Massawa! Heaven help us all!
CHAPTER
5 MY FEVERISH SEARCH FOR MEN, FOR materials, for ships, had taken some weeks. But by the end of January, I had at least the rudiments of what was wanted for salvage and the machinery on order for the rebirth of the naval base. I was then ordered by the Army to depart by air for Massawa via Egypt, to get acquainted with the situation on the ground. Meanwhile, Mr. Flanagan, my energetic assistant, would hire what additional men he could for me and attend to the forwarding of my ships and my materials. Transportation by air in those early dismal days of the war turned out to be not so certain. I was given a high enough priority for an assured seat in a military plane (there were no others) going east for the Atlantic hop, via Brazil to Africa. But day after day in early February went by with no notice to report for departure. Unofficially I soon learned the reason. So desperate was the Army need for fighter pilots in the far Pacific that every Army pilot of any flying experience at all was being gathered for combat there in a last-ditch attempt to stem the Japanese torrent flooding the Philippines and Indonesia, and threatening to engulf Australia. The result was that the new four-engined Fortresses, the only planes capable of carrying passengers, being ferried east to India and Australia over the south Atlantic, were of necessity going out with immature Army pilots who had barely completed their training courses. Under these conditions, the number of Fortresses that crashed en route was startling (or perhaps it wasn’t). However, since several Government missions flying as passengers in these planes had been lost with them, a secret order had gone out excluding further passengers till something could be done to reduce the crash rate. Barring a miracle, and none were being worked in favor of the unready United States in those days, my departure by air seemed uncertain and my safe
arrival in Africa that way even more so. It was a considerable relief then to learn that the Army had chartered a merchant vessel and its crew to sail February 16 for West Africa, carrying personnel for its various projects in the Middle East. Since I was now with the Army, I might go on her or by air as I chose. Naturally, as a sailor I chose to go by sea. The S.S. Pig’s Knuckle (to give the ship the nickname by which she was soon unaffectionately known by some of her passengers) was of 5600 tons gross register, small as passenger liners go, built sixteen years before for the coastal run between Florida and Boston. Heavily wrapped in overcoats and burdened down with our hand baggage, we boarded her in a cold, drizzling winter rain on the scheduled sailing day, February 16, to find her a madhouse. She was still cluttered with shipyard mechanics engaged in finishing fitting her out with guns, with black-out screens, life rafts, extra lifeboat davits and extra boats for her first wartime cruise. The start of the voyage was inauspicious. The passenger list was about 380, divided about equally between Army personnel (both officers and enlisted men) and civilians under Army contract for the Middle East projects. This was somewhat over the 300 passengers the ship was designed to accommodate, but the overcrowding was not bad. What was bad was that the ship, with all the workmen on her and with a newly shipped crew, was unready to receive any passengers. To make that matter worse, many of the civilian passengers, under no discipline at all, either from celebrating their departure or drowning their grief over it, came aboard badly drunk. Between the drunks and the workmen banging away with hammers till midnight on the superstructure, rushing to finish their job, the situation on the ship was not such as to create a favorable first impression on those sober enough to pay some attention to the vessel and her crew. Still less was this impression improved when the shipyard men (against the captain’s protests) cleared off in the middle of the night, leaving the boat deck a cluttered mess of partly rigged and hardly usable lifeboats, in miserable shape for lowering. This situation her surly seamen (mostly just shipped) very unwillingly and very ineffectively tackled. What seemed to be the whole Nazi U-boat navy had taken advantage of the combined golden opportunities of our unreadiness for war and the chance to shift from the wintry north Atlantic, where weather and the British patrols together made submarine operations difficult, to the Gulf Stream where they
were easy. U-boats by the dozen had descended a few days before on our shores. As they were sinking American ships along our unprotected southern coast in sickening numbers, the immediate usability of our lifeboats was an important factor in our lives, though from the slovenly fashion in which the merchant seaman went at readying them, one would never have guessed it. Our ship was just as likely (perhaps even more so) to be torpedoed the moment she poked her nose into the Gulf Stream south of Cape Hatteras as out in midocean a week or two later. In that shape, on the afternoon of February 17, having been hung up by fog from midnight till noon, we got under way for the lower harbor. In bitterly cold weather, we slid slowly past the Battery for our last look at Manhattan and shortly were passing St. George on Staten Island. A lump rose in my throat. There, anchored off St. George, lay the U.S.S. Texas, just in from convoy duty in the Atlantic. Twenty-seven years before, as an ensign just out of the Naval Academy, I had joined the battleship Texas, then newly commissioned. Enviously I gazed at my old ship, grimly effective in her modernized rig for a leading part in the war, looking the very symbol of disciplined power, so different from the ill-manned tub I now knew I was aboard. We dropped anchor ourselves in Gravesend Bay, where an ammunition barge came alongside to transfer to us the ammunition for our newly installed guns. Getting that aboard with freezing spray coming over constantly to interfere, a task for the Armed Guard seamen the Navy had put aboard for the guns’ crews, took the rest of the day. Next morning, still in freezing weather, we swung ship around the Ambrose Channel Lightship to calibrate magnetic and radio compasses. By early afternoon we were under way at last (so we thought) for Africa, headed south, steaming by ourselves. But we were escorted at least by a Navy blimp, the K-6, which circled slowly overhead to detect any lurking U-boats. Further to bolster our confidence, Ensign McCausland of the Navy, in charge of the Armed Guard, promptly posted his men at war stations, and to be sure they were ready for action, test fired all his guns. For a ship of our size, we were well armed. We had a 4-inch gun (evidently removed from some World War I destroyer) on our stern, a 3-inch high angle anti-aircraft gun on our forecastle, two .50-caliber anti-aircraft machine guns on the superstructure aft, and two more .30-caliber anti-aircraft machine guns on the bridge. Against a possible Nazi air raider or any U-boat trying to
overhaul us from astern in a surface attack with guns, we were well protected. But against a submerged attack with torpedoes by a U-boat (when our guns would be useless), we were as helpless as a lamb. Our slow speed (thirteen knots) would allow any U-boat which ever sighted us from ahead to get into torpedo firing position submerged and undetected. And we were of such moderate size as ships go, that one torpedo meant our doom. I began to take a deep interest in our lifeboats and their condition. For us, our only safety lay in a strong convoy of destroyers or in our keeping far away from every area in which the U-boats were reported operating. But except for the blimp, we had no convoy. Still I found soon there was little cause for immediate concern. We weren’t really going to sea—yet. A few hours’ run down the Jersey coast and we ducked into Delaware Bay for the night, there to anchor till daylight. Then down we went through the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal, safely landlocked from U-boats, into Chesapeake Bay. Down that we steamed, still landlocked, past Annapolis to Hampton Roads, where again we anchored to await a calibration of our newly installed degaussing system, intended to protect us against magnetic mines. By now I was acquainted to some degree with both the ship’s officers and with my shipmates for the voyage. Senior on board for the Army was Major General C. L. Scott, an ex-cavalry officer, now of the mechanized forces, going to Egypt to study British (and Nazi) tank tactics at close range. Aside from General Scott, all the Army officers aboard were destined for General Maxwell’s Middle East Command, ranging from Colonel Earl Gruver through all ranks down to the junior second lieutenant, Jerbi, going out as dental officer for the Mission. With them came a collection of Army non-coms of all grades and a few privates, to bring the Army personnel up to about 200 all told. Of the 180 civilian passengers carried, a few were supervisors for the contractors and the rest were mechanics and clerical personnel destined for various parts of the project, though none were my own salvage men. My personnel, particularly the mechanics, were supposed to come out with the salvage ships as their crews. General Scott promptly got his military passengers and their routine strictly organized to lend a hand in emergency both to the Armed Guard and to the ship’s company in handling boats. But the civilian passengers, governed by the top supervisor for the contractor, were left free to rest themselves on the voyage.
In Hampton Roads, on the morning of February 20, while we were awaiting our turn on the degaussing calibration course, the first friction on the ship arose. As a vitally interested passenger who had some knowledge of the subject, I pointed out to General Scott, the senior officer aboard, the scandalous condition our lifeboats were still in, improperly stowed and questionably rigged for lowering, and with a new crew which seemed to know little about the boats and from their lack of attention to them, to care even less. I suggested a lifeboat drill, with all the boats actually swung out while we were at anchor, to test their readiness in an emergency. This seemed reasonable enough and important to the general, who sent Colonel Earl Gruver, acting as his Chief of Staff for the voyage, to the skipper with a request for a full dress lifeboat test. Colonel Gruver, a quiet, very self-possessed, dark-complexioned officer, set off on his mission to the bridge in his usual imperturbable manner, while General Scott and I discussed the pros and cons of degaussing belts as protection against the new magnetic mines the Nazis would sooner or later (later, we hoped) lay off all our harbors. This was an intricate subject so that we hardly noticed how long Gruver had been gone when he suddenly entered the general’s cabin, very red in the face, in spite of his dark complexion. “That skipper of ours is certainly a belligerent boy, General,” reported the colonel. “I had hardly presented your compliments to him and made your request, when the captain practically exploded in my face to tell me the lifeboats were none of the general’s business, nor of any other passenger ’s, either!” Gruver looked significantly at me. “But I stayed with him, sir, in spite of his bullying, and there’ll be a lifeboat drill at 11:00 A.M.” There was, and it turned out as I had suspected. Three of the ship’s largest lifeboats absolutely refused to lift out of their chocks and go overboard. It developed the boat falls on two of these had carelessly been rove off backwards. On the third boat, a davit was improperly assembled. It would take hours to reverse the wire boat falls on the lowering drums and to refit the davit before those three boats could be used. The other eleven boats were, with some difficulty, broken out of their chocks and dropped flush with the rail, ready to take on passengers, in about five minutes. Not good, but not bad either, provided our ship, if torpedoed, stayed afloat and on a reasonably even keel for five long minutes, which could hardly be counted on. After this fiasco, I had hoped nothing further would be required for the ship
immediately to cure the entire boat situation, but it turned out otherwise. True, the chagrined mates turned to, to re-reeve the improperly rove off falls and to refit the davit so all the boats could be swung out, but no attention went to checking or stowing properly the oars and equipment each boat would badly need in a hurry if ever it went overboard. I was amazed that the crew was so little concerned regarding their instant effectiveness in an emergency, especially now that war and torpedoes had multiplied radically the possibility of that emergency arising. However, when nothing was done by the crew to overhaul the boat gear, General Scott detailed a squad of soldiers, aided by a group of carpenters and riggers among the passengers, to do the job themselves. Whatever the captain thought of this concern of his passengers for their own safety, in spite of his previous outburst to Colonel Gruver over the lifeboats, he now said nothing as the passengers turned to on what was the crew’s work. At any rate, by next evening, when we had concluded all our degaussing tests and anchored just inside Cape Henry preparatory to final departure, the boats were all properly stowed at last and ready for use, so that if the worst happened, at least we would not have to swim.
CHAPTER
6 EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 22, 1942, with every passenger wearing a life jacket (which by General Scott’s order he was to wear or keep at hand night and day the rest of the voyage), we stood out between the Chesapeake Capes, bound for Africa at last. On our itinerary as laid out on departure from New York, we had been scheduled to make a stop at Trinidad for refueling. But because of strong U-boat attacks of the last few days inside the Caribbean off Aruba and Trinidad, the routing was now changed by the naval authorities in Norfolk. The ship was directed to proceed to San Juan, Porto Rico, instead, for an intermediate refueling. Since in addition, this change would keep us away from the dangerous Florida coast, in which area the unopposed Nazi U-boats were running wild, with another sinking reported only the night before off Jupiter Inlet, and several blazing oil tankers, set on fire by torpedoes, reported drifting northward, abandoned and helpless in the Gulf Stream in plain sight of shore, it is easily understandable with what relief this change in routing was greeted by the passengers. We stood out in the face of a freezing wind past Cape Henry, bound southeast to clear Cape Hatteras, steaming by ourselves, unconvoyed, and with the knowledge now that we should have no convoy at any stage, for the Navy had no destroyers to spare for escorts. Our safety was to depend solely on our ability to avoid attack or on our guns and our Armed Guard crews in case we failed in avoidance. As one sailor who had considerable knowledge of submarines to another, I went to see our skipper for a discussion on how best he might minimize the danger of U-boat contacts. I found the skipper rather difficult to talk to. He had a distrust (not uncommon among merchant officers of that day or before) of all naval officers as being not really practical seamen and perhaps with exaggerated notions also of their own importance and abilities. Furthermore, this particular
skipper turned out to be an irascible individual, with whom no one, not even his own mates, could take a point of view even slightly differing from his own, without evoking instantly a most bellicose attitude which made further discussion of the subject unpleasant, if not impossible. He was a large man physically, round-faced, red-faced, and apparently nearing sixty. But in spite of all his years, he had evidently never learned that authority comes from a quiet inner assurance of superior knowledge and capability and not from blustering. In background, I learned that he had put in his entire life at sea in the coasting service. Never apparently (till the voyage he was now engaged on) had he been off soundings on an open ocean voyage (nor had his ship, which he had captained for the last sixteen years). Still, as diplomatically as I knew how, seated comfortably in the captain’s cabin over the mid-morning coffee, I opened the subject of submarines and their operating limitations in attack. On this subject I certainly could claim more knowledge than the captain and could inform him how he might take advantage of those limitations in avoiding contact. In particular, I told him I was gratified by our new destination, San Juan, which would help by taking us far away, in that winter season, from the warm coastal areas and the traffic concentrations which joined to make the Florida coast most attractive just then for U-boat operations. “Well, you’re wrong on our route, Commander,” announced the skipper. “I’m following the Florida coast down to Cuba, then along the Cuban coast to Porto Rico.” Had the skipper heaved his cup of hot coffee into my face, I could not have been taken more aback. Incredulously I stared at him. Take a longer and very roundabout course through dangerous coastal waters to Porto Rico rather than the direct and safer route over the open sea? I could hardly believe my ears. Then slowly the situation dawned on me. The skipper was like the old milk wagon horse, which all its life, day after day, had followed the same prosaic milk route till it was second nature. So when it was finally taken out for a Sunday joy ride hauling a buggy, it still persisted obstinately in dragging the buggy over the milk route, making every stop, ignoring the driver ’s frantic tugs at the reins, trying to get it out into the country. I saw it all. No more than with that milk wagon horse was it possible to get the skipper off the old familiar route. To the skipper, the route down the coast to Miami was also second nature—for thirty-five years, more or less, he had
traveled it voyage after voyage. No war and no U-boats were going to get him and his ship off the route he knew, into strange waters. I sank back into my chair, smothered my astonishment. I had to get the skipper to change his mind. Sure that I had correctly estimated his motives and that no harping on the U-boat dangers along his intended course would do anything but antagonize him and stiffen his ill-advised disregard of those dangers, I took another tack. As casually as I could, making as light as possible of the U-boat situation, I pointed out that sooner or later to get to Africa we were bound to have to leave the waters the captain knew, for the open ocean. And it might just as well be sooner, for he was not going to gain what he thought in hugging the coast. With a savage war at sea already raging, all the coastal lighthouses which made practically a broad White Way of the Florida coast, were surely now extinguished to avoid aiding the U-boats. Without those friendly lights the Florida coast would be strange and dangerous ground to him, not the familiar waters he had piloted over so many years. And to that argument, I added what others I could on saving fuel and saving time by the shorter route. What finally convinced the skipper, I don’t know—probably it was the vision of that well-known Florida coast suddenly become the unknowable. At any rate, after much pondering he reluctantly agreed to head directly for San Juan, and with a sigh of deep relief, I thanked him for the coffee and immediately left his cabin. It seemed an unpropitious time to go generally into submarine dangers, of which the captain apparently was deeply contemptuous, lest he become enraged and reverse his decision on the course. I got hurriedly out of the captain’s cabin to find that I was just in time to attend divine services which were being held that Sunday morning at eleven in the main dining room. Having something to give thanks for, I went below to attend. I found Major Abraham Goff of the Army—long, lanky Abe Goff, in physique and warm human sympathy for everybody not a bad counterpart of Honest Abe himself—officiating extemporaneously as chaplain, with some thirty or forty mixed soldiers and civilians as his small congregation. Recollecting the old maxim that the faith of the sailor has always been in inverse ratio to his faith in his ship, I could only judge that if more of our 380 passengers knew as much about our ship and her officers and crew as I now did, the attendance would be greater. Reverently I bowed my head as Major Goff, impromptu chaplain, led us in prayer.
CHAPTER
7 AS WE STOOD SOUTHEAST AWAY from the Capes before a moderate westerly breeze, the freezing chill of the air began to moderate and by afternoon it began to seem there were some signs that we were leaving winter behind. At this I had no regrets (then) as, since leaving New York, I had already picked up a bad cold in the head. Besides, I was getting quite tired of going about all the time in a heavy Navy overcoat, which was a damned encumbrance to a life jacket, especially if one had suddenly to go overboard. But if the weather was getting better as the afternoon wore on and darkness fell and in our wake, America disappeared over the horizon, the war situation and the danger on the sea seemed to grow worse. The air waves crackled with news of mounting disaster. Into the radio room came reports of new torpedoings off Jupiter Inlet, Florida, calls from distant ships in distress, gruesome reports from shore of burning and derelict tankers drifting with the current, lighting up the evening skies like mammoth torches. By supper time we were well clear of Cape Hatteras and standing across the Gulf Stream into warmer weather, on the deep sea at last. Every other vessel had vanished from sight and we were alone on the ocean. I sniffed the warm air, went into my cabin to throw aside my overcoat for the last time for months to come, and beginning to feel much safer, though I still clung to my life jacket, I went below to supper. Meals on our ship were nothing to look forward to. Because of a greater passenger list than the dining room could accommodate, we ate in two sections, with an interval between sittings to clear up and reset the tables. That situation never bothered me, for, as one of the senior officers, I dined in the first section. What bothered everyone was that the steward’s department was as slovenly and lackadaisical as the deck force—the cooking was atrocious, the service the same. In spite of the fact that the Army was paying the steamship line $650 apiece
as the passage for everybody aboard from general through civilians down to privates (which is considerably more than a first class passenger fare on an expensive luxury liner), the food served would have suited better a laborers’ camp in the backwoods. Our meals alternated mainly between unappetizing stew, corned beef and cabbage, frankfurters and sauerkraut, and pig’s knuckles and cabbage. This last dish was evidently the chief cook’s favorite. It was served so frequently that as the passengers’ disgust with the ship grew, she was shortly nicknamed the S.S. Pigs Knuckle, which, I may say, aptly characterized her. More pig’s knuckles for supper. As the weather had warmed up considerably outside, they were even less inviting than usual. I made a wry face and turned to. We could live on frankfurters, pig’s knuckles, etc., and surely before the war was over, we should fare worse. But what irritated all hands was the fact that with the ship being paid a huge sum for first class fare for everybody, the operators had nevertheless provisioned her for fourth class immigrants. The slapdash stewards carelessly slung on the food, served on none too clean dishes. There was no point in complaining to the purser about the service —it had already been frequently done, only to bring from the purser and the chief steward both, the plaintive reply that they had no control over their assistants and could get no discipline into them. Any attempt, so the purser claimed, to insist on decent service from the men hastily shipped as stewards before the ship sailed, would result only in a sitdown strike from his unruly assistants and no service at all. Since this lined up with the situation on deck, it seemed entirely possible. With these conditions, I made as short work of my unappetizing supper as possible, grabbed up my life jacket from beside my seat, and started from the dining room to make way for the second sitting. Fast as I was, most of the other passengers were faster. I had to push my way out through a mob of grumbling ex-diners already clustered in front of the ship’s canteen window, endeavoring there to buy from the purser something to top off their unsatisfactory meal. Thrusting aside heavy black-out curtains hung here and there in the passages to prevent the slightest gleam of light from showing outside should one of the promenade deck doors be opened, I reached my cabin. There I grabbed an orange from the shrinking store of fruit I had brought aboard in New York, and donned my life jacket. With that securely tied on, I went inboard and forward through the central
passage, ducked between a pair of black curtains hung as a light trap inside the door to the deck, and turned the knob to open the door. Immediately the passage light behind me went out, so thoroughly had the ship been rewired to make effective the black-out system installed just before sailing. I pulled the door wide open, stepped through, and closed it. For a moment, in the darkness on deck, I saw nothing. Then as my eyes adjusted themselves to the night, I looked about. It was a gorgeous evening, warm enough in the Gulf Stream current to make an overcoat unnecessary. In the sky, Orion and Sirius glowed brilliantly dead ahead across the waves, while a gorgeous half moon was just setting in the ocean on our starboard side. In a few moments the moon was gone, leaving us veiled in the warm darkness of the night. The scintillating stars above and the slight phosphorescence of the waves breaking in foam against our advancing forefoot were the sole objects visible. Standing beneath the starboard wing of the bridge, my eyes now well accustomed to the night, I looked aft down the promenade deck past the outer cabin doors and ports. Not a trace of light showed anywhere through the locked outer cabin doors or their newly screened ports. Whatever else might be said about the S.S. Pigs Knuckle, certainly the shipyard mechanics had done a beautiful job in blacking her out for wartime service. No lurking U-boat, prowling on the surface at night when she herself was invisible, was going to be able to pick us up by a stray gleam and then, shrouded in her own invisibility and aided by her surface speed which far exceeded ours, close on us for a sudden torpedo attack and our destruction. Satisfied that at least one thing on the ship was “tops” for war service, I stepped out from under the bridge wing for a better look at the stars. Hardly had I turned my eyes upward, when involuntarily my uneaten orange dropped from my agitated fingers and bounded overboard. There over my head on our beautifully blacked-out ship, was the starboard running light burning brightly in the night, shining for all to see miles away! Hastily I ran across the deck to take a look at the port light. There it was, full on also, its red radiance glowing even more brilliantly in the darkness than its green mate to starboard. I dashed up the ladder to the bridge to advise the captain. After all the money and labor that had been spent to black out the ship, and the dire penalties threatened any passenger who should even dare to smoke out on deck after dark, now, on our first night at sea in dangerous waters, some dumbbell of a
quartermaster had neglected to pull the switch on the running lights and they were advertising our presence far and wide to all U-boats in our area! “Where’s the captain?” I demanded as I bumped into the mate on watch on the darkened bridge. “In his cabin, sir,” came the prompt reply. I fumbled in the gloom for the knob on the door leading aft from the bridge to the captain’s cabin, found it, knocked once, and swung it open. Like every other door, it was light-screened off. I closed the door, and sidled through the curtains, blinking involuntarily in the bright light suddenly greeting me. In a chair, reading, was the skipper. He looked up at me, surprised. “Captain,” I said hurriedly, “someone’s forgotten to pull the switch on the running lights! We’re steaming with the brightest lights on the ship full on in the middle of your black-out!” The skipper glared up at me, his red face instantly growing even redder with anger than his glowing port side light. Anger at such negligence I had expected of him when he heard the news. But what he said floored me. “Nobody’s forgotten anything!” he snapped out. “Those lights are on by my orders, and they’re staying on!” Abruptly he dropped his eyes to the book he was reading. So far as he was concerned, all discussion was over. The running lights on by the captain’s orders on a troop ship steaming through U-boat infested waters? What kind of madhouse was our country sending us to sea on? Had it not been for all that had gone before, I should have imagined I was crazy myself before I believed my ears as to what I had just heard. The lights on by the captain’s orders? But it was all of a piece with the unusable lifeboats, the proposed suicidal course via the Florida coast, and all the lesser idiocies I had already observed. There was nothing for it but to cajole the skipper somehow to turn out those lights. So ignoring my brusque dismissal, I asked mildly enough why he thought the Government had spent so much on an elaborate black-out system if it wasn’t a wartime necessity? The skipper, mad as a hornet over having his decision questioned, glared up at me again, but apparently as I was a passenger he could not throw me offhand out of his cabin, and some answer seemed required. I was flabbergasted to learn from him he was doing it because he was in nowise afraid of U-boats, that even if torpedoed he was sure his ship could not sink because she had some six watertight bulkheads. But running without lights! That went against the grain. He might get into
collision with another ship. He might lose his license as a master for a violation of the Rules of the Road. Never would he do it! I nodded gravely as he blustered at me what he would not do. At least I had him talking now, and I was learning something of his antiquated inhibitions. Running without lights was nothing to a naval man. We did it often in close formation even in peacetime. Merchant officers in convoy would swiftly learn (many had already) in this war to get as used to it as we and think as little of it. So diplomatically, as casually as I could, I went to work on him. After all, I had been trained by the Navy, among other things, as a naval architect, I told him. I had worked on ship designs, had built them, had operated them, had helped salvage and repair them when they were in trouble in war and in peace. Then I had been a torpedo officer once, and I had a thorough knowledge of torpedoes and what they had done and could do to ships—warships, passenger liners, freighters. I could assure him that modern German torpedoes with the heavier warhead charges the Nazis now were using would tear such a huge hole in the side of his little ship that his few bulkheads might just as well not be there so far as saving her from quick foundering was concerned. Did he know what U-boat torpedoes had done to the British Athenia, a vastly bigger and safer passenger ship than his, on the very first day of this war in Europe? And to God alone knew how many more large British ships since in this war, not to mention the sad case of the huge Lusitania in the last war? And if all that did not satisfy him, he might consider the recent cases of our tremendous battleships resting now on the bottom in Pearl Harbor, built with hundreds of bulkheads each (as against his trifling five or six) for the very purpose of protecting them against torpedoes. I knew them and their maze of bulkheads by heart. What had Japanese torpedoes done to them in spite of all their bulkheads? Admiral Farragut at Mobile Bay might have been warranted in damning the torpedoes of the Civil War period and going ahead to attack nevertheless, but I could assure him that it wasn’t being done any longer. Every modern naval commander had a very healthy respect for torpedoes and acted accordingly, so did every informed merchant officer. A proper dread of torpedoes was with them a mark of intelligence, not of cowardice. As regards the collision danger of which the skipper was so afraid, now that we were away from the coast and heavily traveled routes and not steaming in convoy with other ships, to me it seemed negligible. At any rate, the
probability of a collision as compared to the probability of getting torpedoed was trifling. Certainly, of these two possible hazards, our skipper as a prudent captain was going to choose the lesser. And as regards the danger to his license, I could assure him that running without lights was normal in wartime. Regardless of what happened running blacked out, his license was in no danger. But there was plenty of danger to his license should any survivors ever appear before an inquiry to testify that he was torpedoed running with lights on. “And that, Captain,” I concluded, “is about all I know on this situation. Now that you’ve been informed also, I leave it to your own sound judgment. Whatever decision you make, goes with me.” Of course, while I didn’t say so, I knew well enough it had to go with me, whether I liked it or not, since with the radio in the captain’s hands and no private messages permitted, there was no possible way of getting him overruled by shore authorities. But I felt rather sure now of the captain, whom I had fairly well swamped with data he couldn’t even argue over. His ignorance of ship damage in wartime was extensive. And I was certain that my final gesture of saving his face by resting everything on his own sound judgment would get him. Still standing, I looked down at the skipper for the decision. I didn’t get it. Befuddled but still obstinate, glaring angrily at me for having intimated he might lose his license if he didn’t comply, he muttered finally: “I’ll see. Maybe when we get far out at sea, I’ll turn ’em off.” “Thanks, Captain, for listening.” I turned to go. “It’s all up to you now,” and I vanished through the door, to take station out on the darkened forecastle where I could watch those ill-omened lights. I wondered how long it would take for the captain’s fears over losing his license for carrying lights to overcome his habits of a lifetime. Ten minutes later the running lights suddenly went out. In a complete blackout now, the S.S. Pigs Knuckle steamed on through the night.
CHAPTER
8 MORNING DAWNED, TO FIND THE SHIP for the first time in her career well out on blue water and off soundings, far away from lighthouses, from buoys, from lightships, from landmarks, from near-by radio beacons, from every piloting aid by which her position had always before been plotted up and down the coast. Now it was up to her officers to fix her position by celestial navigation. It was a beautiful day for it, with a moderate breeze, a following sea, and the sun in a clear sky on the port side shining over seas of a deep blue tinge running right out to a sharply cut horizon. Normally on a merchant ship, one mate only does the navigating, but here all four mates were clustered on the port wing of the bridge, sextants glued to their eyes, shooting the sun for our 8:00 A.M. position. Close at hand, the quartermaster stood with a watch to mark time for them when they called to him. From the near-by boat deck, I was watching them, when the skipper accosted me, more affable than I yet had seen him on the voyage. “Commander,” he invited, “wouldn’t you like to borrow my sextant and navigate yourself? You’re welcome to it.” “Thanks a lot, Captain, for the offer. Glad to take you up. I like navigation.” I accompanied him to his cabin, got his boxed sextant, carefully extracted the instrument from the box, screwed the sun telescope into the eyepiece, checked the index correction, and adjusted the shade glasses. Then I took my stand with the mates, braced my feet to steady me on the slowly rolling deck, and got three closely spaced shots at the sun, for which the quartermaster noted the time each time I sang out, “Mark!” With my altitudes and times, with the chronometer correction, and with the 8:00 A.M. dead reckoning position from the chart for data, I retired to my stateroom, lugging also copies of Bowditch and the 1942 Nautical Almanac
borrowed from the skipper, to work with. Since only a Bowditch was available, I had to work out the sights by the old Marc St. Hilaire method, accurate enough, but tedious. Being somewhat rusty also over the formulas, this took me rather longer than usual. But with my morning position finally worked out and checked over twice to make sure there were no errors in the figures, I took it up on the boat deck to compare it with the positions of the four mates. I found the second, third, and junior third mates all together in the second mate’s stateroom, still struggling with the problem, literally sweating over their formulas and figures. The first mate was nowhere around; evidently he had locked himself up in his own cabin for work in seclusion. I left the three mates worrying over their calculations, the while I wandered out on the boat deck again and into the radio room to learn what was new. There was plenty. About 6:00 A.M. the operator had picked up a signal from a vessel about fifty miles to the southwest of us, reporting she was being chased by a submarine and calling for help. Since then he had heard nothing further from that ship. The radio operator handed me a sheaf of other messages. There was a report of a sinking off Bethel Shoals; radio calls from another ship being tracked by a U-boat off Jupiter Inlet; a report from shore of a wreck drifting on its side off Jupiter Inlet; and finally, a general warning to all ships to keep clear of the Florida coast. I read the reports, handed them back to the radio operator. Evidently the unchecked U-boats were having a profitable morning along the Florida coast. I was certainly glad the Pig’s Knuckle wasn’t there, though I understood that even in February the swimming isn’t bad along the Florida beaches. I went back to see how the navigation stood. The second mate had given up completely; the third mate and the junior third had finally worked out something from their sights. I compared their positions with mine. The results were positively ridiculous—from our three positions, the ubiquitous S.S. Pig’s Knuckle was simultaneously at 8:00 A.M. at three widely scattered points on the ocean. Two of these positions were certainly crazy, and perhaps they all were, for none agreed very well with our morning position by dead reckoning alone. Our dead reckoning position, of course, might itself be badly in error, for during the night we had crossed the Gulf Stream, the swiftest ocean current on earth, with uncertain effect as to where the drift of that current had carried the ship. What was wrong with us? The second mate confessed he was too rusty on
navigation to work out his position at all. He was out of it. Had the chief officer announced his results, I asked, against which the remaining three of ours might be checked? No, it seemed the first mate was still locked incommunicado in his own room. Hastily then I scanned the work sheet of the third mate. His trouble was obvious. He had made a mistake in the time equations and was off on the wrong foot from the start. I turned from his work sheet to that of the junior third mate. He also had bungled some figures, so his position was clearly erroneous also. Both the third mate and the junior third turned to on corrections, but the discovery of their blunders gave me little satisfaction. My own position was too far away from the dead reckoning point to suit me. The dead reckoning might be wrong, but not that badly, for at least an allowance had been made in it to take account of the normal Gulf Stream drift. Something else must be haywire. I looked again at all the computations spread out before us. Then I noted a strange thing. While all of us had taken our shots at the sun within a minute or two of each other under beautiful horizon conditions, our observed altitudes of the sun were in nowise consistent with one another. According to our sextant readings, the sun had been in four different places in the sky at once just before 8:00 A.M., and that couldn’t be, of course. Either the eyes of all of us were badly defective or there was something wrong with the sextants. Probably the latter was the trouble. I turned to the second mate. “I used the skipper ’s sextant. Do you know how long since it’s been adjusted?” “Commander,” replied the second mate, a well-meaning, hardworking officer, but rather slow in figures, “to tell you the truth, I don’t know. I been on this bucket seven years now, and in all that time, there ain’t never been a sextant used aboard her till today. I never even had mine aboard before, and for all I know, there hasn’t been a sextant on board of her in them seven years till we shoved off for this voyage. That’s how I’ve forgotten what navigation I had to learn to get my license. This ship’s never been navigated at sea; she’s always been piloted on soundings. How long since the captain’s sextant’s been adjusted? I don’t know. I ain’t never seen it in use till today.” I listened, open-mouthed. What a ship to send to sea! First the lifeboats, then the course, then the running lights, now the navigation! It was obvious there wasn’t a really competent navigator on board her. Certainly the three mates before me weren’t, and the first mate couldn’t be any better than they or he
would long since have come out of his stateroom to plot his morning position on the chart. Seven years, and not a sight taken on the ship! Probably there never had been one taken on her since the day, sixteen years before, when, fresh from the builder ’s yard, the present skipper came aboard to commission her. I picked up the captain’s sextant, took it out on deck, glanced at it horizontally to test the index mirror, then vertically to check the horizon mirror. Both mirrors were out of adjustment. So were the mirrors on the second mate’s sextant, and those of the third mate’s. None of these three had obviously been checked for a long time. All were inaccurate. The sextant of the junior third mate (who had more recently got his license) was a new and much more modern instrument than the others; it was perfect. So all the sights we had before us to work on were taken with faulty instruments and were worthless except those of the junior third mate. After I had helped him correct his computations, he came out with a position which seemed reasonable, and that, by default, went down on the chart as our 8:00 A.M. position, since the second mate, the third mate, and I threw all our useless data into the wastebasket, and if the first mate ever worked out a position, he never exhibited it. I got the instrument tools out of the skipper ’s sextant box, and went to work on the reflecting mirrors, so that soon I had his sextant properly adjusted to give accurate readings. At the request of the second and third mates, I readjusted theirs also, so for further navigation, we could at least rely on our sights. What results the mates might get in their computations from that point on, I could look forward to only with doubt. I had accepted the captain’s offer to use his sextant only as a lark for one sight; now I saw that I had better keep on navigating. We were having other troubles also. From practically the first day out of New York, the decks had been neither swept nor washed down. With 380 passengers using them, and some of the seasick ones none too successful in getting to the lee rail in time, the decks quickly resembled a pigpen. Routine sweeping and washing down were urgent, but the chief officer, a mildmannered, inoffensive person of slight build and general futility in exercising his authority as first mate and executive officer on the ship, got exactly nowhere with his sullen deck force in getting it done. Neither did the skipper ’s blustering have any better results. The recalcitrant seamen claimed they were overworked; unless they were
paid overtime for it, the wash deck gear could go hang for all they cared. Neither the captain’s bullying nor the chief officer ’s pleading had any effect on them and the filthy decks soon became unbearable. In this predicament, the passengers voluntarily took over. Squads of men, both soldiers and civilians, manned the wash deck hoses and the brooms. Regularly from the first few days out they washed down the decks each morning and swept down twice a day to keep the ship livable, while the idle deck force, contemptuous of their officers and unconcerned about the passengers, lounged about below, reading their seamen’s journals full of articles on how valiantly merchant seamen everywhere were co-operating to win the war. Very possibly on other ships, they were. Meanwhile, in the week since departure from New York, practically every passenger on the ship, civil and military, had come down with a bad cold in the head, and an increasing number were laid up with flu. The army surgeons aboard were tearing their hair, fearful of what an influenza epidemic might result in at sea. Inhalers, drugs, and attempted segregation of the flu cases seemed to be doing no good. After supper, strolling for exercise on the darkened promenade deck, I bumped into Major Curtin of the Army, who had been detailed by General Scott to act as Safety Officer for the voyage. It was his job (assisted by a number of tough sergeants) to see that no one ever appeared outside his stateroom without his lifebelt; that black-out screens were kept in place; that no smoking occurred on deck after sunset; and that all hands turned out at lifeboat muster, which was now to be held daily. On this occasion as we strolled down the deck, since we both had colds the conversation turned quickly to that and the inability of the Army surgeons to check it. I suggested to Curtin that if aboard ship, with all its facilities, his surgeons could do no better than that, the troops were going to have a terrible time with disease when they ran up against field conditions ashore in Africa, which were reported pretty bad. Major Curtin stopped, looked around, noted some seamen near us, then took me by the arm and led me aft to the stern. There, with only the muzzle of our 4inch gun over our heads and the foaming wake of the ship directly beneath us, we were certainly alone. Still, Major Curtin drew close to me, lowered his voice. “Don’t worry about Africa, Commander. I’ll let you in on something. It’s not our doctors, it’s our ship that’s the trouble! The surgeons have just put their
finger on the source, and it’s going to be cured damned quick tomorrow morning.” “The ship?” I asked dubiously. I knew plenty was wrong with the ship and her crew, but what could they have to do with an epidemic of flu and colds? “Yes, it’s the damned Pig’s Knuckle that’s causing it. But keep what I’m telling you dark tonight. Our surgeons have tracked it down to the dining room and the galley. Those lousy stewards below haven’t been washing the dishes or the silver at all between sittings—just scraping the plates, rinsing ’em in cold water, and putting everything back that way for the second sitting. And even for the first sitting each meal the dishes don’t get washed in water hot enough to sterilize ’em; just a dip in lukewarm water, then a lick and a promise with a dirty dishrag to make sure the germs get well spread around. No wonder everybody on the ship’s got a cold, and more and more of ’em every day are going flat on their backs with flu!” Major Curtin paused a moment for breath in his indignation, took a second look around to see no one had come within hearing, then continued: “When they found that out, our senior surgeon and I went to see the chief steward about it. No luck. The chief steward said he couldn’t get his men to wash the dishes, let alone sterilize ’em. Too much work. Then we went to the captain about it. He passed, too. Said it was useless to try. What in hell’s the matter with the officers on this ship, I don’t know. Either they’re worthless or the crew’s got ’em buffaloed, or both, maybe. Anyway”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“on the general’s orders, I’m doing something about it for the Army. Get down to breakfast early tomorrow and you’ll see something.” Being thus tipped off, I was first on hand in the dining room a little before seven next morning, when the first sitting was supposed to breakfast. The dining room was empty. There wasn’t a sign of food in sight. There wasn’t a plate, a knife, a fork, or a spoon to be seen on any table. The only person visible was the very agitated chief steward, running his hands through his hair, eyeing fearfully the closed doors leading forward from the dining room to the galley. I went to my place, sank into my seat, scanned the empty table before me. Then I looked at my watch. “Steward!” I sang out to the only other person in the room with me. “Here it’s seven o’clock and nothing for breakfast. What’s the matter with you?” Unsteadily and apparently shaking with fear, the ashen-faced chief steward stumbled over to my table.
“Look!” I growled, indicating the table. “No plates, no silver, no food, no steward, no nothing! This is a hell of a way for you to run a ship!” “It’s not my fault, Commander,” he mumbled tremulously. “The Army! They won’t let me. With guns, too! Look in there!” And he pointed fearfully to the closed galley doors. I rose, strode over to the nearest door, pushed through it. There, dimly seen through clouds of steam filling the room, was Major Curtin, his back to the doors, blocking the exits, with four Army sergeants beside him, and each with an unlimbered .45 Colt automatic trained on the cowering stewards before them! Major Curtin twisted his head swiftly to see who had intruded, then swung it back again. “Morning, Commander. Breakfast may be a little late this morning,” he apologized. “These boys have just been persuaded it would be a good idea to wash all the dishes, so there’ll be no service till they’re through. They’re so anxious to do a good job now, they’ve decided to sterilize ’em, too, in boiling water while they’re at it, so there may be quite a delay. Sorry.” All over the galley, the stewards, with their eyes shifting constantly from those unwavering muzzles and the menacing faces of the squad of grim sergeants between them and escape, to the huge steaming kettles, were busy plunging everything in sight in the way of dishes and silver into boiling water. Evidently Curtin was right about the delay, but I guessed it would be the last one. From the looks on the faces of the stewards, I judged they had been persuaded also it would be a good idea to wash the dishes henceforth after each meal without further argument. And so it turned, out. But for the rest of the cruise, an armed sergeant was always present in the galley at dishwashing time just to see there was no backsliding. And our epidemic of colds and flu swiftly subsided.
CHAPTER
9 OUR THIRD ‘DAY AT SEA, FEBRUARY 24, commenced with the wind blowing fairly hard, and shortly it had risen to a strong gale with about a 50-knot wind from ahead. The waves built up rapidly to give rise by early afternoon to unusually steep seas, with a remarkable breaking effect on their sharp crests. There was no rain, but the spray, cut sharply from the wave crests by the howling gale, drove like buckshot into the skin, drenched everything on deck. Soon the ship was pitching heavily, driving headlong in the seas and pounding hard each time her bow slapped down in the troughs. Naturally, with all this, the rails were soon lined with seasick passengers, and the dining room got very little patronage the rest of that day and the next, which helped in allowing the stewards to get accustomed to the new order of cleanliness below. But the greatest benefit of the storm was noted in the radio reports. Submarine attacks ceased as if cut off by a knife. Not for two days while the storm lasted was there a single report of a torpedoing. Evidently the U-boats found the remarkably steep seas not to then-liking, either for surface or submerged attack. Probably they were too busy ensuring their own safety to bother about endangering anyone else’s. Nevertheless there were two radio reports during the storm that the skipper relayed to me with great relish—two collisions had occurred off the coast. There was quite an “I told you so” grin on the skipper ’s countenance as, without comment, he showed me these. But as none of the vessels involved had sunk and there were no details in the reports beyond their approximate locations, it was obvious the skipper didn’t know whether lack of lights or the storm was responsible, or even whether the collisions had occurred at night, and neither did I. So I grinned back and said nothing either. I noted that our running lights stayed out though, regardless of those two collisions, however much the reports of them may have bolstered the captain’s ego. On our fifth day at sea, in fine weather with only a slight wind, we steamed
on, expecting to make San Juan harbor in the very early afternoon. In view of that, I took a careful set of morning and noon sights to determine our position, which I communicated to the skipper. But he decided to ignore it in favor of the junior third mate’s position, which placed us considerably to the eastward of my observations. The third mate had a position which placed us far away from either of these, and where the first and second mates thought we were, I never learned. Setting his course from the junior third mate’s morning position (in which the captain seemed to have most faith, though I advised against it), we kept on, headed for San Juan. At about 2:00 P.M., the high mountains of Porto Rico, a very large island stretching for a hundred miles in an east and west direction across our course, loomed up on the horizon ahead of us. Still keeping the course intended to take us into the harbor, the ship held on towards land. But as we got close enough to pick up the shore line through glasses, I noticed increasing uneasiness on our skipper ’s beefy countenance. He had reason enough for it. The city of San Juan, Morro Castle towering above it on the seaward cliff and its lighthouse, all easily visible far out at sea to incoming ships, were nowhere in sight! Nor could he spot anything else, recognizable on the chart to fix its position. Before us in both directions stretched only a barren coast, void of all charted landmarks. Very agitated now by this mishap, the skipper nevertheless obstinately held his course unchanged, still hoping on close approach to pick up something identifiable to show him where he was. But finally there was no help for it. He had to ring up “Stop” on the engine room telegraph lest the ship drive hard upon the unknown shore now close ahead. A more ridiculous (if it had not been serious) scene I never saw on a ship’s bridge. There ahead of us certainly was the island of Porto Rico. But where were we? And which way, east or west, should the ship head to get to the city of San Juan? His face glowing red with anger, the outraged skipper glared questioningly for the answer at his four mates who had landed him in that predicament. The cowed mates, rightly enough uncertain of their navigation, couldn’t agree. Some dubiously suggested east, some thought west would be better. “Captain,” I volunteered in this dilemma, “I’m sure my morning longitude sight was good and my figures O.K. That placed us much further west than the position you used. I advised then a more easterly course. Go east now and you’ll find San Juan about an hour ’s run from here.”
He did, and we did. About fifteen miles eastward down the coast, approximately the distance I had figured we were off the true course, we picked up the entrance to San Juan. From that point on, the skipper was in his element. If there was anything he knew, it was piloting. Once there were buoys and lights in sight to take bearings on, no one could beat him. Very skillfully, relying hardly at all on the local pilot we picked up outside, he conned his vessel through the torpedo nets and the narrow channel, fringed with surf breaking on reefs close aboard, into the harbor and neatly laid her alongside the wharf. But far from any thanks for my assistance in our safe arrival, it seemed to me from the skipper ’s distant behavior from the moment he headed the ship east, that I had now only his strong ill will. I had been a witness on the bridge to that exhibition of gross incompetence in the deep sea navigation of the S.5. Pig’s Knuckle. Our overnight stay in San Juan, while the ship was being refueled alongside the wharf, was memorable, but not pleasantly so. The weather ashore was hot and humid, more noticeably uncomfortable as we had just come from winter. I went into town only to buy a book of modern navigation tables. In addition I picked up a few charts of the South Atlantic and a Nautical Almanac for 1942. With these as my own property and the occasional use of one of the mates’ sextants, for it was perfectly evident I was no longer welcome to use the captain’s, I figured that I could keep on navigating on my own, the while I taught the mates, of whom three at least were eager for help, how to navigate accurately themselves. Most of the larger shops were soon closed, as we had landed late in the afternoon. But still open, especially near the water front, was a plethora of dives proclaiming themselves in Spanish and in English to be “Night Clubs,” with gaudily painted but still ugly and unattractive native “hostesses” swarming about them as lures. From inside each of these places came the most infernal racket of jazz bands, struggling to outdo adjacent competitors in noise. Finally, Porto Rican rum seemed to be on sale everywhere, cheap as compared to New York prices. So far as I could guess, as I sauntered back to the ship with my new navigational equipment, it was already being guzzled in enormous quantities by my fellow passengers, civilians as well as soldiers, judging by their uncertain gait from “night club” to “night club.” Back on the nearly deserted ship, I turned to at once in my stateroom on boning up on the thin volume of Ageton’s tables I had managed to buy ashore.
Ageton’s tables and his method gave a much quicker and simpler means of solving the trigonometric problems involved in celestial navigation than I had learned in my youth. But even Ageton required some practice to develop the familiarity with the tables necessary for speed. Consequently I was still involved in working out by this newer method the sights of the sun I had taken much earlier north of Porto Rico, when 11:00 P.M., which was the zero hour for the expiration of shore leave for the passengers, struck. From then on, singly and in small groups, the sightseers began to return and very shortly, perforce, I had to give up further study. A more hideous and disgraceful night was never experienced on any ship as those drunks, overflowing with Porto Rican rum, staggered aboard—some fighting drunk, some roaring drunk, some singing drunk, and some just drunk. Hour after hour the deafening hullabaloo kept up, started afresh by a continuous stream of late comers each time Major Curtin and his overworked sergeants managed to subdue momentarily some of the most obstreperous of the already on board cases. The drunken soldiers, Curtin and his M.P.s managed to quell. Even when drunk, the soldiers still had instinct enough left to recognize the danger of bucking their sergeants. But the drunken civilians were hopeless. They were free and equal citizens of the United States, drunk as lords, and recognized no authority at all. Short of strangling them, there was no way of quieting them. All through the night, the ship echoed from bow to stern with an ear-rasping uproar from shouting, screaming, singing, fighting drunks that would have shamed a pack of hyenas. No one slept on the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle that night. Morning came at last and with it relative quiet. Worn-out drunks were strewn prostrate everywhere, in deck chairs, in the passages, on the deck. The M.P.s cleaned up by heaving the now dead-to-the-world celebrants indiscriminately into the nearest staterooms to sleep off their stupors. The ship, topped off with fuel, made ready to sail at noon. A check on the passenger list, however, showed one man still missing. So instead of sailing, the ship’s whistle began to shriek, in the thin hope the noise might waken our missing passenger ashore. It did. Half an hour later he sauntered slowly down the dock, his leisurely gait an added insult to the chafing officers aboard. Explaining casually only that he had been asleep ashore till the whistle roused him, he ambled over the gangway and we immediately cast loose, an hour late. That delay promptly caused trouble then and more later. Hardly had the ship
cleared the wharf, and started to swing her bow towards the harbor mouth, than two huge Pan-American flying boats came in from seaward and straightened out, flying low over the water, for a landing inside the harbor. To avoid a possible chance of fouling them, either in the air or in the long lane of clear water they needed to come down on, our skipper had no option but to drop anchor suddenly to hold us clear. As soon as both flying boats had landed in clouds of flying spray, come about, and taxied away to their berths, clearing the harbor, the clatter of chain links banging over the wildcat forward announced our anchor was being weighed. But before it came aweigh, the clanging of chain coming in suddenly ceased, and we remained anchored for almost another hour before the anchor was at last heaved up into the hawsepipe. It was 2:00 P.M., nearly two hours late, when the vessel finally sailed from San Juan. On February 27, ten days out of New York, we stood out of the harbor. We headed due north for some time, then east-northeast, to get well off the coast before turning eastward for our normal course. The naval authorities in the port had warned us before departure that a U-boat had been reported that morning working in the Anegada Passage east of the island of St. Thomas. Several Navy patrol planes and a destroyer were being sent to search the area, and at least keep the U-boat submerged and immobilized during the day. Still, as we would now pass that way at night, it was advisable to give the coast as wide a berth as possible off Anegada Passage. When we were about two hours out of San Juan and straightened away on our eastward course, I learned in strange fashion what had caused the delay in weighing anchor. Up on the bridge where I was chatting with the third mate over my newly acquired navigation tables, came a swarthy, heavy-set seaman, demanding to see the captain. While a messenger went for the captain, the mate whispered to me that this man, chosen apparently for his obstreperousness, was the union delegate, representing all the strange assortment of “seamen” that made up our motley crew. As soon as the captain appeared on the bridge, with no preliminaries, the delegate faced him with an air of obvious insolence and announced, “The crew’s all decided I’ve gotter tell you the ship’s gotter turn back right away to San Juan.” At this outrageous demand, the captain was struck dumb. For once I was sorry for him. It had certainly come to a sad pass in the American merchant marine when a seaman, a crew’s delegate or not, dared brazenly to order a ship
off a voyage and back to port. When finally the skipper came to sufficiently to speak, he asked, “What for?” “We talked it over and decided that the feller what got his mitt jammed in the wildcat when we was weighin’ the anchor oughter be taken right back to San Juan and put ashore in the hospital there.” At this point, the third mate whispered to me that another able seaman had carelessly jammed a finger between chain and wildcat while the chain was coming in. The delay to the ship in San Juan had occurred from an instant stop of the heaving process till the chain was carefully wedged free of the wildcat to clear him. Now he was in the sick bay for treatment of his torn finger. Here at least I had to admire the skipper for his restraint, though I felt his actions were governed considerably by his knowledge that as matters had been going lately at sea, ship’s officers got little backing from authorities ashore in disputes with their organized crews. In case any member of the crew, from cabin boy up, cared to make an official complaint, a ship master was more likely to find himself permanently without a ship, as had lately happened to the unfortunate skipper of the City of Flint, than to find his authority or his judgment backed up. I held no brief for our captain, who had been unable to get his crew, either on deck or below, to do the ordinary ship’s work, so that the problems had been sloughed off on the passengers who had solved them in various ways, but nevertheless no one could help sympathizing with him now. It was my turn to look with astonishment at that brash seaman, unabashedly telling the captain what he and the crew, none of them with the slightest knowledge of surgery, had decided must be done. Turn a troop transport at sea in wartime, with the ship’s own surgeon and an oversupply of military surgeons aboard, all capable of treating any wound, back to port to treat an injured finger. What gall! The captain, with difficulty restraining his wrath, though it was plain from the swelling arteries in his temples that he was near apoplexy, turned from the seaman before him to the quartermaster. “Tell the ship’s surgeon to come up on the bridge. Then ask General Scott if he’ll send the senior Army surgeon up here, too.” The quartermaster slid down the ladder. The captain abruptly turned his back on the insolent delegate before him, lest he burst a blood vessel, strode to the far wing of the bridge, grabbed his binoculars and started to scan the empty sea ahead. The third mate and I walked to the other wing of the bridge, leaving the
delegate grinning alone near the helmsman. Self-satisfaction was written all over his smiling countenance. “This finger business is all a smoke screen,” muttered the third officer. “That bozo doesn’t care any more about that other sailor ’s smashed finger than the king of Dahomey does. I see through his game. If the ship goes back now, it’s so late she can’t sail again till tomorrow morning, and it’ll give him and his mates another go tonight in San Juan at the cheap rum and the cheap whor*s there! Did you notice he waited to complain till we were well out, not when we might have landed anybody and then kept right on going?” Very possible, I thought. At any rate it sounded more rational than the reason given. In a few minutes, the ship’s doctor, a retired Navy surgeon of long experience gone back to sea in the merchant service for the war emergency, clambered up the bridge. He was followed by a major in the Army Medical Corps. The skipper came back amidships, faced his seaman. “Tell the doctors what you want.” “We want the ship put back to San Juan to land that man with the busted finger for treatment in the hospital there.” It was now the turn of the two surgeons to look in puzzled astonishment from the Seaman before them to each other. “What for?” asked the ship’s doctor. “I’ve already operated on that finger, got the bones set, splinted, and bandaged, and there’s nothing more anybody or any hospital could do right now. Don’t you agree, Major?” he asked the Army man. “You watched the operation.” “I don’t understand you, my man,” said the major, wrinkling his brows questioningly at the sailor before him. “Your shipmate can’t get better medical attention in the world anywhere than he’s getting right here. There are four surgeons aboard and only one minor accident case for them to work on. Landing him’s ridiculous.” At that “my man,” the seaman stiffened up as if insulted. Apparently a crew’s delegate expected to be addressed in a more respectful manner, though I noted that he had ostentatiously omitted any title at all when addressing his captain. But he said nothing till the doctor had finished, then he growled sullenly, “That’s what you say. Now I’m telling you for the crew, turn the ship around and land that man.” The skipper grew still redder, but his only answer was to turn to the Army
surgeon. “Will you recommend to General Scott, Major, that I put the ship back to port so’s this patient can be transferred to a hospital for treatment?” “I will not! No doctor could. This is the damnedest ‘Alice in Wonderland’ performance I ever heard of! You can leave me out of it!” and with that the major swung angrily and left the bridge. The skipper turned back to the delegate. “You heard what both the doctors said. That man will be treated aboard, I’m not turning back.” “What them doctors say ain’t nothin’ to me. You put this ship around or the crew—” “Get off the bridge now,” exploded the skipper, “or I’ll have you thrown off!” The startled sailor, cut off in the middle of his “or else,” gazed a moment at the irate captain. There was no question the skipper was through palavering. For once, he was in a fine position in case the crew’s union back home made an issue of it. It was wartime, the War Department was bound to back him up ashore. And right now before the crew tried to start trouble on board if they didn’t like his decision, they would doubtless recall that episode in the galley a few days before when some of them had looked down the muzzles of the M.P.s’ Colts. To save his face, the interrupted seaman started to mumble again his demand. “Get!” shouted the exasperated skipper, moving toward him. The delegate “got.” Leaning over the port wing of the bridge, gazing down at the waves as the ship steamed on eastward, I reflected on what I had just witnessed and what had gone before. It began to look as if that Army surgeon had hit the nail squarely on the head. This cruise of the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle was right out of “Alice in Wonderland.”
CHAPTER
10 T HE REST OF OUR VOYAGE WAS MORE of the same, with variations—some ridiculous, some serious. Our first night out of San Juan, while north of the Anegada Paspage, the bow lookouts reported two torpedo tracks crossing our stem. Nothing hit us, but there was consternation enough aboard. About midnight the second evening, the general alarm sounded from the bridge turning out all hands in their lifebelts to stand by the lifeboats, while the ship, with guns ready for action, suddenly reversed course, and ran full speed away from some undetermined object spotted in the darkness ahead in our path. The food stayed bad, the crew sullen, the captain more so. This latter was not helped any when four days later, approaching the Equator, we were chased by a warship which might have been an enemy raider but turned out to be one of our own cruisers on South Atlantic patrol looking for enemy raiders camouflaged as merchantmen. What thoroughly upset our skipper was the bawling out he got from the warship captain for answering a signal to identify himself by hoisting the Pig’s Knuckle’s confidential war code call letters instead of her ordinary merchant code flag identification. Had our pursuer been an enemy, sang out the warship captain angrily through his bull-horn when close aboard us, this would have put him in possession of a secret code call which he could have used later to decoy other Allied ships. On we steamed over the Line towards our next refueling stop, Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. I ran a navigation school for the three junior mates, which the skipper looked on with obvious but silent disapproval, though the mates took the instruction enthusiastically. Meanwhile, I also navigated myself, using my own equipment and the third mate’s sextant. The skipper ’s sextant, at his request, had gone back to his custody, where it went out of service again. Evidently he regretted the generous
gesture by which he had started all this in offering me the instrument and inviting me to navigate when I pleased, though he never openly said so to me. In this delicate situation, all my positions went down on the chart as the third mate’s, which I believe the skipper suspected, and it went decidedly amiss with him. He still said nothing to me, but went at it obliquely. Calling the third mate into his cabin, he told the mate to tell me to stop navigating. This the third mate refused to do on the grounds that first it was the captain, not he, who had asked me to navigate, and second, the instruction was doing the mates (as well as the ship) a good turn. The skipper became quite violent over this refusal, and the mate came out of the cabin, determined to quit the ship at the first opportunity, sure now that the captain had a knife out for him. On March 8, nine days out of San Juan, we made the Brazilian coast, coming in from seaward some sixty miles north of Recife. The landfall, based on a fine set of star sights I had got just before sunrise and worked out together with the third mate, was beautiful. We picked up Cape Blanco exactly on the bearing and at the time predicted—an occasion notable by its complete difference from our lubberly landfall at Porto Rico, but it was marked on the bridge mainly by a complete silence on the part of all hands there. In sight of land and with known lighthouses again to guide him, the skipper became less sour as with his usual skill he piloted down the coast. Pernambuco harbor, an unusually difficult one to approach because of off-lying reefs and an involved outside system of buoys, he took his ship into in a manner to arouse any seaman’s admiration—a performance which made the skipper himself positively genial as we came in and anchored inside the breakwater, preparatory to docking for refueling. But the geniality swiftly went sky-high. Someone, either the captain, the purser, or the ship’s operators back in New York, or all of them together) had blundered. Our arrival in Recife was a complete surprise to Recife—no berth had been assigned, no fuel oil had been ordered there to await our coming. And with oil in foreign ports in wartime scarce and strictly rationed, this last was serious. The local oil representatives merely shrugged their shoulders— all their fuel oil was allocated, they could let go of none of it to any ship without proper papers. And the poor S.S. Pig’s Knuckle, in keeping with all else in connection with her, had none at all, proper or otherwise. For two days, we lay idle in Recife while the choleric captain burned up the cables to far-off New York, and the purser kept out of sight. Still, to most of the passengers, the captain’s troubles were a blessing. Here was a large city for
a liberty, cooler, though it was close to the Equator, than San Juan, far more inviting. Had there been a repetition of San Juan, however, given two days ashore, our passengers would have torn both the ship and Recife to pieces, ruining forever our relations with Brazil. But this time in port, General Scott was prepared. Rigorous warning went out to every passenger as to dire penalties, should there be a duplication of that outrageous night in San Juan. And as preventative medicine, Major Curtin’s M.P.s went ashore armed, with orders to pick up and return to the ship immediately any passenger seen on the streets unduly happy. As a result of this, there was relative peace in Recifie and on the ship during our stay. Some disgracefully drunk cases were picked up and taxied back alongside by the M.P.s, but we were spared another night of hideous screeching. On our third day in port, we finally started fueling about 9:30 A.M. Sailing time was set at 6:00 A.M. next day, March 11, in preparation for which Major Curtin had all the passengers carefully rounded up and checked in on board the night before. But when 6:00 A.M. on March 11 came round, we did not get under way. To the great chagrin of the skipper, who had been riding General Scott the day before over delaying the ship on account of passengers, several of the crew were missing. Not till 9.00 A.M., three hours late, did we shove off, even then leaving a quartermaster and an oiler who had apparently decided to desert the good ship Pig’s Knuckle, ashore in a foreign port. We cleared Recife, and shortly were out on the broad South Atlantic, headed at last for Lagos in Nigeria, on the coast of West Africa, our final destination. The events in Recife had made the skipper more peevish than ever; no one could speak to him from then on without getting his head snapped off. This situation was in nowise improved by various alarms of sightings of both enemy surface raiders and U-boats—perhaps true, perhaps false. We ran from everything as a matter of prudence. The weather stayed fine, and though we were running just a hair south of the Equator with the sun practically dead overhead at noon, giving maximum summer conditions, the air felt unusually comfortable. Certainly the climate at sea with us was far superior to summer weather I had experienced in New York, Washington, or Boston, where I had often sweltered with the thermometer around 90° F. Major Goff and I, he from Idaho and I from Colorado, in both of which western states the weather is always perfect, pondering this phenomenon our
second day out of Recife, became curious as to what the temperature really was there under the Equatorial sun. Ordinarily I should have solved this problem simply by a look at the bridge thermometer, but that ship’s instrument had been broken no one knew how long before (certainly long before we left New York) and never replaced. So I couldn’t help. Major Goff, however, took care of the matter in routine Army style. Near by on deck was a sergeant. In the Army, sergeants are the solution to everything. “Anderson!” sang out the lanky major. “Get us a thermometer!” “Yes, sir!” With no ado and no questions asked as to where he might find one, Sergeant Anderson, like Major Rowan delivering the message to Garcia, set off to obtain a thermometer. By and by, he returned with a fever thermometer, evidently from the sick bay. “This may not do, Major,” he apologized, handing it to Goff, “but it’s the best I could get.” The fever thermometer would read no lower than 94°, and it turned out the temperature on deck was considerably lower than that. Going back to the sick bay to return the clinical thermometer, I saw a small thermometer secured to the bulkhead, which with the surgeon’s permission I removed and took out on deck. The temperature there turned out to be 84° F., amazingly low for Equatorial summer, indicating that there are far more uncomfortable spots on earth in summer than right on the Equator. Meanwhile, our troubles continued. While bringing liquor on board the ship had been strictly forbidden, still with the experience gained in prohibition days in the art of bootlegging, evidently some of the passengers had smuggled aboard plenty. The amazing situation developed that the senior civilian on board, the top supervisor for our Middle East contractor, was so continuously drunk at sea that the surgeon had reported him on the verge of delirium tremens. After investigation of this by a board of officers belonging to the Mission, he was relieved of his authority and ordered to be sent home immediately we got to Africa. It became clearer, how with such a man in charge of them and setting the pace, our civilians had shown so little selfrestraint. In his place, Mr. Patrick Murphy, construction superintendent for the contractor, a man grown gray in the construction business, took over and brought some order back into the lives of his unruly charges. But Murphy had a hard crowd to deal with, especially as there was still plenty of bootlegged
hooch, both Porto Rican and Brazilian, stowed away aboard. Finally Murphy brought his troubles to me. He had everybody under control but one man, an ironworker by the name of Bill Cunningham. “This Cunningham’s a tough hombre, Commander,” explained Murphy. “When he’s sober, he’s as fine and accommodating a worker as you’ll ever see. But once he gets some liquor in him, he’s a wild man, spoiling for a fight. And he’s got fists like iron!” Murphy shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, then continued, “I’m round sixty now, and none too well for that. If I was younger myself, I’d take care of him. He’s drunk right now and down in the starboard lower passage, looking for a fight. I could send the M.P.s down there and he’d get it. But when it was over, half a dozen of them M.P.s would be busted up and Cunningham’d be so busted up, too, he’d never be worth a damn to me. He’s a terror in a scrap, and I don’t want any. Now you’re an officer, Commander. Maybe he’ll listen to you. He’s worth saving for that African job if we can only get him there whole, and then keep him sober.” My naval training had taught me it’s useless to enter an argument with a drunken sailor. The only safe thing to do is to slap him into the brig and talk to him when he’s sobered up and recognizes authority. But from what Murphy said, slapping Bill Cunningham into the brig meant a battle royal which would ruin him for our purposes, and well I knew that we had very few good ironworkers. In Massawa, one would be worth his weight in gold. Dubiously I told Murphy I would see what I could do, though I didn’t know Cunningham. While I had little faith in my ability as a lion-tamer, still it was possible that Cunningham might be awed by a naval uniform. If not, I was sure that I could run faster than any drunk. So I went below alone to the passage indicated on the lower passenger deck, to find all the stateroom doors on both sides of the passage closed and presumably locked. In solitary possession of the passage, clad solely in shorts and a sleeveless undershirt which exhibited only too well his powerful shoulders and his brawny muscles, clutching in one fist a bottle of rum and banging with the other on the closed doors, was a man shouting drunkenly, “Open them doors, you bastards! Come on out an’ fight!” Evidently here was Cunningham. At the noise of my footsteps, he ceased pounding, looked round toward me, then braced himself, ready to fight.
“Your name Cunningham?” I asked brusquely. “Yeah. Wot’s it to you?” Uncertainly his bloodshot eyes scanned me from my feet to my brass hat. He didn’t know who I was. “Lots. I’m in command in Massawa. You headed there?” “Sure. I’m gonna work there.” “Well, you’re not. You’re fired! You’re a damned disgrace to the United States. I don’t want any drunken bums like you in Massawa. As soon as we get to Lagos, your trip ends! That’s all of Africa you’ll ever see. You’re going right back home on this ship! How’s that suit you?” Cunningham’s bleary eyes stared into mine. Steadily I stared back. My staccato phrases in discharging him so peremptorily had momentarily, at least, taken his mind off fighting and his befuddled brain was evidently struggling with the new idea as he gazed at me. “How’s that suit you?” I reiterated sharply. “Naw. I wanna go to Massawa. Had enough o’ this damned ship. Doan wanna go home on her,” he mumbled finally, dropping his eyes. “Well, you’re going to! You’re fired! You get that? I can’t use any bums like you. But if you think you can do better, quit this damned drinking right now. Then come see me the day we’re due in Lagos and maybe I’ll reconsider. That’s only maybe, remember! I won’t promise anything.” I paused a moment to let that sink in, then snapped out, “Which is your stateroom?” Still further confused by the sudden change of subject, Cunningham shuffled uneasily, dropped his fighting stance, and started solemnly to scan the closed stateroom doors. “That one,” he announced finally, pointing uncertainly with the bottle to the fourth door down. “As a start, then, get into that room and stay there till you’re sober!” I ordered. Cunningham’s drunken eyes came angrily back to mine. With those shoulders he might have broken me in two, but I gazed back unflinchingly. For a long minute we stood glaring at each other. Whatever then motivated him, I never knew. Perhaps it was fear over the loss of the chance of ever seeing Africa. Perhaps it was his dread of the long trip home in the Pig’s Knuckle. At any rate, without a word he shuffled off into his stateroom, leaving me in possession of the empty corridor. I went back up on deck, and told Pat Murphy quiet now reigned below.
CHAPTER
11 AT 11.5 KNOTS, OUR NORMAL CRUISING speed, leaving a little power in reserve for emergencies, we steamed on due east for Africa, keeping a little to the south of the Equator. Lookouts were doubled, the Armed Guard crews kept always on the alert at the guns. It was hereabouts in the South Atlantic the year before that Nazi raiders had caught and sunk two merchant ships, the Zamzam and the Robin Moor, with particularly brutal attacks on their passengers and crews, seeing we were then neutral. It was amazing how out of the world we were on our last leg from Recife to Lagos. We never received any radio news reports, for the ship’s radio set was kept constantly tuned only to the emergency SOS wave length and consequently could receive neither any long or shortwave news broadcasts. As for private portable receiving sets, of which several had been brought aboard by passengers, all had been gathered up and locked away on General Scott’s orders. Such sets in receiving, reradiate sufficiently to act as short range sending sets themselves, giving off a signal which a U-boat not too far off can pick up with a direction finder and thus track down. So as completely cut off from the world as in the old sailing ship days, and at a speed not much faster, we headed for Lagos. The weather stayed remarkable-blue skies, blue water, clouds of flying fish, with at night a gorgeous phosphorescent wake, burning stars—and no moon. This last was especially appreciated, as with no Wacs, no Waves, and no other women aboard, we had no need of a moon, and its absence made everybody feel better since it completed our black-out perfectly. But the weather was our only bright spot. In the dining room, the unending round of stew, frankfurters, and pig’s knuckles, all served as usual with soggy potatoes and awash spinach, more unpalatable than ever under tropic skies, kept the ship true to her nickname. Then the skipper began running with all the huge steel cargo doors in the side of the ship’s hull down near her waterline,
swung wide open, ensuring her prompt capsizing in case of torpedoing. A protest by General Scott against the most serious jeopardizing of the safety of a ship at sea in wartime I ever heard of, brought nothing but a wisecrack from the skipper in answer to Major Curtin who carried the, general’s request that they be kept closed as a matter of elementary safety. In fact, the offended skipper went on from wisecracks to inform the major in ordinary times he would be warranted in locking up General Scott, the major himself, Colonel Gruver, and some other officers he named (oddly enough he omitted me) for their interference with his ship, but he was generously refraining. The fact that these were not ordinary times seems to have eluded the skipper altogether. Had they been, the Army would not have chartered the ship, the general and the rest of the Army passengers would not have been aboard on their way to war, and none of us, including the captain himself, would have been there in the South Atlantic in danger of being torpedoed. So Major Curtin only laughed at the skipper ’s gesture of magnanimity in refraining. It was as obvious to him as it was to the skipper, that locking up the general, with 200 armed troops at his back, for endeavoring to ensure the safety of his troops and himself, was something not lightly to be undertaken by anyone. Eight days out of Recife, found us on March 19 in the Gulf of Guinea, center of the slave trade in the old days. We were just north of the Equator, heading northeast for Lagos and only 346 miles from it. We had already traveled 6500 miles in the thirty-one days we had been at sea since leaving New York, and only one thought animated all hands on our last day out—if our luck held for just one more day, we should get to Lagos and say good-by forever to the Pig’s Knuckle. Personally, I regretted the ill-advised moment in which I had canceled my chance to go by air—a trip in a Flying Fortress piloted by even the least experienced of the Army Air Corps’ newest flyers would have been more competently run and far less nerve-racking. And it would have taken only four days at most, instead of the thirty-one we had already been on the ocean in our roundabout wanderings. Our last night at sea found the skipper fearful of something at last—an air attack! U-boats and their torpedoes he disdained, but apparently planes and their bombs, menacing his upper decks directly, were something else with him. At any rate, he requested of General Scott that the military lookout be doubled during the night to watch for planes, and I volunteered for one of the watches. From midnight on till 4:00 A.M., I stood a sky watch atop the pilot house but
sighted nothing at all except a lovely array of stars, most of them never visible in northern latitudes, which of itself repaid the effort and the loss of sleep. Aside from that, it enabled me to size up leisurely the best stars for morning sights. I was very anxious to see that the ship made a good landfall this last time. A good landfall was imperative for us, as the Guinea coast each side of Lagos was covered with uncharted British minefields for the benefit of any U-boats which might try snooping in the vicinity. It was no shore to come blundering up against blindly as we had at Porto Rico, looking for landmarks to tell us where we were; not at least if we wanted to get into Lagos still afloat. I selected two stars, the planet Venus in the east and the star Shaula of the constellation Scorpio bearing south. Both of these were of a magnitude bright enough to remain visible in a sextant even when approaching dawn lighted the horizon sharply enough for use. And these two stars made practically a right angle with each other in the sky, so that the lines of position I could get from sights of them would intersect almost perpendicularly and give me an excellent “fix” for the ship. With that determined and no enemy planes showing up, I went below when my watch ended at 4:00 A.M., got the third mate’s sextant (as well as the third mate who turned out to help) and went back on the boat deck. By now I had confidence enough in the navigational ability of both the third mate and the junior third (both of whom had worked diligently on navigation the past few weeks) to trust them on their own to get the ship back safely to New York from Africa. But this last position was unusually important and I felt safest doing it myself. Between 4:32 A.M., when the horizon began to show up in the east, and 4:49 A.M., when the increasing dawn started to fade out even my bright stars, I obtained a fine set of sights of both Venus and Shaula. These, swiftly worked out by Ageton’s method, gave us for 4:49 A.M. ship’s time) a sharp “fix” for the ship. The intersection of my lines of position placed us then in Latitude 4° 43.3' North, Longitude 2' 07.7’ East, just 129 miles from Lagos. The third mate, with no further ado, entered this on the chart as his early morning position. From it, run up to 7:00 A.M., the skipper then changed course some 10° more to the westward, and with the ship speeded up to her maximum, 13 knots, headed (so he hoped) directly for Lagos. Meanwhile, I turned in, clothes and all, to catch up on my lost night’s sleep. Hardly, it seemed, had I even closed my eyes when a knocking on my
stateroom door woke me again. I glanced at my watch. Only seven o’clock. Who wanted me that early when I had been up practically all night? I looked up and there in the open doorway stood Bill Cunningham. I rolled out of my bunk, sat up on the edge of it. “You said to come to see you the day we got to Lagos, Commander,” announced Cunningham in a voice strangely soft as compared to his husky frame. “Here I am.” He was certainly bright and early. I rubbed my sleepy eyes, looked him over. He was sober, and from his clear eyes and skin, had evidently been so for some time. The change in his manner, his voice, and his appearance since the day I had last seen him below in the corridor, was remarkable. He was as mild and inoffensive a person now as one might ever see. “All right, Cunningham, you remember what I said when I fired you. How about it?” “I ain’t had a drink, Commander, since that time. I want to go to Massawa, and if you’ll only give me another chance, I’ll try my best to stay sober. I can’t promise you I’ll never take another drink, but I can promise I’ll do my damnedest to stay away from it. I’m not looking for any trouble or any fights with anybody. All I want is to go through with what I started. Don’t send me home.” That was an honest enough statement. Looking into Cunningham’s deeply serious face, no one could doubt he meant it. “That’s fine, Cunningham; I’ll take you at your word,” I assured him briefly. There could be no gain in long lectures on the evils of drink. “You try your best and that’s good enough for me. All right, you can go with us. And good luck to you on the job.” I rose and shook his hand warmly. He thanked me wholeheartedly but uneffusively and in only a few words, and left. I rolled back into my bunk to see no more of Bill Cunningham for months to come. A little later, I was roused by the heat, for as we approached the Guinea coast and the sun got higher, it began to get uncomfortably warm. I rose again, stripped, and soused myself in the shower to cool off. Then down to breakfast, with a feeling of thankfulness that shortly I should say farewell to that dining room and all its unpleasant memories. Up on deck again, even in a light khaki uniform, it was hot. The breeze happened to be from dead astern and about force 2, matching our own speed, so that effectively we were traveling in dead air, with no movement relative to
us to cool us off. But since it was just as uncomfortable on deck as inboard, I soon retired to my stateroom to pack my bags, preparatory to departure. About 2:00 P.M., as expected, we picked up low-lying land ahead. Still steaming on for a short time without the slightest change in course being needed, we hit the entrance to the harbor between the long outlying breakwaters squarely on the nose, a beautiful landfall! This was perfection, which I had scarcely dared to hope for in deep sea navigation. But that something at least within hail of perfection was necessary in making Lagos, soon became evident. As a grim reminder of what was now going on in the world, lying not far to the westward of the channel entrance were the topmasts of a large ship protruding from the water—just the tips of her two masts with some shrouds showing above the waves, and nothing else. The pilot (a very black native of Nigeria who boarded from a small pilot boat at the channel entrance to take us up the river to Lagos) laconically informed us of what had happened. Those were the masts of a vessel which had recently made the mistake of coming close in, too far to the westward. Then when the error was realized, and she had found where she was, she had steamed directly east for the breakwaters, only to hit a defensive mine en route and founder finally, unsuccessful in her struggle to get into the shallow harbor before she went down. I scanned the tips of those masts with professional interest. Apparently the ship was down in about fifteen fathoms of water. Too bad I hadn’t one of my salvage ships with me. Here right at the western gateway to Africa was a job for us. But I knew I had no need to worry about jobs. If what I had heard of Massawa were only half true, we should have a plethora of wrecks to work on. All hands were now crowding up on deck, intensely relieved. Discarded life jackets went sailing helter-skelter onto the boat deck, to land nobody cared where any more. We were inside the breakwaters at last, safe from any further wartime perils of the sea. Now all eyes were turned eagerly on Equatorial West Africa, opening before us as we entered the river up which Lagos in Nigeria lay. White sand beaches fringed the river mouth. Palm trees were everywhere, and the river banks as we stood on were lined with lovely White tropical homes, a yacht club, the Government House, and such other appurtenances of British colonial life as we’d read about. Passing the Government House, the guard and band (very soldierly looking
blacks in white uniforms but with bare feet) were paraded in our honor and an American flag hoisted alongside the British, while the band ashore played both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” As we had no band, we could answer this welcoming gesture only by dipping our colors and cheering wildly. Within half an hour, we were being breasted in by tugs against our berth, a very modern pier. Our thirty-two-day voyage was ended safely—no thanks to the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle and her Pinafore crew.
CHAPTER
12 AS WE HAD KNOWN ALL ALONG, WE were due to cross Africa to our Middle East stations by air. Once the ship was tied up, the sole topic of conversation was how soon the planes would start us on our way, as Lagos was hot, humid, and worst of all, malarial. This was the fever coast of ill fame, where in the old slave trading days, no white man could stay a night without contracting malaria, where a stay exceeding a few months was sure death from malarial fever. Before leaving America, together with all the other Middle East personnel, I had been immunized by the Army Medical Corps against everything possible —smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, yellow fever, cholera, and typhus—a series of shots, which though spread over several weeks, had kept me decidedly groggy till departure. But against malaria, the Army had no inoculation. Each of us was armed with a package of quinine tablets, but that was no preventative—it would merely mask and mitigate the symptoms once malaria was contracted. Our only defense, so our surgeons assured us, was to stay behind screens once night had fallen and the malarial mosquitoes were abroad, and to sleep under mosquito nets, with which all of us had been provided. Under the circ*mstances, although to some degree the swampy mosquito coast had been cleaned up, getting out of Lagos in a hurry was desirable. General Scott sent his aide ashore immediately to check up on the air transportation situation. It turned out to be not bad. The Army Air Corps was running all air transport across Africa with Pan-American planes and pilots doing the actual flying. Having been warned by cable of our coming, though not of the exact day of our uncertain arrival, Pan-Am had arranged to mass all its transport planes at Lagos for the movement. But even so, with 379 passengers landed all at once to take out, the departure would take three days, starting with one plane in the
morning while the others were being assembled for later despatch. Since this was an Army movement, it goes without saying that priorities in departure were naturally to be in order of rank. Civilian rank (due to executive position) was, however, also equally recognized, with the planes taking off alternately with soldiers and with civilians. The first plane out next morning was scheduled to carry military passengers. Early next morning found General Scott and the fifteen top ranking officers (including me) going over the side to the pier, bound for the airport outside Lagos, clad in our lightest weight khaki, for it was already (or still) hot. Without regret and without ceremony, we bade farewell forever to the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle and all she stood for, to us seemingly only a long drawn out nightmarish dream from which at last we had escaped by waking. Hopefully, the moment our feet touched the pier ridding us of her finally, our faces turned eastward across Africa and what opportunities in the war lay before us there in the Middle East. It was only a short ride in a car to the Lagos airfield, a flat, wide, well laid, out plain, baking under the Equatorial African sun, the first of many such fields I was soon to be acquainted with. We were on time for our early morning take-off, but our plane wasn’t. Something wasn’t right with its engines, and the mechanics were still struggling with them. Meanwhile, the sun rose higher, and in spite of the protection of the airfield office into which we promptly fled for shade, we began to swelter. Finally, the perspiring Army Air Corps major running the field came in to tell us the plane, specially rushed to Lagos for the first trip, could not be tuned up sufficiently well to take off that day for the 3000-mile flight across Central Africa. Our faces fell at that lugubrious announcement. Back to the Pig’s Knuckle for another day? It was unbearable! But hastily he revived our sunken feelings. A regularly scheduled land flight was due in about 9:00 A.M. from the cross-Atlantic air terminus at Roberts Field in Liberia; westward of us. Considering all the rank he had before him and the circ*mstances, he would bump all the passengers off that plane and give it to us for our eastward trip. We should be delayed only a few hours. The incoming passengers he would forward, depending on their priorities, as rapidly as he could. This was better. While we sympathized with those coming in who would find themselves unexpectedly held over in Lagos a day or more, still we shed no
tears over them. If they had been lucky enough somehow to get across the ocean to Africa by air in a few days, while we had suffered a month on the same passage, it was only the natural law of compensation that they, rather than we, should bear the burden of this mishap. At 9:00 A.M. on the dot, the plane, a twin-engined Douglas transport, appeared over the field, circled to a landing, and then taxied up to a stop in front of the airfield office. The port side door was swung open, and the passengers started nonchalantly to debark to stretch their legs (so they thought) a few minutes before taking off again for the interior of Africa. With eagle eyes we, already on the field out under the sun again, scanned their necks and their shoulders as one by one those unsuspecting passengers emerged. All Army men, except one naval lieutenant and one very insignificant-looking civilian clutching an umbrella. And, thank God, from their collar or shoulder insignia, not a general, not a colonel, not even a major in the crowd! There would be no serious trouble in bumping off that lot. The Air Corps major bustled up to the descending passengers. “Sorry, gentlemen!” he announced. “There’ll be a delay here for all of you. Get back in the plane and bring out your belongings. You’re going no further in this plane!” We got back into the office out of the sun, content to leave arguments and protests to the airfield manager, of which he immediately got plenty. But some of the more indoctrinated Army juniors and the Navy man, looking over the general’s stars, my brass hat, the eagles, and the silver and gold oak leaves liberally sprinkled over the waiting group in the office, took it more philosophically. Protests or no protests, however, within half an hour the plane had been emptied of all the incoming passengers and their baggage, our bags stowed on board in the nose of the plane in their place, and we were invited to embark. General Scott first, so he might choose where he pleased to sit, then the rest of us, clambered through the door into the khaki-colored plane bearing the Army Air insignia painted prominently on its wings. All sixteen of us were carefully checked off inside the plane, both by the airfield manager and Colonel Gruver, to make sure none were missing and no unauthorized passengers were with us, then the manager descended and the door was slammed to, sealing us in. The plane had stood half an hour already on the field, absorbing heat both from the overbaked ground beneath and the sizzling African sun overhead. Since all insulation and interior sheathing had been stripped from its aluminum
shell to lighten it for war service, it was literally an oven inside once the door was closed. We expected momentarily that the chocks would be pulled from the wheels and we should take off to cool ourselves in flight, but it didn’t happen. Instead, minute after minute for another half hour went by and we stewed. I couldn’t stand it any longer. After a few minutes, off came my khaki jacket, wringing wet with sweat. A little later, off came my khaki shirt, even wetter. Still we remained on the ground. Casting dignity to the wind, off came my undershirt then, completely soaked through. Meanwhile, my fellow passengers were doing likewise, and I think we should next have started stripping off our trousers had not the door of the plane been suddenly opened from the outside. To the cry, “Another passenger! Flat orders to send him! You’re off now!” there was literally tossed through the opened door, followed by his bag, the insignificant little civilian who had previously been bumped off the plane, still, of all things, clinging to his umbrella! Behind him, the door was slammed to again and secured. Simultaneously with that, the chocks were jerked free of the wheels and we taxied over to the runway. Swabbing our faces vigorously to clear our eyes of sweat so we could see out, all of us were so engrossed in watching the ground whiz past while our plane hurtled down the runway and lifted smoothly into the air, we gave no more than a swift malevolent passing glance at the cause of our delay as he picked himself off the deck and sidled inconspicuously into the end seat next the door. Even after we had straightened away in flight and were steadily climbing, all hands were fully occupied for some time in trying to dry their dripping torsos, a hopeless task, as no one had anything dry at hand to work with. Gradually as we rose into higher altitudes, with the hot earth dropping away beneath us and the cooler air rushing by at 160 miles an hour to wash away the heat from our plane, it became comfortably cool inside, so we stopped perspiring. But the plane kept swiftly climbing till we were at 9000 feet long before we or our belongings had opportunity to dry out. As we rose toward 9000 feet, to us it became colder and colder. Whether we liked it or not, to keep from freezing, back one by one went on our soaked undershirts, our dripping shirts, our wet jackets. Finally we were driven to slipping on our overcoats, which we hadn’t worn since leaving Cape Hatteras, but which now fortunately we were carrying with us inside the plane, since we couldn’t stow the bulky things in
our bags. Thus clad, we sat shivering for some time till the heat of our bodies at last dried out everything between our skins and our overcoāts. All this took nearly the first hour aloft. Not till then did I pay much attention to the interior of the plane. When reasonably dry, I began to look around. Our plane was a standard Douglas twin-engined transport, stripped completely and outfitted for Army service. Gone were the upholstered bucket seats, the interior sheathing. We could look directly at the aluminum ribs, the outer aluminum shell, all the tiny rivets holding the plane together. For our seats, instead of the athwartship chairs, nicely upholstered for comfort, there ran along each side simply a long, low aluminum-topped bench, molded into seat bottoms, but naturally with no give to the aluminum. Other than these two benches, the inside of the plane was completely barren of fittings. This plane was the prototype of hundreds of others I was to see before the war was over, unarmed, lightened as much as possible, intended only to carry as many troops or paratroopers and their fighting equipment as it could lift off the ground. Having satisfied my curiosity as to our plane, I looked casually aft along the port side. There, huddled on the end of the bench next the door, sat the added passenger who had been the cause of our sweltering delay. (I was myself seated well forward on the starboard side.) He must have been quite an important civilian in spite of his half-pint size. And he must have had quite an unusual priority to have managed to hold the plane till he could get the airport manager overruled and himself reinstated on a full plane once he had been bumped off. That no one of our own group had been bumped off at the last minute to make room for him when reinstated, was probably due only to the fact he weighed so little, it made no difference to the plane. Now for the first time, I took a good look at him, then looked again in astonishment. There could be no doubt of it, our very important passenger was a Hindoo! Except that he had more on, all light linen, he was a dead ringer in appearance, age, and manner for Mahatma Gandhi, and certainly weighed no more, not over seventy or eighty pounds at most. Perhaps, considering what had happened, he was the Mahatma! I nudged the Army captain seated alongside just abaft me, and asked him to look and see if he saw what I saw. He took a look, and his eyes bugged out. Excitedly he turned again to me. “Why, I know that Hindoo! I was on the Clipper bound westward across the
Pacific for the Middle East that got hung up in Honolulu the day they bombed Pearl Harbor. And that Hindoo was with me, bound home for India. Of course, the Clipper ended its voyage then and there, and how that Hindoo wept all over the place! Now I’ll be damned if I’m not with him again in a plane bound east this time for the Middle East, while he’s still headed for India. But it’s wartime now. How’d he ever wangle an air priority across the Atlantic?” That, of course, I wouldn’t know. It was all quite a coincidence, not to mention very curious. My seat mate jumped up, walked all the way aft down the passage, greeted our Hindoo fellow traveler most cordially. It turned out to be the same Hindoo, sure enough, but he seemed to be far more interested in solitary meditation over that umbrella clutched now between his bony knees than in renewing a casual acquaintance with an American. Their conversation swiftly languished. My companion came back a little crestfallen. “It’s the same Hindoo, all right, but he doesn’t seem to want to talk any more. I asked him how he was lucky enough to get a priority going this way in wartime, and he shut up like a clam, so I left him. Funny little duffer, isn’t he?” I agreed he was, and then lost interest in him, for now, having left the coast and the green valley of the Niger behind us, and having cooled the plane off, the pilot was flying at lower altitude, 5000 feet, and giving us a better view of the country. We were heading northeast for Kano, 400 miles inland from the coast, our first stop, and we were not too far away from it. The terrain below had changed from the dense green along the coastal belt to more open, drier country with only straggling vegetation, and then became rather barren. Soon we dropped very low and started circling for a landing over Kano, a very ancient market city on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Kano, with a native population of 100,000, from the air was startling. All over the place were what appeared to be huge, sprawling, flat-roofed apartment houses heavily built of mud, resembling very much the Indian pueblos of our own Southwest, except they were decorated with gaudily colored tiles. Surrounding the whole city, and perhaps explaining how it had managed to survive some thousands of years, were tremendous mud walls, some forty feet thick. The brown mud of which everything seemed to be built, looked as if a heavy rainstorm would dissolve the whole city, but presumably it rained very little, if at all, thereabouts. We came down for a smooth enough landing and were taken promptly to the
Officers’ Mess of the Air Force for lunch. We stayed in Kano only long enough for lunch, but even in that brief time, two things struck us forcibly. One was the temperature. It was hot, 105° in the shade, but as it was dry, it was bearable. The other was the tall black natives, striding along with heavy burdens skillfully balanced on their heads, clad in white robes of the cut of flour bags (which on close inspection many of them were, brand names and all). Never had I seen such utterly black Negroes; they were so black they seemed to have almost a bluish tinge. After a swift take-off (no waiting in the sun this time), we headed for Maiduguri, 300 miles further to the eastward and our stopping place for the night, since no night flying was being done along that lonely route fringing the southern Sahara. The scenery was more of what we had passed over approaching Kano—tiny native villages composed of round thatched huts, sparse vegetation, and nothing of any great interest. I had a headache, eyestrain I thought, brought on by the glaring sunlight, and the afternoon air over eastern Nigeria was rather bumpy which made most of the Army passengers seasick. None of us were sorry when a few hours later we dropped down on Maiduguri airfield on the eastern edge of Nigeria, ending our first day’s air voyage, though it was still only late afternoon. An airways bus, driven by our own pilot, took us all, passengers and plane crew, from the hot airfield to the Pan-Am station some miles away, where at least there were palms about to give some shade. There was a village of Maiduguri near by, which we had glimpsed from the air, but all hands were quite content to stay at the station. There the buildings, of typical Central African architecture, were built for comfort only and that was all we were interested in. Every building in the compound was the same— one-storied, with thick mud walls, rather high, and over all a heavily thatched roof, sharply pitched, projecting considerably beyond the walls to shade them, and clear of the side wall tops by several feet so that an open space for ventilation was left all around the building. Undoubtedly it was needed. What took our eyes most on arriving, however, was a shower bath, pointed out to us by the pilot. It was primitive, but effective. Atop a fenced enclosure some twenty feet square and eight feet high, stood four fifty-gallon ex-gasoline drums, connected to impromptu shower heads. The water supply was simple— no pumps, no pipes, no valves, no meters. Half a dozen black boys with buckets on their heads brought the water, four more blacks alongside the drums overhead poured it into them, and there you were.
We were all hot, sticky, and uncomfortable. Sightseeing in Maiduguri could go hang. Immediately we had dumped our bags and ourselves into the opentopped, mud-walled rooms assigned us in the main quarters building, we were all stripping. In a few minutes, clad only in towels and shoes and carrying our own soap, we were all trekking through the hot dust to the shower a hundred feet away. There, four at a time, we reveled under the coarse sprays while the grinning black boys overhead poured on the water. By the time all of us had dressed again in dry clothing extracted from our now available bags, the sun had set and it was cooler. Outside in the dust, native merchants, scenting trade, were spreading their wares for display—leopard skins, python skins, elephant tusks, ivory souvenirs, and native weapons of all kinds. Since I had no place within my scanty plane allowance to carry an ounce more, I refrained from purchasing anything, though some magnificent boa constrictor skins were insistently offered. Tiring of the traders’ persistency, I turned away back to the quarters, just in time to glimpse something odder even than the huge boa constrictor skins unrolled a moment before at my feet. Now that all the Westerners had cleared it, there in solitary state was our Mahatma Gandhi, fully clothed, carrying a towel, heading for the shower enclosure, and wonder of wonders, still carrying his umbrella! Did he intend, I speculated, to hold that over him while he stood beneath the spray? About an hour later, dinner was announced as served in a separate mudwalled building, some distance from the quarters. While it was to be nothing special, only the regular evening meal for the Pan-Am and the Army airfield personnel who far outnumbered us, we needed no second urging to be on time. Dinner was served by barefooted black boys clad in the usual white flour sacks, simply but effectively tailored with three holes cut in them for head and arms, but it was far better served than by the surly white stewards we had left on shipboard. And what a dinner! Creamed spinach soup, fried chicken, roast beef, some delicious native vegetables, excellent mashed potatoes, and real apple pie with cheese! Shades of the unlamented S.S. Pig’s Knuckle! How we fell on that dinner! But bur Hindoo companion disdained it. Apparently nothing they served (or its cookery) came within the boundaries of his religious taboos, and not till a can of sliced peaches was brought and opened in his presence, did he deign to take anything at all. Darkness fell quickly. As we were due to make an actual early dawn take-off
for a long flight next day, I turned in at 8:00 P.M. Rather than sleep in the room assigned which still retained quite a bit of the heat absorbed during the day, I elected to use one of the narrow iron beds set up in the open outside, where it was already cooler. Fully clothed, I crawled into the bed beneath the netting. Then I saw that that all-important mosquito net, draped from outriggers at head and foot, was solidly tucked in under the mattress all around me before I undressed and slipped into my pajamas. Of course, to anyone with reasonable experience in a Pullman upper berth, this last was no trick at all. I dragged the sheet over me, then very shortly a blanket also, for it was remarkable how cool it soon got there in the open, once night had fallen. I gazed upward through my mosquito netting at the brilliant Equatorial stars, then swiftly went sound asleep for the first time in over a month. Here in the African desert was a comfortable bed, so different from those on the Pig’s Knuckle, where the pillows, to mince no words, literally stank, and the mattresses were hard as rocks. At 4:30 A.M., still in complete darkness, we were all turned out to dress hurriedly and breakfast before departure. The breakfast matched the dinner— pancakes with real maple syrup, and delicious coffee. That finished, just as the first indications of dawn appeared, we were herded back in the airways bus. Hastily the pilot counted noses in the early twilight to make sure he had everyone, then slammed the bus door. Meanwhile, Colonel Gruver, just as anxious to ensure none of our party was missing, was doing the same. As the pilot threw in the clutch and started, Colonel Gruver sang out, “Pilot, wait! You’ve left a man. That Hindoo is missing!” Instead of stopping, the pilot only shifted into second, then into high. When finally the bus was well under way, he half turned his head to answer, “That’s O.K. He’s staying over in Maiduguri on business. Don’t bother.” That certainly seemed odd. What business could our Hindoo, having moved heaven and earth to get aboard our plane in his urgent desire to get speedily back to India, suddenly have discovered in the God-forsaken village of Maiduguri to cause him to abandon the plane in Central Africa? But in view of the pilot’s curt reply, no one commented any further and we moved swiftly on to the airfield. In the dim twilight, we took off, from several thousand feet aloft soon to witness the sunrise, abrupt in its suddenness in the clear, dry desert air. When the plane had finally been leveled off, the co-pilot took over and the pilot came
back into the passenger compartment, apologized to Colonel Gruver. “Sorry to have cut you off that way in the bus, Colonel, but I couldn’t discuss that Hindoo while we were still on the ground.” “Oh, that’s all right, pilot, no apologies needed,” Colonel Gruver assured him. “I was just afraid you’d forgotten him and the plane would be hung up again while somebody had to go back for him. But what’d he want to stop in Maiduguri for? He didn’t show any signs of having business there last night up to the time he turned in.” “He stayed there on business, all right, Colonel, but it wasn’t of his own choosing.” The pilot swung about to take in General Scott and the rest of us. “Along about 11:00 P.M., when everybody was asleep, a coded radio message came in from British Army Intelligence. It said to seize that Hindoo suddenly before he could destroy anything, search him thoroughly, report results, and then hold him incommunicado in Maiduguri for further instructions. Well, since this is British territory, the airfield manager sent into the village for the head of the British constabulary to do the job. He came out with a couple of limey assistants and you should have seen him work.” The pilot paused, apparently recalling the scene admiringly. “That lad knew his stuff. He got that Hindoo asleep, so he certainly had no chance to destroy anything, and got him and all his belongings out of there into the airfield manager ’s office without waking up anybody else. Then they searched him thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly—went through everything he had and didn’t find a damned thing of interest. After that they stripped him and looked in his mouth, his ears, his nose, between his toes, under the soles of his feet. He came through that as innocent a Hindoo as you’ll ever find. Then they nailed him with the goods. How do you think?” Nobody hazarded a guess; we couldn’t imagine. “By his umbrella! Of course, that constable had gone over the umbrella one of the first things he did—opened it, closed it, found it had a solid wood shaft and handle, no hollows in it to hide anything. But when he couldn’t find anything anywhere else, it struck him the Hindoo certainly set store on that umbrella—he’d had it with him in his bed when they grabbed him. So the constable went back to the umbrella. It had a long metal ferrule over its wood tip; nothing unusual in that, but he thought he’d see. So he worked off the ferrule, and there it was! Wrapped round the tip of the umbrella under the ferrule were long thin strips of paper covered with fine writing, some in German, some in Hindoo. It took two men to hold that half-portion Hindoo
when they found that! “Well, they took that Hindoo and all his stuff off to the hoosegow in Maiduguri to await developments, and I went back to sleep. And that’s the business that’s holding him in Maiduguri. He won’t be flying the rest of the way with us.” So there, sequestered in the hands of the British Intelligence on the edge of the desert in Central Africa, we left our Hindoo and his secret Nazi instructions, weeping even more copiously, I imagine, than when his other plane, stopped halfway round the world from us by Japanese bombs falling on Honolulu, had also failed to carry him further along toward India and sedition.
CHAPTER
13 T HE PILOT, WITH THAT EXPLANATION off his mind, started back for his controls. Just before he ducked through the forward door, he turned and added, “We’re over French Equatorial Africa, which is in the hands of the Vichy French and they’d intern you if we landed. So we’ve got a long nonstop hop to make on this leg all the way to El Fasher in the western Sudan before we can come down. But that Vichy crowd have got no planes to bother us while we’re in the air, so I’m going to fly low now. We’re passing over the Lake Chad country, which is the best wild animal spot in Africa, and maybe you’ll see some of ’em.” In a rather swift descent, we came down to 800 feet. Below us was only desert country—nothing green whatever, with only the African version of sagebrush and desert trees, and the bare earth looking very dry and burned. A couple of lions (startled by the roar of our engines, no doubt) bounded madly away through the brush. We spotted a few gazelles and some half dozen ostriches, then crossed a small river with a few crocodiles basking in it. The river seemed out of place, for Heaven knows where the water might come from; the multitude of fine dry river beds we saw, all of sand, seemed more in keeping. That was all, for it was too uncomfortably hot that low down to stay long, and shortly the pilot took us up to 5000 feet again and continued eastward, with the country below getting more barren and sandy. The hours dragged on with the plane droning steadily eastward and our aluminum seats getting harder and harder. Having no other use for our overcoats, we soon were all using them, folded up, for cushions to sit on, while monotonously, mile after mile, we sped across the dead plain below. Some hours out, the ground, still barren, began to get somewhat mountainous and we rose to 7000 feet. Then up we went still higher, to clear a mountain range with peaks rising to 9000 feet, with their ridges clearly visible
not far below us—jagged, burned very brown, no vegetation on them. Nor any snow either, for they all looked too hot for that. The air became quite bumpy and the plane began to bounce round in lively fashion. Whoever invented the old saw about riding on air as the ultimate in smoothness had obviously never been in a plane with air currents beneath him rising off hot mountain peaks. We got over the mountains safely and settled into straighter flight. All hands breathed somewhat more easily. Had we crashed anywhere, even the Vichy French and their internment would have been welcomed to save us all from dying of thirst, for the caravans we spotted creeping along beneath us were few and very far between. Once again we had desert country to fly over, but soon we reached the western Sudan and there was friendly territory beneath us—friendly, that is, politically only, for the desert looked no more inviting. Then briefly we encountered some more mountains, not so bad this time. Shortly beyond them must have been some water, for there below was the little town of El Fasher on the western fringe of the Sudan, where several important caravan routes crossed to justify its existence. We had flown 900 miles since leaving Maiduguri. We came down on the airfield for a stop to have lunch while the plane refueled. It was hot, as usual. At this field, run by the British, there was no such meal as we had had at the Pan-Am stations. Food was evidently scarcer and strictly rationed. A couple of sandwiches and some warm water had to suffice. Meanwhile, at El Fasher I got a grim reminder of why I had not got off by air from New York. On the field were the burned remains of a Flying Fortress. Just off the field at Kano had been the crushed wreck of another. How many of these early Fortresses had not even made Africa, I never learned. We took off shortly for our last eastward leg to Khartoum on the Nile. We hurdled some more mountains, flew over more desert, and finally in the late afternoon came down on the airfield, the largest we had yet seen, outside Khartoum. We had covered 1400 miles since dawn. When the plane taxied to a stop and we emerged, I gasped as if I had stepped directly into a blast furnace. At the first whiff of that blistering air, involuntarily I stopped breathing. We had thought we had been hot before, but we had met nothing like that Khartoum field. We rushed for the nearest building to get out of the sun and of that dry, baking heat that seemed to shrivel the lungs.
Khartoum was the air crossroads of Africa. Eastward ran the route to Arabia and India. Part way along that course lay Eritrea, where the regular flights never stopped. Southward ran the route to Durban and Capetown. Northward a thousand miles was Cairo, where I was to report to General Maxwell before proceeding to my station. We would stay overnight in Khartoum and the next morning separate, some few going on to Eritrea in other planes, General Scott and most others going to Cairo. Very soon the sun set, and with its disappearance the desert sands cooled off and the air quickly lost its burning heat. Once it was dark, Major Goff and I went into Khartoum to see the famous city where, at the junction of the Blue and the White Niles, Chinese Gordon had been killed and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum had made history in avenging him. Khartoum itself was something of a disappointment. It was a modern enough European city of fair size, about half the population of Kano. But it was neither Egyptian nor Sudanese in architecture and about as exciting as Main Street, with its street cars and its cinema showing an American movie. The one compensation which the major and I got for our twenty-mile ride over terribly dusty roads from the airfield was a view by flashlight (Khartoum was blacked out) of a statue of Chinese Gordon astride, not a horse, but a camel. This was the first equestrian statue I ever saw which could claim any real novelty. It stood boldly out in the little beams of our flashlights against the night sky, a really magnificent bronze. Next, though we searched carefully in the black-out, we could find no statue of Kitchener in Khartoum, where he won his fame and his title. Possibly if he had fallen victim to a fuzzy-wuzzy spear near by instead of to a German U-boat in far distant waters, it might have been otherwise. So back we went to the airfield to turn in after a fatiguing day. Our quarters, adjoining the airfield, were in what we were told was a girls’ college before the war. We slept in one of the ex-dormitories. They must have had those native girls living on a high spiritual plane in that college. The narrow beds, reminiscent of Queen Nefertiti’s long-gone day, had only rope for springs and the pillows consisted of short cylindrical rolls packed hard with straw, which gave me a pain alternately in each ear as I rolled from side to side. We were under way early for Cairo and glad to get high up into the air before the sun really got to work. For some distance north we followed the Nile, to get a startling impression of how that river is Egypt. Only a narrow strip, rarely as much as a mile wide, along either bank was green. Outside that
strip the hot sands came in on both sides to a sharp line of demarcation between desert sand and irrigated fields. For almost a thousand miles we saw that—the thin ribbon of green, intensively cultivated bordering the Nile, running through the desert on each side. Away from where the Nile waters the land, is the most terrible desert on earth from Khartoum north to Cairo. The deserts we had crossed coming from Lagos across Central Africa were as nothing to this. I could well believe that nowhere else on earth or in the sea or in the air could one find an area so absolutely devoid of any form of life whatever—no birds, no animals, no men, no vegetation. Here was only burning sand—sand in ripples, sand in ridges, sand in waves, sand dunes, barren rocks bordered with sand, scorched mountains with never a bit of green on them rising from seas of sand with rivers of sand flowing down their sides like glaciers, and vast clouds of fine sand thousands of feet up in the shimmering air, drifting over the sand below— everywhere desolation, aridity, and sand. We made a brief stop at Wadi Haifa, where the Nubian Desert meets the Nile, for lunch. It was nearly as hot on the ground as at Khartoum. Then we continued on, flying high above the Nile to arrive finally in mid-afternoon at the Heliopolis airport on the outskirts of Cairo, when we came down. Since leaving Khartoum, we had flown directly north over a thousand miles, about the distance separating Miami from New York. The change in latitude to the north produced a similar change in temperature. When we descended, on March 23, from the plane at Cairo in Latitude 30° North, outside the tropic zone, it was to encounter what might have been mild summer weather in any American city. General Russell Maxwell, U.S.A., Chief of the North African Mission, Commanding General of all American forces in the Middle East, was at the airport to greet General Scott. For the first time, I also met him and looked over my new commanding officer with considerable interest. What struck me immediately was his square chin, setting off his rugged features. Evidently from that chin, and the keen, searching eyes above it, General Maxwell was a man of firm decisions and no nonsense. Aside from that, he was broad-shouldered, almost stocky, though only of medium height, all of which seemed to add to the resolution of his face. It became quickly evident, as he greeted us at the plane, that he was quite a reserved person, not much given to casual conversation, though this impression may have been accentuuated by the fact that obviously he had plenty on his mind and was
seeking action, not words, from his newly arrived assistants. The two generals drove off together. Colonel Chickering, Chief of Staff for the Mission, going off with them, told me General Maxwell wanted to see me next morning at headquarters. With that, all the other incoming officers and their bags were loaded into Army cars and driven into Cairo. The Army billeting officer had done as well as he could in crowded Cairo, overflowing with British staff officers and men on leave from the near-by British Eighth Army, to house us temporarily. I was directed to the Hotel Continental, where I was told there would be room for me. There was. Three Army officers and I, lest some of us sleep in the streets, accepted gladly a room meant for two, and drew lots to see who should sleep in the two beds and who on the floor. I drew a bed. Next morning I reported as directed to General Maxwell at the Mission headquarters, a large Egyptian residence hastily turned to office use with no changes. The discussion was brief. The general had had no opportunity as yet to visit Massawa himself. I should find things there in bad shape; the climate also was reported as terrible. Had I read these things in the preliminary reports on that station? I had. The British were in possession of the country, but unable, due to lack of man power and materials, to rectify matters. It was important to get something done at Massawa immediately. The situation on land in Libya was deteriorating rapidly. Rommel had overrun El Agheila, just recaptured Benghazi, and was driving eastward. It was hoped to stop him at Tobruk, to the west of which the Eighth Army was now fighting delaying action in the desert. Tobruk had before held against a long Axis siege; it was believed it could again. However, there was no certainty of it; besides, Rommel might elect to by-pass Tobruk and drive immediately on to Egypt. As regards the British naval situation in the Mediterranean at the moment, General Maxwell knew it was bad, but gave me no details. I might get them when I left by a visit to British naval headquarters in Cairo, just around the block. All in all, the Middle East picture was far worse than when I had left the United States in mid-February. I must get to Massawa immediately and, utilizing what I might find on hand there, do anything that might be done, not waiting for my own men and materials. The need was urgent. I suggested to General Maxwell that it would be well if I went to the British naval base at Alexandria a day or two to get acquainted with the British officers
there with whom I should later have to work, and learn their needs. “No,” said General Maxwell decisively, “get on to Massawa. Leave tomorrow. The British have a Navy captain in Massawa. He can tell you what they need. In two or three weeks from now, when you’ve got things started in Massawa, you can come back to visit Alexandria. Meanwhile, before you leave, come and have dinner with me tonight.” “Aye, aye, sir.” I saluted and left, to walk directly to the near-by British naval headquarters, as General Maxwell had advised, to report my coming to them and get what information I might from the naval staff there in Cairo. If General Maxwell had painted a gloomy picture of the land situation, which the world in general knew from the position of Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps, it was nothing to the gloom of the naval picture, which was a deep secret, completely unknown to the world at large, and probably even to the enemy. I listened with a sinking heart as the background against which Massawa must be made to work, was outlined to me by British naval officers. Britain no longer had a battleship fleet in the Mediterranean to oppose the powerful Italian battle fleet composed of certainly four and possibly five or six dreadnoughts. While it was then completely hush-hush, the British Mediterranean battleship fleet which had dominated that sea since the war began, in 1939, was no more —not a single battleship left in service. Their flagship, the superdreadnought Barham, had been torpedoed late the preceding November by a submarine while operating with her two sisters, the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, off Tobruk, and had swiftly gone down with vast loss of life, over 800 men. It was believed the enemy was unaware of this, or at least not certain of her sinking. The British, in the face of Axis reports, were not admitting her loss. Her consorts, the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, had been withdrawn to Alexandria harbor, there to lie in safety behind submarine nets, pending further operations at sea. Then disaster had struck the remaining two battleships in spite of all conceivable precautions. Only a few weeks after the loss of the Barham, a picket boat patrolling the submarine nets across Alexandria harbor, just after midnight had come across a couple of men in bathing suits perched atop an unused mooring buoy. This was curious; it was hardly normal for anyone to be out swimming in the harbor in the middle of the night. The boat picked them off the buoy, and seeing that the swimmers were obviously neither English nor
Egyptian, took them aboard the nearest moored warship for interrogation, while it departed to resume its picketing. The vessel happened to be the battleship Queen Elizabeth. The swimmers turned out to be Italians, which was disquieting. But if that turned out to be disquieting to the naval officers interrogating them as to what they were doing swimming in the harbor at night, the two swimmers seemed also greatly disquieted at finding themselves unexpectedly aboard an enemy warship. Still, in spite of that, they kept their mouths shut, other than to admit they were Italians, which they could hardly deny. After some futile questioning, leading nowhere, and anxious to lose no time in the face of probable peril, the captain of the Queen Elizabeth ordered his First Lieutenant to get out a hogging line and sweep the bottom of the ship from bow to stern with it, to see if they could catch and dislodge anything which might have been attached to their hulls by those two ill-omened swimmers. Then he signaled the Valiant, advising her to do the same. Meanwhile, there were the two bathers, obstinately mute, though agitated visibly enough even on deck. Perhaps below, they might become sufficiently more agitated to explain what their swimming party meant. So they were separated and sent below, one forward and one aft, to compartments just above the double bottoms, with an armed marine stationed at the open hatch just overhead each. Each bather was informed in Italian that whenever he wanted to talk, the marine would bring him up on deck again. Then commenced a battle of nerves. On deck both battleships, in the darkness working parties broke out hogging lines, dropped them over the bows, time after time carefully swept the drags aft under the hulls, feeling for obstructions. Below, the marines anxiously watched their prisoners, pacing in gradually increasing nervousness the small compartments far below the waterline into which they had been dropped. Nearly three hours elapsed. On deck, the first sharp concern had subsided. The drags had caught nothing. Perhaps those Italians, enemy agents though they probably were, were merely spies from the heterogeneous foreign population of Alexandria, swimming out from shore to scout the fleet at close range. How else, in view of the nets and the close patrols, they could have got into the harbor was incomprehensible. Below, the marines reported their charges still mute, except that occasionally in pantomime, they asked what time it was. At about a quarter of five in the morning came a break. Almost
simultaneously, both marines sang out that their charges, suddenly frantic, were begging to be taken up, eager to talk. Hurriedly the prisoners were rushed up on deck to meet the captain again. They talked volubly now; it was almost impossible to stop them. In a mad torrent of Italian, gesticulating wildly, they begged to be taken off the ship. They had secured a huge mine to her bottom amidships; in fifteen minutes it would go off and blow the Queen Elizabeth to pieces! And a similar mine was under the Valiant! The captain of the Queen Elizabeth took the astounding news more coolly. There were, thank God, no magazines in that vicinity but to him it made no difference if there were. He had no intention of abandoning ship, only of saving her. He had just fifteen precious minutes to work in. Instantly the news, with instructions, was signaled to the Valiant. While the message was going over, on the Queen Elizabeth the General Alarm bells started to ring, the bugles blared to turn out all hands. Bos’n’s pipes shrilled, followed by the hoarse calls. “Secure everything below! Close all watertight doors! All hands on deck!” In the boiler rooms, oil fires were hastily extinguished; in boiler and engine rooms, all steam lines secured. All over the ship men were madly dogging down every watertight door in every bulkhead, every watertight hatch in every deck, every airport in the sides of the ship’s hull, coming up as they secured the openings, leaving no one below and nothing open. In less than ten minutes the entire crew, well over a thousand men, were mustered on deck in the darkness, with below them the darkened and deserted hull of the Queen Elizabeth sealed up, bulkheads, decks, and sides, as it had never been since the day she was commissioned. In excruciating silence, the seamen waited in the night as the last five minutes till five o’clock dragged endlessly by. Was it perhaps only a hoax? Or was it real? And if it were real, what would that mine do to them? Each man’s imagination had free rein. Not one of them but had already seen in the Mediterranean what mines, torpedoes, and bombs had done to other ships. Only three weeks before they had all been present when torpedoes had set off the magazines of the Barham, tearing her to bits as she sank, killing most of her crew. Had there been a mad rush overboard from the Queen Elizabeth, no one could have blamed the crew. But silent, dogged as always, those British seamen kept their ranks, waiting for five o’clock. It was no hoax. At five o’clock a terrific underwater explosion shook the
31,000-ton Queen Elizabeth; a few seconds later a similar shock hit the Valiant. Both vessels trembled as if struck by titanic sledgehammers, then started to settle rapidly in the water. In each, a vast hole had been torn in her bottom beneath the central boiler room, crushing the massive boilers up against the heavily armored protective deck overhead as if they had been only eggshells. Had the crews been caught unaware, both ships would undoubtedly have sunk, total losses. But with no one killed, no confusion, all hands forewarned, and all openings already sealed up, their crews were ready once the explosions were over. Instantly, they went below with flashlights to get what machinery was still intact fore and aft of the damage, going again to battle leakage. The flooding was confined principally to the ruptured boiler rooms amidships. Even so, both vessels sank bodily till their low after decks were nearly awash. Hardly a few feet of their sides remained above water after the explosions. In this parlous position, their crews below fought desperately to keep the water from spreading; only a slight margin of buoyancy remained between them and complete disaster. They succeeded. When dawn broke over Alexandria harbor, there were the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant still afloat, still erect, with no visible damage, and except to someone passing close aboard to note their extraordinarily slight freeboard, looking as if nothing had happened. It was imperative to maintain the illusion that nothing had happened, that Britain still had at least two effective battleships in the Middle East. Some half dozen other Italians in peculiar semi-diving masks, had meanwhile been picked up elsewhere in the harbor or on the beaches inside the nets. It seemed that all the Italians directly engaged in this ingenious and hazardous operation with tiny submersible boats which had somehow got over or under the nets to attach the mines, had been captured. None had escaped; evidently only by air reconnaissance could the enemy judge now what success these men had had in destroying Britain’s all-important battleships. So to carry out the illusion to air observers, who could never detect their low freeboards, life went on as usual on deck both battleships—the bands played, the crews were mustered for inspection at normal hours, small boats came and went on their ordinary schedules. The ruse had succeeded. There was not the slightest evidence now, three months later, that the enemy had any knowledge of the startling success of his daring attack. But that hardly lessened the gloom of the British officers to whom I was
talking. Only a few cruisers, some destroyers, and some submarines now remained as their whole Mediterranean fleet. They had not a heavy ship left to defend themselves with, nor to attack the Italian Navy convoying supplies to Rommel’s advancing army. Not for a year at least would either the Valiant or the Queen Elizabeth be able to enter battle again. By truly herculean efforts, they had expelled water enough from the Valiant, the less damaged of the two, to get her on their large floating dry dock in Alexandria for emergency repairs to her bottom only, so she might safely float while she was being taken elsewhere, out of the war zone. Only that week, with her smashed boilers still smashed, able to steam on her remaining boilers at hardly ten knots, the wounded Valiant had been taken off the dry dock to make way for the still more damaged Queen Elizabeth. The Valiant would shortly proceed at slow speed through the Red Sea to Durban in South Africa, there to receive some further patching to enable her to limp across the Atlantic to the United States for real repairs. Meanwhile, the Queen Elizabeth’s bottom repairs would be rushed on the dry dock in the hope they could at least get the hole patched and the ship away from Alexandria before Rommel got close enough for his Stuka bombers to stop it. But all this was keeping their large dry dock tied up with these two ships only for over six months. This left the Alexandria naval base with only one smaller dock available for cruiser or other ship repairs and they were falling far behind. How soon could Massawa get going and lend a hand? I had to shrug my shoulders. I hadn’t the slightest idea. To deepen my gloom, the British captain to whom I was talking informed me sympathetically, “I understand, Commander, your new station’s a bloody hell-hole. In fact, though I’ve never been there myself, I’m sure of it. To help you, we sent a commander in the Royal Navy to Massawa a month or so ago to await your coming, which we’d been told was to be by air from America. He was to act as liaison officer between you and the Royal Navy. That month in Massawa, partly in February and the rest in March, has browned him off already. He’s now in a military hospital high up in the Eritrean mountains, broken mentally and physically, though it’s reported he’ll recover in time. But then he’ll have to be sent home to England.” He paused while apparently he sized me up as to how I might stand it, then shook his head dubiously. I wasn’t so young nor any physical marvel either.
Abruptly he asked, “How old are you, Commander?” “Fifty, sir.” “Really?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Our medical chaps who’ve surveyed the spot have recommended only men under fifty be sent there for work. They don’t think anybody that old can stick the course.” “Well, Captain,” I assured him, “Americans can stand lots of heat. We’re used to it more than you. America gets much hotter than England. Ever been in Washington in the summertime?” “No,” he admitted, “but Massawa’s unique on earth. So far as temperature goes, they tell me the next stop’s Hades. Well, be that as it may, we’re sending you a relief liaison officer. He’s shoving off for Massawa in the morning by air, but right now he’s in another office here getting his instructions. Just a moment; I’ll bring him in and introduce him.” I waited. In a few minutes he returned with a Royal Navy commander in tow. Briefly he introduced us, then with a clipped, “Cheerio! Good luck to you both in Massawa!” he departed, leaving us alone. I looked over the new liaison officer. Evidently he was some years younger than I. Apparently the Royal Navy had taken great care on that point. But other than that, I was not impressed by the man on whom I must depend in all my contacts with the British. He was bigger than I, tanned enough by the African sun, but decidedly nervous. I learned from a brief conversation he felt he had already been through too much for his new and decidedly unwelcome assignment. It seemed that some time before, he had been beached when his ship was lost. That, I now knew, was not unusual in the Mediterranean. Then he had been assigned to go to Benghazi as Naval Officer in Charge (NOIC, in British parlance) of that newly captured port in western Libya. But before he could report in Benghazi, Rommel had recaptured it and there was now no need for a British NOIC in Benghazi, nor from the looks of things in Libya, would there be there or elsewhere in Libya for a long time, if ever. That had left him available when the liaison officer already in Massawa had so speedily cracked up, and he had been given the job. He had done his best to get out of it, but unsuccessfully. It appeared the swift dissolution of his predecessor in Massawa, whom he knew well, had made a deep impression on him. As a last straw, he appealed to me for aid. Couldn’t I help keep him from
going to Massawa? He just knew he couldn’t stand it there; nobody could, with the summer season just coming on. Even the Italians, he assured me, when they had the place, used to lock it up and flee to the mountains for the summer. Couldn’t I save him from it, he pleaded? All this, somewhat hysterically put, was, I thought, a strange request to make of a foreign naval officer who had come a long way to go to that same station. Massawa, I reflected, must be something if it could make a naval officer of considerable experience bare his naked soul to a stranger he had met only the moment before. Regretfully I had to tell him I could do nothing. I had no voice in the assignments of the Royal Navy; none to speak of, even in my own Navy. I went where I was sent, and I presumed he should have to, also; like good sailors, we would both do the best we could. Still, inwardly I regretted his assignment, and if I had possessed any power to get it changed, I should certainly have used it. This man was licked before he started by his terror of Massawa; yet on him I should have to depend in all my contacts with the British in getting Massawa going that summer, when he had no faith at all in the possibility. Telling him I hoped to get a place next morning in the plane for Eritrea in which he already had a seat reserved, so that we might talk matters over at greater length, I left him. He stood there disconsolate, so wrapped in his fears he was wholly oblivious to the ridiculous figure he was asking me to cut before some British admiral, pleading to have a British officer younger than myself spared an ordeal I, an officer in a foreign navy, was undertaking without complaint. From the Royal Navy offices, in no very cheerful state of mind after all I had heard, I went directly to the U.S. Army Transportation Officer in Cairo with my orders to depart for Eritrea, to get passage there. It turned out our Army was not flying the route from Cairo to Asmara, capital of Eritrea, but the British had a daily plane, not a large one, which ran that route, going via Port Sudan. It was part of a private line, British Overseas Airways Corporation, operating, however, under the supervision of the British Army in the same way Pan-Am in Africa ran under the direction of our Air Corps. The transportation officer said he would immediately get in touch with the British authorities and arrange my flight. He tried, but he didn’t succeed. It appeared that the BOAC plane for Asmara next morning was not only loaded with British military passengers with top priorities, but so were all their planes for over a week to follow. It was too late
to do anything for the plane the next day; regarding those following, provided the joint British-American military staffs were willing to bump someone off in my place, a place might be made in a few days. Somewhat disgruntled at this state of affairs, the Air Corps captain doing the inquiring dropped the telephone and turned to me. “How urgent is your trip, Commander?” “You’ll have to put that up to the Chief of Staff, Colonel Chickering,” I replied. “All I know is that General Maxwell ordered me to get along to Massawa, four bells and a jingle. He wouldn’t even let me take a day or two for a visit to Alexandria.” The air officer was about to call Colonel Chickering to put some heat on BOAC in my favor, when the very Pan-Am pilot with whom I had flown all the way from Lagos, happening to be waiting in the transportation office, broke in. “Captain, I think I can fix this for you. I’m flying my plane back west to Accra via Khartoum in the morning, and we haven’t got much of a load going to Khartoum. I’ll fly the Commander to Khartoum. There he can transfer to one of those special Pan-Am planes headed east for Asmara that are carrying the men from his ship in Lagos through to Eritrea; there’ll be lots of them coming through. Their last hop from Khartoum to Asmara isn’t very long. They can always carry an extra passenger on that jump they wouldn’t dare to haul on the long hops coming east from Lagos. How does that strike you?” The transportation officer looked at me. I thought it over hastily. The trip via Khartoum was roundabout, but it looked certain. Tomorrow afternoon I would be in Khartoum; the second morning, after a few hours’ flight, I would be in Asmara, capital of Eritrea. Whereas on the small BOAC planes, Heaven alone knew who their few passengers might be over the next two or three days and what priorities they might have—possibly whole planes full of Hindoos clutching umbrellas with trick priorities that nobody dared touch, bound for India. “I’ll take you on that,” I said. “It sounds fine to me.” The transportation officer wrote out the necessary papers, one for passage to Khartoum, another for my trip from Khartoum to Asmara. The pilot warned me to be sure to be at the Heliopolis airport at 6:00 A.M.; he was taking off early as he meant to get all the way to El Fasher that day. I assured him I’d be there and thanked him heartily for his help. I took a brief stroll around Cairo the rest of the afternoon to find it completely unaffected by the war, except favorably. Things you couldn’t buy
anywhere else in the world you could buy freely in Cairo—provided you had the price. Even automobile tires. And there was no gasoline rationing for private cars, which were running wild all over the place. The war was being fought all around Egypt, had already been fought on Egyptian soil, and apparently shortly would be again. But the Egyptians weren’t doing any fighting themselves in defense of their country—they were just cashing in. If the British lines held, well and good. With the payroll of the whole British Eighth Army and its supply being spent in Egypt, never in its history had Egypt been so prosperous. If Rommel broke through, so much the better. The Egyptians, for some strange reason, seemed ready to welcome him with open arms. God knows what they expected at the hands of Hitler, but it was evident they must have been promised plenty. Officially, Egypt was neutral. (I had to show my passport to get into the country, an odd situation for an officer in a war zone.) Unofficially, the country seemed to be playing both sides against the middle, forcing the Allies to supply it freely with articles for general consumption which Allied citizens at home couldn’t get at all. And apparently from the eagerness with which they were awaiting Rommel, they expected to do even better with the Axis. I have no doubt at all that the period from 1940 through 1942 (after which the war drifted away from Egypt) will long be remembered in that country as the Golden Age. Evening came. It was cool in Cairo in the evening. For the first time since leaving the American coast, I put on a blue uniform again when I drove to the outskirts of Cairo for dinner with General Maxwell. The dinner party was small—General Maxwell, Colonel Chickering, Lieutenant Sumner Gerard of the Navy, who was the general’s personal aide, a few other Army officers on his staff, and the American Naval Attaché in Egypt, Commander T. V. Cooper, whom I had known since we were both midshipmen thirty years before. The general proved to be a cordial host, but he had apparently had a tough day and said little, content to listen. He had heard something of the voyage of the Pig’s Knuckle from General Scott—it sounded unbelievable, probably just a landlubber ’s tale. Was it really so? It was, unfortunately, I had to inform him, and it came about as a result that the whole evening was mostly devoted to our odyssey across the Atlantic, since all the others had come over earlier by air and were keenly interested in what they had missed by sea.
The party broke up early, since I had a daybreak date at the plane and the others were weary enough themselves. Commander Cooper drove with me back to town, a long ride, mostly along the Nile bank. It seemed so cold after all the heat I’d been through, I turned up the collar of my blue jacket, and if I’d had my overcoat, I would have worn it with pleasure. Commander Cooper, who was more warmly dressed, said regretfully, “I should have warned you, Ellsberg. There’s a chill in these Cairo nights that gets you after a warm day. Be careful the next time you go out.” I thanked him for the caution and we rode the rest of the way in silence. This seemed advisable once we were in the city, for Cairo was completely blacked out, its sole concession to wartime. The way the thoroughly heedless Egyptian drivers tore about in the black-out with no lights on their cars save practically invisible blued-over pinpoints, took everybody’s attention in the car. We didn’t want to be smashed ourselves or to murder any Egyptians on foot whose dark skins stood out none too well in the black-out. It was with considerable relief that I finally safely disembarked at the Hotel Continental.
CHAPTER
14 AS SCHEDULED, I TOOK OFF FROM THE Heliopolis airport early next day in the Douglas transport for the flight southward to Khartoum. There were no other passengers in the plane; mostly it was loaded with freight—captured enemy ordnance material going back to the United States for examination and test. The trip was dreary enough. My second view of that thousand miles of terrible desert from Cairo to Khartoum was as depressing as the first. In the early afternoon we got to Khartoum. Once on the ground, I bade good-by to the Pan-Am pilot, who refueled immediately for his westward hop to El Fasher, while I lugged my bags out of the plane and struggled with them across the burning field to its edge, where I wangled a ride in an R.A.F. station wagon to the transportation office. This was in the group of ex-college buildings some little distance from the runways. As I gasped for breath in the heat and the dust on that Khartoum field, I began to wonder if my judgment hadn’t completely decayed from age or something. I had had a chance in the beginning to go to Iceland instead of to Africa; had I possessed the slightest vestige of intelligence, I should have seized it. If Khartoum was like this, how, I wondered, could Massawa possibly be worse, even though it was so reported? I got to the transportation office, dumped my bags into it and went up to the desk to present my papers for passage to Asmara. The R.A.F. lieutenant running the desk looked at my papers, then looked blankly at me. “I say, Commander, someone in Cairo’s been pulling your leg. We’ve got no flights scheduled out of here for Asmara!” “No regular ones, Lieutenant; I understand that,” I explained. “But there are a lot of special flights going through here from Lagos to Asmara with a whole shipload of Army files and civilians who landed in Lagos with me a few days ago. I’m to go on one of those.”
“Oh, those!” He shook his head pityingly. “My word, were they banking on those? Really, now, that’s too bad. Your Pan-Am chaps did a better job on their transport than they’d expected and their last plane flew out of here on that mission this morning. There won’t be any more.” I gazed at him, stricken. No more special Pan-Am flights to Asmara? Had I come a thousand miles from Cairo only to bake again needlessly in the heat of Khartoum? There was nothing for it but to backtrack to Cairo and make a fresh start from there via the BOAC planes to Asmara. But in that also, I was in trouble. I had now no orders calling for transportation from Khartoum to Cairo and without them the sympathetic R.A.F. man could do nothing for me. He suggested I see the airfield Commanding Officer. Miserably. I dragged myself out of the transportation office and went looking in the heat for the CO. It was a vast airfield and everywhere I went, the C.O. seemed one jump ahead of me. Finally, when night had fallen, I caught up with him in the dining room. Sympathetically he also listened to my sad story. But all he could do, he declared, was to wire my situation to transportation headquarters at Cairo, and ask for orders and a priority assignment. It was now so late, it was hopeless to expect he could catch anyone at Cairo in time to act on the matter that night, so he might put me on a plane in the morning. The very best I could hope for, if in Cairo they assigned me a high enough priority, was a place the second morning following in the plane coming north from Capetown, bound for Cairo. Two more nights and another whole day in Khartoum! I could have chewed nails at the prospect. But instead, I begged him only to get the wire off immediately and make it as strong as he dared. He promised. Wearily I straggled over to a dining table, sat down. My khaki uniform was covered with dust, my face was dry and burned, my eyes ached from the glaring sands. Very evidently a navy cap, in spite of its brass-visored elegance, was not the thing to wear in Africa. I promised myself the moment I returned to Cairo I should lay in a pith sun helmet and a pair of sun glasses for future wear, regardless of whether or not the uniform regulations permitted such non-reg headgear. And I was terribly chafed between the legs also. I decided to add shorts to my purchases—no more long navy trousers for me. I was going to be comfortable, or at least as comfortable as I could, little as my rig in the future might look like a naval officer ’s.
A Sudanese servant—tall, black, stately, robed all in white—set my dinner down before me. It wasn’t a bad dinner, but at the sight of it, I was suddenly made aware that my stomach had been feeling queer. I didn’t have any desire to eat. Instead, without touching anything, I rose from the table and went to the airfield sick bay, looking for the surgeon. The British doctor, military, of course, looked me over, took my temperature, asked me where I’d been, where and what I’d eaten, how long I’d been in Egypt, had I felt chilled any night? I told him. “Gyppy tummy,” he announced without hesitation. “Most newcomers get it right away. Sometimes it’s from eating native food, but you haven’t. Most cases, like yours, are from a chilled abdomen, due to night exposure after a hot day. Must have been that ride you had last night in Cairo with no overcoat. Well, not much I can do for you. It’s a beastly bother but you’ll get over it after a while; everybody does. Take this every few hours; it may help a bit,” and he gave me a small bottle of medicine. I managed to get a servant to cart my bags from the transportation office to the room assigned me in the girls’ ex-dormitory, similar in all respects to the one I’d had my first night there. Then I made haste to locate the nearest toilet. My spirits drooped when I discovered it. Modern plumbing did not exist in that part of Egypt. The sanitary facilities were of the outhouse type made famous by “The Specialist.” Here, however, they were a little more elaborate, being built of brick, and with plenty of chloride of lime at hand. But the little row of hot brick cubicles was at least 200 feet from my room. That would be bad. Forlornly I sat down to cogitate. Just my luck to be trapped with “Gyppy tummy” for thirty-six hours at least in such a place. For that night, all the next agonizing day in the heat, and the second night following, I was not away from one of those brick cubicles for more than fifteen minutes at any one time. I practically wore a path in the hot brick pavement from my cubby-hole of a room to the nearest cubicle. Seriously I considered abandoning my useless bedroom and staying there all the time— my brief intervals away hardly made worth while the constant trekking back and forth, but the odors and the flies, despite the chloride of lime, deterred me. “Gyppy tummy” indeed! That was much too flip a name for it; it warranted something far more impressive, for it was worse to endure than any of the ancient plagues of Egypt the Bible sets forth. Had Moses only smitten the Egyptians with this plague first, he could have spared himself all the trouble of bothering with the many minor plagues he had to use; undoubtedly the
Egyptians would have been so preoccupied with it, the Children of Israel could have gone forth from Egypt at their leisure, wholly unmolested. Only one ray of light brightened my sad state next day—just before noon I was informed radio orders had come through for me from Cairo with the ultimate in top priorities. The C.O. assured me that with that, regardless of who was on next morning’s plane from Capetown and Durban, a place would be made for me going north. It was. When the plane showed up from the south about the middle of the next morning, I was on hand on the Nile bank, for this plane was a huge British flying boat. Wan, weary, and bedraggled from little sleep and much internal tumult, I was hurried by a motorboat through the swirling waters of the Nile rising rapidly to flood stage, to where the moored plane was breasting the current, and thrust aboard. Nobody aboard disembarked. I found the inside of that flying boat already jammed with South African troops headed for the Libyan battle front. They crowded together a bit and made room for one more. In a few minutes, with vast sheets of spray shooting by on both sides, we lifted from the Nile and took to the air. For the third time within five days I found myself surveying the interminable sands between Khartoum and Cairo. I liked them no better on greater acquaintance than on first view—in fact, I was thoroughly sick of that desert, as well as being sick anyway. I had a miserable trip north, not helped any as this flying boat, in spite of all its massiveness, had a continuous vibration I had not noted in the Douglas land planes I had recently been in. This vibratory motion added, if that were still possible, to the uneasiness of my already completely uneasy insides. Between the relative lateness of our start and the slow speed of that flying boat, it was much too late when I finally got into Cairo to do anything that day about getting out of it again, or even to get to the billeting officer for a room assignment. In the faint hope they might by chance have a room, I went directly, bags and all, back to the Hotel Continental. The clerk there dashed my hopes. They had not a single room vacant; they were fuller than ever. So were all other hotels. The clerk, however, had a suggestion. The three Army officers I had previously shared a room with at the Continental still had the same room, and it being towards dinner time, should be in it now. Perhaps they might let me into that overcrowded room again. He would call their room and see. They
would. I went up and almost threw myself on their necks for their generosity, regardless of the fact that this time it would be my turn to sleep on the floor. At least this night I should be near a decent toilet; a bed would not have been of any great use to me.
CHAPTER
15 PROMPTLY WHEN IT OPENED IN THE morning, I was on hand in the Army Transportation Office, to relate to the Air Corps captain there how our elaborate plan to get me to Asmara had blown up because Pan-Am had turned out to be too efficient. He seized his telephone and went to work on BOAC again. After considerable haggling and a great deal of stress on international relations, he finally hung up and faced me triumphantly. BOAC had agreed to take me next morning; their car would call for me at the Continental at 7:00 A.M. He wrote out my transportation order, and I left. I had the day free in Cairo, since I decided it was the part of prudence to keep away from the North African Mission Headquarters, where they thought that days before I had already arrived in Massawa and had turned to there. There was no better way for the moment to help the war effort than to devote that day to myself, so I went shopping for equipment, by now my case of “Gyppy tummy” having somewhat subsided. Cairo, a huge modern city that could hold up its head when it came to shops with New York or London, proved the best place in the world for my purpose. It was overrun with military tailors, all English firms, that were quite accustomed to British officers from the Eighth Army dashing into Cairo from the desert and out again the same day. I had no trouble at all in finding a firm, which, measuring me for three pairs of khaki shorts, promised faithfully that the completed shorts would be delivered to my hotel that night (and they were). In another equipment shop—this proved more trouble, since they were getting scarce—I picked up a fine khaki-colored pith sun helmet. In an optical shop, I found some American-made sun glasses. There was only one odd feature in all this—the tailors insisted on all cash in advance with order, no checks, no C.O.D.s, no credit. Not, they assured me, that they doubted my word or my good faith, but so many officers were getting
killed at sea or in the desert, it was an infernal nuisance collecting from their relatives overseas, and they had given up trying. Cash now, if you don’t mind, and thank you so much. This took all the rest of the morning. I went then to Shepheard’s Hotel for lunch, being very wary now of where I ate anything in Egypt. After lunch, in my new sun helmet, I sat a while on the terrace in front of Shepheard’s, watching the endless flow of burned and weary British soldiers, kit bags and bedding rolls draped over their shoulders with the thick dust of the Libyan Desert all over them, streaming into Shepheard’s for a drink, and (they hoped) a chance at a bath. About the middle of the afternoon, I returned to the Continental, feeling that a nap would do me some good. I stopped at the desk for the room key. The clerk, together with the key, handed me a sealed envelope with my name on it which had been left for me an hour or so before. I looked at it, puzzled. Who, in Cairo, save my three Army roommates who had no need to leave notes at the office, knew I was at the Continental? I tore open the envelope, read hastily the typed blue slip enclosed: BRITISH OVERSEAS AIRWAYS CORPORATION
To: COMMANDER ELLSBERG, Continental Hotel, Cairo. We regret to inform you that you will not be traveling tomorrow morning on our service to Asmara. I stared at that blue slip of paper incredulously. Whether the news itself or the suave language in which the bitter pill was conveyed seemed the more unbelievable to me, I could not determine. But it made no real difference. I swore fluently, tossed the room key back at the astonished room clerk, and dashed out of the hotel, bound for our Army Transportation Office. Was I never going to get to Massawa? Furiously I thrust that blue slip of paper under the nose of the transportation officer who had a few hours before arranged my passage. “They can’t do that to us, Captain!” I exclaimed. He read the slip, flared up more angrily even than I. “I’ll say BOAC can’t do that to the United States!” He grabbed his telephone, started hastily to dial a number, while beads of sweat began to gather on his forehead. “If General Maxwell finds out we haven’t got you to Asmara yet, he’ll tear this office to pieces!” There followed the longest and the hottest telephone conversation over a
plane seat that had yet taken place in Africa, involving everything from breaches of faith among allies through reciprocity and hands across the sea to the allurements of Lend-lease, spiced with dire threats of what General Maxwell would do to BOAC when he heard of it. Finally, after listening for a moment, the Air Corps captain hung up the telephone, wiped the sweat off his brow, and announced grimly, “Be ready at your hotel at seven. They tell me now to tell you, ‘Commander Ellsberg will be traveling tomorrow morning on our service to Asmara.’ And damned intelligent of them to have come to that conclusion, or they couldn’t have got a seat on one of our planes from now on for Churchill himself!” I shoved off next morning, March 29, from the Heliopolis airport in the BOAC plane, a small, low-powered, twin-engine affair, compared to our Army’s Douglas transports, and seeming even smaller relatively since it had not been stripped inside. It had all its peacetime sheathing and its original athwartship bucket seats, seating ten. Of the passengers aboard, six were R.A.F. fighter pilots bound for Port Sudan, where we were to stop en route, there to pick up some American fighter planes and fly them back to Libya. The other passengers, except me, were British military officials, bound for Eritrea or Arabia. For whom it had been intended to bump me off, or who finally was left off the plane when I was reinstated, I never learned. Nobody mentioned the subject. We flew at first due south down the Nile again some 300 miles to Luxor, where we stopped briefly to refuel. By now I had seen so much of the Nile, I felt I might qualify as a river pilot on it without further experience. From Luxor, leaving the Nile, we took off in a southeasterly direction for Port Sudan on the Red Sea, about 500 miles away. This leg, mainly over the Nubian Desert to the eastward of the Nile, was new to me. It was as barren as the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts I had so often just seen, but much more rocky and less sandy, with its rocky plateaus so cut by wind-blown sand they resembled vast river systems, except there was no sign of water anywhere. About halfway on this leg, we crossed the boundary from Egypt into the Sudan. The dividing line could have made little difference to anyone, since the entire region thereabouts was worthless even to desert Arabs, and was wholly uninhabited. Roughly around noon, we spotted the Red Sea ahead, shimmering in the heat below and shortly came down on a stretch of desert sand bordering it, where lay Port Sudan.
It seemed to me as we emerged for lunch from our plane that the field at Port Sudan was hotter even than that at Khartoum, but in this I may have been mistaken. What made it seem so was that the heated air rising from the burning sands could literally be seen like the wavering pattern in moiréed silk, dancing sinuously upward in quivering streams. At the far end of the field from where we landed—there were no special runways on the field, it was simply all hard sand—stood a row of six fighter planes, wing to wing, spaced not very far apart. The six R.A.F. pilots who had come with us as passengers, immediately they had landed, started posthaste on foot for those planes, eager to get out of Port Sudan. As they ran, they strapped to their backs the parachutes they had previously been carrying. With difficulty, as they went by me, I restrained the involuntary cry that rose to my lips, “For God’s sake, wait! Get a boat or you’ll all drown!” For if I were to believe the clear evidence of my own eyes, all of those fighter planes stood submerged in deep water almost to the under sides of their wings—there all about them was a considerable lake, with its blue surface ruffled gently into ripples glistening beneath the sun! I choked back my warning. Of course, it couldn’t be so, even if unmistakably I were looking directly at a lake. Nobody would put land planes in a lake for a take-off. However real it seemed, that lake must be imaginary, a desert mirage effect, the first such I had seen. It was, of course. In a minute or so, it seemed as if all the pilots had suddenly been swallowed by the water, only their heads remaining visible to me above the rippling surface. While I stood rubbing my eyes (which made no difference at all in clearing them of this incredible scene), the pilots clambered up out of the water into the co*ckpits of those planes, started their engines which needed no warming up, revved them up once or twice to try them, and all together in wing to wing formation started off. For a moment it appeared as if their planes were breasting the waves. Then they burst clear of the mirage onto the near-by sand, picking up speed in startling fashion. It was clear at once why they were taking off abreast. A vast cloud of sand thrown up by the propeller race, rose in the wake of each plane; very obviously, no pilot wished to be caught in that choking mass of fine sand and dust by taking off even a little behind one of his mates. So in beautiful formation, all six planes (apparently American Tomahawk
fighters) roared across the field, circled once at low altitude over it while they retracted their landing gear, and then shot across it not a hundred feet up, heading westward. How fast they were going I couldn’t tell—so amazingly fast, anyway, that as they whistled by in the air, I could hardly turn my head fast enough to follow as they swooped directly over and swiftly shrank into tiny dots which vanished in the west. After a very brief pause for a very skimpy lunch, we re-embarked in our own hot plane and hurriedly took off for higher altitudes, partly to cool off, partly to gain the height we needed to clear the Eritrean mountains a hundred miles ahead. We headed almost south, quickly losing the Red Sea behind us and flying inland as we rose. In an hour we were over the border into Eritrea, well away from the coast, and flying at 11,000 feet, with a mountain range about 10,000 feet high not much below us. But these mountains were not so barren as those of the southern Sahara, perhaps because they were higher, more likely because they were closer to the sea and trapped some of its moisture. In another hour, we were over the mountains and well inside Eritrea at last, coming lower over what seemed a vast plateau which lay green and inviting beneath us, 7000 to 8000 feet above the sea, stretching away southward into Ethiopia. There, nestling on the fringe of the plateau, was Asmara, by its appearance from the air a sizable European city. We came down smoothly on the airfield, a very modern one laid out by Mussolini and seemingly now run by our Air Corps. I was in Eritrea at last! I descended from the plane, stretched myself luxuriously. Here for the first time in Africa I was on an airfield which at midday was comfortably cool—in fact, that late March day in Asmara reminded me of similar early spring weather in my boyhood home in Colorado at an altitude only moderately lower. I was met at the field by an Army officer from the Mission headquarters in Eritrea to escort me into the city, and also, to my surprise, by my new liaison officer, the Royal Navy commander I had last seen in Cairo five days before. Since he had got away from Cairo on schedule, I had expected he was, of course, long since in Massawa. I looked questioningly at him as we all got into an Army car for the fivemile drive into Asmara. He did not keep me long in the dark as to his presence. He had not yet been to Massawa. He had no intention of going there to report till he saw me again. Even more wrought up than when I had seen him at
Admiralty House in Cairo, he began once more on the same theme. Now that he was only seventy miles by road from Massawa and had learned more about it both from British military officials in Asmara and paroled Italian officers there, he was even surer he could not stand it in Massawa. Couldn’t he remain in cool Asmara, 7500 feet above that steaming Red Sea coast, and act as liaison officer from there? I assured him that was a matter for the British naval authorities in Massawa to pass on; however, so far as I was concerned, it wouldn’t do. If there was to be a liaison officer, I wanted him close at hand; otherwise I was better off without one. Nervously he mulled over that thought. Then in desperation, he made a final appeal, “Commander, tell Captain Lucas—he’s the Royal Navy NOIC in Massawa— he’ll have to get me quarters up in the hills about thirty miles outside Massawa. It’s cool there. I just can’t live in Massawa! For God’s sake, promise me that!” I tried to show the poor devil his request was ridiculous, and that in making it, he should only get himself in bad with his seniors in the Royal Navy. But he was so obsessed with his phobia of Massawa, logic had no appeal to him— neither had war needs nor the effect on his naval career. He just couldn’t go to live in Massawa—he would die there! And till he had a favorable answer, he wasn’t going to Massawa to report! Finally, to quiet him, I promised I should bear his message to Captain Lucas, Royal Navy, whom, of course, I had never met, but whose reaction I could safely forecast. However, it wasn’t my funeral. If my liaison officer insisted, in spite of all my warnings, I should oblige him. And with that, I turned my back on him, to speak to my Army companion who had been listening in silent astonishment to all this. Very soon we were rolling through the streets of Asmara and down the Viale Mussolini, as fine and broad a city boulevard as one might hope to see anywhere. New modern and modernistic business buildings lined it on both sides—some so new the Fascisti had not had time, when they brought their illadvised war upon their heads, to finish them. Still, uncompleted as they were, they also were in use. We dropped my liaison officer at the hotel where the British Army had billeted him, glad to be rid of him. Then we drove to the government building, formerly Fascist, now occupied by the U.S. Army as headquarters for the Eritrean branch of the North African Mission. There I reported to Colonel L. J.
Claterbos, Engineer Corps, U.S.A., who, as representative of General Maxwell, headed all the Mission activities in Eritrea. I had last seen him in New York in early January, just prior to his taking off for Africa in one of the first Army Fortress flights. He had been in Eritrea well over two months already, and I judged from my first sight of him that already he had been through the mill. Colonel Claterbos was a huge person, well over six feet, with massive shoulders and a set of features looking as if they had been roughly carved out of granite, that matched his tremendous form. In his day (it happened to overlap mine at Annapolis) he had been an outstanding player on Army’s football team; one look at his still athletic figure made it easy to guess why. But since our parting in January, the lines in his creased face had deepened appreciably, his voice had hardened beyond description; very evidently there had been plenty of trouble in Eritrea. We greeted each other cordially, then immediately got down to business. The naval end of the Massawa venture was mine; everything else there and elsewhere in Eritrea Colonel Claterbos had directly on his own shoulders. Nothing had yet been done regarding Navy matters in Massawa, awaiting my arrival; as regards other matters, Claterbos had more than had his hands full in a projected air base at near-by Gura (to be built), projected ordnance shops, motor transport shops, living quarters, ammunition depots, all the construction work required to transform Eritrea into a vast military base for Middle East operations. But the men promised for the projects had arrived only in driblets and in far smaller numbers than promised or needed—he was short of officers and men, the contractors were far short of mechanics, though to balance that they had an oversupply of civilian executives and supervisors, and nobody had any tools or equipment to speak of to work with yet. As regards my naval project, he knew my situation with no naval assistants at all. As soon as he had any, he would assign me a few younger Army officers —I could do what I might to train them in unfamiliar duties. Respecting workmen, a fair share of the mechanics who had come by shipboard with me would also be assigned to the projected housing for the naval base and Pat Murphy would be sent there in charge of them. Of course, so far as salvage in Massawa went, there could be none of that till such time as my salvage forces arrived—he had no men at all who could help me there. Finally, not much was expected of us in Massawa. It was hot there already (it always was, even on Christmas Day) and the season was rapidly coming on when all work in Massawa usually ceased for the summer. He hoped we might,
in view of the war urgency, get a couple of hours’ work in in the early morning at sunrise and a couple of hours more in the evening about sunset— the American civilian workmen would, of course, have to be paid for a full eight-hour day regardless of that or he could get none of them to go to Massawa at all, since on the Asmara plateau they could make a day’s pay in comfort, even in July. Aside from the few American workmen available, I might hire all the Eritrean natives I wished—they weren’t good for much, but they stood the heat better—and if I could use any, he would do what he could to get me as many Italian prisoners of war as I wanted. Some of them were good mechanics; since they were prisoners, it might be possible to keep them working somewhat longer hours than the Americans. That was about everything Colonel Claterbos had to suggest. He assured me of his cordial co-operation, and of his assistance in every way within his limited means, and I felt sure he meant it. Then he turned to face a long line of waiting favor-seekers—American, British, Italian, native—while I left to be driven to my billet for the night, the Army Officers’ Mess in Asmara. I washed some of the dust of Port Sudan from my frame, put away the sun helmet and khaki in which I had traveled from Cairo, and put on a blue uniform and my naval cap. So dressed, I went out for a brief stroll in cool Asmara before dinner. Asmara was something. All the wealth that could be wrung out of impoverished Italy had been lavished on producing there on the plateau bordering Abyssinia a Fascist showplace. There were, I was told, 40,000 Italians in Asmara, not to mention 100,000 Eritreans who didn’t count. All the Italians at least were out for a stroll also on the Viale Mussolini and most of them were in uniform. Not even in Rome, when I had been there in 1936, just at the close of Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure and the start of his sub rosa campaign to help Franco in Spain, had I seen so profuse and so gorgeous a display of the products of the Italian military tailors’ art—the Fascisti might have proved themselves the world’s worst soldiers (exceeded in general worthlessness only by the Fascist sailors), but their tailors, having such excellent clothing dummies on which to hang their creations, had risen to the heights. Apparently every Italian officer captured in the East African campaign the year before was out, magnificently caparisoned, strutting along the Viale Mussolini that afternoon. I had heard these officers had all been paroled by the
British and were now free to live privately anywhere in Asmara, but at sight of them, I could hardly restrain a gasp. I was unarmed, so was every other of the few British and American officers forming a drab blotch on that otherwise brilliant military spectacle. But every one of these prisoners of war was armed—clinging to his waist was an automatic pistol protruding from its holster! There were enough armed Italian officers in sight easily to take over the country in view of the few soldiers the British had left in Eritrea and the slight handful only that I knew we had. What kind of topsyturvy war was this where conquerors went about defenseless while their prisoners roamed the streets at large, armed? At dinner that evening in the Officers’ Mess, where I met practically all the army officers stationed in Asmara, I had my answer from Major Goff, who had beaten me there by some days. “It’s all a matter of Italian honor, Commander,” he explained. “An American can hardly understand its nuances. Brigadier Kennedy Cooke, British Military Governor here, had to explain it to me twice before I took it in. You see, when the Italians surrendered their forces to General Platt after he’d smashed them at Cheren, they insisted on surrendering with the honors of war. So long as there wasn’t any more fighting, nobody gave a damn what they surrendered with. Well, when Platt and his troops had moved back to Libya and they brought all the Italian officers who promised to behave into Asmara as paroled prisoners of war, imagine what happened! The sensitive Italian P.O.W.s claimed that as they had surrendered with the honors of war, precedent all the way back to the Crusades gave them the right to retain and to wear their side arms. And as swords have now gone out as symbols of chivalry, they claimed the right to wear pistols instead as side arms! Unless they retained and wore their pistols, their honor as soldiers would be grievously wounded. Of course, the British just couldn’t bear the idea of wounding their soldierly honor, so they acquiesced. They did insist that the honorable P.O.W.s agree to leave the cartridges out of their automatics, and maybe they do, but nobody ever searches one to see whether his pistol is loaded or not. Neither you nor I nor Brigadier Kennedy-Cooke wears a gun, because as a matter of honor we want to show the Fascisti in this captured country we’re not afraid of them; but the Fascisti think their honor requires them to wear guns to show us God knows what! Who cares? It’s all very honorable. We’ve got Eritrea, they’ve got their honor, and every body’s happy!” He shook his head sadly, then added, “First the Pig’s Knuckle, then this co*ckeyed country letting a prisoner go
around with a gun! Nobody in Idaho will ever believe me again when I try to tell ’em about it. They’ll only look at me skeptically and say, “‘Abe, you used to be a solid citizen and we trusted you. But you’ve sure turned into a Baron Munchausen since you went away to war.’”
CHAPTER
16 AFTER BREAKFAST IN THE MORNING, I spent a little time with the Army finance officer, arranging my personal accounts, then slightly after nine, my bags were loaded into an Army car and I started alone for Massawa. It was March 30; I had been under way for Massawa since February 16. My driver for the trip was an Italian prisoner of war, an ex-enlisted man evidently, who had no honor to preserve, since he wore no pistol. It was a strict Army rule that no American officer should be permitted ever to drive a government car himself; only the driver assigned to the car might drive it. Since in Eritrea there were insufficient enlisted men for such service, various P.O.W.s had been impressed for the job, and I had one. Had I known what I was in for, I should have walked the seventy miles to Massawa, leaving only my bags to go in the car. About five miles out of Asmara, we ran off the 7500-foot plateau and started down the precipitous mountain road to the sea. That beautifully paved road was a triumph of Italian engineering, and for scenery it was marvelous. In thirty miles by road (less than ten miles in a straight line) we dropped 7000 feet. The switchbacks cut into the solid rock of the mountainsides were terrific— regularly as we came to one of those hairpin turns, I was certain we were going to take off straight into empty space. In one spot, Nefasit, within only an airline distance of perhaps half a mile but a vertical drop of Heaven alone knew how many feet, there were seven hair-raising switchbacks. All this would have been enjoyable to me since I grew up in Colorado and liked rugged mountains and mountain scenery, had it not been for my driver. He drove like mad down that mountain road. I doubt that we ever went below fifty miles an hour, and I am certain we never dropped below forty, even on the worst switchbacks. I expostulated from the back seat, but it was hopeless. I knew no Italian, the driver knew no English. In what little I could remember of my Spanish, I
ordered him to slow down, I was in no hurry to get to Massawa. Evidently my involved Spanish phrases did not register. There was no effect. “Lento! Lento!” I shouted next, trying single words this time, while the tires fairly shrieked and I smelled burning rubber as we hurtled round a switchback. There was no slow down. Instead, I caught something in Italian which, from the intonation, I judged was meant to convey to me there was no cause for alarm, everything was all right. We speeded up on the ensuing brief stretch of straight road, heading for the next turn. It wasn’t all right, either with me or with those priceless tires, which were irreplaceable 13,000 miles from home. “No pronto, no pronto!” I tried again in Spanish negatives, hoping to make my meaning clearer. No answer. We skidded sickeningly round that mountain hairpin like a racing car, straightened away for the next stretch with hardly any speed lost. We had before us now perhaps half a mile of steep but straight downgrade to go until the next turn. The Italian P.O.W. must have concluded he had not wholly succeeded in making the foreign officer understand. Now he seized his opportunity to make himself understood beyond any doubt. To my horror, he let go the wheel entirely, turned round, and with both hands gesticulating meaningfully started to explain in Italian again apparently that everything was under control! I seized both his wildly waving wrists, twisted him sharply round forward, and let go. Possibly he understood from that that the crazy American for some strange reason had no desire to listen. He grasped the wheel again. Thank God, we were still on the road! Completely limp, I subsided; it was safer. Had I had a pistol, I should have shot that P.O.W. in the back of the head on the next straight stretch and dived over the back of the front seat, trusting to bring the speeding car to a stop before it crashed the mountainside or dropped off the bordering precipice. But failing a gun, I didn’t dare try taking control; in the struggle for the wheel it was certain we should plunge off the road. For thirty nerve-shattering miles this went on while we dropped from 7500 feet to 500 feet above the sea. As a final aggravation, in Eritrea we were under the British Rules of the Road—that is, all traffic keeps to the left—and try as I would consciously to keep that in mind, subconsciously I could not escape the terrifying impression that always we were hurtling down those mountains on the wrong side of the road, bound to crash head-on into the next car we met toiling up those grades. While still some five miles from the end of our drop, we raced through the
mountain village of Ghinda, 3000 feet above the sea, forty miles by road from Massawa. There, I knew, it had been planned long before I left America, to have the contractor build a housing project large enough to take all Americans working in Massawa. The idea was to haul them to Ghinda in buses each night so they could sleep in cooler mountain air, and each morning transport them back to Massawa for their day’s work. The last thing I had done before I left New York was to order the twelve large buses which were to do the transportation job. As we raced through Ghinda I noted that on a relatively flat spot (still very hilly, however) construction work on that housing project had already started. Some graders were already leveling off various plots for foundations. That was about all I could take in as we whizzed by, but from there on, I took especial note of the rest of the road over which twice a day our large buses were to transport hundreds of American workers, including me, when months hence, the project should be finished. When at last we emerged on the flat desert, a few hundred feet above sea level, which stretched away about thirty miles to Massawa, I knew the whole housing project in Ghinda was utterly impracticable. It might have looked a fine idea in far-off New York; on the ground its absurdity seemed to me immediately apparent. To try to negotiate that mountain road regularly with a fleet of large buses was simply courting disaster—even far more careful drivers than the one I had could not possibly avoid accidents, especially since of necessity the mountain end of the journey would each day start and finish in the darkness. Undertaking such a transportation feat could only result in about a month in no workmen at all—half would be dead, the other half would be in the hospital, and the buses would be masses of crushed junk lying at the foot of some precipice. Enough smashed Italian military trucks lay strewn already bordering that road to make the prediction fairly safe. When finally we leveled off on the desert, even though our speed promptly jumped far above sixty, I breathed a sigh of relief. No matter how bad Massawa proved to be, the less I saw of that road to Ghinda and Asmara, the happier I should be. My leg muscles, till then tensed to jump for my life from whichever side of the car offered at the moment the best chance, gradually relaxed. We had made it safely. I settled back against the cushions and began to think a little less malevolently of Mussolini than I had during the ride. After all, he had built that
road up those precipitous mountains for one purpose only, the invasion of Abyssinia. To the Italians bound for that war the road was perfectly all right and in nowise alarming—whether one got killed on the road or by Haile Selassie’s warriors beyond it, what difference? And the road had even one advantage—if you got killed there, you could count on not being castrated, which was something an Italian couldn’t be too sure of avoiding if ever he got to Abyssinia. It had happened before to them at Adowa, in 1896. We raced along over flat desert country extending from the foot of the mountains over thirty miles all the way to the sea. I began quickly to put out of mind Mussolini, his mountain road-building, Asmara and all else. It was hot on that desert, infernally hot. I had started from Asmara in my blue uniform, even wearing my overcoat for a while, for it was cold there and I had no desire to risk a recurrence of the Eritrean version of “Gyppy tummy” from which I was still weak. Part way down the mountains I had shed my overcoat but my blues had still felt comfortable. Now it was so hot, they were insufferable. I had my aviation kit bag with me in the back seat of the car. A little cramped for space but not minding that, with the desert shooting by at seventy miles an hour, I stripped off my blues and slid into a pair of shorts and a khaki shirt, which last I left unbuttoned from waist to throat. At least I should get some ventilation from the hurricane of hot air streaming down the car sides. How hot it was in that Army sedan, I never knew. The sun, high overhead, was playing directly on us. From both sides and the road underneath, radiant heat from the baked sands was darting at us. The blast of hot air shooting by gave no relief. In a few minutes I was completely soaked in perspiration, as well as burning with the heat. Neither in Khartoum nor in Port Sudan had I been so uncomfortable. I began to get an inkling of why Massawa was unique on earth —it combined in one spot the highest temperatures and the highest humidities known anywhere as did no other place in the tropics. Khartoum and Port Sudan were probably as hot, but they were dry— Khartoum because it was in the desert far from the sea; Port Sudan because the desert winds blew with a free sweep across it toward the sea, giving it a desert dryness. And that dryness, evaporating swiftly all perspiration, gave the body a chance to cool itself off and regulate its internal temperature. I could see now why Massawa was different. Those high mountains I had just descended literally put Massawa and its narrow coastal desert in a bowl,
shutting off any land breezes having a tendency to dry things out. And the scorching sun, working on the hot Red Sea before Massawa, sucked up from it vast quantities of vapor. Cut off from blowing away by those same mountains, this vapor hung in the bowl, giving Massawa the highest humidity all year round of any place on the globe. So that was it. First the heat scorched you, making you perspire profusely in the body’s attempt to hold its temperature down; then the terrific humidity prevented any evaporation, leaving you to stew in your own sweat, and there you were. We raced into Massawa itself, swung left past the vast salt pans onto the AbdEl-Kader Peninsula where lay the old Italian naval base which was my destination, then in the screeching of brakes came to a sudden stop. Seared by the heat, basted in perspiration, I stepped out of the car. What I had been told was correct. The next stop beyond Massawa was Hades.
CHAPTER
17 T HE ARMY CAR IN WHICH I HAD come from Asmara turned about and hastily started back there. Its driver presumably had no wish to remain an unnecessary moment in Massawa. With my bags at my feet and my thoroughly useless overcoat over them, I put on my sun helmet and my sun glasses to protect myself from the burning sun and looked about. I had been deposited in front of the former Italian naval headquarters building. It stood empty, a sizable two-storied office building with massive masonry walls, stuccoed over and finished in the drab yellow which covered everything, apparently to match the dust blowing in from the desert. There was no glass in the windows, only heavy slatted shutters intended to keep out the sun and let in the air, while further to forward the same purpose, a wide veranda ran round the building and the eaves had an enormous overhang to shade the walls. The Italians had done everything they knew with that building (and all the others thereabout) to fight the sun. Behind the headquarters buildings were many others much larger and covering considerable ground, but all shuttered and with locked doors. These I judged were the naval base shops, deserted, full of sabotaged machinery, locked now to avoid having the wreckage stolen for junk. That, I supposed, was also the purpose of the few Sudanese sentries posted here and there, the sole signs of life around me. Everything near by was abandoned, but toward the end of the peninsula and beyond a flat open space baking in the sun was another group of buildings, some two-storied stucco, some one-storied wood, which seemed to be occupied. Above them on a high flag pole floated the White Ensign, so I judged that there, evidently in what had been the Italian officers’ quarters and the barracks for the naval base, the Royal Navy in Massawa had already installed itself.
I swung around to face the sea. Before me and a little lower down lay the naval harbor, the north harbor of Massawa. It was a considerable body of water, beautifully landlocked, a mile across and of somewhat greater length. Stretching out on the water front close by was a heavy masonry pier paralleling the shore with three concreted roadways carried to it on piles. Here was the first visible evidence of war and sabotage—the R.A.F. had bombed Massawa heavily before its surrender and they had hit that pier three times, leaving three sizable gaps in it; while to complete the job, the electric cranes on it, which the Italians themselves had sabotaged before surrender, leaned drunkenly over the water in various crazy attitudes. Farther out in the lifeless harbor lay more striking evidence of Italian sabotage—across the entrance to the harbor from the sea lay a string of scuttled ships. Two which had capsized in going down, lay on the near edge of the entrance with the waves breaking over their now horizontal sides which stretched away, vast flat rusty steel islands a few feet above the water, to form a resting place for innumerable gulls fishing from these convenient newly manmade reefs. Farther away lay several more large wrecks, these erect, with only their masts and smokestacks and the tops of their bridges showing above the surface. Inside the naval harbor itself, not much showed. Well over toward the far shore, the roiled water and a few tiny nondescript objects looking like awash rafts indicated that there probably the floating dry docks had been scuttled— what looked like rafts might be the tops of their deckhouses showing a little above water. I turned from the sea with a sigh. The commercial harbor and the south harbor where I knew most of the wrecks lay, were invisible to me from the naval base, but I had already seen enough to occupy far larger forces than I should ever have. It was no use trying to enter the abandoned Italian headquarters building which would later be my base for work—first it was locked and second it was probably depressing in its emptiness, even should I force my way in. Instead, indicating in pantomime to the nearest Sudanese sentry that he should also guard my bags and overcoat, I trudged off on foot for the point marked by that British flag to make my presence known and pay my respects to NOIC, the British Naval Officer in Charge. It was a hot walk under the near noonday sun, made more disagreeable by the fine yellow dust (disintegrated coral, I afterwards learned, from the coral
formations of which the whole seacoast was composed) which rose in clouds with every step. There were no trees and no shade; it rarely rained on that coast at any time of the year. I was a somewhat bedraggled figure between perspiration, dust, and low spirits, when, with my khaki shirt now buttoned up part but not all the way to my throat as my sole concession to naval propriety, a British seaman doing sentry duty ushered me toward the office of Captain Colin Lucas, Royal Navy, commanding His Majesty’s naval forces in Massawa. The office lay, as I had surmised, in the low, wide verandaed wooden building immediately adjacent to the White Ensign floating high over everything. It was a very formal entry I made, hardly in keeping with my non-reg appearance. The bluejacket presented arms, an aide announced, “Commander Ellsberg of the American Navy, sir!” and I stepped in. Captain Lucas, who had had two fans blowing directly on him as he sat at his desk, and consequently looked much cooler than I, rose to greet me. Hastily I sized up the man with whom I should have most contact in Massawa, and I received an immediate surprise. In spite of what had been said in Cairo about age for duty in Massawa, the British were clearly not taking their own medicine. Captain Lucas was plainly much closer to sixty than he was to fifty, and showed it in every way—his florid face, his bulging waistline, his thinning gray hair. He had been in Massawa almost since its capture, some eight months anyway. One look at Captain Lucas and I already felt better—if he could stand it in Massawa, I was sure I could. We shook hands, Captain Lucas welcomed me to Massawa, and motioned me to a chair, which he thoughtfully hauled into the line of action of one of his fans. We both sat down. I told the captain (which he already knew) that I had come to take command of what was to be the U.S. Naval Repair Base, Massawa, the ex-Italian Naval Base, and, of course, also to command the salvage operations. While at the moment I had no men at all for either purpose, shortly there should be some, together with three salvage ships, one of which was certainly already on the way via the Cape of Good Hope. On his part, Captain Lucas acquainted me with the British situation in Massawa. His responsibilities in Massawa were mainly two—first, to maintain communications with the outside world, chiefly by naval radio, handling all confidential dispatches and coding and decoding them; and, second, to maintain a naval guard over the ex-Italian base to prevent the natives, the
Arabs, and the Italians themselves from making away with even the cement blocks of which the base was built—all were bloody thieves and there was an excellent black market in Eritrea for everything they could steal. While he had a moderate staff, both of officers and enlisted men of the Royal Navy for these two purposes, still he found himself in straitened circ*mstances covering even these two tasks adequately and he regretted that he would be unable to lend me any assistance in my tasks. However, if I thought there was any way he might aid, he hoped I should always feel free to ask. He’d do the best he could to help the common effort. Ah, yes, come to think of it, there was one other thing the Royal Navy was doing to help me. A new liaison officer was being ordered, to be always at my disposal. Where the blighter might be, though, he couldn’t imagine, for while he’d had a wireless a week before from Cairo saying the new officer was starting immediately, he hadn’t shown up yet in Massawa. I smiled grimly at that. “I think I can throw some light on that, Captain,” I said. As noncommittally as I could, since I had no desire to cause any trouble in the Royal Navy, I explained briefly where the liaison officer was, and conveyed his request to be quartered in the hills, not in Massawa. Captain Lucas stiffened instantly. “The insufferable ass! Does he think he’s a duke or something? He’ll stick it in Massawa the same as all the rest of us! Lieutenant Maton!” he shouted towards an adjoining office. At that imperious call, Lieutenant Maton of the British Navy, apparently the communications officer, came running with a message pad. “Lieutenant,” ordered the flushed captain, his wide nostrils practically breathing flame he was so angry, “priority dispatch to Commander— whatever ’s his name—you know, that new liaison fellow from Cairo—only send it to Asmara, that’s where the malingering blighter is now, ‘Report immediately in Massawa or face court-martial.’ That’s all, Maton; get it right off!” I rose. Inwardly, I thought, “Good for you, old boy! We’ll get along fine!” But what I said was, “Sorry, Captain, to have caused you all this trouble. I advised him not to do it, but he insisted.” Captain Lucas rose also, still fuming. “The idea of an officer in the Royal Navy doing that! A commander, too!
The man must be crazy!” “That’s what I thought, Captain,” I agreed. “Well, I’ll get over now and take a look at that cottage they told me in Cairo’d been assigned me as my quarters. I’ll see you later.” “Ah, yes, Commander; it’s off that way, a bit to the left about a hundred yards from here.” He escorted me to the door, pointed out the direction. “And I say, Ellsberg, you can’t possibly be settled by tonight, so come and have dinner with me. I should have invited you before if that blithering idiot in Asmara hadn’t driven it out of my mind.” “Thanks, Captain. I’ll accept with pleasure.” I put on my sun helmet, saluted, and stepped out. The bluejacket presented arms, I saluted him also in return, and walked off in the dust. It turned out I had a very busy afternoon. I found the cottage without trouble, a very good cottage, too, airy, built with the usual widely overhanging roof for sun protection, and with some tropical flowers and shrubs about it, undoubtedly kept alive by profuse artificial watering. But—the cottage was occupied, very fully so, in spite of the fact that I had been told at Cairo headquarters that it had been assigned solely for my occupancy. It appeared that another American naval officer, Commander Dickeman of the Civil Engineer Corps, who had come out to the Middle East via Hawaii and Singapore before war broke out in the Pacific, was in Massawa on a business visit. He had several engineering surveys of African facilities to make for the Navy Department before going back to Washington, and had arrived a week or two earlier in Massawa to check the machinery needs of that spot. There being no other place for him to live, he had naturally enough moved into the single house reserved for U.S. Navy use. Then, the week before, Colonel Claterbos from Asmara had sent down a Major Knapp of the Army Engineers to take charge of the Army construction work and transportation in the commercial port of Massawa. Knapp could find no place at all to live in Massawa and Commander Dickeman had generously invited him to share the cottage at the Naval Base some miles away till the Army could do something about it. So there were my quarters completely occupied, for the cottage was small and had only two single beds. Dickeman would be in Massawa at most only a couple of weeks more; there could be no question in the circ*mstances of his staying where he was. Major Knapp, very embarrassed, offered to move out immediately to make room for
me. “But where will you go, Major?” I asked. “Damned if I know,” said the major. “There isn’t a vacant room in the whole blessed town. I’ve looked already. There’s a closed building, The Bank of Italy, facing the commercial docks that we’re using for Army offices right now; I was figuring on converting the second floor of that for living quarters, but it’ll take some time yet. You’ll find the British Army’s got every hotel in the town of Massawa, every Italian club, and every Italian government building, as well as part of this naval base, full of their own men. And Commander Dickeman can tell you the British Navy’s got every other usable building on the naval base, except this cottage, assigned to theirs.” “Yes, that’s so,” agreed Dickeman. “Maybe they haven’t got personnel enough to run this base, but anyway they’ve got enough to fill up all the livable quarters. All except one building,” and he pointed out a very fine two-storied stucco building facing the sea a quarter of a mile off. “You see that? That was the main quarters building for Italian naval officers. It’s fine inside—I’ve been there—terrazo floors, big rooms, some with private baths, wide terraces outside roofed over, batteries of shower baths, and, best of all, it’s close to the water. If there’s a sea breeze, you get it there. And what do you think they’ve done with it? They’ve given it to a private English company, Cable and Wireless, Limited, for their quarters, when, if, and as they ever need any. Right now Cable and Wireless is strictly limited around here; They haven’t got a cable and the Lord knows when they will have; they’ll probably never have a wireless here; and all they’ve got in that big building which’ll hold two dozen officers in comfort is two Cable and Wireless managers who’ve got nothing at all to do for months yet! So they’re putting in their time figuring on fixing up one whole floor into suites for themselves right now, and saving the other floor for maybe three or four cable operators in the sweet by and by. And where are all our men to run the naval base going to live? Those two limeys from Cable and Wireless say it was promised to them in London and they’re keeping it. If we need quarters, we can go and build a new building—as if you could do that by waving a wand around here, of all places!” Commander Dickeman, who felt warmly on the subject of quarters, and apparently with much reason, paused a moment, looked me over, then in pity at my perspiration-soaked state, suggested, “It’s too hot to talk. Let’s have a drink; you look as if you need it. I’ve got some ice and I’ve got some cans of pineapple juice I wangled off a ship here.
Just a minute.” That cold pineapple juice with ice tinkling in the glass was a life-saver. I was both extraordinarily thirsty and hot, and it helped both ways. I guzzled a huge tumbler full. When it was gone, I sat back, feeling a little better. “Well, boys, I tell you what. Don’t you move out of here, Major; you might find yourself sleeping in the gutter, if they’ve got any gutters around here. But the British Navy is bound to take care of me. Now I’ve got a dinner date tonight with NOIC. I’m going over to take a look first at that building you say Cable and Wireless have got, and tonight I’ll see if Captain Lucas can’t fix it so I can have one of those rooms with a bath in it, and use some of the rest of it for the other officers Colonel Claterbos promised me. Tonight I’ll sleep on this settee I’m sitting on. I’ve done worse. And talking of baths, can you lend me a towel, Dickeman? I want to get into your tub right now!” “Certainly,” said Dickeman. “And I’ve got a tub of water cooling right now. Help yourself. Meanwhile, Major Knapp and I are driving over to Massawa for lunch. Don’t you want to come? You can have a bath afterwards.” “No, thanks. First things first with me; right now a bath comes first. Lunch can go hang.” They stepped out to Major Knapp’s waiting car, and I promptly turned to in stripping off my soaked clothes. I jumped into the well-filled tub, looking cool and inviting before me. It wasn’t; it was uncomfortably hot. Evidently Dickeman had run in too much hot water. I looked for the cold water faucet to cool the tub more, but there was only one faucet there and it wasn’t marked anything. I turned that on a moment to experiment, then hastily shut it off again. The water coming out was even hotter than what was already in the bath. I began to catch the significance of Commander Dickeman’s casual remark, which before I had ignored—“a tub of water cooling right now.” I had wondered why the tub happened to be full when I wanted a bath, now I saw it. There was evidently only one kind of water on tap in Massawa—hot. If you didn’t want a hot bath—and who did?—you filled the tub in the morning and let it stand all day before your evening bath, trusting to evaporation from its surface to cool it a little. Perhaps it worked, but the tubful I was in hadn’t stood long enough. It was too hot for my purposes. I jumped out and began to swab myself with the towel. I got back into my wet clothes; that didn’t make any difference for I realized that if I had any dry ones at hand, they would be just as wet in a few moments.
Then I called the houseboy, who seemed to know a little English, and sent him down to the water front to retrieve my bags from the custody of the Sudanese sentry.
CHAPTER
18 NEXT MORNING FOUND ME MOVING into Building 108, the one assigned to Cable and Wireless, Limited. Captain Lucas, with some difficulty, had arranged for my occupancy and that of such other officers as I might bring, but only, he regretted to inform me, on a temporary basis till Cable and Wireless said they required it all for themselves. Beyond that, the matter was out of his hands. London had turned it over to Cable and Wireless and unless I could persuade them to relinquish or London to change its assignment, nothing more could be done. For the moment, I wasn’t concerned. Not for months did it seem Cable and Wireless could colorably say they needed the building except at most for the four rooms their two managers were already using; long before then, I was sure they would see our need was greater than theirs, and agree to relinquish it or at least to split its use. So I forgot the question and moved. All the first floor and most of the second was empty. I chose a corner room on the second floor facing the sea, which gave me a cross-draft as well as a private shower (no tub, this time). Meanwhile, I had acquired a few other things—first of all, a house-boy of my own, brought round by a friend of his serving as houseboy to Commander Callwell, R.N., executive officer at the Royal Naval Base. Commander Callwell’s houseboy recommended him highly, so I hired him. His name, I was assured, was Ahmed Hussein. That was the only thing of which I was ever assured regarding Ahmed. He was a very black young Sudanese (not to be confounded with American Negroes who were all West African), barefooted, of course, draped in a white robe topped off by a turban which he spent most of his time winding. Ahmed and I completely didn’t understand each other, since he talked only Arabic and I didn’t. However, I was fairly good at pantomime by now and I had hopes Ahmed might pick up some English.
Ahmed’s job was to make my bed, take care of my room, send out the laundry, and get it back (this last no minor trick). What wasn’t his job, but what turned out to be the only thing Ahmed ever took the slightest interest in, was to shine up my automobile. For I now had a car. Major Knapp had taken out the afternoon before from under the wraps in which it had been stored in the Army warehouse, awaiting my arrival, the car assigned to me as Commanding Officer of the Naval Repair Base—a brand-new 1942 Chevrolet sedan, complete with driver. The driver was, as usual, an Italian, an ex-enlisted man now a P.O.W., but wearing civilian clothes as they all did. He had quite a rig which made him look like a movie director—leather puttees, riding breeches, an Army wool shirt, and no hat at all. How he ever survived in that costume I could never figure out, but perhaps his luxuriant hair, of which he was very proud, helped. At least he could talk fair English. My Chevrolet was the only U.S. military car in Eritrea that was not painted in the Army khaki color. When I got it, it was still its original glossy black, and I concluded that as I was not in the Army, I should be different and leave it that way, black. That suited Ahmed right down to the ground. He could get a shine on that black enamel that would have been absurd to attempt on the flat Army field paint that covered all other cars, and whenever I wanted Ahmed, I could always find him shining away on that car, regardless of what else he should have been doing. I paid Ahmed (in Italian lira) thirty cents a day, plus his board. He wasn’t worth it. With my clothes unpacked and stowed either in the closet or the bureau, most of which I did myself to show Ahmed what was expected of him, I shoved off to inspect the town of Massawa and its two remaining harbors. We drove slowly off the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula so I might have a better chance to observe what I had missed before on my racing entry into the naval base establishment. There was more to it than I had thought. Beyond the deserted naval shops was a huge barracks building, stuccoed masonry as usual. This I now saw was housing Indian troops. Behind that building was a maze of one-storied wooden barracks, portable apparently, which were full of Sudanese soldiers. Further along was another stuccoed masonry building, two floors, looking very much like the building in which I was now quartered, except that this building, alone
of all those I had seen, was surrounded by barbed wire, entanglement style, with only a narrow gate through it, also of barbed wire, which was closed. Apparently this was a specially important building, converted perhaps either to an ammunition magazine or to the decoding chambers to warrant all that protection. I indicated it to my driver, asked what it was. “Brothel,” he responded briefly. “A brothel?” I repeated, astonished. “Si, signor Commandante. Army brothel. Black girls for Sudanese, Indians.” I shut up. A beautiful building to be wasted on an Army brothel! I wondered whether the barbed wire entanglements were to keep the black girls in or to keep the colonial troops out, but I didn’t ask. All the same, I made a mental note to see at some future date about acquiring that building for possible use as quarters for ourselves. We drove off the peninsula and that ended the naval base area. On the mainland, we were shortly passing the salt pans, vast shallow rectangular diked-in ponds, into which the Red Sea waters were pumped. There under the blazing sun, the water soon evaporated, leaving the salt. This, I learned, was the only major natural industry of Massawa, which before the war exported salt in huge quantities, especially to Japan. Massawa was an ideal spot for it, as the Red Sea water is the saltiest of any of the oceans and the sun obligingly provided a superabundance of no cost heat for the evaporation process. Beyond the salt pan area we passed through the native Eritrean quarter— terrible-looking hovels with signs at frequent intervals, OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALL T ROOPS , and frequent sentries to see that the order was enforced. Apparently the brothel, probably for medical reasons, had an officially enforced monopoly of the oldest trade in the world. At the end of the native city, we made a sharp left turn onto a long causeway leading to ancient Massawa itself, which stands really on an island, not on the mainland. And now I began to see wrecks in profusion on both sides of me as we crossed the causeway. To my right was the south harbor, where perhaps most of them lay, though that was hard to say. In a long string stretching across the south harbor lay seven large vessels—some erect with only masts and stacks visible, some on their sides, some apparently bottom up. One, on its starboard side in the middle
of that sad-looking string, was a huge passenger liner, apparently as large as anything under the American flag, with a large hole blown in its exposed port bilge and what damage below water only divers could tell. Scattered at random outside that line of scuttled ships were masts and stacks all over the place—one set of masts far off on the horizon. To my left in the commercial harbor, I could see one large ship on its side right at the entrance. Inside the commercial harbor were others right side up, marked as usual by stacks and masts protruding sickeningly from invisible hulls. As a variation, alongside one of the main quays, the massive steel work of a gigantic floating crane rose from the water, looking like a distorted Eiffel Tower with nothing to support it. Somewhere below lay the hull of that crane, no longer floating. And elsewhere in that harbor were the invisible hulks of smaller ships, some alongside the quays, others most anywhere. Here certainly was a salvage man’s paradise, with all kinds of salvage jobs to suit all tastes—wrecks laid out in neat rows, wrecks sunk individually, wrecks on their sides, wrecks right side up, wrecks upside down, wrecks wholly submerged, wrecks partly awash, large wrecks, small wrecks, mediumsized wrecks, wrecks of merchant ships, wrecks of warships, wrecks of docks —wrecks everywhere, enough to make a wreck of any man contemplating all that wreckage, knowing how scant would be his equipment, how few would be his men, how terrible would be his working conditions. A little sick at heart, wishing more than ever that I had chosen Iceland, I ordered the driver to turn about and go back to the naval base.
CHAPTER
19 I HAD LUNCH AT THE BRITISH NAVAL Officers’ Mess (which I had joined) in the building which had served the same purpose under the Italian flag. It was located as well as might be for the purpose, right on the edge of the open Red Sea, with a very wide veranda actually out over the water. There was no beach there—the rugged coral formations formed a miniature cliff against which the waves broke beneath the veranda in music pleasing to any sailor ’s ear. There I met the British naval officers on Captain Lucas’ staff, some ten of them altogether—Commander Callwell, Executive Officer, a slight, mild person; Lieutenant Hibble, the Base Engineer Officer, tall and what was unusual for an Englishman, garrulous; Lieutenant Fairbairn, officially the pilot for the port, about my own size, which meant he wasn’t very large, who was exceedingly serious in looks and in speech; Lieutenant Maton, whom I had seen before as Communications Officer but whose main task turned out to be Intelligence Officer; and half a dozen others, including the naval surgeon, with none of whom did it turn out I ever had much to do. All wore the universal costume for Massawa, khaki shorts, khaki shirts open at the neck, sun helmets (which temporarily lay on a table near the inevitable bar), and all had gold-striped shoulder marks attached to their shirts (not an American naval custom) to denote their rank. In distinction to them, in accordance with American regulations, I wore pinned to my shirt collar on each side, a tiny silver oak leaf, designating my rank, which designation I shortly discovered meant nothing to either Italians or natives in Massawa, where the American Navy and its symbols were both equally unknown. The major-domo at this officers’ mess was an Italian (so also was the bartender) who had evidently run the place in Fascist days; the servants were all turbaned Arabs. The food was both scant and poor—partly obtained as rations from the British Army commissary, partly purchased in the open market which had little to offer that was safe to eat. Very clearly my British shipmates were
used to an austere diet since I heard no complaints from any of them, and naturally I made no criticisms. If this was the best war conditions in Eritrea permitted them, I could stand it as well as they. I may add here, that in my long stay with that mess, the only decent meals we ever got was when we had fish, of which the Red Sea furnished an abounding variety. The drawback to having more fish was that the Arab and Eritrean fishermen were shy on boats and very scary of risking themselves and what few boats they still had in fishing, since the waters outside the harbors were thickly sowed with Italian mines—one could never tell when a net or a line might set one off. Lieutenant Fairbairn, on being introduced to me as the new American salvage officer for Massawa, looked me over with much gravity, then said sympathetically, “My best wishes, Commander. I hope you manage to live longer than the first salvage officer we had here.” “The first salvage officer?” I asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know there’d been one here before. I understood my predecessor was stopped at Pearl Harbor and never got here at all.” “Oh, yes, there was one,” affirmed Fairbairn. “A Royal Navy Commander, tophole chap in salvage, best we had in England, with a fine salvage ship, too. He spent some time in Massawa last summer after the surrender making a diving survey here, those sunken dry docks particularly. He was going to do this job—that is, what could be done. I was on his ship when we went out to lend assistance to some British ship that had beached herself around the Daklak Islands—they fringe Massawa some forty miles out. There are a lot of Italian wrecks around Daklak but we weren’t bothering with them that day. You haven’t seen those wrecks yet, Commander?” I had to confess I hadn’t seen the wrecks on the Daklak Islands yet, only those in Massawa harbor itself. “You simply must see them, Commander; they’re a fine lot of wrecks—six big ships or more scuttled in the harbors in those islands,” Fairbairn assured me gravely, as if he feared I might run short of wrecks to keep me occupied. “Well, to get along with it, we pulled the ship off the beach, she wasn’t on hard, but by the time she was all clear in deep water and on her way again bound for Aden, it was dark. There weren’t any lighthouses going out there and the charts are none too reliable, either, so we were in a hurry to get clear ourselves and back to Massawa before it got too black. The commander took her into what looked like a wide channel between two low islands, and then we hit an Italian
mine. Ever hit a mine in a salvage ship, Commander?” he asked. I had to admit I hadn’t—yet. “It’s wicked, when you’re on such a small vessel. Tore her all to pieces. Killed the commander on the bridge. Most of the rest of the crew, too. Terrible explosion. All I know is there I was in the water, wondering why I was alive. No sign of our ship any more—just four or five other chaps like me, bobbing about, trying to keep afloat. We did, too, all night long, managing to stay together for company, while we shed what little clothes we had on to make the swimming easier. “In the morning, we spotted land a mile or so off, one of those low, uninhabited Daklak Islands. We swam toward it. Tough swim, but the tide helped us, fortunately. As we got closer, we saw we were in luck. There on what we’d supposed was a deserted island were a lot of Arabs, white robes, white turbans, squatting on the beach, watching us. That gave us heart—only half a dozen cables’ lengths or so more and we’d have no more worries—we’d get help. “When we were perhaps only a cable’s length from the beach, all those Arabs lazily took wing and flew away—they were just a flock of big white pelicans! Devilish feeling it gave us. We made the island, all right, but before we got through with it, I give you my word, Commander, we wished we’d all been blown to hell in a hurry like our shipmates. There wasn’t a drop of water on that island. It was small, flat, only a few feet above sea level, all coral sand, with not a palm tree, not a shrub, not a sign of shade anywhere, and we had no clothes to speak of—a few undershirts among the lot of us. We were on that island three days—I won’t weary you with the details—three days with no water and no shade. The sun was horrible—I’ll never see the like of it again this side of hell. The fourth day, an Arab dhow bound from Yemen to Massawa saw us waving, sheered in, and took us off.” Fairbairn rose from the lunch table. “I’ve got a ship to shift berth this afternoon, so I must leave. Better luck to you in salvage than the first commander had.” He picked up his sun helmet and walked out. “Good man, Fairbairn,” commented Lieutenant Hibble, as the pilot disappeared. “Takes things too seriously, though, for his own good. You should see him piloting a ship in or out of the commercial harbor among all those wrecks. He takes it so gravely you’d think he was the Archbishop of Canterbury trying to get the crown front side to at the Coronation.”
I had nothing to say. Fairbairn was evidently grave by nature, but certainly his experiences had given him no reason for levity. Nor me either. It was news to me, but not pleasant, that the British Navy had undertaken itself the salvage task till that Italian mine had put a period to their efforts. I wondered casually how many mines were left about to send me to join my Royal Navy predecessor. Lieutenant Hibble and I left the mess table together. As Base Engineer Officer, he had the keys to all the locked-up Italian naval base shops, and was to accompany me on a tour of inspection of those shops. We saw them all, in each under the watchful eye of some Sudanese sentry with bayonet fixed who had orders to see that nothing was stolen and meant to insure that no one, uniformed or not, violated his orders. Those Sudanese (there was no talking with them, they understood only Arabic) descendants of the fuzzy-wuzzies who had hurled themselves regardless on the murderous machine guns of Kitchener ’s squares at Khartoum, were intensely proud of the British uniforms they wore now and made fine soldiers. Long before I was through with Massawa, I was willing to add my “Amen” to Kipling’s verse: So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan; You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man; An’ ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air— You big black boundin’ beggar—for you broke a British square! The condition inside the shops was about as I’d been told. In every one, the electric driving motors of every piece of machinery had been smashed by Italians swinging sledge hammers with fiendish, glee, judging by the results. In addition, driving gears here and there were broken, and others were missing, apparently tossed into the Red Sea. All machinery was rendered useless, both by destruction of driving power and destruction of essential parts. That was the condition in the machine shop, the carpenter shop, the electric shop, the boat shop, the shipfitter ’s shop, the pipe shop, and the foundry, except that in the foundry there were also the shattered fragments of its indispensable and irreplaceable graphite crucibles. Other than the destruction, I noted the complete absence of any sign of small hand tools like hammers, saws, or chisels. The insides of those naval shops thoroughly warranted the bitter comment which the first Royal Navy Board to survey Massawa made of them: “The whole of the machinery of the Depot and workshops, all cranes,
portable plant and tools and equipment were firstly effectively sabotaged by the Italians; secondly, thoroughly looted by the Free French and remaining Italians; thirdly, anything portable of value left has been appropriated by the Army.” There was sufficient cause for the statement which had come to us in Washington that a complete outfit of new machinery must be furnished Massawa to make it operative again as a naval base. Our tour of the naval shops took some hours. As we left each shop, it was carefully relocked and the sentry posted there resumed his vigil outside. But why it was necessary was not very clear—unless one wanted to steal something for scrap iron, what was there inside to steal? About three in the blistering afternoon, Lieutenant Hibble and I concluded our inspection tour and drove back to the British naval headquarters. There I had my first experience with the Eritrean telephone system—all Italian equipment and Italian operators, save for the British seaman running the small telephone board at the naval base itself. I gave him the call. It took him about an hour, going through the main Italian boards in Massawa and Asmara and the various villages between, to get me Colonel Claterbos in Asmara, seventy miles away. What that seaman went through with the Italian operators in both cities and villages in getting the connection, I could easily judge by listening near by. If he had not been English, I’m sure he would have gone raving mad before finally he looked up at me in triumph and announced, “You’re through, sir.” I picked up the Italian hand phone, a gingerbready affair with the Italian coat-of-arms in colors decorating it, and to my delight I found I actually had Colonel Claterbos! However, I might well have saved myself my enthusiasm. Before I got through with that conversation, fifty minutes had passed, the connection had been broken somewhere at least seven times, and seven times in the midst of a sentence I found myself suddenly listening to or talking to some unknown Italian, Englishman, or American somewhere else in Eritrea. Each time my English sailor came stoically to my rescue and re-established the connection or the conversation with Colonel Claterbos would have foundered ingloriously. As it was, I finally managed to convey piecemeal to Colonel Claterbos that I had quarters arranged, both for the military assistants promised and the civilian supervisors, and had heard enough in driblets from him to assure me that next morning they would be sent to join me in Massawa.
With that hard-won understanding established, I hung up the phone at my end, feeling as if I had been through a major engagement, saved only from annihilation by the traditional tenacity of the Royal Navy in doggedly reinforcing me at crucial moments. “’Ard going, sir, with all them bloomin’ Eyties on the line,” sympathetically observed my seaman as I swabbed my brow, “specially in all this ’eat. But we ’as ’opes, sir, as ’ow the Signal Corps will take over soon.” It couldn’t be too soon for me, fervently I assured the long-suffering sailor as I thanked him and departed for my new quarters, determined to stand under my shower till dinner time. For the water in my new domicile, I’d found, wasn’t so hot—only somewhere around 90° to 100° F. Apparently it was brought down to lukewarm proportions by being exposed to evaporation to cool it in a vast open wooden tank sheltered by a well-ventilated adjacent building intended only for that purpose. I had a bad night. My room, as good a one as Building 108 afforded and probably as well located as any for comfort, had two large windows looking directly eastward over the Red Sea and two others facing south. In addition, it had a large door opening to the corridor on the west side. Since all these openings were without glass, shielded only by heavily built slatted shutters, the room was as exposed to cross ventilation as it was possible to make it, and in addition there was a large overhead ceiling fan to stir up the air. The fan, I may say, was never stopped. It ran night and day. There were, however, no screens over any opening, possibly on the theory that screens shut out the air. At any rate, flies, mosquitoes, and gnats had free access also, but they were to be taken care of otherwise. Before I turned in, Ahmed sprayed the room thoroughly with a Flit gun to take care of uninvited insects, and I had a complete fine mesh mosquito net over my bed, which as a bed was not much, being an Italian affair slightly better than a folding army cot. Lying in the bed, I carefully sprayed the inside of my net-enclosed area to finish off any mosquitoes which might have gained access there, then shoved the Flit gun down on the floor and hurriedly re-secured the netting on that side under the mattress. Thus protected, I hauled my sheet over my pajama-clad form and rolled over. Ahmed, meanwhile, stretched himself out on the floor in the corridor outside the door, ready at hand in case he should be called (which he never was).
I didn’t go to sleep. Very swiftly I came to the conclusion that a sheet over me was unnecessary and I shoved it off, wapsing it up at the foot of the bed. Once more I tried to doze off, but found it impossible. I was too hot and too wet. It was clear I didn’t need or want the pajamas which were already soaked in sweat. Off they came, to join the unused sheet at my feet. Completely naked now, I lay only on the bottom sheet, quite well exposed to what air there might be moving under the impetus of that ceiling fan or a night sea breeze. If any air was stirring, I couldn’t feel it inside my mosquito net, and with no outside screens, I did not dare to push aside the net. Restlessly I tossed from side to side all night through, simmering gently in the heat, while the sheet and mattress beneath me got wetter and wetter from sweat dripping off my body, which didn’t get any wetter only because it was completely wet to start with. If I slept at all, I was unaware of it. Fully awake, at long last I watched the sun rise over the Red Sea, a burnished ball of fire from the instant its upper limb appeared above the distant sea horizon. Wearily I pushed aside the mosquito netting, dragged myself into the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a long stay there, I came back into my room to stand directly beneath the fan while I tried to dry myself. I took a look at my bed. The lower sheet and the mattress were so soaked they looked as if a set of month-old, undiapered quintuplets had occupied that bed since birth. I glanced at my khaki clothes which I had hung over a chair beneath the fan to dry. They were as wet as I had left them the night before. I reflected. This was only April 1. It couldn’t possibly get any more humid, but it could get much hotter. Still there were limits to the amount of suffering one could consciously appreciate—beyond a certain point the body couldn’t differentiate any longer. That was comforting. I started to dress. About the middle of the morning, the first contingent from Asmara arrived to join me, having made an early start from there. Had I had the slightest spark of brotherliness, I should have met them waving a yellow quarantine flag, warning them to turn about and flee back to Asmara while yet they were well and hearty. But instead, feeling inwardly like a fiend, I stood silently by and let them toss their luggage out of their cars. Under the chilling gaze of the two Cable and Wireless men, who looked on this new Yankee invasion with frigid disapproval, the newcomers hastily took over the remaining vacant rooms on the second floor, and part of those below. I found I had drawn one officer assistant—Captain David Plummer of the Medical Corps as surgeon for the Naval Base. In addition, Patrick Murphy had
come down as Construction Superintendent for the contractor, together with several civilian supervisors. With the one officer given me, and some of the civilians, the United States Naval Repair Base at Massawa was put in commission. I started the job of recruiting a Naval Base working force—Italians, Eritreans, Arabs, anybody I could hire except Americans, of whom there would be none available for us. All the American mechanics who had come over with me were earmarked for the contractor ’s various construction projects in Eritrea. Unfortunately for my purposes, these were the air base at Gura on the plateau first, housing at the mountain village of Ghinda and elsewhere second, and construction at Massawa (housing again, mainly) a poor last, since no machinery for Massawa was expected for a long time. I had also the job of getting the shops going without waiting for the machinery from America. My inspection of the Italian shops had convinced me that no matter how thorough a job the Italians thought they had done, as saboteurs they had committed a terrible blunder which left the door open to us for a quick rehabilitation of all the smashed machinery. I meant to take advantage of it. Helping on this I had six of the contractor ’s civilian supervisors whom the contractor was glad to lend me temporarily at least, since in his construction projects in Massawa he had as yet no equipment for them to work with. These six men—Austin Byrne, master machinist; James Lang, electrical superintendent; Herman Weinberg, sheet-metal foreman; Pierre Willermet, pipe foreman; Paul Taylor, electrical foreman; and Fred Schlachter, carpenter foreman—worked like Trojans for me; with their help I managed to give the Axis its first shock in sabotaged Massawa. For I had observed that while there wasn’t an unsmashed electric driving motor on any machine, the smashing had not been symmetrically done. On some motors they had smashed one end, on others the opposite end, on still others the main frame. There were hundreds of motors involved of different sizes, but of each size there were dozens at least. That situation was the key to our solution. If only we could disassemble all the broken motors, out of some dozens of broken motors of a given size, I was sure we could find enough undamaged parts of every kind needed to reassemble a few complete motors at least. Aided by the local British military and naval authorities, I started to hire workmen. Eritreans were not hard to get—there were hundreds available as
laborers. A few dozen Italian workmen were obtained, some of them exmechanics of the naval base, some P.O.W.s eager to exchange the meager fare of the concentration camps for square meals at the American Naval Base, plus real wages, more than they had ever earned in Italy or Eritrea, either as soldiers or civilians. Then in the beginning we got some Arabs also—carpenters, all of them, for apparently none of the Arabs had ever had a chance at machinery. But they were good carpenters, and Fred Schlachter, foreman in that shop, hailed them with glee. Now I ran into other troubles—I had a plan, I had some workmen, but we had no hand tools for them to work with, even on the simple tasks which must come first. Unbelievable as it may seem, we found ourselves practically in the position of primitive man; the commonest hand tools—saws, hammers, screwdrivers, monkey wrenches—which all of our lives we had taken as a matter of course, we didn’t have and we couldn’t get in Massawa. The American solution, going around to the nearest hardware store and buying any tool wanted, was as remote as America, 13,000 miles away from us. There were no hardware stores, there were no tools for sale in Massawa. That was a problem that had to be solved immediately. I took Fred Schlachter in my car and we started for Asmara. Surely there must be some tools there. And at the same time, I sent off all the other foremen I had in Army cars to scour the hinterland of Eritrea—the shut-down Italian gold mines, the cement mills, the little village repair shops over which the tide of war and looting had not swept. They were to commandeer for the United States whatever in the way of tools they could find, and pay the owners whatever was demanded. Up and down again over that seventy-mile mountain drive to Asmara I went myself, more slowly this time, since I had some real control over the driver. In Asmara, after appealing to the British and the American army quartermasters and going through several Italian plants taken over by the occupying forces, we acquired a few tools—two saws, four hammers, a few screwdrivers, files, and chisels, and one wrench. Had I been given the British crown jewels, I could not have been more jealous of them as we stowed these few precious tools beneath the back seat cushion for our return trip, held down by Schlachter and me, sitting on them to make sure they did not mysteriously disappear before we got them to Massawa. Coming back from Asmara, I had a better chance to scan the scenery than on
my first ride. It was magnificent—vast precipices, sheer mountainsides, long vistas, opening continuously, as cautiously we swung around the mountain switchbacks. Now and then we passed a laden camel train or a solitary burro, almost hidden by a huge load several times bigger than himself. But what struck me most was neither the scenery nor the primitive transport bearing produce to Asmara—it was the decorations with which the Fascisti had lined that mountain road. Every hundred yards at least on some prominent rock or cliffside, where it could not escape attention, was carefully and professionally painted in large letters, “W il Duce!” which my driver assured me meant “Viva il Duce.” Very carefully spaced, one to every ten “W il Duces,” was “W il Re!” and again, roughly in the ratio of one to every hundred “W il Duces,” was “W il Duca de Aosta!” From all this it was apparent that Mussolini had had little intention of letting any Italian in Eritrea forget him, or forget who was boss, he or the King of Italy, whom evidently he rated as worth only ten per cent of regimented Fascist vivas. As for the Duke of Aosta, cousin of the King, Commander of the Italian East African Army, and Governor of Eritrea, one per cent of the painted cheers would do for him. None of these “spontaneous” cheers for il Duce had been painted out or defaced by the British, even though they had been in occupation for nearly a year. Nothing, I thought, so showed British contempt for Mussolini and all he might yet attempt as those uneffaced self-testimonials. No Italian in Eritrea could travel that road now without blushing. No American or Britisher could travel it without laughing at that clown, Mussolini. We got back to Massawa in the late afternoon, feeling twice as uncomfortable as when we had left, for the few brief hours in cool Asmara made the hot coast seem even more intolerable. I resolved to go to Asmara as little as I could—the flames of hell are not made more bearable by short vacations in heaven. Soon my other foragers were all back—some with fair luck, some with none. But when we inventoried our acquisitions, it looked as if we had enough hand tools to get perhaps two dozen mechanics going. Next morning we got under way. In every shop, a few Italians were turned to, unbolting smashed motors from machine beds. Crews of Eritreans carried
them to the electric shop, where other Italians started to disassemble them, making heaps of all similar parts that were still good. Still other Eritreans were set to work on the huge scrap and junk piles behind the foundry, instructed to sort out every undamaged gear, every piece of anything in an undamaged condition that looked like a piece of machinery. Meanwhile, Austin Byrne, master mechanic, started a careful piece by piece scrutiny of every machine in every shop. Each machine had, aside from the smashing of its driving motor, been rendered unserviceable by smashing some vital gear, sometimes more than one, or removing some vital part; but not every gear on every machine had been either smashed or removed. Byrne’s task resolved itself into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle—it was his job in the wide assortment of still undamaged gears and parts to see if he could find somewhere in cannibalizing that damaged collection of machinery, enough unbroken gears and parts to assemble at least one good lathe and one good milling machine—more, of course, if possible. It worked out marvelously. By the second day, Lang and Taylor in the electrical shop had reassembled completely half a dozen three and fivehorsepower electric motors from what had once been parts of some twentyfive other damaged motors. Within the same time, Byrne had refitted completely the driving trains on an eighteen-inch lathe and on a milling machine. Two of our first batch of reassembled electric motors were bolted to those two machines, belted up, power thrown on the lines, and we were ready to go. It was a happy moment for all hands when Byrne pressed the button and our first lathe began to spin perfectly. Oddly enough, no American there seemed any happier than the delighted Italian machinist who had been assigned to that lathe—one of the very Italians who the year before had helped swing the sledges which had destroyed everything. Now he positively beamed on the ingenious Americans who had given him that smashed machine in working order again. From then on, the rehabilitation literally snowballed up. On the junk piles we had found three discarded graphite crucibles from the foundry. They were old and thin and cracked about the rims, but they were whole, and with delicate handling, usable. Literally I thanked God when we found those crucibles, saved miraculously from being smashed by having been tossed out previously as junk too worn for use. Nowhere in all the Middle East (for I had contacted every Allied warehouse and shop) were there any crucibles available to us— without them the foundry was useless.
But with those heaven-sent crucibles in our hands, we went to town. Using broken gears as patterns (or where there were none, then patterns carved by hand by Schlachter and his Arabs) we cast what new gears we needed to complete the next machine. We didn’t try to cast in iron or steel—we weren’t ready for that—but only in brass or aluminum, which were easier both to cast in the foundry and to machine afterwards. Hardly was the first gear casting cool enough to break out of the molding sand when it was rushed to the machine shop, where on our one lathe it was turned true, faced, and bored, and then shifted over to our solitary miller to have its teeth cut. That large gear and another smaller one, when finished, went immediately into place to give us a third machine in working order—a boring mill. Each machine, as it went back into service, increased our capacity to make new parts for others—vital parts we couldn’t find. Soon we were casting in aluminum or brass and machining parts to replace broken parts of electric motors that we needed and couldn’t find in our heaps of disassembled parts— end bells mainly. Each new motor made another machine serviceable; each new machine widened perceptibly our ability to make parts for other motors and other machines. The enthusiasm in the shops among our heterogeneous collection of workmen as, one after another, they saw additional machines starting to turn over and produce, rose feverishly—it was amazing to watch the Italians especially, jabbering delightedly to each other as, one by one, in ever shortening periods those smashed machines came to life again. The rehabilitation had another unexpected effect. After a few days it became obvious to every Italian that the few energetic Americans bossing them had neither any intention of locking Massawa up till autumn cooled it off a bit nor of waiting till new machinery arrived from America—in spite of heat and in spite of destruction, those Americans were going to have everything sabotaged going again and that before long. Such being the case, what was the value to the Italians in holding out information they had till it was worthless to them, since its lack was doing us no great hurt? Evidently they saw no value in it any more. Privately, so that none of their co-workers saw them, one after another of our Italian mechanics sought out his own foreman, Austin Byrne, or me, always with the same story. He knew where this or that missing gear or part had been secreted against the return of the Fascisti. But now he was himself sure the Fascisti were not coming back.
Perhaps we should like to know where that part was? Maybe we might pay a little something for the information? But we would be willing to keep it a secret for fear of Fascist reprisals on his family in Italy? Always the answer was the same—we should be happy to know, we should be glad to pay, our secrecy could be relied on. The policy brought gratifying results. Missing parts by the dozen miraculously reappeared, for which we paid up to 1000 Italian lira (about ten dollars) apiece, and in a few cases, considerably more. The net effect of our efforts in heat too intolerable for work was to produce the first Massawa miracle. One American officer and six American supervisors, using nothing—labor or materials or tools—that was not on hand in Massawa or thereabouts when we arrived, in only one month after my arrival had every sabotaged Italian shop in the naval base working at at least the full capacity intended by the Italians themselves; in some cases more. The United States Naval Repair Base at Massawa was fully ready for business the first week in May, 1942, and yet not one of the new outfit of shop machines ordered in America to make it serviceable had as yet been loaded for shipment out of New York! Our naval base went right to work, not a week too soon either, for in Libya, Rommel was crashing eastward and soon was to be knocking at the gateway to Egypt.
CHAPTER
20 FROM THE SECOND DAY OF MY ARRIVAL in Massawa, I had another pressing problem literally staring me in the face each time I looked out the windows of my room at the Red Sea. Lying in the open roadstead outside the naval harbor, swinging to one anchor only, was what looked like a sizable white elephant which had been the immediate cause of the crack-up of the first British liaison officer sent to Massawa. It seems that the year before, both Axis partners had been urgently concerned in stirring up revolt in Iran and Irak against British influence, hoping immediately to shut off oil to Britain and later to acquire it themselves. Meanwhile, also, in Iran they would shut the back door for supplying Russia. The Iranian government, very partial to Axis ideas, had co-operated enthusiastically, so also had elements in Irak. Fighting broke out. But Britain had reacted energetically. With tanks and planes and infantry, her Middle East forces had swiftly flattened out the Axis co-operators and in Persia particularly, a new government more favorably disposed toward Great Britain had hastily taken over. Looking over now quiescent Persia with access to its archives in Teheran, British officials discovered an interesting situation. Lying in the Persian Gulf, practically never used because of a sad miscalculation in the depth of water available for its operation, was a medium-sized floating steel dry dock. On the face of things, this dry dock had been purchased some six years before by the then Persian government from Italy, where it was built to order, but an inspection of the treasury archives in Teheran indicated that not one cent had yet been paid the Italian builders for the dock. In British eyes, this situation had promising possibilities which she promptly proceeded to turn into realities. From captured Massawa was a report from her own salvage expert (later killed) based on his diving survey, that the salvage of the two scuttled Italian docks there was impossible. Britain badly needed a dry
dock, any kind of a dock, if Massawa were ever to function at all. Here in the Persian Gulf was a dry dock the Persians couldn’t use anyway for lack of water, and which they didn’t own either, since they had never paid for it, even partly. Ownership under those conditions lay with the unpaid builders who were Italians (and presumably the Italian government which for reasons not too obscure, had never pressed for payment). The Italians were enemies who had treacherously declared war on Britain; Italian property anywhere within reach was subject to seizure, and certainly that dry dock was now within reach of Britain’s Navy. Given all these facts, there was only one conclusion to be drawn and the British drew it. The Royal Navy seized the dry dock as an Italian prize of war. All I had to do was to gaze out of my window in Massawa to see it swinging to one anchor in the outer roadstead, where it had arrived after a 2000-mile tow several weeks before I had. If that floating dry dock had been a useless white elephant and a problem to the Persians, it was still quite as useless a white elephant and just as much a problem to the British in Massawa, though for different reasons. Temporarily it was anchored in the open roadstead where the ocean-going tugs which had brought it had dropped it and promptly fled from Massawa. It could neither be used where it was nor left there, no matter how many moorings were put down to hold it. In that exposed location the first heavy blow, either from the sea or the desert, was bound to take that high, flat-sided dry dock and pile it up on the coral-fringed shore, a total loss. The logical answer, of course, was immediately to tow it into the sheltered naval harbor, which was the only spot the dry dock could be operated, and moor it permanently there for use. But there were obstacles to logic. Two sunken Italian docks already occupied the only logical spots for floating dry docks, even though they were no longer floating. Whether a third spot existed inside that harbor with water enough and a usable approach for ships being docked, was an unanswered question. Then part of the mooring chains for the dry dock had been lost on the long tow—she no longer had chain enough for a safe mooring job anywhere. Finally, there was the actual problem of towing the new dry dock through into the sheltered naval harbor, now too sheltered, unfortunately, with five ships scuttled across it to block the entrance. My first British liaison officer, faced in my absence with all these problems, had earnestly striven to find the answers before the first severe storm came
along and added the wreck of the Persian dry dock to all the Italian and German wrecks, with which Massawa waters were already too liberally bestrewn. He tried to obtain mooring cables from the British Naval Base in Alexandria. He received, instead of chain cable, the stereotyped Middle East answer to everything which I very soon learned by heart, “There is none available.” In desperation he then sought to figure out a way of taking the dry dock into the harbor between the scuttled wrecks, of finding some place inside the sheltered harbor at least to anchor her. He got nowhere. Between the Massawa heat, the demoralizing sight of all the wrecks roundabout, and the vision haunting him night and day of that valuable dock gone to join the existing wrecks, he cracked up. A nervous wreck himself, he was shipped off to the hospital in the hills shortly before my arrival. Now I had the problem of that dry dock, along with all my other Massawa problems. Since the U.S. Naval Base was now in commission, the Royal Navy had turned over the Persian dry dock to me as part of it. How long did I have to find an answer? No one could tell me. Even though it was early April, it was not too late for occasional heavy blows from the Red Sea. After early May, quite as severe sandstorms could be expected off the desert. Something must be done immediately, or I should now be responsible for the loss of the dock. So while I was in the midst of my hectic start in getting the rehabilitation of the sabotaged shops under way, I had also to undertake to save that dry dock. Accompanied by Lieutenant Fairbairn of the Royal Navy, I went out in the exItalian launch which served him as a pilot boat to survey the wrecks which lay across the channel entrance to the naval harbor. Looked at from the sea, from left to right the wrecks were those of the Acerbi, Impero,.Oliva, XXIII Marzo, and Moncalieri. It was immediately apparent that while these vessels had been stretched out before scuttling in a string across the channel, bow to stern, to block it, the Italians had not succeeded too well in their intentions. Evidently in going down, the Oliva had rolled over on its side and in so doing had swung its stern away from the bow of the XXIII Marzo. At any rate, a clear channel, certainly wide enough to pass an ordinary ship, existed between the hulks of the Oliva and the XXIII Marzo, provided the entering ship was brought in at an angle to the line of wrecks. Was the clearance great enough also to pass the dry dock, which was far wider in the
beam than any ordinary vessel, as well as being far more unwieldy since it was box-shaped, had no rudder and no power, and in a tow was likely to sheer about unpredictably, particularly at low speed? By careful measuring with a sounding line, Fairbairn and I determined the passage between the two wrecks gave us a few fathoms clearance for the beam of the dock between the bow of the XXIII Marzo and the stern of the Oliva—if only we could bring the dock in at the proper angle and hold her steady on that angle till her entire length, about 400 feet, had passed both wrecks. There was not clearance enough to allow passage with a tug secured to one side (let alone both sides) to help hold the dock steady—our unwieldly dock with all the grace and maneuverability of an overgrown rectangular cracker box would have to be handled by tugs secured to her only by lines ahead and astern. To me, bringing the dock through looked possible. But Fairbairn, shaking his head dubiously, pointed out the dangers. He was in a bad way for tugs to handle even an ordinary tow, let alone one requiring the very highest degree of tugboat skill. All he had to work with was two tugs, when the job obviously required at least four, and six would be better. Then, of the two tugs he did have to lean on, one he could only regard as a broken reed, and the other as at best a somewhat flexible one. His first tug, a Royal Navy craft sent down from Port Sudan, was manned by a set of officers wholly incompetent for tugboat work—they were big ship sailors, tossed against their will onto a tug which they despised with no wish at all to acquire the skill they lacked, and intent only on escaping Massawa at the earliest moment. “When those chaps are secured to the end of a towline, Commander, I nearly always have heart failure wondering what they’ll do with it the minute my back’s turned,” confided Fairbairn. “They’ve already crumpled the bow of their own tug, ramming a ship they should have been backing away on. Only the Lord knows what they’ll do next time.” The other tug he had more faith in, but even about that one he was none too sure. “You see, Commander, she’s a Chinese tug, manned completely by Chinamen, excepting only her skipper, who’s English and quite a decent chap. She belongs in Hong Kong; when the Japs assaulted that last December and it surrendered, that Chinese tug, the Hsin Rocket, was the only thing that managed to escape the harbor—quite a smart performance considering all the warships the Japs had blockading the port. Why she ended up in Massawa, of all the
places she might have gone, I can’t explain. Now the Hsin Rocket’s a good tug and her Chinese crew know their business, but I’m always a little afraid that in a tight spot her skipper may lose some precious seconds in translating my orders into Chinese for his crew, and land me in a jam.” Fairbairn went on to point out to me, as he previously had to the first Royal Navy liaison officer, that due to insufficient tugs, to the possible inept handling of the two tugs he had, to the unpredictable action of that box-shaped dock coming in across the tidal current due to the oblique course he must steer, and worst of all, to a possible sudden slew of the high-sided dock if a gust of cross wind hit her, there was grave danger of ramming one wreck or the other coming through with the possibility of the dock being sunk in the only opening now existing in that line of wrecks, blocking off the naval harbor completely. From Lieutenant Fairbairn’s launch, I scanned what showed above water of the capsized Oliva and the upright XXIII Marzo, the Scylla and Charybdis between which the Persian dock must pass if it were to be saved. I made up my mind. If ever I went to join that first liaison officer in the hospital as another nervous wreck, it was going to be as a result of doing something, not of doing nothing. “I’m responsible now, Lieutenant,” I told Fairbairn. “I’ll take the risk. Whatever happens, the fault will be mine. I’ll survey the inner harbor this afternoon for the best anchorage, and tomorrow you get your tugs and take her through at slack tide. I know you can do it,” and I meant that, too, for by now I was beginning to acquire a great deal of respect for sober-faced Lieutenant Fairbairn. “Aye, aye, sir,” he responded, unemotional as always. “I’ll have the tugs round from the commercial harbor and we’ll move at eleven tomorrow morning. That will give me an hour to get her straightened away outside so we can hit the entrance right at high water slack. But mind you, Commander,” he warned me earnestly, “not if it’s blowing tomorrow. I won’t touch her in any wind. And I want a flag marker buoy with no slack planted exactly on the sunken bow of the XXIII Marzo and the sunken stern of the Oliva to mark the clearance for me.” I spent the afternoon in a broad-beamed heavy launch, which in contradiction to her scowlike lines, was elegantly named the Lord Grey. The Lord Grey, manned now by an Italian crew, had been brought from Alexandria and was the only power boat that went with my newly acquired Naval Base. From the Italian chart of the harbor, there was a spot with six fathoms of
water at low tide just to the northeast of where the two Italian docks were scuttled. This offered the only remaining area in which the Persian dock could possibly be operated, though even there, when flooded down at low tide to take a ship, the dock would probably touch bottom. To make matters worse, the approach was bad. A ship coming in to be docked, would first, of course, have to sidle through between the wrecks at the entrance. After that, it would have to dodge a three-fathom shoal spot on its port side while it made a sharp 90° turn to starboard to line up for going onto the dock. All this was going to be very tricky seamanship in handling each ship for docking and undocking, but there was no help for it. It was that one spot for the Persian dock, or nothing. It remained to be seen whether in that solitary available spot showing six fathoms on the Italian chart, there really were six fathoms of water and, more important, to discover whether in the area the dry dock would cover, there were any high spots which might pierce the bottom of our dry dock when it was flooded down to take a ship. With a British quartermaster and half a dozen British seamen to do the work, I put in a very hot afternoon while the Lord Grey cruised slowly back and forth and circled about over the proposed site and the British naval ratings sounded, dragged grappling hooks, and swept drags in circles over the entire area. Finally, I was willing to call it a day. The chart soundings were correct; our drags had caught on nothing that indicated any coral pinnacles below. I visited the dry dock swinging at its anchor off the seaward face of the AbdEl-Kader Peninsula. It was a fair-sized dock, capable of lifting a dead weight of 6000 tons, enough to take the average merchantman if it came in light—that is, with no cargo aboard to speak of. I met the dock crew, and my eyebrows lifted as I learned that the range of nationalities to be employed at the U.S. Naval Repair Base was widening out. The supervisors recently provided by the British with the dock, were English—Mr. Spanner, dockmaster; Mr. Reed, assistant dockmaster; and Mr. Hudson, engineer. But the operating crew of the dock were its original Persian complement—nine Persians, only two of whom spoke any English, plus about a dozen Hindoos who spoke no English at all. This took me somewhat aback, as docking ships, particularly in floating dry docks, is a delicate business, not unlike in many ways the problem of safely delivering an infant. How in heaven’s name, I wondered, was I going to make these men understand in a pinch what was wanted? Already I had Arabs, Chinese, Eritreans, Italians, Somalis, Maltese, and Sudanese to deal with. Now Persians and Hindoos! But I pushed that worry away for the moment. The
present problem was a tow for the dock and mooring her inside. Docking ships would have to await its turn in my string of pressing problems. There was also temporarily aboard the dry dock the Master Rigger from the Royal Naval Base at Alexandria, sent down from there to moor the dry dock if ever she got inside the harbor and provided also he ever found gear enough to moor her with. My discussion was mainly with him. The towing problem was first gone into. I must arrange to borrow from Captain Lucas every one of his seamen not actually on watch, twenty at least, to handle lines and later to help handle the anchor cables. I will not go into the details, they were many, but that English Master Rigger knew his business and we got along beautifully on the towing arrangements and the preliminary anchoring once we got the dock inside (if we ever did). What bothered the Master Rigger was how to moor the dock permanently in place. She required eight heavy anchors with three-inch thick chain cables to hold her; she now had only five since three of her cables had been lost while being used as towing bridles on the long tow from the Persian Gulf. Where, this side of Portsmouth Dockyard on the English Channel, was he going to get those three missing cables? I told him not to worry, the Bible gave the answer: “Seek and ye shall find.” While on my surveying party in the Lord Grey that afternoon on the far side of the harbor from the Naval Base, my eye had lighted on a solitary Italian building standing on the deserted far shore. Very evidently that building, from all the huge concrete mooring blocks lying in front of it, had been the Italian mooring and submarine defense net depot. I had taken the Lord Grey over for a closer look. Stretched out, half buried in the sand near that building were heavy chain cables in great variety, apparently undamaged. The Italians had neither been able to sabotage that massive chain nor to dispose of it—all that under the hot Massawa sun would have been too much work for the saboteurs. We need no longer search—the Lord (in co-operation with the Italians) had provided for all our needs. Leaving to the Master Rigger the task of planting the marker buoys on the wrecks and the additional marker buoys on the site I had indicated on the chart for the dock, I went ashore, inordinately thirsty and, as usual, completely soaked in sweat. My car was waiting at the Naval Base dock, and I made a bee line for the shower before tackling anything else. After that and dinner, I went to see Captain Lucas about borrowing his seamen for the work in shifting the dock. He was very willing to help and there
was no difficulty on that score, but obviously he was much embarrassed over something. Finally he blurted out, “I am ashamed to have to say so, Ellsberg, but that liaison chap in Asmara has outmaneuvered me. He isn’t coming to Massawa. The moment he got my message, instead of starting here as ordered, he reported in at our military hospital in Asmara. And would you believe it, the Army surgeons there admitted him as a patient! Remarkable case of triumph of mind over matter— you know—the kind of thing that puts so many blighters that have never even been under fire in the hospitals with shell shock. I wouldn’t have believed it of a commander in the Royal Navy! Bloody fool he’s made of me! I had to wireless the Commander-in-Chief in Alex that the second liaison fellow had cracked up before he even got here; to send another one posthaste. A reply came this morning—they’re ordering a third commander; he should be here day after tomorrow. I trust he lasts longer than the others. My apologies, Ellsberg; the Royal Navy makes a better go of things usually than it’s done on this.” I had to laugh. Captain Lucas stared at me nonplused—he could see nothing humorous in the tribulations of His Majesty’s Navy. Next day, as scheduled, we went out to move the Persian dry dock. Lieutenant Fairbairn had quite a time deciding which arrangement of his two tugs involved the least danger. Finally he concluded to let the Hsin Rocket, the Chinese tug, tow ahead, supplying the power for the tow and its direction, while the British tug dragged astern where it could cause the least amount of trouble, to help as best it might in steering. The tugs picked up their respective towing bridles at bow and stern, we weighed anchor on the dry dock, and hauled away from the coral-fringed shore toward the open sea. Fairbairn rode on the dry dock; so also did I, with naval signalmen posted on the dock and on both tugs for communication, though Fairbairn depended most on a very shrill whistle, always clenched between his teeth, for his signals. We made a very wide swing out into the open sea, so that Fairbairn might have a good opportunity to get well lined up on his approach course and settled down on it before we got into close waters where every inch of clearance might count. Nobody said anything. Ahead, the Hsin Rocket puffed valiantly at its load, churning up a vast wake which eddied and broke erratically against the square flat bow of the slowly moving dry dock. Astern, the second tug dragged along
on its line to our stern bridle, keeping everything taut so that at least it might attempt to help sheer us one way or the other when required. Occasionally semaphore flags waved or the whistle in Fairbairn’s teeth shrilled out, as he directed the tugs in our wide circle. Two miles out we finished our circle and came about on our final course, 239° or SW by W¼W (true), pointed for the narrow gap between the wrecks which both Fairbairn and I were watching through binoculars. Weather conditions were perfect for our attempt. There was only a slight sea and a gentle breeze from seaward, practically astern of us; according to our tidal data, it would be slack water at the entrance in half an hour when we got to the wrecks again, so we should have no crosscurrents to bother us. The thirty minutes following passed very slowly and in complete silence on the dry dock as the Hsin Rocket, holding straight as an arrow herself, bore down from seaward on the narrow pass with the dry dock yawing gently as it followed. We went slowly by the sunken Moncalieri on our starboard hand, clearing her side parallel to us, by hardly twenty feet. That was good; about correct to give us the slightly less clearance we wanted in passing through the gap when abreast the next wreck. Fairbairn glanced ahead at the two wrecks forming the gate, then astern at the tug there. She was still dragging along, holding the stern line taut. Once more his eyes came back to the Hsin Rocket churning up the sea ahead; she was now in the gap marked by the two flag buoys on the wrecks, and exactly in the center of that gap. Fairbairn, for the first time, released the grip of his teeth on his whistle, let it drop from his mouth to dangle on the lanyard round his neck. A cool pilot, Fairbairn, I reflected, watching him. When nothing could be done, he had no intention of balling up the situation by shrieking orders. And nothing could be done now that would make any further difference—the unwieldy tow must proceed as it was, come what might. Another couple of minutes and the square bow of the dry dock was entering the gap between the side of the XXIII Marzo and the stern of the Oliva, both submerged, of course. Looking down from the high port side of the dry dock, almost forty feet above the sea, both wrecks could be seen through the clear water, the upright XXIII Marzo to starboard parallel to us, and the capsized Oliva to port, at about a 45° angle. Apparently we were beautifully splitting the gap between them. It would take two minutes for the long length of the dry dock to pass clear; if we didn’t swing either way now, we should be all right.
Keeping pace with the slow speed of the tow, I walked aft along the top of the port side wall of the dry dock, holding myself abeam of the Oliva’s stern as the dry dock slid ahead under my feet, my eyes glued on the few feet of eddying water between our steel side and the flag buoy exactly on the submerged stern of the wreck. If that distance either opened out or narrowed down we should be in trouble instantly with one wreck or the other—if Scylla didn’t get us, Charybdis would, and one more bottleneck impeding the war effort would be solidly plugged, to impede it even more effectively. The inertia of our massive dry dock held her steady against what little wind or current there may have been—foot by foot we went through with no appreciable change in our clearance! On the stern of the dock at last (which brought my walk aft to an abrupt halt) I watched the submerged stern of the Oliva draw slowly away from us; in another moment we were clear also of the bow of the XXIII Marzo, safely inside the naval harbor with our precious dock. From far forward on the bow of the dock, I heard Fairbairn’s whistle shrilling out orders again to the tugs. He was starting his sharp 90° turn to starboard to clear the shoal and the two sunken Italian dry docks which lay ahead a little on the starboard bow. I wiped the streams of sweat from my face and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The 6000-ton load of the Persian dry dock was off my shoulders. I could safely entrust the placing of it in its permanent berth to Lieutenant Fairbairn, and the permanent mooring of it there (about a ten days’ job) to the British Master Rigger, now that I had shown him where he could find the mooring cables he was short of.
CHAPTER
21 ONCE THE PERSIAN DRY DOCK WAS inside the harbor, all my attention for the next few weeks was concentrated on the restoring to service of the Naval Base shops and on gathering together for it a sufficient operating personnel. We went through all the records available to the British as to what had happened to the former Italian personnel; a few dozen we were able to retrieve from P.O.W. and concentration camps and from other occupations into which they had drifted. Some other Italians with mechanical skills we were able to get from the P.O.W.s who had never worked in Massawa; but on the whole, the results were disappointing; we got no more than half as many as we needed. We swiftly learned we were up against too much competition for skilled labor. The Army’s contractor at Asmara was hiring all the Italians he could for his construction programs at Gura, at Asmara, at Ghinda, and at other places on the plateau or in the mountains. Massawa’s reputation hung like a millstone round our necks—why should any Italian, P.O.W. or not, voluntarily go to work in Massawa when he could get just as good a job with the American contractor in comfort 3000 to 8000 feet up in the cool mountains? The climate bonus of 20 per cent which we were authorized to pay in Massawa over other areas in Eritrea, never proved attractive enough. We paid the Italians fifty lira (fifty cents) a day. Highly skilled mechanics received seventy-five. With native Eritreans, we were more fortunate; we could hire them by the hundreds. Those who belonged in Massawa neither knew nor cared about the rest of the world. For thousands of years they had lived on that arid coast, and they looked it. Not for two thousand years at least did it seem that any coastal Eritrean had had a square meal. For these people, akin to the Ethiopians and with clear-cut features intelligent in appearance, lived in what has aptly been called, “One of the world’s less promising deserts.” All were reasonably tall, but I doubt if the average adult Eritrean weighed 100 pounds. They were so generally emaciated, I never saw one whose skinny
calf or bicep I could not have encompassed in one hand. This condition, a combined result of countless generations facing starvation rations and that steaming heat, made the ordinary Eritrean a very poor workman—he simply had not the strength to do very much. I have seen one American easily move a pump that six adult Eritrean laborers were struggling vainly to budge. We hired the Eritreans, who worked on the ancient tribal system, in tribes. The deal was always made with the sheikh of the tribe, who was above working himself, but bossed the rest of his tribe, received all orders about the tasks required, and, of course, collected the wages due. In fairness to the sheikhs, however, who were generally quite patriarchal, I have every reason to believe the money was fairly divided, and that every member of the tribe, even though too ill or too old to work, received a share of what the tribe earned. The standard wage for Eritreans was twenty-five lira (twenty-five cents) a day. Next above the Eritreans in the scale of laborers, came the Sudanese. They were big, strapping fellows, excellent as laborers, and we hired all we could, but as they were foreigners in Eritrea, there were few available. Naturally, in view of their much greater strength, they were paid more than the Eritreans, about thirty-five lira a day, which was a source of continuous irritation to the Eritreans who objected to other blacks getting more than they in their own country. However, except to get the entry of further Sudanese laborers barred by the British, they were unable to get anything done to equalize the wage scale. Next came the Arabs. There were no Arab laborers in Massawa—all were either merchants, sailors, or artisans. The Arab merchants didn’t interest me; I had no need for Arab sailors (who were sailors in the strict sense of that word, being acquainted only with sail, not with engines); but we hired all the Arab artisans we could get and our carpenter and boat shops had no other workmen —just Arabs. Fine carpenters they were, too, fully sensitive to the dignity of their ancient trade even working on modern power-driven machines. They were paid the same as the Italian mechanics. By American standards, all Italian and native labor was very low paid, but the wage standards were all set by the British Military Government; we abided by their rules. While we were rounding up a working force and putting them to work on our ever growing number of repaired machines, I struggled with the problem of some office help. If I were going to run a Naval Base on any basis other than that of growing chaos, I simply had to have a secretary who could type a
letter and handle the office files. As usual, there was none available. The contractor would not part with any of his civilian clerks, the Army could not part with any of their few enlisted clerks, and as for my getting a navy yeoman from far-off Washington, that was hopeless. In this dilemma, the Royal Navy saved the situation, though indirectly. Lieutenant Maton, the Intelligence Officer for the British Naval Forces, had his wife with him in Massawa. This odd situation (for there were no white wives in Eritrea save those of Italians) had come about before the war when Mrs. Maton had left England to join her husband on the then peaceful Mediterranean Station. Stranded in Malta by the outbreak of hostilities, she had been moved for safety to Egypt, and later, when he was ordered to Massawa, she had been permitted to join him there, where now she was housekeeping in the cottage next the one I had been assigned but had never occupied. Mrs. Maton, tired perhaps of housekeeping as her only diversion in a spot where servants were plentiful, volunteered to serve as secretary to the new American Naval Base. She could type, she said (and she could), and thought she might make a fair clerk. So, being neither an enemy alien nor a native, she was hired at the going rate for an American typist in the Middle East and promptly began to draw more pay than her husband received as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Whether this ever caused her any trouble at home, I don’t know, but as the Matons were a very devoted couple, I doubt it. Mrs. Maton (in her early twenties, slight, brunette, and reserved) turned out to be a very efficient secretary, whom, for every reason but one, I was always glad to have. That one reason was that her husband was Intelligence Officer for the Royal Navy. We never had any secrets from the British, for whose benefit our Naval Base was being operated, but occasionally American affairs with respect to our relations with the contractor ’s supervisory personnel in Asmara went none too smoothly. I should have preferred to have had all knowledge of these family squabbles kept strictly in the family, maintaining the fiction before our British friends that all Americans were 100 per cent engaged in forwarding the joint war effort in all ways. However, with the British Intelligence Officer ’s wife right in my office, handling my telephone, handling all my correspondence, I’m afraid the Royal Navy soon learned some Americans, even in the war zone, had other interests which came first. The first half of April passed along with the heat increasing daily. Bathed all the time in perspiration, out in the sun a great part of each day, trudging from
shop to shop or on the dry dock where the mooring work was progressing, I began to lose weight rapidly; so did my few American associates who were struggling fiercely along with me to get things going. As regards the Naval Base, I threw all the Massawa legends and traditions to the winds—the Middle East situation was getting more serious each day as Rommel fought his way further eastward across the Libyan sands, increasing the threat to Alexandria. It was that summer or never, if Massawa was going to have any influence on the war. So I cast into the discard the hoary belief that the white man can’t stand the tropics—in Massawa, the hottest spot on earth, he was going to have to, or shortly land in a Nazi concentration camp. The first Massawa custom to go by the board was that of working only three hours in the morning and two in the early evening—instead, a ten-hour working day was instituted for the Naval Base, commencing at 7:00 A.M. and ending at 6:00 P.M., with an hour only out at noon for lunch. I had a theory (which I still believe to be correct) that giving a man six hours off in the middle of the day, from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., resulted only in his putting in six more hours sopping up all the liquor or beer he could lay hands on in his free time, ostensibly at least trying to quench his thirst in the torrid heat. After six extra hours a day spent that way, it needed no proof to demonstrate that the white man can’t stand the tropics. He went to pieces in a hurry. Now there could be no argument about the reality of the thirst—somehow the loss of body liquids apparent in the profuse perspiration had to be made good, or a man would shortly be a bleached-out mummy, especially if he were engaged in active outdoor work. But as long as a man was kept on the job, he could be made to drink water and nothing else to quench his abnormal thirst. As to prostration from the extraordinary heat, a common cause of collapse in Massawa previously, we had a preventative for that also, administered under the supervision of Captain Plummer, our Army medical officer. This had been fairly well proved out in American industrial practice. In blast furnaces and steel mills, where the workers were exposed to unusual heat from molten iron, salt tablets had greatly reduced cases of heat collapse. The theory of this was that excessive perspiration, no matter how well replaced by copious water drinking, shortly leached out from the body all its mineral salts, leaving the body in condition unable to maintain normal resistance to fatigue or the sun’s heat. The answer was to replace the lost salts constantly by taking a salt tablet (looking very much like an aspirin tablet) with every few drinks of water.
In Massawa, at any rate, it worked out fairly well. We drank huge quantities of water, swallowed salt tablets by the dozens, dripped perspiration constantly day and night, wiped the crust of salt exuding from our pores off our hides whenever it became a nuisance, and worked ten hours a day constantly, including Sundays, sometimes more. By the middle of April, the eight moorings on our Persian dry dock had all been laid out and the dock permanently secured in working position. The Persian crew, superintended by Mr. Hudson, the English dock engineer, began to get the long-disused pumping and other machinery of the dry dock back into operating condition. On shore, the sabotaged naval shops were assuming such shape that I could hope in a few weeks to commence actual operations on docking and repairing ships to lift some of the load off Alexandria. I finally had also a liaison officer, Commander W. E. C. Davy, Royal Navy, the third British candidate for that post in a month. Commander Davy had been Engineer Officer of the battered battleship Queen Elizabeth, which for some weeks past had been, and for some months yet to come was to be, the occupant of the large naval dry dock in Alexandria while that vast hole blown in her bottom was being repaired. Since under those conditions the immobilized Queen Elizabeth had little need for an engineer officer, Commander Davy, who had distinguished himself in keeping her from going down when she was mined, was seized on by the British Commander-in-Chief as being both available and most likely to stand the gaff in Massawa. I hoped with him, the merry-go-round of British liaison officers through Massawa would come to a stop. Commander Davy impressed me favorably for the task, He was an engineer officer in the Royal Navy, good training for Massawa, since battleship engine rooms are always hot and usually sticky. Then physically he was well fitted also; he was tall and thin and unemotional, little given to complaints about anything. Later I learned (but not from him) that he was a descendant of Sir Humphry Davy, most famous of British chemists of over a century before. Long before I was through with Massawa I had no cause to regret the chain of circ*mstances that had brought Commander Davy to Massawa. Davy’s first job as liaison officer was to arrange with the naval authorities in Alexandria for the initial ships to be sent to Massawa for us to work on. I considered that by the first few days in May, we should be ready to turn to. But hardly had he started on this matter than we received a heartbreaking setback. When I started for the Officers’ Mess for dinner on the evening of
April 17, it was raining, not very hard, but unquestionably it was raining. A little skeptical over this phenomenon, fearing another mirage effect, I waited a moment before emerging, for I had been assured that rain in Massawa was most unusual. All the dry river beds I had seen on the hot coastal desert between Massawa and the mountains supported that belief—the whole area gave sound backing to the saying that when you fell into a river in Eritrea, you got up and dusted yourself off. Now undoubtedly here was rain, it was no mirage. As I had just put on a dry shirt and some dry khaki shorts, hoping to enjoy a brief period of dryness while I dined, I went back for my raincoat before setting out. Dinner, as usual, was served on the open veranda out over the water, and started off wonderfully with a real breeze fresh off the Red Sea to cool things down, the first time I had felt comfortable in Massawa. But shortly the breeze became so fresh it began first to blow rain in on us, which we didn’t mind much, and then to blow everything off the table, which was a nuisance. Dinner had to be suspended while the Arab servants cleared the outside tables, reset everything on tables inside the building, and hurriedly closed all the window shutters. This turned out to be useless. Before the inside tables could even be set, the wind had risen to gale proportions and the rain had turned into a downpour. In spite of closed shutters on the sea side, rain was driving in through the slatted shutters, soaking everything. Then the lights went out. The electrical effects accompanying the storm were evidently too much for our power system. Using flashlights, the native servants attempted to carry on, but this was quickly seen to be an idle gesture. Even if they could get the tables reset, there was not going to be anything to eat. The kitchen for the mess was in a latticed basem*nt directly below us, with a flight of concrete steps ten feet wide leading down to it. Down those steps a real Niagara was pouring, a torrent of water eight inches deep at least, completely obliterating all vestiges of the stairs in a roaring cascade. We gave up all thought of dining. The wind swiftly increased to hurricane force till it was blowing at least 100 miles an hour and our masonry building quivered as if it might blow away. A terrific electrical display, with lightning flashing all about and the deafening roar of thunder, added to the tumult of the wind. In spite of my raincoat, which I had hastily donned inside the room, I was soon drenched through, for the rain, driven by hurricane winds now, came through the shutters with such force it drove horizontally completely across
the forty-foot interior of the building, attacking from an angle which made a raincoat practically useless and flooding everything inside. Huddled silently inside the room, momentarily expecting that stout building to collapse about our ears or the next bolt of the vivid lightning striking all around us to get a direct hit on our mess building, we waited, while outside the tables literally took off in the wind to crash ominously somewhere in the dark. From farther away, between the ear-splitting thunderbolts, we heard the dull thud of one roof after another, torn free of its building, collapsing somewhere in the open. I could not keep my mind off that Persian dry dock. Had it remained swinging to one anchor in the Red Sea before our building, where previously it had been, we should long since have had it practically in our laps, pounding itself to pieces on the coral cliffs fringing the Officers’ Mess as the waves broke fiercely over them. How was it faring now, even enclosed in the harbor with the surrounding shores and the artificial breakwater made of wrecks to shelter it from the force of the seas? For its high, flat sides, rising far above the low coast, had no shelter from the roaring winds; would those eight heavy moorings we had just completed hold it safely, or had it perhaps already torn adrift to be wrecked even inside the harbor? From where I was, I had no view of the naval harbor—despite the lightning flashes illuminating everything, I could not see the answer. Sick at heart over the mounting disaster outside, I huddled in my raincoat, bracing my legs for support against the wind. That hurricane was making a wreck of Massawa ashore, perhaps had already made a wreck of our precious Persian dock. And there was nothing anyone could do to mitigate damage. There was not available to us even the slight personal solace of tobacco—all my cigarettes were thoroughly water-soaked; so were all those of the British naval officers about me. And then, mirabile mirabilis, it started to hail! In hot Massawa, which had never known snow or ice in any form, huge hailstones began to beat down, hailstones large enough to have killed a man had any been fool enough to remain exposed in that storm! But fortunately, this phase lasted only a few minutes. Soon after the hail ceased, there came a sudden lull in the wind, which had been blowing from the east. It was of short duration. In a brief space of time, the wind was shrieking past us again, strong as ever, this time from the west, threatening now to tear our building off its foundations and toss it into the Red
Sea. The rain came down in bucketfuls as before, isolating us on the land side in a vast lake which poured down our basem*nt steps and flooded in an unbroken sheet over the cliff tops each side of us. The storm lasted two hours. By 10:00 P.M. the worst was over and the wind gradually died away. It took another hour for the lake outside to drain away sufficiently so the servants might dare the cascade and re-establish contact with our kitchen. By that time everything was hopeless, for the galley ranges had long since been drowned out. What food had not been washed away was uneatable. There would be no dinner for anyone that night. Guided by my flashlight, I stepped out of the Officers’ Mess and waded back to my quarters, dodging as well as I could the debris strewn everywhere. Wires were down all over, the darkness was complete, it was useless to try anything that night. Clearance would have to wait for dawn. Daybreak disclosed a dismal scene. Not a road on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula was passable to any vehicle—the wreckage of roofs covered everything on the ground. The roof on the seaward side of our newly established office building was gone, my office and all its papers were completely waterlogged. Buildings which had come unscathed through a dozen R.A.F. bombing raids on Massawa now looked as if direct hits had been scored on all their roofs—the destruction was beyond belief. Nothing all the British bombing had done to Massawa approached one per cent of the damage that hurricane left in its wake. But my precious Persian dry dock, toward which my eyes had first turned when the earliest rays of the sun lighted up the horizon, was still safe. There it lay in the naval harbor, moored as before in place, apparently undamaged. Our heavy moorings had held and saved it; my speed in getting it inside and secured with all the cables it required, had got that task done none too soon. A later check with instruments showed that it had dragged even with all its moorings some fifty feet out of position before its anchors dug in deeply enough to stop further motion, but that endangered nothing. Work on the rehabilitation of all sabotaged machinery stopped abruptly, of course. All hands, American, Italian, and native, turned to on the task of opening up the roads again, clearing away debris, restringing broken electric power wires, and repairing our many roofless buildings, using any and all materials we could get—tile, transite sheets, asphalt sheathing, and finally, even corrugated iron, which normally we would have shied away from as from the devil, since it transmitted the heat of the sun without resistance.
A week went by before our shops were again under shelter comparable to what we had had the night the hurricane hit us, and power and light had been restored to all of them. Not till then were we able to resume rectifying the manmade damage inside the shops. And it took about that long also to get the soggy mass of papers that had once been my plans and office records dry enough to refile. Inquiry among the native sheikhs disclosed that not for thirty years at least had any hurricane at all comparable to this struck Massawa. That was comforting. As I went about the task of restoring order, it was pleasant to reflect that it was unlikely I should have such a chore every month or two. Long before the conclusion of the thirty-year cycle which might bring the next hurricane, I was sure I should have lost all interest in whatever might strike Massawa.
CHAPTER
22 ON MAY 8, 194 2, FIVE AND ONE-HALF weeks after my arrival in Massawa, the United States Naval Repair Base, Massawa, commenced operations. The only thing naval about it was its Commanding Officer. The only things American about it were, in addition to the Commanding Officer, one Army officer as assistant and six civilian supervisors on loan. We had none of the new American machinery, we had no American mechanics, either military or civilian. We had only the refitted Italian equipment and the Persian dry dock seized from Italy, with the Naval Base working force composed now of a few Englishmen, a fair number of Italians, hundreds of Eritreans, and a conglomeration of Sudanese, Arabs, Maltese, Persians, Somalis, Chinese, Greeks, and Hindoos. With nothing but equipment seized from the enemy and with our skilled working force made up mostly of enemy prisoners of war, we turned to under the American flag (except that I had then not even an American flag we could hoist over our Base) to do our bit in Massawa to stop the Axis. The British Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, K.C.B., O.B.E., Royal Navy (victor over the Nazi Graf Spee in the battle off the River Plate), gave us our orders. He was struggling to supply Tobruk, 400 miles west of Alexandria, and the British Eighth Army in the desert to the westward of Tobruk. His only means of supplying them was a fleet of armed freighters plying between Alexandria and Tobruk, always under Axis air attack, often under submarine attack. Not for over two years had a single one of these supply ships been dry-docked or overhauled; now in the warm waters of the Mediterranean their bottoms were so fouled with barnacles and grass as to cut their speed in half. Too many ships were being lost due to their slow speed—maneuvering to avoid bombs was impossible to them; they were so slow now even a submerged submarine could easily overhaul any of them. In addition, the carrying capacity of the fleet was sadly reduced; it took
each ship an ungodly length of time for a round trip to Tobruk, even if it escaped attack. Alexandria had its large dry dock tied up with the Valiant and the Queen Elizabeth from the previous December to some unforeseeable date in the late summer. Its smaller dry dock was as a consequence continuously occupied by British cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, undergoing imperative cleaning and repairs of war damages to maintain their fighting efficiency—it could not be spared even for a moment for any of the supply ships, no matter how desperate the need. And with Durban in South Africa, 5000 miles from Alexandria, the nearest spot where war conditions permitted docking merchantmen, it had been out of the question to send any of the supply ships on that 10,000-mile voyage to be docked—the mere journey to Durban and back would take two months and waste a terrific amount of precious coal. So the first task assigned Massawa by Admiral Harwood was restoring the Mediterranean supply train to some degree of efficiency. Later, depending on how the war developed, we should get a chance at destroyers, which were the largest warships the Persian dry dock would take, and perhaps a chance to overhaul cruisers where dry-docking was not involved. We were ready. Beneath my feet, the Persian dry dock was flooded well down—only a few feet of its side walls on either side showed above the sea. Just coming through the gap in the line of wrecks at the harbor mouth, towed by the Hsin Rocket and steadied astern by the other tug, was our first customer, the S.S. Koritza, an armed Greek steamer which had arrived the night before from Alexandria. Lieutenant Fairbairn was on her bridge, piloting her through. On the dock, we prepared to receive her. Spanner, the English dockmaster, posted his Persian and Hindoo operators at the winches. Hudson, the English engineer, stood by with his Persian staff to operate the machinery. Along the top of each dock wall was a large squad of Eritreans to help handle lines to the ship while she was being warped into the dock. The dry-docking went smoothly enough. Fairbairn made a sharp turn to starboard with the Koritza, dodged the shoal spot inside, and lined her up for the dry dock with her bow only a few hundred feet away. At this point, the pilot boat ran out the head line, a six-inch hawser, the Koritza picked it up, the Hsin Rocket let go and steamed clear, and we began to wind the Koritza into the dock. I acted as docking officer. I found that the Persians, and particularly the head Persian who spoke English, knew their business. In their hands, heaving lines flew smartly through
the air to the Koritza and the steadying lines rapidly followed. The head Persian moved back and forth, shouting orders in languages I didn’t understand but the results were standard—Persians, Hindoos, and Eritreans dashed up the dock as the bow of the Koritza came slowly forward, shifting the steadying lines from bitt to bitt, holding her centered. In less than half an hour, we had the Koritza in proper position inside the dry dock, secured there by bow and quarter lines, and the dock slowly pumped up till she touched the keel blocks fore and aft. Then the side spur shores (massive square timbers which on this dock were mechanically operated) were run in to brace her against heeling as the dock was lifted further. When she was solidly on the keel blocks, the sliding bilge blocks were hauled in under her bilges and Hudson was given the word to pump up the dock full speed. Water started to go overboard from the dock pumps at over a hundred tons a minute; the dry dock and the ship in it commenced a steady rise. In about another hour, we had the Koritza lifted completely out of the water, ready to begin operations on her bottom. By then I had learned a great deal. I could rely on Hudson; he was a stolid, slow-spoken, steady-going Englishman who evidently was a good engineer. Hudson gave few orders to his Persian assistants, but when he did, they were obeyed with alacrity. As for the Persians themselves, they were all first-class, intelligent men who knew their jobs; so also were the Hindoos. Reed, the assistant dockmaster, had not had much to do but at least he had had little to say while doing it. But Spanner, the dockmaster, I would have sold then and there for two cents if there had been any market. Theoretically, he might know all about docks and his trade as a shipwright, but practically he didn’t belong on an operating dry dock. He was rather slight, with sharp, birdlike features which reminded me of a sparrow, and his manner was exactly that as he hopped about excitedly when there was no cause. I was sure he would blow up in a crisis, of which there are many in docking and undocking, instead of acting as a steadying influence when things were going wrong. Still, all of that remained for the future. Right now, the Koritza was high and dry on the dock, her superstructure and hull towering far above even its high sides, and her foul bottom needed immediate attention. I had hired two hundred Eritreans and their sheikhs for work on ships in the dry dock, a special deal handled through an English shipping agency in Massawa harbor in order not to cause a crisis in the supply of longshoremen in
the port. Now the Eritreans were swarming aboard the floor of the dry dock from the Arab dhows which had brought them out. Swiftly they were divided up into groups, each under its own sheikh, and distributed starboard and port from bow to stern of the Koritza to scrape its bottom. The bottom of the Koritza, when exposed, was a terrible sight. Barnacles covered it to a depth of several inches, the older layers hardened practically into limestone by their years of growth; long streamers of marine grasses hung like moss from her plates. With a bottom like that, it was plainly evident why she could make no more than the five or six knots which was now her top speed. Armed with steel scrapers, most of which had been forged out for the job in our new blacksmith shop, the Eritreans turned to. The scrapers were of all lengths—short ones for the men working under her flat bottom where no one could stand erect, medium ones for work around the curved bilges, and longhandled ones on wood poles for scraping high up the sides till we could get staging rigged. The work of scraping went disappointingly slowly. The grasses came off easily enough, but when it came to scraping off barnacles, the Eritreans just weren’t there. I knew they were weak—that was why I had hired twice as many as the job really required—but even for weaklings they were getting little done. I went to the superintendent who had been provided to boss the Eritreans by the British shipping agency, through whom I had hired them. He was a large, beefy, very red-faced Englishman in white shorts, equal in weight to about three Eritreans. He had spent years in the Middle East and was well acquainted with native labor. I objected to what was going on. “See here,” I pointed out to him while both of us stood on the floor of the dry dock, adjacent to the barnacled bilges of the Koritza, “these men aren’t working. You’ve got to get some punch into them.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What can you expect of Eritreans?” he countered. “Now if I had a gang of Sudanese or even of Gyppos, I’d get cracking.” I refused to take that for an answer. He knew as well as I that Sudanese or Egyptian laborers were for us in Massawa unrealizable dreams; we should have to get along with Eritreans. “Get after those sheikhs,” I ordered. “Make them get their men’s backs behind those scrapers. We’re just wasting time this way.” Dubiously he set off to gather the sheikhs together and talk to them. I walked
aft along the floor of the steaming dock to its stern, where I boarded the Lord Grey to go ashore, leaving him an uninterfered with chance to get some action. Ashore, I gave Commander Davy a message to be wirelessed to the Commander-in-Chief in Alexandria: “S.S. Koritza successfully dry-docked at Massawa at 0900. Expected time on dock three days. S.S. Athos to follow,” for we had word that the second supply ship, also a Greek freighter, had sailed from Alexandria and would arrive at Massawa that evening, ready to go on the dock the minute the Koritza came off, with no idle time between. There was some repair work also the Koritza wanted—some sea chests, which could only be opened in dry dock, to have the valves reseated, and some pump rods and cylinders to be turned true so she might quit wasting steam. Austin Byrne, master mechanic, went off in the Lord Grey with a dozen Italian machinists to dismantle the valves and pumps and bring the parts ashore for the new machine shop to work on that night. Also there was another matter. The Greek captain of the Koritza, happy over his brief respite from the nerve-racking run to Tobruk and proud of being chosen as the vessel to inaugurate service at the first American Naval Base in the East, wanted to bother us as little as possible. Still he had a number of leaky rivets in his hull from near miss bombs. Could we caulk them up for him? I had no ironworkers among the Italian mechanics I had picked up; some welders, yes. As a last resort, I was willing to try welding, using a worn-out Italian portable welding machine we had patched up, but I preferred caulking (or redriving rivets, if necessary) to get a solid watertight job on underwater rivets. I went to see Pat Murphy, who was superintending the contractor ’s construction projects in Massawa. Could he lend me an ironworker who could caulk, and if necessary, drive rivets, for a day? I could provide Italians as helpers and holders-on. “Got any air?” asked Pat skeptically. I assured him the Persian dry dock had a small air compressor as part of its diesel engine starting equipment, and some air banks. It could furnish enough air. “Got a gun?” he asked next. I reassured him on that score also. We had found both an Italian pneumatic riveting hammer and a caulking hammer previously hidden in a warehouse; they were useless when found, due to missing parts, but our machine shop and
forge shop had already made good the missing parts. They would work. “Well,” said Murphy, “in that case I could lend you Cunningham for a day. I’m using him for a rigger over in the commercial port just now, but he’s an ironworker. Remember Bill Cunningham? He’s not much good.” I remembered Bill Cunningham, all right. I was sorry to hear Murphy didn’t think much of him; I had hoped Cunningham would make out well in Massawa. But I accepted the offer; anybody who knew rivets at all could do the job on the Koritza. “He’ll do, Pat. Have him on the wharf in the morning for the seven-o’clock trip of the Lord Grey. I’ll see everything he needs is there in the boat for him.” Next morning, I shoved off at 7:00 A.M. on the Lord Grey for the first trip to the Koritza to see how the work was progressing. The Lord Grey, for all her forty-foot length and broad beam, was jammed, mostly with Eritreans she was taking out, partly with Italian mechanics. I noted that a complete riveting and caulking outfit was in the stern-sheets; air hammers, chisels, hoses, forge, rivets, and even co*ke for the forge. Crouched over his equipment was Cunningham, apparently guarding it from any itching fingers in the mob surrounding him. I squeezed into the boat alongside the Italian coxswain and we shoved off for the mile-long trip over the harbor to the dock. Once we were under way, I greeted Cunningham, attired only in shorts and a sun helmet, whom I had not seen since the day we made Lagos in the Pig’s Knuckle. “How are you making out, Cunningham?” I asked. “Not so hot, Commander,” he replied mildly in that oddly soft voice of his which I so well remembered. “Nothing much for me in my trade in the kind of wood and masonry building they’re doing round here. They got me rigging now; I don’t care a lot for it. Glad to take on this riveting job for you today. It’ll be a relief, to get a gun in my hands again.” “Having any trouble?” I persisted, wondering what lay behind Pat Murphy’s lack of enthusiasm for him. “No, nothing to speak of, Commander. Too many limey M.P.s around the town at night, but they haven’t bothered me—much,” he concluded lamely but honestly enough. I wondered how much he had bothered the British M.P.s. I had been so busy at the Naval Base peninsula, I had not yet once been in the town of Massawa in the evening, so I knew little of what went on there, though I could guess from the glimpses of the Italian cafes I had seen on my few daylight visits.
I pressed the discussion no farther. After all, Cunningham was not my responsibility now—he was working for the contractor, not for the Naval Base. As for today, he looked perfectly sober and I had no qualms over his cleaning up all the leaky rivets on the Koritza long before evening. The Lord Grey rounded to alongside the seaward end of the dry dock, with the stern of the Koritza towering high above us. All hands scrambled out on the floor of the dock. Already it was covered with workmen, for the Arab dhows had delivered their cargoes of native laborers. I walked forward along the dock floor close by the line of keel blocks, stooped low to get in under the bottom of the Koritza near her stern, then went slowly toward her bow on the starboard side, back under her on the port side, and ended with a walk around her hull in the narrow gap between her high sides and the side walls of the dry dock. Dirty water, barnacles, and sea grass dripped on me; underfoot, barnacle shells crunched beneath my water-soaked shoes; and all through my inspection trip my nostrils were assailed by the stench rising from dead and dying barnacles rapidly decaying, now they were exposed to the air and the fierce Massawa heat. Altogether, the inside of that dry dock, beneath and around the Koritza, was a most unpleasant place. I finished my inspection trip in dismay. Not a third of the work necessary to scrape clean the underwater hull of the Koritza had been completed in the first day. At that rate, far from concluding the scraping and painting of the Koritza in the three days allowed us for it, we should be lucky to finish the job in a week. And the next ship to be docked was already anchored off Massawa, waiting to go on; a third vessel should be starting from Alexandria that day, to follow her. We should shortly have the roadstead off Massawa crowded with idle ships waiting to be docked, while in the desert the Eighth Army would be looking in vain for the ammunition and the supplies those ships should be carrying to Tobruk. What was the matter? I stepped back against the side wall of the dry dock and watched the Eritreans manning the scrapers. Naked, except for breechcloths and turbans, covered with the mess of decaying barnacles that spattered their black skins as they scraped, they were an unlovely sight. But so was I. They were puny, too, there was no questioning that. But what drove me nearly to distraction was the deliberation of their movements. For all the world like a movie illustrating something in slow motion, their arms moved back and forth with the scrapers so leisurely as to require watching for some time to make sure they were moving at all.
In despair, I sought out the English superintendent again. I must have more speed. Men, Englishmen, his countrymen, our Allies, were dying in the Libyan Desert, facing Rommel’s superior forces, when some of them might live, I told him, if only we could get the empty ship above our heads, her empty sister swinging at anchor outside, other empty ships bound for Massawa for docking, back to Tobruk in a hurry, loaded with desperately needed equipment for the British Army. “You get me better men, Commander, and I’ll get you more speed. I’ve already spoken to the sheikhs. That’s everything I can do. You can’t expect any better of Eritreans,” was his reply. “But they’re not even trying!” I protested. “I know they’re weak, but anybody could go faster than that. For God’s sake, get some life into ’em!” “When you’ve been out in the East as long as I have, you’ll know better, Commander,” he advised me. “All natives are poor laborers; these Eritreans are the worst of the lot. I can’t do any better with them, especially in this heat, but if you think you can, you’re welcome to try. What do you want?” “Call the sheikhs together again,” I answered. “I’ll talk to them, you interpret.” He gathered up the sheikhs, about a dozen all told. Unlike their tribesmen, they were fully clad in long white robes. Clustered beneath the overhanging stern of the Koritza for shade from the blistering sun, they listened gravely while my reasons for more speed were expounded to them. Then all together in Arabic they opened up on my interpreter. Though I understood not a word, I got the gist of what they were saying from their gestures and their expressions. I did not need the confirmation I shortly received from their English superintendent—in the eyes of the sheikhs, their men were doing the best they could, nothing more could be expected. Silently I turned away and the sheikhs went back to their various tribes. Their superintendent clambered up the ladder to the top of the port side wall of the dock, where beneath an awning it was a little less stifling than below in the stagnant air of the dock. From beneath the motionless propeller of the Koritza, I watched the Eritreans again. It was nearly 8:00 A.M. now. I had cherished the delusion that we might scrape and paint the Koritza with the larger force I had brought to her in two days instead of the three allowed us, and perhaps undock her that evening, or at worst, in the morning. Now I should be lucky if I got her off the dry dock in seven days instead of three, and then I should have to explain to the
Commander-in-Chief that with the poor labor I had, it was the best Massawa could do. Dejectedly my eyes followed the hardly perceptible motions of the Eritreans scraping under the starboard bilges before me. It just couldn’t be possible—no human being, no matter how skinny he was, could move that slowly because of weakness. Perhaps they needed an example of what might be done. I went up to the near-by group, seized a scraper from the closest Eritrean, who gazed at me in astonishment that a white man and particularly the Ras commanding the Naval Base should so soil his hands, and motioning the sheikh and his other satellites to watch, went vigorously to work scraping a patch about one yard square of the Koritza’s bottom plating. In about a tenth of the time the Eritreans were doing it, I had all the barnacles off down to the metal plate. With that, I handed the scraper back to its owner, inviting him and his fellows by a wave of my arm to go and do likewise. With an oxlike expression, he took his scraper back and proceeded to scrape. My heart sank. His slow motion pace had not accelerated one iota; neither had that of any others of his tribe who had watched. I went farther forward. Perhaps I had chosen a poor group for my demonstration, perhaps my technique was wrong. Amidships I got hold of one of the sheikhs and in pantomime showed him what I wanted. He shook his head in disagreement. Persuasion and example were useless. Perhaps chastisem*nt would help. I went still farther forward. Up near the stem, I selected an Eritrean scraper whose lifelessness was even more marked, if that were possible, than that of his fellows, and indicated to him that he should scrape faster. When he failed to respond, I seized him by both bare shoulders and shook him so hard I shook his breechcloth off. Then I dropped him, completely naked, motioned him to pick up the scraper he had lost, and get busy. He looked at me with sad eyes, picked up his scraper, and resumed his ultra-slow-motion scraping. I retired, baffled. But still nothing could make me believe that these Eritreans weren’t doing any more because physically they were unable to—it must be because they lacked proper incentive to produce. But what more could I do to incite them? I couldn’t talk to them; any third-hand appeals I might make through an interpreter and their sheikhs would lose whatever persuasiveness my arguments had in filtering through to them. And shaking them and showing them had proved equally futile. Long ago as an ensign, before World War I, I had listened to Admiral Sims
expounding how to get results out of a gun crew—“Don’t waste your breath on appeals to patriotism or duty. The fear of punishment and the hope of reward are the only two forces that move most men.” Admiral Sims’ method was to dangle the hope of reward, in money, mainly; the fear of punishment he held in the background. With that lever, he accomplished wonders in gunnery improvement. His precept came back to my mind in that hot dry dock, far away from the cold North Atlantic where I had heard Admiral Sims expounding it. Somehow I had to move these Eritreans to action and that right away. The hope of reward, money reward, was my last chance of moving them. But my hands were tied by law—the wages of all Eritrean natives were rigidly fixed at twenty-five lira a day, and my laborers were getting that—I couldn’t change it. The week before I had tried to raise the wage of one Eritrean laborer who showed skill in running a small Italian diesel, from twenty-five to thirty lira a day, an increase for him of five cents a day. I was blocked—nothing could be done till two weeks hence a board of a dozen government bureaucrats in Asmara considered the special case of this Eritrean and argued pro and con over the propriety of my giving him an extra nickel! My mind raced over various ways of paying these men an incentive wage to produce, law or no law. Could I claim that all these Eritreans were really Sudanese and pay them the thirty-five lira allowed to Sudanese, provided they jumped the output of their scrapers? I doubted I could get away with it. I could never explain the sudden increase of two hundred in the limited Sudanese population of Massawa. Besides that, any suspicious official looking at the skinny arms and legs of my laborers would recognize them instantly for Eritreans, and my incentive pay plan would promptly come to an inglorious end, with no one could tell what repercussions on my labor situation. There was another possibility of incentive pay, over the legal technicalities of which I felt I was prepared to argue with the most red-tape-minded bureaucrats. At any rate, as an evasion of the wage scales, it wasn’t so obvious and was little likely ever to get me up to Asmara to explain myself. I made up my mind to that scheme in a hurry. It was already 8:30 A.M. and no more time was to be lost. I sang out from the bottom of the dock to the British superintendent sprawled out in a deck chair under the awning near the control house, to get down into the dock with me once more. “Get all the sheikhs back here under the stern again,” I ordered him. “I want to have another talk with them.”
In a few minutes all the sheikhs were gathered about in their patriarchal robes, looking silently at me. I decided to parade the fear of punishment first; the hope of reward I would save for the end. “Tell them,” I said to the interpreter, “that the time I allow for scraping and painting a ship on this dry dock is only three days, no more. Explain that to them.” He did. There was no comment from any of the sheikhs; they were indifferent to American theories of how long a job should take. In the East, time stretched out limitlessly—the past was long, so also was the future. “Now tell them that if the scraping and painting of this ship are not finished by tomorrow night, three days, they are all discharged, sheikhs and everybody. I’ll finish the job with what Italians I can get, no matter how long it takes, and they can never work for the Americans again. I mean it; this is no idle threat.” The Englishman looked at me incredulously, but my last words convinced him I was in earnest. He began to translate again. This time, long before he had concluded, some of the sheikhs began to argue; by the time he had finished, they were all talking —to each other and to him. My threat had struck some sparks, that was evident. When finally all the sheikhs had had their say, he turned to me. “They say it can’t be done. They say they will regret being discharged in disgrace, especially to be replaced by the Italians, whom they hate. They beg that the American Commandant, to whom they wish long life and many sons, will change his mind. Allah himself, they say, could not do it in three days.” I nodded that I understood, then continued. Having set forth the punishment, I would now offer the reward. “Now tell them this. I am going to pay three days’ pay to them for cleaning and painting this ship and every ship that follows her. There will always be plenty of work. If the Koritza is not done by tomorrow night, they get three days’ pay and they are all discharged. If the ship is finished by tomorrow night, they get three days’ pay and they can stay. If the ship is finished by tomorrow morning, they get three days’ pay. If the ship is finished by tonight, in two days, they still get three days’ pay. If they ever finish a ship in less than two days, they still get three days’ pay. The Eritreans are envious of the Sudanese, who get thirty-five lira a day while they get only twenty-five. Let them show that they are better than the Sudanese by finishing this ship and every ship in two days or less, and they will earn more each day than the Sudanese, who will then have cause to envy them. Tell them I promise it shall be so.”
This time an animated open forum broke out under the propeller of the Koritza long before the interpreter was half through. Questions in Arabic interrupted him, the sheikhs argued with each other over the meaning, he had to repeat several times. At last he finished and the sheikhs gathered in a knot for a family discussion. Without doubt, my proposition had made an impression. The discussion among the sheikhs was quite brief. In a minute or two, they turned to the superintendent; one of them spoke for all. When the speaker had concluded, the Englishman turned to me. “They pray that the blessing of Allah may fall on your head. They say that they will do what they can with their followers.” I nodded that I understood. Nothing further was said. The sheikhs dispersed to their various tribes scattered from bow to stern of the Koritza, and called their tribesmen about them for discussion. For perhaps five or ten minutes all work on the bottom of the ship ceased. Nothing was heard except the clatter of an air hammer as Cunningham caulked rivets up forward, and a confused chatter, muffling somewhat the rattle of that pneumatic hammer, as two hundred Eritreans jabbered simultaneously over my proposals. Then the Eritreans went back to work. Had I waved a magic wand over those Eritreans to transform them, the results could not have been more miraculous. I never heard Cunningham and his air hammer again that day. A fierce jungle chant, drowning out all else, rose from all over the dry dock and never ceased; to its barbaric rhythm, there were those puny, previously lifeless Eristreans dancing wildly beneath the hull of the Koritza, while they slashed savagely away overhead with their scrapers at the barnacles! All I had to do was to imagine those scrapers replaced with spears, and I had before me a scene from the fantastic legends of Darkest Africa—the embattled tribes in a frenzied war dance, preparing to attack their enemies. By noon the bottom of the Koritza was scraped clean. Paint brushes and pots of paint supplanted the scrapers in the hands of the Eritreans. Still chanting furiously, they danced now in their bare feet on layers of sharp barnacles inches deep covering the floor of the dry dock, while they slapped on the paint. Soon every Eritrean was more yellow and red than black as paint slobbering from his brush while he danced barbarically beneath that ship spattered him and his swaying fellow tribesmen. But no one cared. On went the paint, the quick-drying anti-corrosive yellow undercoat on the steel plates first, to be followed later by the red anti-fouling
paint as a finish. By two in the afternoon, it was clear that the task was going to be finished far ahead of schedule. I sent the Lord Grey ashore with two urgent messages. One was to Lieutenant Fairbairn to have his tugs and himself at the dock by 6:00 P.M. to undock the Koritza. The other was to Austin Byrne, master mechanic. He must get the valve and pump parts the machine shop had worked on all through the night, together with himself and enough mechanics, back aboard the Koritza by four o’clock to permit reinstalling all the sea chest parts at least by five o’clock or he would be responsible for delaying the undocking. Then I went in search of Cunningham to make sure he would be no cause of delay. No longer could I locate him by the ear-splitting rattle of his pneumatic hammer; in all the din in the dock, a mere riveting gun banging away on steel was lost. I had to use my eyes instead. I found I need have no fears of Cunningham. He had already cut out and redriven afresh the only two rivets so loose as to require it; the other slack rivets he was hardening up and recaulking and he was certain he would get them all before the dock went down and the rising water flooded him out. As an ironworker, Cunningham was both willing and good. Satisfied, I went aft to watch proceedings. The Eritreans were keeping up their fierce pace. A dozen were kept busy doing nothing but rush about refilling empty paint pots from the drums of paint near the stern; all the others were putting paint on so fast it was unbelievable; the sheikhs were anxiously peering about under the ship to make sure no holidays were left in the painted surface which might give an excuse to refuse payment on the ground of poor work. But any thought of refusing payment on any ground was farthest from my mind, in view of the miracle I was watching. I had hoped for and expected a better performance than that of the first day—never should I have believed those emaciated Eritreans capable of what actually they were now doing. If ever I had had any doubts as to the value of incentive pay in getting production, they vanished that day in that steaming, stinking dry dock in Massawa. That valiant seaman, Admiral Sims, long since dead, would have looked on with interest at the verification of his principle, could he only have been present to see how his words of long ago to a young ensign had borne fruit. At 4:30 in the afternoon, the last brushful of the final coat of paint went on the hull of the Koritza. Their skins covered almost in a camouflage pattern of paint, but their eyes shining with a light of triumph, not the least factor in which I am sure was the feeling that they had proved themselves better than, the
rival Sudanese, the Eritrean blacks and their sheikhs trooped off the barnaclecovered dock floor to board the waiting Arab dhows, where they were paid off by their English superintendent. At 5:00 P.M., with all the staging stowed and lashed down, we began flooding down the dry dock. In a few minutes, the sea was surging in over the dock floor, to swirl over the mass of barnacles and sea grass and wash part of it at least away. Steadily the dock went down and the sea rose about the shining coat of fresh red paint now enshrouding the clean hull of the Koritza. At a quarter of six, the Koritza lifted off the keel blocks and floated free. At 6:00 P.M., we had the Koritza out of the dry dock, steaming up, and, towed by the Hsin Rocket and her sister tug, in Lieutenant Fair-bairn’s hands on her way out of the naval harbor through the line of wrecks to her anchorage for the night in the outer roadstead. In the morning, when daylight made it safe for her to dodge any mines which might be drifting even in the swept channel, she would start back for Alexandria, less than forty-eight hours after she had first gone on the Massawa dry dock. Only now with a clean bottom, she would go back with her speed doubled, making her normal eleven knots instead of the five to six knots which was her maximum when she came to Massawa. That evening Commander Davy started another wireless message on its way to Alexandria: Undocked Koritza 1800 today at Massawa. Athos follows 0700 tomorrow. Expected time on dock two days. What ship follows? By midnight we had our answer from the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet. Well done, Massawa. Schedule for next ten days will be communicated tomorrow. I read that message as, naked as usual, I lay stretched out on my bed bathed in perspiration inside the mosquito net in my darkened room, while just outside the netting the British seaman who had brought it to me from the decoding room held a flashlight shining through the net so I could read. Weary though I was that Saturday night with over five weeks’ continuous effort in getting Massawa under way, topped off by that sweltering day down in the dry dock, I smiled in contentment over that dispatch. Massawa had won its first accolade. Tomorrow I should see that those few Americans who had struggled with me to win it, saw that message also. They badly needed a little lift just then.
Next morning, the Athos followed the Koritza on the dry dock. She also was finished in two days and departed. I had feared that the emaciated Eritreans could not keep up their fierce pace, especially as the weather was getting hotter. But I could have spared my fears. Over the next few weeks, one ship followed another at slightly less than two-day intervals over the keel blocks of that dry dock; twelve in the next twenty days. My only real concern turned out to be the naval staff in Alexandria controlling ship movements. Caught between the needs of ship movements to Tobruk and of furnishing empty ships for docking at Massawa, I have no doubt we nearly drove them to distraction by our urgent messages calling for ships lest the dry dock in Massawa remain idle a few hours. Once they had their teeth in the job after the first few weeks, the Eritreans speeded up instead of slowing down. In the hundred and twenty days allotted to docking merchant ships that season, including the worst summer months, we pushed eighty vessels across the keel blocks of that dry dock—a final average of a ship every day and a half. Soon Lieutenant Fairbairn had to have another British officer assigned as Assistant Pilot, and another tug also, lest he delay the job by the loss of time of transferring pilot and tugs from the outgoing vessel to the newcomer waiting at anchor in the outer roadstead. After that, the vessel to be docked passed the outgoing ship regularly just beyond the line of wrecks; the load of one ship was hardly off the keel blocks before the weight of her successor was compressing them again. No dry dock in the world in war or peace has, I believe, ever equaled the record made that year by that one dock in Massawa in taking full-sized ships. We not only ran the whole Mediterranean fleet of supply ships over that dry dock, doubling their speed at sea, but some of the faster ones we took again after a few months to keep them up to topnotch efficiency. And all of it was done by the worst labor in the world under the worst conditions anywhere in the world. The Eritreans in Massawa did their bit to win the war—it should not be forgotten when some day around some table the United Nations delegates meet to decide the future of Eritrea. The worst labor in the world? I often wondered how true that was as month after month in the Massawa heat I watched those puny Eritreans slashing away with scrapers, fiercely swinging paint brushes while all the time they danced and swayed to their barbaric chants. There is no worst labor in the world. Touch the proper chords-pride, incentive to produce, whatever fits the situation —and men will be found men, whatever their color, whatever their physique.
CHAPTER
23 MEANWHILE, TROUBLE IN ANOTHER direction, which had been simmering some weeks, began to boil. We now had on the payroll of the Naval Base several hundred men, not counting the two hundred Eritreans on the dry dock whom, fortunately, I was hiring for the time being through a British company, by whom they were being paid daily. For several weeks there had been growing signs of dissatisfaction among our assorted workmen in the Naval Base shops. They had not been paid. The payroll for the Naval Base was being handled in Asmara by the civilian contractor there, along with the payroll for the hundreds of employees he had in Massawa on his various construction projects. To keep the time records and handle the accounts, the contractor had sent to Massawa one of his supervisors, a Mr. McDonald, together with several clerks, who were installed in an office on the ground floor of our office building. Our labor force, starting early in April, was small, cost accounting for it was simple. However, when the first pay day rolled around (the men were supposed to be paid weekly), there was no pay for anybody. The excuse from Asmara was that the time sheets were not yet worked out; they would be soon. Our labor force was growing rapidly. When the second pay day came around on April 18, and a sizable mob of natives and Italians gathered round the pay office for their wages, there was still no pay, either for the overdue first week or for the current week. The men started to grumble now in strange tongues; understandably enough, they wanted their money. I went to see McDonald about it. He shrugged his shoulders. The payroll was made up in Asmara from his time sheets; it hadn’t come down; he couldn’t pay off. I got the contractor ’s office in Asmara over the telephone, with the usual exasperating delays in getting a connection and the usual trials in keeping it. Yes, they were working up the pay accounts there; next week they would surely
be ready; I could assure all the workmen that next week they would be paid. I went out to assure the sheikhs for the natives, and the Italians and the other assorted races separately that next week they would certainly be paid. They looked a little dubiously at me, but they accepted the assurance and dispersed, muttering, I suppose, over how I expected them to pay the groceryman. Next week, April 25, came around and still no pay for anybody, not a lira. By now I was exasperated—it goes without saying what the unpaid workmen felt. McDonald blamed the office in Asmara; I got the Asmara manager and he blamed McDonald for lack of proper time sheets. I informed the contractor that the situation was getting both scandalous and dangerous; the men must be paid immediately, proper time sheets or not. All I got was a run-around; Asmara would handle the matter; by the following Saturday, May 2, they would pay off for the whole month of April; meanwhile, I should quit worrying them about it. I hung up the telephone in disgust with the contractor and all his works. Asmara was overrun with his highly paid executives (who rarely visited Massawa) and his large head office staff—so large an American civilian force they had taken over completely the biggest hotel in Asmara just to house these men. And yet with all that in the cool comfort of Asmara, they had not yet made up the payroll! How could I face again the growing mob of trusting natives outside the pay office and tell them that the wealthy and the efficient United States was not able yet to pay them their long overdue wages? To mitigate the blow, I sent an officer posthaste in my car to the town of Massawa to draw out in small bills and silver all the money I personally had on deposit in Barclays Bank there. It wasn’t much, $200, but in lira it sounded like a lot more, about 20,000 lira, approximately the payroll for one day for all the men we then had employed at the Naval Base. With that money at hand, ashamed of myself and enraged at the contractor for having put me in that position, I made the announcement—there would be no pay-off today; it would surely be taken care of the following week. Doubt, suspicion, and distrust showed in the mass of black and white faces before me when the statement was translated. Was the wealthy United States worse than the Fascist regime they knew—was it trying to deceive them with fair words while it swindled them out of their pay—a petty swindle, besides, since none of them was being paid more than a few cents a day? I did what I could to ease the situation and restore confidence with my own 20,000 lira. I advised the sheikhs and the other workers, not Eritreans, that I would personally lend any man who badly needed money up to 100 lira to help
him out; I could not afford to go higher than that in order to try to cover as many cases as possible with the money I had. All that was required was to ask; I would trust them to repay me when finally they were paid themselves. In fifty-lira notes and in East African shillings, the money rapidly went out. I believe everyone who wanted help got at least fifty lira. Sick at heart over the whole spectacle, ashamed of some of my fellow Americans in responsible positions, I watched the unpaid laborers, their faith in the United States badly shaken, slowly disperse. Another week went by, another pay day, May 2, came round. Once more there was no pay-off, but this time, distrustful myself of the contractor ’s promises, I had learned the bad news in advance by inquiring of McDonald some hours before quitting time. No, no money and no payroll had come down from Asmara; none was on the way. I got hold, by telephone, of Colonel Claterbos in Asmara, to learn from him that the situation in Massawa was being more or less repeated all over Eritrea. The contractor, claiming lack of help, was so enmeshed in the complications of his own accounting systems that pay to natives everywhere was in arrears. Colonel Claterbos was as much disturbed over the situation as I; in fact, disagreement with the contractor over that and other matters was literally making him sick and had already put him in the hands of the doctors; but the civilian contractor was a law unto himself, he could not force him to pay off. Getting this information from Claterbos over the Italian telephone system from Asmara was practically equal to a day’s work in itself. When, after many interruptions on the line, I finally hung up, I was thoroughly washed out. Claterbos, I supposed, had stood it better; at least he could telephone from a cool room—not from the superheated Turkish bath atmosphere of my office. The time for paying off, with the final blow to American prestige and good faith when words instead of cash would be all that could be offered our long unpaid workmen, was only a few hours away. I told Mrs. Maton to get hold, by telephone, in Asmara, of the top executive present in the contractor ’s office there. After a while, she succeeded and handed me the telephone. “McDonald tells me no pay day today. Is that right?” I asked after the usual salutations. “Yes, Commander, that’s so. We’re still working on the payroll.” “Well, quit working on the payroll!” I burst out in exasperation. “You’ve been doing that for a month now! Send down some money! All the Eritreans and a lot of the Italians can’t buy anything to eat any more! They’ll quit on us
and tie this Naval Base up in a hard knot just when we’re getting under way. Never mind the payroll; put enough cash for two weeks’ pay for everybody in a car and start it down here four bells! That’ll leave you a margin for safety when you get your accounts worked out, and it’ll save our hides down here till you finally pay off. Quit figuring! Send us some cash!” “Now, Commander,” I heard in a soothing voice from the other end, “we can’t do that. We’re short of help, but we’ll get it figured out by next week—” “Next week!” I exploded. “Don’t you know these natives can’t be told that again? You’ve already made a liar out of me with that story! To hell with next week! You pay these men something now!” “Calm yourself, Commander. We’ll take care of it. Keep cool, you’re getting hysterical—” “Hysterical?” I roared. “You’re damned right I’m getting hysterical! Damn your hide, you come down to Massawa a while and you’ll get hysterical, tool Don’t you tell me from Asmara how to keep cool in Massawa! Quit talking and get busy! SEND DOWN SOME MONEY!” and I hung up the telephone with a bang that nearly smashed that fragile Italian instrument. But no money came down and there was no pay day that Saturday. Nor the following one either. The foremen were continually besieged by sheikhs, by individual Italians, begging for their pay, asking why the Americans were breaking their promises. Even the Fascisti had done better than that. Wild rumors, all discreditable to the United States, flew about among the workmen, none of whom believed the real reason, that the contractor, his executives, and his employees were so inefficient they couldn’t work out the payroll. For myself, I kept away from my office and the naval shops as much as I could to avoid entreaties. I no longer had any faith in the contractor. I was making no more promises as to when the men would be paid. I warned the foremen to make none either. And I had no more money of my own in Eritrea to help anybody out. After May 2, a sullen air fell over all the naval shops to replace the enthusiasm with which the men had worked the first month. Men started to absent themselves, production began to fall off. It was evident an explosion was coming soon. I wondered what form it would take—more sabotage, a walkout, violence? The faith and honor of the United States with the Eritreans, the Italians, the Arabs, and all the other assorted races in Massawa stood infinitely lower than that of Mussolini. How the ardent Fascists, still unweeded out amongst our
Italians, went to work behind our backs in hot Massawa! And all the while, 7500 feet up in comfortable Asmara, coolly, calmly, unhysterically, the contractor ’s executives and his accounting force worked, short-handedly they claimed, on the payroll sheets. I never saw any evidence then or later that any one of them from the top down, lost any weight trying to make up for short-handedness in their office, or in trying to solve the problem any other way.
CHAPTER
24 T IED UP AS I WAS ALL DAY LONG OF Saturday, May 9, 1942, with the completion and undocking of the Koritza, I was unaware until evening that that day at last I had received some reinforcements, opening up another field. In the late afternoon, invisible to me down in the dry dock, the S.S. President Buchanan, which had sailed March 21 from New York bound for Suez, had paused briefly in the roadstead outside Massawa harbor and had landed via a tender my first contingent of salvage men. At the same time, another small group, landed at Port Sudan by a different vessel, had arrived from there via Asmara by plane and car. I heard of all this only when I had come in from the dry dock after the departure of the Koritza. I hastened to greet the newcomers, though the added information that another week was ending with still no pay day in sight, somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for anything. I found I had received two supervisors and thirteen men altogether; not a very large contingent to tackle the huge salvage job before us. Heading- the party was one of the two Salvage Masters hired on the West Coast, Captain William Reed. With him were five divers: Melvin Barry, Jesse Enos, Ervin Johnson, George Kimble, and Alvin Watson. Accompanying the divers were Lloyd Williams, Salvage Master Mechanic, with eight salvage mechanics and tenders—James Buzbee, Jay Smith, James Riemer, Lew Whitaker, “Buck” Schott, Charley Hoffman, “Tex” Powell, and “Whitey” Broderick. Bill Reed I had first met seventeen years before, when as a civilian diver he was making a preliminary underwater survey of the sunken submarine, S-51, just before the Navy undertook the task of lifting her itself and I was ordered to the job as her Salvage Officer. Reed, still a civilian, and a number of years older than I, was too old for much diving now. As a matter of fact, he was too old for Massawa also and should have folded up there in a hurry, but as he was blind in one eye in addition, perhaps his failure to see that clearly and fold up
swiftly, as most of the older men and many of the younger men soon did, must be excused. I greeted Reed, and Lloyd Williams whom I had with difficulty persuaded in New York to take the job as Salvage Master Mechanic, with great joy. None of the others I knew anything about. The divers, except Ervin Johnson whom I had engaged in New York, were the men I had hired in Hollywood. So were part of the salvage mechanics and tenders. How a salvage crew accustomed to the artificial atmosphere of movie studios would make out in the face of real wrecks, I was dubious of. I stowed Captain Reed and Lloyd Williams in one of the vacant rooms in Building 108 with me, to the intense disgust of the two Cable and Wireless men who looked with horror at the increasing number of Americans invading the sacred precincts of Building 108. Then I found quarters for the others in one of the ex-Italian wooden barracks along with Cunningham and the other American mechanics employed by the contractor. I told them all to take Sunday to get themselves settled and get acquainted with Massawa and the Naval Base; on Monday morning, salvage operations were going to commence in Massawa. That Saturday night as I tossed about on my soaked bedsheet, for once I didn’t regret my inability to get a decent night’s rest. Even the wireless message at midnight from the Commander-in-Chief about the Koritza swiftly vanished from my thoughts. Weeks before, I had decided on which salvage job I should tackle first when my first salvage ship, its crew, and its equipment arrived. Now I was determined to tackle that same job, even though I had no salvage ship and next to no equipment, for nothing in the way of salvage gear had been shipped with Reed’s little party on the President Buchanan, except only two diving rigs and a small air compressor, which were Reed’s personal property and which he had brought with him on his own initiative. But I was itching to get to work on salvage. Now I had two supervisors, five divers, eight mechanics, and two diving suits—all my own. Nobody could tell me how I must use these thirteen American workmen, the first Americans I did not have to beg for as a loan. With them, I intended to tackle immediately the hardest job of all first, the task which officially had been rated impossible—the lifting of the large Italian dry dock. Impossible to raise though it was considered to be, that dry dock was by far the most valuable prize of war of anything scuttled in Massawa. The Italians knew that, too—that was why eight
large bombs had been placed in it as against only one quarter that number placed to sink the ordinary ships. The week after my arrival in Massawa, Captain Lucas had shown me an inquiry from the British Admiralty in London: “Request you have American salvage experts examine scuttled Italian dry docks and obtain their opinion as to possibility of salvage.” I smiled inwardly when I read that inquiry. So London, in spite of all the expert opinion it had received regarding the hopelessness of that task, was still cherishing the faint hope that something might yet be done to recover the richest prizes in all Africa. I had already cruised slowly many times over and around the two sunken Italian dry docks, the larger one particularly, in the Lord Grey, peering down through the quiet sea-green waters of Massawa harbor at what I might see of those two hulks from the surface. It had not been much; I could see down into the water on the smoothest days only some five to ten feet. I had also studied the report of the first British salvage officer (later killed off the Daklak Islands) on his diving survey of the docks and the terrific damage he had found—seven huge holes had been blasted in the cellular horizontal main hull structure of the large dock, tearing out the bottom, the floor of the dock overhead, the intermediate bulkheads. The damage was described in considerable detail—the Italians had intended to make an end of that dock forever to prevent it from serving their enemies. In their eyes, in his eyes, in the eyes of every salvage expert in Africa and in England who had studied that report, all of them with wide experience on scores of war-torn ships, the Italians had succeeded. But not in mine. A study of that report had convinced me I could raise that dry dock; what little I could see of the dock, leaning over the gunwale of the Lord Grey had confirmed me in my belief. But sure as I might be in my own mind over what could be done, when I was shown that inquiry from London, I was still an expert without any of the tools of my profession to make the examination requested on which my opinion was to be based. So at the time I had simply told Captain Lucas he might report to the Admiralty, Commanding Officer American Salvage Forces considers salvage possible. An attempt will be made when men and salvage equipment arrive. Now that some men but no equipment to speak of had finally arrived, the
time had come to make the attempt. As I tossed about naked on my soaked sheet inside my mosquito net and oozed perspiration all through that Saturday night, I laid my plans. There was underwater work enough on the blasted hull of the large Italian dry dock to keep fifty divers, several hundred surface mechanics, and several well-equipped salvage ships working a year or more to patch up the damage so the dock could be pumped out and lifted—as it was put in one British report, Upon consideration of all reports received, the Admiralty have abandoned all idea of salvage. The salvage work would be long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful. That statement was correct. There was bomb damage enough to that one dry dock to have sunk swiftly seven large ships. But even while I was looking over the sunken dry dock, I knew I should never have anything like fifty divers to work with, nor the hundreds of skilled men and well-equipped ships needed to back them up. At most, I could count on only seven divers all told, two trifling tugboats, and an ill-equipped base ship, if everything arrived safely. Now I didn’t have even the two tugs, the base ship, nor what equipment they carried. But I did have fifteen men to command at last, two of whom at least, Reed and Williams, I knew were good; the others I hoped were. Before they all cracked up in the increasing Massawa heat, waiting for ships and equipment to arrive which might be sunk on the way, I intended to lift that dry dock. With our bare hands, with such mechanical help as my Naval Base shops could render, and with only such equipment as had been lying around Massawa for months or years, available to anybody, we would tackle it. For from all the surveys made of that sunken dock and its damage, I saw a way of raising it that had never entered the minds of the Italians who had scuttled it, nor of all the salvage experts all the way from Massawa through Alexandria to London who had knitted their brows over the problem. Instead of a task which had to be abandoned because it “would be long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful,” I intended to make it short, easy, and certain. I had to. I had no means to do it the hard way, even if I had wanted to, as some salvage jobs have been done for the publicity value and the profit of the salvors. I was little concerned over the opinions of all the experts who had rated it impossible. I was, as a matter of fact, somewhat irritated by seeing myself denominated an “American expert” in the Admiralty inquiry. For I didn’t
consider myself an “expert” in anything and besides I had a very low opinion of “experts” anyway. “Experts” are people who know so much about how things have been done in the past that they are usually blind to how they can be done in the future.
CHAPTER
25 ON SUNDAY, WHILE REED, WILLIAMS, and their men were learning firsthand for themselves what Massawa was and getting themselves unpacked and settled, I docked the Athos in the morning and put in the rest of the day with my foremen. I outlined for them the materials and the men I wanted them to gather up round the Naval Base for the salvage job—plenty of drinking water and lots of ice first of all; then a thousand feet of Italian steel pipe together with connecting fittings; some lumber; a few thousand feet of electric wire and several dozen light sockets; about a dozen Italian mechanics, pipefitters mainly, with a few electricians; half a dozen Arab carpenters; and about thirty Eritreans for laborers. In addition, five Maltese we had, who had been exiled from the Alexandria Naval Base in disgrace and sent to Massawa as a punishment, whom I had observed to be good riggers, were to be sent out for handling weights and materials. They set out on their tasks. A floating dry dock resembles, looked at end on, a huge capital U. The horizontal part at the bottom may be likened to a tremendous hollow rectangular raft, fifteen feet deep, a hundred feet wide, six hundred feet long. It is watertight, of course, strongly braced with steel girders inside to carry the weight of a ship lifted out of the water and resting on wood keel blocks along the fore and aft center-line of the floor of the dock. The buoyancy of this bottom section is tremendous, sufficient to float the weight of the dry dock itself as well as that of the ship it has lifted clear of the water. The vertical parts of the U are the two dry dock side walls. These run fore and aft on each side of the dry dock for its entire length. They are massive hollow steel walls, fifteen feet thick, thirty-five feet high above the floor of the dry dock. Their major purpose is to give the dry dock stability and hold it vertical and upright, so that while the horizontal raft section is completely submerged in order first to take aboard the ship to be docked and later to lift it up out of the water, the dry dock will not tilt or capsize and spill the rising ship
off the keel blocks. In the normal operation of a floating dry dock, the upper few feet of the side walls always remain above water; the dock is so built, in fact, that it cannot be flooded down far enough to submerge the side walls completely (unless damaged). By their very nature, harbors are not usually very deep. A harbor with a clear depth of water of fifty feet is fortunate. The usual trouble with using a floating dry dock is to find a spot in the harbor with water deep enough to sink the dry dock far enough down to take on a laden or damaged ship. Massawa harbor happened to have one fifty-foot deep clear spot; that was the spot chosen by the Italians for mooring their large dry dock and that spot naturally when they blasted it with bombs, was where it sank till it touched bottom in some eight fathoms of water. As it rested on the bottom, the tops of both side walls at the stern of the dry dock were awash at high tide; from there forward, the tops of the side walls were a few inches clear of the water all the way to the bow. At low tide (the average tide in Massawa ran only from one to two feet in range with a maximum range of three feet) the entire top decks of the side walls from bow to stern were a little exposed, giving us something to stand on while we worked, which was fortunate, as we had no salvage ships to work from. On Monday morning, May 11, the salvage job on the large Italian dry dock began. I took Bill Reed, Lloyd Williams, and their little party, thirteen all told, out to the dry dock in the Lord Grey, together with Reed’s diving gear. We clambered aboard the exposed port side wall of the dock and sent the boat back to the Naval Base wharf to bring out what materials had already been procured. With the waves lapping round our feet, I sat down on a box on deck the dock, stripped off my khaki but prudently kept on my sun helmet, and the tenders began to dress me in one of Reed’s two suits—I would make the first dive myself to examine the dock and start the job off. While I stood dressed only in a pair of light cotton drawers, two tenders commenced sliding me inside a stiff canvas-covered rubber diving dress. For once, I looked forward to a dive with some pleasure. The water in the Red Sea was very warm—about 95° F. I had done most of my salvage diving in cold water, in the practically freezing water of the cold North Atlantic off the New England coast in wintertime. There the major problem had always been to keep the diver from freezing to death in the ice water surrounding him. Three suits of heavy woolen North Woods underwear pulled on one over another, two
pairs of thick woolen socks, and a pair of heavy woolen mittens were the standard clothing one put on, before the diving dress with watertight gloves went on over them. Even so I had always come up after a dive numbed and stiff from the cold, requiring a powerful “submarine co*cktail,” a pint of hot coffee and whisky, mixed half-and-half, to help thaw me out. Now all of that was past—no more cumbersome woolen underwear, no more hands so encased in woolen mitts and stiff rubber diving gloves as to be practically worthless as hands, no more freezing. Massawa had one good point: the Red Sea, the hottest ocean on earth, was so warm a man could dive in it in comfort, with his bare hands exposed outside his rubber watertight cuffs so he could use them. On went the bulky diving dress, the copper breastplate, the massive leadweighted diving belt, the heavy lead-soled shoes, expertly draped over my perspiring body by Al Watson and Melvin Barry, acting as tenders. Meanwhile, Captain Reed poured gasoline into the tank of his little diving air compressor, started it up, and laid out the diving hose and a manila lifeline, ready for use. There was no diving telephone set; all communication would have to be by signaling on the lifeline or air hose. The helmet with the diving hose attached was next tested out; compressed air was coming through. On went the helmet; Al Watson gave it a vigorous quarter turn to lock it in place to the breastplate, while Melvin Barry braced my shoulders to prevent my being twisted into a knot during the helmet-locking operation. I tested out my air inlet valve and my exhaust valve; everything appeared to be in working order. Held up by Watson and Barry, for now I was draped with 200 pounds of lead and copper, I dragged myself laboriously to the inboard edge of the port side wall and the two tenders lowered me over the side into the water inside the dock. Once the sea rose over my helmet and I was fully submerged, they ceased lowering a moment and held me, hanging on my lifeline, while once more I checked all my valves to insure their operation, and adjusted both inlet and exhaust air valves so to inflate my diving dress as to make me only slightly negative in weight. That settled satisfactorily, I signaled to lower away, and swiftly down I went through the Red Sea. It was about six fathoms down to the floor of the dry dock; not a bad water pressure to work in. In considerably less than a minute I was on the floor of the dock, peering out through my faceplates into the sea. The visibility was none too good. The light, six fathoms down, was fair, but the sea was peopled by
myriads of amoebae, giving the water a somewhat milky translucent effect which prevented seeing clearly more than a few fathoms. To make matters worse, the moment I started to walk, my lead-soled shoes stirred up the thick mud with which the floor of the dock was covered, leaving it to rise in lazy clouds floating in the sea above the dock floor, obscuring that from my sight. Still keeping close to the vertical port side wall of the dock towering above me in the water, I walked aft slowly through the sea, my head tilted back so I could look up through the upper faceplate of my clumsy helmet. For the method I intended to use in raising that dry dock, the condition of the steel floor and of the steel bottom of the dry dock and the holes blasted in them were of no great moment to me; but the condition of those steel side walls was all important. Were they also damaged, or had they, as I imagined and the lack of contrary evidence in the previous surveys indicated, been left untouched as of no importance by the Italians in their orgy of destruction? With each step as I plodded laboriously along through the sea, straining my eyes upward, I felt better. I could see farther looking up towards the surface than in any other direction and what I saw was decidedly cheering. The side wall of the dry dock alongside me was heavily covered by mussels and barnacles, growing in a solid mass all over it; I couldn’t actually see the steel plates themselves, but I could see that wall rising straight toward the surface with not a sign anywhere of an explosion—no torn steel or bulging plates or vast holes blasted in that vertical wall such as bombs or torpedoes always leave in their wake. Satisfied that my theory of raising the dock would work out, I left the port side wall, and started walking inboard toward the centerline of the broad dock floor to see for myself what the Fascisti had done to the dry dock. A few steps inboard and that vast outside wall faded from my sight altogether in the murky water. From then on, I had great difficulty in maintaining any sense of direction and my course, as indicated on the surface by the stream of air bubbles floating upward from my helmet, must have seemed that of a drunkard zigzagging homeward under grave difficulties. To make matters worse, I began to stumble over unseen obstacles in my erratic path. Close inspection, mostly by feel, for not much could be seen in the muddy water, indicated they were massive blocks of wood, five or six feet long, over a foot square. Undoubtedly these were the oaken keel blocks of the dry dock, tossed by the explosions helter-skelter over the floor of the dock, where they had remained, too heavy and too waterlogged to float away.
Somewhat further inboard, I approached something looking vaguely like the crater of a volcano. Here one of the bombs must have exploded beneath the floor. Ragged steel plates, twisted steel girders, all barnacle-encrusted, rose from the mud-covered dock floor in fantastic shapes, curled back like tissue paper. Beyond the fringe of broken and bent plating I could dimly make out an irregular black spot some fathoms across in the otherwise gray-green water— the hole in the dock floor that explosion had made. I didn’t investigate that hole any further—it was big enough to have driven a huge truck through and it was garnished round its rim with sufficient torn steel to make any diver wary about cutting open his rubber suit on its jagged edges. Besides, that hole in the sunken dry dock floor made little difference to me; I had no intention of bothering with it or of doing any of the terrific amount of diving work required to patch it up on the bottom before we raised the dry dock. That vast hole and its six mates, the sight of which had left aghast the original salvage officer and all who had seen his report since, was a matter of no moment to me in salvaging the dock. I turned aft with the thought of taking a look at the floor of the dock near the stern. The dock floor was built of eight separate watertight steel sections. Seven of them, from the bow aft, had been blasted open by bombs; the eighth section at the stern was reported undamaged. Apparently the bomb which must have been placed there had failed to explode when the other seven forward of it had gone off. I thought I might see some signs of that unexploded bomb, so we could remove it before it blew up in our faces while we worked. And at any rate, I was desirous of checking for myself that the stern end section was the undamaged one—that made some difference, though not a vital one, to my plans. Keeping a little to port of the line of keel blocks, I started aft through the water. By now, I was no longer so sure of the advantages of diving in the Red Sea; I began to long for the icy waters of the North Atlantic where I could freeze to death, or at least into numbness, in comfort. The inside of my diving suit was nearly intolerable. The water outside was practically at body temperature; it was doing nothing to cool me off. I was nearly drowned in perspiration, for the hot air coming down to me from the compressor, thoroughly saturated already with moisture when it started down, was not only not doing anything to evaporate the sweat from my body but was adding profusely to it. I was practically blinded also by sweat running off my forehead into my eyes; with my head totally enclosed in that diving helmet, there was no
way I could get my hands or anything else to my eyes to wipe them clear. And as a final torture, hot as I was, I saw that I had made a serious blunder in not putting on a complete suit of woolen diving underwear. The stiff canvas folds of my diving dress, pressed in against my body by the weight of the sea which had me in its grasp; worked like a rasp on my skin each time I moved, removing cuticle by the square inch. Over these raw spots in my hide, salt sweat was percolating downward continuously, irritating me frightfully. In hot water or not, neither I nor anyone else was going to make another dive in the Red Sea except encased in a full suit of woolen underwear for skin protection. Cursing volubly inside my helmet as the only means of relieving my distress, I plodded aft over the dock floor, hardly able to see anything any more. Then on the flat muddy floor before me, a darker strip than usual loomed dimly up through the water. Before I could stop and appraise the significance of that, I had stepped off into nothingness and felt myself going down, engulfed instantly in blackness. With my lead boots still feeling nothing beneath them, I was brought to in that Stygian darkness by a sharp jerk as the slack in my lifeline took up suddenly and left me dangling on it somewhere in the bowels of that dock. Where the devil was I now, I wondered? What sort of mantrap had I stepped into? I had not walked off the stern of the dock; before I went down, I could still see the floor of the dock stretching away before me in the water. And I had surely not walked unexpectedly into one of those craters blasted in the floor of the dock by exploding bombs—they were certainly all surrounded like a fence with torn steel turned upward like the one I had just seen. But wherever I was, I was certainly in a hole and an inky black one at that. There was no profit in staying there while I investigated the inside of that cavern; something unpleasant might happen to me in the process. There were several ways for a diver to escape that hole, but climbing out was not one of them, since my fingers, clawing about in the dark water, felt nothing within reach. The simplest way out was to be pulled out. Since my lifeline was taut, I couldn’t be sure any signal on it would be felt above. Instead I reached for my slack air hose, seized it, and jerked sharply three times, the signal to haul me up. In a moment both my lines came taut and I felt myself rising through the water. In another moment, I was up in the light again, clear of that hole, but I did not signal to ’vast heaving. I had already learned enough on that dive; I felt too chafed all over for any eagerness to lengthen it out further. I was quite
willing to call it a dive and come up. So as I came clear I did nothing and the continuing pull on my lines floated me obliquely like a hooked fish on a line through the water towards the side wall till the lines were up and down; after that, I rose vertically towards the surface. For a depth of six fathoms of water, no stops on the way up for decompression to avoid “the bends” were necessary. In another couple of minutes, everybody on the topside who could get a hand on my rig was helping to lift my heavily weighted figure over the gunwale of the dock onto its upper deck, where I promptly sagged down exhausted on the box thrust under my knees. My helmet was twisted off. I gasped with relief at my first breath of open air, hot though it was, and instantly my wet hands rose to wipe clear of sweat my still wetter eyes. After I had been undressed and was being rubbed by a towel in the hands of a tender, futilely endeavoring to dry me off, I gathered all the diving party round me for a report. “It’s the way I thought. The bottom’s torn wide open. The side walls look undamaged, the port side wall anyway. The next man can examine the starboard side wall to make sure. We’ll go ahead on the scheme I laid out, to raise her as a diving bell; the holes in the bottom won’t make any difference. Let’s go.” In brief, my idea was to convert that blasted dry dock into the equivalent of a huge diving bell, open at the bottom, and raise her solely with compressed air pumped into the side walls which had only to be made airtight on the top and sides. The openings in the bottom made no difference; the compressed air pumped into the tops of both side walls would force the water down steadily and out through those holes in the bottom till enough water had been expelled to make the dock slightly buoyant. After that, it should start to float up, buoyed by the air-filled side walls. The more compressed air we pumped into the side walls, the farther up the dock would rise. It was very simple. All we had to do was to make the undamaged side walls airtight by plugging all openings in them, both top and sides, either in or out of water, and then leave the rest to the big air compressors (which I didn’t have yet). I dressed again in khaki shorts, put on my sun helmet and dark glasses, and still smarting from the raw spots on my skin, turned to. In a minute or so, everything I had on was completely soaked in sweat. The next diver was being dressed (against his violent protests, wearing a suit of woolen diving underwear) to examine the starboard side wall and the stern
which I had not seen. After he had been warned to beware of unexpected pitfalls in the floor of the dock, everybody else except Bill Reed and two tenders went to work on deck. The Lord Grey had returned, loaded down with two-inch Italian steel pipe, lumber, and native workmen. All hands started to unload her, part of her cargo going on top the port side wall, the rest to the other side of the dock atop the starboard side wall. To make my scheme work, a great deal of labor was required, though fortunately most of it could be done above water where labor conditions were normal, if any conditions in Massawa could ever be called that. I should have to lay a compressed air main along the top of each side wall, connect each one of the eight watertight sections in each side wall to that air main, interconnect the port and the starboard air mains across the eighty-foot gap of sea between what little showed on the surface of the side walls, provide air gauges to check the pressure built up in each of sixteen side compartments as the compressed air went in, plug up or seal off every opening of any nature in the tops and sides of both side walls to make them airtight, and finally provide enough big air compressors to expel thousands of tons of water from the dry dock through those holes in its bottom. There were innumerable small tasks that had to be done also to make the scheme work. The above were the major ones, for which divers were required only for plugging such normal openings, airports, scuppers, and drains, now submerged, as existed in the side walls. Everything else could be done on the surface by ordinary mechanics. Drinking water service was our first imperative. Arab carpenters hastily knocked together a large wood box to make an impromptu icebox. Into that immediately went several hundred pounds of ice brought out on the Lord Grey and at least two hundred quart bottles of water. A little awning was rigged over the box to protect it from the direct rays of the sun. Three Eritreans were appointed as water boys to rush promptly a bottle of cold water to anyone singing out, “Mai!” (Water!) Each man was provided with his own quota of salt tablets. Those black water boys were always kept on the run. With the water problem thus disposed of, I went over with Lloyd Williams what else was required of him. I indicated where I wanted the 500-foot long air mains run on each side, where to interconnect them from port to starboard across the water, how he was to run a branch line from the mains to each one of the sixteen dock compartments. I picked out where we would locate the big
air compressors (when I got some), and laid out some other work required which I figured would keep Williams and all the men he had, both American and otherwise, busy the rest of that day. After some further instructions to Bill Reed (who now had his first diver down inspecting the starboard side wall) about locating underwater openings in the side walls with succeeding divers, I piled into the Lord Grey myself to go ashore and get that which was the sine qua non of the whole plan—some big air compressors. I had no fears about the physical lack of the necessary air compressors in Massawa—there are always air compressors of some kind in every place on earth where there is any machinery at all, or where there has been any roadbuilding. While the Naval Base itself had not a single air compressor, there were, I knew, in Massawa the very air compressors I needed—in fact, the mates to the air compressors I had ordered in America for my salvage work but which had not yet arrived. For a strange situation existed in Massawa in connection with salvage, which I had learned immediately after my arrival—the British themselves already had a substantial salvage undertaking under way months before I saw the place. It was another one of those “Alice in Wonderland” situations which have to be seen to be believed. Lying near the docks in the town of Massawa was a huge warehouse stuffed with salvage equipment of all kinds—more salvage gear than I had ever before in my life seen collected in one spot, all of it the property of the British Admiralty. Lying in the commercial harbor of Massawa was a beautiful Danish salvage ship and its Danish salvage crew, a finer ship by far for salvage than any I should ever have, under charter to the British Admiralty. Controlling all this salvage equipment and this Danish salvage ship was a private British company which had a contract (and what a contract!) from the Admiralty for the salvage on a commercial basis of the wrecks inside the commercial harbor only of Massawa, the center harbor of the three at Massawa. The British company (a firm of shipping agents) which held that salvage contract had never been in the salvage business before; neither had they any equipment for the job, so the Admiralty had generously furnished them with sufficient British equipment at no cost to make any salvage man’s mouth water, and in addition had given them control of its chartered Danish salvage ship and crew. In explanation of the course of the Admiralty in this case, it must be said that
every British concern with salvage experience already had its hands full around the British Isles; I can think of no other reason for giving a salvage, contract to a concern with neither salvage nor engineering experience. The British company had sent out to Massawa as its Salvage Officer to run this operation, a Captain McCance, presumably a merchant service captain (if one at all), for he certainly was not in the Royal Navy. If anything further was needed to give an opéra bouffe touch to the whole situation, Captain McCance gave it. He knew no more about salvage than the company employing him, and to top off all, he was the very embodiment of the low comedy Englishman, and the butt for the caustic humor of every Royal Navy officer in Massawa. He wore a monocle, the only one in Eritrea. Exceedingly affected in his manner and his speech, he signed all his letters (written always in a bizarre green ink) “Younger Brother of Trinity House,” which dubious claim to distinction never failed to draw a raucous laugh from the British naval staff in the port. Had he been put on any American stage just as he was as a burlesque Englishman, the dramatic critics would have denounced him as a caricature too grotesque for belief. As little like a seaman as can be imagined, he was never dressed other than in perfectly laundered whites—white shoes, white socks, white shorts, white shirt, white sun helmet—that rig on a salvage officer, especially when topped off with a monocle, was enough to make any real salvage man accustomed to work in the muck and filth of wrecks, doubt the evidence of his own eyes. Most of his time, probably six days out of seven on the average, he spent in Asmara where it was cool, seventy miles away from and 7500 feet above the wrecks in hot Massawa that he was supposed to be salvaging. The seventh day, very careful not to soil his lovely white clothes, he came to Massawa to examine languidly through his monocle the progress on the wrecks his men were working on—that the progress was negligible went, of course, without saying. To make matters worse, he refused to use on either of the two wrecks he was engaged on, the solitary capable group he had, the Danish salvage ship and her crew, leaving her lie idle month after month in the harbor, useless to anybody, useless to the war effort, while her men ate their hearts out in bitterness, looking at all the wrecks about them. I swore every time I thought of that idle ship, till finally some months later, the Admiralty sent her elsewhere. The two jobs McCance had his men on, the huge floating crane sunk alongside the main Massawa wharf and the Italian combination passenger ship and freighter, the Gera, scuttled in the middle of the commercial harbor, they
had been busy with since the previous December, when it was reported to London they were making excellent progress. It was now May, but neither of his two wrecks showed any signs yet of coming up. In about six months, McCance and his men (quite a sizable civilian force) had raised exactly nothing. I judged that in his incompetent ignorance, he was botching both jobs, at the expense of the British Admiralty which was standing all the costs. I sensed immediately after my arrival in Massawa that I was not welcome on board either of McCance’s salvage jobs. I learned from some of his men whom on the quay in Massawa I had asked a casual question as to how they were getting along with the sunken crane, that they had all been warned to give me no information. So since that moment, Captain McCance and I had gone separate ways—not a difficult matter since most of his time was being spent in Asmara. Now I had observed, on one of my few inspection jaunts about the town of Massawa, through the open doors of his warehouse all the unused salvage gear the British Admiralty had placed at Captain McCance’s disposal—in particular two large Ingersoll-Rand air compressors which were just what I needed for the salvage job on the large Italian dry dock. I had not entered the warehouse— I had no desire to give McCance the opportunity of accusing me of trespassing on his domain—but even from the doors I couldn’t miss a good view of those two big air compressors, shining in glossy paint, apparently new and unused. I had never mentioned those heaven-sent compressors or my need of them to anyone before; I preferred to wait till my own inspection of the sunken dry dock showed the job could be done the way I had hoped. But now I knew. Immediately I had disembarked from the Lord Grey, I went to my near-by office. Austin Byrne, my master mechanic, and Commander Davy, liaison officer, looking out over the naval harbor, were scanning through binoculars the motley crew of men now swarming over the top of the sunken dock. Both of them turned questioning eyes on me the moment I entered. I tossed aside my sun helmet and my sun glasses and, looking very much like a beachcomber, sank wearily into my chair. Mrs. Maton looked me over sharply, then went immediately for a glass of ice water. I swallowed a salt tablet, guzzled the ice water, and thanked her heartily. Mrs. Maton went to the cooler to refill the glass. “Commander,” I said to Davy while I swabbed the sweat off my grimy face, “you can send a wireless to the C.-in-C., Alex, with a copy to the Admiralty in London, reporting that this day salvage operations on the large Italian dry dock
have commenced.” I paused, seized the second glass of water, and gulped that also. Mrs. Maton went for a third one, and Commander Davy, thinking that was all, with a respectful, “Aye, aye, sir,” started for the door. “Wait a minute, Davy,” I sang out after him, “there’s lots more.” He came back, regarded me quizzically. “Look, Commander, now’s your chance to do some real liaison work. I need a couple of big Ingersoll-Rand air compressors for that salvage job. Now your Royal Navy owns a pair right in this town, some big 210 cubic feet a minute air compressors, just what I need, only they are in the hands of Captain McCance in his salvage warehouse over in Massawa. He’s not using them at present, it’s doubtful if he ever will, but you know McCance. He’s like some other—” I paused suddenly, considering the rest of my intended remark undiplomatic, for I had meant to say “Englishmen around here,” meaning the Cable and Wireless outfit who were clinging like grim death to title to Building 108. “He’s, you know, a regular dog-in-themanger over everything he gets his hands on,” I concluded instead. “Now, Commander, let’s see how good a liaison officer you are. Maybe you can fix it through Captain Lucas, but if you can’t, keep going right on up the line to the First Lord of the Admiralty himself in London, if necessary. I want those two big Ingersoll-Rand babies out of McCance’s warehouse for as long as I need them on this salvage job, and I want them loaded aboard that Danish salvage ship he’s got lying around doing nothing, so she can steam over and land those compressors with her salvage boom on top of our sunken dry dock just where I want them. And I want them landed there by Tuesday morning, that’s tomorrow, at the very latest. That is all, Davy. You get me those two compressors and you’ll have done more for your country than you’ve had a chance to do since you kept the Queen Elizabeth from sinking when the Eyties mined her.” Commander Davy blushed a bit at this reference to his heroism (for which King George had decorated him) but all he said was a very serious “Aye, aye, sir,” and departed on his tasks. I turned to my master mechanic. “Byrne,” I informed him, “all the air compressors we can get won’t be any too many for this job—that dry dock is going to take lots of air before she comes up. You get on the telephone to Asmara and see what you can do with Colonel Claterbos in getting me all the air compressors the Army can lay its hands on in Eritrea. There ought to be some Eytie compressors around this country the Army can commandeer. I want them in Massawa tonight so they
can go out on that Danish salvage ship tomorrow morning along with those two Ingersoll-Rands Davy is going to finesse for us from McCance.” “Aye, aye, skipper; leave it to me,” replied Byrne. “If they’re in Eritrea, you’ll have ’em.” He seized the telephone and went to work to get Asmara; a harder task, I felt, than getting the air compressors. By now I was firmly convinced the best way to solve the long distance telephone communication problem in Eritrea was to shoot half the Italian operators out of hand, put the other half in a concentration camp, and then take an automobile for Asmara whenever a discussion was necessary. “You can tell anyone who comes in, Mrs. Maton, that I’ve gone to my quarters for a shower. After that, I’m going to see Dr. Plummer for some ointment for my hide—I feel as if I’d been flayed. I’ll be back here in about an hour,” and I went out to collect my Italian chauffeur for the ride to Building 108. When I got back an hour later, feeling a little better for the shower bath and the skin lotions which had been liberally applied all over me, Byrne, his soaked shirt clinging tightly to his back, was expostulating with some Italian somewhere in Eritrea to whom he didn’t wish to speak but with whom he had suddenly found himself talking nevertheless. He started jiggling the telephone switch. “I just lost Colonel Claterbos again,” he muttered grimly, “but I’ll get him once more if it’s the last thing I do on earth. If I ever get back where I can use American Tel. and Tel. again, I’m going to kiss everybody in the company from the President down, on both cheeks, I’ll be that glad to- Hello, Colonel Claterbos? Thank God! When did you say you would load those compressors, Colonel?” I didn’t laugh. There wasn’t anything about the situation that was funny; having to communicate with anyone in Asmara over the Imperial Italian Telephone lines was the last straw necessary to break completely the spirit of the sweltering talker in blazing Massawa and make him a ready candidate for Mai Habar hospital up in the hills. Byrne listened for a moment, and then hung up the telephone. His eyes gleaming in triumph a little more than usual, he swung about and faced me. “Those Eyties nearly threw me for a loss,” he announced, “but I made it anyway, even with seven Eytie operators pulling plugs all over Eritrea trying to stop me.” He went over to the water cooler, and in quick succession, swallowed a salt tablet and four glasses of water to make up for the sweat he
had oozed during his hour ’s torture on the telephone. “Now, here’s the dope, Commander,” he continued when at last he could hold no more water. “Colonel Claterbos says they’ve got two Eytie air compressors that Colonel Clark of the Ordnance Corps has just finished overhauling in an ordnance repair shop he’s fixed up in Asmara. They’re nothing to brag about—two 150 cubic feet a minute Eytie jobs, old as the hills, semi-diesel drives—but at least Colonel Clark claims they’ll run now he’s overhauled them. That’s all there is till Colonel Clark and his ordnance men turn out some more, so I grabbed ’em. Colonel Claterbos says he’ll have ’em loaded on a big Eytie truck late this afternoon and started down, so you’ll have ’em tonight if the truck makes all the curves coming down that mountain road. Where do you want ’em unloaded at this end—if they get here?” I told him to arrange that with Davy; to have the truck routed into the commercial harbor to the point on the quay most convenient for the Danish salvage tug to swing the Italian compressors with its salvage boom directly from the truck onto its own deck, after it had taken aboard the two IngersollRands Davy was to procure. Byrne nodded, then asked, “Can I borrow your car, Commander? I think I’d better get over to the Royal Naval Base and see how Davy’s making out with Captain Lucas.” “Certainly, I won’t be using it a while. I’m going out in the Lord Grey again to see how they’re making out on the Persian dock with that second Greek ship. She’s supposed to be undocked tonight. After that I’ll stop off on the way back to see how my salvage gang is coming along.” That gave Byrne, who was about to depart, a thought. He paused in the doorway to remark, “By the way, speaking of salvage, if you want to get anything done on your sunken dry dock, skipper, you’d better get cracking, as our limey friends say. This Naval Base is going to turn into a good imitation of The Deserted Village any day now. ‘No pay, no eat, no work.’ I’ve learned enough dago and Arabic to make out that’s how the Eyties and the natives around here feel about it. And who can blame them?” Byrne vanished. I groaned, but I saw no answer to my master mechanic’s parting question. To the contractor in Asmara, busy with big schemes, whether a lot of assorted dagos and nigg*rs in Massawa got paid now or next year was too trifling a matter to cause him to cut the Gordian knot of his accounting complexities. And I could do nothing about it save wait for the blow to fall; everything I
could possibly say had already been said to everybody involved, directly or indirectly. Thank God, the crew of Eritreans I had on the Persian dry dock had neither been hired nor were they being paid through our American contractor in Asmara. The British contractor with whom I had that deal, with only one Mohammedan clerk on the dock to handle all the lack of paper work and absence of complex accounting, was paying off daily, as was the Eritrean custom with the poverty-stricken natives. What a black eye to the idol of American efficiency! I dared not venture near the naval shops to see myself how matters stood for fear of being besieged by a mob of hungry natives begging for their pay. Instead, as I followed Austin Byrne out of the office door, I said briefly to Mrs. Maton, “I’ll be out on the water the rest of the day, till after the Athos is undocked. Signal me out there if you need me for anything.”
CHAPTER
26 OUT ON THE SUNKEN DRY DOCK, things were moving fast. My new American workmen, less inhibited than I, who had spent a good part of Sunday in the Torino Bar over in the old town of Massawa, where they had mingled with British soldiers and sailors, McCance’s salvage crew, various Italians, and other Americans who had preceded them to Massawa, had picked up a great deal of fact and fiction about the scuttled wrecks. The wrecks were all boobytrapped for divers—close an innocent-looking submerged valve anywhere and you’d blow yourself to bits. The wrecks (but not the dry docks) were loaded with alluring treasures—gold, cases of champagne, cases of whisky, cases of beer—whatever you were most interested in. And, of course, they had learned all about the impossibility of raising the dry dock they were to work on. Some of them, with firm faith in themselves and their salvage officers, had made some bets on that with pessimistic Englishmen who had more faith in British reports than in American ingenuity. I laughed as I listened to their tales while all of us munched sandwiches and guzzled bottled water during our brief pause for lunch. Booby-traps in the dry dock? Ridiculous! The idea could never have entered the minds of the Fascisti, who would have considered them completely unnecessary. As for the fabulous cargoes in the sunken ships, that was all moonshine, too. Those ships had all been in blockaded Massawa harbor a year or more before they were scuttled; their cargoes, especially cased liquors, must all have been removed for use ashore long before they were sunk. As for the impossibility of raising the dry dock, they had it under their feet now; two of them, Barry and Doc Kimble, had already been down after me and had seen it for themselves. They all knew the damage and they knew my plan for the dock. Only one question was asked regarding the dock’s raising. Bill Reed asked it. “Can you get any air compressors, skipper?”
“Four of ’em, Bill! Two big new Ingersoll-Rands and two old Eytie compressors, total air capacity 700 cubic feet a minute, will be on deck this dock tomorrow,” I replied confidently. “They’ll push the water out from inside this dock ten tons a minute, excepting always air leaks.” “It’s in the bag then, boys,” said Reed gleefully. “We’ll make monkeys out of them limeys over in the Torino Bar who’re betting we can’t raise it.” Lunch didn’t take long. In a few minutes everyone was working again and in spite of no shelter at all from the burning midday sun, all hands, stripped to the waist for ventilation, were hard at work. By late afternoon, when I had to go over to the Persian dock to undock the Athos, both of the long air mains had been strung and the pipe coupled up, running the complete length of the dry dock on each side. In addition, most of the small branch lines to feed air to the sixteen separate side wall compartments were piped up, tapped into blank steel flanges which I had had made in the machine shop to go in place of the six-inch mushroom vents atop each of those compartments. These blank flanges killed two birds with one stone—they sealed off the air vents from the side wall tanks, and at the same time gave us an easy connection for pushing compressed air down into the tops of those tanks. Laying the cross-connection air main from the starboard to the port side of the dock across the eighty feet of water between, was harder, but even that was finished also by evening. To carry it, Whitey Broderick and the Maltese riggers had strung two half-inch wire cables, supported on each side high above the side wall decks, across the water. From these cables they had hung a wooden foot walk across the water, giving us both a suspension bridge to get from one side to the other without a boat, and a support for our athwartship air main. It wasn’t long before some wag draped a sign on the side of the foot walk marked, “George Washington Bridge. New York, 13,000 miles,” with an arrow beneath it pointing westward. Meanwhile, the divers had closed all the airports in the upper part of the submerged hull and plugged all of the other openings they could find in the side walls, scupper holes mostly. Into such openings, they sledged home tapered wood plugs, mostly six-inch-diameter ones, that Fred Schlachter had turned up for us on a lathe in his carpenter shop. We made no investigation as to the purpose of any hole we found in the submerged side walls; so long as the hole was round and the diver could get a plug to fit it, a sledge hammer promptly drove it in hard after he had cleaned away the barnacles from inside
the hole so the tapered plug would seat tightly enough to hold air. I undocked the Athos at 6:00 P.M. and then went back again to the sunken dock, to which all the American salvage crew returned also after an hour off for supper ashore. Our electrician, Charley Hoffman, had salvaged from the electric shop ashore a small gasoline-driven generator which he hooked up to the electric light wires and the lights which he and the Italian electricians had strung on impromptu poles erected by Buck Schott and the Arab carpenters. When we got back from supper, the little generator set was already chugging away and our crudely hung lights were already on. We needed them, for in the tropics the twilight is brief and night falls early. We worked till 10:00 P.M., putting in a fifteen-hour day, with all hands soaking up drinking water like sponges and exuding it from their pores like sieves. I drank twelve bottles of water, three whole gallons, myself. When finally we all knocked off, all the piping was completed, ready to connect up the air compressors; and all the openings the divers could find, several dozen, were plugged. There would be plenty more holes discovered, I felt sure, and innumerable leaks, but they could wait until the compressed air hit them. After that, they would make their locations plain immediately by the streams of air bubbles rising through the water. It was a very hot and a very weary crew of salvage men that embarked with me on the last trip ashore for their last night ashore in some time, but a very satisfied one. Every man felt he knew that dry dock now and that it belonged to him, but he also knew that once the compressors started, the salvage job was going to be an around-the-clock performance for every one of them. We turned to again at 7:00 A.M., but I had to dock the third vessel on the Persian dock before I could join the salvage crew. By that time, the Danish salvage ship was feeling its way cautiously alongside the nearly submerged port side wall of the sunken dock to avoid what we knew must be a hidden menace to navigation close aboard there. For in scuttling the dry dock, the Italians had also capsized overboard the two large traveling cranes which ran on tracks atop each side wall of the dock. We could tell where they had gone over the sides—there were two huge gaps in the pipe railings guarding the upper decks. One gap was a little forward of amidships on the port side outboard; there the port crane had been flipped over into the sea, and looking down in the water, a vague shape ten or fifteen feet down could be seen near the dock, probably the top of the steel crane boom. The salvage ship coming in had to avoid that or it would tear its bottom out.
The starboard crane, from the evidence of the broken railing on that side, had been tipped inboard into the dry dock itself, where completely invisible in the water, it lay with its boom broken, on the floor of the dock, constituting no present danger to anybody except the divers who might get fouled up in it. That Danish vessel had its quarterdeck completely covered with air compressors—there were the two shining Ingersoll-Rands and two somewhat dilapidated-looking (by contrast) Italian Fiats. Commander Davy had evidently functioned 100 per cent as a liaison officer—he had got both the desired compressors and the ship to transport them—no simple task I perfectly well knew. I learned later he had persuaded Captain Lucas to order McCance to turn them over to us, not allowing him any option as to whether he wanted to or not. Captain Lucas had personally guaranteed that the compressors would immediately be returned should McCance have need of them. Over that guarantee, I never worried. I felt sure I should long since be finished with them before McCance, at the pace he was going, could possibly have any need of those compressors, more especially as it was evident McCance showed no signs of knowing the value of compressed air in salvage work; he was wholly relying on pumps in what he was attempting in the commercial harbor. Under my directions, the Dane backed slowly in, stern first against the port side wall, while we on the dock handled lines for him. Shortly his salvage boom was swinging aboard us one after another, two compressors weighing several tons each—nasty objects to have to handle aboard had we not had his husky boom to do it for us. After landing the two compressors, one IngersollRand and one Italian Fiat, alongside our new air main compressor connections, he cast loose and steamed slowly around to the starboard side of the dock, where he likewise deposited the other two. That completed, the only bit of salvage work in months his fine ship had been permitted to do, her Danish captain gave us a friendly parting wave. From his wistful expression he would have given his right leg for a chance to remain and help. Then in English which surprised me, he sang out, “Good luck to the Americans!” as he steamed clear of us and headed back through the wrecks to his berth inside the commercial harbor and more enforced idleness. It didn’t take long to couple up the air compressors—we used no pipe, only lengths of two-inch rubber air hose to give us flexible connections so the vibrations of the pounding compressors wouldn’t shake our rigid air mains to pieces. In less than an hour after they had been landed, we had fresh water in
their radiators, fuel in their tanks, lubricating oil in their crank cases, and both Ingersoll-Rand machines running, throbbing rhythmically as they pounded compressed air into our mains and then into the tops of the side dock compartments. I breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction—the full-throated bass of those massive Ingersoll-Rands hammering compressed air into the sunken dock beneath my feet was heavenly music to my ears—I wouldn’t have traded it for any symphony on earth! Getting the two Italian compressors going was another matter—they were a primitive semi-diesel drive type requiring the insertion of a slow-burning chemical cartridge into the tops of some of the engine cylinders to start combustion while somebody cranked them over by hand. I had never seen anything like that before, neither had any of my salvage crew, and we should have wasted hours figuring out how to start them had not one of our Italian mechanics who was watching our strong man, Buck Schott, in his futile efforts at cranking, come to our rescue. Tony, which was the only name I ever knew him by, though I doubt that was really his name, knew no English at all, but he knew all about those Italian compressors and indicated by signs that he would be happy to show us. He looked into the compressor tool box and found there a package of small square sheets of paper, apparently impregnated with some chemical. Rolling one of these into a tight tube, he unscrewed a cap from on top an engine cylinder, inserted one end of his newly made cartridge into a recess inside the cap, lighted the other end. It didn’t burn, it merely glowed dully like a piece of Chinese punk. Tony screwed the cap, glowing fuse and all, back into the cylinder top and then started to crank furiously. It was lucky Tony had a stout right arm, a stout heart, and oceans of determination, for he used up half a dozen cartridges, all his Italian cusswords, and most of his strength on the crank before finally that semi-diesel gave in, coughed sporadically and then decided to keep on rolling over. Tony, naked to the waist and a limp wet rag by then, stepped back proudly. “Bono, Tony!” I exclaimed (that and “no bono” being all the Italian I knew) as I patted him enthusiastically on his dripping back. “I’ll put you in charge of these compressors! Now you go over there,” and I pointed across the suspension bridge to the starboard side where alongside the quivering Ingersoll-Rand the other Italian compressor stood idle, “and you start that one, too.”
Tony smiled cheerfully at me and nodded that he understood what was wanted. “Si, signor Commandante!” he beamed as he started across the swaying footpath. “Immediamente!” I had no doubt Tony meant immediately, and certainly his intentions and his will were of the best, but Tony was in for a battle. Before the other compressor also was running, he had used up practically all the chemical cartridges that had come with both compressors and Tony was a wreck, hanging gasping over the rail. “Huh,” I remarked to Lloyd Williams, who also was in bad shape, having spelled Tony on the crank of the second machine, “let’s hope these damned Eytie compressors never stall! It’s a day’s work for a man just to start one of ’em. Now you see Tony gets promoted right away to foreman for this and find someone who can tell him that in Italian. That’ll give him seventy-five lira a day instead of fifty—if he ever gets anything. He’s worth all of that and lots more to us out here. And, Lloyd,” I concluded, “send someone ashore to rustle up a lot more of those chemical cartridge sheets. We’re going to need ’em by the dozens.” Hour after hour under the hot sun, the laboring compressors pounded away, pushing in the compressed air. It was going to take a whole skyful of air, rammed down into that dry dock, before we could push out enough water from inside it to make any impression. My major concern was whether the smoking compressors would stand up long enough under the terrible operating conditions to do the job. With the only air available for cooling them the hot blast atmosphere of Massawa far over 100° F., how effective would their radiators be in keeping the engines and the compressors cool enough to avoid overheating and seizing of the pistons? They weren’t any too effective, we swiftly found out, when all the radiators shortly started to boil. After that, we learned that those radiators gulped down more water than we did, and it had to be fresh water, too, all brought from shore. Shortly we had to provide a 1000-gallon tank to store fresh water on the dock for radiator refilling, and the refilling job kept the four Italians whom I gave Tony to help him, busy all the time. Aside from that, and replenishing frequently the crank-case oil (for the hot engines also used that up at a terrific rate), we had at first no great trouble—the Ingersoll-Rands ran beautifully. The Italian Fiats, however, as befitted their age and antiquated design, vibrated very badly; so badly they would shortly have waltzed themselves off the dock into
the sea had we not chocked them solidly beneath their wheels and then lashed them securely down to the deck. Our real troubles soon began. Before enough air pressure had even built up inside the dock compartments to register anything on the pressure gauges I had installed atop each compartment, we began to find air leaks in the upper decks above water. They weren’t hard to find—the air could be heard hissing gently as it escaped back to the atmosphere, under practically no pressure at all. My respect for the craftsmanship of Mussolini’s shipbuilders back in Italy where that dry dock had been built hardly six years before, went sharply down. Seams in the steel plates forming the top decks and connecting seams between the decks and the side walls, all of which should have been tightly caulked in any ship structure, were either caulked in slovenly fashion, or in some spots difficult to reach, had never been caulked at all. The Fascist inspectors on the construction of that dry dock should all have been shot for allowing such leaky steelwork to be palmed off on il Duce, but there it was and now it was my headache, not Mussolini’s. The top decks of the dock were leaking like sieves —no air was being contained inside and none could be till we had stopped those leaks. All hands, divers, electricians, carpenters, pipefitters, were knocked off their normal tasks and turned to caulking seams in the steel plates. Ordinarily this was ironworkers’ work, but I had none such in my own crew. So every mechanic, regardless of his trade, so long as he was a mechanic and had any skill at all with tools, was put on the task. Armed with hammers, such chisels as we had aboard, and more that I had hastily sent out from shore, they all began caulking steel plates—not a pleasant job, for those steel plates, under the vertical rays of the Eritrean sun beating mercilessly down on them, were soaking up so much radiant heat they were too hot to touch with the bare hand. Even the Eritrean natives, accustomed to going barefooted all their lives on the desert sands and with soles to their feet tough as elephants’ hoofs, couldn’t stand those sizzling steel plates. I noticed they were binding their bare feet in burlap or old canvas, and frequently soaking them in the sea as added protection, before they walked the hot grill of the deck plates of that dock. But hot steel or not, we had to caulk. So seated on improvised pads of wet canvas or wet burlap, anything at all at hand available to prevent burning our sternsheets as we sat on deck, we all caulked. Seams which were not too badly open were sealed in the usual way, by forcing the steel edge of one plate down tightly on the plate beneath with hammer and chisel. Some spots where the
plates were so badly fitted (especially at the forward corners of the dock) as to make that impracticable with the primitive hand tools at our disposal, we sealed up as best we could by caulking soft lead strips into the open joints and then hammering the steel hard down on the lead with sledges. We gained on the leaks. By early afternoon we had stopped enough of the worst ones on deck so that the dock commenced to hold some air and slight indications of pressure began to register on the gauges. As the afternoon wore on, by ounces almost, the needles on the pressure gauges drew away from the zero marks; each ounce of pressure meant the water inside the dock had been forced down about two inches. I had no plans of that Italian dry dock at all—of its construction, its design, its weight, or of its size. I had to judge everything by what little of it I could see on the surface and by such crude measurements of it as divers could take of it as it lay on the bottom. Nothing of this gave me any very accurate data as to how much it weighed, how much air I should have to pump, or how far down I should have to force the water in the side walls before the dock became buoyant enough to break free of the bottom and commence to float up. There was a great deal of guesswork in the problem—all I really knew at the moment was that at last I was starting to push some water out. At 6:00 P.M., except for Tony who wouldn’t leave his compressors, and me, and three Americans who stayed aboard also to keep an eye on matters and to help service the compressors, all hands went ashore in the Lord Grey. The Italians and the natives were through for the day. The salvage men, after they had procured their suppers, were coming back with cots, mattresses, and mosquito nets for all of us and some food for those remaining aboard, prepared thereafter to live on the dock. The sun went down, darkness quickly fell, our electric lights twinkled on, glowing cheerfully on the quiet waters of Massawa harbor. It didn’t cool off perceptibly; the air stayed just as hot as during the day, but at least now we could lay aside our sweat-soaked sun helmets, spared for a few hours the fierce rays of the sun boring in on us like drills. And caulking on the steel plates, which all of us continued after supper, was no longer quite such an ordeal; with the sun gone, the steel soon changed from sizzling to merely hot. At 10:00 P.M., we quit, except for the watch set to service our quivering air compressors all through the night. All the air leaks in the decks we could detect, even with soap and water, had been practically sealed except for very minor pinholes. That more leaks would develop when the air pressure inside
the dock built up substantially, I very well knew, but for the present at least the surface leaks were licked. What underwater leaks there were, we should learn when the water inside the dock was lowered appreciably. Lloyd Williams and two men took the first night watch. The rest of us, roasted to a medium rareness where we had been sitting while caulking, and well seared elsewhere all over our hides, sprawled out on mattresses or cots spread at random on deck; we would sleep under the stars till our turns came to service the compressors. I picked out a spot forward on top the starboard side wall, where if we had any breeze off the water a few inches away, I might get it. There, as far away from our hot compressors as I could get and still remain on the dock, I set up an iron cot, spread out my mattress, rigged my mosquito net, and crawled in, soaked as I was, not even removing my waterlogged shoes. It wasn’t bad there. Overhead, I could look directly up at the marvelous display of tropic stars, the constellations burning in unearthly splendor against the blackness of the night. I loved the stars and never tired of admiring them. Now to my aching body they were a solace from on high as slowly the heavens above revolved, lifting yet new stars into sight—a spectacle to raise the spirits of the most distressed. To salvage men (who have more need of faith than any shepherds ever had) as well as to shepherds do “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Then to add to the glory of that scene, there was a symphony of sounds about, blending together harmoniously—the gentle lapping of the sea against the steel walls of that dry dock both sides of me, the deep bass of the IngersollRands, the higher-pitched pulsing of the Fiats, all throbbing rhythmically away in the night. Soothed by sight and sound, but not comforted any by the sweltering air inside my net, I rested somewhat but I didn’t sleep any better than in my room —there was too much of uncertainty wound up in the problems of that dock for my mind to relax. How many days would the compressors hold out? How bad would the underwater leaks prove? How long could my new men, not so accustomed to the Massawa heat as I now was, last before they cracked up on me? What else, completely unexpected, as always happens on any big salvage job, was going to smack us before we got that dock up? At 1:00 A.M., I rolled out from under my mosquito netting, and with Al Watson, diver, and Jay Smith, carpenter, to help, relieved Lloyd Williams and
his two companions on the compressor watch. “All the compressors have just been serviced, Commander,” Williams told me. “Once an hour is enough to check on oil and fuel, but watch those radiators! If the water gets below the top hose connections, it’ll all boil out like a geyser before you can get to it with a water can! Keep ’em well filled up! And the ice in that wooden oven we’ve got for a refrigerator is all gone; all you’ll have to drink till tomorrow is going to be nice warm water. There’s a few dozen bottles of that we left you.” “O.K., Lloyd, and pleasant dreams. We’ll take care of it,” I assured him. “And thanks for leaving us anything to drink. We’ll try to do as much for Bill Reed when he comes on.” Al Watson and Jay Smith, very different personalities, I learned on that watch, were both exceptionally able and willing men, keeping a sharp eye on the compressors and their needs and leaving me little to do except roam the tops of the side walls, crossing our swaying footbridge from time to time, while I studied with a flashlight the pressures showing on my collection of sixteen air gauges. They were, of course, scattered, each gauge directly on top its own compartment, so that by the time I had made one round only over the dock to inspect them all, I found I had walked more than one-third of a mile in the process. The sight of those gauges was, however, heartening. The pressures were building up; we had shoved the water down inside the dock perhaps two feet. So far, the salvage wasn’t going badly. In my rounds, I paused a while each time to talk to Al Watson, since it was important to know my divers, their powers of observation and judgment, and how much confidence I might place in what they said they saw and did on the bottom. Al Watson I found a very keen person, inquisitive, and observant, crisp in his speech, which was unusual for a diver, and as salty in his expressions as any of them. He wasn’t big, a hundred and fifty pounds perhaps, but he had a splendid athletic figure which showed off well in his scant costume—smooth, hard muscles and a streamlined pair of shoulders and hips that made me think he must have been an expert swimmer. I later learned he actually was—the finest in Massawa. Before that watch was over, I felt sure I had a good diver in Al Watson which soon he proved himself to be—one of the best I ever saw. Meanwhile, he was tending the two compressors in his care with all the attention a fond mother might bestow feeding her infants. Jay Smith, carpenter, tending compressors on the other side of the bridge,
was different. Tall and thin, quiet and slow in speech, much older than Watson, he took everything more phlegmatically. He somehow didn’t seem to fit the picture amidst a lot of smoking machinery, but he was tending it carefully nevertheless, learning, I suppose, that a salvage man has to do everything required from painting to pipefitting. So my three-hour watch on the lonely dock dragged along as I plodded endlessly the one-third mile course round the decks, armed always with two things—in my left hand a bottle of warm water from which occasionally I drank from the neck, and a flashlight in my right to avoid the mass of obstacles littering the decks of that sunken dock and particularly the naked bodies of the salvage crew sprawled aimlessly out on their mattresses, sleeping restlessly in the hot night. Bill Reed, with cadaverous-looking Jess Enos, diver, and big Buck Schott, carpenter, to help, relieved us at 4:00 A.M. Everything was going well (too well, I thought to myself, for a salvage job). I warned them about the radiator water and sympathetically informed them they would have only warm water to drink themselves—we had left them still a few bottles in the iceless icebox. And with that I tumbled back under my mosquito net, where flat on my back, I could once again regard the stars—almost a new-looking set which a three hours’ revolution of the heavens had brought upon the scene. Uneasily I tossed about on my damp mattress, wondering a little about myself and my own chances of standing Massawa much longer. I had lost twenty pounds since my arrival six weeks before; I couldn’t afford to lose any more. Neither could I afford to take things any easier. My assistants were willing enough but they were neither seamen nor salvage men, and if I slowed down, everything ashore and afloat around the Naval Base would slow down also. With everything just getting under way, this was no time for a slow-down —not with the war situation what it was in Libya. But several little things had impressed on my mind what Massawa was doing to us—first my leather belt, stiffened and rotted by the salt sweat soaking it all the time, had disintegrated completely several weeks back, leaving me dependent at the moment on a piece of halyard to hold up my shorts, which more than ever needed holding up: since I had shrunk so much about the waist, my khaki shorts were far too loose. Then my leather wrist watch strap (the second one in six weeks and the last one I had) had cracked in half that afternoon, all the life rotted out of the leather from the same cause—salt. I had been lucky enough to have caught the watch as it dropped, or it would have gone overboard to make yet another salvage job
for me; now it reposed in my pocket. I puzzled vaguely where in Eritrea I could get another strap for I badly needed the free use of that watch. Then there were my shoes—not the ones I was wearing, those were so saltand water-soaked and cracked as to be a disgrace to any hobo—my better ones stowed in my closet in my room in Building 108. The day before I had had to warn Ahmed not to keep them in that closet any more—they were all covered with green mold from the never-ceasing humidity. Perhaps if they were exposed daily to the sun and then kept under the bed, they might do better. And all my undershirts were going fast. When I wore one, which was rarely now, it usually came off in handfuls when I tried to get the sticking garment off my wet back—the rotted materials could no longer stand any strain. Finally, there was my knife—to a sailor, especially one wound up in salvage, a most important article. It was of good steel but not stainless; I hadn’t been able to get a stainless steel knife before I left New York. My knife was always rusty now, the blades corroding so fast I had practically worn them away trying to keep them sharpened up, so when I had to cut a line in a hurry, I could cut it. It wouldn’t last much longer. Where in Eritrea was I going to get another knife to replace it? These little things were all symptoms only, but worth regarding. Leather, cotton, steel, and flesh—Massawa was fast rotting away everything I had; would I last myself, I wondered, till I had finished the task I came for? There were many Army officers already in the Middle East, but General Maxwell had not a single naval officer under his command to send to take my place should I crack, or to spell me a while so I shouldn’t. Wound up in these musings, but finally lulled by the soothing lapping of the waves and the throbbing of the compressors, I dozed off.
CHAPTER
27 SEVEN A.M. BROUGHT THE USUAL flotilla of Arab dhows sailing before a slight early morning breeze to the Persian dock, loaded with half-naked Eritreans to begin their day’s scraping and painting. But it didn’t bring the usual boatload of Eritreans and Italians to the sunken dry dock to begin the day’s salvage work there. Not till it was an hour late did the Lord Grey arrive alongside, and then it was empty except for the two Maltese riggers who formed its night crew. While the engineer held it in with a boathook, the coxswain clambered aboard with a note which he had for me. It was from my master mechanic and was very brief. Come ashore immediately. There’s trouble. BYRNE. I sprang into the boat, singing out to Captain Reed, “Take charge, Bill! Keep those compressors going. I may be ashore quite a while!” “Aye, aye, Commander! Leave ’em to me!” The coxswain was back in the boat also. “Shove off!” I ordered sharply. “Ashore!” The engineer pushed the heavy boat clear, and the coxswain gave him the ahead bell. We started over the glassy surface of the harbor, for now with the sun well up, the early morning breeze had died away completely. “What’s the matter?” I asked the Maltese coxswain, who spoke good English, once we were well under way. “Where’s the day crew of this boat? Where’re all the workmen?” The coxswain shrugged his shoulders. “No Italianos came to relieve us, so we stayed on. All night on this boat and no breakfast yet. I’m hungry. Then no natives came to the quay to bring out, so
we waited for them till Mr. Byrne gave me that message to bring out. That’s all I know, Commander. When do we get relieved so we can eat?” “I don’t know, either,” I confessed. “Stay in the boat when we get ashore and I’ll see you get some breakfast sent down. I’ll get you relieved as soon as I can find out what’s wrong with the regular day crew.” Byrne was waiting for me on the wharf with my car which apparently he must have driven himself since there was no sign of a chauffeur. He wasted no time. “It’s come, Commander. No workmen. Not an Eytie, not a native in the Base this morning. Everything’s dead. They’ve all gone on strike! What do you want done about it?” We drove up to the Naval Base from the water front, Byrne at the wheel, and stopped in front of the machine shop building, our busiest shop always. I got out and looked in. It was completely deserted. Austin Byrne, master mechanic, gloomily surveyed all his idle machines. Not an Italian machinist was in sight. Next door was the carpenter shop, normally manned by Arabs with Sudanese for laborers. Fred Schlachter, foreman, was standing in the open doorway; I glanced past him. The Arabs and the Sudanese had acted no differently than the Italians—not a machine was going, not a native was in sight. “It’s the same all over the Base, Commander,” said Byrne. “Nobody came to work. And it’s the same with the contractor ’s building operations, too. None of his gang showed up either, except his Americans, so he’s still going after a fashion.” So the strike had come at last! Seeing that neither natives nor Italians had any organization, and the natives were of many diverse races, it was amazing in its completeness. But on second thought, perhaps it wasn’t so amazing. There is nothing like completely empty bellies to compel unity of thought; it required next to no organization under those circ*mstances to get spontaneous action to force some pay, at least. Our men hadn’t been paid since they started, many of them over a month before. I trudged through the dust with Byrne back to our office building. Except for the usual Sudanese sentries about, I saw nobody. The Naval Base was as silent, as dead, as deserted, and as useless as that day I first arrived in Massawa and was dumped out on the front steps of that same office building. Inside the door on the first floor was Pat Murphy, construction superintendent for the contractor, and a group of his American foremen, of whom he had plenty, discussing the strike.
“Well, Commander,” said Murphy, who I believe had previously protested the pay situation to his employers in Asmara as strongly as I, “now we’ve got a strike. Got any ideas on the subject?” Before I could answer, I started to get profane advice from some of his foremen, demanding action which apparently they had been pressing on Murphy. The gist of it seemed to be that I should get the British to give us soldiers to break the strike. They had two regiments in Massawa—one of Sudanese, one of Bengalis and Sikhs, both fine fighting regiments. With those we could easily force the Italians at least, many of whom were prisoners of war and the rest enemy aliens subject to concentration camps, none of whom had any ordinary civil rights, to go back to work at the point of a bayonet. That should terrify the Eritreans sufficiently so they would return also. I shook my head. “I’m doing nothing, Pat, except report this to Colonel Claterbos in Asmara for his action on your company. That’s the only spot bayonets may do some good. I’m not asking the British here for troops; I’ll get out of Massawa myself first. I want work out of these men in Massawa, not sabotage, and sabotage is all we’ll get with bayonets in this case.” I continued up the stairs. So far as I could judge from his expression, Pat Murphy was of the same mind. In my office, I found Mrs. Maton. Byrne looked very glum as he stared out the rear windows at his deserted shops. “See if you can get Colonel Claterbos in Asmara, Mrs. Maton,” I said to her, then turned to Byrne. “Any of your workmen been to see you about this before this walkout?” I asked. “No, Commander,” he said, “nothing but the usual breaking off of some Eytie or some Eritrean whenever I passed through a shop, to beg me for some pay. It wasn’t any worse yesterday than any day. When quitting time came last night there wasn’t anything different, no demonstrations at all. They all jammed into the trucks for the ride back to the native village, Edaga Berai, and Massawa. Only this morning when the trucks with the night crews of drivers went to meet them at Edaga Berai causeway, there just wasn’t anybody to meet, and nobody’s shown up round here since. You just can’t help sympathizing with these skinny natives—when they say they’re hungry, it means they’re starving. I don’t blame ’em for staying home to scratch round for something to eat,” Byrne concluded, and returned to gazing morosely at his idle shops. I looked out southward towards the Royal Naval Base; there were no shops
there but Captain Lucas always had a considerable force of natives working on ground maintenance. Apparently everything was normal with him; there were all the usual signs of activity around the British buildings, with the usual natives working on the grounds at their usual pace. Only the Americans were the object of the strike. “Colonel Claterbos, Commander Ellsberg,” said Mrs. Maton. She had succeeded in getting him in jig time, for once. “Hello, Colonel, this is Ellsberg,” I said. “We’ve—” “You’ve got a strike down there, I hear,” he broke in on me. So the news must have traveled fast to Asmara. “Yes, just what I expected,” I replied. “Complete tie-up, every shop’s dead. Queer strike, though—no delegates, no ultimatums, no demands, no nothing— just no workmen. The U.S. will get a hell of a black eye out of this all over the Middle East. The news will be in Yemen just as fast as the first Arab dhow can sail across the Red Sea, and then God knows what the Axis propagandists will do with it on the radio from Rome and Berlin! Starving Mohammedans strike because those friends of democracy, the Americans, gyp them out of their pay! Italian prisoners of war risk death to quit working for pluto-democracy rather than be swindled! You know how Goebbels will dress it up! It’s a natural for him and this is one time he won’t have to lie! What can you do about it, Colonel?” “Only get after the contractor,” replied Claterbos grimly. “And I will! He’s got to settle this.” “There’s only one way to settle it,” I advised. “Make him quit talking about payrolls and start paying! It doesn’t have to be everything; a couple of weeks’ pay now and an honest promise to pay the rest in a few days or so and then no more delays in paying off, will get them back. Only do something quick! I’ve got a salvage job on the fire, and ships to repair on the dry dock and no shops to do anything with! Put the screws on ’em; let ’em know there’s a war on!” “I will,” said Claterbos. “I’ve sent for the contractor already. That all?” “That’s all!” I hung up the telephone with relief, surprised to have finished my first Asmara telephone call without a broken connection. I wondered how Colonel Claterbos would make out; back in the United States the contractor would long since have been in bankruptcy for failure to pay off on any pretext at all, the way he was doing here. I sat back and thought. There was a great deal of work for everybody in
Eritrea in all the shops—for the British, for the local Massawa authorities, for the contractor, for the ship in dry dock. Everything would have to wait now till the strike was settled, though it would be awkward explaining, especially to the British forces. But that ship in dry dock couldn’t be delayed—she was due to come off that night. I wondered what we had for her. “Come on,” I said to Byrne, “let’s get over to the machine shop. I’ve got to find out what you’ve got in way of work for that ship on the dock. We can’t hold her up.” Austin Byrne, thin, gray, and eagle-eyed, reminding me every time I saw him of what I thought one of the old Roman senators must have looked like, led the way to a battery of lathes. Some partly turned valve disks were held in the chucks. “I’ve got only some valve parts left now,” he said, “some disks and some seats for two sea chests. They were to have been trued up this morning, so they could go back by noon.” “What can you do about it, Byrne?” I asked. “I can’t flood the dock down without those valves and she’s got to go off. Another ship’s here already from Alex to go on tomorrow.” “Finish ’em myself, I guess,” said Byrne. “Have you got any machinists to reinstall ’em?” “There’s only Hudson, that English engineer on the dry dock. He’s a good machinist; he could do it, with his Persians to help him. That crowd’s on a different payroll; they haven’t quit.” “Good enough, Commander. I’ll have these valve parts down on the pier by one o’clock; I’ll stay right with it till the job’s done.” Byrne quit talking, started up the nearest lathe, and went right to work facing off the worn valve disk held in the lathe. I went back alone to the office. “Mrs. Maton,” I said, “there’re two Maltese manning the Lord Grey haven’t had any breakfast yet. Can you get over to the employees’ mess hall, get some coffee and something for ’em to eat, and then get back here with it? I’m going out again immediately, but I can’t let ’em go out hungry. They’ve been on all night and now they’re going to have to stay on a long while yet. The Lord Grey’s the only boat we’ve got. I can’t tie her up without a crew.” “Yes, Commander,” answered Mrs. Maton. “I’ll be right back with something, if I have to cook it myself.” Just then the telephone rang. Mrs. Maton lifted the receiver, then said, “Captain Lucas, Commander Ellsberg.”
I took the instrument, while Mrs. Maton departed. “This is Lucas, Ellsberg. Commander Davy’s here and he has just informed me all your Eytie workmen and the natives have left you flat. Sorry to hear it, old chap. Is there anything I may do to help?” “No, Captain. It’s just as you’ve heard it; we’re all tied up in the Naval Base, but I’m all right out on the water. We’ll keep the dry dock going and hold up no ships for Alex. Thanks for your offer, but whatever ’s to be done to settle this has to be done in Asmara. Colonel Claterbos is handling it there. Oh, come to think of it, there is something you can do. Will you fix it with Davy while he’s there to furnish a British naval crew for the Lord Grey right away? I’m in a bad way for seamen for her while this lasts.” “It will be a pleasure, Ellsberg. And if there’s anything else, let me know.” I hung up the receiver and mopped my brow. The Lord Grey, our only harbor transportation, would not much longer be one of my worries. Mrs. Maton, loaded down with a bag of sandwiches and a can full of hot coffee, was soon back. I went out to the dry dock in the Lord Grey. While I steered, the crew fell ravenously on their belated breakfast. I couldn’t leave the sunken dock for long, and what few excursions I might make from it would mostly be to the other dry dock to see that our program there did not slack down, strike or no strike ashore. I could do nothing ashore—there was one way only of settling the strike—payment in part (or in full, if possible) immediately and no more delays in regular pay days in the future. Only when the contractor was actually ready to pay off was it necessary to get in any of the Naval Base employees, natives or Italians, to parley with them; neither the Naval Base nor any of its officers could take part in any discussions with the workmen on any other basis. I imagined that with a disgraceful strike with international implications tying up an American Naval Base on his hands, our civilian contractor might not now be so unhysterical and calm as previously in ironing out the pay accounts; he would find some way of hastening matters. I disembarked alongside the sunken dock, with a final order to the coxswain to see Davy immediately on his return and get the promised relief crew for the Maltese. The boat shoved clear for the return trip. Bill Reed and Lloyd Williams, both very curious over my sudden departure, were at the rail to meet me as I clambered back aboard. I told them the sad news —for some time, we should have no laborers at all to assist us; the thirteen men in the salvage party, plus the three of us, would have to carry on by
ourselves. “Well, for Christ’s sake, anyway call back that boat!” exclaimed Reed. “Don’t you know we’ve run out of ice and the drinking water ’s all gone, too? We can get along without those strikers but not without ice water! Not on this job!” I came to with a jolt. This was really serious. “Boat ahoy!” I sang out at the top of my lungs to the Lord Grey, already a hundred yards off. “Come back here!” The startled coxswain put his helm over sharply, started to circle back. When the boat was close enough, I shouted to him, “Don’t come alongside! When you get ashore, strike or no strike, get half a ton of ice and at least a couple of hundred bottles of water down on the wharf and send them out, four bells and a jingle! We’ve got nothing to drink here! Never mind how you do it! Get us that ice and water right away!” “Aye, aye, sir!” he acknowledged. Without slacking its speed, the boat finished its circle and kept on for the shore, while I swabbed my brow and looked apologetically at Reed. “I’m damned if I see how I ever forgot about the water, Bill, even with a strike shoved in my lap. Can’t we drink some of that water for the compressor radiators till some more drinking water comes out?” “Naw,” said Reed, “we’ve tried that already. The Eytie tank it’s in is snafu. That water stinks! I guess we keep on going dry. And I’m dying of thirst already! God, how I wish I had a can of nice cold beer!” He looked at me reproachfully with his one good eye. “And I was telling Lloyd here when you came back, you’d certainly bring us a boatload of ice and water; you knew it was all gone. What kind of a salvage officer are you, anyway? I thought that was what you were going for when you shoved off in such a sweat! A strike! Hell, what’s that against some water on this job?” I had nothing to say in rebuttal. Reed was right; I was thirsty already myself and I had been inside a building most of the time with several drinks while I was gone. How must my men feel who had been out in the sun half the morning with no water at all? I’d be lucky if they didn’t want to heave me overboard. I looked around. Only three of the compressors were running. One of the Eytie compressors, the Fiat on the port side, had stopped. In front of it, Tony and Buck Schott were taking turns cranking, trying to get it started again. Buck, who was the most powerful man we had, was a giant, not in height exactly, but at least in circumference. Naked to the waist, his protruding stomach stood out magnificently; he resembled that way the carved images of
Buddha, or perhaps more precisely those massive Oriental wrestlers who are tremendous in their girth. He had powerful arms also; his biceps were in proportion to his waistline. Alternately, first with his right, then with his left, he spun the crank of that Fiat each time a new chemical fuse was screwed into its head by Tony; his whole body, covered with sweat, positively glistened in the sun as he labored. But he had no luck. The recalcitrant Fiat refused to start. With a bang that nearly bounced it overboard, Buck angrily flung the crank down on the deck, and flopped heavily back against the rail, gasping for breath. He was through. Tony, whom I was surprised to see on the dock at all since he must have known his countrymen were going on strike and he might have gone with them the night before or at least have left with me in the boat that morning, picked up the crank. Tony, no weakling, had neither Buck’s avoirdupois nor his strength, but he did have more finesse. Alternately he inserted burning fuses and then cranked madly, but there was no start in that Fiat. Finally Tony, in a frenzy himself, smacked the crank to the deck, and with both fists shaking menacingly, danced up and down, cursing the compressor. Then he retrieved the crank and once more went at it. All to no avail. At last, too exhausted even to curse, he let go the crank and sagged back alongside Buck. “I shouldn’t wonder that machine’s so worn the compression’s bad,” I muttered to Williams. “Don’t let anybody else bother with it till night, Lloyd. Maybe when it’s cooled a bit, we can get it going again. And when his tongue has quit hanging out, you try to make Tony understand he can go ashore in the next boat. I don’t want to take advantage of him just because we’ve still got him aboard. He can quit with all the other strikers. Make sure he knows I won’t hold it against him.” Williams nodded, and I passed along to make a tour round the dry dock to read all the pressure gauges. They were the first encouraging news I’d had that morning; the pressures were rising steadily all over the dock; already we had reached two pounds on every tank. That meant the water inside the dock was continuing to go out; now it must be down four feet below the level of the sea outside. In spite of leaks, in spite of the loss of one compressor, we were gaining. By the time my inspection was finished and I had returned to the port side, I found all hands, including Tony, clustered beneath the awning over the empty icebox, trying to escape the sun. No work was going on; the thirsty men were all past doing anything further till some water came aboard.
Lloyd Williams indicated Tony. “We had a long conversation, mostly with our hands,” said Lloyd. “Tony knew all about the strike, but he’s not striking; anyway not while this dock is on the bottom. He wants to stay and watch it come up—you haven’t got a stronger fan in the world on this job, Commander, than Tony. He says you let him stay and he takes care of the compressors, night and day, all by himself—he doesn’t want any help. That’s how Tony feels about leaving. I told him you’d let him know.” I twisted round and looked at Tony. He knew he was the subject of the discussion and was eagerly watching me. “Bono, Tony. You stay,” I nodded at him. Tony smiled gratefully as if I were doing him a great favor in letting him stay to kill himself over those sizzling compressors, and wan as he was, picked up the watering can by his side and sidled out from under the awning into the broiling sun to water the compressor radiators. He might be ready to collapse from thirst himself, but his pets were not going to go without a needed drink. In an hour the Lord Grey was back in charge of three British sailors, who landed it most expertly alongside, not a surprising feat since it was a Royal Navy boat. But it was the cargo, not the crew, which interested us—there were six huge cakes of ice and stacks of bottled water rising to the gunwales. Never was a boat unloaded any faster than that one nor water greeted more eagerly. Hastily the ice went into our box, but nobody waited to cool any of the water; warm as it was, off came the cap the instant each man got his hands on a bottle and down his parched throat went the water. After a free-for-all lunch of cold canned willie, topped off with more water, everybody went looking for leaks again, but except for the forward corners on both sides of the dock, nobody found anything serious. But those corners, where the deck plate, the side plate, and the end plate met were bad. We had already caulked all the lead we could get into the seams, but the results were far from perfect. I put Jay Smith on one side of the dock and Buck Schott on the other to keep hammering away at the joints with caulking chisels, trying to make them tighter. In the early afternoon, the Lord Grey came by again with the sea chest parts for the ship in the Persian dock. I boarded her and went over with them to that dock to tell Hudson he’d have to install them. Hudson, a short, stocky, broad-faced Englishman with a thick accent I had difficulty always in understanding, was much surprised at the request, but very
willing to undertake the job. Everybody on the Persian dock knew of the strike; they had consequently not expected to see those essential valves for days yet and had given up any hopes of undocking on schedule, though the Eritrean painting crew had not slacked down. Hudson started talking to his head Persian. In a few minutes the newly machined valve parts were on their way down into the vessel’s engine room, and I had Hudson’s promise that by late afternoon everything would be installed and the ship ready to go off. “No more repair jobs on this dock till the strike’s over ashore, Hudson,” I warned him as I left, “only cleaning and painting. You tell the skipper of the next ship we take that if he opens up anything on his hull, he’ll have to put it together himself before we’re ready to flood down, unless he wants the sea coming in on him. I can’t count on getting any more work done ashore.” “Aye, Commander, I’ll see to that,” Hudson assured me. After telling the dockmaster, Spanner, that he was to start flooding down as soon as both Hudson and the painters were through, I left. This was May 13, the sixth day since the dock had started operating, and we would be finishing our third ship. We were doing all right. As the Lord Grey pulled away, I looked down the length of the dock at the horde of Eritreans beneath the partly painted hull, chanting and dancing as they painted. They had not slowed down any yet; there was still all the savage madness of the jungle in their chant. I wondered if I could get half a dozen tom-toms somewhere to help the illusion. Back on the sunken dry dock, I watched the gauges as the afternoon dragged along, and only the pounding of the compressors and the metallic ring of steel on steel, as Smith and Schott banged away at the leaks, broke the silence. No diver was dressed; no air leaks had shown up in the water yet, requiring attention. Except for Tony and Lloyd Williams, watching the compressors, the two men working on leaks, and Hoffman, the electrician, rigging additional lights, everyone else was in what scant shade he could find, resting after two strenuous days and nights. I congratulated myself that I had pushed the job so hard the first two days while we had plenty of help. All the tasks requiring mule-hauling we had managed to get done while still we had all the laborers; now, I imagined, the little salvage crew left could handle what more troubles turned up while we pushed down compressed air and waited for results. At 5:00 P.M., Spanner started to flood down the other dock and I went over to watch, intending to let him handle the undocking. Nothing unusual happened. The ship floated smoothly off the blocks as the dock went down. Spanner,
more excitable in action than I liked to see any dockmaster, handled her out and clear with nothing going wrong, however. From there, Lieutenant Fairbairn, already on the ship’s bridge, took over and with the Hsin Rocket and the Pauline Moller as usual towing, piloted her out of the harbor to the outer roadstead from where she would sail for Alexandria in the morning. Altogether, docking was getting to be a completely routine operation now for all hands. When I got back on the sunken dry dock, it was getting dark and supper was in progress. We had rigged up an informal galley just forward of our port side air compressors; Hoffman had wired it for electric percolators and a small grill. There was no cook; everybody was welcome to cook for himself or to use a can opener as he preferred, so far as our stock of canned goods and other provisions from on shore permitted. The menu was far inferior to what was served in the contractor ’s messhall ashore for American employees, but so far as I was concerned, it beat what I usually got at the Royal Naval Officers’ Mess. And I shouldn’t wonder that Tony, who was also invited to help himself, found it considerably better than his accustomed Italian fare. Darkness fell, our scattered lights came on, and we started our second night on the sunken dock. An unearthly silence enveloped both the harbor and the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, broken only by the throbbing of our three air compressors. The gleam of our quivering lights was the only illumination visible anywhere over the dark waters of the harbor. The heat was as oppressive as ever; now that the sun was gone, not a breath of air stirred anywhere. Gripped in the heat, the silence, and the darkness, I moved cautiously about the wrecked decks, unable to escape the eerie feeling of being part of a scene wholly out of this world. A little later, we made another attempt to restart the stalled Fiat compressor, but it was futile, in spite of cranking by half a dozen volunteers. Rather than wear everyone out, I called off the attempt, determined to wait now till the strike was over and I could get some Italian diesel expert out from the machine shop. At any rate, I doubted we were losing much; probably the IngersollRands were pushing down practically all the air that was being compressed. By 8:00 P.M., the pressure in our compartments had risen to over four pounds and here and there the deck plating could be seen to be bulging slightly from the air pressing up below. Reed eyed these evidences of weakness dubiously, then asked, “How much pressure do you figure you need to start her up, Commander?”
“There’s no telling exactly, Bill. I don’t know the weight of this dock, and I can’t even guess how much it will take to tear loose if she’s stuck in the mud. But I figure that around six pounds should give her buoyancy enough to start lifting. She probably won’t start with any less; how much more it may take, nobody knows.” “Well,” said Reed, “if she’s bulging on four pounds pressure, I’m damned if I know how she’ll act with six. We ought to start shoring those weak spots down right now, but there’s nothing we can shore against up here except the sky. What are you going to do?” “Let her bulge,” I suggested. “We can’t do anything else. I’ve looked at those spots; there are only a few of them where the stiffeners below decks are wide spaced. That flat plating can bulge quite a bit yet without anything letting go. I’m not concerned.” We set the same compressor watches as the night before. Tony insisted he would stay up alone all night and tend the compressors, but I refused to let him. He was, however, permitted to take Jay Smith’s place on the mid-watch, since Smith, worn out from his efforts in the fierce heat at caulking leaks, looked all in. Most of the men turned in early that night to try to catch up on lost sleep. Since I slept very little anyway, I continued on my rounds reading the air gauges till nearly 11:00 P.M., by which time the pressures had risen to about five pounds all around and everything was still holding together. At 11:00 P.M., leaving the watch to Lloyd Williams, I crawled under my mosquito netting, to rest at least, if not to sleep, for I had lots on my mind. What progress, I wondered, had been made that day in Asmara on ending the strike? If it lasted very long, with Rommel all the while getting closer to Egypt to encourage them, we would give the Fascisti still at large among our workmen excellent ammunition for a campaign of sabotage and disaffection that could hamstring the Naval Base very effectively. Our success so far had rested in great degree on the co-operation of’ our Italian mechanics; if I lost that I was at least badly waterlogged if not wholly sunk, for I had no American mechanics at all in the naval shops. But the throbbing of the air compressors brought my straying thoughts back to matters closer to my cot. I thought I could detect an erratic note in the pulsations of our sole remaining Fiat. Yes, it was so—that laboring semi-diesel was beginning to miss fire—it probably wouldn’t last much longer. Perhaps if it stalled, Tony might have more luck in restarting it than he’d had with its
mate. I hoped so. Once again as I tossed uneasily about in the stifling heat, I dreamily watched the stars. Being close to the Equator, practically the whole panorama of the heavens was unfolded above me as the earth slowly revolved—the southern constellations as well as the northern ones to which I was more accustomed. The southern stars, I thought, were overrated; there was more beauty in the constellations always visible in the northern hemisphere. I speculated idly on why God had seen fit to bestow most of His blessings north of the Equator—in the skies as well as on earth. But I saw no answer. One A.M. finally rolled round, and armed again with my bottle of water and my flashlight, I rolled out to begin again my night watch. This time I was backed up by Melvin Barry, diver, and Tony when I relieved Williams, who pointed out to me the erratic firing of the last Fiat before he turned in. “She’ll probably fold up soon,” commented Lloyd. “I guess she needs another overhaul after two days’ running.” I indicated to Tony that he should pay special attention to that machine, but there was no need. Already he was fiddling with the fuel injection, trying to get smoother firing. I started my initial tour of the pressure gauges, going aft on the port side first. The gauges were cheering; the needles were hovering around the sixpound marks on the dials. We had done a fair job, evidently, on caulking leaks. I judged we must be retaining inside the dock to push out water through those vast holes in her bottom at least half the compressed air we were pushing in at the top. When I went forward on the port side wall to check the gauges there, I was surprised to find Bill Reed huddled on deck in the darkness, intently looking over the side at the water. Reed heard me coming, and glanced up at me as I turned my flashlight on him. “Commander,” whispered Reed, as if afraid a louder tone might upset matters, “look! See that big mussel shell just above the water line on that vertical guide roller? Half an hour ago it was just in the water; now it’s an inch out. The dock’s starting to come up!” I looked where Reed pointed. There was an unusually large mussel clinging to the guard roller at the dock entrance which Reed evidently was using as a marker. It was undoubtedly wet, though it was now a little clear of the surface and out of water. “It doesn’t mean anything, Bill,” I replied after sighting it. “The tide’s
probably fallen a little and uncovered it; you know while there’s not much tide here, there’s still a little—maybe a foot or so rise and fall.” “Tide, hell!” whispered Reed emphatically. “She’s coming up, I tell you! It was high tide when you undocked that last ship; then it fell till midnight when it was low. I’ve been watching here ever since you turned in. At midnight the tide turned and she was rising a little on them oysters till half an hour ago when the water quit rising on them and started to drop! She’s rising!” I sat down on the hot deck plates alongside Reed and carefully sighted his impromptu marker, that large mussel shell dimly visible in the glow of our electric lights on the water. I swung my flashlight on it to illuminate it more sharply. Reed was right about the tide, I remembered. Such as it was, it should now be running flood, not ebbing. In a few minutes my heart began to pound. That mussel shell was slowly but without question increasing its distance from the glassy surface of the lake of water between the two dock walls. The impossible was happening before our eyes! My scheme was working; only two and a half days after we had begun operations, that “long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful” operation on which “all idea of salvage had been abandoned,” was showing success. The terribly blasted large Italian dry dock was coming up!
CHAPTER
28 BY MORNING, THE SCENERY IN THE naval harbor of Massawa had changed appreciably. Anybody looking out over the water could see (and even without looking, could smell) the difference. The Italian dry dock already protruded several feet above the water, a very prominent object, and was steadily rising fore and aft. On board the dock, my salvage men were practically delirious with looking at their handiwork—no very beautiful object, crusted with a heavy layer of barnacles and mussels which began to stink horribly when the sun hit them— but beautiful beyond any words in the eyes of those few who had struggled to make the sight possible. There is no need to go into the details of the intensive, salvage work necessary around the clock over the next few days to keep the dock rising; they would interest only salvage men. A few only will be mentioned. The second Italian Fiat compressor folded up in the heat and quit on us that morning. Tony broke his arm trying to start it again when the crank suddenly snapped back and struck him. But he refused to quit; after a brief journey ashore where Captain Plummer reset the broken bones, splinted his arm, and then bandaged it up for him, Tony was back on the rising dry dock with his arm in a sling, tending the two panting Ingersoll-Rands which nobody could drive him from. They were his children; with his one good arm, he patted them affectionately. On their continued hammering down of air rested now the continued rise of the dock; Tony, sure no one else could do it as well as he, would not from then on, night or day, let anyone else service those two allimportant machines. His brief periods of rest he snatched by flopping on the hot deck alongside his charges. And every time I came by him, Tony pointed out excitedly to me the new inches the dock had risen since my last round, fearful lest I should not have observed them. The strike ashore lasted till next day, when it was ended by the contractor
sending down a heavily guarded car from Asmara loaded with money, something that could as well have been done weeks before. I didn’t see it; Byrne told me there was nearly a riot trying to keep the hundreds of assorted natives and Italians lined up in some order so they might be checked off as they were paid. Most of them (not all) went back to work, once they had their money. The ending of the strike had now a special and a new interest for me. If we on the dock were not all to be asphyxiated by the stench rising from mussels rotting beneath an incandescent sun, the foul sides of the dry dock had to be scraped continuously as it floated up. If ever those huge dock walls, high as four-storied buildings, long as two city blocks end to end, covered all over with barnacles and mussels, were exposed, unscraped, all at once to the sun, the decaying mussels would shortly drive all hands from the dock. I had to have a big gang of natives to scrape off barnacles as the dock, day by day, rose further. With the strike over, I could get them. Soon all other noises on the dock, including the compressors, were drowned out by the cries of Eritreans, working all around the dock walls from floats, scraping away for dear life. There would, of course, have been an end to the further rising of that dry dock after a couple of days, once the compressed air was forced so far down inside the side walls as to reach the level of the holes in the blasted floor of the dock where it could escape freely into the water still covering the whole floor —except for one thing. That one thing I knew of from the beginning and had counted on to finish the lifting for me. The eighth and last bottom compartment forming the floor of the dock at the stern was undamaged. The bomb placed there had failed to explode, so the British had reported on their survey, and so I had found in our own diving. There were over 1200 tons of buoyancy in that one undamaged but still wholly submerged bottom compartment, fortunately for me, located at the very stern. When the buoyant side walls had lifted the dry dock off the bottom as far as they could and began to blow compressed air out in geysers through the bomb holes in the seven damaged bottom compartments, I went to work on that undamaged stern compartment. It was first isolated from all the other compartments by closing off the valves connecting it to the common piping systems of the dry dock. Then we expelled practically all the water from inside it by putting more air pressure on it than on any of its mates to force the water out through its still open sea valves.
That did the trick for us—the buoyancy in that stern compartment not only lifted the dock floor at the stern completely out of water, but pulled the two compartments forward of it up far enough for work on their floors also without diving. From then on, everything was certain. Working in the open, where a man can do ten times as much effective work as he can in a diving rig, all hands went to town. With my salvage mechanics, with my divers, with all the Arab carpenters and Italian mechanics I could drag out of the reopened naval shops, we patched temporarily with wood and canvas the exposed hole in the floor of the dock compartment next forward of the stern so it would hold a moderate air pressure on top. Putting more air pressure in that compartment pushed out enough more water through the open hole in its bottom to lift the dock still farther, exposing more of the damaged floor forward, where the process was repeated on such compartments (not all of them) as we needed to lift the dock. In that way, we walked ourselves forward along the dock floor, patching temporarily one huge hole after another while the bow of the dock steadily lifted further. Meanwhile, there was the problem of the unexploded bomb in the stern compartment. Once we had the stern well exposed, I went back to the manhole in the floor of that compartment. Before the dock came up, the divers had found that manhole cover off, lying near the opening. We had replaced it and held it down by a few nuts to make the stern compartment watertight on top during the lifting operation. Now that manhole (too small for a diver in his bulky rig to get through) was again exposed to the air. Cautiously I opened up our air main connections to that stern compartment to let the air pressure inside it vent down to atmospheric so we could enter it. There was a vast quantity of compressed air in that compartment; it took quite a while to whistle out. But when at last all signs of inside air pressure were gone, we unbolted the manhole cover in the floor and looked down inside. There, some fifteen feet below, resting on the bottom plates of the dry dock, was the unexploded bomb. Jess Enos and I, neither of us very big in girth, both stripped naked and went down through the opened manhole into the hold on the dock to remove the bomb. Once I was standing in the few inches of muddy water still covering the bottom plates of the stern compartment, without touching it I examined that unexploded bomb with great respect. It was a vertical steel cylinder several feet high, with the biggest diameter that would go through the manhole, and it was
still standing on its end. In its head, masked a little by slime covering everything, I could see where the detonator charge and the primer had been screwed in, and from that primer still hung some ten or fifteen feet of waterproof detonating fuse. What had caused that bomb, alone of all eight the Fascisti had placed in the dock, to misfire, I never knew then or ever. All Jess Enos and I were concerned about at the moment, however, was that we should do nothing to cause that armed bomb, 200 pounds of TNT, to explode right under our noses. It was obviously too heavy for us to lift, even together, and push up through the manhole fifteen feet above. So very gingerly, while Jess tilted the bomb a bit so I could get under it, I slung it in a manila bridle kept well clear of the firing mechanism in its head, and looped the slack fuse in a small coil on top of the detonator to get it out of harm’s way. Then while half a dozen men heaved slowly from the topside, Jess and I, down in the hold, carefully guided it upward and out through the manhole, with our lives staked on our care in seeing that in that lift we kept both fuse and whatever type of firing mechanism the Italians had installed in that bomb, clear of any contact that might detonate it. We got it safely out of the hold, through the manhole, and into the Lord Grey, where it went immediately ashore to be turned over to the Royal Navy’s torpedo specialists. They took it some five miles inland into the desert, where from a respectful distance they fired it. In spite of having been submerged over thirteen months, it went off with a roar that shook distant Massawa so badly as to cause all the natives and Italians to rush for air-raid shelters, thinking Massawa was being bombed again from the air, this time by Rommel’s planes. We worked in the muck and the slime covering the floor of the dock. In diving rigs when it was necessary to get inside some of the still-flooded hold compartments to plug bomb-damaged bulkheads, but mostly half naked when we could work out of the water, divers and salvage crew struggled night and day to make the dock bottom watertight enough so it could float without the continuous running of the air compressors to hold it up. We built a number of moderate-sized wooden cofferdams which we slid under the bottom of the dry dock to seal off temporarily the holes blown in the steel bottom of the dock. This turned out to be not as hard a job as I had anticipated, for invariably we found that the holes in the bottom plating of the dock, while large, were still smaller than the holes torn in the steel floor overhead. To help us even further, we ran into the odd situation that in every
case, the bottom plating, instead of being blown down as might have been expected from an internal explosion, was blown up and into the dry dock. This freak of explosive effect was a godsend. It left no protruding steel below the smooth bottom of the dock to interfere with the quick installation underneath the dock of our wooden cofferdams—a very great blessing. I had in Massawa then none of my underwater cutting torches needed to burn away the interfering steel had there been any. And so we came to the end of our salvage job on the evening of May 19, nine days since we had started. In nine days the large Italian dry dock was fully and safely afloat from end to end, all salvage work concluded. As salvagers, we were through with it. One American officer, two American supervisors, and thirteen other American divers and mechanics, with only two old diving rigs and nothing else brought from America, had lifted that impossible to salvage dry dock in nine days. To have lifted it in nine months would have been considered a remarkable performance by any salvage officer. With only such equipment as had been lying around Massawa for long months, available to anyone who had the vision to try, that “long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful” operation was ended in nine days, the shortest salvage job I had ever tackled. It proved to be a nine days’ wonder in the Middle East (and in some other places).
CHAPTER
29 MAY 20, THE DAY FOLLOWING THE completion of our salvage job on the large Italian dry dock, turned out to be a red letter day for us in Massawa in many ways, not all of them pleasant. I had spent the previous night ashore in my own bed, the first night since May 11. When I turned out on the morning of the twentieth, the two Cable and Wireless managers seized the opportunity (the first they had had to get hold of me in over a week) to serve an eviction notice on me. I and all the other Americans must get out of Building 108 by June 1. Where we went, or whether there was anywhere we could go, was none of their concern; on June 1, Cable and Wireless wanted the whole of Building 108, though it had no more men in Massawa than it had had seven weeks before when I had first moved in. I went to see Captain Lucas of the Royal Navy about that immediately; there wasn’t a place in Massawa available to us as quarters. Captain Lucas knew of the situation, I found; he was terribly distressed over it and had objected on his own. But the Cable and Wireless men had insisted; the building had been promised them, they wanted it June 1 to start rearranging it into suites for themselves. All Captain Lucas could do, he said, was to recommend strongly and immediately to his superiors that the building be given to the Americans, with some other provision made for the two Cable and Wireless men there then and such others as might ever come later. What would happen, he didn’t know. But I knew by then that Cable and Wireless was a powerful British corporation with excellent government connections in London; I feared the worst in spite of Captain Lucas’ recommendations. Somewhat down in the mouth over this scandalous reward for our efforts, I rode from the Royal Navy headquarters to my own office. Mrs. Maton greeted me there with news of a different nature. She had just had a telephone call from up in the hills. Major General Russell Maxwell, commanding all American
forces in the Middle East, was in Asmara. About 11:00 A.M., accompanied by various high ranking officers of the British Army, by Colonel Chickering, his Chief of Staff, and by Colonel Claterbos, he would visit Massawa for his first inspection of the Naval Base. Immediately on hearing that, I looked out the windows over the Abd-ElKader Peninsula and the array of ex-Italian buildings covering it. The scenery didn’t suit me; it never had since first I had seen the place. To the south, floating high above everything, was a British White Ensign, the only flag in sight; there wasn’t an American flag anywhere. I had tried previously to rectify that situation by getting a large American flag suitable for flagpole use, from the Army with the usual Middle East results —there was none available. I had refused to hoist as a flag over our Base, one of the little handkerchiefs I could get. Within sight of that large British ensign, it would only serve to make the United States look ridiculous in the eyes of both Eritreans and Italians. Now something had to be done; I couldn’t let General Maxwell on his first visit to one of his posts gaze on a situation where that British flag seemed to be covering everything in sight. There happened that morning to be an American freighter, the S.S. Oregon, unloading in the commercial harbor; one of the first to reach Massawa. I seized on Herman Weinberg, sheetmetal foreman, a very forceful person, ordered him posthaste to Massawa in my car to present my compliments to the captain of that freighter and beg of him, as a patriotic favor to us orphaned Americans, to lend us for that day only the largest American flag he had on his ship. Then I got hold of Austin Byrne, told him to gather up my Maltese riggers, and erect immediately on top of the highest building we had (the three-storied end of the electric shop) the longest pole or substitute thereof he could find in the Naval Base. He was to approximate in height above the ground that flagpole, ex-Italian, which the British were using. I warned him he had only a few hours in which to get results. Meanwhile, once he had that job started, he was to canvass the multitude of American workmen the contractor had on his construction work and see if he could find anybody who knew how to blow a bugle. I would borrow the bugle from the Royal Naval Base, on which errand Commander Davy immediately departed. In less than an hour Weinberg was back with the flag—a large ensign, fine for my purpose, which Weinberg told me was not a loan. The merchant ship’s captain had insisted on making me a gift of it; he had another for ship’s use.
In less than two hours, Byrne had the flagpole up—a real flagpole which he had found in the dust alongside the carpenter shop. It wasn’t so long in itself (which was fortunate when it came to securing it in place) but on top of the building, it stood about as high as the British pole a quarter of a mile off. And he had a bugler, a young American, not so long before a Boy Scout, whom I sent into a closed room to do some practicing on the British bugle till I wanted him. At 10:00 A.M., I shut down all the naval shops briefly and mustered all hands I had ashore—Americans, Eritreans, Arabs, Somalis, Sudanese, Maltese, Italians, and all the diverse races we had—on the hot baked plain in front of our highest building. There with the few American and British officers present at “Salute,” and all the others in such attitudes of respect as their various customs dictated, our American flag was first unfurled to the Massawa breezes. As the bugler feelingly sounded “Colors,” it was swiftly run up to the masthead. It floated out beautifully—to those Americans who had struggled along with me in torrid Massawa to make a naval base of the sabotaged junk we had found beneath where that lovely flag now streamed out, a thrilling sight. It was the first American flag to fly over an American naval station in Africa; perhaps the first to fly over an American naval base on former enemy territory anywhere in the world in this war. As the last note of “Colors” faded away into silence and our hands came down from “Salute,” we felt very proud of it. Our American Naval Base now looked American, ready for its Commanding General’s inspection. About 11:00 A.M., four dusty Army cars bearing General Maxwell and his party from Asmara hauled up at the Naval Base. As we had neither any guard, any band, nor any means of firing a salute, the military formalities of receiving him and the two British Major Generals accompanying him had to be reduced to hand salutes on the part of myself and Captain Plummer. But General Maxwell was little interested in military formalities. He and Colonel Claterbos, together with his British guests, Major General B. O. Hutchinson, commanding His Majesty’s Forces in the Sudan; a South African Major General, representing Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Premier of the Union of South Africa; Brigadier Stephen Longrigg, who had just taken over as British Military Governor of Eritrea; and their staffs were interested only in seeing what was going on in Massawa which might be of use in helping to stop Rommel.
Before lunch, I escorted them through all the naval shops, every one of them humming with activity with all the lately sabotaged Italian machines busily engaged on war materials with which to smash the Axis. (I thanked Heaven our strike had ended some days before or I shouldn’t have had a machine running.) In each shop as we entered it, I introduced General Maxwell and the accompanying British generals to its American shop foreman. I couldn’t help laughing inwardly as in shop after shop, that group of generals raised their eyebrows in puzzled astonishment over the heterogeneous collection of P.O.W.s and assorted natives that they saw running the machines. At last they asked me where were all the Americans they had heard of who had rehabilitated that Naval Base? I had to tell them there might be plenty of Americans elsewhere in Eritrea, but they had already seen all the Americans who had ever had anything to do with making good the sabotage in Massawa; you could count the lot of them on the fingers of two hands and have some fingers left over. Austin Byrne, James Lang, Paul Taylor, Herman Weinberg, Pierre Willermet, Fred Schlachter, and myself—that was the whole story. We had lunch, served in a sweltering atmosphere that I knew even General Hutchinson from the Sudan was not accustomed to, and which nearly melted away the others acclimated only to the Egyptian and Libyan Deserts, and even cooler spots in Africa. After lunch, I packed everybody into the Lord Grey, by no stretch of the imagination any admiral’s barge, and took them out on the water to cool them off a bit as well as to show them what was going on afloat. The major object of interest, of course, was the salvaged Italian dry dock, salvaged only the day before. Its vast bulk, standing out now above the harbor waters like the Great Pyramid over the desert, completely dwarfed the Persian dry dock on its starboard side. General Maxwell insisted on boarding the newly raised dock, undeterred by the barnacles, the mud, and the miscellaneous wreckage littering the dock floor, and the British generals went with him. There were some startled gasps as they saw the huge holes, twenty feet across, some patched with wood, some still unpatched, which gaped in the floor of that dock, now a major repair job in any shipyard. Gingerly they skirted the keel blocks scattered about the dock, ducked under the traveling crane lying a barnacle-crusted wreck in the middle of the dock where the Italian saboteurs had dumped it from the starboard side wall above, and finally threaded their way to the bow of the dock. To save them the very messy journey back over 200 yards of still muddy deck, I had the Lord Grey run around the dock to the bow end to pick them up.
I had to admit they weren’t as good-looking a set of generals when they left the dock as when they had boarded it, but they certainly seemed impressed. That dry dock, still considerably festooned with barnacles and covered with mud, with startling evidences of Violent explosions all over its floor, looked like a mountain which had suddenly been spewed up from the ocean floor by an eruption. It was enough to impress anybody. From the salvaged Italian dock, we moved over to the Persian dock, where one of Admiral Harwood’s Mediterranean armed supply ships, a British vessel for a change, was lifted out of the water, the seventh ship we had taken on that dock in thirteen days. Here our visitors were more than impressed; they were incredulous. That a good salvage man could have lifted that Italian dock in a hurry they were willing to believe, having seen it; that anybody could get Eritrean natives to work the way those Eritreans before them were working was more than anyone who knew Eritreans could believe even when he thought he was seeing it. Brigadier Longrigg and General Hutchinson, who knew Eritreans best, opened their eyes wide in astonishment at those dancing natives, and wanted to know what I had done to them. But I was non-committal. Longrigg, as Military Governor of Eritrea, was the last word on native wage scales. I had no desire at all to do other than let that sleeping dog, my incentive wage plan, keep on sleeping. I laughed it off with the statement that it was so damnably hot in the dry dock, they were just trying to stir up a breeze under the ship, and we all moved on. It was hot in that dry dock. We got back into the Lord Grey and ran out of the harbor to give everybody a good look at the wrecks lying at the entrance of the naval harbor, in the commercial harbor, and in the south harbor. As we left the south harbor on our way back, having seen them all, the South African Major General, with what I thought was at least no overstatement, observed, “Messy lot of wrecks the bloody Eyties left you, old chap. Likely to keep you hopping a while yet, eh, what?” It was a long ride back in the slow Lord Grey from the south harbor. The Major General from South Africa, ruminating on what he had seen, again commented after a while, “Blessed lot of work here yet. Any way I might help you, Commander?” “General,” I assured him earnestly, “there are lots of ways. But what I need worst now is men, mechanics; and when it comes to mechanics, what I need worst is some ironworkers. I haven’t got a damned one! You saw the wreck of that dry dock; she’s salvaged now, but if I’m ever going to repair her, I need
ironworkers. Where I’m going to get any, God knows!” “Ironworkers, eh? Well, I’m on my way to our army in Libya; when I get there, I’ll see what I can do about it.” He relapsed into silence. I promptly forgot it; Libya was a long way from South Africa where alone he could get workmen. A very polite gesture on his part, but what good could a general on his way to join the fierce fighting west of Tobruk, do me? The Lord Grey, once more manned by her regular Italian crew, lumbered along on her journey over the Red Sea. I was having a rest, anyway; it was the first day in seven weeks I was not wrestling, afloat or ashore, with some part of the work in my dual command. We rounded Sheikh Said Island. Then in the open sea again we were shortly passing on our port side the entrance to the commercial harbor. Standing prominently out in the narrow entrance was the wreck of the S.S. Crefeld, a German steamer, lying on her side where in an attempt to plug the bottleneck entrance, she had been scuttled. Fortunately the Nazis and the Fascisti between them had bungled the task; she had swung round enough in capsizing to leave a narrow but workable channel into the commercial harbor for even the largest ships entering. The wreck of the Crefeld drew all eyes as we passed. The conversation in that boatload of Army officers became quite animated, the topic, naturally enough, being the sabotaged condition in which the Fascisti had left all Massawa on the surrender. Major General Hutchinson, of the Sudan forces, whose Sudanese troops had helped to take it, remembered well its depressing state when first they had entered Massawa to find everything apparently an irretrievable wreck. He better than anyone else present was in a position to judge what had happened since. Leaning aft toward me on the thwart on which he sat, he said, “Commander, I know of no one who is doing as much to help win the war as you.” That, I thought, was laying it on a bit thick, but it was a pleasant compliment anyway. That General Hutchinson really meant it, however, I soon found out, for in an official letter which he sent to General Maxwell that night, he repeated his statement in practically the identical words. Soon we were back at the Naval Base pier with the afternoon nearly gone and all hands disembarked. It was time for the inspection party to start back for Asmara if they were not to traverse that hazardous mountain road in the darkness. General Maxwell, who had had very little to say all day long, apparently too busily engaged in observing everything to talk much, now drew me aside for
the first discussion I had had alone with him since he arrived. “Commander,” he said crisply, “there’s too much required here for any one man to handle alone without breaking down. You need naval help. Tell me what officers you need and I’ll have them ordered here from Washington.” “Thanks, General,” I replied, “I agree with you, but there’s no use asking Washington. I was told in the Navy Department when I was ordered here that I was the only officer who was going to be sent; I wasn’t going to get any assistants. They said they had no officers to send; I wasn’t to expect any later. No use your bothering over it; I’ll do the best I can alone.” “Ridiculous!” countered General Maxwell. “I can’t leave you here this way! Tell me what you need, not what the Navy won’t give you. Getting them for you will be up to the War Department.” “Aye, aye, sir, but I’m not hopeful. What I need for Massawa is seven naval officers: one lieutenant commander as general assistant, two lieutenants for engineering assistants, two lieutenants as hull assistants, one lieutenant as docking officer, and one lieutenant as supply officer and paymaster. That’s the least I need to run this Base; it’s not much. Captain Lucas over at the Royal Naval Base next door has ten British naval officers from commander down to lieutenant to help him, and he’s got no ships, no shops, no docks, and no salvage to look after—just piloting, communications, intelligence, and guard duties. That’s the story.” General Maxwell noted down my list. “I’ll get on this the moment I get back to Cairo,” he said. “No question you need them badly.” I stood at “Salute” as General Maxwell and the others climbed into their cars. In a moment, with friendly farewell waves from my visitors, the four Army cars shot out of Massawa, bound for the cool mountain plateau. I wondered as I watched them go, if anyone had noticed the flag. No one, British or American, had commented on its presence. I was sure, however, I should have heard comments enough had there been none. But comments or no comments, it gave me a lift as I looked up at those beautiful stripes and that starred blue field waving over my Naval Base. Even in God-forsaken Massawa, it made us still a part of far-away America.
CHAPTER
30 NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT BUT AT least the most pressing problem I had on my mind was where my few Army officers and myself and all the American supervisors, both for the Naval Base and for the contractor, were going to sleep shortly. (The little cottage, once assigned to me as quarters, had long since been reassigned to Commander Davy, liaison officer, as his quarters.) For in a few days, in spite of Captain Lucas’ recommendations and their approval by Admiral Harwood, the British C.-in-C. in Alex, the answer on the housing problem came back negative from London. We must all get out of Building 108, the promise to Cable and Wireless was to be kept, the building given to them exclusively unless they voluntarily agreed to some other arrangement, which in Massawa their representatives refused to do. Where could we go? There was no building in any condition for occupancy, least of all any intended as quarters. Of the other abandoned Italian buildings, I picked out Building 35 as the least objectionable—a two-storied masonry building used once by the Italians as an engineering office building. It was vastly inferior in location, ventilation, and coolness to Building 108. It had no water supply, no plumbing, and especially no shower baths, without which life in Massawa was intolerable. (Normally, when ashore, I took from three to five shower baths a day to keep myself going.) It stood as far from the sea as was possible on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, in the middle of a dusty plain where no sea breeze ever penetrated, but plenty of fine dust always did. Still, it was that or nothing. I arranged with Pat Murphy, construction superintendent for the contractor, to take some of his men, particularly pipefitters, off building construction elsewhere and do what he could to pipe up that dilapidated Eytie office building with showers and toilets and cut it up inside into rooms. Pat estimated that at best the job would take him three weeks. The sole concession I could get out of the Cable and Wireless nabobs in Massawa was to
defer our eviction date from June 1 to June 14. Murphy dragged some men off the job of building a badly needed new and larger shipfitter shop for me at the Naval Base and turned them to on the conversion job on Building 35. To add to my distresses, now that June was approaching and the already unbelievably hot weather was getting still hotter, we who were working outdoors began to suffer from a tropical affliction. It wasn’t any of the dread diseases we had all been inoculated against—typhus, yellow fever, typhoid, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, or even malaria, against which there was no inoculation. It was none of these; it was something peculiar apparently to Massawa—prickly heat. I had always laughingly regarded prickly heat as something you dusted a baby’s delicate skin with talcum powder for, against minor skin irritations in the summertime. In Massawa, we found prickly heat was no laughing matter, to be eased by talcum powder. There was no easing at all of the Massawa variety. Bathed all day and all night in perspiration, a raw irritation burst out all over us and stayed there, giving our skins the appearance of a coarse grade of Scotch pebble-grained leather. Talcum powder was no palliative for the terrible itching—the sweat washed it away immediately. Lotions and salves did no good either against the salt sweat exuding continuously from every swollen pore. There was no help for any man working in the open except to grin and bear it if he could, or to bear it without grinning if he couldn’t. But for everyone working on salvage, especially the divers, the situation was even worse. The mud, the filth, the decaying barnacles, infected the prickly heat eruptions, causing major boils at random on the body, nearly driving the victim wild. Captain Plummer did all he could, lancing boils, bandaging where possible, but that afforded negligible relief. All my salvage men suffered continuously the tortures of the damned. I was lucky even to conclude the swift salvage of the dry dock before my divers began to crack. Long, lanky Jess Enos went first. With his whole body a mass of unbelievable sores, his arms swollen to twice normal size, Jess was carted off to Mai Habar Hospital up in the mountains, a sad case. He never came back to us. Months later, with his original skin all gone and what had taken its place from beneath looking like something run through a hotcalendering machine, he was shipped back to the United States. Next went Melvin Barry. Between the prickly heat and the heat in general, aggravated by the terrible diving conditions, his blood pressure shot sky-high
and his heart showed signs of trouble. He went to join Jess at Mai Habar; soon he also was on the way home. My first salvage job had cost me two out of the only five divers I had; that wasn’t all. “Tex” Powell, carpenter, gashed his leg badly, slipping on a float in the half-raised dock. The deep gash landed him also in Mai Habar. A month later, however, when he came out of the hospital, he had had enough of Massawa and never came back to us either. Instead, while convalescing, he got himself assigned temporarily as paymaster in Asmara where he could wear a gun while traveling in the contractor ’s pay car. That gun simply fascinated “Tex” and he refused ever to come back to work in Massawa. “Whitey” Broderick, rigger, quickly had enough, too; he was transferred to a job ashore where life was not so exacting. So in about two weeks I had lost permanently four of my little salvage crew of thirteen; quite a casualty rate. The others, together with most of the men I had or ever got, afloat or ashore, spent approximately 25 per cent of their time from then on in the hospital being treated for aggravated prickly heat. We had a rough time with it. Meanwhile, the older men began to crack up. Colonel Claterbos had informed me, while on his visit to Massawa with General Maxwell, that he also was through, that he was being shipped back to the United States as soon as transportation was available. I looked at Claterbos incredulously when he told me that—no American in all Africa could match his magnificent physique. But it was so, he assured me—his heart was going bad, the doctors wouldn’t let him stay. A little later, when I visited Mai Habar to see my own men, there was the huge colonel, himself a patient in a wheel chair, hospitalized till departure. I commiserated with the colonel over what Eritrea had so swiftly done to him, but he corrected me. It wasn’t Eritrea, he assured me bitterly, that had broken him down; it was the interminable bickering with the American contractors (of whom, I could thank God, I had only one to deal with; he had several) which had done the trick. Eritrea was merely the climatic background which had made it impossible for him to stand up physically under the strain. I was sorry. I had worked with Claterbos back in New York on Mission plans before either of us had come to Africa; since then, he had done everything he could to lend me a hand. Then shortly Pat Murphy vanished from the Massawa scene, also to take a bed in Mai Habar, never to return except in the fall on brief inspections. Murphy, rather elderly, had been knocked out by the Massawa heat. That also was a calamity to me, I felt; Pat Murphy had worked hard from the beginning
on the Massawa construction projects, always strictly on the job. His successor as construction superintendent, sent down by the contractor, was a much younger man. But there were a few things on the brighter side over the last weeks of May and the early part of June. A few days after the inspection visit to Massawa, I received a letter from Colonel Chickering, General Maxwell’s Chief of Staff. In it was a copy of Major General Hutchinson’s letter to our Commanding General. As General Officer, Commanding His Majesty’s Troops in Sudan, General Hutchinson took occasion officially to repeat to General Maxwell what he had said to me in the Lord Grey. But that was not all. In the same envelope was a pink routing slip of the North African Mission, bearing in Colonel Chickering’s handwriting a note, General Maxwell desired that this copy of radiogram be furnished you. We all join in the chorus. W. E. C. Attached to the routing slip was a green carbon copy of a very long radiogram from General Maxwell to the War Department in Washington. The gist of the radiogram was that the War Department request the Navy Department to promote me to Captain in the Navy without delay for “most outstanding service with this Mission.” The bulk of the radiogram was given over to General Maxwell’s relation of the outstanding services (apparently while he had said very little on his inspection trip, there wasn’t much he had missed); the rest of it to his reasons for prompt action. In remarkably few days, considering the difficulties of communication between the Middle East and Washington and the normal interminable routine of any inter-departmental actions in Washington itself, a wire was received in reply. The rising of that dry dock must have stirred up more commotion in Washington than it had done in the waters of Massawa harbor, so to have shortcircuited all usual delays. By direction of the President, I was promoted immediately to the rank of Captain in the Navy. Six months before, I had entered the Navy from civil life as a Lieutenant Commander. Now, almost as rapidly promoted as if I had joined the Air Corps instead, I was a Captain. For the Navy, that was something. I hastened to get an Arab tailor over in Massawa to change the gold stripes on my shoulder marks from three to four. Those shoulder marks (which I now
always wore on my shirt like the British so the Sudanese sentries about the Base might recognize me in the dark as a naval officer and not shoot me) were the only insignia of my rank that needed changing. It was folly to bother about changing the sleeve stripes on my solitary blue uniform which in Massawa would never be worn. In fact, to get the extra gold stripes for the shoulder marks, I had the Arab tailor strip a stripe off my unused blue uniform, the only available source of gold lace in Massawa. So now I was a Captain; that had its advantages. No longer would I have to salute every colonel, American or British, who rolled through Massawa. Better yet, in the eyes of all the natives and all the Italians, the commanding officer of the American Naval Base was the equal in rank of the commander of the Royal Naval Base near by. In the East, that counted for something. But other than those imponderables, my promotion made little difference. It didn’t affect my pay except negligibly. If financial reward had been a factor, I might have bettered myself considerably more by resigning my commission altogether and taking a job with the contractor as a civilian mechanic. There was hardly an American workman I had whose pay didn’t exceed mine. As for the contractor ’s major executives, luxuriously ensconced in the best hotel in cool Asmara, who were the bane of my Massawa existence, my salary as a naval captain (subject to American income tax which heavy war tax they wholly escaped in Eritrea) was simply not to be mentioned in the same breath with theirs. But I felt very proud of my promotion nevertheless. I had received it as a reward “for outstanding service,” not as a merely routine matter after having managed to live the required number of years without being court-martialed, until some vacancies occurred to which someone had to be promoted. And the greatest thrill I got from it came not from receiving the congratulations of all the senior British officers, Army and Navy, in Massawa, cordial though they were, but when I lifted the telephone in my office to make my first call the morning the news came through. Before I could say more than the number I wanted, the British seaman (whom I knew only as a voice) manning the switchboard on the naval peninsula, before he started to get the number paused to say, “My ’earty congratulations, Cap’n Ellsberg. All us lads ’ere at the Royal Naval Base are ’appier at seeing you promoted Cap’n ’n if we’d all been rated up ourselves!” The same day I got another surprise, quite as welcome as my promotion. A
British military transport plane landed on the seldom-used ex-Italian airport on the fringe of Massawa. Out of it, still in full battle equipment—tin hats, rifles, bayonets, cartridge belts, and mess kits—piled ten South African soldiers, fresh from the Libyan battle front just west of Tobruk, all in charge of a sergeant with orders to report to me! I could hardly believe it. That South African Major General had made good on what I had taken only as a polite but meaningless gesture! He had combed a South African regiment immediately on his arrival in Libya, picked out ten men who were ironworkers before they became soldiers, piled them all into the first transport plane he could lay hands on, and started them off for Massawa to help someone he felt badly needed help. There was a man! If ever he should see this, he will know I have never forgotten him, even though our solitary meeting was so casual I have no record of his name. But there is one American at least who will always cherish in his heart a warm spot for South Africa for what her soldier son and the men he sent did to help the U.S. Naval Repair Base at Massawa when it terribly needed help. That was much more than our own America did for us. A few days later General Maxwell received a reply to his other radiogram asking for the seven American naval officers badly wanted for the Massawa Naval Base. The answer was no; no more American naval officers would be sent to Massawa. I wasn’t particularly disappointed; I had expected no help. But General Maxwell, shocked, couldn’t believe it and again, pressed for help. However, in spite of all his efforts, he came out exactly where he went in. To the end of my tour in Massawa, no other American naval officer was ever detailed there to help me. I might have four gold stripes now, but in spite of all the dignity that might go with my new rank, I was left just as free to crack up in hot Massawa without assistance as when I had only three.
CHAPTER
31 EARLY IN JUNE, PUSHING UP A HUGE bow wave that resulted in a report from the British naval lookout station that a destroyer was coming in full speed, my salvage tug, the Intent, arrived safely in Massawa. Three months on the way from Port Arthur, Texas, she had circumnavigated Africa, sailing 13,000 miles with her General Motors diesel pushing her steadily along. Always a mere lone speck on the face of the ocean, now with all the 1200 horsepower of her diesel electric machinery driving her, she came at full speed, eleven knots, into Massawa, her tiny hull invisible behind the foaming bow wave her stubby stem pushed up. Edison Brown, skipper and salvage master, H. M. Keith, chief engineer, and their little crew of twelve men had done a fine job in bringing their trifling co*ckle-shell of a harbor tug half the distance round the world, mixing their seasons scandalously on the way. They had left Port Arthur in late winter, arrived in Capetown in mid-autumn, and reached Massawa in early summer. I welcomed them enthusiastically as they maneuvered slowly in against the pier at the Naval Base, both for their voyage and for this reinforcement to my sadly depleted salvage gang. In addition, I looked with pleasure on the two .50 caliber anti-aircraft guns I had ordered mounted on top the Intent’s bridge; now if we had an air raid on Massawa, I should at least have something to shoot back with at the bombers. The next few days, so far as the Intent was concerned, were spent first in arranging quarters ashore in wooden barracks for her crew, since her stuffy little forecastle was uninhabitable beneath the Massawa sun and in taking her captain and engineer into Building 108 with me; and second in breaking out from the storeroom under her fantail, the salvage gear she was carrying. Naturally, being very small, she wasn’t carrying much—one small air compressor for diving use, a small electric generator lighting set, her diving rigs, four small salvage pumps, and some miscellaneous tools—enough to
work with. I had a salvage job already picked out for her. Two days after her arrival I took her over to the south harbor and introduced Captain Brown, Keith, her Chief Engineer, and their twelve shipmates to their first task, the scuttled S.S. Liebenfels, a large German freighter sunk at the south end of the line of seven wrecks strung out in a line there. The Liebenfels, sunk to block the approach to the oiling pier for the large oil tank storage in the desert near by, had gone down as intended as a block ship. Her hull was well submerged; only her superstructure amidships and a little of her forecastle and poop showed above water, three little islands rising from the sea. Ahead of her lay the S.S. Colombo, capsized, and five more wrecks. The British diving survey indicated that the Liebenfels had one large hole blasted in her hull on the port side forward. From the damage and the way she looked on the surface, I sized up the Liebenfels as a routine salvage job—not easy, but one on which normal salvage methods together with hard work should assure results. Brown had three divers. “Buck” Scougale, a small, wiry individual, was the only one rated a first class diver (which he swiftly proved he was). Wiard, a husky, athletic young man, and Dorcy, tall, fairly heavy, and rather studious in appearance, were the other two. They were rated divers, second class, and so they were, though Dorcy, at least, gave all he had to the task. Wiard, after his first wreck, decided he had had enough of diving in Massawa. Buck Scougale made the first dive to inspect the hole torn in the Liebenfels, and finally came up from his initial dive bathed in sweat to describe to me in crisp, incisive phrases what he had seen. The bomb had evidently been placed in the port forward bilges of the number two cargo hold, all the way outboard of the double bottom, and against the after side of the heavy steel bulkhead separating the number two hold from the number one hold just forward of it. The Nazis had chosen with great care the most damaging point possible for their heavy bomb. In the explosion, they had blown a huge hole in the ship’s side about twenty feet long, laying wide open the side in both the number one and the number two holds. They had destroyed the lower outboard corner of the vertical bulkhead inside between the two holds; they had blown out the bottom of the ship in that vicinity; they had torn wide open the double bottom compartments near the point of explosion in both holds. Roughly two-thirds of all the damage was in hold number two (the largest hold on the ship); hold number one (smaller because the ship started there to narrow down towards the
bow) was laid open only half as much as number two. While the two remaining divers in succession went over the side of the Intent to make sure there were no holes blown in the Liebenfels elsewhere, I discussed with Brown as salvage master, what I wanted him to do. We would make no attempt at all to seal up the big hole in the number two hold. A rough calculation indicated to me that if we sealed up the hole in number one hold, which was easier, and closed off all the sea chests on the ship which had undoubtedly been opened to help scuttle her, and then pumped out all holds except number two hold, we should have buoyancy enough, with a fair margin for contingencies, to float up the Liebenfels. That was work in plenty for his three divers and the slight crew he had to assist. I was sure we could lift the ship with the biggest cargo hold in her still flooded and wide open to the sea; we would attempt no more under Massawa conditions than would permit me to raise the Liebenfels in waterlogged condition and immediately put her in dry dock for repairs. On that plan, Brown proceeded. Early each morning, the Intent sailed out of the naval harbor for her station alongside the Liebenfels; late each evening she came back so her crew might have ashore in the barracks, while not so good, at least the best chance for sleep Massawa afforded. To seal up the hole in the number one hold we had to install a huge cement patch, a cement filling, so to speak, containing over thirty tons of concrete, all of which had to be placed under water by divers. In addition to patching the hole, there were about a dozen sea chest openings in the way of the boiler room and the engine room which had to be made watertight. A cursory inspection in the engine room of the one sea chest valve Buck Scougale in a diving suit could at great risk to himself even get to amidst the mass of machinery there, showed the Nazis had sabotaged the valve by removing its insides and cover, leaving that open sea connection impossible to close. Undoubtedly they had done the same to all the sea chest valves in the crowded bilges to which we couldn’t get a diver close enough to inspect, even by feel. No doubt the Nazis figured even trained eels, once cased in cumbersome diving suits, could never get to those dismantled valves to seal them against the sea. But we easily beat them at that. While Buck, by far the best diver, was working on the hole forward aided by Dorcy, Wiard was given the simple task of sealing off the sea chests from outside the ship, not from the inside, where even the best diver could not get at them. All Wiard had to do was to locate in
the shell plating down near the bilges just above where the Liebenfels rested in the mud, the perforated grating in the outer shell covering each sea chest connection. Then on a thin wood batten which he carried down with him into the sea, he marked with a diving knife the height and the width of that grating, and if there was any curvature to the shell in that vicinity, he carved one side of the thin batten to a shape to fit that curvature. Up on deck, under the direction of Scotty McLay, the Intent’s energetic first mate, the ship’s carpenter swiftly knocked together a heavy canvas-covered wood frame to dimensions slightly exceeding those of the perforated grating, and chiseled the edges of the frame to suit its curvature. The four edges of the frame, which were to go against the side of the ship, were covered with canvas stuffed with oakum to make a somewhat flexible soft pad which would seat tightly against the steel plating of the ship all around the sea chest grating. A couple of long iron hook bolts, made by Keith, the engineer, completed the assembly. These had hooked ends inside, small enough to pass through the perforations in the sea chest gratings and catch inside them. On the outside, these hook bolts were threaded, with a washer and a nut where they passed through the canvas-covered frame. When the first frame, about two feet wide and three feet high and slightly curved, was done, it was weighted so it would just sink and was lowered down the side to Wiard. Far below us in the water, he was standing on a little diving stage hung against the side of the wreck just below the main sea injection for the condenser, which that frame was to seal off. The installation went swiftly. In less than half an hour Wiard had got the frame over the grating, hooked the two bolts into the grating, and set up the two nuts tightly against the canvas-covered frame so that its oakum pudding was bearing hard against the steel shell plates, completely sealing off the opening from the sea to the largest valve inside the ship. We had no need for any further worry about that sabotaged valve inside; no great amount of water would ever leak by that seal outside when we started pumping. In that manner, every sea chest opening in both sides of the ship was plugged off; most of them took smaller frames than the one just described. There was one other diving task that had to be done, a very difficult one. Each cargo hold on the ship had to be separated as watertight as possible from all others, especially forward, where number two hold was to remain waterlogged. To do this required closing the drainage manifold valves, difficult of access but reachable, which stood on the floorplates of the
submerged engine room. Buck, who if any diver could get in, could do it. He wormed his way down the maze of steep ladders to the engine room floorplates. There by feel in that black water he closed all the drainage valves he could find, driving tapered wood plugs hard into the seats of all the valves whose bonnets were missing so they couldn’t be closed. With that I figured, the inter-connecting piping systems were fairly well sealed off. We had one further major job, as well as a number of minor ones. There were five large cargo hatches to the holds of the ship, all but one of which hatches lay wide open to the sea in the well-submerged decks. (The fifth hatch was out of water in the superstructure amidships.) We couldn’t start to pump out the three holds, one forward and two aft, which we had to dry out (together with the amidships hold, the engine room, and the boiler room) while those three huge cargo hatches lay open beneath the sea. To take care of that problem, we had to build three heavy rectangular vertical wood cofferdams (large vertical trunks, open at both ends) to go over each of the three submerged hatches. Each of these vertical cofferdams, anchored watertight to the hatch coaming below, rose some ten feet through the sea to just above the high tide line, to form a watertight shaft from the tops of the holds below to the open air above. Each of these cofferdams was of the size of the cargo hatch below it, about twenty feet athwartships and eighteen feet fore and aft. Made of tongue and grooved planks two inches thick, their construction and installation, partly with divers, partly from the surface, was a slow and laborious task. On these installations, both amidst the wreckage and the mud down on the ocean floor and the blazing heat up on the surface, Brown and his crew, only fourteen men all told, labored day after day, no time out for Sundays or anything else, that stifling June for three weeks. Meanwhile, as the Intent’s little crew was getting along all right, I was with them only part of the time in the south harbor, having considerable in other directions to attend to, but at least I received now some officers to help me with it. General Maxwell, since he could get no aid for me from the Navy, decided to do as well as possible with Army officers. So he seized on two young officers, one of whom had been sent out to the Libyan Desert as an observer on tank warfare and the other as an engineer, and ordered them to Massawa to report to me—Captain Paul Morrill of the Infantry and First Lieutenant David Woods of the Corps of Engineers.
Promptly I assigned Morrill as my Executive Officer and Woods as Shop Superintendent. I found I had been lucky in the two officers given me, both young men, of course. Morrill was a stocky, bull-dog-jawed pugnacious individual of excellent organizing ability; Woods, a slightly-built, slowspoken, phlegmatic young engineer (a Southerner, I think, from his drawl, though I was never sure). Neither of them know nor pretended to know anything about ships. But they both had what was most important—enthusiasm, ability and a desire for action. That was all I needed, and I turned them both to at once, where they relieved me of most of the shore load. Afloat, I had the problem of repairs to the salvaged Italian dry dock. On that, which I considered the most important repair job of all confronting the Naval Base, I put Lloyd Williams, salvage master mechanic, in charge. I gave him the remnants of Reed’s original salvage crew, three divers, and the six American mechanics he still had left himself, plus the ten South African ironworkers who had just arrived, together with a few Italian mechanics from our shore base and a large gang of Eritreans for laborers. I suspended all further salvage by Captain Reed’s crew for the present, feeling it more important to use him and his divers to help the repair gang on repairs under the dock floor where only divers could get at the bottom. Normally such a repair job as that Italian dry dock presented would have been solved by dry-docking her in an even larger dry dock; for Massawa that was impossible. There was no larger dry dock in Africa or elsewhere which could be taken for the job, even if she could be towed there. The Queen Elizabeth was tying up the only dock in Alexandria which could take her; her sister, the Valiant, was tying up in Durban in South Africa the only other Allied dry dock big enough for the task. So it was up to us to repair our salvaged dry dock as she lay afloat in Massawa harbor, a devilish job under the circ*mstances, which Lloyd Williams uncomplainingly took over. But there were complications even in Massawa to that procedure. We needed several hundred skilled mechanics; we had only a couple of dozen, mainly South Africans. We needed a great deal of steel; there was only a trifling amount in Massawa. I radioed America to ship several hundred tons of steel for the job and at least fifty shipbuilding mechanics. Very promptly I received an answer—no. America was too busy on its own shipbuilding program requiring some ten million tons of steel a year to spare any men or a few hundred tons of steel for us. We were in “an area of British responsibility”—Britain must furnish us both the steel and any men needed.
By what process of logic anyone in Washington could reconcile the sending of our Mission to the Middle East to help hard-pressed Britain, with the statement to us that we must look to Britain for help in materials and men, I couldn’t figure out. Who was to help whom was another “Alice in Wonderland” problem. But so it was. In Washington, we weren’t even stepnephews of Uncle Sam; apparently we were completely orphans. I had Commander Davy go to work on the British C.-in-C. in Alex to get us some steel and some more men, seeing America had washed its hands of us. Very soon we had an answer—the C.-in-C. would be glad to help but every ton of ship steel in Africa, which wasn’t very much, was already being swallowed up in repairing the vast holes, in the battleships Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, on the dry docks in Alex and Durban, respectively. All the shipbuilding mechanics in Africa were similarly tied up; none were available to us. Steel for us would be ordered in England, overwhelmed already with demands for steel, but God alone knew when we might get it. Then the delivery would take three months, even after some were pinched from England’s meager stocks. However, we were informed there might be a few stray steel plates and beams in Port Sudan. Commander Davy promptly flew to Port Sudan to find out. He came back, having arranged for the shipment from there of what he could find—fifty tons all told perhaps. That cleaned out Port Sudan. I started an intensive search of Massawa itself. We found a little in some unexpected places which I had explored. The Fascisti had taken all the steel ship plates and steel channel bars there were in Massawa and used them to construct the roofs of underground airraid shelters. Buried beneath tons of overlying coral rock, I found what ship steel Massawa had possessed. With bulldozers borrowed from the contractor, we tore all the air-raid shelters on the Abd-ElKader Peninsula to pieces to recover that precious steel—perhaps fifty tons more—leaving us naked under heaven should we be raided ourselves. We should have nothing save tin hats (if only we could get some tin hats) for protection against bombs or air strafing should it come—now no very remote possibility as events swiftly proved. But so great was our need for steel I have no doubt I should still have demolished those shelters for it even under a rain of bombs. Out from beneath the coral overlay it came, to be turned over to Lloyd Williams. With that immediately at hand, and the little which arrived in a week from Port Sudan, he started his repair job. We should need vastly more to finish. Where it might
come from, only a crystal gazer might foretell. But for the moment, I had everything going. On the Persian dry dock, we were running merchant ships over the keel blocks at a pace averaging now a ship every day and a half—the jungle ballet of my Eritrean natives wielding scrapers and paint brushes was dizzying to behold. On the Italian dry dock, Lloyd Williams and his assorted crew (the South Africans having laid aside their bayonets) were busy with acetylene torches cutting away blasted steel. In the Naval Base shops, all hands were busy on repairs for the ships in dry dock, fabricating materials for Williams’ job on the Italian dock, salvage materials for the Liebenfels, and on miscellaneous orders from all over Eritrea. Meanwhile, it was getting hotter; now was the time when the Italians had always locked up Massawa and retreated to the high hills for the summer. I had been curious about the Massawa heat and humidity ever since my arrival, but having nothing with which to measure them, I had written my wife to procure a hygrometer, and a thermometer reading up to 150° F., and mail them to me. The first week of June, they arrived—a wet and dry bulb hygrometer and the special thermometer. The hygrometer I saw at once would be of no use to me in the daytime, at least; its two thermometers read only up to 110° F. As regards the thermometer, Mrs. Ellsberg wrote in a note contained in the first class package, that she had been unable to get a 150° F. thermometer; they either stopped at 110° F. or else ran very much higher. The one she was enclosing, a technical thermometer, read up to 220° F., made for testing boiling water; it was the best she could do. I took the thermometer the day it arrived, June 6, out to where the men were working on the floor of the Italian dry dock, and as unostentatiously as possible, held it a few minutes at the level of the keel blocks in the center of the dock, about head high. In spite of my precaution, in a moment there were gathered round me half a dozen American and South African workmen, attracted irresistibly the instant they saw the thermometer; they were curious, too, about the temperature. When I swung the thermometer round and took off my sun glasses to scan the reading, I tried to keep it a secret but it was no use; everybody grabbed at the thermometer to read it. It read 149° F.! That, of course, was in the sun, but so also were all the workmen. Retrieving my thermometer from alien hands, I then laid the thermometer on the steel plates of the dry dock floor. When I took it up from there, it read 163° F.! That steel, I knew before was far too hot to touch without heavy gloves or
for the natives to go barefooted on; now I knew why. This was only early in June. It kept getting hotter as June dragged along into July and August but I never again dared drag out my thermometer to check what the July and August temperatures had risen to. My little experiment immediately cost me several hours’ work on the part of all Americans and South Africans; 149° in the air; 163° on the steel floor! Everyone instantly began to swab himself and look for some shaded spot, feeling twice as hot as he had been a moment before. How was any white man expected to live, let alone work, in temperatures like that, they asked me? I really didn’t know; all I knew was that there was a war on and that we had to. But I didn’t argue with any of the poor, half-naked devils before me suffering with prickly heat; I let them loaf in the shade, shouting for the water boys and some ice water till finally after guzzling a few bottles apiece, they recovered enough from the shock to go back to work. But that thermometer never saw the Massawa sun again. We were close enough to the temperature of hell already to suit me; if I ever actually knew that it was any hotter, I doubted that I could stand up myself under the knowledge.
CHAPTER
32 ON JUNE 14 , WE WERE EVICTED FROM Building 108. Our substitute quarters, Building 35, were not completely ready, but were at least habitable and we all went, but not without the bitterest hard feeling, especially on the part of the civilian supervisors. They did not hesitate profanely to say what they thought about being thrown out, over a dozen of them, from the only half decent quarters in Massawa so the same space might some day be used by three or four of Cable and Wireless’ British mechanics. Actually I was confronted for a while with their flat refusal to move at all— if Cable and Wireless wanted them out, let it try throwing them out by force and see what happened. Short of bayonets, and perhaps even in spite of them, they were perfectly willing to wait and see who possessed Building 108 when the fight was over—themselves or Cable and Wireless. But I was undesirous of having what would undoubtedly have been a bloody riot between British and Americans furnished to Goebbels’ propaganda mill. There were troubles enough for the Allies that month, especially in the Middle East where the British were in hasty retreat to El Alamein with the siege of Tobruk by Rommel just beginning. Still all my arguments to move out peaceably would have gone for nought had not a vessel arrived in Massawa the day before moving day with a consignment of portable room air conditioners for us. With these we might make our new rooms in Building 35 livable when we could get them installed there; it was worth a try. So finally, muttering threats and curses, all hands packed their few belongings into bags and the houseboys carted them down to a waiting truck for the move. Nevertheless, I had to warn the two Cable and Wireless managers to keep themselves well away from Building 108 and not show themselves again till everyone was completely out or I would not answer for their personal safety. They prudently disappeared completely on moving day. In Building 35, my new room contained only a desk for me to work on, a
chair, a flimsy wooden wardrobe, and an even flimsier apology for a narrow wooden bed, either of which I could have kicked to pieces with ease. Bare as a prison cell, there were no curtains, no carpets, no pictures; there never was anything else except the air conditioner which was later installed. Being far from the sea, it was hotter than hell and as dusty as the desert. It did have a shower in one corner and a tiny alcove for my bags. I promptly stripped and got under the shower, then twice as promptly got out again—the water from the solitary valve to the shower head came out steaming —scalding hot! With my skin blistered where the spray had struck it, I looked in dumb amazement into that shower. What was the matter? There couldn’t be any heater on the water line; there never was anywhere in Massawa, but that water seemed practically boiling to me. I knew a completely new water supply system had been installed for the building, but something must be wrong with it. I hastily drew on a bathrobe and some slippers and went out on the veranda to locate the trouble. The trouble showed up plain as day. To provide the pressure in that forsaken locality to force water for Building 35 up to the second floor where I was, the pipefitters had installed a vertical steel pressure tank three feet in diameter and eight feet high, together with an old Italian automatic pressure pump to force more water into the tank when the level got low. There out in the sun on the hot coral fifty feet from Building 35, stood the bare steel water tank, soaking up heat from the sun like a boiler exposed to a fire! I pulled on a few clothes, my sun helmet and my sun glasses and went to sick bay to see what Captain Plummer could do for the blisters overlaying my prickly heat. On the way back, coated with salve, I stopped in at the pipefitter shop to tell the foreman, “Frenchy” Willermet, that he should have known better than to expose a water tank in Massawa. But he protested there wasn’t any place else he could have put it and still provide for it the suction he needed and the required accessibility for servicing of its ancient Italian automatic pumping equipment. In that, after some reflection, I concluded he was right. Still, something had to be done or our water system was useless. No one could use steaming water for a shower bath, and even for flushing a toilet, it had drawbacks. A solution was finally reached by coating the entire steel tank with a three-inch-thick insulating jacket of magnesia block and asbestos cement —a paradox if there ever was one. We had heavily to insulate a water supply tank, not to keep the heat in as in all civilized climates, but to keep the heat out!
After the insulation went on, things weren’t so bad. The water thereafter ran merely very warm in the showers, instead of scalding hot, except on the frequent occasions when the decrepit Italian pumping mechanism broke down, when there wasn’t any water at all. That usually happened when I came back in the evening before dinner after a terrible afternoon in the sun, feeling that unless I had a shower immediately, I couldn’t live another minute. At that time, it ordinarily took an hour or more to locate a pipefitter (all of whom by then had quit for the day) to get the damned contraption going again. All this, borne by my fellow occupants of Building 35 as poorly as by me, did little to alleviate the bitterness caused by our eviction from Building 108, which for months thereafter remained mostly unoccupied. To the end of my stay in Massawa, there never were one quarter as many British occupants as when we Americans had lived in it. Never could I pass Building 108 without cursing.
CHAPTER
33 IT TOOK NO VERY KEEN OBSERVER from the middle of June onward to note a marked change in the attitude of our P.O.W.s and other Italian workmen. The British Eighth Army under Ritchie, outmaneuvered and defeated west of Tobruk, was in headlong retreat toward Egypt. All Libya was swiftly reconquered by Rommel and his Afrika Korps; only in vital Tobruk was a British garrison left to deny to Rommel the use of that harbor as a supply port for his army. Making no attempt at a stand before Tobruk itself to stop Rommel there, Ritchie and his battered troops not only evacuated Libya but also most of western Egypt, not pausing in their flight for anything till finally they came to El Alamein, only forty-five miles from Alexandria and not much further from Cairo. With this retreat, gloom descended everywhere in the Middle East, lightened only by the fact that instead of continuing in hot pursuit of Ritchie’s beaten Eighth Army, Rommel had paused before Tobruk with his whole force to besiege it. Instead of by-passing Tobruk as he easily might have done, and continuing eastward to give Ritchie the coup de grâce before the shattered Eighth Army could pause for any effective stand in defense of Egypt, Rommel had elected to break off the pursuit while he took Tobruk. All hands breathed a little more freely at that. Tobruk was left well defended; its British garrison was now the largest in Tobruk’s war history. With lesser forces, Tobruk had held successfully the year before against an Axis siege for nine months till relieved by a British advance. Even though Rommel himself was now its besieger, it was confidently expected it would hold a long time, if not indefinitely. That was the sole gleam of hope amid spreading disaster. This depressing situation was reflected by my Italian working force as by a barometer. Never a reticent crowd, where before in the shops I used to hear denunciations of Mussolini and his Fascisti and praise of American democracy, now those I had suspected of Fascist sympathies were openly
exultant; the remainder were keeping their mouths shut lest they be soon the victims of reprisals from their triumphant Fascist associates. And the events leading up to the strike of the month before were trumps in the Fascist hands— if the vaunted Americans couldn’t even manage a payroll, why should anyone ever fear they could win a war? I got further light on the probable future from my new South Africans, only recently arrived from the desert west of Tobruk. I didn’t have to ask them for information; I received it involuntarily. One after another, all ten of those South African ironworkers came individually to see me, pleading to be permitted to rejoin for the last battle their comrades, now in desperate straits in their flight past Tobruk into Egypt. I refused each man’s request; I needed him too badly as an ironworker where he was to let anyone go. But in their urgent entreaties, I learned a great deal. Every man of them, having fought back and forth in the Libyan Desert for two years, had great respect for Rommel—he was smart. Of the men of his Afrika Korps they had no fear; they were as good soldiers themselves as any Nazis. The trouble lay in the generalship so they felt; neither Auchinleck, top commander, nor Ritchie, field commander, could compare with Rommel—he outsmarted them every time. But all the same, outsmarted generals or not, each man entreated me to let him go back-he felt like a coward who had deserted his comrades in their most desperate hour. He just had to get back into the fight. For God’s sake, wouldn’t I release him? I wouldn’t, but while we were talking about the desert war, how about Tobruk? How long could it hold out? I got varied opinions, none optimistic. Some thought a month or so; some only a few weeks. I got my most decided answer from the youngest of them, a fair-haired boy of twenty from Johannesburg who had been in the Libyan fighting since he was eighteen. “Rommel’s only playing with Tobruk a few days yet; he hasn’t attacked it. When Rommel hits Tobruk, Captain, he’ll knock it over in a few hours. You wait and see.” I didn’t have long to wait. On the morning of June 21, 1942, Rommel opened a heavy artillery and air bombardment on the rings of concrete pillboxes, wire entanglements, and vast fields of defensive land mines encircling Tobruk. In the early afternoon he moved his tank columns up for the actual assault. Through the narrow lanes, which under cover of his artillery fire, his low flying fighter planes with light bombs to avoid cratering had plowed in the mine fields, went the tanks—a very smart trick. Passing down those safe lanes, within four hours his tanks had broken through, Tobruk and
its entire garrison of 25,000 men had surrendered, and the British vessels, naval and merchant, trying to escape from the harbor, found themselves under the pointblank fire of armored tanks enfilading them from the quays as they fled the port! Complete gloom instantly fell on all Allied hopes in the Middle East at this disaster. If Tobruk, a naturally defensible and heavily defended fortress, could not last a day against Rommel and his triumphant Afrika Korps, what hope now for stopping him anywhere? Headlong for Suez on came Rommel, in swift succession by June 29 occupying Sollum, Sidi Barrani, Mersa Matruh, to bring up finally against El Alamein where the Eighth Army had at last paused in flight, thanking God for the week the too-smart Rommel had given it to dig itself in there unmolested while he paused to prepare his brilliant assault on Tobruk. Once more Rommel halted to organize his assault on the British position, not so good naturally this time as that of Tobruk, but the last possible point short of Suez where any defense at all could be attempted. General Auchinleck, British Commander-in-Chief of the land forces, relieved Ritchie, his field commander, to take personal charge himself. But the situation looked hopeless; already short-range Stuka bombers flying hardly twenty minutes from fields in Rommel’s rear, were dropping bombs on the British Naval Base at Alexandria, making it untenable. Auchinleck sent word to Alex and to Cairo that when the assault came (which might be any day now) he could promise to hold only for twenty-four hours. What happened after that was in the laps of the gods. If Rommel then broke through, in two hours his tanks would be in the streets both of Cairo and Alexandria—El Alamein was that close. A wild exodus, inelegantly termed “the flap,” of all Americans and British started from both cities, by air, by truck, by sea. By nightfall, Asmara airfield in Eritrea was swamped by the American personnel, civil and military, of the North African Mission and of our Egyptian Ambassador ’s staff. Nobody but General Maxwell himself, Ambassador Kirk, and a handful of their staffs remained in Cairo. The British evacuation situation was worse. The Naval Base at Alexandria was hastily shut down, all vessels there, naval and merchant, hurriedly got under way for Suez jammed with British refugees, men, women, and children. But Admiral Harwood, aside from that, had a terrible problem on his hands. On the large dry dock still lay the battleship Queen Elizabeth, her bottom
amidships a vast open hole with repairs to it uncompleted. For weeks the frantic British had been trying to get some haste out of their Egyptian workmen and Egyptian contractors ashore so they could get the Queen Elizabeth plated up and away before the worst happened. But why should the Axis-minded Egyptians hurry? It wasn’t their battleship; shortly Rommel in person would be welcomed by their king to thank them for not hurrying. They didn’t; the hole in her bottom remained wide open. Admiral Harwood made a desperate decision. Hole or no hole in her bottom, the Queen Elizabeth must go immediately if she were not soon to be sunk by bombs from the planes day and night now attacking her. Her bottom was a wreck, but there was nothing the matter with her guns. Spouting fire like a volcano, the Queen Elizabeth had so far successfully fought off all air attacks, but would her luck long hold out? Still, even if by some miracle she continued to avoid destruction from the air, nothing could prevent her falling a welcome prize into Rommel’s hands when he entered Alex. So on the Queen Elizabeth, all watertight doors and hatches to the boiler rooms beneath which that hole gaped, were once again tightly closed. The floating dry dock was flooded down, with the sea once more freely entering the stricken battleship amidships. Waterlogged, heavily convoyed, the wounded Queen Elizabeth moved slowly out of abandoned Alexandria towards Port Said on her long voyage (with a stop at Durban to finish patching that hole) to America where she was finally to be repaired. With her departure, the last British Naval Base in the eastern Mediterranean shut down and resigned itself to awaiting imminent occupation by the Nazis. In the deserted base, only Admiral Harwood and his staff remained, prepared to demolish everything when they had to. It was against that situation in the Middle East that events in Massawa now moved. I had the only remaining Naval Base and dry dock in the Middle East; I kept it busy. But we were sitting on a powder keg. What might our Italian workmen, ex-soldiers, most of them, do to force the issue now that their Axis forces were on the verge of breaking through and flooding all the Middle East? There were scant British troops left in Eritrea, only a few battalions. East or west, most of the Indians and Sudanese had been drawn off to the battle fronts. Orders came down from the Army headquarters in Asmara to organize all the American civilian workmen who cared to volunteer into militia companies, arm them with rifles, drill them. Many men joined; Captain Morrill and another
Army lieutenant sent from Asmara started to drill them. For the first time also, another order came down from Asmara permitting officers to wear side arms, loaded .45 Colt automatics. The Colts were issued, but as the order was not mandatory, I never wore any. I had no intention of indicating to the Fascisti in Massawa that the Commanding Officer of the Naval Base was any more afraid of them now that Rommel was at the gates of Egypt than I had been when he was on the other side of the Libyan Desert west of Benghazi. But there was no use blinking my eyes to the seriousness of our situation. If the El Alamein line cracked, Eritrea would be swiftly overrun, with Rommel’s planes, operating from Jibuti in the hands of his satellites, the Vichy French, available to him at once as a base, blocking to all ships the narrow exit from the Red Sea. There would be no place for anyone in Massawa to go to escape immediate capture except southward into Ethiopia. I took a look at the moldy pair of heavy leather mountain boots I had brought from New York and wondered whether they would last me over that 500-mile trek to Addis Ababa.
CHAPTER
34 JUNE 30, THE DAY AFTER ROMMEL came up to the El Alamein position and paused to gather his forces for the final assault which was to overwhelm the Middle East and bring the war everywhere to a swift conclusion, my salvage crew on the Intent completed all the underwater work on the scuttled Liebenfels and we were ready to start raising her. What salvage pumps the Intent had, four four-inch pumps and one six-inch pump, were rigged on platforms over the amidships and after water-filled holds and cofferdams. In addition, I had two British-made six-inch pumps (much heavier and clumsier than our American pump of the same size) which Captain Lucas to help us out had obtained for me from McCance’s stock of British salvage equipment. These two pumps were rigged over the number one hold forward to give us maximum pumping capacity from that damaged compartment, sealed off now with a heavy concrete filling where it had once been blasted open. As all the pumps, American and British, were driven by gasoline engines, I had a dozen fifty-gallon drums of gasoline standing by for refueling. Those seven pumps, running night and day, would eat up huge quantities of gasoline. With all of them running, we could expel 6000 gallons (22 tons) of water a minute from the Liebenfels’ holds. On the estimate that the weight of the empty Liebenfels was 6000 tons, it would take from four to five hours to start the ship up, assuming no leakage into her, which assumption was, of course, ridiculous. There would be plenty of leakage, both through our crude concrete patch and nearly everything else on the ship till we got her main deck above water, and even after that still a considerable amount. The pumps, all started by hand cranking with magneto ignition to fire their engines, were put in operation early in the morning. The American pumps, all new Jaeger self-priming machines, started easily and immediately began shooting beautiful streams of water overboard from the Liebenfels’ holds. We had more trouble getting the British engines to fire and still greater difficulty
in getting their complicated self-priming pump mechanisms to pick up a suction, but finally we achieved both objects and the British pumps also began ejecting water at a great rate. Watching those streams of water flowing overboard made me forget the battle line at El Alamein and everything else from then on. My job, everybody’s job on the Intent from that moment on, was getting water overboard from the Liebenfels. Hoping for the best, we left the war, both on land and sea, to General Auchinleck and Admiral Harwood till the Liebenfels was up. To keep those pumps running and get that scuttled Nazi ship off the bottom and back into Allied service was for the time being our war job. All our pumps ran smoothly enough, and from bow to stern what little of the Liebenfels showed above the sea looked like an enormous fountain, gushing water in glistening streams at seven points. Rainbows, lovely in their iridescence, glittered in gorgeous arcs over every pump as the sun shined through the clouds of spray, and in ever widening circles little trains of ripples chased away over the calm Red Sea from the foaming vortex where each stream cascaded into the ocean. Tended by the deck force of the Intent, mainly by thin Hollis Miller, stocky Terry Engdal, and even stockier Herald Bertolotti (“Muzzy,” short for “Mussolini” to his shipmates) who made regular rounds to replenish oil, gasoline, and radiator water, the pumps ran on steadily. I was happy to note that inside each of our wooden cofferdams to the submerged deck hatches, the water level was steadily falling. So also was it going down inside the steel hatchways rising to the superstructure from the engine room, the boiler room, and the midships hold (number three) where we needed no cofferdams. It wasn’t falling very fast, for there was a sizable area in every hatchway or cofferdam, but it was certainly going down all over. All day long, with the tiny Intent lying alongside the scuttled Liebenfels, we pumped. The sun rose high in the sky, beating mercilessly down on the sweating seamen scrambling with cans of oil, water, or gasoline along the flimsy staging rigged to give access to the pumps, each perched on a little island of its own rising from the sea. I was aided in one thing by a new assistant recently arrived, young Robert Steele, a naval architect about a year out of college, whom I had hired in New York to help in lifting from my shoulders the burden of all the complicated mathematics involved in the buoyancy and stability of the wrecks to be lifted. He had come just in time to assist on the Liebenfels. Together we made the
rounds of all the holds, measuring how far down the water had gone in each. Then Steele figured how much of the 6000 tons minimum of buoyancy we needed to start the Liebenfels up, we had gained. Plenty more buoyancy was still required. The day dragged along, we fried under the burning sun, drank water constantly to keep from being completely dehydrated, swallowed salt tablets, and endlessly watched our smoking engines and their steaming radiators. We soon found we could improve them. Each gasoline engine had a thermostatic control valve inside its discharge line from the engine block to the radiator. The thermostat was intended, as in any automobile engine, automatically to choke down the circulation of cooling water in cold weather as required to prevent the engine from being cooled too much. Of course, in Massawa no choking was ever required; the thermostat valves were all automatically wide open in a futile endeavor to circulate water enough to prevent boiling. But the mere presence of the thermostatic control valve inside the discharge line was of itself a choke, even when wide open. So one by one, we shortly shut down every pump. Without waiting for it to cool, we dismantled the engine discharge casting holding the thermostats, threw the thermostats bodily into the Red Sea, reassembled the engine connections, and restarted the pump. We found that helped; nothing could stop the radiators from boiling, but at least they boiled less vigorously after that. The afternoon wore on, evening came to relieve us of the radiant heat of the sun, though the air temperature dropped very little, and the humidity not at all. To light the job as darkness fell, the Intent switched on her searchlight and trained it to rake the sea over the Liebenfels. In addition, the little portable electric generator set, a 5-kilowatt machine, which the Intent carried had already been set up on the superstructure of the Liebenfels exposed above the waves. It was connected up to electric wires suspended precariously from the masts and from whatever else fore and aft on the scuttled ship that showed above water. Now the generator set was started up, to add the racket of its exhaust and the humming of its electric generator to the chorus of the seven pump engine exhausts and the roar of falling water already playing the prelude to the rising of the Liebenfels. As the water levels inside the holds dropped, and the pumps had a greater and greater lift to overcome to suck the water up into them, the volume of water discharged from each pump decreased. Hours since, the water levels had dropped completely out of the ship’s hatches and the wooden cofferdams we
had built to trunk the submerged deck hatches off from the sea. Now we were pumping water out of the ship’s holds and the machinery spaces themselves, but we had to suck it just the same all the way up to the levels where the pumps stood, a very considerable suction lift. With no tremendous gain in buoyancy resulting from it, we had unavoidably set up a situation where the laboring pumps were no longer gaining very much against the inevitable leakage into the ship. There was no help for this situation except to lower the pumps themselves down inside the hatches and the cofferdams to bring their suctions close again to the water. (A practically perfect pump will not work with the water over twenty-eight feet below it; a salvage pump does well to keep going when the water is down about twenty-four feet and even then loses considerably in volume.) Long before midnight, we were forced to start lowering away our pumps, a terrible job at any time, a worse one in the darkness. There was no sleep for anyone on the Intent that night. All hands turned to, first to rig new pump platforms some fifteen or twenty feet down inside the slimy, dripping hatchways we had freed of water, well below the level of the sea outside. When that was done, each pump in succession, shut down temporarily but still scorching hot, a mass of smoking metal weighing from half a ton to well over a ton for the larger British pumps, had to be lowered away with such improvised blocks and tackles as we could rig up from the masts of the Liebenfels protruding above the sea. That task, in the weird semi-darkness of the deep hatchways in spite of the best light we could provide, took real men. Everything was wet, slimy, and excessively slippery. On the frail planking above and on the flimsy improvised platforms below in the trunks, half-naked men streaming with perspiration fought for a footing, heaved on the tackles, cursed as the heavy pumps, smoking all over, swayed drunkenly as they came down, threatening to crush any unwary seaman below against the sides of the hatchway if he were not agile as a cat in side-stepping on what little slippery planking he had to maneuver on. There were seven pumps to lower; there were only fifteen men, including officers, on the Intent to do the job. One by one, we got the pumps down, lengthened out their discharge hoses so they would discharge the water over the tops of the cofferdams into the sea, restarted them. Not till the flaming dawn broke over the Red Sea and the sun, an intolerable ball of fire from the
moment it rose above the distant horizon to the eastward of us, was up, did we finish that task. Only by then did we get the last pump (and one of the two heaviest) lowered far down the cofferdam over number one hold, and with great difficulty restarted and pumping again, to begin our second day on the salvage of the Liebenfels. In brief shifts, the weary salvage crew had breakfast, some jammed in the hot combined galley and messroom of the Intent to eat, while the others serviced salvage pumps. After breakfast, all hands, with still no sleep for anybody, turned to on servicing our pumps, for now the task had suddenly more than doubled in difficulty and far more than doubled in danger. No longer could any man get to a pump treading a horizontal scaffolding set above the sea. Now the pumps were all down wells twenty feet or more deep, to be reached only by clinging with one hand to a can of water, of oil, or of gasoline, while with the other as best one might, one clutched the greasy, wet, slippery rungs of a vertical wood ladder on the descent. But at least, close to the water again, our pumps were doing better. Still the water levels went down only slowly, for now in each hold the water was being drawn from over the whole area of the hold, a vast cavernous space dimly to be seen beneath the dripping steel beams of the Liebenfels’ decks overhead—an area about sixty feet fore and aft, and of about the same width athwartships. We struggled on during the morning, servicing pumps endlessly, pouring unbelievable quantities of fresh water into the radiators to keep the pump engines cool enough to avoid (God save the word in all that heat) freezing the pistons in the cylinders. Towards noon, the water in all the holds, but especially in the holds aft, had gone down far enough below the level of the sea outside to give me reason to believe something should soon happen. I lined up two marks on the poop of the Liebenfels, exposed a little above the sea, with a mark on the concrete oiling pier on shore astern of her. Thereafter every half hour I sighted along it. In the early afternoon, with the slight Red Sea tide flooding in to help us a little in buoyancy, I noted that my line of sight on my shore marker had shifted a bit, not only upwards but also a little to port. The stern of the Liebenfels was beginning to rise at last! And to put the matter beyond doubt, she had certainly swung in her bed in the mud a trifle to the westward! That news cheered the worn seamen of the Intent tremendously. They needed cheering for, utterly exhausted from lack of sleep and the interminable climbing of steep ladders, they were all staggering unsteadily as they made
their rounds. In another hour the lift of the stern was easily visible without the need of any markers; by mid-afternoon, the bow of the Liebenfels also came clear of the mud, and the whole ship drifted a little to port till she brought up on her anchor cable which was already down forward, and on a steel hawser we ran out from her stern to the oiling pier abaft her. By late afternoon, the main deck of the Liebenfels came awash and soon, thickly crusted with barnacles, it was above water. Once again from bow to stern, a sailor could walk the decks of the scuttled Liebenfels, provided he had on a stout pair of shoes to prevent his feet from being cut to pieces. Now our wreck began to look like a ship once more, though to counterbalance that she began to stink like a charnel-house. But nobody minded that. In the eyes of any salvage man nothing on earth is so beautiful as his first sight coming up above the sea of the wreck to which he has given his heart’s blood, which is probably fortunate for that is the only real reward the deluded fool ever gets for his sufferings. The wreck continued to rise from the sea, more and more of her steel sides showed above the water. But we began to have troubles. One after another, without apparent cause, the pumps quit running. Immediately that happened, some seaman of the Intent’s crew scrambled down the ladder, checked the oil, the gasoline, and the radiator water to make sure everything was all right, retarded the ignition so the engine would not backfire and break his arm, and started cranking furiously. After a while, the engine would fire again and commence pumping, but the trouble necessary to restart a pump increased appreciably; the task was killing the already exhausted men. After that had happened on five pumps, I went down the number four hatch with Keith, the Intent’s engineer, when it happened the sixth time to the pump there, our six-inch American Jaeger. Keith looked the engine over. Everything seemed in running order; it shouldn’t have stopped but it had. While I cranked the engine, Keith gingerly tested the spark on one of the plugs with a screwdriver. There wasn’t any spark; some more cranking (tough work in that hot, steaming hold) showed not a spark on any of the four cylinders. “Magneto must be grounded,” announced Keith laconically. He examined the magneto; it looked all right but it was damp, evidently grounded by moisture. It had a right to be. The interior of that cargo hold was saturated with water vapor. Below, the hold was over half full of very warm water; from every deck beam and the steel plating overhead moisture dripped constantly. The humidity
in that hold was certainly 100 per cent; everything electrical in that high tension magneto was bathed in the hot vapor-saturated air. No wonder it had quit furnishing any spark. No machinery was ever designed to work under the conditions in that hold. Nor men either. Keith laboriously climbed up on deck and got a pyrene hand fire extinguisher off the Intent. With that, when he came back he sprayed the magneto, the distributor, the spark plugs, and all the ignition wiring with carbon tetrachloride to dry them out. Then he retarded the timer, threw on the ignition switch, and I cranked once more. The engine started up, the pump again started to throw water. There was no question of the trouble; moisture-grounded magnetos in those steaming holds were stopping the pumps. It was getting on towards evening. We had a second night’s work and no sleep facing us, and the little crew of the Intent was already badly knocked out. The pumps had to be kept going though, or the holds would refill from leakage, submerge all our pumps now well down inside those holds, and the Liebenfels would sink again, this time taking our precious salvage pumps down with her. I got hold of Bob Steele, put him in the Lord Grey which had come alongside with more gasoline for us, and sent him back from the south harbor to the Naval Base to round up Bill Reed, Lloyd Williams, and the nine men they had in their salvage party and bring them all back to the Liebenfels immediately, prepared to work all night. It was dusk when Steele shoved off; it was completely dark three hours later when he came back with Reed and the relief salvage party. They took over none too soon. The sleepless, fa*gged-out crew of the Intent now could hardly drag their weary bodies up and down the ladders to the pumps. Reed, Williams, and their nine men had all worked already all day long themselves on repairs to the hot dry dock. They were no fresh and rested reliefs, but they knew salvage and its troubles and they took over with no grumbling. Brown’s drowsy and over-fatigued men dropped in their tracks in the darkness all over the Intent’s deck to snatch some rest. The second night began, a repetition of the first night, only worse. Once more new pump stages had to be rigged still lower down in the holds, and the pumps lowered again to keep their suctions. The pump working in the engine room was worst of all. The water level there had gone down so far the Liebenfels’ huge reciprocating steam engine was wholly exposed as well as
most of her auxiliary machinery. Because of the engine room gratings and the interfering machinery, we could no longer lower the four-inch pump we had in the engine room hatch with a block and fall; it had to be taken down the narrow steep steel ladders going from one grating level to the next below. Those ladders, four of them altogether, sloping steeply, wet with the sea just receded from them, slippery beyond description from oil and grease coating them, only dimly lighted from far above, were terrible traps to send a half-ton gasoline engine and pump down, handled only by men to mule haul it about. But the pump went down, with men beneath it holding it back, men above it slacking it away, men struggling each side to guide it, all sweat-soaked, their muscles straining in the half light and the eerie shadows of that engine room, looking like demons of the nether world struggling in some unearthly task. The pump never slipped from their greasy hands, no one was crushed in the lowering of it. That seemed unbelievable. Down on the engine room floor plates at last (for in the engine room the water had been pushed down that far) the pump suction hose was led to the waterlogged bilges below the floor plates, a long discharge hose was coupled up to lead to the open deck far above, and once again the engine cranked up. We had another problem now; the exhaust from the gasoline engine had also to be piped all the way up to the open air or we should shortly have filled that engine room so full of poisonous carbon monoxide gas from the engine exhaust as to kill anyone who came down the engine room ladders to service the pump. Servicing pumps became more of a trial than ever; getting to most of them meant going down and up thirty to forty feet of vertical ladder—a man-killing job each trip. The stopping of any pump was now a calamity for us, but still they stopped. Each time, some salvage man had to descend to the pump, spray its magneto with carbon tetrachloride, even then nearly kill himself in the heat and the steaming air cranking it over till at last it fired again. I was up all through the second night with Reed’s crew, for now as the water went far down and the lightened Liebenfels rose well out of the sea, stability problems started to enter. With her number two hold completely flooded and in free communication with the ocean through the huge hole there, and a free water surface still existing in every other hold (none of which were yet pumped dry) the stability of the top-heavy Liebenfels was negligible and she started to list to port. Ordinarily this would not have been serious; we would soon have dried out
some of the nearly emptied holds and made the Liebenfels quite stable, able to float erect. But I swiftly found out salvage in Massawa had nothing ordinary about it. Under the terrific humidity conditions to which all pumps were now exposed far down in the holds, they kept stalling with grounded magnetos before we could get a single hold completely dried out. Then while we struggled to restart a stalled pump, water leaked back into that hold, the unstable ship listed more to port, all the loose water in all the holds ran to that side, increasing the list so greatly we suddenly had thrust upon us the need of abandoning all else to concentrate on lashing all our pumps securely to their platforms lest they slide off into the water below them. Under such conditions, struggling to keep enough pumps running all at once to prevent too much of a port list, I got no sleep at all the second night either. The sun rose again, the third day on the lifting of the Liebenfels commenced. The crew of the Intent with some sleep to recuperate on, took over once more. Reed’s salvage gang, worn by twenty-four hours straight of back-breaking labor, sprawled out beneath whatever shelter they could find from the sun, to sleep themselves. Somewhat haggard myself, I turned to with Brown’s crew on the problem of straightening up the lightened Liebenfels so we could tow her away and put her on the dry dock, thus ending our struggles. Under any normal conditions, anywhere else in the world, salvage on the Liebenfels was already completed. We had the ship well afloat, high out of water, drawing twenty-four feet, considerably less than her ordinary loaded draft of twenty-eight feet. Ordinarily under those conditions, we should simply have towed her into the nearest shipyard, which could easily have docked her, and washed our hands of further concern over the Liebenfels. But not in Massawa. The only dry dock I had operating was the Persian dock, not a large dry dock. It could lift only 6000 tons, and could not take any vessel coming in drawing more than nineteen feet for strictly routine dock operation, or perhaps twenty feet if I were willing to take a chance with the dock and sink it farther than it was designed to go down safely. That situation left me with two incompatible conditions to meet with the Liebenfels. To get her on the dry dock, I had to lighten her up to twenty feet draft or less. But with free water in all her holds and one big hold (number two) completely flooded, getting her that high out of water made her excessively top-heavy and unstable, likely to capsize on me. Still both things
had to be done, or the Liebenfels could not be saved, even though we had already lifted her. There was nowhere else in the world we could tow her; it was Massawa or nothing. So I started the third day with that insoluble problem on my hands to solve. There could be no sleep for me till I had the answer. There was only one hope. I must get the boiler room, the engine room, and the number three hold absolutely dry so as to give the ship sufficient stability to stay right side up at all. To control her listing, I would juggle water in the two after holds, numbers four and five, across the shaft alley. The shaft alley, a long horizontal tunnel from the engine room to the propeller, passed through those two cargo holds to divide the lower eight feet of each hold, along its fore and aft centerline, into separated starboard and port compartments. Back and forth across the top of that shaft alley, I must pump water as necessary from the low to the high side to balance the ship. It would be a neat trick if I could do it, somewhat akin to keeping a pencil balanced on its point. All day long, the crew of the Intent struggled to keep enough pumps going together to do what I had to do. It was the story of Tantalus all over again. Occasionally we approached dryness in the midships hold and the machinery spaces, with the water far enough down in the forward hold to approach the light draft we needed. Then most of the pumps would stall, water would begin gaining on us, increasing the draft again, and the ship would begin again to take a bad list, sometimes to starboard, sometimes to port, depending only to which side she happened to be listed when the pumps quit. Over and over again we fought to restart our pumps, to settle the matter. Each time we gained something permanently in lightening her up, but that resulted only in decreasing her stability as the ship rose higher from the sea. When next several pumps quit and some water returned, all pouring over to the low side, the ship listed even worse than the time before, beginning to assume really dangerous angles to one side or the other. All day long in the blistering heat and the intolerable humidity far down in the holds of the Liebenfels, we fought that battle, with the Liebenfels mostly heeled so badly as to make climbing up or down the vertical ladders to the pumps an acrobatic feat on top of a fatiguing one. Night came. We had not won. Brown’s knocked-out crew went off, Reed and his men again took up the struggle. I could no longer keep my eyes open or drag myself about. I lay down on the superstructure of the Intent for a little rest. Two hours later I was
up again, making the rounds of the holds to encourage the weary salvage men to keep the pumps running till we had her straightened up, now seemingly a hopeless task. Dawn came again, the fourth day. Still our ship wasn’t light enough. Brown and his tired men took over; all hands were beginning to get discouraged. This was like no salvage task they had ever worked on before; they were nearly dead on their feet on a ship which by all the rules was already successfully salvaged. But even so, if only all those pumps would keep on pumping, as anywhere else on earth they would have, everything would soon be over and they could rest. The fourth day was worse than all its predecessors. The Liebenfels was higher out of water and lighter than ever (though not yet light enough) and more top-heavy and unstable than at any time before. It took less loose water to give her a bigger list. She was never near erectness any more. When I tried to straighten her up somewhat to make work on the broken-down pumps, walking on deck, and climbing up and down those alarming ladders less arduous, by trimming water in the after holds from the low side to the high side across the top of the shaft alley, it resulted only in heart-breaking failure. The ship would gradually straighten up to within 5° of vertical, then for no cause at all would suddenly flop over to take a big list to the opposite side, in which sudden roll no one could help wondering as she went whether she was ever going to stop. Each time it seemed for certain that she was going to keep on and capsize, to go down on her side like the Colombo lying just ahead of her in that line of wrecks in the south harbor. I gave up trying to get the Liebenfels erect while we lightened her further; keeping her listed 10° to port, a bad list to work with, satisfied me. Walking the decks under those conditions was difficult. My shoes, waterlogged, soaked in salt, cracked and stiff whenever a few minutes on deck gave the scorching sun and the hot steel a chance to harden up the leather, were killing me, they had shrunk so much. To make matters worse, because of the list, when walking fore and aft along the deck my shoes were at a bad angle to my ankles and the stiff leather rubbing hard against them swiftly wore through the skin and into the raw flesh—between the sweat, the salt water, and the muck I had continually to walk through, those raw spots on both sides of both my ankles made walking a torture. The day wore on. We gained on lightening up, we lost on stability, for we could never keep the pumps working long enough together to get our midships
holds completely dry and hold them that way. Keeping pumps going and restarting them when they stalled, got more and more of a murderous job— apparently the moisture was working deeper into the magneto coils and each time it was harder to remove the grounds by spraying the magneto with carbon tetrachloride, our only cure. I had cleared the Persian dry dock, ordering no other ships to be docked on it from that morning on, so that the moment we got the Liebenfels both light enough and erect enough, we could tow her directly from where we had raised her around to the naval harbor, seven miles away, and put her on the dry dock immediately, whether by night or day. By early afternoon, it began to appear as if we were getting through. The Liebenfels was nearly light enough to go on the dock; I felt sure I could juggle trimming water in the after holds fast enough to keep her reasonably erect while we docked her. So I sent word to Lieutenant Fairbairn to get over to the south harbor with his tugs, prepared to pilot us round for docking. By the time Fairbairn and the tugs arrived I felt that we would be in condition to go. Then disaster struck us. One after another the pumps began to stop and the half-dead seamen were unable to restart a single one. As the pumps quit the ship started to make water slowly, to increase her previously light draft, and worst of all to increase her list to port. Gradually she heeled more and more— from 10° port to 11°; then to 12°. Standing on the sloping decks became difficult. Below, all the men I had, both in Reed’s crew and in Brown’s, were fighting to get the pumps going again, to stop that increasing list. Finally the last pump of all, the one on the engine room floor plates, quit also. Silence fell on the Liebenfels, broken only by the imprecations of agonized sailors far down in the sweating holds, cranking away on moisture-saturated pump engines, cursing the day they ever saw her. The list of the Liebenfels, bad already, got worse. At that unpropitious moment, Lieutenant Fairbairn and his two tugs entered the south harbor to tow us away. Fairbairn didn’t even come near us. It took no very experienced navigator to see that no ship with that heavy list on her, with her tall masts lying far over to port in evident distress, was going to be towed away, still less to be docked. The pilot took only one look, then turned his tugs about, and steamed back to the commercial harbor. Down the greasy ladders of the Liebenfels’ engine room I shot, followed by Keith, the Intent’s engineer, when the last pump coughed uncertainly a few seconds and then quit, leaving us helpless to prevent the ship’s capsizing. To
preserve some remnants of stability, that engine room pump was the most important of any on the ship—it had to be restarted, regardless of the others. Keith sprayed the magneto. I tried cranking, Keith tried cranking, one of his huskiest machinists tried cranking. We couldn’t get the engine to fire; not even a solitary sputter did we get from its exhaust. “That magneto’s completely grounded now. She’ll never spark,” Keith finally announced glumly. “She’s got to start, Chief!” I countered. “If she doesn’t, the ship’s lost after we’ve all but killed ourselves to save her! There must be something you can do to get this engine running again!” “Nothing’ll do it but taking off that grounded magneto and putting on a new one, Captain. I’ve got a spare magneto in my storeroom. But it’ll take over an hour to make the shift. Will this leaking bucket last that long before she capsizes?” Keith asked me gloomily, looking questioningly up at the huge main engine of the Liebenfels, already leaning crazily to port over our heads. “I don’t know. We’ll have to gamble on it. You try, Keith.” “Aye, aye, sir.” Keith sent his mechanic up on deck to board the Intent and get the spare magneto, the only spare he had. Then Keith turned to himself with a wrench to remove the grounded magneto from the engine, no very simple job on a badly tilted gasoline engine resting on the greasy, slippery floor plates, with little room to get at the bolts he had to loosen. “I’ll be back in a minute, Chief,” I told him once he had started. “I want to check on where we stand on the list.” Whether Keith thought he was being deserted at the bottom of that mantrap of an engine room while I prudently retired to a safer spot on the open deck, I don’t know. But he said nothing while I left, only clenching his teeth involuntarily while he strained to get at those hard to reach bolts. I climbed the slippery, winding steel ladders up from the floor plates, a tortuous climb under any conditions, a dangerous, terrifying one with every ladder slanted dizzily to port. There was scant room to pass; all about was the crowding machinery of the Liebenfels, so badly tilted now as to look as if any moment the massive main engine and its auxiliaries would tear loose their holding down bolts and go crashing downward into the port bilges, capsizing the ship instantly. It was a climb equal in height to that from the basem*nt to the roof of a four-story building; nobody down on the floor plates could ever possibly make it when the ship started finally to capsize. Panting for breath, I came out at last in the ship’s superstructure to the only
side escape door in the engine room hatch, and cautiously made my way forward. Walking along the frightfully heeled over deck was next to impossible except by grasping one thing after another protruding from nearby bulkheads to avoid sliding headlong into the port scuppers and probably overboard. Toward the forward end of the superstructure, in what had once been one of the cabins for the ship’s officers, I had several days before rigged up a crude inclinometer against a vertical athwartship wooden bulkhead. It was simply a steel bolt suspended on a string from a nail in the bulkhead; nearly six feet long, that improvised pendulum swept over an arc carefully marked out in degrees with a pencil on the bulkhead. For measuring the ship’s heel, it was accurate enough, even if it had no pretensions to the beauty or to the machined finish of a regular inclinometer. With great difficulty, I made that cabin. Inside it I found my youthful assistant, Bob Steele, busily engaged with a slide rule and a pencil in figuring out the rate of our heel to port. Already my pendulum had reached 15° port heel; 10° more to port and the pendulum would be off my scale. Without stopping, Steele glanced up momentarily at me as I came in, then continued on his figuring. “Don’t bother to figure much beyond 20°, Bob,” I advised him. “After that we probably won’t care.” “I’ve been watching this pendulum and logging its rate,” he advised me. “She’s heeling down steadily to port; no intermissions, Captain.” “How fast is she going over?” I asked anxiously, wondering how much time Keith had for shifting the magneto. Steele looked at his log, did a little mental arithmetic. “On the average, about a degree every seven or eight minutes, though I’m not sure but that it’s a little faster than that right now. I’ll try to check the next degree,” and he took out his watch, then carefully read both the pendulum scale and the time. “Shall I let you know, Captain?” he added as he saw I was about to leave. “No, never mind. It won’t help me any.” She ought to stand five degrees more list. That might give us thirty-five or forty minutes yet, I thought, to shift the magneto and get the pump going again before the end. I must get back with Keith; I started out of the cabin into the deck passage to port. “When will she roll over, Captain?” asked Steele with professional curiosity evident on his face as he followed me out of the tilted cabin. “I figure that when
the gunwale goes under, that’s her limit.” I clung to the rail while I looked down the port side of the Liebenfels at the Red Sea alongside us. Even on the superstructure we weren’t very far from the water, being on the low side of the ship; but the port main deck edge, one deck down from us, was very close to the sea. I estimated roughly the distance from the main deck gunwale to the water. The gunwale was only out of water a few feet now, instead of the twenty feet of freeboard that on the normally erect light ship should have been showing there. “You’re right, Bob. Keep your eye on that port gunwale,” I indicated, pointing to the listed main deck below us. “As long as that gunwale shows above the sea, she’s safe. But the minute the water rises above that gunwale onto the main deck, she’ll go over on her side and down like a rock. We’ve got maybe two or three feet to go yet before the sea washes over that gunwale and ends it. I’ve got to get back to the engine room. Never mind that pendulum any more. You stay out here and watch that gunwale. When the sea is within two or three inches of it, you sing out down the engine room hatch and down the holds for everybody to get out. That’ll give us maybe a few minutes to get clear. Then you’d better go overboard yourself and start swimming away.” I started on my return journey to the bottom of the engine room. Clinging tightly to anything I could get my hands on, getting back over the steep deck and down that dizzying maze of insanely tilted ladders, fast as I dared go, took me five minutes. Keith’s mechanic was already back with the spare magneto, still left wrapped in its waxed paper cover to protect it as long as possible from the surrounding moisture bathing us as in a Turkish bath. Kneeling on the greasy steel plates alongside Keith, he was holding a flashlight to help light the job. Keith himself, the bolts of the old magneto just freed, was cautiously working it off its foundation, careful not to rotate its shaft and so destroy all knowledge of the position of its rotor with respect to the driving shaft on the engine. If he lost that position, the ignition timing would be wrong; even with a good magneto the engine wouldn’t fire. It might take hours to retime the new magneto to the engine. We would never have the hours. Holding his breath tensely as if his life depended on it (as indeed it did if he stuck with the job), Keith delicately worked the magneto free of its pedestal and out onto the floor plates. Then with a deep sigh of relief, he set it tenderly against the base of the near-by ship’s condenser so it wouldn’t slide away from him, while he wiped his eyes clear of the sweat pouring down his forehead.
“Thirty minutes yet, Keith, I think,” I said to him. “You’re doing fine!” Keith paused only long enough to look up to note I had rejoined him, then with his eyes dried enough so he could see, he picked up the old magneto again and studied its coupling to note the position of the timing marks punched on it. I took the flashlight while the mechanic tore away the waxed wrappings of the spare magneto. Keith seized it and hurriedly but carefully set its rotor to match exactly in position the marks on the grounded magneto he had removed. After that, down on his stomach on the sloping engine room floor, he started to install the replacement magneto while I held the flashlight for him and the mechanic passed him the little open-ended wrenches he required. It was a watchmaker ’s job to get the coupling re-engaged correctly under any conditions. In the semi-darkness of that terrifying engine room far below the level of the sea with the minutes ticking away and the ship perceptibly increasing its awesome heel, that Keith’s fingers got the new magneto back in place instead of having it slip from him into the bilge water inexorably rising to port of us over the floor plates, was a miracle. Steadily, methodically, Keith held the magneto in place with one hand while with the other, he began to set up its holding down bolts. Directing the flashlight a little this way and that, so to light the nut he was attempting to reach with the little S-wrenches, I still could not keep my eyes from wandering a bit to observe what lay about us. Over our heads hung the tilted main engine, dismayingly inclined, apparently defying all the laws of gravitation, for it looked as if long since it should have toppled over to crush us. All about us was other machinery, bulkheads, gratings, all at nightmarish angles, so that one might almost as easily have walked on what had once been a vertical bulkhead as on what was supposedly serving us as a deck. Would Keith get it done in time, I wondered? It was a fussy job. No use trying to hurry him, that would only ball it up. Keith’s fingers, heartbreakingly slow as they seemed while he nursed his little wrenches round the nuts, were nevertheless going as fast as prudently they could without losing in the bilges the slippery wrenches. If we lost the ship, and with it probably the three of us down there, it wasn’t going to be Keith’s fault. I watched in agony as endlessly it seemed he tightened nuts and the Liebenfels leaned over more and more till it appeared she couldn’t possibly delay another second the sickening sudden roll that would bring the sea cascading down the open engine room hatch above us, our only escape, and spell the end for us and all our troubles with the salvaged Liebenfels.
Keith finished tightening the final nut, fingered the magneto coupling a moment to satisfy himself as to its free alignment, then painfully dragged himself up off his stomach. “O.K., Captain,” he announced soberly. Hastily I threw on the ignition switch, retarded the timer. The mechanic sprang for the crank, fumbled about a moment for something to brace his feet against, then cranked madly. Thank God, the engine fired! In another moment, the pump picked up a suction (an easy matter since the water level in the flooding bilges was close to its base) and the laboring engine slowed a bit as it started to push water from the bilges far overhead to the open air to throw it over the side into the sea. Engulfed as we three were far down in the bowels of the Liebenfels, we could still hear cheers from all over her as the salvage crew, down in the other holds or on the topside, caught the roar of that engine exhaust and the music of that heavy stream of water splashing overboard. I swung the flashlight upward toward the first steel ladder. “Come on, boys!” I sang out. “It’s time we got the hell out of here!”
CHAPTER
35 T HE “LIEBENFELS” WITH HER MASTS and stack lying over at a horrifying angle, had heeled down to 21° port I found when I got to the topside again. Only a little freeboard remained before the port gunwale went awash, when suddenly the heavenly music of water cascading overboard again had ended everybody’s agonies. The heeling of the Liebenfels stopped, then very gradually, she began to right herself. In the hours that followed, by baking out the grounded magneto in the galley oven to remove the grounds, and then interchanging it continuously with the other magnetos to be similarly baked out, we finally got most of the other pumps running again. Night came, the fourth night. All during the dark hours we worked endlessly beneath the tropic moon, all hands shifting magnetos and servicing pumps, but at least we were spared the need of lowering pumps any further. At odd hours during that night, I managed to snatch three more hours of sleep, a total for me of five hours’ sleep in four nights and days. By late morning we had the Liebenfels light enough to go on the dry dock and listing only 13° to port—to all of us now, a mere trifle of a list, though once I should have considered it very bad. Once again I sent Steele in the Lord Grey for the pilot and the tugs. About an hour later the tugs came into the south harbor, and Lieutenant Fairbairn boarded us from his pilot boat. Dubiously he looked up at the masts of the Liebenfels—13° port heel was nothing to be laughed off. “This is unsafe for towing, Captain,” Fairbairn gravely advised me. “I’d rather not assume the risk. And you can’t dock her at all with any such list, so why bother to move her?” I didn’t have to look at the masts to estimate the list—my aching feet told me all I wanted to know. I could stand now on deck without having to hold on to
anything; to me any such list was negligible. Besides I was dead on my feet; I couldn’t possibly spend any more time working on the Liebenfels without collapsing; neither could my knocked-out salvage crews. “You tow her, Fairbairn,” I ordered, “and leave the docking of her to me. It’ll be my funeral, not yours. Get her under way!” Fairbairn, having warned me, like a good sailor objected no further. He started whistling signals to his two tugs to come close in and pass us the tow lines. That didn’t take long. Meanwhile, we on the Liebenfels unshackled the heavy anchor cables on her forecastle, ready to let slip the chains, for we had no means of weighing the two ponderous anchors the ship had down forward. Similarly we stood by to slip our stern hawser when the tugs had hold. In thirty minutes we were ready, with the panting tugs straining on their tow lines, hauling the high out of water and stinking Liebenfels well up to the eastward, clear of the line of wrecks where she had so long rested on the bottom. Fairbarne nodded to me he was ready to go. From the bridge of the salvaged ship, I waved to Brown on the forecastle and Reed aft on the poop. Instantly sledge hammers came down on the pelican hooks to knock them free, releasing the preventer gear, and with a terrific banging the freed ends of the two anchor chains flew out the hawse-pipes. At the same moment, the stern hawser was slipped and the Liebenfels was under way again at last. Simultaneously, with the halyard aft manned by Bob Steele, amid the feeble cheers of the men who had salvaged her, up to the peak of the mainmast went her colors, the Stars and Stripes floating proudly out above the Nazi swastika under which the Liebenfels had always sailed before. And with those two flags, one above the other, streaming out over our salvaged wreck, we slowly towed the Liebenfels out of the south harbor into the Red Sea past Massawa. There everybody, British, native, and Italian, turned out to watch the procession—the light but listing Liebenfels with her flags flying high above her barnacle-covered decks and sides, the tiny Intent which had raised her steaming alongside like a duckling trying to convoy a swan, and the two tugs towing. Slowly we all steamed around Massawa and through the entrance gate between the wrecks into the naval harbor. There I boarded the Persian dry dock, flooded it far down, and (against Spanner ’s violent protests) heeled it over to a marked port list, almost causing the port side of the dock to disappear
beneath the sea. But I had got to the point where, if a few inches of anything showed above the water, it was safely afloat so far as I was concerned. Then back again I went to the Liebenfels which I carefully brought up to only a few degrees port list, to match the list I had given the dry dock. Hurriedly I dragged my ship onto the drydock, landed her on the inclined keel blocks before she could flop over to starboard, and started to pump up the dry dock, a very tricky docking which left the timid Spanner aghast that I should try such a thing. It happened to be the Fourth of July when we came in with our prize of war. That parade at sea with the American flag flying in triumph over Hitler ’s on the once scuttled Liebenfels was our Fourth of July celebration. I never had a happier one. Once the Liebenfels was safely landed on the keel blocks in the dry dock and well started on her way up and out of the water so nothing further could happen, I left her to the dockmaster and the Eritreans. I went ashore, covered with the grime and sweat of four nights and five days’ constant labor, to tumble wearily into bed, with Ahmed ordered to guard the door and see that I was not called for anything till next morning. I needed a rest.
CHAPTER
36 NEXT MORNING, I TURNED OUT AS usual at 5:00 A.M. My first concern was for my salvage crews. They badly required a vacation from Massawa after those last five days and four nights on the Liebenfels. So I locked up the Intent, put a Sudanese sentry aboard to guard her, and sent Edison Brown and his entire crew, together with Bill Reed and all his salvage men, up in the hills to Asmara for five days to recuperate. My next concern was what had happened at El Alamein, for I had been completely out of the world for nearly a week. To my intense relief, I learned that Auchinleck and the Eighth Army were doggedly holding their positions; Rommel had failed to achieve a breakthrough on his first assault. For the moment at least, the Middle East was safe. No one was particularly optimistic over the future, however, for since Tobruk, Rommel was a name to conjure with. But I felt better; if the British Eighth Army had pulled itself together enough to withstand the first shock, they would hold at El Alamein. No soldiers in the world could excel the British in a pure slugging match, and El Alamein was a position naturally guarded on both flanks (by the sea to the north, by the Quattaro Depression to the south) which could be taken only by a frontal assault—all strategy was out, the best slugger would win. Rommel, with all his tricks, had been too smart. He had thrown away his golden opportunity to win the war immediately, by giving the Eighth Army a chance to dig itself in at El Alamein while he took relatively unimportant Tobruk in a grandstand play. For that feat, Hitler had instantly made Rommel a Field Marshal; if Hitler had had any real military sense, he would have ordered Rommel shot instead for letting the main objective slip while he grasped at baubles. But Rommel, likely to renew his assault at his own moment, still hung like a threatening cloud over Egypt. Alexandria remained shut down under the rain of bombs from his Stukas. The “flap” from Egypt was slacking down only
because hardly any Allied personnel were left to flee. In Cairo, the Egyptians confidently awaited the coming of the Axis, and Rommel, grandstanding as always, was radioing en clair to the manager of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo to reserve the whole hotel for himself and his staff; they would arrive shortly. Once I had learned that Rommel had not broken through at El Alamein, my mind came back to my own job at Massawa. I had been away from the shore base five days; it urgently needed attention and I turned to at once, mainly on repair matters afloat. With all my salvage forces gone to the hills, I couldn’t undertake more salvage for a while even if I had wished to. First there was the matter of the damaged Liebenfels, now high and dry on the Persian dry dock, tying it up. It was imperative that I repair that bomb hole in her port side and get her off the dry dock as swiftly as possible; two supply ships already were waiting outside the harbor to go on that dock; more would be coming. Repairing the Liebenfels was strictly a shipbuilding mechanics’ job, but there were none such in Massawa, either South African or American—all the ironworkers there were simply structural steel men with no experience on ships. Still they would have to do it. So while a horde of Eritreans turned to in cleaning the entire Liebenfels, inside and out, of mud and barnacles, I shifted all the South Africans to her to cut away the bomb wreckage and that concrete patch the divers had installed in the number one hold. Williams who, alone of all those who had salvaged the Liebenfels, had elected not to go to Asmara for a rest, was put in charge. He wasn’t a ship man either, but he was the best superintendent I ever had anywhere. I marked out for him where the damaged plates around that gaping hole in the Liebenfels’ side and bottom were to be burned away. With the South Africans, he started in. And then I had a bit of luck. The contractor ’s new construction superintendent ashore decided that Bill Cunningham, his ironworker, wasn’t worth the trouble it took squabbling with the British M.P.s to keep him. Unless I wanted him, he was going to be shipped home. It seems some unidentified American had slugged a British M.P. in the Torino Bar the night before and broken his jaw with a single punch. While the American involved was unknown, Cunningham was strongly suspected by the British and the contractor was through with him. Did I want him? Concealing my elation, I accepted responsibility for Cunningham with seeming reluctance lest any over-eagerness spoil the deal, and Cunningham officially joined my salvage force—a gift. Had the contractor only known it, I
would have traded practically all the mechanics I had for him, so badly did I need ironworkers. “Bill,” I said to him, once he reported, “now you’re a salvage man you’ve got to keep out of trouble. I can’t be spending all my time keeping you out of British jails. What did you slug that M.P. for last night anyway? Why didn’t you let him alone?” “Honest, Captain, I tried my damnedest not to,” pleaded Cunningham, “but he just wouldn’t let me be. It being the Fourth of July, I was celebrating by having a beer in the Torino Bar just as quiet as a lamb, not bothering anybody, when in comes this limey M.P., and seeing I was an American, he starts to razz me about Pearl Harbor. I know I got a bad reputation ’round Massawa and can’t stand getting in trouble, so I only shoves my beer farther down the bar to get away from him. What does he do but follow me up, harping on Pearl Harbor, so to quiet him, I told him what I thought about the surrender of Singapore. Then he lunges at me and I let him have it on the jaw. Honest, Captain, I only hit him once as light as I could so’s I could stop him and get away without a fight, and then I hauled out of there! Nobody but you knows for sure I did it. How’d you find out?” I didn’t tell him, but it was easy. No one in Massawa but Cunningham could have broken that man’s jaw with one punch, “light” or otherwise. “See here, Bill, I’ll be honest with you. I need you badly. You’re no good to me in jail. I’m not blaming you for this so I’m saying nothing. Now for God’s sake, do me a favor and behave! But if you do get in trouble, let me know. I’ll do what I can for you, and you do the same for me.” “Aye, aye, Captain,” answered Cunningham. “You watch me. What d’ye want me to do now?” “You report to Lloyd Williams on the Liebenfels. He’s got plenty of use for you.” So Bill Cunningham, a fiend for work when any steel was in sight, turned to with the South Africans on the bomb damage. To repair that huge hole, I had to take practically all the scanty stock of steel I had accumulated in Massawa. But there was no alternative; I couldn’t keep the dock tied up with a wreck; I couldn’t take her off with a hole in her. Lloyd Williams, Bill Cunningham, and the South Africans went at that damaged ship like demons, cutting away wreckage, then heating and bending to shape the new steel framing required. Most of the new ship plates went on flat, but with one of those new plates, I was in a dilemma. The hole went through the
bilges, where the steel plating (called the bilge strake) joining the side and the bottom was bent round in a 90° curve. To get that curvature into a new steel plate one inch thick required passing it through heavy plate rolls, normally the biggest and most massive piece of machinery in any shipyard since the plates are thirty feet long and the heavy iron rolls have to be even longer. But the longest set of plate rolls the Italians had left in Massawa (sabotaged, of course, but since repaired) would take a plate only five feet long; it couldn’t start to take a plate thirty feet long. There was nothing for it, except to cut my long bilge strake plate into five-foot pieces, roll each piece separately to the required curved shape, and then weld the six curved pieces together again into one plate; an operation which vastly added to the work, since I had only a few welders. Then assembling all the new plating for the sides and the bulkheads so they would be watertight, with only ironworkers who knew none of the tricks of the trade in the shipbuilder ’s art, was a heart-breaking task. Still we did it. In eight days, the Liebenfels, with all trace of that huge hole vanished, with her sides cleaned and painted and her underwater hull once more sleek and fair and completely watertight, as sound a hull as ever, went off the dock, erect and safely afloat once more. But Lloyd Williams, who had moved from the salvage of the Liebenfels to her repairs with never a break between, was practically dead. I shipped Williams to Asmara to cool down for a week, together with all the ironworkers, who also were in a bad way from the extraordinary exertions required of them in that furnace of a dock in the middle of a Massawa July. I should have known better. The fourth day of their vacation, Williams telephoned me from Asmara at 3:00 A.M., with bad news. Bill Cunningham and another ironworker, one of the South Africans, a corporal, were in the military jail; eight British M.P.s, who had recklessly tried to arrest them, were in the military hospital; and most of the other M.P.s in Asmara were in bad shape. What should he do? I thought hurriedly. When morning came and those two were dragged up before a British military court, that would be the end; I would never see either one of them again. No charges could possibly have been filed yet; there hadn’t been time, and probably no complainants in good enough shape yet to file a complaint. At that moment my two ironworkers were probably booked on the night ledger as just two drunks in the jug. I told Williams to get hold of the American military provost marshal in Asmara immediately, tell him there were two drunks belonging to the Massawa
Naval Base whom I wanted released at once to American custody for the severest punishment I could inflict in Massawa, and if it worked and he got his hands on them, to put them instantly in a car and start with them for Massawa before dawn. He must not delay. If ever the wheels of justice started to grind on those two men, I was out two ironworkers, and so was Williams. As for the two culprits, I would punish the pair of them, all right; I would turn them to again at hard labor on the Massawa dry dock, a punishment which in any other jurisdiction would have been barred by law as cruel and inhuman. He could assure the provost marshal they would both be punished terribly. Nothing a military court in Asmara could do to them would equal what I was going to hand them for massacring all those M.P.s, only he wasn’t to say what the punishment was to be—just say it would be swift and adequate to their heinous offense. As for the British M.P.s, after their assailants’ punishment had started, I would apologize to the British Military Governor for the conduct of my men, and extend my sympathy to the victims. Williams said he understood and would get to work. He must have been a persuasive talker, for by 7:00 A.M., just in time for breakfast, he rolled into Massawa with my two bad boys. I looked them over. They were somewhat under the weather, somewhat bruised, but not badly, and in fair shape to go right back to work. Neither looked as if he had been in a bloody riot, such as must have occurred. “Well, Bill,” I said as I welcomed my lost sheep, “can’t I even send you on a vacation without your causing me trouble? What happened this time?” “Honest, Captain, nothing at all, so far ’s I know,” Cunningham explained in his lamblike voice. “Tom here,” indicating the South African corporal with his thumb, “and me had just been circulating down the Viale Mussolini last night, having a few drinks to quiet our nerves after that repair job on the Liebenfels, when we figured finally we’d both had enough an’ started for the hotel. But we was too tired to make it, so we just lay down in the gutter in the dark, out of the way o’ everything, for a nap. I don’t remember no fight. The next thing I knew, there was Lloyd shaking me to wake me up, and I was surprised as Tom was to find I was in the jug instead of still sleeping somewhere along the Viale Mussolini. Lloyd said you wanted him to drive us down here, and that’s every blessed thing I know about it. Thanks, Captain, for getting us out o’ that jail; I don’t like jails.” “Get back out on that Italian dry dock, both of you,” I muttered wearily, “and
if you get me out of bed again, I’ll have you shot for it. Don’t you know I need some sleep, too? I’m as tired as you are. Get to work; you both lose the last two days of your vacation.” They left. I turned to Williams. “Thanks, Lloyd, for saving them for us. Never let Cunningham out of Massawa again. The British Army can get lots more M.P.s, but where in hell we can get any more ironworkers I don’t know. Now you go back to Asmara once more.” But Williams declined; he had had rest enough. Besides, getting out of Massawa, now he was here, just to have to come back again after a couple of days in the hills would only make him feel worse. So he also, after breakfast, went out to resume work on the Italian dock with his two ironworkers who officially now were serving time on it for their crime. That day, July 16, turned out to be my day for difficulties with the British Military Government. Hardly had I had breakfast myself and sat down at my desk overlooking the Naval Base to scan what papers there were lying for me to sign, when Mrs. Maton informed me there was a young man, some civilian but not one of our workmen, urgently wishing to see me. He wouldn’t state his business; all she could get out of him was that he must see me; he was very agitated, she said. I told her to show him in. He entered; I looked him over. He was young, all right, probably about twenty; tall, very gaunt, and quite bronzed; to say that he was agitated was putting it very mildly. The moment he opened his mouth, I judged he was on the verge of hysteria; his words, in a high-pitched, youthful voice, poured out in an incoherent torrent. All I could gather from his excited statements was that he was appealing to me, the Commanding Officer of the American Naval Base, as his last hope; if I didn’t help him, he was doomed. Finally, mainly by showing a sympathetic willingness to listen rather than indicating that I was too busy, I got him calmed down enough to gather what his trouble was and what he wanted of me. His name was Eugene Zeiner; he was a Czech, a Czech Jew, he informed me. In 1938, after Munich, but before the Nazis entered Prague, though then only sixteen, he had fled to France to escape them. His father, his mother, his younger sister, who had stayed in Prague, he told me in heart-broken tones, must now all be dead—in four years he had heard nothing from or of them. In September of 1939, when the Nazis attacked Poland, he had crossed from France to England and had enlisted as an infantryman in a British regiment. He
was burning to kill Nazis for what they had done to his family. “See!” he cried, dragging from his pocket some soiled papers and tremblingly spreading them out before me. They were his official service records as a British soldier, starting in September, 1939, when seventeen-yearold Eugene Zeiner had volunteered. “I served all through that first campaign in France, through the collapse in Belgium, the retreat to Dunkirk. I was evacuated under fire on the beach at Dunkirk!” His shrill voice rose almost to a shriek as he pointed to the record. It was so entered there. “Then after a few months in England, they gave us new rifles and I came to Libya. I fought with the Eighth Army in the desert under Wavell. See, again?” He pointed to the entry. “We did well, we got to Benghazi, we nearly drove the Fascists out of Africa, only suddenly we were all shipped out of Libya to stop the Nazis in Greece. Look!” Once more he pointed to the record. “Greece was terrible, a few thousand Englishmen against a million Nazis!” His piercing voice broke, he paused a moment, then excitedly went on. “We fought hard, but we were crushed. We had to retreat. Then from Greece another evacuation under fire on the beaches. It was worse than Dunkirk!” Completely broken up by the recollection, he mumbled incoherently while he fumbled with the record, then pulled himself together a bit and pointed to the next entry. “See, Crete next!” Now indeed his shrill cry sounded almost that of a madman’s. “Crete, Nazi paratroopers, skies full of Nazi bombers and fighter planes strafing us, and we had hardly our bayonets to oppose them! Crete! That was worst of all! We fought like tigers. But once more we had to be evacuated from the beaches, those who were left!” He began to sob. I said nothing; there were several British naval officers in Massawa who had been at Crete; they had assured me that nothing in the whole war, on land or sea, had equaled Crete in hellishness. “Look, Captain!” Zeiner finally managed to ejacul*te, pointing to the last entry. Private Eugene Zeiner had been evacuated from Crete to Alexandria. Immediately after, in June, 1941, already at nineteen a veteran with four of the war ’s most horrible campaigns behind him, a medical survey had adjudged him unfit for further military service-shell shock, psychosis, whatever it was the surgeons had called it, had made a wreck of the lad and he was honorably discharged from His Majesty’s Forces. The closing entry went on to note that he had been a good soldier, that for his disability he was entitled to a pension of four shillings a week or four shillings a month, I have forgotten which.
“Well?” I asked, looking up at him after I had read that. What did he want of me? “They wouldn’t let me fight any more, though I was willing! I hate Nazis!” he shrieked. “But all the same I was discharged, a civilian in Egypt. I couldn’t go home; I had no home to go to. Of course I couldn’t live on the four shillings but other soldiers helped me. It was hard getting a job in Egypt; people looked at my military papers and decided I must be crazy—maybe I am! At last I got a job as a clerk with the contractor for this American Mission in Cairo—they needed clerks so badly who could understand English that they would hire anybody. I worked hard; I did all right there in Cairo with them. Then came Rommel to El Alamein and this ‘flap’; everybody American in the office fled in an instant! But I could not flee, I was not American; so I stayed in the empty office to straighten things out till quitting time anyway. On one desk I found lying ten thousand dollars in American bills; so fast had everybody gone they had not even bothered over all that money! I wrapped it up and took it to the American Ambassador ’s office; he was almost the only American left in Cairo. Then I was out of a job again, and besides Rommel was expected in Cairo almost every hour. Rommel and his Nazis! What would they do to me—a Czech Jew who had escaped Czechoslovakia to fight them as a British soldier!” Again Zeiner ’s high-pitched voice rose to a shrill crescendo. Fascinated now, I listened to him, as unable to interrupt his discourse (even had I wanted to) as The Wedding Guest clutched by The Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s rime. Zeiner got his breath again, continued excitedly. “I had to get out of Egypt, but I wasn’t British, I wasn’t American, I had no passport of any kind, nothing except my military papers. I went to the Egyptians; without a passport, I could not leave. I went to the British for a passport; they said they couldn’t give me one since I was not British. I showed my British military papers. That didn’t help; being a British soldier didn’t make me a British citizen. I was desperate; all the other civilians were gone. When the Nazis came, I should stick out among the Egyptians like a lighthouse to be seized instantly. I begged of the British to do something for me. But God save bureaucrats and red tape! There was nothing in the official books that covered a case like mine, so they could issue no passport. “I refused to leave that office—two years I had served their king; now his servants must do something, even to breaking their rules, to save me! Finally one of them had an idea. They couldn’t issue me a passport, but they could give
me a transit visa through all British territories to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia (God himself only knows why Ethiopia); it would look enough like an official document in place of a passport that I might get out of Egypt on it. Would I take that? I was frantic! To get away from the Nazis and maybe fight again some day, I would take a transit visa to Ethiopia, to hell, to anywhere! Of course I took it. I went to Alexandria. There was much excitement there, refugees, bombs, Stukas; it was almost like another evacuation. My paper had a big enough red seal on it; the Egyptians were not paying close attention; I was permitted to board a freighter for Massawa on my way to Addis Ababa. So I came at last to Massawa, Captain!” finished Zeiner breathlessly. “Yes, I understand that all right, Mr. Zeiner, seeing that you’re here right now. But still what has all this got to do with me or this Naval Base?” Zeiner clutched my arm, as if to hang on, fearful that I might order him thrown out, while he thrust still another paper down on my desk. “Read that, Captain! You must save me! I can’t go there!” he screamed. I read it. It was on the O.E.T.A. stationery I knew well, a letter from the Occupied Enemy Territories Administration in Asmara, the British Military Government, to Mr. Eugene Zeiner. He was advised that already he had overstayed the brief period in Eritrea allowed him on his transit visa to Addis Ababa; unless he proceeded immediately on his journey to Ethiopia, he would be deported there. It was signed by one of the British officers in O.E.T.A. whom I knew slightly. Now indeed Zeiner became hysterical; I felt as if I were listening to one of the damned as he shrilled out, “I’ll die in Ethiopia! What is there for me to do there? There’s no way out of Ethiopia! Where could I go from there? I saved ten thousand dollars for the Americans in Cairo. You’re American; for God’s sake, do something for me! You are the American Commandant; the British will listen to you! Make them let me stay in Massawa at least! Maybe here I can find work, perhaps even for the Americans. But don’t let them send me to Ethiopia! I can’t stand any more!” and very evidently on the verge of utter collapse, he began sobbing violently. Now I saw his reason for pouring out his story to me, a heartrending one truly. And his papers backed it up. This broken lad, who had fought our enemies till the disasters he had been through had turned him into the hysterical wretch I had before me who could fight no more, was going to get all the help I could give him, if I had any influence in Eritrea. I told Mrs. Maton, standing near with tears in her own eyes, to get me on the phone the O.E.T.A. officer in
Asmara, a major, who had signed that deportation letter. It took some time. Meanwhile, I seated Eugene Zeiner in a chair, got him some water to cool him off, and calmed him down a bit by telling him to quit worrying—he wasn’t going to Ethiopia. No matter what it took, I would see to that. Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Maton, who had been patiently working on the phone, looked up at me and announced, “You’re through, Captain.” I took the phone. “Hello, Major, this is Captain Ellsberg, Massawa Naval Base. There’s an exBritish soldier, a Eugene Zeiner, in my office with a deportation order from you. He did something for us Americans in Cairo, and I’m taking an interest in his case. Can’t you cancel that letter?” “No, Captain Ellsberg. I know that case; the man’s an alien with only a transit visa through Eritrea. He’s already overstayed his transit time. We’ve been easy on him over that, but he’s got to get cracking. He can’t stay any longer.” “But, Major, you’ll kill him if you deport him to Ethiopia! That man’s fought for you till it’s made a wreck of him. He’s entitled to consideration. You saw his papers, didn’t you?” “Yes, Captain, I saw them.” “They’re in order, aren’t they? Anything wrong with them? Are those service records correct?” “Yes, his military papers are in order. But except for that pension, they don’t entitle him to anything. You don’t understand, Captain. The man’s not a British citizen; he’s an alien, and he can’t stay in Eritrea on only a transit visa through to Addis Ababa. He’s got to move on. The regulations don’t permit his staying.” “I’ll say I don’t understand, Major!” I answered bitterly. “Neither will anybody else in America, when I give this story to the American newspaper men from Cairo who’re all in Asmara right now because of this flap! There’s not much news in Asmara; those reporters will all fall hard for this Zeiner story. It’ll sound fine in the American press, won’t it? Broken-down British soldier, a mere boy, veteran of Dunkirk, Libya, Greece, and Crete, kicked out of Eritrea to his death against the protests of the American Commandant because British red tape can’t be cut! That’ll certainly encourage Americans to go all out to help Britain! There’ll be an explosion in London over it; London’ll hop your boss, Brigadier Longrigg; and the Brigadier will fall on
you like a ton of bricks for being such a dumbbell as to let that story break! You deport that man, and by God, I’ll do it!” “Really, Captain, I trust you won’t do anything like that!” came in a horrified voice over the wire. “It wouldn’t be cricket, you know, old chap. I didn’t make those regulations; it’s only my job to see they’re enforced. Really now, I sympathize with the poor blighter as much as you do, but what can I do? He’s not all there, you know; you must have observed that yourself in talking to him. If I let him stay, nobody’ll employ him, he’ll become a public charge, and I’ll be held respon—” “Is that all that’s worrying you?” I broke in. “Why, Major—” And the next instant I found myself suddenly listening to someone talking to me in Italian. Somewhere between Massawa and Asmara, as usual, some local operator had crossed the wires. But for once, instead of swearing over it, I blessed the operator who had done it. It gave me a few minutes to ponder that O.E.T.A. Major ’s last remark. I gave the phone to Mrs. Maton. “Connection broken as usual, Mrs. Maton. Please try to get it again.” I turned to Eugene Zeiner, and hastily sized him up. He looked like a welleducated young man; his English was perfect. “What can you do if I give you a job?” I asked. “Anything, Captain!” he burst out excitedly. “Clerk, maybe interpreter; I know five languages. I know even a little about machinery I learned in the Army! Anything at all you want, I’ll try! Digging trenches for pipes even! I’ve had lots of experience digging foxholes; I can—” “You’re through again, Captain,” interrupted Mrs. Maton, passing the phone towards me. “That’s enough; you’re hired!” I informed Zeiner as I took the phone. “Sorry, old chap,” I heard, “some one of these blessed Eyties broke in on us. What were you saying, Captain?” “I was going to say there was another factor in the case I’d overlooked. It didn’t occur to me it meant anything till your last remark. Brigadier Longrigg knows how devilishly short-handed we are down here, and that man Zeiner ’s employed at this Base. If you deport him, I lose an employee, and I’ll not stand for it; I’ll go right to Brigadier Longrigg myself, on top of what else I promised to do, over your robbing me of one of my men when I’m breaking my neck to get ships out for the Royal Navy! He’ll flay you alive for it!” “He’s your employee, you say? My word, that puts a different light on the
case!” I heard a much relieved voice saying over the phone. “Too bad you didn’t tell me that right off; I would have fixed it all up without bothering you so much over it, Captain. Your employee, eh? That’s topping! That settles everything with no need of troubling anybody about the case. You just write us an official letter as Commandant of the Naval Base saying he’s one of your employees, and we’ll cancel that deportation notice and give him a permit to remain in Eritrea as long as he works for you. Happy to oblige you, Captain. Anything else?” “No, thanks, Major. That fixes everything. Good-by!” and I hung up the phone. “It’s all right, Zeiner,” I said, looking speculatively over my newly acquired employee. “They’re canceling that letter. You can stay and work here.” Eugene Zeiner, with a light in his boyish eyes very like what I imagine might shine in those of a man suddenly pardoned as he stood with the noose round his neck, was too inarticulate for any words. He merely straightened stiffly up to attention, saluted in the British fashion, and looked at me as if awaiting orders. “You take Mr. Zeiner down to the pay office, Mrs. Maton,” I said to her, “and see he’s entered on the Naval Base rolls as a clerk. I’ll see about his actual assignment this afternoon, when I’ve had time to think over where we can use him best. Probably in the machine shop office.” Once more Zeiner saluted, faced about, and followed Mrs. Maton out of the office. So now, by the grace of Field Marshal Rommel, I had a clerk; the first male clerk the Naval Base itself had been blessed with. I could use one.
CHAPTER
37 I HAD A BUSY DAY FROM THEN ON. Already it was nearly 10:00 A.M.; I had promised to be on the Naval Base pier for a discussion with Brown on the Intent before he shoved off to start his second salvage job. I hurried down there. Brown and his men had returned a few days before from their excursion to the Asmara plateau, somewhat rested again. They had since been overhauling the Intent’s salvage outfit, particularly her pumps. Now everything was restowed, cleaned, dried out, and ready for business as before, except the crew themselves—they weren’t the men they had been when first they had arrived— Massawa and the Liebenfels had already cost them plenty. Inside the little bridge of the Intent, I went over briefly with Brown his second assignment—the scuttled S.S. Frauenfels, also Nazi, a slightly larger sister to the Liebenfels. She was sunk as the third ship ahead of where the Liebenfels had once lain, right in the center of that long line of wrecks in the south harbor. The salvage job would be practically the same as that on the Liebenfels except for three things which made it harder—the Frauenfels was in deeper water; she had two holes blasted in her, one forward and one aft, which meant twice as much patching under water; and Brown’s crew, including Brown himself, weren’t what they used to be, while one of his three divers, Wiard, was now on a shore job with the contractor. On the credit side of that ledger, however, there were some offsets. A freighter from America had come in a few days before with a considerable number of portable air-conditioning units, some new salvage pumps I had ordered in New York, and a large number of cases of small hand tools of all kinds for me. With the air-conditioners, I could fix up not only our quarters completely, but also the barracks for the men so all hands might have a chance to sleep at night without perspiring—that would help alleviate the prickly heat which was
driving us all wild. The new American salvage pumps, a consignment of big ten-inch and sixinch pumps, would give us vastly improved pumping capacity on the Frauenfels, allowing us to cut the pumping time so low we should get the ship up and dried out before moisture could kill off all the magnetos, avoiding the battle we had had on the Liebenfels. And all the hand tools—torches, drills, diving telephones, that were in those new cases—should greatly help both the salvage crews and the Naval Base shops in working—at last we should have enough small tools to work with. So without trepidation, I looked forward to the lifting of the Frauenfels, though undoubtedly it would take considerably longer than the Intent had spent on her sister. In addition to two holes to patch, because of the greater depth of water and the resulting greater load coming on the main deck of the wreck when we started to pump out the submerged holds, Brown would have to have the divers shore up inside underneath the main deck of the Frauenfels before we started pumping out. Otherwise that deck, with the weight of thousands of tons of sea water on top of it, would collapse on us and ruin everything, once the water inside the holds fell away from the main deck and no longer supported it from below. All that I went over with Brown—the shoring, the patching, the hatch cofferdams, the sealing up of the sea chests, the closing of all interior valves. It was all clear, and the Intent could shove off for the south harbor to commence, but Brown seemed to have something on his mind distracting him from the job in hand. I asked him what was the matter; was he too worn out for another raising? “No, it’s not the Frauenfels; we’ll get her up, Captain. It’s that gang up on the hill! They’re enough to drive anybody crazy!” I supposed he meant the American contractor. While that contractor was causing me more mental anguish than anything I had to battle in Massawa, still why should Brown be concerned over those people? I looked at him, puzzled. “I went to see them while I was in Asmara for our rest, Captain, to go over with them some claims my crew has got for pay on the voyage round from Port Arthur, and did I get a going over! But the boys are entitled to that money, and I wasn’t taking no for an answer from anybody. Finally I finished up talking to just about the top mogul, and do those people up there think they’re God! You should have heard what their foreign manager said to me. I didn’t get the money due my men, but take it from me, Captain, I told them off! Read
that!” Brown shoved a carbon copy of a letter into my hands. I glanced at it. It was dated in Massawa, July 13, three days before, addressed to the contractor ’s foreign manager in Asmara. My DEAR SIR: I wish to thank you for the very enlightening interview that you so graciously gave me at your Asmara office on July 7, 1942. Until I was so informed by you I had not realized that I was just a “camp follower.” It was extremely kind of you, a busy man of affairs, to take the time to inform me in such a courteous and tactful manner exactly what I was, and make clear to me the small and insignificant part that the men in Massawa were playing in the extremely large scale operations under your jurisdiction. Until pointed out to me by you I had not realized that Captain Ellsberg, U.S.N.R., was “a small pebble on the beach” and the operations at Massawa “just a drop in the bucket.” If you put all the supervisors in your company in their places as deftly and efficiently as you did me, I am sure they would co-operate to the limit of their endurance for your company in the war effort. Sincerely yours, EDISON D. BROWN , Salvage Master c.c.CAPT. EDWARD ELLSBERG I shoved my carbon copy of his letter into my shirt pocket, trying not to grin. “You certainly told ’em off, Brown,” I had to admit. “Now I’m a naval officer, and I couldn’t write letters like that to anybody, but since you’re still a free and equal citizen of the United States, I suppose you can. However, don’t lose any sleep over that crowd. We’ll do our bit for the war effort in Massawa even if you are only a ‘camp follower ’ and I’m only ‘a small pebble on the beach.’ Now if you have any more problems with that outfit, let me handle them while you tend to the Frauenfels. I’m used to being kicked around by their big shots in the high hills over the telephone (Massawa’s too hot for ’em to come down here much to bother me) and I see you’re not. Leave them to me, and you at least will have fewer headaches. You can shove off now, and good luck to you, Brown, and your men on the Frauenfels.” “Aye, aye, Captain.” Brown reached for his bridge controls to start
maneuvering his tug away from the pier while I hastily slid down from his superstructure onto the wharf, an exit which on that tiny craft required no more than two good jumps. I waved to the salvage men on the Intent’s fantail as their vessel fell away from the pier and her powerful propeller started to push her ahead on her way to the south harbor and the scuttled Frauenfels. Next day I should be with them there. Back in my office, I took up other problems again. I had managed to get turned over to the Naval Base the huge masonry barracks that shortly before Britain’s Indian troops had been occupying. Part of the Bengalis and the Sikhs had been hurriedly shipped east to fight the Japs; the rest I had persuaded Colonel Sundius-Smith, commanding the British forces about Massawa, to move out of Massawa to some ex-Italian wooden barracks in the hills halfway to Asmara. That massive building would make fine quarters for all the American (and South African) workmen in Massawa; it was the one place which (once all its shuttered windows were sealed off airtight with masonite sheets) could be airconditioned. For now we had quite a number of air-conditioners. A few sets, the first to arrive, had already been installed in Building 35. There we had sealed up tightly every shuttered window and door, put a portable air-conditioning set in each room, and the results had been marvelous. In my room, for instance, the air-conditioner, running night and day, of course, with never a shut off, had managed to knock the inside temperature down to go° F., and the humidity down to 65 per cent. It was unbelievable what the effect was. Entering that room at night after a regular day under the Massawa sun, it felt as if I had suddenly entered a refrigerator, and for a while after entering I always had to slip on a coat to avoid a chill till I got used to it indoors. Then there was another gain. With all room openings tightly sealed off and the only air now coming in blowing first through the filter of the airconditioner, I no longer had to sleep under a mosquito net enveloping my bed. That was wonderful. Between the absence of the mosquito net and that beautifully cool 90° F. air in my room with only 65 per cent humidity in it, I could now wear pajamas again at night without perspiring; I didn’t have to sleep naked any more. The effect of all this was heavenly. No longer bathed in sweat all night through, the prickly heat from the day’s exposure outside subsided a bit,
leaving the sufferer to start from scratch, so to speak, each morning in accumulating a fresh crop of prickles in his prickly heat instead of having it build up as before without intermission, day or night. Every night I blessed the Westinghouse Company which had made my air-conditioner and wished them unending prosperity for what their machinery was doing for me in Massawa. Now to talk about heavenly comfort in a room with the thermometer at 90° F. and the humidity at 65 per cent (conditions which in any American city would be headlined in the papers as a heat wave, with the prostration victims listed daily) only goes to show that everything is relative. In Massawa, my airconditioned room was the nearest thing to heaven that existed. Of course, it goes without saying that there was a catch to all this bliss—the catch came when every morning between 5:00 and 6:00, I opened my door to step out and begin my day’s work. Some day, somewhere, somehow, there may arise another Shakespeare with words graphic enough to convey the shock resulting each morning when I emerged from my cool room to meet again that soul-shriveling blast that was Massawa in midsummer; I can’t do it. At least, in air-conditioned rooms, we could sleep at night now; that was something. Now the problem was to get my ex-Italian barracks building sealed up, air-conditioned, and our American workmen moved into it. How was that going? Captain Morrill came in to report to me on the subject; progress was not too fast. Overhauling the plumbing system and rewiring the building with electric circuits heavy enough to carry all the new air-conditioners, were the major difficulties. There were available in Massawa to hurry the job neither enough plumbers nor enough electricians; most of the Americans in those trades were still engaged at Ghinda in finishing up that magnificent housing project in the hills (against which I had futilely protested many times), which would be utterly worthless to us when finished, and which as an actual fact never was used by anybody in Massawa. I listened to Morrill’s report. With difficulty I avoided a hysterical outburst myself over the tragic waste of money, men, and material at Ghinda. “Well, Morrill, let’s hope they finish it soon, so it can be abandoned to the natives, the Eyties, or the goats up there, whoever wants it, and the workmen in Ghinda at least moved somewhere they’ll do some good. Anything else?” “Yes, Captain; there’s that man you hired this morning. Anywhere special you want him assigned?” “Oh, Zeiner, you mean? I’d forgotten about him. You got any suggestions?”
“Yes, if you’ve got no objections. I’ve talked with him while you were out. Looks like a very bright youngster to me, and maybe he can fix something that’s been giving me and Woods a headache. You know all those cases of small tools that came in last week? We’ve got nobody to inventory them or keep track of their issue, and Lieutenant Woods tells me the stuff in the few cases he’s already opened has disappeared like a snowball would in this place, with no trace of where it’s gone. There’s a swell black market around here for everything these Eyties steal. Now suppose we give that Zeiner to Lieutenant Woods, give him a few Eritreans to help, and let him crack open all those cases, inventory what’s in ’em, and after that make him responsible for issue and return of all those tools. That boy can talk both Arabian and Italian; none of these Arab or Eytie mechanics will put anything over on him. I’ll bet you, Captain, he’ll save us his whole year ’s wages in one day!” “O.K., Morrill; it sounds fine. You turn him over to Woods and let me know in a few days if it works out.”
CHAPTER
38 NEXT MORNING ON ARRIVAL AT MY office, I received a telephone call from Captain Lucas at the Royal Naval Base. He had something of a top secret nature he had to talk with me about; he couldn’t, of course, mention it over the phone. Would I be so kind as to drop over at once to see him? I would. As I went over to Lucas’ office, I wondered what on earth was up now. Were the British going to haul me over the coals for Bill Cunningham and his riot in Asmara? Then I decided it couldn’t be that; nothing connected with that riot could possibly be considered top secret. Perhaps it might be my harsh words to Brigadier Longrigg’s major in the Zeiner case if he didn’t meet my wishes. That seemed more likely. But after I got a look at Lucas’ face, I decided it was for none of my crimes. Lucas was serious enough but not in the manner I’d seen him each time he’d had to call my attention to some dereliction on the part of my obstreperous Americans (which had been often). So it turned out. Posting his orderly to keep everyone out of earshot of his office, Captain Lucas informed me of what was up. The Duke of Gloucester, Lieutenant General in the British Army, brother to the King, and his official representative, had manifested an interest in what was going on in Massawa. The next morning, by car from Asmara, he would arrive at ten o’clock to inspect the U.S. Naval Repair Base and the salvage operations. Naturally Captain Lucas was perturbed, and I didn’t blame him. Here was a member of the Royal Family, third in the succession, and likely suddenly to awake any morning as King of England himself should one of the many bombs aimed at Buckingham Palace strike it, thrust into our hands to inspect a naval station manned to a high degree by enemy aliens and P.O.W.s. If anything unfortunate happened to the Duke of Gloucester while in Massawa, the responsibility would be on our heads. It was absolutely imperative to keep the Duke’s coming visit top secret to the last minute—till too late for any plots to
be hatched. After the last minute, we should have to be prepared against any impromptu episodes. I nodded in agreement. Captain Lucas undertook to look out for the Duke everywhere on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula except when he was actually within my Base and afloat; during those periods, it would have to be my task. No one knew of the matter at the Royal Naval Base except himself and his executive officer; I could inform my own exec, Captain Morrill. But in neither case, till about sixty minutes before the Duke’s arrival would either of us inform even our major assistants. There was one other thing. Colonel Sundius-Smith, commanding officer for the British Army, was also in on the matter—he would furnish several battalions of Sudanese and Indians to be reviewed by the Duke on his arrival on the grounds of my Base, though none of his men were to be informed in advance as to the why of the parade. I thanked Captain Lucas for his information, promised to let him know that night of my preparations, and started to depart. Then one other matter occurred to me, and I paused. I had to take the Duke around on the water to show him our salvaged craft and our wrecks; all I had for the job was the Lord Grey, a terrible scow to ask the Duke to ride in. Would Captain Lucas be so kind as to lend me for the occasion his own boat, the ex-Italian admiral’s barge which the British had promptly seized on the surrender? For this occasion she would have to fly an American flag; would Captain Lucas mind? Lucas agreed cordially to lend the boat and not to object to the flag. So I went back to my own Base to call Morrill into our own top secret conference. Hurriedly we arranged matters. An hour before the Duke’s arrival, Morrill would inform Lieutenant Woods and our shop superintendents of who was coming. In every shop immediately thereafter, every overhead crane was to be run to one end of the shop, the crane hook trolleyed all the way over to one side, the Eytie operator removed from the overhead crane cab, and the power cut off the crane. I was taking no chances on anyone accidentally dropping anything from above on the Duke’s head as he passed through; I had seen such accidents happen before. Ten minutes before the Duke’s arrival, each foreman was explicitly to warn all his workmen that visitors were shortly expected; the warning was to be in all appropriate languages so no one could possibly misunderstand. The men were to be told then also that just before the arrival in that shop of the visitors, a whistle would be blown. After that whistle all hands were strictly to tend to
their machines; any man who made a move from his task before the visitors had departed from that shop was likely to be shot instantly and without discussion. Finally there was the question of who should stand by to do the shooting if necessary. As an American Naval Base, it would look well if only we had some American bluejackets in each shop as a guard, but our American Naval Base didn’t possess even one American yeoman, let alone a more seagoing bluejacket. Captain Lucas had plenty of British bluejackets, whom doubtless he would be very willing to lend us, but I would have died of mortification if the Duke of Gloucester should see that the United States had not even provided its Naval Base with at least a few of its own seamen. That was a tough one, but we solved it. In the commercial harbor were now a number of American freighters discharging. They were all armed; they must have Navy Armed Guard detachments aboard. Morrill was to go over to the commercial port, and in my name borrow at least twelve American bluejackets and two Armed Guard naval officers, all to come armed with Colt .45s by 9:00 A.M. next day. Then Morrill would instruct them in their jobs; they would be divided into two squads, each under an officer. One squad would guard the shop being visited; the other, the next shop to be entered. As soon as the visitors had left a shop, the guard there was to leapfrog to the second shop beyond, and so on alternately. It ought to work, and if the Duke were not too observant, he would think the United States really had a well-manned Naval Base in Massawa. There was one other trouble for me. The uniform for the occasion for all naval officers, set by Captain Lucas as Senior Officer Present, was to be whites —white shorts, of course, white shirts, white shoes and socks, and white sun helmets. I didn’t have any white sun helmet, but that I could get around by wearing my white gold-visored naval cap; damned uncomfortable in place of a helmet, but at least suitable in appearance. What stymied me was that I had no white shorts—nothing but the khaki that had served me on wrecks and everywhere else. And in Massawa I could neither buy any nor have any made. It looked as if I were going to be a disgrace to the United States. In that dilemma, Captain Morrill, who as an Army officer would wear khaki along with all others, came to my rescue—remarkably enough he had a pair of white shorts, though they were no part of any Army uniform. Someone somewhere had loaned him a pair for something, he couldn’t remember what, and he had forgotten to return them. I was welcome to them permanently. Later
that day I tried them on; they were quite large for my much-reduced Massawa figure, but by heavily reefing in, I could keep them up. I accepted them gladly, all set now to receive the Duke of Gloucester in borrowed shorts, borrowed sailors, a borrowed boat, and under what had once been a borrowed American flag. I may add that the Naval Base itself was also all borrowed from the Eyties, including most of my skilled workmen in it. Next morning, the show started off at nine as scheduled—there were three battalions of Sudanese, Bengalis, and Sikhs, all lined up on the parade ground in front of my electric shop, with our one large American flag, somewhat faded and dusty by now, proudly displayed above them. In front of them were all the naval officers, British and American (twelve British and one American) from both naval stations. Then there were Colonel Sundius-Smith, and various British and American Army officers, all except Morrill and Woods, who were having their hands full in the shops, instructing both the foremen and our borrowed sailors. It was damned hot out in the sun; to avoid being knocked out, I was wearing my khaki sun helmet over my whites, reserving my white naval cap till the last minute before the Duke showed up. Nine-thirty rolled around. The news of who was to be received was passed out to all officers. It caused quite a stir—among the British because of their natural respect for the Royal Family; among the Americans because Dukes were rara avis to them. Ten o’clock came but no Duke nor any sign of him or his cavalcade. Meanwhile, here and there men in ranks, though all allowed to stand at ease, were keeling over one by one—a startling thing considering they were all colonial troops, brought up in the tropics. Evidently neither India nor the Sudan was any proper training for the Massawa sun in July. I thanked God I’d had sense enough to be non reg for a while and wear my khaki sun helmet, otherwise I should myself long since have collapsed. At 10:20 A.M., a British dispatch rider raced in on a motorcycle to inform us the Duke would be along in a few minutes, would we be patient? The Duke was late, but it wasn’t his fault; he had started in plenty of time from Asmara. Unfortunately, he was being transported in a British Army Ford, brought from the Libyan Desert and fitted out for desert service. But that Ford never knew what deserts were till it struck the Massawa desert this side of the mountains. Then its radiator water had all boiled out, the engine had frozen up, and with all its pistons seized in the cylinders, the engine had curled up and died in the
middle of the desert. After vain attempts to unfreeze it by pouring in a fresh charge of water while the Duke cooked inside the car, the attempt had finally been abandoned, the Duke had been taken aboard Colonel Chickering’s Chevrolet, and the procession had started again, abandoning the Duke’s Ford. He should shortly arrive. He did. At 10:30 A.M., I hurriedly tossed aside my khaki sun helmet and donned my white cap, as amidst appropriate flourishes, the Duke himself descended from his borrowed American car, and my conscience ceased to trouble me about all my borrowed accessories. Apparently even Dukes could borrow under sufficient necessity. Everything went off beautifully. The colonials (that is, those still left on their feet) paraded in amazingly soldierly fashion, considering the long preliminary roasting they had received. However, all hands were even that way, for the Duke had baked in the desert while we had roasted on the parade ground, and he looked it, with his khaki shirt unbuttoned well down from his throat and thoroughly soaked from head to foot in perspiration. After the parade, I escorted the Duke through all the shops, where he gazed with great interest at the previously sabotaged machinery and at our all-nations workmen, busily attending their machines. Morrill had done a splendid job in the shops, backed up by Woods. In every shop was presented a scene of native and Eytie workmen so thoroughly engrossed at their tasks they hardly looked up at the Duke as he slowly passed through, asking how this or that damaged machine had been repaired, and being introduced to the American superintendents who had done it. Meanwhile, my borrowed bluejackets were leap-frogging magnificently; one would never have guessed there wasn’t a permanent American naval guard in every shop. After the shop inspection, we moved briefly over to the Royal Naval Base where at the Officers’ Mess, lunch was served for the Duke and the senior officers. That over, back at my Base, we shoved off in the boat borrowed from Captain Lucas, disguised at the stern with a small American boat ensign. Fortunately, there was a little breeze, and it was cooler out on the water. I’m sure the Duke appreciated it. By this time I had seen enough of the Duke to conclude he was a very unaffected human being, in no way trying to be regal, and honestly interested in what was going on. He manifested tremendous enthusiasm over our achievements on both the Liebenfels and the salvaged Italian dock, insisted on
boarding both, laughed over how the Persian dry dock had been finessed as a prize of war, and was as startled as I had been at first viewing the rows on rows of scuttled ships with which the Nazis and Eyties had festooned the harbor waters. About the middle of the afternoon, we came back to our Base and the Duke was ready to leave. But he had had enough of traversing the desert outside Massawa, so while we were inspecting the Base, a plane had hastily been flown down from Asmara to the little-used Massawa airfield to take him back to Asmara. The Duke didn’t say farewell; instead he invited me to fly back with him to Asmara to have dinner there with him as his guest, and later to attend an evening reception he was giving. I accepted with great pleasure. While the Duke was being transported to the airfield, I rushed to my room to get an overcoat lest I freeze in Asmara, then joined him at the airfield. The plane ride I thought was a great improvement; in twenty minutes we had covered the forty airline miles to Asmara, instead of putting in at least two and a half hours on that terrible seventy-mile combination of desert and mountain road. And the more I saw of the Duke of Gloucester, the more he seemed to me to resemble his brother, King George, whose coronation five years before I had attended. The conversation at dinner ran mostly to the story of Massawa. At the reception afterward, I saw little of him, for all British and American officialdom in Asmara was there. Late in the evening, I managed to squeeze through the crowd about him to thank the Duke for his interest and to say good-by. On his part, he thanked me for my help to Britain and promised that if ever he might put in a word to help us, he’d not forget Massawa. I was quite willing to believe that; never would he forget Massawa, if for no other account than what he had suffered there.
CHAPTER
39 T HE LAST FEW WEEKS OF JULY moved unexcitedly along while endlessly we labored and sweltered. We got the barracks building finished for the men and moved all the American workmen—the slight Naval Base force, the contractor ’s men, my salvage crews, and the South Africans—into it, where they also could get the blessings of air-conditioning. Our cases of hospitalization for prickly heat immediately dropped sharply. Out on the Persian dry dock, we were pushing ships through steadily, one every day and a half. My major troubles on that dock were now meeting religious requirements—I had to furnish a goat every five days to the Persians to meet their necessities and it seemed to me that every day was the Sabbath for some group on that dry dock—I never knew there were so many religions in the world. Lloyd Williams, assisted by Bill Reed and his divers, and by Cunningham and the South Africans, was repairing the salvaged Italian dry dock as fast as his skimpy stock of steel allowed. All of us were going around the Naval Base now with our eyes glued to the ground, looking for odd scraps of steel plate or bars we might somehow use. And I had one more American ironworker, Horace Armstrong, who, five months in transit by sea, had finally arrived as an additional salvage mechanic. He was, according to Williams, another tough guy, more pugnacious even than Cunningham, who was pugnacious only when he was drunk, while Armstrong tended toward pugnacity all the time. But he showed himself to be a good ironworker, and I could pardon much for that. He and Cunningham now worked as a team. Then there was the Liebenfels. Her hull was repaired, but her boilers, her engines, and her electrical outfit, submerged in the Red Sea more than a year, had all to be cleaned and her machinery dismantled, oiled, and reassembled before she could steam again. For this task, a terrific one, I took Hudson, the English engineer on the
Persian dock, and put him in charge of all machinery repairs on our salvaged wrecks, helped by such miscellaneous Italians as I could spare and a few Danish, Jewish, and Greek engineers as could occasionally be hired off some ship coming into Massawa. I never had any Americans at all on that task. Hudson proved to be a wonder—a hard worker himself, a fine engineer, and a good leader. Under him, considering the few men he had, we started to make excellent progress in getting the machinery of the Liebenfels ready for sea again. Finally aside from everything going on in the naval shops, there was the Intent working on the Frauenfels. I visited her every few days, made a few dives to inspect her damage, and left the rest to Brown. There was nothing novel on the Frauenfels—just the day by day torture of working on her under the July sun, undersea and on the surface. Brown and his men kept steadily at it. For well over two months, I had been bombarding Cairo to get me more workmen for repairing my salvaged wrecks—first, for the Italian dry dock, then for the Liebenfels also. America swiftly passed the problem to the British; the British said they couldn’t help. But now with the Naval Base at Alexandria shut down, it seemed to me there must be men from there available to be sent to Massawa, if only temporarily, and I had commenced a second barrage of requests along those lines. Seemingly I was getting nowhere with this either, and I began to get morose, particularly with everybody’s personal troubles, native or American, being landed in my lap for solution. For instance, Mrs. Maton complained to me about the Sudanese laborers in the carpenter shop. They were parking the goat for their Sabbath dinner right alongside the office building all through the week and then slaughtering and roasting him right there in the open. As she had to be in the office all day long, smelling that goat all week, not to mention witnessing his piteous demise and the ensuing rather savage feast, she felt that after three goats, she was fed up. Couldn’t I do something about it? A cursory investigation showed Mrs. Maton was in nowise exaggerating, so I declared a moratorium on all goats ashore within the limits of the U.S. Naval Repair Base. Then Doc Kimble, diver, came to me to complain that the circulation of air in the corner of the barracks where he now slept didn’t suit; would I do something about it? Of course, for a diver I’d do anything. I personally investigated that corner and had the fans changed.
Then Bill Reed, salvage master, had a complaint also. It appeared that he had only a station wagon to haul his men about, while one of the contractor ’s superintendents ran around in a sedan. Bill felt there was no justice in that situation. I agreed with Bill heartily on that; he was as much entitled to a sedan as that construction superintendent—more even, maybe, for he certainly worked harder—but where could I get the sedan? All I could do (and did) was to tell Bill he could use my sedan whenever I wasn’t (which was most of the time). Then Mohammed Ali, with God alone knows how many children and wives, needed a job to keep them all from starving. Mohammed, of course, came to see me about it. I hired Mohammed. Next Garza, my Somali chauffeur (who had long since superseded the Italian driver I had originally) felt decidedly aggrieved over his rate of pay and I must do something about that. Garza, as a Somali, was on the payroll as a native at twenty-five lira a day. Garza assured me that he had some European blood in him, and was consequently entitled to be paid as such—say, at fifty lira a day, the same as the Italians. I looked at Garza, but I was stumped; what he said might well be true, but who was I to pass on how much European blood, if any, Garza had in his veins, and what between twenty-five and fifty lira a day that entitled him to? For once, with great glee I passed a problem on to the ponderous board of bureaucrats sitting on wage matters in Asmara—let them struggle with that one. Then came Buck Scougale with fire in his eye and a fist full of figures to prove to me that the paymaster was trying to gyp him out of some of his money due for dives made, and would I please wring the paymaster ’s neck for him. Seeing all the trouble the pay office had once caused, I should once have been glad to oblige Buck, but now could I see his figures anyway? I was under the impression that under a new paymaster the pay office was doing better since the strike, which was before Buck’s time in Massawa. I audited Buck’s figures. Undoubtedly Buck was right; I knew he had made the dives he claimed; his pay envelopes failed to show any pay for them. I promised Buck I’d see the paymaster did right by him. Buck left, a little skeptical. Buck was naturally a pessimist; till he actually had his hands on his money, he’d remain dubious. He’d heard too many tales about that pay office. Then along came Ahmed Hussein, my own Sudanese houseboy, dragging an interpreter, through whom I heard a lugubrious tale of woe from Ahmed, also involving the paymaster. Ahmed claimed that for two weeks he had gone
unpaid; Allah would bear him witness that all that time he had been always on the job; there was no reason why he should not have been paid. Leaving Allah out of it, I knew that except for the hours spent shining my car (which to Ahmed was pleasure, not work), I could bear witness myself that he had always been sleeping across my doorstep, which was about all Ahmed ever did to earn his pay. Still, since he had faithfully been doing that, there was no reason why he should not have been paid as usual and I was perfectly willing myself to bear witness to that. Here was a case that could quickly be settled, so with the interpreter tagging behind, I escorted Ahmed into the pay office, to see what was the matter. We had a new paymaster since the strike, Ed Mahoney, a very energetic, a very capable, and a very co-operative person, who in my mind made only such errors as even the best of human beings make. I explained Ahmed’s case to Ed. He started to thumb his pay sheets—he had only about two hundred Ahmeds on his payroll; most of his other native laborers went by the name of Mohammed. Finally Mahoney’s finger came to Hussein; he looked at Ahmed puzzled. The pay sheets indicated that for the two weeks in question, Ahmed had drawn his pay. Through the interpreter Ahmed was taxed with this: why was he trying to draw his pay twice over? Ahmed stood mute. He had nothing to say in explanation, but Ed Mahoney who, like a good paymaster, had been scanning Ahmed closely, didn’t stand mute. “Captain,” he averred finally, “that black boy is also on my payroll under the name of Mohammed Bayumi. I recognize him.” He thumbed through the Mohammeds till he came to Bayumi, who had also been paid for those same two weeks. I looked at my houseboy in horror. Apparently Ahmed was not as dumb as he looked, or perhaps he was even dumber, trying to push a good thing entirely too far. Through the interpreter, Ahmed was taxed with this duplicity. Why had he been trying to cheat Uncle Sam? Ahmed still had nothing whatever to say, so he was fired on the spot for a payroll fraud, and promptly (with what pay was due him for the current week) escorted out the gate by a sentry. Never would Ahmed darken my doorstep again, over which I shed no tears. No longer would I be in danger of stumbling over his black torso when I came in late off some salvage job; and as for shining up my car, it could get along with Garza’s attention. I decided for the future to dispense with any houseboy.
Finally there came the worst problem of all. Lieutenant Winfield, who had come down from Asmara to help Morrill drill the civilian volunteers, had also been assigned Intelligence Officer and Provost Marshal at the Naval Base. He came to me one day with a red-hot situation. It appeared that the warehouse foreman, an American employee of the contractor, Barton (which wasn’t his name), was about to marry an Italian girl (a bleached blonde, as is usual in such cases) working as his warehouse typist. Winfield pointed out it couldn’t be done—she was an enemy alien, and all fraternization with enemy aliens, let alone marrying one, was strictly forbidden by Army regulations in wartime. To make the situation worse, the girl’s dossier, which Winfield had checked in the British files in Asmara, showed a very disturbing state of affairs. That girl, according to the Italian records, which the British now had, had come to Eritrea in 1935 as one of a batch of Italian prostitutes sent by Mussolini to serve with the Fascist army in the campaign against Haile Selassie. That service completed, she had settled down in Asmara as the mistress of an Italian civil official, an ardent Fascist, now in an Eritrean concentration camp. She herself was suspected of being a Fascist transmission belt, if not an active espionage agent. That was the girl Barton wanted to marry. “Tell the damned fool he can’t do it, it’s against the law,” I ordered Winfield. “He’s under military law here, civilian or not, and he can’t do it without my permission as Commanding Officer here. I’ll not give it.” That, I thought, ended it, but it didn’t. Barton swiftly came to see me to get my permission. “Don’t be an idiot,” I told him. “The rule’s sensible. I’ll not waive it. Besides, don’t you know that girl’s record?” “Lieutenant Winfield told me. I don’t believe it.” I looked at Barton. He was certainly well over thirty and old enough to have more sense; I had seen that Italian girl in the warehouse, and from her bleached hair down, she matched her dossier. But there was no use, apparently, arguing with Barton. “No permission will be given you to marry any enemy alien. That settles it. I don’t care whether you believe it or not. Now get back to work,” I ordered him. Barton left. But it didn’t settle it. A few days later Lieutenant Winfield advised me he had learned via the underground, that there was more to the case than he had suspected before. Barton was arranging secretly to marry the girl at 4:00 P.M.,
the coming Sunday, permission or no permission. The girl was pregnant. But to complicate matters, the friends of her Fascist paramour who was sequestered in a concentration camp, were threatening to knife Barton if he married the mistress of their temporarily out-of-circulation associate. On the other hand, the Italian friends of the girl were threatening to knife him if he didn’t marry the girl he had made pregnant. Barton was apparently in a dilemma. So also was I, who had to do something or Romeo Barton would surely be murdered either by the Montagues or the Capulets in this strange Italian vendetta over a prostitute, certainly no very attractive modern substitute for Juliet. Here was a situation in which even Beatrice Fairfax might have been stymied in giving advice to the lovelorn, and I certainly had no claims to being any “expert” in that field. The only proper thing for me to do as Commanding Officer was to see that the wartime regulations were enforced, and as that seemed to be the best way out for Barton also, who was the only party involved for whom I had any responsibility, I acted accordingly. “Winfield, your orders are to see that Saturday afternoon, Barton is suddenly called out of Massawa and that he doesn’t get back Sunday. How you manage it is quite up to you. And then see our Army headquarters in Asmara and see that the contractor transfers Barton to Egypt or Palestine or Arabia or wherever suits them. I won’t have him back in the Naval Base warehouse here again under any circ*mstances. He’s undesirable.” Winfield promised to attend to it. The week rolled along and I forgot all about it in the press of salvage and repair work. That Sunday afternoon for once I had free, and I was in my room writing a letter home, when outside Building 35 I heard what sounded like an antiquated automobile falling to pieces. Then followed the rush of feet up the stairs, a bang on my door, and the next I knew in burst four disheveled Italians I’d never seen before. Without any by your leave, they hurriedly scanned my room, which, bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, could be taken in at a glance. In broken English, one Eytie demanded, “Signor Barton, where ees he?” “He’s not here, and I don’t know where he is! Get the hell out of here, all of you!” But they needed no invitation to leave. Satisfied I wasn’t concealing Barton, already they were on their way out on the run, heading pell-mell down the outer stairs into their rattletrap machine in which they vanished in a cloud of
coral dust, headed for the old town of Massawa, before any Sudanese sentries could be alerted to stop them. They left me gasping an instant at their audacity, till I reflected that when you are out to murder someone, a little added misdemeanor like trespass is of slight moment. Whether they were the friends of the bride, ready to stiletto Barton if he didn’t show up at the wedding at 4:00 P.M., or whether they were the friends of her paramour, trying to locate him to stab him if he started for it, I never found out. There never was any wedding. And Barton shortly was working for the contractor far away from Eritrea. And so it went as July melted into August in Massawa—British, Americans, Somalis, Italians, Sudanese, Arabs—everybody came to lay their troubles in my lap. Sometimes I solved them, sometimes I soothed them, sometimes I couldn’t do anything but wish for a less patriarchal country where all hands didn’t look on the Commanding Officer as the father who had to concern himself with all their problems, their amours, and their personal frustrations. I had frustrations enough of my own, and no one at all closer than 13,000 miles away by sea on whose shoulder I could lay my head and shed tears.
CHAPTER
40 ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, I RECEIVED A surprise; for once, a pleasant one. It was in the form of radio orders from General Maxwell to proceed immediately to Cairo for a conference with him there and with the Royal Navy command in Alexandria over furnishing British labor for Massawa—something I had been trying hard to get. I was to expect to be gone for a week to ten days; I should arrange my Massawa affairs for such an absence. Hurriedly I got hold of Captain Morrill, Lieutenant Woods, and Commander Davy, liaison officer, and informed them all of it. Then I turned my command over temporarily to Captain Morrill, as senior American officer remaining, warned him against allowing any changes to be made in my absence, instructed him in detail as to keeping things going (fortunately over that period we were starting nothing new), and told him jokingly we would now have a chance to see how the Army could run a Navy. And would he please also start phoning Asmara to get me a seat in the plane next morning for Cairo? Then I left them, to pack my aviation bag for a ten days’ trip while Garza rushed my car over to the garage to fuel it up for the trip to Asmara. In an hour I was ready to leave. I stopped a moment on my way out at my office to see what luck Morrill had had with my plane reservation. He informed me he had managed to get Asmara, and while the Army transportation officer there could not immediately give him the seat, I could rest assured the Army would see I got one, even though the plane was going to be a British BOAC. And in addition, Morrill with a wry grin informed me that already the news of my departure was all over the Naval Base (though how it had got out he didn’t know; from Asmara probably). That didn’t matter much, but what he thought might interest me was the accompanying rumor that I wasn’t coming back, which he had already heard from several Americans who had dropped in at the office to say good-by to me. They had the straight dope, they said, right
from the horse’s mouth—the contractor had finally succeeded in having me kicked out of Massawa as a nuisance; the conference business in Cairo was just eyewash to camouflage the situation a bit. Could that be true, Morrill asked of me? I knew, didn’t I, that the Army Air Corps colonel at the Gura air base near Asmara, who had apparently become persona non grata to the contractor there, had suddenly departed from his command, never to return? “The air certainly gets hot around here, Morrill,” was my only comment. “You just see nobody puts anything over on you till I get back, and that’s all I ask. And you might advise those who seem too interested, not to start celebrating. So long; I’ll see you again in about ten days,” and sliding into the car alongside Garza, I motioned him to shove off for Asmara. It was a hot ride. Shortly we were out of Massawa and racing at seventy miles an hour across the thirty-mile stretch of flat desert that lay between Massawa and the mountains. Garza’s one shortcoming as a chauffeur was that he also, like the first Italian who had ever taken me over that course, had a speed mania. But on the desert stretch, I didn’t mind. It would allow my Somali to get some of the speed germs out of his mixed blood before we hit the mountain switchbacks. Then in addition we would that much sooner get over that terrible desert. To satisfy my curiosity as to exactly what we would have faced twice a day had we ever attempted to drag our Massawa workmen in lumbering buses back and forth to that housing project in Ghinda (and also what the Duke of Gloucester had been subjected to while stuck there), I had brought along with me my special thermometer. It had not seen the light since that day, nearly two months before in early June, when I had exposed it on the dry dock. Now I laid it down on the seat beside me, in the shade this time since it was inside the car, and left it a few minutes. When I picked it up, it read 160° F. Fairly warm, I thought, for the shaded inside of an automobile with the breeze streaming through all its open windows at seventy miles an hour. What it might have read had I told Garza to stop while I exposed the thermometer to the still air in the sun outside, I had no idea. Nor had I any desire to tell Garza to stop long enough to find out. It didn’t take us long at the rate we were going for our Chevrolet to get across that desert. Once we hit the mountains, I slowed Garza down considerably, aided slightly in my endeavors by the mountain grades we were climbing. Thirty miles an hour suited me there, with reductions to twenty around every switchback. I had considerable difficulty in holding my speed-
mad Somali, with all that horsepower at his feet, down to what I wanted. But I succeeded, principally, I think, because Garza knew his only chance of ever getting any part of that increase to fifty lira a day he had his heart set on, rested with my continued existence. Before long, we had climbed to over 3000 feet, it had cooled off considerably, and we were in the mountains passing Ghinda and its vast array of now completed and deserted buildings. I could hardly restrain bitter tears as I passed it—supposedly built to help us at Massawa! Permanent brick residence buildings, elaborate recreation hall, huge mess hall—everything to house around a thousand men—completed now and useless except perhaps as quarters for occasional passers-by, stray Eyties, and casual Eritrean goats. I had been forced to slave in Massawa in the heat with little help, begging occasionally for the loan of a single mechanic. I supposed I had made a nuisance of myself everywhere objecting to Ghinda’s continued construction, once I had seen Eritrea. But when I thought of what I might have been able to do on urgent war work with all the wasted American labor and materials on which my eyes now rested, I became almost hysterical. My nerves weren’t as cool and calm any more as they had been when first I came to Massawa. For once, I urged Garza to go faster as we passed through Ghinda; I couldn’t stand the sight of it. It took us over two hours to cover the remaining forty miles, more or less, to Asmara, and by that time, I had cooled down considerably, both mentally and physically. By the time of our arrival on the high plateau 7500 feet up, I was completely dressed for the first time in months—jacket, shirt, undershirt, long trousers, and my naval cap instead of a sun helmet—and had laid aside the sun glasses which had practically become a permanent part of my face. I went to the Army Officers’ Mess in Asmara for the night to learn there that BOAC had reserved a seat for me next day in the plane. On General Maxwell’s orders, I had the top priority for the plane; there had been no argument. We were to take off at 9:00 A.M. Asmara, I noted, was rather cold. All the Army men were wearing woolen O.D.s. As I had with me only the khaki I needed in Cairo and the white naval uniform (with my borrowed shorts) which I felt I must use in Alex where all the Royal Naval officers would be in white, I elected to stay indoors all evening rather than to freeze to death. Next morning, Garza drove me to the Asmara airfield and then returned alone to Massawa, to him a heaven-sent opportunity to go as fast as he liked. I
could only hope for the best with regard to the car as I stepped into the little BOAC plane and waved him a farewell. In a few minutes, we took off on our way to Cairo via Khartoum; our first hop in the little plane would be only the few hours’ ride to Khartoum on the Nile, where after laying overnight, I would board a much larger plane for the long flight to Cairo itself. I seized the opportunity while in the air to write a letter home; before it was finished we were circling for a landing over the Khartoum airfield which I knew so well. I looked curiously down on that hard-baked Khartoum field shimmering in the sun, where twice before in March I had nearly expired with the heat. How would it feel to me, now that it was midsummer and August instead of early spring and March? I got a pleasant surprise—that Khartoum airfield, when I stepped out of the plane, felt only moderately warm. A car was waiting for me to take me into Khartoum itself where perhaps because of the added dignity of my rank as Captain, I was to spend the night in a hotel, the Grand Hotel, of course, instead of that ex-girls’ college dormitory of unblessed memory near the airfield. The Grand Hotel in Khartoum, I found, was really grand; it had hot and cold running water and the usual plumbing of any ordinary good hotel. As I gazed on the white porcelain equipment of my bathroom, my mind went back to my last stay in Khartoum. Why, when I had “gyppy tummy” and badly needed that bathroom, had I been quartered in that cursed dormitory with its little welldetached brick cubicles, instead of in this grand hotel where I was when I had little need of it? After lunch, I wandered out into Khartoum to do a little shopping, as Massawa offered no such opportunity. To my astonishment, I found every shop in the city closed until after 4:30 P.M., because of the heat. What heat, I wondered? I gave Khartoum up in disgust, and went back to the Grand Hotel to spend the rest of the day and all the evening catching up on my home correspondence. In the morning, I took off for Cairo on the thousand-mile flight north over the desert bordering the Nile. Having seen already too much of that desert, I ignored it to continue writing home, trying to make up for all the nights in Massawa when I had come in so dead and so hot, I couldn’t do anything but collapse on my bed. Circ*mspect as I was about mentioning anything, even that
I was in Egypt again instead of in Eritrea, I couldn’t help wondering how those letters would look when they finally arrived home after the censor ’s razor blades got through cutting them up. We landed at Heliopolis military airport and I learned with interest that instead of going into town to a Cairo hotel, I was to be billeted with some Army officers in an Egyptian mansion just on the edge of that military airfield, a very convenient arrangement for me, I thought. The “flap” was over, so far as the Army was concerned. All military personnel evacuated early in July had been returned to Cairo for duty. As it was practically evening and too late for any conferences that day, I didn’t go out, instead spending the evening swapping my Massawa experiences for those of half a dozen Army files who had been out in the desert as observers with the Eighth Army in its Libyan vicissitudes. But the round table didn’t last very long. Hardly had nine o’clock struck when all my Army companions got up and prepared to go to bed. “What’s the matter with you fellows?” I asked. “The evening’s young, and I’m willing to hear lots more yet on how Rommel chased you all a thousand miles or so way across Libya.” “No,” one major answered me, “we better turn in now if we want any sleep. There’ll be an air raid tonight about 1.00 A.M. We won’t get any sleep after that. We’re the target out here, alongside the airfield.” “So?” I inquired skeptically. “How do you know what Rommel’s planning tonight? Been decoding his battle orders?” “No, Captain, but it’s easy to figure. There was a Nazi snooper plane over at 40,000 feet this noon, taking pictures. That always means bombs that same night; as for the 1:00 A.M., that’s the optimum time for attack, considering all Rommel’s conditions. You’ll see. By the way, I’d better lend you a spare tin hat; I see you didn’t bring any.” I had to confess that the omission was due to the fact that in Massawa I didn’t even own one; we had next to nothing out there in the sticks. So I was provided with a tin hat and trooped up to the second floor to bed with my companions. Sure enough, at about 12:40 A.M., air raid sirens began to wail all over Cairo. I dressed hurriedly, seized my newly acquired tin hat, and started for the roof to get a good view of what happened, but I was restrained. “You can’t go up there,” the major who had fitted me out with my headgear sternly ordered. “It’s too dangerous! Didn’t I tell you before we’re the target here? This building might just as well be in the center of the airfield, so far as
the bombers are concerned. We’re right behind the main hangars, and they’re such poor shots they’re as likely to hit us as the hangars. Hell, we’ll shovel a couple of buckets full of shrapnel and bomb fragments off that roof when the raid’s over. We always do. You’d better go down in the basem*nt.” “Well, what’s the tin hat for, then?” I queried. “If I go down in that basem*nt you’ve got rigged as an air raid shelter, I won’t need it for shrapnel. And if a bomb gets a direct hit on this house, the whole place will collapse right on me, and a hell of a lot of good a tin hat’ll do me then!” “It’s if you want to go out on the portico,” explained the major patiently. “There’s a fair roof over that which’ll catch most of the shrapnel, and the tin hat may take care of anything heavy that manages to get through the roof. But you’ll be safer in the basem*nt, Captain,” he cautioned, “except, of course, if we get a direct hit, when it won’t make any difference where you are.” I thought to myself that if safety had been my major consideration, I should certainly never have gone in for diving, let alone volunteering for a war when I was over fifty. “Does the portico face the airfield?” I asked. “Yes, partly.” “Well, Major, I’ll settle for the portico then. I’m not looking for maximum safety; a reasonable amount’ll do me. This is my first air raid and I’m not going to miss it. You coming along?” “Sure thing!” exclaimed the major. “I always watch ’em from there. Let’s go!” So, escorted by the major, I went downstairs instead of up as I had first intended, and out on the portico. The roof, which seemed quite substantial, interfered with the view directly overhead; still a fair view out and up over the airfield, as well as over a considerable part of Cairo, was possible. By now, the air raid sirens had quit screaming and a dead silence reigned over very thoroughly blacked-out Cairo. But why it should have been blacked out, I couldn’t see. The Nile, gleaming against the desert, running north and south through Cairo, gave any bomber an excellent marker for compass direction, and the Pyramids to the west of the Nile, clearly visible even at night, gave an excellent point of departure from which to lay out a bombing run. Heliopolis airport was the only target in (to the Nazis) otherwise friendly Cairo. Any navigator, with all that to guide him, who couldn’t get over it, blackout or no blackout, should have been sent back to kindergarten. Then there were the searchlights. A vast ring of searchlights was fingering
the night sky over Cairo, each an immense bluish pencil of light sweeping its own arc of the heavens. Again the blackout puzzled me; if the Nile and the Pyramids didn’t show where Cairo was, how could anybody fail to locate it with all those searchlights encircling it? But whether useful in defense or not, Cairo was still thoroughly blacked out. Maybe it had a psychological value somewhere, either on the attacking bombers or on the Gyppos. “Here they come,” whispered the major. In all that silence and darkness out on the portico whispering was certainly natural, though it never struck me till later how grotesque it was really. I strained my ears, heard the distant roar of high-flying engines. A moment later, three searchlights suddenly swung together toward the west in a vast pyramid, apexing far up in the dark sky and something glimmered in that apex. “They’ve got one! They’ve got one!” shrieked the major, forgetting all about whispering now, which was probably just as well, for in another instant hell broke loose right under our noses. I hadn’t realized an anti-aircraft battery was that close to us. All the guns in that heavy battery let go simultaneously with a roar, and the battle was on. Other groups of searchlights swung over eagerly, joining in the search; other batteries of guns, not so near to us, commenced firing. Long streaks of heavy tracer fire streamed skyward at targets, seen and unseen, some batteries probably firing on radar bearings at planes the searchlights hadn’t picked up. On came the bombers; the throb of engines could be heard more plainly now in spite of the concussions of the rapidly firing guns. Next, a new note entered; it sounded as if it were hailing. That, I supposed, was the shrapnel from shells exploding far above us, coming down on the roof. Then a shrill whistling, rising to a shriek, suddenly overrode every other sound. “Here come the bombs!” I thought. I couldn’t help wondering how good the aim of the Nazi bombardiers, sighting downward at the hangars amidst that inferno of shells bursting about them, would be. It wasn’t so good. In terrific eruptions, the bombs hit and exploded, a dozen of them perhaps, one near a hangar, the rest mainly over the open airfield which was vast in extent. A few may have missed the field altogether, but except for that one near the hangar, none struck very close to us. The guns and searchlights kept on tracking and firing as the noise of engines faded away; then suddenly all the lights were switched off, the guns quit blazing, and unbelievable silence ensued. Apparently the raid was over.
Perhaps night fighter planes, certainly up by now, might track and knock down some of the Nazis on their way home, but we were unlikely to see anything of that. So far as I could judge, for both sides it was a scoreless tie—unless that bomb exploding near the hangar had done some damage. Certainly the guns had knocked down no planes, though they might have damaged some; we would never know. And as for Heliopolis airport, we could see that no hangars had been squarely hit and probably no parked planes either, as no fires had resulted anywhere after those volcanic blasts. Most likely only a dozen craters had been dug in the open field; a few bulldozers would hastily fill and level them off in the morning and all would be serene again. “That’s all tonight,” announced the major. “We might as well turn in again. Only one wave; not much of a raid.” That may have been so. But as regards the half dozen R.A.F. men, six poor devils whom next morning we learned had all been killed by that bomb exploding near the hangar across from us, I imagine the raid was heavy enough. I saw General Maxwell the following morning, to learn my visit had a double purpose—one was the labor matter he had mentioned, the other was to give me an involuntary vacation from Massawa for at least ten days in the relatively cool Nile Delta. Even though all my conferences might be concluded sooner, I was not to leave until about August 11 or 12. Aside from business, I could spend my time looking over the Suez Canal, the naval base at Alex, the preparations of Generals Alexander and Montgomery (who had taken over from Auchinleck and Ritchie) to smack Rommel, or stay in Cairo, just as suited me best. General Maxwell was intensely interested in getting maximum results from the Massawa Naval Base, especially now that the worst had happened and Alex was practically shut down, unable to function effectively under continuous bombing. He regretted he had not succeeded in getting me any help, naval or otherwise, from the United States, but the situation with respect to the British, on whom he had also been working, looked better. Admiral Harwood, the British Commander-in-Chief, had manifested a lively interest. The major purpose of my visit was to go to Admiral Harwood personally, since I knew best what Massawa needed and what it could do, and negotiate directly with him. General Maxwell himself would not go to Alex; he would leave the matter wholly in my hands.
I thanked the general for all he had already done for Massawa, and incidentally for his glowing recommendation which had got me promoted so promptly to captain. But did he know I was facing considerable underground opposition to my program of Naval Base operations—more specifically that I was shortly going to be booted out of Massawa because I was spending Government money illegally? There wasn’t one of my salvage or repair gang afloat that hadn’t had that whispered in his ear—that I was taking American funds which otherwise could be used ashore to increase the wages and the overtime pay of all the American civilians in Eritrea, contractor ’s construction force and everybody, and using them to pay Eritreans, Eyties, all the flotsam and jetsam of the Middle East I could lay my hands on, to repair British ships. Who was responsible for setting that rumor afloat, I couldn’t state positively, but with my men, as well as the contractor ’s men whom I had to deal with, believing that any minute I was going to be removed, my authority was definitely being undermined. I had troubles enough in Massawa without that one. Apparently my order to Cairo had brought that rumor to a head; those interested in tying my hands afloat were bragging I wasn’t coming back. Where did I stand? “Rot!” stated General Maxwell incisively. “You’re doing exactly what I want you to do! What’s the Naval Base for except to keep British ships going? What other ships are there around here to fight this war? You’ll be relieved only for failing to carry out my orders, not for obeying them. Don’t concern yourself any more over that. Now make your own appointments in Alex to try to get some British workmen.” “Aye, aye, sir!” I acknowledged, somewhat relieved at hearing it stated so definitely, though I had never had any fears about being backed up by the general. I left to go to Admiralty House in Cairo to arrange the meeting in Alex with Admiral Harwood. There, after some telephoning to Alex, the meeting was set for the third morning following. It appeared that Admiral Harwood’s staff, especially some of the dockyard civilian superintendents, were considerably scattered now from Suez to Alex; it would take that long to get all those together in Alex he wanted there for the conferences. So aside from that day, I had two free days myself in between. I decided to spend them looking over the salvage situation along the Suez Canal, which I had heard over the Axis radio the Nazis had blocked with mines. Colonel Chickering, Chief of Staff for the North African Mission, fitted me
out with an Army car, an enlisted man for a driver, and orders wide enough in their terms to take me anywhere in the Delta and the Canal zone, where of course there were innumerable military road blocks and all ordinary traffic was barred. Early next morning, bidding my Army hosts alongside the airfield farewell for a few days, with the further hope that on my return that house would still be there to accommodate me, I started by car for Suez. It wasn’t a long ride, eighty to ninety miles perhaps over fairly flat country, but between showing our papers at every road block and passing interminable convoys of loaded military trucks headed towards Cairo from Suez, we didn’t get along very rapidly. Meanwhile, as we drove, the whole desert on both sides of the road seemed covered with British tank squadrons, motorized infantry, and infantry on foot, all maneuvering endlessly in battle exercises on terrain similar to that over which they would fight. Apparently Montgomery was holding secret practice on a huge scale behind the lines, preparing a few trick plays of his own to spring on Rommel. We reached Suez in the early afternoon. Suez as a city, whether a sink of iniquity or not, didn’t interest me at all. I had eyes only for its harbor—the terminus of the long sea route around Africa into which America was pouring weapons and supplies to crush Rommel. My eyes opened wide—Suez harbor and the water front, including a considerable part of the wide canal stretching north, was jammed with ships unloading tanks, guns, ammunition, trucks, packing cases—all in tremendous quantities. I didn’t stop in Suez. Instead I ordered the driver to head north along the west side of the Canal for Ismailia, and Port Said where we would spend the night. Mile after mile we passed huge piles of war supplies stacked along the bank— the whole area was one vast open warehouse packed with fighting equipment and supplies for Montgomery at El Alamein. At Ismailia, halfway up the Isthmus above the Bitter Lakes, the Canal really started, with steep straight banks cut through sand and rock. From then on, I kept a sharp eye out for all the wrecks, sunk by mines dropped from heavy Nazi bombers in the Canal, which over the Axis broadcasts from Berlin and Rome, I had heard were blocking the Canal completely. We got to Port Said; I hadn’t seen a single wreck. The Canal was as open to traffic as in the quietest days of peace, though for other reasons, partly to save heavy Canal tolls, all ships were being unloaded at Suez, and only warships were transiting the
Canal. The British, though the Nazis didn’t know of it, had developed a remarkable detection system to spot all mines dropped into the Canal. No sooner was a mine dropped into the Canal waters than the British had the exact spot where it had splashed downward marked, traffic stopped temporarily, and minesweeping crews and divers working on that exact spot to explode or remove the mine. In a few hours, all mines would be cleared, and ships moving again. The Nazis had dropped plenty of mines, all right, but with no results; there were no wrecks in the Canal. And the British were saying nothing to contradict the Axis claims; if the Nazis wanted to keep on wasting bombers on planting harmless mines in the Canal instead of using the bombers elsewhere where they might do real damage, it was all right with the British. Smart people, I thought. It was evening when I got to Port Said. In Port Said I was taken to the largest hotel there for the night as the guest of Captain G. C. C. Damant, C.B.E., Royal Navy, Principal Salvage Officer for the Mediterranean Forces. Captain Damant, now over seventy-five and long since retired, was of course too old to direct salvage operations afloat personally. A much younger man, Commander Rithon of the British Navy, was doing that at Port Said, with Commander Wheeler, an associate, directing operations at Alex. Captain Damant, whom I looked on as the grand old man of diving, since thirty-five years before he had personally done the experimental diving work on which the science of deep diving rested, simply advised from shore on knotty problems when they came up. Next morning, I accompanied Captain Damant, who really was in remarkable physical shape considering his age, along the Port Said water front to where Commander Rithon, the officer actually in charge of salvage there, was going to stage an experiment on underwater electric welding for my benefit. As my eyes swept the harbor, dotted here and there with the destroyers, cruisers, and submarines which could no longer safely be based on Alexandria, they fell to my astonishment on a British battleship, a huge superdreadnought swinging placidly at anchor not a quarter of a mile off the quay, standing out like a goose amidst a brood of goslings! “Captain!” I exclaimed. “What battleship is that? I understood you didn’t have a single battleship left in the Mediterranean, and there’s one of the old Iron Dukes that fought at Jutland along with the Barham and the Valiant that used to be around here! What’s her name?”
Captain Damant didn’t even bother to turn his head to look at her as he replied, “She’s not a battleship; she’s just a dummy. She’s the old Centurion.” A dummy? I looked again. That battleship was close to me and broadside on, easy to scan. If ever I was looking at 13.5-inch naval guns, heavily armored turrets, a powerful battleship stripped for action, I was seeing one then close aboard me under conditions where she couldn’t be another mirage—it wasn’t hot enough in Port Said for that. Besides, the Centurion was a battleship; her tremendous 13.5-inch guns had done heavy execution on Admiral von Scheer ’s German fleet at Jutland in 1916. “Quit trying to fool me, Captain,” I protested. “Why try to kid your Allies you haven’t got a battleship? I know a battleship when I see one!” “That’s what our Eytie friends think, too,” answered Captain Damant. “We’re pulling their leg just the way we’re pulling yours. Good job, isn’t she? All those heavy guns you’re looking at are made of wood! So’s all the armor on what you think are turrets! The Centurion had all her real guns and gun turrets taken off years ago to change her into a target ship, though her machinery is still all there. So when the war came along and Admiral Harwood found himself on this station with every battleship knocked out, the Admiralty in a hurry fitted out the old Centurion with wooden guns and armor, mounted a good set of real A.A. guns on her topsides, and sent her down here. She does fine. Fooled you, didn’t she? Well, she’s fooling the whole Italian battle fleet, too, that’s afraid to come out and meet what they think is one old British dreadnought. Any little Eytie gunboat that had the nerve to get close enough, could sink her easily, but she’s keeping off at least four modern Eytie superdreadnoughts! She steams out occasionally, escorted by a few destroyers, to show the flag in the eastern Mediterranean and keep the big Eyties holed up in home ports. She gets strafed plenty on her cruises by everything the Nazis and the Eyties have got in the way of bombers, but she has a grand set of A.A. guns, including four “Chicago pianos,” and she keeps ’em off. She hasn’t been hit yet. Blessed lot of bombs she’s cost the Axis! Quite a show the old girl’s putting on, don’t you think, Captain Ellsberg?” I had to agree. So the battleship I saw before me was nothing but another Middle East mirage! Very bright of my British friends, I thought. I took a last look at the Centurion, not to meet her again till two years later on the Omaha Beach in Normandy right after D-day, where once more our paths were to cross and I was to tread her decks myself, both of us then engaged in
outsmarting Rommel and his Nazis, far away from Africa. Half a mile further along the quay, we came to the spot where Commander Rithon, actual British Chief Salvage Officer for the Port Said area, had a diver waiting for us with his underwater welding experiment. The experiment was of no great importance and interested me very little, but Rithon interested me a lot. Rithon, who seemed a very decent chap, blushed in considerable embarrassment when Captain Damant introduced him to me. For Rithon knew (and knew I knew it also) that his associate in Alex, Commander Wheeler, had made a considerable bet with another British engineer (the latter the source of my information) that I wouldn’t raise the sunken Italian dry dock in Massawa— it was impossible. And then to Wheeler ’s great confusion, the dock had come up in only nine days! Wheeler, of course, had paid up, as the other party to the bet who had come to Massawa to see for himself had gleefully assured me, adding that the Italian dry dock was a sore subject in British salvage circles, best not to be mentioned to any British salvage officer. I didn’t mention the dock; neither did Rithon. Our discussion centered wholly on the salvage troubles Rithon was having around Port Said, generally with waterlogged ships ready to sink at one end or the other from actual or near miss bomb damage. The poor devil was being run ragged keeping his derelicts from sinking altogether before he could get them beached. He had my sincere sympathy. The three of us went back to the hotel for lunch, with Captain Damant as host. It was a beautiful day, pleasantly cool, with the usual cloudless sky and azure blue of the Mediterranean spread out before us. About half through lunch, with no warning at all, a battery of very heavy A.A. shore guns opened up near by. I jumped from my seat, but nobody else even quit eating. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Isn’t this another air raid on Port Said?” “No, nothing to bother about this time of day,” replied Commander Rithon. “There’ll be no bombs. It’s just another high-flying Nazi snooper with a camera, with the sky guns keeping him a respectable distance up. They can’t reach him; he’s got no bombs, so nobody worries on either side. The bombs’ll come tonight, after he’s got home and they’ve developed his pictures to show them what ships are in the harbor. Better sit down, Captain; your lunch will get cold.” However, I was much more interested in Nazi air tactics than in lunch, so I got out from under the veranda to where in the garden I could get a good look
upwards. Sure enough, so far up in the heavens that the plane itself was completely invisible, was the snooper, his presence marked only by a lengthening trail of white in the stratosphere streaming from his plane—the vapors from his engine exhaust congealing instantly into a frosty plume in the cold and rarefied air up where that very specially designed high-flying camera plane was. The ack-ack was tracking him, futilely it knew as well as he. For the guns could reach only 30,000 feet up, where in lazy puffs opening like flowers well below him and his trailing cloud, the heavy shells were exploding. But at least they were keeping him from 35,000 to 40,000 feet up, from which altitude his pictures would be none too good. The trail of vapor made a complete circle over Port Said and then headed back westward, presumably to a field in Rommel’s rear beyond El Alamein. The guns ceased firing. No one but me had bothered in the slightest. I sat down again, asked, “What can you do about that?” “Nothing at all, around here,” replied Damant. “Even if we had a specially fitted out fighter that could get that high, before he ever got altitude enough to fire a gun, that snooper would be halfway back toward El Alamein. But we’re discouraging ’em. The news of this has already gone to Alex, which is a hundred and twenty-five miles west of here, right on the path of that plane homeward bound. There’ll be a special fighter up from Alex when he gets there, high enough to give him a fight. They’ve already knocked down about half of Rommel’s Port Said snoopers on their way back over Alex; I imagine what’s left of ’em will get discouraged soon and let us alone.” Lunch over, Captain Damant went back to his office, while I spent the afternoon with Commander Rithon, looking over several of his beached wrecks, his salvage crews, and his salvage gear. I was astonished to note that though his operation was all Royal Navy, the equipment he had couldn’t start to compare with all the salvage gear the Admiralty had so plentifully placed at the disposal of the incompetent McCance and his commercial basis operations in Massawa. In particular, Rithon bewailed how his shortage of underwater cutting torches, for burning away protruding steel on the hulls of his wrecks, had set him back. He had possessed several British make underwater torches, but they were cumbersome and slow for a diver to work with; he had needed far more to cover his work properly. “Then I had a bit of luck with this underwater burning, Captain,” he confided
to me. “I’ve got one torch now that’s tops; it does more work under water itself than all the torches together the Royal Navy’s given me. And where do you think I got it? Out of the junk heap! Along with some other gear shipped here from home, there was a box full of junk of all kinds; stuff perhaps they had an idea in England I might find useful in repairing something else. I was pawing that box of junk over—bolts, nuts, copper piping, old brass valves—when I came across an old underwater torch I’d never seen before. Worn out, all green with verdigris it was, evidently discarded as junk itself. My men and I took it apart, cleaned it up, repaired it a bit, put it together again, and took it down on a wreck to try it out. Mighty handy torch it proved; beat everything we had all hollow! Let me show it to you.” Commander Rithon drew forth from a tool kit an underwater torch, considerably battered from long years of hard use before he salvaged it from the junk pile, and proudly handed it to me. I took one look and laughed. If the Centurion was a British joke on me, that torch was my joke on them. It was my underwater torch—one of the original torches I had invented over fifteen years before for my first salvage job on the submarine S-51! How it ever got to England and then to Port Said, I couldn’t imagine. But it was an Ellsberg torch, all right; the most battered one I’d ever seen, still doing its bit under water in Port Said to help win the war. “Well, that’s certainly interesting! Thanks for the unexpected compliment!” I told Rithon as I explained to him what that unknown torch was. “Now if you’re still in trouble over torches, I can help you out. In a shipment I got from New York just lately, there’s a whole case of these torches, half a dozen new ones, the very latest model. I can spare you one; I’ll send it to you as soon as I get back to Massawa; the new ones are much handier even than this old model.” But with typical British conservatism, Rithon refused the gift. The one he had suited him fine; it wasn’t by any means worn out yet and he didn’t want anything better. Only in case some diver lost his most prized possession in the deep sea would he take me up on my offer to give him another and a newer one for nothing. So Commander Rithon and I parted very good friends (in spite of his associate’s bet on the dry dock which still remained unmentioned) and I started back for Cairo. From Port Said, while roundabout the whole Delta, going via Cairo was still the quickest way by road to get to Alex.
CHAPTER
41 T HE NEXT MORNING I WAS SEATED at a long conference table in the Alexandria dockyard, facing an array of Royal Navy officers and British civilian dockyard superintendents. I had already met Admiral Harwood—the biggest admiral I had ever set eyes on. I was willing to bet that when he walked out to the end of the flying bridge, his flagship heeled appreciably to that side. After a brief discussion with him and an invitation to come back and spend the night with him as his guest when I had finished, I was turned over to the Royal Navy captain serving as Superintendent of His Majesty’s Alexandria Dockyard. The latter had already received his instructions from the admiral. The conference opened. Admiral Harwood had instructed the dockyard superintendent to go all out in providing me what I needed at Massawa. The first need was the seven naval officers as assistants, whom America had stated to General Maxwell wouldn’t be furnished me from home. That was agreed on without argument—the need was obvious. The only question, a tough one, was which seven British naval officers should be ordered to go. Massawa was a highly undesired station. Finally they were selected—two Royal Navy commanders, two lieutenant commanders, three lieutenants. If the Admiralty in London approved, they would be ordered to Massawa. Next came the problem of mechanics. I wanted two hundred shipyard men in assorted trades; I had a list of what I wanted. There wasn’t any argument over that need, or over their distribution by trades, nor even over their availability now that the dockyard at Alex was functioning to a limited degree only. But didn’t I understand that British dockyard workmen were like Americans; they were free and equal citizens of a democracy and couldn’t permanently be shipped about from one city to another without their consent? Now the discussion waxed really hot, with the civilian dockyard supervisors
doing most of the discussing. Their men were scattered everywhere over the Middle East by the “flap”—Suez, Port Said, Beirut, Haifa—even getting in touch with them to canvass their willingness to go was no simple matter. Then Massawa had a terrible reputation. They doubted they could get any volunteers at all. Perhaps if a sufficiently high bonus were offered, they might get some. What bonus would be offered? I offered to pay a very handsome bonus; one I thought would prove attractive; I would see that the men sent earned it. Then there was a fierce argument over that. Not that the bonus I suggested wasn’t large enough, but that it was too large—it would cause repercussions on the wage scales at the Alexandria dockyard itself when the men finally came back to work again there. The conference became very heated. Finally the bonus was cut down radically to what wouldn’t hurt Alex in the long run. I didn’t feel it was enough to help Massawa much right then, especially as the wages all American workmen were getting in Massawa made the offer to the British mechanics, bonus included, look very sick. But I got nowhere on that; Alex and its future came first. The Captain of the Dockyard ordered his civilian assistants to start canvassing their scattered workmen for volunteers to go to Massawa on the terms finally set; obviously it would take some time. The conference broke up. The civilians and most of the officers left. The Captain of the Dockyard and another officer, the fleet naval constructor, Commander Mann, R.N., began a private discussion over a damaged light cruiser they had on their hands. I couldn’t help overhearing them since apparently neither of the two regarded the matter as confidential so far as I was concerned, and immediately I pricked up my ears. It appeared that the light cruiser, H.M.S. Dido, was in serious trouble. Her stern, beneath her steering engine room, was flooded, apparently as the combined result of concussion from near-miss Axis bombs while she was bombarding Rhodes, and too light a hull structure aft. (This last was a result of lightening up her whole structure during the idiocy resulting from the Geneva naval agreements on limiting warship sizes, where the British, as we did also, had lightened up warship hulls so much trying to keep weights inside arbitrarily assigned class limits, as to get themselves in serious trouble now there was a war on and ships had to fight.) The Dido had to be dry-docked for a considerable underwater repair job to her stern before she could fight again. Since they dared not dry-dock her in constantly bombed Alexandria, they were discussing the final arrangements for
sending her 5000 miles to Durban in South Africa to dock her there and carry out the repairs. She would be gone from the fighting line in the Mediterranean well over a month, perhaps nearly two months. That was all too much for me, and I broke in on the discussion. “Captain,” I asked, “why send the Dido to Durban if she’s only a light cruiser? She has to pass right by my front door in Massawa on her way through the Red Sea to Durban. Send me a few workmen right now, send her to me, and I’ll dock her in Massawa, repair her, and have her back here again throwing shells at the enemy in less than a quarter of the time she can possibly get to Durban and back for that job!” Commander Mann, the fleet naval constructor, explained to me why not. The “light” cruiser Dido was not so light; she actually displaced over 7500 tons in her fighting trim, somewhat more now that she was flooded aft. I couldn’t possibly dry-dock her in my Persian dry dock, the only one I yet had operating, which could lift only 6000 tons at best. Besides that, the Dido was far too long for my floating dry dock. She was 530 feet long from stem to stern, my Persian dry dock was only 410 feet long. Even if my dock could lift the weight, docking a ship with such a terrific length of her hull overhanging the dock with no support, would break her back. It was too bad, Mann added. They had considered sending her to Massawa at first, but once they had checked the size of my Persian dock against the Dido’s dimensions and weight, of course they had dropped the idea. Now if only that large Italian dry dock I had salvaged were repaired already, that would be a different story, but of course it wasn’t yet. Serious as sending one of the few major remaining Mediterranean warships away for so long was, there was nothing for it except to take the knock and send her to Durban. I gnashed my teeth. If only someone, America, Britain, anybody, had sent me the modest quota of men and the materials I had begged for, I could long since have had that salvaged Italian dry dock back in commission, ready at that vital moment to dock this damaged warship! Now God alone knew what damage to the Allied cause might result from her long absence from the weakened fighting line at sea while she went to Durban. But what Commander Mann had said was true—my salvaged Italian dry dock wasn’t yet repaired. I said nothing further and left the conference room. I spent the rest of the day looking over the half-deserted Alexandria dockyard, the damage there to ships and naval shops the Nazis had already done with their constant bombing, and what damage the Nazis and the Eyties together had done to Alexandria itself.
But I wasn’t seeing the bomb damage, even though I was looking at it. Hour after hour as I wandered on foot over Alexandria there kept running through my mind the picture of that cruiser, H.M.S. Dido, steaming 10,000 miles to Durban and back to be repaired, a terrible waste even in a war when waste is accepted as a matter of course. But her long absence from her fighting station —there was a danger nobody could laugh off! How could I fit that overweight and overlong cruiser into my little Persian dry dock and avoid both the waste and the danger? My eyes were looking at collapsed buildings, bomb craters, sunk or burned-out ships along the dockyard quays, but I wasn’t seeing them; instead all my mind saw was every conceivable and inconceivable fantasy of the Dido and that Persian dock being somehow fitted together—truly a miracle if it could be done. In the late afternoon, my steps turned finally toward the Egyptian mansion taken over as a shore residence by Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, K.C.B., O.B.E., R.N., Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet (if anyone could still call it a fleet without blushing, seeing it was composed mainly of a few cruisers and one dummy battleship). There I was to dine with him and spend the night. My bag was already at his house, left by my Army driver. I was escorted to my room by a British petty officer, apparently detailed temporarily as steward to me. He had already opened and been all through what I had in my aviation bag. Spread out on the huge Egyptian bed in that large room was my best white naval uniform, gold buttons already inserted, shoulder marks attached, campaign ribbons pinned on. My only white shoes, newly whitened, reposed on the floor alongside. That steward knew what was appropriate when one dined with the Commander-in-Chief; he was evidently taking no chances on any nonreg American from even more non-reg Massawa appearing in the wrong clothes. “Anything else I can do to ’elp, sir?” he inquired anxiously as he pointed to what was laid out. “Your bath’s already run, sir,” and he indicated the bathroom with its well-filled tub. “No, thanks, steward. You seem to have tended to everything; that’s all, I think,” and I waved him out, a little fearful he might insist on staying to dress me, which I doubted I could stand up under. After all, I wasn’t too sure of what was customary from British valets. I stripped and climbed into the tub, the first time in months I had used one instead of a shower. After drying myself on a huge towel, the like of which I
never knew in Massawa, I started to dress for dinner. And then in a flash it came to me! If only they would give me the Dido, I had the answer—I could dry-dock her in Massawa; repair her; return her swiftly to the Mediterranean! She need never go to Durban! The prospect positively dazzled me as it dawned on me how it could be done! And then the first glow swiftly faded. My method would probably sound unorthodox, and I was dealing with the very conservative British. Would they ever let me try anything so unconventional on one of their precious cruisers? Hardly likely. There, for example, was Commander Rithon in Port Said, so conservative he wouldn’t even let me give him as a gift a new and improved underwater torch to help him out—he was perfectly content to continue with that old model of mine I had discarded over ten years before. But the idea was too good to drop without a fight, and then it struck me that after all, I might be in luck—my chance of getting the Dido might be excellent. For in a few minutes I was to dine with Admiral Harwood himself, who would have the last word on my proposal and Admiral Harwood just couldn’t be the conventional Englishman—his bulk was unconventional and so also must be his ideas, for he had won his fame, while a commodore, by fighting off the River Plate, in 1939, the most unconventional naval battle a British admiral had ever fought. There with simply three small cruisers, armed only with six-inch and eightinch guns, he had fallen in with the Nazi pocket battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, armed with six eleven-inch guns in heavily armored turrets. Against the heavy guns and the thick armor of that battleship, built by the Nazis with the boast that her guns could sink anything her engines couldn’t outrun, and that her engines could outrun anything her guns couldn’t sink, the guns and protection of Harwood’s little cruisers were mere popguns and tinplate. Had Harwood been the conventional admiral, he would have formed his three cruisers into prescribed line of battle ahead and engaged the Graf Spee, broadside to broadside, to go down with all his ships firing to the last, flags nailed to their masts, the very symbol of dogged British courage against overwhelming odds, while the Graf Spee, without a scratch on her after the battle, would have continued her career of destruction in the South Atlantic. Queerly enough, exactly that had happened in World War I, when another British admiral had fallen in off Chile on the other side of South America with a superior German force commanded in the flesh by the very Admiral Graf
von Spee for whom Harwood’s antagonist was now named. But had Harwood fought a conventional battle? He had not. Did he go down in conventional style as he should have with guns still firing and flags flying? He did not. Instead when all the smoke had lifted from over his very unorthodox tactics in that battle off the River Plate, the bewildered captain of the Graf Spee lay dead by his own hand, a suicide, and the battered and defeated Graf Spee lay on the bottom, also a suicide, scuttled in despair by her own crew! The unconventional Commodore Harwood, all his own little ships battlescarred but still afloat, had gone on triumphantly to become Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. With him I was to dine in a few minutes. I felt sure that with Harwood, my unconventional scheme for the Dido would get an O.K. Dinner was soon announced, and I sat down to a very formally served meal at which the others present, aside from the host, were his Chief-of-Staff, Rear Admiral Edelstein, R.N., unlike his C.-in-C. very thin and gaunt; and his naval aide, Flag Lieutenant Sinclair, R.N.V.R., like all flag lieutenants, a paragon of attention to his admiral’s guests. The conversation roamed all over the world—from Block Island to Rabaul; from the River Plate to the Red Sea. While the soup was being served, Rear Admiral Edelstein, the Chief-of-Staff, apparently as well qualified for the diplomatic service as for the fighting line, asked the C.-in-C. whether he had ever read a book by me, “On the Bottom,” relating to the raising of the American submarine, S-51, sixteen years before. But despite the obvious diplomacy of this opening remark, he came to grief with his question. Admiral Harwood, whom I had found very human and very unaffected, also proved himself very honest. He confessed he had never heard of “On the Bottom,” a terrible statement to make regarding any book in the presence of its author. “My word, Admiral!” exclaimed the Chief-of-Staff. “You simply must read Ellsberg’s ‘On the Bottom.’ It’s one of the most thrilling books I ever read; a real classic of the sea! All the London critics so acclaimed it when it came out!” Admiral Harwood promised that in between battles he’d get himself a copy and read it. Then the admiral steered the conversation down the Red Sea, praising wholeheartedly what he called my remarkable achievements in getting the
Naval Base there going, in raising the Italian dry dock and the Liebenfels, and in putting his supply fleet in some decent shape for efficient action, all of which aid he highly appreciated. While he had to confess he’d never heard of my book, my reputation in salvage he well knew of before and he was deeply gratified to see it so much enhanced by my performance at Massawa. “Tit for tat, old man,” I thought to myself, so I told him that for three years I had glowed inwardly over his remarkable performance at the battle off the River Plate, even going so far at the time as to write a special article in an American seagoing journal calling attention to it as not only a brilliant victory, but as one unique in the tactics which had brought victory to the side to which no naval “expert” would have given the slightest chance. Now that I had the opportunity to tell him of my admiration in person, I wasn’t going to pass it up. So mutually admiring each other ’s efforts in our widely different fields, the dinner progressed through the fish to the roast, then finally to the coffee for which we retired to another room where the dismal situation in trying to provision beleaguered Malta by sea got some attention. All the time I was wondering how I could toss my scheme for the Dido into the admiral’s prodigious lap. But since nobody else mentioned her or anything relative to her, I finally bluntly dragged her in myself. “I understand, Admiral,” I said, “you’re sending the cruiser Dido to Durban for dry-docking and repairs.” “Why, yes, Ellsberg,” said the admiral, a little startled at the sudden change of subject. “She’s waterlogged aft; the dockyard chaps say there’s nothing for it except to send her away for docking. You see, Rommel won’t let us dock her here.” “So I understand, Admiral, but Durban’s a long way off. Why not let me do the job at Massawa? It’s much closer.” Admiral Harwood looked at me somewhat puzzled, then turned to his Chiefof-Staff. “Didn’t the dockyard staff tell us, Edelstein, that Massawa can’t take her? The dock there’s too small, I thought they said.” “That’s correct, Admiral. Our constructor, Commander Mann, has been all over that. She’s too big for Massawa; she’s got to go to Durban.” “I understand all that, Admiral,” I interjected. “I’ve been over that part myself this morning with both Mann and your Captain of the Dockyard; fact is, I first learned of the Dido from them. They’re right, the dry dock at Massawa is too small—ordinarily. But I’ve given it a little thought and I’ve figured out a
way to do it at Massawa. You give me the Dido at Massawa, Admiral, and I’ll give her back to you repaired in no time at all compared to Durban! Where’s a pencil? Look!” And with pencil and paper which the Flag Lieutenant hurriedly brought me, I drew sketches to show Admiral Harwood and his Chief-of-Staff how I was going to dry-dock a 7500-ton cruiser in a dry dock for which she was both far too heavy and far too long—a seeming impossibility. Admiral Harwood gazed at the scheme in open wonder, but he was cautious. Would it endanger the Dido? He could take no chances. Did I know how few ships he had in his fleet now? “Not many, I hear, Admiral. No battleships; that I know, but that’s about all I know for certain.” “It’s top secret information and if the enemy knew it, the Eytie fleet would slaughter us, but seeing your Naval Base is involved I’ll tell you. My whole fleet, including the Dido, consists of exactly four light cruisers! And two others, the Euryalus and the Cleopatra, her sisters, out of those four, are damaged exactly as the Dido is, only not quite so badly. We’re praying their sterns will hang together till the Dido gets back here; one ship at a time is as much as I dare send out of the Mediterranean for repairs. If you could only do the lot of them at Massawa, it would be a godsend to me!” So? Now there were three cruisers instead of one Massawa could work on. “Admiral,” I assured him earnestly, “you send me those three cruisers in succession and I’ll repair all of them for you! And fast, too! All I ask of you is that you furnish from Alex the steel and the men for the repair work; they can come down with the Dido. I’ve got no steel at all for the job, and next to no men in Massawa.” “Sinclair,” ordered Harwood sharply, “send for the fleet constructor right away!” He turned to me while his flag lieutenant hurried out to send an orderly after Commander Mann. “You see, Ellsberg, I don’t claim to know anything myself about docking ships, neither does Edelstein here; but Mann, of course, does. If he says there’s the slightest chance of doing it your way, the Dido goes to Massawa. If you do her successfully, then you get her two sisters also. It will be wonderful! You’ll have to pardon my sending for Mann, old chap, but I’m in a tight hole, and I’ve got to be cautious. You explain it to Mann; he’ll understand you better than I; it’s his business. When I’ve heard what he’s got to say, I’ll give you an answer right off!” “Aye, aye, sir,” I agreed. “If I can’t convince Mann, then my plan’s no good
and neither am I. You can forget it.” While we were waiting for the fleet constructor who was quartered a considerable distance away, the talk went back to the River Plate. From his own lips, I listened fascinated while Admiral Harwood related to me his weird battle tactics in defeating the Graf Spee. Then he told me how a short time before, two of his light cruisers escorting a convoy of freighters through the eastern Mediterranean to the relief of Malta, had found across their path in broad daylight an Italian superdreadnought, and in addition an Italian cruiser force in itself far outgunning them. Escape for anyone was hopeless unless the fast cruisers fled immediately, leaving their slow convoy to be sunk. By wireless the situation had been reported to him in Alex by his commodore at sea; he had wirelessed back what to do. And then while he waited in agony to learn what his losses were, he heard that his commodore had outbluffed the vastly superior enemy force and escaped without a fight, cruisers and precious freighters all saved! At that moment the fleet naval constructor arrived and all other discussion promptly ceased while Admiral Harwood ordered Commander Mann to attend closely to my scheme for dry-docking the Dido at Massawa instead of sending her to Durban. I showed Mann the sketches, explained the operation. Mann was evidently a skilled naval constructor; it took slight explanation only for him to grasp the novel idea. He gazed in admiration at the rough penciled sketches, then turned to his Commander-in-Chief. “No reason at all why it can’t be done that way, Admiral,” he agreed. “Odd it never occurred to anyone else. All it requires is skillful handling of the dry dock during the lifting operation.” “Topping!” exclaimed Admiral Harwood. “That settles it, Ellsberg; the Dido goes to Massawa! Mann, you find out from Ellsberg in the morning what he needs at his dockyard in the way of materials and men for the job, and get cracking yourself on loading them all on the Dido. Edelstein, you change the Dido’s orders to Massawa instead of Durban, notify them in Durban she isn’t coming, and see the Dido gets under way as soon as Mann has her loaded. And now I guess we’d better all turn in; there’ll be plenty to do tomorrow—for all of us.” After an early breakfast, I returned to the dockyard to work with Mann. He would send me the blueprints for the task, see all the steel necessary loaded on the Dido, together with one Royal Navy lieutenant commander to advise me,
and thirty British mechanics, two British civilian superintendents, and four foremen put aboard the Dido to do the actual repair work under my direction. He offered to send me more men, but thirty, I thought, should be enough to work three shifts around the clock. It would be a close quarters job around that damaged stern; more men would only get in each other ’s way and slow up the work. All that settled, I went to Admiral Harwood’s headquarters to bid him goodby. “Everything arranged regarding the Dido?” he asked. “Yes, sir. It’ll take your dockyard a few days yet to collect the men and the steel; after that, she’ll be right along, Admiral.” Admiral Harwood shook my hand warmly in farewell, then added fervently, “Good luck to you and my thanks for what you’ve already done for us. But for God’s sake, Ellsberg, be careful with the Dido! She’s one quarter of my whole fleet!”
CHAPTER
42 HARDLY HAD I LEFT THE COMMANDER-in-Chief’s headquarters and started in my Army car for his residence to retrieve my aviation bag, than the air raid sirens began to shriek all over Alexandria. When I got to the house, all the personnel there had already retreated to the shelters, but I was so treading on air myself over the prospect of what Massawa was going to do for the Mediterranean fighting fleet, that a minor thing like an air raid didn’t concern me. I went up to my room, heaved all the clothes in sight into my bag, and was about to close it when the ground guns opened up and the bombs began to explode. From all the noise, Alexandria was certainly putting up a terrific barrage with its guns—what I had heard in Cairo was nothing to this ack-ack. And for their part, the Nazis were surely unloading far more bombs. Presumably the Alexandria dockyard was a much more worth-while target to them than the Heliopolis airport. I lugged my bag downstairs through the deserted house and tossed it into the back of the sedan the Army had given me, then hurriedly climbed aboard myself alongside the chauffeur. “We’d better make knots away from this place!” I ordered the driver. “Let the limeys attend to those Stukas; I’ve got no more business here!” In another moment, with no other traffic moving to bother us, we were racing out of Alexandria bound for the open desert, praying that no ill-aimed bomb would come our way. None did; very shortly we were clear of the city and its mingled roar of thundering A.A. guns and detonating bombs. It Wasn’t long, however, before our progress was sadly impeded by endless convoys of military trucks headed for El Alamein, only forty miles to the westward of us. I should have liked to have gone there myself to look over the Nazi lines and I had all the rest of the day for it, but I couldn’t. That was the one area my passes wouldn’t get me into. Even Colonel Chickering by no stretch of
his imagination could camouflage a naval officer into an American military observer, entitled to enter the British Eighth Army’s fighting lines. I tried to achieve it by indirection, purposely losing my way, taking a wrong turn, and heading for El Alamein to the west, instead of Cairo to the southeast. But the first military road block we ran into, ruined the scheme. There the British M.P.s, after examining my papers, very courteously pointed out my error, apologized for the poor road signs that must have caused it, indicated the roads to take to get back on the main road to Cairo, and then over my objections that they should go to so much trouble to help, obligingly put an M.P. on my running board to guide us till we came to the main road and were again headed southeast along it towards Cairo. So I had to give up a visit to El Alamein, and after finally dropping our helpful M.P. to board a convoy headed west for his return journey, we kept on towards Cairo. There I reported to General Maxwell what had happened in Alex—that I was to get seven Royal Naval officers as assistants, two hundred British workmen, also what materials they could spare. All, of course, subject to the approval of the Admiralty in London, which would take some time to get; and to the volunteering of a sufficient number of the dockyard civilians, which I feared would take a major miracle to bring about. Still it looked promising—I might ultimately get an officer or two, a couple of dozen mechanics, and perhaps a few tons of steel—it would all help. My major news, I saved for the last—that Massawa had done Durban out of the cruiser Dido and was now to blossom forth as an actual Naval Base, directly supporting the fighting ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, taking the place of shut-down Alexandria. General Maxwell glowed over that—that was what in his plans Massawa had been intended for originally. And to think that it had been achieved with none of the shipyard machinery supposedly required from America to make it possible, yet delivered in Massawa! The general wished me luck with my first warship, warned me to take care of myself and not crack up in the Massawa heat now at its midsummer height, and gave me permission to start back the second day following, August 11. That would give me just about a week’s vacation from Eritrea. He also ordered one other thing. I was directed to show up next morning at his headquarters for an interview with all the press representatives in Cairo (which they had just requested) on what had been going on in Massawa. A little
perturbed at this, for I couldn’t get by the censors in letters to my wife that I was even in Massawa, I asked him how free I should be to answer questions. I learned to my astonishment that I was free to answer any questions whatever and the general would be pleased if I told the whole story. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “Every war correspondent’s story will be submitted to the censors here before anything goes out. Whatever the censors want concealed, they’ll cut out. Leave that to them.” So next morning I met all the correspondents, American and British, in Cairo, plus a battery of photographers. They received free answers to their questions—the rehabilitation of the Naval Base, the salvage of the large Italian dry dock, the raising of the Liebenfels. It was interesting to note what the censors passed—not a word on the Liebenfels, not a word on the re-establishment of the sabotaged base, but the story of my dry dock salvage went out in full. That night the air waves were full of Massawa. The British Broadcasting Corporation put it on the air from London, telling the world in English of that dry dock, and to make sure our enemies didn’t miss it, beaming the news to Berlin in German and to Rome in Italian! And in New York the same story went out over the air on all our networks and on short wave to the forces abroad. As I afterward learned, it made the front page in every New York newspaper, as well as the one in Cairo which I saw the next day. After that, I concluded it wasn’t a military secret any more that I was in Massawa, but nevertheless it still happened that whenever I mentioned the place in any letters home, the censors continued carefully to excise the name. Probably they were all too busy with their razor blades ever to listen to the home radio or read our own newspapers. Meanwhile, Colonel Chickering took care of my transportation next day back to Massawa to see that BOAC should not suddenly pull my seat out from under me—it was arranged I was to go back via Port Sudan again, only a one day’s journey as against the two days via Khartoum. On the morning of August 11, I took off for Massawa. At Port Sudan where as usual we made an intermediate stop, the airfield commanding officer agreed to send a wireless to Asmara, asking to have my car sent up from Massawa to meet me at the airport. When in the very late afternoon, I alighted at the Asmara airfield, Garza and my car were both there. Since I had no desire to run the mountain road in the
darkness any more than was necessary, we started back promptly for Massawa. About two-thirds of the way down, darkness caught us. After that we went quite slowly with surprisingly little resistance from Garza; I judged my Somali must have raced up those mountains so fast he was content for the day. We arrived at the Naval Base about 9:00 P.M. I disembarked in front of Building 35, bursting to find my assistants and tell them that our establishment was about to take over from Alex, and so enthusiastic over our prospects I totally ignored my sudden reintroduction to the blast furnace temperatures I had been spared for eight days. So I was delighted to find Captain Morrill waiting for me inside my own air-conditioned room when I entered it. But before I could tell him anything, he started to tell me instead. “Damned glad to set eyes on you once more, Captain!” he burst out. “Till I got your radio this afternoon asking for your car, I never expected to see you again and was wondering where I should send your clothes. There’s hell to pay around here! Look at that!” He shoved a paper under my nose. It was on the stationery of our civilian contractor, dated at Asmara, August 10, 1942, the day before. It read: To: All concerned. From: Assistant Foreign Manager. Subject: Assignment of Personnel. Effective immediately, Capt. Edison Brown is placed in complete charge of all Red Sea salvage operations for this company. Morrill continued angrily: “Hell’s sure popping around here over that! On the face of it, you’re relieved, Brown’s in charge! Of course I never expected to see you again; neither did anybody else. Here the contractor, who everybody figured had eased you out of Eritrea, was already designating Brown as your successor on salvage! Was there an explosion over that! Captain Reed, Lloyd Williams, and all their men say they’re quitting—they’re damned if they’ll work for Brown! Then you don’t know it, but your big salvage ship, the Chamberlin, finally arrived yesterday from San Diego, and her skipper, Captain Hansen, says he never signed on to work for Brown, and he guesses he’ll quit, too! Everything’s in a hell of a mess around this Base! Thank God, you’ve come back; you’re staying, aren’t you?” I had to have a few minutes to think, so I said nothing while once again I read that brief order from the contractor, addressed to all hands in Asmara as
well as in Massawa. Whether rage or mirth was my predominating reaction at that moment, I still don’t know. The idea of a civilian contractor working for the War Department issuing such an order in wartime and in the war zone! They were undertaking to relieve a naval officer designated both by the Navy, Department and by the Commanding General in Africa as Officer in Charge of Salvage Operations, by one of his own civilian subordinates! Shades of “Alice in Wonderland”! Had they completely lost their senses? Finally I turned from the typewritten order to look into Morrill’s wrathful face again. “Morrill,” I said, “if it were not for the serious morale effect this has already had on my salvage crews, I’d say nothing I’ve seen in Eritrea since I first laid eyes on all those ‘W il Duce!’ signs on the road between here and Asmara, strikes me as so funny! I’ll flatten this out so fast it’ll make its sponsors dizzy! I gave them credit for having more finesse. The only thing I’m really concerned about is, What did Brown have to do with it? Is he any party to this thing?” Morrill only shrugged his shoulders. I looked at my watch. It was a little after 9:00 P.M. Brown should be in his room, just around the corner on that same floor in Building 35. “Bring Brown in here,” I ordered Morrill. I sat down at my desk, took another look at that unbelievable notice. Another mirage, perhaps? No, on the third reading, it still read the same. Morrill returned, with Brown trailing him. “Brown,” I said abruptly, handing him the notice, “what do you know about that? Are you any party to this proceeding?” Brown gave the order only a perfunctory glance to identify it. He had, of course, seen it before. “No, sir,” answered Brown promptly. “I had nothing to do with it. I never saw it before till I received it yesterday like everybody else. I don’t know anything about it.” “That’s all then, Brown; you can go back to your room. Don’t bother to act on that order. It’s worthless and illegal; the contractor had no right to issue it. Just for the record, you’ll see it rescinded in no time at all. Good night!” Brown left. “Well, that lets Brown out, Morrill. I should have been damned sorry to have found him mixed up in all this mess,” I said. “Now all that’s necessary is to squelch that order for what effect it’ll have in undoing all the harm it’s done.” I picked up the telephone to call Asmara, asking for Lieutenant Colonel
Knapp, the Area Engineer, whose approval as contracting officer for the Army, the contractor had to have before he could issue any personnel change orders. Knapp, I knew, could never have approved any such order. I got Knapp, to find he didn’t even know any such order was in contemplation, let alone had approved it. The rest of the story was short, covered in two more brief orders. Asmara, Aug. 12, 1942 Assignment of Personnel. Assistant Foreign Manager. 1. Reference to your letter August 10, 1942, appointing Captain Brown in complete charge of the Salvage Operations. 2. You are directed to rescind this order at once as this change was not authorized by the contracting officer. RALPH E. KNAPP , Lt. Colonel, Corps of Engineers, Area Engineer, Eritrea Area. The next day the following order from the contractor reached Massawa: Asmara, Aug. 13, 1942 To: All concerned. From: Assistant Foreign Manager. Subject: Assignment of Personnel. Reference is made to memorandum from this office, dated August 10, 1942, assigning Capt. Edison Brown in complete charge of all Red Sea Salvage operations for this company. Effective this date, the order is rescinded. So that ended that. Whatever, I wondered, could have motivated that contractor in such a crudely conceived maneuver, so easily defeated? Was it simply to annoy me? Was it intended to get Brown in trouble? But I had a war on my hands and no time to bother my head over contractor maneuvers, crude or otherwise, regardless of how much time his men in Asmara might have on their hands with nothing better to do in the middle of a war than to think them up. And I had the shattered morale of my whole salvage force to restore, none
of them in either Captain Reed’s old crew or the newly arrived force under Captain Hansen on the Chamberlin willing to believe that their associate, Captain Brown, had not been mixed up in the scheme somehow, trying to make himself their overall commanding officer. All of this was bad at that moment, for the Chamberlin had brought practically all the rest of my salvage equipment in her large holds, several more divers, and a moderate-sized crew of salvage mechanics; I had expected on their arrival to get salvage going on a much larger scale than before. The effect on the Chamberlin’s crew, from her captain down, was particularly bad. They had arrived the very day that order had been posted in Massawa, to find themselves in the middle of an uproar, with their expected Officer in Charge of Salvage vanished from the country, the wildest rumors flying about concerning him, and with all certainty as to who was running the operation knocked sky-high. If that was the way things were run in Eritrea, they had better look out for themselves—next time the contractor might be more skillful in his tactics and they would find themselves being directed by someone of whose qualifications for the task they were doubtful and of whose loyalty they were suspicious. It took their hearts out of their work; never was I able to make a really effective salvage force out of the Chamberlin’s crew. The only real assistance I ever got out of my biggest and most expensive salvage ship came from her as a repair ship, and from the materials she was carrying in her holds and the few men I was able to detach from the ship for assignments elsewhere. In a material way, the Chamberlin brought me plenty. She delivered a beautiful set of salvage pumps of all sizes. She brought some air compressors, including one tremendous Sutorbilt low pressure salvage air compressor that could by itself deliver more compressed air than all four of the borrowed compressors I had used on the big Italian dry dock. In the way of salvage material, she brought practically everything I had ever ordered in New York; no longer should I have to bother about borrowing anything from reluctant Captain McCance. Then further to help out, she brought several fine heavy motor launches for work boats for salvage, and a fast motorboat for me—this last a beautiful launch suitable for a captain’s gig in which I could speedily get about on salvage work between all the harbors, and when I again had official visitors, take them out in it without apologies. With all those boats at my command, the Lord Grey was promptly relegated to the task of harbor workhorse, for which
she had been built. One of the men who had shipped out as a seaman on the Chamberlin was assigned as coxswain of my boat—he proved to be an unusual person. Glen Galvin, lately a backfield man on Howard Jones’ University of Southern California football team and himself a participant in Rose Bowl battles, was trying his hand in an entirely different kind of broken field running and against decidedly different opposition. I chose Galvin myself for the job; he seemed about the most intelligent and willing member of the Chamberlin’s crew. From then on Glen, with his powerful athletic figure, was always alongside me on wrecks, clambering aboard to lend the salvage crews a hand whenever I boarded a wreck. I think Glen did everything in salvage except dive himself. As my coxswain, Glen Galvin gave me a strong lift. He was proud of the United States himself and he both ran and rigged his boat so everyone who ever saw her in Massawa would have equal cause to be proud of his country also. With the aid of two very black, very tall, and very thin Eritreans as his boat crew, both always immaculately rigged out in white turbans and breechcloths setting off their glistening torsos beautifully, Glen Galvin made his boat and his boat’s’ crew into something to make any skipper happy. It took some weeks to unload the Chamberlin’s holds and get her ready to try salvage work herself—a very unfortunate circ*mstance since it gave her salvage crew too much time to pick up all the gossip of Massawa. And then as the final blow to the Chamberlin’s salvage effectiveness, her best diver, Wilford Wood, went ashore shortly after her arrival looking for a secluded spot where he might hang his diving dresses to dry them out after a long sea voyage. Unable to read Italian, and unacquainted with the Naval Base, he wandered into the second floor of what he thought was an abandoned building but which actually was a live high voltage power substation. Hanging up his diving suits, he touched some power wires, and 3000 volts of high tension current hit him with a blinding flash. Fortunately that lightning jolt flung him clear of the wires, though unconscious; why he wasn’t instantly killed no one could ever tell. His moans after a while attracted attention. Horribly burned, he hovered for weeks in the hospital between life and death; finally, badly crippled forever, he was shipped home. If anything more had been necessary to destroy the effectiveness of the Chamberlin’s salvage crew, the sad accident crippling Wood furnished it, both
from my losing him as a diver and from the effect it had on his shipmates.
CHAPTER
43 IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS TURMOIL, I received word H.M.S. Dido was on her way through the Suez Canal bound for Massawa and would arrive late on August 18. I had to make immediate preparations to quarter ashore somewhere the British supervisors and mechanics she was carrying. All the decent quarters I had ashore in the ex-Italian naval barracks were now well filled, mainly by our contractor ’s American workmen on shore construction projects. I couldn’t put the Englishmen with the Americans; there was no room for them there. It was undesirable also for various reasons to quarter the British coming temporarily to Massawa with the Americans—the major reason was my fear that should the newcomers hear too much regarding the horrors of staying long in Massawa, that on their return to Alexandria, they would effectively kill off any volunteering there with their tales of the place. Their personal experiences would be bad enough to combat; I didn’t want them augmented by accounts of what had happened to various Americans. There was only one possible place I could quarter the newcomers—one I long ago had had my eye on. So I went to Colonel SundiusSmith of the British Forces and asked that he clear all the black girls out of the military brothel for colonial troops at the foot of the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula and give me the building. The colonel agreed; the building was hastily evacuated. I turned to a large gang of native laborers in it, scrubbing it and disinfecting it thoroughly with chemicals furnished by our medical officer. Then a new set of cots, mattresses, sheets, and mosquito nets was hurriedly installed, and our new quarters building was ready for occupancy. It really was quite a fine masonry stuccoed building, equal in interior finish to the late-lamented Building 108, though not nearly so well located near the sea. The only reminder left of its former use was the barbed wire entanglement surrounding it. I merely had the gate removed and didn’t attempt the nasty task of clearing away the barbed wire; I hadn’t time.
On the early afternoon of August 18 we undocked our last supply ship; no more were to arrive until we reported the day the Dido would leave. Then with great care we prepared the keel blocks and the bilge blocks of the Persian dry dock to suit the shape of the Dido’s underwater hull from a plan of her previously sent us. All was ready, ashore and on the dry dock, to receive the Dido and the workmen she carried. About the middle of that afternoon H.M.S. Dido arrived and anchored in the outer roadstead, just beyond the wrecks guarding the entrance to the naval harbor. Immediately she sent ashore in her boats the civilian working force she was transporting and the steel she had brought. My first concern was to house the British workmen—two superintendents, four foremen, and thirty mechanics. I loaded the workmen into trucks, the supervisors into my own car, and transported them to their waiting quarters where all disembarked with their baggage. All hands from Alex were definitely pleased. They were sweltering—that they had expected to stand a while. But their murmurs of appreciation over the beautiful building they got for quarters—something they had never expected— were plainly audible, particularly when they saw the large refrigerator jammed with bottles of cold water I had provided for them. The supervisors received individual rooms. The mechanics were housed barracks style. All were told to make themselves at home till next morning when their labors would begin. Several were curious as to the why of all the barbed wire surrounding their new domicile, but on that I remained noncommittal. Then I departed to board the Dido for a discussion with her captain on the work. I came aboard that British warship in my new boat, expertly landed alongside her starboard gangway by Glen Galvin and his two mostly naked but very nautical Eritreans, to be received on her quarterdeck with the usual naval ceremonies—side boys, bos’n’s pipe, Officer of the Deck, and all the other accessories to life in the Navy whose existence my long stay in Massawa had almost made me forget. I was welcomed aboard by the Commanding Officer, Captain H. W. U. McCall, R.N.; we promptly retired from his hot quarterdeck to his not much cooler but much fan-ventilated cabin. There he sent for his Executive Officer, his Engineer Officer, and his First Lieutenant, and we immediately got down to brass tacks on what was to be done to the Dido. Also present was Commander Mole, R.N., of the engineering dockyard staff in Alex, sent down from there with the Dido to advise me technically concerning the design of that particular
ship. We went into the details of what was needed—the new steel stringers to be installed in the stern to make it stronger for the future, the new steel hull plating required to replace her cracked shell plates which now were allowing her stern to flood. I informed the ship of what was wanted of them in the way of assistance in docking the Dido. Then I learned to my great surprise that after a careful diving examination of her damage by the British before her departure, we were to be allowed twelve days on the dock for the repair job before starting the Dido back to the Mediterranean. I promptly vetoed that. “Nothing doing on twelve days,” I announced. “I can’t spare the dock that long on one ship—too many other ships waiting to dock here. Right on that dock, we repaired a huge bomb hole in the Liebenfels with fewer men than you brought, all of them inexperienced in ship work, in eight days. The Dido can’t be as bad as the Liebenfels. The Dido will go off repaired in eight days—no more. And maybe after I’ve lifted her and seen the actual damage myself, I’ll cut that even further, but it’ll not be increased.” There were immediate objections from Commander Mole and from the Dido’s officers. Commander Mole pointed out that the Alexandria dockyard with all its machinery couldn’t do the job in less than twelve; neither could Durban, had she been sent there. To figure that Massawa, far inferior in size and equipment to either of these dockyards and further handicapped by intolerable working temperatures, could do it in less, was unsafe. Captain McCall, skeptical of my statement, pointed out the disastrous effects on his crew of an underestimate in time. Living conditions in the crew’s quarters below decks on his ship, veritable steel ovens already in Massawa and bound to be worse when the ship was lifted out of water on the dry dock and more of her hull exposed to the sun, were so bad he was sending half his crew that afternoon in trucks to a British military camp in Asmara on the high plateau for the first half of the repair period. The other half of his crew was to be sent there during the last half of the repair time after the first party came back. If my guess was wrong, as both he and Commander Mole of the Alex dockyard felt assured it was, and he brought his second party back at the end of eight days, he would have his whole crew jammed aboard during the remaining four days of the job—longer even than that if the task took more
than twelve days which he thought possible. That would practically kill off his whole crew—when sailing day came, he wouldn’t have men’ enough left on their feet to take his ship out of Massawa, still less any able to fight on their return to the Mediterranean if he ever got there. “I’m sorry, Captain,” I told McCall, “but I’m giving you the facts; you’ll have to accept responsibility for how long you send your first party away. If you send your first party away for six days, the second party may never even start for the hills. At best they’ll only have a day there before they must return. I tell you the Dido will be on the Massawa dry dock not over eight days. Tomorrow after I’ve lifted her, I’ll tell you definitely how much less than that, if any, she’ll be here. The pilot will be aboard at 7:00 A.M. to take you in; you’ll go immediately on the dock. And remember, you’ll be on the dock not over eight days!” The next morning, early on August 19, H.M.S. Dido, the longest ship yet to make the passage, was cautiously piloted by Lieutenant Fairbairn through the line of wrecks and swung hard to starboard to clear the shoal spot and line her up for the dock. The Persian dry dock was, as usual for a large ship, fully but not abnormally flooded down. Excessive draft was not a problem in docking the Dido—it was her gross overweight and her excessive length that were the difficulties to be overcome. The Persian dry dock could lift a maximum of only 6000 tons; her keel blocks could support a length of only 410 feet. H.M.S. Dido displaced (or weighed) over 7500 tons; her length was 530 feet. It was on the face of things my job to dry-dock a ship of 7500 tons displacement and 530 feet in length in a dry dock which could lift only 6000 tons and support a length of only 410 feet. Of course, I could not do that. No one but God himself could have done it. I had no intention of even trying to do it. The thing that had struck me like a flash in Alex the day I was pondering the problem was that it wasn’t necessary to do it in order to repair completely the damage to the Dido. It so happened that the damage to the Dido was wholly at her stern. To repair it, all that was required was that I lift her stern clear of the water. I didn’t have to lift her bow out of the water also, as is normally done in docking any ship—there wasn’t any damage to the bow. And not having to lift her bow out of the water (which I couldn’t do simultaneously anyway) solved the other dilemma of the inability of the short dry dock to support such a long ship lest the unsupported part
break off. The bow of the Dido was going to remain floating in the water at practically its normal draft forward, supported almost as usual by the sea, while I lifted only the stern clear of the water to repair the damage there. The whole result was going to be that when docked for repairs, the Dido (and, of course, also the dry dock with her) was going to be on considerable of a slope as if sliding downhill towards her bow. The effect was to be about as if some titanic derrick had taken hold of that long cruiser at the stern and lifted that warship’s stern well out of water while leaving her bow afloat and undisturbed. In the actual operation, the dry dock would not have to lift even 6000 tons’ worth to get the stern completely out of water; it would be easy for the dry dock. The only dangers involved were in getting too much of the lift needed, towards the bow of the dry dock—that might strain the ship there; and in getting the ship on such a steep slope that she would slide forward down the incline and capsize the keel blocks on the floor of the dry dock. The first danger could be avoided by not lifting too much with the bow compartments of the dry dock. The second danger could be eliminated by not lifting the stern any higher than necessary to repair the damage and by securing the Dido to the dry dock by stout fore and aft steel hawsers, hauled taut, so she had no chance to slide forward in the dry dock. And that was how H.M.S. Dido was dry-docked in a dry dock too small to take her. She came into the dry dock as for any normal dry-docking, but was hauled through it till about 110 feet of her bow overhung the forward end of the dry dock altogether. Then the dry dock was pumped up with the ship level fore and aft, no trim on her, till the keel blocks of the dry dock touched for their entire length. At that point, the sliding bilge blocks were run in under the ship and the side spur shores run in against her sides to keep her from listing to either side as her stern lifted. At the same time, the steel hawsers to keep her from sliding forward were hauled taut. After that, the dry dock was pumped up on a slant, with far more buoyancy aft than forward, till the stern of the Dido came clear of the water, leaving the overhanging bow afloat practically as usual. I stopped lifting when the stern was clear, leaving about four feet of water over the dry dock floor aft—no more than a man could wade in and reducing the slant of the ship by that much. At that point the docking operation was completed and the repair job could start. I must admit that anyone looking across the harbor at that crazily slanted
cruiser and dry dock would have concluded there was something co*ck-eyed going on in Massawa. And he would have been right. Once the sea had dropped far enough down around the stern, carpenters working from boats began to rig scaffolding on both sides around her after end. But I didn’t wait for any scaffolding to stand on to make my inspection. Crossing in a small skiff myself, I got close in under her exposed counters, supporting myself first by her propeller blades, later by standing on her shafts, and made a close examination of her troubles. I found them worse than the British diving examination had reported. In way of the starboard after propeller, a huge piece (about as large as a garage door) of her Steel hull, made of two thicknesses of plating, was cracked completely through and through and all around; nothing seemingly supported it any longer. Why it had not fallen out already was a mystery. On the port side, a somewhat similar cracking existed in way of the port after propeller, but it had not gone quite so far. Swiftly but carefully I went over the damage outside while the scaffolding was being rigged. Then I clambered back aboard the Dido, and dropped through a small manhole alongside her steering machinery into the stern compartment beneath, from which by now most of the sea water there had been drained out the way it had come in—through the wide open cracks in her sides. In that confined stern hold, a devil of a place to try to get about in because of its narrowing triangular shape between the propellers outside, I crawled around over wet steel. With a flashlight I examined cracked girders which would have to be replaced, the difficulties involved in building in the new girders wanted in a space already so full of interlacing steel one could hardly move about, and our chances of getting at the inside welding and riveting that would be required. It was going to be tough, much more difficult to get to than when the ship was first built, for then the workmen did not have the deck overhead to seal them in. We, however, would not only have that deck as an interference to our every movement, but in addition nearly everything needed in that cramped space, men and materials, would have to enter through a manhole so small a man had difficulty in getting through. In hot Massawa, once we started welding and riveting inside that jammed-up hold, the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta would be the very acme of cool comfort in comparison. But it could be done, and, of course, it had to be. Back up on deck, smeared with rust and slime (I was wet through anyway from perspiration so the water in the hold had made me no wetter), I gathered
up the two top British dockyard superintendents, Mr. Smith and Mr. Edwards, and also Commander Mole. With them all, I went to see Captain McCall of H.M.S. Dido to inform him how long his ship would be under repair on the dry dock. “Captain,” I said, “I have carefully examined the damage from all causes to your ship both inside and outside. It’s worse now that it can be seen in the light of day than reported by your divers, whose ability to inspect was naturally limited. I’ve sized it up against other damage jobs I have handled, and particularly against the Liebenfels bomb repair job recently done on this dry dock. I find my estimate of yesterday of eight days for this job needs revision. The estimate was too generous. The Dido will be repaired and off this dry dock in six days. You can all make your plans accordingly.” I got repercussions. Captain McCall, who had been reluctant to arrange his leave parties to Asmara on an eight-day limit, felt that arranging them on a sixday basis was taking a grave risk of putting his whole crew out of action. If we failed, the results would be tragic. I told him that was my responsibility as Commanding Officer of the Naval Base; I was informing him of what was going to happen; I would shoulder all responsibility in seeing it happened. He was going out in six days; it would be wise to act accordingly. The two British dockyard superintendents—Mr. Smith, the elder, very wiry but grown grizzled in the British dockyard service, and Mr. Edwards, middleaged, somewhat stout, but also a very experienced supervisor—both objected strenuously. They had considered eight days highly improbable but had made no vocal objection; they had been willing on that to try, and perhaps finish in ten. But six days for the job was completely out of question—they knew their men, all good mechanics, better than I did. They couldn’t do it in six days; it wasn’t even worth trying. I had a simple answer to that. “Gentlemen,” I countered, “you’ve got four foremen and thirty good British shipyard mechanics with you for this task. Over on that salvaged Italian dry dock I’ve got one American superintendent, Lloyd Williams; about six American ironworkers and welders; and ten South African ironworkers. Not one of them, including Williams, ever worked on a ship before in his life until he saw Massawa. I know what they can do. If you and your men, twice as many as they, don’t want to tackle this Dido job on a six-day basis, you can all start back toward Suez tonight without tackling it at all. I’ll bring my Americans and
South Africans over from that dry dock, and Lloyd Williams will see they do it in six days. It’s going to be done in six days, whether you do it or not. I’m merely offering you the chance. If you don’t want it, say so right now. I’ve no time to waste.” Those two Englishmen looked from me to each other, conferred privately a moment. Then they proved they were of the same breed as their countrymen facing Hitler alone after Dunkirk. “We’ll have a go at it, anyway, Captain,” announced Smith, the elder, laconically. “Fine!” I sang out. “That’s all I ask of you. You’ll do it, and no trouble. Now, you and your men get cracking; I’ll be with you on the staging in a few minutes.” Both superintendents left. I looked at Captain McCall, who, of course, had been listening, but he had no further comment. So I motioned Commander Mole, who was as skeptical as the dockyard superintendents in spite of his silence while they spoke, and we both left the skipper ’s cabin. “They won’t do it,” said Mole, who as an engineer commander, had had considerable experience in British dockyards. “They’ll do that job in six days,” I replied, “unless I’m badly disappointed in what British mechanics can do.” “You’ll be disappointed, then,” answered Mole.
CHAPTER
44 T HE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE VERY hectic ones under the stern of the Dido. Night and day around the clock, without intermission, three shifts of British mechanics labored in the Massawa heat. Rivet guns rattled like machine guns firing in action. Acetylene torches cutting away damaged steel sent trails of scintillating sparks flaming across the dock like ack-ack tracers in the night sky. Pneumatic drills groaned and hummed as they bored through thick warship steel. Crackling electric welding arcs cast a weird unearthly bluish light over everything as molten steel flowed from their electrodes to knit steel plates together—electric arcs rivaling the sun on which it was wise not to look unless one wanted to go blind. Inside and outside, the light cruiser Dido’s stern was a tight spot in which to work. On the scaffoldings outside there was room for only a few men to stand at once, and that few had to be careful of their every movement lest they knock a fellow worker off the staging into the dry dock below. Inside the stern, where the ship narrowed down practically to a knife edge at the rudder post, hardly two men at a time could enter, and one of them normally had the other man’s elbows or his feet in his stomach. It was stifling in that confined space from the outside heat, from red-hot rivets to be driven, from smoke and gas fumes from cutting torches and welding arcs. I did what I could to make it bearable. On the quarterdeck I installed an American electrically operated water cooler; one of two just brought us by the Chamberlin. Cold water flowed on tap—to my thirsting Englishmen a boon from heaven. Inside the lower hold, I got what electric blower fans I could to force down fresh air and to exhaust the gases. Otherwise the few men down there would have been asphyxiated in short order. I found all those Englishmen exceptionally skilled workmen—they knew ships, they knew their trades. I found all of them, superintendents, foremen, and mechanics alike, very willing workers, and soon I was calling them by their
first names—Willie, Alf, ’Erbert, Eddie, or Tom—how could you do anything else when you were sweating with them cheek by jowl jammed together in a tight hole trying to figure out how a particularly impossible-to-get-at rivet was to be driven, or a piece of cracked girder cut away with an acetylene torch without burning also into a good steel plate that would be hell to renew if accidentally it were burned into also? Very swiftly I ran into the reason why Commander Mole felt assured the job could never be done in six days—British trade union rules and British trade customs ingrained in all these men by a century of labor conditions and labor battles in England. I met that issue head on the first few hours when first it arose on the starboard scaffolding, over sending up on deck for another mechanic to perform the next operation on removing a damaged steel plate—it wasn’t the trade of the man on the staging with me then, Alf, to do that operation, it was ’Erbert’s trade. ’Erbert, who was on deck the Dido, would be sent for while Alf got off the staging to make room so ’Erbert could work when he arrived. Half an hour would be lost while the shift was being made, and another half hour also when ’Erbert got through and Alf had to be sent for to resume. We lost the first half hour then and there, but it was the last half hour we lost on the Dido over that. I knocked off everybody, gathered them all, superintendents and mechanics alike, on the Dido’s quarterdeck. I told them they’d work like everybody else that worked for me in Massawa—every man would do anything he could as well as he could every time he could regardless of his trade or anybody else’s. This wasn’t England, it wasn’t a British dockyard—it was Massawa in wartime where neither I nor anybody else had time or energy to waste on trade union rules or customs, British or American. It was too damned hot where we were and we were fighting Hitler and Mussolini, neither of whom was paying any attention to rules of any kind, union or otherwise. “That’s all, men,” I concluded. “You’re good mechanics, every one of you knows enough of the other man’s trade to do a bit of it when it means either doing it or stopping the job a while. Now get back to work, and nobody pulls any more rules on me! We don’t stop for anything in Massawa!” The men went back to work, and to the undisguised astonishment of very British Mr. Smith, veteran of many a trade union dockyard controversy over rule technicalities, they did exactly what I asked of them. He shook his head incredulously as he watched them.
“I could never get them to do that! You couldn’t either, Captain, if this was a British dockyard. But even here, I can’t see how you’re getting by with it without their quitting on you. You don’t know how sacred them rules is to all these men!” But I didn’t care. It wasn’t a British dockyard; I wasn’t interested in hampering rules. Massawa’s resources were too limited ever to get anything done if I went by the rule book in labor or in anything else. We got along with the job. Around and around the clock, night or day the same to us. The damaged steel was cut away; cracks which could safely be welded up again were welded; patterns (templets) were made to be sent ashore to the Naval Base shops from which to fabricate there all the new steel plates and girders required. The Lord Grey was busy all the time bringing us materials. I had a careful schedule made of when each new plate, each new piece of girder had to arrive from the shops and be installed to keep us on my six-day timetable. Those Englishmen took as much interest in keeping on that schedule on their warship as I did. The third day went by, all the damaged structure was removed and new steel began to arrive to replace it. The fourth day of that scorching August vanished and more steel came out. By morning of the fifth day, we had the holes in the sides of the Dido plated up and riveting guns and welding arcs going all over the stern securing the new plating and girders together. My British workers were all tired and wan from the heat by then but since they were working only one shift a day each, at least they got ashore when their shift was over to sprawl out on their cots under their mosquito nets and get what rest they could in the heat (which wasn’t any too much). I felt they would last out. The fifth day, on the Dido’s quarterdeck, I tried to do a little missionary work on elderly Mr. Smith and youngish Mr. Edwards towards getting them and as many of their men as possible to volunteer permanently for Massawa, instead of returning to Alex. There would be a good bonus in it for the volunteers. Mr. Edwards seemed interested and promised to give it consideration, but first he would go back to Alex anyway. But with graying Mr. Smith there was not a chance. “I’m too old for this place, Captain,” he assured me. “And then I’m too old for you; you’re too much of a driver for me to keep up with long. It takes younger men, like Mr. Edwards here.” Then he seized me by my unbuttoned
shirt near my throat as if to choke me, and continued. “Besides, what do you mean by deceiving a poor old man like me? Remember I asked you when we came here about the barbed wire around that fine building you’ve put us all in, and you didn’t answer me? A fine building it is, all right! What’ll my good wife back in Portsmouth say when she hears I’m living in Massawa in a brothel? And mind you, Captain, a black brothel at that! I’ll never live it down!” I had to laugh. So did Smith. “So you’ve found out, eh? I wondered how long it would take for the scandalous truth to leak out!” But both Smith and Edwards promised to do what they might to get me some volunteers from among the thirty men they’d brought, so with that we all turned to again. The fifth day dragged along. Everybody—British workmen and British officers on the Dido—could see the task was so well, advanced there was little doubt we’d finish within the six days set. Captain McCall, astonished but pleased, so reported to the Commander-in-Chief back in Alex and went about getting the second section of his crew which had gone to Asmara only the morning before, back aboard by next night in preparation for final undocking and departure. Meanwhile, the Eritrean natives, who had already scraped clean the exposed portion of the Dido aft (she wasn’t very foul), began to apply the first coat of underwater paint. The idea was that when all the repairs were completed and all the exposed stern painted, the cruiser would be floated, shifted aft inside the dry dock till the stern overhung about 150 feet, and then the bow end lifted out of water for swiftly scraping and painting that. When we were all through, except for a small part of the bottom amidships which would never come out of water during any part of the liftings, we should have the Dido not only wholly repaired but mostly freshly cleaned and painted also when she left Massawa. Late in the evening of the fifth day, all the new plating was secured in place except the last plate on the starboard side, an outer course plate or doubler. This was an especially thick steel plate for which we could not lift a templet till all the plating beneath it was riveted and welded up. The shipfitters went to work then against the side of the ship to make their templet, a pattern of thin wood strips to the exact size and shape of the required steel plate. On a large scale, the job resembled a dressmaker ’s laying out of a
paper pattern for a section of a dress, cut to match all adjoining seams. It was a fair-sized steel plate we would need—about six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and around three-quarters of an inch in thickness. The shipfitters worked with great care on that templet; the rigid steel of the new plate would have to match exactly all the seams and rivet holes of the plating beneath it. About midnight the templet was finished and sent ashore in the Lord Grey to the plate shop where the new plate was to be fabricated during the night. My plate shop, unfortunately, had rather scanty machinery; the Italians had had no great amount of plate fabricating machinery in Massawa and none of the beautiful equipment for that shop (or any shop) had yet reached us from America. The Italian plate shop in Massawa had been their most poorly equipped shop. I saw that the shop foreman and his Italian assistants got started on the steel plate, and then went home to Building 35 for a rest myself. The new plate should be ready to ship out about 6:00 A.M. About 6:30 A.M., beginning the morning of our sixth and last twenty-four hours, I was back on the dry dock. So also was that final steel plate, hanging from the traveling crane of the dry dock, ready to be swung into place against the Dido’s starboard side. On the scaffolding in way of the starboard after propeller where that plate was to go, were all the workmen, but no one seemed to be doing anything towards swinging that plate over in place. I clambered from the side of the dock over the wooden walkway bridging the water beneath me, to the scaffolding inboard of the propeller. One of the British foremen handling the early shift greeted me. “That plate ain’t right, Cap’n,” he informed me, pointing to it as it hung from the crane hook. “We ’as to send it back to the shop ashore for ’em to work on it there again before we can erect it.” I looked at the plate. It looked all right to me. “What’s the matter with it?” I asked anxiously, for we had no extra steel, and if my shop ashore had cut that plate to the wrong size, especially if it had made it too small, it would be a major tragedy. “It ain’t got the knuckle in it,” he explained. “Cast your eye over this, Cap’n,” and he turned toward the Dido where right under our noses, the plate had to fit. “D’ ye see? There’s a sharp knuckle in the counter o’ this vessel which’ll come about six inches below the top edge o’ that plate. We showed that knuckle on the templet Willie made an’ sent ashore, only them Eyties o’ yours in the plate shop there forgot to knuckle the plate to suit the templet. It’s got to
go back to be knuckled.” I knew that knuckle in the Dido he was referring to well enough. Her stern, from the quarterdeck down, was practically straight-sided till it reached a few feet below her water line; then the plating was sharply knuckled or creased inward to run at a considerable slope inboard and downward toward her keel. The top edge of our last steel plate came to about six inches above this horizontal knuckle line; of course, to fit the ship it also had to be knuckled over at the top so it could be riveted and welded there neatly and watertight against the plating already in place. “Oh, is that all that’s worrying you!” I exclaimed, much relieved. “Don’t bother to send the plate ashore. We’ll have to knuckle it over in place with sledge hammers. Just swing it over, secure it where it belongs, bolt it up, then rivet and weld the bottom and both sides up to near the top, and after that we’ll do the knuckling with sledges, with the ship as a jig to knuckle against.” The foreman looked at me as if I were crazy, or else perhaps knew nothing of shipbuilding. “Knuckle that thick plate over by hand?” he gasped. “Why, they got power machinery ashore to do jobs like that! All you have to do is put that plate in a keel-bender, put about 500 tons o’ pressure on it, and the keel-bender ’ll knuckle it over for us in no time!” “Yes, yes,” I admitted, slightly peeved at the time being lost. “I know all about keel-benders. You don’t have to tell me how they work. Only there isn’t any keel-bender in the plate shop ashore. That’s why they didn’t knuckle that plate for you in the first place. And there isn’t any other kind of machine ashore either that could knuckle that plate, or I’d have it done. This is Massawa, not the dockyard in Alex. Now you get that plate swung over in place, secure it as I told you, then get some acetylene torches to heat the plate up red-hot along that knuckle line and put two of the huskiest men you’ve got swinging sledges on the hot iron to knuckle it up against the ship’s side. After that, we’ll weld it in place along the top seam and we’ll be all through. Now don’t lose any more time. Get going! I’ll be along again in about an hour to see how you’re making out.” With as stricken a look in his eyes as if I had just sentenced him to Massawa forever, the foreman turned and waved to the crane operator on the dry dock far above him to lower the plate further and then to swing it in. As I left, I heard him muttering, “No keel-bender? What kind o’ dockyard is this they’re wanting us to stay
an’ work in?” I really could have told him, but I refrained. I ducked on the scaffolding to keep clear of the rapidly descending steel plate, climbed over to the side of the dry dock, and took my boat over to the Italian dry dock to see how Lloyd Williams and his crew were getting along in patching the bomb holes there. I had hardly been aboard that dock in five days; practically all my time since her arrival had been put in on the Dido. I nodded approvingly to Williams as I went over his job. Already a number of the huge bomb craters had vanished forever, permanently sealed over with new steel plating. But about half the bomb holes were still left, all the damaged steel removed but the holes on top in the floor still yawning chasms waiting for steel. “We’ll just about run out of steel by tomorrow, Captain,” Williams informed me. “Will there be any left over from that job”—he inclined his head toward the Persian dock—“that you can give us when she leaves?” he asked. “Nothing to talk about, Lloyd; just some scraps, maybe.” I sighed at our predicament. “I’ll try Alex again tomorrow. Maybe with the Dido back in their laps, they’ll feel grateful to us here and scrape up a few plates for us.” I got back into my boat and returned to the Dido. It was nearly 8:00 A.M.; I’d been gone somewhat over an hour. I disembarked and hurried over the side of the dry dock back on the starboard scaffolding, eager to see how much progress the men had made in knuckling that plate. My heart sank as my eyes fell on that plate. No progress had been made in knuckling it. True, it was now in place against the sloping lower shell of the ship, with most of the quilting rivets driven to hold it there. But its top edge stood sharply away from the shell there, with not a sign of a knuckling yet in it. I looked over the men on the scaffolding. It was crowded now with men— too many for anybody possibly to work. There were Smith and Edwards, their foreman, two English riveters who were certainly the huskiest Englishmen on the job, a torch operator, some sledges, and a torch. Everything was there that I had ordered to do that knuckling job, but there was no indication of any knuckling. “We’ve been waiting for you to come back, Captain,” said Smith somewhat apologetically as he noted my chagrin. “I’ve stopped ’em from driving any more rivets. We’ll have to cut out the rivets they’ve driven already, take that plate off o’ there and send it ashore somewhere to be knuckled. Nobody can knuckle it the way you said; it’s too thick a plate. It’s a job for power
machinery.” “But there isn’t any power machinery ashore!” I burst out exasperated. “I told your foreman here that and he must have told you. You shouldn’t have stopped the job, Mr. Smith. I told ’em how to do it. Now let’s all of us get off this scaffolding and give your men a chance to get to work with that torch and the sledges. We’ve lost too damned much time already talking about this!” “It’s no use, Captain,” replied Smith, blank despondency written all over his grizzled face. “Here’s the two strongest men I’ve got and they say they can’t do it; nobody can. And I agree with ’em. It’s beyond human strength. I’d expected you to have that plate knuckled in a keel-bender ashore here, or I’d never have agreed to let ’em send the ship here instead o’ to Durban. Now we’re in a pickle. We can’t finish the job!” I looked at Mr. Smith in dismay. There was no question—he wasn’t being mutinous, he wasn’t being obstinate—the job was just completely beyond him. I turned to his two riveters, huskies both of them, though I was sure I’d seen better. “Can’t you men do that?” I asked of them, touching the protruding plate about in line with our heads. Both of them shook their heads solemnly. “No, Cap’n,” said the nearer of the two, “nor nobody else neither.” I looked from the dejected men about me to that troublesome plate which had to be beaten in or we couldn’t undock the Dido. If anybody was in a pickle, it was I. This was the last day. The captain of the Dido had already radioed Alex that next day he was returning to the Mediterranean. No doubt already in Alex, the C.-in-C. was arranging his warship movements to take account of that. Now not only would she not undock tomorrow, as these men saw it, but no one could say when she would undock—probably not till that recalcitrant plate had been removed from the Dido and sent on a round trip to Alex to be knuckled under the keel-bender there. We couldn’t get that big plate into a plane. If it went by freighter, it would take around two weeks for the journey. What a lot of rot! I couldn’t believe they couldn’t do it. In the quarter of a century since I’d worked on my first ship, I’d seen men, many of them English and Scotch, do far more than that to steel. “So you try to tell me it can’t be done my way, eh? This is your last chance. Can you do it?” Everybody involved shook his head again. “All right then, boys; just move aside and clear this scaffold so somebody who can, gets a chance to swing a sledge! Pick out some seats along the side of
the dock where you can all see without getting in the road, and I’ll show you something!” I turned toward the nearby stern of the dry dock where my new boat was tied up waiting for me. “Glen!” I sang out to my coxswain. “Get over to the Italian dry dock and tell Lloyd Williams to break Bill Cunningham and Horace Armstrong off whatever they’re doing and bring ’em both over here four bells with the biggest pair of sledge hammers they’ve got on that dry dock! Bring all three of ’em back with you; I’ve got a little job here for ’em! Shake it up now!” “Aye, aye, Captain!” With a wave of his hand to show he understood, Galvin shoved off and with the throttle all out raced away toward the other near-by dry dock. Silently all the Englishmen started to clear the scaffolding. I restrained their top superintendent. “You’d better stay here with me, Mr. Smith. You’ll want a close view, so next time you’ll know what men can do when it has to be done.” His wrinkled face incredulous but silent, the elderly dockyard superintendent picked out a spot on the end of the scaffolding where he would be clear but still close by. In ten minutes, the boat was back, and its three passengers disembarking. Galvin pointed out to them where I was up on the scaffolding over the starboard after propeller. In single file, Williams leading, with behind him Cunningham and Armstrong, each nonchalantly swinging a heavy sledge in one hand, they threaded their way past the British mechanics now perched on the side of the dry dock near by, and came over the walkway to the scaffolding where I stood. I looked at Cunningham and Armstrong approvingly, both stripped to the waist, both glistening with perspiration. They were tough guys, and over Cunningham particularly I had had plenty of headaches in the past. But now I needed a couple of tough guys and they were going to repay me for all my troubles. I had no fears. “Boys,” I said, “you see this steel plate?” and I laid my hand on its protruding upper edge. “I want it knuckled in flat against the shell behind it to let us weld this top edge and make the stern of this cruiser watertight so she can go back and fight.” I turned carefully around on the narrow scaffolding toward my late companions on it, now all ensconced some thirty feet away on various vantage points. “Now, boys, you see those Englishmen over there? It was their job to do this, only they say they can’t. And what’s more, Bill, and you, too, Horace, they say
you can’t either!” Cunningham and Armstrong both took a brief look at the thick steel plate, then gazed belligerently at the onlookers. Neither of them cared much for Englishmen; they were all potential M.P.s to them. Already Lloyd Williams was lighting up the acetylene torch which lay on the scaffolding at his feet, applying the hot flame to the plate at about the knuckle line, heating the steel. “Them limeys say we can’t do it?” as soft in speech as ever, Cunningham asked of me. “Is that all you want of us, Cap’n?” I nodded in assent. Cunningham looked at the spot Williams was heating, then at the narrow scaffolding to get a proper stance for his feet. The sledge hammers the Englishmen had left there were in his way. He glanced casually at them, then contemptuously kicked them both overboard into the water covering the dock floor below. Compared to the sledge hammer he was carrying, they were only toys, too small for a man to work with. Lloyd Williams had a considerable spot of steel red-hot. Cunningham looked inquiringly at Armstrong. “O.K., Bill,” answered Armstrong, bracing himself while he raised his sledge, gripped it with both hands. “All right, Horace, let’s go!” said Cunningham, and with a terrific clang, his heavy sledge hammer came down against that hot steel plate. It sounded as if Big Ben himself had struck one. As Cunningham’s hammer swung back over his shoulder, Armstrong’s cracked down, and from then on it seemed as if Hercules and Vulcan themselves were rhythmically sledging away on that steel plate as Bill and Horace plied those ponderous sledges. Soon they had a gallery, with all the other British mechanics, practically the whole crew of the Dido, and almost everybody belonging on the Persian dry dock lining the rails of the Dido and the dry dock to watch them—everybody from Captain McCall of the Dido (whom someone had informed of impending disaster), immaculate in whites and gold-visored cap, down to practically naked Eritreans fouled with dirt and paint. The reaction on everybody, cruiser captain to naked savages, was the same. They were witnessing something not often seen—they were seeing men work. Never was I prouder of being an American than while I watched my two fellow Americans, the center of the awestruck attention of men of every race and every religion in the Middle East, beating that plate into place.
Pausing only periodically while Lloyd Williams heated up new stretches of steel for them to swing on, steadily they worked their way with their sledge hammers along the fifteen-foot length of that plate. The task took them an hour and a half. At the end of that time, from end to end that heavy steel plate along its upper edge lay neatly in against the plating under it, beautifully knuckled over. With his last blow swung home to finish, Bill Cunningham rested his sledge negligently on his shoulder and turned again to me. “Anything else you want o’ us here, Cap’n?” he queried mildly. “No, Bill, that’s all. And thanks to both of you.” I could have kissed him for what he’d done, and Armstrong also. “C’mon then, Horace,” said Cunningham to Armstrong. “We’d better get going back to that Eytie dry dock an’ get some work in this morning.”
CHAPTER
45 NEXT MORNING, AUGUST 25, COMPLETELY finished, H.M.S, Dido was undocked, having spent exactly six days on the Massawa dry dock. We were through with her in just half the time allowed us for the task in Alexandria. Hardly was she off the dry dock when another of Admiral Harwood’s armed supply ships, waiting already outside the harbor, took her place on the keel blocks. That day the Dido started back for her station in the Mediterranean, having on her return been absent from it a total of eleven days, as against the forty to sixty days she would have been missing from the war zone had she gone to Durban. Via Captain Lucas, R.N., NOIC in Massawa, the usual wireless to the C.-in-C., announcing her completion, went out. H.M.S. Dido undocked 0630 today. Kythera follows. A few hours later, a sweating British seaman from NOIC’s office caught up with me to thrust into my hands a wireless from Admiral Harwood in Alexandria: Your 0802/25. Pass to Ellsberg. Well done indeed. Great work! That, from a conservative British admiral, was certainly praise. The United States Naval Repair Base at Massawa at last had come of age. Shortly we were informed that we were also definitely allotted the cruisers Euryalus and Cleopatra, damaged sisters to the Dido. Our performance on the Dido had pushed Durban off the C.-in-C.’s list so far as further wartime maintenance of the Mediterranean Fleet was concerned. All the British mechanics who came down with the Dido had already been ordered to remain in Massawa to await the coming of her sisters—only Commander Mole and Mr. Smith had returned to Alex with the Dido. The commander went back to report firsthand on our performance; Mr. Smith because Massawa had proved too much for his aging body.
With only a few days overlap in the Mediterranean to change stations about, H.M.S. Euryalus was sent to us, arriving September 5. We cleaned up her damage and sent her back, only four days in dry dock, an even better performance than on the Dido, but, of course, by then we knew better what to expect and were prepared in advance for it. Last of all came H.M.S. Cleopatra, namesake of that woman who never failed to cause trouble to everyone who crossed her path. The Cleopatra ran true to her name. We repaired her and sent her away in five days, commencing on September 19, but she nearly ruined the Massawa Naval Base and everything in it, including me. She lost no time in causing trouble. Hardly was her stern half lifted out of water and I beneath it in a small boat scanning her half-exposed bottom for her damage while standing on the gunwale of my skiff, than a wave washing into the still partly flooded dry dock lifted my boat suddenly, bringing my left foot on the gunwale up with a terrible jolt right against the sharp lower edge of her bronze propeller blade there, nearly amputating my big toe and laming me severely. That was only the beginning. I got the work laid out and the repair job going with the British mechanics now under the immediate supervision of Lloyd Williams, without any difficulty. But at that unfortunate time, I received a peremptory order to proceed instantly to Alexandria for a conference there on some top secret matter. It nearly broke my heart to have to leave that cruiser docked in what I as well as everyone else in Alex and Massawa knew was a ticklish situation. I had no competent person I could really trust to shift the Cleopatra in dry dock when her repairs were done and it came time to drop her stern and lift her bow to finish the cleaning and painting job, which the Cleopatra needed more badly than her two sisters. But the orders permitted no delay, the conference was for one day only, and on the face of it, it looked as if I could get back in time to do the shifting myself. I had no fears about Lloyd Williams. I instructed him what to do on repairs, which had been already laid out as a five-day job. Where my knees shook was over Spanner, the English dockmaster. I warned him to watch the ship carefully and to let her alone; I would be back in time to shift her myself. Then I dashed to Asmara to catch an Army plane next day for Cairo via Port Sudan, the fastest route, where I arrived in the early evening.
From Cairo, I was hurried next morning to Alex by car, to find that my conference was, oddly enough, wholly with a Major Quilln of the Royal Marines, an officer attached to Admiral Harwood’s staff for special missions. It appeared that the Royal Navy was deeply interested in blocking the entrance to a certain enemy port supplying somebody (Major Quilln never mentioned either name, but I thought I could guess). The idea was to run in and sink a blockship under fire, something attempted many times before in many wars, and usually with as little success as attended the late Lieutenant Richmond Pearson Hobson’s effort to block Cervera’s fleet in Santiago Harbor back in our own Spanish War, in 1898. What concerned Major Quilln was how to sink a blockship so she would stay sunk. The British were undesirous, after a number of Royal Navy men had sacrificed their lives in sinking the ship, of having some Nazi salvage officer swiftly remove the blockship and open the harbor entrance to traffic again. Since I had done a fair job in quickly lifting an important wreck that the Axis had sunk so she was thought impossible to raise, it had occurred to the British command to have me sent for to tell them how to sink a ship so she’d stay sunk, thus paying me the compliment of implying that the Nazis had no one who could outguess me in salvage. I went over the problem with Major Quilln and pointed out to him how best it could be done; since the subject is still a top secret one and I have no wish that the information ever be used against us, I won’t go into it here. That was the reason for dragging me out of Massawa at an unpropitious moment. An important reason, no doubt, but one giving me little peace of mind when I knew I hadn’t a single trained naval assistant in Massawa to take over in my absence, least of all when we were in the midst of a tricky docking operation. When finally I had finished with Major Quilln, I breathed a sigh of relief, and in the late afternoon rushed back to Cairo. A seat had already been reserved for me in the Asmara plane via Port Sudan next morning. I should get back to Massawa the day before it was necessary, to shift the Cleopatra myself, which no doubt the C.-in-C.’s headquarters had also figured on. Early on the morning of September 22, I was on hand at Heliopolis airport to catch the plane for Asmara, but there was no plane there. Then for the first time, I learned the BOAC plane flights for Asmara didn’t originate in Cairo, the route started in Syria somewhere and the plane was late arriving at Cairo. It would take off for Asmara as soon as it got in and could be refueled.
The hours dragged on, the morning wasted away, my margin of safety in getting to Massawa shrank constantly and I sat there in Heliopolis, capable of chewing nails had there been any about available for the purpose. Finally the plane arrived in the early afternoon. It had had engine trouble somewhere to delay it. Then the final blow was administered. The plane would not take off for Asmara that day—it was too late to start the flight, besides the engines needed attention. They would be tuned up during the rest of the afternoon; next morning we should take off. There wasn’t anything I could do except go back to my billet alongside the airfield and await the next day. So I did. The situation now would be that I might with luck arrive a few hours only before the Cleopatra had to be shifted. It was going to be nip and tuck. On the morning of September 23, again I was early on hand at the airfield. The plane was wheeled out, our baggage was put aboard, we embarked. The pilot revved up his engines preparatory to the take-off. Apparently they didn’t suit him. All passengers were disembarked while the mechanics were called back to work again on the tuning up supposedly taken care of the day before. Whatever was the matter with the ignition system on that plane, I don’t know. The morning drifted away, the sound of the engines never suited the pilot. Finally about noon, we were informed the flight was off for that day also. The mechanics would have to change completely something on the engines; tomorrow morning we should surely fly. For the first time I realized acutely the meaning of what previously I had considered only a flip epigram: “If you’ve got lots of time, fly; otherwise go some other way if you want to arrive on schedule.” Once again I returned to my billet to impose myself unexpectedly on an overcrowded Army menage. Now I was in real agony—the tricky handling of the Cleopatra on the dry dock, something which on the Dido Admiral Harwood had begged of me for God’s sake to be careful of, was going to be in the hands of a dockmaster in whose competence I had no faith. The Lord alone knew what now was going to happen, with me a thousand miles away, helpless to do anything. Next morning, September 24, the third day since it was supposed to start, the BOAC plane took off at last. I arrived in Asmara in the very early afternoon, grabbed an Army car there, and raced for Massawa. This time so far as I was” concerned, the driver could go as fast as he pleased; there was never a word
from me to slow down. By 3:00 P.M., I was in the Naval Base, looking out over the water as I roared down the road. Something was wrong, I could see the moment I got a glimpse. The Cleopatra was off the dock, as she should have been, anchored now outside the wrecks. But the dock itself was empty—there was no supply ship lifted out of water on it as should have been there. As I dashed through my office to the water front to get my boat and get out on the water to find out what the trouble was, I picked up Captain Morrill who told me, though he knew none of the details. There had been an accident, all right. The Cleopatra had dropped off the keel blocks late the night before in connection with the shift; the dry dock was out of commission with all its keel blocks reduced to pulp; and what the damage to the Cleopatra was, no one knew yet. When she fell off the blocks, the dock had been hurriedly flooded down by Spanner to get her out of the dry dock. At that moment in the afternoon, the bottom of the Cleopatra was being inspected by one of my divers, Al Watson, to determine the damage to her. So with Glen Galvin opening his throttle wide, with an anguished heart over this catastrophe I raced to the outer roadstead to board the Cleopatra. What had we done to the Cleopatra, a quarter of Admiral Harwood’s priceless fleet? Captain G. Grantham, R.N., commanding officer of H.M.S. Cleopatra, met me at the gangway and escorted me to his cabin, where very generously he offered his condolences. He knew apparently how I must feel over what had occurred at my Base during my unexpectedly prolonged absence. He had other news for me. His ship, in spite of about a four-foot drop in the dock, had apparently suffered slight damage—his Engineer Officer and his First Lieutenant had reported that at most there was only one minor leak in her bottom that would cause no trouble. Re-docking, which was impossible anyway with my dock out of commission, would not be necessary. As for the appearance of his bottom, that he couldn’t tell me, since the diver hadn’t reported yet. Regarding other matters, fortunately no one had been injured; when she went down, no one, native or otherwise, happened to be under her or he would have been crushed to death. Very shortly, Al Watson, who had been examining the Cleopatra for some hours, came up to report. There were only four minor dents in the bottom plating; nothing was ruptured anywhere; the leak reported was through a sprung rivet in one of the dents—it was of no great consequence. I breathed a sigh of relief. The Cleopatra, at least, had suffered insignificant
harm. Her stern repairs had been completed, most of the painting finished, she could sail back for the Mediterranean in good fighting trim. To Captain Grantham and to me, that, of course, was the major matter. We shook hands and he prepared to sail. He would be all right. I re-embarked in my boat for the long run back into the naval harbor. The Cleopatra was all right, but how about my dry dock, the only one I yet had working in Massawa? Already two ships were waiting for the dock; at least three more were on the way. On the trip, carrying Commander Davy and Lloyd Williams, both of whom I had picked up on the Cleopatra, I learned a little more of what had happened and why. Williams told me he had finished the repair job early the evening before, according to schedule. It was time to flood down, shift the cruiser aft, and lift her bow out of water as we had done on her two sisters, so her bow might be cleaned and painted. In my absence, Spanner had undertaken to do that and apparently had succeeded. He had lowered away the stern, floated the cruiser, shifted her well aft till her stern overhung the dock, then lifted the bow out of water while the stern floated, so the Eritreans could scrape and paint her bow, which they had started to do. They had finished beneath her and were working on her sides. She had been that way an hour, perhaps longer, when calamity struck. The steel hawsers had not been secured taut to the dry dock to hold the Cleopatra tightly in position against sliding aft as she lay sloping aft on the dock. At about 11:00 P.M., she suddenly went aft down the slope, capsizing all the keel blocks and crushing them into matchsticks as her heavy hull came down on top of the mass of toppled blocks. Fortunately, in crushing the blocks as she seesawed aft, she had made a soft cushion for herself on the dry dock floor which had taken the shock and saved her. But what she had done to the dry dock was terrific—there wasn’t a wooden keel block in the dock left to support anything; they were all just rubbish now. The dock was out of commission; that, of course, was why the next supply ship waiting to go on when the Cleopatra undocked, had not been lifted. Grateful that the Cleopatra had only been dented slightly and that no one had been hurt, I began to feel somewhat better, even towards Spanner who had been in charge of the shifting. After all, the keel blocks in that Persian dock had had a tough life since May 8, when we had docked our first ship, the Koritza, on them. Some sixty-five or more ships had passed over those blocks in that short
time. Perhaps from constant heavy loading, the blocks had finally come to the point where they might have collapsed under the Cleopatra even though Spanner had hauled taut those hawsers. However, I was skeptical of that; the keel blocks had looked in fair shape to me when we were preparing the dock for the Cleopatra. Still I was willing to give Spanner the benefit of the doubt. Then Commander Davy’s next remark sent all my altruistic feelings towards Spanner whistling down the wind. “When we get ashore, Captain,” he said, “I’ll take up with Alex the return there without docking of the supply ships already here, and the cancellation of all future sailings for docking here for the next six weeks.” “Six weeks?” I asked, puzzled. “Why six weeks? That dock’ll never be out of commission that long. Where’d you get that?” “Why, from Mr. Spanner, Captain. He went to Captain Lucas at the Royal Naval Base this morning and asked him to send a signal to Alex reporting that the Massawa dry dock would be out of commission for from four to six weeks and to cancel all dockings. Captain Lucas took his word for it as dockmaster, since you weren’t here, and sent the signal. It’s gone already. And Spanner says it’ll take longer than that unless Alexandria sends us immediately the new heavy timbers to saw up into keel blocks. There’s no timber here.” Six weeks to replace a set of crushed keel blocks, while that invaluable Massawa dry dock lay idle all that time! Was Spanner crazy? And to think that he should have dared to send such a calamitous signal in my absence! Had he been present in my boat at that moment, I could have wrung his birdlike neck for that! I had suffered enough already from Spanner and his timid flutterings. Now this! What would they think of me in Alexandria! Savagely I faced Commander Davy in the co*ckpit of the boat, though he was in no way to blame. “Commander, I’m getting off on the Persian dock, but you take the boat ashore. Send out instantly a signal to Alex, canceling that signal from Spanner. Then send another to the C.-in-C. signed by me as Commanding Officer of this Base. Tell him that on the fourth day from now, that’s the morning of September 28, the Massawa dry dock will dock its next ship. We’ll be out of commission four days only, including today. We’re returning no ships undocked. He’s only to delay those that haven’t started yet, by four days. Do you get that, Davy? And find out if the C.-in-C. can send me another dockmaster instead of Spanner! It makes me ill to think of having to keep him any longer!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” acknowledged Davy. “I’ll start on it immediately I’m ashore. But, Captain,” he asked, frankly puzzled, “where are you going to get all the new keel blocks? There isn’t a stick of heavy timber in Massawa to cut them from. Spanner ’s right about that.” “Spanner ’s a plain damned fool!” I exploded. “He’s supposed to be a shipwright as well, as a dockmaster, so if he weren’t blind, he’d see. They’re right under his nose. Look!” We were passing the salvaged Italian dry dock, floating only a couple of hundred yards from the Persian dock which was disabled for want of keel blocks. Stacked in neat layers out of the way on the floor of that Italian dry dock were hundreds of already cut keel blocks which the bomb explosions had tossed all over its floor. I knew those keel blocks well; I had stumbled over them as they lay scattered on the floor of that dock on the bottom of the sea when I had made my very first dive in Massawa to start off the salvage work. We couldn’t use those keel blocks again on the Italian dry dock till all the holes in her were repaired, which meant till I got steel I didn’t have. Long before I got that steel, I was sure I could get timber for new keel blocks for that dock. “All we have to do is to clean up the wreckage of the smashed blocks on the Persian dock, transfer those Italian dock keel blocks a few hundred yards over the water, and set them up in place of the crushed blocks. There’re twice as many blocks available as we need; that Italian dock’s much longer than the Persian one. Davy, if Spanner had only been what he’s supposed to be in his trade, a shipwright, instead of being an empty-headed fool, he’d never have sent that signal this morning! He’s been passing right by those huge stacks of idle keel blocks twice a day in a boat now for weeks, and he’s got the nerve to tell the C.-in-C. there’re no keel blocks in Massawa! And that for want of them, the only working dock within thousands and thousands of miles of Alex is out of commission for six weeks, maybe more unless they give us keel blocks. With technical assistants like that, no wonder commanding officers break down in- the tropics! I could shed tears myself!” Glen Galvin was maneuvering the boat in against the stern of the Persian dry dock for our landing. The naked Eritrean on the bow reached out with his boathook and hooked the dock. A brief glance down what had once been the four-foot-high row of keel blocks showed me all I wanted to know. Those blocks were lying now, a pathetic mass of crushed pulp perhaps a foot high, all along the length of the dock floor. As soon as we were close in, I leaped onto the dock floor, motioning Lloyd
Williams to follow me. Commander Davy stayed in the boat, which immediately shoved clear to go ashore. Mr. Spanner was on the stern of the dry dock floor to meet me. At once, in his chirpy manner, he began to explain what had happened, why it had happened. “Get the hell out of my sight, Spanner, and keep out of it for the next four days! I’m not blaming you for anything except that idiotic signal you sent the C.-in-C. this morning. There’s no excuse for that, and it cooks your goose with me. This dock’s going to dock its next ship four mornings from now, and I don’t want you balling things up by getting in the road. Lloyd Williams is taking charge of this dock for the next four days, and if you get in his way, it’ll be just too bad for you. Lloyd hasn’t got the patience that I’ve got. Now get out of here!” Spanner looked at me, then like a startled sparrow, he fluttered away. “Now, Lloyd,” I said to Williams as soon as Spanner had departed, “I mean just what I said. You’re in charge of this dock for the next four days. Hudson, the engineer, will help you with that overhead crane in laying the new keel blocks, and Hudson’s a man—he’ll help you. If anybody else on this dock attempts to interfere with what you want, don’t argue, smack him one. Now this is what I want. Start all the Eritreans on this dock and every man you’ve got on the Italian dock cleaning up here and moving blocks over from the salvaged dry dock. I’ll get you all the carpenters I can steal from the contractor ashore out here to help. Take everybody you can lay your hands on—it’s a hell of a big job. This is Thursday afternoon. On Monday morning we flood down to dock the next ship. Now don’t stop for anything; your gang will have to work night and day. Do it your own way, Lloyd; I won’t try to tell you how, only do it. If you want any help from me, sing out; otherwise it’s all up to you.” “Aye, aye, Captain; just leave it to me,” Williams assured me in his usual solemn tone. “If you say it’s got to be done in four days, it’ll be done.” The next few days and nights were a veritable tornado of activity between the salvaged Eytie dry dock and the Persian dry dock, with Lloyd Williams the center of a frenzied conglomeration of Eritreans, Hindoos, Maltese, Americans, Eyties, South Africans, Englishmen, Sudanese, and Persians. It was done. On Monday morning, September 28, with Lloyd Williams wan and haggard but triumphant, the dry dock was flooded down and the next ship landed on a completely new set of keel blocks. The Massawa dry dock was going again. That same day, with H.M.S. Cleopatra, the third and last of his three
damaged cruisers back on her Mediterranean war station and his whole fleet of four light cruisers now for the first time in several months again all fit for action against the enemy, Admiral Harwood sent the following message to General Maxwell: Office of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Station 28 September, 1942 For GENERAL MAXWELL from C.-in-C. Med. Very many thanks for splendid work done recently at Massawa. Quick dockings of over 50 merchant ships, raising of Italian docks, and emergency dockings of three cruisers are great achievements, and I know largely due to ELLSBERG’S own great energy. Damage caused in last docking was a risk we accepted and I am glad it was not more serious. Please congratulate ELLSBERG and all his staff. With great gusto I posted that message at the Naval Base and sent another copy to Asmara, so all who had struggled to make it possible might know their efforts were appreciated by the top command, and those others who had been just as busily engaged in heaving monkey wrenches might make of it what they pleased.
CHAPTER
46 T HE PRESENCE IN MASSAWA OF THE British mechanics, sent down with the Dido for work on the light cruisers, gave me an opportunity. They were all to go back to the Middle East upon the completion of the third cruiser, the Cleopatra, but, in between jobs on those warships, I had them available for other work around the Naval Base. Consequently, after the completion of the Dido on August 25, I shifted the lot of them over to repair work on the Italian dry dock till the Euryalus arrived, and seized the chance thus afforded to take two out of three of Captain Reed’s crew of divers, plus the remnant of the salvage mechanics who originally had worked with them, off repair work on that dry dock and start them again on salvage. The third diver, Ervin Johnson, was left on the dry dock to tend to what underwater repair work was necessary as that dry dock rehabilitation job proceeded. So now I had two divers, Al Watson and Doc Kimble, and five salvage mechanics available under Captain Reed for another salvage job. I started them on August 31 on the salvage of the smaller Italian dry dock which lay in the naval harbor completely submerged about a hundred yards to port of its salvaged sister, where the Italians had scuttled it. Reed made a swift diving survey of his new task. We found the smaller dock had been built in six sections, of which five had been blasted open by bombs. Here again, however, one bomb had misfired, only this time it was the second compartment from aft which was still intact. Except for this difference, which was not important, the salvage problem was identical with that of the first dry dock, and Reed tackled it in the same way. There was, however, one other variation which forced more mechanical work. The upper decks of the side walls of this small dock were some nine feet under water, so we had nothing to stand on while we worked, and Reed had no salvage ship to work from. To overcome this, two wood scaffoldings, about
eleven feet high and each over a hundred yards long, were built by Reed’s carpenters and set on the submerged decks of the two side walls, thus giving the men a walkway about two feet above water. For air compressors, I was somewhat better off than before. As a main source of air supply for the job, I had a huge Sutorbilt low pressure air compressor, capable of delivering 1200 cubic feet of air a minute, by itself more than one and a half times the total capacity of all four compressors on our first task. This machine was so big, it took two 200 horsepower Waukesha engines to drive it, and the whole assembly—driving engines, starting engine, belt drives, and compressor—took up about as much space as a small-sized room and stood about as high. As a matter of fact, the massive crate that this machine came in on the Chamberlin might well have served as a one-room cabin. This air compressor we mounted on a barge secured about amidships and outboard of the starboard side wall of the sunken dock, so that as the dock floated upward, it would just clear the barge. It had been my intention to use two such compressors when I started salvage on the second dry dock. I had ordered two in New York, one of which came out on the Chamberlin and which I unloaded myself in the naval harbor in Massawa, and the other of which came out on an American freighter and was unloaded in the commercial harbor by our contractor. Our contractor insisted on handling himself everything that came into Massawa; insisted on sending everything arriving in Massawa up to Asmara first, ostensibly for checking, regardless of its use or destination; and insisted also on keeping me completely in the dark as to what had arrived by freighter till it suited his plans to inform me of it (if ever). All this was one reason why I had the Chamberlin, which was my own salvage ship, brought to the naval harbor for unloading, even though the unloading facilities at my Base were vastly inferior to those in the commercial harbor. At least when something of my salvage equipment was unloaded at the Naval Base, I knew I had it, without either first searching all over Eritrea to discover it and then battling the contractor for possession of salvage equipment I had ordered for my salvage work. At any rate, in the present instance, my intelligence service informed me that the second Sutorbilt air compressor had arrived in Massawa and had been unloaded there. With this information, obtained sub rosa, I requested the contractor ’s office in Asmara to deliver the compressor to me at once as I needed it badly for salvage work. What happened then would have been
unbelievable outside an insane asylum. After some checking, the contractor informed me the air compressor had been received some time before, as stated (although he had never informed me of that), but that it had been shipped from Massawa to Asmara first for inventorying there as per his usual custom. As soon as that was completed, it would be shipped back to me. I made no comment. How any supposedly sane person could undertake to ship an air compressor assembly literally as big as a house over that tortuous mountain railroad 7500 feet up to the summit plateau, just to check the markings on its crate, and then ship it back where it started from for use, about a hundred and fifty mile journey, was beyond me. That was certainly American efficiency at its best in conserving Eritrea’s scant resources in labor in prosecuting the war. And yet some Americans were criticizing the British for inefficiency! A few days went by. I had started my salvage job and I needed that second Sutorbilt compressor, so once again I inquired by telephone as to when my salvage compressor would be sufficiently inventoried up in the mountains to be returned to me for use down on the seacoast. In some embarrassment, the contractor informed me they were still trying to locate the compressor in Asmara but hadn’t found it there yet. All their shipping papers showed its receipt in Massawa, its dispatch by rail to Asmara, but they couldn’t find any record of its receipt in Asmara, and they couldn’t find any air compressor there either. They were still searching their Asmara warehouses. Whatever happened to my mammoth air compressor assembly, I never found out. The ship’s papers showed its delivery in Massawa; the contractor ’s check sheets showed its receipts there and its dispatch to Asmara, and after that it vanished from the sight of men (particularly from mine) forever. The contractor could never find it and couldn’t offer any explanations except that probably it had been stolen by the Eyties off the train on its way to Asmara (to which, in any sane establishment, it would never have been sent). When I manifested incredulity over that, maintaining that even the rapacious Eyties would have been as badly stumped in stealing that ponderous compressor assembly as they might have been in attempting to get away with the Washington Monument, I was informed by the contractor ’s Massawa warehouse manager that a whole train of freight cars bound for Asmara not long before had vanished completely—cars, freight, and all—and had not since been found. Whether I was supposed to believe that or not, I couldn’t tell. By now, however, I was getting to the point where I could swallow anything,
however fantastic, relating to goings-on in Eritrea. Nevertheless, my invaluable compressor was gone and I could never find a trace of it. Doubtless I made of myself a considerable nuisance to the contractor, insisting that since his scheme of keeping me in the dark while he thus handled my salvage equipment had culminated in this unbelievable disappearance, he must find it for me. But the contractor was too busy all over the Middle East with vast projects on a vast scale to be overly concerned with a minor matter like the strange evaporation while in his hands of the biggest piece of machinery in all Eritrea. He never found it for me. And except perhaps to make a note that there was a disturbing influence in Massawa to be gotten rid of at the first convenient opportunity, he seemed wholly unconcerned. So with only one big Sutorbilt air compressor to carry the main load, and one very much smaller Ingersoll-Rand air compressor available to act as a stand-by when the big machine had to be shut down for servicing, we started our salvage job. By now, Al Watson and Doc Kimble, the two divers, knew their Italian dry docks; so also did all the mechanics, particularly one fine new carpenter, a mountain of a man named Bill Oyea, who had come to us since the lifting of the first dock. He was even bigger than Buck Schott, whose place as carpenter he was taking, Buck himself having been promoted to foreman under Lloyd Williams for general repair work on already salvaged wrecks. Captain Reed and his little crew of seven Americans all told, aided by a moderate number of Eyties and Eritreans, turned to enthusiastically to duplicate their initial exploit. They did, too. Starting on August 31, with only half as many divers and mechanics available to him as the first time and more work to do, since here the decks were totally submerged, by September 10 Reed had everything rigged and sealed up, ready to start the compressors. On September 10, we started pumping compressed air from the big Sutorbilt compressor to starboard and the small Ingersoll-Rand to port. Immediately air leaks showed up, air bubbling upward through the sea all over the dock structure where the steelwork was improperly caulked by the Italian builders. This time we could caulk leaks only by diving, so Al Watson and Doc Kimble had a busy time under water for some days with caulking tools, making good enough of the leaks so the dock would hold air, particularly on the starboard side wall, which I intended to lift first. Doc used a regular diving rig; but Al, who was a marvelous swimmer, did practically all of his diving in a face mask only, which, in that shallow water, was less of an encumbrance to movement.
On Sunday, September 13, the starboard side of the dry dock floated up, exposing all the deck hatches. I brought aboard the barnacled deck some small 3-inch gasoline-driven pumps, with which we then swiftly pumped free of water all the storage and machinery compartments in the upper part of that side wall, thus floating it up further till about three feet of the starboard side wall was completely out of water. All the deck hatches in the starboard side wall deck leading downward to these upper compartments we found worthless for watertightness, as their gaskets were all rotted away from long submergence. As we were unable to close these hatches therefore to retain compressed air, and the next deck down was leaking air so badly the compressors were unable to gain further on the water in the lower holds, it became necessary to get into these freshly pumpedout upper compartments and work inside them to plug leaks in the steelwork below. For that purpose, I brought over from the big Italian dock a small gang of ironworkers composed of Armstrong, riveter; Larsen, welder; and Jones, shipfitter. Armstrong and Larsen were Americans; Jones was a very tall, very thin Englishman, one of the mechanics just through with the cruiser Euryalus repair job on the Persian dock near by. With hand tools, this small crew started forward inside the newly exposed and pumped-out upper compartments of the starboard side wall, plugging all the air leaks they could find, and gradually worked their way aft. Meanwhile, the air compressors, which had been running night and day in much hotter weather even than we had had in mid-May when we raised the first dock, were having troubles. This was particularly true of the big low-pressure Sutorbilt compressor, which, never designed for service under any such conditions, was running with its compressor main bearings smoking hot all the time, literally so hot it would have been simple to have broiled steaks on them. We used the best hard grease available for lubricating those bearings, but it always melted swiftly and ran out like water, to fry odoriferously on the hot metal, giving to all the surrounding atmosphere a smell of cooking going on on a major scale. That odor of frying grease, mingled with the smell of rotting mussels on the now exposed starboard wall of the dry dock, gave an unforgettable aroma to the whole salvage operation. But as well as we could we kept both our compressors going and kept the air going down. I was holding the water level steady in the afloat starboard side and sending most of the compressed air through the cross connecting mains to
the port side, hoping soon to get buoyancy enough on that side to float it also off the bottom. In this situation, the dry dock was on a considerable slant to port, with its port side still resting in the mud on the bottom of the harbor and nine feet of water over its port side deck, while the starboard side was afloat, about three to four feet out of water along its whole length from bow to stern. What I was working for was to get an even amount of buoyancy all along the port side so it would finally float up evenly, bow and stern together, with no trim. Of course this could not be assured for there was no way of telling whether the side still in the mud was more firmly stuck to the bottom at one end than at the other; also the only set of air pressure gauges we had or could get was none too reliable in showing how far down the water had gone inside any port side compartment. All Sunday and Sunday night, and on into Monday, we kept on plugging leaks and pumping air. My three ironworkers finally arrived by the middle of Monday afternoon at the after compartment in the afloat starboard side in their quest for leaks, and there they found a very bad one. They sent Jones, the English shipfitter, for me to look it over. I followed Jones, who very much resembled a bean-pole in build, aft along the barnacle-encrusted deck to that stern compartment. While all the other hatches in the deck were on low horizontal coamings, the hatch to this after compartment was different. It was a booby hatch; that is, it was a vertical steel structure rising above the deck to the height of a man nearly, with a rather small vertical steel door opening on its forward side to give access to a steep ladder going below from just inside that door. Jones had to duck his lanky figure considerably to get through the opened door; then he descended the steep steel ladder inside. Even I had to duck a bit to avoid bumping my head on the steel door frame above; then I followed him down the ladder to find myself in an elongated watertight compartment, steaming hot inside, with no openings for ventilation except that booby hatch at the forward end by which I had entered. Lighted only by my flashlight, I followed Jones through the waterlogged rubbish of what perhaps had once been used as an Eytie storeroom, some forty feet aft to the very after end of that compartment. There was Larsen alongside Horace Armstrong, who in the cramped space overhead was futilely trying to get a decent swing with a hammer on his caulking chisel. Armstrong paused to indicate to me the trouble. A strong stream of
compressed air from the still-submerged dry dock section below was whistling out past an atrociously driven rivet in the top bounding bar of the after bulkhead. It wasn’t just a little air leak; it was a big one. The rivet, very loose, came nowhere near filling its hole; evidently the Eytie riveters, in originally driving that rivet, had had difficulty getting at it and had left the job badly botched. Armstrong, Jones, Larsen, and I held a conference on that rivet. It was finally agreed to accept Armstrong’s solution—give him time and he felt sure he could get that rivet point sufficiently caulked to stop the leak. It would be a slow job since he could hardly find space overhead amidst the cramped steel bracing for a fair swing with a hammer, but he felt he could do it. So, leaving Larsen and Jones to hold the light for him and spell him on the caulking, I left them fairly cooking in the hot vapor surrounding them and, with difficulty, threaded my way forward through the inside wreckage to the ladder, climbed up it, and squeezed out the booby hatch door to the deck. When I first went down that booby hatch, dressed only in a khaki shirt, khaki shorts, and some old shoes, I had already been thoroughly soaked with sweat; when I came out, however, I was positively dripping. I felt sorry for the men below. It was several hours after lunch and everybody was hard at work. As I went slowly forward along the starboard scaffolding reading the pressure gauges, I noted that the Eritreans were as busy as usual, scraping away from floats alongside at the barnacled side wall of the dock. Back aft was the thirty foot boat which we had fitted up with a small compressor for diving. Doc Kimble, fully encased in his diving rig, was descending the ladder over the stern of the boat to caulk some underwater leak, while Al Watson, in bathing trunks only, and Lew Whitaker were acting as his tenders. Bill Reed, salvage master, was in the boat with them to receive whatever reports Doc had to make over the diving telephone from below. On deck the dock itself below me, Lloyd Williams was working with various mechanics engaged in trying to make watertight and airtight the ruined gaskets on the deck hatches and on some other hatches which needed bracing to hold the air pressure below them. When I finally came amidships, Jim Buzbee, pump mechanic, who was standing watch on the air compressors, called to me to come down off the scaffolding and take a look at our big twin-engined air compressor; it looked to him as if we were in for serious trouble soon.
I clambered down off the scaffolding; went by the air valve manifold, an intricate array of valves by which the flow of compressed air was directed from our Sutorbilt compressor to various parts of the submerged dry dock; and then crawled down the vertical ladder on the outboard side of the dry dock to the barge on which the throbbing Sutorbilt compressor stood. It was certainly a huge array of machinery. The two massive Waukesha engines, side by side, which furnished the power, were far too big ever to dream of starting by hand cranking. Instead, in between them stood a small gasoline engine whose sole purpose was to start the big ones. After they were both unclutched from the compressor, the little gasoline engine was started by hand cranking, then clutched in to the big engines one at a time to start them; then, when both the big engines were running, they were clutched in on the compressor to carry the heavy compressor load. It was quite a slow and complicated arrangement, but workable; by hand alone, no one could ever get the rig going. However, it wasn’t the engines that were bothering Buzbee; they were doing all right in spite of the heat. It was the compressor itself. Specifically, he called my attention to the main bearings at each end of the compressor casing—they were smoking as never before. “Cap’n,” complained Buzbee, “I was just about to go looking for you. If we don’t shut this machine down quick, she’ll shut herself down. I’ve never seen those bearings so hot before. I’ve been shooting grease steadily into ’em, but it’s no use. She’s running hotter ’n blazes, and why that bearing metal hasn’t wiped out already, I don’t know. Better let me shut her down right now so she can cool off, or we won’t have any compressor left!” I looked at the bearing housings. The iron had a peculiar gray tinge I hadn’t seen before. Buzbee was certainly right; they were far too hot to continue operation. It wasn’t any use to try feeling the bearings to test whether they were too hot or not; I should only get a seared hand from that. I would have to go by sight alone and by the odor of that sizzling grease as it ran from the bearings, smoking as if it were on the point of spontaneous combustion. “O.K., Jim, you’re right. Shut her down. Only give me a few minutes to get up at that air valve manifold to close off the valves to this machine when you stop her, or the compressed air from inside the dock’ll blow back through this compressor and run it in reverse.” I climbed hurriedly up to the valve manifold above and stood by to shut off both the four-inch valves there. As soon as I was set, I waved to Buzbee below
me, who promptly unclutched the compressor and shut down both engines while I hurriedly, with both hands, screwed shut the air valves to prevent blowing back and losing the valuable compressed air we already had pumped into the dry dock. Immediately, a strange silence fell over the dock, now the roar of those two huge engines was stilled, broken only by the comparatively trifling exhaust from the smaller Ingersoll-Rand compressor still running across the water in its barge outboard of the submerged port side of the dock. I sighed regretfully. We had lost about 80 per cent of our air supply; it was doubtful if the Ingersoll-Rand by itself could even make good the leakage from all over the dock. I could now expect the afloat starboard side of the dry dock to start to sink slowly as the air leaked out from below. To minimize that, I set the air valves to throw all the air from our remaining compressor over to starboard to make good leakage there and hold the starboard side up as well as possible till the Sutorbilt compressor had cooled enough to hold grease in its bearings and make it safe to start it up again. Hardly had I finished setting valves, when I felt a tremor in the dock beneath my feet. Startled, I looked up, to see that the wood scaffolding atop the submerged port side wall of the dry dock had lifted higher above the water! The sunken port side of the dry dock was coming up, and at no slow speed either! Swiftly my eye ran along the hundred yard length of that scaffolding to port of me, to note to my dismay that it wasn’t coming up evenly fore and aft; that whatever the reasons, it had already risen farther at the stern than at the bow, and that that already bad situation was getting worse as she rose. I gazed in agony. At this moment of all moments when I had just lost my big air compressor and with it all chance of controlling the movements of that dock, the port side with no air at all going into it any longer, had broken free of the mud at last and was on its way up, stern first instead of evenly, throwing the whole dry dock out of balance and heading for possible catastrophe! By now the port side had risen three or four feet, easily visible to everyone anywhere on or near the dock. All around I heard men begin to cheer at the sight, but to me it was nothing to cheer over. In anguish, I sang out to Buzbee below me to starboard, just beginning to inspect the dead compressor. “For God’s sake, Jim, start that compressor up again! Never mind if we ruin it now! START IT UP!” Buzbee, masked by the starboard outboard side of dry dock near him from any view of what was going on to port, couldn’t understand my sudden
reversal of his orders, but like the faithful helper I had always found him, asked no questions and dashed for the little starting engine to crank that up first and get things going, while I stood by the compressor air manifold valves to twirl them open the moment the big compressor started to roll over, and shoot all the compressed air I could get forward into the starboard bow of the dry dock to hold that up. We were going to need it there. For already I could see that the starboard bow of the dry dock was trimming lower into the water as the port side rose, high by the stern. A few seconds more and the stern on the port side broke above the surface while the starboard bow directly ahead of me, previously three feet or more out of water, slowly sank lower and I could see the ocean gradually rising toward the deck. Below me to starboard, Buzbee was frantically working to start up the compressor engines, but it was an involved and a slow job. I looked to port. The whole deck of the port side wall was now above water, still stern high, with the entire skeleton of that eleven foot high scaffolding standing on it completely exposed. But now I could see also that on the depressed starboard bow the ocean was already lapping aft along the deck and water was starting to pour down the forward hatches into the bow compartments of the dry dock. For me, that spelled the end. Even if I got air now from the compressor, it was too late. Nothing could save the entire dock, now all afloat, from swiftly sinking again as those bow compartments flooded and the water ran swiftly aft to flood other compartments in succession. There was no longer any hope of keeping the dock afloat. All I could do was to see no one was trapped inside when it went down. I left my useless station at the air manifold to run aft along the scaffolding shouting for all hands below to get up on deck. Whether Jim Buzbee ever got that air compressor started then, I don’t know yet. It made no difference any more. Long before I got near the stern along that stretch of starboard side scaffolding, the whole dry dock had submerged again, both sides. Nothing of it was visible any more except a foot or two of the tops of the scaffoldings which a moment or two before had all been completely above water. All about, swimming in the turbulent sea, were the men who had been working before on deck the starboard side, and, I fervently hoped, those who had been working below decks. The broken water all about, badly disturbed by the sudden rising and the even more sudden sinking of the dry dock, was a mass of foam in which heads were bobbing about, striking out for the scaffoldings or the boats
for support. I had only one worry—had everybody got clear from below? Hurriedly I looked about me, but with mainly only unrecognizable heads dotting the foaming sea, there wasn’t any way of taking an immediate muster. But one thing I knew—whether anyone else had been below when the trouble started, Armstrong, Larsen, and Jones certainly had been. They had all been far aft inside the very compartment at the stern now submerged beneath my feet, into which I could see a flood of water must be pouring through the invisible booby hatch leading down to it, marked at that instant by a swirling vortex of water going down and of air bubbling up. Had those three men got out before the dock submerged aft, the last part of it to vanish? In agony I looked about. I saw nothing of any of them on the scaffolding, in the few boats or floats near by. They might indeed be among the swimmers I couldn’t recognize; that I couldn’t tell. My eyes fell on Lloyd Williams on the scaffolding near me. He had been on deck of the dock near that booby hatch when the dock started to submerge. He might have seen whether those men had escaped or not. “Lloyd!” I shouted. “Where’s Armstrong and his mates? Did they get clear?” “Don’t know, Captain. I didn’t see ’em get out. All I think I saw was a hand waving out that booby hatch when she went down, but I can’t swear to it!” So probably they hadn’t escaped; they were trapped below by the inrushing water. If we would save them, we must act swiftly. Close by me at the stern now was my diving boat. In it, still fully dressed in a diving rig except for his diving helmet and his partly unbolted breastplate, sat Doc Kimble, apparently up from his last dive and being undressed when catastrophe struck. Near him in the boat were Captain Reed, with Al Watson and Lew Whitaker who had been undressing Kimble. “Bill!” I shouted to Reed. “Clap Doc’s helmet back on him again and get him overboard! There’re three men trapped in the stern here!” “No use, Cap’n,” shouted back Reed, “It’ll take five minutes to get Doc dressed again. They’ll all be drowned by then!” Reed was right. That couldn’t be done swiftly enough to matter. But alongside Kimble was Watson, a fine swimmer and an expert diver in a face mask, which would take him only a moment to slip on and go overboard. “Al!” I shrieked. “Get on your face mask and get overboard to help those men!” Watson took a look at that veritable maelstrom of water and air over the
booby hatch, then answered briefly, “Can’t be done, Cap’n. Anybody going in there now’ll only be sucked through and killed himself!” My heart turned to lead. There was no absolute certainty that those three men were trapped below, but they probably were. And if they were and we waited either for Doc to get dressed or the water to calm enough for an expert swimmer like Al to dare that whirlpool in a face mask, it would be too late. I wasn’t much of a swimmer myself, but those were my men trapped inside that submerged dry dock and I was responsible for them. They couldn’t be allowed to die without at least an effort, poor as it might be, being made to save them. I plunged overboard from the scaffolding into the boiling vortex marking the booby hatch. It was nine feet down through the water to that booby hatch and the instant I submerged, I could no longer see anything—just a mass of swirling water, milky with air bubbles, impossible to see through even an inch. Fortunately, my plunge took me straight down where I wanted to go; possibly the inward rush of water helped suck me to the right spot. At any rate, completely blinded, I still by feel spotted myself in front of the booby hatch, over toward the latch side. I turned right side up, felt the door was open a bit, not much, and grabbed its edge with one hand to hold myself down while I felt round the steel door with the other. My fumbling fingers came across something soft, an arm, jammed between the door and its frame. There was somebody still down there! One man at least! I tried to swing the steel door open but still there was some pressure of water pouring through to hold it closed. Frenziedly I braced both my legs somehow against the unseen barnacle-encrusted booby hatch, clinging to that arm with one hand lest I lose it in the rush of water when the door opened, while with the other I heaved with all the strength I had against that steel door. It swung back. With both hands then, I got a good grip on the shoulder of the arm I had and dragged a completely limp body out of the hatch, though still I could see nothing of it. Gripping that body tightly now, with one arm and both legs, I pawed my way up through the sea to the surface. Immediately I came up, gasping for air, a dozen arms reached down to grip me and my burden. I was alongside a boat which apparently had got there while I was below. Willy-nilly, I was dragged up into that boat, still clinging to whoever I had in my arms. In the process, the whole right half of my khaki shirt was torn from my back by someone heaving on me. The next moment, I
was inside the boat, half strangled, gasping for breath and looking down at Horace Armstrong unconscious at my feet. If Armstrong had been caught below, the two others with him probably still were there. “Give ’im first aid, quick!” I mumbled, and then went overboard again. Once more I brought up alongside the booby hatch, to grip it with both legs while I felt about in the milky swirl inside the now opened door. My hands came across another body, just as limp as Armstrong’s, jammed in the upper part of the booby hatch against its curving steel back. With a strong tug, I dragged it clear, and shoved off for the surface again with whoever it was clutched tightly against my breast. I saw it was Lloyd Williams who dragged me into the boat this time, while others helped. I dropped my lifeless burden on the floor boards, looked at it. It was Larsen. A little aft in the boat several men were already working on Armstrong. Only Jones could be left now. I jumped overboard a third time to get him. For the third time I went down. The water around that booby hatch door was quieter now but as impenetrable to sight as ever. I felt through the door. My clawing fingers touched nothing. I jammed a whole arm and part of my body inside, clinging somehow with my legs to the framework of the booby hatch to keep from going through into what must now be that wholly flooded compartment, and thank God, my fingers closed on another body in the upper part of that booby hatch, apparently as lifeless as both the others. This must be Jones; there were only three men there. With considerably more trouble than before, I managed to drag Jones’ limp figure out through the little door into the clear and start up with him through the sea. For the third and last time my head popped through the surface, there finally to be dragged into the boat to stay. Exhausted, I sank down on a thwart, while others began first aid on Jones, when to their surprise he opened his eyes languidly and looked around. The other two, who had been brought up first, were completely out, perhaps dead, but Jones, who had been down longer than either, was semiconscious! The only way I could ever explain that was that being so very tall, his nose may have come into a little pocket of air in the top of that booby hatch above the door frame, allowing him to get at least a few whiffs of air while the others, completely engulfed in water, strangled. But there was no time for speculation. Hurriedly all three men were put in
separate boats where they could all conveniently be worked over at once, and first aid for drowning proceeded on all of them. In a few minutes, Glen Galvin and my boat, which had raced ashore for the surgeon, was back with Lieutenant Salmeri (who had lately relieved Captain Plummer as our surgeon), together with several Army hospital corpsmen and their pulmotor equipment. Out in open boats over the now wholly sunken dry dock, they went to work. Jones was speedily restored to full consciousness. Within an hour Larsen also had been brought to, was breathing regularly, and was out of danger. Only Horace Armstrong, the first man I had brought up, still was not revived, though Dr. Salmeri thought that he could detect a faint heartbeat in his stethoscope. They would keep on working on Armstrong. With a heavy heart and my prayers following him, I watched Horace Armstrong, still limp, still steadily being worked on with a pulmotor, taken ashore in my boat (together with the now revived Larsen and Jones), there to have resuscitation methods continued in the sickbay. For the first time, now that the three men were gone from out in the harbor, I took a look at myself. I was a mess. I had on only half a shirt, the left half; the right half of my shirt, together with the gold-striped shoulder mark that belonged there, was gone completely. But what surprised me was that the left leg of my khaki shorts was cut wide open, and my left leg inside from knee to groin was a mass of gashes, looking as if a razor had slashed deeply into it vertically at least a dozen times. And I hadn’t even noticed it before! Apparently at some point below while I was gripping that booby hatch between my legs to hold myself, the barnacles encrusting it had gone to work on me. Lew Whitaker had in his diving boat a bottle of some special antiseptic he had brought from Los Angeles, used by the fishermen around Catalina Island to avoid infection from cuts on fish. We had found it helpful in Massawa. A good part of the liquid in that bottle went on my leg into all those gashes; then Doc Kimble (who actually was an M.D. but preferred diving for a change) bandaged up the whole inside of my leg and I was ready to go to work again. It was around 5 P.M. Still out on the scaffoldings or in boats near by were all my men (except the three Dr. Salmeri had taken ashore) gazing mournfully at what little of the scaffoldings still showed above water. So far as I could judge, nothing of our air main setup or of the scaffoldings supporting it had been injured during the wild gyrations of the dry dock in rising and sinking again. My men were still all more or less in a state of shock over what had just
occurred; when they got over it, what their reactions might be to continued work on that unfortunate dry dock would be difficult to estimate. But at the moment, all were too numbed to do much thinking, so before their wounds could stiffen, so to speak, and slow them up, I started all hands immediately on the re-raising of that dry dock. The bearings on the Sutorbilt compressor had cooled somewhat; we packed them with fresh grease and started it up, sending all its air down to the sunken starboard side. That done, I busied all hands in getting out from shore and from the big Eytie dry dock another set of gasoline-driven 3-inch pumps to replace the ones now on the submerged dock beneath us, which would be waterlogged and useless even when they emerged once more from the sea. At 10 P.M. that Monday night, lighted only by the stars and the glimmer of a few electric lights, the starboard side of the dry dock floated up again. All hands turned to with the new pumps to dry out for the second time all the upper compartments, including the after one where stood that now innocuouslooking barnacle-covered booby hatch in which our three shipmates had been trapped. There was no cessation of work, even in the darkness. Once the starboard side upper compartments were pumped dry and that side again as high out of water as it originally had been before our accident, I swung most of the compressed air over to the port side. We had one thing in our favor. Now at least it was night, and hot though it was, we were spared the radiant heat of the sun playing on our big compressors. If only I could get the port side up again while still I had that big Sutorbilt compressor running, I would be all right. Hour after hour, I kept pouring compressed air into the port side, praying for action before dawn, while yet we had the night to favor us. At 3:30 A.M. the port side showed signs of movement, then began to float up as before somewhat by the stern. Instantly, with Bill Reed helping me twirl valves, we shut off air from the port side, shot everything we had in the way of compressed air from both compressors forward into the bow compartment on the starboard side to hold it up in spite of the tendency of the rising stern to trim it down into the sea again. It worked. This time the bow never went under as the port side broke surface and then after bobbing about in a mass of broken water settled down with the whole dry dock on a fairly even keel. Savagely, in the darkness the salvage crew shifted our 3-inch pumps across
the water over to the port side, hurriedly to pump out the now exposed upper compartments there and ensure enough buoyancy to avoid that side’s sinking again. Meanwhile, to help the same end, I redistributed the flow of compressed air all over the dry dock to hold it as level as possible. When dawn came not long afterwards and the flaming sun went to work on us again, we had won. Both sides of the dry dock were high out of water, all danger past, and rising rapidly from all the compressed air now being poured in. The salvage task was over. In sixteen days, by September 15, with somewhat less than half the men used to raise the large dry dock in nine days, Captain Reed and his little crew had salvaged its smaller sister, just as badly blasted by bombs. But the dawn brought us no feeling of triumph as we gazed on our handiwork. For Horace Armstrong was dead. At midnight my boat had brought out to us the sad news. At 11 P.M., after seven hours of continuous first aid in resuscitation, at first by hand in the boat, later by pulmotor ashore, whatever faint signs of life Armstrong had manifested had vanished completely, and Dr. Salmeri sadly had to admit there was no longer any hope of revival. Our shipmate was gone. As I remembered Horace Armstrong, swinging a huge sledge hammer under the stern of HM.S. Dido, together with his comrade Bill Cunningham, showing the Middle East what an American could do when it was necessary, I wept when I heard that he was dead.
CHAPTER
47 ON SEPTEMBER 3, JUST AFTER WE had started salvage on the smaller Italian dry dock, my second salvage tug, the Resolute, finally arrived in Massawa, some three months out from Port Arthur over that same 13,000 miles of open sea that her sister, the Intent, before her had successfully traversed. I gazed on the Resolute with mixed feelings. Her skipper, Captain Byglin, while a good seaman, knew nothing of salvage, and was of no help to me that way. Acting as her first mate was Captain Frank Roys, hastily flown to Trinidad to join her there for the rest of the voyage, and to serve as her Salvage Master on arrival. Roys was a good salvage man; I knew him and had tried myself to engage him before my departure from New York, but he was then not free to go. Now he had arrived with the Resolute but the Resolute had brought not a single diver with her! What good to me was another salvage ship and even another salvage master, when they had no divers with them to work on salvage? My predicament regarding divers was distressing. I had fewer available to me than in early June. The Chamberlin, having lost her best diver, Wood, was in a bad way for divers herself. After several weeks spent unloading her holds, she was ready to go to work, but being highly unmaneuverable, she could not safely be moored alongside any wreck. So I had selected for her to work on, the XXIII Marzo, one of the wrecks to the right of the entrance to the naval harbor, a ship which had her bottom badly blown out fore and aft and was a tough wreck to raise. But she was one of the few where the cumbersome Chamberlin could moor herself safely close enough to send boats over to work from without fouling up any channels needed for harbor entrance. Captain Hansen of the Chamberlin had now only four divers for his task, not enough for the vast amount of underwater work required; of these four, while two were very willing workers, none were expert divers. Hansen was going to have a rough time with his wreck, I knew; he couldn’t spare any divers for the
Resolute. By now, I had already lost four divers permanently, but I had received one other good diver, who had applied by mail to me for a job while I was in New York. However, before his letter reached me, I had sailed. So Mr. Flanagan, my dynamic assistant in New York, had hired him, and sent him out by ship alone. He had finally arrived a short time before and had turned to temporarily with Reed’s crew, proving himself a fine diver. I had hoped to use him on the Resolute, which I had been informed was coming without divers. But that scheme had shortly blown up in my face. He had come to me to quit; he could go home and make more money diving than he was getting in Massawa; or, better yet in his eyes, the contractor had agreed to give him a job as a construction foreman ashore at considerably more than his diving pay. Unless I could better either offer, he was through diving for me. I refused. I couldn’t pay him more than the other divers were getting. And as for letting him go, that I wouldn’t either. He had asked for the job himself; he had signed a contract to dive in Massawa for nine months on the very terms he was getting; besides, I desperately needed him as a diver; he couldn’t back out. But he and the contractor between them quickly showed me that he could. Contract or no contract, he quit and walked off the job. Short of trying to put him in jail, I could do nothing about it. Then strangest of all, in spite of my violent protests, the contractor himself who was a party to the very contract my diver had so cavalierly disregarded, after a brief interval took him on as one of his supervisors at a considerable increase in pay. So the rest of my divers got a stiff jolt to their morale—while they dived under heartbreaking conditions, there was one of their former mates in a cushy job ashore at more money—truly an excellent situation to encourage them in risking their lives undersea. At any rate, there I was with the salvage ship Resolute and no divers for her. All I could do was to break Ervin Johnson off diving work on the repairs to the large Italian dry dock whenever he could be spared there and lend him to the Resolute for her to work with Johnson on what could be done under such conditions on the wreck of the Moncalieri, scuttled ahead the XXIII Marzo on which the Chamberlin had started. So from the beginning to near its end, the month of September drifted hectically along. The Resolute arrived on September 3 and started on the Moncalieri the same day the Chamberlin began operations on the XXIII Marzo. Over in the south harbor, all through the month the Intent was struggling with
the Frauenfels. On September 5, we dry-docked the Euryalus for repairs; on September 9, we undocked her. On September 14, the wreck of the smaller Italian dry dock came up and sank again and Horace Armstrong was killed; on September 15, we finally raised that dry dock. (I might add here, that the day after Armstrong’s death, I had learned that he had not drowned, which at least eased a bit my mental torture that if only I had been a little quicker, he might have been resuscitated like the two men I had brought up after him. Dr. Salmeri, after an autopsy, had discovered that Armstrong had died, not of drowning, but of ruptured lungs. Apparently, first man at the steel door of the booby hatch, as he was emerging, the rush of water pouring down had slammed the steel door to on him. The closing door had hit him a terrible blow across the chest, injuring his lungs so he died as a result. Then the swinging door had jammed closed on his arm, blocking the solitary exit to Larsen and Jones behind him.) On September 19, I dry-docked the Cleopatra in the Persian dry dock and then had to fly to Alexandria for a conference. On September 24, I returned to Massawa to find the Cleopatra had made hash of my Persian dry dock. From September 24 to 28, we worked frantically to restore that dry dock to service. On September 28, we succeeded and resumed docking on the never-ending stream of supply ships flowing to us from the Mediterranean. Normally, that might have been considered a sufficiently full month for any naval base, even for far better manned ones than ours, but more was added. I have previously mentioned that the British had another salvage operation going in the commercial harbor, which harbor was exclusively assigned for salvage to Captain McCance and his British co-workers. His company had received its contract in October of 1941; in December, 1941, it was reported to the British Admiralty that excellent progress was being made; by early September, 1942, nothing had yet been floated and the Admiralty, considering all the salvage equipment furnished and all the money it had paid out, was becoming somewhat discouraged with the results McCance was achieving. To make matters worse, McCance had twice tried to salvage the huge floating crane sunk alongside the Massawa commercial wharfs, and twice had failed. That crane was a sore point with me. It had been scuttled simply by opening its sea valves; no explosives had been used in it to damage its hull. As it lay in about forty feet of water alongside the quay, it should at most have been a few weeks’ work or less for any competent salvage master to recover, undamaged as it was, and restore it to service where it would have been of
tremendous value on the multitude of small salvage jobs in Massawa. But McCance was not competent, or if he was, he was never on the scene long enough properly to supervise. Whatever the cause, nine months after salvage operations had started on that crane, it was still on the bottom. And what was worse, in his two bungling attempts to raise that crane, McCance had thoroughly ruined the watertight-ness of its previously undamaged main deck, and had finally, after his second failure, given it up as hopeless of salvage. At that point, in late August, he had cabled his company in London, reporting the crane impossible to raise. He recommended that it be demolished by explosives as it lay on the bottom, thereby at least clearing the berth alongside the quay which it was blocking, as the Italians had intended. The Admiralty demurred at granting permission for demolition. Next to the two Italian dry docks, that huge crane was the most valuable piece of marine equipment in the Red Sea, if only it could be recovered. Instead of acquiescing, they cabled Captain Lucas, ordering him to get in touch with me to request me to advise McCance on how to raise that crane, assuming I still thought it possible after all the added damage to it. So Captain Lucas, laying the whole sad tale before me, asked me if I thought the crane could still be lifted. I told him I did. Then he requested me, as the Admiralty had ordered him, to advise McCance on how to do it. I refused. I told Captain Lucas he could advise the Admiralty I saw no value in giving McCance any advice. I had no authority over McCance and couldn’t make him take my advice after I’d given it to him. All that would happen would be that the bungling McCance would by distant control from Asmara bungle the job a third time and then blame my plan for failure. I could carry out my own plan to raise the crane with men over whom I had authority. I wouldn’t trust it to McCance under any circ*mstances, nor to any others whom I could merely advise, not direct, regardless of who they were. If the British Admiralty wanted to turn the lifting of that sunken crane over to me, though now it was a far harder task than originally, requiring peculiar methods to overcome the damage McCance had inflicted on that crane, I’d lift it for them. Otherwise, they could leave me out of it. Captain Lucas reported by cable to the Admiralty the results of his discussion. But nothing happened. Apparently the Admiralty couldn’t turn over to me the salvage of that badly needed crane without canceling wholly the contract McCance’s company held. And they couldn’t bring themselves to that. Neither would they acquiesce in the demolition by explosives of the crane. So
matters remained in the status quo. The crane stayed on the bottom, all work on it abandoned. The berth it was blocking remained blocked. McCance, monocle and all, continued in misdirection of salvage in the commercial harbor of Massawa, operating mainly from Asmara, for it was damned hot in Massawa where I was laboring under the hallucination that the place for a salvage officer is where the wrecks are. Then early in September, a remarkable thing happened; something I should hardly have believed had I not witnessed it. McCance and his men almost salvaged a wreck! What happened, had it not been tragic, would have been humorous. Lying in the middle of the commercial harbor was the scuttled wreck of the Italian steamer Gera, a little smaller than the Frauenfels on which Brown was then working with the Intent in the south harbor, and almost identically damaged— both had two bomb holes blasted in their sides. But whereas I expected Brown and his little crew to finish so we could lift the Frauenfels about ten or eleven weeks after he started on her, McCance’s company, with a far larger force than Brown had, had been working on the Gera over six months, and more probably around nine. After six to nine months on what should have been about a six to nine weeks’ job, McCance’s men finally got the holes in the Gera patched up with cement, and McCance came down from Asmara, monocle and all, in white as usual, to supervise the pumping out of the Gera to lift her. As McCance, I knew, had a whole warehouseful of British pumps, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t, assuming his men had done a decent patching job, which they certainly had taken time enough to do. About September 4, the pumping on the Gera started. Since I wasn’t invited to witness the operation and would have been too busy anyway to have accepted even had I been invited, I noted it only casually morning and evening, looking out from the second floor of Building 35, which had a good view over the commercial harbor about a mile away on the west side of the Abd-ElKader Peninsula. Roughly on September 5, the Gera lifted her main deck above water. If McCance had got that far, the ship should soon be high enough to tow around to the naval harbor for docking to repair her damaged hull, and I began to wonder vaguely where I might fit her into the docking schedule between the Euryalus, due to arrive in a few days, and the Cleopatra, soon to follow the Euryalus. I wanted to dock her in the brief interval, ten days, between those two
cruisers, while still I had all the temporary British mechanics in Massawa. Otherwise, repairing her would put a severe crimp in the other Massawa repair operations. But I soon found I had no cause for concern. By September 7, the Gera was fairly afloat but very badly heeled over, unfit for dry-docking, and that was as far as McCance ever got with her. The next ten days, every time I looked out over the commercial harbor, the only matter in doubt was whether the Gera was about to capsize to starboard, or whether this time it was her port side she was about to roll over on, making of her a worse obstruction to traffic in the harbor than originally she had been. Considering that McCance had plenty of men and plenty of pumps, within four days at the outside he should have dried her out and straightened her up, light enough for dry-docking. But it didn’t happen. Day after day she wobbled from side to side, making everyone about the harbor seasick to look at her. The cruiser Euryalus came and went; the small Italian dry dock came up, went down, came up again; all the period in which I might have dry-docked the Gera faded day after day; finally came September 18, the day before the Cleopatra was due. When she left, all my extra British mechanics were going with her. It was too late now to dry-dock the Gera before the Cleopatra; and after that warship left I should no longer have workmen to handle the job conveniently. On September 18, I received a telephone call from Captain Lucas at the Royal Naval Base. From him I learned that McCance was in desperate straits with the Gera; every pump he had in his overflowing warehouse had in succession been put aboard the Gera in the past two weeks and every one of them now was broken down, leaving him helpless with his wreck, which now he was sure was going to capsize on him unless he got more pumps. Would I be so kind as to lend McCance four salvage pumps to save the situation? I told Lucas I’d be glad to and as swiftly as possible deliver them to him aboard the Gera. Hurriedly, I dragged the Resolute, my nearest ship, away from her wreck, loaded four new American pumps, two 6-inch and two 4-inch Jaegers, aboard her, steamed at full speed out of the naval harbor and around the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula into the commercial harbor to deliver them. We steamed in alongside the Gera, which was badly heeled to port, and there was McCance, monocle still in his eye, but his beautiful white clothes rather soiled, clinging to a bulkhead grab rod to avoid sliding overboard. “What’s the matter?” I asked, curious as to why in two weeks’ time he hadn’t
got his wreck erect and pumped dry. It should long ago easily have been done with far fewer pumps than were in sight on deck the Gera. McCance mistook my question. “All my pumps have broken down,” he answered. “The blighters I’ve got aboard here have been dipping salt water up out of the holds and putting it into the radiators instead of coming up the ladders to get fresh water; every pump engine below has frozen up as a result of all that salt in its cylinder jackets.” I said nothing. If McCance didn’t know enough to observe what was happening before it went too far, it was his funeral, not mine. And if he didn’t have sense enough as salvage officer not to wear white aboard a wreck, he probably was spending too much time trying to keep his clothes clean to notice what kind of water went into the radiators. “Where do you want these pumps?” I asked, preparing to have Frank Roys, salvage master on the Resolute, swing them over with his boom. “Just a minute, Captain Ellsberg,” answered McCance. “What are your conditions? I’ve got to know them before I can accept the pumps.” I stared at McCance in blank amazement. Conditions? I hadn’t thought of any conditions; I was merely lending a man in trouble some desperately needed pumps. Then it dawned on me. As a commercial salvage man himself, McCance was afraid I might enter a salvage claim against the Gera for salvage for having helped save a vessel in desperate condition from capsizing, and thus force him to divide his salvage fee for the salvage of the Gera. He wanted to know how much I was going to hold him up for before he took the pumps. “There aren’t any conditions,” I replied angrily. What did he think I was, anyway? “I’m just lending you some pumps, that’s all. It’s in return for some air compressors and a couple of pumps Captain Lucas once got from your warehouse for me. All I ask of you is that you see your men don’t put any salt water in these radiators and ruin them too.” I turned to Captain Roys. “Swing those pumps aboard her, Frank, and let’s get out of here. They seem to think we’re a gang of pirates!” We delivered the pumps and steamed away from the terribly heeled over Gera. Those were four fine new pumps. If McCance couldn’t straighten up his wreck with them, he wasn’t any good at all. He wasn’t. Over the next couple of days, the Gera careened as crazily as ever from side to side. On September 19, I departed on my way to Alexandria, leaving the Cleopatra just dry-docked. On September 24, I got back; the Gera was no nearer safety than when I had left. That day and the following day, I
could pay little attention to her antics; I was too busy seeing to the rehabilitation of the crushed keel blocks in the Persian dry dock. When I left my room in Building 35 early on September 25 there was the Gera still badly over to port. It seemed unbelievable. Three weeks had gone by since that ship had lifted off the bottom and she was now no nearer safety from capsizing than the day she had lifted. At least by accident in all that time, one would have thought they might have got her straightened up. Evidently McCance had a far greater capacity for blundering incompetence than I had given him credit for. In the early evening of that day, Friday, September 25, Captain Lucas phoned me to ask if I could come immediately to see him. I went, leaving Lloyd Williams to struggle alone with the keel blocks in the Persian dry dock. Matters in respect to the Gera had apparently reached a climax. McCance had just sent a message to inform Captain Lucas that again all the pumps, including mine now, were broken down and he was helpless to do anything further to save the Gera. Whether that meant he was voluntarily throwing up the sponge, I didn’t learn, but I believe that was what was meant. At any rate, Captain Lucas, acting on cabled authority from the Admiralty to use his discretion, had decided the time had come to use it—he was canceling completely the contract held by McCance and his company in London. Would I be willing to take over everything, and particularly was I willing to take over instantly and try to save the Gera? I told him if he would give me an official order canceling the British contract and authorizing me to take over, I’d take over at once. He had the order already made out—he handed it to me. It was about 6 P.M. I hurried from his office to organize an emergency salvage party for the Gera. Hastily I started the crew of the Resolute, just in from her wreck and alongside our Naval Base pier, out to both salvaged dry docks to pick up from them all the salvage pumps still on those docks; rounded up Captain Reed and all his salvage men; got hold of Bob Steele to help on stability calculations, and at 7 P.M. everybody steamed away for the commercial harbor on the Resolute with half a dozen assorted pumps on her fantail. At 7:30 P.M., we were alongside the port side of the Gera, listed now so badly to port it was impossible to stand on deck without holding on to something and with her port gunwale very nearly awash. She was in a very bad way; no pumps of any nature were running on her. Far up on the high side, clinging there to the railing, I spotted Captain
McCance. Telling Captain Reed only to start unloading pumps, to get them down inside the hatches, and to get some running in one hold forward and one hold aft as fast as possibly he could, I left him. I clambered with great difficulty up that inclined deck to where McCance stood, bedraggled in his white clothes, for once without his monocle, looking wan and haggard as he clung to the upper rail to keep from sliding down the deck and overboard. I was sorry for the poor devil; nobody looking at him then against a background of complete failure could help pitying him. Hanging to the rail with one hand myself, I handed him a copy of the order from Captain Lucas, acting in the name of the Admiralty. “We’ll take over now, Captain,” I said, as sympathetically as I could. “Better luck to you elsewhere in the future.” “What do you want of me?” asked McCance, reading the brief order. “Nothing at all, Captain. You’re all knocked out. Better get off and go home to get some sleep. We’ll take care of this ship. Don’t worry any more.” But I was wasting my sympathy on McCance, I swiftly found. He began to insist that I give him a receipt for the Gera, afloat in safe condition. I looked at him in astonishment. He wanted me to sign a certificate which, if the Gera immediately capsized on me before I could do anything to her to save her, would put all the blame on me? I promptly quit feeling sorry for Captain McCance; even if he’d lost his monocle, he hadn’t lost his monocle manner. “If you’ll get down this deck after me, on to the Resolute where I can get a hand free to write without breaking my neck, I’ll give you a receipt for the Gera ‘as is’ and no conditions. And that’s all you’ll get! Take it or leave it!” Very cautiously, hand over hand, I worked my way down that dangerous slope on to the Resolute, wrote out the receipt as promised, and saw McCance off. Then I turned to. But I had little to do myself. Captain Reed, elderly as he was and with only one good eye for observation in getting about, knew his business; so did Captain Roys; so did all the salvage men I’d brought out. To all of them the Gera was a challenge—for three weeks they’d all observed her teetering crazily on the verge of going over, itching to get their fingers on her. Now at last she was theirs—they would show everybody round about that harbor in Massawa what salvage men could do. On careened decks on which a monkey would have had difficulty in getting about, they manhandled the pumps aboard, got them down terrifically inclined hatches, coupled up discharge and suction hoses. Then in one hold forward and
another aft, I got pumps rolling over and pumping out water, so as to get two holds dry and give the ship some stability before she rose high enough to make her topheavy and capsize her—the one thing McCance, trying to empty, all holds together, hadn’t had understanding enough to do. Of course it was an all-night job; we didn’t start until 7:30 P.M. Our greatest hazard we found as darkness caught us was to avoid breaking our necks on those sloping decks falling over McCance’s collection of broken-down pumps littering the Gera. Every kind of pump I’d ever seen or heard of was there in profusion, every one a piece of junk at the moment—gasoline-driven pumps; steam-driven pumps, both reciprocating and centrifugal; diesel-driven pumps; electric-driven pumps, both ordinary motor-driven centrifugals and special submersible units; together with donkey boilers to furnish steam and massive diesel-driven generators to furnish electricity for their special pump units. There was nearly enough broken-down salvage machinery on the Gera’s decks to make her topheavy enough to capsize from that cause alone. And that was only what was up on deck. There was plenty more broken down inside the holds, including, from what causes I didn’t know, the four new pumps I had loaned McCance. We worked all night. By noon on Saturday the Gera was fairly well dried out in all her holds, floating erect, and no longer in any danger. At noon on Sunday, September 27, with all holds and machinery spaces dry, we towed the Gera, stable and upright for the first time in three weeks, out of the commercial harbor and around inside the naval harbor, to moor her there, waiting a propitious moment when from somewhere I could get men enough to repair her damaged hull when I docked her. All my temporary English mechanics had departed with the Cleopatra three days before. Perhaps soon I should get some of that batch of 200 mechanics promised me from Alex, and for whom, with Captain Lucas’ co-operation, I was already preparing quarters. At any rate, there in our harbor near the Liebenfels lay now the Gera, on which Captain Reed and his men, together with Captain Roys and the Resolute’s crew, gazed with much pride. In two days, aided by a little knowledge, they had accomplished what all McCance’s men and machinery had failed to accomplish in three weeks. Seeing that it was already Sunday afternoon, I let Reed and Roys and all their men have the rest of the day off as a reward, and decided to take the rest of the day off myself. So far, September had been rather wearing. September, however, was not quite through with us. Next day, Monday, September 28, with all work on the keel blocks of the Persiandock completed
by Lloyd Williams, I dry-docked the next supplyship and then settled back for a few days of only routine work tillon October 1 the Frauenfels would be ready for lifting and all handswould go to work again. Everything seemed propitious. The weather was as hot and humid as ever. But September, at least, the month (so I had been assured by my British friends who knew Massawa better than I) which would certainly knock us out with the heat even if June, July, and August hadn’t, was practically gone and we were still on deck with a considerable amount accomplished. I no longer had any cause to worry about the Massawa heat stopping operations at my Naval Base, though the contractor had long since cut off working in the middle of the day on his construction jobs. Monday ended in the most gorgeous evening I had ever seen in the Red Sea. I can’t describe it better than by a direct quotation from the end of a letter I wrote my wife that evening (and finished next morning): However, it is Monday night now and all is calm and peaceful on the shores of the Red Sea. I went down to the waterfront in the night to look over my collection, and we had a most marvelous harbor scene—no moon, but the brilliant stars glowing over the dark water which was absolutely smooth and like a mirror in which was reflected the inverted image of the nearest ship, our first salvage prize. And farther off sparkled the lights of the salvaged dry docks and our other salvaged ship. A lovely night—but utterly wasted here alone by your devoted NED. P.S. Tuesday morning, September 29 About 2 A.M., our quiet night went all to hell. It started to rain (very unusual here) and blow like the devil. Our first ship [the Liebenfels] dragged its anchor down the harbor about half a mile before I could get some tugs alongside and drag her back to a safe anchorage. And our second one [the Gera] parted her stern mooring and swung round on her head mooring till she grounded astern. We’ll have to pull her off at high tide tonight. Quite an exciting life. It was. When high tide came, late at night on September 29, with the Resolute, the Intent, the Hsin Rocket, and the Pauline Moller all tugging together on heavy hawsers, we managed by morning of September 30 to drag the stern of the
Gera off the mud flat on to which the sudden gale had driven it hard, but fortunately not damaged it. Most of September 30 was spent in remooring her again with such steel hawsers as Massawa afforded. And so ended September. September had been a very hectic month for me.
CHAPTER
48 ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, ALL UNDERWATER work on the scuttled Frauenfels was completed, as scheduled, and with practically everything I had at my command, I started out to lift her. During the eleven weeks since July 16 when he had started, Brown and his little crew of twelve had struggled faithfully, underwater and on the surface, to patch up with cement the two large holes, one forward and one aft, which Nazi bombs had blasted in her, and to seal up watertight all seachests, close or plug all inside valves, build cofferdams around the submerged deck hatches, and rig up the pumps. In every way, the Frauenfels was a harder task to salvage than the Liebenfels had been. She was somewhat bigger, she had twice as many holes in her, she lay in considerably deeper water, which made necessary some inside shoring of her decks by divers to avoid their collapsing under the heavy waterload on top of them when we pumped out inside. I had made a few dives myself on the Frauenfels for inspection purposes and had often visited her to check the progress of the work. Most of the actual underwater work had been done by little Buck Scougale, for whose energy, skill, and daring as a diver my respect constantly increased. Buck had been aided by Dorcy, the Intent’s only other diver who, while he lacked Buck’s skill and ability to get about in tight places, nevertheless put everything he had into helping out underwater. Buck and Dorcy together had done all the work inside and outside the submerged hulk of the Frauenfels, a terrific job for only two men in such a short time. To some degree, they had been aided by a shipmate, Herald Bertolotti, “Muzzy,” who was learning to dive. “Muzzy” proved an able student, and was of considerable assistance on the bottom. Now the Frauenfels was ready for her rise. I had no intention of a repetition of the man-killing episode on the Liebenfels. This time, I had a magnificent set of salvage pumps of my own, big
ones as well as little ones, which the Chamberlin had brought out from the United States. My pumping equipment, already mounted in place on wooden platforms standing island-like on the cofferdams rising from the submerged hull of the Frauenfels, was topped by four huge 10-inch Jaeger pumps. These mounted, two forward and two aft, had twice the capacity each of the 6-inch pumps I had used on the Liebenfels—each of those 10-inch pumps could throw 3000 gallons of water a minute. Then, in addition, I had four 6-inch pumps, half-a-dozen 4-inch pumps, and finally some small 2-inch pumps which could be carried around by hand. Accompanied by the Resolute and carrying Captain Reed, Lloyd Williams, all their salvage men, and the ten South Africans to help out, the Intent steamed into the south harbor early on October 1 to commence. I had forty-eight men all told this time; I intended to have enough to work round the clock and still let everyone get some sleep by working only in shifts. With the Intent and the Resolute both tied to port alongside what little of the Frauenfel’s superstructure amidships showed above the water, we started up our pumps. The effect was magnificent—the rhythmic roar of over a dozen pump engines and the huge fountains of water cascading from one end of the wreck to the other into the sea, made a scene that for sound and sight was unforgettable! It so happened that the wreck of the Frauenfels lay in the exact center of the line of wrecks with her bow very close to the wreck ahead of her, the Vesuvio, while the stern of the Frauenfels hardly cleared the wreck astern of her, the Brenta, by ten feet. Under these conditions, I considered it best to raise her bow first, to give us a better chance of keeping her clear of the neighboring wrecks when she floated. Consequently, we pumped to lighten her bow more than her stern. With all the pumping capacity I had, by mid-afternoon, I had the forward holds pumped far enough down so by all of Bob Steele’s calculations, she should start to lift forward, but she didn’t. I checked Steele’s figures; they were right, but the bow wasn’t lifting. Brown, Reed, Roys, and I all knitted our brows over that puzzle, but we couldn’t find the answer. However, not wishing to get so much buoyancy forward as to make the bow lift finally with a sudden jolt that might cause trouble, I slowed down all the forward pumps and speeded up those astern. We would have to lift her stern first now, in spite of hardly any clearance aft. We did. By late afternoon, the stern started to rise and by early evening we
had the afterdecks awash and rising steadily. When I had the stern high enough to insure that nothing the submerged bow might do could cause the stern to go under again, we slacked down aft and went all out on the forward pumps. The water in the forward holds went down continuously, but the bow didn’t rise. Already during the daylight hours, we had once lowered all our pumps down the cofferdams, a tough job, since those 10-inch pumps were veritable mammoths to handle in getting them down onto new scaffoldings inside the wet holds. Now to avoid losing suction forward, we had to lower away the pumps again, this time in the darkness. We managed it successfully, after which half my combined salvage forces flopped down at random on the decks of the salvage tugs, and the other half kept on servicing pumps—they were consuming huge quantities of gasoline and fresh water for their radiators. We kept on pumping forward. We certainly had buoyancy enough to start the bow up, but obstinately it refused to lift. There was no reason apparent, there was nothing to do but to keep on pumping. At midnight with a sudden jolt, the bow broke free of the bottom, jumped ten feet at least in a violent leap that sent water cascading off both sides of her forward in solid cataracts like twin Niagaras, and then rose hurriedly till her forward deck was fairly well out of water, at least as high up as her stern. It took a diving survey outside her to disclose the why of that performance. Then we learned the answer. The bomb exploding forward had laid part of her port side steel plating flat out some feet to port and flush with her bottom. This protrusion, buried under some five or six feet of mud in the sea floor, invisible to the divers working on her previously, had been acting as a huge anchor, holding down her bow till we had developed sufficient excess buoyancy to tear it free when the bow had come rushing tip. But as all our pumps had been well lashed down in anticipation of such trouble, no damage had resulted. We had our ship afloat fore and aft, and coming up steadily through the night as full power was put on all the pumps. Friday morning saw the Frauenfels, encrusted all over with mussels like her previously risen sister, with her decks all well above water and her sides far enough up to make her look like a ship again. By early Friday afternoon, I had her far enough up to consider drying her out that night and towing her into the Naval Base Saturday morning. But no salvage job is ever completed without unexpected trouble of some kind and the Frauenfels proved no exception. About the middle of the afternoon, with no warning at all, it started suddenly to blow a full gale.
Hurriedly, I cast loose both the Intent and the Resolute and sent them steaming full speed through a gap in the line of wrecks to take up positions to starboard of the Frauenfels, the windward side, in case of trouble. Hardly had they got round to the starboard quarter and each passed us a six-inch manila hawser which, on the Frauenfels, I hurriedly secured to the starboard quarter bitts, when the Frauenfels which had been straining heavily on the old wire hawsers holding her stern in position, snapped both those long-submerged steel cables. Instantly, her stern started to swing down on the sunken bow of the Brenta not over ten feet astern of her. I had a wild time on the poop of the Frauenfels, directing the Intent and the Resolute, straining on their manila hawsers in the midst of that howling gale, while somehow we kept from fouling the wreck of the Brenta till the stern of the Frauenfels was worked down through the narrow gap and a little to leeward to clear her of the wreck astern. Matters now looked better. My waterlogged wreck, about as high out of the water as any ordinary ship, was streaming to her bower anchors, held up against a 50-knot gale only by the two tugs straining on the two six-inch manila lines to our quarter. Unfortunately, we had to stay nearly broadside on to the gale. For not only did the chart show a bad shoal off our port side on which our stern would certainly be piled up if we went very far around to port, but also on that side if we let her swing head into the wind to ease the strain on our manila hawsers, we should be driven broadside into the wreck of the Vesuvio. Either one of these catastrophes would certainly, with the wind and the sea pounding us the way they were, finish our newly salvaged ship. None too hopefully, I watched the straining manila lines to my two tugs. I had no fears about the tugs; each had 1200 horsepower General Motors diesels —plenty to hold against the storm as their engines drove full power into it to hold us up. What worried me was the hawsers—they were both only six-inch manila lines, the biggest either ship had, and, while new, were none too big for the job. Would they stand the strain? For twenty minutes, perhaps, I watched those lines, taut as piano wires, while the wind shrieked by, full against our now exposed hull and superstructures, the seas pounded our starboard side, and the biting spray drove like buckshot into our half-naked hides. The gale had brought a sudden change in temperature—for the first time in my whole Massawa experience, I felt cold. But I didn’t dare leave the poop to get even a shirt; and then, it struck me, what would be the use of leaving anyway? All my clothes were aboard the Intent,
tossing like a cork a hundred fathoms off to starboard while she steamed in the heavy seas against the storm. Then, suddenly, both six-inch hawsers snapped! With nothing any longer to hold our stern up, we started to swing to port downwind on to the shoal where I could plainly see the seas breaking over the coral reefs below. If we grounded on that, the Frauenfels was finished! I had good cause to bless the marvelous maneuverability which the General Motors diesel electric drives, controlled wholly from the bridge, gave both my tugs. Like falcons, the instant those lines parted, both tugs spun about and came driving down on our quarter, while on their fantails their crews madly heaved in on their ends of the broken hawsers. Perhaps a little more favorably placed, the Intent got to us first and sent a heaving line whistling up on our quarter. Cap tain Reed and I began frantically hauling in, to drag aboard the frayed end of that broken six-inch hawser and hurriedly pass it round our bitts, well away from where it had broken. Instantly the Intent headed out into the wind again to get a strain on the line and stop further swinging before we hit the reef. She succeeded, thank God! We were still clear by perhaps fifty feet. Meanwhile, the second line had come aboard again from the Resolute but I cast it loose. If the two lines had not before held us, it was unlikely they would again for long, especially if the gale increased in force. So, taking a chance that the single line to the Intent would hold us off the reef while I executed the maneuver, I both sang out and waved to the Resolute that we didn’t want her line—she was to steam through the gap astern us, get round to our lee side, put her nose against our port quarter, and push against us, full power into the wind, where she could exert her full propeller thrust without worrying about whether her hawser might stand it. Captain Byglin on the Resolute waved he understood, and circled around our stern, where he managed to squeeze in between us and the reef, come up on our lee side, and start to push. Before long, we were safely clear of the reef and with the Intent pulling and the Resolute pushing, sure to ride out the tropical storm. I felt better. It had been a remarkable exhibition of seamanship on the part of both tugs and their captains, particularly on Brown’s part in so swiftly repassing his broken line. The storm blew altogether for two hours, during which, never knowing what instant they might be piled up on a reef and the ship sunk in a storm under their feet, the salvage men aboard, mainly Reed’s crew, kept all the salvage pumps going and the water pouring steadily overboard.
Finally, in the late afternoon, the wind blew itself out, the sea in the south harbor subsided, and we found ourselves still afloat but confronted by new problems. I could not stay where we were without keeping both salvage ships steaming all night to hold us clear of the wreck ahead, the wreck astern, and the reef off to port, all of which we were in danger of fouling each time the tide changed. There was nothing to do save to get the waterlogged Frauenfels out of that line of wrecks and anchor her for the night elsewhere. But we couldn’t weigh her anchors, and if we slipped them, we should have nothing to anchor her with elsewhere. I finally decided, nevertheless, to buoy both anchors so they could be recovered later; slip both anchor cables, retaining the inboard ends of her cables aboard; and then take her away and try mooring her to one of the mooring buoys in the south anchorage outside the line of wrecks. It would be a ticklish handling job, but I felt my two tugs could manage it. So, with one tug heaving on a line forward, and the other tied up alongside her quarter to steer, we slipped the cables, juggled the recently risen Frauenfels clear of the other wrecks we had been dodging in the storm, towed her about a mile away, and managed to shackle up what was left of her starboard anchor cable to the ring of a long unused Italian mooring buoy. I could only hope that the unseen ground tackle holding that old mooring buoy was still in fair shape. There we swung all through the night, while we worked to dry out our wreck. Of course, she did some heeling in the process, but nothing like what had occurred on the Liebenfels, since we were never short of workable pumps, nor of men either to keep them going. By Saturday evening, we were through. The Frauenfels was completely dried out, high out of water, and upright. That night, everybody, except for a small watch on the pumps, slept. On Sunday morning, October 4, again with our solitary American flag flying over her Nazi .swastika, the S.S. Frauenfels, another prize of war taken both from the Nazis and from the sea, was towed in triumph from the south harbor. Around Massawa and into the naval harbor, standing high out of water, she proceeded majestically in a striking marine parade, headed by the Intent, which had raised her, and shepherded by the Resolute and the Hsin Rocket to help steer. We all felt proud of the Frauenfels job, salvaged in eleven weeks, lifted and dried out in three days, particularly as a contrast to what had happened in the
long-drawn-out operation on the Gera, so suddenly ended by us only the week before. As a reward for their efforts, I sent Captain Brown and the whole crew of the Intent up to Asmara for a week’s vacation to cool off. And as a somewhat belated vacation for Reed’s men for the small Italian dock, I sent them off also. Meanwhile, the raising of the Frauenfels did nothing to simplify matters for me at the Naval Base. I now had five salvaged wrecks-three ships, the Frauenfels, the Gera, and the Liebenfels; and two dry docks, the. larger and the smaller Italian units—to work on, and a negligible force only with which to work on them. Repairs on the Liebenfels’ hull were completed, and Hudson, my English engineer superintendent, had her engines and boilers practically ready to go to sea again. The large Italian dry dock also was far along toward completion; but the other three wrecks were crying for work, both on their hulls and machinery and I had absolutely nobody to put on them. If only the 200 workmen promised me from Alex would arrive!
CHAPTER
49 WITH MOST OF MY SALVAGE CREWS away and no emergency jobs on the dry dock, I had a few days over the following week to get closer to affairs at the Naval Base. I learned to my delight from Captain Morrill that Eugene Zeiner had been performing miraculously as a toolroom supervisor—our loss of tools had dropped almost to the vanishing point—and when occasionally something did disappear, Morrill told me Zeiner came to him to report it with tears in his eyes, almost as if he had lost a relative. He was proving perhaps the most valuable employee we had ashore. And one other episode Morrill told me of did nothing to make me regret having gone all out to save Zeiner from deportation. It seems that the week or so after Zeiner had turned to in the toolroom and had inventoried and become sufficiently acquainted with his precious stock of tools to take his eyes off them a few minutes to see what else was going on around the American Naval Base, of which he now found himself a part, he had discovered the existence of the American volunteer militia companies. With great interest, he had gazed on his fellow workmen drilling in preparation for possible action against either Fascisti or Nazis. “What do you think that Zeiner did then, Captain?” Morrill asked me. “You’d’ve thought he’d had a bellyful of fighting after all he’s been through and been discharged from the British Army as a shell-shock case, but no! The minute I’d dismissed the company, he rushes up to me and wants to enlist. Since he isn’t an American, and our orders restricted us to American volunteers only, I couldn’t take him in, but I told him I’d put it up to headquarters. The answer came back No-Americans only. “When I told that to Zeiner, it nearly broke his heart. If there was going to be any fighting around Massawa, he didn’t want to be left out. I felt so sorry for the poor devil, for once I developed a bright idea! The orders said Americans
only as members of the volunteer companies, but they didn’t say anything about restrictions on who might train them. And here was a man who’d been through more fighting than anybody else in Eritrea, against both Eyties and Nazis and knew all their tricks! It would have hurt my conscience to risk all those raw Americans in action without the best training possible, so I gave Zeiner a uniform without any American insignia on it, rated him a drill sergeant, and any day you go out to watch ’em drill, you’ll find Eugene Zeiner, Czech drill sergeant, showing our men how to lay away Nazis and Eyties without getting themselves killed! That boy’s good! And, of course, Captain,” concluded Morrill, “if it comes to a fight, who’s going to kick if the drill sergeant has to get into it too, just to make sure his pupils haven’t forgotten what he’s taught ’em?” Morrill grinned at me, and I grinned back. Without breaking any regulations, he had certainly cut the Gordian knot to everybody’s benefit. I had a little time also to inspect closely some mechanical betterments. Some of my long since commercially ordered shipyard machinery had finally come in early in September and had been set up, mainly machine shop equipment. To hold it all, we had taken what had once been the Eytie mine depot building, their largest in the Naval Base, and had converted it into a new machine shop. To that had been transferred all the ex-sabotaged Italian machine shop tools, filling one half of it, while in the other half of our new building had been erected all the lathes, the drill presses, the boring mills, the milling machines and the rest that had come to me from America. I looked over that vast machine shop proudly; between everything the Italians had left me and what I had ordered myself in America, without doubt I now had the finest machine shop in all Africa. There we could do anything, and we were doing it too, not only for all Eritrea and for the Naval Base, but also for the Middle East Forces in Egypt for whom Austin Byrne, Master Mechanic, was executing both production and repair jobs. But my new plate shop, my most badly needed building, which had been under construction since the previous May, wasn’t ready yet to house anything. Unfortunately, priority was being given to housing for the construction forces over construction for direct war purposes. This had an interesting result. A vast quantity of labor and materials had already been wasted on housing at Ghinda, which was now lying idle. Most of the construction workmen from there were now in Massawa, overcrowding the housing facilities at the Naval Base for useful workers for war purposes while they built for themselves, this time
right on the Naval Base grounds, permanent masonry residence buildings, mess halls, and recreation rooms to serve themselves. When they got through with all that, they would then themselves move into their magnificent new quarters and start some real work toward providing the extra buildings the Naval Base really could use to expedite its war work. That is, they would, provided they weren’t already too late with it. The war in the Middle East, which on my visit to Alex late in September, I could see was getting ready to swing into action and move westward in a big way, might suddenly move westward so swiftly and so far away from Eritrea as to make anything anchored to the ground there, like buildings, totally useless in the further prosecution of the war. Frankly, I was losing all interest in further construction by the contractor; we had got along quite well in Massawa without any aid from his vast construction projects; now that he was getting around to some of them in Massawa, I was sure the inversion of an early war lament—too little and too late—better fitted the case. Our contractors’ vast projects in Massawa were going to be too big and too late—long before he got around from his vast housing projects to tend to war construction, the war was going to move elsewhere. And while you could move machinery, ships, cranes, and floating dry docks to where else they’d best help the war effort, masonry buildings for housing were going to stay where they were when the war moved on, like those in Ghinda, a double loss, a waste of labor when they were built, a total loss when they were abandoned. So, if the machinery in my converted ex-Italian mine depot gave me a lift as I looked at it busily engaged on war work, all the new housing construction on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula in Massawa gave me a sharp pain every time I looked from it to that far-from-finished plate shop. What, I wondered, had we all been sent to Massawa for—to make ourselves comfortable, or to help keep the war from being lost?
CHAPTER
50 OCTOBER 11; MY SALVAGE MEN came back from their vacation in Asmara. I started Brown and his crew overhauling all the salvage gear used on the Frauenfels, about a week’s job. After that, they were to go back to the south harbor to make a diving survey of the damage to the Brenta, the Italian wreck scuttled astern of the spot from which we had just lifted the Frauenfels, and then to proceed with salvaging her on a plan to be developed after I had the diving survey report. Meanwhile, being very short on mechanics for repair work, reluctantly I turned all of Reed’s crew to as repair men for a few days, his salvage mechanics to work on the topside, and his divers underneath, in repairing the smaller Italian dry dock they had salvaged. This hurt me a lot, to have to use salvage men on repairs but somebody had to rebuild the bottom of the small dry dock or we should forever be running compressors on it to keep it afloat. For their part, the Resolute, with its one diver, returned temporarily to the wreck of the Moncalieri, and the Chamberlin continued its job on the XXIII Marzo. A couple of days went by. Through Commander Davy, liaison officer, for some weeks I had been pressing Alexandria for the promised workmen, but with ever-decreasing hope, for I knew that while no dry-docking was going on in Alex, other repair activities were being resumed and men were being returned to Alex, now that it was certain that in the face of Montgomery’s growing Eighth Army, Rommel’s dream of ever breaking through at El Alamein had completely faded. But I desperately needed those men, and the brighter Montgomery’s prospects became, the darker became my chances of getting any volunteers from Alex. I was engaged in discussing this problem with Commander Davy about the middle of the morning of October 13, when unceremoniously, Captain Reed burst into my office, his bronze face flaming. Mad as a hornet, he exclaimed,
“You’d better get right down into the contractor ’s office below, Captain! They’re pulling a scandalous trick on you down there!” “Excuse me, Davy,” I said, rising immediately. When the contractor started to do anything in Massawa, it was wise to pay attention to what was going on. Already, Reed was on his way out on the run. I followed him downstairs into the office on the first floor directly below mine, used by the contractor ’s construction superintendent in Massawa. An interesting sight met my eye as I entered that office. Seated at his desk was the Massawa construction superintendent, apparently only a spectator, while standing alongside him, about to pass out some papers, was the contractor ’s Assistant Foreign Manager from Asmara, who, being one of the contractor ’s major executives deeply involved always in vast projects, rarely found time to steal a few hours off to visit unimportant (and disagreeably hot) Massawa. If he was in Massawa personally, something really was up. A swift glance around the office confirmed that conclusion. Seated along the wall were Captain Brown, Captain Byglin and Captain Hansen, while a vacant chair alongside Hansen indicated where Captain Reed (who now remained standing) had probably been seated when he had smelled a rat and walked out to invite me to a salvage conference where the contractor himself had seen no value in my presence. What had gone on before, I never learned. But as the Assistant Foreign Manager seemed on the point of distributing a notice of some sort to my salvage officers, I felt entitled to one also, so reaching out, I took one from his startled fingers before he could object. Noting that my name was on the long list at its bottom of those who would ultimately receive copies, I saw I had done nothing unethical in seizing mine then and there, although uninvited. So I started to read it, while the Assistant Foreign Manager, a heavy-jowled, heavily-lidded, heavy-set individual, built like a heavyweight pugilist, hurriedly passed out the other copies to everyone except Reed, who, I believe, refused to accept one. At one time, that notice on the contractor ’s letterhead would have shocked me, but now as I read it, I was shockproof: October 10, 1942 To: The Area Engineer Eritrean Field Area
Asmara, Eritrea From: Foreign Manager Subject: General Superintendent in Charge of Salvage Work. Attention: LT. COL. RALPH E. KNAPP 1. Effective Tuesday, October 13, 1942, Captain Edison Brown is appointed General Superintendent of Salvage work. 2. Captain Brown will be in charge of all personnel, and equipment engaged in the salvage work, and will be in complete charge and will direct Salvage Operations. So! In somewhat more elaborate language than the August before and with a high-sounding title to go with the new responsibilities, the contractor ’s Foreign Manager himself was this time relieving me of my command and appointing Brown in my place. And it being October 13, the day the order was to take effect, he had evidently dispatched the Assistant Foreign Manager, who the August before had flopped in putting it over, to Massawa to try his hand again. He should have picked a better messenger boy. I looked around. Probably everyone had already read the notice. I looked at my watch. It was about 10 A.M. “This is a working day, gentlemen,” I observed. “Brown, you ought to be on your ship where I thought you were, instead of here. Are you responsible for this?” “No, sir,” replied Brown. “I’m not sticking my neck out!” “Very sensible of you, Brown,” I admitted. “Now, you get back aboard your ship immediately and turn to. And I warn you, Brown, if you make the slightest move to act on this paper, I’ll have you court-martialed! I’m in charge of all salvage here by General Maxwell’s orders, and unless and until he relieves me of that responsibility, anyone else who attempts to take over is going to get hurt. Now, Brown, you can go!” Without a word, Brown departed. I turned to the other salvage masters. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, you’ve been dragged off your work for all this foolishness. Get back to your ships and pay no attention to this piece of paper. It means nothing. Leave this matter to me. I’ll clear it up.” Very willingly they started to go, but each one of them, Reed, Hansen, and Byglin, before he left, served notice on all present that he was quitting if that order ever took effect. I waved them out.
“Don’t worry, boys, it never will.” They left. I turned to the Assistant Foreign Manager, who, for whatever reason, had stood silent while his conference with my salvage captains was being taken out of his hands and summarily dissolved. “Now, that’s all,” I told him. “You can go back to Asmara. I’ll have the Army kill this order as dead as its predecessor, which you got out. Meanwhile, you can inform your Foreign Manager which orders you saw Brown and all the others here obey—my orders, as their Commanding Officer, or his in this paper.” “Now, Captain Ellsberg,” he urged, “you’d better be sensible. This time the order ’ll stand up. That appointment has already been approved by the Contracting Officer for the Army and it’s legal.” I manifested a doubt. After all, I knew Lieut. Colonel Knapp would never give his approval, at least without consulting me first, and I said so. “Oh, don’t count on Knapp. He’s not Contracting Officer any more and he’s got nothing to do with it. That job has been transferred to Cairo and Major MacAlarney there has got it now. He’s already approved Brown’s appointment as General Superintendent. That settles it!” So Major MacAlarney, whom I knew slightly, was now Contracting Officer and as such in far-off Cairo had evidently approved that appointment! MacAlarney, I knew, was little acquainted with affairs in Massawa; he belonged in Cairo and had made only one brief visit casually to Massawa months before. MacAlarney had too much common sense, however, ever to have approved any such order if he had known what really was involved. I glanced at the copy of the order in my hand; MacAlarney’s name was not listed among those to receive a copy. Probably, he’d never seen the actual order, didn’t know what was in it when the matter of his approval was requested and had imagined he was merely approving the appointment of someone the contractor wanted to promote to a higher position, involving little else, and certainly not involving his attempting to override General Maxwell’s orders in making me Officer in Charge of Salvage. Well, Cairo was farther off than Asmara and communication with it was poor. The order had to be squelched for the record and I knew MacAlarney would do it, but this time, it would take longer. Still, there was no use arguing over that. “Just all of you in Asmara bear in mind I’m Officer in Charge of Salvage here till I’m relieved by General Maxwell’s orders,” I stated flatly. “I don’t take
orders to surrender my naval command from any civilians. Anybody who gets in my way in carrying out my duties is going to get hurt! Unless you want Brown court-martialed, don’t egg him on to try to take over!” “Now, don’t get excited, Captain,” the Assistant Foreign Manager advised me. “We’re not relieving you as Officer in Charge. We’re merely making Brown General Superintendent of Salvage Work.” “Really?” I asked, taking another careful look at that order. “And after you’ve done that, what does that leave me as Officer in Charge of Salvage to do in Massawa?” “Oh, all you’ll have to do is to give us a list of the ships in the order you want ’em raised, and we’ll tend to everything else.” I looked at him in astonishment. Could he possibly be serious? He seemed so. Whether he thought I was another Captain McCance or just a plain damned fool, I couldn’t make out. Why, in that case, should the Navy waste one of its few senior salvage officers around Massawa at all? If that was everything being an Officer in Charge of Salvage involved, I might just as well write out the list, pack my bags, and go home where it was cooler! Turn over all control of the salvage work to a contractor who long ago had admitted to me in New York that not one of his officers knew the slightest thing about it? Ridiculous! I turned on my heel and left. There was no point in staying further to listen to such drivel. In Asmara I was, of course, backed up both by Colonel Hodges, senior Army officer in Eritrea, who said he neither knew of nor had authorized any such order, and also by Lieut. Colonel Knapp, Area Engineer, in refusing to allow that order to go into effect. But, as neither of them was now designated as Contracting Officer, they could not order its recision—only Major MacAlarney, Contracting Officer in Cairo, technically could do that. And as Cairo was far away and the lengthy coded communication required on such a matter would only overload the radio, in spite of some fruitless correspondence, it wasn’t until several weeks later that action from him could finally be obtained. Then, Major MacAlarney came personally to Massawa to investigate what it was all about; after that, he immediately had the order rescinded. But during those weeks, that order caused me plenty of trouble. Brown, as he said, wasn’t sticking his neck out. He was too prudent to risk any court-martial, and did nothing to attempt to take over. But also obviously he was receptive— neither did he say or do anything to show he was in any way averse to the idea
or ready to assist in scotching the contractor ’s ridiculous attempts to relieve me under the guise of appointing a General Superintendent. So what happened was that during that period, every other salvage master eyed Brown malevolently, ready with most of his men to quit instantly if the contractor, as he claimed he could do, succeeded in making the order stick. Under those conditions, it can be imagined how effectively salvage operations in Massawa proceeded, with practically the whole salvage force, except Brown’s own crew of twelve (and perhaps even some of them), fighting mad over what was going on and ready to quit on a moment’s notice. As best I could under these circ*mstances, I ignored the situation and proceeded as if I had the utmost confidence in everybody’s loyalty to his work and to his obligations. Oddly enough, it was from Brown himself that I got the only set-back to my attempts to carry on effectively. The Intent, as ordered, started about October 20 on the wreck of the Italian ship, Brenta. A few days after that, I went out to the south harbor in my boat to see how she was getting along with her diving survey. I clambered aboard her as she lay alongside to port of the Brenta’s superstructure, about all of that wreck which was showing above the sea. I found everyone in a state of great excitement. A few minutes before, Buck Scougale (now undressed on deck) tended on the bottom by Muzzy, also in a diving rig, had hurriedly been hauled up at his own request long before he had completed his diving inspection. No other diver now was down. Buck himself told me why. “Cap’n,” said wiry little Buck in even more rapid-fire tones than usual, “I dived a short while ago to inspect her port side from outside, and Muzzy went down with me to tend my lines on the bottom. It’s about eight fathoms to the bottom—not much to bother about. We was both walking along in the mud, pretty tough going, pushing through the water close aboard her port side, when we came to a big bomb hole in her side—a hell of a big hole—opening into her number two hold. “I took a look at that hole, with the plating blown outboard all around, and I figured I might as well use it for an entrance to see what the number two hold looked like from inside. So I put my helmet against Muzzy’s and told him to stay outside and tend my lines while I went in. “Muzzy got it, all right, so I left him and walked right on through the side of that ship from the bottom outside her, as easy as if I was going through a big garage door. Of course, the minute I went through her side, it got darker in the
water inside her, with only the light coming down through the sea into that hold from her flooded cargo hatches above. But after a minute or so, my eyes got used to it so I could see well enough again and I went ahead slow through the water over her floor boards to see what might be inside that hold. “And then, Cap’n,” exclaimed Buck excitedly, “I damn near walked straight into’ a submarine mine! There it was, detonating horns sticking out all over it, and me about to walk smack into it in my diving rig and explode the damned thing! “I stopped dead, took one good look to make sure, and, Cap’n, believe me, I went flying through the water out o’ that hold through the hole in her side out onto the ocean floor again so fast I knocked Muzzy out there flat in the mud before he could even duck! And without waiting for Muzzy to pull himself out of it, I gave ’em four jerks on my lifeline, to haul me the hell up and out o’ there right now!” So the scuttled Brenta had an unexploded Italian submarine mine, not a bomb, still inside its number two hold! I knew I could believe what Buck Scougale told me—he was one of the two best divers I had in Massawa, if not absolutely the best, and subject to no nightmares on the bottom. If Buck said he had seen a mine down there, I knew he had seen a mine, not just a waterlogged cask which, distorted in the murky water, might to less practiced diving eyes than his have been imagined into anything. Well, if we had a submarine mine inside the Brenta, standing in the middle of an open hold where we should have to work in patching the hole in the side of that hold, there was nothing to be done save to remove the mine before we proceeded further. But to avoid blowing up the diver in the process and probably our salvage ship too (for a mine carries about twice the explosive charge of a bomb), not to mention so damaging our wreck as to make further salvage on her fruitless even if some of us survived, it was necessary to know all about that mine before we touched it. Particularly was this so, if by any chance the Eyties had rigged that mine up as a booby trap to destroy us, which might well be the case, seeing that a naval mine had no normal reason for being in the middle of the cargo hold of a merchant ship, even of a scuttled one. Before we went any further, I had to learn all about that mine. Buck, when I should ask him, could give me a rough idea of its size and type, I knew. The British Navy had data on all enemy mines. From Buck’s description, I could identify it on the British ordnance pamphlets and study both how to
remove it without exploding it, and also everything the Eyties might have done to its mechanism to make a booby trap of it. But for the present, we had to leave it alone. So I ordered Brown to discontinue diving on the Brenta, and to return with his excited crew to the Naval Base, there to cool off while I read up on Italian mines. It might take several days. Meanwhile, they could all rest. I got back into my boat, and Glen Galvin shoved off with me from the Intent while Brown prepared to cast off himself. Acting through Commander Davy, liaison officer, I had the British fly an explosives officer, a Royal Navy lieutenant, from Alex, loaded with all the pamphlets the British had on enemy mines. He arrived the next evening. From a somewhat more detailed description of that mine and its lead horns, which Buck Scougale gladly gave us, Commander Davy, the explosives lieutenant, and I were able to identify it as a specific type of Italian mine. Thanking Buck for his aid, we let him go, while the three of us started an intensive study of that mine and every detail of its mechanism and design, however insignificant—a process which took us most of the night. The explosives lieutenant was quite excited over the situation. While he had a great deal of information on that type of mine, all obtained by British intelligence men through captured or purloined Italian documents, never had they had in their hands one of those complete mines. Here was his golden opportunity as an explosives expert. If only I could recover that mine intact for him, he wanted to dissect it—as effervescent over the prospect as an entomologist about to ensnare in his net an entirely new species of butterfly! He warned me on all the dangers, all the possibilities of exploding that mine, kept cautioning me on how to avoid damaging it. His earnestness made me smile. It was easy to observe that, all unconsciously on his part, his concern over that mine was for an entirely different reason from my own—if we got ourselves blown up, his tears would be shed over the lost mine, not over us. By next morning, I knew enough about that mine and how to handle it, including all its booby trap possibilities, to feel willing to go out and remove it, doing all the diving on it myself, if necessary. Pending the arrival aboard the Intent of Commander Davy and the explosives lieutenant, who were to go along with us, I started in to tell Brown of the preliminaries necessary, before we shoved off for the Brenta and the south harbor. That was when I received my first real shock in Massawa. For the first time in all my salvage experience, I heard a salvage master saying he wouldn’t
tackle a salvage job because it was too dangerous! The Intent would not cast loose to work further on the Brenta! The way Brown put it was interesting—he put the blame on his crew. They were all afraid of that mine on the Brenta and wouldn’t go near it again; it was too dangerous. And, of course, he couldn’t make them. While Brown, the man who aspired to take over my job, was blandly telling me all that, I observed him with great interest. So here was the man who thought he was competent to take over the whole operation, claiming he was incompetent to get his own salvage crew to work in the face of danger! He wasn’t refusing to go himself, only his crew wouldn’t go! The situation made me laugh inwardly, but outwardly, I only listened gravely to the most astonishing statement I had ever heard from a salvage officer. Of course, I didn’t believe his crew was afraid to go if properly led. There wasn’t a man in the twelve of them alongside whom I hadn’t myself worked and sweated and stared danger in the face with—I knew them all. They weren’t cowards. I could muster that crew on deck, point out to them I didn’t believe they were the cowards their captain said they were, show them the need in the middle of a war of ignoring danger, and then lead them to work on the Brenta, to do the diving myself to encourage them. But if I did that, Brown’s value to me as a salvage master was going to be forever destroyed, and I had too few salvage masters in Massawa to risk losing one of them, however much of a weak-sister in some directions he was proving himself to be. Besides, all the circ*mstances surrounding salvage at that moment were in a distressing state, and pending action shortly expected on Major MacAlarney’s arrival from Cairo, I had no desire to make them any worse. So I merely lifted my eyebrows over Brown’s strange story and told him not to be concerned over his crew. I’d let the Brenta go till a little later. Meanwhile, I’d send the Intent out on an easy job I’d been saving for a rainy day—no explosives, no bomb holes, no patching-something any salvage man should be able to do almost in his sleep. That would give his crew a chance to get over their case of nerves, and then we’d tackle the Brenta again. The ship to be raised was the Italian S.S. Tripolitania, a moderate-sized passenger ship scuttled, not in Massawa itself, but in the Daklak Islands forty miles offshore. She was one of that group of wrecks which Lieutenant Fairbairn, our British Navy pilot, who had almost died out there, had urged long ago that I must see.
Several months before, I had decided to take Fairbairn’s advice. But not wanting to waste too much time covering those widespread islands, I had accepted an invitation from Squadron Leader Feather stonehaugh of the R.A.F., liaison officer between ourselves and O.E.T.A., to fly me out over those islands in his plane while I made my survey from the air. So, in an R.A.F. plane, I had gone out with Featherstonehaugh (popularly known among us as “Feathers”) and he had very thoroughly covered the islands for me at low altitude so I could see all the wrecks. As Fairbairn had maintained, there certainly was a fine lot of wrecks out there, but the day had long gone by when looking at more wrecks developed any enthusiasm in me. I had wrecks enough in Massawa harbor. So other than noting down how many there were—six—where they lay, and their approximate depths and conditions as regards future salvage, I had paid little attention till my eyes lighted on the wreck of the Tripolitania. Then I became suddenly interested. For over an hour, Feathers wheeled and circled to fly me as low as he dared over that wreck while I observed her from all angles. No explosives, I knew, had been used on any of the wrecks scuttled in the Daklak Islands—they had been sunk in as deep water as possible simply by opening seaco*cks. But the Eyties had certainly bungled the job on the Tripolitania. Easily observed from the air, she lay right on the edge of a shelf off which the water deepened suddenly. But in going down, she had hit bottom on the shelf, not off it, and there she lay with her main deck hardly awash at low tide, no holes in her. All that was necessary to lift her was to seal off seachests outside as usual, close a lot of open airports in her hull, and pump her out. Of course, the usual precautions to avoid her capsizing while she was being lifted would be required, but that was all. Almost all that was necessary to lift the Tripolitania was a diver to seal up outside and some buckets to bail her out with. I came back with Feathers in his plane from the Daklak Islands with the Tripolitania in my mind as a job to be held in reserve for a rainy day—a task on which I should some day send out a salvage crew when my men got so worn from real wrecks in Massawa that they needed a rest. So after listening to Brown’s comments on the refusal of his crew to face the dangers on the Brenta, I decided a fine solution for many reasons would be to send both Brown and the Intent out to salvage the Tripolitania. No salvage man could with a straight face refuse to work on her. And while the job lasted, about a week more or less, Brown and his ship, the storm center of all my morale
troubles, would be far removed in the Daklak Islands from any communication with those ingenious thinkers in Asmara till after Major MacAlarney had arrived in Massawa and squelched that morale-shattering order. I gave Brown the Tripolitania job and his orders regarding her. I wasn’t going out to her; there was no necessity for it on such a simple job. After loading up a barge for him with all the pumps and salvage gear he might conceivably need for the job, I sent him away toward the end of October, towing the barge, headed for the Daklak Islands and the Tripolitania. Meanwhile, I had to advise Commander Davy and the explosives lieutenant that unfortunately the Brenta was delayed a couple of weeks; however, after that, we’d certainly recover that mine, so as not to disappoint our connoisseur in explosives. He left for Alex, to return when advised.
CHAPTER
51 ON OCTOBER 14, THE DAY AFTER THE abortive attempt of the contractor to take over control of salvage, I decided the time had come to undertake the lifting of the sunken derrick alongside the quay in the commercial harbor. This was the ex-Italian floating crane which Captain McCance had twice failed to raise, and the demolition of which he had consequently recommended to the British Admiralty. With McCance’s contract canceled, the crane was now mine to salvage and I concluded that with all my salvage forces back from Asmara, I had better start on it or the British might think I was no better than McCance, who had wasted some nine months on it. The lifting of that crane, with its main deck irreparably damaged in its watertightness and airtightness by McCance in his two failures, presented now a very unusual salvage problem. In its original undamaged condition, as it lay on the bottom scuttled with open sea valves, it might easily have been prepared for lifting and lifted by any competent salvage officer who understood the factors involved, in any one of three ways. The simplest way would have been to have used compressed air, as I did on the two sunken dry docks, with the addition of proper air escapes to take care of decreasing outside water pressures as the hull of the crane floated up. This required considerable knowledge of how compressed air acted on a wreck. The next simplest method would have been by a combination of pumping and compressed air, still requiring considerable skill. The hardest method, though the one which would ordinarily be used by a man knowing little of salvage, would be by sealing up the hatches in the submerged main deck, shoring up inside, and pumping out. This was the method McCance had twice tried and twice failed on, damaging the deck of the crane badly, though a good salvage man could, with considerable intelligent diving work before lifting, have done it successfully. But now, all three of these methods were out, for no longer could the main
deck of the crane hull be made either airtight or watertight—not after McCance and his men got through with it. There was no longer any chance of making the crane buoyant, either by pumping or by using compressed air, so that it would float up of itself. There remained only one other possible way to raise that crane-it had to be lifted from the bottom of the sea as a dead weight of some 400 to 600 tons (its exact weight was unknown to anybody). But there wasn’t a crane in Massawa that could lift over 15 tons, and very few anywhere in the world that could even lift 300 tons, so using floating cranes or derricks for the lift was out. Since also there wasn’t any tide in Massawa to speak of (only one to three feet rise and fall), no help could be expected of the tide (a favorite British salvage method) by using surface barges secured to the wreck at low tide and lifting with it as the tide rose. There remained as the solitary means of raising that derrick, the use of submersible pontoons. These are huge specially built horizontal steel cylinders, which can be flooded and sunk down alongside the wreck, secured to it by cradle slings of heavy wire or chain passed under it, and then made to lift the wreck by expelling all the water from inside the pontoons with compressed air. If everything is handled properly, the buoyant pontoons will then rise to the surface, bringing up the wreck with them hanging in its cradle of slings. It so happened that my first (and most prominent) salvage job had been the submarine S-51 back in 1925, where I had used the pontoon method to raise a 1200-ton smashed submarine sunk in deep water in the open Atlantic off Block Island. On that difficult pioneer task, I, then a lieutenant commander, had been Salvage Officer; and interestingly enough the Officer in Charge of the Salvage Squadron, then Captain Ernest King, was now, as Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. At any rate, on that task, I had learned all about pontoons and their idiosyncrasies (which are many, and which on the S-51 nearly stumped me and my divers). After successfully raising the S-51, I had finished my career in the regular Navy by designing pontoons which didn’t have any idiosyncrasies. It was the pontoons I had used on the S-51, rebuilt to that design, which later were used by the Navy in lifting the sunken submarine S-4 off Provincetown and the Squalus off Portsmouth. So if there was anything at all on which I might claim to be an “expert,” it was on pontoons and their use. (The average salvage officer knows very little about them or their behavior in action.)
The only drawback to the use of pontoons in lifting that sunken derrick in Massawa was that there weren’t any pontoons in Massawa. Nor so far as could be discovered, were there any pontoons anywhere else in Africa, nor could any be obtained from elsewhere. And it was perfectly obvious to anyone that there wasn’t available anywhere the steel out of which to build pontoons either, not to mention the lack of skilled labor also. It would take a lot of both. So the problem of raising that invaluable sunken derrick came down to raising it with pontoons that didn’t exist and couldn’t be built, or in not raising it at all. I suppose it was at that point in his reasoning that Captain McCance had arrived when he advised the Admiralty to demolish the crane with explosives, and at least clear the berth it was blocking. I determined to use pontoons to lift the derrick and to provide them shortly in spite of the non-existence of pontoons and of the steel and labor needed to build any. So, in preparation for the task, I broke the Resolute off the salvage job on the Moncalieri, and sent her around with Ervin Johnson, her solitary diver, to the commercial harbor to begin work on the sunken crane. I put Captain Reed, my most experienced and competent salvage master, in charge of the operation, gave him Captain Roys, salvage officer on the Resolute, as his assistant, and started them off. Their first job would be to sweep under the sunken crane four one-inch diameter steel wires which later could be used to haul under her hull the much heavier wire hawsers needed for the actual cradle slings. Getting those four messenger wires under the hull was going to be a very tough job, requiring them to be sawed back and forth through the mud, coral, and debris, on which that sunken crane was resting, till they were under her in the proper positions. I figured that getting those wires sawed underneath would take Bill Reed and Frank Roys and the Resolute’s whole crew a couple of weeks, by the end of which time, I’d have the pontoons necessary to go ahead with the job. For oddly enough, all the pontoons required for that job had been lying right there in Massawa under everybody’s nose for over a year, unused for anything. The difficulty had been that no one had ever recognized them as pontoons. Every time anyone looked at them (and they were so big you couldn’t avoid seeing them), they had always thought they were looking at a row of huge horizontal cylindrical storage tanks for aviation gasoline. On the edge of Massawa was the very large ex-Italian military airfield (unused since the surrender) which had received the careful attention of the
R.A.F. during the bombardments from the air prior to Massawa’s capitulation. Squadron Leader Featherstonehaugh himself had flown one of the attacking bombers; whether it had been he or one of his fellow pilots who had scored the hit, I didn’t know. But at any rate, one of them had succeeded in scoring a direct hit with a moderate-sized bomb on one of a row of eight mammoth horizontal cylindrical tanks which the Eyties had provided on the edge of the airfield for storing their aviation gasoline. The results of that bomb hit must have been startling. The bomb had knocked out the head of one of those eleven foot diameter by forty-five foot long cylindrical tanks, each capable of holding 30,000 gallons of gasoline, and had poured thousands and thousands of gallons of gasoline out on the ground where, of course, it promptly all ignited from the bomb. The effects of the ensuing conflagration were still visible on the seven unhit tanks. They had all been instantly enveloped in a sea of flames, which must have made them all red-hot for the steel plates forming the upper part of every one of those cylinders was now corrugated like a gigantic washboard. That disaster had ended the usefulness of the airfield. With no-storage there for gasoline any more, the R.A.F., when it had taken over, had never seen fit to repair the gasoline storage tanks for use again, and they, together with the airfield, had lain unused now for eighteen months. When shortly after my arrival in Massawa, my eye had first lighted on those idle gasoline tanks, I recognized them instantly for what they were to a salvage man—pontoons ready at hand for my use should I. ever need any for a salvage job. Of course, they would need some modifications and repairs to fit them for use, but it would be only a minor job. Now that I needed some pontoons, there they still were waiting for me, the biggest pontoons I had ever seen, far larger than those used on submarine salvage operations. Each tank, as a pontoon, could exert a lift of a little over 100 tons. Of course, there were drawbacks to their use. The Eyties, when building them simply as gasoline storage tanks, had neglected also to provide them with the hawsepipes necessary for their use as pontoons, with the internal bulkheads required for stability, and with the lifting eyes and the air connections required, but so much of that as was absolutely imperative, my mechanics in the Naval Base shops could easily install. That didn’t concern me much. What really was a drawback, was that I neither owned the airfield nor its gasoline storage tanks, none of which, not being on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, was under my jurisdiction. It must, of course, all belong now to
some one of the various British military organizations in Eritrea, and I set out to learn which, so that I could obtain official permission to take the unused tanks off the airfield and use them as pontoons for a while. I wasted three whole days trying to find out who legally owned those damaged tanks. Everybody passed. Colonel Sundius-Smith, British Army Commander in Massawa, didn’t own them. Captain Lucas of the Royal Navy didn’t own them. The R.A.F. senior officer in Asmara didn’t own them. Neither did Brigadier Longrigg, the Military Governor of Eritrea. I finally learned they were probably under the jurisdiction of an R.A.F. lieutenant in Massawa, attached to headquarters in Cairo, where the R.A.F. air marshal was reserving them for future R.A.F. use in Egypt. I went to see the R.A.F. lieutenant to get his permission to take the tanks for a month or so, only to learn he’d gone a few days before somewhere into the Sudan, and wouldn’t be back for two or three weeks. Since I couldn’t afford to wait two or three weeks, I concluded the best solution was to steal the gasoline tanks without further ado. Since nobody owned them, nobody could give me permission to take them, but they could, and without doubt would, stop me from taking them if I were to ask any nonowner ’s permission. The other way, the worst that could happen if I were caught at it before I got through, was to make me put them back in the airfield and if they did that, the Royal Navy would never get its floating derrick. Now stealing half a dozen gasoline tanks, each as big as a Pullman car, is nothing lightly to be undertaken. It requires some equipment, and I had none. But Pat Murphy, the first construction superintendent in Massawa, who was back on his feet again and sympathetic toward anyone still suffering in Massawa, occasionally visited the scene of his own early troubles, and I persuaded him to lend me some of the contractor ’s heavy equipment for a few days and say nothing about it. (Not that I made him an accomplice by informing him I was stealing the tanks.) So Pat arranged for me with his successor as construction superintendent, the loan of a couple of heavy crawler cranes, some low-bodied trucks, and the necessary men. With all this equipment, in two days, I stole six gasoline tanks off their concrete foundations near the deserted airfield, brazenly hauled them in broad daylight some four miles down Massawa’s main street, and unloaded all six of them on the quay close alongside the sunken derrick. There, with a locomotive crane belonging on the quay, I could lift them overboard into the water whenever I had the changes finished that I required to make them into
pontoons. While Bill Reed and Frank Roys were struggling to saw messenger wires under the sunken derrick, I brought Lloyd Williams and a few salvage mechanics over from repairs to the Italian dry docks and started them on making pontoons out of Italian gasoline tanks in stead. The main job was to insert vertically in each tank, one near each end, a pair of hawsepipes to take the lifting slings. These were simply eleven-foot lengths of heavy ten-inch diameter steel pipe, welded watertight top and bottom into the gasoline tanks to give a vertical hole through them through which the cradle slings might pass. Then, we also welded lifting eyes to each end on top, securing eyes to each end on the bottom, provided connections for one-inch air hoses on top of each tank, and fitted a six-inch valve at each end on the bottom. These last were to allow the water to flow out at the bottom of the tank when we forced compressed air in at its top, thus making the tank buoyant when we wanted it to rise. I didn’t do anything to those huge gasoline tanks that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping the work down to the barest minimum that would give me a set of six of the crudest and flimsiest pontoons that any salvage man ever saw. They would be full of idiosyncrasies when it came to handling them, but that had to be expected. I had been working on the conversion of these tanks about a week after I had purloined them, and had even got so far as to try one of them out under the sea (with none too encouraging results either) when it occurred to me one morning that there was one other possibility of ownership I hadn’t thought of. Considering that I ought to keep salvage on as reputable a basis as possible, I decided to investigate that avenue at once and, if possible, get formal authority, which long since I had learned in dealing with the formal British, was of major importance. So, on going to my office, I called up the local representative of the Shell Oil Company, the official British source of supply in Eritrea for all petroleum products. After all, my new pontoons had once been meant for oil tanks; perhaps the Shell Oil Company knew who officially owned them. At last, I found I had hit the right people. Strange, I had not thought of them before. Yes, Shell was acting as representative of the R.A.F. headquarters in Cairo; the Shell manager in Asmara knew all about those tanks; if I called him there, he had complete power over them.
So, with the usual delays, Mrs. Maton got the Shell manager in Asmara on the phone for me. Yes, he controlled the airfield gasoline tanks as agent for the R.A.F. in Cairo. His orders with respect to them were that in a month or two, when a ship with a big enough deck was available, he was to get them to the waterfront, load them aboard ship, and send them all to Alex, where they were to be sent by rail to some new R.A.F. airfield then building in the Sudan. I asked him to lend six of them to me for a month for my salvage job, pointing out the great advantages that would accrue, both to the Royal Navy and to himself from such a loan. The Royal Navy would get the sunken derrick. As for himself, if he approved the loan, I would save him all the trouble of getting the tanks from the airfield down on the quay (which he had to agree would be a troublesome job), repair all the leaks in them for him, and deliver them to him all ready for use again as gasoline tanks—all this without the slightest labor on his part. That all of these things were already done to those tanks, I felt it unwise to advise him of, trembling in my boots meanwhile that he might want to come from Asmara to Massawa to look the tanks over on the airfield before deciding. To my great relief, however, my proposal sounded so attractive to him, that as agent for the R.A.F., he gave me immediate permission to proceed to remove the tanks, which permission he would immediately confirm by letter. I thanked him and hung up. Everything with my new pontoons was now according to Hoyle; I was an honest man again. I had that most valuable of all things in dealing with military authorities—official permission from someone on high, authorized to grant it. And none too soon either, it swiftly turned out. Hardly had I cleaned up a few other matters in my office, which took about an hour, and was preparing to return to my pontoons on the quay over in the commercial harbor for the rest of the morning, than my phone rang and Mrs. Maton, answering it, looked up at me to announce, “Colonel Sundius-Smith wishes to speak to you, Captain Ellsberg.” Colonel Sundius-Smith commanded all the British Forces in Massawa, a very fine officer. I had had from him a most sympathetic personal letter the month before on the occasion of the death of Horace Armstrong. What, I wondered, did he want of me now? I swiftly learned. In a very grieved voice, Colonel Sundius-Smith regretted he had to call my attention to something that pained him greatly. Six large gasoline tanks had disappeared suddenly from the airfield and it had been
reliably reported to him that at that very moment, those identical gasoline tanks were in possession of my men down on the commercial quay, miles away from where they belonged. While, of course, the colonel admitted that he didn’t own the tanks, still he knew very well that I didn’t either, and they certainly were British property, as prizes of war. As senior British officer on the spot, it was his duty to see that such things did not go on in His Majesty’s occupied territories. Much as it hurt him to say so, I must return those tanks to the airfield at once and he would overlook my dereliction. I felt almost like the heroine in the melodrama, who is cut loose and dragged off the railroad tracks just as The Limited roars by. In the most innocent manner possible, I replied: “Why, Colonel, you don’t mean to imply you think I’d have taken those, tanks without official permission, do you? Of course, I have it. Those tanks were in the custody of the Shell manager in Asmara as representative of R.A.F. headquarters in Cairo. I have the Shell manager ’s official permission to take those tanks. I’ll see you get a copy of his official authorization for your records.” Colonel Sundius-Smith apologized handsomely for ever having given such a vicious insinuation about a brother officer the slightest credence. Yes, just so nobody else, if he were away, bothered me again over the matter, he’d be glad to have a copy of my official permission for his files. And with more profuse apologies, which I accepted, he hung up. I wiped the sweat off my brow. Saved in the nick of time, by the grace of God! My salvage job could proceed! I got up to leave my office. “Mrs. Maton,” I said, “as soon as that Shell man’s permission comes down tomorrow from Asmara, you see that Colonel Sundius-Smith gets a copy of it immediately!” She smiled a Mona Lisa smile, and it struck me suddenly that she very much resembled that woman. What was Mrs. Maton thinking of behind that enigmatic smile, I wondered? After all, she was the wife of the Royal Navy’s intelligence officer in Massawa. How long were all the scandalous goings-on amongst us Americans going to remain asecret from the British?
CHAPTER
52 HOWEVER, I DIDN’T GET OVER TO THE commercial harbor that morning, nor that day either. It appeared that Captain Reed, before going over to the sunken crane that morning, had, as usual with him, paid a routine visit to the Gera to check on conditions aboard her. The Gera, for want of a better berth, now that both the Liebenfels and the Frauenfels had the only decent moorings for large ships inside the naval harbor, was temporarily tied up alongside the starboard side of the large Italian dry dock, there to await the day when I had workmen enough in Massawa to dry-dock and repair her. On my way down to the Naval Base pier to get my boat for the trip to the commercial harbor, I met Captain Reed on his way up to my office. He looked very grave. “Captain,” he informed me, “I was just going up to get you. You’d better come out to the Gera right away. I think we’re in danger of losing her!” Naturally on that I went double time to the pier, as did Reed. I told Galvln to make knots with his boat for the Gera. Then I asked Reed what was the matter. “That patch McCance and his limeys put on her side forward, looks to me as if it’s likely to give way any minute. The upper part of it’s only wood covered with canvas; she was on the bottom so long after they got the patch on before they raised her, that the teredos must have eaten most of the wood up. Anyway, the leak through it has been increasing the last few days. This morning, she’s leaking so bad, a six-inch pump can hardly keep up with it. I took a look at that patch; it looks to me as if it might fall to pieces and let go any minute. If it does, the Gera’ll sink right alongside the big Eytie dry dock and we’ll have to salvage her all over again!” When I boarded the Gera, I found what Reed had said was so; to save the Gera from possible foundering, it was necessary to dry-dock her immediately, whether I had any mechanics to work on her or not. There was no help for it.
We had a British armed supply ship on the Persian dry dock, but at noon she would be finished and the dry dock flooded down to undock that vessel. The dry dock would then be clear. I sent word over to Spanner, the dockmaster, that instead of taking the next supply ship waiting in the outer harbor, the Gera would be docked instead. But because of the enormous amount of cement McCance’s men had poured into her port side to form the lower parts of their patches, and also because of about 500 tons of rock ballast he had heaved into her holds during his futile attempts to make her stand up, the Gera was drawing quite a lot of water. The Persian dock would have to be flooded down more than normal to dock her at all. I would let Spanner know later just how far he would have to flood down to permit the Gera to come on. Meanwhile, Reed was starting up salvage pumps in every hold, both as a precaution and to get her as dry and as light in draft as possible for going on the dock. While that was being done, my boat was hastily dispatched to the commercial harbor to come back with Lloyd Williams and all the salvage mechanics there. At the same time, every salvage man working on the Italian dry docks was rushed aboard the Gera to help stand by the pumps in case of trouble. Water was pouring through that worm-eaten patch like a sieve, two pumps in that hold were now running all out to hold the water down. I could only hope nothing worse happened over the next couple of hours till we got the dry dock cleared and the Gera on it. Another hour went by. I had a sizeable gang of my salvage men aboard the Gera by then, all stationed for trouble. The Persian dock was being flooded down. Lieutenant Fairbairn came into the naval harbor with his tugboats to take the supply ship out. I waved him alongside the Gera and advised him to come back aboard the Gera, the moment he had the other vessel through the wrecks at the harbor entrance, and to bring back his tugs also for an emergency docking—the Gera was in precarious condition. He waved his acknowledgment. Soon, the supply ship was freely afloat and Fairbairn was taking her out. On deck of the Gera, we began singling the hawsers holding her alongside the big dry dock, so that the moment Fairbairn got back with his tugs, we could quickly cast off and depart for docking. Bob Steele had already been around the Gera in a skiff, checking at bow and stern the draft marks on her. She was going to cause us plenty of trouble in docking. She was drawing, by far, more water than any vessel we had ever
taken on the Persian dry dock; considerably more, in fact, than that dry dock was built to accommodate. To drag the Gera into that dry dock clear of the keel blocks, the dry dock would have to be flooded down two feet deeper than it was designed to go, even more than I had taken it down when I had docked the listing Liebenfels. Still, there was no help for it. A little of the dry dock, not much, would yet remain showing above water—so little, it might raise anybody’s hair to look at it. But by now I knew that Persian dry dock well. I was sure I could get away with it without losing the Persian dry dock, and it was either taking a chance in doing that, or be sure of losing the Gera. Already, there were wrecks enough on the bottom without adding to their number. So I sent Bob Steele over to inform Spanner of the bad news—as soon as the other ship was clear, he was to flood the Persian dry dock down two whole feet more than normal and await the Gera. I would myself direct the docking of the Gera from aboard her, as I dared not leave her. If her patch let go and she started to founder before we succeeded in getting her on the dry dock, I wanted to be aboard her for what fighting chance my salvage men, Captain Reed, and I might have to keep her afloat, even though we could no longer dry-dock her immediately. Steele had gone to convey the message and for some time since had been back with me. Fairbairn had taken the other ship out and now with three tugs, was coming in to haul us away and line us up for going on the dry dock. I looked over toward the Persian dock, only a hundred yards off to starboard. I could see it still lacked a foot of being flooded down far enough for the job. “Bob!” I ordered Steele. “Take my boat and get over to that dry dock at once. Tell Spanner to take her down that last foot immediately. We’re about to start for the dry dock!” “Aye, aye, sir!” Steele slid down the Jacob’s ladder from the Gera’s deck into my boat and shoved off. A tug came alongside, Fairbairn clambered aboard us to pilot us out, we began taking hawsers from the tugs. In a few minutes, the tugs were secured, Fairbairn was shrilling out signals to them on his whistle, and we had cast loose. The Gera was underway, to be dragged toward the harbor entrance, swung about there to point her bow for the dry dock, and then towed up to it. I begged Fairbairn for once to throw his usual prudence to the winds and hurry; our case was desperate and every minute might mean the difference between success and disaster. If the Gera’s patch let go while we were
maneuvering in front of the dry dock, she might founder there, blocking the only approach to the dock and putting it out of commission for weeks till we could repatch and salvage the Gera again. He must hurry. Fairbairn agreed. And then at that moment, when we had drawn well clear of our mooring, my boat ran back alongside the Gera and looking down into it, I could see Bob Steele waving frantically up at me. I leaned over the Gera’s bridge rail and asked: “What’s the matter?” “Spanner won’t take the dry dock down any farther!” Steele shouted up at me to make himself heard amidst the puffing of the tugs. “He says it’s too dangerous!” Too dangerous! I was getting sick of those words. First, from my Amerigan salvage captain, now from my English dockmaster! Didn’t they realize there was a war going on, and danger for everybody was part of his job? But, whereas with Brown on the Brenta and her mine, I could afford to be diplomatic and take a little time to iron out the situation, with Spanner and the dry dock I couldn’t afford to waste a minute. The Gera was underway for the dry dock. In twenty minutes, she would be coming on it. The dry dock by then had to be low enough to take her aboard or catastrophe would overwhelm us all. Savagely, I shouted down to Steele so there might be no misunderstanding of what I meant: “Get back aboard the dry dock at once! Tell Spanner I shouldn’t leave the Gera and I don’t want to! But tell him if he doesn’t take that dry dock down another foot instantly, I’m coming aboard that dry dock personally to heave him overboard! Then, I’ll take the dock down myself! Don’t wait for Spanner ’s answer, Bob. Come right back here with the boat so I can have it if I need it. I don’t need to know his answer. I can see from here whether he obeys or not. I want that boat back immediately for my use in case he doesn’t! Shove off now, and see Spanner doesn’t misunderstand me!” Steele waved he understood and Glen Galvin raced away with him over the short stretch of water to the dry dock, from which the Gera now was steadily drawing away as the tugs dragged her out toward the harbor entrance to wind her about for a proper approach. Through Fairbairn’s binoculars, I saw Steele climb aboard the upper deck of the dry dock, which required only that he step from the gunwale of my boat directly onto the deck—the flooded dry dock was already so low in the water—and start talking to Spanner. Steele, I knew, I
could rely on to make my meaning clear. Steele wasted little time on it. I saw him turn abruptly from Spanner, jump back aboard the boat, and start back for the Gera. I could see through the glasses, Spanner standing in indecision a moment or so, then start for the dry dock control house where the flood valves were operated. I dropped the glasses. My boat was nearly back now, but I shouldn’t need it. It wasn’t going to be necessary for me to heave Spanner overboard. The dry dock started slowly to sink down that last all-important foot, leaving hardly any of her side walls still visible above the sea. I could keep my attention on the Gera. As swiftly as the tugs could do it, Fairbairn wound the Gera end for end as water from the pumps below battling the leakage poured overboard, straightened her away on the approach to the dock. The Hsin Rocket puffed mightily ahead of her to drag her up to it. The bow of the Gera nosed up to the entrance, we picked up a headline from the dry dock, and the Hsin Rocket sidled off to port to get clear, while the two tugs astern kept shepherding us to hold the ship properly in line as slowly our bow was dragged in between the two side walls of the dry dock. Looking down from the Gera’s bridge, where I then took over from Fairbairn, now that the ship was entering the dry dock, I could see what little of my Persian dock remained above the surface—what there was of it resembled two long but almost awash rafts stretching ahead to starboard and to port of me. There wasn’t more than 300 tons of reserve buoyancy in that dry dock left showing above the sea. If anything went wrong now to put any load on that dry dock before we could pump her up again, the Persian dry dock would suddenly go down those last few inches like a rock, to become a salvage job herself. Slowly, carefully, I directed the Hindoos, the Persians, and the Eritreans on those dry dock walls as they handled the hawsers to drag us forward and to help keep us centered along the line of unseen keel blocks beneath us. The Gera was a wide beamed ship, as well as a deep draft one. There wasn’t much clearance on the sides as she dragged ahead through the water into the dock. To make matters worse, that patch on her forward, which McCance’s men had clumsily put on and which was the cause of our present troubles, protruded underwater three feet from the port side, widening her beam by that much, and giving us next to no clearance at all between that patch and the port side of the dry dock as we came on. With infinite care, I took the Gera into the barely afloat dry dock, praying that nothing might happen to that patch till we got her in position and the dry
dock pumps started. For now, if the patch carried away for any reason, it would be worst of all. Over 1000 tons of water would pour instantaneously into the number two hold. Even if we managed to keep the Gera from sinking altogether, that sudden extra load would bring her down on the keel blocks, now only inches clear of her keel, and sink the dry dock right from under her, with the Gera most probably ending up by sinking completely herself squarely on top of it—a terrible mess to have to salvage, one wreck atop another. Hardly daring to breathe, in which sad state I knew all my salvage men aboard the Gera and the dry dock crew were, as well as I, I maneuvered the Gera cautiously ahead. I had her three-quarters entered with everything going well when, for no apparent reason at all, she ceased moving forward. I ordered Spanner on the dry dock to heave just a bit harder on the headline, not much. He did. The ship didn’t move. Evidently that patch to port had caught on something below water inside the dry dock, either at the side or underneath. I dared not heave hard ahead for fear of tearing loose that decrepit patch, least of all now when it would do the most harm, so I ordered the headline slacked off to relieve any possible strain on that fouled patch. Then for the next hour I went through hell as gingerly I struggled to clear that disintegrating patch of the unseen obstruction below without using any force which might collapse it. By hand only now on all our lines, we struggled as if we were walking on eggs, to haul the ship to starboard, to haul her a little astern, to get the patch clear of whatever it was hung up on. There was no obvious reason why she should have caught on anything there; already that patch had cleared three-quarters of the length of the dock. But stuck it was, and obstinately stuck it remained in the face of what trifling force I dared use to free it. Nobody said a word. Every order I gave was instantly obeyed. Even Spanner on the port drydock wall, who must have considered this the verification of all his fears, struggled manfully and whole-heartedly to help free the recalcitrant Gera of whatever it was that was holding her and us in that terribly dangerous position. Suddenly, at the end of that agonizing hour, with no reason any more apparent for her going than for her stopping before, the Gera moved slowly ahead once more. Breathing a prayer of thankfulness, I dragged her forward the last hundred feet into the dry dock, hurriedly centered her over the keel blocks, and waved to Spanner to start up all the dry dock pumps full power. It took but a few turns of those powerful pumps to float the dry dock up
enough to bring the keel blocks into contact with the Gera’s keel. In a few more minutes, the Gera was herself slowly rising from the water while we ran in the side spur shores, hauled the side bilge blocks in under her hull for side support, and wedged up a few extra shores from the dry dock walls to the Gera’s sides to make sure she did no listing on us while she rose. In another hour, we had the dry dock and the Gera in her both high up out of water, all danger of any nature over. I looked at that exposed salvaged wreck as she rode there on the keel blocks, her two patches to port ready now to be torn away and repaired permanently with steel plating. I felt as if the dry-docking of that wreck had taken ten years off my life. With Lloyd Williams beside me, I inspected her blasted port side for what work would be necessary on the dry dock to repair her before we could take her off again. She was sickening to contemplate. McCance’s men must have spent most of their six months on her in pouring concrete into her port side double bottoms abreast the holes-there were hundreds of tons of concrete set hard as granite there. It would take us a couple of weeks at least just to remove all that concrete with what pneumatic paving busters I could get, so that we might then go ahead with the repairs to the steel hull. Actually, if we hadn’t finally used some small charges of dynamite on it to break up that mass of concrete, we might still be hammering away on that concrete mountain with our puny cement busters. As it was, it took Lloyd Williams a whole week to get rid of all that concrete, most of it unnecessary for salvage purposes. Then, with every mechanic I had left myself, whom I could throw on the job, and some I must admit I stole from the contractor ’s work to help, Lloyd Williams turned to to replate with steel the huge holes gaping in the side of the Gera where the bombs inside had exploded. In all that steel work, I was as handicapped as I had been on the Liebenfels and on the Dido months before by the lack of my new plate shop. There was now a lovely set of masonry residence buildings, a grand mess hall, and a really cozy and spacious recreation room for the contractor ’s construction forces ashore. But my new plate shop, the only new building I really needed in the Naval Base to get along without back-breaking hand work every time I had a steel plate to fabricate, still gaped unfinished at the sky—roofless, sideless, frontless, and useless. Lloyd Williams, aided by a fine new American foreman, Charley Journey, whom I had picked up wandering about jobless in the Middle East, and by my old reliable, Bill Cunningham, a tower of strength in himself when it came to
steel, managed to get the job of rebuilding the Gera’s steel sides done in about eight days after the concrete was cleared away, and that wholly without any new plate shop to back him up. I felt sure that if only Horace Armstrong were still alive to work alongside Bill Cunningham, the job might have been done in even half that time. As it was, the Gera went on the dry dock on October 29. On November 14, sixteen days on the dry dock, a remarkably short period considering what had to be done, she came off, her hull completely repaired and sound. But even so, the day she came off, we had six British supply ships anchored idly off the outer roadstead waiting for the dry dock. I had managed to stop any more from coming from the Mediterranean. I suggested to Commander Davy, pointing out that flotilla of useless ships waiting outside, that if only he could impress on Admiral Harwood’s staff in Alex the importance of delivering to me some part of the mechanics, the officers, and some of the steel long since promised me, I could hurriedly put the two salvaged Italian dry docks back into commission and avoid any such holdups in docking in the future. Perhaps that was what finally got action. At any rate, three days later, seventy British shipyard mechanics, accompanied by Commander Mole and a Royal Navy lieutenant, arrived in Massawa on November 17, all ordered to report to me for work at the U.S. Naval Repair Base in Massawa. Some steel was promised me swiftly to follow them. For the first time, six months after it had started operations, I had a moderate force of mechanics under my control for my Naval Base, and a couple of faaval assistants who knew ships. I could hardly stand it; I had become too used to getting along on a shoe string, and sometimes even without one. If I had known the day they arrived what exactly one week from that day I was to learn, I couldn’t have stood it at all.
CHAPTER
53 LLOYD WILLIAMS WITH HIS MISCELLANEOUS little crew of mechanics was in the very middle of the job on the dry dock on the Gera, that is, he had just cleared away the last of the cement. With his worn-out men, he was contemplating the formidable steel job that still lay before him. As I marked out for him where the bomb-damaged plating was to be burned away, someone on deck the dock above shouted for me to look out to sea. I sidled out from under the Gera’s bottom, clambered up the high port side wall of the dry dock to her deck, and looked seaward as bid. There, some miles out toward the horizon, was the Intent, headed for the naval harbor, with the Tripolitania, listed perhaps 5° to port, in tow astern of her, and the barge full of salvage pumps, towing astern the Tripolitania. It was November 6. Hastily, I counted on my fingers. This was the eighth day since the Intent had departed for the Daklak Islands. Brown had done well; I had figured on seven working days lifting the Tripolitania and he must have done it in six. I left the Gera to Williams and ran ashore, to order out the pilot and his three tugs—one tug to relieve Brown of that barge tailing his tow, and the other two to help the pilot bring the newly salvaged wreck into the naval harbor and moor her alongside the port side of the smaller Italian dry dock. That was the last berth I had left available for mooring a wreck. The Liebenfels and the Frauenfels were occupying the only two safe berths afloat in the naval harbor itself. The Gera, when she came off the dry dock repaired, would have to go back to be moored off the starboard side of the large Italian dry dock. Nothing was left for mooring another ship except that spot alongside the smaller dock where I intended to put the Tripolitania. After she was in that berth, there wouldn’t be another spot in all Massawa for mooring another salvaged ship—I would have the naval harbor all full of salvaged wrecks and no room for any more.
The only ray of light in that situation was the Liebenfels—completed now, with steam up and engines tried, she was ready to go to sea again to do her bit against her late owners, the Nazis, as soon as the promised crew for her arrived in Massawa. Of course, I could never dream of sending her out under her new flag still under her old name, so I had renamed her the General Russell Maxwell (though our commanding general in Cairo, in whose honor she was thus named, was completely unaware of it). With that name already painted on both her bows and on her stern, looking bright and new in fresh paint all over her hull, our first salvage prize of war was ready for sea—a complete product of Massawa, salvaged by my salvage forces, repaired and refitted by my Naval Base. All hands in Massawa were quite proud of the General Russell Maxwell, part of their contribution toward helping to defeat the Axis. But sad to relate, I now had to admit that her room was more welcome than her company. I must start pressing for that crew for her in spite of a scarcity of merchant officers and seamen, or I should be in a devil of a predicament over where to stow away the next ship after the Tripolitania to be salvaged. But that at least was for the future. As the Intent, dragging the salvaged Tripolitania, came in, we welcomed her home to Massawa with all the whistles we had, the loudest of which, interestingly enough, was that of the General Russell Maxwell, once herself scuttled by the Axis. The ex-Liebenfels sent all the steam of her powerful boilers roaring out her deep-throated whistle, to echo far and wide over all the wrecks still on the bottom in all the three harbors of Massawa, in fervent greeting to our latest anti-Axis recruit, now risen from the depths. The Tripolitania was shortly secured alongside the small dry dock, and the Intent moved in to moor herself at her usual berth alongside the naval pier. I went back to the Gera’s bottom to finish laying out the job there for Williams and his men. About the middle of the afternoon, I came ashore again from the dry dock to board the Intent. There I congratulated Brown on his success, and told him to convey my congratulations to all his crew for a fine job, swiftly done. Then I got down to business. I didn’t mention it to Brown and there was no need of my mentioning it—such things I knew got around Massawa amazingly fast. Having been ashore already a few hours with plenty of time to talk to the contractor ’s local men, I knew perfectly well Brown knew what had happened during his absence in the Daklak Islands—that Major MacAlarney, contracting officer from Cairo, had been in Massawa and that the piece of paper on which
it appeared some people at least had built up fond illusions, had gone into the waste basket where it belonged with other waste paper. The only Officer in Charge of Salvage in Massawa was the one so appointed by General Maxwell. “Now, Brown,” I informed him, “I’m not sending either you or your crew to Asmara for a rest after this salvage job. You don’t need one. You’re staying here in Massawa. Tomorrow, you get your ship straightened out for another job. Day after tomorrow, early, you are all going back on the Brenta, to tackle that mine again. You’re not afraid any more that your crew is afraid of it, are you?” “No, sir,” answered Brown promptly. “They’ll all go.” “That’s fine, Brown. I’m certainly glad to hear it. It saves me a little trouble. I was sure a short trip to the Daklak Islands would do you all some good in getting the right point of view. Now, here’s the program,” and I outlined to him what we should do. I told him to inform his crew of it, send Buck Scougale up to my room that night so I could go over with him the confidential British ordnance pamphlets on that mine, and next morning, we should all start out again for the Brenta. I got hold of Commander Davy when I got ashore, and he retrieved from the guarded safe in the Royal Naval Base, those highly secret documents, meanwhile advising the explosives lieutenant in Alex to start for Massawa again. That night, Buck Scougale and I went over the intricacies of that Italian mine and its potential dangers, while Davy listened. I started by informing Buck he needn’t risk his life on that mine if he didn’t want to; I’d be glad to do the diving on it myself. Buck would hear of no such thing; he wanted to do it himself. He had never himself been afraid of that mine. He had been startled enough when first he had seen it, but all he wanted, like any sensible person, was to know as much as possible about the dangers involved in facing it, before he had to face them again. And while he didn’t say so, he knew that he was a far better diver than I was and that there would be considerably less chance of anybody’s getting hurt under water if he tackled the mine rather than if I did. At any rate, Buck being perfectly willing to face that mine again, I let it go at that and started to instruct Buck in what every gadget he would encounter on that mine meant and what its possibilities of causing detonation were in normal operation. After that, I showed Buck every conceivable way in which that mine might be rigged for abnormal operation as a booby trap. Buck took it all in. The second morning, the Intent started back for the south harbor and the
Brenta. If any member of her crew had ever had the slightest fear of going back there, I could find no trace of it on any of them, as we steamed around Sheikh Said Island into the south harbor and up to the line of wrecks again. That line of wrecks had changed considerably in appearance since first I had seen it late the March before. Now, in November there were two long gaps in the line, where once had rested the ex-Liebenfels and the Frauenfels. Soon, I felt, there would be another gap, where rested the hulk of the Brenta, alongside which we tied up the Intent and prepared for diving. Buck was dressed in his diving rig. This time he was to enter the Brenta’s hold by going down from above through the cargo hatches, not from the ocean floor through the bomb hole. Carefully again, I, who was manning the ship end of his diving telephone, went over his instructions with Buck before his helmet was clapped on. He was to drop down into the hold, clear of the mine, and approach it gradually. He was to examine all around it before he moved toward it to make sure there were no trip wires along the floor boards of that hold which might set off the mine if he stumbled over one. He was to get within one foot of the mine, but no closer, and he was not to touch it or any part of it. He was to measure as exactly as he could, without touching it, with a folding steel rule I gave him, its diameter and its height. He was to count the number of lead horns on the mine, note where they were located. He was to pay particular attention to the hydrostatic piston mechanism, which should be on top of that mine, and so far as he could determine, discover whether the hydrostatic piston was down inside its cylinder, or up. The location of that piston in its cylinder was an important factor in whether the mine was armed and ready to fire or not. Finally, Buck was to check whether two lifting eyes were where they should be on the spherical mine case, and also whether the spherical mine was still secured by tie rods to the square mine case beneath it, which should be serving as its anchor. All this, Buck was to do, and report to me over the diving telephone each item as he checked it, before proceeding to the next, while I checked off on the diagram of that mine as he reported it, each feature to make sure it corresponded with the particular mine we thought it was. When he had done all this, and noted anything else of interest relating to that mine, still without touching the mine, he was to come up. After that, it would be decided what next to do. Buck went over the side of the Intent and vanished beneath the sea, with
Muzzy tending his lines from on deck. Marked by a trail of bubbles in the water, rising from his helmet, I could trace Buck’s course across the wellsubmerged deck of the Brenta and then his descent into her number two hold, while Muzzy carefully fed out slack on his lifeline and airhose. Buck hit bottom far down inside the flooded hold. Muzzy stopped paying out line. Buck reported over the telephone he could see the mine standing about a fathom off; there seemed to be no trip wires in the water; he was approaching it. I could see by his moving bubbles that he was; then he stopped. A moment went by. Then, in the flat toneless voice of every diver under pressure, I caught his next words, quivering with excitement in spite of the heavy air pressure flattening out all tone quality. “Cap’n, I’m close to that mine now and it’s standing on three torpedo warheads!” Three torpedo warheads in the Brenta as well as a submarine mine! What, in Heaven’s name, were we up against? What should all those explosives be doing inside a scuttled merchantman? But this time, in spite of the unexpected new explosives, Buck stood his ground and so long as he stood his ground alongside that mine, I could certainly stand mine on the other end of his diving telephone. “All right, Buck,” I answered. “I got it. Three torpedo warheads as well as a mine. O.K. Now, go ahead and measure the mine with that steel rule.” Down on the bottom, about a foot away from several thousand pounds of high explosives put there by the Eyties for no good purpose so far as Buck was concerned, Buck unfolded his steel rule, held it as closely as he dared alongside that huge steel ball containing sudden death, and sighted through the face plate of his helmet both sides of the ball to check its diameter. “Thirty-nine inches, Cap’n,” came up to me in Buck’s far-away flat tones. “Thirty-nine inches,” I repeated. Practically one meter in the metric system used by the Italians. That checked exactly with my diagram. “O.K., Buck. Now the height.” It took Buck a little longer to measure the height. He had to stoop to sight top and bottom along his vertical rule; in a diving rig, not an easy thing to do when he must not fall over against one of those protruding horns, ready to kill him more quickly than any rattlesnake’s fangs, should he strike one. Buck reported the height only approximately; he couldn’t get in exactly, but his figures checked fairly well with what they should be.
“Good enough, Buck. Now count the horns.” Far below me, Buck proceeded to count the horns. Those were the lead protrusions all around the steel mine case. If anything hit and bent one of them over, it broke a thin glass vial of acid inside the lead horn, the acid spilled out over a carbon and zinc cell generating instantly an electric current, the current flowed through a relay inside to fire a detonator, and the detonator exploded about half a ton of TNT, all before you could wink an eye. Of course, when that happened, no one in the vicinity would any longer be interested in winking an eye. “Seven horns, Cap’n,” reported Buck. “All in one row, spaced even around the top half o’ that mine, pointing up on about a 45° angle.” “You’re doing fine, Buck!” I sang out into the telephone. “It’s the mine we’ve been studying all right! Everything checks! Now, how about that hydrostatic piston on top? Is it in or out?” But there Buck was stumped. Peering through his helmet as well as he could without touching anything, trying to look into what should be an open cylinder on top of the mine, Buck could see the cylinder well enough but that was as far as he got. “Can’t tell you, Cap’n,” he reported finally. “I can’t see into that cylinder. It’s not open on the top the way you said it oughta be. Looks to me as if a wood plug’s been driven into it, and maybe sawed off just a little above the cylinder.” A wood plug driven into the hydrostatic piston! No wood plug belonged there. That appeared to be some evidence of booby trapping that mine. I’d have to think that over carefully. “Good enough, Buck,” I cautioned. “Don’t touch it! Now, how about those lifting eyes and the bottom tie rods to the anchor case?” Buck checked. The lifting eyes were as they should be; the mine sphere was securely held down to its anchor. There was nothing more to be learned. “That’s everything, Buck,” I told him. “Get well clear of that mine and come up!” Buck rose to the surface with Muzzy heaving in cautiously, and we took him aboard. I learned nothing new from questioning him on deck. What were those three torpedo warheads doing under that mine in the Brenta? I had no idea. Neither had anybody else, but Buck assured me neither the mine nor its anchor case was secured to them; the mine assembly was just standing on them. But that plug driven into the hydrostatic piston cylinder bothered me a lot. It
didn’t belong there. That hydrostatic piston was supposed to be pushed down by the pressure of the sea to arm the mine as it sank, once it had been planted overboard in the normal manner. Had the Eyties perhaps driven in that plug to force the piston down to insure its arming? Or had they perhaps done it for another purpose? Possibly with other changes inside that hydrostatic piston which we couldn’t see, had they rigged that mine so that if ever any attempt was made to lift it out, the decreasing sea pressure would make the piston work in reverse, arm, and fire the mine as it rose? No one could tell. However, that was evidently the major danger. Buck was sure that if we gave him a sling fitted with proper hooks, he could without danger to himself, hook them into the lifting eyes so we could hoist that mine straight up and out the open cargo hatches overhead. But if it exploded on us as it came up? I couldn’t prevent its exploding, but, at least, I could avoid the explosion doing us any harm, even if I couldn’t save the Brenta from it. I ordered Brown to rig one of the Brenta’s forward booms, protruding above the sea, so that it plumbed the center of the number two hold. Then I took the Intent down the line of wrecks to the stern of the Colombo, lying with half her port side out of the water, capsized just astern of the Brenta. Far aft on the stern of the Colombo, 1000 feet at least away from that number two hold on the Brenta, we rigged up and secured a small portable gasolinedriven winch. I told Brown to reeve off a long line from that winch set on the Colombo’s stern, lead it the whole length of the Colombo and most of the length of the Brenta, then down through a block from the boom on the Brenta’s plumbing the hatch. On the end of the line, he was to provide a bridle fitted on each leg at its lower end with a pair of sister hooks to engage the eyes in the mine. I gave him the rest of the day to get all that rigged up. Next morning, all of us would come out again and remove the mine. After that, provided we did it successfully, we would proceed to remove the warheads the same way. So I left Brown and his men to do their rigging job, while Davy and I in my boat went back to the Naval Base to ponder the matter further as to whether the Eyties might still be a jump ahead of us in the matter of booby trapping the Brenta. The problem had me worried. While I had never said anything on the subject to any of my divers in Massawa, that was part of what Major Quilln in Alex had wanted to quiz me on when in late September, I had so suddenly been called off the docking of H.M.S. Cleopatra to go to Alex for a conference with him. Among other things, he wanted to learn how the proposed blockship
might be booby trapped so that enemy divers attempting to lift it might blow themselves up and those few who escaped destruction might get discouraged and quit. But with that part of Major Quilln’s problem I had refused to have anything to do or to offer any advice. I felt that salvage men, even enemy salvage men, faced dangers enough on a wreck without trying to add to their dangers by any such damnable devices as booby traps under water. I was perfectly willing to assist in preparing a blockship so it couldn’t soon or easily be raised, but that was as far as I was willing to go. I hoped never to run into any underwater booby traps myself, I told Major Quilln, and I certainly wasn’t going to be any party to preparing them, even for our enemies. Now it began to look as if the Eyties in Massawa perhaps hadn’t been so ethical as regards me and my men. What did that wood plug driven into the hydrostatic piston of the Brenta’s mine mean? I made whatever other arrangements I wanted at the Naval Base for the next day’s work, and then spent the rest of the day and all of the evening with Commander Davy and the explosives lieutenant (who had meanwhile arrived from Alex), puzzling over mine pamphlets trying to solve the riddle, but we couldn’t. Unless in some way it was to help in exploding the mine as it rose or after it was up, there seemed no reason for its presence. So we separated and finally turned in. Next morning, we started out again for the Brenta. Aside from the Intent, I had need for a work boat, a shallow punt, and a skiff, and I had provided them all. The Intent carried the skiff. The work boat went on her own, towing the punt. As a work boat, I selected the Lord Grey, whose broad shallow hull best suited my purpose, though I was certain her Eytie crew, when they learned what was wanted of them in the south harbor, would not be pleased. Still, by then it would be too late for them to rebel. There had been some argument after everyone else had started off from the Naval Base, as between myself and Commander Davy on one side, and the explosives lieutenant on the other. At some point in the lifting proceedings, while the mine might be brought to the surface without anyone ever getting near it till then except Buck, who was to engage the lifting hooks, someone else was going actually to have to handle that mine to get it into the punt and get it ashore. Commander Davy and I had agreed that we two being the only naval officers
around, should do that without exposing anyone else to danger while we handled the mine. Now the explosives lieutenant insisted on going with us. However, we both, being much senior to him, sprang rank on him and refused to allow it. After all, two men could handle the job perfectly; there was no reason to hazard a third. Particularly was this so, we pointed out to him, in case of an unfortunate accident with the mine, when it would be desirable to have someone acquainted with the situation left over to explain to the C-in-C. what had happened. We would deliver the mine to him in the south harbor on a deserted beach, if we got it successfully ashore from the Brenta. There it would be all his to dissect at his leisure without our company, and if in that process he blew himself up, we should both be left over and glad to reciprocate by informing the C.-in-C. of what we knew about what had happened to the late lamented explosives lieutenant. As I had four stripes and Davy had three, while the poor lieutenant had only two, he hadn’t a chance in the argument with us. We both got into my boat with Glen Galvin and set out to overhaul the Intent, while all he could do was get into my car with Garza (which I had offered him to salve his hurt feelings) and drive around by land to the deserted beach on the south harbor a mile away from the Brenta, on which beach we promised him to deliver the mine. My boat could make twice the speed of the Intent. We easily overhauled and passed her, as well as the Lord Grey and its unsuspecting crew of Eyties, and were first alongside the Brenta. The Intent arrived shortly and rigged for diving. Buck Scougale was quickly dressed and was preparing to go overboard when the Lord Grey, towing the punt, arrived. I ordered the Lord Grey to move on to the stern of the Colombo and await us there. Buck went overboard. It wasn’t necessary to go over his instructions again; he knew exactly what he was to do. Carrying a thin manila line already attached to the slings dangling from the boom plumbing the hatch, he submerged, crossed the Brenta’s deck, was lowered carefully down into the hold. As he went down, Scotty, the Intent’s first mate, slacked away gently on the heavy manila line leading downward from the boom so that Buck would not have to pull it down with him. As before, I manned the deck end of Buck’s diving telephone. Buck reported himself on the bottom; he was moving toward the mine. He was close alongside it; we were to slack away a little more on the bridle line. We did.
Then, there was silence for about ten minutes as below us in the depths, Buck worked cautiously with his bridle to engage the sister hooks in the eyes on the mine and to seize them there with marline so they couldn’t come loose, while all the while he knew and we knew that he must not bang any of the horns or anything else with his lead weights, and that he must keep his lead-soled boots off those torpedo warheads beneath it. If Buck, working engulfed in water on a slimy deck, slipped or moved carelessly, it would be very unpleasant for all hands. Finally, Buck phoned up to tell us to take up the slack on the mine-lifting line —it was hooked up. Gingerly, we heaved in slack while Buck stood by the mine to watch that we left the line neither so slack a loop of it might foul a horn, nor so taut we swayed the mine up off its strange foundations. We got the line heaved in to suit Buck’s critical eye, secured it that way, leading far aft to the winch on the Colombo’s stern. Then Buck got clear and asked us to take him up. The moment Buck was back aboard, without waiting to undress him, the Intent cast off from the Brenta and herself steamed back astern the wreck of the Colombo where she tied up. All was now ready to proceed. There wasn’t anybody closer than 1000 feet to that mine in the fore hold of the Brenta. If it exploded as we lifted it, the Brenta would be the only sufferer. I took a position well off to port of the Colombo’s stern, where from my boat, I could see over the Brenta’s submerged forward decks, as well as seeing the men of the Intent manning the gasoline winch secured to the capsized stern of the Colombo. Brown started up the gasoline winch. I signaled him to start heaving in slowly on his lifting line. Carefully Brown clutched in the winch and took up all the slack in the 1000 foot bight of line between him and the Brenta’s boom; then when he had a strain on the line, he cautiously winched in. Probably two or three minutes went by while he took in fifty feet of line and all hands waited for an explosion from the rising mine. Nothing happened. Then the mine, looking somewhat like the Man from Mars with its strange spherical head spiked all over with protruding horns standing atop a square mine anchor case on wheels, burst through the surface and gradually rose some six feet above it. Then I sang out to Brown: “Avast heaving!” Brown stopped the winch. Very gently the mine swayed on the end of its
lifting line, dripping water all over. I let the mine hang about half an hour. If there was any delay action to a mechanism intended to explode that mine when the sea pressure was off it, I was perfectly willing to give it a chance to act without coming any closer. When at the end of half an hour, nothing had occurred, Davy and I agreed we were dealing only with an ordinary naval mine with only the usual potentialities of death and no added special features, in spite of that inexplicable wooden plug in the hydrostatic piston. So we swung into action. I beckoned the Lord Grey to come alongside my boat with the punt it had in tow—a very long punt, twenty feet long, five feet in the beam, and some three feet deep inside its hull. Very reluctantly, the Eytie coxswain did, for with that mine now swinging in the open, plainly visible, he began to suspect the worst of his strange invitation to visit the south harbor for the first time in weeks. I explained to him his part. Towing the punt astern of him, with only Commander Davy and me in it, he was to tow us on a very long towline, directly under the hanging mine. To do that, the Lord Grey would have to pass over the submerged deck of the Brenta (dodging its not so well submerged ventilator cowls) and directly beneath the mine, but he needn’t worry—he wouldn’t touch anything below with his hull if he steered straight, nor anything above either if only he kept his head down. When the punt towing astern came under the mine, he was to stop and leave the rest to us. Davy and I would take care of it while he was a long way off on the far end of the towline. Instantly the Eytie coxswain and his whole crew began gesticulating wildly in protest, but they were up against two very hard-hearted men who paid no attention. They were not going to be in any danger, regardless of what they thought—it was only Davy and I who were going to face that. We climbed into the punt, slacked away on the long towline I had provided, and bade them get underway or it would be the worse for them. Shepherded by Glen Galvin in my boat (which could not safely navigate that passage over the Brenta or I would have used it) to see that the Lord Grey did not suddenly cast us adrift and flee, the Lord Grey headed for the Brenta and her mine. She made a long sweep to allow her to straighten out so she could cross the submerged Brenta just forward of her exposed bridge and just aft her foremast, from one of the booms of which the mine was suspended. If ever that Eytie coxswain steered a straight course, he did that day, with a
sunken hull below him, a deadly mine overhead, an awash bridge to starboard, and a mast sticking up from the sea to port. Carefully, he went through over his obstacle course, with every man in his boat stretched practically flat out on the thwarts as they passed under the mine. Once he was clear himself he began to take a more intelligent interest, as far astern of him he towed us toward the Brenta. We crossed her submerged port gunwale and waved to him to go very slowly till he had us directly under the mine, then we stopped him while from the punt, we lassoed the wheels of that mine to get a guide line on it. Once we had that, we straightened the punt out so the mine hung directly amidships over us, and signaled to Brown who was now in the skiff well off to starboard where he could see both us and Scotty at the winch, to lower away gently. Now came the pinch. That mine and its anchor weighed a ton at least. It was up to Davy and me to guide it squarely into the punt so it landed clear of everything without fouling any of those dangerous horns and bending them. Brown signaled the winch to slack away gently. Down came the mine between us, Davy astern of it, I ahead. We grasped its wheels as soon as we could touch them, and with more delicacy than I, at least, had ever handled anything, guided that ton of high explosives downward inside the punt till we had it safely landed on the floor boards without it tipping sideways and bending those horns. Then we cut loose the lifting slings, and Brown signaled to haul them clear, while swiftly Davy and I passed manila lashings from the mine case to the gunwales in every direction, to hold that mine firmly down and avoid any possibility of its moving any way at all into contact with anything. When that was done, we signaled the Lord Grey to tow us and our mine out of there. She did. Once we were well clear of the Brenta, I had the Lord Grey back down to the bow of the punt, when, so to speak, Davy and I abandoned ship, leaving the punt unmanned while we boarded the Lord Grey and hastily paid out all the slack on the towline again. Davy and I smiled at each other. Our danger was over. We towed the punt as far up toward the beach as the Lord Grey could safely go without grounding herself, tossed over the towline with an anchor on it to hold the punt, and waved to the explosives lieutenant on the beach that there was his mine intact and he could do with it as he pleased, including either wading or swimming out to it. We were through.
I may add here, he spent about a week dissecting it, without blowing himself up, which is all I know about the further history of that mine, as he departed for Alex with whatever he learned, including the mystery of that wood plug in the hydrostatic piston, without my ever seeing him again. Meanwhile, next day we cleared out the torpedo warheads, which were taken out to sea and sunk, and the Intent proceeded with the salvage of the Brenta.
CHAPTER
54 WHILE I WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE Gera, the Tripolitania, and the Brenta and her mine, these formed only minor interludes in what was really my main task during that period—the salvage of the sunken crane. By the latter part of October, I had both physically and officially come into possession of the six pontoons I needed for the job, and had completed the changes required to make crude pontoons out of the first two gasoline tanks. Bill Reed and Frank Roys, in the face of terrific obstacles, had managed to sweep four steel messenger wires under the hull of the sunken crane, and with these, against even fiercer difficulties, had succeeded in hauling through the actual cradle slings needed to lift the derrick. Those cradle slings were something to contemplate. They were of almost the heaviest steel wire imaginable—as thick as a man’s wrist, they were of twoinch diameter steel wire—such wire as one rarely sees. That I should ever have found such heavy wire hawsers in Massawa, I should not have believed, but all I had to do to get them was to look into what formerly had been Captain McCance’s salvage warehouse and which now was mine. It contained everything—there was reel on reel of that massive two-inch diameter wire that even in New York I couldn’t have obtained on short notice. That warehouse was a regular Ali Baba’s cave of salvage treasures, all mine now without asking anyone’s by your leave or having even to say, “Open sesame!” I used that thick wire doubled to make up each cradle sling. Three hundred feet of it, doubled up to give a finished length of 150 feet, formed each sling, strong enough to stand a load of 300 tons before it broke. As I intended to put a pull of only 60 tons at most on each end of that sling, I felt assured my slings, at least, would not break on me in the lift. Meanwhile, with Ervin Johnson diving to find out, I learned the submerged crane hull was 100 feet long and 60 feet wide. That presented me with another
problem. Since my impromptu pontoons were each 45 feet long, I could get only two of them, end to end, down alongside each side of the crane hull—that is, only four pontoons altogether, two to starboard, two to port. Now four pontoons could lift about 420 tons. If the crane turned out to weigh 400 tons or less, I might lift it with only four pontoons; if it proved to be heavier, I couldn’t do it. I should then have to use all six pontoons, and the last two pontoons could not be placed alongside—there wasn’t room for them there. They would have to go down athwartships, one across the square bow and one across the square stern of that crane. However, that would require another pair of cradle slings under the crane, hauled under her the long way of her hull. Inasmuch as dragging two pairs of slings under her athwartships, the short way, had nearly killed us all as we tugged mightily with two huge bulldozers in tandem on the quay heaving on the messenger wires to drag those massive wire slings through the debris and coral on which the heavy crane rested, I hoped and prayed to be relieved of that necessity. Even on the short slings, many a time as we heaved with the bulldozers, the inch-thick steel messenger wires, strained taut as iron bars, had suddenly snapped, to come swirling back on us in hurtling coils that threatened to decapitate us should a coil catch us in its path. I decided to try with only four pontoons. If I failed on that, there would be nothing for it save to stand the gaff and run through a third pair of slings fore and aft for the third pair of pontoons. So in late October, I started to lower pontoons against a changing war background. For on the day I started, Montgomery and Alexander with the British Eighth Army opened up the long-awaited assault on Rommel’s positions before El Alamein. While under the hot Red Sea sun I labored in Massawa on that crane, before far-away El Alamein, wheel to wheel for miles on end, British guns started to pound Field Marshal Rommel’s whole forty mile long position between the Mediterranean and the Quattaro Depression. The war in the Middle East was about to move westward, I felt sure. If I didn’t want to be marooned in the backwash, I’d better hurry and get that crane afloat, so not only it but I also could depart for pastures new where there would be more going on shortly than there would be in Massawa. Interrupted somewhat by the need of saving the Gera, taking care of the incoming Tripolitania, and getting the Brenta clear of that mine, I stuck nevertheless mainly to the problem of getting pontoons down and that crane
up. The last few days in October, with the first two pairs of cradle slings in place, I decided to try lowering the first pontoon to see how it would act. It had, I knew, every idiosyncrasy that a pontoon could have, for I had neither the materials, the men, nor the time to build inside it the intricate steel bulkheads and piping systems to make it controllable in the water, as a pontoon should be. This pontoon was devoid of all the inside compartments it required—it was as uncomplicated inside as an empty tin can, which on a huge scale, it resembled. It acted terribly. With the biggest locomotive crane in Massawa to lift its 15 ton bulk off the quay and overboard, we put it in the water, where completely light, it floated in deceptive docility, looking even bigger than it had on the quay. We towed it around to the starboard side of the crane (the side away from the quay), threaded through its hawsepipes the guide wires attached below under water to the starboard ends of a pair of cradle slings, opened the flood valves at the bottom of each end of that pontoon, opened the air vents on top to let the air out as the water flowed in, and proceeded to sink the pontoon. Meanwhile, I shackled in to the lifting eye provided on top at each end of the pontoon, a six-inch manila hawser. With those two manila hawsers, when the pontoon got heavy enough to sink, we would lower the pontoon away from alongside the Resolute, to whose bitts those hawsers were led. There was, as anticipated, trouble in making the pontoon go down horizontally, that is, both ends together and level. Anyone will swiftly determine this who cares to experiment with a soup can emptied of soup with both heads in place and with two holes punched top and bottom in one end (or in both ends if he or she prefers) floating in the bathtub so that water can enter at the bottom hole while the air inside escapes from the top hole. That soup can will start by floating horizontally at first, but it will be impossible to get it to go down horizontally as it fills. Regardless of how carefully you try to balance it, as soon as water enough has entered, the water will run to one end or the other, and the can will go down, not horizontally, but one end first. With a soup can, that isn’t serious. But with a pontoon as long as a four-story building is high, it is, especially when the pontoons weigh about 15 tons each, as these did. From my previous experience, I knew I should have plenty of trouble getting that pontoon to go down horizontally, and I had all I anticipated and plenty
more. My salvage men, most of whom had never seen pontoons in action before, were aghast at the antics of that leviathan alongside the Resolute, bent only on obeying the laws of nature and going down on end, while I insisted that it violate them and go down horizontally so that it might be of some use to me. After various hair-raising maneuvers on the part of the pontoon (without here going into the technical details of how it was done) I outwitted the pontoon and got it sunk horizontally just above the starboard forward deck edge of the sunken crane. While from the Resolute with the manila hawsers we held the heavy brute from sinking further, Ervin Johnson went overboard in his diving rig and passed through the loop of wire of each cradle sling now protruding just above the tops of the two hawsepipes in that pontoon, a heavy steel pin (if it can be called such) five inches in diameter and two and a half feet long. These two massive steel pins, straddling the tops of the hawsepipes inside the loops of cradle wire, were intended to take the 100 ton lift on the slings that the pontoon would exert upwards when we blew all the water out of it. As those pins weighed several hundred pounds each, Johnson had quite a time under water threading them through the wire loops. We helped him with lines to the surface, where we might take some of the weight off his hands. With the locking pins in place, Johnson then had to put his life in considerable jeopardy by lying down on deck the sunken crane with that vast pontoon hanging only a foot or two above him, while he secured to its bottom a pair of wire straps already attached to the crane hull, and intended to hold that pontoon properly aligned in position just above the crane after we on the Resolute let go of it, and moved on to devote our attention to its companion pontoons. If, during that time, while Johnson, down there in the water, was sandwiched in between the deck of the sunken crane and the pontoon, anything carried away on the Resolute or she rolled suddenly from the wash of a passing ship, the heavy pontoon would come down on Johnson and very neatly flatten him out. Johnson knew that and so did I; I took what precautions I could and Johnson trusted to me. He succeeded in getting the pontoon secured beneath, and dragged himself out to come up for a while. The heavy pontoon being secured from below, we held it level from the Resolute, while gradually I blew compressed air into it to push water out to lighten it up enough so it would just float horizontally above the derrick hull on its own buoyancy, tugging lightly upward at each end on the two wire straps
Johnson had just attached to it. Each one of those wire straps would take a pull of about five tons only; they weren’t intended to lift the derrick with, only to hold the slightly buoyant pontoon in position after we let go of it from the Resolute. I blew in only enough compressed air so that the strain on the manila hawsers from the pontoon to the Resolute just vanished. The pontoon was floating now on its own buoyancy, a vast submerged cylinder just above the sunken derrick, pulling gently upward on the steel straps under it. Johnson dived again, first to shut tight the flood valves on the bottom of the pontoon, and second to cast loose the manila lines from its top to the Resolute. This left the work on that pontoon completed, so that we might move the Resolute and proceed with the placing of the other three. Johnson came up. These proceedings took all day and part of the early evening. Meanwhile, I had smoked up some three packages of Camels (my whole week’s ration) steadying my nerves, which badly needed steadying, and if my allowance had permitted and I’d had them, I should probably have disposed that day of a whole carton. At any rate, we were through. I swabbed off my half-naked torso with a towel and started to put on my khaki shirt so I might go back presentably to the Naval Base, when that pontoon struck back at me. A passing ship being piloted out the commercial harbor, sent her wake sweeping across the water to rock the Resolute violently. I had my boat out in the harbor to stop any ship movements while Ervin Johnson was beneath the pontoon, but of course I couldn’t keep harbor traffic stopped all the time. Whether the Resolute now rocked or not made little difference, but that propeller wash, sweeping far below the surface, did. The current hit the side of our submerged pontoon, gave it a heavy jolt, and broke loose the pad welded at its after end to hold the securing straps there. The after end of the now light pontoon started promptly to float surfaceward. The moment it did, all the water still inside the pontoon ran to the low end forward, and that end, suddenly heavy, even more promptly started for the bottom. Before I could barely get in some adequate profanity to express my feelings, there was the pontoon I had just put in the whole day securing horizontally below, now in the position it preferred—that is, on end! In just about forty-five feet of water, there now it stood—its forward end in the mud, its after end just clear of the surface, our carefully placed heavy cradle slings dragged out of
position, and everything, in plain words, in a hell of a mess! Such, I reflected as philosophically as I could, is the life of a salvage man when he has to handle pontoons with idiosyncrasies. Oh, if only I had there in Massawa some of my own pontoons, designed so they would placidly float and sink horizontally without protest! But my properly designed pontoons were at the Submarine Base in New London, as unattainable to me in Massawa as if they’d been on the moon. There was nothing to do except to take off my half-on khaki shirt and go to work again. All day, my men and I had worked on that pontoon—now we could work on it all night also. We did. It took most of the night, with Ervin Johnson uncomplainingly doing all the diving in the dark water below while we struggled on deck with air compressors and airhoses, to get the pontoon cast loose of the cradle slings and floated up to the surface. There completely light and empty, it floated horizontally once more, as if trying to delude us into the belief that it might again be persuaded to do that submerged. All we had left now to do, was to go through that fight with the bulldozers again to get our cradle slings back into position once more. But as it was already 3 A.M., and all of us were a little tired, I decided it would be better to tackle that task next morning. However, it so happened the next day, October 29th, was the day the Gera elected to attempt to sink on us, so Captain Reed and I, being otherwise engaged for most of the day, weren’t able to get back on the Resolute. Captain Roys, nothing daunted, undertook the job himself with the bulldozers and managed to carry it through in spite of the fact that in the midst of his struggles my boat arrived to take most of his men away from him to help save the sinking Gera.
CHAPTER
55 WITH REPAIRS ON THE “GERA,” NOW dry-docked, started under Lloyd Williams’ direction, I came back with Captain Reed on October 30 to resume my battle with the Eytie gasoline tanks masquerading as pontoons. As a first step, we lifted our first pontoon out of water back onto the quay, to reweld to its bottom the clip which had carried away on us and caused us all the trouble. It appeared from the break that the welder, probably weary in the hot October sun, had done none too good a welding job. So not only did I make sure that clip was solidly welded back, but had the welder go back over all the clips with extra beads of welding on the second pontoon also to make sure that this time everything was certainly solid. Since now Lloyd Williams had nearly every man who was any sort of mechanic working on the Gera, it took the solitary welder I could keep on the commercial quay some days to get all the welding work done. On November 5, we were ready to go again with the pontoons. It so happened that the night before, Montgomery smashed through Rommel’s lines at El Alamein, destroyed most of his tanks, and captured about 50,000 men, mostly Italians, whom Rommel deserted as he turned to flee westward with the battered remnants of his Afrika Korps. Rommel was proving himself the military idiot I felt he was when he tossed away his golden opportunity late the June before, to grasp at Tobruk. Now he was falling back on it. Shortly he would find, I had no doubt, how worthless to him in defeat was that bauble for which he had traded decisive victory. But what it all certainly meant was that the long war in the Middle East had finally actually started westward. And if I knew the Libyan Desert, it was going to move that way fast. Time was running out for Massawa. Once again I had placed my first pontoon in the water and at 6 A.M. we started in on it. We had all the troubles we’d had the first time. Whoever starts to buck the laws of nature has his hands full, and I did again with that pontoon. All
morning long, I juggled it, first one end up, then the other, before finally I succeeded in getting a balance good enough to get both ends under water at once and heavy enough for it to sink. Then it took all the rest of the day to get it secured in position over the sunken crane before finally late in the evening we could cast it loose. This time it stayed down. While next day, Frank Roys got the second pontoon overboard and rigged for lowering, I put in my time on the Gera, with Lloyd Williams, a day interrupted somewhat by the need of stowing away the newly-arrived Tripolitania and getting the Intent set for renewing her attack on the Brenta’s mine. November 7, I was back on the Resolute, all set to sink the second pontoon, which was to go down to port. The second one showed all the difficulties we’d encountered on the first one, with some troubles added. At least on the first pontoon, when it was down, we could secure it in place to its cradle slings by having the diver shove a heavy steel pin through a loop in the sling, where the wire had been doubled over. But on the second pontoon, on the port side, we couldn’t do that. There the two parts of the wire near its ends lay simply side by side—there wasn’t any loop. To secure the wire in place over the hawsepipe, we had to put on wire clamps—massive steel castings made to fit the lay of the two-inch diameter wire and hold two parts of it together without slipping. For a diver to get these heavy castings fitted underwater to the wires just above the hawsepipes and bolted together with inch-and-a-half bolts is a task— poor Ervin Johnson was nearly dead before he succeeded in getting three such clamps, one above the other, on the end of each cradle sling just above the hawsepipes. Meanwhile, since all hands on the Resolute were badly knocked out by their tussle with the first pair of pontoons, I decided to give them all a rest for a few days, while I myself spent them on the Brenta wrestling with that mine. When I got back from the first day on the Brenta, I heard the best news I’d heard since December 7, 1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. It was November 8, 1942. My radio when I turned it on greeted me with Eisenhower ’s landing in North Africa that morning! Literally I cheered! At last America had quit defending itself and had started to fight! And in North Africa! That spelled the end of Rommel and all his dreams of conquest. With Montgomery and the Eighth Army chasing him
westward and Eisenhower landed in his rear, Rommel had no escape now, with his deflated Afrika Korps, except by swimming. I doubted he was any better a swimmer than he was a strategist. The end in the Middle East could now not be far off! Later that day I received some radio orders from the Navy Department, forwarded by the War Department, that made me decidedly less happy. I was ordered to proceed on an inspection trip from Massawa to Durban in South Africa, there to survey the needs of that port for some additional floating dry docks which would, if I decided they were needed, be built in the United States and towed to Durban. Then when I had completed my survey in Durban, I was to proceed to Freetown in Sierra Leone on the West African Coast, and make a similar survey of the dry dock needs of that port. After that, I was to return to Massawa, make out my report and recommendations, and send them to the Navy Department in Washington. I reached for a map of Africa and scanned it hurriedly. I should have to go all over Africa to do that. It involved a journey of 14,000 miles from East Africa to South Africa to West Africa and back again to East Africa. Africa is a big continent. I couldn’t possibly do it, even with the best air priorities I could get, in less than two to three weeks. Badly upset, I considered those orders. What would happen in Massawa if now I should leave for even two weeks? The past record offered no consolation. The first time, in August, I had been ordered to Cairo for a conference, the contractor had seized the opportunity to try to relieve me of my command. By great good luck, I had returned only next day and squelched that before too much damage was done. The second time, in September, when I had been ordered to Alex, my dockmaster had dropped the Cleopatra in the dry dock, smashing all the keel blocks, and then reported that our dry dock was going to be out of commission for from four to six weeks! And it would have been, too, had I not returned that day to squelch that situation. Now, of all times, when I was right in the middle of the salvage of the sunken derrick, by far the most complicated salvage operation undertaken in Massawa, to be carried out by makeshift pontoons, ludicrous gasoline tanks on which I had staked everything, I was ordered to leave again. The British had failed twice on that job; the eyes of everyone in the Royal Navy from the Admiralty in London through Alex down to Captain Lucas in Massawa were on that sunken crane. I had promised them I should do it. I could trust no one else
whatever to carry it through in my absence, and I didn’t want to come back from traipsing all over Africa to find that through some perfectly excusable calamity all my flimsy pontoons were ruined and I had nothing left to try it over again with. That would be no excuse for me in anybody’s eyes for my failure to lift that crane! Of all the blows I had received in Massawa since first I saw the place late the previous March, those orders were the worst! Completely miserable, I scanned those orders again. I couldn’t refuse to obey. But was there perhaps any out for me in them? Word by word, I went over them again, and then, thank God, my eyes lighted on two insignificant words that in my first reading had been overshadowed by Durban, Freetown, dry docks, and the important instructions in those long orders. I was to proceed on the survey “when convenient.” I began to breathe again. It wouldn’t be convenient to leave Massawa till that sunken derrick was up, in one to two weeks perhaps. After that I could leave. So I sent an answering dispatch to the Navy Department, via the War Department, stating it would not be convenient for me to leave Massawa for that survey for roughly two weeks yet; after that, if I heard nothing further, I should start as ordered. But I also pointed out that with not much more mileage to fly, an officer from Washington could make the survey, and there would be in such a case the advantage that on his return to Washington he would be available to answer any questions anyone might ask of him there. I would appreciate Washington’s comments on this, but if I heard nothing further, I would in two weeks start myself. And with that off my chest, I turned on the radio again for what later news there might be of Eisenhower ’s landings in North Africa. Next morning I was out on the Brenta again. Commander Davy and I removed the mine from her to the beach. For the next few days, I alternated between the Gera on the dry dock and the Resolute on the quay, where Reed and Roys, with next to no men to work with, were trying to get the changes finished on the second pair of pontoons and the cradle slings for it adjusted in place. Then I received a reply from the Navy Department to my message. I was not to start from Massawa unless further advised. Washington would check on the availability of someone there for the survey; if a suitable officer was found, he would be sent instead of me. I promptly forgot about Durban and Freetown. Washington was full of officers itching to get away from it and somewhere near the war zone on any
pretext at all. As soon as the word got round, there would be a line of officers a block long asking for the job. If the Navy Department couldn’t find a suitable one among them, it would indeed be strange. On November 14, starting very early, I got my third pontoon down. It may have been mid-November, and back in the United States overcoats might be coming out of moth balls, but in Massawa it was still hot. Not so hot perhaps as in August—only just as hot as a midsummer day in New York on which half a dozen people die of the heat, a few dozens more are prostrated, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard shuts down and sends all its workmen home because it’s too hot to work in such a heat wave. I drank only about three gallons of iced tea and nearly wore out a slide rule figuring buoyancies while I struggled with that third pontoon. Finally I got it down and secured, and left in time in the late afternoon to get back to the Naval Base and undock the Gera, which that afternoon had been finished by Lloyd Williams and practically all our mechanics, salvage and otherwise, who had been working on it night and day for sixteen days. As I dragged the repaired Gera off the Persian dry dock to tie her up again alongside the large Italian dock, I reflected that if there was anyone to whom the United States owed a Medal of Merit for helping along the war effort, it was certainly Lloyd Williams—always uncomplaining, always able, always ready to perform a repair miracle on a ship when it had to be done. Then on November 15, I was back on the sunken dry dock for (I hoped) the fourth and last pontoon. It went down no easier than the first three, but the human mind and body are fortunately so constituted that once the limit of agony is reached, additional pain causes no more conscious suffering. So it was with all my crew on the Resolute. We got the pontoon down; we secured it in place. All next day and the day after we spent installing heavy wire lashings to keep our pontoons and their cradle slings from sliding up and off the bow of the derrick when we raised her bow first (as happened to the unfortunate salvagers of the Squalus). That was a tough underwater job, requiring two divers, so Al Watson came over to help Ervin Johnson with it. We got it done fairly early in the evening of November 17; I sent all hands away then to try to get a decent night’s sleep. Next day we would try to lift the derrick. The salvage crew would need all they had in the way of energy. I was myself badly worn out, and my mind was tormented by doubts to which there could be no answers till the trial was made. To most of my men,
those pontoons were pontoons, but I knew that really they were only gasoline tanks, far too lightly built. Pontoons always had steel shells much thicker than these had; they had bulkheads inside to strengthen them; their hawsepipes were much heavier to take the lifting loads; they had a big factor of safety in strength. I had carefully calculated what the quarter-inch thick shell plating of these tanks would stand, what load the steel pipes I had improvised my hawsepipes from might carry. Normally, those gasoline tanks should stand up under the staggering load of 100 tons each I was going to put on them. But the situation was not normal. Every one of those gasoline tanks had been through a terrific conflagration; its steel plating had been red-hot, the top of every tank was wrinkled and corrugated horribly. What effect would that lack of cylindrical symmetry have on those tanks now that they were going to be, as pontoons, subjected to strains they had never been designed for? How much had the fire those tanks had been through weakened the steel? And finally, how much did that derrick weigh? Did it run over 400 tons, so that even if my four pontoons held together under the strain, they couldn’t lift it? Until actually I made the trial I could have no answers. Was I going to lift that derrick next day, or were my four pontoons going to be inadequate, or worst of all, were my fire-damaged tanks going to collapse on me when the lifting load came on them, leaving me with a third pathetic failure in the history of that crane to add to the two McCance had suffered on it? I could only pray. And feeling that an added prayer might well be in order, I sent that night a brief note home: November 17, 1942 LUCY DARLING: We have our sunken derrick with all four pontoons secured to it, and all the lashings on, to hold them in place. Tomorrow morning we shall attempt to raise it. Pray for us. With love, NED I took the letter out to see it got into the outgoing mail in the morning. Of course, I knew that long before that letter got home, it would be all over, one way or another. But at least asking for my wife’s prayers for us might be a help. I felt better, and rolled wearily into my bed.
CHAPTER
56 AS AN ACT OF FAITH, NEXT MORNING, November 18, I kept the Persian dry dock clear of any vessel, so that when we brought the sunken derrick in hanging between the pontoons, we could immediately put her on the dry dock. Early that morning, I had all Reed’s crew of salvage men, all the Resolute’s crew, and all of Lloyd Williams’ salvage mechanics on the wreck of the sunken crane—some on the Resolute’s decks, some on the quay near by, the rest in the work boats we should need. On the Massawa quay itself close by, we had quite a gallery to watch us, mostly British, among whom could easily be picked out McCance’s salvage crew who from their very audible remarks, had come to sneer our failure. (While McCance was failing, I had carefully kept all my men far away.) A considerable number of bets were made, which my men eagerly took, for the odds offered them were very attractive. To McCance’s men, who had struggled with that derrick for nine months, the idea of someone coming along with some old gasoline tanks and in four weeks walking off with the crane, seemed ridiculous. But the odds made no difference—if I knew my men, they would have taken every shilling offered at any odds at all. They had never known failure in Massawa, and nothing could make them believe they were going to get acquainted with it that day. Ervin Johnson and Al Watson were dressed and both went down to make a final inspection underwater of our lashings, our cradle slings, and our air connections to the pontoons. They came up to report the pontoons still in place, all the underwater rigging in order. Lloyd Williams started up the air compressors. On the quay, I had one of the 210 cubic foot Ingersoll-Rand machines from McCance’s warehouse (now mine) which originally I had used in lifting the large Italian dry dock. On the Resolute, I had a much smaller compressor that belonged to her. Between the two of them, we could furnish about 300 cubic feet of air a minute, enough to
expel water at the rate of perhaps 6 tons a minute. That would be ample. One at a time, I started air going into each pontoon, while Ervin Johnson, down below again in his diving rig, opened up cautiously the bottom valve at the after end only of each pontoon to make sure that the water was going out of it before he opened it wide. Since that happened to be the case on every one of the four pontoons, he opened the after valves all wide and came up again to rest with his helmet off till he might be needed. I worked off the Resolute, lying just ahead of the bow of the crane, with a gauge before me to show the pressure inside each pontoon. My intention was to float up first the bow, then the stern, and then have the Resolute tow the sunken derrick away from there. About 9 A.M., I opened the compressed air up wide to both bow pontoons, moderately to the after pontoons, and then with the gauges and the air valves before me, like an organist before a pipe organ, I began to play a tune with the compressed air flowing through the rubber hoses to my pontoons. For one long hour the compressors throbbed heavily. In front of me, sticking up out of the water was the steel derrick structure of that sunken crane, a mass of interlaced steel standing high out of water, looking like one of the steel piers of the George Washington Bridge as it towered over our heads. But except for that massive steel crane-work, built to support a load of 90 tons swinging from its hook high in the air, there was nothing before me but water. Below, I knew, was the sunken hull of the crane; secured just above that hull were my four ex-gasoline tanks. But all of that, one had to take on faith— nothing of it was visible. The compressed air went down as the minutes dragged along toward the end of the hour and I watched the pressures. But Captain Reed by my side had, as always, more faith in barnacles and mussel shells as indicators than he had in gauges. He kept his one good eye glued to a mussel properly located on the waterline for his purposes. Reed poked me in the ribs. “She’s rising, Captain!” he whispered, pointing to his mussel. She was Smoothly, slowly, majestically, and to me, beautifully, that tremendous mass of steel in front of me was rising out of the sea, exposing more and more of its barnacled steelwork till the bow ends of our two forward pontoons broke the surface and the lifting stopped. The bow was up! Instantly I swung all the compressed air we had into the two stern pontoons, to blow them dry.
Ten minutes later, the steel derrick structure which was leaning aft at a considerable angle, with the bow end of the hull afloat and the stern still in the mud, began slowly to tilt forward toward me. The stern was rising. In another moment, my after pair of pontoons broke surface and there were all four of my ex-gasoline tanks afloat, with the 400 ton load of that Italian derrick swinging in the wire slings between them, a perfect lifting job! In no more time than it took to cast loose our shore air connections (which wasn’t much) the Resolute was towing that ex-Italian floating crane away from there, while Jim Buzbee and Jay Smith, salvage mechanics, went racing up the steelwork of that derrick like monkeys to unfurl from a flagstaff previously rigged atop it (another act of faith) the same American flag which proudly had floated out over every wreck we had raised. And so, leaving the gallery on the quay gasping at the quickness of it, an hour and ten minutes after we had started the lift, the Italian derrick was on its way out of the commercial harbor to the naval harbor, salvaged at last!
CHAPTER
57 WE DRY-DOCKED THE CRANE, SINCE there was no damage to its underwater hull, no repairs on the dry dock were necessary, though we found its main deck as rolling as an ocean wave from what McCance and his inexpert salvagers had done to it. All we had to do, once the derrick was landed in the dry dock, was to pump up the dock a little to take the load off the pontoons onto the dock, then cast loose our pontoons and tow them away. After that as the dry dock was lifted higher and the crane hull came completely out of water, there was nothing required except to let the water in the hull run out the opened sea valves, then close the valves again. As soon as the Eritreans had scraped and painted the underwater hull, we floated the crane off the dock, which it had occupied one day only. So far as its hull was concerned, it was perfectly ready for use again. However, the crane machinery, submerged a year and a half, required to be taken apart and cleaned, and that job, together with the rerigging of new steel wires to its lifting winches and hooks, took some weeks. After that, the Italian floating crane went right to work unloading ships in the commercial harbor. But I never saw it make its first lift. For a few days after we had salvaged it, late on Saturday afternoon, November 24, I received a dispatch from the War Department, transmitted to me by General Maxwell. It had come from Washington in secret code; only a paraphrased version of it was delivered to me: 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 ’s headquarters in 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
My heart leaped as I read that. The war, I knew, had suddenly moved far away from Massawa. Already Montgomery had chased Rommel completely across Libya. Tobruk had long since fallen back into British hands and somewhere beyond Benghazi, Montgomery was pursuing his fleeing enemy into Tripolitania. Massawa’s day was done. Only the portable equipment—the ships, the dry docks, the floating crane, the machinery—could be moved close enough to the new theaters of war to be of any further help. All else shortly would have to be abandoned. Hurriedly, I directed Mrs. Maton to send for all my salvage captains. I had very little time left, my plane would be going out of Asmara early next morning, Sunday. I said good-by to all of them, after ordering all salvage work knocked off and the ships to start loading salvage gear at once to leave for the western Mediterranean via Capetown immediately they were loaded. The new American army in North Africa had urgent need of them. I went back to my room in Building 35 and hurriedly started to pack what little I could take by air, with the rest of my belongings to go on the Chamberlin. Captain Morrill and Lieutenant Woods came in to help. I turned my command of the Naval Base over temporarily to Captain Morrill. No doubt, now the Royal Navy would shortly take over. My telephone started to ring. Colonel Sundius-Smith, Captain Lucas, other British officers, called to bid me farewell, and wish me good luck in North Africa. My shop foremen came to say good-by. I thanked them all for what they had done—more than I could ever repay them for. I worked till 3 A.M. packing, by which time I had to quit and go. My plane was leaving Asmara early in the morning for Khartoum. Trying to sort out everything I should need in North Africa into the few things I could take by air, was troublesome. One thing after another had to be laid aside to go via the Chamberlin. Finally, my aviation bag was jammed, it seemed nothing more could be taken, when my eye, sweeping my bare room for the last time, lighted on our flag. It had been retired from service the week before, too frayed, too worn to be flown safely any longer over our Naval Base. The last time it had been used was when hoisted over the Italian floating crane as we had brought her in. Impregnated now with the coral dust of the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, badly faded from battling the scorching rays of the Massawa sun, its days as a flag
were over. But as I remembered that day on May 20, when first we had proudly hoisted it over our Naval Base and how it had flown over our every triumph since, I felt it had to go with me. Dusty as it was, I hastily jammed it down on top of my few clothes and closed up my bag. Below in my car, Garza was waiting to drive me to Asmara. Regretfully, I shook hands with Morrill and with Woods; no commanding officer had ever had two more able and more loyal lieutenants; it hurt me to part with them. I climbed into the car alongside Garza. The car started away in the night under the dark stars. Out over the waters of the Red Sea, I saw the lights twinkling across a harbor full of wrecks that I had salvaged; as we moved past the open Naval Base shops, I could see in them the machinery that once had been but sabotaged junk. Silently I gazed on everything as rapidly I slid out the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula. I wasn’t sorry to leave Massawa; it was a nightmare I should be a long time getting over. What had happened in Massawa, I should never forget; Massawa had left scars on me I should carry for the rest of my life. We drew out of Massawa and went racing away through the darkness across the hot desert toward the mountains. Soon we were climbing rapidly. I drew my long-unused overcoat around my shoulders. Now I should need it again. North Africa, in the midst of a fierce campaign, might prove to be more hectic than Massawa, but, at least, it certainly would be cooler.
EPILOGUE British Admiralty Delegation, Building T-4, Navy Department, Washington, D.C. BRITISH ADMIRALTY DELEGATION (British Supply Council in Washington) N.1298/42 15 September, 1942. SIR, I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to convey to you an expression of their appreciation of the very valuable services rendered by Captain Edward Ellsberg, U.S.N., as officer in charge of salvage operations at Massawa, which have resulted in the successful raising of the floating dock sunk in that harbour. My Lords consider that the skill and energy shown by Captain Ellsberg in carrying out this work are deserving of high praise, and would be grateful if an expression of their appreciation could be conveyed to him. I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, E. A. SEAL Deputy Secretary of the Admiralty North America The Secretary of the Navy Navy Department Washington, D.C. American Embassy,a London, England
March 12, 1943. DEAR ELLSBERG: Receipt of the enclosed letter from Sir Henry V. Markham of the Board of Admiralty, delighted me so much that I am sending it along to you with this note. Of course, a copy will go forward to the Navy Department for inclusion in your record. The British indicate that you have done a perfectly splendid job and your aid to them constitutes a major contribution to the Allied war effort. It is a real joy to add a “well done” to this expression of gratitude of the Board of Admiralty. I wish for you a most speedy return to good health, both for the personal happiness of you and yours, and also because of the great value of your work to the service. Best wishes. Keep cheerful.
Sincerely, HAROLD R. STARK. Captain Edward Ellsberg, U.S.N.R., c/o Navy Department, Washington, D.C. BOARD OF ADMIRALTY London, 9 March, 1943. ADMIRAL H. R. STARK, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces in Europe. DEAR ADMIRAL: I write to let you know that the Board have had before them reports from the late Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, of the outstanding services to the Royal Navy of Captain Edward Ellsberg, U.S.N.R., at Massawa. At Massawa Captain Ellsberg by great skill and unflagging energy raised the two Italian Floating Docks in spite of considerable weight of opinion that this
was impossible. He also salvaged a number of sunken ships and a 90 ton floating crane, which Salvage Contractors had failed to float. By the time he left Massawa to take up an important appointment in North Africa, the harbours and the Naval Repair Base had been fully restored to use with the exception of one berth on which he was working at the time of departure. Three of H.M. Cruisers had been partially docked and repaired there under his directions, at the worst time of the year and at a period when it was impossible to deal with them elsewhere in the Near East owing to enemy activities. Most of this work was done under the most trying climatic conditions, and without his zeal, energy, and constant direction, which were an inspiration to his salvage crews, these excellent contributions to the Allied cause could never have been realized. This Officer ’s enthusiasm and drive, apart from their material result, have had an excellent effect on Allied relations. Captain Ellsberg’s knowledge and enterprise have been of the greatest value to the Royal Navy, and it is with regret that we learn that he has had temporarily to relinquish his duties on account of ill health. May I ask you to be so good as to convey to him an expression of the gratitude of the Board of Admiralty? Believe me, Yours very truly, H. V. MARKHAM. Admiral H. R. Stark, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces in Europe. [There have been omitted from the above letter certain commendatory statements relative to services in North Africa, which are not .pertinent to Massawa.] Upon recommendation by the War Department, the following award of the LEGION OF MERIT, then newly authorized as a decoration, was made in the spring of 1943: THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY Washington
The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the LEGION OF MERIT to CAPTAIN EDWARD ELLSBERG United States Naval Reserve for service set forth in the following CITATION: “For exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service to the Government of the United States in the establishment of a Massawa Naval Base, Eritrea, from January 8, 1942 to April 5, 1943. Working with tireless energy at a task considered in some respects as hopeless of accomplishment, Captain Ellsberg achieved remarkably successful results in the salvaging and repair of vital naval equipment. Having rehabilitated the Massawa Naval Base shops, he made possible extensive drydocking operations for the benefit of all types of Allied shipping.” For the President, FRANK KNOX, Secretary of the Navy.
THE END
Image Gallery
“Captain Brown and I, looking very contented after taking a fall out of both the ocean and the Nazis.” Ellsberg (right) in Massawa uniform, July 3, 1942.
The forecastle of a scuttled Axis ship in Massawa harbor.
Captain Ellsberg surveys a scuttled Axis wreck before beginning salvage, February 18, 1943.
Seven ships scuttled by the Axis to block the entrance to the South Harbor.
Eritrean natives boarding a drydock for repair work in Massawa.
The large Italian drydock, the first wreck salvaged in Massawa, fully afloat again.
The salvage tug Intent, thirteen thousand miles out of Port Arthur, Texas, alongside a wreck.
The scuttled Nazi vessel SS Liebenfels.
The HMS Dido, a damaged British cruiser, entering a drydock in Massawa. This was the first warship to be drydocked there. August 19, 1942.
Pumping out a sunken ship, Massawa, 1942.
The salvaged Italian liner Tripolitania coming into port under tow, and passing the salvaged Italian freighter Gera, under repair in the drydock.
A scuttled floating derrick after salvage, afloat on pontoons.
Ellsberg (left) and Doc Kimble in Massawa, 1942.
A submarine mine intended as a booby trap for divers being hoisted out of the scuttled Brenta before they commenced salvage operations.
Captain Edward Ellsberg in Massawa uniform.
Scuttled ships in Massawa harbor.
Italian prisoners of war and Eritrean laborers on drydock repairs.
Sheiks in charge of native workmen in Massawa, with salvaged drydocks and ships in the background, February 18, 1943.
Diver Ervin Johnson coming up from a scuttled floating derrick.
A booby trap mine being hauled out of the Brenta.
Scuttled ships in Massawa harbor.
A salvaged Italian drydock with the SS Tripolitania alongside.
The tugboat Intent alongside the SS Liebenfels.
The American flag flying above the Nazi flag on the salvaged SS Fraunfels as it came into port on October 4, 1942. This photo was sent to Ellsberg’s wife, Lucy, with a birthday letter.
Ellsberg in Massawa, 1942.
Ellsberg’s birthday letter to his wife, Lucy, November 22, 1942.
Captain Ellsberg in Cairo, July, 1942.
The Far Shore
“You can almost always force an invasion, but you can’t always make it stick.” (General Omar Bradley to the war correspondents on the eve of D-day in Normandy) TO CAPTAIN DAYTON CLARK
and THE MEN OF THE NAVY HE LED
in FORCE MULBERRY
They made it “stick.”
CHAPTER 1 “To Selsey Bill—” So said the orders. Selsey Bill? To an American, an odd name for any spot. Till I’d been given those orders, I’d never heard of the place. Now I was looking at Selsey Bill. In English parlance, it was a “bill.” To me, in everyday American, it was just a promontory, protruding not too importantly into the English Channel just east of the Isle of Wight. Selsey Bill turned out to be both a sandy cape and a most unpretentious seashore village straddling a long, wide beach. Its thin line of frowzy summer cottages, stretched out along the Channel sand, was reminiscent of the flimsy shelters of a generation ago fringing our own New Jersey coast. This collection of shacks was evidently the summertime haven of some hundreds of middle class English families fleeing to sand and sea from sweltering London streets. Selsey Bill was most unimpressive. Unlike not so distant Brighton, no shore hotels caught the eye. Nor did it give any indication of being a seaport, large or small. Selsey had no harbor, it had no piers, it had no warehouses. It had absolutely nothing of importance to friend or enemy in a war—except that wide stretch of endless beach fronting the English Channel. For, only a hundred miles from that beach, due south across the water, lay Normandy— and less than a hundred miles north of it over defenseless open country lay London. That wide, flat beach—Selsey Bill had something there. But what? Asset or danger spot to the British whose beach it was, now that there was a war? Four years before, when France fell, it had been spotted instantly as a glaring danger point by the British, stripped of their arms at Dunkirk, naked now before their enemies. Across that inviting beach, every Englishman at no great strain to his imagination envisioned hordes of steel-helmeted Nazis leaping ashore from landing barges to trample beneath their hobnailed boots what few defenders Britain might muster on the sands. And then without pause moving north to overwhelm both him and nearby London. Faced with that prospect, the English had hastily evacuated all cottagers from
Selsey Bill, in desperation had sowed the broad sands with buried land mines, festooned the beach before the front doors of the emptied cottages with endless snarls of concertina barbed wire. So in 1940, except for a few sentries peering anxiously out to sea each morning as the dawn broke, Selsey Bill became a deserted village. Before me there, in 1944, still remained much of the tangled wire. Even some of the warning signs, faced to be read only from the land side, screaming to any unwary Englishman approaching the beach: “KEEP OFF THE SANDS! MINES!” But that was all over. Four heartrending years of war had wrought some changes. Now it was the spring of 1944. The wide flat beach at Selsey Bill, by an ironic reversal in the whims of Mars, had in British eyes been metamorphosed from a danger spot to an invaluable asset. From Britain’s vulnerable Achilles’ heel to Britannia’s strong right arm. For from that selfsame beach at Selsey Bill, seemingly made to order for just such a purpose, reprisal was about to start. From its sands, an irresistible lance to strike down the enemy on the Far Shore was at last about to be launched! Or, was it about to be? There was little doubt in the minds of the planners (both British and American) round about Grosvenor Square in London that the allied lance was actually irresistible, as planned. But there seemed to be (in one American mind, at least) some gnawing doubt as to whether the launching of it was likely to come off. So in the face of fervid British pooh-poohing of any basis at all for the existence even of such a silly question, I had been ordered by the American high command to Selsey Bill to see what actually was the situation. As a result, there was I, gazing for the first time out over the Channel towards Hitler ’s boasted impregnable Atlantic Wall, invisible to me below the distant southern horizon. Immediately before me lay Selsey Bill and its simple village, easily encompassed at a glance—the string of unpretentious cottages, the rusted remnants of the barbed wire, the faded warning signs, the wide sands beneath which here and there still lurked, like deadly cobras set to strike should one step on them, such of their own mines as had escaped even the most intensive efforts of the British to find and remove. Altogether, it was no very striking seashore scene. But, just offshore—?
I stared offshore in open-mouthed astonishment. Nothing I had heard from anyone round about Grosvenor Square or read there concerning invasion planning had prepared me for what now hit me in the eyes, just offshore. What was this fantasy, sprawled over five square miles at least of what should be the rippling open sea? That conglomeration of tall black towers reaching skyward from beneath the Channel waters? That massive jumble of half submerged block-long windowless concrete warehouses—a hundred of them, perhaps even more—far and near protruding in no recognizable pattern, helter-skelter, from the waves? Those ponderous steel arches, evidently disjointed sections of highway bridges, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, mysteriously swimming on the surface of the sea, somehow afloat in spite of gravity, interspersed crazily amongst the even crazier disarray of those semisubmerged concrete buildings? A city, perhaps, insanely shuffled about and then sunk by some overwhelming catastrophe? To my dazed eyes, I might be looking on a grander scale at nothing more or less than lower Pittsburgh, half buried from sight beneath the waters in full flood of the overflowing Monongahela and Alleghany, joining to form the still more overflooded Ohio. There before me could be Pittsburgh’s tall blast furnaces, dead now, their fires drowned out; her warehouses, with the waters rising nearly to their roofs; her deserted bridges flooded to their floors— everything half hidden in the rising waters, half still showing above the rivers —mile on square mile of flooded city. Some such vast industrial metropolis as that, overwhelmed by the sea, lay there off Selsey Bill, so any casual observer would swear. What it really was, of course, I knew. In Admiral Stark’s American naval headquarters in Grosvenor Square, studying the thick volume embodying every facet of the Overlord Plan, I had been thoroughly saturated in its purpose. Still, even so, the first sight of the reality in all its immensity stunned the mind—mine, anyway. There it rested like a titanic unsolved jigsaw puzzle, scrambled beyond any recognition of its true design. Half-engulfed in the Channel waters, it lay in a multitude of pieces, the instrument unenvisioned by the enemy (so we hoped), which was to sustain to success an invasion which the enemy High Command knew could not possibly be successfully sustained. Provided only, that as planned, we got it from Selsey Bill to the Far Shore close on the heels of the first wave of our invaders. Close on the heels of the first wave—
Therein lay now the doubt I had been sent to investigate. On that point, the skeptical captain in our Navy in whose hands had been put responsibility for its placement and operation, once it was transported to the Far Shore, had himself no doubt whatever. His belief, vehemently expressed to whomever in authority he could buttonhole long enough to pour it out, was that it wasn’t going to be delivered to him on the Far Shore on D-day close on the heels of our first wave. In fact, he doubted that, with the plan as laid out, it would ever be started off the bottom at Selsey Bill, let alone be delivered to him in Normandy, while he and any others in the invading force still were alive to care—they would all, for want of it, long since have been slaughtered in counterattack by the waiting Nazis on the Far Shore before it arrived to sustain them in their assault! Viewing for the first time what lay before me, sunk off Selsey Bill, I began to sympathize with our agonized naval skeptic. To lift that sunken city hurriedly from off the bottom and get it underway from Selsey Bill for Normandy was a salvage job such as might have appalled even that half-god Hercules, had he been a seaman and a salvage man.
CHAPTER 2 Looking at wrecks sunk wholesale was no longer any novelty to me. In the Red Sea, where I had been flung immediately we were shoved into World War II, I had counted wrecks around about Massawa by the dozens—three harbors full of sabotaged German and Italian ships, forty perhaps, and little enough to work with on them. Still, lifting the more important hulks one at a time had kept ahead of our war needs in that Middle Eastern area—we salvagers had made out there with the means at hand. Next for me had come our North African invasion. Transferred at once to the Mediterranean as Eisenhower ’s Principal Salvage Officer, I found sizing up wrecks by the harborful becoming commonplace. From Casablanca in Morocco through Oran in Algeria to Bône on the Tunisian border, what harbors in North Africa were not strewn initially with wrecks from our naval gunfire and French sabotage were soon in no better case, with the victims of Nazi bombs and torpedoes littering those harbor bottoms. And to complete that dismal picture, other terribly blasted ships, victims at sea of U-boat or aircraft attack, which somehow we had managed to keep afloat till towed in, cluttered many a badly needed wharf. Still, whether in the Red Sea or in North Africa, there had been no absolute deadline in salvage work. With more bombs still exploding about you, you lifted wrecks or cleared harbor entrances and piers as rapidly as your ingenuity, your little salvage force, and your own endurance allowed. While you wore your heart out on the wrecks, the war about you still went on—a little the better while your heart stood up, a little the worse when it began to fail and willy-nilly you slowed down, or dropped dead. But at Selsey Bill, it was different. Here, confronting everyone as starkly as the enemy-manned cliffs on the Far Shore, there was a deadline—D-day. Here, with the lives of a million men inexorably intertwined with what happened on D-day, that day stood as deadline. The lifting from the sea floor of that vast mass of sunken equipment off Selsey Bill for overwhelming military reasons must not start till immediately before D-day. And when D-day dawned, for even more overwhelming military reasons, most of that helter-skelter submerged
city must be afloat again, moving immediately in the wake of the assaulting forces to be resunk, in proper arrangement this time, on the beaches of Normandy—or the invasion must fail. Would all this then, as planned, be moving on D-day—or would it not? On the British side of every discussion concerning that subject, from Cabinet Minister in London down to Brigadier in command at Selsey Bill, the answer to any such absurd question was, “Assuredly. Beyond all doubt. My dear fellow, the Royal Engineers have it in charge.” And if any shadow of skepticism still persisted in an untutored American, he was informed that the history of the Royal Engineers ran unbroken back through many centuries to the days at least of Charles the First. That, of course, settled it. On the American side, one lone naval officer, wholly unawed even by that many centuries, replied flatly, “No!” Somehow, perhaps because he was a naval and not an army officer, to him the Royal Engineers, however ancient and royal they might be, were no more immune to failure than any other military organization. And having carefully looked over how the Royal Engineers proposed to carry through the lifting task which must be done before he had anything with which to work on the Far Shore, he was certain of their failure. But he had no reputation in the field of engineering, even less in that of salvage to back up his belief. Initially, his doubts went unheeded. Still, more and more emphatically as D-day grew closer, he persisted in voicing his dissent each time he came up from the Channel to the London headquarters in Grosvenor Square of Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe. But he had only four stripes—he was just a captain. His doubts, at first not really taken too seriously even on the American side, were nevertheless, to set his mind at rest, finally transmitted from Admiral Stark’s headquarters to the British in nearby Whitehall, where lay responsibility for that part of the operation. All doubts got short shrift there from both British Army and Navy. The British Major General in charge of the Royal Engineers felt that he and his engineer subordinates, down to that Brigadier he had placed at Selsey Bill to see it through, had the situation properly in hand. The Admiral of the Fleet serving as First Sea Lord, already with troubles enough afloat, felt it impolitic for the Royal Navy to intrude itself on the problems of the Royal Engineers so far even as to express any opinion on a subject in their hands. So the British
Cabinet Minister, at the head of the hierarchy under whose wing the project came, replied officially to Stark that he had absolute faith in the Royal Engineers—there was consequently no question needing inquiry. Stark, confronted with the situation that all the know-how there was available in Britain was reported unanimously of one mind, accepted the decision. Our distressed captain continued to get nowhere. Who was he, a lone seagoing skipper and a very junior one at that, to have his unsupported judgment override that of the responsible British Cabinet Minister, controvert the technical judgment and confidence in its own abilities of all the Royal Engineers, backed by centuries of tradition, or refute the acquiescence, though tacit, of the high command of His Majesty’s Royal Navy? And to top off his sad situation, with all hands in the foreign services opposed to him, covered with an acreage of gold lace so vast that to it his own puny four gold stripes were but picayune threads? Still, like Cassandra sensing irretrievable disaster, he continued to protest, though now his protests went without hearers. As D-day grew nearer, more and more convinced that in the hands of the Royal Engineers the one ace on which the Allies must rely for victory was never going to get to the Normandy Beachhead in time to be played, his agonized protests became almost hysterical. But no longer in Grosvenor Square could he buttonhole even one senior long enough to get another hearing for his oft-told tale.
CHAPTER 3 The year before, in 1943, in the Mediterranean, with one American lieutenant and some British soldiers picked up on an Algerian beach to help, I had boarded the abandoned hulk of a torpedoed and sinking British cruiser. She was already stern awash and badly heeled down, threatening each instant to capsize and take us with her to the bottom. In a three days’ battle round the clock with the sea for that waterlogged warship, we had saved her and towed her to the port of Bougie. But that cruiser, H.M.S. Pozarica, had been one wreck too many for me. I came ashore from her to be thrust into the military hospital at Algiers by the first Army surgeon who got his eyes on me at headquarters. From there, a few days later, with “in view of the possibility of complete cardiac failure” entered in my Navy medical record by the Army specialists, I had hurriedly been flown home from the African war zone to become just another patient in the huge Navy hospital at Bethesda, immediately outside Washington. Bethesda, with no bombs exploding nightly over it, was more restful than Algiers. Two months on its rolls, part of the time by the grace of an understanding Navy medic as an outpatient allowed to go home, and my heart was considered relaxed enough to go on beating for awhile. Bethesda released me then as a patient, reported me fit for some kind of duty, not too strenuous. After some difficulty in finding a berth for a sub-par relic of the war in Africa, Admiral King, naval C-in-C, had me sent to help supervise inspection of warcraft building for the Navy at some thirty shipyards, big and small, round about New York. But a little less than a year on inspection of ships under construction was all I could stand. I felt I still could do more toward helping win the war were I again with ships on the front lines. Early spring of 1944 saw me once more in Washington facing Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, under whom I had served years before as Salvage Officer on two sunken submarines when King was a Captain and I a Lieutenant Commander. Having lived with Ernest King for months on deck a salvage ship so small
no one aboard her, out of his bunk, was ever wholly clear of another ’s sight, I thought I knew King well enough to ask a favor of him. And certainly he’d had equal opportunity to know me quite as well. The things King wanted done, would swiftly come to pass. All I wanted now of him was that he see I got sent back to the war zone—I’d had enough in wartime of doing my fighting on the home front. Busy though Admiral King was in running a two ocean war, on the basis of auld lang syne, effective at least on King’s aide, I was admitted to King’s office. King, the nearest thing in human form to a completely impersonal machine that the Navy has ever had on its roster, long, lean, severe, listened silently to my request. He had last seen me the year before in Algiers, hardly two weeks before that episode on H.M.S. Pozarica which finally had ended my salvage command in the Mediterranean and sent me home, a hospital case. King heard me through, inspected me quizzically, commented at last, “So, Ellsberg, you think you have come back to battery, do you?” This unexpected ordnance simile set me back on my heels. Here I was, unflatteringly being discussed as a worn out gun, which its overworked recoil cylinders have only with difficulty managed to return once more to firing position. Still, I answered unargumentatively (and truthfully, I believe), “Yes, sir. I think I have.” King knew salvage. He also knew salvage officers, of whom the Navy had but few of any experience, but was badly in need of many. If the one before him felt able again to keep on his own two feet, King was evidently not going to quibble over whether he might perhaps be mistaken. After all, there was still a war on, not yet won. He quit eyeing me, scanned for a moment the thin air over my head, considering, I soon discovered, that immense map in the war plans room encompassing the entire world, then asked me, “Where would you like to go? The coming invasion of Europe will give you quicker action, but the Pacific war has longer term possibilities.” Here, certainly was a businesslike enough appraisal of the differing opportunities offered by the war scene; quite unimpassioned, too. Seeing I was being offered a choice, I hastily thought it over. I was not too certain I could last long enough to take decent advantage of the Pacific’s longer term possibilities—the quicker action in the European theater had obvious attractions in my case. “I’ll take Europe, sir,” I answered quickly.
“Done. I’ll cable Stark I’m flying you over. You’ll get action enough with him. Good luck, Ellsberg.” That was how I came to join the staff at 20 Grosvenor Square in London, of four-starred Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe. My first war assignment from Stark was nothing to set anyone’s pulses to beating madly with excitement—it was prosaically enough nothing more nor less than reading a book. It was a massive book I was given—one glance showed it would take quite a while to read—it was at least as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory and certainly weighed as much. But unlike the Manhattan telephone directory of which the number of copies in circulation must reach toward two million, of this book there were probably not a dozen copies in existence—it was rarer than Shakespeare’s First Folio. The reading of that book, never taken by anyone from Stark’s Naval Headquarters, was a ritual. First, a Navy Chief Yeoman with no other apparent duties than keeper of The Book, operated the combination of the safe in which it lay. The safe was opened, The Book carefully extracted by its guardian, the safe again closed and locked. Then came a short procession, composed only of the Chief Yeoman bearing The Book and of me following, to a small room down the corridor. We both entered, to complete the ritual. The door was closed behind us. The Book was laid on the solitary table there, its number (seven, as I recall) checked carefully by its keeper, a receipt for it bearing that number placed before me. In my turn, I checked the number on The Book with that on the receipt, signed it, sat down in the single chair before the table to read. The keeper took the receipt each time, reminded me I had better lock myself in, and hurriedly departed, no doubt with a considerable weight off his mind. For some hours, till I should call him to surrender that volume and get back my receipt, that priceless Book was my responsibility, no longer his. Each day at noon when I went out to lunch, late each afternoon, when dizzy from reading I had to quit and retire to my billet, the ritual was reversed. My receipt was returned, The Book locked again in the safe, to be guarded through the night hours by marine sentries. Never did that Book leave Stark’s offices in Grosvenor Square. For that Top Secret Book was Stark’s copy of the Overlord Plan, most carefully guarded of all military documents. It took me over a week to read it. Long before I finished, I could see the need for the extreme security measures
surrounding The Book. There, first set out in over-all terms, then in exact detail, was the strategic plan involved in the Normandy Invasion, from months before D-day till months afterward when the beaches had been left far behind and the war had become one of movement deep into France, aimed at the Rhine. There were set out the forces to be used and the parts to be played by every unit, British and American, on land, at sea, in air, in carrying through the plan. And lastly there they were—what was unique to this invasion and most secret of all—the strange devices which were to make possible the impossible —the unbelievable assortment of mechanical contrivances on a vast scale designed to overcome or to nullify each and every condition which Hitler ’s General Staff knew made a successful invasion impossible. The reading of The Book left me dazed. I was given no instructions regarding it—just to read it—all of it. My instructions would come after. So I read it all, absorbed all of it I could, from the over-all strategy on a grand scale on which the campaign in France was to be based, through the tactical stratagems intended to delude the enemy on D-day as to the exact point of attack, down finally to the futuristic devices provided to make possible the breaching of the Atlantic Wall—devices alongside which, both in conception and immensity, the gigantic Wooden Horse which crafty Ulysses devised to breach the walls of Troy was but an infant’s tiny plaything. Daily I read till higher strategy oozed from my ears, strange engineering concepts stunned my mind, life itself became only a nightmare in which all men on land, in air, over or under the sea, seemed to be gripped in a fantastic vortex, inexorably being sucked like bits of cosmic dust into a mad whirl spiralling about a solitary dazzling sun— D-day! Everything in The Book, in life itself now, revolved about D-day. This was to happen so many days before D-day, that, so many days after—on D minus 30 days, for instance, this was to come to pass; that, on the other hand, not till D plus 42 days had come. Here was a new calendar to govern the lives of all about me, in which time was reckoned, not from the birth of Christ, but as being such and such a time before or after THE DAY on which the Allies set foot at dawn on the coasts of Normandy. My life now, sleeping and waking, revolved, like that of everyone else around me, about D-day. It was, perhaps, sometime in the beginning of the week of my reading of The Book, that first I met Captain Dayton Clark. He had just come north once more to London from the Channel, to pick up immediately from someone at 20
Grosvenor Square the interesting bit of news that since his last visit there something new had been added to Stark’s naval staff—the man who had been General Eisenhower ’s Principal Salvage Officer in the North African Invasion, a fairly senior captain. In Clark’s despairing eyes, here at last was a heaven-sent opportunity— someone attached to Grosvenor Square who would understand his problem. He waylaid me in the corridor as I came out for my lunchtime break from the locking up of The Book, still in a half-daze from the reading of it. “Captain Ellsberg?” I had to stop, since my path was blocked. I looked up (I’m not so tall myself). Before me was a gaunt naval figure with four stripes, a deeply seamed face framing a pair of intense eyes that gripped me instantly as might have those of the Ancient Mariner, and stopped me just as effectively in my tracks—a tall, lean figure whose very leanness made him look taller perhaps than actually he was. Already in a half -trance, I was soon completely in one before I finished listening to the tale of agony poured out by this tortured seaman who had as heavy a weight crushing his soul as Coleridge’s unfortunate after he’d shot the albatross—except that this mariner apparently had no such sin to blame for the evil future that he faced. Before me, I swiftly heard, stood Captain Dayton Clark of our Navy, eight years junior to me, assigned to command Operation Mulberry. He was facing disaster over his Phoenixs, the key to the Mulberry Operation. That finished me off as an involuntary listener. I hadn’t got that far yet in my reading of The Book. I hadn’t the foggiest notion then of where Operation Mulberry came in, in the Overlord Plan, let alone of what a Phoenix was. What this Captain Clark was so bitterly bemoaning was wholly beyond me. In spite of those piercing eyes, I managed to come to enough to seek escape. I must be excused from further listening. Unlike Coleridge’s unwilling listener, I could plead no wedding I must attend, but I was hungry, and I stated bluntly I had a hasty lunch to get so I might return to my sole job—the reading of The Book. Come see me in about a week, Captain—perhaps then I’ll understand what so distresses you. Until then—goodby. I brusquely broke away. Mulling how unfortunate it was any such wrought-up character had managed somehow to wangle a command assignment in an invasion requiring of all hands the most imperturbable reaction to difficulties, I ate my lunch. Soon I was back once more at my reading, trusting never again to have the ill luck of
running into that Captain Clark. A few days back on the beach, with his men, away from the tense atmosphere at London headquarters, would, I hoped, restore him to a state of mind more suitable to his rank and responsibilities and keep him from bothering me further. Meanwhile, there was my reading to make me quickly forget him. By the early part of the following week, I had read The Book through completely and had a fair over-all grasp of what the vast Overlord Plan encompassed. Now I was rereading more carefully that section which had to do with the strange mechanisms which were to make Overlord possible. Somewhere among all these mechanistic fantasies, all wound up with seaports, existent and nonexistent, I know my own assignment must come. These, not the complicated strategy set out for guidance of the army commanders, now got my absorbed interest. Among these, Operation Mulberry swiftly became to me a most concrete reality. It came first in the structure on which victory was to rise. Operation Mulberry was literally the new-found key to success in invasion. It was to make possible what the wholly impersonal German General Staff had long since concluded was an obvious impossibility; an unpalatable conclusion that the British, after their bloody repulse on the beaches at Dieppe two years before, had wholeheartedly been forced to concur in as correct; a conclusion with which every American strategist, however skeptical, who had studied the question since 1941, was also ultimately, but most reluctantly, forced to agree. The German General Staff, a body governed in its military thinking solely by logic, had early figured the problem out to its one logical conclusion—cold logic showed a successful invasion to be impossible. Their advice to Hitler consequently had been, “Hold the ports and we hold everything.” And thus ran their reasoning (which no one, whether on the German side or on ours, could refute): A large, mechanized army, such as von Rundstedt and Rommel had, covering the Atlantic Coast from Denmark to Spain, could be defeated (if at all) only by a larger, better mechanized army—an invading army of a million men, at least, formidably equipped. Conceded that the Allies might, with their superior sea power, somehow land somewhere on the open European coast the larger army needed, they still could not land the heavy tanks, the big guns, the mechanized equipment and continuously disembark the immense quantity of supplies required to make that
army an effective fighting force, without the wharfs, the harbor cranes, and the huge protected harbors necessary in all kinds of weather to handle ashore heavy equipment and supplies in such vast quantity. Unlike the situation in World War I, when every French port was open to supply Pershing’s army, now every harbor in continental Europe from Norway through to Spain was in German hands, defended by large German garrisons and formidable concrete-casem*nted heavy coastal artillery emplacements. Against those unsinkable heavy coastal batteries, the superior Allied navies could never hope to stage, from the seas, a successful bombardment to capture any one of these harbors. The Allied naval commanders knew better than to attempt that. It was freely conceded by both sides that these harbors could be taken only by massive, long-drawn-out siege assault from the land side. However, siege assaults on the harbors from the land side could be undertaken by invaders only after defeating Rommel’s field armies. But without the heavy mechanized equipment and supplies which could only be landed through harbors the Allies didn’t have, Rommel’s forces could not be defeated in the field, to allow after Rommel’s defeat an assault from the shore side to take the harbors needed to land the equipment necessary to defeat Rommel—and so on, round and round, ad infinitum. The only possible conclusion? An invasion, yes, if the Allies are so mad as to be willing to offer up a million ill-equipped men to be massacred by Field Marshal Rommel’s mechanized forces. But a successful invasion? Obviously an impossibility! To that conclusion, the German General Staff, the British War Office, the American strategists, including Eisenhower ’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, ultimately all subscribed without dissent. How could any one of them, bound in his thinking by the laws of reason, possibly dissent? He could not. Who can question irrefutable logic? But the British are a most illogical and stubborn race. Had they been more logical and less stubborn, they would swiftly have surrendered to Hitler after the Fall of France, and the question later of how successfully to stage an invasion impossible of success would never have risen to plague them. But running true to British doggedness even in the face of inevitable defeat, they neither accepted defeat after Dunkirk nor the impossibility of landing once again in Europe, even after their disastrous attempt at Dieppe. Doggedly the British planners continued to butt their heads against the stone wall of that impossibility. They continued to get nothing for their efforts except more
headaches. Then with Pearl Harbor, American strategists came to London, full of enthusiasm, to take over from the stupid British, to show them how an invasion of Europe should and, before the end of 1942, would be staged successfully. Our own strategists, with their noses up against the hard realities of the problem, got no further through that impossibility than had the British. Soon it was being agreed by our planners both in Washington and in England, that if there were to be an invasion of any nature at all in 1942, it had better take place in North Africa. There we would face no German army whatever in our landings, and there the highly essential but ill-defended French African ports would fall swiftly into our hands before the nearest Germans, whether with Rommel in distant Libya before El Alamein or with Kesselring in Italy, could do anything to interfere with us. That face-saving solution provided an invasion in 1942 for those shrieking for some immediate Allied action to pacify Stalin and save the Russians. But it failed to help any on staging the vital European invasion. That dilemma remained—the British planners, unvexed now by the Americans, continued doggedly as before to try to solve the unsolvable. The American strategists found their hands temporarily, at least, full of new problems in North Africa, but problems somewhat more susceptible to solution of some sort—Darlan for one, Rommel and his Afrika Korps for another. Meanwhile, the phlegmatic, the unimaginative, the even (in the minds of some American worshippers at the shrine of a Yankee monopoly on ingenuity) stupid British, finally solved the riddle. A jest, a joke too ridiculous even to be taken seriously, was the entering wedge. The scene, the messroom in Norfolk House, headquarters of Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of the British Planning Staff. The occasion, a group of British officers of all services, mulling over after dinner in late June of 1943 for the ten-thousandth time that bête noire of the invasion —the ports in France they must have to stage one. The wine, apparently, had loosened both British tongues and British tempers, a situation much aggravated by the quite un-British summer heat on that June day. The army representatives had just reiterated flatly, unequivocably, and for the last time their position. Without at least one major port, say Cherbourg, in our hands and working all out to land heavy equipment in the first few days, it was silly even to discuss invasion any further.
The navy planners countered acrimoniously with the obvious retort—you bloody well know the enemy has all those ports; it’s our job to solve this problem without a port. Period. The embattled planners, stymied, could only glare ferociously at each other across the conference table, blood-pressures rising dangerously. At this juncture, when it seemed most likely that British officers and gentlemen were about to forget that they were either, Commodore John Hughes-Hallet, senior Royal Navy planner, rose, stood a moment rolling his pencil briskly between his palms, then with mock solemnity tossed in his solution for the impasse. “Well, gentlemen, all I can say is this—if we can’t capture a port, we must take one with us.” All hands—soldiers, sailors, airmen alike—roared heartily at this merry conceit—fancy that, a whole seaport afloat, being towed across the Channel. A good joke, Commodore, worthy of more wine! They had it. Tensions relaxed. With everyone still laughing, the meeting broke up, with any solution to the port problem no nearer than before. But by morning, the uproarious jest of the night before had begun to haunt both the jester himself and the most important of his hearers—Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of the Planning Staff. That silly idea—floating a seaport across the Channel—was the only alternative. Silly then or not, might not that sole alternative, taken seriously somehow be made a reality? Morgan and Hughes-Hallett, looking hopefully at each other next morning, agreed that possibly it might. Hughes-Hallett was assigned to develop it. And so in June of 1943 was conceived what was to become Operation Mulberry. Considering its monstrous size (its requirements stood out above those for normal military concepts as might a dinosaur above a mouse) its period of gestation was remarkably short. With the aid of Brigadier Sir Harold Wernher, called in soon to help Hughes-Hallett in design and planning, by late July the project was ready for presentation in London and in Washington to the Allied Chiefs of Staff, British and American. Both military groups felt it worthy of further consideration. By mid-August, at the Quebec Conference it was accepted by Roosevelt for America and by Churchill for England as giving at last some kind of unsuicidal basis for proceeding with invasion. From the Quebec Conference went out finally the firm order ending the endless talk on both sides of the Atlantic about invasion. Hughes-Hallett’s idle jest—a joke no longer—was accepted as foundation for an invasion set for May 1, 1944. And thus, in August, 1943, at Quebec, Operation Mulberry was born.
CHAPTER 4 Commodore Howard Flanigan, of the American Navy, had always been somewhat less than wholly reverent in his attitude toward higher authority. In fact, when first I saw him in July of 1910, he was even then being punished for this very shortcoming. Flanigan’s classmates had all been released from the rigid disciplines of the Naval Academy by graduation the month before and were now enjoying the heady freedoms of the junior officers’ messrooms in the Fleet. But Flanigan himself was ingloriously being held over at Annapolis without his diploma because of some final flouting of the innumerable Regulations governing midshipmen, till higher authority at the Naval Academy should decide what ultimately to do with him—or to him. At any rate, Flanigan, who should already have been graduated and at sea when I entered Annapolis as a plebe, wasn’t. Instead, there he was still at the Naval Academy, still a midshipman, assigned temporarily to the depressing task of drilling the newly entered plebes. I learned about Flanigan then and there—a crackling mass of high voltage energy, competent, strict, brusque in speech, authoritative in manner. In fact, in the eyes of the new plebes, including mine, if God himself could speak with half the authority of Howard Flanigan, He must indeed be an omnipotent Deity. In the intervening years since 1910, I had not once set eyes again on Howard Flanigan. But somewhere along the way, in the middle 1930’s, apparently Howard Flanigan’s lack of proper reverence for higher authority decided him that thirty years of living that way was enough. Suspecting perhaps that his shortcoming might stand in the way of his further promotion, he chose to retire as a Commander in 1936, to take on as a civilian the task of organizing the New York World’s Fair, then only a nebulous idea being promoted by Grover Whalen. No doubt higher authority in the Navy and Howard Flanigan both breathed a sigh of relief at their parting—to neither did it ever occur that they should meet again. But through the good offices of Adolf Hitler, they did—involuntarily I’m sure, on both sides. For when in 1944, I reported in London to Admiral Stark, there selected by
Stark himself as his wartime Deputy Chief of Staff sat Howard Flanigan, restored to active duty, hurriedly given back all his lost promotions, now a newly made Commodore. Thirty-four years had not in the slightest blurred my indelible youthful image of him—I recognized him instantly—the same manner, the same brusqueness, the same competence, the same authority, and I swiftly learned, still the same unawed irreverence toward higher authority— this being widened now to take in the upper echelons of the British civil and military hierarchy. Howard Flanigan, it was plain for all thereabouts to see, ran the office of the Commander, American Naval Forces in Europe, not because he was Stark’s Deputy Chief of Staff, but because he was Howard Flanigan. It was evident he liked it. Soon I learned Stark liked him, trusted him, left decisions in his hands, relied on him to get what action was necessary. In all directions regardless— British or American, civil or military, Army, Navy, Air—Howard Flanigan was the U. S. Navy in London. A casual awareness of what was going on at 20 Grosvenor Square showed me that, long before I finished the reading of The Book. I began, in fact, to wonder from all I saw going on around me, if Stark himself wasn’t after all just a figurehead in his own office, till later I learned there was a little more to it than that—Stark apparently was letting Flanigan function practically as Commander, American Naval Forces in Europe, while he confined his own activities to that rarefied diplomatic atmosphere above in which moved only a very few persons—one president; one prime minister; some kings and queens, with and without countries; a few ambassadors; and the exalted figures of the combined Chiefs of Staff—a realm into which, except on one occasion, I got not even a glimpse—nor, I suspect, did Howard Flanigan. I finished reading The Book, including a careful re-reading of Operation Mulberry and all its accessories. I so reported to the Deputy Chief of Staff. What next should I do? Flanigan called me into conference. Probably not in thirty-four years, since last I’d heard him shouting “Squads right!” into my befuddled ears at Annapolis and I’d gone “Left” instead of “Right,” had he had occasion for a word with me. But now things were different—the gap in rank between a senior captain and a newly made Commodore was as nothing to that between us when first We’d met. And now, aside from that, I learned Flanigan had another side to his personality—he could when he desired, be the most charming fellow you’d ever met—Flanigan, dressed for Ascot, might easily have been chosen as the typical polished English gentleman by the English themselves. Which, I think, was one of the reasons Stark chose him for the task
—it was a revelation to watch Flanigan as Deputy Chief of Staff, in Stark’s name steam-rollering his fellow Americans on the one hand, and on the other beguiling his British opposite numbers—in either case, of course, only when necessary to get things headed in the direction Flanigan felt they should go. Flanigan spread a map of France out before us, wanted to know if now I thoroughly understood Overlord? I did—backward and forward by now. Briefly, then, we ran over the highlights on the map. It was to be the Navy’s job to land Montgomery and the British before Caen, Bradley and the Americans at Omaha and Utah Beaches at the base of the Cherbourg Peninsula. Montgomery, closest to Paris, was then to delude Rommel into thinking the British were striving desperately to break through and be on their way to not so distant Paris. But actually he was not to get away from Caen and his supplies—merely to attract to his British front all the Germans he could, and thus leave Bradley as unhindered as possible while Bradley and the Americans drove for the first real objective, the port of Cherbourg, at the northern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. Cherbourg was to be taken by D + 17. Meanwhile, Operation Mulberry, consisting of two artificial harbors to be brought by the Navy from Selsey Bill to the Normandy beaches, was to handle ashore all the fighting equipment and supplies needed to hold off Rommel while Bradley was taking Cherbourg. It was hoped that by D + 47, a month after its capture, Cherbourg would be reasonably usable as a port—till then, Operation Mulberry must carry the load—or all was lost. Immediately after taking Cherbourg, Bradley on D + 22 was to turn southward down the Cotentin Peninsula, punch a hole through the German lines somewhere around Avranches and then hold off Rommel while Patton, freshly brought from England, and his Third Army were poured southward through the gap into Rommel’s rear. Came next an unbelievable twist. Germany, the Siegfried Line, Paris and most of Occupied France, von Rundstedt’s reserve army based in Holland—all the enemy and every obvious objective we had to take or knock out to win the war, would lie then to the eastward of Patton’s Third Army. But Patton, however, was not to turn to the eastward toward Germany, toward any of those objectives—he was instead to turn westward—toward America! Westward of him at Avranches would lie the Brittany Peninsula—of no great value any longer to Germany, but priceless to
us as we then saw it. For round about the western end of the Brittany Peninsula facing the Atlantic lay three major French ports—Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, through which in World War I, we had mainly supplied our army. Once again we must have ports at any cost—the drive against Germany must wait while we captured more ports to sustain our invasion. Montgomery and Bradley together now, still sustained solely through Mulberry, were to do nothing for weeks but hold Rommel to the eastward off Patton’s back, while Patton’s Third Army went west, away from the major enemy, to drive down the Brittany Peninsula and take the ports of Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire. He was given until D + 42 to do all that. But here Flanigan stopped. Never mind Patton or the land operations any more—here was where I came in. I had the background up to this point well in mind? I had. Well, by D + 42, Patton might or might not actually have captured Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, but if he hadn’t, you could rely on him to have their garrisons all so closely bottled up they’d be unable to get out into the open Brittany Peninsula to bother anybody any more. But whether we had those three ports then or not, neither Cherbourg (which already presumably we did have) nor these three would be anything for a long while but unusable heaps of demolitions—useless to anybody as ports. The Germans would attend to that. It would be someone else’s assignment to clear those ports—mine was to be to help rig a port on the Atlantic, to assist immediately the Mulberry harbors in the Channel to carry the load till Cherbourg, Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire would take over. Had I read the part Quiberon Bay was to play in Operation Overlord? I had. Did I see Quiberon Bay on the chart before us, lying between L’Orient and St. Nazaire? Yes, I saw it. All right—I was to turn to on Quiberon Bay as my particular assignment—there on D + 42 we were to tow from England around the by then immobilized Brest Peninsula and start setting up the equipment for a harbor independent of the Mulberries in the Channel—and very different. Quiberon Bay was swiftly to become our major temporary port. Quiberon Bay was a vast natural anchorage protected by Belle Isle and other off-lying islands. It was the ancient rendezvous for centuries back of the entire French fleet in the long-vanished days of sail and three-decker ships-of-the-line. It was naturally much better suited for landing supplies than over the exposed Channel beaches where we were going to spot the two Mulberries. All we really needed to create a port in already protected Quiberon Bay was some type of wharf equipment to be towed around from England once the Nazis on
the Brittany Peninsula were contained. It would be simple. No breakwaters would be required. I was directed to turn to and study Quiberon Bay closely, and then the pier equipment already gathered in England for the job. Between Quiberon Bay on the Atlantic and Operation Mulberry on the Normandy Beaches, we could keep the invasion armies supplied through the long months ahead, till Cherbourg, Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, rehabilitated no matter how badly sabotaged before surrender, could finally take over the load permanently. I nodded. I understood. I turned to, to study closely the charts of Quiberon Bay and the equipment gathered for it. Flanigan, with Quiberon off his mind, went back to struggle with his quota of other headaches for that day. Since I was never to see Quiberon Bay, nor for that matter were any others of the half million Americans in the vast army that was to have been landed through it for the major assault on the Siegfried Line, I’ll pass over the intricacies of that operation in Quiberon, save to say that it was a big wheel in the original plan. Operation Mulberry was at best expected to keep the invasion going, although metaphorically only on one cylinder, till D + 42, when with Quiberon Bay coming into action, we could start to hit on all six and really turn to, going eastward, on chasing the Nazis out of France. Ultimately, when all the regular French ports were back in service, we’d trade our temporary ports—the Mulberry harbors and Quiberon Bay—for the latest 1944 eightcylinder model of supply, those four captured and restored French ports, and start driving across the Siegfried Line with all our supply problems over— from then on it would be just a question of Patton and Rommel slugging it out. With America’s vast resources of production at last flowing freely into France through four real ports, not just through makeshifts, there could be only one answer as to the outcome of Operation Overlord. And it was on that note that the Overlord Plan ended. Operation Mulberry was the first rung of the ladder into France, Quiberon Bay was the second, the four French ports were the third—and then we were over the top and ready to fight in earnest. I became promptly submerged in the problems involved in hurriedly making a port out of some of the undeveloped real estate fringing the Quiberon Bay waterfront. Completely absorbed in the intriguing Quiberon Bay project now handed me, for some days I forgot all else. But hardly was I well settled in laying out the schedule for that installation on the northern end of the Bay of Biscay, than once again I found myself buttonholed in the corridor by that apparition of the
week before. Looking even more cadaverous than the first time, there was Captain Dayton Clark, firmly gripping me by one of the gold buttons on my navy jacket, determined that this time I should not escape till I had heard him through. I did. D-day was a week nearer. My narrator had obviously moved much more than a week nearer to imminent doom in prognosticating complete disaster. I listened, more impatient even than the week before that I should be bothered with his irrational worries. But now, at least, I understood what it was he was pouring into my ear, though it was none of my concern. I told him so, tried to break away. Clark clung on tenaciously. I was a salvage man, the only American in London who could understand. This was a salvage problem, though no one other than he recognized it as such. I must go with him to the Channel, look over how the Royal Engineers were preparing to tackle Mulberry, come back and let all hands at 20 Grosvenor Square know it wasn’t going to work. I was a salvage man—decorated already for what I’d done for Eisenhower in the Mediterranean. Both Stark and Eisenhower were bound to listen to me— Operation Mulberry, the whole invasion, depended on it! It was only ninety miles to the Channel. Clark had a car waiting—in a couple of hours we’d be on the beach. Wouldn’t I come? I wouldn’t. It all sounded ridiculous to me. Matters couldn’t possibly be as badly bungled as they seemed to his untutored eye. Why should I make a fool of myself, dashing off over the countryside like Don Quixote to tilt at the fantastic forebodings of his overwrought imagination, when they were none of my business anyway? I said so. He was a naval officer. He knew the chain of command. If he thought there was anything wrong with the Operation Mulberry set-up, let him quit bothering me and take it up with Admiral Stark. Stark was responsible. I wasn’t. Clark’s somber eyes bored hopefully into mine. If Admiral Stark ordered me to the Channel to look things over, then would I take his doubts seriously? Anything now, I thought, to get rid of this character. Here was an out for me. “Of course,” I said, certain there was no earthly chance of his convincing Flanigan, let alone Stark, that I should now be yanked off the Quiberon Bay task freshly handed me, just to stand a while on the Channel shore and hold the hand of this hyper-agitated captain in Operation Mulberry. It was far more likely that one more frenzied appeal to Stark would get him relieved of his command, as the best solution to a situation which was obviously getting out of
hand. And a good thing that will be, I thought, for all hands in Operation Mulberry. Clark let go the button on my jacket by which he was holding me anchored. “Thanks!” was his brief comment. He strode off down the corridor toward the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. I went back to my desk, cautiously testing that gold button to see if it was likely to stay with me till I could get it to the nearest London tailor.
CHAPTER 5 That was how I came to be at Selsey Bill staring seaward at that startling apparition of a sunken city protruding from the ocean. Flanigan, only that morning, at 20 Grosvenor Square, had briefed me on my mission. There wasn’t really anything in it—frankly, it was being put on mostly for morale reasons. Weeks before, Stark had been assured that all was well by competent British authority—the very highest. While Flanigan himself was the last person at headquarters to be awed by dicta simply because it was from On High, still as between all the British on one side, who had some engineering competence, and Clark on the other, who had none, he was forced to concede the improbability of so many Englishmen being completely wrong. Probably he was sending me on a wild goose chase. Still he agreed with Stark that so long as there was any shadow of doubt on so important a matter as Mulberry, and they now had someone with experience in that field to check it, there was not too much harm in delaying Quiberon Bay long enough to have the check made. But mainly, right there in the middle of the picture, badly needing to be salvaged himself, was Clark, assigned to the command Operation Mulberry by Flanigan personally; Clark, so wrought up already by his forebodings of disaster as very likely to crack up before carrying it through. It just happened, unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone unassigned in London at this late date in the invasion preparations who, if Clark cracked, might safely take over from him. So Stark, principally to save that situation, had acceded to Clark’s last fervent request—that I be sent to look matters over. Clark would take my word for it if I said the Royal Engineers were doing all right. That would quiet Clark and restore him to usefulness—he was a good officer, worth a lot of trouble to save. As for me, I must be most careful, Flanigan emphatically warned me, to tread on no British toes at Selsey Bill. There was dynamite in the already touchy situation there, a lot more than I might realize. If I set off an explosion, the resulting shock waves would go instantly right up to the British Cabinet on one side, to Eisenhower himself on the other, with unpredictable consequences
to myself, to Flanigan, and to Stark. We could risk no international backbiting now. The British were on Mulberry heavily committed to their position in support of the Royal Engineers. National as well as service prides had by now been rubbed raw in too many areas. Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander, was walking on eggs enough in his efforts to get harmony in all the seething jealousies—personal, inter-service, international—agitating his heterogeneous command. I was to use my eyes at Selsey Bill as I saw fit, but on what I thought as a result, I must not let my tongue slip—to Clark, to anybody. My report, whatever it might be, was only to be made back in London to Admiral Stark directly—and I wasn’t to take too long about it, either, as that Quiberon Bay job was too important to be much delayed. So with that as a last admonition from Flanigan, I had shoved off from Grosvenor Square in a staff car, headed south for Selsey Bill and the Mulberries. And now I was looking at them. Gradually my shock at the unimaginable magnitude of the Mulberry units before me subsided. More soberly, I began to fit the pieces I saw before me into the picture they were to make when floated over to the Far Shore—a picture of two vast artificial harbors miraculously to be unfolded under fire before befuddled Nazi eyes on the bare sands of Normandy. I knew now from my reading of The Book that the Normandy beaches presented formidable harbor problems, unmatched in difficulty by any other potential harbor sites, Atlantic or Pacific, in our two-ocean war. First and worst of the obstacles came the Channel tides—they were tremendous—from high tide to low, a rapid fall of over twenty-one feet. The net effect of so terrific a change in sea level was that at low tide on those flat beaches the waterline rushed seaward a quarter of a mile, twice each day moving the shoreline far out from the beach, leaving only wide stretches of bare sands where a few hours before a ship might comfortably have floated. That Normandy shoreline was like a drop of quicksilver—you couldn’t hold a finger on it in any one spot long enough to let you unload a cargo there. Next came the tidal currents. The vast quantities of sea water involved every six hours in the changing ocean levels surged in and out the Channel like swiftly flowing rivers running alternately west and east along the coast as the tides ebbed and flowed—baffling currents of amazing strength, of themselves enough to drive a seaman out of his mind struggling to handle his vessel onto or off the beach.
Finally the shoreline itself, wherever momentarily it might be, unprotected by any natural promontories or off-lying islands, was exposed freely to the full sweep of the seas beating in from the open Channel. And the Channel was a restless body of water, notorious historically in fact and fiction for roughness the year round. Small craft, let alone larger vessels, in anything but fine weather would find unloading cargo on those unprotected surf-beaten sands an unsolvable problem. Those were the major obstacles—in any seaman’s eyes making the beaches untenable for any long-continued cargo handling, even of light materials, let alone of heavy guns and tanks—unless you held a protected seaport on them. For each of these insurmountable obstacles to any use of those open beaches, Operation Mulberry was to provide in a protected seaport what was needed to surmount them. There, lying off the Selsey sands, shortly to be moved to France, were the answers before me, idiotically purposeless though the whole thing seemed. Most important of those answers, of course, was the need for shelter from the open seas and the never-ending surf. For that, a massive breakwater was required. Massive breakwaters on open coasts take years to build up-from the sea floor—everyone knows that. But there, despite what everyone knows, were two massive breakwaters, designed to be installed on the sea floor in France, ready for use in a matter not of many years, but of a few days. There before me were the Phoenixs, those obsessions which were fast driving Captain Clark from the verge of insubordination to the verge of breakdown. Phoenixs, code name for the heart of this entire operation—about a hundred of them—those majestic concrete blocks protruding from the surface, staring me in the face like awash warehouses tossed about in insane disarray by some unsubsided flood. Actually, as now I well knew, Phoenixs were the gigantic sections from which shortly were to be formed the breakwaters to be. Each Phoenix section was of itself capable of being made as buoyant as a ship. It was first to be floated up off the bottom on the English side where temporarily it rested awaiting D-day, and then to be towed a hundred miles across the Channel to Normandy, there once again and finally to be sunk. But this time ranged end to end with its mates in a predetermined line a mile off the beachheads, to make an enclosed and sheltered harbor of the area chosen for invasion. Each of these amazing Phoenixs was two hundred feet long, sixty feet high, sixty feet wide—a tremendous chunk of hollow reinforced concrete divided into watertight compartments and displacing 6000 tons—as heavy as the
average Liberty ship, as high as a six-storied building, as long as many a city block. Sunk end to end in two long strings off the French coast, these Phoenixs were to form two separate breakwaters, each two miles long, one on the intended American front, one before the British front—20,000 feet altogether of breakwater. They were to be sunk a mile offshore in water thirty feet deep at low tide. Then, even at high tide, about ten feet of their upper structure would protrude sufficiently above the surface to break the waves and shield the artificial harbor inside them from the Channel seas. Thus they would provide inside them the quiet water in which cargo unloading, whether onto pierheads or from small craft beached on the protected sands, could go on day and night undisturbed by surf or waves. To get sufficient depth for ships inside, even at low tide, the breakwater line had to be planted nearly a mile offshore. There then would be draft enough inside the breakwater to provide berthing space along each inner Phoenix wall for seven Liberty ships while they unloaded, as well as sheltered anchorage for unnumbered smaller craft. Next, as the problem to be countered after that of shelter, came those troublesome currents. Something had to be done to break them up. It was provided. A relatively short cross breakwater of more Phoenixs was to be laid at the western end of each harbor, running from the inshore sands outward and perpendicular to the main breakwater, which it was to join at the seaward end. That cross breakwater, short though it was, would act like a cork at one end of the harbor, throttling off the dangerous alongshore rivers. Finally, but by no means least, there was the pierhead problem—a really acute headache. To keep up with the enormous tonnage of supplies necessary with the limited number of vessels available, there must be a fast vessel turn around on the Far Shore. That meant that all the unloading of tanks and heavy guns would have to be off the bow ramps of LST’s—those strange seagoing monsters which fling apart the immense doors in their bows to open wide their mouths, then drop down the ramps which simulate their tongues, and finally swiftly disgorge from their cavernous stomachs their cargo of heavy tanks, mobile guns, and combat-loaded trucks—all rolling ashore from the LST under their own power in a matter of minutes after the touching down of the ramp. That is, all this ponderous cargo would roll ashore in a matter of minutes, provided there was a substantial something ashore fixed always at the proper level just above an LST’s bow waterline for it to drop its ramp on, so the cargo
could roll off onto it and head landward. But on the Normandy coasts, there were those precipitous tides and their constantly shifting water levels. With a water level twenty-one feet lower at low tide than at high, there arose instantly a complication to our unloading anything onto a pier, except briefly at high tide. Any normal pierhead built at the right level to unload an LST at high tide would at low tide tower so high above that LST’s bows that its ramp could not possibly reach up to the pierhead, nor if it could, could any vehicle possibly mount so steep an incline. To this dilemma, there was no answer—except to provide an abnormal pierhead. Operation Mulberry provided exactly that answer—the Lobnitz pierhead—an abnormal monstrosity, if ever there were one. The Lobnitz, a tremendous structure, was a vertically moving pierhead held at a fixed level above the changing surface of the sea. Regardless of the stage of the tide it always kept itself at just the right height above the water for unloading LST’s onto it. Those Lobnitzs, half a score of them, aimlessly interspersed amongst the sunken Phoenixs, were those factory-like contraptions with that forest of protruding tall black towers, always in groups of four, reaching skyward from them like chimneys. Those square towers (four per Lobnitz, one at each corner) just now rising high into the air, were actually four tremendous steel legs to be rammed downward through the Lobnitz hull firmly into the ocean floor at the chosen pierhead site, to anchor it there. On those stout legs, the movable pierhead itself, always controlled by intricate machinery inside its rectangular steel hull, thereafter rose and fell with the changing tides. Always it maintained its deck at constant height above the changing waters, never immersed deeply enough to gain buoyancy sufficient to allow it to float free, always keeping weight enough on its four legs to hold them pressed firmly down into the bottom sand, anchoring the Lobnitz solidly in position. And finally, those scores of massive steel arches, intermingled with all else, looking like sections of highway bridges irrationally afloat on the water, crazily pointed every which way? What might they be? Those, which I knew now went by the code name of Whales, frankly were sections of highway bridges, each one an eighty foot highway truss floating on all but invisible pontoons. Joined together finally on the Normandy beachhead into 3000 foot lengths, they were to form floating bridges running seaward from just above the high-water mark on the beach sands to that point where, well inside the protecting breakwaters but over half a mile out to sea, the
Lobnitz pierheads were to be placed. Over half a mile out to sea—quite a distance. So far out from the high tide line, that out there, even at the lowest of low waters in that extraordinary fall of the tide, there still remained at each floating pierhead water enough to berth end on two floating LST’s. So far out, that for 24 hours round the clock, night or day, regardless of the stage of the tide, regardless of weather, there would come rolling ashore over those floating highway bridges from the Lobnitz pierheads a continuous stream of the tanks, the bulky self-propelled guns, the combat-loaded trucks bearing the priceless ammunition and supplies—a continuous stream of all the vast tonnage of heavy equipment with which only the piers, the cranes, and the dock facilities of a major seaport could be expected to cope. And for the lack of which facilities in our hands on the French coasts, the German General Staff knew no invasion could possibly be staged successfully. There was Mulberry, ready to go—over a million tons of it, to form the two artificial seaports destined for the Far Shore. Thoroughly scrambled in arrangement on the Selsey sands to disguise its purpose, there it rose from the sea—apparently some madman’s nightmare of purposelessness on a titanic scale. What did the Nazis, photographing it from high-flying planes, think it was? Most likely, another British attempt, on a vaster scale than any before, to hoax them? Some new secret weapon, perhaps? Or, God forbid, its actual use? No one on our side knew. But there was endless guessing. Gradually as I watched and mentally tried to rearrange that jumble into the picture patterns I knew they were to have in France, my state of trance faded. But in its place, there began to come over me a fear which in London I had thought could not possibly have any foundation—it began to sink in on me that Captain Clark’s Cassandra-like forebodings might have a basis. There, before me, most of it resting on the sea floor, was Mulberry, all right, in all its vastness. Mulberry, adequate undoubtedly to serve as intended as the springboard from which a successful invasion could be launched. But—was Mulberry ready to go? Would it ever go? Hastily I calculated … 100 sunken Phoenixs … 6000 tons displacement each … 600,000 tons of sunken Phoenixs nestling in the mud on the ocean floor off Selsey Bill … all to be torn free of the bottom when the signal to go was given, ready for tow to the Far Shore … all in the few scant days allowed before and after D-day. Before me lay the equivalent of raising a hundred sunken cargo ships in hardly any time at all—the equivalent in tonnage of raising ten sunken
Normandies—with the time allowed for the job not the two long years that wartime task took all the salvage forces that could be mustered in New York harbor to lift one Normandie only, but a few days only for lifting all ten of them. Quite an operation. And to be sandwiched in between two inexorable deadlines—one for starting, one for completion—two deadlines, by the exigencies of war squeezed so closely together that the time between them allowed for the lifting job was sliced to such a thinness as to be practically imperceptible as any filling at all in the sandwich. A Herculean task, no question. The biggest lifting job in salvage history, I didn’t doubt. Odd that it should ever have been given to the Royal Engineers, not to the Royal Navy, for ship salvage is a job for seamen, not for soldiers. How could that have come about? But all that was now beside the point. The assignment had irrevocably been made. The Royal Engineers had the task and already had grown apoplectic at Captain Clark’s bluntly asserted doubts of their competence to carry it through. What was the fact? Were they incompetent? Or was Captain Clark merely a hyper-sensitive seaman verging on incipient shell-shock under the strain of approaching D-day? Still, if Captain Clark were right, the invasion was facing disaster.
CHAPTER 6 Considerably depressed by the possibilities, even if remote, of any such contingency, I turned from a survey of what lay at sea to scan the deserted village of Selsey, stretched out along the sands. It wasn’t wholly deserted any more. To the right of a string of boarded-up cottages lay the center of the village with the barbed wire cleared away in that vicinity. There stood some larger buildings. One of these, once a store perhaps, was quite actively occupied. From the military traffic centered on it, this was obviously headquarters for the British forces at Selsey Bill. I trudged off through the soft sand, wangled my way past the sentry outside, introduced myself—an American Captain from Admiral Stark’s staff in London sent to inspect the progress on Mulberry. I was promptly escorted in to meet the Naval Officer in Charge—NOIC in British naval slang—a retired Royal Navy four striper, quite an elderly captain. He was back now on active duty and assigned to the command of this newly set up shore post at Selsey Bill. My welcome by NOIC to Selsey was at best noncommittal. It shortly developed there were already some other American naval officers stationed in Selsey, all assigned to Mulberry, all with rank much junior to mine. But even so, they had not exactly made NOIC’s life so far a happy one—in particular, one Lieutenant Barton, whom (I soon perceived) NOIC would most evidently have been glad to see hanged, drawn, and quartered. The presence now in Selsey, to further complicate the Mulberry situation, of still another American naval officer, this time one with rank equal to his own, did not to NOIC seem any cause for rejoicing. “What could I do for you?” he asked perfunctorily—a wholly rhetorical inquiry as it immediately turned out. For somewhat bitterly and with no delay, lest I erroneously conclude he might do something for me, NOIC hastened to inform me he was in no position to do anything at all for me concerning my mission, regardless of what its purpose might be. The Admiralty, having assigned him to the command of this God-forsaken strip of sand, had neglected to give him anything to go with it to uphold either his authority or his dignity.
Did I wish to board the Mulberry units sunk offshore? NOIC could not help me—the Admiralty had given him not even so much as a punt to maintain his dignity afloat as a captain in the Royal Navy, let alone to take me or anyone about. However, if I appealed to that Lieutenant Barton of my own Navy, whom I should find somewhere on the beach (doubtless looking like a disgrace to any Navy) Barton might. Barton, it seemed had the only boat in Selsey—and also what few tugs there were about, NOIC added acidly—a complete monopoly on Selsey’s very limited waterborne transportation facilities. However, should I desire information respecting the Mulberries or their problems, NOIC hastened to pass on that score also—he possessed none. Brigadier Bruce White of the Royal Engineers, or his local subordinates were the chaps to talk to on anything concerning them. NOIC, I soon gathered, felt himself an outcast on Selsey Bill. Here he was, a captain in command of a Royal Navy base established specifically to handle the Mulberries. And it was a question who ignored him the most—those soldiers, the Royal Engineers, in the person of their brigadier and his assistants, who were providing from all over Britain the Mulberry units there being assembled? Or that American Lieutenant Barton, who (possessed of all the signal equipment, the lone boats, and what few tugs there were) had brazenly already usurped NOIC’s authority in receiving the Mulberries and all else relating to their berthing once they appeared on the horizon off Selsey Bill? And NOIC, it seemed, could do nothing about it save to stand on the sands and fume—fruitlessly. Silently I drank all this in as NOIC ran on. The situation was not heartening. The Admiralty must be scraping the bottom of the Royal Naval barrel when it had to put on active duty again so befuddled an aging captain. There was NOIC, a worn-out old warrior, long past the point where anybody seemed to pay any attention to his attempts to command, powerless from lack of knowledge to direct, railing at the situation the Admiralty had put him in. God help Mulberry! I thought. On the American side, a vigorous enough young captain to command the operation once it was afloat for France, but one who from worry over its ever getting afloat, was already dangerously near the breaking point. And on the British side, as the man who should be actively engaged in seeing that it got afloat, an aging retired captain, apparently past any present usefulness, from his own rambling comments, just a futile old man fuming at a situation completely out of hand! What this Lieutenant Barton’s job might be in Selsey, I didn’t know—yet. Nor even actually what he was doing there, regardless of whether it was his job
or NOIC’s to do it. But, that a mere American lieutenant could, right in an English port, so bulldoze a Royal Navy captain as totally to usurp his authority, as NOIC claimed was happening, was something. It would be intriguing, wholly regardless of any relation to Mulberry, to meet this Lieutenant Barton before I had to return to London. But right now that must wait. Brigadier Bruce White and the Royal Engineers were what I was in Selsey for. Could NOIC tell me if the Brigadier himself was then in Selsey? It appeared he probably was not, but he had a Colonel of Royal Engineers stationed there handling affairs—him I could, no doubt, find somewhere. Unregretfully, I bade NOIC goodby, departed in search of the all-important Colonel. I found him easily enough—one panoramic glance east and west along the Selsey sands was sufficient always to reveal practically anybody in the vicinity. The Colonel exhibited no more enthusiasm on observing my presence in Selsey than had NOIC—undoubtedly he sensed behind me the obnoxious aura of Captain Clark and his irritating doubts. But since he did not mention Clark, neither did I. I set out my position—I was an officer lately joined to Admiral Stark’s London staff. Recently I had commanded the Allied forces, afloat and ashore, engaged in harbor clearance and salvage in the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean. The pending invasion had a harbor problem, as he well knew. Admiral Stark had sent me to the Channel to become thoroughly acquainted with the artificial harbors involved, now at Selsey Bill, shortly to be moved to Normandy, where we Americans were to operate one of them. I should appreciate his assistance in my task. And I should further appreciate being informed as to whether he foresaw any difficulties in his task wherein the specialized knowledge of a salvage officer might assist in getting the Mulberries on their way to France. No, I learned, neither the Colonel nor the Royal Engineers needed any assistance—the matter was nicely in hand. Though there had been, for a time, the Colonel unbent enough to inform me, a sticky problem involved which was none of their making—he would get to that in a moment. Meanwhile, so I might understand that problem, now solved, there was a bit of history I should know. The Royal Engineers, it seemed, had been given originally the design problem of the Mulberries. That, under their Brigadier Bruce White, they had
done well with; that he took it, was beyond question? I nodded assent. Very well, then. The production and fabrication of the mountain of diverse materials it took to turn the designs into reality, the Royal Engineers had further handled through Brigadier Sir Harold Wernher, operating in conjunction with the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Supply—a task in which Sir Harold had practically set over-strained Britain on its head to bring the Mulberries to the point I now saw off Selsey Bill. I appreciated Sir Harold’s results, did I not? I expressed my deep appreciation most enthusiastically—no one looking at what lay off Selsey Bill, could possibly feel otherwise regarding Sir Harold’s work. Good. We could come then to that sticky problem he had alluded to—none of it of the Engineer ’s making, I must understand. The Royal Engineers had designed the Phoenixs, and built the Phoenixs, and had had the Phoenixs towed from all around England to the invasion departure point at Selsey Bill, all as proposed. And always with the idea that they were to be left swinging to their moorings at Selsey Bill till D-day, then to be towed behind the first wave of invasion to the Far Shore. There for the first and the last time in their careers those Phoenixs were to be sunk once and for all to form the indispensable breakwaters in Normandy. So far, so good. But the assembly at Selsey Bill of all that material would take some months till the Phoenixs were to move on to France. Meanwhile, who, by the way, was to provide the heavy mooring buoys dotting the surface of the sea off Selsey Bill like raisins on a cake, to which the arriving Phoenixs were all to swing till departure on D-day? Moorings? There seemed to have been a regrettable lapse of liaison respecting that mooring matter—nobody was providing any moorings! Since the seagoing tug which was to bring the first Phoenix to Selsey Bill could not be kept indefinitely off an open beach to hold its tow from drifting away, an agonized cry went out from the tugboat people for the moorings. The Royal Engineers passed—mooring Phoenixs had been no part of their picture, they had provided none. Let the Admiralty, which had been mooring everything afloat for four centuries, tend to that. The Admiralty hurriedly totted up the number of huge anchors, the astronomical amount of chain cable, and the quantity of mooring buoys and accessories involved in mooring a hundred vessels—and the Admiralty passed also. It neither had them, nor could the Admiralty now possibly wring them out of Britain’s impoverished economy in time to make any difference.
But something had to be done. After all, the Phoenixs were intended to be sunk—off Normandy, to be sure. There could be no harm to them in giving each a preliminary sinking off Selsey Bill, where it could rest quietly on the bottom till wanted across the Channel. So Phoenix Number One was shoved in by its tugs till it grounded on the sands, and then flooded internally to hold it down on the bottom till needed. In the face of so happy a solution to the mooring dilemma, it seemed to have occurred to no one to question the incongruity of the Royal Engineers assuming the resultant task, come D-day, of getting afloat again that and all the succeeding Phoenixs—about a hundred of them. I had listened intently. So that was how it came about the Phoenixs were sunk —no moorings. I had before assumed they had been sunk so that in the long interval till D-day, they might be safer from Nazi air attack—less of them was thereby exposed above water to bomb damage, while their flooded interiors would far better resist shock waves from the underwater explosions of near misses than would their empty compartments, if still afloat. But why they had been sunk was now immaterial. They were sunk. How did the Royal Engineers, who had so nonchalantly taken on the task, propose next to get them all afloat again? My attention was invited offshore to a pair of small coasting vessels anchored out beyond the parked Phoenixs. Did I see them? They were the answer—those two Dutch schuits. Dutch—what? Dutch schuits. Schuit was the Dutch word for a small steam freighter intended to work the coasts and canals of Holland. Those two schuits out there had fled across the Channel from Holland when the Nazis had invaded their country—the British had them now, Dutch crews and all. The Royal Engineers had previously conceived the bright idea of fitting up the capacious cargo holds of these two with special boilers and electric generators, making them floating powerhouses to service a captured French port—Cherbourg, for instance—should they, as was most likely, find the local utility plant sabotaged when the port was captured, and no electricity available for harbor needs. So with those floating powerhouses in the works anyway, till they had need of them in France, the Royal Engineers felt it no greatly added strain on them to make their two Dutch schuits useful at Selsey Bill by installing also in their holds some electric-driven pumps for pumping out the Phoenixs; there was plenty of electricity available below decks in them. So those schuits now had
installed in them a terrific pumping capacity—just what the lifting task needed for rapid completion. No, the Royal Engineers wanted no assistance; everything was well in hand. Should I like to see those double-purpose installations on the two schuits—the Colonel was, apparently, very proud of them—he had a Captain of the Royal Engineers—fine chap, Scotch, good man —aboard them with the Dutch. He would be glad to show me about. But as for transportation out to them, there was a rub there. The Colonel had no boat. I looked dubiously out to sea, feeling more and more that perhaps Captain Clark had a basis for his doubts—two clumsy Dutch tubs only, no matter how powerful their special pumps, to float up a hundred sunken hulks in a hurry? There was more to raising a fleet of sunken wrecks than just providing pumps. Was it possible the Royal Engineers didn’t know that? Exactly that might be possible, but I repressed my doubts. With Flanigan’s warnings fresh in my ears, I must jump to no conclusions. Yet, if those two Dutch schuits were now the nub of the problem, the sooner I was aboard them, the better. So the Colonel had no boat. No news now in that. However, there was still that Lieutenant Barton— I thanked the Colonel. Yes, I wanted to see the schuits. No, I wasn’t concerned over his inability to put me aboard them. I’d arrange that myself. Goodby. I went to look for someone in the uniform of a lieutenant in our Navy—that Lieutenant Barton. But this time I was baffled. I could see everyone there was out on the beach —British sailors, English soldiers, some nondescript merchant seamen off the tugs, perhaps, even a few American Seabees. But in spite of NOIC’s statement that I should doubtless find Barton on the beach, there was on the beach no American naval officer with the two gold stripes of a lieutenant on his sleeve, through whom I might get a boat. It occurred to me finally that the rest of NOIC’s vitriolic comment on Barton had some significance—he might not be in naval uniform. Perhaps in spite of being an officer, he might not be in any uniform at all, though both NOIC and the Colonel, the only two officers I had so far met, had been most formally and correctly decked out in the regalia of their ranks. As, for that matter, as a visitor, so was I. Still, Barton might be in working clothes—anything at all. From that point of view, I resurveyed the sands, looking now for someone more like a workman, and the answer was obvious. That huge figure in a white sweatshirt some hundred yards off at the water ’s edge, bawling orders through a megaphone to a Dukw heading offshore and the only person in sight
supervising anything, must be Lieutenant Barton. I went in that direction. It was Barton, all right. Even before I got within ten yards of him, I understood better how NOIC, uncertain of himself, uncertain of his task, had abdicated to Barton. There was nothing whatever uncertain about Barton. He had a voice like a bull, a figure like Samson in its massiveness, a solid assurance in his rough manner that any Englishman (let alone a decrepit one like NOIC) would have difficulty facing up to, and a garb that was generously free of any implication of the subordination that is inherent in the livery of a naval uniform. Clad in baggy trousers that defied classification, in a sweatshirt that once had presumably been white, soaked now in perspiration, and in no cap at all, Barton very obviously looked like neither an officer nor a gentleman—simply like a man striving vociferously and profanely to get something conveyed across a widening stretch of water and never mind any amenities, naval or otherwise. That was Barton. I accosted him. Barton turned, looked at me. Down went the megaphone in his left hand, up went his right hand in salute. Uncouth though his appearance was, an American Captain, apparently, rated with him. But I saw instantly there was more behind it than just that, for I didn’t have to introduce myself. Barton knew of my coming, guessed immediately who I was, greeted my arrival with unfeigned joy. High time, too, he grumbled belligerently. London should long ago have sent down someone with rank and savvy enough to straighten these limeys out on Mulberry. What could he do to help me that way? I indicated the Dutch schuits out beyond the Phoenix park—I’d like to board them. “Sure, Captain!” Up went his megaphone again, aimed at that Dukw he’d been talking to when first I’d spotted him, now so much further out from the beach that to me it seemed to be beyond range of any communication save by radio. But in that Dukw they heard him, all right. And they wasted no time, either, in obeying his stentorian order to return. In a moment, the Dukw, looking like an awash 3-ton truck, had come about and was swimming toward us. In a few more minutes, with all the lack of grace of an actual duck waddling ashore, its wheels emerged from the sea, its useless propeller ceased whirling, it quit being a boat, and like any well-behaved truck, it rolled up the sand to stop alongside us. With some difficulty, since it seemed to have neither the steps of a truck nor the side ladder of a boat, I clambered up over its side to a seat
beside the driver—one of Barton’s Seabees. Barton waved nonchalantly to his driver. “Take the Captain wherever he wants to go,” he ordered airily. The driver, that hybrid between soldier, sailor, and mechanic which was denominated a Seabee, looked at me hopefully. There was all the latitude in the world in that tantalizing order. Where did I wish to go? By land, to Chichester, perhaps, the nearest inland city and a blessed haven for Seabees from the toil under Barton on the barren beaches? Or by sea, somewhere out on the water into the maze of Mulberry units? “To those Dutch schuits,” I replied, pointing. Not too happily, the driver turned his clumsy vehicle and headed it for the water—for me a new experience, since I’d never been shipmates with a Dukw before. In a moment, amidst a weird shifting of multitudinous gears and clutches and a partial deflating of tires, we rolled down the sand into the water. Our conveyance started to float, ceased being a truck, became a boat. With whirling propeller and rudder in action now instead of drive wheels and steering knuckles, and with my chauffeur metamorphosed into a coxswain, we were on our way. And a damned queer way, I thought, for a sailor to get about in a harbor, but it certainly had its advantages. In calm water only, I hastily qualified, as I noted the not so generous freeboard of our practically unloaded vehicle. A little nervously I looked about in the truck till I spotted some life jackets—they might be useful now that it was a boat, should we have the hard luck to strike rough water. Even in that calm sea, the Dukw proved to be no speedboat; that way, it more resembled its near namesake in rate of locomotion. But we were making progress though our truck body was not so streamlined. Soon we were well offshore, threading our way amongst the Mulberries. And very swiftly, closeup views of Phoenixs, Lobnitzs, and Whales, towering high above our squat hull, made me forget my uncouth conveyance altogether. Like Alice-inWonderland, I stared, mouth almost agape, at the monstrosities covering the waters all about me. It was hardly believable they were real. And even less, when viewing them at close range, did it seem possible anyone not in on the secret could ever guess their purpose. A mile or so of dodging nightmares and we were out on the seaward side of the Channel. There, anchored rather closely, as if huddling together for more normal companionship in the lee of that grotesque assemblage, lay the two
schuits. We ran close aboard the nearer one. A Dutch sailor came to the rail. “Is there a Royal Engineer Captain aboard?” I shouted. The sailor shook his head, pointed to the other vessel. We headed for that and this time with no more hails, ran up along its side ladder. I told the coxswain I should be aboard some hours, most likely. He was to tell Barton to have his signalman keep an eye on the schuits. When ready, I would have the schuit signal him with an Aldis lamp for a Dukw to take me ashore. And with that, I stepped from my seat to the side ladder, ordered the Dukw to shove off, and clambered up the side of the schuit. She was just an ordinary coasting freighter, so far as anything visible indicated on deck. There a mate met me, but he spoke no English. By the captain, to whose cabin I was escorted, and whose English was infinitely above my Dutch, I was taken to an adjacent stateroom intended normally for some one of the mates, assigned now to that Captain of the Royal Engineers whom I was seeking. The skipper peeked through the curtains shrouding the door, satisfied himself my officer was within, nodded to me, and departed. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. Feeling I was entitled to at least as much latitude as the Dutch skipper had allowed himself, I also peeked through the curtains. There stretched out on the bunk at the far side of the little stateroom, fully clothed in his olive-drab uniform, shoes and all, lay that Captain, back to me, sound asleep, apparently. I was not surprised. It could well be that his working hours with his charges being most irregular, he snatched sleep whenever, day or night, he could get some. So with no more ado, I shoved aside the curtains, entered, seized him by the nearest shoulder, and gave him a vigorous shake. “This poor devil must certainly be worked to death,” I thought, for in spite of the vigor of that shake, he rolled over toward me only sluggishly, very slowly opened his eyes, and stared at me apparently unseeingly for a considerable interval before finally he slid off the bunk and stood up. I told him who I was, why I was there—his Colonel had suggested I see him about the schuits, about their mission. Would he kindly show me? Apparently shaking off his doze, he began slowly to come alive. A fairly tall young man, somewhere in his early thirties, I figured, he became quite cordial as he seemed to wake. Yes, he would be quite happy to show me what he had below decks in these schuits. Would I mind waiting though, till he got hold of
his sergeant to see the holds below lighted up, and his men stationed? Every army is the same, I muttered—no sergeants, no action. I nodded assent. Shortly he was back again. Together we descended from the poop to the middle hold of the schuit containing most of the newly installed machinery. He presented his sergeant, a very husky Englishman, whose slow, thick speech I could hardly decipher. Behind the sergeant were ranged his enlisted men, all about as big as the sergeant. I looked them over with interest. If these were average specimens, the Royal Engineers needed no machinery to destroy their enemies—their brawn alone appeared quite adequate to the task. I gazed about me in that cavern. What had once been the bleak main cargo hold of that old freighter was jammed now with the modern machinery the Royal Engineers had recently installed there—boilers, turbo-generators, condensers, feed pumps, circulating pumps, fuel pumps, air ejectors, forced draft blowers, and a set of electrical distribution and control panels glistening with ammeters, voltmeters, wattmeters, circuit breakers, switches, and a dizzying array of regulating gadgets. Here was a complete power plant in all its complexity, all right, but what I was interested in was only some simple salvage pumps, which might indeed be driven by steam off that old schuit’s original boilers without any of all this vast complication of newly added machinery. Where were all the salvage pumps? It was indicated to me that they were forward. We clambered up again to the deck, down the ladder on the forward side of the next bulkhead into the adjoining hold till we were again down on the floor plates just above the ship’s bottom. There, the Captain proudly indicated to me his salvage pumps; massive centrifugals, electrically driven, with ponderous steel suction pipes running vertically up to the deck far overhead, for connection there to the rubber suction hoses intended to be run athwartships over the side to the Phoenix being pumped and then down again into the Phoenix’s flooded holds to wherever the waterlevel there happened to be. Unavoidably, with the set-up necessary to pump out the Phoenixs, the water inside them would first have to be sucked upward ten to fifteen feet or more before it could pass over the gunwale of the schuit alongside doing the pumping, and then flow downward inside the schuit to the pump. It would take a pump with a first class suction pull indeed to lift the water that high up over the hump between the Phoenix and the high side of the schuit, before it could start flowing downward to the pump in her hold. And what had the Royal Engineers
provided for pumps requiring so fine a suction lift? 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 with 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 circ*mscribed 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 to 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. Long before we got to Southampton, however, I had lost all interest in
verdant fields. The endless caravans of drab military trucks loaded with war supplies going our way south, the huge dumps of military stores already covering field after field in Hampshire, and finally as we neared Southampton, the long strings of murderous-looking tanks parked nose to tail just off the pavements, alternating with more parked strings of heavy artillery, ammunition caissons, and God only knows what other ponderous military hardware, inexorably caught my eye and held it fixed on them to the total exclusion of sights no more exciting than the pastoral greenery which now was being wholly blotted from view anyway. The build-up for the invasion of military equipment of all kinds for a vast army was in full swing, all converging on this area for convenient transshipment, come D-day, to the Far Shore. Certainly, some millions of tons of it were plainly in sight. So much was there already, waiting only to be moved aboard ship for the last hundred mile water jump to Normandy, with more arriving every hour, it seemed that long before D-day should finally come round, all southern England must sink under that tremendous added weight. Had I been under any illusions as to how much tonnage army planners felt they had to have in Normandy to back up their invasion, that glimpse of County Hampshire would completely have dispelled them. Whatever the quantity might be exactly, the sight of it was stupefying. The whole vast production of America’s factories and farms was being funneled through right here to Hampshire. And it was truly no farfetched fantasy to wonder if County Hampshire, unless somehow shored up, might not collapse under the load. But for me, that sight brought me once again hard up against a very sobering reality—all this was destined for hurried unloading on the Far Shore. But in the absence of the Mulberries, how was that ever going to be done? Somewhere, tangled in that question, was why, evidently, Quiberon had so cavalierly been shoved aside and I sent on the way again to the Channel. We rolled through badly bombed Southampton and then down the easterly side of Southampton Water to Portsmouth. There was no use my going for the moment to Selsey Bill—around Selsey there were no hotels, or any temporary billets available, and how long I was to stay in the area this time was as yet nebulous. Portsmouth offered better chances for a place to rest my head till Admiral Stark should tell me what was expected of me—further, its communications with London, so that finally he could tell me anything at all, were far above what the solitary telephone line out of Selsey offered.
The billeting officer in Portsmouth groaned at sight of me— accommodations for casual officers around Southampton Water, a major concentration center for invasion jump-off—were most scanty. But ultimately he managed to stow me away in the antiquated Queen’s Hotel. That hotel, when Victoria had just married Albert, might have been new and attractive. But now a century later, what with rationing, shortages, and blackouts superimposed on all its ancient inconveniences, it was depressing in the extreme. However, it was a place to sleep—if I saw no worse before D-day, I should be fortunate. And it had one great advantage—its none too desirable location, quite out of town and well away from the Royal Dockyard on the waterfront, removed it to the far outer circles of that target for Luftwaffe bombs of which the Royal Dockyard formed the bull’s-eye. Portsmouth and the Southampton invasion area, unlike London for the time being, was heavily bombed on the average about three nights a week. It would be at least some comfort to feel on turning in that if a bomb, dropped during one of these night raids, landed on this hotel, it would be merely by coincidence, not by intention. I started out next to insure my line of communication with London, which, considering what was most likely to be the subject of London’s communications to me, had better be kept wholly out of British hands. While Captain Clark’s own headquarters for Mulberry were in far-off Plymouth along with the rest of the American naval command afloat, I understood that Clark had put his Deputy Task Force Commander nearer to Selsey Bill, right there in Portsmouth. To keep this Mulberry squabble wholly in the family, it looked best to work with London through the local American Mulberry staff. So I’d better let that group know I was about, and have them inform London they were to serve as the sole pipe line to me for all messages. With some difficulty, once I had managed to work my way through the cordon of Royal Marines guarding entrance to the Royal Dockyard, I found the local Mulberry headquarters in a shed most cozily located in the lee of the latrine hard by Admiralty House—surely an efficient arrangement for a visitor having business requiring to be transacted in a hurry in several different spots. But unless so unlikely a location had purposely been chosen to throw snooping espionage agents off the scent of that “Top Secret” project by providing stronger scents nearby, it did not augur well for the importance attached to Operation Mulberry by Admiral Sir Charles Little, Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. And a further drawback was that the two tiny rooms in the skimpy shed turned over to Mulberry as its local headquarters could hardly house all at
once Clark’s Deputy Task Force Commander, the few young officers who were his aides, his priceless telephone, his even more priceless typewriter, and the yeoman who manned it. However, wedging myself into this very compressed ménage, I introduced myself to Clark’s Deputy, Commander Alfred Stanford. Commander Stanford, I found, was an amateur yachtsman who had temporarily abandoned motor cruisers for warcraft. He was suave, tall, and good-looking, and was the complete antithesis in manner to his chief, Captain Clark. While Clark had already, by too much thinking on the hurdles besetting Operation Mulberry, certainly been given that “lean and hungry look” so much deplored in Cassius’ appearance by Caesar, Stanford, urbane and relaxed always in spite of Mulberry’s difficulties, still could closely have met Caesar ’s specification that those about him be “sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.” A strange pair, I thought, this professional seaman and this amateur sailor, to be joined as chief and second in a major enterprise. But perhaps two such diverse characters might complement each other in getting the task accomplished. Stanford appeared heartily glad to see me. He knew, of course, of my recent visit to Selsey Bill, of the reasons behind it, of my trip back to London. To him, the speed of my return to the Channel looked promising. What were the results, he asked eagerly? Were the Royal Engineers on their way out? I could only shrug my shoulders. If there were any results, I knew nothing of them. I had merely been sent again to the Channel—this time just to await orders. Beyond that I had no information—I was just to wait for what might happen, if anything. A distressing situation, obviously, with D-day, as was most likely, hardly three weeks away. Stanford considered that thoughtfully. They were in a bad position because of those Phoenixs, he muttered. Unless a solution swiftly hove into view, his chief, he felt, would certainly crack up. And now nothing was in sight on the horizon except more delay? I had to agree. Stanford shook his head soberly, then asked what seemed an inane question. “You are on waiting orders only? You have no assignment meanwhile?” No, I had none; nothing at all to do, except to hang around, waiting. Would I mind then, queried Stanford, going back to Selsey Bill and showing his men something? No, I shouldn’t mind. Selsey Bill was certainly within my allowed waiting perimeter, perhaps at the very center of it. What was it he wished?
Stanford explained. The core of that problem at Selsey Bill was, of course, getting all those Phoenixs afloat again. Neither Captain Clark, nor he, had ever had any great faith in the magical solution to the problem to be provided by the Royal Engineers with those two little Dutch schuits of overwhelming pumping capacity. I knew more about those schuits now than he, so he wouldn’t discuss them. But there was something else I didn’t know. Though no salvage men themselves, Captain Clark and he already had inside knowledge that there was more to raising those Phoenixs than just pumping them out. And that knowledge was fast driving Clark wild. What it was, was this: Having little faith in the performance of the promised Dutch schuits, over a month before they had somehow purloined from the multitudinous naval forces arriving in the Channel, an American salvage tug, our very latest, fitted with the best American salvage pumps, all of which they had managed quietly to divert temporarily to Operation Mulberry. That salvage tug had undertaken to float up one of those Phoenixs for them, and it had failed ingloriously. The salvage tug (appropriately enough named the U.S.S. Diver, ARS5) was, by great good luck, still at Selsey; so, of course, was also that very Phoenix, still solidly on the bottom. Now, I was a salvage officer. Since I had nothing else to do anyway, would I mind going back again to Selsey to show that salvage tug how to raise it? They’d appreciate it on the Diver; so would he. And it could cause no possible complications in London; it would all be just amongst us Americans on the beach. Here, I thought, is certainly an intriguing way to keep from being bored silly while waiting—casually raising a 6000 ton hulk in my off hours. I was, of course, willing. But I did think it odd no one in Selsey had previously mentioned that episode of the Diver to me, not even that Scotch Captain. This American fiasco could prove very embarrassing. The Royal Engineers would find it excellent ammunition in the current battle as showing that when it came to raising Phoenixs, even sailors had their off days. Did the Royal Engineers know of this, I wondered? Stanford doubted it. The British equipment—those two Dutch schuits— together with that widely assorted lot of Royal Engineers, had not at that time yet arrived at Selsey Bill. And since the raising problem was officially wholly in the hands of the British anyway, Stanford and his men hadn’t ever felt called on to advertise their own very unofficial (and unproductive) activities in that
same field. Good enough. However, there still were two additional minor points I wanted assurance on should I go to Selsey Bill again—one, transportation, and two, housing. How about them? Selsey Bill was a long way from normal habitations. I was getting a little old, I felt, to volunteer for a task where it seemed likely that, when night came, all I could do was to push aside some of that rusted concertina barbed wire, wrap myself in a tarpaulin jacket, and sleep on the beach. For from my slight observation of it from the sands, Selsey Bill was wholly lacking in hotels and boarding houses, nor did there seem to be there even any cottages open and willing to take in paying guests. Everything along that beach appeared tightly boarded up. If I were to go there again, someone would first have to undertake some firm commitments on my behalf. Stanford laughed jovially. Was that all? As for my transportation, he’d handle that himself. And as for housing, that was no problem either. Wait till I got to Selsey and saw how the unconventional Lieutenant Barton had solved that one. Barton would take care of me, also. I was satisfied. Commander Stanford got me a jeep. Without ever having slept there, I checked out of the Queen’s Hotel, notified the Portsmouth billeting officer that that bed was all his again, and headed out to box the compass almost, on the very circuitous route to Selsey Bill—only ten miles away due east across the water, over twice that distance in practically all directions, by land. When I arrived again on the Selsey sands, everything looked quite the same there, even to the negligently un-uniformed but very busy Lieutenant Barton, on the beach as before. But it wasn’t. Barton, already aboard a Dukw and about to roll away on an amphibious voyage, pointed out to me that approaching Selsey there loomed up against the horizon as odd a sight as I’ve ever seen afloat—one of his Phoenixs, light, with its sheer concrete sides rising abruptly full forty feet above the water, a huge rectangular box placidly moving along toward us, completely dwarfing the seagoing tug ahead of it at the far end of a towline, furiously churning up the water. That, I was informed, was a freshly built Phoenix, just arriving on its maiden voyage from its construction dock in the Thames. Barton was about to go out to it with a couple of his own little tugs, much lighter draft vessels than the ocean tug, take over the tow, and bring the Phoenix in to shallow water where he would open its sea valves, flood it down, and park it there amongst its mates.
Would I excuse him? It would take him some hours. I acquiesced, of course. A monstrosity such as that, imperiously demanding to be parked, took precedence in anybody’s Navy over the housing needs of a mere captain. Barton shoved off in his Dukw. I remained on the beach, scanning with evergrowing respect that amazing sunken city in the sea which our British friends had conceived and provided as springboard for the invasion. But how, I wondered, was Admiral Stark getting along with his proposals for a change in the control of it? Would he go directly to the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, another American, who after all was responsible for the success of the invasion—every part of it—to force a change lest disaster ensue? Or might he feel it more politic to go instead to the British to persuade them to make a change themselves? And failing in that persuasion, what then might he do? Push it regardless, or let the matter drop and hope for the best? It was a question. How Flanigan, contemptuous always of higher authority, would handle it, I felt I knew. His method would be to cajole the British into acquiescence while steamrollering the American top command into pressuring the wavering British to make up their minds to accept the inevitable gracefully. But though everything else I’d witnessed around Com Nav Eu had been settled by Fanigan, this, I knew and Flanigan knew, was out of his hands. It was something that our Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe, must handle personally—if indeed, anyone handled it at all. And that decision, too, must rest with Stark. How would Stark, when he’d had time to consider fully what was involved, handle that hot potato? Admiral Harold R. Stark, even with his four stars and all the gold lace on his sleeves, was in a peculiar position in this matter, not wholly free to take too much of a chance. He had already, at the very outbreak of this war, received one stunning blow over the head—undeserved, I thought, but terrible. Would he dare take a chance on getting another which might finish his career? For, on Pearl Harbor day, Admiral Stark had been Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, the top command in our entire Navy. And in the wake of the smoking and sunken debris of our shattered Pacific Fleet, the President had held Stark personally responsible for the disaster, had swiftly relieved him of that top command, and had sent him to vegetate ingloriously for the rest of the war in London as Commander-in-Chief of our Naval Forces in Europe, where we had no naval forces to speak of and were quite unlikely ever to have any. The naval war, as every child even could then see, was very
obviously going to be fought out with the Japanese in the Pacific, where it would swallow up all the naval forces we could ever again muster. Bearing then on the probabilities of those sunken Phoenixs before me ever rising once more, was the injustice of what had happened to Stark. That any negligence on Stark’s part had in any way contributed to the Pearl Harbor calamity, I never believed—neither did most others in the Navy who had any access to the facts. But nevertheless, Stark had publicly been made a scapegoat. And further to add to the agony of that cruel blow dealt out to Stark, the disgrace was heaped on him alone; nothing whatever had been done to Stark’s opposite number, General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, who was far more responsible, if either of those two were, for whatever might have happened to the fleet in Pearl Harbor. For every naval man knew that by previously agreed doctrine of defense, the protection of a land naval base and of the fleet while berthed within it, was an Army responsibility. If there was negligence in anyone’s letting the Japanese air attack in on our ships, the negligence was Army’s. But had the Army’s Chief of Staff suffered anything as a result? Not visibly. There in Washington still sat as Army Chief of Staff the man who had had that post on Pearl Harbor day, while his naval opposite number had ignominiously and ostentatiously been demoted to a then innocuous and practically nonexistent command where he might do no harm. Or any good, either. What might be the effect of all that on Stark, confronted now with the prospect of major controversy at the very moment when the Supreme Command was straining to achieve harmony? Stark, most of all those in the top echelon, had excellent firsthand knowledge that there was little justice and less equity to be expected in dealings with the summit, if the dealings got you in disfavor. It was easy to trace what could happen. The Major General in command of the Royal Engineers would stand by his subordinates, both Brigadier Bruce White in London and his juniors at Selsey Bill, all confident that they had the matter in hand. (Or should anything prove refractory, that shortly they’d rectify it.) The War Office would stand firmly behind their Major General. The British Secretary for War would back up his War Office. The Admiralty, as before, would discreetly refrain from any opinion reflecting on the abilities of the Royal Engineers. The Prime Minister would then, of necessity, support the cabinet official heading the War Office. And who was there in Britain, then, in such a case to challenge Winston Churchill, the colossus who had saved Britain
in her hour of need? Obviously nobody. That being the case, what would Harold Stark do? Oppose the Prime Minister, and risk what would follow? Com Nav Eu, due to the exigencies of long months of Nazi U-boat warfare, had unexpectedly grown now to be a very respectable naval command, expanded still farther by invasion needs, a wartime command well worth having. And Stark had it, a command wholly unenvisioned when he’d been skidded out of Washington over two years before. Would Stark, with his head still aching from the unjustified bludgeoning after Pearl Harbor, risk another? All it would take, should he continue to oppose, would be a transatlantic call, easily imagined, from Prime Minister to President, both reported to be very blunt with each other in their exchange of opinions. “See here, your Admiral in London, the one you threw out of Washington, is making a bloody nuisance of himself, poking his nose into military matters our Royal Engineers are handling. We told him off most politely a month or so ago, but now the blighter ’s at it again. Take him out of here, will you?” And most likely, within a day or so, Harold Stark would find himself ordered as Naval Attaché to Switzerland—or put on the retired list. So what, I wondered, would Admiral Stark do? Once again dutifully question, but only perfunctorily, the capabilities of the Royal Engineers, and then play it safe by accepting the almost certain “No” for his answer? Or go all out to force a change regardless and risk the loss of his command? Still, if he didn’t oppose, if he took the “No,” and for want of the Mulberries the invasion foundered in a sea of blood as inevitably it must, how much good would it be to him, or to anybody, to be Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe? On the other hand, while the loss of his command could be counted as a certain result of pugnacious but unsuccessful opposition, might it not happen if he let matters take their course, the invasion would somehow be successful despite the missing Mulberries? Was anything inevitable? Sometime miracles happened, in military matters as in others. It might be best, after all, in Stark’s situation not to be belligerent in opposition to the point of risking any reprisal. It might be advisable for him to accept “No” for the answer and hope for the best. I looked again at the Mulberries, half buried in the sea. Admiral Stark’s naval career now might very well hang on them. So certainly did the lives of uncounted soldiers from D-day on. What, I wondered, would Harold Stark do
now? It was a very complicated situation.
CHAPTER 9 By early evening, Lieutenant Fred Barton had his Phoenix safely parked on the sea floor and was back on the beach with me. Unless another Phoenix should appear wholly unannounced during the night, which was possible, he was through for the day. So, should I excuse his unorthodox appearance, he would be glad to have me go home with him, have supper with him, and stay the night —longer, should it suit me. His manner intrigued me—in dealing with a captain in his own Navy, he seemed slightly unsure of himself, and uncertain of the proper etiquette expected of a lieutenant. Though it was obvious that merely the rank itself did not bother him—NOIC, a captain in the Royal Navy, he treated as less than the sand under his feet on Selsey beach. I thanked him for his invitation. I’d be delighted to accept. And as for his lack of uniform, he could quit bothering—we were in a war, not on parade. But I had to admit I was puzzled—where in all the desolation of this deserted village, was home? I scanned again all the boarded up cottages, the solitary unboarded building, which was NOIC’s British headquarters. That, certainly, the sole thing I could see occupied, could not be home for Barton. Barton would show me. We plodded across the sand, skirted the western side of NOIC’s headquarters along a road leaving the beach, turned left behind the line of boarded-up cottages, pushed along for perhaps a hundred yards on their landward side through overgrown brush and shrubbery untouched in the four years since Dunkirk—and there on our left was home. The backs of two adjacent cottages there were unshuttered, the yards behind them had a very lived-in appearance, and clotheslines from which still hung the day’s wash decorated both yards. From the clothesline to starboard dangled some socks, some khaki shirts, and, some heavy underwear—all very naval; from the one to port—this startled me—some quite flimsy feminine lingerie. Women—on this deserted beach? Barton indicated the cottage to starboard. “This is it. Come on in.” We entered. I looked around. I’d seen the exact like of that cottage on many
American beaches—a flimsy shingled shell, unsheathed inside, wooden partitions running only head high, all decidedly en famille—standard beach shacks. “How’d you get this?” I asked. “Nobody was using it, so I just took the shutters off the back side and moved in,” answered Barton. “What’ll you have for supper?” So that was my introduction to home life on Selsey Bill. Barton’s cookery was crude, but at least equal to what he had to work on—army field rations and what he could obtain by barter with the few farmers still domiciled inland from Selsey—the barter being the exchange for American cigarettes of such strictly unobtainable items in English food shops as eggs still actually in their own shells (not powdered), and a little real butter and bacon. While both of us were washing up the dishes afterwards, I asked Barton about his neighbors. Were there really women on this abandoned beach, as that laundry line next door indicated? Barton nodded. There were. Tough case, too. Two young girls, sisters, both married, one of them with two tiny children, husbands now soldiers, both in the British army, he didn’t know where. The older one, the one with the children, both under three, had had her home in London hit by a bomb. Literally that house, came crashing down around her ears. She’d lost an eye as a result—she and the children were lucky to have come out of the rubble still alive. But with their home in London a wreck, and nowhere else there to shelter them, they’d come down to their long-abandoned summer cottage on this beach, which the children had never seen, taken off the land side shutters, and made out as best they could on that deserted beach. After all, it was a roof over their heads, even though it did have barbed wire right up against the locked front door, and the mother was desperately afraid her babies might somehow elude her and get out on those enticing sands to play, only to be blown to bits by undiscovered mines. A little later, her younger sister had joined her, partly because housing in London was getting extraordinarily tight, partly to help her care for the children till their husbands came back and all of them might live again under more civilized conditions. That had been a number of months back. Imagine the surprise of this little Swiss Family Robinson group, self-marooned on Selsey beach, when Selsey Bill was unexpectedly designated by the C-in-C, Portsmouth, as the main assembly point for Mulberry, when strange shapes began to mushroom out of the seas, and the deserted sands came suddenly alive with sailors, soldiers, and
Seabees, some of which unwary newcomers were almost as suddenly swiftly dead from straying off the well-beaten Dukw tracks across the sands, until the survivors learned to believe in signs. To on pair of such unfortunates, that had happened directly in front of their very cottage. The coming of all that personnel to such a lonely spot might ordinarily have been a blessing to the refugees from London. At least, it had brought them friendly neighbors in the persons of Barton and of a young lieutenant, his assistant, who had promptly emulated those sisters by taking down the rear shutters and making themselves at home next door in some other still absent Englishman’s castle. But the coming of the Mulberries had been no blessing. Before, the beach at Selsey had been unworthy of enemy attention—now it suddenly interested them, and regularly on every raid directed at either Portsmouth or Southampton, the Nazi flyers first dropped a few sticks of bombs while passing over Selsey Bill. “Those girls next door are a damned nuisance every time we get bombed,” complained Barton. “They just go into hysterics. You’ll see. A man can’t get any sleep. They ought to go back to London.” But even Barton freely conceded there wasn’t any place in London they could go back to, now that the coming of Mulberry had made Selsey Bill as great a torture for them as London had ever been. Those poor girls, I thought. The only thing they can look forward to, to bring them relief, is D-day, which will get the Mulberries away from here—so I hope, I hastily qualified. But on the other hand, D-day, as well those girls knew, would see both their husbands thrown into the assault against the Nazi machine guns and tanks and God knows what else waiting them on the Far Shore—maybe those two girls weren’t looking forward to D-day with such mad enthusiasm, after all. Well, there was nothing I could do about it—c’est le guerre. Where should I sleep? Barton indicated one of the two makeshift rooms semi-partitioned off from the central living space—in there. It seemed his assistant, that other lieutenant he had mentioned, was elsewhere in the Channel on Mulberry business for a few days. I could use his bed. The bed, it turned out, was standard summer cottage furniture—the castoffs of a former era elsewhere, an old iron bed with a mattress to match its antiquity. Still, it was a bed. We had a quiet night. No air raid sirens, no bombs.
In the morning, we had breakfast—a better breakfast than any I’d ever been able to get in London. Barton produced some of his authentic eggs and some bacon. The rate of exchange thereabouts on eggs, I learned, was one package of Camels per egg, or for wholesale transactions when that many eggs were available all at once, one carton of cigarettes per dozen eggs. Swiftly thereafter, Barton, regretting he couldn’t accompany me, put me aboard the U.S.S. Diver, then anchored on the outer fringe of the Mulberry parking lot. Coming over the Diver’s rail, I met her skipper, a young senior lieutenant, and his junior officers. The skipper welcomed me most respectfully —he’d had a signalled message from Stanford warning him of my coming, and the visit of a four-striper to so unpretentious a vessel of war was quite unusual. In the presence of so many young officers and of so much obvious respect, I began to feel my age unduly—after all I wasn’t so old, even as captains go. But to these youngsters, I might as well have been Noah himself. However, down to business. What was their trouble in floating up a Phoenix? Hadn’t their pumps functioned properly? Or was it something else? The skipper explained. No, it wasn’t the pumps. They had a good set. They’d all worked all right, pumped fine. From his calculations, they had pumped water enough out of the Phoenix to give it positive buoyancy, so that it should have floated up, only it hadn’t, even with the tide rising to full flood outside. And from that point on, further pumping was useless, as the tide outside the Phoenix fell faster than the pumps could lower the water level inside. The result was that the Phoenix, which hadn’t lifted anyway, was from then on continuously losing buoyancy instead of gaining any, in spite of their furious pumping. So at that point, the lifting attempt, wholly an unofficial trial, had been abandoned. And since it wasn’t their business anyway, and the British were bringing in for the task some vessels with a pumping capacity far outranging theirs, there had been no second attempt. That was how things stood. However, he’d be glad to try again. Whatever I desired of him, he’d do it as I wished. I found that skipper a pleasure to work with. He knew already about all the Navy’s salvage school could teach him. What he still lacked was more actual experience with wrecks—in salvage, as in all else, there is quite a gap between theory and practice. So far as I know, nothing closes that gap like tangling with a lot of real wrecks. We picked out a Phoenix conveniently located for the Diver to lay alongside of, steamed over, and tied up to it. The tide was falling. Most of the Diver’s
crew turned to with booms and winches to swing their salvage pumps over the gunwales and aboard the Phoenix, landing them in the narrow shelf which formed a slight deck roughly halfway up the concrete hull. For speed in getting started the pumps were landed on this shelf, rather than being hoisted over the top and down the holds, for all of which added work it might have taken us another day to rig up. At that time, this shelf was well above the surface of the sea. Other seamen clambered to the top operating platforms, far up the concrete sides, there to open wide all the seaco*cks. Our idea was, of course, to get rid of as much water inside as we could-as the tide fell, while we were rigging up to pump. The Diver’s pumps were all portable, self-contained, gasoline-driven pumps, especially built for salvage. Their special feature, aside from their selfcontained portability, was their self-priming ability—that is, unlike the centrifugals on the Dutch schuits, the peculiar internal design of these pumps enabled them to develop and hold a powerful suction, and that very rapidly. They were a salvage man’s dream—you could take them with you aboard a wreck, lower them down any hold to within convenient suction distance of the water level, start their gasoline engines, and there you were, in business— pumping out the water through short suction lines. Their only drawback was that to insure portability they had to be within the capabilities of the salvage men, as riggers, to handle them over the side of their own vessel and aboard a wreck and then, if need be, lower them away inside her holds. That limited their weight, and consequently their capacity. Probably all the salvage pumps on the Diver, taken together, had not onequarter the capacity of those huge centrifugals on the schuits. But the Diver’s pumps, at least, could be placed where needed, to make sure that they would take a suction and deliver that quarter. The Diver’s men got her pumps all placed on the Phoenix shelves, with their rubber suction hoses lowered through manholes down into the water-filled holds below. Then they closed off the seaco*cks at about low tide, and we started pumping. The pumps, as expected, all took suction immediately, and seawater started furiously to cascade overboard, giving that Phoenix the appearance of a very modernistic fountain. Until the tide should reverse and the incoming sea rise high enough again to flood the shelf on which our pumps stood (unless the Phoenix lifted sooner) we had about six hours in which to work to get her afloat. At the rate at which we were pumping, that Phoenix should come afloat in
about four hours—if only lack of buoyancy was what was holding it down. But very clearly, lack of buoyancy wasn’t the only problem. I sat down with the Diver’s skipper and his first lieutenant to consider why they hadn’t raised their Phoenix the first time, and how to avoid such a failure on this trial. Since the Phoenix had not floated up when they felt that their pumping had given it sufficient buoyancy on their first attempt, the reason obviously was bottom suction. Or to put it in plainer language, she was just stuck in the mud. And that such was the case, was, of course, not extraordinary, considering that the Phoenix had an absolutely flat bottom, ideal for suction, and that furthermore it had been sitting there long enough to give the sea bottom, like an octopus engaging its tentacles, all the time it needed to get a firm suction grip. That ancient saw, “a regular old stick-in-the-mud” respecting someone (of course, always excluding yourself) who can’t be moved, even by reason, expresses the wisdom of the ages on the subject—nothing sticks like something stuck in the mud. And it is an unfortunate fact that with wrecks stuck on the bottom, the direct force necessary to break bottom suction may greatly exceed in tons the buoyancy necessary simply to float the ship up. Many a salvage man, to his utter despair, has learned this truth. Since in the average case, there is trouble enough providing even sufficient buoyancy simply to float a wreck, providing in addition that extra buoyancy required to break bottom suction, should he encounter it, is the salvage man’s nightmare. I had myself found long ago there was no profit in trying to lick bottom suction by brute force, that is, by direct added lift. The only sensible thing to do was to outwit it. The method I used ordinarily was to employ the principle first enunciated some thousands of years ago by Archimedes—that a small force at the long end of a lever (as of a crowbar) would easily move a weight that a vastly greater direct force couldn’t budge. In practice, on wrecks, this consisted usually of using the wreck itself as the lever, by lightening first one end only (either bow or stern) till that end was buoyant enough to tend to lift a bit and gradually, a little at a time due to its leverage, then to break loose the suction all the way along the bottom to the other end; thus presenting me finally with a break, which if attempted all at once by direct lift, I could probably never get. In the case of this Phoenix, the major drawback to that method (always the surest) was that it took rather a long time—you had to allow sufficient time, after lightening the first end, for the water gradually to seep in beneath the
lightened end and then to work its way toward the other end, bit by bit to break the suction and permit the lightened end finally to lift. And then there was the time required after that to pump out and float up the other end. Since in this case we had at most only about six hours till high water would flood over our pumps sitting on the Phoenix shelf, it seemed better on this rush experiment to use a second method. Instead of trying to get force enough to break the suction by the principles of leverage, we could attempt to destroy the suction, or at least, to destroy enough of it to let us lift the Phoenix with what excess buoyancy we might obtain by high tide time. We started immediately on that. The Diver, designed as a salvage ship, had air compressors, big ones, both for supplying air for her divers and for use on a large scale in salvage, should the task require it. We should jet streams of high pressure air in under the bottom of the Phoenix in a number of spots on each side, blowing away the mud there, freely admitting the sea water which (we hoped) would seep both fore and aft and athwartships, further destroying the bottom suction. Could we get enough such spots freely open to the sea beneath her, the suction would vanish and we’d have only buoyancy to struggle with. So soon, alow and aloft, the Diver’s salvage men were furiously attacking that Phoenix. On the top side, with pumps madly churning away, sucking out water from inside the flooded hull compartments. And on the bottom, with improvised lances made of galvanized pipe secured to the ends of air hoses, probing in the mud beneath her, jetting in streams of highly compressed air which came out again from underneath as vast clouds of expanding bubbles laden with mud. It was nip and tuck as the water inside went down and the tide outside, running flood now, began to rise, helping to increase our buoyancy, but reaching up also to our pumps. What would happen first? Would she tear loose and rise before the tide reached our pumps? Or would the sea, flooding the shelf, force us to quit and remove the pumps before the mud let go? We hadn’t much time left to gamble on the answer. To weight the odds a trifle more on our side, even the little handy-billy pumps the Diver carried were all rushed aboard the Phoenix, lowered inside her, and for what good that might do, set to adding their little streams to the majestic discharges of their big sisters on deck. We won. With a shudder in that 6000 tons of concrete that gave those aboard it the impression that a prostrate Titan was rolling over, that Phoenix tore itself
loose from the mud, lurched suddenly upward, and in a moment, with its dripping concrete sides still rolling unsteadily, came fully afloat—a happy sight to all aboard the Diver and even more so to those belonging to Operation Mulberry on nearby Selsey beach. Barton rushed out with his tugs, to take over from the Diver, which meanwhile was temporarily holding the floating Phoenix up against the tidal current. The Diver began to remove her pumps. In a few hours, Barton had resunk the Phoenix, the Diver had reanchored offshore, and all seemed as before around Selsey Bill. I went ashore with Barton.
CHAPTER 10 On the beach, a British bluejacket from NOIC’s office met me with a message. It seemed that Commodore Flanigan, in London, had for some hours been trying to get me on the phone. Would I call him the moment I came ashore? I looked questioningly at Barton. What Commodore Flanigan probably wished to discuss with me was nothing I was desirous of airing in NOIC’s office. Barton didn’t have a phone somewhere in that shack of his, did he? No, he didn’t, but in the American camp housing his Sea-bees, a mile or so inland, there was one. He would drive me to it. By most unusual luck, it was not too long before I was through to London, talking to Flanigan. Admiral Stark, I learned, had already an answer to his recommendation for a change at Selsey Bill. The answer was “No.” The British continued to feel that no change was necessary there. The Royal Engineers, acknowledging their initial trouble with the machinery in the schuits, considered the fault trivial and would soon rectify it. All that was necessary, they reported, was to substitute for the numerous lengths of rubber suction hoses they had first used from the schuits down into the holds of the Phoenixs, some sections of welded steel suction pipes which would eliminate the air leaks which they claimed had destroyed their pump suctions, and then all would be well. They had already ordered those welded steel suction pipes. It would take a week or so yet to provide and deliver them at Selsey—after that, everything would be all right. Flanigan said that Admiral Stark, before accepting that “No” as a final answer, wished to be informed as to what I thought of that as the solution. I informed Flanigan I thought nothing of it. The trouble was basic with the whole schuit set-up, which was as complicated and as unsuited to the pumping job in hand as the most freakish design Rube Goldberg had ever dreamed up— it wasn’t just the rubber suction hoses. In fact, we had just completed raising a Phoenix, the first one ever to be lifted, using rubber suction hoses, and they hadn’t prevented our pumps from doing a fine pumping job. I stuck by my original report—all of it. There must be a change, and right now. The change couldn’t wait for decision for a week or so for the Royal Engineers to learn
that there was more to it than just substituting steel for rubber in the suction hoses. It would be too late then. The task must be shifted to the Navy, at once. Flanigan answered he’d pass that along to Stark, who would pass it along to the British. Meanwhile, as before ordered, I was to continue to wait at the Channel. The conversation closed. Lieutenant Barton drove me back to the beach. My conversation with Flanigan left me much depressed, in spite of our success with the Phoenix. Matters in London did not look promising to me. It should not be too difficult for the Royal Engineers to fight a delaying action till they had a chance to try out those steel suctions in which now they seemed to have so much faith and which, in spite of the unbelievable scarcity of steel in England, they had already put on order. And after that, it would be too late, in spite of the failure I could foresee, for a change to do anybody any good. D-day would be too close then. The thing was working out about the way I feared. It was dismal. Barton dropped me in the high weeds behind his cottage and then continued on to the beach. His day wasn’t yet done, though mine was. I entered the house. Alone there now, I looked about the living room inside that cottage. It was about as dismal as the prospect facing Operation Mulberry. Its only probable relieving feature ever must have been the view out the front windows over the wide beach to the sea beyond. But now those windows were shuttered and the door opening on the beach was not only tightly bolted inside, but also, I knew, barred on the outside to prevent any inadvertent passage from inside that living room to the barbed wire and the possible mines just beyond. My gaze wandered around the dim interior. The shabby, castoff furniture did nothing to relieve the gloom. As a final touch, some stacks of old newspapers and magazines rose practically to table height just beneath the shuttered front windows. I examined them, got a lesson in archeology. Like an explorer digging amongst the earthen mounds covering the ruins of a long vanished civilization overwhelmed by some calamity, it was possible by looking at those stacks of yellowed newspapers to deduce exactly when and why the civilization along Selsey Bill had disappeared. There were layers of yellowing London newspapers for many summers back, the penultimate layer being for the summer of 1938, concluding with editions bearing headline stories in the late September numbers on the Munich Pact, insuring “Peace in Our Time.” Then on top of those, came the final layer of newspapers for the ensuing season at the shore, covering the summer of 1939, ending this time abruptly with the
September 1, 1939, editions screaming out Hitler ’s attack on Poland. Apparently the “Peace in Our Time” insured by Munich, had lasted exactly eleven months. And after that ominous edition of September the first, there were no more layers. Before the shore season of 1940 had arrived Dunkirk had come. And after Dunkirk, the one-time inhabitants of Selsey, as shown by the absence of any layers of 1940 or later newspapers, had become one with the vanished races of history. Along with the Mound Builders and the Cliff Dwellers, they had departed from the stage and only artifacts were left to give any clue to their manner of life and to the reason for their disappearance. A new race, American Seabees, Royal Marines, British soldiers and sailors, now inhabited Selsey beach, in lieu of that long vanished, and perhaps, superior culture. But not wholly vanished, I recalled. There were those two girls next door, relics of that past, who had returned unbelievably, like the coelacanth of paleozoic eras in the seas about Madagascar, to the scene of their former existence. What were they like, I wondered? After all, if I could believe all I had read in post-1914 war novels, the major reason for the existence of wars was to provide for authors with a keen eye toward the best-sellers list, a background of erotic situations in which amorous girls flung themselves into your war-weary arms. Here was a war, next door were two young girls— married, both of them, it so happened—but with their husbands both away, what difference should that make? According to all the novelists since World War I, none at all.
CHAPTER 11 Another day passed. I stayed on at Selsey Bill, waiting further orders. Until afternoon, nothing happened except that Lieutenant Oakes, Barton’s young assistant, came back to Selsey Bill. This created at once a billeting problem, since there were but two makeshift bedrooms and but two beds in the cottage in which we had established squatters’ rights. Naturally, I tendered Oakes his bed again—he was there on duty. I was but a visitor who might just as well have gone back to Portsmouth and that billet at the Queen’s Hotel. But Oakes refused. He would sleep on a couch in the living room—as the much younger of us two, he insisted he could stand it better than I. After a fairly swift survey of that couch, I concluded it was best not to pull rank on this young lieutenant, but to let him have his way—I would not order him back to the bedroom and deprive him of the couch, if that was the way he wanted it. Late afternoon found me still on the beach, still studying the scrambled Mulberries, still wondering whether D-day would find them on their way to France or still stuck firmly in the mud off Selsey Bill—the war ’s worst fiasco. It all depended now on Admiral Stark. How far was he willing to risk his neck to override that “No!” of yesterday? A bluejacket from NOIC’s office found me, interrupted my speculations, handed me a sealed note. I opened it. NOIC, it seemed, had something he wished to discuss with me, highly confidential. Would I be so good as to come to his office where we might consider it in more privacy than was possible on the beach? As this was the first attention I’d received from NOIC since my original arrival at Selsey Bill, it seemed significant. Something might have happened. I accompanied the seaman. If it were at all possible, NOIC seemed now an even more befuddled and upset old man than at my first glimpse of him. He invited me to be seated. Then in much agitation, he confided that he had just received in code a signal from the Admiralty—highly important (but unspecified) personages from London would arrive by car in Selsey Bill about the middle of next morning, for an inspection of the Mulberries. He was to make all arrangements, afloat and
ashore, to facilitate their inspection. It swiftly became obvious from NOIC’s unease as to why he had hastened to ask to see me. Who were these highly important personages? He hadn’t been told; it was a deep secret for security reasons. But he could guess—some cabinet ministers probably, since the comings and goings of lesser lights, especially if military, were shrouded in no such secrecy. Why were they coming? He couldn’t imagine that, either, and for him it made no difference anyway—certainly not to get from him any information on the Mulberries—he had none. But that signal had put him instantly in a quandary—there was that word “afloat”—he hadn’t even a bloody plank to take these V.I.P.’s afloat on, should they desire a close-up view of the Phoenixs. As I well knew, everything in the way of water transportation at Selsey Bill was in the hands of my Lieutenant Barton. Would I be so good then, as to order my Lieutenant Barton to make the necessary provisions afloat? NOIC was sure I would appreciate his embarrassment should he, a captain in the Royal Navy, personally have to approach Barton with such a request. I appreciated his embarrassment, all right—NOIC would almost, I was sure, by now prefer to go overboard clutching an anchor than to ask a favor of that hulking American lieutenant who had so completely usurped his job. I nodded acquiescence—for me it would be simple; I had only so to order Barton. Was there anything else I might do to help my Royal Navy opposite number respecting this visit? NOIC reflected. Since obviously he hadn’t the remotest idea why any V.I.P.’s from London should be interested right now in the Phoenixs, his mind was a blank on what other than transportation might be required of him, or whether in any other direction a little help might be in order. Finally he shook his head. He could think of nothing. I rose to go. Then an idea did strike NOIC. What his motivation was—whether to save himself some trouble should he be asked any questions on the Mulberries, or whether in gratitude at my saving him from the need of a personal appeal to Barton, I never knew. Could he have the pleasure of my company as a fellow captain, in greeting those V.I.P.’s tomorrow, and in their subsequent inspection of the Mulberries? Whatever NOIC’s motives may have been, I accepted that invitation with alacrity. Even if NOIC couldn’t, I could make a shrewd enough guess as to what it all might be about. Back of that unexpected inspection, somewhere must
lurk the figure of Commodore Flanigan. And beyond him must stand that of Admiral Harold Stark refusing to take “No!” for an answer. Matters might be beginning to look up. And it would be worth a lot to the change I saw as imperative, to be right on the spot with those V.I.P.’s should any one of them want to know what was wrong with the idea of letting the Royal Engineers carry through to D-day. I thanked my stars I had decided to keep on doing my waiting at primitive Selsey Bill and not gone back to wait at more ease in Portsmouth. NOIC had a last request to make as I was leaving. These security matters, as I must surely know, were all very sticky—he’d overstepped, perhaps, even in letting me know of this visit one day before. However, to help avoid letting anything leak out which might compromise the safety at Selsey Bill on the morrow of those V.I.P.’s, he was telling no one on his own staff. So, on my part, would I promise mentioning their forthcoming visit to no one, absolutely to no ‘one, not even to Barton who must furnish the boat, until tomorrow? I promised. Stepping out onto the Selsey sands again, I felt much better. So Admiral Stark wasn’t taking any “No!” perfunctorily. However he was doing it, he had already upset British reverence for the infallibility of the Royal Engineers so far as to force some personages of importance into a trip to Selsey Bill, at least ostensibly to take a careful look at the Phoenix situation. And regardless of who those V.I.P.’s might be or what previous fixed conceptions occupied their minds, no one, I felt, could stand the impact of a first actual sight of that enormous mass of Phocnixs sunk off Selsey Bill without instantly getting an impression that the lifting of them from the sea floor was no task to be left to amateurs. Dusk came at last—late now in mid-May in that high latitude. A very weary Lieutenant Barton and his equally weary assistant, Oakes, called a halt in the darkness to the labors of their little flock of Dukws amphibiously busy in the task of provisioning the Phoenixs against the coming hegira across the Channel. Together, the three of us trudged off the sands, keeping carefully in the Dukw tracks, and then from the safe landward side, we made an approach on the rear of our cottage. Just before entering, Barton paused, scanned the darkening skies a moment, and announced, “Air raid tonight. We’d better get some sleep before one A.M.; we won’t get any after.” I looked at Barton skeptically. How could he be so certain of Hermann
Goering’s intentions? Barton gave no reasons; he just knew. So taking his word for it, we wasted no time over our unelaborate supper of warmed-up field rations. Immediately that was over, down came the blackout curtains over all our unshuttered landward windows, off went the lights, and we all turned in—Barton and Oakes, at least, dead tired. Sure enough, as a prophet. Barton rated a 4.0. At a little before one, I woke to the shrilling of a siren, warning of the coming of the bombers. Automatically almost, I rolled out of bed, grabbed a flashlight, slid into a bathrobe, and started for the living room. Oakes, who of course, was there already, had by then turned on the lights; Barton, a little slower in his movements, arrived not much after me, armed, as was I, with a flashlight. Should the electricity fail in the raid, which was always a probability, our flashlights would be invaluable. Nobody said anything. In the dead silence that followed the dying moan of the siren, we waited as usual. At nearby stations completely ringing Selsey Bill, gun crews, we knew, were rushing to the ack-ack batteries and electricians were manning their searchlights. But for us in that flimsy cottage, no shelter at all from blast, there was nothing to do save wait—the most trying of all ordeals. We waited. I’d been through air raids before. All across Africa from Heliopolis on the Nile to Casablanca on the Atlantic, I’d been among the targets present when the bombs came whistling down. I can’t say that to me custom ever staled the quickening of the heartbeat as one waited in silence for that whistling shriek which well might be the last sound one would ever hear. Still, having learned by experience that you’d lived through your first bombing (if you had), you could always feel thereafter that you were just as likely to live through the next one. And having once learned that fact, it took a little, at least, off the agony of the waiting next time for the bombs to fall. So as I waited, I told myself this bombing could be no different from my last one off Algiers. But it was. Hardly had the terrifying crescendo of the first bomb to come hurtling down ended in the thunderous explosion that signified to me that at least I’d lived through to hear that one go off, when the cottage door swung violently open. And before the ringing in my ears from that bursting bomb had subsided enough to let me get set for the whistling of the next one, I found myself with a hysterical girl clad only in her nightgown draped around my neck, two
shrieking babies clutching my legs, and to top off all, a second girl, also only in a nightgown, clinging frenziedly to Barton. The next few minutes were beyond description—the ear-splitting whistling of the falling bombs and their thunderous detonations as they exploded I had lived through before and probably should again, but those shrieks of pure hysteria beating directly in my ears were something I hoped never to be exposed to again, particularly when punctuated by near strangulation from that death grip around my neck each time another bomb detonated. And never anywhere, as the roar of the engines of those bombing planes overhead faded away towards Portsmouth, had I heard an “All Clear” wailing out on the siren with the blessed feeling of relief that came to me after that raid on Selsey Bill had ended and I had succeeded finally, aided by Oakes, in getting that hysterical girl quieted a bit and uncoiled from round my neck and her two babies clear of my legs. General Sherman, I felt, in three succinct words had long ago far more honestly characterized the effect of war on the emotions roused in women than had any of our latter day novelists with their erotically glamorized fiction.
CHAPTER 12 Barton proved also a first-class prophet in the second part of his forecast for the night—we got no sleep to talk of after the raid. It took the combined efforts of all three of us almost an hour after the “All Clear” to get that hysterical mother and her two still more hysterical babies (even with the aid of her less upset younger sister) calmed enough to be willing to leave what slight reassurance the presence of other humans gave her in the face of death. At last, still shivering from fright, they all trooped back alone to their own cottage. Even after they’d finally gone and I’d slid back into bed, for me that night there was no more sleep. I kept on feeling that panic-stricken girl, with the black patch over the eye she’d lost in the London raid plastered practically on my own face, quivering in terror round my neck. She had cause enough for it, there was no doubt—the burned-in memory of the night the heavy timbers of her home had come crashing down on her and her babies wasn’t exactly conducive to stoic acceptance of more falling bombs. But as a neighbor to fighting men, she was exactly what Barton had said of her—a nuisance. As I tossed sleeplessly through the rest of that night, I also heartily wished she’d find some habitation she could go back to in London till at least we and our Mulberry harbors were all gone from Selsey Bill. Morning came finally. Three very tired men, all completely willing to omit comment on the night just gone by, silently got their own breakfasts, and washed and put away the few dishes and utensils used. Then even more silently as they went by the neighboring cottage, they departed for the beach. Not until all of us were again back on the sands did I inform Barton of what might be wanted of him that day. While not overly happy at the prospect of losing the services of one of his Dukws for an indefinite period, nevertheless with his usual bluntness he assured me I could count on his seeing a Dukw was laid on anywhere on the beach I designated, for those V.I.P.’s on next to no further notice to him, once they had arrived on Selsey Bill. And then without any more ceremony, Barton turned to with his trio of Dukws on what was to him of far more importance than the visit of any number of V.I.P.’s—the task of
getting food enough aboard each Phoenix for the fighting men who were to take passage on it to the Far Shore—its coming crew of Seabees and antiaircraft gunners. A few hours went busily by on the beach. Then a new note broke into the symphony of sounds the men on the sands had grown accustomed to—three British M.P.’s astride unusually noisy motorcycles came roaring down the road from Chichester, outriders for a cavalcade of motor cars which, flanked by more M.P.’s on more motorcycles, swiftly turned eastward onto the beach to come to a halt before NOIC’s office. Here, evidently, were our V.I.P.’s arriving. I turned to wave to Barton, down at the water ’s edge, to get a Dukw up on the sands, somewhere near those cars. Then I started myself across the sand toward the door to NOIC’s headquarters for whatever welcoming ceremonies there were to be. I was curious, of course, as to who might be the V.I.P.’s whom Admiral Stark had managed to flush from their desks in London for this (to them) wholly useless visit to Selsey Bill. The two cabinet ministers involved most directly would be the British Secretary for War, under whom as part of the Army came the Royal Engineers; and the First Lord of the Admiralty, who, I trusted, might somehow if only he were forced to be present, be inveigled into agreeing to have the Navy take over. Had Stark managed to get these two ministerial aces included in the hand dealt out for this inspection? Or had he been forced to settle for Under Secretaries only, and their corresponding military and naval subordinates? None of these august personages, either civil or military, now starting to descend from the cars, did I know by sight. I should have to wait the introductions to learn whom we had drawn. And then I saw I needn’t bother. Admiral Stark had managed by some miracle to get us dealt for that inspection a hand, so to speak, with all thirteen spades! There, getting out of the first car was Winston Churchill himself, Britain’s Prime Minister! My heart skipped a beat. If Winston Churchill felt the problem at Selsey Bill was of such importance as to warrant his personal attendance at the examination into it, then this inspection was most unlikely to be only a perfunctory confirmation of the previous decisions. Whoever else now might be in that party made not the slightest difference to me. The one man in Britain to whom the rising of those Phoenixs must mean the most had come to look them over. I got a dazed impression as I was hurriedly presented to the party, that there
were other cabinet ministers there, and certainly many of the higher brass hats of both British Army and Navy (I was the only American present). But, save for one exception, who they all were I never got clearly, nor cared much either, for that matter. The one exception was Brigadier Bruce White, the Royal Engineer in charge of the Phoenixs, whom I was meeting for the first time, and in whom therefore, I had a special interest. For Brigadier Bruce White himself I had great respect, due to the magnificent job he had turned out in producing the Mulberries. My only regret regarding him was that he didn’t seem to realize when he had finally gone in over his head and the time had come at last to let go his hold on his beloved Phoenixs, lest the whole project founder. It turned out to be a most informal inspection. Hardly had all hands descended from their cars, than Winston Churchill, to the last detail matching my impressions of him—cane in hand, cigar in mouth, Homburg on his head —took a swift look about Selsey Bill and then indicated with his cane that we would go—that way. That way, turned out to be to the eastward along the sands in the direction in which on our right rose from the sea the panorama of sunken Phoenixs. And hardly had he pointed out the direction in which he desired to go than the Prime Minister started out going along it. A couple of civilians (other cabinet ministers, I supposed) flanked him, one on each side. The rest of that group of perhaps a dozen, mostly military, fell in close behind them by twos and threes, while NOIC and I brought up the rear, sometimes accompanied by Brigadier Bruce White (who was apparently junior in that array of gold lace) and sometimes not, as the Brigadier moved up to just behind the front row in case he should be wanted for questioning. Ordinarily, to have let the Prime Minister stroll off in the lead over those once-mined Selsey sands would have been something NOIC, in spite of his indecisiveness in other matters, would never have allowed—it would be shaking dice with sudden death for Britain’s least expendable citizen. But by now, in that direction an impromptu road had already been beaten into the sand by endless heavy truck tires; what unremoved mines were there had long since been exploded; those particular sands were safe enough. What else it might be that had NOIC so jittery as he trudged along with me at the tail of the procession, I had no idea. But what kept me fidgeting as I watched Churchill and his entourage staring intently seaward at that stupefying vista of Mulberry Units, was marshalling in brief phrases the points involved pro and con the
continuance of the Royal Engineers in charge of the lifting of those Phoenixs. For inevitably the questions must begin to flow respecting the need for any change at all. The decision on that, Churchill had obviously decided should be left in no lesser hands than his. And Churchill, as I’d heard, was from a long life in Parliamentary debate, a most incisive questioner. The prospect before me was enough to keep anyone fidgety. We plodded along the sands for perhaps a mile in Winston Churchill’s wake, pausing occasionally at some vantage point which gave an unusually good vista of that prodigious sunken city seaward of us, a vast mass of disjointed concrete looking no more movable than the Pyramids at Gizeh. At each pause, Brigadier Bruce White moved up expectantly toward the front row should he be wanted, since very evidently he was the one on the defensive. But so far as I could judge during any one of these pauses, Churchill contented himself by puffing only more vigorously on his cigar; there was never a question. The party turned about. Still led by Churchill, it started back, westward this time along the same sands, moving no faster than before, pausing quite as frequently. As we came nearer again to the halted string of cars, I could see Barton’s huge figure, marked by his sweatshirt, standing near his Dukw, waiting impatiently to fulfill his part in the inspection. I had been a bit puzzled so far on our walk by the lack of any questions at all about the lifting of the Phoenixs. Now it came to me that Churchill must be waiting to see the Phoenixs from close aboard afloat, and perhaps even to board the Dutch schuits anchored beyond to see what the Royal Engineers had provided on them, before beginning his inquisition on the factors involved in Phoenix lifting. We got back at last to where the Dukw waited on the seaward side of the stopped motor cavalcade and its motorcycle convoy. It would be a little crowded in one Dukw for all the officials in that party, but it seemed to me undesirable to separate them. And then besides, it had evidently appeared unnecessary to Barton, even after he’d seen how many there were present, to yank another one of his little squadron of only three Dukws off his task for no more reason than to give a lot of V.I.P.’s a little more elbow room afloat, when one Dukw would certainly take them all aboard with not overmuch crowding. At any rate, there ready, stood one Dukw. But surprisingly, as we came abreast it, Churchill ignored the waiting Dukw completely, and pointing again with his cane, climbed the few steps from the sands into NOIC’s office, to be followed by so many, not all, of his party as could crowd in there behind him. NOIC, as host, wedged his way in also; I
stayed out. If Churchill, holding his discussion inside, wanted me, he could send for me; I wasn’t intruding myself on what was otherwise evidently an allBritish conference. However, there couldn’t have been any conference. In so few minutes as practically to preclude that possibility, out came Churchill again. Could he have entered, I speculated, to see whether, as he once humorously observed in another connection, there was a door adjoining NOIC’s office with his initials on it? After all, it was possible—he was not a young man any more. At any rate, I got ready immediately to get him at least aboard the waiting Dukw. But once again he ignored the Dukw and clambered back instead into the car in which he’d come. And in another few minutes, with all the visiting party similarly re-loaded, headed as before by the three helmeted motorcycle outriders and flanked as previously by more motorcycle-mounted M.P.’s, the cavalcade roared away off the Selsey sands bound again for Chichester and Number 10 Downing Street beyond it. The inspection of the Phoenixs at Selsey Bill was obviously over. So far as I knew, not one question had been asked of anybody on the beach about the matter in dispute. Left there on the sands futilely holding the Dukw, so to speak, Barton looked at me in disgust. So these were the English, eh? They’d caused him to lose at least two precious hours at sea with that Dukw, and then they’d scorned it. What did I wish him to do next? I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t understand it myself, but so far as the Dukw was concerned, the answer was clear. He could now proceed to put it back to work. Which promptly Barton did. As for me, I looked northward at the cloud of dust vanishing up the country road going toward Chichester and began to ponder a question not unlike that one propounded three-quarters of a century before by Stockton in his “The Lady or the Tiger?” In other words, what lay behind Churchill’s swift departure without his ever getting afloat or asking any questions? Change, or —No Change? Did it mean his view from the beach of those sunken Phoenixs was so overpowering in effect on him as to convince him without more discussion that the greatest salvage skill available—in other words, the Navy’s—would be none too much? Or did it mean simply that he had already decided to rely on typical British veneration for the traditions of the Royal Engineers and allow them to carry through, so consequently saw no point in wasting more of his
time at Selsey Bill? Like Stockton’s hapless captive gazing at the two doors before him and trying from his little knowledge of psychology to deduce behind which lay life and love, and behind which lay death, I stared after that cloud of dust and tried to figure how Churchill’s mind might work. What meant the briefness of that visit? I found no answer.
CHAPTER 13 In a state of suspended animation, almost, I waited on the Selsey sands through the rest of that May day for any indication that might come to me from NOIC’s office or via Portsmouth that a decision had been reached. Suppose now that it should be adverse? And that this time, worse than before, it should turn out that it was Churchill himself who was saying, “No!”? Would Stark dare to go beyond that? And even if so, where could he go then? To General Eisenhower, perhaps? And would that do him or anybody any good, considering Churchill’s unique position as one of that pair of equals guiding all Allied invasion decisions? And in this case, with Churchill, the only one of the two actually on the spot, having himself made the decision? Still, over and over again, I could not get away from the thought that the very brevity of Churchill’s inspection gave a certain and definite clue to his decision, if only I, like Joseph faced with Pharaoh’s dream, could correctly interpret it. But which way should that brevity be interpreted? In the late afternoon, the agony was partially ended. In NOIC’s office, I received a phone call from Mulberry headquarters in the Dockyard at Portsmouth. I was to call Commodore Flanigan in London from some phone on which I could talk privately. So a decision must have been reached. I hurried by jeep to the phone in the Seabee camp, from which I could talk in such privacy as resulted there from ail-American surroundings. I put in my call. In due course, which meant after a long wait, I was through to Flanigan. Commodore Flanigan showed himself a person of rare understanding. Yes, a decision had been reached that afternoon and communicated to Admiral Stark —final, this time. Knowing my deep personal involvement, Flanigan regretted to say I should be both sorry and glad to learn it. Glad to learn that Churchill had announced as his decision—To take the task from the Royal Engineers and give it to the Navy. I almost shouted a “Hurrah!” into the telephone at that. So what Winston Churchill’s brevity meant was that he was no hidebound worshipper at the shrine of tradition, no matter how venerable! But I should be sorry to hear, continued Flanigan evenly, that in spite of
Stark’s urgent recommendations to the contrary, Churchill had further decided to turn the job over to the Royal Navy, not to us Americans. Stark had pointed out that every voice which had ever dared question the situation or take a chance in urging the imperative need of a change—Captain Clark’s, mine, Flanigan’s, and his own—had all been American; not one was British. So in fairness to the Americans, now that the need of a change was conceded, they should be permitted to take over. But with regard to that, Churchill had been immovable. Having seen it, he agreed heartily with Stark that it was a Navy, not an Army, job. But this job was in Britain, it had been commenced by British hands, and by British hands it must be finished. Consequently, the Royal Navy must have it. As Britain’s Prime Minister he could not order otherwise and leave the Royal Navy any self-respect. And so, Flanigan added as a matter of fact, the Royal Navy already had the assignment and was moving with extraordinary speed to take over. Some time tomorrow, the Senior Salvage Officer of the Royal Navy, already ordered to the job, would arrive in Selsey Bill to relieve the Royal Engineers in the lifting of the Phoenixs. So with that Flanigan extended his congratulations. I had succeeded in the mission on which I’d been sent to Selsey Bill. On the major point, we had won —the lifting of the Phoenixs, on which success in the invasions vitally rested, was now in hands which could carry it through. On the minor point, as to precisely to whom those hands should belong, we shouldn’t exactly feel that we’d lost either, since this was in Britain and we had to make some concessions to save the feelings of our friends, the British. Still, even on that, knowing my deep interest in the problem, he offered his sympathy that we weren’t to handle the lifting. I took that disappointment silently and with what grace I could; I hadn’t exactly set my heart on handling the lifting of those Phoenixs at Selsey Bill. Still, as between that job at sea and struggling in London over a desk with the planning of the harbor to come later at Quiberon Bay, I shouldn’t have hesitated a second in choosing, had I really been given any choice. With the decisions on those two points conveyed to me, we seemed to have covered ground enough for any ordinary discussion of the problem at issue. So the matter was now settled. I stifled my chagrin at our not getting the lifting assignment, and casually broke in with what I thought was only a perfunctory question, hardly worth bothering to ask over the phone: Would it be all right with the Deputy Chief of Staff, if, it being now late afternoon, I delayed starting
my return from Selsey Bill to Grosvenor Square to resume my work there, until the following morning? If I had stuck a harpoon into Flanigan, I couldn’t more startlingly have changed the suave nuances of his voice (hardly concluded from expounding to me the need for our diplomatic understanding of the morale problems of our sister Navy) into its habitual brusqueness of command. No, it was not all right. I wasn’t to start back next morning, nor that same afternoon, nor at any other time. In fact, I wasn’t to start back at all. And had I waited a moment more before breaking in on him, he would have told me so. It was now Admiral Stark’s order to me to stay on as his representative right on the Channel until after D-day, and to act there as consultant to the Royal Navy salvage forces in the lifting of the Phoenixs. Consultant? That unsavory prospect set me instantly hard back on my heels. Fumbling for a way out of any such as signment, I hastened to recall Flanigan’s attention to that very important task on Quiberon Bay he’d given me; had he forgotten that? I couldn’t possibly handle the complicated planning on Quiberon from my shack on the remote Selsey sands. It seemed that Flanigan had not forgotten Quiberon, but that from there on out, I was to forget Quiberon—permanently. Someone else still at Grosvenor Square now would handle it. Quiberon being thus clarified, was there anything else I still had on my mind? There still was, and I didn’t hesitate to express it, even if it should result in my being booted incontinently out of the European Theater of Operations. I had to say that I felt my new orders were ill-advised. Had I been given command of that salvage job, I should neither have needed nor wanted a senior salvage officer of the Royal Navy tied round my neck in the guise of a consultant. And assuming, as we must, that the Royal Navy was sending an officer at least as competent as I, and perhaps even more so, to direct that salvage job, he would feel about it exactly as I did—he would neither need nor want nor ask my advice and he would resent my presence as a reflection on his competence. It would be much better for all hands, British and American, if I got out of Selsey Bill. And further, whether that was seen in London or not, they were putting me in a most untenable position—I was being given no authority at all to command with respect to the lifting of the Phoenixs, merely to advise, if asked. The result of that would be that while I had no opportunity at all to avert a catastrophe should the Royal Navy itself now bungle, I was nevertheless, even if never asked anything, right in the line of fire (and so also
with me would be Admiral Stark) to catch from both sides of the Atlantic a very generous share of the blame for any ensuing failure. So I didn’t want any part in the further proceedings on the Phoenixs. No more, I was sure, did that new British salvage officer, due at Selsey tomorrow, want me in them. It would be a favor to us both to take me out of Selsey Bill. I was no longer needed there. I paused, practically out of breath from expostulating. I had made out a very logical case. “Anything else?” asked the Deputy Chief of Staff. “No, sir, that covers it,” I responded. In tones that in their absolute authority carried me back more than thirty years to the days when it had ordered me like a wooden soldier about the drill ground at Annapolis, Commodore Flanigan’s voice floated over the wire from London into my ear: “Admiral Stark is not concerned about how either you or your opposite number in the Royal Navy may regard your further stay in Selsey Bill. His orders to you are that you stay on the Channel till after D-day, as consultant to the Royal Navy in the lifting of those Phoenixs. You heard me!” “Aye, aye, sir!” We both hung up. I drove slowly back to the beach, from the seat of the jeep to regard in a completely new light once more that mass of sunken Phoenixs. So now I was to stay awhile on this Godforsaken strip of sand to act as consultant to the lifting of them. What might that mean? Next morning, I began to find out. About the middle of the morning, the new salvage officer sent by the Royal Navy arrived to take over at Selsey Bill. I had to concede the Royal Navy was not taking its new assignment any too casually —it had sent the best it had. Commodore MacKenzie and I shook hands. We’d never I met before, but we weren’t strangers to each other. In salvage, which is as international as the world of music, MacKenzie, in spite of the slightness of his stature, was one of the Titans. Years before, when the crews of the vessels of Kaiser Wilhelm’s High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow after Armistice Day in World War I, had unexpectedly scuttled their battleships there rather than turn them over to British hands, it was MacKenzie who had been called on to lift the biggest of those ponderous hulks, capsized, many of them. MacKenzie had turned in one
of the all-time feats in salvage at Scapa Flow. MacKenzie had put in a lifetime going through the salvage mill. He would need advice from me as a consultant on how to handle the lifting of the Phoenixs about as much as Beethoven might need the services of a consultant in composing another symphony. I scanned MacKenzie with interest. One thing about him, being decidedly out of character for a salvage man, puzzled me. Here he was, a Scotsman of all things, come down to the beach to throw himself immediately into the problems of lifting a lot of fouled-up wrecks. And yet his uniform jacket, far from being a war-worn tunic, such as I had seen adorning the figures of all hands in the Royal Navy from Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, on down, must have been his very best. Glistening on each sleeve was a broad commodore’s stripe that could not have been brighter had it just been cut from a roll of new gold lace at the tailor ’s. MacKenzie observed my glance. His own eyes dropped admiringly also to the braid on his sleeves. In a marked Scottish accent, he commented, “Handsome, isn’t it? And new, too. I’ve had it only since yesterday, when the Admiralty ordered me to this job, and all at the same time promoted me to Commodore to give me rank enough to go with the importance of this task.” I could only gawk in silence at MacKenzie’s new glory. So that explained the newness of his braid—till yesterday, like myself, he’d been only a captain—the highest rank held, so far as I knew, by any salvage officer in the British service. Some London tailor must have sat up all the night turning out that jacket so MacKenzie might make his initial appearance on Selsey Bill in all the radiance of his new and exalted rank as Commodore, commanding His Majesty’s Salvage Forces. Being human, I could hardly repress a sigh. I was still a captain. But there, as result of my battle with Royal Engineers over the Phoenixs, stood MacKenzie, suddenly made Commodore! Had he been told, I wondered, how all that had chanced to come about? Probably he hadn’t the vaguest idea; he gave no indication of it. So with the anomaly explained of a display of brand-new gold braid adorning the jacket of a salvage man about to tackle a job for which the normal garb was the oldest clothes he had, the discussion proceeded. MacKenzie must know that I had orders from American naval headquarters to remain till after D-day as consultant on his task; did he? Yes; the Admiralty had informed him of it.
Very well, I’d be there on the beach and glad to help him in any way—he had but to ask. But he’d have to ask. I had no desire of intruding any unwanted advice on him, nor any even less wanted suggestions on his men (which suggestions would most likely be misinterpreted as orders from me, with much resulting confusion). Meanwhile, I’d appreciate knowing his plans regarding those two Dutch schuits the Royal Engineers had provided at Selsey Bill. What part should they have in his plans? MacKenzie shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t counting on them; none— probably. He was mustering at Selsey Bill every salvage tug, every usable salvage barge or scow on which pumps could be placed, all the salvage pumps, and every salvage master and man, whether naval or commercial, he could lay hands on in every British port. The complete salvage forces of all Britain had already been ordered to converge on Selsey Bill—by that evening, the vanguard would be arriving. In a day or so more, his forces for the job at Selsey Bill should be adequate, regardless of the two Dutch schuits. MacKenzie thanked me for my offer of assistance—he greatly doubted he’d be asking for any, however. He’d have officers and men enough; they were all skilled in the business; and he could trust them to handle what he asked of them. Still, should he need advice, he’d not hesitate to ask. We shook hands again and parted, MacKenzie to take over from the Royal Engineers, I to consider what I might do round about Selsey Bill to make myself useful till D-day other than on the lifting of the Phoenixs. For I well knew that MacKenzie had not the slightest intention ever of asking any advice from anybody regarding the floating of the Phoenixs. And as an actual fact, he never did. Nor did he need it. Left as a sort of fifth wheel for the lifting project at Selsey Bill, I tried to find out from such of the Grosvenor Square staff as oscillated between London and the Channel, what they might know as to what in London had led to any such queer assignment for me. Had it been Stark’s idea, knowing the vital importance of the Mulberries to the invasion, to hold me on the spot to sound an alarm, perhaps, should matters again start to go haywire? Or had perhaps the British themselves suggested it to him, as some sort of sop to salve American feelings at not being assigned the task? But no one could enlighten me. None knew. However, I did hear from one aide his account of how Stark had managed to
get by that reiterated British “No!” of a few days before, to frustrate the delaying action of the Royal Engineers over the matter of substituting steel pipe for rubber suction hoses as a proper solution to their dilemma and to force the visit I’d seen. Stark had gone directly to the King with his demands for a change, something no other American in England, not even our Ambassador, would have been able to do, nor dared even to try. “The King?” I laughed outright. Suppose Stark had; what of it? What power did the King of England have to order anything? Every schoolboy in America knew that in Britain today, the monarch was but an ermine-bedecked figurehead; the Prime Minister was the actual ruler. My informant from Stark’s staff, almost English himself now from his years in London, eyed me tolerantly. “Too bad, old chap, you haven’t been in England longer, or you’d know what every Englishman knows, even if every American schoolboy doesn’t. Tradition is what rules England—this tradition, that tradition, tradition over all. England is ruled more by tradition than by the Prime Minister. And that’s where the monarchy comes in; it is the tradition that holds Britain together. It was Edward the Eighth’s attempt to flout British tradition over who may be Queen that skidded him off his throne, and put his more tradition-minded brother George on it. “Now the more astute a Prime Minister is, the more he bends to tradition and doesn’t risk his neck bucking it. And that’s where English regard for tradition makes the King a powerful figure—the more knowing as a politician the Prime Minister is, the more power it gives the King in advising on policy. And nobody should underrate Churchill as a politician.” “Maybe you’re right,” I conceded reluctantly, “but with so damned much British respect for tradition around, how ever then did an outsider like Stark get by it to the King?” That, it seemed was just a freak. Not another American in London could have wangled it. For Stark was no outsider. It seemed that Admiral Harold Stark and His Majesty, George VI, were to each other, just two old salts—old shipmates. Odd, wasn’t it? It had all stemmed from a time, almost thirty years before, when George wasn’t so important in the British scheme of things. He wasn’t in line for the throne. His older brother, Edward, Prince of Wales, was the assured successor. George, as an unneeded younger brother in the monarchial plan of life, was quite expendable, now that Edward had got by babyhood and gave every
indication of living a long while more. So in World War I, while the Prince of Wales was solicitously being kept out of harm’s way, his younger brother George wasn’t. George, already a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, went to sea in World War I with the British Grand Fleet, to take his chances along with every other Briton there afloat, against the exploding shells from the heavy guns of von Tirpitz’s formidable High Seas Fleet at Jutland, the bloodiest naval battle ever fought. The British, in that fierce slugging match, had lost many of their biggest ships and thousands of officers and men from admirals on down. George’s vessel, the Iron Duke, leading the battleline at Jutland as Jellicoe’s flagship, though the major target for German shells, had survived that battle and so had George. And it had happened also shortly thereafter, when we came in as Britain’s ally, that who should be assigned to the Iron Duke as liaison officer and observer of German battle tactics for the U. S. Navy but young Harold Raynsford Stark, of Admiral Sims’ American staff? Nothing makes close friends like danger shared in common. With another Jutland always a daily possibility to the Grand Fleet cruising in the mists of the North Sea, there was plenty of danger to be shared. Harold Stark, though American, and George, though Duke of York, found additionally that they were exceptionally congenial. So friends and shipmates once in the Iron Duke, they stayed friends and shipmates forever after. Even unto the day when George found himself unexpectedly King of England and in the middle of another vicious war, and Harold Stark, now as Admiral commanding U. S. Naval Forces in Europe, found himself with a war problem vital to the success of the coming invasion and making no progress at all in the proper solving of it. So Stark had cut the Gordian knot, by-passed all chains of command, American and British, civil and military, and regardless of all repercussions and their probable effects on him, had gone directly to his old shipmate, his last remaining hope in avoiding catastrophe, with his problem. George, once a seagoing naval officer himself, saw it as his friend Stark saw it, as vitally important. There was but one man in Britain who could make Churchill do anything, and that man was George. But knowing Churchill apparently, he didn’t choose to go about it that way. George, as King of England, got hold of his Prime Minister. That problem of the Phoenixs at Selsey Bill, his friend, Admiral Stark, felt was being mishandled. And to him, the King, from Stark’s account, such seemed most likely also. Had Churchill
himself personally looked into that very important matter of the Phoenixs? No? Would Churchill, then, go personally to Selsey Bill to look into it? He, George, was deeply concerned over it. He would, of course, rest on his Prime Minister ’s good judgment after Churchill had seen it; so also, it went without saying, would his friend, Admiral Stark. But to ease his monarch’s mind, Churchill must go himself to look; he must take no subordinate’s words for it that all was well. Whatever Churchill may have thought of George’s friend, Admiral Stark, for having maneuvered his King into making that (shall we say?) suggestion to him, nevertheless like the very loyal English subject that he was, he went immediately to Selsey Bill to avoid further distress to his monarch, George VI. And evidently, immediately thereafter, to avoid further distress to himself, he had promptly snatched the task there on the Phoenixs from the Royal Engineers. So, I thought? Was that the way it happened? It seemed that kings might have their uses, after all. A whole army of G.I.’s, though they would never know it, would have cause, come D-day, to thank George VI for their lives.
CHAPTER 14 In my new station as a salvage consultant at Selsey Bill who was quite unlikely ever to be further consulted, I had for a brief time excellent opportunity to concentrate attention on our view from the beach at what lay beyond the horizon, waiting us on the Far Shore. No longer was I distracted from that prospect by complete submersion in the details of how somehow to provide something to overcome or evade what we should meet there. Like most others involved in the planning, I knew what we had with which to hit the enemy. So also did the enemy know all that with the solitary exception of the Mulberries. These, though as unhideable as the Washington Monument, he gave no indication of ever seeing through. (General Jodl, Nazi Chief of Staff for the West, came to the conclusion these concrete structures must be intended by us to be floated across the Channel as replacements for the piers and wharves we should find destroyed in the French ports we hoped to capture. That being Jodl’s opinion, in true Nazi fashion, no one subordinate to Jodl felt called on to do any speculating as to whether Jodl might be wrong.) But what did the enemy have to hit us with when H-hour arrived? That was what was giving our G.I.’s nightmares. Some of it we knew, some we could guess at, much of it lay wholly in the realm of pure speculation. And in that realm of speculation, Joseph Goebbels, conductor of a propaganda orchestra the like of which no war had ever seen before, played on our nerves like a virtuoso to create an aura of mystery and terror cloaking the Far Shore, sufficient to fill with fear the stoutest heart waiting on the Near Shore for D-day and make its owner unfit to fight. On that propaganda field of battle, even if we had had anyone equal to Goebbels, which by far we hadn’t, we and our British friends were at a tremendous disadvantage. We were free peoples with a tradition of freedom; our enemies suffered under no such handicap. Anybody in Britain, soldier or civilian, who had or could get near a radio set (and who amongst the million Americans waiting on the Near Shore for the assault to be launched, couldn’t?) was free to turn on Radio Berlin, Radio Luxembourg, or Radio Calais for their broadcasts to us in English, and get the straight dope on the devilish fate the
Nazis had awaiting us, directly from Dr. Goebbels himself. But those air-waves were not a two-way street, for us to exploit in reverse. In totalitarian Germany and her overrun satellites, Adolf Hitler wasn’t leaving anybody free to listen to us. Round the tuning knob of every radio set in Germany, in Occupied France, in every other occupied country (and that meant practically all Europe) by Nazi edict hung a card containing, in the language of the country, a warning: “Think—Before you Tune.” It was as much as any listener ’s life was worth to tune an Allied station. For any station, if tuned in, must be turned up full volume, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear—and promptly to report to the Gestapo should it be other than Nazi. And prowl cars, fitted with delicate electronic detection gear, roamed the streets to detect any clandestine receivers or anyone suspected of listening on so low a volume or on earphones so as not to be audible outside— except to those damnable electronic detectors. So in that battle of nerves on the air, our ability to hit back at Goebbels was puny in the extreme, compared to what he could do and was doing to us. For every European listener, at the risk of his life tuned in low on us, Goebbels had 10,000 hearers in England tuned in full blast on his maestros. There was that fugitive British Fascist, Lord Haw-Haw—William Joyce— Goebbels’ star. Outside of Winston Churchill, not a person lived in Britain who could match Haw-Haw in effectiveness as a speaker. The man was amazing. Had he stayed in England and gone to Parliament, as certainly he would have, even the Prime Minister would have had trouble standing up to him in debate. Many a time I listened to him on the air from Berlin, discussing for the benefit of his fellow Britons, but occasionally for that of us Americans, whatever wartime situation was hottest in the headlines. He’d base his. excellently developed and persuasively presented argument on 99 44/100% fact—things you knew actually were so. And then with those facts, he’d unostentatiously mix in 56/100 of 1% of poisonous fiction on matters you didn’t know and couldn’t possibly quickly check, and leave you gasping helpless to combat his wholly logical conclusion—always, that you were fighting on the wrong side. Then, aimed more directly at us, was that American traitor, Fred W. Kaltenbach, the boy just like us from back home in Kansas. Kaltenbach’s broadcasts to his old neighbors more recently come over from the United States, were in homely terms (very different from Haw-Haw’s cultured English) opening always with his folksy, “Hello, Yanks!” And from that
brotherly greeting, he proceeded next to assure us we were all just plain suckers—simps for whom his heart ached, falling for the wiles of Wall Street and those “International Jews,” like Barney Baruch, for instance, who had no country, really, but did have our President wrapped about his little finger. And of course, we Americans were just barbarians and uncouth hicks who should be learning from, not fighting against, the super-cultured Nazis amongst whom he had the luck to find himself in Berlin. For instance, our fellow fliers in our forces then under Mark Clark trying to advance on Rome, had deliberately and maliciously bombed and destroyed that irreplaceable monument to medieval culture, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But, Kaltenbach added sarcastically, in our crude American fashion, we’d probably try to make that damage good by putting up in its place a 1200 foot high skyscraper as an improvement. The fact that the Leaning Tower was at that very moment, and is even yet, standing undamaged in all its medieval glory, was nothing to Kaltenbach—he knew that not one of his American listeners could get behind the Nazi lines in Italy to take a look for himself at the Leaning Tower and then to expose his lie. But the program which Goebbels staged as “Invasion Calling” seemed to me potentially the most damaging of all to our fighting morale—it came across completely in English, of course, but it featured no traitors, British or American, in putting over its punch. It depended purely on psychology, and in that field, Dr. Joseph Goebbels showed he was entitled to his doctorate. “Invasion Calling” got all the G.I. listeners, at whom it was deliberately aimed. It opened always with the same song “Lili Marlene,” sung in honeyed tones in English by a girl, who, if her figure by any chance came near matching the seduction in her voice, could easily have put Venus herself out of the business of competing for any male attention. “Lili Marlene,” tops as the perfect blend of German sentimentality and Teutonic militarism, the song the Desert Rats of the British Eighth Army in Libya regarded as the most valuable bit of loot they gathered in from Rommel’s routed Afrika Korps, the song like no other in any language expressing the passionate ache of the soldier long away to crush again his sweetheart in his arms. “Lili Marlene,” sung to soldiers in the field by a girl who must have been a lineal descendant of that voluptuous Rhein Mädchen, depicted always on her rock as clad only in her flowing flaxen hair, Lorelei herself. And quite as successful as Lorelei, with her siren song, in captivating each man into believing she was singing to him alone, of helping lure every G.I. within range of her voice to his destruction.
And with the range given to her voice by Goebbels’ powerful radio, that ran the number up to near a million. That girl with her “Lili Marlene” roped in the G.I. listeners, poised far away in their camps and barracks on the Near Shore waiting the signal to embark for the jump off. What 100% on the Hooper Rating is, I don’t know, but if Goebbels had ever asked the Hooper outfit for their rating on his Lorelei in the weeks before D-day, that’s the answer he would have received—100%—she had them all gathered around the barrack’s radios, listening raptly in on her “Lili Marlene.” And then, having finished her stint of luring in the customers, “Lili Marlene” dissolved into thin air, leaving her listeners with their tongues hanging out, ready bait for Goebbels as he proceeded next to put on his commercials. Uproarious laughter began to spout from the loud-speaker in front of you. Something was so excruciatingly funny, the Nazis roundabout that microphone in Berlin just couldn’t control themselves—they must be rolling on the floor. What could the joke be, you wondered? Why—“INVASION!” sneered out one Nazi; “INVASION!” sarcastically cackled back another. And then all hands practically died laughing again—presumably nothing so silly had ever before been heard along Unter den Linden as that those fool Americans listening on the Near Shore were actually considering throwing themselves against Hitler ’s Atlantic Wall in an invasion! When, presumably, the incredulous Nazis had laughed so much over that one that they’d finally choked, and the laughter at last had died away, came another song. Nothing erotic this time, nothing to give you the idea the sponsors were again about to float you off in the loving arms of Aphrodite—this one was gruesome. In mingled male and female voices, it painted a picture, purposefully vague and mysterious, of the frightful weapons waiting to slaughter you on the Far Shore, and urged you to delay no longer in coming over to meet your fate—the Nazis on the Far Shore, and more especially the lovely girls now singing to you, a little impatient already at your delay, were waiting eagerly to welcome you there with open arms—holding incidentally in them a beautiful White Cross with your name on it, all ready to drive into the soft earth over your freshly dug grave! Then followed the grisly suggestion you write home and prepare your folks for your coming finish. And the program signed off always with the same Nazi punch line, uttered in faultless and precise English with such a striking rise in interrogatory
inflection on the final syllable as almost to lift you into the air with it as, still ringing in your ears, it left you wondering: “Do you realize all your sacrifices are at the direction of Jewish power politics in Washington and Moscow?” Moscow? I hadn’t realized before that the Jews controlled Moscow. I had thought that Leon Trotsky, the only Jew ever with any power of his own amongst the Bolsheviks, had first been out-maneuvered, then driven out of Moscow, and finally murdered by his more ruthless comrade, Joe Stalin. And at that moment, from everything I saw, Stalin, no Jew himself, was giving every evidence of being pretty well in solitary control of things in Moscow, in spite of all Goebbels’ pronouncements to the contrary. And as for Washington, if Joseph Goebbels knew so little of American politics as really to believe that anybody controlled Franklin Roosevelt, then he’d believe anything. But whether he really believed that or not, he judged his American listeners were stupid enough to believe it, if only he told them so often enough. Which religiously he did every night while, a little more wrought up after each broadcast over what faced us, we awaited D-day. What lay behind all this was the Nazi fear that our talked-of invasion was only a hoax—that actually we never meant to invade. Hitler had no fears about his Atlantic Wall being able to hold us, while Rommel shot us to pieces and his Panzers stood poised to crush any spearhead which might break through. His fear was that we might never give him the chance thus to slaughter us— consequently the taunts and gibes at us for our delays. For now in 1944, the war situation on the Eastern Front was such that Hitler could no longer hope for victory there—the best he could expect for his retreating armies on the Russian front was a stabilized line somewhere in Poland and Czechoslovakia, perhaps, which he could hold while he negotiated a stalemated peace leaving him in possession of all Western Europe and a substantial part of Eastern Europe. But he could never achieve that stalemated peace so long as Britain and America cherished the delusion that they could successfully invade on the Western Front. Consequently, the sooner they had that absurd idea knocked out of their heads, the sooner he could force the stalemate. Consequently, odd as it might seem, Hitler welcomed the invasion, looked forward to it hopefully as providing a swift solution to his mounting troubles on the Eastern Front. And to that end, Dr. Goebbels labored manfully—first, to insure invasion; second, to insure its failure.
CHAPTER 15 What awaited us, come D-day, when the ramps of our landing craft went down and the G.I.’s in our first wave plunged into the surf to wade ashore in Normandy, had already received the most intensive investigation possible from our invasion planners. Except for such new and secret weapons as Hitler might actually have and still be holding under wraps to greet us with on our arrival (weapons clothed always in mystery but nevertheless in terrifying hints blared nightly into our ears) everything else awaiting us was only too obviously in view from myriad reconnaissance photos taken from the air at all stages of the tide on the beach that we called Omaha. And what was already in view there, even though nothing more at all should ever be unwrapped, was not helpful to the morale of any man who might fancy himself having to breast his way shoreward on the Omaha Beach, whether in the first wave or in the tenth. Rommel on the Far Shore was showing himself no adversary to be despised. When the area along the Normandy shore enclosing our proposed Omaha Beach had initially been chosen in 1943 (long before the coming of Rommel to Normandy) by Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan and his planners as not only the most feasible, but practically the only, point of assault, those wide Normandy beaches had been only wide strips of open sands, still just as Nature had made them, complicated only by the tremendous Channel tides which alternately covered and exposed them. You could disregard those sands in attack—it was then only what was behind them that caused the planners worry. For, enfilading the beaches from the rocky and steep bluffs behind them were the camouflaged concrete gun emplacements and the machine-gun nests of the Atlantic Wall, formidable enough in themselves to give any general cause for deep thought before daring to fling his attackers against them alone. But those dismaying fortifications were not alone. For well the planners knew that behind that Atlantic Wall, poised for counterattack, waited Hitler ’s fanatic Panzer divisions, those armored irresistibles that already once had knifed through both Maginot Line and the combined armies of France and Britain as if they had all been but cardboard dummies. That was where our Mulberry harbors were to come into the picture; they were necessary to give
our men the overwhelming edge in tanks and guns to counter those Panzers, once we were through the Atlantic Wall. That was how it was in 1943, and even into early 1944, during our initial build-up. For up until then, von Rundstedt, Commander in the west of all Nazi forces, like any other veteran Field Marshal whom Hitler might have placed in that command, had been content to put his main reliance in smothering promptly any invasion, upon counterattack with his tried and trusted mobile Panzers, should the Atlantic Wall even momentarily be breached and some invaders get inland. But Rommel, younger and more ferocious, once he had been assigned by Hitler in February of 1944 as von Rundstedt’s new field commander for the Nazi mobile forces and for all those fortifications in the Normandy sector, had quite different ideas. Rommel had decided on the basis of his experiences in fighting in the Libyan Desert, that the open beaches before the Atlantic Wall, not the bocage country behind it, were the best place to end all nonsense about invasion. So on those beaches he would pin his enemies down while from the high bluffs above he very thoroughly shot them to pieces. To effectuate that design, Rommel began, immediately on taking over, to improve on nature, so far as the previous innocuous aspect of those open sands was concerned. On the wide stretches of beach between the high and the low tide marks, set so as just to be covered with water and therefore invisible to attackers racing in at high tide, obstacles began to sprout profusely from the tidal sands—all sorts of obstacles. Nearest inshore on the sands came the hedgehogs, wicked-looking welded assemblages of pointed steel bars—French anti-tank obstacles originally, once intended to ruin the tractor treads of Nazi tanks on the roads now in Rommel’s rear leading southward from the French borders to Paris. From the roads in his rear Rommel had no longer any fear of attack. So up from the shoulders of those roads where they had been parked since the French surrender in 1940 and down on the Normandy sands promptly went every one of the anti-tank obstacles in northern France. Planted now in the Channel sands in staggered rows, decorated on top with mines, and all joined with tangled barbed wire to hang up any infantrymen from sunken landing craft trying to wade ashore in between them, these hedgehogs, set so as all to be just covered and thus unseen at high tide, were sure death to any landing craft which might have got that far and were still trying to get their troops in over them and up to the high-water mark on the beach beyond.
Those deadly hedgehogs took care of the shallow areas closest in to the high-water mark—they stood only a few feet high—their job was to finish off a landing craft, should it by any freak ever get by the outer obstacles. Then, further out, as the beach gradually sloped down and the water below the high tide level became somewhat deeper, heavy logs slanted to seaward were planted irregularly and generously all over the sands, with the sharpened tops ending a foot or so below high tide level, so that they also should be invisible. Each log was stout enough of itself to punch a hole through or rip a gash in the bottom of any landing craft unfortunate enough to ride over it, but that alone wasn’t relied on—each stake was finished off on top, as frosting on the cake, with a contact mine. If the mine didn’t finish off your craft, the log itself, as a lance or can opener, certainly would. And then in between those logs, to take care of you after you’d gone overboard, again was draped more barbed wire to tangle you up as you floundered in the water while the machine guns on the bluffs above worked you over till you’d quit floundering. Still farther out, where the water at high tide began to get to a really respectable depth, came the worst of all, the “Belgian Gates,” the Element “C,” standing about ten feet up from the sands. Like all the other obstacles, these were set also so as to be just covered and out of sight at high water, which was the only time the Nazis could envision any assault as being staged. These “Belgian Gates” were very substantial steel barricades, solidly latticed backward to withstand heavy impact, with three stout steel beams protruding vertically at their tops, nicely set to impale and slice open the bottoms of all landing craft, wood or steel, coming their way and trying to ride over them. And as usual with all the other obstacles, with a mine lashed to the top of each vertical beam. And for good measure, with more barbed wire draped in festoons between them to help drown in the deep water there any such poor G.I.’s as might still be living after their craft had been blown apart or ripped open to sink from beneath them. Those were the obstacles—the fiendish devices with which Rommel was decorating the beaches. The devil himself couldn’t have done better in making that approach to the Atlantic Wall impassable to boats when the tide was in and those obstacles were all lost to view just below the surface. Our air photographs, taken at low tide, duly showed them all, scanty in March, plentiful in April, still more profuse as May drew along. And immediately what those new photographs of the Normandy beaches unmistakably showed kicked our invasion schedule and our planning right in
the stomach. For up to the day Rommel intruded his hobnailed boot into the pattern of our designs, our intended D-day (still waiting to be set definitely till our build-up was more complete) had always been that day on which high water on the beaches should come an hour after dawn—our best combination for assault, as not only we but the Germans also perfectly well knew. That would allow us to make our approach from the sea covered by darkness. Then as the dawn broke, it would permit us to land our first wave in light enough to see what we were attacking on a strange shore, high up on the beaches, subjected to fire for the least time while we advanced on our objectives on the bluffs above. And thereafter, it would give us the longest amount of daylight possible in which to bring in supporting waves to help carry through and overwhelm those objectives. In every book on tactics, the proper time for a surprise assault is set down as dawn. When additionally the surprise assault is to be amphibious then it must take place only on such a day as high tide, also necessary, comes at dawn. In our planning, we’d carefully followed the book—that was just common sense, as much to us as to the Germans, who never believed our invasion would take place on any day which didn’t meet those two conditions. Following the tides, which follow the moon, such periods came just once about every two weeks— roughly a day later every lunar month. One such day was coming very early in May—tentatively, our original D-day. Another such was due about June 1. Now with his obstacles, Rommel had thoroughly muddled our plans. Attacking at high tide as we had intended, we’d never get troops enough in over those obstacles even to put up a decent battle on the beaches beyond. It would be a fiasco worse even than Dieppe. There, though with no obstacles on the beaches to hash up the British landings, it had taken the Nazis, with only such forces and beach defenses as they had already on the spot, not more than nine hours to wash up the invaders and force those few not already dead or captured to flee back to Britain. So some way had to be found to knock out or to circumvent that forest of submerged obstacles, or our assault just wasn’t on. Hastily an exact replica of those obstacle-laden Normandy beaches, copied from our air photographs, was set up in the United States in a secluded spot on one of our wide Florida sands, with “Belgian Gates,” mined logs, hedgehogs and all, including the barbed wire. And in our thoroughgoing American way, we set out with that replica to find some scheme to provide safe channels in the water over or through those obstacles for our landing craft. The obstacles were bombed from the air at high tide, at low tide, and at tides
in between. No go. Destroyers from offshore fired torpedoes at them, trying with live warheads to blast a clear channel through. It was a fizzle. As a last resort, an LST, which probably would be sunk by Nazi gunfire before ever it could get close enough inshore actually to duplicate the experiment on the Omaha Beach, was nevertheless for the Florida trial paved with an extraordinarily thick layer of concrete inside its flat bows to make it immune to the mines, and then sent in over our trial course to steam-roller flat the obstacles, leaving us, it was hoped, a safe path astern for troop-laden landing craft. It failed. Everything anyone could think up failed. Those “Belgian Gates,” mainly, in the deeper water were too damned obstreperous. There was just no way to get our landing craft safely over or through those obstacles so we could make our assault at high tide—it just wasn’t possible. A little sadly, that word was passed back to our planners round about Grosvenor Square; something in their planning was going to have to be changed radically. By this time, our invasion planners had developed a high degree of flexibility in their thinking. If it wasn’t possible to make a proper assault as called for by the book, then an improper assault would have to be made. Regardless of how sacred was the idea of attacking only from closest in on a high tide, the idea was going to have to be jettisoned—high tide, by the grace of Erwin Rommel and his obstacles, was out for us. For at high tide, when we couldn’t see those obstacles, if we came roaring in with our troop-laden assault craft, we could neither clear them nor dodge them—they would ruin us, exactly as Rommel intended. But if instead, we came in a little before a rising half tide, things would be different. Although now a very unwelcome eighth of a mile further seaward when our boats grounded at the half tide waterline, there before us, more or less in the dry on the uneven sands, would be all of Rommel’s obstacles, fully exposed to our view. So if we picked as D-day a day on which half tide flood came a little after dawn, we could ground our boats just to seaward of those obstacles, drop our ramps, and unload. Then, while the men of our first wave worked their way in over the last eighth of a mile of exposed sand through obstacles they could now see and dodge, demolition teams of engineers, armed with explosives and wire cutters, could blast apart all the “Belgian Gates,” cut loose the barbed wires, explode the enemy mines, and mark clear paths with poles and buoys for all our landing craft to follow. After that, as the rising tide flooded swiftly in, the waiting boats could run right up through the blasted out
stakes and hedgehogs to the high-water mark and unload the following waves of troops close up to their objectives. It would all, of course, have to be done under enemy fire. But shortly before H-hour, a preliminary terrific heavy air bombing was scheduled to be laid on to blast to bits all the gun emplacements on the bluffs overlooking the beach. Then just before H-hour, the naval fire from the fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers lying offshore would take care of what Nazi guns might still be left. Our first wave and our demolition teams would go in at H-hour against a badly shattered and wholly demoralized defense. So D-day was moved in the planning from that day on which high tide came at dawn to that day on which at dawn the rising tide had still four hours to go before reaching full flood—roughly four days later in the month finally chosen for attack. But setting our attack date back four days wasn’t all Rommel and his obstacles had done to us. The need to deal with those obstacles called immediately for the provision of what might well be a near-suicide unit in the assault force. Demolition teams, both engineer and naval, began feverishly to be trained for what obviously was going to be the most deadly task on the Omaha Beach on D-day—to stand there on the wet sands in the early dawn at H-hour, practically sitting ducks for every Nazi gunner still in action, and make no attempt to take cover while blasting and slashing clear the paths through those mine-draped obstacles for our troop-laden landing craft waiting close by in the surf to seaward. And in spite of Nazi fire, to be damned quick about it, too. For the incoming Channel tide would be rising rapidly, four feet an hour, coming in fast behind them. Either the men in the demolition teams kept blasting beachward at a fast clip despite enemy fire from the bluffs above, or they’d be caught in the still undemolished barbed wire before them, swiftly to be drowned there in the surging currents of the tide coming in behind them. For that incoming sea would finally stand some sixteen feet higher over the sands they were working on than when they’d started their blasting a little before half tide—plenty deep enough to drown anybody if he didn’t keep moving shoreward ahead of it. That then, was the problem facing the demolition teams, composed mainly of the men of the 6th Special Engineer Brigade, and of some naval demolition groups assigned to work with them. The top command of this amphibious force took a good look at the operation as training for it began, and reported, with much understatement, it might be “expensive.” And on May 4, as D-day
began to loom up close aboard, General Eisenhower himself was writing to our Army’s Chief of Staff, General Marshall in Washington, to list as very first among the “worst problems of these days,” the problem of how to remove those underwater obstacles that Rommel had planted in his path to the beachheads. It began to look to all involved that unless something drastic was done to silence the guns commanding the beachhead, the removal of those obstacles would be carried through at the expense of most of the blood of the men of the demolition teams.
CHAPTER 16 The sands chosen as scene for the assault on what came to be known as the Omaha Beach, the major American point of attack on D-day, were crescentshaped. They were about 7000 yards long, rather thick in the middle, thinning down to sharp points at both ends, where the beach faded away into the rocky bases of the cliffs protruding there to the water ’s edge, enclosing and terminating the crescent. Just above the high-water mark, the fine beach sand changed into a thick bank of coarse shingle, about fifteen yards wide, thrown up there by the neverending surf. This rocky shingle, of heavy pebbles running up to three inches in size, was banked up along the westerly third of the beach against a sloping seawall built partly of masonry and partly of wood, from four to twelve feet high, and about a mile long. Back of this seawall for the length of that same mile ran a paved promenade road paralleling the beach. At its easterly point, both pavement and seawall ended together. The beach road itself, however, continued farther east, still paralleling the sea, for some two miles more, but now only as an unimproved track on the hard-beaten sand, no longer paved. Along this easterly two mile stretch, the same coarse shingle now directly lay against a dune line buttressing the seaward side of the road, forming a natural seawall there. This, in a crude way, gave to the unpaved road behind it the same protection from the pounding seas as was provided for the paved promenade road toward the west, first by the sloping wooden seawall there and then by the sloping masonry wall beyond. It was not possible for a vehicle to get from the beach itself up that shingle bank onto the road behind it—the steep slope of the bank and the poor traction in the shingle between them barred such passage. Further inshore, on the landward side of the beach road was a second sandy flat, not very wide at its extremities, but reaching a depth of perhaps two hundred yards at its midpoint, with the tiny village of les Moulins set on this inner strip, not much above sea level. Some miles to the eastward of the Omaha Beach, the British under Montgomery directly, were to land and attack toward Caen. About an equal number of miles to the westward of the Omaha Beach, a second American
army under our Major General Lawton Collins, in smaller force than at Omaha, was to land and attack on the north and south stretch of sand at the southerly base of the Cherbourg Peninsula that we called the Utah Beach. This spot was substantially closer to our first objective, Cherbourg, than was the Omaha Beach. In both these assaults, to the east and to the west of Omaha, beyond the flat beaches on which the landings were to be made, lay only further flat terrain going inland—nothing in a topographical way to give to the defenders any great natural advantage in opposing the landings. But on the Omaha Beach, this was decidedly not so. Back of the beach flat there and behind les Moulins, lay the feature which made the Omaha Beach a joy to the Nazis to defend, a splitting headache to us as attackers. Fronting the whole of the Omaha Beach from end to end, and close up to the sands beyond the beach road, rose a continuous line of bluffs and cliffs, ranging in height from 100 to 170 feet above sea level, and in declivity from very steep slopes to sheer cliffs. Particularly at the western end, where the sand faded out and the cliffs rose abruptly from the sea, did those precipices dominate the whole crescent of the beach. Anyone who looks across the Hudson River from Manhattan toward the New Jersey shore in the vicinity of the George Washington Bridge, will see practically what faced us overhanging the Omaha Beach—for all the differences there were, we might as well have had the Palisades themselves towering over most of our landing beach. No planner in his senses would ever have picked a beach so completely at the mercy of both raking and direct fire from the line of cliffs fringing it, had there been any other beach whatever available to him in the vicinity with sufficient frontage to act thereafter as the temporary harbor site we so desperately needed to back up our assault. But there was none such. So we had to settle for those forbidding cliffs and bluffs, along with the beach we needed, if we were to invade at all. The beach itself suited us fine as an ideal site for our artificial harbor; no doubt the cliffs looming up above it suited Rommel quite as well as made-to-order sites for his guns. Gettysburg was won by the North and lost to the South solely because of Union guns on the ridges dominating that bloody battlefield. At Omaha Beach, Rommel began by utilizing to the hilt every advantage nature had bestowed on him in gun positions. Atop the far western end of the sheer cliffs, at Pointe du Hoe, where there was no beach, he had emplaced a heavy coastal defense battery of six 155 millimeter howitzers, partially casemated. These were the heaviest artillery
pieces anywhere between the naval batteries defending Cherbourg and those set to defend Le Havre; they were sited for use against ships at sea, not against infantry. With their range of 25,000 yards, from Pointe du Hoe as a center their fire covered an arc of the sea to over twelve miles out, controlling the entire area into which must come every vessel of the invading American armada, carrying all the troops for both Omaha and Utah Beaches. The plunging fire from that battery of powerful howitzers at Pointe du Hoe could destroy any ship in the invading fleet—even the armored decks of our bombarding battleships would not be proof aganist the hail of 155 mm. shells coming down on them from the sky at such steep angles. That single battery of six 155’s was capable of completely disorganizing and disrupting the entire invasion fleet before ever it had the chance to land its men—unless it were first put out of action. A little further to the eastward of Pointe du Hoe, coming just where the sand beach itself commenced, lay Pointe de la Percée, a very prominent cliff. At this point began the more local defenses of the beach itself. Built into the face of that cliff near its top were casemated 88’s, the famous all-purpose gun Rommel had first unveiled in the Libyan Desert, with which he had there shot to pieces practically all the Eighth Army’s armored divisions. Set now into that cliff, with their long muzzles cunningly masked from view from seaward by thick concrete walls running diagonally outward from the casemates, these 88’s were the most deadly of the beach defenses. From their strategic placement high up at the western edge of the sands, they dominated the beachhead completely. They could cover it with lateral artillery fire from end to end, while themselves immune to observation from the sea and consequently to any counter-battery fire from warships offshore. Somewhat to the eastward of Pointe de la Percée came the first of four narrow natural gaps in the cliffs, cutting gashes from the inland plateau down to the beach sands. Up through this first gap, from the promenade road on the beach to the village of Vierville-sur-Mer, a quarter of a mile inland, ran. the solitary paved road leading off the sands to the main network of highways serving the interior. This gap, the major break in the cliffs facing us, was denominated the Vierville Draw. About a mile still further east at the other end of the paved promenade road, lay the village of les Moulins, nestling on the sands at the foot of the cliffs there. A second gap in the cliffs occurred just behind les Moulins, which we called les Moulins Draw. And three-quarters of a mile eastward of les Moulins
came the third gap, labelled as the St. Laurent Draw, with the fourth and last gap opening up another three-quarters of a mile along. This last one was designated as the Colleville Draw. Through each of these last three gaps, unpaved roads led inland also. The two more westerly roads, from les Moulins Draw and St. Laurent Draw, though starting at points three-quarters of a mile apart on the beach, once they were up on the plateau both converged on the village of St. Laurent, about a mile in. The fourth and more easterly road, from the Colleville Draw, as its name indicated went directly to the village of Colleville, also about a mile in from the shore. So leading off the sands at Omaha, there were four gashes through the cliffs, each with its own road leading up and inland off the beach. Those four roads were vital to us in getting our tanks and heavy guns up off the narrow beachhead and deployed inland, there to get set to take the initial shock of counterattack by Rommel’s Panzers. Getting possession of these four roads and opening them to traffic off the beach was our first and major D-day objective. But Rommel was himself just as interested in these gaps as we, except that his interest lay in seeing that we never got near those four roads through the cliffs, let alone up them and inland. Consequently he clustered his major defensive gun positions about those four gaps, with the Vierville Draw, the only one with a paved road going up through it, and the les Moulins Draw at about the center of the beach, getting the greater attention. A dozen Nazi strongpoints were strung out along the crests of the cliffs and bluffs behind the beach. Eight concreted gun casemates, containing 88’s and 75’s, flanked each of the gaps to deny to us any passage through them. Thirtyfive pillboxes with lighter guns stiffened up a line of firing trehches and machine gun nests, all sited to cover with plunging fire both the roads up from the beach and the beach sands themselves. Eighteen anti-tank guns, ranging in caliber from 37 to 75 mms., were distributed among these positions to help the heavier casemated guns in taking care of any armor we might bring ashore. Not on the heights but down on the beach level itself, the village of les Moulins after first having its inhabitants totally evacuated and then being partly demolished by the Nazis to give them unobstructed arcs of fire, had been converted into a self-contained fortress area on the sands. It was a forbidding maze of trenches, machine gun nests and pillboxes, made humanly unapproachable from the sea by tangles of barbed wire, mine fields in the
sands, and echeloned anti-tank ditches fifteen feet wide and twelve feet deep which blocked off every approach to the road there leading off the beach and going up through les Moulins Draw. Coming about in the center of the beach area, the defenses at les Moulins, on the beach and on the heights above it taken together, had probably more deadly fire power concentrated there than at any other spot on the beachhead. Blocking off approach to the three other roads up the cliffs, anti-tank ditches similar to those at les Moulins cut deep scars in the sands. To finish off the defenses of the beach as a whole, double coils of concertina barbed wire were strung along its entire length, placed close up against the landward side of the beach roads. Anyone attempting to dash across the road would be fully exposed to fire during his crossing and would end on the far side, not only still fully exposed but also snarled up in the snaky coils of this wire, there, now close under the machine guns hidden on the nearby ridges, immediately to be cut to ribbons by almost point-blank fire from above. However, should anyone somehow get through the wire while the attention of the machine gunners was momentarily engaged elsewhere, he would nevertheless be taken care of. The sands between the road and the foot of the bluffs, and even such of the bluff slopes as seemed climbable were sowed with land mines—all kinds of mines—mustard pots, butterflies, Tellers, trip mines and rock fougasses, these last being blocks of TNT covered with rock, to be set off by trip wires in the underbrush. The Nazis, and Rommel in particular, were adept in making murderous minefields of the most innocent looking areas. Rommel must have surveyed the hornet’s nest he had built up dominating the approaches to and the heights over the Omaha Beach with complete satisfaction. Skillfully cooperating with nature, he had turned out the perfect defensive position. Back at SHAEF in London, where now sat the concentrated command for the invasion, practically all this was known either from reconnaissance photographs or from information dribbled surreptitiously across the Channel by members of the French Resistance in Normandy. Soberly, all of it was carefully taken into account in laying out the assault. First, there was that ominous battery of 155 mm. howitzers at Pointe du Hoe. Unless that were swiftly washed out, the invasion fleet would be sunk before it managed to get its troops unloaded. That battery might be knocked out by heavy air bombing in the weeks before D-day, but any such concentrated air
attack on Pointe du Hoe would be a dead giveaway of just where we intended to invade; that was not to be thought of. So scaling the precipices on which stood that battery in a surprise attack and knocking out those six howitzers right at Hhour seemed the only alternative. That was obviously a Commando job. It was turned over to Lieut. Colonel James Rudder (who happened to come from Texas) and some 250 of his men (who came from all over), comprising three companies of Rangers (no relation whatever to Texas Rangers), the American counterparts of those specially trained tough bruisers which the British called Commandos. Colonel Rudder was given the cliffs near Swanage on the Isle of Wight to practice on and a completely free hand in figuring out how to carry through from the sea a scaling operation on precipices that might well have discouraged a troop of monkeys. Then there were those underwater obstacles. To take care of them, D-day was changed to present them to us all exposed at H-hour, and our demolition groups now were busily engaged in full dress rehearsals on British sands in destroying replicas. Still left was the most glaring question of all, and to soldiers the most important—how to get our men in on the beaches and then off the beaches and inland without having all of them slaughtered by that mass of firepower Rommel had waiting them on the cliffs. This, a matter literally of life or death to every man in the assaulting forces, naturally enough got the most attention. No slips here were permissible, or irretrievable disaster, exactly as promised us by Dr. Goebbels, would overwhelm the invasion. Air power mainly was to take care of this. We had complete control of the air—Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe had long since been knocked out of the skies over Western Europe—we were free in the air over Normandy to do as we pleased. What pleased Eisenhower and his staff in this instance was to use this unopposed air power to blot out completely in a holocaust of heavy bombs all the gun positions, casemated or not, and all the elaborate defenses on the cliffs and on the sands on the preparation of which Rommel had bestowed such loving care. But this air bombardment, any more than one on Pointe du Hoe, could not be staged before D-day without disclosing our intended point of attack. To take care of this item, then, our Eighth Air Force was to fly over Omaha Beach just after dawn on D-day with an air armada of 330 B-24’s, our heaviest bombers. For this, purposely a daylight attack to obliterate the enemy just before our troops landed, the bombers were to smack the defenders from H-30
minutes to H-5 minutes, with a drop of 650 tons of bombs. These were all to be 100 pound fragmentation bombs with instantaneous fuses, to avoid undue cratering of the beach itself. After that deluge of 13,000 bombs had landed on Rommel’s defenses overlooking Omaha, our airmen felt there wouldn’t be any defenses there worth talking about any more. As some airmen put it, all the infantry would have to do after that would be to wade ashore, their major problem thereafter being not to fall into any waterfilled bomb craters in the sands and drown there. However, just in case the bombing pattern itself should have holes in it and some Nazi gun positions thereby escape their share of bombs and remain still in action after that blanketing of the area from the air, the Navy was briefed to take a hand. Commencing as the dawn broke and somewhat before the air bombardment opened, and lasting until almost the very last minute before the first line of landing craft dropped their ramps, the battleships Texas and Arkansas from 18,000 yards out, were to lay down 600 rounds of 14-inch and 12-inch shells on the crests of the cliffs. Simultaneously, three cruisers from somewhat closer in were to lay 950 rounds of 6-inch and 8-inch shells on the same defenses, and eight destroyers, from only 1800 yards off the beach, practically point-blank range for their guns, were to plaster it with 2000 rounds more of 5-inch shells. All this naval firing would in general be aimed simply at the probable locations of the Nazi batteries as shown on the maps, clustered about the four draws going up from the beach, with the hope that some of the shells would hit a vital spot, and with the definite intention of keeping all the German guns silent under that massive barrage of naval shells during the fleet approach and the run-in of the first wave of landing craft. It was assumed that all German guns still left in action would be anxious to keep that fact undisclosed (and thereby not subject themselves to the chance even of specially aimed counterbattery fire from the sea) until the landing forces were practically at the water ’s edge. From that moment on, random fire on the cliffs was no longer tolerable. With no local observers to call the shots for the ships, we had to lift our naval gunfire off the beaches to avoid shelling our own men. At that unfortunate moment when our naval fire had to be lifted, it was expected the remaining Nazi guns (if any) would all come promptly into action against the troops before them, just being unloaded into the surf. The main German gun positions were well camouflaged and indistinguishable from the cliffs themselves as targets from the sea;
additionally, the heavier guns were intended only for lateral fire along the beach, and were, as said before, shielded from view from the water by lateral concrete walls extended well beyond their muzzles. But the German gun set-up, ingenious though it was in concealment, still had its Achilles’ heel—the muzzle flashes from the guns, and to some degree thereafter the muzzles of the guns themselves, were visible from the sky overhead. To exploit this weakness and hurriedly to finish off any guns remaining in action when H-hour arrived and our men began wading ashore, forty Piper Cubs, each flown by a British naval pilot and each carrying as observer an American naval gunnery officer from some one of the ships in our bombarding flotilla were provided. These tiny planes, highly maneuverable, could take off from little fields on the Near Shore closest to Normandy. They were to take the air just long enough before H-hour to cross the Channel and come in low over our landing craft as they made their approach to the beach, and then circle about continuously over the German gun positions on the crests of the cliffs. The moment any German gun exposed itself by opening fire along the beach, the nearest naval observer was to spot the flashes from above, mark the position of the muzzle with respect to the cliff front, and bring down on that point the fire of the particular turret on the warship at sea for which he was acting by radio as fire control officer. With the fire of our heavy naval guns controlled and corrected by a spotter in the air right over the target, it would be a miracle if within a few salvos that target wasn’t completely blown to bits. Finally, to help along in destroying any defending Nazi troops manning open trenches and machine-gun nests that had survived the air bombardment and the initial naval barrage and to catch those defenders just as they were coming out of foxholes and dugouts to man their weapons, came next a rocket attack to be launched in force just before our first wave touched down. Nine specially fitted landing barges, LCT (R)’s, equipped for rocket launching, were to come in just behind the leading landing craft, take station on a line 3000 yards off the beach, and when the first wave was only 300 yards from the waterline, let go all together with a barrage of 9000 high explosive rockets to drench the entire beach area—sands and cliffs alike—with a deluge of bursting rockets such as had never before been seen. You could tally it all up—after 13,000 bombs, 3550 heavy naval shells, and 9000 high explosive rockets had detonated in a period of less than forty minutes just before H-hour on the Omaha Beach—a total of 25,550 explosions, one explosion approximately for every three square yards of
beach area, it did not seem probable many Nazis would survive till H-hour itself in any condition seriously to interfere with the landing of our first wave. Still there might possibly be some, and close-up artillery support for the men in the first wave, who would be armed only with small arms, mortars, and bazookas, was highly desirable right on the beachhead. Should any of the Nazi heavier casemated guns still survive and open up on our first wave, until the Navy and its aircraft observers could spot them and blast them to pieces, some Army artillery right on the beach itself would help a lot in bolstering the morale of those first in. Close up on the beach, so our artillerymen could see along the beach itself as well as could their enemies, such guns would have a line of sight inside the lateral concrete walls shielding the Nazi guns from observation from the sea. They could fire in reply right into the Nazi gun embrasures and at least keep those guns hotly engaged in an artillery duel while our men landed, if indeed they didn’t succeed themselves by overwhelming firepower in knocking out the enemy before the Navy did. So as the next to final measure of protection to the assault forces, that closein artillery support was abundantly provided. Sixty-four General Sherman tanks were specially fitted out with propellers and flotation cells of pleated canvas to make them amphibious—they could then run on land or water. These dual-drive monsters went by the name of “DD’s”—dual-drives. They were to be put overboard by their mother LCT’s in the invading fleet roughly 6000 yards offshore about forty minutes before H-hour. Then they were to swim in on their own power just ahead of the first wave, take station at the water ’s edge evenly spaced all along the beach from one end of it to the other, and if any enemy gun from the heights above opened up on our men as the naval barrage was lifted off the beach, all such tanks as could see inside its concrete screen were instantly to take it under fire. With sixty-four Sherman tanks all ready for action right on the beach edge for artillery support as the first wave landed, it looked as if even should every Nazi gun on the heights overhead have come through unscathed from the previous terrific assaults on them with bombs, with naval guns, and with rockets, those sixty-four tank guns could still swiftly smother the fire of the lot of them. Finally, just to play it safe, should it turn out that those 64 DD tanks with their 75 mm. guns got fouled up in the beach obstacles and never got in to the water ’s edge to give the infantry that essential close-up artillery support, a second string to the close-up artillery bow was provided. After extensive experiments off British beaches to prove the feasibility of
the operation, a large flotilla of Dukw’s was used to make amphibious artillerymen of the Field Artillery. Three batteries of 105 mm. field guns, belonging to the 111th Field Artillery Battalion, were installed in Dukw’s, one gun to each Dukw. Similarly made seagoing were the howitzers of several Cannon Companies, and the anti-tank guns of various anti-tank platoons. With all these Dukws each bearing a respectable calibered field gun, the Dukw flotilla became a very formidable navy of itself. It was intended to put overboard these Dukws from their carriers about 10,000 yards out, have them swim in behind the landing craft carrying the first assault wave, firing on the beachhead as they went. Finally, while the troops of the first wave were wading shoreward through the exposed obstacles on their way in to the shingle above the high-water mark, these Dukws would stop just to seaward of the obstacles so as to take no chances of becoming entangled, and from there would pour in a hot fire from their 105’s, their anti-tank guns, and their howitzers, to smother any fire from the cliffs, whether our DD tanks got in to the beach themselves to provide that covering fire or whether they never did. So if the bombs didn’t do it; if the Navy pre-H-hour barrage failed; if the Navy spotter controlled fire at H-hour was ineffective; if the rockets didn’t completely wash out the defense; if the DD tanks all got fouled up and sunk in the mined obstacles, then the field artillerymen, firing afloat from those closein Dukw’s would still give the G.I.’s struggling ashore the smothering fire needed to protect them from the machine guns and the Nazi 88’s on the cliffs behind the beach as they went in. Six independent means of knocking out the Nazi guns were provided; they couldn’t possibly all fail. That then was the view of the beach as seen from opposite sides of it. The defenses Rommel had installed were impassable—so he felt. Our assault preparations to pass those defenses were irresistible—so we thought.
CHAPTER 17 My impression of how rightly to envision the invasion underwent a radical change under my new freedom to spend my time listening at night to Dr. Goebbels presenting one point of view respecting D-day, and during the daylight hours to listening to the opposing point of view as seen by airmen preparing to blow the cliffs on the Far Shore into the sea; as seen by Rangers preparing to scale Pointe du Hoe; as seen by some Navy men practicing demolition tactics on the beach obstacles and by still others detailed as fire control spotters weighing the possibilities of squeezing two naval officers, one British and one American, into a Piper Cub built to carry one man only as its pilot and their increased chances thereafter in the overloaded Cub of being shot down over the Far Shore by the enemy; and finally as seen by Army men involved in every phase of the assault from swimming DD tanks ashore for close-in artillery support to wading themselves with the first wave of troops into the surf and through the obstacles. Listening to all these swiftly cut down the size of the invasion to the scale of single comprehensible human beings and their very human feelings as they faced what faced them on D-day. No longer did the invasion seem to me just one grandiose project in which everything, men as impersonally as materials, was lumped together by the millions into the single vast mass of the Overlord Plan on which I had spent so much time at Grosvenor Square. The invasion began now to dissolve into the individual dangers starkly confronting a million different individuals. All about me, jammed into the invasion staging area on the Channel centered on Southampton water, were the men involved in all these undertakings. They were waterproofing their equipment, testing their explosives, trying their guns. But above all they were studying—studying maps, studying air reconnaissance photographs, and finally, studying snapshots taken all through the period between World War I and World War II by tourists on the Normandy beaches before Vierville, les Moulins, St. Laurent, and Colleville—incongruous photographs, most of them, showing in the foreground on the sands Mrs. Joe Doakes in her latest daring French bathing costume, which was the only reason originally the snapshot was taken by Joe himself during the 1930’s to lift the
eyebrows of the folks back home. But that picture chanced to show in addition something Joe himself had not the slightest interest in when he pressed the button to take that picture—as a background behind Mrs. Joe, stood a good view of some section of the bluffs overlooking the beach. In short, Joe, all unknowingly, had provided a picture of the identical section of the bluffs which was to be the very particular task of the platoon officer, with that snapshot now in his hands, to get his men on to the crest of—pronto. So under a powerful magnifying glass that snapshot was being carefully studied for what it showed on the bluffs behind in the way of curves and contours (not Mrs. Joe’s; nobody on the Near Shore gave a damn about her or the cut of her bathing suit any more). For on the ability of the men of that platoon to know and to utilize to the full every curve and every contour in that bluff as cover from gunfire laterally or from above as they scaled it, might very well depend whether any of them would ever reach the crest alive. However, I swiftly discovered I wasn’t going to be left wholly free to wander about the staging areas and talk with the men struggling with the diverse bits of what had all to be fitted together to make a go of the invasion. The reason was simple. There I was, the only American naval officer around Selsey Bill with four stripes. Captain Clark, the only other four-striper connected with Mulberry (who actually commanded the operation) could no longer, now that the agonizing problem of the Phoenix lifting was taken off his soul, find time to come again to Selsey Bill. Other pressing problems, in particular the one of getting enough ocean-going tugs to tow his Phoenixs to Normandy once they were afloat, and that other one of finessing somehow from some command enough competent officers to handle them once they were on the Far Shore, had become his new bête noire in place of the nightmare I had the good fortune to help solve for him. Captain Dayton Clark was still in a tough spot. It was, unfortunately for him, a fact that while those few top echelon naval planners in London involved in developing Overlord fully realized the overriding importance of Mulberry, most of the naval officers commanding afloat never did. To them, their jobs in getting the invasion armies safely across to Normandy and successfully ashore there constituted the whole task. The need for Mulberry to counter Rommel’s Panzers later, once the troops were ashore, was to them wholly nebulous— something out of their field and their concern. Winning the land battles, once they had successfully got the troops ashore, was the Army’s problem, not
theirs. Anyway, Mulberry, vital though it might be to ultimate success, was required only after the success of the initial assault. Consequently every naval commander involved in the initial assault was naturally enough wholly submerged in seeing that first things were put first—the needs of Mulberry, if any so far as he was concerned, could wait for attention till later. But wherever Mulberry fitted into the first stage operation of anyone, it then got too much attention, unfortunately, for Captain Clark’s equilibrium. For Operation Mulberry touched so many different parts of the Overlord Plan that Captain Clark found himself simultaneously subordinated to five different naval seniors—to Rear Admirals Kirk, Hall, Moon, and Wilkes of our Navy and to Rear-Admiral Tennant of the Royal Navy—each commanding different parts of Overlord. Each one of these five seniors had his own particular task to carry through; each ran his own rehearsals, planning conferences, and inspections. And each insisted Captain Clark be personally present with him whenever and wherever he inspected, rehearsed, and conferred, to be sure that Mulberry was properly phased in with his individual part of the show, which was as far as his interest in it went. Captain Clark did his damnedest to comply. An officer more dedicated to the success of the invasion didn’t exist anywhere in it. Between scurrying back and forth attending everybody’s training exercises of every kind at half a dozen Channel ports from Plymouth east to Portsmouth, he had hardly time for sleep any more, let alone for going further east than Portsmouth, beyond which, thank God, he had no seniors demanding his presence. So he made no more visits to Selsey Bill. There, at last, matters seemed now under control; Selsey Bill, tacitly at least, he left to me. I had to be there anyway, and he didn’t. So he stayed away. The results were natural enough. I was right there on the spot, so every Mulberry problem at Selsey Bill was brought to me for decision. It was not possible to brush off the officers at Selsey Bill, all but one very much junior in rank to me, when they laid their Mulberry problems in my lap. I was obviously Senior Officer Present at Selsey Bill—I had been ordered there by Admiral Stark, I had four stripes, it was naturally up to me to untangle the knots and to make the decisions. Had I attempted to say that I wasn’t assigned to Selsey Bill for that and that none of those matters were my affair—take them up with Captain Clark, then probably somewhere on the road far to the westward and quite unreachable, or with Commander Stanford in not so distant but for them
practically as inaccessible Portsmouth—not one of those troubled juniors, all new to the Navy, would have believed me. To them, I should have become simply another superannuated fuddy-duddy resurrected from the old Navy, willing enough to take an active assignment and draw full pay for it, but even more willing to let his juniors flounder while he shirked his plain duty. The problems were various, depending on whose problem it was. The one that was bothering Lieutenant Barton most, now that the Royal Engineers were out of the picture, was the crews of his small tugs, the ST’s. These were the tiny 86 foot long harbor tugs furnished by the Army to handle the Phoenixs in shallow waters—that is, in berthing them first on the Near Shore, and in sinking them finally on the Far Shore when the ocean-going tugs (which Captain Clark was still striving frenziedly to get) should deliver them there. Barton’s tribulations with the crews of those ST’s would have driven a less impassive officer to suicide. The Army, which owned them, had built, furnished, and manned those tugs, but their crews weren’t soldiers. It was just as obvious they weren’t sailors either, though they were classed as merchant seamen. Neither they nor their merchant officers knew much about handling tugs or for that matter, about handling ships of any kind. If they had, they would probably all have been at sea on something more impressive than a trifling harbor tug. Even landlubbers can be trained, however, given a little time, provided only they are subject to some discipline to hold their noses to the grindstone while undergoing training. But these crews weren’t under any discipline of any kind —they weren’t in the Army, they weren’t in the Navy, they were civilians, free and equal citizens of the United States, and war or no war, subject to no man’s domination. Even the usual peacetime fear of losing their jobs was nothing to them. They could swiftly get others at still more fantastic pay. If how they were handling, or rather mishandling the tugs, didn’t suit, that was your hard luck. If you complained too much, they could walk off the job. The result was that whenever Barton sent a tug from Selsey Bill to refuel at Portsmouth (incidentally, a fine liberty port, far more exhilarating to a sailor than the dismal sands at Selsey) it came back when its crew damned well pleased. And when he didn’t send one, it was just as likely to desert Selsey Bill during the dark hours and go to Portsmouth anyway. Barton, now full of faith in me for the changes I’d brought about on Selsey Bill, came to me almost with tears in his eyes. Couldn’t I help persuade the Army to provide him more dependable crews for those ST tugs? They were
bad enough to cope with at Selsey Bill. Where would he be on the Far Shore when he desperately needed not only competent men but men on whom he could rely to stay on the job? I promised I’d try. I started in by phone on the Army Transportation Corps in London to see what better men might be available for Barton. To my horror, I learned that not only could the Army not furnish us any better men to man those tugs, but that those we did have, the Army had been able to hire in the United States solely on the understanding that they were abroad only for noncombat duty! Noncombat duty! How did the Army define that? We wanted those tugs mainly for use on the Far Shore in sinking Phoenixs on the Omaha Beach, starting on D-day; otherwise they were completely useless to us. Was that noncombat duty, as the Army saw it? There would be plenty of combat going on all around while we were sinking those Phoenixs. We couldn’t at that critical time have the operation tied in a knot by our tugboat men’s deciding then we were using them for something that they hadn’t signed on for. How about that? What was noncombat duty? The Colonel in the Army Transportation Corps at the other end of the line informed me that the term had never been precisely defined. So long as we placed no guns of any kind on the tugs, and their crews were never asked to take any part in manning weapons, it all looked to him like non-combat duty, whether the tugs were handling Phoenixs on the Near Shore, as they now were, or on the Far Shore, where shortly they would be. It wasn’t so hot on that late May day, but nevertheless I hung up the receiver literally in a sweat. Not only were we being given dregs as seamen to handle our tugs during the nerve-racking maneuver of trying to hold in position against the tidal currents those massive Phoenixs while we flooded and sank them off Omaha. Now it turned out that should what was going on all over the beachhead while our troops stormed ashore look like combat to them, they could quit! And having had a good look at them, I was sure they would. I gnashed my teeth in sympathy for Barton. This was one hell of a way to expect anyone to run a war! After digesting this sad sidelight on how weak was the reed on which we were leaning, I started in higher up in the Army Transportation Corps to see what might be done to improve the situation. Would the Army object, seeing they could do no better themselves, if perhaps the Navy found some more reliable crews to man the tugs assigned us?
I could get no immediate answer. The Army, while sympathetic, had scores of other tugs, similarly manned, round about Britain and would have to consider the probable effect on their over-all tug picture. It was a very involved matter. They would let me know. I called attention to the fact that D-day, while not yet announced, must be very close. They couldn’t take too long about it; the new crews must have at least a little training on Phoenix sinking at Selsey Bill before having to carry it through under fire on the Omaha Beach. At this juncture, Dr. Goebbels took a hand and solved that problem for us— the only thing I ever had cause to thank him for. The Germans had taken endless air reconnaissance photographs of what we had off Selsey Bill—no air raid ever went by without chandelier flares being dropped for an illumination that could have no other purpose. But other than that (and the bombs, of course), in all their programs on the air they had religiously ignored our existence. Now abruptly they changed that policy. Dr. Goebbels put his star performer, Lord Haw-Haw himself, into the middle of an “Invasion Calling” broadcast, with a special message to us. After “Lili Marlene” as usual had put all her listeners into a trance, came Lord Haw-Haw, to jolt at least all those involved in Operation Mulberry rudely back to reality with his personal greeting: “To those United States Navy Seabees and soldiers on the concrete caissons off Selsey Bill.” And while Commander Stanford, listening in Portsmouth, as surprised as anybody, hurriedly seized a pencil and took it down, the Seabees at Selsey Bill, gathered round their mess hall radio, listened also thunderstruck at being singled out as the specific objects of Haw-Haw’s attention. In the most cultured tones of an English gentleman, Haw-Haw went soothingly on to assure his Yankee listeners. “We know exactly what you intend to do with those concrete units. You think you are going to sink them on our coasts in the assault. Well, we are going to help you boys. We’ll save you the trouble. When you come to get underway, we’re going to sink them for you.” The effect on the Seabees listening in was not good. If Haw-Haw, and with him naturally also the Nazi U-boats and their E-boat torpedo flotillas, knew that much about our Top Secret project at Selsey Bill, here was no threat to be laughed off. More particularly as very shortly before, as we all knew, a Nazi Eboat flotilla had caught our Exercise Tiger (a full scale night rehearsal by Rear
Admiral Moon’s assault forces of their coming landing on Utah Beach) steaming eastward off the coast of Devon during the dark hours. And in spite of the destroyer convoy provided, they had got in undetected, torpedoed and sunk two LST’s and badly damaged a third, and after drowning 700 G.I.’s aboard those torpedoed LST’s, had made a clean getaway, unharmed themselves. That disaster had badly shaken G.I. confidence in the Navy’s ability to protect them. If those lightning-fast Nazi E-boats could do that to a major convoyed assault force, rehearsing close in on the English side of the Channel, what couldn’t they do if they put their minds on it to all those Seabees manning a lot of floating blocks of concrete, moving unconvoyed across the Channel directly into their jaws, on the end of a towline at hardly three knots? Every Seabee took that broadcast practically as his personal obituary notice. A deep gloom descended on all in that mess hall as Lord Haw-Haw concluded his broadcast to them. Nobody spoke; nobody had to. Fatalistically, each man turned in. His number was up now and he knew it. But there was nothing any Seabee could do about it. There was a war on, he was in the Navy now, orders were orders. His were to man those Phoenixs and start with them for the Far Shore, come what might, Haw-Haw or no Haw-Haw. But the effect on the ST tugboat crews was markedly different. Suddenly and virtually unanimously it occurred to all of them that service with the ST’s on the Far Shore was not the noncombat duty they had signed on for—they weren’t going to the Far Shore. Almost en masse, they quit and went ashore. Handling Phoenixs came to an abrupt halt. Barton’s first reaction to that (and mine too) was to organize a firing squad. But more sober second thought showed us we were in luck. Thanks to Dr. Goebbels and Lord Haw-Haw, our crew problem was suddenly solved, now that the ST’s no longer had any crews. For no longer would anybody have to beg permission of the Army to allow the Navy to substitute better seamen, could it at this eleventh hour get them. Now that their crews had quit, declaring that service on those ST’s was not noncombat duty, it was the direct obligation obviously of the Army Transportation Corps to man them again with crews to whom staying around even with hot steel flying about, was part of their job. And while the Transportation Corps was doing that, it might as well also furnish us men who knew something of shiphandling. Trying not to seem too cheerful over it, we conveyed the news of this sudden
change in the ST crew situation at Selsey Bill to the Transportation Corps Headquarters in London. Would they please take care of it—immediately? Manfully, they did. If there were ever any arguments with the ex-crews of the ST’s as to what was and what was not noncombat duty, we at Selsey Bill were never bothered with them and with surprising speed, the tugs were remanned— where the Army got those crews, it was none of our concern to ask. But some of them were better seamen than those before, and now like the rest of us, all of them were willing to take their wars where they found them. Barton was swiftly back in business again. A second problem that was thrown into my lap was even less mine than that of the tugboat crews, and I should gladly have ducked it completely, had I been able. It so happened that except for the soldiers assigned to man the pair of antiaircraft guns mounted on each Phoenix, the crews of the Phoenixs were all Seabees. These men of the Construction Battalions, somewhere far up the chain of command, came under the wing of Rear Admiral Wilkes, Commander of Landing Craft and Bases (to be) on the Far Shore. Wilkes, however, was himself far away in Plymouth, buried in more urgent matters in his command and practically a stranger to all at Selsey Bill. Locally, at Selsey Bill the Seabees came under Commander E. T. Collier of the Civil Engineer Corps—it was in that branch of the Navy that the brilliant idea of the Construction Battalions (the CB’s—colloquially, the Seabees) had originated. Part of the Seabee idea had been to gather together as Construction Battalions for naval bases abroad men skilled in various trades who were above draft age—that is, to build up essentially from mechanics considered too old for the rigors of the fighting line, at least so far as the draft age limit was any criterion of that, an experienced volunteer naval support force. So, generally speaking, the men in the Seabees were middle aged or even more; most were above draft age—real volunteers. Now with D-day coming up in what seemed like giant strides to those still trying to whip their outfits into shape for the jump-off, it occurred to someone with importance enough in SHAEF to get his idea made official, that actual battle was something only for the young in years. This came down from above toward the end of May in the shape of an order to every unit preparing to take part in the assault, to weed out all hands (except officers) above the age of fifty —none older than that were to go to the Far Shore to face the Nazis. The effect on us at Selsey Bill was devastating. While in the average rifle
company there might have been one man in a hundred beyond fifty who might have to be eliminated, with the peculiar composition of our Seabees that percent age was away up. Commander Collier, who was organizing from his Seabees the riding crews to handle each Phoenix on its tow to the Far Shore and the sinking crews there to take over and sink them, found himself with a sizeable chunk of his force made suddenly ineligible to leave the Near Shore. Collier was in a pickle. All he could do was hurriedly to get in touch with his own direct senior in the Seabees, Captain Coryell in Plymouth, and arrange a deal with him by which the overage Seabees at Selsey Bill should be traded for younger men combed from other Seabee tasks in Britain not immediately involved in the assault. But it would all take time, and meanwhile Collier ’s training program for the Phoenix crews was thrown for a bad loss. And now began my troubles. One by one Collier called in his bumped-off men and informed them they weren’t going and why. Whatever they had to say to Collier, I never heard—no doubt, plenty. But shortly I commenced to receive a liberal education in psychology—a subject I’d never had a course in, either at the Naval Academy or in any of my postgraduate work thereafter. Obviously, to all hands at Selsey Bill, with my four stripes I was senior to Collier, who had only three. So almost immediately every Seabee who had failed to get anywhere in his argument with Collier came to me to get Collier overruled. Each man commenced by assuring me his case was most exceptional, to which SHAEF’s order shouldn’t apply. I listened to all sorts of reasons, all. different, all showing conclusively that for the man before me, an exception must be made—he, although others of his age were perhaps unfit, must be allowed to go. I must overrule Collier. Some offered to prove to me their fitness to go as against any younger man I might choose in any contest I cared to suggest—from running the 100 yards to doing handstands. Others rested their cases on their superior judgment in handling Phoenixs—no young man could possibly have the experience their years had given them in doing the right thing the right way at the right time— in sinking Phoenixs, that was of top importance. Still others put it on humanitarian grounds—why should a young man with his whole life ahead of him be sent to face Nazi fire, when he, who already had pretty well lived his, was ready, willing, and capable of going instead? How could I combat those arguments, honestly set out, vehemently presented, and frankly for the most part, the incontrovertible truth? I couldn’t
and I didn’t try. All I could say after patiently listening as each man presented his case was that I wasn’t overruling Collier—first, I had no authority to, even if I so felt; and second, I was as much under obligation to see that order enforced, regardless of what I thought of it, as Collier was. SHAEF had so ordered; neither Collier nor I was in any position to flout the order or to make exceptions to it. I was sorry; though in each case, I had to add, I was also proud of the man before me—he was a real American, even if he did have the hard luck not to be so young a one any more. But I swiftly found that that never ended the argument. Practically every man, as I turned down his plea to go, looked me over quizzically, and then asked the same question, “Captain, how old are you?” “Fifty-two,” I had to reply. Invariably the questioner ’s eyes lighted up triumphantly. “Fifty-two, huh? Well, since you’re going, why can’t you take me?” Somewhat embarrassed over the unfairness of the situation, I had to explain that officers were excluded from the application of that order. And then somehow I had to maneuver that still unconvinced Seabee out to make way for the next one waiting to see me. But intermingled with the stream of older Seabees pleading with me for the chance to carry through on what they’d volunteered for came some others who presented the other side of the coin. That so many of the older men were not bamboozled by Goebbels’ propaganda as to want to grasp the chance of an easy way out was a little surprising to me but understandable. They had all lived long enough already to know they didn’t care to live on in the world if it had to be to Hitler ’s specifications. From some others, however, I got the reverse picture—they didn’t want to go—they wanted me to order Collier not to send them. These I listened to just as patiently as to the others, and I think, with as much understanding. For every one of them was young—very young. Not one was over eighteen. How they ever got into an organization like the Seabees, intended mainly for artisans, which they weren’t old enough to be yet, and for middle-aged artisans at that, was beyond me. But there they were—children almost, they seemed to me, and terrified beyond measure by all they’d heard on the radio, culminating with that direct message to them from Haw-Haw himself. There weren’t so many of them—for everybody’s good, I was thankful there
were only a few. From each one of them, I heard the reasons why I must order Collier to take him out of the Phoenix crews—reasons, not one of which was the very evident real one—that I had before me a very scared boy, not old enough yet to realize that most of the terrors one saw ahead in life dissolved altogether or didn’t look so bad on closer approach, not mature enough yet to stand up and look real danger in the face. The reason most frequently advanced as making it impossible for that particular boy to go was seasickness—the boy talking to me would be worthless once he got out into the Channel and the waves had a chance at him. Somebody else who could stand it better ought to take over his job. Or it might be that he had recently been sick and hadn’t really fully recovered his strength. Or that he never had, nor had then, the muscle it took to manhandle those heavy wire tow-lines on the tow or the massive valve wheels to be twirled swiftly open in the sinking operation. Few though these cases were, they caused the most trouble. All, of course, were sent back to Commander Collier, who handled them finally as well as was humanly possible—he managed to brace up most enough to go back on their jobs. But the whole situation left me shaken. I couldn’t help sympathizing with those scared kids, particularly while being forced to turn thumbs down on their elders pleading to go in their places. Meanwhile, all about me on Selsey Bill the pace was accelerating. Out on the water, MacKenzie’s men were readying their growing fleet of salvage scows and their tugs, testing their salvage pumps, practicing on the waiting Phoenixs. MacKenzie himself wasn’t around much—apparently to him the most important part of his task was rooting out of every British harbor what he could find there in the way of salvage gear and men. The assistants he sent to Selsey Bill as salvage masters (none above the rank of lieutenant, which in the Royal Navy appeared to be about tops for salvage men) seemed seasoned enough as salvors—no more than MacKenzie himself did they ask or want any advice of me or of anyone. So I gave none, except on one occasion when in the practice lifting of a Phoenix the British salvage officer in charge allowed it to take so heavy a list that to me it seemed possible he might capsize his semi-flooded hulk. I pointed out to that man the need for more attention to the stability calculations involved in waterlogged wrecks, which the Phoenixs were during the lifting operation, lest actually he capsize one. But the only result was that next day I got a message, relayed to me without comment by Commodore Flanigan, that the
Royal Navy was complaining I was giving orders to their men; would I kindly desist? Eagerly I pointed out to Flanigan that the best way to cure the complaint was to take me out of Selsey Bill, but Flanigan couldn’t see that. I must remain as ordered as consultant. To my outraged explanation that I had certainly given no orders, only offered a helpful suggestion to a junior salvage officer, his only comment was that with MacKenzie’s juniors, it would be prudent to restrict my conversations to remarks on the weather; with MacKenzie himself, I might go farther should MacKenzie invite it, which was most unlikely. So cursing the luck which put me in the position of a bird dog with birds all about, but forbidden absolutely to do any pointing, I stayed on. However, since my orders didn’t restrict me to Selsey Bill but only to the Channel, I attempted to reduce the chances of more friction with MacKenzie’s salvage forces by going a little further afield than before. The result was that, going somewhat west of Portsmouth for the first time, I got a close view of another component of Operation Mulberry, of which I’d read, but to which I’d paid little attention. These were the Bombardons. Bombardons, it seemed, were the answer to the problem of attempting to enlarge the protected harbor area off the Normandy beaches far beyond what could be enclosed by the Phoenix breakwaters. Regardless of how little attention others, especially in the naval combat arm, might give to the problem, the Army’s logistic experts struggling with the millions of tons of equipment they had to get unloaded on the Far Shore, were ravenous for the utmost in protected ship discharge space. So to provide that in the area outside the Phoenix breakwater line, endless experiments in how best to break up wave action in deep water had been carried out. The experimenters had come up with the idea, of all things, of a floating breakwater, anchored well out beyond the Phoenixs in water so deep a regular breakwater could never be planted there. The Bombardons made up that floating breakwater. They were lengthy steel structures, floating about two-thirds submerged, cruciform in shape, suggested by a British engineer named Lochner. To each side of a long and thin rectangular vertical steel hull, a horizontal steel fin about nine feet wide was welded, sticking out from the hull below its water-line. These Bombardons were two hundred feet long each. Between their deep central hulls, protruding partly above water, and their flat side fins immersed horizontally in it, they exerted an appreciable quieting effect on waves. About twenty-four of those
objects, chained together end to end to make a floating breakwater nearly a mile long, were to be moored well offshore outside the Phoenix line, there to break the waves. Inside the line of steel Bombardons and outside the line of concrete Phoenixs would be a substantial semi-protected area in which it was figured Liberty ships could anchor and discharge into Dukw’s alongside under practically all probable conditions of the seas in summer. At Portland, which was the assembly point for the Bombardons, I looked them over with both awe and a little skepticism. The awe came from any seaman’s fear of having to handle such unwieldy and dangerous looking objects, both in the tow across the Channel, and in the securing of them in place on the Far Shore. Just a little inattention or hard luck on the part of the tugs handling them, and those wicked steel fins, completely out of sight, could slice open a ship’s hull like a can opener. Commander Ligon Ard, an old shipmate of mine of Naval Academy days, had the unlovely job of handling them; I didn’t envy him it. The skepticism came from whether their value in quieting waves could ever offset the loss to other military uses, even in Operation Mulberry itself, of all the steel it took to make those Bombardons. For every other project in England, where steel had become more precious than ducal diadems, had been bled of steel to get enough to build those highly hypothetical breakwaters. What hurt me most was that many of the vital pontoons to carry the Whale bridging ashore from our Lobnitz pierheads had been made of concrete, eggshell thin, instead of steel, so the steel plate saved could go into these Bombardons. And hourly now we were having continuous headaches with those concrete eggshells floating our Whales at Selsey Bill and Portsmouth— you hardly dared look hard at them lest they crack and leak. Keeping them pumped dry and afloat was a full time salvage operation in itself. And all to save the steel that should have gone into them for these unpromising Bombardons! Finally, to add insult to that injury of such dubious use of what little steel there was, it was obvious now where all the spare mooring gear and cables in Britain had gone, that might have obviated much, if not all, of that nightmare of sinking Phoenixs at Selsey Bill instead of mooring them. There it all was at Portland, every spare anchor and cable in the United Kingdom, assigned to the job of serving as the moorings on the coasts of Normandy of that string of Bombardons! The Bombardons would have to do a magnificent breakwater job on the Far
Shore to compensate for all the troubles they had so far caused. I swore at the sight of them. Returning via Portsmouth, I ran into another aspect of the voracious appetite of the Army top staff for harbor space. Regardless of how it might seem to naval combat officers, there was no doubt about it but that in the minds of the Army staff, nothing was so imperative in avoiding disaster on the Far Shore as provision for a rapid build-up of supplies. Now it so happened that it had become swiftly apparent that Britain’s ability to produce Phoenixs by D-day was substantially short of what the Mulberry plan had originally contemplated. Since a reduction of protected harbor space was not to be thought of, and an attempt to squeeze more Phoenixs out of the dismally creaking British economy was even more fruitless than trying to squeeze more juice out of an orange already run down by a steam roller, some other answer had to be provided. It was a vivid commentary on the desperate need for harbor space, that the answer was provided at the expense of that hitherto sacrosanct cornerstone of British existence—merchant shipping. Both in World War I and so far in World War II, in the face of savage U-boat sinkings, the need for ships had outweighed all else in British eyes. Now, however, ships themselves were to be sacrificed as substitutes for the Phoenixs which Britain couldn’t produce in time. The oldest ships, of course, worn-out ships, ships with rickety machinery and with boilers approaching the danger point; but nevertheless ships that still could steam, and might in less pressing circ*mstances have kept on carrying cargo to the United Kingdom. So under Lieutenant George Hoague, Jr., Captain Clark had set up a special group to handle and sink these vessels to form auxiliary breakwaters on Omaha and Utah Beaches, designated by the code name of Gooseberries. Twenty-three merchant ships were ballasted, fitted and wired with explosive charges, and gathered in the northern Scotch port of Oban, ready to sail so as to be off the Far Shore immediately behind the assault forces on D-day, then and there to be sunk as the first breakwater. Since their depth of hull was substantially less than that of the sixty foot high Phoenixs, they would have to be sunk in shallower water; still their breakwater would form adequate harbor space for coasting steamers and landing craft of all kinds, though not for ocean-going ships. With this part of Operation Mulberry, I had had no contacts—the ships and their crews were all being assembled and made ready for scuttling far from
Channel waters. But as I came into Commander Stanford’s Portsmouth office on this occasion, I made contact with it. Stanford introduced me to a commander in the Royal Navy who, he said, was looking for me. I looked at him inquiringly. He looked familiar—had we met before, I asked? It seemed we had, in the Mediterranean. Did I remember the Centurion? The Centurion? I remembered her all right. Immediately my memory went back to Port Said, in the summer of 1942. There Captain Damant, Royal Navy, Principal Salvage Officer for the Suez Canal which the Nazis were then desperately trying to block with mines and bombs, and which Damant was just as desperately striving to keep cleared of wrecks and open to traffic, had just finished telling me the straits the Royal Navy was in, in the Eastern Mediterranean. It seemed they were trying there to hold off the entire Italian Navy, dreadnaughts and all, with only four light cruisers—they hadn’t a single battleship of their own left in the Mediterranean. Of the three they’d had, U-335 had sunk the Barham at sea, and some Italian frogmen, getting through the net defenses of Alexandria harbor, had put the other two, the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, out of action for a year at least with limpet mines with which the frogmen had blasted vast holes in those battleship bottoms. And hardly had Captain Damant finished telling me that, as we strolled along the quay at the entrance to the Canal, that I happened to look to seaward. There, not a quarter of a mile off the quay, was moored a British dreadnaught, bristling with 13.5-inch guns—as formidable a battleship as one might ever see. “What’s that then?” I queried. “I thought you’d just said, Captain, you hadn’t a battleship in the Med.” Damant didn’t even look to seaward to check what I was indicating. “That?” he answered. “Oh, that’s not a battleship; that’s a dummy. That’s the Centurion.” I looked again. I knew a battleship when I saw one—I’d spent over thirty years looking at them, and this one was hardly two ship lengths away from me. At such short range I could hardly be fooled by any dummy, made up to look at a distance like a battleship. Before me was a full-sized battleship without doubt —tripod masts, heavy guns, armored turrets. I recognized her; she was the Centurion, of the Iron Duke class; she’d fought at Jutland, in World War I. “Quit trying to fool me, Captain,” I objected. “I know a battleship when I see one.”
“That’s what our Italian friends think, too,” replied Damant. “We’re pulling their leg, just the way we’re pulling yours. Good job, isn’t she?” And Damant went on to explain the Centurion was a dummy, though once she had been a battleship. Years ago, she had had all her real guns and turrets taken off and had been reduced to service as a target ship. But when in World War II, every battleship in the Med. had been sunk or put out of action, the Admiralty had hastily fitted out the old Centurion with wooden guns and wooden turrets, mounted some real anti-aircraft guns on her topsides, and sent her to the Med. to fool the Italians into thinking Britain really had a dreadnaught there. And against the Italians, she’d done a fine job of it too; cruising in the Med. she’d kept four Italian superdreadnaughts holed up, afraid to go to sea lest they should meet her. Yes, I remembered the Centurion, all right. But all that was in 1942. What had that to do with me in 1944? I soon learned. To my surprise, the Centurion was now at my service. My service? Yes, at my service. Before me was her new skipper, ordered, so he understood, by the Admiralty to pay his respects to me and get whatever orders I had to give him with regard to Operation Mulberry. The Centurion in Operation Mulberry? I looked at him in amazement. What good was a dummy battleship, however excellent a dummy she might be, to Operation Mulberry? We weren’t engaged in running any hoaxes on anybody; we had no need of the Centurion to pull any Nazi legs, no matter how successful in leg pulling she’d been with the Italians. There must be some mistake. No, there was no mistake. He and his ship, the Centurion, had been attached to Operation Mulberry. As I was Senior Officer Present, he was reporting to me for orders. As he understood it, the Centurion, no longer needed anywhere as a dummy now that we had knocked Italy out of the war and controlled the Mediterranean completely, had been ordered home and the Admiralty had concluded she and her wooden guns could best serve the Allies, from here on out, as a Gooseberry—she was at the last minute being turned over to Operation Mulberry to be scuttled by her own crew as the key vessel in our line of old hulks to be sunk off the Omaha Beach. He, formerly her Executive Officer, had taken over the command from the Royal Navy captain under whom she had masqueraded in the Med. as a battleship in full commission. Now with her normal crew of a thousand men reduced to the seventy men only whom he needed to steam her on her last voyage across the Channel, he was to
take her there, and then blow her bottom out at whatever spot off the Omaha Beach suited me best. What directions did I have to give him to carry through those orders? I had to explain I wasn’t running Operation Mulberry, no matter what surface appearances to the contrary might indicate. Commander Stanford, Deputy Commander, Mulberry, would put him in touch with the officer in Operation Mulberry actually detailed in charge of the Gooseberries who would be glad to brief him in his new part. So he was to scuttle the Centurion, eh? Queer end for a battleship. But it wasn’t a bad idea—in death, she would still keep on helping win the war; so huge a vessel, three times the size of any other ship we had, would make a wonderful anchor for the western end of our Gooseberry breakwater. And her anti-aircraft battery, even after she was scuttled, would be a powerful addition to the air defenses of Omaha Beach. I wished him luck; I’d see him again, I hoped, off Omaha. I shoved off for Selsey Bill, shaking my head incredulously over the lengths the higher command was willing to go to get the maximum amount possible of sheltered waters for the artificial harbor off the Omaha Beach. First, twentythree still usable freighters. Now this venerable old battleship, even though her fangs had long since been pulled. And that brought to an end the month of May. What might June have to offer?
CHAPTER 18 June 1 brought Captain Clark to Mulberry Headquarters in Portsmouth with the news that the date chosen for D-day had been released at last. It was to be June 5. At Selsey Bill, alerted immediately, the news spread fast. The frantic pace that Barton had set in getting stores and ammunition loaded became even more frantic. To add to Barton’s problems, he found to his consternation that his Seabees were loading everything portable in southern England that they could get their hands on, from tractor cranes to bulldozers, aboard the Lobnitz pierheads—such items might come in handy on the Far Shore. Barton had no objections to that—they might well all be handy—but it presented him with a terrific additional stowage problem in lashing down for sea. Meanwhile, with D-day a concrete fact at last, the atmosphere at Selsey Bill became more tense than ever. Every threat of secret weapons waiting to obliterate us on the Far Shore got a fresh going over from those most vitally concerned in them. What might these mysterious weapons be? Who knew? One, always hinted at by the Nazis, was that we should be met and incinerated in seas of oil, set afire once our landing craft were so near in on the Far Shore they could no longer turn and flee. Could there be anything in that? It was nothing the average G.I., who knew little of the sea and less of oil and its flammable possibilities, could brush from his thoughts—what most G.I.’s knew only too well was that in World War I, the Germans, stymied on the Western Front, had suddenly unmasked their flamenwerfer, flame-throwers, on the unsuspecting Allies, with horrible effect. Might they not now repeat on a vaster scale and set the whole surface of the sea on fire to defeat the invasion? And if they did, how could we counter that? The G.I., looking about him, could see no signs of anything being provided for him to counter with. That might mean we felt such a weapon was impossible, and needed no counters. Still, that quieted nobody’s fears—we might be wrong; also, most likely, nothing was being provided because no counter was possible. Nobody faces with equanimity the prospect of being suddenly trapped and roasted to death in a sea of roaring flame, as promised. And the Nazis were
quite capable of doing such a thing, if they could. Could they? Hardly less frightening was the prospect of being met with poison gas. Along with their flamenwerfers, the Germans had in World War I unmasked poison gas also on the Allies, with more horrible effects even than they had achieved with flame. Poison gas, unlike flame, was however now barred from warfare by international convention. Still, who was so naive as to believe that Hitler would pay any attention to international conventions, should it please him once again to treat them as just scraps of paper? No G.I., anyway. And there was real evidence that poison gas, at least, was likely to be used on him. Every G.I. was being given a gas mask, clothes specially treated to be resistant to gas, various ointments to plaster his anatomy should some of the liquid poisons (the worst of all) splash his skin. Encumbered with that gas mask, loaded down with that clothing and his ointments, no G.I. was in any position to laugh off the poison gas probability—and next to the innate horror with which anyone looks on being made a living torch, comes his horror of poison. Then, flaunted in all faces, was the prospect held out almost nightly by Goebbels of wholesale drowning on the way over. Aside from bombs and torpedoes, we faced the threat of deadly minefields in the Channel, sowed with mines of a new and terrible nature, against which no known means of sweeping would be effective. Here again was something which must be taken seriously. Early in the war, the Nazis had unveiled another secret weapon, the magnetic mine, which amidst widespread sinkings, had practically blockaded every British port for some weeks and was threatening the United Kingdom with starvation until a hastily developed counter—degaussing belts—provided ships with some protection. What could the new mines against which none of our sweeping measures were effective do to us? It was impossible to say. Our best protection lay now in seeing no squadrons of German mine-layers got out into the Channel to lay any such minefields in quantity. Still, it wasn’t possible wholly to prevent any being laid, from U-boats or from planes. So to the perils of flame and poison was added the peril of being drowned en masse, which Goebbels repeatedly stressed. To G.I.’s mainly unaccustomed to the sea and made oversusceptible of drowning anyway by their recent wartime crossing of the Atlantic, death in this form loomed up more real than that by either flame or poison gas. So real, indeed, that the Supreme Command itself became alarmed and had to act to avoid demoralization; so real that, almost on the very eve of invasion an urgent cry went out from SHAEF to
Washington in late May—a demand that no matter what else got bumped off in consequence, at least fifty fast Coast Guard 83 foot picket boats be put aboard freighters at once for immediate dispatch to the Channel. It was anticipated that thousands of G.I’s would be swimming in the Channel waters during the night crossing; the picket boats were solely for the purpose of accompanying the fleet to rescue them from drowning. No one from Eisenhower down, still less Rear Admiral Moon and the Navy, least of all the G.L’s, had forgotten what had happened to the men in Exercise Tiger shortly before, when Nazi E-boats had drowned 700 soldiers—what easily could happen to us from mines on the Channel crossing could make that tragedy seem picayune. Shortly the Coast Guard picket boats began to be unloaded—substantial craft each easily capable of taking aboard well over a hundred men. Ostentatiously they were paraded in all the Channel loading ports, for what morale effect they might have on the G.I.’s, waiting to be loaded. There was a counter to German mines they could see. They were not to be left to drown as had been the hapless G.I.’s in Exercise Tiger. Five thousand swimmers at least, possibly twice that many, could easily be rescued by that flotilla shepherding the invasion fleet, ready instantly with life rings and life nets to take men from the water wholesale. Flame, poison gas, and water—hideous as death from any one of them was to contemplate—were at least nameable terrors. What were the others—the nameless terrors that Goebbels was always hinting at? Just because you couldn’t put a name to any of them, you couldn’t afford to laugh them off merely as fantasies designed to frighten you—too many times in the past had Germany suddenly unmasked some unimagined weapon to annihilate her enemies—she could again. A feeling of facing mysterious terrors against which one was powerless to take precautions began to grip everyone, creating far more unease in everybody’s soul, now that D-day was no farther away than you could count on the fingers of one hand, than the more concrete prospect of running head on into the Atlantic Wall with Rommel and all his Panzers to back it up. Goebbels had done a first class job on us. Not since Columbus in 1492 was about to weigh anchor, had men prepared to sail so fearful of the mysterious perils of the unknown seas before them. With the disclosure of the date finally set for D-day came an unlooked-for effect—all Britain was sealed off from the rest of the world. No mail was dispatched, no cables or phone messages permitted to go out, even the
diplomatic dispatches of such few neutrals as had embassies in London were embargoed, regardless of their outraged protests. No chance was taken, should any espionage agent, and especially an alluring female one, worm the date from some half-drunk or loose-lipped member of our forces. For then it was certain that through some neutral country, Sweden or Switzerland, for instance, it would be promptly piped through to Berlin. Two thousand men of the Counter Intelligence Corps descended on southern England to enforce security in this regard. For surprise was as vital to success for us as all the armaments we had provided for the invasion—surprise as to the day the blow would fall, surprise as to the spot on which the blow should land, even surprise as to whether actually it was intended there be any blow at all. Many Nazis felt the whole invasion was only a gigantic hoax. Now more than ever was security needed—those three vital secrets were become the common property of some hundreds of thousands of men, who now knew they were to assault just after dawn on June 5, and were being most minutely briefed, even down to the privates involved, as to exactly where they would strike and what manner of terrain they would find confronting them as they landed. On all points, we had good reason to expect we should achieve surprise. The Germans would expect us to attack, if ever we actually attacked, on that day on which high water came at dawn. That day was June 1; already it had gone by. Not till June 15 would there be a similar conjunction of tide and dawn. On June. 5, the Germans, therefore, would not be expecting us. Further, the weight of expert German military opinion was that the point of assault would be Calais. There the Channel was narrowest; the roads, both to Paris and to Berlin, the shortest. There, sure that was where we should strike, von Rundstedt had massed nineteen German divisions, by far the largest single Army he had in one spot in Western Europe and over twice as many as the seven divisions he had allotted Rommel to repel an attack in Normandy. We had done everything possible all through the spring of 1944 to encourage the Nazis in their belief in Calais as our intended point of attack. Fake invasion exercises in southeastern England, obviously aimed at the Pas de Calais, were staged with next to no security measures taken, with the expectation that Nazi espionage agents would hurry the news to Berlin. Dummy campfires and dummy tents, all visible from the air, were set out there, to create the impression that vast numbers of troops were bivouacked in that area,
ready to jump off for Calais. And finally, it was given out that General George Patton, who of all American commanders the Nazis most respected and most feared, unemployed since he had routed the Nazis out of Sicily and itching only for another chance at them, had taken command of this nonexistent army and with much-publicized ferocity was whipping it into shape for a savage assault on von Rundstedt at Calais. From von Rundstedt’s disposition, it appeared the Germans believed all that and were strenuously engaged in preparing to fend off Patton; we should achieve our hoped for surprise as to point of attack. While we struck at Normandy, their major mobile forces would be waiting to repel Patton at Calais, one hundred and fifty miles away—much too distant effectively to reinforce Rommel short of a week’s time after D-day. So on two points, as to time and as to place, we expected confidently to achieve surprise. We weren’t attacking on the day on which high tide came at dawn; and we weren’t assaulting at the point where the Channel was narrowest —Calais. But to keep those secrets, southern England was suddenly more thoroughly seeded with Counter Intelligence men than a plum pudding with plums. And further to keep confidential our intentions, the troops to whom unavoidably now the secrets must be disclosed; commencing at the end of May, were rushed directly from their barbed-wire enclosed encampments to their transports, there to be held incommunicado till they sailed for Normandy. June 1, June 2, and June 3 came and went, three days long to be remembered by all hands on the Channel—days marked by endless columns of British and American combat troops marching from their encampments to the “hards,” the concrete paved waterfront slopes on which the landing ships were grounded, swiftly to be swallowed up there by the waiting vessels. And made even more noteworthy for the camouflaged strings of tanks and mechanized heavy artillery, parked for weeks along the roads, coming suddenly to life and with clanking treads and roaring motors, swarming ponderously down also to the hards, there to be engulfed in the bowels of the huge LST’s or run up the ramps of the smaller LCT’s. And following closely in the wakes of the tanks down to the hards, also there to be run aboard, came thousands of trucks. These were already combat-loaded with the ammunition, the priceless gasoline, and the military stores without which today’s fighting man is completely helpless. Over 4000 vessels, in a dozen English ports from Bristol on the Irish Sea around Land’s End to Portsmouth on the Channel, were loading for the invasion. By afternoon on June 3, those farthest away, at Bristol, carrying
mostly the supporting follow-up troops for the assault, would be sailing. By afternoon of June 4, all the rest would set sail from the Channel ports, prepared to have the first wave hit the beach under cover of the air and sea bombardment just after dawn on June 5, and the supporting waves in the hours following. On the morning of June 3, with the rearguard troops still being loaded, we received at Selsey Bill our final instructions for D-day on the Far Shore. They were in the form of a caution, relating not particularly to Mulberry, but to craft of any kind carrying anti-aircraft guns. That took us in, for every Phoenix carried at least one and most of them two, forty millimeter AA guns and a force of soldiers to man them. All told our Phoenixs had over 100 AA guns, a very formidable armament. So along with every other kind of craft carrying AA guns of any caliber, we were warned: “If you see any aircraft overhead during daylight on the Far Shore, do not fire. They will be ours. We have absolute control of the air over Normandy; no enemy planes can get over the beachhead.” The word went swiftly out to the Army gun crews, but it spread just as quickly among the Seabees. So we need fear nothing from the air; with all the other fears we had to weight us down, it was at least a slight comfort to know we had that one countered. At Selsey Bill we were ready also. Fully afloat, standing high above the water, was the first batch of ten Phoenixs moored temporarily by lines to other still sunken Phoenixs. They were fully manned now. Aboard were their riding crews of Seabees, ready to make fast the mooring bridles to the squadron of ten ocean-going tugs, anchored just beyond the Phoenix park. Aboard them also were the anti-aircraft gun crews, expectantly watching the skies, guns loaded and ready, for now of all times they could expect more bombs than ever. In the Phoenix park, MacKenzie’s men labored night and day over their pumps, readying the next batch of ten Phoenixs for swift lifting. Too many could not be afloat at once, but dozens could be lightened enough to make the final pumping out and breaking free the work of only a few more hours. The schedule was all set up. The first ten Phoenixs would go out in tow immediately behind the tail end of the invasion fleet and follow over at three knots. Then in batches, with the second tug flotilla a few hours later, would go the second ten, and so on as the tugs worked back and forth across the Channel,
till all were on the Far Shore. MacKenzie’s crews would have to work fast to keep ahead of tugs; however, he had men and pumps and salvage craft enough to do it. But now, shortly after noon on June 3, most unexpectedly came something else we couldn’t counter, to throw sand into the intricately geared timetable of Operation Overlord—the weather. All through May, the weather, in England had been wonderful—the kind of spring that poets, especially English poets, grow lyrical over. And a thorough search of weather records for all the years back so far as records went, a search made while Overlord was being developed, had indicated that June weather along the southern coasts could safely be relied on to be as good as May had been. All of Overlord depended on good weather for D-day and on reasonable weather for several days at least thereafter for the build-up. Good weather was imperative to avoid landing combat-laden assault troops through heavy surf; for swimming in from three miles at sea the DD tanks for the close-in artillery support; for clearing the beach obstacles; for decent visibility right after dawn for the vital pre-H-hour air bombardment, and for the just as vital naval barrage during the run-in of the assault forces—in other words, no good weather, no invasion. But there had been no cause for worry over that in all the planning; we would pick for D-day the day in June that suited us; June weather in southern England was always good, or at least, good enough. So the records showed. And as June came in, the weather charts from far west in the Atlantic showed that the good May weather was to continue. Group Captain J. M. Stagg, R.A.F., Chief Meteorologist for Overlord, was quite satisfied as to that as a long range prediction. However, before Saturday, June 3, was half over, it began to look to us on Selsey Bill as if our luck had completely run out. It started to rain, it commenced to blow a gale, and the latest weather forecast, flying in the face of everything normally to be expected and suddenly reversing the previous long range forecast given out for early June, indicated several days more of not only the same, but of worse yet to come. The wind we had by nightfall on June 3, given two days more to act on the water, could kick up quite a sea in the Channel by June 5 and a worse one on the surf-beaten beaches. It became more and more evident that now of all times, on the very eve of the invasion, the worst gale to hit southern England in twenty years at least was coming in from the Atlantic to lash the Channel waters. At Selsey Bill, we knew that the invasion forces in the Channel were all to be
underway by 1600 (4 P.M.) on Sunday, June 4—unless by noon of that day, we got the code word, BOWSPRIT, that the invasion was postponed for twentyfour hours. As I looked off to sea from Selsey Bill on the morning of June 4, it was obvious to me that this was no weather in which to launch an invasion on anybody’s coasts, defended or undefended—disaster would be insured, not by the enemy but by the breaking seas driving before that gale which would certainly swamp all our landing craft on their way in. To go as scheduled would be suicide. We should only be transporting a cargo of G.I.’s, too deathly seasick to fight when they got there, to a beachhead on which they couldn’t possibly be landed successfully through any such seas. And sure enough, before noon the coded signal, BOWSPRIT, came over from Portsmouth—we were all to delay twenty-four hours—D-day now would be Tuesday, June 6—unless before noon on June 5 we got another signal in code postponing it for yet a second twenty-four hour period until June 7. Meanwhile, destroyers raced to sea to intercept and turn back to port the flotillas which on June 3 had already sailed for the Channel rendezvous from Bristol and the northern ports. But that could only be done once; those vessels had not fuel enough to last through a second turnback. If again they turned back, they must refuel before sailing for a third time. And that refueling delay would make it impossible for them to sail for a D-day set for June 7. If the invasion were delayed till June 7, it would have to be made without the supporting troops for the first wave. Completely wet and miserable, we waited at Selsey Bill for any sign of a break in the weather that might give us a chance to land on June 6. For while not so many in the hundreds of thousands loaded aboard the invasion fleet knew that a day’s delay or even several days’ delay was anything worse than the added aggravation of being packed aboard overcrowded transports for that many days more, those few who had ever read the Overlord Plan itself knew how tightly the Plan was tied to the moon—that if by June 6, we didn’t assault, we couldn’t try again till June 19, or perhaps even till July 3. And it would just not be possible to keep all those men jammed into the invading ships till June 19. If we didn’t attack on June 6, they’d all have to be unloaded again. And if some hundreds of thousands of men were unloaded, all aware now of where they were to assault and when they should have assaulted (which was the key to exactly when next they might assault), what chance was there, in spite of 2000 Counter Intelligence agents trying to enforce security, of keeping those secrets intact until June 19?
Even on June 19, we shouldn’t be as well off as on June 6. We’d have, it was true, the same conjunction then of the moon and the sun which would give us half tide flood an hour after dawn, which was our most imperative need, but we wouldn’t have the same late rising moon—we’d have no moon at all on June 19. And part of what Eisenhower was planning heavily on to relieve Nazi pressure on the landing beaches was to drop a large force of paratroopers on both flanks of the invading forces—American paratroopers to be dropped at 0200 (2:00 A.M.) behind the Utah Beach on the Cherbourg Peninsula on the western flank, and British paratroopers to be dropped simultaneously behind Sword Beach on the eastern flank to the east of Caen. In both cases, Eisenhower wanted no moon at all till well after midnight, thus to mask from the enemy the approach to the drop zones of the troop-carrying planes and gliders; But immediately the approach was nearing completion, he wanted a rising moon to give the light desired by the pilots to help locate the points of drop, and to light the fields for the paratroopers in their assemblies and initial attacks on the nearby bridgeheads they were to seize before dawn. Now on June 5 (and June 6 also) we got what we wanted—a rising half tide an hour after dawn to give us the precious hour of daylight for pre-assault bombardments; the incoming tide still low enough to expose all obstacles at Hhour, an hour after dawn; and a moon rising about 0130, which was just what the paratroopers wanted to allow darkness to shield their approach and then moonlight to light their drop. However, should the attack be deferred until June 19, there would be no moon at all. That would make matters for the paratroopers, already tough enough, even tougher, but since the other conditions would be met, it was at least passable as a date. To help make that pill a little easier to swallow, it was recognized that if June 19 were let go by, that not till July 3 would all the conditions wanted, including moonrise at the right time, occur once again—a delay of a month practically from June 6, if we didn’t go then. Those were the conditions faced by Eisenhower as June 4 drew along. The gale whipping the Channel showed no signs of abating, and the question had to be faced as to whether by the next day, June 5, all the invasion forces should be allowed to set sail, or for a second time, the code word, BOWSPRIT— postpone for twenty-four hours—be sent. For Eisenhower knew that a second postponement would be not for one day only, but for two weeks at least and possibly for a month, with all that that entailed—loss of morale, probably loss of secrecy, loss of two weeks to a
month in summer campaigning weather in France, two weeks or more time for Rommel to set more obstacles, casemate more guns along the beachhead. But over and above all that, it entailed another fact never set down in the Overlord Plan, never even officially discussed in connection with it. That fact was Joseph Stalin who ruled Russia, an absolute despot who had already murdered all his rivals, standing now like a saturnine devil in the background to put the worst construction possible on every Allied move. Stalin, having no scruples himself, naturally enough considered his allies as being quite as unscrupulous as he. Stalin did not believe we honestly meant ever to stage any invasion—so at least his sarcastic comments indicated. When at Tehran, he asked how many Nazi divisions we were prepared to tackle in the Overlord assault and was told we were landing troops (all we could find vessels to carry) to meet twelve Nazi divisions, which was twice more than we could expect Rommel to have in Normandy on D-day, his only comment was the cynical question: “And what if there are thirteen?” Stalin had also been told at Tehran the invasion would be staged in early May. When, as May approached, Eisenhower had found it imperative for his build-up to delay a month till June, the delay was met from Russian sources with contemptuous insinuations that it showed only we never meant to assault at all—we were only stalling. Should Eisenhower now, on the very eve of the new invasion date, order a second major postponement because of bad weather, that would be something which Stalin, who knew nothing of the power of the sea, would never understand, and being Stalin, would never believe anyway. And then, indeed, the fat would certainly be in the fire. In the back of everyone’s mind who had any real understanding of either Soviet Russia or Stalin was the fear that Stalin might seize on a second delay as a valid excuse to make a separate peace with Hitler, quite acceptable to himself, and leave us in the lurch. Such a piece of treachery was easily within the possibilities, considering that those two totalitarian tyrants, Hitler and Stalin, though ostensibly deadly enemies, had enough in common to have done exactly such a thing in 1939. And they might well repeat that performance in 1944. Hitler, in a tight spot, would undoubtedly be glad to. And Stalin was quite capable of it should a second invasion postponement occur to give him any more basis for his belief that he had better double-cross us while yet he had the chance to profit greatly thereby, lest as he saw it, we do the same thing to him first.
Now should such a thing occur, in addition to the fifty-eight divisions von Rundstedt already had to defend Western Europe, there would suddenly be made available to him over a hundred battle-tested Nazi divisions from the Russian front. In the face of such a force, even to try to carry through an invasion of Europe would be inviting sure disaster. We might land, but no army we could muster in 1944 could hope to defeat immediately thereafter such an overwhelmingly reinforced Nazi army. Those were the facts to be faced by Eisenhower and his top commanders, sea, air, and land, as all through that dismal June 4 the rain beat down on southern England and the gale, strong as ever, howled by to cover the Channel with foam-crested waves running five to eight feet high. By 1600 June 4, the convoys from the Bristol Channel must sail again if on June 6 the assault was to be made. But by 1600 June 4, the weather was as bad as ever, with no indication whatever from the meteorologists that any improvement was in sight on the weather charts over the North Atlantic, which was the source of that gale beating all our hopes into the deep mud everywhere surrounding us. Should the Bristol fleet be held, or allowed to sail again? Eisenhower decided to let them go. If by noon, June 5, the signal, BOWSPRIT, had to be made, they could again be recalled while at sea. And that, of course, would definitely put an end to the invasion for early June. But meanwhile, they might as well be on their way to permit the invasion to be staged on June 6, if by any miracle over the next twelve hours there should be any sign of a change in the storm. The rest of June 4 went by with the storm as bad as ever. The rain beat down; the mud underfoot grew deeper; on the Channel, the storm-driven whitecaps grew higher and higher. June 5 dawned. Clad in foul weather gear, I dashed out for a look at the weather seaward from the beach at Selsey Bill, as the first light broke. Gloomily I came back to join Barton indoors for breakfast. The weather was no better; possibly the wind was blowing even harder than the day before. I was confident that by noon, once again we would get from Portsmouth the word, BOWSPRIT—delay once more, for good this time. Slowly the hours dragged along toward noon, the storm blew on, but no word came. Noon came and went and no word of any nature. Wonderingly Barton and I looked at each other. The instructions were that unless we heard affirmatively of a postponement, the party was on. But in such weather, it didn’t seem possible to proceed. Somehow we must have missed receiving the code
to delay. Barton checked with Stanford in Portsmouth, but found there was no mistake—no signal for delay had ever been sent, the party was on. I looked outdoors again at the wind-lashed waves and I couldn’t believe it. God help the poor G.I.’s sent to land through such seas! But what I did not know, what none of us along the Channel, not even General Bradley or Admiral Kirk, poised in Plymouth for the jump-off, knew, was that at Southwick House, Admiral Ramsay’s naval headquarters on the bluffs overlooking Portsmouth, at 0400 that morning there had been a last forlorn hope meeting of the Supreme Command to check the weather. Fighting their way through mud and rain to that meeting were Eisenhower himself, Supreme Commander; Bedell Smith, his Chief of Staff; Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander; Admiral Ramsay, Royal Navy, Commander of Allied Naval Forces; General Montgomery, Army Commander; Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory of the R.A.F., Air Commander; together with the Chiefs of Staff to these last four. Group Captain J. M. Stagg of the R.A.F., Chief Meteorologist for the combined squad of British and American weather forecasters, a tall and gaunt Scotsman, came in. For the last few days, Stagg and his men had been going through hell—the settled weather we had been blessed with all through May and for the first couple of June days had unexpectedly broken up on them. From now on, long range forecasting was impossible; twenty-four hours in advance was farther even than could wholly be relied on. Stagg’s weather predictions for Britain were based on reports coming to him from as far west as Greenland, where beyond the North Atlantic, we had weather stations reporting hourly to Stagg. (It may be said here that earlier in the war, the Nazis, realizing Greenland’s importance weather-wise, had also set up weather stations on the isolated icy Greenland plateaus, but these our Arctic task forces had long since wiped out, leaving the Nazis blind weather-wise, so far as the Atlantic was concerned.) The evening before, Stagg’s weather reports from Greenland and all points east of it in the Atlantic, including Iceland, had shown no cause whatever for any hope that any change was in sight. But during the night, something that startled Stagg had come in. The low pressure area from around Iceland which, spreading southward against an Atlantic high, had caused the storm, was unexpectedly being pushed back now by a sudden reversal in trend of that high pressure belt in the region of the Azores. And that high pressure belt coming up from the Azores was now heading for England at amazing speed. There was
going to be a change in the weather, and soon, unlikely as that might seem to anyone poking his head outdoors. Captain Stagg smiled wanly. Then he called attention to the storm howling outside, as predicted, but he might just as well not have bothered. Everyone present knew perfectly well that had Stagg’s prediction of the day before been disregarded and the invasion fleet been sailed as scheduled for D-day on this morning of June 5, the invasion by now would have been an irretrievable disaster. Stagg, looking around to check that that point had registered with all his hearers, ventured now on a further prediction. Regardless of how hopeless the outlook had seemed to all of them as they came through the storm to the meeting, from the data now at hand he could safely promise a marked break in the weather. Commencing late that afternoon, June 5, there would be a break in the storm lasting through for twenty-four to perhaps thirty-six hours. The weather on June 6, therefore, should be passable, with a drop in wind velocity and some break in the clouds. By evening of June 6, more bad weather with higher winds and rougher seas again, though not as bad as at that moment, could be expected when the Azores high had passed them by and the Iceland low took over again behind it. That was as far as his data, based on the reports covering the Atlantic from Greenland’s icy plateaus to the verdant slopes of the Azores, would let him go. We should soon have better weather—not good but better—for twenty-four hours starting late that afternoon, June 5. That was the gist of it. Stagg withdrew; what was done with his report was the business of others. Eisenhower looked about at his commanders. All had heard; some had even questioned Stagg as to details on clouds and visibility. All were thinking deeply now on what effect going in under the conditions set out by Stagg would have on his part of the operation. Eisenhower asked for comment. Should they go—or postpone for two weeks? Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander, was not sure. Leigh-Mallory, who actually commanded the joint air forces, also was most dubious. Both felt conditions would be poor for air support. General Smith was greatly concerned over whether poor visibility might not wash out naval spotting, exposing the first wave to unopposed enemy fire, a very serious handicap, but still he was for going in—delay was worse. General Montgomery, over-all troop commander for both British and American assaults, was unreservedly for attack—no delay for him. As for Admiral Ramsay, his position was that the Navy would manage either way; it was for the others to decide.
The choice obviously was only as between two repulsive-appearing evils. Which was worse—the dangers of delay, or the dangers of attacking under poor, but possibly tolerable conditions? As Eisenhower put it to them after all had expressed their opinions: “The question is, just how long can you hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there?” Since no one but himself was in any position to answer that question, no one even tried, and the discussion ended abruptly while Eisenhower thought it over and the others looked on in silence. Finally, at 0415, in broken phrases showing the turmoil in his mind over his dilemma, he announced his decision: “I’m quite positive we must give the order.… I don’t like it, but there it is.… I don’t see how we can possibly do anything else.” So that was it. In fifteen minutes from the time the meeting had started, it was over. Eisenhower had decided the signal, BOWSPRIT, should not go out the second time. He would chance all on fitting the whole Overlord Operation into the twenty-four hour break in the storm promised him by Captain Stagg. Silently the several commanders went out into the storm to proceed to their various stations for the assault. Eisenhower himself, soon wholly alone, was left with his thoughts. Had he made the right decision? The next few days would tell; till then, neither he nor anyone could know. He didn’t know himself —for sure. Was he wrong? Perhaps. He sat down to do that which there is no record in history of another commander ever having done on the eve of decisive battle—to admit culpability for disaster before it had taken place. So he wrote: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.” And then he slipped that unprecedented statement, known to no one else whatever, into his pocket to be released only should his decision to move in bad weather rather than risk the dangers of delay end in such a blood bath on the Far Shore that he would have no option save to withdraw the remnants to avoid complete massacre. That would be Dieppe all over again, except that his failure this time would be irretrievable and on a vastly grander scale. But he might comfort himself with the thought that probably he should never have to release it. For in spite of the poor conditions unexpectedly thrown in
his path by the weather, his margin of safety in the operation was tremendous. His intelligence reports, all based on accurate and detailed data from reliable men of the French Resistance in the Normandy area, showed a startling thing. The entire front of the Omaha Beach, in spite of all the labor put into its defenses by Rommel, was manned by one battalion only of the German 726th Regiment—of itself only a very mediocre fighting outfit composed 50% of impressed Poles and Russians, who could have little urge to die for Adolf Hitler. On top of that, since the 726th Regiment had to stretch itself along the Channel from Port-en-Bessin to Grandcamp, a front of twelve miles, it had been able to allot just one battalion, only 800 to 1000 of its men, to cover the actual three mile line of the Omaha Beach sands—scarcely men enough to man the fixed defenses, with no one at all left over for reserves or for casualty replacements. Against such a weakly manned front, the beautifully organized and carefully rehearsed attack of the 34,000 men of the two superb American divisions, the 1st and the 29th, spearheading our assault on the Omaha Beach, should swiftly crash through and overwhelm their far-outnumbered opponents, even without any help from our Air Corps or from our Navy on the beaches. And while that was going on, the lone battalion defending the beachhead could expect no timely support. For the nearest mobile fighting force Rommel had to the Omaha Beach was the German 352nd Division, a tough outfit to be sure, but they were reported in reserve at St. Lò, over twenty miles inland. The 352nd Division could not possibly get to the beachhead till late afternoon of D-day. By then of course, we should have smashed well inland, and have reserves enough of our own ashore to fight off the whole of the 352nd—and much more. Consequently, good weather or bad, as long as we achieved strategic surprise, there was really no cause for the Supreme Commander to worry about ever having to dig from his pocket that remarkable statement.
CHAPTER 19 So with the gale still howling, the Bristol flotilla, already underway, kept on through the night for the Channel. As dawn broke, the forces from all the ports round about Plymouth slipped to sea during the early morning of June 5. And as the day wore on, from all remaining Channel ports, in spite of the storm, the other squadrons sailed. From the heights behind Portsmouth, I watched the ships there weigh anchor—so many ships, so tightly packed into the wide waters north of the Isle of Wight, that the mere getting them underway without innumerable collisions was an unbelievable feat of seamanship. Soon our 4000 ships, the largest armada ever in history to put to sea bent on invading an enemy coast, was streaming eastward along the shores of southern England, bound for the Channel rendezvous. This was a specially buoyed circle in the open sea, marked on everybody’s chart, and called YOKE, ten miles in diameter, well to the southeast of the Isle of Wight. From YOKE, during the night, completely blacked out, that tremendous fleet moved silently on in ten columns abreast for Normandy, each vessel following the dim willo’-the-wisp light faintly marking the stern of the ship ahead. Over them, at from 3000 to 5000 feet, now flew Leigh-Mallory’s air umbrella of fighting planes alert to protect them from air attack, though it was hardly expected Goering’s badly pummeled Luftwaffe would come out. Ahead of them, with electronic, acoustic, and mechanical sweeps all in operation, covering the ten lanes in which they moved, steamed ten squadrons of minesweepers, sweeping en echelon for such mines as could be swept. Amongst the transports, vigilant to scurry toward the first sign of any explosion erupting beneath a troopship, tossing like corks as they fought the seas, came the fifty Coast Guard picket boats, the smallest vessels in the fleet, ready with life rings and scramble nets to drag from the water the floundering G.I.’s from such transports as were unfortunate enough to meet a mine that could not be swept. Astern of the sweepers came the naval barrage vessels, by far the largest ships in the movement. First steamed the seven dreadnaughts—four British, Warspite, Nelson, Rodney, and Ramillies, to cover the three British beaches to the east; and three American, Texas, Nevada, and Arkansas, to cover Omaha
and Utah Beaches. Then astern the battleships rode the cruiser force of four British and three American cruisers. Finally on the flanks steamed a mixed flotilla of over forty destroyers, British and American, to protect against both E-boat and U-boat attack. Later, close in on the Far Shore, these destroyers would join the battleships and cruisers in the naval barrage scheduled to precede H-hour. And finally, lending a bizarre effect to the armada, overhead floated thousands of barrage balloons, streaming astern each vessel to foul up any Nazi fighter trying to slip in beneath the air umbrella on a strafing mission. The weather was not good. As predicted, somewhat before darkness fell, the wind moderated to about twenty knots, the skies partly cleared, and the waves in the Channel decreased somewhat—to about five feet in height. Even in the regular ocean-going transports, that was enough to make the average G.I. seasick. But in all the special landing craft—the small but shipshape 150 foot LCI(L)’s, the shallow draft LST’s, and the many variations of the flat-bottomed barge-like LCT’s, the troops embarked had a miserable voyage. For such small vessels, five and six foot high waves were heavy seas indeed; they had trouble maintaining course and speed; the G.I.’s in them were all soon badly under the weather. Long before they had cleared the YOKE rendezvous, and turned southward directly into the open Channel, they were a thoroughly seasick set of soldiers who would be landed for assault, come H-hour. Still, even that had some compensation. The desperately seasick men were too oblivious now to all else save their then retching stomachs to keep their imaginations on the terrors promised them by Goebbels on the Far Shore, now mile by mile getting closer as H-hour approached. But to Rear Admiral Alan Kirk, Commander of the Western Naval Task Force, whose major job it was to get General Omar Bradley and his first U. S. Army to the Omaha and the Utah Beaches reasonably intact for the assault, Hhour was a problem hours away yet. Kirk had more pressing problems to engage his immediate attention. There were those lightning-fast Nazi E-boats, working out of Cherbourg, which had hit Exercise Tiger. As darkness fell, Kirk paced his bridge on the cruiser Augusta, his flagship, subconsciously keeping a wary eye on the sea to starboard. On that side lay Cherbourg. It was inconceivable that Admiral Theodor Krancke, German Naval Commander at Cherbourg, could be any longer unaware of the day long movement of such vast numbers of ships in the Channel hardly fifty miles to northward of him. He had radar, he had air reconnaissance, he had his fast patrol boats. One or all
of these was bound to spot the movement, and it could not possibly be misinterpreted this time for a rehearsal headed for some point on English beaches. It could mean only one thing—the invasion was finally underway. What that news would mean to Rommel, come H-hour, was General Bradley’s affair. Right now, what it meant to Admiral Krancke was what desperately concerned Kirk. For Krancke could be waiting only for cover of night to strike with everything’ he had. In the murky darkness, any moment now Kirk could expect hurtling destroyers and E-boats at 40 knots to come lunging suddenly at him out of the night, letting go salvos of torpedoes at the slow-moving columns of ships wallowing along in the wake of the minesweepers. With such a huge number of targets broadside to them, each torpedo could hardly miss hitting some ship. And the usual defenses for a vessel under torpedo attack—maneuvering evasively or sharply changing speed—would do none of his ships the slightest good. Such maneuvers would lead only to collisions in the darkness which could easily be as disastrous to life on his jam-packed transports as exploding torpedoes. Kirk had but one defense—his own radar, and those on his destroyer screen. He must detect the impending attack while yet it was far outside torpedo range and smash it with his screening destroyers before it got within range. On the Augusta, on every flanking destroyer, the radar men sat with eyes fixed on their radar screens, intent on catching the first faraway pip of light which would signal an enemy destroyer or an E-boat making an approach. But as the night wore on Kirk and his men gazed more and more incredulously at their radar screens. Not a single pip ever showed up! Was it possible that from all over the south coast of England such tremendous numbers of ships could get to sea undetected by enemy radar, enemy reconnaissance planes, enemy patrol boats? They couldn’t believe it. But it was so. The same foul weather that had tied knots in the Overlord schedule had put the enemy to sleep. For, lacking the weather information that Stagg had gathered from Greenland, from Iceland, and from the Azores, the Nazis had not the slightest intimation that there was in prospect for June 6 even a twenty-four hour break in the storm whipping up the Channel. To them, all through June 5 it looked from local indications as a bad gale bound to continue for some days. Now to Nazis who believed firmly that June 1 having gone by without attack, no assault could be staged until June 15; and further that regardless of the moon, no assault anyway could take place in any such weather, ordinary
vigilance seemed unnecessary. Since two nights before, when the storm first struck, no routine patrols had gone to sea from Cherbourg; no reconnaissance flights had been made from anywhere; and even the German radar, whatever the reasons (probably lack of vigilance) had picked up nothing at all of what was going on along the far side of the Channel. Nor for that matter any sign of what now by air and by sea was approaching Normandy this night of June 5. How the Nazis, in view of this combination of conditions, regarded any probability of action on June 6 was well highlighted by three things. Rommel himself, en route to Obersalzburg in Austria for a personal conference with Hitler, was on June 6 stopping over at his own home near Ulm in Germany for the day—he wasn’t even in France, let alone with his armies in Normandy. Further, on June 5, because of bad weather Admiral Krancke had cancelled all mine laying and patrol operations out of Cherbourg harbor which had been already scheduled for that night. And finally, General Dollmann, Commander of Rommel’s Seventh Army, had revoked a practice invasion alert previously ordered for all troops along the Normandy coast for the night of June 5, so his subordinate commanders could attend a war game to be played on June 6 in the army map room in Rennes, a hundred miles to the south. So it was. Between their own fixed conceptions as to what phase of the moon we might attack in, and their belief that no one could launch an attack in the foul weather that day lashing the Channel, the Nazis in Normandy failed wholly to detect and to oppose in any way, save by already placed minefields, the movement of our ships or of the planes carrying our paratroopers. As the hours drew on toward midnight, Kirk’s fears about E-boats and destroyers slackened. If they were ever coming out, they should be attacking by then. Still, there was no slackening of the radar watch. However, there still remained somewhere ahead of him those sixteen Nazi minefields, laid during the last half of 1943 in the middle of the Channel by the enemy. Destroyers and E-boats, if your radar was good, you could detect in advance and if you were fast with your guns, you might counter. But minefields were different; there was never any advance warning. The first knowledge you had you were in a minefield was when the sweepers started to explode them, and (so you hoped) without themselves being blown sky-high. When your sweeping techniques were right for the type of mine in your path, the sweepers would explode them all safely astern of themselves. When the techniques your sweepers had didn’t suit the types of mines you encountered, or when some new type you had no gear to sweep appeared in your path, the results then were different and
extraordinarily distressing. Both the minesweepers and the vessels following them, regardless of size, normally all disappeared amidst huge volcanoes of erupting flame and water. But to the intense relief of every Navy man in the convoy from Kirk on down (not the least relieved of whom were the crews of the minesweepers themselves) no mines were encountered—or, at any rate, no live ones. Those original minefields were now so old that their detonating mechanisms apparently were no longer operative—there could be no other explanation of such luck. And to keep them that way, for months before, our vigilance in the open Channel had denied to Krancke any opportunity on a major scale to freshen up his minefields. So to the incredulous amazement of all hands in the naval convoy, the invasion squadrons stood on across the Channel, undetected and unmolested in any way, either by torpedoes or by mines, thanks partly to the storm, partly to the vigilance which had prevented the laying of any new mines in those old fields. The Coast Guard picket boats found nothing to do on the crossing. They might just as well have stayed in the United States. Of all the thousands of G.I.’s conservatively estimated to require rescue that night from the dark waters of the English Channel, not one man went overboard. But by most of the G.I.’s on the crossing, that bit’ of luck went unnoticed—they were too sick to care. With the unmolested invasion fleet nearly all the way over on its passage toward the coast of Normandy, to the Nazi defenders still blissfully unaware of what was going on, there came a sudden awakening. At 0200 on the early morning of June 6 American paratroopers started to drop from the skies on the Cherbourg Peninsula well inland behind the Utah beachhead. Simultaneously, fifty miles away, British paratroopers began to rain down on both banks of the Orne, just east of Caen. Within minutes, in both sectors, German sentries sleepily walking their posts found themselves suddenly engaged in hand to hand actions in the fitful moonlight, trying to fight off blackened-face demons rushing to seize the nearby bridgeheads. That began at 0200. By 0215, Seventh Army Headquarters for all Normandy and Brittany at Le Mans was flashing out warnings, ordering the highest state of alert to every defense installation along the coast of Normandy from Caen in the east to Avranches at the western base of the Cherbourg Peninsula. Immediately, although it was miles away from where on the east and on the west startled Nazis inland were already battling paratroopers, the Atlantic Wall came
suddenly to life. But its hastily turned out defenders, peering out from its defenses into the storm and the darkness to seaward saw nothing there to alarm them. Beyond alerting its coastal defenses, Seventh Army Headquarters was still literally and figuratively in the dark as to what it should do next. So also was von Rundstedt himself, hastily routed out-of bed, to whom all this had instantly been transmitted at his headquarters in far-off Paris. What meant these two seemingly isolated air attacks, so far apart? Had a major invasion aimed at Normandy actually begun? Von Rundstedt in Paris thought it over and concluded not. To him it was most likely a diversionary attack, intended to draw his main forces, the Fifteenth Army, away from the Pas de Calais. The instant he moved from there, Calais would be assaulted by Patron’s army in the real allied effort. He refused to be drawn off base. No troop movements of any nature from other areas to reinforce Normandy were to be made. Field Marshal von Rundstedt was not going to be made a fool of. The Seventh Army, with the forces on hand already in its sector, would cordon off and destroy the paratroopers attacking its flanks. It should not take long. Meanwhile, of course, the defenses of the Atlantic Wall should remain on the alert for whatever, if anything, might follow in that area during the night. But if there was indecision in the German High Command as to what the paratroop attack portended, there was no indecision whatever among those gathered at Rennes as to what was indicated for them. Instantly the map exercise for the coming day was abandoned—the action for June 6 was not going to be on paper. Within a few minutes, out of Rennes, staff cars were on their way to the threatened front. Heading east toward his headquarters in Le Mans roared the car bearing Colonel General Friedrich Dollmann, commanding Seventh Army. Northward at high speed rushed other staff cars, headed first for St. Lô, where they would separate, bearing Generalleutnant Dietrich Kraiss, commanding the powerful 352nd Division, and Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, commanding the troops defending Cherbourg and its Peninsula. As these cars ran through the night for St. Lô, General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, whose 84th Corps was holding the areas attacked, had substantial cause to congratulate himself. With the blessing of Rommel himself on the change, he had already pulled that ragtag regiment, the 726th, composed half of substandard Germans, half of Russian and Polish “volunteers,” out of the
line facing the beaches. And in their place, he had moved up from reserve in St. Lô to man the Atlantic Wall in that sector, not just a better regiment but instead an entire infantry division of three regiments, the 352nd, the very best he had. The 352nd, Generalleutnant Kraiss’ Division, were a fine outfit—battle-tested on the Russian front, well rested now in Normandy, superior fighting men. And to top off all, he was sure the enemy had no knowledge even that they were there, though he had had the 352nd in place for weeks—long enough for them to become thoroughly familiar with all their guns and with the beach terrain before them. For by a freak, his security men had recently shot down a carrier pigeon bearing to England a message from a Resistance agent on recent Nazi troop movements in that area. Without that precious bit of intelligence on changes, the enemy would be unaware that the scum in the 726th, and not even scum enough properly to stretch over that front, no longer faced them there. General der Artillerie Marcks, alone of all those commanding in Normandy, had reason to relax as the others rolled on toward St. Lô. Those paratroopers, east and west on the flanks of his 84th Corps, he would dispose of by morning. And that marriage of the elite 352nd Infantry Division with the Atlantic Wall which he had arranged lifted all remaining worries from his mind. Should von Rundstedt be wrong on the strategy involved, and should it be the Yankee intention really to assault the beaches lying between those paratroop drops, Eisenhower and his men were in for a startling surprise.
CHAPTER 20 Shortly before 0300, with the dreaded Channel crossing uneventfully behind them, Admiral Kirk’s forces separated. So far, on balance the storm had been a blessing. Force U, under Rear Admiral Moon, now turned with its transports southwestward toward the Utah Beach. Force O, under Rear Admiral Hall, kept on due south a few more miles until, still completely blacked out, it came to anchor a little over 12 miles offshore from the sands that were to become the Omaha Beach. This spot, so far out in the open sea, was chosen because at 25,000 yards it was expected to be just outside the effective range of that venomous battery of six 155’s at Pointe du Hoe. An anchorage not one-fourth as far offshore would have been vastly preferable, to avoid subjecting the troops to so long a voyage in small boats in such rough seas. But should they be detected, it was obviously suicidal to bring the transports while unloading within short range of so powerful a battery of howitzers as those on Pointe du Hoe. With the wind still blowing from the northwest at around fifteen to twenty knots, the seas thereabouts running white-caps from three to five feet in height, and beneath a sky half overcast through which the moon showed only intermittently,’ the transports of Force O first put overboard their troop carrying LCVP’s, and then began in the darkness to offload their troops. About 35 men were assigned to each LCVP, six LCVP’s to each infantry company. A cynic might have said that if anything more was necessary to make troops about to go into battle care less about whether they lived through it or died, it was promptly provided by that shattering period of being loaded into pitching LCVP’s from transports rolling in the open seas. The LCVP’s, precariously held alongside by bow and stern lines, leaped and jerked erratically amongst the waves sliding by. Meanwhile the overburdened G.I.’s, each now further encumbered by an inflated Mae West buckled around his middle, clambered down the scramble nets to drop into an LCVP, there to cling desperately to the gunwales, struggling to hold some kind of footing till the remainder of his outfit had come down the scramble nets into the LCVP and they could cast loose. They thought they were seasick already from their rough crossing. Now
that they were being packed into small landing craft gyrating violently among those waves, preparatory to twelve more miles of the same or worse on the long run to the beach, their tortured stomachs began to show them what it was really to be seasick. Meanwhile, the minesweepers which had led the fleet across the Channel steamed closer in and in the darkness began to sweep parallel to the coast line, clearing the water there for the bombarding warships to operate in for the preliminary naval bombardment. Behind them, the larger warships inched slowly in to their firing positions—the battleship Texas with her 14-inch guns on the western side to take Pointe du Hoe under fire; the battleship Arkansas with 12-inch guns on the eastern side to engage a battery at Port-en-Bessin between the British and the American beachheads; and the heavy cruiser Augusta, Kirk’s flagship, with her 8-inch guns about opposite the middle of the beach. Eight destroyers, their convoy duties over, moved closer in even than the big ships, preparing also for their part in the barrage of shells that was to keep down the fire from the guns on the cliffs when the landing craft ran in. The Nazis of that tough outfit, the 352nd Infantry Division, manning the casemates and trenches fringing the cliff tops and bluffs, all alerted now to the fact that far to east and west of them paratroop landings had taken place inland, looked anxiously to seaward in the darkness but saw nothing at all there to alarm them. Nevertheless, twelve miles out the unloading of troops into LCVP’s was furiously going on, nine miles out the battleships were taking station, and three miles out the line of LCT’s that were to launch the 64 DD tanks for the close-in artillery support were ranging themselves opposite their intended strips of beach. All this took nearly two hours, but with every vessel concerned still completely blacked-out it went on totally unobserved from shore. Sunrise was due on June 6 at 0558. The tide would be low at 0525. H-hour was set for 0630, about an hour after dead low water. Dawn and the first light sufficient for some visibility should come at 0530. At H-40, that is, at 0550, the assault on the beachhead was to open with the naval bombardment, thus allowing about 20 minutes after dawn for the light to strengthen enough for decent visibility. Ten minutes before this, at 0540, the 64 DD’s, which were no speedboats, were to go overboard for their three mile swim in to the shore. This allowed them forty-five minutes to get to the beachhead waterline, there to open fire on the enemy guns above them at H-5, five minutes before the spearhead of the first infantry wave touched down there at H-hour.
Meanwhile, General Bradley, looking down into the darkness from the Augusta’s bridge at the waves washing by, began to have qualms as to whether all would go as planned with an assault predicated on fine weather. They were having, as a fact, the break in the storm predicted by Captain Stagg, but even so, no one but a moron could call this any weather suitable for a sea borne invasion. Admiral Kirk had suggested that among those waves, the DD’s might not prove as seaworthy as in rehearsal on the Slapton Sands in Devonshire. Bradley gazed dubiously at those foam-crested waves, rolling endlessly by to disappear into the windy night. What would such waves do to the flimsy canvas wings that made his tanks amphibious? And if, as seemed likely, those waves did what seemed probable to his DD tanks, what would the G.I.’s on the beachhead do without their close-in artillery support? But to Bradley on the Augusta it looked too late for-him now to do anything, though the landing craft bearing those DD’s were still within a few miles of him. It was, he felt, up to the junior officers on the DD’s themselves and in the LCT’s carrying them, to decide what to do; and to the G.I.’s in the LCVP’s to take the consequences of those decisions. To the High Command—to Bradley, commanding the First U. S. Army for both beaches; to Gerow, commanding the V corps which was making the assault on Omaha; to Huebner, commanding the 1st Division and to Gerhardt, commanding the 29th Division, whose men were spearheading the invasion, the minutes went slowly by as they sweated it out on the naval flagships waiting for the first light of dawn to illuminate the effects of such dismal weather on their beautifully thought out plans. To the Navy’s young sea men, none of whom in any war theater had ever been under fire before, manning now a thousand landing craft of all kinds close in on a hostile shore, trying desperately to get their tossing boats into position for starting the long run in to those cliffs so far away they couldn’t even make them out as blobs in the night, the minutes went too fast as they cursed the seas that were threatening to ruin all chance of maneuvering their boats into the alignments they had so carefully rehearsed on the British beaches. But in some order or other, still in the darkness, they finally got underway. And to the seasick soldiers, cased in assault jackets jammed with ammunition and grenades, heavily laden with weapons, packed now into tossing LCVP’s, with every breaking wave drenching them with thick spray to add to their miseries, time seemed to stand still—they were mostly beyond
caring as to whether it moved or not. The dawn broke at last, a misty, hazy dawn. There would be light now, of course, but the sun itself was something that obviously was not going to shine that morning. Visibility through the morning mist was very poor. To the strained eyes of the gunnery officers on the warships offshore, the cliffs over Omaha started slowly to take shape on the distant southern horizon. Through their director telescopes, the fire control officers, high up in the tripod masts, began to focus hairlines on the points on’ the distant cliffs which were their mapped targets. Obediently, the big guns in the turrets followed the directors to train on those objectives. Initially they would simply fire on points marked on their charts as the hidden locations of enemy guns, except for that one battery atop Pointe du Hoe—that isolated point the fire control officers on the Texas could actually see. Later, when the naval spotters in the little Piper Cubs from England came over the beachhead at H-hour, the guns could all be fired more accurately. Then the locations of the actual casemates on those cliffs would be disclosed by radio to the fire control parties on the warships, with the fall of the shots called for them and corrected by their spotters in the air. With such close-in spotting, results with heavy shells from naval guns were always sure —and swift. 0550. Thunder and lightning broke the stillness off Omaha. The battle was on. All together the warships opened fire. From the 14-inch guns of the Texas, from the 12’s on the Arkansas, from the 8’s on the Augusta, from the 5’s.on eight destroyers, full salvos leaped on long arcs through the skies to come down all along the cliff line from Pointe du Hoe to Port-enBessin, to drive the defenders from their guns to such underground shelter as they might have provided. Meanwhile, even before those heavy naval shells began arching over their heads, the LCVP’s from twelve miles out had already got underway in the darkness. Now that there was light on the heaving seas, they struggled to rectify their ragged alignment. There were fifty boats in that formation, running in line abeam, one hundred yards between boats. And in that formation they were to hit the beach, well spread out, offering to enemy fire only a widely scattered set of targets covering evenly the whole extent of the sands from the Vierville Draw on their right to beyond the Colleville Draw on their left. This would disperse the fire of the machine guns on the bluffs and prohibit a heavy concentration on any single group of G.I.’s while wading ashore.
Into the fifty landing craft in the first line were loaded the cream of the assault regiments, veterans of the North African and Sicilian landings, many of them—nine companies all told. There were eight companies of the Regimental Combat Teams of the 116th Infantry and of the 16th Infantry, augmented on the right flank by Company C of Lieut. Colonel Rudder ’s 2nd Rangers. And simultaneously on the far right of this line and several miles due west of it, Lieut. Colonel James Rudder himself with three other companies of the 2nd Rangers, 250 men altogether, carried by ten British LCA’s, started in for their own desperate adventure against the cliffs and the guns of Pointe du Hoe. Theirs was to be an isolated battle, far removed from the main thrust. Only three minutes behind the first line of troop-laden LCVP’s came a line of 24 LCM’s, wallowing even more heavily along in the breaking waves than the LCVP’s. For the LCM’s were carrying the vital demolition parties. These were the combat engineers and the naval demolition groups, loaded down with the explosives needed to blast gaps in the obstacles to clear paths for the boats astern. And with them in some LCT’s were more combat engineers and sixteen bulldozers. These, when the demolition groups had blasted clear the way for them, were to waddle ashore, there to bulldoze openings in the shingle, the dunes, and the seawall to give immediate passage for mobile artillery and vehicles from off the beach sands up and on to the beach road. And from there, once the strongpoints guarding them had been knocked out, on to the four vital breaks in the cliffs leading to the plateau inland. Right astern these two leading lines of LCVP’s and LCM’s came a space of several miles of open sea, intended to give the demolition teams thirty minutes to cut clear their gaps, unimpeded by landing craft trying to come in while they were blasting obstacles. But seaward of that open stretch came line after line of landing craft of every kind carrying more infantry, more engineers, then the line of LCT (R)’s with their rockets, then dozens of Dukws with their 105 mms. for artillery support, then again more landing craft, till in all eighteen successive waves of landing craft, coming in at intervals of minutes only apart, had put ashore along that three mile beach 34,000 fighting men and over 3000 vehicles. These were the first wave only. On their heels, starting in at noon, the second wave would come. The guns on the warships kept belching shells at the cliffs. What the results might be, for the present they could only guess, except on Pointe du Hoe. That the 14-inch shells from the Texas, visibly exploding on top of Pointe du Hoe were at the very least keeping the German gunners there from their guns, was
obvious from a fact noted with gratified surprise by General Bradley himself. Not one shell fired in counter-battery had come from those heavy howitzers on Pointe du Hoe, though now in the spreading daylight thousands of ships were within sight of it, many of them within easy range, as fine a set of targets as any artilleryman could ever hope to have offered him. But still, absolutely no counter-battery fire from Pointe du Hoe. The Texas kept on firing to keep the situation that way till Colonel Rudder and his Rangers had scaled the cliffs to take care of that battery from then on. The leading line of LCVP’s, growing more ragged as it advanced, came on past the Texas, then past the Augusta. The LCVP’s were having a desperate time of it amongst the waves. Green seas were breaking over their gunwales, starting to flood their open interiors. To avoid disaster from the water rapidly rising in their boats, coxswains shrieking to make themselves heard above the roar of nearby guns ordered their seasick passengers to forget their stomachs, to doff their helmets, and to bail for their lives. Most did, and managed to keep their LCVP’s afloat. In ten boats, however, for whatever reason, the bailing was not enough—they swamped and sank, leaving their troops, heavily weighted down, to flounder in the waves. And the first G.I.’s of many more to come began to strangle and drown in the breaking waves in the seas off Omaha. The rest of the LCVP’s, not daring to break formation to maneuver to try to rescue anybody, kept on for the beach. 7000 yards away now; about two-thirds of the way in. Still too far off for any fire from the laterally sited guns on the cliffs ahead to reach them, but soon—unless they also swamped first—they would be within range. And then as they closed the beachhead, the naval fire would have to be lifted and those guns on the cliffs would open up. First the casemated 88’s and the 75’s, then those hornets’ nests in the trenches, with their machine guns and mortars— unless they were countered. Anxiously the bailing soldiers, as they heaved helmets-ful of salt water over the gunwales, snatched a glimpse ahead at the stretch of tumbling sea still between them and the distant breakers. Not too far ahead of them now should be their first and their best counter—that flotilla of 64 DD tanks, over one tank for each LCVP, swimming in to touch down on the beachhead five minutes before they did and to provide there the counter-battery fire on which their lives depended. Where were those DD’s, anyway? Launched from their LCT’s only 6000 yards offshore, they should be not more than 1000 yards ahead now, easily in sight even in that rough water, stretched out in a line longer even than theirs.
But not a G.I. could spot one. And then with sinking hearts, they spotted the answer instead—close alongside as well as farther off in the waves. The water thereabouts was dotted with little knots of men on rubber rafts, some not on rafts but simply in Mae Wests, all bobbing violently about in the heaving seas, all wildly waving to the nearest LCVP to stop and drag them from the water. The DD’s, not so amphibious as had been hoped for, less seaworthy by far than the LCVP’s, had apparently all promptly swamped—those men struggling in the water were the tank crews—those few of them, that is, that had managed somehow to get out the escape hatches. Where the rest of the tank crews were with those ponderous monsters now submerged completely was not difficult to imagine. Dismally the seasick G.I.’s in the LCVP’s looked at each other. The sinking of those DD’s was as likely to be their death warrant as that of those men already drowned or drowning in those foaming seas. For there was not now going to be any close-in artillery support to smother the Nazi guns when they got to the beach! But they couldn’t stop bailing long enough to discuss what that might mean. And besides, there still was that carpet of bombs from the air, the rocket barrage, the Navy bombardment, and those dozens of 105’s coming in behind them on the Dukws, to take care of the Nazis. Those might yet save them. They kept on bailing. But the LCVP’s kept on also, in spite of the pleas from the drowning men in the water. The coxswains all had strict orders to keep formation and hold on for the beach, regardless, or many more men would certainly die as a result of their efforts to save a few. However, their formation was no longer what it should be. There were gaps where LCVP’s had sunk. And there was a much worse gap, a thousand yards at least, between most of the remaining LCVP’s and the half dozen or so carrying the infantry on the right flank. Unobserved by most of the coxswains, whose view of the none too obvious landmarks on the cliffs ahead was very badly obscured by smoke and mist, the three knot tidal current running flood along the coast was setting them down to the eastward. And this drift was further aggravated by a stiff wind blowing from the northwest. Only the LCVP’s carrying the right hand company, Company A of the 116th Infantry, and the two LCA’s with Company C of the 2nd Rangers traveling with them, avoided this mistake. Possibly Pointe de la Percée, somewhat to the right of their objective, an easily recognized cliff, gave the coxswains of these right flank boats a better mark to steer by. At any rate, the right flank alone, with
touchdown not far off, was the only group still headed for its proper objective. All the others, with an unfortunately wide gap open in the line, were being bunched up too far to the east. The landing now could not possibly be the evenly spaced touchdown intended. A lot of men were going to be landed in front of terrain on which they had never been briefed and of which they knew nothing; and to make matters worse, so bunched together when they hit the beach as to make them luscious targets for the machine guns on the cliffs— unless those guns were themselves washed out first.
0600. Thirty minutes to H-hour. Overhead, mingling with the thunder of the naval guns, came now the steady drone of over 1300 airplane engines as some 330 Liberators, the four-engined B-24’s, the heaviest bombing planes our air corps had, flew over to deliver the coup de grace to the Nazi defenses crowning the heights above the beach. Instantly every G.I. glanced hopefully skyward. With the DD’s washed out, those Liberators were now his best hope of survival. But he could see nothing of them. The bombers were all above the cloud cover. Unfortunately, neither could the bombardiers, in those B-24’s see anything of the beach below. They would consequently all have to bomb through overcast, by instrument. Sensing this probability, the Eighth Air Force the night before had already obtained from Eisenhower permisison to hold their drop a few seconds beyond the indicated instrument release point to insure dropping no bombs on our own landing craft approaching the beach. For over fifteen minutes, from about H-30 to H-15, the steady roar of invisible engines showed that huge formation of B-24’s still passing overhead to unload over the beachhead. 13,000 bombs cascaded down from those B-24’s. With the mist, the dust and the smoke from the naval bombardment already obscuring the beachhead, from the tossing LCVP’s still over two miles offshore nobody aboard could see anything in particular of what as the result was happening ashore. Nevertheless, all hands, seasick and worn from bailing as they were, bucked up appreciably as they heard the distant rumble of the exploding bombs. 13,000 bombs! There wouldn’t be any Nazis left now, nor any barbed wire or land mines either to bother about. Instinctively, they all felt better. Bailing now was their, only problem. When they got there, the Omaha Beach would be as
thoroughly drenched as if a tropical cloudburst had struck it—except that the drenching would have come from a cloudburst of exploding bombs. The beach was going to be a shambles. 13,000 bombs! 0615. H-15 now. The last of the invisible B-24’s had unloaded its bombs and passed inland. The LCVP’s had still somewhat over a mile to go till they reached the breakers. A couple of thousand yards astern, anyone looking aft could see the rocket launching LCT(R)’s jockeying to get into position for their show; that is, to come up on their firing line exactly at the right instant. But they were in trouble, both from the rough seas and from the wash of the wakes of other landing craft surging about them. It all made station keeping for the LCT(R)’s an almost impossible task. Their rockets were all set for a range of 3000 yards—were they that far off, or closer? Or maybe too far out? That last could be bad. In such a case, they’d land their rockets on our own men. It was safer to be in a little too much than out a little too far. They edged in a bit to make sure, and then struggled with the sea to hold alignment and the proper distance as they came in, keeping their eyes on the leading line of LCVP’s. They must hold that rocket barrage to the last second they dared. If they fired too soon, the Nazis, holed up by the naval fire, would still be in their underground shelters—they wouldn’t catch them exposed. And if they fired too late, they might spray our own troops, already unloading on the beach. 0627. The bursts from heavy naval shells exploding on the cliffs lifted suddenly and shifted to targets in the hinterland. The dust clouds fringing the bluffs started slowly to drift clear. A long minute went by. If the Nazi defenders were ever coming out to man their guns, now was that time; our landing craft were hardly 500 yards off. And if those Nazis were coming out, now was the time to catch them exposed. Part of another minute went by. On the flat decks of the LCT(R)’s, bristling all over with rockets like porcupines with quills erected, the crews waited tensely. Their alignment was far from what was intended, but there was no time any more to waste on checking alignment. 300 yards more to go for the LCVP’s to get to where the breakers marked the shoreline. The nine LCT(R)’s burst suddenly into billowing flame as if they had themselves exploded, 9000 high explosive rockets, each streaming fire, leaped
skyward in such a fireworks exhibition as no man thereabouts had ever seen before. In graceful arcs they curved upward over the LCVP’s, turned, and came down to explode in a second massive drenching that should tear to pieces everything in the beachhead area that might have escaped the bombs. But no longer did the men in the boats pay any attention to where those rockets came down, or indeed to anything else any more going on outside their own bobbing landing craft. In seconds from then, down would go the ramps of their LCVP’s, and they would be in action. All bailing stopped. They needed their tin hats now for something else than bailing cans. Back on their heads went their helmets. Each man then tested cautiously the adjustment on his Mae West—even more than on his helmet, his life might well depend on the buoyancy of his life belt. A man, especially should he be wounded now, would badly need its support. Alongside, the waves were cresting up as the water shoaled on the flat sands. Ahead, close now, was the roar of the surf—bad surf, with ominous breakers running three and four feet high—tough for a naked swimmer to negotiate, terrifying to a heavily laden man with a pack on his back and his hands full of weapons. But seasick as he was, each G.I., if he could still think at all, comforted himself with the thought that if only he could get through the surf, in a few minutes that torture would be over—seasickness was a thing that left you with startling speed once the motion causing it had ceased. And especially when you had other matters to take your mind off it. “Stand by to beach!” sang out the coxswains. The boats, now riding in the breakers, pitched violently. Ahead, exposed beyond the breakers, were the obstacles. The moment the bows grounded, down would go the ramps, into the water would go the troops. The G.I.’s braced themselves for the shock of landing. But on many of the LCVP’s, it didn’t go at all that way. A hailstorm of machine gun bullets, directed with fiendish precision, started suddenly to drum against the steel plating of their bow ramps. The Nazis on the cliffs above had opened on them with a well-aimed torrent of fire that meant swift death to all those inside the boat should the steel ramp shielding them go down now. In those LCVP’s, the men looked at each other a moment in dumb amazement. Were these the handfuls of second rate troops they had been told of, manning the defenses? They were firing like full regiments of sharpshooting veterans. But veterans or rookies, why weren’t they all dead? How, in God’s name, had they survived that shower of bombs, that rocket
barrage, ever to man those machine guns? Nobody stopped to give any answer. If the machine guns already had them in their sights, it wouldn’t be long till the slower moving casemated 75’s and 88’s trained on them, with only one exploding shell necessary to tear their craft, steel ramp and all and they with it, to shreds. They dare not stay another second. On many an LCVP, with a stream of bullets beating on its bow, as its forefoot bumped the bottom more often than not on an offshore sandbar and progress ahead stopped, the ramp never went down. Over the sides to dodge the bullets rattling on the ramp went the G.I.’s, to find themselves usually in water up to their necks, and sometimes most unfortunately, in water deeper even than that. On other boats, not at the moment caught by machine gun bursts, the ramps were lowered and the men debarked from forward as intended. But few found conditions much better—rarely was the water less than waist deep as they first plunged into it. But even so, they swiftly learned the beach was so fringed with offshore hidden sandbars on which most of the LCVP’s grounded and dropped their ramps, that a man breasting his way forward with his rifle held high over his head and the water hardly to his hips, might suddenly find himself wholly submerged and swimming for his life before his feet again made any contact with the sand. And when that happened, into the sea went any special equipment he was taking ashore to help in the fight on the beach—bangalore torpedoes, bazookas, mortars, radio equipment. Right ahead now were the obstacles, all fully exposed on the sands but with pools of water here and there about them. You could see them all, fearsome looking objects right in front of you—first the “Belgian Gates,” then the stakes and the hedgehogs, draped with mines, hung with long lines of barbed wire. Gingerly the G.I’s avoided the mined obstacles, cautiously snaked through the wire. It slowed them up fearfully. And all the while the fire from the machine guns on the cliffs seemed to be increasing as they got closer in. The whole crest of the ridges, as well as the strongpoints around the four draws, was spitting fire at them. No one had time to think. Avoidance of entanglement in the barbed wire right before him which would make a man a sitting duck for the machine gunners on the crest above was the main problem in survival. But a few took time to look ahead. Where were all the bomb craters on the beach beyond the high water line, that marked the explosions of the fragmentation bombs meant
to take out the minefields and the concertina wire at the least, since obviously they had failed to knock out many of the dug-in machine-gun nests on the bluffs? But not a single bomb crater was visible anywhere—not on the beach sands, not on the bluff slopes, not on the crests—no craters anywhere. The air bombardment must have been a total loss—that was clear. Actually the bombs—all 13,000 of them—due to too late a release, had missed the beach itself literally by miles. Most of them had landed in the open fields three miles inland. The Nazi gunners on the cliffs hadn’t even known it was they who were supposed to be bombed! And as for the myriad pockmarks that should have been left by the hardly less powerful shower of explosive rockets, they weren’t in evidence either. Every rocket apparently had overshot its mark by far—there was no damage whatever to concertina wire, to trenches, to gun positions from either the carpet of bombs from the B-24’s or the rocket drenching from the LCT(R)’s, either of which alone had power enough wholly to have obliterated the defenders. But both had obviously scored clean misses. The enemy not only was undamaged, but was in position in force enough to light up the whole crest with fire. The lack of beach cratering, immediately visible to every G.I. who snatched a glimpse ahead as he struggled slowly forward through the obstacles, came like a blow between the eyes. The DD tanks which were to have come in ahead of him to engage such guns above as might have survived all that bombing, hadn’t themselves survived the seas to fire a shot to cover his landing. But ironically enough, those Nazi guns had somehow all survived the bombing and there they were, all firing like mad at him. Sicker at heart now than a few minutes ago he had been sick at the stomach, each G.I. saw that he was in for it. There was still a terrible distance to the first possible shelter on the beach—the seawall, the shingle, and the dunes fringing the road. What chance did he have, naked to the fire of all those guns on the cliff, of ever making that seawall, unless those howitzers coming in on the Dukws soon got in close enough to take the place of the foundered DD’s? Or better yet, unless the Navy spotters flew over soon to zero in the heavy naval guns on those strongpoints shooting down at him and blast them from the bluffs? Slowly the exhausted G.I.’s struggled forward through the obstacles, hoping each instant to hear the whistling overhead of counter-battery fire from the 105’s on the Dukws that would silence those murderous machine guns. Or even more, for a sight of those Navy spotting planes coming over the cliffs so the warships offshore could resume fire.
But not everyone struggling forward was still on his feet. The wounded, prone on the wet sands, were crawling in, trying to keep ahead of the tide advancing now at over a yard a minute, only finally to drown when, so weakened they could no longer make that yard, the rising tide caught up with them. Others, more mercifully killed outright, floated face down amongst the obstacles till fouled in the outer wire. There they bobbed gruesomely about in the paths of still other G.I.’s wading by them until the flooding tide rose high enough to tear them free and wash them further inshore to catch again on the next line of barbs. Meanwhile, further offshore, a second tragedy was taking place in the heavy seas to destroy almost the last hope of support for the defenseless G.I.’s struggling toward the beach. About halfway back in the lines of landing craft moving toward the beach came the desperately awaited lines of Dukws. In thirteen Dukws on the right rode the thirteen 105 mm. howitzers of the 111th Field Artillery Battalion, all unlimbered, loaded, and ready to fire. To the left of that battery were thirteen more Dukws carrying the guns of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion. And to the left of these were six more Dukws with the six howitzers of the 16th Infantry Cannon Company. These thirty-two mobile guns were to help furnish fire support while on the way in, firing from the Dukws underway. But most particularly they were to stay, still afloat, just beyond the obstacle line to furnish close-in artillery support to the infantry already ashore, either in addition to the DD’s, or in place of them should they fail to get through the obstacles. But as I had observed weeks before off Selsey Bill the freeboard even of an unloaded Dukw had looked to me as nothing to put up against a voyage in rough seas. With a 105 mm. aboard, together with its ready ammunition and its gun crew of fourteen artillerymen, the remaining freeboard of a Dukw and the seas running off Omaha Beach that morning just didn’t go together. The heavily laden Dukws couldn’t take it. Toward the right of the line, which was the windward side and the most exposed to the breaking seas, the Dukws started to fill and swamp. Soon twelve out of the thirteen guns belonging to the 111th Field Artillery Battalion had gone down, Dukws and all; with them also had been lost many of their gun crews. Six of the howitzers of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion followed them to the bottom. So also did five of the six howitzers belonging to the 16th Infantry Cannon Company. Long before they came anywhere near the surf line, with twenty-three out of thirty-two of these
Dukws already sunk, the crews of the nine remaining were concerned only with staying afloat themselves, not at all with counter-battery fire on the cliffs above Omaha. Bailing desperately, they managed to keep those last few Dukws afloat somehow, but they never fired a shell in support of anybody. Nor till somebody cleared a path for them through the obstacles and up on the hard sand, which as they approached the surf line looked highly dubious for a long while yet, did they dare fire lest the added shock of recoil sink their practically awash Dukws. As a fire support group, the Dukw flotilla with their powerful 105 mm. howitzers had failed the G.I.’s struggling up the sands as badly as had the DD’s with their lighter 75 mms. And now, practically unnoticed in all the turmoil of thun-dering guns on sea and land, of foundering Dukws amongst the foam-crested waves, and of the cries of men drowning everywhere in the spreading wakes churning up the seas astern of endless lines of LCVP’s, came the final blow to any hope of artillery support for the struggling G.I.’s trying to wade ashore. As scheduled, timed to arrive just after H-hour, when neither bombs from the B-24’s, rockets from the LCT(R)’s, nor shells from the naval barrage should knock them from the sky, came the flight of Piper Cubs flown by the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. They bore the spotters for the close-in overhead naval fire control that was to lay directed heavy gun fire from the warships on the enemy casemates and strongpoints atop the cliffs, putting an umbrella of intense and accurate naval shells over the G.I.’s as they waded inshore through the obstacles. Queer looking planes they were; tiny of course, which was one reason they had been chosen for the job; rather slow in speed, which was just what a naval spotter needed to stay in the vicinity of his target long enough to spot the fall of the shots with some accuracy. And they were totally unlike any fighting plane, allied or Nazi, that anyone there had ever seen. Flying low, the spotting planes came in from the Channel, headed for Omaha Beach. The sea beneath them was covered now with hundreds and hundreds of landing craft bound inshore. Purposely, the planes kept well below the cloud cover, so the spotters could see their intended targets the instant they exposed themselves by firing on anything. That huge flotilla of small landing craft headed for the beachhead—the LCVP’s, the LCM’s, the LCA’s—had no armament to talk of, but every one of them did have mounted aft a machine gun, sometimes two, mounted for AA work—at the moment the whole surface of the sea was dotted with boats
carrying those machine guns. And in general, from coxswain through to bow man, the boats were manned by young seamen seeing action for the first time —all jumpy, and probably excusably so. There was that order, passed to all hands on the Near Shore a few days before we shoved off; every coxswain knew it: “If you see any aircraft overhead during daylight on the Far Shore, do not fire. They will be ours.” But these queer little planes, coming in so low over them were like no planes they had ever seen before. Could they be one of Goebbels’ boasted secret weapons, coming in now to destroy them? Orders or no orders, some triggerhappy gunner on a landing craft (none of them carried any officers) concluded on his own that they must be enemy and opened fire on one. The gunners in the nearby craft, assuming he must somehow have had information that those odd planes were enemy, opened fire also on others, and the firing swiftly spread. In a moment, the little planes, easy targets all to that unexpected burst of fire from friendly craft below them, came crashing down into the sea to join the other wreckage roundabout. We had shot down all our own spotters! Now when the G.I.’s most desperately needed naval gunfire as their last remaining hope of support, our warships had all been blinded. And the landing craft, that momentary burst of firing over, kept on for the beach, unaware even of what they had just done. The last protection for the G.I.’s wading ashore in the face of all that fire from the superbly manned Atlantic Wall had been destroyed. The best planned, the best rehearsed, and the best supported invasion assault in history was falling on its face, mostly because of bad weather, partly because of that undetected placement by the Nazis of their 352nd Division. The generals were out of it now. If any of those G.I.’s on the beach were to survive even the next hour, it was up to them alone. Every shield provided for their protection had been destroyed.
CHAPTER 21 Only three minutes behind the leading line of landing craft and assault troops moving on Omaha Beach came the combat engineer and naval demolition groups, foaming along in twenty-four snub-nosed LCM’s. They were to blast the sixteen highly essential gaps through the obstacle fields, two gaps in each one of the eight sectors into which the beach was divided. For this there were sixteen demolition teams of forty men each (including thirteen men of the Navy per team), sixteen bulldozers, and eight supporting teams for clean-up; twenty-four teams all told. All along, these men had suspected during their training on the English sands that theirs might be a suicide mission. By the time they hit the beach on D-day, from what they could see going on inshore of them, they knew it was. The soldiers and sailors in the demolition groups caught it even worse than the G.I.’s landing only three minutes ahead of them. Probably because their LCM’s were somewhat bulkier than the LCVP’s, the heavier caliber Nazi artillery in the concrete casemates on the cliffs above decided to leave the LCVP’s and their troops to the machine guns while they themselves took on the more formidable looking LCM’s just astern of them. To landing craft already loaded with high explosives, the results were disastrous both to the mission and to the men in the demolition parties. As it was coming in to the breakers, a shell hit the LCM of Team 14. The explosives on deck, waiting to be landed, detonated, killing all the naval personnel. The LCM carrying Team 11 had just touched down and eight naval men in that team were dragging clear of the ramp their pre-loaded rubber boat filled with their quota of explosives, when another shell bursting just above set off their cargo. Only one man survived. The men of Demolition Team 15 had somewhat better luck. They had got as far as the surf line with their rubber boat when a mortar shell scored a clean hit on it and touched off its demolition charges. Most of the team survived that— only three were killed, though four more were wounded. Another LCM, coming in a little late, caught a shell hit directly on its ramp.
As it drifted free, out of control, a second shell exploded fairly on its bow, killing fifteen engineers. Only five army men from this craft eventually got ashore. The sixteen bulldozers, brought in on LCT’s with a tank battalion trying to get ashore nearby, started to land and work their way in, clearing obstacles as they went. Instantly, they also became prime targets for artillery fire, particularly from the 88’s on the cliff at Pointe de la Percée. Out of sixteen only six ever reached the shore line. And out of those six, three more were promptly smashed by direct hits by artillery. That left the engineers only three bulldozers for the entire beach. The Nazis now were having a field day, shooting up engineers in preference to G.I.’s. The engineer teams, practically immobilized by the requirements of their mission, offered superior targets. Meanwhile, in spite of bursting shells and detonating explosives spreading death and destruction all about and amongst them, the remaining engineers and naval demolition groups went doggedly to work on the obstacles. Many of their LCM’s were as much as fifteen minutes late in hitting the surf line. They had been allowed only thirty minutes from H-hour to blow all sixteen of those gaps before two things coming in from seaward would inexorably call a halt to their operation—the rising tide which would by then have flooded the outer obstacles to a depth of at least two feet, and the next wave of assault infantry which would prohibit any more blasting lest they blow up our own men coming through, along with the obstacles. Disregarding exploding shells and the drumfire of machine gun bullets, those men of both Army and Navy turned to on the wet sands, wiring up obstacles with explosive charges to destroy them and their mines, slashing the barbed wire, running the primacord fuse lines back and forth, offshore to inshore, connecting all the charges for a given gap fifty yards wide and from outer “Belgian Gate” to inshore hedgehog into one vast spider web of primacord and blasting charges so it could be blown all together to leave a cleared path. The results were not all that had been anticipated. Out of sixteen gaps desired, only six were actually blown, and those not evenly. Like the troops before them, the engineers also had been set down to the eastward and were never uniformly distributed. Also some teams had been annihilated and others had hard luck of another nature. Team 7 had its charges set and ready to blow when an LCVP, unluckily choosing their area to try to bull its way in, smashed into the obstacles, exploded half a dozen mines and itself, and broke their fuse
lines. They could not blow their charges. In a second case, the naval officer about to pull the twin igniters to set off the blast on his gap, was at that instant struck by flying shrapnel that cut clear both his fingers and the primacord fuses. There was no blast. The worst disaster hit Team 12. With their gap completely fused and ready to blow, the men of that demolition group were just getting clear themselves when a mortar shell hit the primacord fuse. Off went the blast, together with all the Nazi mines wired to the obstacles. When the smoke cleared, nineteen men of that team, killed or wounded, lay all about in the rising water, plus some nearby unfortunate G.I.’s who had been trying to crawl inshore through obstacles adjacent to that wired gap. By H + 30, the rising tide put a period to the efforts of the demolition teams; the water was so high now in the outer and intermediate obstacles they could no longer work. And the LCVP’s of the next wave were already coming in. The remnants struggled inshore. In thirty minutes, the men of the two Engineer Combat Battalions and the Navy Combat Demolition Units had suffered 41% casualties. They had, however, succeeded in clearing six gaps through the obstacles to the shore—one each side of les Moulins Draw, four between the St. Laurent and Colleville Draws. They had been unable to blast any gaps at all before the important Vierville Draw on the west, or along the easterly end of the beach. And of the six gaps they had blown, they had unfortunately been able to mark only one with buoys and poles so that it would still be visible after the incoming tide had wholly covered the obstacles—the remainder of their marking gear had been lost or destroyed in the melee. The net result was that in spite of the wholesale sacrifice of the men of the demolition teams to the unopposed fire from above, 95% of the obstacle fields, at H + 30, remained in place. But at half tide, for a while at least, they were still partly visible to the incoming LCVP’s. The wan survivors, for the first time in half an hour free now like every other G.I. on the beachhead to concentrate only on dodging machine gun fire, headed from the fire-swept obstacle field to the shingle above the high water mark, seeking what cover it might afford them. There was not a demolition man left on his feet but agreed wholeheartedly now that Dr. Goebbels for once had spoken truly about the Atlantic Wall. Those not on their feet, the scattered corpses mainly in the water rising among the remaining obstacles, bore silent testimony to the same truth.
CHAPTER 22 The situation along the beachhead, though but thirty minutes had gone by since H-hour, was already completely sickening. Between the shattering effects of the storm and the unexpected strength of the defense, the spearhead of Eisenhower ’s carefully prepared assault was practically demoralized, with no more visible effect on the Nazi defense than to cause them some expenditure of ammunition. As for the spearhead, Company A of the 116th Infantry, landing on the right of the beachhead (with Company C of the 2nd Rangers on its right flank) was already shot to pieces. Company A, almost alone of all the attackers on the western half of the beach, had to its immediate grief come in on its proper objective—squarely in front of the Vierville Draw. On its left, over the adjoining thousand yards of beach, where ten other boatloads of infantry should simultaneously be touching down, there wasn’t a single boat to engage Nazi attention—they had all been set down to the eastward with the tide. The result for the men of Company A and for the two boatloads of Rangers just on their right was practically a massacre. They were all directly in front of the heavily defended strongpoints at the Vierville Draw, and also the nearest target on the beach to that devastating battery of 88’s perched high up on Pointe de la Percée where it could enfilade the whole stretch of beach looking eastward. And there was nothing anywhere close to them beyond on their left to invite any dispersion of enemy fire. They caught it all—from in front and from their right. One boat belonging to Company A foundered a little offshore. A second landing craft, just touching down, literally disintegrated in the breakers under the bursts of four direct mortar hits rained down on it from the cliff above. The men going overboard from the remaining boats when they grounded found themselves enveloped in intense machine gun fire. In spite of peeling off to right and left to get some dispersion as they stumbled down the ramps into the surf, in no time at all every officer and practically every sergeant was killed or wounded, and within fifteen minutes, two-thirds of all the men of Company A, pierced by bullets or gashed by bursting shells, were lying dead or wounded
among the obstacles. The remaining third (joined now by those few who had managed to gain the open sand at the high water line, only to find that if they wanted to stay alive, they had better get back into the water) crouched in the breakers to hide themselves. There, with no more of their noses exposed in the surf than they needed to catch an occasional breath, they dodged from obstacle to obstacle as the tide rose, to work their way in with it to the shelter of the shingle lying against the steeply sloping masonry seawall. And there finally the leaderless remnants of Company A clung, practically weaponless, completely knocked out as a fighting force, out of action for the rest of the day. A little to their right and therefore not quite so exposed to the direct fire from the Vierville Draw, Captain Ralph Goranson and his sixty-four Rangers landed. Still, in spite of being a trifle out of the line of fire, they had about as bad a time; the whole top of the cliff before them burst into fire as they entered the surf. Since the beach promenade road at its western end terminated where it turned to ascend the Vierville Draw, there was no seawall at their end of the beach sands—there the high water mark ran practically up to the foot of the cliff, which was the first possible shelter for the Rangers. With artillery shells exploding all about his two boats as he came in, and with intense machine gun fire greeting them as they touched down, Goranson’s Rangers lost over half their men before they made the base of that cliff. In its lee, safe temporarily at least from further fire, Captain Goran-son paused to reorganize what men he had left. He, at least, unlike most, knew exactly where he was and what he was supposed to do there—to knock out the strongpoint on the cliff above him, just to the west of the Vierville Draw, which had been murdering his men with their machine guns. With his remaining twenty-three men, he prepared to try to scale that vertical cliff and do it. Meanwhile Companies F and G of the 116th Infantry, which should have been hitting the beach evenly spaced to the left of A Company, came in instead with a gap of a thousand yards open on their right, with the boats of both these companies crazily intermingled, and with the already disorganized flotilla landing almost en masse directly in front of les Moulins. As a consequence, these men were trebly in hard luck. For not only were they jammed up instead of evenly dispersed, and also with that fatal gap of a thousand yards open on their right, but additionally there was another gap, even worse, of twelve hundred yards, open on their left. With wide gaps on both sides of them, they came in on the beachhead with nothing in their vicinity
to force any dispersion of enemy fire. To the Nazis overhead, they offered a beautifully concentrated target. The results were almost similar to those at the Vierville Draw. Les Moulins, both on the beach sands and overhead, was a heavily defended set of Nazi strongpoints guarding the draw there. Some of the men of Company F on the right flank, coming across the sands, got a little shelter from clouds of smoke rising from burning grass on the bluffs set afire by the naval bombardment, and within fifteen minutes of landing made the shelter of the seawall to the right of the les Moulins Draw with no great losses. Still, when they got there, they did not know where they were; their confused officers could not decide what to do. However, the majority of the men of Companies F and G disgorged in that area by their landing craft, unsheltered by any smokescreen, came instantly under withering fire from les Moulins. Half never reached the beach; the remaining half, after forty-five minutes of dodging bullets in the surf, managed to get to the shelter of the shingle, badly disorganized, with most of their officers gone, on terrain where they should not have landed, and ignorant therefore of the defenses confronting them and how best those defenses might be attacked. But this last difficulty made little difference at the moment—the completely exhausted and stunned G.I.’s still alive were in no condition to assault anything—their major preoccupation was so to dig themselves into the depressions in the uneven slopes of the shingle as to get some shielding from that lethal plunging fire coming from the bluffs beyond. So on the western half of the beach, the assault made by the four companies of the 116th Infantry was in poor shape—by no stretch of any imagination could it be called an assault—there had been no fire from the battalion on the enemy positions. Company A was already shot to pieces. Company F, in front of les Moulins, was nearly as badly off. Company E had been carried so far to the eastward by the tide that when finally it touched down, it wasn’t in the western section at all. And Company G, in somewhat better shape than the others, was lost somewhere to the east of les Moulins, where it knew it shouldn’t be, and was considering how to go about a move westward along the fireswept beach to the sector where it belonged. On the eastern half of the beach, the men of the 16th Infantry, all veterans of the landings in Sicily and in North Africa, were to land. Like all old soldiers, they had taken extra precautions—each man of the 16th wore two Mae Wests instead of the usual one, and each man in addition had an extra Mae West tied to
his heavy equipment to help in floating it through the surf. But in spite of what all these veterans had thought they had learned in their previous encounters with the sea, on the Omaha Beach their landings on the eastern half of the sands was only a heartbreaking repetition of what was going on in the western sector —of wounded men helplessly drowning in the surf; of men who survived the initial debarkations from the landing craft only to be shot to pieces as they struggled inshore through the obstacles; of the same murderous fire continuously pouring in on the dazed remnants as they stumbled in toward the shingle. Only on the far left end of the beach crescent, where as on the far right the tidal flat reached all the way up to the foot of the vertical bluff with almost no shingle in between, did a single company succeed in duplicating the dubious luck of Captain Goranson’s company of Rangers on the far right. There on the far left of the Omaha Beach, Company L of the 16th Infantry managed to get in to the protection of the bluff itself with the loss of only half its men, which was neither much better nor much worse than others, but unlike them, with its officers still alive and with it, and ready as quickly as the exhausted remnant could catch its breath, to do something with what was left of the company. All along the beachhead from west to east, those who had finally made the shelter of the shingle or of the cliffs, now received a respite from fire. Seaward of them in the open, offering at the moment much better targets, were the demolition parties working amongst the obstacles. Most of the Nazi machine guns now concentrated on them. The men sheltering behind the seawall or the shingle they would take care of a little later. An odd feeling of isolation descended on the stunned G.I.’s huddling together for such, shelter as the sloping seawall and the shingle might afford for the moment. Till the Nazis could pay attention to them again and start to pulverize them with high angle mortar fire against which the sloping seawall would afford little protection, they were relatively unmolested. Plastered flat against the shingle, it was not possible for the G.I.’s there to see even a hundred yards along the beach. What might be going on, if anything, either to the right or to the left, was beyond anyone’s determination —and there was no means available for communication beyond what could be seen. Practically all the radio communication gear being lugged ashore had either been jettisoned by men unexpectedly stepping into water over their heads, or ruined by salt water while coming through the breakers. Here was a situation unique in the history of warfare—and the more so for
occurring in this age of the wonders of wireless. Not only did Eisenhower in his headquarters a hundred miles away across the Channel in Portsmouth not know what was going on, nor did Bradley aboard the Augusta only a few miles offshore know any more, but even the men actually on the Omaha Beach could see little and knew less. The battle, if so far it could be called one, was wholly out of anyone’s control. From what little of it the dazed G.I.’s squeezed against the seawalls could see about them, it also seemed irretrievably lost. And so far as they in the first assault wave were concerned, it was. However, to some of the men looking behind them over the exposed sands where lay their dead and such of the wounded as had not yet drowned, came an unexpected sight. Here and there along the water ’s edge were a few tanks, engaged in a decidedly unequal battle with the artillery on the cliffs. The G.I.’s rubbed their eyes; most of them, wholly wrapped up in dodging from obstacle to obstacle in getting inshore, hadn’t noticed that before. Some of the tanks, after all, had managed to make the beach, but neither in time nor in the force anticipated to be any shield to the first wave. Of the 64 DD’s which should have swum in to furnish the intense artillery fire needed to cover the first wave in landing, only 29 actually were launched, 27 of these swamped, and only 2 succeeded in reaching shore. On the LCT’s carrying the remaining 35 DD’s fitted out to swim in, the officers there took a thoughtful look at the flotilla of DD’s already launched and already sinking, took a sober second look at the 6000 yards of whitecapped seas between them and the beach, and decided that enough tanks had submerged already to show that this was not any morning for amphibious tank operations. Instead of trying to swim in any more DD’s, they would take their chances of bringing in the LCT’s themselves, tanks still aboard, till they grounded. There, under fire, of course, they would unload the tanks in the surf, and let them bull their way in through the obstacles—if they could. They would be no worse off then than the 32 General Sherman tanks which had never been converted to DD’s, and which were to be landed exactly that way. These last 32 General Shermans it had always been intended to take in on carriers, to bolster up the DD barrage on the beachhead, giving a total of 96 tanks all told for close-in artillery support. They would all be a little late for H-hour that way, but that was no cause for argument. Anyone looking at the streams of bubbles marking where the tanks already launched had submerged, would concede that a little late was infinitely better than never. So nearly a score of LCT’s, carrying the 35 unlaunched DD’s, the 32
General Sherman tanks, and 16 bulldozers for the combat engineers, started for the beachhead. On the far right of this line of tank landing craft, Company B of the 743rd Tank Battalion with 16 DD’s on 4 LCT’s tried to beach in front of the Vierville Draw. That put it under fire from the flanking 88’s on Pointe de la Percée, the deadliest battery on the beach. Those 88’s literally tore apart the two nearest carriers, sinking eight tanks, and killing the company commander and most of his other officers. While the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée were fully absorbed in this slaughter, the other two LCT’s of Company B managed to slip in to the surf line and get their eight tanks overboard. This they were successful in doing because the guns squarely before them on the Vierville strongpoints, with their muzzles shielded from direct view to seaward by lateral concrete walls, couldn’t fire down at them. But by the same token, neither could the tanks there fire on the guns behind those casemates at Vierville. At the best, the tanks could fire only laterally to their right at the gunflashes on Pointe de la Percée, where the guns, unfortunately for them in an artillery duel, had them at a strong disadvantage in target visibility. So in general these eight tanks were in a poor position to help anyone where they were and terribly handicapped in getting anywhere else where they could help more—they couldn’t climb the shingle to the road to get better angles of fire for themselves. Their only real hope lay in the bulldozers coming in far to their left with the combat engineers—those bulldozers should open a slope for them through the shingle up to the road. Unfortunately for this hope, of the 16 bulldozers coming in on the LCT’s along with the tanks on their left, only three ever survived the barrage of shells from the cliffs above them during their passage through the obstacles to the beach. And of these three bulldozers, not one was close enough to help disentangle the eight tanks marooned before the Vierville Draw. To the left of the Vierville Draw, profiting also by the time it took the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée to finish off to their satisfaction the two nearest LCT’s and the eight tanks aboard them, the LCT’s farther away managed also to unload 16 DD’s and 16 General Shermans, a total of 32 tanks, in the surf line just short of the obstacles in front of les Moulins. But these tanks, like those at the Vierville Draw, found themselves also immobilized by their inability to get across the shingle to the road. Somewhat farther to the left, the going for the remaining LCT’s was tougher. Here the two DD’s which by some miracle had covered 6000 yards of
heaving seas on their own flotation and power finally landed. And near them, the three remaining DD’s of their group which had never been launched were put overboard from an LCT. Alongside them, on other LCT’s, came the second squadron of 16 General Shermans for the eastern half of the beach. Instantly, this concentration of LCT’s drew artillery fire from all along their fronts—laterally from les Moulins and the St. Laurent strongpoints on their right and a criss-cross from the Colleville strongpoint to the left. Three of the remaining DD’s and five of the General Shermans were swiftly destroyed. The remaining thirteen tanks—two of the DD’s and eleven of the General Shermans —went into action as best they could against what they could—immobilized, like all the others. But it was much too late for any of the remaining tanks to do anything to save the men of the first wave. In general, machine gun fire from hidden trenches just beyond the crest of the bluffs had already pretty thoroughly chewed them up. All the tanks could do now was to divert some of the artillery fire from above to themselves and away from the men in the landing craft in the waves to follow. But when it came to smothering the machine gun fire, they could do little to help, even by diverting some of that fire also to themselves. For the canny Nazi machine gunners wasted none of their bullets on tanks, and the flat-trajectory tank fire was ineffective on machine gun nests buried in trenches behind the crest of the bluffs. And against the concreted casemates the tanks could see, their 75 mm. guns weren’t powerful enough to smash through; the most they could hope for was that flying shrapnel from their bursts would interfere with and hold down the artillery fire from above. What the demoralized G.I.’s crouching behind the shingle needed most to save them was mortar fire of their own to rain down vertically into the trenches on the bluffs above them—but they had lost all their own mortars landing in the surf. Or else the terrific impact of bursting heavy naval shells to smash through the enemy casemates and silence for good the Nazi artillery and their concrete strongpoints. Then they might hope to ascend the draws and clear those trenches and their death-dealing machine gun nests with hand grenades—but the warships close by and anxious to help were all blind; they had no spotters any longer. Without spotters, they dared not fire; they were more likely then to kill our own men huddled on the beach than the wellsheltered Nazis. 0700. The second wave of assault infantry began to come in. In the assault plan, by
0700 there should have been sixteen marked gaps in the obstacle field, through which all succeeding small landing craft and the much larger LCI(L)’s and LCT’s could come to discharge their men, artillery, and vehicles well up on the beach sands. But it hadn’t worked out that way. The second wave had practically as much trouble with the obstacles as the unfortunates who had preceded them. Still there were some improvements, mainly due to the fact that with more targets in their field all at once, the Nazi gunners could not concentrate so effectively on the newcomers as they had on their predecessors. The landing craft coming in now caught only part of the artillery fire—willy-nilly, the enemy gunners had to devote some of their attention to the tanks still able to fire on them. And some of the machine gunners also, though they were hitting nothing there, had to keep a substantial curtain of fire going on the top of the shingle bank lest the men sheltering behind it seize a lull to rush en masse across the beach road toward the bluffs and burst through the wire. The results were uneven. On the far right, once again misfortune ruled. Most of the boats of Company B, 116th Infantry, landing in front of the Vierville Draw to reinforce the first company of their regiment, were just as badly mangled there in their landing—only an ineffective remnant ever reached the shelter of the seawall to join the already demoralized survivors of Company A. From there on east, conditions varied radically. Some companies, while the machine gunners on the bluffs were busily occupied shooting to pieces men landing from adjacent boats, got up to the shingle with slight losses and with many of their heavier weapons. The other companies, the unfortunates in the adjacent boats, on whom meanwhile as targets all the automatic weapons spraying the beach front with fire were concentrating, left as high a percentage of dead and wounded as they came through the obstacles as had any companies in the first wave. The luckiest group was a battalion of the 5th Rangers, carried in fourteen landing craft, supposed to come in behind Companies A and B of the 116th Infantry, whose shattered remnants were huddled against the seawall fronting the Vierville Draw. But Lieut. Colonel Max Schneider, commanding the 5th Rangers, after a searching look at the mass of dead and wounded of the 116th Infantry already littering the sands there as his flotilla approached, concluded that spot was a death trap and veered his boats to the east to land them halfway between the Vierville Draw and les Moulins. As a result, he got his 450 Rangers through the obstacles and up the seawall with the startlingly small loss
of only six men. To emphasize his luck, and possibly also in some measure the cause of it by letting his small craft slip through while bigger game took the gunners’ eyes, LCI(L) 91, the first of any of the larger troop carriers attempting to beach, came in just where Schneider ’s Rangers were snaking through the obstacles to the left of the Vierville Draw. LCI(L) 91, an ocean-going infantry carrier, jammed full with more troops of the 116th Regiment, came in looking for the marked gap in the obstacles in its assigned sector. Through that gap it would swiftly drive up on the beach to pour its load of G.I.’s down the ramps hanging on its starboard and port bows, and then back out of there, four bells. But the skipper of the 91, already a veteran of the landings both on Sicily and Salerno, could find no sign of any gap at all, either marked or unmarked, for him to come driving ahead in. However, since it was as yet around half tide only, the tops of what obstacles were there still protruded sufficiently above the waves to show him where they were. His only chance now of fulfilling his mission was to attempt to nuzzle his way in between them to the surf line to land his troops. Slowly, so as to be able to maneuver enough to avoid exploding the mines on those obstacles visible to him, he came on. And instantly such a major target, and a slow-moving one at that, got the undivided attention of those enfilading guns on Pointe de la Percée. Shells began to splash about her. The 91 brought up against a “Belgian Gate” and came to a forced stop. Before she could back, several shells struck her. With engines reversed, the 91 pulled clear, stopped, headed in for a second attempt. This time she fouled up solidly on another “Belgian Gate” and could get no farther in. By then, the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée were bracketing her with bursting shells. The 91 was in a tough spot; whatever she did now was bad. What was least bad? In desperation, the skipper decided the least bad thing he could do was to drop his ramps where he was, in six feet of water forward. He must get rid of his troops now, regardless, before worse happened. Down went the ramps. The G.I.’s, led by their officers, started to pour down the gangways over both bows into water over their heads, there to start swimning for the surf breaking not so far ahead. Now came disaster. A shell burst squarely on the crowded deck forward and apparently touched off other explosives on deck. A tremendous volcano of
flame leaped skyward to send those on deck still able to jump plunging overboard to extinguish their burning clothes—most of those in that vicinity, however, were beyond where even jumping into the sea would do them any good. And of the twenty-five G.I.’s in the bow compartment on the deck below, not one ever got out. A torn and flaming wreck now, LCI(L) 91 was hurriedly abandoned by everybody else still alive and able to jump. Overboard went all hands, G.I. and seaman alike. All about, the waves were dotted with men trying to swim in, while to insure a thorough job of it, the gunners on Pointe de la Percée poured in more shells, both on the stricken vessel and on the men about her in the sea. LCI(L) 91, wholly aflame now and with the fires fed continuously from her fuel oil tanks, burned fiercely all day, sending up to hang like a funeral pall over the beach a vast column of black smoke, visible for miles. A few minutes later, her sister, LCI(L) 92, similarly came to grief. Heading in for a landing close by on the beach and finding no cleared path, the 92’s first attempt to worm a way in landed her on a “Belgian Gate” where she exploded some underwater mines. These promptly ignited her oil tanks and the helpless 92 was immediately out of action. At that, the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée, with their muzzles scarcely clear of smoke from their fusillade on the 91, opened fire on the disabled LCI(L) 92 with sickening results. And then there were two flaming torches that minutes before had been ships, both going at once on the outer edge of the belt of obstacles—far enough offshore so they were the one thing easily visible from end to end of the beach to every G.I. burrowing into the shingle for shelter. If anything further was needed completely to destroy their shattered morale, the sight of those two huge pillars of fire and smoke furnished it. What hope of success or even of rescue could there possibly be now?
CHAPTER 23 With the arrival of more and more G.I.’s in the second wave, what space there was behind the crest of the shingle bank and the seawall safe from the plunging fire of machine guns on the bluffs beyond, began to get decidedly overcrowded. And it was further evident that when the Nazis above had caught up with the simpler problem of shooting down all the G.I.’s in sight, and had time then to give the matter a little thought and to reorganize their ideas, they would then turn to on the unfinished business of shooting up all the G.I.’s not in sight. And for that, all that was required was to plaster the area just to seaward of the shingle with mortar and enfilading artillery fire. Those mortar shells particularly, coming down almost vertically and exploding directly in the lee of the shingle to drench it with flying shrapnel, could very swiftly make a bloody shambles of that shelter. But most of the G.I.’s behind the shingle were too stunned for any coherent thought on that or any other subject. Still, there were some yet able to think a little, and to them it did not seem that there was any future in just waiting for help from support troops coming in from seaward—trying to crowd more men behind the shingle would simply leave the rear ranks bulging beyond the shelter zone. The only way out for them was toward the bluffs. They peered ahead over the top of the shingle. Just ahead lay the beach road —it wasn’t so wide—thirty feet maybe—a man could get over the top of the shingle and across that in a few seconds—if he were fast on his feet, before a machine gun could zero in on him. But beyond the road came the hitch—those wicked rolls of concertina wire. That would stop a man long enough for the automatic fire from above certainly to finish him off—unless there were gaps in the wire, so he could keep going until he got into the tall beach grass just beyond the road. That might hide him till finally he arrived at the foot of the bluffs. And from there, he might scale the bluffs to do the fighting he had come for, with the Nazis at present safe from him in the trenches above. But, of course, there weren’t any gaps in that wire. The bombs and rockets that should have washed it out had missed it altogether. And now there were
never going to be any gaps unless some G.I.’s got over there and cut them. How hazardous was that? You could look and see for yourself. Here and there, a few men, armed with wire cutters usually, had already crossed the road to try it. And there, lying in grotesque lumps in the front of the tangled wire coils were their mangled bodies—caught on the barbs where machine gun bullets had riddled them as they attempted to work their wire cutters. The Nazis above seemed to be keeping a keen eye and sufficient machine guns alerted to cope with attempts at wire cutting. However, there were still the bangalore torpedoes—those didn’t expose a man to fire so long. Those bangalore tubes, twenty feet long and loaded with high explosive, you could shove through the bottom of the coils of wire in an instant, set the igniter, and dart back behind the shingle. You did not have to stick around working wire cutters on the wire while the enemy carefully drew a bead on you. In a moment, the explosion of that bangalore torpedo would have torn a fine gap in the wire. Through that, you and your comrades could dash when it suited you. Yes, there were still the bangalore torpedoes, all right; exactly what the job needed—only, where were the bangalore torpedoes? With sinking hearts, the men of the first wave looking about behind the shingle for the wherewithal to get them through the concertina wire, found that the bangalore torpedoes had had no better luck in getting lugged ashore than had their mortars and their bazookas. Bangalore tubes twenty feet long are a substantial handicap to a man trying to swim in rough water or even to one crawling on his stomach through the surf amongst those damnable obstacles. There were no bangalore torpedoes. Not till the later arrival of the second wave did even a bangalore torpedo or two start to show up here and there behind the shingle. But even then, the few G.I.’s contemplating using them took a second look at the corpses already draped in the concertina wire across the road and decided it might be more prudent to wait till some officer, organizing an attack, ordered him to take one and open a gap. 0800. To add to the confusion already on the beachhead cluttered with dead bodies, smashed bulldozers, disabled tanks, and wrecked LCVP’s, now there began to arrive the much larger landing craft, the LCT’s and rhino ferries (huge, flat, rectangular self-propelled scows). With their decks crammed with the first
flight of the 3300 vehicles that were due to be unloaded on the beach by noon, they headed in from seaward for discharge. Of course, all this had been predicated on the existence by now of sixteen cleared and well-marked gaps in the obstacle fields through which these larger craft could come and discharge well up on the beach. And on the further assumption that the sixteen bulldozers sent in just behind the first wave would already have cut slopes through the shingle by which these vehicles could get off the sand and up and onto the beach road. And on the still further assumption that the 64 DD’s, the 32 General Shermans, and the G.l.’s in the first wave would have burst through such shattered remnants of that nondescript battalion of the 726th German Regiment as might be left after the bombs, the rockets, the Dukws’ fire, and the spotter-directed naval fire had finished with them. And on the final assumption that our assault spearhead having burst through, the combat engineers and their equipment would have cleared for traffic all four of the roads leading through the draws in the bluffs to the plateau behind, so that the vehicles coming in could immediately proceed inland with their loads. Since most of these basic assumptions had turned out to be one hundred per cent pure fantasy rather than fact, there was immediate trouble on the beach. Starting with the complication that there were but six gaps instead of sixteen, the first snarl came when the vehicle-loaded LCT’s and rhino ferries all tried to get inshore through those six gaps. Jammed together that way, they made fine targets for artillery fire. And the second and far worse snarl came when some of them managed to get through to touch down in the surf line moderately well up on the sand by now, and began to discharge their vehicles—trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, halftracks, cranes—almost anything you might name that ran either on wheels or treads. But there was not even one path cut through the shingle to the beach road. So there wasn’t anywhere that a single vehicle could go once it was unloaded on that strip of sand above the surf line. And that strip of sand between the surf line and the shingle was constantly narrowing as the flooding tide now rose faster and faster. The result was shortly a traffic jam on the sand of indescribable proportions, particularly in front of the St. Laurent Draw, where four gaps had been blown, and the nearby spot to the left of les Moulins where there was a fifth gap. Through these five gaps, most of the vehicles coming in had been landed. The sands from the surf line up, which till this time had been cluttered
mainly with corpses, began now in this St. Laurent area to be almost hidden from sight by massed vehicles unable to move. To the enemy artillery flanking this area on both sides were offered magnificent targets—a bursting shell, if by chance it missed the vehicle aimed at was bound to hit another next to it. Even to the less accurate fire of the German mortars in the trenches above, accuracy became of little moment—you couldn’t miss. It was a gunner ’s paradise. And once one vehicle was hit and disabled, it jammed up even what slight movement was previously available to those behind. So all soon became a solid mass incapable of spreading out to minimize the hazards from shell fire; even worse, incapable of moving any higher up on the sands to escape the rising tide which swiftly now, row after row, began’ to drown out even such vehicles as had as yet escaped any damage from shells. With the jam on his beach approaching irremediable chaos, the distracted commander of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion took action along the only line left open to him to take any action whatever. He had absolutely no power to do anything to make matters on the beach he was supposed to control any better, but he could prevent them from getting any worse. He did. In possession of one of the few radio sets on the beach still operable, he radioed out an order suspending completely the landing of any more craft bearing vehicles—no matter what they were nor how badly anyone thought they were needed ashore. ‘Immediately that developed a wholly unforeseen situation. Since they could no longer come in on the beach, nor get back offshore to reload their cargoes on larger ships, scores of rhino ferries, LCT’s, and even some cargo-loaded Dukws, had no option save to circle where they were. So round and round they went in the rough water off the beachhead, as Colonel Talley, Army observer, noted and reported it to Corps Headquarters, “like a herd of stampeded cattle,” chased continuously by splashes and bursting artillery shells from Nazi gunners on the cliffs. Apparently the latter, tiring of shooting at the sitting ducks before them in the traffic jam on the sands, perhaps feeling also that those jammed up vehicles were incapable of any further offensive action anyway, and wanting “to keep their hands in on moving targets, found the excitement of chasing that ocean circus about, worth the ammunition. It seemed as if that weird target circling just offshore was the only thing that saved those immovable vehicles already on the beach from total annihilation.
CHAPTER 24 Omar Bradley, commanding the first U. S. Army, was having an agonizing time. By now, his men should have been miles inland from the Omaha Beach, getting themselves set for the shock of the first counterattack. All he knew for certain was that those who hadn’t already been slaughtered had not as yet even got off the beach sands. Why not? He didn’t know. What should he do about it? He did not know that either. Since he knew next to nothing about what was going on, except that it was bad, nor could he seem to find out anything, he was helpless. Not five miles off the beach aboard the Augusta, which should have been for him the ideal command post from which to direct his battle, he found himself most unexpectedly a general both blind and deaf. He could look off through his binoculars at the beach and could see nothing at all that meant anything to him. Between low visibility, smoke and dust, all he could clearly make out was the distant crestline of the bluffs—beyond that, nothing of what was going on there could be seen. And as for hearing, the portable radio transmitters sent in by the dozens with the units of the first wave to tie operations together and to keep him informed as to what was happening on the beach, were all strangely totally silent. Not a word from his men on the beach itself. What little news he got were scraps picked up on the Navy network from landing craft skippers or naval beach commanders talking to each other —about their own situations, all of which were desperate. Gerow, commanding the Vth Corps, had sent his Assistant Chief of Staff, Colonel Benjamin Talley, in on a Dukw behind the first wave to report to him by radio from the beach as to the progress of the battle. But Talley from his Dukw swiftly saw that if he ever landed on that beach, he’d be instantly immobilized. The most of the battle he’d ever see would be only what little happened within a few yards either side of where he chose to touch down. And even that much he’d never be able to report to Gerow, for his radio set would be soaked and useless, if by a miracle he ever managed actually to get it in through the breakers and then through the obstacles.
So Colonel Talley prudently decided to stay in his Dukw along with his radio equipment, cruise up and down about 500 yards off the beach, see what he could, and report what he saw. Even from 500 yards off, visibility across the rough water from a low freeboard Dukw turned out to be none too good. And what he could see, both during his approach and later as he scanned the sands, was none too good either—swamped Dukws, swamped DD’s, sunken landing craft, heavy enemy artillery fire, furious machine gun fire, corpses washing up on the beach, G.I.’s struggling through the obstacles to the shingle, only finally and firmly to be pinned down there without ever getting near the enemy on the bluffs. Talley’s reports, no more pessimistic than he could help, went sketchily in to Gerow who sent them along to Bradley: “Obstacles mined, progress slow. 1st Battalion, 116th, reported 0748 being held up by machine gun fire—two LCT’s knocked out by artillery fire. DD tanks for Fox Green swamped.” (The two LCT’s referred to were those carrying eight tanks destroyed in front of the Vierville Draw by the guns of Pointe de la Percée; Fox Green was the beach before the Colleville Draw.) Talley’s reports were certainly models of understatement—to say “progress slow” where there was no progress at all, was surely not being unduly pessimistic. But Talley, considerably handicapped in observation, was cautious as to what he reported—he did not care to make things sound worse than he was certain they were, and he could not be very certain as to most of what he saw. An officer in a naval fire support party, scanning from a short distance offshore the same beach that Talley was looking at, reported on it a little later in much more forthright language: “Troops were plainly visible on the beach lying in the sand. So were the dead. Heavy machine gun fire coming from enemy positions halfway up the hill. Troops were unable to advance.” With great faith in the rockets on the LCT(R)’s behind him, his solution for breaking what to him seemed a deadlock in the battle was to request permission to lay down another rocket barrage and smash those obstreperous enemy machine gun positions on the bluffs. Those, he reasoned correctly enough, were the main cause of the trouble. But the Army higher command, properly enough dubious of how accurately any rocket barrage might be controlled, refused permission. Rockets were
certainly deadly enough weapons, but what if the barrage fell short? There were our own men pinned down on the sands who would then be obliterated. And, as it was hopefully phrased in the refusal, even if it didn’t ‘fall short we had to have regard for the safety of our assault troops “who may have filtered through.” So no permission was given for more rockets. And that, as the morning wore on, was all the information on the battle transmitted across the Channel to Eisenhower, sweating it out even farther from the scene of battle in his headquarters overlooking Portsmouth. Essentially, what little came to him over his elaborately prepared battle radio communications network added up only to this—negligible progress, troops pinned down on the sands, disaster to the tanks. Fitting those dismal bits against the background of the one fact incontestably known to all in the higher command—that the assault had been laid on in spite of the storm—gave substance to the comment made then by one of the staff at Portsmouth—the gloom at SHAEF was so thick you could cut it with a knife. And, no doubt, though none of his staff had any knowledge even of its existence, Eisenhower himself, nervously fingering the announcement he had written and shoved into his pocket the day before, was beginning to wonder how soon he would have to pull out that confession of culpability for defeat and publish it. Had Eisenhower known how it looked then to von Rundstedt, who had a plethora of first hand information, his worst fears would have been confirmed. He might well have felt then and there that the time had come to release that announcement. For the Nazi Commander of the casemated fortifications at Pointe de la Percée, the one man on either side who really had a ringside seat at this battle, giving him an unexcelled view of the entire beach, having surveyed the scene before him with complete satisfaction, had just sent in his report. He saw the American troops ashore (the few that had got that far) firmly pinned down by machine gun fire, seeking what shelter they could behind the shingle and the obstacles. He observed that ten tanks he could count, and “a great many other vehicles” he couldn’t count were burning. The fire of his own guns, as well as that of the other artillery emplaced on the bluffs, he felt had been excellent. There were those two burning LCI(L)’s as well as the smashed tanks and numerous other wrecks as proof. The sands below him were strewn with American dead and wounded. The defenses of the Atlantic Wall were intact.
All this he passed on to the headquarters of Generalleutnant Kraiss, commanding the 352nd Division. From there it was passed along to General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, commanding the 84th Corps. Marcks noted it and sent it on up to von Rundstedt—the Allied assault on the Atlantic Wall in what we called the Omaha Beach had been hurled back into the sea.
CHAPTER 25 It happened that on the far right of the assault, on its far left, and in a few spots more or less in the middle, some officers still remained alive with their men, and with enough of their shot-up units still together to react to orders. On the far right, Captain Ralph Goranson, out of the original sixty-five men who composed his Company C of the 2nd Rangers, had managed to get the twenty-three who had survived the frightful strafing on the beach to shelter at the foot of the cliff between Pointe de la Percée and the Vierville Draw. Directly above him lay the westernmost strongpoint on the Omaha Beach. On the far left, Company L of the 16th Infantry, commanded now by Lieut. Robert Cutler, Jr. (his company commander had just been killed) had also around half his company still left, about a hundred men, situated at the eastern end of the beach. The easternmost strongpoint of the beach defenses was just above him on the bluff. Between the St. Laurent and the Colleville Draws, Companies E and G of the 16th Infantry, each still about half intact, lay behind the shingle, together with a disorganized mass of men who comprised a good part of what else was left of the regiment that had been the pride of the First Division, the veteran 16th Infantry. Into this area with the second wave came the regimental commander, Colonel George Taylor. Between the Vierville Draw and les Moulins, Lieut. Colonel Schneider with his 5th Rangers, and Company C of the 116th Infantry, were together jammed up against the seawall. Into this area, also with the second wave, came Colonel Charles Canham, commanding the 116th Regiment, and Brigadier General Norman Cota, Assistant Division Commander of the 29th Division to which the 116th Infantry belonged. None of these groups could see any of the others, nor was there any communication or coordination possible between them—their only common factor in what they all did next was that they still had officers, and the officers had men enough, still together, to do something with. Each group acted in complete ignorance of what might be going on elsewhere. Its driving motive was to get itself well inland to the line there it was supposed to defind against
imminent counterattack in the afternoon. But each group (except one) was handicapped by lack of exact knowledge as to what lay above it on the bluffs that it must first assault. The landings had all been hopelessly scrambled, and all their previous briefing was therefore worthless. Action started on the right. Captain Goranson and his handful of Rangers, practically alone of all those along the beachhead, knew exactly where they were and what defensive positions the Germans had above them. Before them was the vertical cliff between Pointe de la Percée and the Vierville Draw. Above them lay the western maze of machine gun nests protecting the Vierville Draw, which had already killed over half their company as they came in to beach, and which had power enough easily to dispose of the remaining two dozen should they assault it. By all the laws of logic, Goranson and his men should have stayed below, clinging for shelter to the base of the cliff. Goranson and his Rangers had come prepared for mountain climbing. Lieut. William Moody and two men started west, hugging the cliff base, looking for a spot in the face of that precipice offering possibilities. Three hundred yards toward Pointe de la Percée they found one—a crevice. There, hand over hand, using bayonets to dig in for handholds, they made it to the top—ninety feet up. Moody had brought along four toggle ropes. These he secured to stakes in a minefield near the crest, and all was ready. Moody went back along the ridge, under small arms fire now from the Vierville Draw, to above where Goranson and the rest of the company were clustered at the base, then shouted down directions to them. Clinging to the cliff base for shelter, the men went west to the ropes, then like a troop of jungle apes, clambered up the toggles—hardly two dozen men to face whatever they might find above. While Goranson, intending to be last man up, was watching his Rangers ascending the swaying ropes, he spotted a lost LCVP, loaded with men of Company B, 116th Infantry, which should have been landing directly in front of the Vierville Draw (where they would undoubtedly all have immediately been cut to pieces), landing instead on the rocky beach near him. Here was luck. Goranson sent a Ranger to guide the whole boatload to his ropes—he could use those men; now his tiny force would be doubled. But without waiting for these reinforcements to get ashore and up the ropes, Goranson himself climbed up and with only his two dozen Rangers started for the German trenches. Of the vast invasion army, these were the first Americans to scale the cliffs at Omaha and come to grips with the Nazis manning the
Atlantic Wall. A weird battle ensued. Topping the cliff just beyond its crest, protecting the western flank of the Vierville Draw, was a fully-manned zigzag maze of trenches and dugouts cut into the rock. Machine gun nests and a mortar position stiffened up the trench lines—a position deadly in its fire power, as the landings attempted before the Vierville Draw had already proved, and an impregnable position to assault frontally. But on its right, with an abandoned stone house in between, was another trench, also abandoned, as the Germans apparently feared no attack from the western flank. There they considered the vertical cliff face an unsurmountable obstacle to attackers. First dropping his men into this empty German trench, Goranson used it as a point of departure for initially feeling out and then for assaulting the manned trenches to the east on the other side of the house, and a series of ferocious battles promptly ensued. Four times Goranson’s men surged out of their trench, broke into the German positions, smashed the elaborately concreted mortar post there, and cleaned out the defenders. But each time, hardly were they in occupation than German reinforcements came through communicating trenches from the Vierville Draw and the savage fight for those trenches started all over again. For some hours Goranson’s men fought grimly on, while the possession of the main German trenches passed back and forth, knowing that here at least they were dealing out more than they were getting. And knowing further that since they had first opened their attack, not another machine gun bullet had been fired from that strongpoint upon the beaches below to carry on the slaughter to which they themselves had been exposed. Finally no enemy reenforcements remained to come a fifth time from the Vierville Draw—they had bled its reserves white. Captain Goranson was left at long last in unmolested possession of all that network of German trenches. That section of the Atlantic Wall was unlikely ever again to figure in Dr. Goebbels’ radio programs—when the new occupants counted up, they could scarcely believe it—they had themselves suffered just two casualties, but sixtynine of the enemy lay dead in the position the Nazis had been unable to hold. Captain Goranson, leaving the men of Company B to hold the trenches, hastily collected his Rangers and moved out to proceed overland to Pointe du Hoe. Somewhere in that vicinity he had a rendezvous with Lieut. Colonel Rudder and some other Rangers; already he was late for it. Meanwhile on the far left of the Omaha Beach, Lieut. Cutler and what he had
left of Company L of the 16th Infantry, decided also to get off the beach. In a way, though they were in a strange territory on which they had no briefing, they were favored a little by luck. The beach road, beyond which the Nazis had strung coils of concertina wire, turned inland short of their position. There was, therefore, no such barbed wire in front of them, any more than there had been in front of Goranson’s position at the other end of the beach. But there were minefields to be wary of. And Lieutenant Cutler had some further luck. With the second wave, there had been landed near him one of the Naval Shore Fire Control Parties (designated as NSFCP’s), intended promptly to pass inland with the troops they were assigned to, to assist in naval fire support on inland objectives. But since nobody was passing inland (yet, anyway) that NSFCP eagerly attached itself to Cutler ’s force. Was there anything it could do for him? There was. A couple of thousand yards offshore was a destroyer, its guns all silent, waiting impatiently a chance to help. Would the NSFCP get in touch with that destroyer, lay its fire on the strongpoint above them on the bluff, while Cutler ’s men, under cover of that fire, moved up to assault it? The NSFCP would and did. In a moment, beneath salvos of destroyer shells bursting atop that bluff, the men of Company L began their attack, helped by bits and pieces of four other companies in the vicinity. And helped further by the fire of two tanks still in action on the left end of the beachhead, which for the first time were given a chance really to assist in covering an infantry attack. Cutler developed a beautifully coordinated assault. While the destroyer fire and that of the two tanks kept down the fire from the strongpoint, three sections of Company L advanced up a slight draw a little to the right of the strong-point, shielded from view by heavy brush. With only minor losses, in spite of having to cross minefields, they got to the top of the bluff and spread out a trifle inland and directly behind the strongpoint. Meanwhile, scattered groups of Companies E (of the 116th, which belonged on the western end of the beach, three miles away) and of I, K, and M (of the 16th), all directed by Captain Richmond of Company I, senior surviving officer of what was left of his battalion, were massed in a second assault group which moved straight up the bluff toward the strongpoint against the now negligible enemy fire, till they brought up just below it. At that point, Cutler ’s men behind and Richmond’s in front had the strongpoint in a nutcracker. But they couldn’t close it; there was that destroyer ’s fire, a vital aid till now, still bursting on the strongpoint itself.
From on top, the men of Company L phoned the beach they were ready to assault if the naval fire were lifted. NSFCP radioed the destroyer to cease fire. It did, and so did the tanks. And then matters happened lightning fast. Before the Germans sheltering from the destroyer fire in their dugouts could swarm out and get back to their guns, and before even the men from Company L behind could get to the strongpoint, it was stormed from the front by the troops below. Hand grenades and satchel charges swiftly ended all resistance in the German trenches and the machinegun emplacements; thirty-one Nazis still able to walk, with hands held high above their heads as assurance of submission, straggled out of the trenches as prisoners. And that finished off the strongpoint on the far eastern end of the beachhead. Captain Richmond and Lieutenant Cutler started inland with their conglomeration of men from both ends of the battle line, to take up their assigned defensive position inland. So now at either end of the beachhead, the flanking strong-points had been knocked out, and the attackers were moving inland. Meanwhile, there was action also in the middle. Between the St. Laurent and the Colleville Draws, the major units of the 16th Infantry which had made it that far were banked up against the shingle fringing the beach road. The seawall itself did not come that far east. Conditions behind the shingle were bad. With the case-mated guns of the St. Laurent Draw on the right, and those of the Colleville Draw on the left, the already demoralized men behind the shingle were exposed to enfilading fire from both sides should they stay behind the shingle, and to the fire of a dozen machine gun nests on the bluffs in front of them should they leave the shingle to advance across the road to the concertina wire on its far side. The net result was a huddled mass, too stunned to move. In these circ*mstances, two different officers organized advances. Second Lieut. John Spalding, who had managed to get through on the first wave with part of what had been his original section of Company E of the 16th Infantry, saw facing him directly across the beach road what looked like a small draw running at a slight angle up the face of the bluff. If only he could get to that, he might stage an advance, shielded from the fire of the strongpoints to his right and to his left, and get up on the plateau beyond, in between those strongpoints. A little on his left, Captain Joseph Dawson who had come in on the second wave with a substantial part of Company G of the 16th, in a little better
condition than most for he had succeeded in getting several of his machine guns ashore with him, considered the same idea. Spalding acted first. He blew a gap in the wire facing him with a bangalore torpedo, got his men across the road and through the gap, and then found himself blocked by minefields in the marshy ground beyond, while machine guns from the strongpoint on his left started to spray him with bullets. Luckily his men spotted a path around the minefield or they would shortly all have been cut to pieces; they swiftly got in to the protection of the draw Spalding originally had noted. Unfortunately, on his right, a soldier who had inched ahead with a bangalore to try to clear a path there through the minefield was killed by an anti-personnel mine. And exploding mines killed two other G.I.’s attempting to get through the minefields toward the left. Meanwhile, on Spalding’s left, Captain Dawson had also started operations. With some machine guns of his own to help, he waited till the enemy machine guns on the crest above exposed their positions by firing on the next flotilla of LCVP’s coming in. Then building up a heavy supporting fire of his own on the nearest of those enemy guns, he sent several little groups across the road to blow the wire there. At this point, so thickly had the Nazis laid their concertina coils, it took four bangalores to blow a single gap. To complicate matters, trip wires to detonate anti-personnel mines had cunningly been set out to snare anyone approaching the wire. So the job took some time; without the smothering fire of his own machine guns on the crest above, it is doubtful that any of his men would have survived long enough to make the cuts. As soon as the gaps were blown, Captain Dawson started to move his company across the road for an advance on the bluffs. He got them across, only to find in front of him more of the same minefields which had faced Spalding. Dawson got his men safely through by a grisly expedient. Before him were the dead bodies of the two G.I.’s recently torn to pieces in the first attempt to cross. Evidently there, at least, the hidden mines had already been exploded. His men might, if that turned out to be the fact, have a safe passage through simply by going over the bodies of their dead comrades. They did, but it was a little nerve-racking. Immediately, some stray combat engineers followed them across the road, to clear more mines and to widen the gaps in the wire. Meanwhile, the rest of the men of the 16th Infantry, jammed up behind the shingle in a confused conglomerate of disorganized units with no longer any officers, showed no inclination at all on their own to follow through the gaps.
They had seen the mine explosions just beyond the wire; they’d had enough already; they wanted none of that. They weren’t moving in spite of enfilading artillery bursts and exploding mortar shells now starting to inflict casualties on them even behind the shingle. Colonel George Taylor of the 16th endeavored personally to order the mob before him forward through the gaps. But those G.I.’s were not accustomed to getting orders directly from colonels. Orders from sergeants, yes; to those they had learned by hard experience to react automatically. But as for orders from colonels, the men were too numbed by what they’d gone through already to absorb any such radically new ideas—they only stared dumbly at him and squeezed a little harder against the shingle. They weren’t moving. Colonel Taylor was no man to accept disaster simply because it was inevitable. Grabbing the nearest sergeant, he roared out to him and to all the panic-stricken G.I.’s clinging to the shingle near him. “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die! Now let’s get the hell out of here!” And ordering that sergeant to collect a sizable squad, regardless of what unit either he or they belonged to, and start across the road, he now got action. Soon every non-com, leading men he’d never seen before, was on his way through the wire toward the bluffs. The jam tying up the 16th Infantry behind the shingle was loosening. While the men of Company G were gingerly picking their way through the minefield, Captain Dawson and one of his men started up the bluff. Halfway up, a machine gun set to cover any approach up the little draw opened fire on them. Jumping for cover into the brush, Dawson ordered the man with him back to bring up the company while he alone kept on. Still under fire but screened by one patch of brush after another, he managed to get within 75 yards of the gun when the Nazis lost sight of him and ceased firing. At that, Dawson circled to his left, made the crest unobserved and then crawled toward the gun from behind. Not till he was within 30 feet of it was he spotted; then action on both sides was amazingly rapid. Dawson leaped to his feet, clutching a grenade; the Germans started to swivel their gun on him. Dawson got his grenade in first; the explosion killed the whole crew. The path up the inclined draw was now open. Shortly the 5th Section of Dawson’s company, arriving first, knocked out the two machine gun nests adjacent, leaving quite a hole in the line of enemy machine gun fire from the bluff.
Captain Dawson reorganized his Company G just beyond the crest and started immediately inland in columns of sections toward Colleville. As had been thoroughly impressed on him, the imperative need to get a defense line hurriedly organized inland against counterattack took first priority over all else, over even his opportunity to further damage the defenses of our enemies on the Atlantic Wall, once he had penetrated that. A little on Dawson’s right, there was Lieut. Spalding with his section of Company E. His struggle up the bluff was partly eased by what Dawson had accomplished in knocking out the machine gun at the crest, but even so, it was no clear sailing. Nearing the bluff top, he came under fire from another machine gun covering the draw from the right; before he could rush the position and capture the solitary soldier manning that gun, it had knocked down three of his men. With twenty-three only left now, he reached the crest, found a line of trenches there already abandoned, and then parted company with Dawson—while Dawson with the larger group went inland, he would first see what he might do with his small party on the bluffs to help those still below. So he went west. Looking down now from the bluffs, Spalding saw the cluttered beachhead as the enemy had seen it—a dismal sight for American eyes, but now there was something he could do about it. Directly below him lay the shingle bank and adjoining it the beach road. Racing across that road in sporadic groups headed for the gaps in the wire beyond were squads of the G.I.’s of his own regiment whom Colonel Taylor was pushing forward. But the Nazis in the massive strongpoint to Spalding’s right, guarding the easterly side of the St. Laurent Draw, noting that heavy advance, were beginning to mass machine gun fire on those gaps. Moving back from the crest of the bluff into fields crisscrossed by hedgerows and shaded by clumps of trees, Spalding and his twenty-three G.I.’s managed undetected to get to the rear of the strongpoint and above it. In a concerted rush then, they came downhill upon the surprised Nazis busily engaged in firing in the opposite direction, and burst into the outworks. From then on, it was hand to hand combat with grenades and rifle butts. In that tangled network of trenches and gun-pits, it took Spalding’s men two hours to knock down the opposition, but at least from the first assault, there was no more fire on the beach from that strongpoint—a most important gain, for major reinforcements were just starting to debark at that section of the beachhead.
By 1000, Spalding had the strong point. And immediately, a startling change took place on the beach below. No longer under fire from artillery overhead, the combat engineers of the 37th Engineer Battalion, manning one of the two bulldozers still in action, tore the first chunk out of the shingle bank, opening at last a path for vehicles from the cluttered beach up to the road beyond. And on the other side of the St. Laurent Draw, the 146th Engineer Battalion promptly bulldozed through a second gap. Movement off the sands was at last possible to trucks. They began to untangle themselves. Whether Spalding and his little group of G.I.’s from Company E of the 16th ever had a chance to pause and look down on the change they had wrought on the beachhead situation, is dubious. Hardly had they finished rounding up their prisoners (aside from the enemy dead, as large a force as they) when a runner reached them from battalion headquarters with orders to move immediately south to Colleville, there to join the rest of their regiment, now pouring unmolested up the sides of the bluff, to establish the inland counterattack defense line. Farther to the west, between the Vierville Draw and les Moulins, up against the seawall, lay the units of the 116th Infantry Regiment in various stages of demoralization. Directly in front of the guns of the Vierville Draw, sheltered at least temporarily by the concrete seawall, lay the remnants of Companies A and B, battered into impotence, incapable even of further movement to save themselves. On their left were somewhat less than half of Companies B and C of the 2nd Rangers, almost as badly cut to pieces while coming in by the fire of the same German positions. From here eastward came a gap of some four hundred yards to where lay the 5th Ranger Battalion, practically intact, with the wreck of LCI(L) 91 blazing fiercely on the beach in their rear. Adjoining them, clustered against the timber seawall there, was Company C of the 116th Infantry, the only company in the 116th Regiment that had the luck to come in reasonably whole. With this company was the regimental commander. Colonel Canham. Action in this sector started on the right. Here sixty-two survivors of the original hundred and thirty men of Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers lay against the masonry seawall, catching their breath after their desperate struggle in the water and on the sands to get through against exploding shells and whizzing bullets from the Vierville Draw. But where they now were hardly looked good to them as a shelter for long. To add to this gloomy outlook, neither on their right or on their left could they
see any other troops. A sense of utter isolation gripped them all. Except for three DD tanks (the few survivors of the sixteen brought in there by LCT’s) at the water ’s edge, firing on the strongpoint of le Hamel with its machine gun nests cresting the bluff immediately over their heads, it seemed to them they had made the shore only to be left there practically unaided to take on the massed fire of the whole Atlantic Wall. Still, there were those few tanks for company. However, a swift look to the westward showed over half a dozen similar tanks already blazing furiously from the shells coming from Pointe de la Percée; it could hardly be long now before the gunners there knocked out these tanks also and then turned attention to what lay behind the seawall. So rest or no rest, they had better get out of there before either the enfilading fire from Pointe de la Percée or the mortars from the Vierville Draw were centered on them as the sole remaining target. Looking particularly attractive as a better refuge was a group of beach villas just across the road from them, all wrecked now by the gunfire of the naval bombardment, but shrouded by tall trees and thick shrubbery which offered excellent cover—only there was that concertina wire in between and they had no bangalore torpedoes to blast the wire apart. However, they hadn’t any time either. There was that protective tank fire blanketing the ridge above; while still it lasted to protect them, they might gap the wire only with wire cutters. A few men dashed across the road to try; they did it; then the others sprinted over into the cover of the shrubs to join them. About half of Company B’s men now turned right, intending to ascend the Vierville Draw as laid out in their original briefing. But the original briefing had been based on the theory that by now either bombs or spotter-directed naval gunfire would have washed out the gun emplacements there. Intense fire from the Vierville Draw indicating as they approached it how completely theoretical this still was, they backtracked to their point of departure, the ruined villas. Meantime, the men of Company A were cautiously trying the ascent of the bluffs directly. The first two Rangers to make the 150 foot climb and gingerly crawl over the top, could see enemy trenches just beyond the crest with three machine-gun emplacements, all clearly in view hardly twenty yards off but all unmanned—the German strongpoint which had helped to shoot them to pieces amongst the obstacles. While the gratified Rangers were contemplating this unusual situation, six more G.I.’s snaked up to join them. All eight crept forward then to examine the
empty defenses. But scarcely had that movement started when the Germans rushed from the dugouts where they had been sheltering from the shells of the three tanks on the beach below, manned their machine guns, opened fire. But they had already made the fatal error of waiting too long. Three Rangers were knocked down, but the others, aided swiftly by more Rangers coming up over the bluff, soon mopped up all the enemy positions, killing half the defenders and capturing the rest. That ended the resistance at the crest, the major defense on that bluff. While the battered but undaunted handful of the 2nd Rangers on the right was punching this hole in the Atlantic Wall, about a quarter of a mile to their left but out of their sight and unknown to them a wider movement was simultaneously underway. In front of Company C of the 116th Infantry lay a very steep section of the bluffs, but it was to a fair degree now masked by smoke from grass fires all along the slope which promised some cover once a man got that far. However, when it came to getting that far, there facing the men behind the seawall were those forbidding coils of concertina wire. And what might lie beyond that on the bluff, they didn’t know; what they did know was that they had landed about half a mile out of position to their left—they should have landed before the Vierville Draw, on which they had been briefed. What actually might be before them was terra incognita, except there was nothing doubtful about the presence of machine gun nests excellently placed for plunging fire on the beach beneath —bullets from above sprayed the top of the shingle as a warning to them to go no farther. Private Ingram Lambert, lugging a bangalore torpedo, disregarded the warning. Scrambling over the top of the seawall, he sprinted across the road, shoved the bangalore tube through the wire, pulled the friction igniter. However, he could, see it had failed. He paused to reset it. But that delay of even a few seconds was fatal. An unseen machine gun above swung over, a burst of fire hit him. Lambert fell dead. There was no gap. Neither were there any volunteers for a second try—very obviously, the machine gunners above were exceedingly quick in swivelling their guns. So their platoon leader, Lieut. Stanley Schwartz, crossed over to tend to it himself. He reset the igniter, jerked it once more; got safely back. The explosion this time blew a very satisfactory gap in the wire but the first man across to try it was felled alongside Lambert. However, after that, their luck changed very decidedly; with only a few casualties, the entire company,
well dispersed, straggled across the road into the tall grass beyond. From there, protected by smoke but slowed up markedly by a wary search for mines ahead, they went diagonally up the bluff, reaching the top to find the trenches there empty, and the plateau before them invitingly open. While Company C was starting its move, the largest intact group of men on the beach, from end to end of it, was doing likewise. Lieut. Colonel Schneider with 450 men of the 5th Rangers, practically his whole battalion, had hardly got himself ensconced behind the seawall before he was organizing his forces to leave it. Simultaneously, his men blew four gaps in the concertina wire with bangalores. Then masked somewhat by smoke, his battalion streamed across the road with only eight casualties, and started up the steep bluff. Smoke so heavy as to force some of the men to don their gas masks slowed them, but it was welcome—in that smoke they, were beautifully screened. Nearing the top, the Rangers on the left came on the machine gun nest, craftily positioned just under the bluff crest for fire on the beach below, which had killed their comrades just as their dash across the beach road had begun. This position, manned only by a few Germans, they swiftly disposed of. Then unbelievably they had another bit of luck. As the Ranger battalion streamed over the crest, they spotted signs intended only for the defenders, cautioning, “ACHTUNG! MINEN!” Guided by those friendly signs, they easily avoided a minefield containing over 150 mines and moved safely onto the plateau beyond. And there on their right, very much astonished at finding they were after all not alone in the area, were the men of the 2nd Rangers who had just reached the top. So now, all on top of the bluff were the little group of the 2nd Rangers, the entire 5th Ranger Battalion, and all of Company C, 116th Infantry—nearly 700 men all told—by far the largest force to reach the top in one place anywhere. From there, Colonel Canham of the 116th started the entire force southwestward toward Vierville to take up a position on the counterattack line.
CHAPTER 26 Five miles to the right of the Omaha Beach, with nothing but rocky cliffs and no sand at all in between, lay Pointe du Hoe. On top this rugged promontory was sited the battery of six 155 mm. howitzers that was the specific objective of Lieut. Colonel James Rudder and his three companies, D, E, and F of the 2nd Rangers. Rudder and his men, carried in ten British LCA’s, got underway in the darkness from twelve miles out for a three hour voyage through rough seas to hit his objective at H-hour, simultaneously with the landing of the first wave on the Omaha Beach itself. To ease his problem, the U.S.S. Texas from 18,000 yards offshore was given Pointe du Hoe as the specific target for its 14-inch guns during the initial bombardment; and two destroyers, one British, one American, H.M.S. Talybont and U.S.S. Satterlee, were detailed for close-in fire support after H-hour, once the fire of the distant Texas had then to be lifted as Rudder ’s men landed for their assault. Rudder ’s plan for scaling rested mainly on rocket guns, similar to those long used by life saving crews in firing lines aboard wrecks. Each of his LCA’s was fitted with three pairs of such rocket guns, firing rockets dragging grapnels to which were secured three separate sets of lines. The lines for one pair of guns were plain ropes; for the second pair, toggled lines; and for the third pair, rope ladders. All were to be fired simultaneously from the boats on beaching. As a second resource, each LCA carried a pair of small, portable rocket projectors to be carried ashore and fired from closer in. These dragged plain lines. Finally, each LCA carried also a set of tubular sectional ladders, each section four feet long, which could swiftly be joined into whatever length seemed necessary for scaling. And as a last resource, should all else fail, Rudder had with him four Dukws, each fitted with a 100 foot extension ladder borrowed from the London Fire Department. It was hoped the Dukws could be run up the shingle to the very base of the cliff, there to raise their ladders right from the Dukws to the cliff
top. So with three companies of Rangers, all of whom had had extensive training with this very equipment on the cliffs at Swanage on the Isle of Wight which greatly resembled those at Pointe du Hoe, the expedition was put overboard and shoved off on its desperate adventure. Rudder had trouble from the beginning, all stemming from the storm. One of his ten LCA’s swamped near the start. Of the two supply boats carrying his reserve ammunition and equipment, one swiftly went down in the heavy seas, and the other had to jettison all its cargo to avoid a similar fate. But the four Dukws, in spite of the load of the long Fire Department extension ladders they were carrying, strangely all survived the breaking seas to reach Pointe du Hoe. Now came a second and worse trouble, as a result both of darkness and the heavy seas. The tidal current set them to the eastward, far to the left of their objective. This went unnoticed by the Rangers in the tossing boats, since Pointe de la Percée on their left so much resembled Pointe du Hoe as viewed from the sea in the dim light around dawn that they were practically on Pointe de la Percée before the mistake was caught. Rudder had then to head his whole flotilla to starboard, close enough inshore now to bring him under fire from strongpoints in his lee, and head westward back toward Pointe du Hoe. As a result of all this extra voyage under fire, not till forty minutes after H-hour did he get back to the cliff which was his target. This delay had two highly disastrous results. As scheduled, at three minutes before H-hour, the Texas lifted its fire off Pointe du Hoe. With the forty-three minutes grace from heavy gunfire thus bestowed on them, rather than the intended three minutes only, the Nazi defenders of Pointe du Hoe had ample time once again to man their defenses on the cliff crest before a solitary landing craft made the cliff base. But even worse, Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers, temporarily under Lieut. Colonel Schneider together with his own entire Battalion of the 5th Rangers, eight companies all told, waiting well offshore for the code signal (two flares) from Rudder that he had successfully scaled the cliffs and they should then come in behind him on Pointe du Hoe as his support, of course never got any such signal as expected shortly after Hhour. So following their prearranged orders, when H + 30 (0700) came with still no signal received from Rudder (who had not even by then got back to his objective) all the eight supporting companies of Rangers concluded he had
failed and joined the second wave of the 116th Infantry. Their instructions were then to come in with the 116th on their alternative objective, the Vierville Draw, and their final orders were to proceed from there inland and overland to Pointe du Hoe to take out that battery of howitzers by an assault from the landward side, it being then a reasonable assumption that Rudder ’s attack from the sea had been beaten off. So that delay in getting to Pointe du Hoe, due to the combination of bad weather and the tide, cost Rudder dearly—it deprived him of his supports and it permitted the enemy time to get set again to repel him. The destroyer Talybont, lying off Pointe du Hoe, watched with dismay Rudder ’s flotilla heading for Pointe de la Percée, unable to understand it, for the shells from the Texas were visibly bursting atop Pointe du Hoe. Things were going to be bad now for Rudder. Both the Talybont and the Satterlee moved in closer to extend what help they could when he returned. At 0710, Rudder ’s flotilla got back and turned to come in on the eastern flank of Pointe du Hoe and on a 400 yard front. Immediately from above the enemy opened on him; one of his Dukws was sunk by 20 mm. fire. The remaining boats started to touch down on the heavy shingle footing the cliff. Machine guns opened on them; fifteen Rangers were hit. Both Satterlee and Talybont took a hand at sweeping the crest with every gun they had from 5-inch turret guns down to their AA’s while the Rangers debarked. They managed to pin down much of the fire coming from the crest, and prevent greater disaster. Meantime, all the LCA’s as they hit the shingle, fired their rocket guns. Immediately, twenty-seven sets of grapnels dragging a varied assortment of lines tailing from them went hurtling toward the cliff top. But only about half of them ever cleared the edge to get a grip there. Another unforeseen result of the storm here took a hand—on the long run in, many of the ropes had become so thoroughly water-soaked by spray that the rockets could no longer lift the added weight. And the Dukws immediately ran into another unforeseen difficulty which ended any hope of assistance in scaling from the three still left. There was a shingle strip, about twenty-five yards wide, at the base of the cliff. Although there was not a single crater on the entire area of the Omaha Beach, this little strip of shingle was so badly cratered by shell bursts from the Texas (and perhaps also from some pre-D-day bombs) that no vehicle could possibly hope to cross it to get to the foot of the precipice. And from where the Dukws were
marooned at the water ’s edge, 75 feet out, their 100 foot extension ladders couldn’t reach the top. The Dukw experiment was immediately liquidated. The Rangers aboard the Dukws promptly abandoned them to join their mates from the LCA’s in a mad rush for the ropes hanging down the precipice before the Germans above should cut them all. The Germans on top started to rain “potato masher” grenades and rifle fire down on the Rangers below to keep them from the ropes, but this proved a bad mistake—there were more Rangers below than Germans on top. While most of the Rangers kept on for the ropes, others armed with BAR’s, keeping back a little, instantly picked off each Nazi who exposed himself; the Satterlee, in close now, swept the whole crest for a few minutes with a concentrated fire that chased every remaining enemy well back from the cliff top. The Satterlee then lifted its fire and the men below started up the cliff—some on toggles, some on hurriedly assembled sectional ladders, some on the few rope ladders which had made the top. In less than five minutes from the touchdown of their LCA’s, at half a dozen different points, Rangers were coming over the top. A few of the ropes over the top, had been cut by the enemy or the grapnels had slipped, but enough were left so that supplemented by the portable ladders, within twenty minutes, the entire scaling party was over the top on Pointe du Hoe. Before them was a scene of unbelievable destruction. Shellfire had so badly cratered everything, there was hardly a landmark they had been briefed on which could still be recognized. But without waiting for more than two or three others to join, each group started as best it could to find the howitzer position assigned to it for destruction. What few Germans first showed themselves as the gun demolition parties dashed for their prey, they promptly drove to cover in the maze of ruined trenches. But one party after another, as it arrived at the gun emplacement it had been briefed to destroy, got the same shock—there was the concrete gun position, all right—but it was empty. There was no howitzer there! However, if there wasn’t a big gun left on Pointe du Hoe, the startled Rangers swiftly found all their gun crews still remained—and in substantial force. From a machine gun nest on the east, from an AA emplacement on the west, and from several of the smashed trenches here and there, artillery and mortar shells and bullets started coming at them from all directions. Immediately, those on top the point itself, the bulk of the Rangers, had to take over the smashed trenches nearest them to organize for defense lest they all be swiftly destroyed.
But Pointe du Hoe, even though the Rangers had it, was not their real objective. Where were those guns? Without the guns, Pointe du Hoe was no danger to the invasion, and worthless to expend another man in holding. But the guns, wherever they were, even without Pointe du Hoe, still constituted the gravest menace to the success of the invasion. Where were those guns? They were too bulky to have been moved far; they must still be somewhere about. While Colonel Rudder and most of his force stayed on the point to fight a seesaw battle with a superior force of Nazis in underground shelters and tunnels of whose ramifications they knew nothing, to hold Pointe du Hoe as a base while they sought the guns, Rudder sent his remaining Rangers in several parties under Lieutenants Hill and Lapres inland to find those guns. They had a series of bad brushes on the way. One group, hardly 300 yards from the point, was caught by fire from inland and lost eight killed and seven wounded. Lieut. Hill, skirmishing ahead then with Pfc. Anderson for support, reached a low hedgerow beyond which Hill spotted a machine gun, without himself being seen. Hill, enraged by what already had happened to his men, decided he could best destroy that gun by getting its invisible crew to expose itself. So standing suddenly up, he shouted: “You sons of bitches! You couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle!” As the startled Nazis leaped up to swing their gun toward him, Hill dropped to cover, caught a grenade tossed him by Anderson, and as the machine gunners opened fire, he hurled the grenade. That finished the machine gun; very luckily too, as only a few minutes later Lieut. Lapres and his party came by the same position. By 0815, hardly an hour after their touchdown, Lapres and Hill had reached the main road half a mile inland and with a total force of fifty men, established a roadblock, cutting the main east-west highway to the Omaha Beach. Immediately they sent out patrols. Those guns must be somewhere about, most logically somewhere near the road. And they were right. At 0900, a two man patrol consisting of Sergeants Lomell and Kuhn, going down a double-hedgerowed lane some 300 yards south of the main road, found the guns. There they were, most ingeniously camouflaged, sited and ready to fire on either Utah or Omaha Beach as desired, shells nearby with points inserted ready for setting—but not a Nazi gunner in sight anywhere! There were, however, only five guns, not six. Whatever had happened to the
sixth, no one ever found out—at the moment, however, neither Kuhn or Lomell cared. There were five of the big guns anyway, over which many of their comrades already had died. While Kuhn with his rifle at the ready stood guard to prevent interruption, Lomell dropped thermit grenades into the recoil cylinders of two of the guns, smashed the sights on a third, and then, two demolition grenades being all they had with them, they both hurried back to the roadblock to get more grenades. During their absence, a second patrol led by Sergeant Rupinski, independently stumbled again on the guns. Rupinski’s patrol was more plentifully equipped for destruction. He dropped a thermit grenade down the muzzle of each gun, smashed all the sights, then heaved another grenade into the ammunition neatly stacked nearby, to start a sparkling blaze there, and hurriedly beat a retreat, lest the gunners, alerted by the explosions of their powder, should unexpectedly reappear. But there was never a gunner anywhere about—apparently they had all been pinned down by the heavy fire from the Texas in their permanent quarters on Pointe du Hoe; that tremendous drumfire had so numbed them, they hadn’t moved as far as their guns, even when it lifted. And now Rudder had them pinned down for good (or was it vice versa as to who was pinned down?) and the guns were no more. All within less than two hours of their arrival on Pointe du Hoe. Immediately a runner was dispatched from the roadblock position to inform Colonel Rudder, still fighting a nip and tuck battle on the tip of Pointe du Hoe, that the guns had been found and destroyed. But so difficult were communications that it was midafternoon before Rudder ’s message, via Navy sources, finally reached Bradley aboard the Augusta: “Located Pointe du Hoe—mission accomplished—need ammunition and reinforcement—many casualties.” Bradley, hardly able to do anything even to affect the major battle on the beachhead, was wholly unable to do anything for Rudder. Had it not been for the destroyers Satterlee and Talybont, and later the Barton and the Thompson, which stood by him for two days and with their guns beat off increasing German attacks both from inland and from the Nazis already on the point, it is unlikely any of Rudder ’s devoted command would ever have survived. As it was, two days later when the 116th Infantry and the 5th Rangers, with heavy tank support, finally fought their way through from Vierville to his
rescue on Pointe du Hoe, hardly 90 men of his original 250 Rangers were still on their feet. Lieut. Colonel James Rudder, twice wounded in these actions, was awarded the DSC for extraordinary heroism, and his 2nd Rangers a Unit Citation for knocking out that vital battery of 155’s on Pointe du Hoe. Each earned it.
CHAPTER 27 1000. Ten A.M. Three and a half hours only since H-hour. To the men of the 16th and 116th, to the combat engineers and the Navy demolition teams, to the Rangers on Pointe du Hoe, to all still living who had come in on the first wave, it seemed an eternity since dawn. To the dead lying shoulder to shoulder all along the sands, the G.I.’s whose waterlogged corpses in solid lines from one end of the Omaha Beach to the other fringed the sea where they had been washed up by the flooding tide, gruesomely jostling each other in the pounding surf, it was eternity. Their sodden eyes would never see another dawn. To the G.I.’s of the 18th Infantry, just coming in on LCVP’s and LCI(L)’s for a landing a trifle to the right of the St. Laurent Draw, matters on the beachhead could not possibly have looked worse. The tide was running toward flood. The obstacles were all invisible, exactly the state expected by the Nazis when they set them there. The losses to landing craft as they came in to beach were high from bottoms stove in on log ramps or blasted open by mines. The narrow strip of sand between surf line and shingle bank was jammed with immovable vehicles; below the surf line were plenty more awash, already drowned out. And so far as they could see machine gun fire was still coming from the bluff tops and shells from the strongpoints guarding every draw. If the situation had been any worse at H-hour, they couldn’t see how. But they were in a poor position to judge. Compared to the drenching rain of machine gun bullets which had greeted the first wave, what now still was coming from the bluffs was nothing. And no longer was there the criss-cross artillery fire on both sides of the St. Laurent Draw to envelop them in bursting shells as they approached. Lieut. Spalding had washed out the strongpoint firing westerly from the easterly side of the draw, they fortunately were landing in that washed out sector where no nearby artillery now covered the beach, and at that very moment, bulldozers were starting to slice the first two cuts through the shingle to the beach road beyond. The 18th Infantry landed. A terrific number of its landing craft were lost in
the invisible obstacles but the personnel losses were light, thanks to the work of the G.I.’s of the 16th and the 116th who had already in their surge through the wire and up the bluffs disposed of many of the machine gun nests above which otherwise would have shot the 18th Regiment to ribbons as it floundered ashore from its wrecked landing craft. On the whole therefore, while the beach looked like hell to them, the men of the 18th waded to it still mostly intact, and what was as important, with most of their heavy weapons and radio equipment still with them and in working order. A little offshore, every here and there off the beach lay a destroyer, eager to help in the fight, helpless to do anything till the camouflaged strongpoints were spotted for them—but there were no spotters in the air, and those wading in with the earlier waves had lost or had ruined their radio equipment in the surf. The destroyers were impotent to do anything. A few LCT’s and LCI(L)’s, unable to stand off and watch the slaughter of the G.I.’s they were bringing in if landed beyond the obstacles, had smashed through the obstacles to the surf line, there to remain with all guns firing on the strongpoints inshore until Nazi artillery had set them ablaze. To the demoralized men behind the shingle, this display of courageous naval support may have helped momentarily in bolstering morale, but as the end result was only more blazing wrecks on the beach, even that was questionable. In front of the 18th Regiment as it landed was that obstreperous casemate covering the westerly side of the St. Laurent Draw. And blocking everything but a frontal approach to it were entrenched machine gun nests on the slopes, minefields, and tangled concertina wire. Company M of the 116th, which for two hours had been trying to get up the westerly shoulder, was containing the machine gun nests on that flank by a heavy fire of its own, but it wasn’t getting either in or up. The situation was a stalemate. The 18th Infantry, which had to get forward, decided to break it. On its left on the sand was a tank, the only one in the area still able to fire. A joint attack by the tank and the infantry opened, directed at the casemate. But the shells from the tank’s 75 mm. gun were too light—they made no impression whatever, either on the gun shield or on the concrete encasing the gun. The attack stalled completely. At this point, the NSFCP which had come ashore with the 18th Infantry took a hand. Its radio equipment was in good order. Offshore lay a destroyer, close in now that the tide was nearly at full flood, with its bow practically scraping bottom in its anxiety to get even closer if it could. The NSFCP contacted the
destroyer, by radio maneuvered it to a position farther east from which, close in to the beach where it was possible to see laterally along it, the destroyer had a line of sight inside the blast screen of that German 88, able at last to gaze practically straight down the muzzle of that camouflaged gun. That settled it. For the destroyer gunners, with their target pinpointed for them by that NSFCP just below it, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. At short range, with their flat trajectory shells passing only a few yards above the heads of the G.I.’s on the beach, it took only three salvos, starting a little high to keep on the safe side, to bring the fourth salvo down squarely on the armored gun shield protecting the opening in the concrete casemate enclosing that deadly 88. Two high velocity naval armor piercing 5-inch shells went through the armor, of that gun shield, leaving two very neat round holes, and burst inside. Immediately, all the Nazis inside that massive pillbox still able to move, rushed out in surrender. All that was required of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th then was to accept their surrender and occupy the position. That ended all resistance on both sides of the St. Laurent Draw. Immediately, the bulldozers pushed forward to fill in the anti-tank ditches blocking access to the draw, the engineers of the 16th Regiment turned to on clearing mines and cutting away wire, while on the western slope the Engineer Special Brigade turned to with some freshly disentangled bulldozers to carve an entirely new road up the draw clear of any of the mines bedded in the old road. By 1300, vehicles were moving up this new road, the first of any whatever able to move inland. The St. Laurent Draw became immediately the major funnel for all traffic off the beach and inland, and the log jam on the beachhead was broken at last. Farther west, conditions were rapidly being improved also, now that some communication was being established by NSFCP’s with the offshore warships. In front of the Vierville Draw, up which went the only paved road off the beach and before which the worst slaughter anywhere along the beachhead had taken place, lay behind the seawall the shattered fragments of Companies A and B of the 116th, completely immobilized. Here no progress at all had been made, except that Captain Goranson and his little group of Rangers, before passing inland, had cleaned out the machine guns and mortars on the high right shoulder. But the heavier artillery in the thickly concreted casemates and the machine-gun nests on the left shoulder made the draw itself as impassable as ever. And besides that, all thought of
movement anyway had been thoroughly beaten out of the dazed minds of those anywhere near it and still alive. They were mentally as well as physically pinned down. Into this scene of death and desolation came straggling from the east some engineer demolition units, destined originally to land before the Vierville Draw with the first wave, but set down by the tide for an ultimate landing far to the eastward. Dragging their demolition materials, they had finally made their way along the cluttered beach back to the area on which they had been briefed, mainly for the destruction there of the massive concrete road blocks the Nazis had set up across the pavement of that vital road mounting the draw. But it was obvious to the engineers on a casual glance up the draw that so long as those casemated guns and automatic weapons above commanded the road, the only demolition work likely to be done around the roadblocks would be executed by the Nazis on the bodies of anyone foolish enough to show himself near them. However, along with the engineers there arrived an NSFCP sent ashore to help the 116th Infantry on whose sector all this came. Not far offshore lay the destroyer McCook. Some nine miles out lay the battleship Texas which, since lifting fire at H-hour on Pointe du Hoe, had been given nothing to do. For the NSFCP, it was an ideal set-up. A little on their right was a massive target, clearly visible to them from the beach, but invisible from seaward. Offshore were two warships, waiting only for someone to designate a target for them. The NSFCP immediately lined up both vessels for action. Since the concrete casemates housing the guns on the western shoulder of the Vierville Draw were by far the most massive of any on the Omaha Beach, it was decided that the McCook’s 5-inch guns would yield to the 14-inch guns on the Texas in the initial bombardment. At about 1200, the Texas opened fire from long range, giving her main battery shells a high angle plunging effect on impact. The fall of the shells, four per salvo, was swiftly spotted and moved on the target by the NSFCP. After the fall of the fourth salvo, the McCook, which from her offshore position could see somewhat better up the draw than could the observers closer in on the beach, radioed in to the beach to direct the Texas to cease firing. On the McCook even through the tremendous clouds of dust raised by the exploding shells, they could see the Germans coming out of their shattered emplacements, hands held high in token of surrender. There being no one nearer, the beaten Nazis proceeded down the draw to
surrender to the demolition engineers. That left only the strongpoints on the eastern flank of the draw, mainly trenches, mortar pits, and machine-gun nests. On these, the McCook and her 5inch battery turned to, helped by a few more salvos for good measure from the heavy guns on the distant Texas. All this observed naval fire, to put it euphemistically, swiftly “neutralized” completely these defenses. Except for a few snipers who still constituted a minor nuisance incapable of being dealt with by warship guns, the Vierville Draw was open. The engineers promptly turned to with their own explosives on demolishing the road blocks. 1300. With the defenses of the Vierville Draw now only shattered blocks of concrete and smashed trenches, there remained on the western flank of the Omaha Beach only the casemated guns on Pointe de la Percée. But these were not to be laughed off; they were quite as able as ever to destroy any landing vessels approaching the Vierville Draw and to block any traffic attempting to move up that exit. The destruction they had already spread on both landing craft and tanks on the western half of the beach had been terrific. From various vantage points amidst the debris of the fortifications once protecting the Vierville Draw but now no longer exposed to fire from there, the NSFCP could clearly discern the gun emplacements on Pointe de la Percée. But set as they were well into the eastern face of the promontory and a trifle back from the point itself, they were neither visible from the sea nor exposed to any direct fire from offshore. They were intended to be wholly safe from fire from seaward and so they appeared to be. For not only could the Texas not see the emplacements on Pointe de la Percée, but a good substantial part of the rocky point of the cliff itself lay between the emplacements carved into the precipice and the guns of the Texas off the coast. Still there was a way, for heavy naval guns at any rate. Directed by the same NSFCP, the Texas next opened fire with her main battery on the exposed end of the cliff itself. Under that tremendous battering, the rock started to give way. Before long, the whole face of the cliff, together with all the guns there emplaced, tumbled into the ocean. It is not of record as to whether the Nazi commander of the fortifications on Pointe de la Percée, who at 0800 was reporting that the invasion had been smashed at the water ’s edge and “hurled back into the sea,” survived to report that shortly after 1300, Pointe de la Percée itself had been smashed and all his guns (and he perhaps with them) hurled forward into the same sea.
It was with good reason that Bradley, who all morning had been left to agonize helplessly over the situation on the beachhead, reported with relish that the first message to reach him directly from Gerow of the V Corps read: “Thank God for the U. S. Navy!” By a little after 1300, naval gunfire from all along the beach had knocked out every major gun position and shortly thereafter the advancing G.I.’s had overrun the remaining machine-gun nests topping the bluffs. The defenses of the Atlantic Wall on the Omaha Beach had all crumbled. The way to the interior for the troops still pouring ashore was cleared at last—once the remaining obstacles, the minefields, and the debris covering the beachhead were removed by the engineers. The issue on the beaches themselves had been decided. The scene shifted now from the battle of the beachhead to the battle of the build-up—from the bloody struggles of small groups of men battling each other amongst the obstacles and the defenses of the Omaha sands to a much larger question. Could Eisenhower now, without any ports, somehow get across those open beaches into Normandy men enough and the vast tonnage of heavy military hardware and supplies he needed to make a fighting army of them, before von Rundstedt and Rommel between them could concentrate there from the overwhelming forces they had already in France the shock troops and the Panzers needed to crush him in counterattack inland? That now was what was becoming Bradley’s major headache. For Bradley on the Augusta, just beginning to receive the news from Colonel Talley in his Dukw that our G.I.’s, no longer pinned down, were at last swarming over the bluffs and moving inland, had cause now to ponder his own grim judgment made on the Near Shore on the eve of shoving off for the assault: “Just as soon as we land, this business becomes primarily a business of build-up. For you can almost always force an invasion, but you can’t always make it stick.”
CHAPTER 28 Tailing along, behind the Invasion Armada as it sailed away from its ocean rendezvous, Point Yoke south of the Isle of Wight, bound for the Far Shore, came Captain Dayton Clark and his motley flotilla comprising Force Mulberry. They and the Artificial Harbors with them in tow for Normandy were the devices on which rested what chance we had to make the invasion stick. Clark himself was embarked in a 110 foot subchaser; Stanford, his deputy commander, in another. Both tiny tubs were having a rough time of it in heavy seas. So also were Lieut. Barton and his squadron of little ST harbor tugs, hardly seagoing vessels either. Then came more queer vessels of all kinds, mostly British, from ships with horns projecting over their bows intended to help in linking up the Whale sections, to shallow-draft ancient excursion sidewheelers pressed into service as tenders, all rolling wildly now they were exposed to the open sea, and a stormy one at that. Astern came dozens of merchant ships and that dummy battleship, the Centurion, going like victims to the sacrifice, all to be sunk to form the Gooseberry breakwaters. For them, the seas on this, their last voyage, were nothing to be concerned about. And finally, astern of all, came the first flight of Phoenixs, looking like nothing ever seen at sea before, ten massive blocks of concrete towering above the waves, moving majestically along at three knots on long towlines astern the ocean-going tugs. They, of course, could not pretend even to keep up with an armada steaming along at ten. It was obvious to everyone that should the Nazi E-boats sortie out of Cherbourg, the Phoenixs, far astern of all else and their major protective convoys, so slow moving as to be practically stationary, would form ideal targets. Should the E-boats, if able to believe such monstrosities were real and not simply hallucinations brought on by battle psychosis, fire torpedoes at them, they couldn’t miss. And ultimately behind those Phoenixs would come more Phoenixs, mingled with Bombardons, Whales, and the Lobnitz pierheads, all lumbering along behind tugs, all to be assembled finally on the Far Shore in their proper pattern.
It took Captain Clark and his mongrel fleet a long time to cross. Night had fallen on D-day while still they were at sea—a night for them made tense by complete ignorance of how the assault flung ashore in the storm had gone— whether our G.I.’s were firmly on the beach and they could proceed with their part, or whether Dr. Goebbels had been a good prophet and our assault had been smashed before the Atlantic, Wall. The night sky ahead was laced with fiery tracers, vivid flares burst here and there over the dark Channel—very evidently, whatever had happened on the beachhead during the day, Goering and his Luftwaffe had come over Omaha for a night air attack and were then engaged in making it. Dawn came on D + 1. Captain Clark with his part of Force Mulberry moved into the area off the Omaha Beach, already jammed with thousands of ships; Commander Stanford with his force peeled off to starboard, headed for the Utah Beach. Clark examined the bluffs and the cluttered area of sea just in front of them. From long before, based on soundings shown on the French charts of that coast, the locations for the Mulberry Harbor and its breakwaters had been laid out. But were those French soundings, made, fifty years before, still reasonably accurate on a shoreline notorious for shifting sands? He must find out before he sank his floating breakwater units. Accompanied by Commander Passmore, Royal Navy, who in a tiny British survey boat only thirty feet long, the Gulnare, had made the passage across the storm-beaten Channel with her much bigger sisters, Clark started out to check. He and Passmore with handlines sounded the site for his Gooseberry line first, found it in reasonable agreement with expectations. The Gulnare set out the marker buoys for the first six ships to be sunk, and moved on to survey the sites for the Phoenixs. Clark, grim, tense, and already worn from months of battling on the Near Shore to make a reality of the units needed for Mulberry, as he sounded the depths for his first breakwater also surveyed the scene inshore of him. The Nazi artillery emplacements on the bluffs and cliffs not half a mile off, had, thank God, all been knocked out on D-day. Some small arms fire, sporadic but annoying, was still coming, oddly enough, from tunnel ends you could see in the cliff faces—Nazis would suddenly pop into view there, fire on the beach below, just as suddenly retreat into the tunnel, safe from reprisal. Till somehow the G.I.’s on the plateau could trace out the intricate tunnel system leading from the bluffs to the villages inland, and flush out the snipers using them as bases,
there was no stopping that. All along the beach, small landing craft and some somewhat larger— LCVP’s, LCT’s, and LCI(L)’s—were busily pouring troops ashore, ferried in from troopships still prudently some miles at sea. And Clark swiftly saw why prudence kept them there. For the beachhead before him, surprisingly enough, was still the target for directed enemy artillery fire—from well inland. Apparently all the mobile field artillery of the 352nd German Division was now massed some miles back in camouflaged positions in the wooded high ground there. And controlled by Nazi observers hidden in the tunnel network piercing the bluff faces, somehow still in direct communication with those guns, all that was necessary to bring down on any spot along the beachhead a galling fall of bursting shrapnel was to provide there a decently attractive target for artillery. So while the little landing craft, relatively fast on their feet so to speak, and well dispersed along the beach brought in the troops, the really large transports, the ocean-going fleet, stayed far offshore, well out of artillery range. And they were going to remain there too, until Gerow’s G.I.’s, pushing inland should, it was hoped, in the next few days overrun those positions and shove the Nazis and their artillery far back into the hinterland, out of range of Omaha. But that did Clark no good. He was going to have to bring ocean-going freighters close in to shore that very day, within easy range of those unseen batteries, to sink them on his Gooseberry line for his initial breakwater. And that sinking problem, involving all his ST tugs to hold a vessel in position against the tidal currents while he blasted out its bottom and set it down, was now going to be complicated by having to be done under enemy artillery fire —something never anticipated. But there was no way out. The first Liberty ship destined for the Gooseberry line, the James lredell, started to make its approach. Clark, with Lieutenant Commander Bassett in charge of the ST tugs for the Gooseberries, boarded her, accompanied by Lieutenant Hoague and his specially trained crew of sinking specialists to do the actual blasting. As the James lredell came inshore, the first vessel of anything like her size to come within range, some shells from inland began to fall in her vicinity— none very close, as she was still a moving target. The bursts were close enough, however, to convince the merchant skipper and his crew that this was
nothing they wished any further part in. They refused to go any farther. Fortunately, however, the renovated crews of the ST tugs offered no objections, so with the captain and the crew of that freighter removed, Clark and his tugs took over completely. With a few shells bursting about but none hitting her, under Clark’s direction Bassett and the ST tugs brought the lredell in to the marked position about half a mile offshore, and held her there a brief moment while they fired the prepared explosive charges in her holds and blew out her bottom. Down went the James lredell. Enough of her upper hull and her superstructure remained above water, however, to make a fine shelter in her lee. Captain Clark and his forces in swift succession brought in two more freighters and very neatly put them on the bottom also astern the James lredell —each bow slightly overlapping the stern of the vessel ahead, to leave no gaps in that line of sunken ships as a breakwater. But by now these activities were awakening great interest in quite diverse spots—the Nazi fire control observers ensconced in their hideouts on the bluffs, and the thousands of G.I.’s still jammed aboard the transports offshore, waiting their turn for disembarkation, all with their eyes glued to the beach, straining to see what awaited them there. To the Nazi gunnery observers on the bluffs, only one conclusion seemed logical—the Americans were starting to bring in their larger ships to speed up unloading from close inshore. And while, expecting no such thing—they as observers for the batteries inland had not been able to get much fire concentrated on that first ship as it came inshore—still they must have been lucky—a stray shell had evidently touched off some explosives aboard, and they had sunk it! Should the enemy in spite of this major disaster try such a thing again, they would be more ready the second time. Their enemy did try it again, and this time, with more shells falling about, once again they must have scored some fortunate hits, for once again, with hatches flying skyward from an internal explosion, down went their second victim! And a third time, except by then being well alerted, substantial artillery fire was bracketing their target, as under the eyes of the Nazi observers, jubilant at the remarkable results they were getting from their guns inland, it too went to the bottom! To the startled G.I.’s in the support force watching all this from the packed
transports offshore, waiting themselves somehow to be unloaded, there was nothing in what they saw to cause any jubilation whatever. Unaware of what actually was happening (for Operation Mulberry had always been Top Secret) all they could understand was what was plainly going on under their very eyes. There, one by one, moving out of the transport area in which they lay, were big ships just like their own, loaded, so far as they knew, with G.I.’s as was also theirs, heading inshore to unload. And there, before a single G.I. could be seen getting off, under enemy fire the ship was sunk! To G.I.’s who before D-day had heard plenty over “Invasion Calling!” as to the white crosses waiting them on the Far Shore, and among whom the wildest stories (unfortunately, most of them true) were already circulating as to what had happened on the beaches, to the first waves, what now was visibly going on inshore put morale into the sub-cellar. Was their own troopship the next in line for a similar fate? And shortly came the pay-off. A huge battleship, British apparently, three times the size of any troopship thereabouts, steamed from the transport area, headed inshore, far closer than any big ship ever before had gone. To the astonished Nazi artillery observers on the bluffs, to the unstrung G.I.’s watching her from offshore, the black muzzles of her menacing 13.5-inch turret guns trained ahead as she steered in meant only one thing—she was going in with her main battery ready to blast those obnoxious inland guns off the face of the earth. Here was a target worthwhile, though against such heavily armored battleship turrets and protective decks, mobile artillery could not expect to accomplish much. Still every battery the 352nd Division had, directed by those shore observers, concentrated on her. On came that dreadnaught, disregarding the shells bursting all about, evidently holding her own fire till she had a position that suited her. When close in to the three hulks already protruding from the sea only half a mile offshore, she swung slowly to starboard, obviously to present her whole port broadside to the shore, ready to let go a crashing salvo from all the guns she had. An even better target for them now, the Nazi batteries inland, firing furiously, bracketed her from bow to stern as she swung parallel to the beach. And then to the horror of the G.I.’s watching and to the delirious joy of the Nazi observers, before she could fire a single broadside, a series of internal explosions shook the ship and down went the Centurion!
I listened that night at Selsey Bill to “Invasion Calling.” Goebbels had been in a tough spot on D-day evening—with forebodings of diaster on the beachheads pouring in, except for his regular feature, “Lili Marlene,” he had dealt only in vague generalities. But by evening of D + 1 he had pulled himself and his propaganda machinery together and was in his usual form. Now, aside from gory prophecies of what should happen to us as soon as Rommel and his Panzers hit our forces behind the beachheads, “Invasion Calling!” had hot news of amazing Nazi successes in the battle still going on for the beaches. German artillery had sunk a number of Allied transports foolishly hazarding themselves trying to discharge close in to the Normandy shore. And to top off all, a British dreadnaught of the Iron Duke class, steaming in to strafe the beaches, had also been sunk by the devastating fire of those Nazi gunners! And more! The loss of life on that battleship had been terrific! So swiftly had she gone down, that out of over a thousand men and officers comprising her crew, not more than seventy had been observed able to get on deck to abandon ship! The Allies had suffered a major disaster that insured their swift defeat! So, Dr. Goebbels? I couldn’t keep from smiling as I listened. That harmless old dummy, the Centurion, to the very last still pulling the enemy’s leg as she had in the Mediterranean, had now done her final bit for her country. She had gone down in a blaze of enemy publicity such as even the actual performance of her real 13.5-inch guns against the German High Seas Fleet at Jutland twenty-eight years before had never centered on her. Quite a finish for an innocuous old hulk. Tremendous loss of life, eh? My thoughts ran back to the interview I’d had just the week before in Portsmouth with the Centurion’s new skipper—that Commander in the Royal Navy who was seeking to place her at my service. Hadn’t he told me then that his entire crew to steam the Centurion across the Channel on her last voyage had been reduced to seventy? He had. And the excited Nazis now were telling the world that only some seventy men out of her entire crew were seen escaping the sinking Centurion! I chuckled. That Royal Navy three-striper had done an excellent job—even by Goebbels’ own account, in spite of all the fire Nazi artillery had laid on his ship, while he was sinking her for our Gooseberry breakwater, he’d got his whole crew safely off and away from there. A good show.
CHAPTER 29 On the wide beach at Selsey Bill on D + 1, I stood figuratively chewing my nails as I watched another flight of Phoenixs, all afloat, get slowly underway astern the towing tugs and head out for the Far Shore. I had had a trying week. Seven days before, checking the arrangements aboard one of the Mulberry auxiliaries, I had slipped off a vertical steel ladder inside a cargo hatch, shot feet first down into the hold, landed with a terrific impact on one heel only on the steel inner bottom. At the hospital in Netley on nearby Southampton water, which our naval surgeons had taken over from the British in anticipation of the huge number of naval casualties expected on the crossing, I was lugged in, expecting at the very least a fractured foot. X-rays showed no breaks, only massive bruises. On crutches then, with a foam rubber pad under that heel to ease the pain, I went back immediately to the Channel. After two days the crutches were discarded in favor of a couple of canes, and on those, with D-day now announced as only a few days off, I resumed my unofficial task of doing whatever seemed to need any doing to get the men, the materials, and the helter-skelter mass of Mulberry units moored off Selsey Bill ready to go. A great deal needed doing. A couple of canes are a handicap to normal ease of movement on crowded decks; still, it was the canes or nothing, so with them I hobbled about the ships offshore. I made out fairly well, till two days before D-day, when in trying to leap from the gunwale of one vessel to the gunwale of another tied alongside, I didn’t quite make the gap and landed in the Channel between the two ships. Fortunately, some sailors on one of those vessels, noting my sudden eclipse, rushed to the rail and flung me a line as I floundered far below in the narrow gap between those two ponderous steel hulls. At the end of this line, I was dragged up that sheer-sided canyon before the wash of the seas brought those two ships into contact again and thoroughly squashed me between them. I noted as a by-product of that unintended immersion, that the waters of the Channel weren’t very cold. Presumably the G.I.’s who might in a few nights also
involuntarily find themselves overboard in it would at least not be so numbed by frigid waters that they couldn’t swim. Since I’d lost my canes anyway in that mishap and now had reason enough also to feel they were more of a hindrance than a help in getting around afloat, I didn’t replace them. From then on, I simply hobbled about mainly on one foot. And that was my situation when on the storm-whipped afternoon of June 5, we failed to receive a second notice of any postponement and knew the party was on. For those going from Selsey Bill, the time had come to shove off. Soberly the Seabees and the soldiers forming the AA gun crews looked down from the first lot of Phoenixs, all afloat now, tugging heavily at their temporary moorings. And in that ramshackle cottage facing the beach, Lieut. Fred Barton, for the first time, began to buckle on all his battle equipment. Barton was big anyway—but when at last he was encased in all of it and finally slipped on his helmet, he looked to me as huge as Ajax armored and ready for battle before the walls of Troy—and beneath his helmet, his face looked quite as grim. Silently we shook hands and he departed. Very soon, Barton and his little tugs were only tiny atoms lost in the vast mass of ships fighting the rough seas in the Channel on their way to the Far Shore. D-day dawned, still in a storm—not so bad a storm any longer, but nevertheless nothing for small craft to be about in. For me, still hobbling around Selsey Bill, my major obligation was keeping an eye on the flotation of the batch of Phoenixs already prepared for final lifting on D-day. MacKenzie’s numerous salvage crews by now had their teeth well into the task—up came the Phoenixs—no troubles. MacKenzie himself wasn’t even around; probably he had shoved off with the British for their beaches off Bayeux. At any rate, for the moment there was neither any need for or any likelihood of any consultations at Selsey Bill about lifting Phoenixs. So I commandeered a jeep and headed for Portsmouth. There I would be closer to London and to Grosvenor Square should Flanigan by any chance, now that the battle had begun, change my orders and relieve me of my present assignment. And frankly also, I should be closer to both SHAEF in Portsmouth and Allied Naval Headquarters at Southwick House, with far better opportunity in that area to keep in touch with what was happening on the Far Shore than in isolated Selsey Bill. But as the hours dragged along on that sixth of June, all I learned around
Portsmouth was that the first optimistic report from the flyers just returning from the pre-H-hour bombardment of the Omaha Beach just couldn’t be so. Their report was that never had our heavy bombers delivered such a tremendous blow—so thoroughly, in spite of the overcast, had they plastered the beach beneath with fragmentation bombs that there could not possibly be a vestige left of barbed wire, mines, trenches or of Nazi defenders—the G.I.’s would simply have an unopposed walk ashore to take over the beachhead. But from the lack of any reports from Bradley as the morning drew on, it was swiftly evident at SHAEF that the G.I.’s weren’t simply having a walk ashore. And when more hours still had gone by with no word of any progress at all from Bradley, and what scraps of information coming in from other sources, mainly naval, indicated that due to heavy weather offshore, everything on the Omaha Beach had gone wrong, the strain at Eisenhower ’s headquarters became unbearable. Here was a general’s headquarters beautifully set up with the nest array of radio communications ever seen in its numerous circuits to receive reports on progress and to direct the moves needed—army, navy, air—on a far flung battleline in France. Yet Eisenhower with all his up-to-the-minute gadgets was less in control of the battle there than Caesar had been two millennia before, when with nothing for a communications system but some leather-lunged Roman behind a horn, he also had fought in Gaul. Eisenhower could clearly sense impending disaster, but he could find out nothing that might guide him in a move to fend it off. It was about at that time I ran into one of his naval staff just outside, who informed me that the gloom inside SHAEF was then “so thick you could cut it with a knife.” Apparently then, there was nothing to keep in touch with in Portsmouth. Dismayed, I went back to Selsey Bill. There, at least, watching Phoenixs rising from the bottom of the sea, I could take my imagination off what might be happening to turn into disaster in the melee on the Omaha Beach that exquisitely devised assault on it set forth in the Overlord Plan. That, in the calm of Grosvenor Square where I had studied it, had seemed so absolutely foolproof. Had the Nazis after all, sprung on us one of Dr. Goebbels’ ofthinted at irresistible secret weapons? Or had the storm done it? D + 1 came and went, with no further real information at Selsey Bill except what might be deduced from the failure of any order to come through suspending the lifting and dispatch of any more Phoenixs. But not till Dr. Goebbels with his “Invasion Calling!” program came to my
rescue that night was I really relieved. Listening to Goebbels’ excited accounts of Nazi successes in those sinkings off Omaha, nailed down by details of the glorious artillery engagement in which they had sunk the Centurion, I knew at last we were getting along reasonably well off Omaha, no matter what had occurred initially. Unless we had a fairly firm grip on the beach, Clark couldn’t possibly already be engaged in setting down his Gooseberry breakwater. D + 2 came. Another batch of Phoenixs was coming up, ready for dispatch that afternoon when the ocean-going tugs got back from Normandy. And still no word in the way of any orders for me from Grosvenor Square. Alone now in that summer cottage facing the Selsey sands, I made up my mind and began heaving my few belongings into a kit bag. That cottage, so far as I was concerned, could now revert to the state of an archeological artifact in which Barton had found it. And the girls next door could get over their hysteria —no more bombs were likely ever to come down on Selsey Bill. As for myself, I was departing for the Far Shore. It was obvious to me there was nothing I could do any longer on the Near Shore—the Royal Navy had the Phoenix-lifting situation there well in hand. But on the Far Shore, in setting up those Artificial Harbors, there might well be a great deal I could do to help. And so far as I could see from my orders—oral ones anyway—directing me to stay on the Channel as a consultant on the Phoenixs, after all, the Channel had two shores. Neither one had definitely been specified as my station, and I might be needed just as badly for consultation on the Far Shore concerning problems involving Phoenixs, now that there were many there already and more going, as on the Near Shore. I would chance it— my interpretation of my orders was as logical as might be anyone else’s to the contrary. I crossed the Channel for the invasion of Normandy aboard a 6000 ton block of concrete at the end of a long tow-line, moving at all of three knots astern a laboring tug. The crossing took over thirty hours—no very swift passage. We—that is, the squadron of some ten similar chunks of concrete— had the protection of no convoy of our own; we were much too slow for any convoy to stay with us. But by keeping in the main stream of invasion traffic bound for France, we had the benefit of the occasional presence in our vicinity of destroyers passing us accompanying faster groups, mainly troop carriers. Still, especially during the night passage, there was always the chance an Eboat might phase itself into the traffic lane, astern of one group of destroyers,
ahead of the next, and take a shot at a Phoenix—it could hardly miss. We on a Phoenix had no more chance of taking evasive action to dodge a torpedo coming our way than had the Houses of Parliament in ducking a bomb. One Phoenix had already been so sunk the night before by an E-boat. And one of the larger Navy tugs had come in with nothing on the end of its towline, to report that it believed its Phoenix had struck a mine, in spite of being in the swept channel—anyway, a terrific explosion had sent it down. And in a third case, while the tow itself, this time one of the Whale sections, was still found afloat, its towing tug had been sunk. After that the E-boat had evidently finished off the Seabees on the tow by machine gunning them; there were no men aboard the Whale bridging, but there were plenty of bloodstains. The net effect of all this on the thirty men, half Seabees and half soldiers, forming the crew of my Phoenix, was first to see our AA guns constantly manned for action. And secondly I noted that every man aboard, including myself, elected to sleep in the open on the topside, picking out the soft side of a hard plank on the wooden platform serving as a deck there, as far above the water as he could get, and incidentally, with his Mae West cuddled closely alongside him. The beautifully constructed compartment below inside the concrete hull, fitted out as quarters with bunks, mattresses, and all the comforts of home, got the cold shoulder on that passage from all of us. Should our Phoenix be either torpedoed or mined, it did not seem possible for a man in those quarters below to get out and up the long vertical ladders into the clear above before the Phoenix submerged. And apparently, no one cared to try. However, we were lucky. Late next day we arrived intact off Omaha, where I debarked while the ST tugs took over the Phoenix to get it into position for sinking in the already impressive line of sunken Phoenixs off Omaha. As we came in, from the high elevation of the gun platform of my slowgoing Phoenix, I had plenty of time for a careful look all about through my binoculars. The most obvious thing, of course, especially to one coming in by sea, was the vast mass of ships lying offshore all busily unloading. And next to that, the water covered with landing craft of all kinds, going in toward the beach loaded with troops and stores, coming back many of them, with their flat decks dotted with litters—the wounded on stretchers—grim notice the battle front was hardly off the beach yet, and so far as enemy artillery bursts were concerned, not even that far back. If any confirmation were needed of this, there was my old ship, the Texas (in which thirty years before I had served on what was both her first commission and mine also) firing her 14-inch guns
with great deliberation, apparently smashing away as directed by radio at some invisible target inland thwarting the advance of our troops. Right ahead loomed those high cliffs, the distinguishing mark of Omaha, looking down over a beach so strewn with wreckage and debris of the assault that ever clearing it seemed more of an impossibility than any of the labors of antiquity set to stymie Hercules. Smashed tanks, wrecked landing craft, tangles of barbed wire, uprooted obstacles, battered trucks, littered the beach from end to end. Amongst them struggled the combat engineers, with bulldozers and tractor cranes trying to bring about some means of giving traffic a better chance to move inland and away from the unutterable chaos of the sands. And right at the foot of the bluffs labored the burial parties, clearing the beach of the dead G.I.’s. Temporarily the bodies, wrapped only in their blankets, were hastily being tossed into the wide anti-tank ditches the Nazis had dug to block access to the roads up the draws; bulldozers then pushed a thin covering of sand over, to fill that impromptu mass grave. More formal burial would have to wait more settled conditions on the beach. But if the view of the beach itself looked hopeless, offshore, at least, there were visible and marked signs of the improvements Captain Clark had already wrought. Paralleling the shore, from les Moulins to the eastward, the sunken ships forming the Gooseberry breakwater were mostly in place—a magnificent shelter, already operating to speed up unloading by protecting from the waves and the surf the myriad of small craft beaching to discharge before the St. Laurent and the Colleville exits. And off the westerly half of the beach fronting the Vierville Draw also lay the substantial beginnings of the Phoenix breakwater—almost a quarter of a mile of concrete wall already, standing boldly out against the sea. In its lee were anchored temporarily some of the floating pierheads and a number of the Whales that already had arrived—those links of steel bridging, 480 feet long each, that were to connect up the Lobnitz pierheads with the beach. Clark was obviously making unusual progress. It seemed from a look at the devastation on the beach that there was urgent need of it. Bradley’s carefully worked out assault schedule for getting ashore immediately a huge amount of artillery and ammunition to back up his men must have been sadly set back on its heels by what obviously had been a catastrophe in the attack. Both in the men and in the tonnage, so confidently counted on in the first few days for his build-up, he was clearly terrifically behind. In a situation where originally he had had no margin of safety anyway,
now he was in imminent peril. Unless he could swiftly make up that deficit in his fighting power, Rommel, no mean antagonist, once again back in Normandy to direct the defense, would shortly knock him flat in counterattack with his Panzers, and then massacre the whole invading force in a debacle to which Dunkirk would be nothing. And perhaps, do it even if that deficit were swiftly made up. For Rommel with his Panzers behind him was a name to conjure with—plenty of the wizardry which had earned him the title of The Desert Fox, still clung to Rommel. It would take a vastly superior and a superbly armed force ever to defeat him in the field. Bradley knew that. Looking at that battered beachhead, it was easily obvious what was bothering Bradley.
CHAPTER 30 I found Captain Clark aboard an LCI which had been converted to a headquarters ship, and informed him I had moved my base of operations as a consultant to the Far Shore. Did there happen to be anything on the Far Shore respecting either the Phoenixs or Operation Mulberry that once more he would like to consult on? There very certainly was, and Clark further added that it was a pleasure to him to see me. I wished I might have said the same about him, but I couldn’t—it was a shock to me to see him—positively cadaverous now, with sunken eyes and a voice so hoarse it was absolutely raw; it did not seem possible he could have had even one minute’s sleep since D-Day morning. It was evident now how so much progress had been made in so few days in getting that breakwater of sunken ships in place under fire and so many Phoenixs already sunk as a shield for the landing craft. Captain Clark had been driving himself inhumanly and every man under him mercilessly day and night, first to get those vital breakwaters in, then behind them the rest of the Artificial Harbors. If no one else there in the Navy understood what Mulberry meant and what depended on its early functioning, Clark, at least, understood it very clearly. The lives of a vast army of G.I.’s, compared to which even all those sacrificed on D-day to gain a foothold on the beach were as a corporal’s guard, were hanging in the balance. Which way that balance swung depended now wholly on who should win in the build-up for the massive battle soon to come. Clark wasn’t sparing anyone’s body or feelings in Mulberry, least of all his own, to insure that the winner should not be Rommel. Well, what was his problem? Clark explained, and further that he had to have a solution in a hurry, so that he might get going with his pierheads, on which now he was stymied. His dilemma was this: The floating pierheads had been designed for three seperate floating roadways (or Whales) running from the floating pierheads some 3000 feet more or less in to the beachhead, to provide three wholly independent traffic
lanes going ashore. But the loads to be taken ashore varied from battle-ready Sherman tanks weighing 38 tons, to a vast number of combat-loaded trucks and lightly armored vehicles all weighing under 25 tons. A sensible solution would have been to design and build all the roadway bridge sections and the pontoons on which they floated for loads of 40 tons—then any vehicle or tank could be run ashore indiscriminately on any one of the three roadways. But steel was very scarce in wartime England and to save some, the British designers had cut their solutions very thin—they had designed and built two of the three Whale roadways to take only 25 ton loads; the third roadway alone had been built with steel trusses and supporting pontoons massive enough for the 38 ton loads of the tanks. Since there would be far more trucks than tanks, they considered that satisfactory—when there were many trucks and no tanks, the trucks would have all three roadways to get ashore on. And when an LST loaded with Sherman tanks came in, the whole of the 40 ton roadway (the western one of the three) would be reserved for the tanks—the trucks would then have the use of only the other two. And that way the British had saved some of their scanty stock of steel. And they had saved a lot more (much to my distress when first I saw it on the Near Shore) by building many of the supporting pontoons, both for the 25 and for the 40 ton trusses, out of an eggshell type concrete instead of all out of the far sturdier steel plate. Now came the hitch. On the Near Shore, there had been trouble enough keeping the Whale links, borne up on those concrete eggshells, from partly submerging whenever one of those eggshells cracked and sprung a leak. That had been bad enough. But on the Channel crossing, there had been disaster. Under the motion of the open sea and the pounding of the steel trusses resting on them, more of these concrete eggshells had crushed or cracked and some of the Whale links had gone to the bottom of the Channel. So now there just weren’t enough 40 ton links left afloat even to run that one 40 ton roadway far enough in to reach the shore. Unless some solution could be found, the main value of the floating pierheads would be lost—no tanks at all could be unloaded on them—just the trucks, which were less important. Clark pointed out he had considered inserting into the 40 ton roadway, sections enough to be stolen from one of the 25 ton Whales to lengthen it as necessary, leaving him finally with two roadways only. He believed that the steel trusses designed only for 25 tons had margins of safety enough to stand
up under the tank loads of 38 tons, but there were still those 25 ton pontoons to be considered; they seemed to have little reserve buoyancy. They were his headache; would they float if 38 ton loads came on them instead of the 25 tons they were intended to support? Or would they promptly submerge completely and drop his roadway, tanks and all, into the sea? Clark looked at me somberly. I was a salvage man; I ought to know all about pontoons. Would these very peculiarly shaped and constructed things the British had given him in the guise of pontoons still float or would they sink if he overloaded them by 60%? In other words, was he going to have the D-day tank disaster all over again, except that this time, instead of their canvas wings collapsing under the DD’s and submerging them, it would be his Whale pontoons submerging under the General Shermans and going down into the sea with both the tanks and his roadway? Would I kindly give him the anwer to that? I saw that—a proper enough question. If Clark would provide me with a small boat from which I might work while surveying those pontoons, I would provide him with the answer—pronto. Clark got me the boat—one of the small skiffs he had to run out mooring lines for his Whales. In that tiny tub, I was soon afloat in the waters of our new harbor, under one of the steel trusses of a 25 ton Whale link, studying the pontoons supporting them. They were oddly shaped affairs on top, resembling a huge cabochon ruby in their peculiar faceting—no very simple solid on which quickly to calculate buoyancy volumes as they sank deeper under additional load. And it was swiftly obvious that should a 38 ton tank load come on that pontoon, it would submerge down to that cabochon top, which had never been expected to go under water at all. Under an added weight of at least 13 tons, was there buoyancy enough in that cabochon top to float 13 tons, and a little more for safety, or would the whole thing promptly submerge under such an overload and head for the bottom? Here was a neat problem in solid geometry, which would have intrigued Euclid himself. I crawled all over the top of that pontoon, getting measurements. And when finally I had them, I went back to Clark’s LCI(H), where I was given a tiny stateroom to serve both as quarters and office, and turned to on calculations. Fortunately, I’d brought a slide rule. The figuring took me most of the night. When it was done, and I went out for a final look at Omaha Beach in the dark before turning in, to my surprise
there was Clark himself in his own cabin, still awake and poring over dispatches. I looked at Clark in astonishment. Didn’t the man ever sleep? But all Clark, brusque as always, wanted to know was when would I get back to my figuring and produce that answer for him? By daylight, he hoped? I told him he could have it then. And the answer was—Yes. Those 25 ton pontoons would remain afloat, though only by an eyelash, under a 38 ton load, but I would guarantee they would remain afloat. All that would be necessary to unload the General Shermans over them would be to have plenty of M.P.’s on the floating roadway as traffic police to see the Sherman tanks stayed at least 160 feet apart (the length of two trusses) and never exceeded a speed of 5 miles per hour. So wide an interval was required between tanks to prevent the weights of two Sherman tanks ever coming simultaneously on one pontoon, while the slow speed was necessary to avoid any dynamic loads that might submerge a barely afloat pontoon. With those precautions, it could be done. I turned in. Captain Clark, I imagine, stayed up through what little was left of that night to compile a new schedule for installing Whales, mixing 25 ton links as necessary with his 40’s to make a complete roadway. That seemed to cover all he wanted of me—then, anyway. I got a few hours sleep. I found a few other things to do the next day, and on the days following— mainly in the salvage of D-day damaged craft, no one of itself of any great difficulty, but in the mass quite a problem. On that, over the next few days I struggled aiding Captain Chauncey Camp, NOIC for the Omaha Beach, and the slight salvage forces the Navy had there under its beach-salvage officer, Lieut. Henri. They might profitably have used a far greater force than the few allotted them—but I suppose the Navy had never envisioned the terrific destruction of that D-day landing. During that period on the beachhead, I became exceedingly wary of mines. While the Nazis had not mined the sands up to the shingle and the beach road, still it was unwise even on them to assume they were safe—unexploded Teller mines washed in from the obstacles might be anywhere under the sand. It was the part of prudence to move only where you could step in Dukw tracks or areas already flattened by the bulldozers. But beyond the beach road and up the four main draws, it was suicide to move outside the lanes marked with white tapes, where the engineers with mine detectors had done their best to remove or explode the hidden mines. Still, even there, there was no assurance of safety—several Dukws and their crews had
been blown up proceeding up the Vierville Draw and three G.I.’s on foot, unfortunately too near a truck when it set off a mine in the same area, had been blown to bits. So if you wanted to stay alive, aside from avoiding the beach areas being shelled from inland by the Nazis, it was wise when on a road to stay on the pavement, and when off one, to proceed only in the wheeltracks of some truck which had gone before, or not to proceed at all. Still in spite of caution, it didn’t always work. Several days after my arrival, going inland up the Colleville Draw (which that far in from the beach had a paved road) a truck convoy headed for the shore came down the other way. The driver of the leading truck, a ten wheeled affair with dual rear axles and double tires except on his front wheels, carefully hugged the pavement, even though on the stone walls bordering each side of the road ran a white tape, indicating the road shoulders had been cleared of mines all the way out to those tapes. As luck would have it, just as the rear of his truck, came abreast of me, a double outside tire on his right rear end running just off the pavement went over an undetected Teller mine, not ten feet from me. When the stunning effect of that blast had passed enough to let me think again, and I saw alongside me the wreck of the rear end of that truck, and the gap blown in the stone wall just outboard of it, I could hardly believe I was myself left still alive and in one piece. Even if I hadn’t before, from then on I had a most wholesome respect for Nazi mines, to those of us left on Omaha Beach still a deadly peril. But my experience gave me also one slight comfort—if one of those mines did actually get you, you were dead before you realized even what was happening to you. Meanwhile, as I worked ashore on beach salvage, I watched the startling growth of the Phoenix breakwater, and in its lee, the speedy installation of the Lobnitz pierheads. By this time also, Commander And had his floating breakwater, the Bombardons, all moored in a long line outside the Phoenixs, giving some moderate shelter out there to vessels being unloaded. It was amazing to observe the effect obtained inside the Gooseberry and the Phoenix breakwaters on unloading. Gone now were the waves in the inner harbor and with them were gone also the surf and the breakers pounding the beach. Aside from the anticipated help in allowing safe unloading of LCT’s and LCM’s, the smaller types of landing craft, a wholly unexpected result also
followed. Previously, to General Bradley’s intense disgust, Admiral Kirk and the Navy had firmly opposed the beaching of its big tank landing ships, its LST’s, for direct unloading on the shore, fearing (with good reason) that on those uneven sands and with normal wave action, they would pound and break their backs. The big LST’s weren’t that expendable. But with wave action washed out by the breakwaters, and with the combat engineers and their bulldozers quickly smoothing out the sands just below highwater mark opposite the Colleville and the St. Laurent exits, an entirely new complexion was put on the beaching situation. It was found then by trial, under pressure from Bradley to make up for the deficit in tonnage discharged in the days immediately following D-day, that with the breakwaters in and the sands levelled, an LST brought in at high tide could swiftly discharge directly to the beach, and at the next high tide, float off, safe and undamaged. And with that, ferrying cargoes in from LST’s ceased— they all started coming in to beach themselves. And that helped two ways; first, the LST’s discharged more quickly, and second, all the ferrying craft were released to help unload ordinary freighters which couldn’t come up on the beach, drop their ramps, and unload. As a result, by D + 5 the tonnage unloaded at Omaha jumped to 7100 tons per day against a target of 8000 tons daily for the, fully completed harbor, something not anticipated till D + 12. So by D + 5, through the extraordinary efforts of Captain Clark on breakwaters and of the combat engineers with their bulldozers on beach clearance, the tonnage landed through Mulberry had nearly reached the goal set for a week later. Bradley, fighting fiercely inland now to link up his Omaha beachhead with that of Utah on his right and with that of the British on his left, before Rommel could gather force enough to prevent it, was beginning to catch up at least on the wherewithal to hold his own. Already, to the puzzlement of the Germans facing him, he had guns and shells enough ashore to match their artillery shell for shell. That, they could not understand. Mulberry was beginning to pay off.
CHAPTER 31 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was considerably perturbed. A factor he had not previously attached any weight to had upset his carefully planned defense of the Atlantic Wall. Hitler, in a rage, had demanded of him a detailed explanation of the failure. Why had not the invaders been thrown back into the sea? Before Rommel now was the simple explanation, furnished by General Kraiss of the 352nd Division on whom had fallen the assault—heavy naval guns. All his cunningly concealed casemates had been smashed by heavy shells from battleships offshore, blasted off the cliffs by more of their heavy shells, or penetrated by direct hits on their armored shields by destroyer shells from close in—all directed by naval fire control groups on the beach. And in addition, so the 352nd Division felt, minefields on which they had every reason to count confidently to protect all approaches to their strongpoints, both up the bluff faces and in behind their positions on the plateaus, had been exploded by the preliminary naval bombardment of those same warships. The enemy must have had advance knowledge of precisely where those minefields were—that bombardment had destroyed practically all the major ones, and exposed the defenders to enemy infantry infiltrations up the bluff faces, which had then captured such trenches and strongpoints as the naval guns had not already destroyed. But Rommel had more on his mind now than that report to be forwarded to der Fuehrer. After all, Rommel was an outstanding exponent of the tactics of mobility—that he had lost a fixed position of defense was nothing to crush him. In mobile warfare, he should crush his enemy. But in the last few days, other things had occurred to throw him badly off balance just as he was starting the crushing. It was obvious that the enemy would try to join up his forces landed on the Cherbourg Peninsula to the west and those landed before Vierville and St. Laurent. In between those separated enemy forces lay the town of Isigny with its massive Norman stone buildings, a natural fortress easy to defend. It lay, moreover, on the banks of the Aure, astride the bridges forming the only possible highway for a junction of his enemies’ troops. There Rommel placed
one of the remaining regiments of the 352nd Division, heavily reinforced it and awaited the enemy, fully confident that he could never get through Isigny to effect his necessary junction. After that, Rommel, taking the invaders one at a time on either side of Isigny, would cut each of them up more at his leisure. What had actually happened? Again those heavy naval guns. On D + 2, 14inch shells, fired from invisible battleships from a distant invisible sea had come crashing down out of the sky upon his troops in inland Isigny. The Nazis had no option but to evacuate or die. They evacuated. The extremely important junction town of Isigny was occupied by the enemy without even a real fight for it. The implications were plain to Rommel. There was not a chance now of preventing a siege of Cherbourg. There was not a town on the relatively narrow Cherbourg Peninsula, which he had been counting on as anchors for a line of defenses blocking every highway leading northward into Cherbourg, which was not as vulnerable to those naval guns as Isigny had been. All were within easy range from the sea from one side of the Cherbourg Peninsula or the other. Cherbourg was doomed. At best, it might withstand a siege of some weeks; at worst, it might be taken in ten days. And it was useless for him to move an army up the Peninsula to raise such a siege; those naval guns on his flanks would soon smash his army. There was now only one thing to do to Cherbourg. It was no longer of any value to Germany. But as a port, it was sine qua non to the enemy; they had to have it to make a success of their invasion. Had he ever doubted that, he knew now from a V Corps Field Order taken from the dead body of an American officer in Vierville, that the capture of Cherbourg well to the north of all the landings, was nevertheless the first order of business for the American forces —all else was to be subordinated to that. It was that important to his enemy. Very well, then. The denial of the port of Cherbourg to those Americans was even more important to him. He might, if von Schlieben, its commander, put up a good defense, delay the capture of Cherbourg; it was unlikely, in the face of all those battleship guns, he could do anything to prevent it. But there was one thing he could do, and he so ordered it—as a port, Cherbourg must be destroyed. He would so sabotage and destroy the port facilities of Cherbourg and so mine its harbor waters with all the underwater mines in the naval arsenal there that it would be worthless to the Allies when they got it and unusable for long months afterwards. And thus while the Allies had the city of Cherbourg, they would still have no port. And without a port, long before they
could possibly rehabilitate the wreck of Cherbourg he would leave them, he would, inland and out of range of those damnable naval guns, have crushed them with the overwhelming weight of armor and artillery he had already in France. Already the order had gone out to Admiral Hennecke, Naval Commander there, to destroy the port of Cherbourg. Hennecke, with typical German thoroughness, would have ample time to make such a job of its destruction as the world had never seen before. So if his foolhardy enemy, as that captured V Corps order clearly showed, was counting on the possession of Cherbourg quickly to provide him the port he needed to stage a real campaign, Rommel, still as much the fox as ever he had been in the Libyan Desert, was seeing to it that he was leaning on a very broken reed. Rommel had lost the first round to our naval guns. But now he was insuring himself, by the timely offering up as a sacrifice to the gods of war of the entire port of Cherbourg (which would be a French loss anyway, not his) that he would lose no more. Let the Americans, covered by their naval guns, take Cherbourg if they wished to pay the price von Schlieben and his garrison troops would exact in a siege. They would find when finally they entered Cherbourg, that still they had no port. And that would be the death warrant of their foolhardy invasion.
CHAPTER 32 All over Normandy, events were moving fast, except on the left flank. There Rommel and Montgomery were in stalemate before Caen, where Rommel, to block off Montgomery’s path to Paris, had thrown in the 21st Panzer Division, the 12th Panzer Division, and the Panzer Lehr Division, all the armor he had at hand in Normandy. He was blocking Montgomery, all right, but had he only known it, that was exactly what the Overlord Plan hoped for—that Montgomery at Caen would attract and hold on his front the major German forces in Normandy, especially the armored divisions, while Bradley on the right would be left free to consolidate his Utah and Omaha beachheads and then move northward up the Cotentin Peninsula to take Cherbourg. Bradley, unfortunately, was far behind time. The D-day catastrophe on the Omaha Beach had seriously crimped him in both men and fighting materials ashore. The deep penetrations he had counted on to secure by nightfall on Dday against a surprised enemy, he didn’t even have by D + 5 against an enemy now thoroughly aroused and viciously fighting back. And had it not been for naval fire support, called on now immediately each time the enemy made a stand at one of those massively built Norman towns erected centuries ago to withstand the ages, he would still not have progressed that far. But with the support of those naval shells, which one after another swiftly beat into dust and rubble the stout Norman masonry of the towns the Nazis attempted to defend, he soon formed his junction and prepared to wheel north up the Cotentin Peninsula toward Cherbourg, which by schedule, he was to take by D + 17. Meanwhile, to make that possible, men struggled ceaselessly on the Omaha Beach. Combat engineers with bulldozers (they had plenty now) chewed away the shingle and the seawalls to give access to the beach road all along the beach. Other engineers and other bulldozers carved more roads up the shoulders of the bluffs, not only at the four natural draws the French had used but at other slopes those Frenchmen never dreamed of as having exit possibilities. Still other engineers with probes and mine detectors searched for minefields and particularly for the undiscovered solitary mines buried in the supposedly
already cleared road shoulders, which were daily still killing our G.I.’s going inland. Night and day, mingled with the roar of artillery battling only a few miles inland was the nearer thunder of mines exploding as our engineers found and destroyed them. But a view of the harbor offered the real miracle. On the quiet harbor surface behind the breakwaters, all along the beach at the high water mark lay dozens of LST’s, their jaws flung wide apart, their ramps down, long lines of trucks, of tanks, of troops streaming endlessly ashore from them and up the draws to back up the G.I.’s on the inland battleline. Here and there were LCT’s and the smaller LCM’s and rhino ferries, beached also, discharging down their ramps the combat-loaded trucks they had taken aboard from freighters lying off, some inside the breakwater lines, some inside the Bombardons. But the most amazing sight of any on Omaha was the Dukws. Ceaselessly, a long stream of Dukws coming down to the beach from the dumps inland would enter the water, swim out to whatever freighter they were unloading, with military precision range themselves starboard and port, five on each side, one opposite each cargo hatch of the freighter. There almost immediately, dropped from a cargo boom overhead on the freighter, a net containing two to three tons of whatever freight that ship had would land in the body of the Dukw. And simultaneously then all ten Dukws together would shove clear with bulging cargo nets and all they contained, and head for the shore, making way alongside that freighter for the next ten Dukws. In a couple of minutes, twentyfive tons of supplies from that ship were discharged and on the way ashore— well over 300 tons an hour from each freighter. But that was not all. With their loads now, the Dukws swam in, blandly ignored the waterline which ordinarily would require transshipment from boat to truck on a pier, clutched out their propellers, clutched in their wheels, and as trucks with no pause at all ran up the draws and a mile or so inland to the proper dump for what cargo they had—this for ammunition, that for food, another for cased gasoline, and so forth. There at the dumps came the final step in unparalleled speed and efficiency in cargo handling. Hardly would a Dukw come to a pause at its proper dump when a tractor crane there would drop its hook, seize the loaded cargo net containing all the Dukw had received from the freighter out at sea, lift it clear, fling into the Dukw an already emptied cargo net, and the Dukw, unloaded now after a few seconds only at the dump, would be on its way again down the road to the beach, there to metamorphose itself
once more to a boat and swim out for another load. It was marvelous. Round and round went that stream of cumbersome Dukws, hundreds of them, ceaselessly. And freighters, unloaded at speeds undreamed of before, emptied in a fraction of the time that same task would have taken alongside a pier, steamed back to the U. K. for another cargo. With the breakwaters all completed, by D + 9 the unloading at Omaha for the Mulberry Harbor went over the top—9000 tons for the day as against a fondly hoped for 8000 tons in the original plans for the entire operation, including the as yet uncompleted floating pierhead installation. On the hurried completion of that, Clark was pushing Lieut. Freeburn and the Seabees under him ferociously. He had been allowed twelve days from Dday for the job. The British admiral commanding in Plymouth had expressed a doubt that the task could be done even in thirty days. Clark, risking a courtmartial for obvious insubordination, had snapped back at him that he would need not even the twelve days allotted—he would get it done in ten. And now Clark was driving hard to do just that. With him it wasn’t just a case of meeting a completion date—they might well meet it and their quotas of cargo tonnage also and be content. But Clark wasn’t content. Ashore men were dying battling to oust Nazis from their chosen positions for defense. The more shells and guns and tanks we landed, the fewer G.I.’s would die in overrunning those enemy positions. And soon must come the day when somewhere inland out of range of the support of our naval guns, we would have to face Rommel’s armor flung at us in massive counterattack. If by then Bradley didn’t have more armor, they’d all die. It didn’t matter how much we were getting ashore—the guns were insatiable —no matter how many shells we got ashore, it wasn’t enough—not if human effort could get any more landed. Clark led his men, drove his men, lashed his men to get the Artificial Harbor put together as speedily as human or (so some of his men thought) inhuman effort could achieve it. They were dealing with gigantic pieces, each running to thousands of tons, topped by those 6000 ton Phoenixs, all to be placed in an area with terrific tidal currents, all neatly fitted together, and they weren’t simple to fit. But in spite of all that, down went the Phoenixs for the breakwaters, and somehow men ready to drop from exhaustion nevertheless got the floating pierheads in place, their huge steel legs driven down into the sands beneath, the Whale sections joined end to end to make the half-mile long roadways, the network of steel guy wires run sidewise from each pontoon of
the Whales to anchors set well out to prevent distortion of the roadways from the tidal currents sweeping alternately east and west. By nightfall on D + 9, the task was done. Next day the floating pierhead could commence discharge, three days ahead of schedule, far ahead of the similar Mulberry being installed by the Royal Engineers for the British on their beachhead off Arromanches to the east. On June 16, D + 10, ten days only after D-day, Mulberry A at Omaha, ready and waiting, received its initial tank landing ship. The first LST vessel ordered to unload at the new floating pierhead nosed slowly up to it, assisted by one ST tug, landed her bow on the underwater slope of the pierhead. Slowly her monster doors swung wide apart and then her ramp banged down on the pierhead slope. While still the ramp was descending, the roar of truck engines starting up inside the belly of the LST filled the air. Hardly had the ramp landed than the first truck headed out and up the slope to the pierhead, made a slight left turn onto the roadway and at fifteen miles an hour headed down that long steel lane for shore. Simultaneously from the upper deck of the LST, another truck started across a gangway to a pier ramp leading downward. Soon from both inside the LST and from its upper deck, two streams of trucks were flowing ashore, to be meshed together at the floating roadway entrance and from there to continue in one steady traffic line without a stop across the half-mile Whale roadway to the shore entrance to the nearby Vierville Draw. In minutes from the time they had rolled off the LST, they were vanishing from our sight inland past those shattered casemates on the shoulders of the Vierville Draw, which ten days before one approached from sea only at the cost of his life. In less than forty minutes from the time it had made its approach, that LST, completely unloaded, was lifting its ramp, closing its bow doors, and shoving clear again, bound back for the Near Shore and another load of vehicles. It is dubious if ever a Broadway opening played to a more absorbed firstnight audience than the one watching the startling performance of the Mulberry pierhead in unloading that LST. From generals down to G.I.’s, everybody roundabout got a tremendous lift. And not the least among those uplifted were the men of Force Mulberry. Their bit had been thankless, the forces afloat had uniformly ignored them when they needed a hand, but there before everybody now was the proof of the pudding. It all worked wonderfully—breakwaters, Lobnitz pierheads, floating roadways. Shortly another LST was berthed that this time carried a cargo of General
Sherman tanks. Like its predecessor it came up to the pierhead, swiftly opened its doors and dropped its ramp. Again came the roar of engines as the first tank, battle-ready, crawled up the ramp onto the pierhead, its grim-faced driver in padded leather helmet peering out his opened hatch just under the tank gun, its helmeted tank commander just as grim with head protruding from the hatch on top. That tank was immediately ready for combat. Within the hour, it most likely would be in action, so close was the front to the beach. But that was not yet. For that tank had still to get ashore over a roadway floating on pontoons many of which had never been designed to bear any such load as that of this battle-loaded 38 ton Sherman tank. And in spite of mathematics and all the calculations in the world, till actually it had been done, there was no absolute assurance that under the strain the overloaded pontoons might not submerge or collapse. I was standing on the pierhead, blocking access to the Whale roadway leading ashore as that tank lumbered up to it. The tank stopped. I stepped up to the driver. I was going to go backward all the way over the half-mile bridge between his tank and the shore; he was to follow in my footsteps though always fifty feet behind and to keep his eye on me. But I would not be keeping an eye on him; both my eyes were going to be over my own right shoulder, keeping an eye on the next pontoon astern of me to see how it behaved as the load of the tank came onto it. And should I hold up my hand, he was to stop instantly, prepared to back. And should I wave him back, there was to be no hesitation; he must back immediately or all of us and the roadway would submerge. So in that fashion we got underway—an odd procession led by a naval officer walking backward with his head twisted over one shoulder, followed at an interval of fifty feet by a Sherman tank with clanking treads, and tailed by a long string of more tanks all cautiously keeping two truss lengths apart. It was a little nerve-racking as I strained my eyes over my shoulder to watch the first 25 ton pontoon completely submerge its straight sides as the load of that approaching first tank began to come on it from the first truss. And decidedly more nerve-racking as with one hand ready to shoot up in the air to halt the oncoming tank, I watched the water flooding steadily up over that cabochon-shaped pontoon top as the tank got nearer and nearer to the end of the truss resting on that pontoon and under the increasing overload the pontoon sank deeper and deeper. But it was all right. The tank came slowly on till it was squarely over the pontoon and the maximum load it could exert was laid on—all 38 tons of it—
and enough of that cabochon was still protruding above the sea to give a slight margin of safety—nothing any engineer would want to accept in times of peace, but this was wartime. I waved to the tank—I should turn about and we’d speed up now to a normal walk. It was all right, but still I’d go all the way with him. So walking as fast as I could, somewhere around four miles an hour, I continued, with that steel roadway undulating oddly beneath my feet as the pontoons went deeper each time a tank came directly over, and bobbed back to normal as it passed. At the far end of the roadway, I stepped down on the sand of the Omaha Beach. The tank behind me rolled off also onto the sand, speeded up, and headed for the road up the nearby Vierville Draw. I waved “Good luck!” to the driver as he went on by me but he didn’t see it. His tense eyes were fixed only on that road up the battle-scarred draw, and his mind no doubt only on the battleline which lay so close beyond in Normandy. Tank after tank now rolled off the weaving roadway and went on by me as I stood there at the end of our Mulberry highway into France, waving them goodby. And as I watched at close range the grim faces of the helmeted heads of the tank crews going by, I saw immediately what was the only possible end now to the battle for France. Twelve hours before, those tanks now rolling into battle just behind our beachhead had been in England. If now we lost one of them in action, within twelve hours we could land its replacement on French soil. But if Rommel lost a tank, with our fighter planes interdicting all road traffic in France by day and with all the bridges across the Seine knocked out already, it would be at least a month before Rommel, moving a tank surreptitiously by night, could ever get a replacement tank from somewhere behind his Siegfried Line four hundred miles away up to the line of battle in Normandy. There could be only one answer to the battle now—so long as through our Artificial Harbor we could keep up anything like that flow of heavy military hardware. I was no military strategist, but I could tell a plain fact when it was thrust right under my nose. As the last of that column of tanks went on by me and vanished up the Vierville Draw, and as at the far end of our floating highway I could see the LST which had brought them from the U. K., already with its ramp retracted and its bow doors closing, shoving clear to head back for the Near Shore and another load, I saw one fact very clearly. If Erwin Rommel were really the general he was acclaimed to be, while still he had an army, he should beat the fastest retreat with it he possibly could to
behind the Siegfried Line, much closer to his base of supplies, and put us that much farther from our own. There, perhaps, with good generalship, he might fight us to a standstill. But here in Normandy, with the huge advantage the Artificial Harbor (which Rommel didn’t yet seem to realize we had) right at our backs was giving us, no matter what super-genius of a general Rommel might be, he was bound to lose. Unless he could destroy our Mulberries. And that, with our overwhelming air superiority and our naval guns to guard them, was, of course, wholly beyond his power.
CHAPTER 33 On June 17, D + 11, Bradley’s troops succeeded in reaching the sea on the western shore of the Cotentin Peninsula at Barneville, slicing the peninsula completely across, cutting it off from the German army to the south, and neatly laying it out on the operating table, ready for the amputation of Cherbourg. Leaving three divisions to hold off the enemy on this southern flank, Bradley turned Collins and his VII Corps northward toward his first main objective, Cherbourg, 20 miles away. To shut Collins and his American troops off from any such access to the north, von Schlieben confidently expected to make a firm stand hinged first on the city of Montebourg, and secondly and finally on Valognes. Both were heavily built Norman towns astride the road going north to Cherbourg, both ideally suited for stout and long-dragged out resistance from their thick-walled stone buildings and from the massive concrete pillboxes long before erected outside them to prohibit their being outflanked. But under the pounding of distant naval gunfire immediately laid on in front of our troops, both crumbled into rubble. Von Schlieben, with the anchors for his defense lines destroyed, during the night of June 19 fell back in considerable haste to a fortress perimeter ringing Cherbourg at about a five mile radius. The major delay Collins’ VII Corps encountered at both Montebourg and Valognes came from waiting for his bulldozers to clear the blocked streets of shattered masonry, so his armor could proceed northward through them. On June 21, the siege of Cherbourg began. Bradley was ready for it. All during June 16, 17, and 18, there had been pouring ashore over the floating pierheads at Mulberry, as well as directly over the beaches, a stream of heavy siege artillery—our own motorized self-propelled 155 mm. howitzers, the “Long Toms” intended to pound the defenses of Cherbourg into powdered dust. And flowing ashore also, interspersed with them were 105 mm. field guns, tanks by the score, antitank guns—all the armor his mechanized army required. Now all this artillery was before Cherbourg, ready to batter down its
fortress defenses. The siege of Cherbourg was going to be wholly an Army task. For Cherbourg was the one spot so far encountered within reach of the sea that the Navy was helpless to lend an effective hand in assaulting. Cherbourg, France’s major naval base and arsenal, was itself defended by heavy naval guns in emplacements ashore you could hardly see and which you could not sink. Those shore guns had ranges and hitting power equal to any carried by battleships; they had range finding devices superior to any aboard ship; finally as targets, they offered no silhouettes standing out against the horizon. For battleships likely to be sunk by hits from such powerful shore batteries to engage them in a serious artillery duel was suicidal. Here the Navy, for the first time since D-day, would have to stand aside. No, Cherbourg was a nut for the Army to crack. Bradley began to crack it— he had the men, he had the air support, he had the siege guns. He opened fire. But meanwhile in Bradley’s rear, real tragedy was brewing, which for the first time since the close of D-day, threatened to smash the invasion. By June 18, D + 12, the second roadway, a 25 ton design, was wholly completed. Unloading from the floating pierheads immediately speeded up with two streams of vehicles, one of tanks and one of trucks, being able now to move ashore simultaneously. But I was no longer on the Omaha Beach to witness this final triumph, which (since not enough Whale sections were left afloat ever to complete the third intended roadway) marked the end of mechanical installations to increase the tonnage unloading capacity of Operation Mulberry. For the afternoon before, June 17, Commodore Flanigan in London had concluded that whether on the Far Shore or the Near, my services with Mulberry were no longer imperative, and had ordered me back to Grosvenor Square. I had consequently immediately boarded an LST loaded with wounded and about to shove off for its return to Southampton; by mid-morning of June 18, I was back in Grosvenor Square. By noon I was studying my new assignment. The campaign in Normandy, the Omaha Beach, and the Mulberry Harbors were definitely in the past, so far as I was concerned. Ahead of me now lay the Port of Antwerp in Belgium; it was not expected that it would be out of Nazi hands and in ours short of, say, the coming November, when we should be well on our way toward the Rhine and would be needing bases of supply much closer thereto than Cherbourg and the Brittany Peninsula. I was to study Antwerp thoroughly and develop plans
for opening up to traffic the sabotaged channels we could count on the Nazis leaving us. But I wasn’t through with the Omaha Beach, though at the moment neither Commodore Flanigan nor I foresaw that. For hardly had I left it than on the afternoon of June 18, the seas in the Chanrier started to roughen up perceptibly and the skies took on a peculiar appearance. A storm must be coming, the first since D-day. Colonel Richard Whitcomb, commanding the Army’s port unloading facilities, dispatched a messenger to Navy headquarters on the Lobnitz pierheads asking for weather information—three of his loaded Dukws had swamped that afternoon bound in from the area beyond the breakwaters; nothing like that had happened since the casualties on D-day. What was the answer? Should he cease operations? The regular weather report from the Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Forces, posted on the bulletin boards for all to read, was for fair weather for the rest of the week, just gentle breezes. But as it was obvious the breezes even then weren’t gentle, and were increasing in strength from the northeast, making of the Normandy Coast a dangerous lee shore, it seemed wise to get a fresher report on what was to come. The flagship Augusta, anchored five miles out, was signalled—what were the latest weather reports? The Augusta’s weather prediction for next day was most reassuring—a gentle wind from the northeast, eight to thirteen knots. But by nightfall of June 18, there was grave doubt all along the Omaha beachhead that the weather forecasters knew what they were talking about. Already the wind was above twenty knots—by no stretch of anyone’s imagination any longer a gentle breeze. All work of unloading vessels from offshore by ferrying craft, whether Dukws or LCT’s, was suspended. By morning it was blowing thirty knots. A storm was already kicking up a bad sea outside the harbor, and was rapidly growing stronger. And now an even worse factor than the wind entered the picture. It was around the period of the new moon, when maximum spring tides were due. Between the high tides due anyway at that time, the falling barometer which of itself lifted the sea level, and those strong onshore winds piling the Channel waters high up on that lee shore, the sea level rose a full ten feet above any normal maximum and started to wash clear over the tops of the Phoenix breakwaters, as well as to sweep straight across the decks of the sunken Gooseberry ships. It was evident the AA gun crews aboard the Phoenixs were in danger; soon
the seas would begin to wash them overboard. So they were hurriedly evacuated, no easy task with waves breaking over the Phoenix tops now. But it was done. Next, all traffic ashore over the floating roadways, undulating violently now on their heaving pontoons like writhing pythons, was suspended altogether. On the Lobnitz pierheads, everything portable was lashed down and extra hawsers run to secure more safely the vessels moored alongside. The wind continued to increase as darkness fell on June 19. No doubt about it now; a real storm was already blowing; worse was likely to come. The weather reporting system had failed miserably; there had been no warning, giving reasonable time to get the hundreds and hundreds of small craft safely sheltered against a full scale gale. All they could do now was to anchor inside the breakwaters, wherever they happened to be. As a result, now came real trouble. The smaller landing craft, the LCT’s and the LCM’s mainly, all ramp-type vessels, had no bow anchors. Their normal method of anchoring was by a wire line off a reel on their sterns, so that after touching down to unload over their ramps (having already dropped their stern anchors before beaching) they could then haul themselves astern and off the beach. But that method of anchoring had serious drawbacks in a storm—stern to, a vessel, and especially flat sterned craft as these all were, does not ride storm waves so well as bows on to them. And secondly, and worse, those wire lines, all they had for moorings, had a woeful shortcoming as anchor cables in a storm. There was no spring whatever to them, as there is in a chain link cable hanging in a long bight due to its weight, which under extra strain lengthens slowly into a flatter curve and eases the shock. But those wire anchor lines, already stretched as taut as bow strings by the tension on them, had no possibility of any further give at all under any added strain. So when a heavy sea smacked the flat stern of one of those anchored craft, the inevitable happened—the already taut wire snapped under the blow, and that landing craft found itself instantly adrift in the storm, driving to leeward at the mercy of the seas. The landing craft, caught without warning, anchored themselves by their sterns as usual and then did what they could to ease the strain on their anchor wires. They started up their diesels and kept them going full astern to mitigate the danger by easing the strain on their anchor wires. But it didn’t always work. Some, half waterlogged by seas breaking over them, couldn’t get their soaked engines going; others, after long hours of such unexpected oil consumption, ran out of fuel; still others, going full astern for such unusually long periods,
suffered machinery breakdowns. The results in all cases, regardless of the cause, once engine power failed, were identical—almost instantly after the next heavy sea smacked their flat sterns came a parted anchor line and then a landing craft with no longer any motive power drifting helplessly before the storm. Many drove up on the beach, which in itself was bad enough, but nothing to what followed when other helpless craft piled up on the same stretch of sand and then still others, with all then churning against each other in the heavy surf and making hopeless masses of scrap iron of the lot, not to mention what happened to their crews caught between grinding steel and pounding surf. Even worse occurred. Five LCT’s, broken adrift, drove down before the storm in the night and crashed into the eastern roadway to the Lobnitz pierheads. Instantly there was trouble. The battering LCT’s smashed the concrete pontoons, banged holes in the steel ones, sank some pontoons completely, sank others on one end only, so that some of the bridge trusses submerged, other trusses were twisted sideways on upended pontoons, and the Whale roadway was soon a terrible wreck. The night dragged on, dawn came on June 20, the storm blew on. The tide during the morning was low. The Mulberry Seabees and their officers, led by Lieut. Freeburn, worked their hearts out, dragging those LCT’s clear of their precious roadway and its pontoons, leaving the trusses free for resetting when the storm subsided. But the storm didn’t subside. With afternoon came high water again and an increase in the gale. More landing craft smashed into the roadways. Again they were dragged clear. But by that time every little tug or motor boat Force Mulberry possessed had either been sunk in the storm or disabled. Her men could do no more. Captain Clark through all this had been shrieking orders through loud speaker and megaphone into the teeth of the gale, for all adrift landing craft to keep clear of his Whales. When that failed to produce results, he reinforced his orders by frenzied threats of gunfire on any vessel disregarding them. But in the storm, orders and threats alike fell on deaf ears. The man who for a year had lived for nothing save to make a working reality of Mulberry had to stand impotently by and watch more and more of those fouled up landing craft battering his priceless roadways to destruction. No longer did he have a tug left to drag them clear. Night came, the storm increased—to what nobody knew, but enough. And in
those pounding seas now came still worse disaster. The Bombardons, that floating breakwater of dubious value, to provide the steel for which the Mulberry roadways and pontoons had been both skimped and scamped, ironically turned now into an engine of further destruction for Mulberry. That 2400 foot long floating steel barrier, set well offshore to form an outer harbor, tore from its moorings, broke up into its units, and those steel units, gigantic floating battering rams now, drifted to leeway before the storm waves to find the line of concrete Phoenixs directly in their path. There in the surging seas those ponderous 200 foot long sections of steel Bombardons started hammering away on the concrete Phoenix walls, battered many of them in, and as the tide fell, carried that destruction down to the low tide line. Then as the tide rose again, the unobstructed seas poured now through the gaps in the breakwaters to set up even worse waves in the inner harbor than before. And another day, June 21, went by with the storm still continuing, the Bombardons making greater breaches in the Phoenix wall, the desolation over the harbor beyond description. And once again the waters off the Omaha Beach were dotted with the bodies of the dead, mostly seamen from foundered landing craft this time, still clad in life preservers, a ghastly sight as they drifted amongst the spume and the spray of the breaking waves. The storm waves began now to exert a powerful influence inland. What was beyond Rommel’s power was well within theirs. Bradley, pounding away at the defenses of Cherbourg with every gun, large and small, that he had, found himself suddenly nearly out of ammunition. The steady flow from the beachhead which had heretofore at least kept up with the voracious demands of his guns, though allowing little leeway for building up a reserve, now stopped abruptly. Angrily, Bradley sent word back to the beachhead, demanding more ammunition. When informed in reply that a storm at sea had shut down the port, he refused to believe it necessary, sent some of his aides to order more landed regardless. The obedient aides, at the risk of their lives, made their way out over the twisted and tossing wreckage of the Whale roadways to learn what chance there was of somehow getting in some ammunition through that storm. The only possible way was pointed out to them. Some small coasting steamers loaded with ammunition, riding out the storm at anchor well offshore, might be brought inside the Gooseberry breakwaters as near high tide as possible and stranded there. When the tide went out and left them completely high and dry, it might be possible to run trucks directly alongside
the coasters on the wet sands and unload from their cargo hatches into the trucks, which with luck, might then get all the way inshore without bogging down—some might, anyway. The whole thing was dubious, but it might work. The only thing about it that didn’t seem dubious was that the coasting steamers would most likely all leak like sieves thereafter from the pounding against the sands they’d get till the receding tide fell enough to leave them solidly on the bottom; they’d all probably be wrecks after that single unloading. It didn’t seem worth it to sacrifice valuable ships for such a one-time operation in discharge; ships weren’t that expendable; they could tell Bradley that. The aides crawled back ashore to relay that message to Bradley on the battle front. The answer from Bradley was short and unequivocal—to hell with what happened to the ships—he had to have ammunition! If soon he didn’t have some, the enemy could turn on his helpless troops and butcher them! More ammunition immediately, no matter what the cost to the ships! So storm or no storm, the coasters were run in, beached, and when the tide went out, unloaded directly into trucks—1000 tons of ammunition on June 21, 500 tons on June 22. Apparently it sufficed as a stopgap. Bradley, fuming and incredulous at what he’d been told, in view of the importance of the situation came down on June 22 to see for himself and then to speed up matters. But looking at a beach which to him seemed more littered with destruction than even on D-day, he stood appalled, and made no further criticism of those running the harbor. Now he understood. For by night, when the gale finally subsided and a count could be made, it appeared that some 800 landing craft had been stranded on both British and American beaches, vast numbers of them beyond any hope of possible salvage and repair, 300 of these hopelessly battered wrecks on our waterfront alone. At the Omaha Beach, the wrecks were literally piled six deep against the shore end of our twisted Whale roadway—other wrecks encumbered the waterfront from one end of the beach to the other. And one LCI(L), caught at sea outside the area of the harbor and there exposed to the full blast of the gale, had been flung bodily up on the rocks at the base of the cliffs near Pointe de la Percée, so high above any sign of high water in that vicinity that except by building launching ways under her and sending her down that incline, it was hopeless to expect ever again to get her back into the water. Had the Nazis been able to cause us one-tenth the damage which that storm dealt us, Dr. Goebbels would have had sound warrant for going all out on the radio to proclaim it to the world as a major German victory.
It looked to every person gazing then on the remains as if the Artificial Harbors were through—and so also was our invasion. All the Nazis had to do now to toss our armies back into the sea was to stage immediately their dreaded counterattack. We were helpless to resist. What I had so fondly looked on during my last day at Omaha as our certain assurance of victory— something wholly beyond Rommel’s power to destroy—lay now before Bradley’s eyes and everyone’s there, destroyed. Though by nature’s hand, not by Rommel’s. But what difference did that make? It was destroyed. And surely now the Nazis knew it. For the first night of the full storm, the night of June 19 when no longer did we have any manned AA guns on the Phoenix line to keep them off, had seen more Nazi planes over Omaha dropping mines in our offshore shipping areas than on any night since first we had landed there. Undoubtedly then the Luftwaffe had scouted also the harbors to see what the storm was doing to them—now they must know. And soon would come the result of that knowledge—the crushing impact of Rommel’s Panzers driving toward the sea on our armies, fatally handicapped by lack of ammunition to hold them back. To that part of our harbor forces which still survived, battered, seasick, totally exhausted by their struggles against the storm, anguished at the destruction that for four agonizing days and nights had gone on under their very eyes, there seemed no other possibility. The disaster was irretrievable. The invasion of Normandy must now collapse—unless swiftly we captured the port of Cherbourg in immediately usable condition—a wholly hopeless dream. For Rommel would not hesitate to sacrifice a French port when its destruction served Nazi interests.
CHAPTER 34 While still the storm was raging in the Channel, Commodore Flanigan sent for me. Once again I heard my assignment on a future project was suspended. There had come in an urgent radio from the Far Shore, asking my immediate return to the Omaha Beach. I was to proceed instantly to Portsmouth and there catch the first dispatch boat able to get to sea again. I was to do what I could to get Mulberry back in service. Never mind how long it might take me. I could forget Antwerp yet awhile; it could wait. Unless Mulberry soon started functioning again, we’d never get to Antwerp anyway. Early on June 23, aboard one of the Coast Guard’s 83 foot picket boats I was on my way out of Portsmouth. From the young ensign who was its skipper, I got an impression of what the storm, now subsiding, had been as seen by those at sea. He himself was much shaken. He (an experienced amateur yachtsman before the Coast Guard grabbed him) had somehow managed to get his boat back into port the first day of the storm. That was more luck than some of his fellow Coast Guard skippers had had. Two of them at least, boats and crews together, had gone down in the gale—no survivors. And so had some of the Phoenix tows and much else that had been caught at sea on June 19. Of course, after all that, nothing had gone to sea again until this morning. All shipping in the Channel had been halted, all planes had been grounded. The weathermen in the U. K. now were announcing it had been the worst June storm to hit the Channel in eighty years. And we had caught it on the chin, wholly unwarned of its coming, even as a matter of fact, promised good weather instead. Why that had been allowed to occur seemed a puzzle. Our weather experts were first class—they had done an excellent job with their D-day forecasts. But perhaps the reason was that this storm had struck us, not from the westward as just before D-day, but from the northeast. In that direction lay Scandinavia and Holland, all in Nazi hands, from which we could get no weather data. Possibly we were as blind in forecasting weather originating across the North Sea from Norway as the Nazis had been, pre-D-day, in predicting what was coming across the Atlantic from Greenland or the Azores. At any rate, our lack of
warning had cost us plenty. What actually it had cost us, I never even vaguely appreciated till later that day I stood myself again on the Omaha Beach, gazing on wrecked landing craft in every direction and on such destruction as I could not have imagined possible from any cause—either from the fury of man at his worst or from nature at her most violent. Inshore lay a beach strewn with wrecks. Offshore lay the sunken ships of the Gooseberry breakwater, most of them now (including even the monster Centurion) with broken backs from the pounding they had received. And to their left, the concrete line of Phoenixs, with here and there huge chunks chewed out of that wall where the Bombardons had hammered them. And finally, the two long Whale roadways, now two twisted and pathetic strings of wreckage running out to the heavily battered and partly foundered pierheads. It seemed wholly unbelievable. But it was so, and something had to be done about it. Fortunately that was immediately possible. With the wind died away and the. tides once again down to normal, the Gooseberry breakwaters and the remains of the Phoenix walls, badly battered though both were, once more were providing fairly smooth water in the inner harbor—plenty smooth enough for small craft to operate in. Already the bulldozers were pushing or pulling aside enough wrecks here and there once more to allow workable though narrow passages for Dukws up the sands and on to the beach road leading to the draws. And the Dukws then saved the day, and no doubt the invasion also. For while by the hundreds the little landing craft, the LCM’s and the LCT’s, were being pounded to junk on the beaches or against the Whale roadways, the Dukws (except for the three lost the first afternoon) all safely nestled well inshore on the plateau near their various dumps, rode out the storm on land, no more bothered by it than their half-brothers, the trucks, also parked on the bluffs above the beach. The Dukws now waddled down from the plateau and swam nobly into action alongside coasters and freighters brought into the inner harbor, and even out to those in the rougher water outside. Aided by the LCT’s and the LCM’s which had survived (about half the total) a veritable miracle in cargo handling was achieved. 10,000 tons of cargo (most of it ammunition) were brought ashore on June 23, the first day after the gale, topping by a thousand tons the best record the port had ever made even before the storm. And next day, on the 24th, even that record went by the board—11,500 tons came in, to be topped
again within two days on June 26, when working frenziedly to make good the deficit in ammunition before the enemy should strike at us, the men on the Omaha Beach landed through the Mulberry Harbor 14,500 tons of supplies— not too far from double the 8000 tons it had been hoped for from Mulberry in pre-invasion days! Rommel had lost his golden opportunity. Heaps of artillery ammunition adequate to counter any attack now rested safely ashore in the dumps. With Cherbourg likely now soon to be in our hands and the guns which were so voraciously chewing up ammunition in its reduction, silent after that for a few weeks till they should open again for a breakthrough at St. Lô on the southern flank, those heaps could grow substantially. We were safe. Meanwhile, a battle of a different nature was in the making on the Omaha Beach. To back up the Dukws flotillas in unloading, the second order of business had been to clear away the wrecks from in front of the Colleville and St. Laurent Draws where the LST’s had before grounded out to unload. That also was swiftly done since the wrecks there were all small. And soon, directly over the beaches, once again LST’s (none of which had been lost in the storm) were discharging their loads of warlike materials, from tanks rumbling ashore on their tractor treads to G.I.’s stumbling ashore under inhuman packs on their own two feet. The only drawback to all that grounding of the LST’s on a big scale was that once an LST had beached itself on a high tide for unloading, it had to wait idly by for the next twelve hours till high tide came again and it could haul free for a return to the U. K. and another load. Whereas the Lobnitz pierheads and the Whale roadways had taken care of unloading and starting an LST back to the U. K. in not over forty minutes. With the result that that same emptied LST was already back in England, reloaded and once again headed back for Normandy in less than the twelve hours she would have lost sitting idly on the beach at Omaha waiting for the next tide to float her free. The haggard Captain Clark, who literally had put his body and his soul into the project for making all that possible, once clearance work enough had been done to get the Dukws going.again and the LST’s unloading on the sands (although with considerable lost motion due to beaching) pressed eagerly for the rehabilitation of the pierheads. Would I next check the condition of the Lobnitz pierheads and their now no-longer-floating roadways and advise whether it might not be possible to get at least part of them working again? It
would practically double the usefulness of the LST’s, the most valuable vessels we had in supporting the invasion, if only their turnaround time on Omaha could once again be reduced to the forty minute period he had averaged in getting ashore the heavy artillery and the tanks in the three days before the storm. All that was logical enough and worth tremendous effort. Considering the millions and millions of dollars and the year of labor poured into Mulberry, it was reasonable to put in whatever more of effort might make it produce to the limit. I started a detailed survey of what wasn’t smashed beyond swift repair in that tangled mass of pontoons, bridge trusses, and pierheads. Considering that it comprised originally materials for three roadways and six pierheads, surely we should be able swiftly to salvage from what was there on Omaha enough to put back into service one roadway and two pierheads. And perhaps within a month or so, to repair enough additional parts so that with what was still in England, we could place a second roadway and two more pierheads back in action. It would be of tremendous value in unloading LST’s swiftly. Having put together in Massawa from cannibalized pieces of smashed machinery a whole naval base sabotaged by the Italians, complete from shops through piers to drydocks, I had no doubt a similar result could quickly be obtained from cannibalizing the wreckage of the floating piers in Omaha. I would guarantee it. I told Clark so. Eagerly Clark rushed to the higher naval command afloat for authority to start. But all he got for his enthusiasm for rehabilitation was ice-cold water thrown in his face. The naval command afloat had never taken much interest in Operation Mulberry—it didn’t then, when part of it was smashed by what some claimed wasn’t even a storm really—just a “strong breeze.” Why bother further? And besides, Cherbourg was about to fall within a day or two—that was certain, and then we should have a real port. The largest salvage group the Navy had in Europe was at hand on the Near Shore, ready and itching to move immediately into Cherbourg behind our invading troops, and decidedly lukewarm to the idea of anyone’s dallying with anything less dazzling. Within three days, so they calculated, based on some experience with what had happened in Nazi-damaged Naples harbor before its evacuation the year before, they would have the port of Cherbourg open and ready to begin operations. Why waste any more effort on the damaged installation, after all a
makeshift harbor anyway, of Omaha? The Omaha Beach had had its day. Cherbourg would swiftly make it wholly superfluous. That the thoroughgoing Rommel and his unhurried naval subordinate, Admiral Hennecke, might present us with a situation very different from that left by a Nazi general hastily evacuating Naples, seems not to have entered their thinking. So Captain Clark was flatly refused permission to attempt any restoration of his damaged pierheads. What might appear salvable to them, the British could have for repairs and extensions to their Mulberry B installation on their beaches to the eastward. That British artificial harbor, remarkably enough due to a location naturally less exposed to the fury of a storm from the northeast, and due partly also to its still uncompleted state, had emerged with far less damage. The most that would be done at Omaha would be to bring additional Phoenixs from England to patch the holes in the breakwater punched by the Bombardons, which last, of course, would never be replaced. With only those minor repairs, our Mulberry Harbor might make out as best it could for the remainder of its existence, which would now not be long under any conditions. From the rosy estimates passed along to the higher command by the waiting salvage parties, Cherbourg should be operating within the week. Captain Dayton Clark, utterly worn down anyway by his hectic drive to get his harbor swiftly into operation after D-day, then broken in body by his four day battle with the elements to save it from destruction, now broken in spirit by this last rebuff, could take no more. The day after the capture of Cherbourg, June 26, he was on his way back across the Channel, bound for the Near Shore and hospitalization—as much and as badly wounded an invasion casualty as if on D + 1, one of those Nazi shells bracketing the first vessels he was sinking on the Gooseberry breakwater had burst in his face. He had had it.
CHAPTER 35 The attack on Cherbourg opened on June 21 with a general assault on the perimeter of bunkers and strongpoints ringing the city. On June 22, the Air Corps was called on for a daylight strafing attack by fighters on all these defenses, to be followed by 1100 tons of bombs. After twenty minutes of fierce fire from the fighter planes, 375 heavy bombers came over to finish with an hour ’s attack concentrated on the six major forts in the defense ring. The material damage to the enemy was apparently not great. But the effect on the morale of the Nazi defenders was terrific—the sight of unopposed Allied fighters and bombers having a field day in the skies over them with never a single plane of the Luftwaffe coming to their aid was too much. While they were frenziedly being urged by Hitler to die for Cherbourg, why, the defenders asked, weren’t Goering and his Luftwaffe there to die with them if Cherbourg were that important? On June 23 and 24, against weakening but still substantial resistance, the VII Corps pressed forward into the inner defenses. A major assault was scheduled for June 25 against the line of inner forts, of which Fort du Roule, crowning an eminence completely dominating all of Cherbourg and its harbor, was the main objective. To make the attack decisive in shattering what will to resist the Nazis had left, Bradley asked Admiral Kirk for a naval bombardment of the harbor forts while he smashed against the landward ring. Bradley well knew that the Cherbourg naval batteries outranged the guns Kirk had and that Kirk could do them no real damage; still he felt certain that the moral effect of heavy American shells falling on Cherbourg from the sea outweighed the risks to Kirk and his ships and would hasten the collapse of the defense. Kirk obliged. The battleships Texas, Nevada, and Arkansas under Rear Admiral Carleton Bryant were to make the main attack. Supported by the cruisers Augusta, Quincy, and Tuscaloosa under Rear Admiral Deyo and assisted by the British cruisers H.M.S. Glasgow and Enterprise, the fleet stood in for a long range engagement with the numerous coastal defense guns facing the sea from
Cherbourg. Admiral Bryant, knowing very well that the shore batteries had him outclassed, cannily offered the enemy eight different targets to keep his fire dispersed, and then kept all his own warships steaming erratically at high speed to make them as poor targets as possible while they poured in their shells to burst on what they trusted were the Cherbourg gun positions; whether they hit them or not was not too important. While neither Bradley or Kirk knew it then, they got precisely the reaction they were hoping for. Not a bursting naval shell ever hit anything that made a difference so far as anyone knew. But the resulting thunderous explosions, heard most distinctly by every Nazi in a Cherbourg bunker as well as by von Schlieben, had the exact effect desired. First that strafing from the skies, then the battering from landward on their casemates by 155 mm. shells from our G.I.’s with their multitudinous “Long Toms,” now this hail of heavy shells from the seas—it was all too much for the harassed and hopeless defenders. Von Schlieben, begging permission by radio of Rommel to surrender, noted: “In addition to superiority in materiel and artillery, air force and tanks, heavy fire from the sea has started, directed by spotter planes. I must state in the line of duty that further sacrifices cannot alter anything.” But to this Rommell, his hands tied by Hitler ’s orders, could make no answer save: “You will continue to fight until the last cartridge in accordance with the order from the Fuehrer.” Offshore, having fired shells enough to make the proper impression on those on the receiving end in Cherbourg, when the shore batteries there finally began to straddle even his fast moving ships and bursting shells started to explode on his flagship, the Texas, Admiral Bryant discreetly withdrew, along with all the rest of the fleet. Meanwhile, as this bombardment from the sea was adding the last straw needed to terrify the already demoralized defenders, the 314th Infantry, aided by the 311th Field Artillery, was attacking Fort du Roule, a towering precipice looking about as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar. But nevertheless, in a fierce all day battle, fought out finally practically hand to hand under the stone walls of the fort with hand grenades and satchel charges, they overwhelmed it. On June 26, with G.I.’s now breaking into the city itself from all sides, General von Schlieben and Admiral Hennecke, military and naval commanders respectively, together with 800 troops were all caught in an underground bunker cut out of the solid rock, forming the defense command post for
Cherbourg. They refused a demand to surrender, but changed their minds when a tank destroyer fired several rounds into the bunker entrance. So on D + 20, with its defenses everywhere collapsing and our troops pouring into the city, Cherbourg fell into our hands. That night over the radio on the Omaha Beach I listened to Goebbels announcing what one might think had been a major disaster to German arms, but it wasn’t exactly put that way. As Goebbels told it, it seemed that the valiant defenders of Cherbourg, after exacting an unheard of toll of dead from the attackers for each inch of ground, finally with their last cartridge expended, had been forced to lay down their useless rifles. Their unparalleled defense was a glorious page in the annals of Hitler ’s Reich. Heil Hitler! Next day I drove from the Omaha Beach through shattered Montebourg and Valognes into Cherbourg to estimate for myself how soon Cherbourg might take over as a seaport. As usual, I traveled in a jeep with an Army sergeant for my driver. For miles, all the way going north from Valognes to the outskirts of Cherbourg, I passed an endless stream of heavy howitzers, field artillery, and tanks, all bound south now for the coming attack on St. Lô. But what struck me was not the plethora of heavy armor composing that southbound army; it was the G.I.’s, just come from battle, the veritable G.I. Joes of the cartoons— muddy, unkempt, unshaven. About a mile or two before entering Cherbourg, I passed on the left a hastily wired enclosure behind which were the Nazi prisoners, some 30,000 of them who having fired away their last cartridge in desperate defense had then no option but to surrender. I stared at them in surprise. A group of soldiers more ready for parade in Potsdammer Platz you never saw—clean uniforms, shaved faces, shined boots—these the men who had just fought to their last cartridge? It seemed unbelievable. Some few, not in sight of my jeep, might have, but not the shined up crowd that I could see. Was it possible that Dr. Goebbels had exaggerated? My driver and I proceeded a little further. Just outside Cherbourg itself, we had to slow considerably to avoid hitting a mud-plastered G.I. who, staggering under the load of a huge roll of khaki canvas he was trying to balance on his shoulder with one hand while he gripped his rifle with the other, was steering quite an erratic course down the road, also bound into Cherbourg. I told the driver to stop alongside him, invited him and his curious bundle into the back seat of our jeep (which invitation he accepted with great alacrity)
and we proceeded along the highway into Cherbourg itself. I looked back with interest at our passenger; why, I wondered, such solicitude for that oversized roll of canvas? But soon I quit wondering about the canvas to stare puzzled instead at that G.I.—he was the most nervous character I’d seen in weeks, eyes darting incessantly from side to side, rifle at the ready. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “This town’s surrendered. It’s ours now.” “Yeh, Captain,” he muttered, “but there’s a lot of snipers around that don’t seem to know it yet. Some of us G.I.’s ’ve been shot dead already. I’m taking no chances. Better keep your rifle ready—like me!” Snipers? I hadn’t thought of that. Still, it might well be; he should know. But I didn’t have a rifle; I told him so. “We’ll soon fix that for you, Captain,” he said. “Tell the sergeant to stop a minute; anywhere’ll do.” How that would fix it, I couldn’t see, but this G.I. seemed to know what he was about. I ordered the driver to stop. He stopped. “There!” said my G.I., pointing. “Help yourself, only be sure you take one that works!” I looked. Alongside the road were German rifles by the dozens, all along the shoulder, tossed there evidently by columns of Nazis trooping out to surrender. Easily in sight were at least a thousand. I hopped out, observed my G.I., now that we were stopped, with his rifle at his shoulder, scanning the houses on both sides, ready instantly to fire should we be fired on. Thus protected, I seized the nearest German rifle, tried the bolt. It worked fine. I passed that one to my driver; selected another for myself; that one also worked satisfactorily. What good, however, were rifles without cartridges? According to what I’d heard directly from Dr. Goebbels only the night before, there weren’t any left in Cherbourg—they’d all, down to the last cartridge, been fired at us before those prisoners I’d seen outside had surrendered their useless rifles. But somehow it appeared from the evidence in front of me that someone had been pulling Dr. Goebbels’ leg; he had been grossly misinformed. Before me, alongside those rifles, were German ammunition belts loaded with cartridges by the thousands. I helped myself plentifully, passed more up to my driver, could have loaded our jeep with cartridges enough to have broken its springs, had I so desired. But I didn’t need any more. We proceeded all the rest of the way into the center of Cherbourg, with two rifles now at the ready and a third handy alongside the driver. But on that trip, we had no need of them. My G.I.
thanked me and hopped out, to stagger off once more under his load of canvas; I thanked him heartily for his warning; the rifles might still come in handy on our journey out. Finally my jeep hauled up in the dock area, at the head of the huge pier where the transatlantic liners used to dock. Several times in peacetime, I’d come in there myself. I found, already in Cherbourg, an old friend of my submarine salvage days of years before—Captain Norman Ives, slated to be Port Captain of Cherbourg. Ives would have nothing to do with the rehabilitation task—on the water, that was the job for the Navy salvage party; on the land, for the Army engineers. But once the port was ready to run, it would be Ives’ job then as Port Captain to run it. So I asked Ives, now that he’d seen Cherbourg Harbor, when he expected the port would be in operation. Ives preferred not to discuss it then. He suggested I look about for myself and after I’d seen the situation, we could compare notes. That seemed reasonable. So still in my jeep with rifle at the ready between all stops, I set out to examine what had happened. I can best epitomize what I saw by quoting the report on it by Colonel Viney of the Army Engineers: “The demolition of the port of Cherbourg is a masterful job, beyond a doubt the most complete, intensive, and best-planned demolition in history.” That was based on what Colonel Viney could see of the port installations— the piers, drydocks, harbor cranes, and breakwaters—all beautifully demolished. What Colonel Viney couldn’t see, and what was unique in this sabotage job was what was under water. Cherbourg had been more than just a seaport. It had also been a major naval arsenal. It was the base for the vast number of submarine mines that were to have been freshly laid in the Channel that spring as an anti-invasion barrier—only Admiral Hennecke had had no seagoing minelayers available to lay them there so they all remained in Cherbourg. When Hennecke on June 7 received orders from Hitler to demolish the port, he introduced a new wrinkle—all the mines that should have gone into 80 miles of minefields in the Channel, screening all Normandy from England, had been first armed and then dumped instead into Cherbourg Harbor to make it the most intensively mined water area the world had ever seen. That, not the destruction visible above ground, made the problem of using Cherbourg Harbor again something decidedly not contemplated when the clearance forces were talking glibly about getting it going in three days.
Cherbourg, thanks to its ingenious naval commandant, turned out not to be a second Naples. Admiral Hennecke, the Nazi who dreamed up that job, the day after his capture by the men of the VII Corps, was awarded by Adolf Hitler (in absentia, of course) the Knight’s Cross for “a feat unprecedented in the annals of coastal defense.” Having seen the “feat,” for once in my life I found myself in complete agreement with Adolf Hitler. You could not move on the water anywhere in the port of Cherbourg except in a rubber boat with muffled oars, without being blown sky high by a mine of some type—acoustic, magnetic, or contact. Some hours later, having noted all this, I went back to see Norman Ives before departing for the Omaha Beach. We both looked at each other pessimistically. Ives wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to when he’d have a port to operate, and I didn’t feel called on to act the part of a prophet either. So we parted with the question unresolved—except that it couldn’t possibly be soon. Omaha Beach, crippled as it was, was going to have to keep on carrying the load to the end. In the matter of our seizing a port, the Nazis had outwitted us. They had made sure that so far as the battle going on for Normandy was concerned, Cherbourg would never serve us as a port. If we won, we’d have to win without it. But as they’d seen it, without it we couldn’t win. That was why Hennecke got that Knight’s Cross.
CHAPTER 36 Erwin Rommel was in a quandary. His defense had not gone as he had expected. On D-day, the Atlantic Wall, on which he had expended tremendous effort, where confidently he had counted on hanging up the invaders in the beach obstacles while he stung them to death from the bluffs above, had been smashed by heavy naval guns—something which had not figured in his calculations, for after all, Rommel was a soldier, not a sailor. Then at each town behind the beachhead, where he had confidently expected to cordon off the invaders while he crushed them with his armor, again those naval guns had quickly pulverized both his positions and such of his armor as had not fled in time. In fact, such a stunning impression had those naval guns already made on Rommel (and on his generals also) that they failed to take due account of the fact that their enemy, even with nothing but open beaches for entry (so they still seemed to think) had developed a very respectable armored weight on his own side. To them, even after the setbacks of the first ten days, it seemed that if they could only deny to the enemy the nearest port, Cherbourg, and get at him meanwhile far enough inland to be out of range of those naval guns, they would yet crush him. But Rommel now was beginning to doubt even that. His freedom of action in running his campaign was being hamstrung from his rear by Hitler on the far Russian front. Rommel, to meet the exigencies of a fast-changing battle front, could not move a Panzer Division to where he thought he most needed it, without the Fuehrer ’s express permission. And by the time he got it (even if he did, which was not always) the move was too late to do him any good. How could he do anything but lose a war under such conditions? That had not been all. His good right arm, General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, Commander of his 84th Corps defending the coast line, a most capable and much respected officer, on D + 6 had been killed by a strafing attack and his headquarters promptly overrun by G.I.’s on the ground. Bradley was now in possession of all the 84th Corps files, and could not possibly be unaware of the severe command handicaps imposed on Rommel by Hitler ’s
remote control methods of directing the war in Normandy. Not to mention also that it was certain Bradley had in his hands the file copy of that famous order from Hitler on D-day morning to the 84th Corps—that by nightfall of June 6, it was the Fuehrer ’s express command that all invaders be hurled back into the sea. Ironically, by D + 6, Marcks was dead, and the order itself was in the hands of those same invaders, who far from being in the sea, were in possession of the 84th Corps Headquarters. From a psychological point of view, aside from its military aspects, that was bad. Faced with that situation, Rommel and von Rundstedt between them had persuaded Hitler on D + 10 (June 16) to come to Normandy to see for himself. As for them, they now favored a withdrawal, say at least to the line of the Seine, which was better defensible. But Hitler would have none of it. His secret weapons, the V-l (already just launched against London) and the V-2 (yet to come) would soon win the war for him. Meanwhile, he would not give up an inch of his conquests. Every soldier in Normandy must fight to his last drop of blood and to his last cartridge. There would be no withdrawal, regardless of how imperative one might seem to generals viewing the situation from purely military considerations. Hitler flew back to Berchtesgaden to be closer to the Russian front. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, an old man but still a clear-sighted one, went back to his headquarters, much depressed. Under similar circ*mstances in World War I, the German General Staff had forced the Kaiser to abdicate and obtained an armistice. But with Hitler in the saddle, that was impossible. No one could force him to abdicate. So the destruction of Germany was unavoidable. But Rommel was a much younger man and one with a greater stake in Germany’s continued existence. He also went back to his headquarters, fully resolved now. To him, catastrophe was not unavoidable and he would help avoid it. He would cooperate with the plot long brewing among other generals in Germany to assassinate Hitler—that was the only possible way, he saw now, to remove Hitler and to avoid the total destruction of Germany. He gave his assent via his Chief of Staff—now he would cooperate. After Hitler ’s death, with Rommel himself, the military idol of the Reich, installed as Chief of State, Rommel to save Germany from utter destruction would make the best peace he could with the West. But meanwhile, till the plotters in Berlin could somehow implement their design, Rommel had still the war in Normandy to occupy him. He must, if possible, produce a stalemate there. On that rested his only hope for success in
later negotiations. To produce that stalemate, Rommel did his best. Matters in Normandy went still from bad to worse. With Allied fliers in complete control of the skies, Rommel’s best turned out to be far from good enough. By day, no German military traffic could move along any road leading through northern France to Normandy without surely being destroyed from the air. And by night, it moved only blacked-out along jammed roads, very slowly. Rommel’s Seventh Army, defending Normandy, could not even get up to the front the minimum 3000 tons a day of ammunition, gasoline, and supplies it needed for bare defense. Colonel General Dollmann, commanding that Seventh Army, reported most pessimistically that the 4500 tons a day he required to sustain offensive action in an armored attack were fantastically beyond the capacity of such trucks as he had to move to his front. Even more so was it impossible to him to build up the 14,000 tons reserve necessary before opening an offensive. To mount an armored counterattack was wholly beyond the realm of reality. Had Dollmann known (which he didn’t) that at that very time, over 8000 tons a day, twice as much as he was getting, was coming in to supply his enemies over the beachhead at Omaha (wholly aside from what was coming over the British beachhead and at Utah) he would have been even more pessimistic. But German Intelligence in Normandy was now all shot to pieces and Luftwaffe reconnaissance was nonexistent; having no knowledge of what was going on at our beachheads, he was spared that added weight on his mind. Rommel tried to block off Bradley’s path to Cherbourg. Battleship guns defeated the effort. Conceding then the ultimate loss of Cherbourg as inevitable, Rommel started to withdraw southward from the Peninsula, before it was cut through, his best divisions for further field use at St. Lô in cordoning off our beachheads. Hitler defeated that effort. Not a man, even of the mobile field troops, was to be withdrawn from the Cherbourg Peninsula; they were all to stay there along with the garrison forces, and fight to the last drop of blood, the last cartridge. So Rommel, having to countermand his orders actually already given for that withdrawal, was left to contemplate now the loss of both Cherbourg and his mobile troops. No doubt also by then he was beginning to contemplate which was causing him the most damage—our battleship guns or Hitler? Now came worse. Cherbourg fell. While adequate steps had been taken already by Admiral Hennecke and his naval command to see that Cherbourg
was valueless to its captors, still the moral effect, both in Germany and elsewhere in the world, was tremendous. On both sides, to Herr Schmidt in Berlin and to Joe Doakes in New York, neither one of whom realized how useless Cherbourg would be for months yet, it seemed the same. Now the Allies had a seaport, a big one. Defeat or victory (depending on who was doing the looking) was now just around the corner. Colonel General Dollmann, commanding Rommel’s Seventh Army, sadly depressed already by what he was unable to do, could stand the strain no longer. The capture of Cherbourg with almost 40,000 of the men of his Seventh Army, was one blow too much for him. The day following its fall, Dollmann dropped dead of a heart attack. On the eastern front, Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of the German General Staff, was almost as badly upset over Cherbourg’s capture. Immediately he got von Rundstedt in Normandy on the far end of a telephone line reaching from the Russian front all the way across Germany to France. In great agitation, he inquired of von Rundstedt: “What shall we do?” Von Rundstedt, with Dollmann’s death fresh in his thoughts to remind him that he was much older even than Dollmann, answered nevertheless only in cold logic: “Do? Make peace, you idiots! What else can you do?” And he hung up. To Keitel, even from von Rundstedt that was rank insubordination; he rushed to Hitler. Three days after the fall of Cherbourg, von Rundstedt along with Rommel stood before Hitler in Berchtesgaden to recant, but instead of recanting they both insisted on an immediate withdrawal beyond the range of naval artillery, with the obvious inference that it would be even better to withdraw wholly from France to the Siegfried Line, while still they had an army with which to make a stand there till a peace could be negotiated. They got nowhere. Hitler announced it was his order to them to confine the enemy to his bridgehead. The two Field Marshals, convinced that an impossibility was demanded of them, went back to Normandy. Now matters moved fast. Two days later, von Rundstedt was relieved of his command. Daring to question the Fuehrer ’s ideas of strategy was too much. Field Marshal von Kluge took over, fresh from the Russian front, with orders to stage an offensive. Rommel, seeing the only soldier in whom he had any confidence thrown out of France, exclaimed: “I will be next!”
For Rommel that came soon, but not exactly as he had expected. Bradley, with Cherbourg as an objective off his mind, turned everything he had—armor, infantry, and air support, to the south for the breakthrough southward into the open that was contemplated in the Overlord Plan. After that breakthrough, Patton and the newly constituted Third Army were to go westward into the Brittany Peninsula and secure for us there the additional (and so it was initially thought, essential) ports of Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, and to allow us to set up an added temporary harbor on Quiberon Bay. By D + 42, all that should be done, and at that point, our original First Army and Patton’s new Third Army would turn east again, with Montgomery at Caen as the hinge, then really to begin the Battle of France. But first, in order to do that, we must take St. Lô as a base for our next move, the breakout to the south. By July 3, D + 27, we had passed through our beachheads, English and American, into Normandy a total of 929,000 men, 586,000 tons of supplies and 177,000 vehicles. Bradley’s share was about half that total; he had already ashore four corps composed of eleven infantry divisions and two armored divisions, a total of thirteen, a very respectable army, well armored, well supplied. Even before he had all that, and as part of the original Overlord Plan program, Bradley had started to batter his way into St. Lô, which he had to have before he could ever stage a breakout to the south. And Rommel and his Seventh Army just as fiercely resisted. St. Lô, a most important road junction, had been expected to fall into our hands by D + 5. It hadn’t. Before St. Lô, Rommel massed everything he dared take from Montgomery’s front at Caen, even to his 2nd Panzer Division, the only armored division he had elsewhere than before the British. A continuous battle for St. Lô ensued until June 18 (D + 12) when Bradley called a halt there—he could no longer afford an offensive on St. Lô—he needed everything he had for the assault on Cherbourg. St. Lô, important as it was, would have to wait. But immediately Cherbourg had fallen, Bradley threw his whole weight again at St. Lô. He didn’t get through—St. Lô didn’t fall, as had Isigny, Carentan, Montebourg, and Valognes, almost within a day. The difference, actually was neither in the guns or men we put into the attack, nor even in the defense put up by the Nazis. The difference lay in the fact that for the first time since D-day a heavy attack was being thrown at a town blocking a vital road, where that town was not within range of the sea,
and battleship guns could not swiftly flatten it and its defenders out for us. The battle for St. Lô became a terrific slugging match, probably the longest drawn out and bloodiest in the whole campaign from the Normandy beaches to final victory on the Elbe. Bradley had to get through there, if ever he were to break into open country; Rommel was determined he should not. So tanks, artillery, machine guns, and infantry on both sides fought each other to what looked likely to become a stalemate. But it didn’t. The weight of superior artillery and ammunition on Bradley’s side, and one other item that occurred on July 17, finally combined to give us entry into St. Lô on July 18. That day St. Lô fell into our hands; it was a completely shattered town, but invaluable as the heart of a network of highways we had to have prior to any breakout to the south. What had occurred on July 17 was that after that day, Rommel, Germany’s best field general, was no longer any part of Bradley’s problem in Normandy, or for that matter, beyond it, either. The day before we took St. Lô, July 17, while Rommel was returning from an inspection of his front lines, a strafing Allied fighter plane spotted a Nazi staff car trying to make its way inconspicuously along a back road near the front. Down like a diving falcon came that fighter on the road, its guns going all out. A bursting shell hit the left side windshield pillar of that car, sent it crashing against Rommel’s skull, tore the driver to pieces, and started the car careening into the ditch, while Rommel, unconscious, was pitched into the road. French surgeons saved his life, something Rommel soon had no cause to be thankful for. Three days later came the actual attempt to assassinate Hitler, with its regrettable failure to result in a satisfactory job. Hitler, quickly recovered, started Himmler looking for all those in the plot and began hanging all German generals suspected of being involved on meat hooks like slaughtered hogs. Rommel’s involvement with the conspirators was soon discovered. But that discovery put Hitler in a terrific dilemma. What would be the effect on the average German if it should come out that the man whom Hitler himself had built up as the military hero par excellence, the ideal Nazi soldier, had finally concluded that the best thing he could do for Germany now was to help eliminate der Fuehrer? No, that would never do. It might start too many other Germans to thinking that if the national hero had come to that as the only logical solution for Germany’s difficulties, then it must be logical for them also so to conclude—
and act. No. Rommel must die. But his death still must serve the Fuehrer. So with his ultimatum Adolf Hitler sent to the convalescent Rommel’s home near Ulm two of his SS generals whom he could trust to murder their own mothers should he so order. They had with them a powerful poison, practically instantaneous in its action; Rommel could go with them in the staff car in which they had come, ostensibly for a conference, and take the poison, after which it would be announced he had had a sudden hemorrhage resulting from his wounds and died. Or he could if he so preferred, die hung up on a meat hook, with ensuing dire reprisals on his wife and his son. Der Fuehrer would much regret being driven so far—the poison was better—but Rommel could choose for himself. Rommel chose the poison, said goodby to his wife (whom he told also what was about to occur), and went for the ride. In fifteen minutes, he was dead. Hitler decreed a state funeral for his hero and sent Frau Rommel his “deepest sympathy.” Then with a keen eye to that pageantry on which he had built the Nazi regime, and on which now more than ever he had to rely to bolster his tottering grip on power, he ordered Field Marshal von Rundstedt whom he had just incontinently tossed on the military rubbish heap and who was in total ignorance of what really had occurred, to Ulm to deliver the funeral oration over the body of his former subordinate. While all over Germany at Hitler ’s order every flag was flown at half-mast in mourning, von Rundstedt, deeply’ moved, haltingly read the script prepared for him, apparently by Dr. Goebbels himself, never realizing as he laid at the feet of his late comrade in arms the tremendous wreath sent personally by Adolf Hitler, the diabolic irony of the concluding words: “His heart belonged to the Fuehrer.” To avoid future repercussions, the body was cremated. So passed Rommel, the major stumbling block in our path into Europe from the moment we encountered his obstacles on the beach off Omaha to the day his troops solidly sealed off our road into St. Lô. There at least, when finally it was man to man and armor to armor with no naval guns to settle the issue, we never passed while Erwin Rommel was on his feet to command. With the death of Rommel, the elimination from the scene of the enemy top command in Normandy whom we had faced on D-day was complete. Von Rundstedt had been removed, Rommel had been murdered, Dollmann had dropped dead, and Marcks had been killed in action. The defense of Normandy
rested now in the hands of Field Marshal von Kluge from the Russian front, and his newly chosen set of generals.
CHAPTER 37 We entered St. Lô on July 18. The fiercest and longest-drawn out battle ashore we had so far fought, or were ever to fight in France, ended in our favor. The Artificial Harbors had performed magnificently in supplying what was necessary to let Bradley first hold his own at St. Lô against the German armor while he was taking Cherbourg and then to break through. And, in spite of what the storm had done to Omaha, it had still all been done over the beaches. Cherbourg, already in our hands for three weeks, had no part in this crucial victory; oddly enough, not till the eve of the entrance of our battleworn troops into St. Lô did those struggling with the mines in Cherbourg Harbor manage finally to clear even the narrow pathway required to allow passage for some Dukws to enter for a landing on a bathing beach inside. Hardly were our troops in St. Lô than Bradley went on to his next step. For the whole of the six weeks since D-day, we had after all been contained within the cordon drawn by Rommel (now out of the picture) to block us off from movement into the open in France. The Overlord Plan was weeks behind schedule—here it was, D + 42, when Patton should already have had the Britanny ports and we should be starting on the Quiberon Bay harbor, and Bradley had as yet not even staged the breakout which was to furnish the gap in the cordon through which was to be poured Patton and his newly constituted Third Army. Immediate action was necessary. Running westward from St. Lô to Périers and on to Lessay on the seacoast at the western shore of the Cherbourg Peninsula was the St. Lô-Périers highway, easily visible from the sky. To the northward of that road now lay Bradley’s army. Just to the southward of it, from St. Lô from which they had just been driven, all the way to the seacoast, von Kluge had disposed his forces, determined that Bradley should get no further. But Bradley had to. However, after his long drawn out experience in breaking into St. Lô, he neither wished or could afford so long and costly a delay to his breakout. So picking out a spot on that St. Lô-Périers road some three miles to the
westward of St. Lô, he marked off a rectangle just to the south of the highway, three and a half miles along the road and a mile and a half deep southerly from it. That “carpet,” as he denominated it, was heavily defended by the Nazis to prevent any movement southward along the two highways crossing it from the north. Bradley decided to drench that carpet with bombs so thoroughly as to obliterate entirely the Nazi troops and armor facing him there. After that, with a striking force composed of four of his infantry divisions and two armored divisions he would smash through the gap and race southward toward Avranches and the corner of Britanny before the shattered Nazis could reform. At that point, on August 1, Patton would take over the new Third Army, turn west to capture or contain the Brittany ports, and then allow us to proceed with the installation of our temporary harbor on Quiberon Bay. But in view of the total failure of the air bombardment on D-day of the Omaha Beach, Bradley, freed now of all considerations of tide and dawn in fixing his day and hour for attack, decided this time it would be a daylight attack and only in clear weather, not through cloud cover, so the bombers could see a target they should never miss. The air attack was to consist of 1500 heavy bombers, 400 medium bombers, and 350 fighter bombers, to drop a total of 60,000 100-pound fragmentation bombs from the heavy bombers alone. The attack would be nearly five times as big as that aimed at the beachhead. And this time Bradley left the date flexible. He would wait for a clear day, intending that the attack should take place only on such a day as the bombardiers could see their target and that road to Périers. This time he would insure both that they hit what they were aiming at south of the road and didn’t hit our own troops north of it. And to doubly insure that last, Bradley would draw his men to the north three-quarters of a mile back from the road before the bombs were dropped. That requirement of clear weather tied knots in Bradley’s proposed assault; he would have been ready to move a couple of days after entering St. Lô on July 18, but not until one abortive attempt, called off on account of cloud cover on July 24, did the skies clear enough on July 25 for the actual assault. Over 2200 warplanes came over from Britain, an awe-inspiring air armada, with the 1500 heavies flying at 8000 feet. But regardless of beautiful visibility and no clouds, again the heavy bombers fumbled their attack. In spite of that east-west road plainly marking the division line between our troops and the enemy, and the 1500 yard safety zone on our side of it, the first reports
Bradley got stunned him. Both his 9th and his 30th Divisions, waiting to jump off, had been bombed by a drop short of the road—some hundreds of G.I.’s had been killed, his spearhead had been blunted and knocked off balance. And a little later, he learned also that Lieut. General Lesley McNair, an observer on our own front with those G.I.’s had been killed by a direct hit on his foxhole. The disorganized assault, which should have followed through immediately on the heels of the last bomber, was now difficult to get started at all, as our front line troops, badly shaken at having been bombed by our own planes, cleared away first their own dead and wounded. By night fall, the dismayed General Bradley was uncertain as to whether his carefully prepared breakout was not a total failure. So far, he had made little progress. And the enemy, once the bombing had ceased, might well have been given time enough to rush in new troops to plug the gap altogether. But fortunately for Bradley, von Kluge had no longer any reserves, no new troops in Normandy ready to rush in anywhere. The nearest uncommitted Nazi forces still lay behind the Pas de Calais, fifteen divisions of them, 150 miles away, poised to repel the attack from Patton and his mythical First Army Group supposedly stationed in southeastern England. While ironically now Patton himself, completely hidden by a thick security blanket, was actually there on the Cherbourg Peninsula with his whole staff, just behind Bradley’s front, waiting only for the breakthrough to take command of a new army to be formed from some of the very divisions poised for attack there. Oddly enough, the reputation alone of a mythical Patton still sufficed to keep from von Kluge the divisions that might, had they been moved in time to Normandy, have stopped the real Patton from ever getting there. Von Kluge had no reserves at hand to plug that gap, though, unintended by Bradley, he was given time enough. When finally Collins and his reorganized troops moved forward to the St. Lô-Périers road, they found that most of those 60,000 bombs had landed as intended—regardless of what they had done to Collins, they had obliterated completely the enemy in that carpet. Nothing alive was left in it. It was an area only of corpses, burned out tanks, dead cattle, and absolute desolation. Against practically no opposition Bradley poured through this St. Lô-Périers gap his four infantry and two armored divisions. By July 26, next day, they were all through and rushing pell-mell along every road leading southward. The First Army had now nothing before it but the shattered left flank of the enemy line stretched between St. Lô and the sea. It had taken Bradley’s G.I.’s
five weeks to make the last five miles into St. Lô. Now in five days they went forty miles through a broken enemy line to turn the corner at Avranches into Brittany. And there on August 1, the augmented American forces were divided into two, with Hodges relieving Bradley as Commander, First Army; Patton becoming Commander of the new Third Army; and Bradley, made now the equal of Montgomery, assuming command of both First and Third Armies under the name of the 12th Army Group. With that army reorganization in effect, it was time now to tend to Brittany and to undertake the capture of its three ports, Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, whose possession months before had seemed so important to the success of the Overlord Plan. And to set up, pending their rehabilitation, our vast temporary harbor on Quiberon. Patton’s Third Army was to turn westward to do all that, while Hodges’ First Army was to hold von Kluge off his back. But seven weeks of fighting in France had changed a great many ideas. With the sour taste of the husks of Cherbourg Harbor in their mouths, neither Eisenhower or Bradley was now enthusiastic over biting into the Brittany ports. It was obvious, if Cherbourg was any sample, that Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire might be of use to us in World War III, but as for helping win World War II, it was ridiculous to waste time and men in taking them. And now further to offset what once had seemed a sine qua non, more ports to support the invasion, the Artificial Harbors on the Normandy beaches were going great guns. On August 1, Omaha Beach alone, crippled as it was by the loss of its pierheads, still had handled 16,000 tons ashore, twice its designed capacity. If pushed, it could do that every day, perhaps more, on up to November. By that time, we should be wanting ports like Antwerp in Belgium, not those far in our rear in Normandy. So it was now obvious we didn’t need Brest, we didn’t need L’Orient, we didn’t need St. Nazaire as ports to supply our armies. Neither was there any longer the slightest need to set up another harbor on Quiberon Bay. And there was sound basis for arguing that we didn’t even need Cherbourg, which we already had. It wasn’t going to do us any good whatever in the immediate battle for France; if it weren’t already ours, it was questionable whether the effort being spent there in rehabilitation would not pay greater dividends on some other port further east. The Mulberry Harbors, which originally it was hoped would keep us going, hanging on by our fingernails so to speak, for the thirty days it should require
to take Cherbourg and restore it to service as a port, were performing beyond the fondest dreams of their military customers. It was plain now that they alone could keep the armies going throughout the Battle of France. So why now waste time and men going west simply to match an outmoded Plan? The enemy lay to the east. Eisenhower could see no reason why he should—he was safe now in jettisoning all thoughts of more harbors in Brittany and on the Bay of Biscay. He didn’t need any more ports whatever. And as his enemy lay to the east, there he would go. The rest of the Overlord Plan went immediately into the waste basket. And its elimination put the major movement into France itself practically back on schedule. George Patton, a genius for mobility, was told to send only a containing force into Brittany to seal it off—with the bulk of his forces, and especially with his armor, he was directed to drive eastward into the open country of France, south of von Kluge’s Seventh Army, in a vast pincers movement, Eisenhower would put von Kluge between Montgomery’s British army to the north and Patton’s Third Army to the south. Field Marshal von Kluge, if he had sense, would have no option then save to fall back immediately to the Seine to save himself. All northern France, up to the Seine, should fall promptly into our hands. There was, of course, some risk to us in this. Von Kluge, instead of evacuating, might choose instead to stage a drive of his own westward to Avranches and the sea, and thus cut Patton and his Third Army off from their line of supply. But to counter that, if tried, Hodges and the First Army were left before Avranches. Should von Kluge try such a move, unless immediately successful, he would have his Seventh Army in a trap. He would have Montgomery on the north, Hodges on the west, Patton on the south. Should Patton and Montgomery close on his rear, to the east, the Seventh Army would be doomed. No sensible general would hazard that. Patton, given his head and anxious to prove that his being shelved, after the face-slapping episode of the year before in Sicily, was a serious military blunder, literally ran wild on von Kluge’s southern flank. A master of movement and of fighting men, he moved fast and they fought ferociously. The opposition before them crumbled. Never had there been such a blitzkrieg. In swift succession Patron’s armor was through Rennes, Laval, and Le Mans with the road to Or-1éans and the Seine south of Paris wide open before him. At this point it might have seemed sensible to any general in von Kluge’s
position to order an immediate retreat of his forces along the only line still open to him—that is, eastward to the Seine, and to abandon northern France. But von Kluge was not free to decide. Hitler would relinquish nothing of France he had conquered; von Kluge was ordered instantly to shift his Panzers to the westward and attack toward Avranches and the sea to cut Patton off. As Hitler saw it, here at last was the golden opportunity to destroy the enemy piecemeal, and so far inland that the naval guns which had saved them initially would be powerless now before his armor to save them again. Obediently von Kluge began to shift his armor from before Montgomery in the Caen sector toward Mortain, some twenty miles eastward of Avranches, and the nearest point to the sea still in Nazi hands. Five Panzer Divisions, mostly withdrawn from the Caen area, formed the spearhead of the attack, the major offensive by the Nazis since D-day, the heaviest they ever staged in the Battle of France. Von Kluge faced an unbelievable situation. It had been a basic tenet in the logic of the German General Staff that a huge mechanized army, such as they had in France, could be defeated, if at all, only by a larger army, a million men at least, highly mechanized, heavily armored. But since the Nazis held all the ports and this requirement of getting ashore heavy armor was obviously an impossibility to the Allies, they had written off the occurrence of any such development as a manifest absurdity. But absurd as such an impossibility had once seemed, there on three sides of von Kluge it was as a stark reality—there were the million men, beautifully equipped with motorized transport for mobility, heavily armored with tanks and guns. Still, they were after all only an army, and no army is invincible. Defeat is never inevitable. The enemy had provided von Kluge with what seemed a serious blunder in their tactical dispositions. They had given him the chance to drive to the sea, cut them apart, and then to destroy each part separately. He prepared to assault at Mortain. At this point, von Kluge learned what Rommel before him had learned— what it means to have a battle directed by remote control and particularly when that distant director comes to his decisions by intuition. Hitler, who first had frenziedly ordered von Kluge to stage his attack immediately, which von Kluge was moving to do, now from the distant eastern front reversed himself and decided there was no cause for haste. He ordered von Kluge to delay the attack on Mortain till more armor could be brought from the Pas de Calais. There,
obviously, it was no longer needed, as Patton and the forces it was presumed to counter off Calais were very plainly already rampaging on von Kluge’s southern flank in France. But von Kluge couldn’t wait. A delay till more armor could reach him from Calais would result only in allowing his Seventh Army to be encircled completely, even before that armor ever reached him—a ridiculous reward for waiting. When could those Panzer divisions from the Pas de Calais reach him? He didn’t know. The skies were full of Allied fighters; those Panzers could move only by night—slowly. And it was 150 miles to the Pas de Calais. Their arrival could not be soon. What he did know was that Patton was fast closing on his own communications to the eastward. Should Patton get astride the highways still open to the east, Patton could strangle him. No longer then could his vital supplies of fuel for his tanks or ammunition for his guns get through. His only hope lay in throttling Patton first. He had only to get to Avranches, block the highway there, and then that stream of tank trucks, highballing it eastward with the fuel to keep Patton’s tanks and motorized columns going, would be dammed for good. Patton’s offensive would instantly shrink and soon die. And so also would Patton’s Third Army, left without gasoline or ammunition. Von Kluge made up his mind. He must either attack at once or withdraw. And since he perfectly well knew Hitler would never authorize him to withdraw, to him it seemed the best way to meet the Fuehrer ’s demands was to attack. So advising Hitler that waiting was wholly impossible if he were ever to attack as ordered, just after midnight, early on August 7, without waiting for any answer from Hitler, he launched his offensive in full strength. It hit Hobbs’ 30th Division, which had just come into the line before Mortain, and overran his forward positions. One battalion was completely cut off and surrounded by that avalanche, but refused to surrender. The rest of the division, infantry against armor, fell back but hung together. All day of August 7th, the battle raged. Hodges threw in two infantry divisions to bolster the 30th on its front, and an armored division to attack the enemy on his right flank and slow him up. Then the 35th Division, which was nearby, though belonging not to Hodges’ First Army but to Patton’s Third, was nevertheless seized also and thrown in on Hobbs’ right. At that, satisfied that whatever von Kluge threw at him, his front before Mortain would hold, Bradley ordered Patton to disregard the battle at Mortain and everything occurring in his threatened rear and go all out east with one
corps for Orléans and the Seine, while with another, at Le Mans, he was to turn north for Argentan and there get astride the enemy’s main road for retreat to the east. Meanwhile, so Patton was informed, Montgomery was coming down on Falaise from the north and then on to Argentan, which would completely shut off von Kluge from any escape. Von Kluge pressed his attack. Nazi Panther tanks, outgunning our General Shermans, drove forward. And what was more, at Mortain they not only outgunned our tanks but for once far outnumbered them also. Von Kluge had there five Panzer Divisions, a massive striking force. Hodges had but one armored division to oppose them; the other two armored divisions we had were with Patton, stabbing into the enemy rear far to the east. Bradley had decided to leave them there. For Bradley was relying on means other than his own tanks to stop those German Panthers. He had artillery, plenty of it, and he was not stinted on ammunition for his guns. And he had air support. Our fighters could now operate from nearby airfields set up on the bluffs overlooking Omaha, and behind the British beachhead. American Mustangs with their guns and British Typhoons carrying rockets under their wings flew low over the battlefield to help the artillery by engaging the Panthers in direct combat. Mortain was as strange a battle as ever was fought. For six days von Kluge hammered viciously with five Panzer Divisions against a front held only by four divisions of American infantry and one of armor. By all the rules, his Panzers should have gone crashing through those infantry divisions before Mortain and then on to Avranches by the sea with even greater ease than once they had ripped through British infantry to the sea at Dunkirk. But they didn’t. With massive artillery support to back up the troops and with the fighter planes overhead coming down with screaming rockets and bursting shells to meet the Panthers each time they advanced in force, the infantry held its ground against all attacks. From August 7 through August 11 Bradley and von Kluge slugged it out before Mortain. But as night fell at last on August 11, it was von Kluge who gave up. The battlefield was littered now with the smoking wrecks of hundreds of his Panthers, and he could get no replacements for them. The sea was still twenty miles away, no closer to him appreciably than at the hour he had jumped off for his attack. And worst of all, he noted with dismay that while he was fighting at Mortain, Patton, instead of retreating to cover his own supply line, had boldly dashed eastward to Argentan where now he sat astride one line of
von Kluge’s retreat while Montgomery was rapidly closing on Falaise to shut off the only other line. Von Kluge had to admit failure. Never would he get to the sea. And unless now he moved fast in the opposite direction, never would he be able to extricate the Seventh Army either. He begged of Hitler that the attack be abandoned and he be permitted to withdraw to the Seine. He got Hitler ’s very reluctant permission on August 12, and started a withdrawal. But it was Eisenhower ’s permission he should have asked instead. For now it was much too late for the Seventh Army to withdraw without it. Hit by Patton at Argentan on the southern neck of his line of retreat, harassed by Montgomery closing on Falaise on the northern side of that exit, and squeezed hard by Hodges’ First Army pushing forward from Mortain, von Kluge’s Seventh Army was now in a sack with the mouth closing. Nineteen German divisions, the whole of the Nazi forces in Normandy, had but one way out, and that one exposed to heavy shelling from both sides. And further exposed, as they jammed up trying desperately to squeeze out through a narrowing bottleneck, to incessant attack from our unopposed fighters, flying night and day strafing the milling mass of Nazis trying to flee from the Falaise pocket. The net effect was the capture, practically complete, of eight Infantry and two Panzer Divisons. And so decimated and broken were the remnants of the remaining divisions that managed partly to escape but practically without any heavy equipment, that the fragments were hardly any longer an army. It was a debacle far worse than von Paulus had suffered before Stalingrad. The German Seventh Army was destroyed. What few elements escaped never stopped their flight till they reached the German border. Most of France was lost to Germany in that disaster; the remainder was soon also to be liberated. Hitler raved at the news. He accused von Kluge of having violated his orders and of having deliberately staged his attack before the arrival of additional armor, for the specific purpose of holding him, der Fuehrer, up to ridicule as a general who had ordered an impossible attack. And he promptly superseded von Kluge as Commander in the West by Field Marshal Walther von Model. Since there was no longer any army in the West worth considering, that sudden relief from command of it could not have meant much to von Kluge. But what came with it in his orders meant a great deal. On August 18, hardly six days after he had broken off his offensive at Mortain and had begun his attempted flight from the Falaise pocket, von Kluge was peremptorily told to
proceed to Berlin to explain himself. As it did not appear to von Kluge that any explanation he might put forward setting out the imperative reasons which had forced his decision to attack without further delay would even be listened to by his enraged Fuehrer, it seemed to the disheartened Field Marshal an act only of simple prudence to forestall Hitler by killing himself. This he promptly did. The mortality among Nazi top commanders in Normandy was getting startlingly high.
CHAPTER 38 By the end of August, it was apparent that the battle of France was practically over—it had been won. On August 15, General Devers had invaded southern France, shortly seized Marseilles, and then, almost unopposed, moved north. On August 25, our First Army liberated Paris. Antwerp was occupied by Montgomery’s British troops on September 4, a tremendous gain for us. Everywhere now throughout France the enemy was either contained or in full flight for the shelter of Germany and the Siegfried Line, its vaunted West Wall. Nothing more was ever heard, even from Dr. Goebbels, about the Atlantic Wall. Somehow, that, barrier to our armies seemed now so far in the distance as to have been lost from view. But the West Wall was surely going to be different. Past that, we should never get. Eisenhower still had major problems, but no longer were they the ones that faced him prior to D-day. Tides, the phases of the moon and its relation to the hour of dawn, the weather good or bad, on a specific day in the future, no longer concerned him. His problem no further lay in getting materials in vast quantity across an open beachhead so that he might win the Battle of France. That had been solved for him by Mulberry. It lay now in getting those materials, and especially gasoline, once they all were landed somewhere in France, over the vast number of miles that lay between the Normandy beaches and the borders of Germany he was rapidly approaching. Transportation facilities in France—railroads, bridges, rolling stock, all of which our bombers had zealously smashed to seal the enemy in Normandy off from supply—now became Eisenhower ’s greatest headache. Eagerly he looked forward to opening up Antwerp in the north and Marseilles in the south, both far closer to the Rhine than any port in Normandy, to ease that transportation problem. But as August, 1944, ended and the Battle of France faded imperceptibly into the Battle of Germany, far in Eisenhower ’s rear the Artificial Harbor at the Omaha Beach still continued to function. For the armies now approaching the Rhine it was furnishing supplies at a rate approaching 15,000 tons a day, nearly twice its designed capacity. Had there been trucks enough to take it
away, it could have handled even more. It had far outlasted the thirty days life expectancy earnestly prayed for in its infancy lest the invasion fail. Now that the invasion had turned out an undreamed of success, nobody already beyond the Seine and rapidly approaching the Rhine paid much attention any more to the crippled old work horse that had made all that possible. As a matter of fact, most of them never had, anyway. But until November, Omaha as a harbor continued to overshadow by far in tonnage even the port of Cherbourg on which we had expended our major effort in rehabilitation. Ultimately, Cherbourg contributed to the winning of the Battle of Germany, but the Battle of France which had to be won first or all was lost, was won with no help from ruined Cherbourg; only Mulberry carried that load. Finally, as winter approached and the nearer ports of Antwerp and Marseilles took over, Omaha Beach as an unneeded port of entry was at last shut down. So without fanfare, and with all those whose agonies and heartaches and broken bodies had made it a reality, long vanished from that blood-stained beach, Operation Mulberry, that fantastic conceit which had made the Normandy Invasion stick, faded into oblivion. Only a vast cemetery atop the bluff at the St. Laurent Draw, where lie buried the bodies of those who never left the Omaha Beach, remains now to mark the wide sands where once lay Mulberry.
GLOSSARY AA AT BAR Bazooka Belgian Gate Bombardon Concertina wire DD Dukw E-boat Far Shore G.I. Gooseberry Hedgehog LCA LCI(L) LCM LCT LCT(R) LCVP Lobnitz “Long Tom” LST
Anti-aircraft artillery Anti-tank gun Browning automatic rifle Portable rocket launcher, hand carried Steel underwater beach obstacle, German Floating steel breakwater section, 200 ft. long Coiled horizontal barbed wire entanglement Duplex drive amphibious tank 2½ ton amphibious truck, six-wheel drive German fast motor torpedo boat, similar to our PT The coast of Normandy (Government issue). Colloquial name for U. S. soldiers Code name for breakwater of sunken ships Steel underwater obstacle, made of three crossed angle irons Landing Craft, Assault (British), for 35 men Landing Craft, Infantry (Large), for 200 men Landing Craft, Mechanized, for 1 tank or 70 men Landing Craft, Tanks, for 4 tanks (some larger) LCT fitted for rocket firing, 1000 rockets Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (wood), for 35 men Semi-floating pierhead, 200 ft. long, anchored on four vertical steel legs 155 mm. howitzer, long barrelled, American Landing Ship, Tank. Ramp type seagoing ship, loads 1900 tons tanks and trucks 300
No Banners, No Bugles
FOR MY DAUGHTER,
MARY ELLSBERG POLLARD
CHAPTER
1 IT WAS RATHER COLD ALONG THE shores of Algeria and Morocco that early morning of November 8, 1942, when “We came as friends” to the coasts of North Africa. Along the shores of the Red Sea on the other side of Africa at that same moment, it was rather hotter—in fact it might have been called with no exaggeration infernally hot. There in the Red Sea, I was struggling that morning on the bottom of the ocean with an Italian naval mine apparently rigged inside a scuttled vessel as a booby trap to blow us all to hell if we dared to try to recover that sabotaged Italian ship. In Massawa, stewing in the unbelievable heat of the Red Sea sun even in November, we had no illusions as to who our friends were. It was plain enough we had none, or we should never have been sent, war or no war, there to Massawa, the hottest spot on this earth, and then left forgotten till we were as thoroughly “cured” as desiccated fish beneath that inhuman Red Sea sun. That Italian mine in the flooded forehold of the submerged Brenta, dimly visible to the heavily weighted diver who cautiously breasted his way about it on the sea floor, was not too much of a worry either to the diver on the bottom or to the rest of us on the surface just over him. He knew and we knew that one incautious contact with those deadly acid-filled leaden horns or the delicately balanced hydrostatic piston protruding from that steel, TNT-laden sphere which the Italians had evidently rigged out with loving care for our destruction, and we should all suddenly have our troubles ended together in a volcanic eruption of flame and water shooting us skyward. Still we weren’t too much concerned. Long months of torture in the blazing heat and incredible humidity of Massawa had left us apathetic and drained of hope of escape. If we succeeded in removing that mine from inside the sunken ship and its half ton of TNT without detonating it, we might then recover the precious Brenta for Allied use. If we didn’t and we touched off that booby-
trapped mine in the process, we should be the gainers anyway. In one flaming instant our sufferings would be ended instead of being excruciatingly drawn out minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, over still more agonized months till the flaming sun above us, as certainly but less mercifully, achieved the same result. The diver, wiry little Buck Scougale, without ever having touched the mine, came up as instructed to report to me on the surface its description and what the Italians had done to it, so far as he could determine in the dim light of the ocean floor, and especially to its hydrostatic piston, to convert it to a booby trap for our destruction. After listening to his agitated account at some length, I called off all further diving on the Brenta and steamed back with my salvage crew to Massawa. There in the seclusion of my room ashore I might study more at leisure the blueprints (furnished me from Cairo by British Naval Intelligence) showing the normal workings of that death trap planted in the Brenta’s forehold, and figure what I might do, if anything, to outwit the Italians by removing the mine without exploding it. Half-naked, soaked from head to foot with sweat, and oozing perspiration from every pore, I entered my room, tossed aside my sun helmet and my dark glasses. That room after a session outside beneath the Red Sea sun was always a shock. Inside it was only 95 ° F. because two large Westinghouse airconditioning sets were running night and day with never a stop, to cool it down and dehumidify it. Coming in to that 95 ° after exposure to the ordinary Massawa heat and humidity outdoors was like being plunged abruptly into ice water. In spite of the heavy bathrobe in which I made haste to wrap myself, I shivered violently a few minutes from the chill. Then as I grew slowly accustomed to it, I locked all the doors to my room, unlocked the massive iron chest containing those highly confidential blueprints filched from the Italians in Rome itself by British espionage agents, and spread out the plans for inspection. My knowledge of Italian was poor and I made very heavy weather deciphering the technical notes which explained the workings of that mine when rigged for normal operation beneath the sea to blow up any vessel unfortunate enough to pass over it. A little music, I reflected, might ease my mental strain the while I sought to unravel the combined complexities of both unfamiliar Italian and even less familiar Italian naval ordnance. Over my desk was a very fine short-wave radio set I had bought some
months before from an officer of the Royal Navy, a Lieutenant Hibble. Hibble, till then one of my shipmates in misery in Massawa, had been so hurriedly detached between two suns that he had been forced to leave behind his most prized possession in his sudden departure by plane. I have no doubt, however, that if it had been essential to him in making the weight limit on that plane, Hibble would gladly have jettisoned all his clothes also down to his skin and departed Massawa in only his sun helmet and his dark glasses. At any rate, there was the short-wave radio set, all mine for twenty pounds sterling in the swiftest radio deal on record. Ordinarily now I shrank from turning it on. The set was good enough (where I was on the Red Sea) to bring in clearly every station in the eastern hemisphere. But at practically every point on the dial from all over Europe and Asia about all I ever heard was voices in German, Italian, or Japanese alternating in English with assorted traitors from Lord Haw Haw through Axis Sally and Ezra Pound to Tokyo Rose, broadcasting triumphantly the latest British or American disasters and usually in those days with no need to embellish them much with any lies. Squeezed closely in on the dial between two Axis stations was B.B.C. in London, the solitary audible radio station on the dial still remaining in Allied hands. With care I could get B.B.C., but getting it was hardly any more comfort to me, for even B.B.C. had to admit the disasters, and the natural British regard for conservatism prevented it from fabricating any victories as an offset to cheer its listeners. There in the Middle East on the shores of the Red Sea we were sandwiched in during, most of 1942 between two enemies. The Japanese tide was running in full flood from the east and promising to break through India to engulf us. Rommel and his invincible Afrika Korps were rushing irresistibly from the west across the Libyan Desert to the gates of Egypt. From there he was confidently expected hourly to crash through a demoralized British Eighth Army to overwhelm us. As a consequence, our position had never been one from which we might listen with any great nonchalance either to Lord Haw Haw on the one side or to Tokyo Rose on the other pouring into our ears from the radio the latest news of our increasingly hopeless situation and our inexorable doom. To us few Americans in Massawa sent to struggle with the mass of wrecks littering its harbors, the pitiless sun overhead was as much our actual enemy as either of those to the east or to the west of us, and was as inexorably draining
us of life. Then what inducement was there to turn on the radio to learn how much closer our human enemies had closed on us since yesterday, unless it might be to satisfy an idle curiosity as to which of our three enemies would spell our end soonest? A wan and shrunken captain in the Navy, long since nervously exhausted in Massawa in the battle against the sun, the sea, and those mercenary Americans (in safe and comfortable mountain billets far from the superheated Red Sea shores) who should have helped us but instead interfered, I had no such curiosity. I was resigned to whichever fate should first overtake us, hoping only in the interim to get as much done as was possible of the task we had been sent to Massawa to accomplish. Still I reached to turn on the radio before I leaned my naked torso over to concentrate once again on those Italian plans. Even the Axis stations baited their triumphant propaganda programs with music (good music too, and some of it occasionally American) to entice their wearied and battle-worn enemies to tune in. After the music they hoped to hold their listeners while insidious propaganda destroyed what little morale still remained in their audience. Hoping I might get music to soothe my nerves on some station, enemy or not, it made no difference, and figuring on switching stations to dodge the propaganda and the inevitable bad news, I turned on the radio switch. After a moment I began to swing the selector knob. One after another distant stations came in as I swept across the dial. No music anywhere, worse luck. Instead, highly excited and violent voices were angrily shouting in German, in French, in Dutch, in Italian, even in Rumanian, Polish, and Greek, all Axis and all enemy of course. They seemed interested only in hammering home something of importance to their own nationals, since not one of the large stable of British and American traitors was pouring out at the microphone his usual poison in English. Evidently something out of the ordinary was up which had chased both music and English completely off the Axis air. I was left with a Babel of foreign tongues which were all Greek to me whether they came from Athens or Antwerp or any one of the multitudinous Axis stations in between. Nothing remained to me then but B.B.C. in London, 3500 miles away, the most distant European station. Getting B.B.C. was always a delicate problem for me, especially in daytime, because the Axis had so carefully placed a station of its own close alongside B.B.C.’s wave-length on each side, which made the extricating of B.B.C. a difficult feat for most radio sets.
But my late British shipmate’s set was up to it. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of raucous and animated German pouring loudly out on either side, I finally isolated B.B.C. The next instant my chair was flying from beneath me across the room, I was on my feet shrieking deliriously. Both that booby-trapped mine inside the Brenta and its Italian plans on the desk before me were swept from my mind. Flowing from my radio set from B.B.C. in smooth, clipped, unexcited English were coming the sweetest words I ever heard over the air: “An Allied Expeditionary Force has landed in North Africa. Powerful American and British armies under Lieutenant General Eisenhower, supported by British and American battleships, have already taken Algiers and are advancing on Casablanca and Oran. All is going well. We come as friends. Only token resistance is expected from the French, whom we have come to liberate.” AT LAST! America was on the offensive, we had struck! And of all places, in North Africa! Rommel now, our arch enemy, was surely caught between Montgomery just starting savagely to strike his front from El Alamein in Egypt and Eisenhower landing in great force in Algeria in his rear! The Afrika Korps was doomed! The danger to us from the Libyan Desert was ended! Dazedly I listened, dumb now after that first irrepressible shriek which had numbed my vocal cords. How could that Englishman on B.B.C. pour out the heavenly news so unexcitedly, how could anyone? Why didn’t he shout as I had, even at the risk of being stricken speechless? B.B.C. had plenty of other broadcasters to carry on after him one after another. Why weren’t they all bellowing like the Axis broadcasters, whom I now saw had ample reason for the violence and the unbridled torrents of anger in unknown tongues which I had just heard from every Axis capital? Then it came to me. He was English. But I wasn’t. Still trembling and in a delirium which only those who had gone through the same agony with me in Massawa might wholly understand, I listened tensely, my ear close to the loudspeaker lest I miss something. But there was no additional news-only the same announcement repeated over and over again. Finally I shut down the radio, retrieved my overturned chair, and sank into it. Dazzling visions of escape from Massawa to a more human climate flashed one after another across my mind. With Eisenhower (who, anyway, was
Eisenhower? I’d never heard of him) and an American army campaigning on the livable side of Africa three thousand miles from the burning shores of the Red Sea, surely we should all instantly be sent to help. An amphibious expedition such as his meant wrecks from bombs, mines, torpedoes and sabotage, and wrecks meant salvage and salvage meant my outfit. There in the Red Sea I had certainly the best salvage crew anywhere in Africa. Subconsciously I started to edge toward the tinny Italian telephone on the left side of my desk. I half expected any moment now the ring from our army headquarters in distant Asmara, high in the Eritrean mountains, which would bring news of my detachment. I made ready to pounce instantly on that phone lest even a split-second should be lost in my getaway. But no such ring came—not that hour, not that day, not that week. Eisenhower was making fine progress, the French resistance (so the radio kept repeating) was only of a token nature. In three days Oran was on the point of capitulation, Casablanca (as well as Algiers which we already had) was delivered into our hands by Admiral Darlan, and the French in North Africa were co-operating with us and the British, accepting the fact that “We had come as friends.” It became more evident each day from the radio news that Eisenhower apparently had no need of salvagers such as we to assist him. Dully I resumed my former life, my iridescent dream of escape from Massawa and the Red Sea burst in my face like a child’s soap bubble. With an effort, as a first step I forced myself again to the study of the Italian mine plans. A few days later, with only three men anywhere near the Brenta (Buck Scougale on the bottom and Commander Davy of the Royal Navy and myself on the surface, to reduce the loss to three only if I were wrong), we three, handling that mine more tenderly than any newborn babe, cautiously snaked it up and out of the Brenta and turned it over ashore to a British explosives expert to disarm it. That done, we proceeded in more routine fashion with a full crew to the salvage of the Brenta herself, a job requiring perhaps two months with my worn-out men. With that started under the supervision of Edison Brown and his crew on the salvage tug Intent, I turned to myself in earnest with my most experienced salvage master, Bill Reed, and the crew of a sister salvage tug, the Resolute, on my last important and my most difficult salvage task in Massawa. This was the recovery of a 90-ton capacity floating crane. The Italians in sabotaging everything had sunk this in the harbor alongside an important quay where (aside from the loss of that invaluable derrick itself) it would do the Allies the
most harm by making the berth unusable for shipping. On that task, a British salvage company had already struggled nine months that year, had failed dismally in two successive lifting attempts, and had finally thrown the job up as impossible, recommending the demolition of the crane by explosives as the only means of at least making usable the badly needed berth. But the British Admiralty, which needed the crane intact for future use even more than it needed the berth, refused to concur immediately in that defeatist recommendation. Though it had no great hope for success, the Admiralty had instead canceled the British contract and requested me and my salvage forces to attempt the recovery before it gave up altogether. As much as an opiate to deaden the raw hurt from the collapse of my visions of escape as for any other reason, I now plunged head over heels into this problem. By outrageous improvisations, as the conversion of ex-Italian aviation gasoline tanks (pilfered from the Royal Air Force) into salvage gear, enough to make any salvage man blush to relate his methods in more orthodox salvage circles, on November 18, ten days after Eisenhower ’s landing on one side of Africa, we floated that priceless 90-ton crane to the surface on the other side, and turned it (as well as the cleared berth) over to the astonished and grateful British who had great need of it. When that was done and the first flush of enthusiasm over our success was dissipated, which didn’t take long under the Massawa sun, life lost all meaning as well as all hope of release. The last task of the many required to make Massawa into a usable base for British naval operations was now completed. Several dozens more of scuttled Italian and German wrecks (including the Brenta) remained around Massawa but only as an incubus now. These were valuable of course as ships if we could recover them, but obviously there were wrecks enough to occupy the scant forces given me for several normal lifetimes. In view of that endless succession of wrecks what hope was there for us of living through another summer toiling on those blasted and sunken hulks? We were condemned to labor under conditions compared to which those faced by the French convicts on notorious Devil’s Island were the height of comfort. No one, whether Eritrean black or European white, had ever been expected even by the Italians to work from April to October in Massawa beneath that fiendish sun. And no Italians in their half a century of occupation before had even attempted to remain in Massawa throughout that season. The high hills about Asmara, always cool and comfortable 8000 feet above the steaming coast, was
the normal refuge for them then. But in that terrible year of 1942, it had been the summertime or never if the Mediterranean were to be saved, and my men and I had done what had not ever been attempted before in Massawa. We had worked feverishly there throughout the season when traditionally white men could not remain alive there even in idleness. Some who had come with me were dead and buried now in the baked coral dust of Massawa. Others, completely broken already, were on their way back to America, human wrecks. About a quarter of the force was always in the hospital suffering the tortures of the damned from what the sun had done to them. It had been a costly effort. But we had succeeded in our aim. Although the Italians had sabotaged Massawa with fiendish skill before its surrender beyond any hope of restoration we had made it once again into a usable naval base. And what was more (and more unusual in 1942) in time too. God alone knew (or cared) what it had cost us. But when Alexandria ceased operating as a British naval base, under threat of imminent capture by Rommel, Massawa was ready by the grace of God and the efforts of a few American salvage men. Massawa took over as the solitary remaining naval base in the Middle East from which the crucial defensive war in the Mediterranean could be supported till the Allies were ready to strike offensively. 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 T HE 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 over 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 NOVEM ber 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. The legions of Hitler and of Mussolini were immediately awaiting us, Caesars the like of whom in evil the world had never seen, inhuman fiends to whom Louis XVI and George III alike were but kindly disposed old gentlemen. Was it any wonder that never had “The Star-Spangled Banner” so stirred me as
when I heard it poured out that evening in the war zone in heartfelt strains as “Colors” by the sons both of France and of America! The last note died away, the two flags fell side by side into the hands of waiting soldiers, were swiftly unbent from the halyards and folded up. More gruff orders in two languages, bayoneted rifles swung to shoulders, the lines broke into columns of squads, and “Colors” was over. To the gay strains of “Mademoiselle from Armentières” which had power also to stir men, but in other ways, the troops marched off. A storm of cheers, seemingly from the sky, roared out after them over the Place de la Bastille. Looking up for the source of those cheers, I saw what before I had missed. From every window up to the roofs of the six- or seven-story buildings on three sides of the square came a fluttering of handkerchiefs and heartwarming cries of “Vive les Américains!” Every window was jammed with French men and women waving frantically and shouting after the departing soldiers. Here was something to write home about. Certainly this demonstration of the affection and the enthusiasm of everyday Frenchmen for their liberators was spontaneous. Men and women can be herded into vast squares to cheer themselves hoarse for their oppressors if they know what’s healthy for them. I had seen plenty of such regimented cheering of Mussolini in Fascist Italy. But by no conceivable gestapo methods could all the inhabitants of all those apartments far above the streets have been forced to their windows to cheer. These Frenchmen and their wives were cheering us because that was the way they felt about it. Otherwise the women at least would have been busy in their kitchens at that hour, far from the front windows. There could be no doubt that these people, the plain citizens of Oran, believed us when we had said on Dday, “We come as friends.” The troops vanished round the corner, the fluttering of handkerchiefs and the shouts from above started to die away. My eyes, still glued to that extraordinary spectacle aloft, came abruptly down to street level again as a raucous voice broke the spell, “Come on, sailor! You’re blocking the traffic! Step on it!” The M.P. before us was imperiously waving us on again. My jeep rolled ahead a few yards further to disgorge me, muddy and chilled through, at my billet for the night in the unheated Grand Hotel d’Oran, already bulging with the headquarters staff of the troops which had just taken Oran from these cheering Frenchmen.
CHAPTER
5 ONCE AGAIN I WAS UP BEFORE THE dawn of the last day of November to be jeeped back to Tafaraoui and continue on to Algiers and Eisenhower ’s headquarters. This time, I found I was to proceed in convoy. Packed nose to tail at one end of a runway, stood a score of twin-engined transports, embarking troops from Oran to be moved up to the fighting line now bordering Tunisia. On another runway, similarly jammed together on the hard surface ready for a takeoff, waited a dozen fighters assigned as our air escort. I clambered into the transport pointed out to me to find my fellow passengers there all army officers bound also for one reason or another to Algiers. Our plane, I learned, would travel eastward with the convoy only to a point well to the southward of Algiers. There while the rest of the convoy and all the fighter escort continued eastward into Tunisia, we should peel off and proceed on our own northward to Algiers without any fighters. One close behind another in breath-taking succession the transports roared down the runway and lifted off, each to join in an ever-lengthening circular formation over the field till all were in the air. Then we straightened away eastward in two columns at no great height, with the fighters, which had taken off more swiftly even than we, flying in tight V’s on both sides and astern of us and at somewhat higher altitude to cover us. Day came but no sun. It was cloudy overhead, a typically gray late autumn day. Below as we went eastward Algeria was spread out, the Garden of Allah indeed, a lovely prospect from the air after what else I had seen of Africa. In rolling agricultural country were immense wheatfields, all looking carefully cultivated; scattered groves of trees, presumably of oranges and olives; vast areas of vineyards; and here and there in the midst of what could only be plantations (they were much too large for farms) were pretentious chateaux and clusters of attendant buildings. Apparently the French proprietors had done very well for themselves in Algeria with Arab labor—only our ante-bellum
South with its gracious mansions might have matched that view. We flew onward toward increasingly hilly country. In the better daylight, I looked round inside the plane. It was the mate of every other twin-engined army transport I had flown in. With all its rivets, plates, and ribs showing, it was stripped of everything inside except long aluminum-topped benches on each side on which we sat. Overhead and leading aft to the solitary exit door to port was fitted the usual rod to which paratroopers might snap their parachute release rings when jumping at low altitude. There was, however, one feature of this particular transport which was different. About amidships of the cabin, running on a slight diagonal from top to bottom on each side was a vertical row of neatly drilled and evenly spaced holes about four inches apart. Apparently they were unplugged rivet holes perhaps for a diagonal lifting band still to be fitted on the outside of the plane. At 160 miles per hour these were acting as unneeded ventilators on a cold morning so I asked the co-pilot who, now that we were well underway, was chatting with his army passengers in the cabin, what the purpose of those holes was and why they were not already fitted with rivets. The co-pilot looked at me, recognized perhaps he had with him a dumb navy passenger unacquainted with the facts of life in the air, and explained courteously enough, though briefly, without even a look at what I had indicated. “Oh, those? Last trip east a Nazi fighter made a pass at us from starboard. They’re the holes from his machine-gun bullets. We haven’t had a chance to patch them yet. But don’t worry; they don’t weaken the plane.” A little embarrassed, I shut up and our conversation ceased. But my eyes could not help traveling time and again back to those ominous rows of holes. They registered nicely with about the fifth seats from forward on the aluminum benches both port and starboard. Perhaps the plane hadn’t been weakened any by them, but I wondered about the soldiers who might have been sitting or standing last trip in way of those holes. They would have been weakened considerably. What about them? But as the co-pilot seemed not to be in a mood to volunteer any further details, I felt it impolitic to ask and the episode remained unclarified. Some two hours after the take-off, over fairly mountainous country, our plane peeled off from its position in the port column and with no obvious adieus to the rest of the convoy, we headed away northward by ourselves. My eyes wandered from the bullet holes on both sides of me to gaze regretfully at
the fighters still flying protectively above the fast disappearing convoy. I felt like a sitting duck. However, I noted immediately that our pilot was evidently no foolhardy daredevil. He seemed to be no more anxious than I was to offer again his now unprotected and unarmed transport as a target to prowling Nazi fighters. Swiftly we started to lose altitude till we were below the ridges of the surrounding mountains. We became invisible to searchers except from directly overhead, and so low were we in the valley that any fighter diving on us now stood a fine chance of cracking up before he could pull out of his dive and start weaving on our tail through that irregular pass. So we flew on safely enough by ourselves shielded by the surrounding mountains till we emerged on the plains not far south of Algiers into an area not likely to be molested in daylight by stray Nazis. Shortly thereafter we set down on Maison Blanche Airfield some eight miles to the southeast of Algiers. In a few minutes in a staff car, I was on my way to my final destination, six days en route from Massawa. There followed three hectic days at headquarters. Most of the rest of my first day was consumed in the billeting process. From my orders, it appeared I was to be a permanent addition to General Eisenhower ’s staff in Algiers. The billeting officer, an army captain, shook his head dubiously. He hadn’t a permanent billet left on his list of accommodations. “Right now this town’s worse than wartime Washington for housing, Captain. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll run you in at the Hotel Aletti. A couple of days is the regular limit there for anybody, but I’ll stretch that a bit if necessary and maybe by then somebody around here’ll either be killed or be transferred and that’ll make a vacancy for you. O.K.?” My room was a very fine one indeed, beautifully carpeted and furnished, though here and there the wallpaper was strangely marred. And of all things, it had a private bath! Apparently my four stripes were paying off, at least in Algiers. Not till I was dressed again after a lukewarm bath did it strike me that someone had neglected to raise the window shades and open the inside shutters of my room to let in some daylight. The only light in that completely shuttered room came from a not very powerful electric ceiling lamp, a very evident waste of electricity in broad daylight in a city which could not have any surplus of fuel for power generation in wartime. I went to the window to open the shutters and raise the shades before I turned out the light.
The shutters on the inside easily folded back, disclosing the fact that there were no shades, either up or down, though the room remained as innocent of daylight as before. The reason was obvious. Every pane of glass in both top and bottom windows was smashed and over the empty window frames cardboard had been tightly nailed from the outside. I raised the lower sash of the blanked-off window and looked out. Directly across a narrow street facing me was a gutted six-story building. Its roof and the upper floors had collapsed. Through the gaping windows in the still standing walls I could see the dismal wreck of the interior where a Nazi bomb had exploded not fifty feet away. No wonder my window had no glass. I understood now also the half dozen or so holes marring the plastered walls of my room to which I had given little thought before. They must be shrapnel holes from fragments of the bursting bomb across the way. Soberly I closed the window again to shut out the wind and the cold, though simultaneously, of course, I again shut out the daylight. And for what little good they might be in stopping future shrapnel, I carefully also secured the wooden shutters inside. Apparently being billeted in the Hotel Aletti had drawbacks. Its beautiful location beside the harbor put it right in the path of straying bombs aimed (but none too accurately) at the ships alongside the quays. Next morning, dressed in my one and only blue uniform which I had not worn before in Africa, I went to report to headquarters. Headquarters was the Hotel St. George, a vast, rambling, antique tourist hostelry topping the steeply sloping hillside overlooking the sea against which much of Algiers was built. The St. George, now no longer serving as a hotel, had been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel for offices for all the assorted nationalities and armed services which Eisenhower was endeavoring to weld into a single coordinated fighting unit. It was clear that it was useless in that maelstrom at G.H.Q. to try to report directly to General Eisenhower, though my orders stated that. Even getting by the sentries into the St. George without a headquarters identity card, in spite of my regular naval pass, had been difficult enough. I decided it would be best to make contact first with some junior who might know the ropes, his army aide perhaps. I was overjoyed then to learn at the inquiry desk that the Commanding General’s personal aide was, of all things for a general, a naval officer, a lieutenant commander. Here was luck indeed. Certainly I could get in to see any two-and-a-half-striper without trouble, and since he was a naval officer as well
as Eisenhower ’s personal aide he could brief me on the details of that “urgent salvage work required in all North African ports” for which I had been rushed out of the Red Sea. Lieutenant Commander Butcher greeted me cordially enough, but I soon learned that he was a social not a naval aide. I learned further that I couldn’t see Eisenhower that day. At midnight of the day before he had just returned from the muddy front in Tunisia with a bad cold. Lest it turn into flu, his surgeon had stowed him away in bed. And even when he rose, I probably couldn’t see him for a day at least; he would be wholly engaged in matters of state with Darlan and various other French dignitaries, including Giraud. It seemed the Commanding General was trying to get them to see the Axis as the only enemy while the only enemies they really seemed to recognize were each other and General de Gaulle (who was in London). “There’s nobody in our Navy actually attached to the headquarters staff here, Captain,” Butcher told me. “The Royal Navy’s responsible for the Mediterranean, and their Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham runs the naval show, reporting to Ike. So our naval staff here is all British too. But there are a couple of Americans in Algiers on liaison work for the Navy Department back home, and I’m sure they know. You probably know them. There’s Jerry Wright, a four-striper, who’s been with us some time and’ll probably stay, and Rear Admiral Bieri who’s bound home soon.” I knew them both, particularly Bieri, who had been a first classman at the Naval Academy the year I entered in 1910 as a plebe. With a G.I. guide called back as escort, I was soon on my way to see Bieri. Before I left, Butcher promised to let me know at my hotel when I was to report officially. I was certainly glad to see Bieri again. As befitted his task as liaison officer between Admiral King (our C-in-C and Chief of Naval Operations) and General Eisenhower, he knew what had happened in the naval assault and the French resistance, and so far as anybody knew, why those things had happened, and what was necessary to remedy them. What nobody knew for sure, he had already made some shrewd guesses at, and he very willingly gave me the benefits both of his knowledge and of his estimates. There had been nothing “token” about the French naval resistance either at Oran or at Casablanca. Both ports had been the scene of fierce naval actions, particularly bloody and disastrous to us at Oran. The harbor of Casablanca, though still usable, was as a result a wreck from our heavy naval shells. But the harbor of Oran was the major problem. After inflicting on us heavier
casualties there both on land and on sea than anywhere else, the French admiral at Oran before capitulating to our land forces under General Fredendall had sabotaged the harbor and everything in it most thoroughly. He had sunk block ships at the entrance and scuttled everything else alongside the main quays. Oran was a mess. There were only two major harbors in the Mediterranean capable of supporting a heavy offensive against the Nazis in Tunisia. They were Oran and Algiers. Casablanca on the Atlantic, damaged or not, was too far away from Tunisia to be of much help. It had been seized for other purposes now accomplished—to insure the neutrality of Spain and to counter Franco’s joining with or permitting the Nazis to sever our Mediterranean lifeline at the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Swashbuckling Patton at Casablanca had already settled those problems. But the swift restoration of sabotaged Oran to full usefulness was imperative, both because Rommel was falling back on Tunisia, and even more so because the Nazis already had thrown a large new army under von Arnim into Tunisia from Sicily and were feverishly reinforcing it. Unless Eisenhower managed to knock out von Arnim before Rommel joined him, the elimination of their joint forces would require a build up from overseas of Eisenhower ’s army in Algeria far beyond the original 107,000 men with which he had seized Algeria and Morocco. Eisenhower ’s needs for unfettered port facilities to permit this were bad enough already. On top of everything else, the need would soon be much worse when Montgomery’s Eighth Army chasing Rommel, also entered Tunisia in his wake. By then Montgomery would be 1500 miles over desert roads from Cairo—overly far from his Egyptian bases. Montgomery must then be supplied at least partly from near by North African ports, or Rommel, resupplied from Tunisia, would turn on him, and he might find himself not much better off than von Paulus at that very moment hamstrung and being cut to pieces before Stalingrad at the end of a similarly overstretched supply line. Exactly that had happened twice before already to British armies which had driven deep into the Libyan Desert from Egypt. To make the picture complete, Bieri threw in the further fact that the Nazis knew as well as ourselves the importance to us of the Mediterranean ports— their night bombing attacks to knock them out had caused damage enough already and were getting worse. We had been handicapped in air defense by mud on most of our fields (that I already knew), by lack of night fighters, and
by insufficient radar equipment for good night control of the A.A. batteries we did have. Since D-day, we had taken an awful licking from the air in ships bombed and sunk all the way east from Algiers to Bône just behind the fighting line. I would shortly see that. And now to top it all off, U-boats were becoming decidedly more active with their torpedoes off the whole north coast. Between bombed ships, torpedoed ships, and scuttled ships, the Mediterranean was a very hot area. There was plenty of salvage work required already, there was going to be plenty more, and that was why I had been taken out of the Red Sea. But still the most urgent problem was unquestionably Oran and its sabotaged harbor; it must be restored immediately. “That sounds worse than I expected, Admiral, though I’m no optimist,” I had to admit when Bieri finished. “Now tell me, what salvage forces are there to tackle all this with?” “Not much,” replied Bieri soberly. “In a naval way, the Mediterranean by agreement between London and Washington is a British responsibility. You’ll have to look to the British. You’ll find a few American divers in Oran and some diving suits, I guess, but nothing else of ours. There’s a British salvage ship there, sent from Gibraltar; a good one, I’m told, though she’s got no divers at all. And that’s the whole story. Sorry.” I had to think. This sounded like Massawa all over again when I first got there by air—a major port to be cleared in a hurry and next to nothing in the way of salvage ships, men, and materials prepared in advance for the job—a situation I had never believed would be duplicated again in this war. But apparently it had been in Oran. The prospect nearly floored me. Physically I wasn’t the person I had been the winter before—the year spent struggling with Massawa had taken care of that. Where I really belonged after Massawa was in the Naval Hospital in Washington. Eisenhower had sent for a very broken reed to tackle his salvage problem in North Africa. But there was no help for it. Sick at heart, I thanked Bieri for his time and his generously given information. Then escorted out of G.H.Q. by the inevitable G.I. guide, I went back to the Aletti. Completely sunk, I flopped down on the bed and tried to figure a way out. I had been cherishing the childish illusion that with an American as overall Commanding General and its own soldiers heavily involved, the resources of America would, if not already prudently provided in abundance for the task, at least be available for salvage in North Africa. Now I knew better. “You’ll have to look to the British.” I wondered if Bieri knew the full
meaning of his words. Massawa had taught me what they meant. To every request on the British there for anything, came always as reply the unvarying response, “There is none available.” And it was true too. The British were exhausted, terribly mauled, and already bled white as to the target of two years of blitzkrieg while we were still neutral. Straining every salvage resource to keep English ports open in the face of magnetic mines constantly planted to block them, they had nothing available for salvage work elsewhere.
CHAPTER
6 A LITTLE BEFORE NOON, THE telephone rang to inform me that General Eisenhower would be up from his sick bed that afternoon and that I might, if lucky, perhaps see him briefly before he had to leave for a hospital tour of the wounded. If I missed him, I might as well report to his Adjutant General, who had been given the General’s instructions. I rushed back up the hill to G.H.Q. I found Eisenhower very sober and looking very tired, quite evidently submerged in a thousand problems, all of them headaches. He looked at me, I looked at him. What he thought of me, if anything, I don’t know. From his looks, I thought a little more help, understanding, and support from home wouldn’t hurt him. He scanned my orders briefly, said, “Glad to see you here, Captain,” as if he meant it, and turning to an Army aide, ordered him to see that Colonel Daly, his adjutant, endorsed my orders as having reported. “You report now to Admiral Cunningham, Captain, for duty,” he continued. “He’ll put you to work. There’s lots,” and with that he was on his way. After some delay waiting for my orders to be endorsed, on inquiry from Colonel Daly I learned that there was no need (or use either) to wait for my orders. When his overburdened staff had put on the proper endorsem*nt, made God only knows how many copies as required by regulations, and he had signed the original, my orders would be returned to me at the Aletti. From the looks of the adjutant’s office packed with G.I.s hammering away none too expertly on typewriters, trying to reduce the mountains of papers before them, I judged that not the least of Eisenhower ’s headaches was getting paper enough to carry on the war as per regulations. So about the middle of the afternoon, I turned to to carry out my oral orders to report to Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, G.C.B., R.N., the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief. I knew him only as a legendary figure in the Middle East, where, with inferior forces always, he had in the first years of the
war so savagely battered the powerful Italian fleet every time it left its harbors (and once even inside its harbors) that an Italian super-dreadnought nowadays hardly dared face a British cruiser. But I had never seen him, for a few weeks after my arrival in the Middle East, he had been detached from the Mediterranean Fleet and gone to America to set up the task he now had in North Africa. Admiral Cunningham was the highest ranking officer afloat of Britain’s mighty navy, latest of a long line of fighting admirals running centuries back through Nelson to Drake and Hawkins who had smashed the Spanish Armada for Queen Elizabeth. There was nothing pretentious nor bellicose about Cunningham from his clothes to his manner. Here was Britain’s top commander, a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, reflecting the scarcity of everything in England, dressed in tarnished gold lace and threadbare blues, frayed at the edges, gone at the buttonholes, repaired at the elbows. Such a wornout rig would have been disdained by an American ensign for anything save unavoidable inspection of the double bottoms. Admiral Cunningham himself, clearly older than any others in the Allied African top command, seamed in the face, rather ruddy in complexion, squarejawed, thin enough to make him seem taller than he was, and, if there is such a thing as a typical Englishman, not at all looking like one to me, greeted me cordially by name, showing possibly he was as good a diplomat as a sailor. And further to confirm that impression, after seeing that I was seated in the best chair he had, he suggested to his Chief of Staff, Commodore Roger Dick, that it might be a splendid idea if the marine orderly outside scouted up some tea for the three of us to compensate a bit for the chill of his unheated office. That he should go to so much trouble for a captain reporting to him, clearly showed his tact, for four-stripers were as common in the Royal Navy as in the American. So my official tour in the North African campaign started very informally and quite cozily in tea for three served in most unmartial surroundings. But the coziness swiftly faded out as I listened to my new chief. “Now, Ellsberg,” said the Admiral in words only slightly British in his crisp enunciation, “I’m the one who told General Eisenhower to send for you. I knew of your work in the Red Sea. I want you to clear out Oran so it’s usable first. Meanwhile do what you can to the other harbors. Then there’s a U-boat we damaged scuttled off Tenes between here and Oran in not very deep water. If you can search that with divers, you may recover secret codes that will be
valuable. But mainly I want to learn how far the Nazis have gone in fitting their U-boats with radar and anything like our Asdic for finding their targets either on the surface or submerged. Finally, of course, there’ll be various torpedoed or bombed ships in the Mediterranean to be saved if you can. I’m assigning you in command of all Allied salvage forces for this theater.” Rather grimly as I finished my tea I suggested to the Admiral that I had it on good authority there wasn’t much to command, only one British salvage ship with no divers and a negligible quantity of American divers of unknown and uncertain value, all at Oran. Could anything be done to improve that situation? Immediately I saw that I had unwittingly rubbed a raw wound. Admiral Cunningham’s eyes practically flashed fire and he flushed angrily. I noted for the first time as I looked into his flaming eyes, that one of them, the right one, seemed permanently bloodshot, accentuating his angry glance. Ignoring my question, he said in incisive tones that admitted of no discussion, “You mention that salvage ship at Oran, the King Salvor, which I sent there from Gibraltar. It is reported to me that her salvage officer, Lieutenant Commander White, has been relieved of his command by the American admiral in Oran and replaced by the American lieutenant in charge of the divers you refer to, all with-out reference to me. Officers of His Majesty’s Navy may not be removed save by my orders. Immediately on your return to Oran, Ellsberg, you will replace White in his command. And see that such a performance is not repeated.” “Aye, aye, sir,” I acknowledged a little numbly. What sort of mare’s nest in Oran was I supposed to clear out? Weren’t the wrecks enough? Now I, a captain, was to go to Oran and practically slap the American admiral’s face there by peremptorily reversing his orders, all in an international situation concerning which I knew nothing whatever, but obviously loaded with dynamite. However, Admiral Cunningham was now my chief, and if those were his orders, I’d carry them out. And from the steely look in his eyes, there was no question but that those were his orders. I judged it best to make no comment at all. That insult to the Royal Navy had evidently been rankling in his breast, but with it off his mind, Cunningham resumed his previous informal tone and answered my question. “Quite as you say, Ellsberg, about forces. Very regrettable indeed. But I have hopes of improving things a bit. I’m trying to get a sister to the King Salvor down here from England to help out and some British divers. Then there are
some French divers in Oran who’ll come under your command also. But I’m afraid that will be all. You will do the best you can.” That led up to the only ray of hope I had been able to glimpse while I had pondered the problem at the Hotel Aletti. I sprang it on Cunningham. “Admiral, I had in Massawa three small salvage ships and about a dozen divers, five of them good, and some fine salvage mechanics. When I was detached a week ago, I took a chance and ordered the ships to quit diving and start loading everything to come here via the Cape of Good Hope. I couldn’t actually order them underway here, for the orders I got were simply for me, not including my salvage ships. But you can see they’re ordered here immediately. This area is more important than the Red Sea now. These ships’ll be a great help—two of them are fine tugs—only it’s 10,000 miles round the Cape and it’ll take a couple of months before they get here to lend a hand.” Admiral Cunningham thought it a fine idea. There ensued an earnest discussion between him and his Chief of Staff, Commodore Dick, over whether the ships at Massawa might not be ordered via Suez and the eastern Mediterranean, only 3000 miles, instead of via the 10,000 mile Cape route. But the Mediterranean between us at Algiers and Suez was not open. The British were taking terrible losses from air attacks from Sicily trying to get ships through from the west only as far as Malta to keep it supplied from Gibraltar. The axis-controlled bottleneck between Sicily and Tunisia effectually throttled all through traffic to Alexandria or Suez. That was so obvious that as a present measure, the passage of my ships wasn’t even considered. The discussion centered on whether in a month or so Eisenhower might have Tunisia and thus open the route at least to vessels hugging the shelter of the African shore. My ships, if they started via Suez, might wait out that month somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, possibly at Tobruk in Libya, where they could be usefully employed in clearing that wrecked harbor while they waited. I objected. If there had to be a month’s delay in passage, my ships could hardly arrive much sooner via Suez than via Capetown. And being slow vessels, incapable of dodging any bombs, there still was a chance that even with Tunisia in our hands, air raiders from Sicily would knock them off en route or they might strike mines and be lost. And with them would go invaluable salvage gear that I now knew only too well I could never get replaced either from America or England. Finally, who knew whether Eisenhower would really take Tunisia in a month? If he didn’t, there would be
more delay which would make the passage take longer even than via the Cape. And in addition, during that delay if my ships got heavily wound up in clearing Tobruk harbor, there was bound to be a fight with the Eastern Mediterranean Command over breaking them away from there to leave in the midst of an uncompleted operation. There might, for all I knew, be trouble enough in breaking them away immediately from Massawa. Why add to it at Tobruk? Both Admiral Cunningham and his Chief of Staff agreed. Passage via the Cape, long as it might take for my three tiny ships, was surest, safest, and probably quickest. At least some day we’d get the ships that way. So Commodore Dick was ordered to get the names of the three vessels and, through Washington, get them detached immediately from Massawa and the Middle East Command and started via Capetown for the western Mediterranean. In about two months, if there was not too much red tape to be cut in Washington arranging the transfer, we might expect to see them off Oran. But even two months was still two months too long to wait in semi-idleness in Oran with only the slight, unknown, and dubious forces there to clear it. I had one further idea to help. Beyond any question I wouldn’t see my salvage ships for two months yet nor their priceless salvage gear. But working with next to nothing, so long as I had a few good men to work with, was becoming second nature. And with Admiral Cunningham’s assistance I might get the few good men in time to do some good. I broached the second half of my idea. “Admiral, in Massawa I was serving under the army command of our General Maxwell in Cairo. General Eisenhower, I think, can radio him direct and ask to have him transfer here in a special plane immediately what I need most—as many of my divers and their diving rigs as the plane will carry. What do you think of that?” “Excellent idea, Ellsberg! I’m certain it can be done quickly. I knew your General Maxwell while I was in Egypt myself as C-in-C, Med. He’s a fine officer whom I know will do everything he can to help us. You tell Dick here what you want, and he’ll prepare the dispatch to Maxwell for General Eisenhower ’s signature. Now you take tomorrow to look the situation over in Algiers and get acquainted at Headquarters, then return to Oran. Commodore Dick will see your orders making you Principal Salvage Officer are sent you there. Anything else, Ellsberg, before you shove off?” There was lots, but I could think of nothing that would be helped any by discussing it then, so I replied, “No,” and rose to leave. I might as well get to
work. “There’s only one thing more then, Ellsberg,” said Cunningham, rising also. “Feel free to come back to see me on anything whenever you think necessary. We’ll always back you up here.” From the real warmth of his parting handshake, I had no doubt of it and felt better. Before I got through with what I’d already heard of the treacherous tangle of international jealousies and inter-service bickerings that passed for allied co-operation in North Africa, I was sure I’d need plenty of backing up.
CHAPTER
7 T HERE WAS AN ALERT THAT NIGHT. Air raid sirens wailed, somebody below pulled the switch in the Aletti, all the room lights went out. I seized the tin hat I had borrowed passing through Oran, and dashed for the roof. I had better see for myself what our ships were up against. By the time I got up the stairs to the roof, which wasn’t long as I was billeted high up, Algiers was completely blacked out. Still, how much good the blackout was going to do was questionable. Practically every building in Algiers was white, and there they all were standing plainly out in the clear night against the steep hillside facing the bay, beautifully outlining the city. As if that were not enough to mark the target, on the crest of the hill slightly to the westward of me, a tall white marble monument (resembling our Washington Monument on a reduced scale) stood boldly out against the sky, forming a perfect marker as a point of departure for any bomber starting a run over the harbor. The harbor itself, the target, of course, was jammed with ships of all kinds. It lay practically at my feet, stretching both ways in a long narrow crescent enclosed on the sea side by a massive breakwater forming the outer quay. So thickly were vessels packed inside that harbor, it seemed impossible to drop a bomb there without striking one of them. The sirens had quit screaming. An unearthly silence gripped Algiers waiting its ordeal. All vehicles had stopped, everyone on the streets had fled to air raid shelters. I knew there would be a twenty-minute interval between the alert and the bombs—Algiers always had that much warning from the stations to the eastward of it toward Tunisia. But if Algiers waited in silence, it was not waiting in idleness. Around that harbor I knew there was now the greatest concentration of A.A. guns anywhere in the world outside of London. Then six British Beaufighters, specially equipped with radar for night attack, had just arrived to fill a sad gap in the air
defense. They must already be taking the air from Maison Blanche, in their special coloring to fade into instant invisibility in the night skies. And below me to seaward I began to see closely-spaced smudges of smoke rising all around the harbor periphery, from the outer breakwater as well as from the quays on the landward side. As I watched, the smudges swiftly grew into pillars, spread out, vastly increased in volume. Soon, almost magically as befitted such an Arabian Nights city, the harbor and all the ships in it had vanished completely, invisible beneath a widespread lazy cloud fringing the sea side of the city. Algiers was ready. A few more minutes dragged painfully away. Wholly alone on the roof of the highest building in the vicinity, I waited, having already scouted out the chimneys on the Aletti’s topside which might afford me some shelter from shrapnel. The drone of engines became faintly audible toward the east, swiftly increased to a roar. The bombers were approaching. Searchlights abruptly flashed on, long pencils of unearthly blue light started to feel about the eastern skies. But so far as I could see, they picked up nothing. The bombers kept on coming, as yet wholly invisible from the ground. From the noise, they must be somewhere nearly overhead, still undetected. Then simultaneously from round about the harbor, all hell broke loose. The anti-aircraft batteries had opened up, guns of all calibers were roaring, the whole sky over the harbor was cut to pieces with fiery tracers streaming upward in terrific volume. The guns must be firing by such radar control as they had, for there were certainly no targets visible to any of the gunners. That umbrella of streaking projectiles and bursting shells far above the harbor was apparently too much for the unseen bomber formation. It changed direction and swerved inland to the southward to curve back and make its bombing run from the west, for the gunfire decreased in volume and swung along that path, while the noise of the engines decreased markedly. Soon the droning of airplane engines started to swell again, kept on rising. This time the bombers apparently meant business. On they came, still not one caught by the searchlights. Again the ground guns concentrated protectively over the hidden harbor and its invaluable shipping. Cutting now through both the roaring of guns and the beat of engines came a new sound, a shrill whistling. Instinctively I plastered myself flat against the heaviest chimney, on the side opposite the harbor. I had heard that whistling before, both in Cairo and in Alexandria. The bombs were away!
The whistling increased to a fiendish shriek, while I strove to flatten myself out even flatter against the chimney. Those bombs would be close. Then came the bursts. For an instant, Algiers was illuminated brilliantly in split-second succession by a dozen flaming volcanoes and my eardrums rang to the concussion of heavy explosions to which the previous racket had been nothing. And I saw I had chosen the wrong side of the chimney. Every bomb had struck to landward of the hidden harbor—the bombers had not dared enter the blazing inferno of shells over the ships. A red glow lighted up the sky perhaps a hundred yards inland and uphill from me. One bomb at least had landed on a building there; now it was in flames. Below in the streets I heard the clatter of trucks. The French fire brigade, already at the alert, was on its way. But as I ran to the parapet to peer in the direction of the fire, I could see the firemen were going to have trouble. Down the steeply sloping street toward the Aletti came a cataract of waterapparently other bombs bursting in the street itself had ruptured the water main there. Where the remaining bombs had struck except probably in the open, I couldn’t tell. There were no other fires. But certainly they hadn’t landed in the harbor. And the gunfire was drawing away to the eastward in the wake of the bombers. None of them had been touched—they were still shrouded in darkness, still wholly unseen. Evidently the bomber formation then broke up, probably by arrangement, to scatter the targets, disperse the gunfire, and give the bombers better opportunity for individual runs over the harbor. At any rate, that seemed the plan, for the droning of the engines came now from several different directions over Algiers. Both the searchlight beams and the gunfire broke up into groups working different sectors of the dark sky feeling for the targets which the radar indicated there, but not accurately enough to get either shells or searchlights on the circling planes. But if that was the Nazi tactic, it came to grief. A new factor had entered the battle. Suddenly every searchlight went out, every gun stopped firing. Except for the dull glow of the flames nearby and the beat of engines in the sky, peace, quiet, and darkness reigned again over Algiers. I had an inkling of what that meant, though apparently the Nazis overhead hadn’t. As well as if I had had a pair of phones strapped over my ears, listening in, I knew the word had just gone out over the whole Algiers fire control circuit, “Cease fire! Night-fighter has the target!”
I swung my eyes toward the monument topping the hill to the westward, its white marble shaft easily visible there against the night. It would be from over there that any good bomber would start his dead-reckoning run for the smokehidden harbor. And it should be there that the Beaufighters would be lurking. It was even more calm and peaceful over that monument a mile or so away than where I was. Nothing whatever was visible there. But not for long. A stream of tracers suddenly etched a fiery trail high up in the dark sky, a trail composed of not very elongated straight red dashes in the blackness, a very short trail, ominous in its shortness. Evidently having homed by its own radar close in on the tail of an unsuspecting bomber before opening fire, every shot from the Beaufighter ’s guns was striking home. Not a single tracer missed to cut the usual long curving red path in the sky beyond. As suddenly as it had begun, the short burst of tracers ceased. Darkness again. Why, I wondered, had not the night-fighter kept on firing to make sure of the job? Why take a chance on that Nazi’s getting away to bomb us again? But evidently the Beaufighter had made sure. For a few seconds later, a tiny point of light like a new bright star glowed in the sky high over the monument, heading for the harbor. As it came on, it glowed more brightly, swelled rapidly in size till it more resembled the ball of fire that was the sun. In a long curving arc it passed diagonally over the harbor, a flaming sphere like a vast meteor now, gradually losing altitude all the time. Not a gun fired as it passed overhead, an easy target for the ground guns. It wasn’t necessary. Still at fair elevation it crossed the line of the outer breakwater, was out over the open sea beyond, steadily but evenly dropping lower, constantly increasing in size and brilliance. Then as instantaneously as if a shutter had snapped behind it, the huge blazing ball vanished. The sea had closed over that bomber, still in full flight when it struck. That ended the air raid. Whatever the other bombers in that now dispersed formation had intended to do, they changed their minds immediately and started for home instead. That meteoric path of fire cut in the night skies over Algiers by the first Nazi bomber making a solitary run over the harbor and its sudden extinguishment in the sea, must have unnerved them. It took no vivid imagination to figure the fate of that bomber ’s crew. There were no more bombs, there was no more gunfire, the hum of engines in the sky faded out. Shortly the “All Clear” sounded. Only the fire about a block away and the water still gushing noisily down the steep street beneath me remained to mark what had happened. But as the handicapped firemen seemed
to have the blaze confined to that one building, I went below to my relighted room in the Aletti and finished the letter home I had been writing when the lights went out.
CHAPTER
8 T HE PLANE IN WHICH I WAS TO return to Oran would not take off till late afternoon. So next morning in accordance with Admiral Cunningham’s instructions to get acquainted in Algiers, I circulated through the St. George. I had now been fitted with a G.H.Q. pass, very officially stamped and signed by “J. J. Baker, Colonel Infantry, Headquarters Commandant,” so that I was no longer required to go about the building in custody of a G.I. guard. Colonel Baker ’s flowing signature seemed to have much magic in it. I went to see first Captain Jerauld Wright, U.S.N., “Jerry” Wright, who was scheduled to remain as permanent liaison for Admiral King with Eisenhower ’s forces. Poor Jerry had been through the mill already, and had good reason to fear that worse was yet to come. It was Wright who had been put nominally in temporary command of the British submarine P 219, the H.M.S. Seraph, of which Lieut. N. L. A. Jewell, R.N., was actually the captain, authorized by special dispensation to fly American colors when it was dispatched from Gibraltar a few days before Dday in North Africa. Its mission was to make possible the escape of General Giraud from Vichy France. Giraud was the French military hero in whom our political savants had put their trust to convince the French in North Africa by radio broadcasts at Hhour that we had come as friends. He was to order them not to resist. He was to inspire them to rise as one man immediately we had landed and assist us in throwing out their Nazi and Fascist conquerors. Jerry Wright took a very dim view of Giraud. As scheduled, at the appointed rendezvous on the French coast, he had picked General Giraud up in the dark of the night of November 4, nearly losing him when the general fell overboard in the darkness during the transfer from small boat to sub. Then with Giraud safely aboard, the sub had promptly submerged and headed back for Gibraltar, a thousand miles away. And Jerry Wright’s troubles had promptly begun. He
learned to his dismay that in addition to all the many drawbacks he knew submarines had, a submarine submerged had for him now an additional one— there was absolutely no place to go to get away from his very important passenger. For General Giraud turned out to be a nightmare. Once he was aboard, still dripping he turned to on Jerry with the astounding assertion that he would immediately take overall command of the invading forces, superseding Eisenhower. And as if that were not enough, he followed it up with the disclosure of his own plan—the carefully prepared invasion of North Africa must be abandoned. Instead he would lead the troops to victory and glory by diverting them northward and invading southern France! Jerry Wright’s diplomatic suggestions that all this was impossible, that Giraud misunderstood what his part was, that a plan for which men and ships had been trained for months could not be cast aside on the spur of the moment for another for which there was neither training nor preparation, that the ships were all at sea nearing their prepared assault beaches and could not possibly be diverted—all this was brushed aside by Giraud as of no importance. He was General Giraud, he was like Joffre, his honor would not allow his serving in a subordinate position to Eisenhower, to anybody. He would take supreme command, he would lead the invasion to glory through southern France. Napoleon had done just that on his return from Elba. But that Hitler and the Nazis were not the weak Louis XVIII and his unstable royalist supporters, and that the unarmed French civil populace had little inclination left to rise with flails, scythes, and sickles to face Stukas and tanks in the hands of their conquerors, seems not to have occurred to Giraud. Hour after hour as the submarine swam southward, Giraud dinned his projects into poor Jerry’s ears, demanding his assistance, following him into the torpedo room forward, the motor room aft, every one of the few compartments in between as Jerry Wright sought refuge from l’honneur, mon prestige, l’invasion de la France tout de suite! Had there been a solitary torpedo tube on the P 219 empty of its torpedo, I have little doubt Jerry would have crawled into it and slammed its heavy bronze door to behind him to escape Giraud’s incessant demands on him. But there was no escape. Two days and nights of this Jerry Wright had to stand as the P 219, sometimes submerged, sometimes on the surface ready for a crash dive if danger appeared, headed southward through the Mediterranean for Gibraltar. Then on the third morning, November 7, the day before D-day, came blessed
release. A British Catalina, a flying boat, made contact with them at sea well off the Spanish coast, to take Giraud off and fly him the rest of the way to Gibraltar for his rendezvous with Eisenhower and his briefing for his prearranged part in the imminent landings. “I tell you, Ellsberg, I certainly felt sorry for Ike when I finally got Giraud aboard that Catalina and in the air headed for Gib,” concluded Jerry. “My conscience hurts yet.” I nodded sympathetically, but not overly impressed. Giraud was nothing. Eisenhower had had plenty of trouble with Giraud, who had failed miserably in his part of the invasion plan, even after cold logic, Ike’s persuasions, and rapidly moving circ*mstance had forced Giraud into reluctant acquiescence and the abandonment of his preposterous demands. But wait till Ike had to deal with de Gaulle, whom I had seen in the Middle East. Giraud then would seem to Ike the acme of rational and complaisant Frenchmen. Leaving Jerry Wright, I had a brief interlude before I resumed my round of military calls. There was to be a special ceremony that morning in the heart of Algiers in joint tribute to all—American, British, and French—who had lost their lives assaulting or defending North Africa three weeks before. I hurried down the hill to the little terraced plaza in the center of the business district where stood the Monument aux Morts, a modest cenotaph. Shortly there was martial music, and small detachments of British, French, and American troops filled what space there was on the lower terraces. Then Darlan, Eisenhower, and Cunningham personally one by one laid wreaths at the base of the cenotaph, there was a moment of respectful silence, and the brief ceremony was over. I gazed with great interest at the four major figures in this scene, for Giraud stood with the other three, though to Darlan, not to him, went the honor of representing France in this tribute to her fallen sons and those of her new allies. Taller than any of the others, General Giraud was also by far the most impressive military figure, a fact more striking as he stood in simple uniform wholly without any decorations or ribbons—these he refused to wear till once again he could parade down the streets of Metz. But it was Darlan, rather than Giraud, who held my attention. Admiral Darlan was the reason for the storm of abuse both in America and Britain which was swirling round Eisenhower ’s head. There was Darlan, short, stocky, bull-dog faced, impassive, the very antithesis of Giraud in everything. It was perhaps no accident that Eisenhower and Cunningham stood between the two of
them, as all four faced the Monument aux Morts, for these two Frenchmen had nothing in common. Yet Eisenhower had to deal with both to make his campaign a success. If he were not to risk losing his command he must placate idealistic American and British public opinion which thought it saw in Giraud something of the soul of France. And if he were to avoid the certainty of military disaster which would result if all French North Africa fought him or surreptitiously sabotaged his efforts instead of co-operating wholeheartedly, he must deal with Darlan, who was the only Frenchman to whose orders any other Frenchman in North Africa—soldier, sailor, or civilian—paid attention. Nobody in Algeria or Morocco had listened to Giraud’s impassioned appeals on D-day or afterwards, not a gun had ceased firing. But when unimpressive Darlan had issued the order to quit fighting and to co-operate, not another shot was fired. And the French were co-operating. There stood Darlan, a very devil in the eyes of American and British public opinion. Was he? Or was he as patriotic a Frenchman as Giraud? Enigmatic, inscrutable of countenance, he laid his wreath in tribute to Americans, British, and French alike, and stepped back impassively. I could imagine with what dramatic fervor Giraud at the other end of the quartet would have deposited that wreath at the base of the Monument aux Morts. It would have been a lendlease reverse of “Lafayette, we are here!” But if it had not been for Eisenhower ’s swift comprehension of realities and his quick agreement with Darlan, there would have been vastly more mothers in America, in Britain, and in France also, who would have paid for the privilege of having Giraud lay the wreath instead of Darlan by having their sons also honored at the Monument to the Dead that morning of December 2, 1942.
CHAPTER
9 BACK IN ORAN BY EARLY EVENING, I was once more billeted in the Grand Hotel, this time with more permanence. The eastward hegira of the army and the resultant overcrowding at Algiers had had at least one good result—it had eased the pressure on quarters in Oran. I drew a room by myself, a rather ancient, unheated and depressing room. Compared to the cabin I might have had if afloat, it was terrible. But compared to what I saw the G.I.s up against on my trip in from Tafaraoui Airfield, that room, any room with a roof and a floor, was heaven itself. By the thousands, I saw G.I. pup-tents set up in fields of mud (there weren’t any other kind of fields about) with the men half mired in it, nothing to sleep on save cold, clammy mud, and nothing to shield them from the nightly near-freezing rain except a flimsy bit of canvas. Why they didn’t all die of pneumonia, I was never able to figure out. Vividly I recalled the cynical retort of a battlewise infantry general just after World War I to a flying officer enthusiastically expounding war in the future, “The next war may start in the air as you say, but it will end just where all other wars have—in the mud!” Well, the next war, a quarter of a century later, was here now. As prophesied, it had started in the air, all right, over Pearl Harbor; now it was being fought out true to form in the African mud. December 3 I saw Oran harbor. Oran itself stands on a wide plateau a few hundred feet above the sea. The harbor area is a long narrow strip of low ground beneath the city, reached only by a sharply sloping wide road carved into the rocky face of the plateau. The harbor is flanked at the eastern end (its entrance) by a precipitous cliff on which stands the Ravin Blanc Battery, and is flanked on the western end (or head end) by another eminence carrying Fort Lamoune. Between these two forts, the harbor runs east and west, a rather narrow rectangle about a mile and a half in length. Except one pier at the head of the harbor, all the piers lie to the
southerly or landward side, and a massive stone breakwater forms the northerly or Mediterranean side. The harbor has only one opening to the sea, that at its eastern end, directly under the guns of Ravin Blanc Battery, a naval battery, and hardly a quarter of a mile from them—pointblank range, in fact. About three miles to the westward of the commercial harbor of Oran, lies the separate French naval harbor of Mers-el-Kebir, with a towering rock, the highest in the vicinity, crowned by the formidable Du Santon Battery, commanding all the sea approaches to Oran and Mers-el-Kebir. I felt sick when I got my first glimpse of Oran harbor from the heights above, and sicker yet when I got a close range look first from a jeep and later from a small boat. There were twenty-seven French wrecks littering the harbor. Masts and stacks at crazy angles broke the surface of the harbor waters wherever one’s eyes lighted—in most cases, the hulls, whether right side up, upside down, or on their sides, were wholly submerged and invisible. A string of masts and smokestacks lay across the entrance to the inner harbor. There six ships, anchored in two lines nearly bow to stern, had been scuttled to block the port. Inside these were sunken destroyers, sunken submarines, sunken freighters, sunken passenger ships, sunken drydocks. Everything in the port had been scuttled before the surrender—across the entrance, in the fairways, alongside the quays—wherever in the opinion of the French naval commandant at Oran they would cause us the most trouble in reopening the port. And as a sad reminder that the taking of Oran had had nothing of “friendliness” about it, torn fragments of the blasted hulls of two British menof-war protruded slightly above the surface, one just inside the inner entrance, the other very near the head of the harbor. Inside those battered hulls still lay the mangled bodies of some four hundred men, mostly Americans, who had all died within a few minutes in the taking of Oran. With these two added wrecks, H.M.S. Walney and H.M.S. Hartland, the score was complete. Twenty-nine hulks lay inside Oran harbor—twenty-seven French, two British. Ironically enough, H.M.S. Walney and Hartland and the special assault forces they were jammed with, had been shot to pieces in the initial assault in a desperate attempt to prevent the very damage I now saw. It had been their mission to seize the harbor and its covering forts before the main troop landings around Oran, and thus prevent any sabotage at all. Instead, they had become the first two of all the wrecks littering the floor of Oran harbor. And on their decks had taken place the worst slaughter in the attacks anywhere from
Casablanca to Algiers—as many men in fact had been killed in those two little ships as in all the other fighting on all the other fronts together in the taking of North Africa. The Walney and the Hartland, two small British men-of-war of about the tonnage of large destroyers, wholly unarmored, carrying only one five-inch gun apiece and a few smaller guns, had sailed together from England under the command of Captain F. T. Peters, Royal Navy. At Gibraltar they had taken aboard their American forces. These consisted of a specially trained battalion of our 1st Armored Division, some 400 men, under Lt. Col. G. C. Marshall; and about 30 of our bluejackets and marines under Lt. Comdr. G. D. Dickey. Aside from these, there was also aboard the Walney a British Commando unit of about 50 men. Including the British crews of the Walney and Hartland, there were roughly 700 men all told in this venture; somewhat over half were Americans. The plan was that shortly after H-hour and before the main troop landings had alerted the French, Walney and Hartland, hidden in the darkness, were to crash through the booms forming the wartime harbor gate. Then Walney, the leader, carrying 200 American troops, part of the American naval contingent, and the 50 British Commandos, was to run the entire length of the harbor to its head, lay alongside the pier there, the Môle Centre, and discharge her assault troops. These were to capture Fort Lamoune which commanded the head of the harbor. Meanwhile Hartland, following Walney through the gap in the broken boom, was to go only a short distance into the inner harbor, then turn sharply to port, lay herself alongside the first pier, the Môle Ravin Blanc, and there discharge her forces. Her troops, the remaining 200 Americans, were to scale the high cliff immediately behind and capture Ravin Blanc Battery surmounting it. During all this, the naval parties on both Walney and Hartland were to board all merchantmen at the various piers and prevent any scuttlings. The desperate nature of this venture was clearly recognized. It had no chance of success unless complete surprise were effected and the vessels could crash through the booms into the inner harbor and get alongside the piers before the French came to and manned their guns. After that, scaling the heights in the darkness to take Ravin Blanc Battery, which certainly would by then be alerted, was still a highly dubious gamble. Rear Admiral A. C. Bennett, U.S.N., destined to be the naval commander in Oran after its capture, protested most vigorously against this plan, but was overruled. The stakes were high, the attempt was
ordered. The only effect of Bennett’s protest was, so far as the American naval officers on the Hartland interpreted it, to obtain an understanding that if the essential element of complete surprise were lost, the ships would withdraw without attempting to enter. So matters stood on the night of November 7, when a little after midnight Walney and Hartland, jammed with their landing forces, took station at sea in the darkness a few miles off blacked-out Oran, waiting for 3 A.M., the designated moment for their assault. Farther out, shrouded in the night, lay a powerful British naval force under Commodore Thomas Troubridge, R.N.— the battleship Rodney with nine 16-inch guns, the aircraft carrier Furious, the light cruisers Aurora and Jamaica, and thirty-one other assorted warships from destroyers to mine-sweepers. These were to shield the transports steaming on through the darkness toward their landing beaches twenty-five miles eastward and thirteen miles westward respectively of Oran, where far from the heavy guns of the naval batteries at Oran, the main troop landings were to start at 1 A.M., H-hour. Three a.m. came. In the darkness far to the east and to the west of Oran, landing craft were already disembarking the first wave on the beaches, but around Oran itself all was still quiet and undisturbed. With Walney leading, Captain Peters started for the entrance, his own two ships completely blacked out and working hastily up to full speed for maximum impact when crashing the boom. As they straightened away for the entrance gate, they heard air raid sirens beginning to scream in Oran. Apparently the news of the landings on the distant beachheads had just reached Oran—it was being alerted. But there was no sign that they had themselves been detected. They stood on, swiftly gathering speed. Then Captain Peters, peering from the Walney’s bridge into the darkness at the breakwaters starting to loom up through the night in the water ahead of him, saw to his dismay that he had misjudged his approach. He was too close inshore and would miss the entrance gate by perhaps a quarter of a mile. He dared not slow and make an oblique approach—he must hit that boom squarely and at full speed if he were to smash through and not hang up in it. He had but one option: he must make a 360 ° circle at full speed and come back better lined up for the impact. With no slacking of speed, hard right went the Walney’s rudder. She heeled sharply to the turn, her stern began to skid sidewise through the water, creating a wide wake. Close behind her, the Hartland had no choice but to turn and follow, still further widening that fatal wake which was glowing
now through the darkness in brilliant phosphorescence where only the black waters of the Mediterranean had been a moment before. That widespread phosphorescence, suddenly illuminating the sea almost beneath their eyes, was enough for the surprised naval garrison of Battery Ravin Blanc, a moment before alerted by the air raid sirens. They had till then no reason to suspect danger from the sea in front of them. The sky above was the natural danger area when the air raid sirens gave an alarm, but as yet no sign of planes or sounds of engines in the sky had reached them. Now, however, beneath them and a little beyond the harbor entrance was that startling glow in the water. Instantly a searchlight switched on, trained on the gleaming wake, followed along it naturally enough to its source, and the Walney swiftly stood fully revealed in the searchlight beam. All chance of surprise was gone! Instantly the 130-millimeter guns of Battery Ravin Blanc opened up. But though the range was short for naval guns, hitting a target changing deflection as rapidly as does a ship in a hard turn, is next to impossible. Not a shell landed on the Walney, which as yet had completed only a quarter of her circle. Still at full speed, she continued turning to starboard. Behind her steamed the Hartland, uncaught by the searchlights concentrating on her sister, unmolested by gunfire. To the American officers on the Hartland, following the Walney in her turn, watching the exploding French shells sending up geysers close aboard her, the show was over. Surprise was gone. As soon as the Walney had finished a half turn, she would head out to sea away from Oran, zigzagging then, of course, to dodge shells and hoping for luck in eluding them. And they, zigzagging also, would follow her out to sea as prearranged if surprise were lost. The anti-sabotage problem of Oran harbor would have to be left now to the heavy naval forces placed well at sea about it but out of sight in the darkness, and to the Army now landing in force some distance away on both sides. Still under fire, still illuminated by the searchlights, the badly heeled over Walney finished her half turn away from Oran. But if there was no longer any surprise left in the situation for the alarmed French, there still was a sharp surprise remaining for the Americans watching from the Hartland. Instead of beginning to straighten up as would be normal on the Walney as she eased her rudder to stand straight out to sea away from Oran, she continued heeling to port as much as ever, kept turning in as tight a circle as before. In another moment her intention was clear. Surprise or no surprise, Captain Peters on the
Walney was completing a full circle, still clearly bent on crashing the boom into Oran harbor! Astounded by this change from the plan as they understood it, both Col. Marshall and Comdr. Dickey watched the Walney come full circle, and still followed by the Hartland, straighten away at full speed for the boom close ahead. Captain Peters was going to crash into Oran harbor with every gun there, every searchlight, every warship inside, ready and waiting now for his two little ships. History was repeating itself. As at Balaklava nearly a century before, someone was blundering into an even more suicidal charge, and another commander was leading 700 men this time instead of 600 into the point-blank fire of unnumbered naval guns. It was going to be murder. Helped by stray light from the searchlight beams centering on her, which to a degree also illuminated nearby objects, the Walney on this approach correctly located the boom, smashed squarely into it, broke through, and then with no loss of speed, hit and broke through a second barrier composed of a string of barges. But with this success, the Walney’s luck ran out. From then on, she must travel practically a straight course down the narrow harbor, a perfect target. No more circling, no zigzagging to avoid enemy fire was possible. Now came hell itself. The guns of Battery Ravin Blanc above, at a range of 500 yards only, began to register on their target. For a quarter of a mile, the Walney took this, came then opposite the Môle Ravin Blanc. Between this môle and the Môle Millerand next beyond, two French submarines lay moored, the Cérès and the Pallas. The instant the Walney cleared the end of Môle Ravin Blanc, exposing her port side to them, these two submarines at a range of 200 yards only opened on her with machine guns and their 75-mm. A.A. guns—so short a range that nothing could miss. Still the Walney staggered on up the harbor, helped a little now by the fact that the guns and searchlights of Ravin Blanc had at last discovered the Hartland and shifted fire to her. As a further blessing, the outer end of Môle Millerand now coming abeam to port, interposed to shield her from the hail of bullets and shells streaming from the Cérès and the Pallas. Then came a crushing misfortune. Close ahead, from the Walney’s bridge was made out a large French destroyer, of all things in that harbor that was supposed to be taken by surprise, already underway and standing for them! In desperation, the Walney swung sharply to starboard in an attempt to ram her, but at this instant, shells from no one knew which of their many enemies, shot
away their bridge and ruined the maneuver. At a range not exceeding 100 feet, that destroyer as she passed abreast of them let go with full broadsides from her five 138-mm. guns. If the range had been a little greater so the French guns might have struck lower at full depression, they would have torn the ill-fated Walney to pieces on the spot. As it was, those broadsides, raking her decks and topsides, spelled finis to any chance now of landing enough men alive to assault anything. The French destroyer, not daring to stop or back in such close waters, drew astern of them, while the doomed Walney, steering now by emergency wheel, kept doggedly on for her objective, the Môle Centre only 300 yards ahead. At that instant a shell, probably from the destroyer astern, exploded in her boiler room and deprived her of all further power for her propeller. A completely helpless wreck, under only what momentum she still had, the Walney slowly drifted onward for the right side of Môle Centre, her planned disembarkation point. But lest the measure of disaster to the Walney be not already full, pressed down, and running over, along that side of the Môle Centre, one ahead of the other, lay two more large French destroyers, Épervier and Tramontane! Both now opened up with everything they had, five 138-mm. guns, four 130-mm. guns, their machine-guns, even their A.A. guns, on the helpless target literally drifting right up to the muzzles of their guns. Nothing missed, nothing could miss. With her decks heaped high with the dead and her compartments below a shambles, the remains of the Walney, disintegrating in an inferno of bursting shells, drifted lazily onward to collide gently broadside to broadside against the first of the two French warships which was firing into her now at no range at all. She had arrived at last at her objective at Môle Centre. A handful of survivors managed to leap from the shell-swept deck of the Walney to the destroyer at the moment of impact, there to be taken prisoner immediately. Before more could jump, the Walney bounced off, drifted a little clear. Whoever else could still move, leaped overboard to try to swim to the nearby quays. Soon thereafter a sharp explosion tore what was left of the Walney apart, she capsized and went down, carrying with her both the dead and the dying. Three-quarters of all those aboard, when she had crashed the boom at the harbor entrance a few minutes before, were casualties, soldiers and sailors alike, most of them dead now inside the sunken hulk off the Môle Centre, hard by the walls of that Fort Lamoune they were to have captured. The remnant, all unarmed swimmers who had made the quays, were themselves
captives. Meanwhile her consort, the Hartland, was having no better luck. Traveling 600 yards astern of the Walney, she had initially escaped detection by the searchlights, both in the turn outside the harbor and in the approach which followed. But she paid for her immunity. The stray light of the searchlight beams centered on the Walney which had dimly outlined the harbor entrance jetties for her, was not there to mark them when the Hartland steamed up. Having made the 360 ° turn not quite so tightly as had the Walney, she was a little further shoreward. Instead of coming through the gap which the Walney had left in the barriers, she missed in the darkness and her bow ran up on the sloping jetty forming the inshore side of the entrance and hung there. Backing furiously to get clear, the Hartland churned up so violently the phosphorescent waters of the Mediterranean that she instantly attracted attention from the heights above. A searchlight swung inquisitively in her direction, picked her up as she managed to pull free. Leaving the doomed Walney to the warships below, all the guns and searchlights of Battery Ravin Blanc immediately shifted from the Walney to the Hartland. In a perfect hell of fire from the French gunners who had by now got their hands in tuning up on the Walney, the Hartland came on again for the entrance, cleared it this time. She had only a quarter of a mile further to go to turn in alongside the Môle Ravin Blanc, the landing point for her assault forces, most of whom were stowed in the compartments below to shield them as well as possible to the last moment. But it was a terrible quarter of a mile. Before they could fire more than three shots in their own defense, bursting shells from above had wiped out all of Hartland’s gun crews and silenced her return fire. Still she kept on, came abeam the head of Môle Ravin Blanc, turned to port to berth herself there, port side to. Immediately she cleared the head of the môle, the two submarines, the Cérès and the Pallas, which had previously riddled the Walney, opened on her, much closer aboard than they ever had been to her sister. The Hartland had not even a machine-gun left in action with which to answer. As if this were not enough, the same evil luck which the Walney had encountered at the Môle Centre, now fell on the Hartland. Alongside the Môle Ravin Blanc, at the very spot where the Hartland was to unload, lay another large French destroyer, the Typhon, which, for whatever reasons, had not fired a shot at the Walney as she went by. But to make up for that omission, she was
more than ready now, and there was the defenseless Hartland only a few hundred feet away. A perfect torrent of 130-mm. shells poured from the merciless guns of the Typhon to burst inside the unarmored Hartland. Immediately the Hartland lost all boiler power, all steering control, and was set heavily on fire below. Completely helpless, the battered Hartland started slowly to drift broadside away from the Môle Ravin Blanc toward the Môle Millerand. All the while the Typhon poured shells into her till the Hartland had drifted a few hundred yards. Then the Typhon had to cease fire lest some of her shells, going clear through the Hartland’s thin sides without exploding, should strike other French ships now in line beyond. But this did the Hartland slight good. She was already a raging furnace below. The assault troops packed into the compartments there (those still alive, that is) were driven to the decks above to escape roasting. And as they came on deck, the machine-guns of the Pallas and the Cérès, very close aboard now, cut them down. Afire below, her topsides blazing, with incessant streams of machine-gun bullets sweeping her decks, there was no longer the slightest hope for the Hartland or her mission. Half those aboard were already dead. Those still able to, heroically pausing under heavy fire to put life jackets on the wounded, first pushed them overboard and then followed themselves, to swim to the adjacent quays where they were promptly taken prisoner as they hauled themselves or the wounded from the luridly illuminated waters. The Hartland, manned now only by the dead, continued to burn fiercely till a terrific explosion tore her apart, scattering her steel plates over the near by quays. What was left sank to join her sister, the Walney, on the bottom of Oran harbor. The assault was over. More than four hundred men had died in vain.
CHAPTER
10 HUDDLED OUT OF THE COLD RAIN in a miserable shack knocked together from such stray dunnage boards as they had been able to gather on the quay, near the head of Môle Ravin Blanc I found the quarters of the little American naval salvage party which had entered Oran on its surrender November 10th. I introduced myself. Lieutenant George Ankers, U.S.N.R., the senior officer, was in charge of twelve American divers and mechanics, two ensigns as his assistants, and another homeless officer, Lieutenant William Reitzel, U.S.N.R., whose original invasion task had apparently evaporated. From Lieutenant Ankers (and later from Lt. Comdr. E. White, R.N.V.R., the displaced British salvage officer whom Admiral Cunningham had mentioned to me) I pieced together the tangled local salvage command situation which I had been ordered to rectify immediately. Ankers, a giant of a man whom I soon learned to respect as a very competent salvage officer, had been taken from the wrecks at Pearl Harbor for this invasion. To help him, he had been assigned a small group of divers of whom two were good, and the two ensigns, Victor Aldrich and Leo Brown, both experienced ex-warrant officers. This little group had trained together at Rosneath, Scotland, before their departure for North Africa, the idea being apparently that they should cope with what little ship sabotage in Oran harbor occurred after its seizure by the Walney and the Hartland. They had been drilled and equipped for that only, since Ankers himself was given no salvage ship, no salvage equipment except a few hand tools, and only the diving rigs needed for his men. Unfortunately, the anti-sabotage assault of the Walney and the Hartland had been a bloody fiasco. When Ankers and his men entered Oran with the troops of General Fredendall who had forced its surrender on the afternoon of November 10 after two and a half days of hard fighting ashore, they found a
sad and completely unanticipated situation. All over the harbor, half-flooded ships and floating drydocks were on their way down, but as yet mostly unsubmerged, scuttled with their sea valves hastily opened by orders of Capitaine de Frégate Duprès, Commandant du Port d’Oran. On most of these vessels, nothing at all could be done to keep them afloat, even if Ankers had had several times his actual force, for their opened seaco*cks were already under water. But at the one spot which vitally mattered, the situation might yet have been saved. Across the entrance to the inner harbor, from the head of Môle Ravin Blanc to the outer breakwater opposite, six ships had been strung roughly in two parallel lines, one inside the other, and there hurriedly scuttled to block the port. However, so hastily and unprofessionally had the job been done that only a few valves had been opened on any of these ships. As a result, they flooded and went down slowly. Several, with one end or the other already resting on the bottom, still had their bows or sterns afloat, which buoyant ends were flooding even more slowly. This gave a heaven-sent opportunity to frustrate the French intention. There was still time to lash to these still floating ends, let the ships pivot on their sunken opposite ends, and turn the wrecks 90 ° to the right or left to leave a clear and unobstructed channel through between them, wide enough for ships of any size to enter or leave Oran. Lieutenant Ankers saw this, of course, but he was helpless. He had no salvage ship. If he had had rank enough to carry any weight, he might have commandeered some of the British naval mine-sweepers outside Oran and done the job with them, for he knew how. But with two stripes only, his chance of commandeering anything, even a rowboat, was nil. And every vessel outside Oran was busily engaged in a preassigned task. Ankers had neither the rank nor the prestige which might have persuaded the mass of generals and admirals, both American and British, about Oran to break a suitable vessel away from its task and give it to him. Apparently a message was sent to Admiral Cunningham, at that time with General Eisenhower at invasion headquarters at Gibraltar 220 miles away, indicating the situation and asking a salvage ship to clear the entrance. Admiral Cunningham instantly dispatched the King Salvor, then stationed at Gibraltar, with Lt. Comdr. White, R.N.V.R., its salvage officer, to Oran. It took the King Salvor eighteen hours, steaming hard, to get there. Meanwhile the golden opportunity was steadily dissolving in the sea rising about the sinking ships.
The arrival of the King Salvor unfortunately only muddled further an already very muddled salvage situation. She carried no divers of her own, and without them was handicapped in handling the situation which was now desperate and requiring instant action if anything at all was to be achieved before it was too late. Ankers, the American lieutenant, had divers but no salvage ship. White, the British lieutenant commander, had a salvage ship but no divers. Which should take charge of everything? Ankers, who had been sent initially as the salvage officer for Oran but without proper equipment for the task as it stood, or White, sent there later on an emergency mission but lacking badly needed divers in his crew? They could not agree; each felt his instructions empowered him to take full charge. While White was senior, the difference was not enough of itself to settle the matter. For mere seniority in no service of itself entitles a newcomer to take over from a junior in rank a task assigned the junior unless his orders unequivocally so require and state. White’s orders, probably oral, were of necessity only general. To make matters worse, the two disagreed radically as to how the job should be tackled, though I have myself little doubt that either, if given everything and left alone, would have made a success of his plan even at that eleventh hour. As a final touch to complete this tangled situation, Commodore Troubridge, R.N., commanded all naval vessels (all of which were British) engaged in the Oran operations, and undoubtedly the King Salvor came under him. Rear Admiral Bennett, U.S.N., was to be Flag-Officer-in-Charge, Oran, once it was taken, and undoubtedly Oran was now taken. But Bennett had no vessels whatever under his command, and, though senior to Troubridge, no control over the forces afloat. Whether an appeal by either Ankers or White to their respective seniors would have swiftly resolved the situation is unknown. It might have, and of course it should have. But neither Bennett ashore nor Troubridge afloat could be reached quickly in the confusion reigning around Oran. What actually happened I don’t fully know yet. Ankers wanted to hook on to one vessel first; White preferred another. More time was lost. Ankers apparently took the bull by the horns and with his men secured hawsers to his choice, the barely visible bow of the not yet quite wholly submerged Boudjmel, a vessel in the inner row of blockships. White, apparently left with no other choice, heaved on the hawsers with the King Salvor, and between the two of
them, they swung and dragged the Boudjmel on her already submerged stern before she sank altogether on them, enough to uncover a partial opening in the outer line of sunken ships between the bow of the Spahi and the stern of the Pigeon sunk just ahead of the Spahi. But by the time that was achieved, there was no longer any chance of anything further. The Spahi on the removal of the Boudjmel became the cork in the harbor bottleneck. For a long time she had been partly afloat but meanwhile she had rolled to starboard and gone down completely, lying on her side—the worst position possible for future salvage. And with the complete sinking of the Spahi ended all chance of clearing the harbor entrance without extended salvage operations. The sequel was what might have been expected. When matters in Oran had settled enough to give opportunity, both salvage officers complained to their respective seniors of the unsatisfactory command situation still existing. Admiral Bennett’s Chief of Staff, Captain Spellman, outraged by what might have been accomplished but wasn’t, took matters into his own hands and without reference to the British higher command, ordered White out of the King Salvor, putting everything in Ankers’ hands, a procedure which in the overall international command picture was bound to have repercussions and did. And there I was with peremptory orders to put White back on the King Salvor as salvage officer and take Ankers out. The orders admitted of no dispute by anybody—Admiral Cunningham was Allied Naval Commander-inChief to whom everybody in anybody’s navy, British, American, or French, afloat or ashore in North Africa, was subordinate. And the orders were in themselves wholly reasonable. If a British naval commander had ordered an American officer out of his ship without approval higher up, he also would certainly have been reversed. But all this did me little good. Orders may be orders and in the naval service must be obeyed, but if I were ever to open Oran harbor with next to nothing to do the job, I had to have everybody’s good will and co-operation—Army and Navy, whether British or American. For only God knew to which of these diverse forces I should continuously have to appeal (I couldn’t command them) for every little thing in the way of men, materials, and equipment I might have to improvise into salvage gear. I couldn’t begin by antagonizing the American admiral commanding the port, nor his Chief of Staff. Still less would I get anywhere by antagonizing the
British vice admiral afloat who had succeeded Commodore Troubridge in that area. And of course if I failed to satisfy Admiral Cunningham in the matter, I had no further worries at all—I should promptly be on my way home in disgrace. I was in considerable of a dilemma. Whose toes had best be trodden on and still give me a chance for success in Oran and later all over the Mediterranean? Everybody’s feelings were on edge. White was deeply incensed over his removal. The local British admiral afloat and the overall naval commander in Algiers felt the Royal Navy had been insulted. Admiral Bennett and his Chief of Staff, Captain Spellman, felt strongly that the local situation had warranted the summary action taken. I, as the designated executioner, felt worse than any of them. Whatever I did or didn’t do spelled trouble which would ruin my mission in Oran. Only Lieutenant Ankers, whom I had orders to fling off the King Salvor, seemed to see nothing either personal or national at stake and appeared unconcerned over what I did about him. A few days spent cautiously feeling out this tempest in a teapot and getting at first hand some knowledge of the personalities involved, only made the situation seem more hopeless. I had to have the wholehearted co-operation of both White and Ankers, for they were the only two experienced salvage officers available to help cover a thousand miles along the Barbary coast. Restoring White might be a way out, for it would mollify White and not enrage Ankers, regardless of how much it angered the American higher command in Oran. And of course it would save my official neck. But while it seemed that Ankers himself would take no offense if I took him off the King Salvor, there were his American divers, the only ones at hand. It was certain that they would take considerable offense if ordered now to serve under White, the British salvage officer. Long experience with divers had taught me plenty. On the surface, disgruntled seamen can be made to do something at least under fear of punishment. But not divers. They work unseen and alone. Success with divers depends wholly on their willingness and desire to risk their lives inside wrecks, solving the problems they encounter by feel in the black waters amidst unseeable and unknown entanglements likely to trap them. Of these the salvage officer on the surface knows nothing at first, and later knows only what the diver on coming up chooses to tell him of what he has learned and what he has done, if anything. The result is that a salvage officer for whom his divers are not willing to gamble their lives, not only gets nowhere but he has no means of doing
anything about it. That salvage task is simply added to the long list of previous salvage failures. Such was the situation in Oran. Of everybody from Admiral Cunningham down, the last individuals I could afford to antagonize were a few American enlisted men, the divers, if vitally needed Oran harbor were soon to be of any good to General Eisenhower and his fighting troops. Admiral Cunningham, a four-star admiral, had gold lace on his sleeves reaching from his wrists to his elbows and could chop my official head off with a word, but still what worried me most was not what he thought but what a few common seamen thought, though they could do nothing to me officially. After a few days’ study on the spot, I found a solution which when presented to Admiral Cunningham he heartily approved and immediately acted on. An order was issued by Allied Naval Headquarters, and given wide public notice in Oran, restoring Lt. Comdr. E. White, R.N.V.R., to his position as Salvage Officer on H.M.S.V. King Salvor. This took care of the honor and dignity of the Royal Navy. Then Lt. Comdr. White, together with the King Salvor, was ordered to leave for Bône, the Algerian port nearest Tunisia, and only some forty miles short of the actual fighting line. Bône was getting a terrific nightly bombardment from Axis bombers with fields only twenty minutes’ flying time away. Already half a dozen ships had been sunk inside its harbor, badly needing attention. Two thousand Axis bombs fell on Bône within a period of seven weeks. White was radiant over his assignment to Bône—it was certainly the post of honor in the campaign. That took care of White. However, the King Salvor was still badly needed at Oran, for without her and her equipment there was little chance of handling the situation in that harbor. Therefore White departed immediately for Bône without his salvage ship, which was not to join him in Bône till some time later. The King Salvor was ordered to remain in Oran temporarily till the harbor was fully cleared, meanwhile to work there with Lt. Ankers as salvage officer and with his divers. Since that physically preserved the status quo in Oran, it satisfied the divers, Lt. Ankers, and the American higher command in Oran. Since everyone now seemed satisfied, I was left free to turn my attention to getting along with the war.
CHAPTER
11 T HERE WAS LEFT FOR THE MOMENT only the problem of what to do about Oran harbor. I had now to work with, a British salvage ship, an American salvage officer and some divers, and, oddly enough, a French salvage officer and some French divers also. I found soon after my arrival in Oran that the French contingent was going to be of little immediate value to me. Having been cut off by the Axis from access to the world since the Fall of France, they were meagerly equipped and their diving suits were so worn out, with patches now being patched in pathetic attempts to keep them watertight, that it was amazing men could still be persuaded to risk their lives in them. And at the moment I had no extra diving suits at all to give them. But what really concerned me over my new French assistants and allies was not so much their lack of decent diving equipment as their totally incomprehensible point of view. I knew, of course, that in North Africa, the French whom recently we had been fighting, were now not conquered enemies who must take our orders as the Italians in Massawa lately had to do, but our allies. As our allies now, the French admiral lately in command of Oran and that Capitaine de Frégate Duprès were still in their previous posts even though it was under their sole orders (both Darlan and Pétain stoutly disclaimed ever having ordered it) that Oran harbor had been thoroughly sabotaged. And every man and officer in the French Navy around Oran was still responsible directly to them. If those two Frenchmen had in any way changed their ideas since sabotaging the harbor on their own initiative, nothing I ever saw indicated any sign of it. Now I found to my astonishment I was in the midst of a regular Alice-inWonderland situation. If it seemed plain as day to me (as it did to General Eisenhower and to Admiral Cunningham who had sent me there) that the first order of business was fully to open Oran harbor, and the second to restore the
harbor facilities, that wasn’t the way the French high command in Oran saw it. Not at all. Without any thought to the future they had deprived themselves of all their warships, first by sending out their destroyers after the Walney-Hartland episode, which destroyers Commodore Troubridge’s waiting cruisers had thoroughly and swiftly shot to pieces, and then by scuttling all their submarines. Now they found themselves in the peculiar predicament of having not even a rowboat to go to sea in or to hoist an admiral’s flag on. That, not the Allied need for the use of Oran harbor, was what seemingly concerned the local French high command deeply. When Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard, the French salvage officer, a very pleasant, a very studious-looking, and a very eager young man, first reported to me, I received a shock. He informed me that it was the desire of his superiors that I concentrate the American and British salvage forces available in Oran on lifting immediately the French submarines they had recently scuttled! I stared blankly at Perrin-Trichard. Did he mean it? He did. I soon learned that badinage was far from the thoughts of this very serious lieutenant who, fortunately for me, spoke excellent English. When the situation dawned on me at last, I had difficulty in not insulting him and all France by laughing outright. With a pressing war situation requiring the swiftest possible reopening of the harbor, I was instead to turn to on lifting three scuttled French submarines which even when lifted would take six months or more to refit for any service! It was too ludicrous for words. As dispassionately as I could, I explained to Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard that much as it broke my heart (for lifting sunken submarines had in my younger days been my forte), the unfortunate submarines Cérès, Pallas, and Danaë must remain submerged for the present on the bottom of Oran harbor while all of us went about more urgent business. First, regrettably for the needs of his superiors, must come that prosaic scuttled freighter, the Spahi, blocking the entrance, and then that even more prosaic huge floating drydock they had also scuttled. Of all things around Oran,. what meant most in winning the war in North Africa was the Spahi out of the harbor entrance and the return of that huge drydock once again to the surface ready to repair torpedoed ships. He must convey my profound regrets to his superiors, M’sieu I’Amiral and M’sieu le Capitaine de Frégate, his Commandant du Port. I could not possibly do what they wished. Woebegone at having to be messenger for such unwelcome news,
Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard left me. He must quickly have concluded I had descended on Oran as his special nemesis, for next day when I got hold of him again I asked him what he and his French divers were then engaged on. His answer nearly floored me. He had been and was still engaged in attempting to raise the capsized French battleship, la Bretagne, sunk in Mers-el-Kebir harbor. La Bretagne? This was the last straw. When Oran harbor was shrieking for attention, he was still engaged in working on that useless heap of junk, that thirty-year-old pre-World War I French battleship lying upside down in Mersel-Kebir where she was doing no harm. Even if recovered, it would require two years’ work and priceless skilled labor and materials badly needed elsewhere to refit la Bretagne. Even if refitted, so ancient was her design it made her practically valueless as a battleship in this war. Her history was tragic. After the Fall of France in 1940, the British, in desperation lest the French warships in Mers-el-Kebir harbor fall into Nazi hands, had appeared in force off Oran and served an ultimatum on the French admiral there. He must either join them and continue the war against the Nazis as de Gaulle was doing, or sail with his warships to the French West Indies for internment, or surrender, or—take the consequences. The French admiral indignantly rejected all the alternatives offered him. The British opened fire. The French were in no position to fire back. A salvo of 15inch shells from H.M.S. Hood, Valiant and Resolution had landed on la Bretagne and she had promptly and ingloriously turned turtle and gone down. Which was exactly what that ancient ark could be counted on to do again if anyone ever raised her and put her back in a battle line against modern warships. So I informed Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard that the lifting of la Bretagne must be suspended for the duration. When the war ended, if the French wished to raise and refit her for the next war, they might resume operations. But pending defeat of the Nazis, I would assign him and his men a salvage task that meant something in this war. Tomorrow I would let him know his assignment. Once again, completely hardhearted this time, I gazed into the stricken eyes of Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard. Then, voiceless, he departed as before, to report, I suppose, to M’sieu I’Amiral what that unfeeling Principal Salvage Officer sent by the Naval Commander-in-Chief was about—unswervingly bent on leaving the submerged French Navy submerged.
I was by now, I felt, completely beyond possibility of further shock. So, having settled the British-American imbroglio at about the same time as I polished off la Bretagne, I set to work to try to accomplish something constructive. That meant first the Spahi. In a small boat in the harbor entrance, I held a discussion about the Spahi with Lieutenant Ankers, with his two best divers, with Lieutenant Reitzel, his assistant, and with Captain Victor Harding, Merchant Navy, skipper of H.M.S.V. King Salvor. I learned from Ankers that his two divers, “Red” Gatchell and George Lynch, had already made a fairly thorough diving survey of the inside of the Spahi and what they had learned was not very encouraging. It seemed that the Spahi, an ancient French tub of a freighter, had been fully loaded with hogsheads of wine in all holds, fore and aft, and had been about to sail for Marseilles where the wine was to be delivered to the Nazis, when she was instead taken to the harbor entrance and scuttled by opening her sea valves. She had filled slowly, her stern had sunk first, and finally in going down completely, she had rolled on her side and lay now on the bottom, flat on her starboard side. That made it very bad, both for the lifting of her and for the divers working on her. Gatchell and Lynch, both good divers, had been through her, so far as conditions permitted. They had already located the opened sea valves and had plugged them (their bonnets had been removed). But so far as they could discover in the murky water below, she had few bulkheads and those were of very doubtful watertightness. The cargo holds were solid with huge wooden hogsheads of wine and were inaccessible to the divers. Getting around on the half-capsized Spahi was exceptionally difficult—her decks were now all vertical instead of horizontal and of course could not be walked on; all her companion way ladders were now horizontal instead of vertical and could not be descended. A diver had a tough time in the black water and the tangled mess of wreckage inside the topsy-turvy Spahi with no footing to get about on. To make matters worse, there were no plans or blueprints available of or in the Spahi to tell us anything about her or her interior arrangements. Lieutenant Reitzel who was acting as liaison for the salvage party with the French assured me that this was not because the French were holding anything out on us, but because the vessel was so old her plans had long since disappeared from her files (the divers had searched fruitlessly her chartroom and captain’s cabin) and no French shipping office in Oran had any duplicates.
So it appeared that if we wanted to know anything about the Spahi we could find out (maybe) by having a diver play blindman’s buff inside the murky and opaque water filling her. Submarine lamps were useless; even with them a man could hardly make out his hand in front of his faceplate. The indispensable measurements to figure with some accuracy what buoyancies I might get to refloat her, we could learn only by having divers try to measure her while dangling in the water below at the ends of their lifelines alongside her now vertical decks. Altogether, the Spahi was a very dubious subject for a quick lifting operation. There was no salvage gear for lifting available then in Oran nor to be expected for months yet. It was obvious that if we were to uncork the harbor mouth, the Spahi, a mystery ship so far as we were concerned, would have to float herself out of the entrance. I trusted she would oblige. With the dimensions of her which Ankers already had obtained from looking her up in Lloyd’s Register—her length, beam, and depth of hold—I adjourned the conference afloat and we all went ashore to the salvage shack on the quay at Môle Ravin Blanc where I might better do a little rough calculation. The plan I desired to try involved dividing the ship up into five separate watertight compartments (if we had any luck making her ancient bulkheads, now probably sieves, watertight) blowing compressed air into her hull till we had expelled all water down to the upper edges of her now vertical cargo hatches, and hoping that way to get buoyancy enough in her to float her off the bottom, still lying on her starboard side so she would not spill out all our precious compressed air as she rose. From the dimensions of her which Ankers gave me, and the best guesses I could make of the probable sizes of her cargo hatches, her own weight, and the weight of her cargo, it figured out there might be a fighting chance. I estimated that about a week’s work by all hands in Ankers’ party should put us in position to try a lift with compressed air. So Ankers and his men, working off floats moored over the Spahi, turned to. Captain Harding meanwhile started to rig the King Salvor for a rather unusual towing job, that of a vessel to be towed while on her side. And Lieutenant Reitzel turned to on raking up all the portable air compressors he could find in Oran, no matter who owned them. We should need a great deal of compressed air. I left the salvage shack with Lieutenant Reitzel to go back to Oran. It was raining as usual, a cold, dismal rain. Alongside the stone quay near by, the
King Salvor was moored. A little farther out, a few broken steel plates barely showing above water marked the remains of the Hartland and her still entombed dead. In one way, it wasn’t a bad location for that salvage shack quartering Ankers’ men. Almost a hop, skip, and a jump from it were wrecks enough, including the Spahi, to suit anybody. No diver was ever going to get rich on portal to portal pay going from his bunk to his job. Lieutenant Reitzel had an ancient, low-slung French roadster, looking like an ex-racing car, which somehow he had finessed for the salvage party. We crawled under its canvas top into the bucket seats, to find the watersoaked canvas above literally resting on our caps. Reitzel got the contraption underway, quite a tricky accomplishment with everything wet, and we started to drag through the deep mud down Môle Ravin Blanc to a paved road some hundreds of yards away. We made it. I studied Lieutenant William Reitzel curiously as we went along the waterfront. Working with a salvage party was the last place I might have expected to find an officer of his type—he was slight, somewhere around thirty-five years old, obviously a student, certainly never trained in engineering or mechanics, or for that matter, even in seamanship. Reitzel, I had learned from Ankers, was a volunteer addition to his salvage party, on a somewhat informal basis. Lieutenant Reitzel had come to North Africa, not for salvage work for which he had no training at all, but as a naval intelligence officer, for which by education and temperament he was extremely well fitted. Oran, after its capture, was an excellent spot for intelligence work, with its intrigues, its communists, its Vichyites, its location close to totalitarian controlled Spain and Spanish Morocco on the one side and to the fighting line on the other, offering splendid opportunity to Nazi espionage agents, far superior to much publicized Tangier or Casablanca. Lieutenant Reitzel, with his exceptional knowledge of French, had turned to whole-heartedly on it on his arrival with the invading forces. However, through no fault of his own, he had promptly come a cropper. Unfortunately for him, he was in the American Navy, and once Algeria was taken, intelligence work was no longer any part at all, apparently, of our naval interest or function there. All responsibility for intelligence work, of which there was still great need, was left to the British who already had a wellestablished Mediterranean network, or to our Army which had done the preliminary intelligence work for the invasion (I’affaire Giraud was one of its
fruits) and was presumably now spreading its system of army agents ashore. In rather blunt terms, Lieutenant Reitzel, U.S.N.R., had been told to forget it and find something else to interest himself in. That had been quite a blow to Reitzel and he still did not wholly believe it. With all the intrigue about, to tell a trained intelligence officer that he must take no notice, was, I suppose, like trying to convince a quivering pointer in a stubble field full of quail that it was to do no pointing. At any rate, he had as philosophically as possible looked about Oran at what activities the Navy still had an interest in. He had then volunteered to help Ankers who badly needed help in his contacts with the French, where Reitzel’s knowledge of French could be very useful. So there was Lieutenant Reitzel at my side in his shaky French rattletrap roadster (itself in the circ*mstances concrete proof of his ability to get results), an impromptu salvage officer. We bumped along a terribly worn-out French pavement fronting the quays, with Reitzel weaving his car cautiously in and out amongst a series of waterfilled potholes, trying to avoid dropping a wheel into one of them. In between potholes, Reitzel told me of what he had learned in his early intelligence work regarding the personalities of the French higher command. In return, I suggested to him leads which might profitably be explored in looking for air compressors—contractors and road builders preferably, though the road we were on gave very little encouragement to the idea that road builders still existed around Oran. Reitzel nodded seriously, taking mental notes. We came finally to the head of the harbor, like the rest of it studded with sorry looking smokestacks and masts sprouting directly from the water, and swung sharply left toward the steep incline (fortunately with its paving in better condition) leading up the side of the cliff to the city above. To our right lay Fort Lamoune, still French manned; to our left the wide road with heavy streams of trucks, mostly military, ascending or descending and having great difficulty in avoiding skids on the very slippery pavement. It struck me that if the temperature got only a little colder and the never-ceasing rain froze on that slope, Eisenhower would find his army as effectually blocked off by land from Oran harbor as by water owing to the Spahi. But perhaps it never actually froze there in the winter—it merely felt as if it were momentarily on the verge of it. Or most likely the trouble lay wholly in my shivering self—any temperature much less than the 130 ° or 140 ° F. of Massawa probably felt near freezing to me.
We managed to get safely up the long slope into the city, where Reitzel deposited me at the Grand Hotel, and circling the Place de la Bastille, himself set out in search of air compressors. I pushed my way past the sentries outside to the lobby crowded mainly with army officers, ignored the antediluvian hydraulic elevator which offered a lift service so slow and occasional as to be worthless (no down service was permitted), and climbed three flights of stairs to my unheated room. There, first making sure I was safe from intrusion by locking the door, I cautiously removed from my raincoat pocket a 60-watt light bulb I had just acquired from Ankers’ salvage stores at Môle Ravin Blanc and with a somewhat guilty feeling substituted it for the 25-watt electric bulb which (by courtesy) illuminated my room. I had work to do and needed light enough at least to make out the markings on my slide rule. Then I turned to in earnest on calculating buoyancies on the Spahi.
CHAPTER
12 MY FIRST WEEK IN ORAN MOVED briskly along. We had some night air raid alarms and a few bombs but no damage. Evidently the Nazis had enough targets more favorably located closer to their home fields in Tunisia to bother sending major bombing squadrons over Oran. They raided us just enough to keep ack-ack batteries pinned down in Oran which would have caused them more trouble if sent further east. Oran very obviously they intended to take care of in other ways. The first intimation of this came a few days after my arrival. Into the naval harbor of Mers-el-Kebir limped at slow speed the fast British mine-layer, H.M.S. Manxman, with a sizable hole in her port side. She had just been torpedoed by a U-boat off Oran. Fortunately for her, the torpedo must have been making practically a surface run, for the hole was close to her waterline where it did the least damage. Even more fortunately, it was fairly well aft, leaving her vital machinery spaces and engines intact so she could still steam. Evidently the Manxman’s skipper was the darling of the gods, for an even more astonishing bit of luck had attended her torpedoing. The exploding torpedo had taken the port side mine track and mine passage just above the point of explosion and made hash of them—a smashing jolt which inevitably should have detonated every one of the long string of powerful naval mines stowed on that track, and torn the Manxman into shreds. Probably that was why the canny U-boat captain had fired high and aimed at that spot instead of at the normally more inviting machinery spaces farther forward. But the Manxman happened to have had not a single mine aboard—she had just laid all her deadly eggs before returning to Oran! It must have been a very much nonplused U-boat captain who, peering through his periscope, saw the mine-layer Manxman, instead of disintegrating as expected, calmly steam off before he could get in another shot! There wasn’t anything we could do for the Manxman in Oran—we had no
steel plates as yet to patch the hole in her. But she didn’t need much. While down a little by the stern from the flooded compartments there, she was still safely afloat. She could steam, and she could go back to England under her own power where permanent repairs could be made. So after we had shored some bulkheads below to make sure they didn’t give way on her passage, she departed for home, with every seaman watching her go, hoping that when his turn came, he might be blessed with as much luck. The Manxman gave me cause for plenty of thought. My orders from Admiral Cunningham made me responsible for all ships torpedoed or bombed at sea and needing help, as well as for the harbors. But with what? There was a long coast to cover; I had only the King Salvor, a very slow ship, to handle anything with. I made sure that Captain Harding at least kept up enough steam to cast off instantly should he get orders. To my gratification I found my concern was unnecessary. Like a good salvage man, that was exactly what already he was doing—from Andy Duncan, Chief Engineer, to Jock Brown, 4th Engineer, his engine room officers (all Scotch, of course) were ready and rarin’ to go. We had not long to wait. The British vice admiral commanding afloat, with U-boats operating on his doorstep, undertook to meet the menace. He sent immediately to sea a flotilla of British destroyers, all fitted with Asdic, the highly secret British underwater submarine detection device, on a search for what U-boats were lurking off Oran. A day went by. Then next day, December 10, the searching flotilla found the U-boat, but in an undesired manner. In the late morning I got word that in code, a radio message from the destroyer flotilla commander had been received in Oran: “H.M.S. Porcupine torpedoed port side in engine room, completely disabled and sinking. Position Lat. 36° 05’ N., Long. 00 ° 20’ W. Am attempting to take her in tow for Oran.” Evidently the hunter had become the quarry. Asdic or no Asdic, the U-boat captain had got home the first torpedo, and might well get in more before it was over. With a stricken destroyer to be taken care of by her sisters, the advantage now lay on his side. In a few minutes I was in the office of the American Port Commandant at the head of the harbor, poring over charts with Captain Ansel, Captain Lewis, and Commander Andrews, all of Admiral Bennett’s staff. Hurriedly we plotted the
position given. It was almost due north of Cape Carbon to the eastward of us and something over thirty miles by sea from Oran. I did some hasty mental calculating. A torpedoed destroyer in a seaway could hardly be towed faster than three knots. It would take ten hours yet at that speed to get her to Oran. No destroyer with a torpedo hit in her engine room and reported as sinking was likely to remain afloat ten hours. Was there any port or even any land closer to her than Oran? There was. About fifteen miles south from the position of the sinking Porcupine lay the little harbor of Arzeu, just eastward of Cape Carbon and the closest point of land to her where a destroyer could even be beached. If only she could be kept afloat five hours more, she might make Arzeu. There we had a small naval base subsidiary to Oran and twenty-five miles from it by road. The problem was to keep the Porcupine afloat for that five hours. I grabbed my cap, told Captain Ansel I was on my way to Arzeu overland, the quickest way to get there. I asked him to have Admiral Bennett request the British to order the destroyer towing the Porcupine to change course and head for Arzeu —under no conditions to try to make Oran. And finally I asked Ansel to see that the American Base Commander at Arzeu had an MTB (a British Motor Torpedo Boat, similar to our PT’s, and very fast) waiting at the quay for me to take me to sea to board the Porcupine. Then I dashed down the stairs from the office to the quay below. Waiting there for me was an army jeep, which Lieutenant Reitzel had the day before persuaded the Army to assign for my personal use as Principal Salvage Officer. Along with it went a colored sergeant assigned as driver. I jumped in alongside him, ordered him to make knots for the King Salvor, a mile and a half way away at the other end of the harbor. He did. We ran alongside the King Salvor at the quay with our horn shrieking to get quick attention aboard her. We got it. Captain Harding came tumbling down from his cabin to meet me at the rail almost before the jeep jerked to a stop there. “Where’s Ankers?” I asked. Harding motioned toward the harbor. A quarter of a mile away on the floats, I could make out Ankers with some of his divers down, working on the Spahi. It would be an hour at least before he could safely break enough men away to do me any good, or even safely leave them and come ashore himself. I gave that up. “Who’s ashore of that party?”
“Ensign Aldrich and a storekeeper, there in the shack, Captain,” Harding replied. “What’s up?” “The Porcupine’s torpedoed and sinking, skipper,” I explained hurriedly. “They’re trying to get her into Arzeu before she goes down. No use sending out the King Salvor. That destroyer ’d be gone before you could ever get there. She’s probably gone anyway unless something’s done quick. I’m starting overland to board her from Arzeu and see if there’s anything’ll keep her afloat till she gets in. I’ll be aboard her in an hour. Got a good man I can take along to lend me a hand?” “There’s Jock Brown,” he suggested, indicating his Fourth Engineer, who along with most of his deck force was lining the King Salvor’s port rail, listening eagerly. “He’s good!” “O.K., Captain.” I was willing to take Harding’s word for it. “Hop aboard here, Jock,” I sang out to Brown. “Just as you are. We’re getting underway!” Brown, clad in khaki, cased in his raincoat, hurdled the gunwale to the quay, started to wiggle past me into the back seat of the jeep. The driver began to set his multitudinous levers to back clear. I had one more concern. “Harding,” I ordered, “tell Ensign Aldrich to get a big army truck, load it with all the portable salvage pumps you can give him off the King Salvor, get himself a dozen men, a couple of divers and their rigs, and start for Arzeu as soon as he’s loaded.” The sergeant jammed home the last lever, let in the clutch, the jeep started to back away from the quay. “And tell Aldrich to wait for me on the quay at Arzeu, ready to work the minute the Porcupine comes in —if she ever does!” I shouted as the jeep hauled away. Captain Harding waved he understood. We bounced down the harbor road, up the incline, through the city traffic of Oran, and out on the open highway to the eastward with no stops for anything. That colored sergeant knew not only his driving but his M.P.’s—all of them waved us along. We raced for thirteen miles through the countryside, then through the village of St. Cloud in whose main (and only) street a column of our infantry advancing on Oran on D-day morning had been trapped and heavily machine gunned by the “friendly” French from the thick-walled houses still pock-marked by our return fire. Finally after some eight miles more of open road we reached our destination. In thirty minutes all told, we were in Arzeu, scene of the major Army landings on November 8 for the assault on Oran. The jeep squealed to its first stop since leaving the King Salvor’s side, in
front of the stone building housing the local Port Commandant’s office. Lt. Comdr. Dickey, who had gone through hell on the Hartland, now in charge at Arzeu, was waiting for us in front of his office. He jumped on the running board to guide us. We threaded our way along the Arzeu waterfront to the massive Grand Quay, which like every quay in every French port, great or small, was built of heavy masonry, apparently intended to last down the ages. Alongside the quay, engines running, lay the MTB I had asked for. Thanking Dickey and asking him to take care of Ensign Aldrich’s party due to arrive in a few hours, Jock Brown and I jumped from the jeep to the MTB, which immediately cast off. With over a thousand horsepower pushing on that quivering 70 foot hull, we roared out of Arzeu harbor, throttles full out, and headed north into the Mediterranean. Three miles out we cleared the rocky point of Cape Carbon. No longer sheltered by its lee, we met a fresh breeze and a choppy sea with waves running some four feet high. The MTB began to pound heavily as she smashed into it, still at full power. I looked glumly down from the low hull to the waves alongside—such a sea, while nothing to an undamaged destroyer, might well break in two and finish off the weakened Porcupine laboring through it in tow, even if somehow she managed not to sink first still in one piece. It was a little past one o’clock in the afternoon on a typical winter ’s day off the Algerian coast—dull, overcast skies, a chill wind, a gray sea running moderate whitecaps which would make it difficult to spot a U-boat periscope and its fine feather of foam. The solitary offset to all this was that it didn’t happen to be raining and the visibility was good—a real advantage I decided when a few miles further along through my binoculars I first made out masts on the horizon ahead with a large patrol plane circling low above them. So long as daylight lasted, that plane would be a great help in spotting the U-boat periscope, and perhaps even the barely submerged U-boat itself, if it came in for another attack on the handicapped flotilla. It was startling how fast our racing MTB raised above the horizon the hulls beneath the mastheads we had first sighted. We were swiftly in the midst of them, to see one destroyer at high speed zigzagging constantly about two others which seemed barely to be moving. And now even disregarding the fact that she was the one being towed, it took no high I.Q. to distinguish which of this last pair at opposite ends of a long towline, was the Porcupine. Even from some distance, it was evident she was in a bad way; close aboard it seemed astonishing the wallowing Porcupine didn’t roll over and sink any
second, for her stern was awash, she had a terrible list to starboard, and next to no freeboard left amidships on that side. That list to starboard both puzzled me and caused me some delay as my MTB slowed down to starboard of her, and started to circle round to land me there as I had ordered. We had purposely made our approach down the starboard side of the tow, expecting to find that the high side and the Porcupine heeled down to port, which was the side on which the radio message had reported her torpedo damage. However, someone had apparently blundered; she must have been hit to starboard instead. It was obvious we had better not attempt laying the little MTB alongside the Porcupine’s heeled down side, if for no better reason than that it was highly undesirable to be on that side should she roll over while the MTB was there, as seemed probable. The British sub-lieutenant commanding her looked dubiously from the Porcupine’s starboard side to me. I was about to suggest to him that I had changed my mind and that he keep on past the destroyer ’s stern before he made his turn, when I heard an officer on the destroyer ’s bridge bellowing to us through a megaphone to keep off their starboard side. That made it unanimous. The sub-lieutenant reversed his helm, came back to his original course for perhaps half a minute longer. Clear then of the Porcupine’s stern, he started a wider circle to bring him up on her port side, parallel to her course, and fairly close aboard. We swung round astern of her, crossed her wake, and started to head back in the same direction as the destroyer was going, sheering gradually in towards her port side and easing the engines to dead slow to avoid overrunning her. Owing to the starboard list, her port side was very high out of water, exposing her bilge keel, and except near the stern, making her difficult to board from the low deck of an MTB. I spotted a wide “Abandon Ship” scramble net hanging down her port side right abaft her bridge in way of the smokestack and was about to indicate we should come alongside there, when my eyes traveling further aft, I saw after all she had been torpedoed to port. Practically amidships and a little abaft that scramble net, for a considerable distance the port side of the Porcupine just wasn’t there any more! That exploding torpedo, running deep evidently, had done a terrific job. From the line of her shattered deck, now high above the sea, down to the water, there was a gaping cavern in the Porcupine’s port side some twenty feet or more long, with the waves washing freely in and out the vast hole as she rose and fell in the seaway. It seemed miraculous that that destroyer, even though
she was a very new and a large one, around 1900 tons, should still be afloat at all. Without any word of caution to him about it being necessary to take it gingerly, the sub-lieutenant made his approach on the Porcupine, with Jock Brown and me at his starboard rail, ready to leap from his deck for the scramble net the instant he came close enough. I warned the MTB skipper to sheer his craft away the moment we had jumped, lest impact with his boat rising and falling in the waves alongside, be the last straw wanting to break the Porcupine’s back. He nodded acquiescence. With some six feet of water still between the two vessels, we jumped together to land on all fours in the scramble net, catching its heavy rope meshes with both hands and feet and very much helped by the circ*mstance that the destroyer ’s high sloping side was heeled sharply away from us. Some British seamen above, rushing to stand by with lines and life preservers should we miss our grip, now dropped them as unnecessary and lent us a hand to help drag us over the port gunwale on to the destroyer ’s oil-covered deck while the MTB sheered off, never having made contact. The Porcupine’s captain, Commander George Scott Stewart of the Royal Australian Navy (as I soon learned), hurried to meet us at the rail. Like most Australians, he was a big chap, but one glance at him showed he was nearly as much on his last legs as was his ship. His eyes were sunken, his face haggard and deeply lined, his uniform streaked with oil and water. In a moment we were joined by his Chief Engineer. Between the two of them, they swiftly informed me of their situation. The torpedo some hours before had caught them low squarely in the middle of the engine room, a perfect shot. They had made no contact before by Asdic with any U-boat; they had seen no track of the torpedo. Neither had any of their sister destroyers. Nor had any Asdic contact been made since by anybody in the flotilla in spite of a very thorough underwater search by their sisters backed by the certain knowledge that there was a U-boat very close aboard. After an hour ’s fruitless search, seeing she was still afloat, one of her sisters had taken her in tow while the other had continued about as guard, and best of all, a British patrol plane had come out to watch from overhead. Where the U-boat was, nobody knew. But it must still be close, regardless of whether its future intentions were to escape or to attack again, for being compelled willy-nilly to stay submerged, it could not have traveled very far from its point of attack, and they hadn’t either. Most likely it was close about,
looking for a favorable chance to evade the circling destroyer and sneak in another shot at them or at their sister towing, both of them now practically sitting ducks, unable to maneuver. So much for the U-boat, from which at any instant we might expect another torpedo—the only reason Stewart could see it hadn’t come already was that the U-boat captain saw no need as yet to expend another torpedo on him. His ship, he continued, as I could see, was in desperate condition. The explosion had completely torn away his port side amidships and his bottom, and instantly deprived him of all power and light. His port engine, the heavy high pressure turbine there, with no foundation any longer under it, had simply dropped through the hole in the bottom of the ship and sunk. That, I saw, explained the puzzling fact of the starboard list instead of a port heel—with such a heavy weight gone from the port side, the unbalanced ship had no option but to heel immediately to the opposite side. And she had. He had lost his whole engine room watch below at the time of the accident. Not one man had got out alive. The blast of the exploding torpedo had killed them all, but if it hadn’t the result was the same anyway. What was left of the engine room was wholly flooded all the way across the ship from port to starboard, and looking down through the deck hatches into it, a few dead engineers could be seen just under water trapped amongst broken pipe lines and machinery. The others were invisible, probably caught even lower down. Very somberly, Stewart told me he hoped the explosion had killed them all outright and at least saved them the agony of being drowned somewhat more slowly trapped amongst the wreckage or, worse still, of being cooked by escaping steam till the water rose over them. When he and his Chief Engineer, Lt. Comdr. Robert Bartley, R.N. (for Stewart’s crew, except for himself, were all Royal Navy as was his ship), had seen, immediately after the explosion, that their ship promised to stay afloat even a few minutes, they had turned to with the remainder of their crew to see if they could save her. Left helpless without any power and with all the ship’s pumps submerged in the engine room, there was little they could do, but that little they had tried. Forward and aft of the shattered engine room they had closed all watertight doors and hatches, hoping in spite of the bad list, the damage amidships, and numerous leaks aft, that the ship might hold together and they might keep her afloat till they were towed in. But the situation had grown increasingly hopeless in the hours following. Water steadily coming into the after compartments had sunk the stern lower
and lower till now it was awash. The list to starboard had continuously increased, apparently increasing the leakage in proportion. With the vessel still from four to five hours away from port, it seemed unlikely now she would last till she got in. And they dared tow no faster or the ship, almost broken in two and already working badly in the open sea, would certainly break in half. And that was it, Commander Stewart concluded soberly. They had had already some terrible hours, he and his crew were badly exhausted, all hands fully expected to be torpedoed again. But they were still perfectly willing to fight for their ship and had no thought of abandoning her till she went from under them. If there was anything further I could suggest, they would gladly tackle it. But Stewart’s bitter disappointment was evident enough, though not expressed, that after all his desperate struggle to keep his ship afloat till help came, he saw his ship boarded by two men only, outfitted with nothing but their bare hands, when unquestionably he had expected a fully equipped salvage ship, loaded with pumps and jammed with fresh seamen, to come racing to his aid. I saw no point, however, in adding to his depression by telling him that neither his country nor mine had provided any such ship; that the only ship I did have was so slow that she could arrive only after he had sunk, and rather than engage in any useless gestures, I had not bothered to send her out, coming instead myself with Brown the fastest way. So I told him only that Brown and I would first look around, then do what we could to help. Ordering his engineer officer, Lt. Comdr. Bartley, to do whatever I said, Commander Stewart went back to his bridge to keep in touch with his lookouts and his gun crews for whatever good they might do in warding off another attack, while I took Bartley and started aft to see for myself. Getting aft on the Porcupine was not simple. The deck was listed and fouled with heavy black oil blown from ruptured fuel tanks below by the blast, making footing very unsure. Amidships, the port side had to be avoided, for the deck plating there was buckled up and fractured all the way to the fore and aft center line. Even to starboard (on which side we passed aft) the deck plating was badly corrugated, and what little I could see of the starboard side shell plating still showing above water, was corrugated also. It gave me an eerie feeling as I passed over it, to see those steel corrugations working like an accordion there amidships, as that precariously held together destroyer rose and fell in the sea. Once past the damaged section, Bartley, Brown, and I hastily clambered up
the sloping deck to the high side again, for a little aft the waves were already lapping over the starboard gunwale onto the deck. We wiggled by a multiple torpedo tube mount, still with all its torpedoes in it, then continued aft to port outboard of the after deckhouse. Atop that, I noted the gun crews all in lifepreservers, at action stations ready at their loaded guns. But I knew as well as they, this was hardly more than a morale-building gesture—against a submarine attacking submerged, guns are next to worthless. Only rapid maneuvering and the dropping of depth charges are of any value and the wounded Porcupine was now helpless to do either. Being literally now in the same boat with them, however, I had some inkling of the nervous strain they were under. Perhaps I felt it even a trifle more, for if another torpedo came, they at least would be on the topside in the clear while I, most likely, would for a while be below where a life-preserver would do me very little good. “Down here, Captain,” said Bartley, a much chunkier individual than his skipper, indicating through a door in the deck-house, a ladder leading below. “There’s our trouble.” I squeezed through the deckhouse door, looked down, lighting the space below with my flashlight. I was looking down into the destroyer ’s wardroom, forward and aft of which apparently were the officers’ staterooms. I went some steps down the ladder for a better view. The deck below me was flooded, deep on the starboard side, shallower to port, with the whole surface covered by a thick layer of black oil. On the ship’s center line, the water seemed as yet only about three feet deep, not too deep for wading. So followed by Bartley and then by Brown, I descended the rest of the way down the ladder, to find myself in water not quite to my hips. That oil-covered water felt rather messy; to make matters worse, the surface was dotted with oil-soaked pillows, mattresses, and other debris floating out the stateroom doors to swash about aimlessly. I flashed my light forward. There was a long passage there, terminating in some storerooms forward, with, so Bartley told me, the ship’s main fuel oil tanks beneath those storerooms. I started forward up the passage, with the water shoaling as I went, for the ship was decidedly down by the stern. By the time I brought up against a solid bulkhead which stopped me, the deck in the passage was dry. “That’s the after side of the engine room bulkhead, Captain,” Bartley volunteered. “She’s all flooded for ’d of that. And the main fuel tanks are right under us.” I swung my light over the after side of that thin steel bulkhead, all that lay
between the engine room wide open to the sea, and us in the foundering stern. But the trifling leaks showing in that bulkhead could never account for all the water already in the stern and still coming in. Possibly somehow the oil tanks below us were ruptured and acting as passages to admit water aft. I turned my light downward. The deck we stood on looked intact; to starboard and port in it were two dogged down manholes, which the Chief Engineer said led to the fuel tanks below. Seeing that the manholes showed no signs of leakage, which should occur if the tanks underneath were now open to the sea and under any pressure, I suggested to Bartley we slack the covers a bit to check, and if the manholes then showed no leaks, we open them to make sure. Bartley had a wrench. Using it very cautiously, Jock Brown slacked off the starboard cover a bit, ready instantly to drive it tight again should oil spurt out. Nothing happened. We slacked a little more. Still no leak. Assured by that, we slacked the manhole off completely, opened it, looked down into the tank. It wasn’t more than two thirds full. There couldn’t be any particular leak into the starboard fuel tank anyway, or the oil in it would have been pressed hard up against the deck by the entering water. We secured the starboard manhole. In the same way we tried the port manhole, even more cautiously if that were possible, for that was on the side of the exploding torpedo and more likely to be ruptured. But it wasn’t; like the starboard tank it also was only partly full. We resecured the port manhole. Rather puzzled now I looked at Bartley. Water was certainly coming into the stern; he assured me it had risen several feet the last hour, since before that the port side of the wardroom had been free of water altogether. Where then was it coming from? Very evidently it was not coming through the after engine room bulkhead, either above the deck on which we stood, nor through the fuel oil tanks below that deck. The Chief Engineer couldn’t tell me. But I judged that if the water rose two more feet in the next hour, the ship would either sink or lose all stability and capsize, and probably very suddenly with no warning at all. An hour was the outside limit we had in which to do something effective. We sloshed back aft through debris and increasingly deep water to the wardroom. There, immersed in the oil-covered flood to our waists, we stopped for another look around. To starboard, the water was deep; probably over our heads. To port, of course, it was much shoaler. From what I could see by flashlight of the port side, there was no damage through which water was entering, yet entering it certainly was from somewhere and fast enough soon to end everything.
Three miserable-looking figures now, there in the half-flooded wardroom of the sinking Porcupine, Bartley, Brown and I stood in the darkness amongst the floating debris, flashing our lights all about, to starboard, to port, aft, forward, even overhead at the deck beams, looking for any signs of those fatal leaks. Brown’s practiced eyes lighted on something unusual; he took me by the shoulder and twisted me first to starboard, then to port, to look. On each side, port and starboard a few feet off the center line, as he focused his flashlight on the oily surface, was a slight circular eddy in the oil, resembling a moderate spring bubbling up from below. Their symmetrical arrangement off center suggested something to me; I asked Bartley what was below those eddies. The Chief Engineer first flashed his light about the wardroom to check the locations, then answered, “Those are the manholes on the access trunks leading down to the port and starboard shaft alleys. It’s a wiper ’s job once a watch to go down those trunks and oil the spring bearings on the propeller shafts. But those manhole covers are always dogged down when we’re underway, except while the wiper ’s below inspecting. They’re closed now.” Jock Brown, an engineer himself, promptly pushed into the deeper water to starboard, then into the shallower water to port, to check by feeling around below with his feet. He nodded; both the manholes were closed as Bartley had said. But still there wasn’t any question; closed or not, those eddies showed water was coming up through both manholes. Those were the leaks we were looking for, and very likely the only leaks, for the shaft alleys to which they gave access there in the stern led forward port and starboard directly into the flooded engine room and very low down. Water from the engine room must be coming under considerable pressure through the bulkhead stuffing boxes, intended to make a watertight joint round the propeller shafts, but now undoubtedly badly damaged and no longer watertight. That water was flooding both the shaft alleys and then rising under heavy pressure through the leaking manhole covers into the stern to flood it. If we could stop that water, we could save the ship! Bartley sang out to the seamen peering down from the deck above for someone to pass him a hammer. In a moment it came down. Jock Brown seized it, passed me his flashlight, closed both his eyes tightly, disappeared bodily through the oil-covered water to starboard, doubled himself over the manhole
there, feeling in the blackness for the dogs holding it down. Muffled by the water, we heard the clang of his hammer driving the steel dogs up hard, battening down that hatch for a full due. Then he burst back through the surface, a terrible sight, soaked through, slimy with black oil, half-blinded with what oil had got into his eyes in spite of their being tightly closed. Brown leaned back against the ladder to get his breath, wiped his eyes as well as possible with some waste I gave him, then gasped, “That manhole’s as tight now as it’ll ever get, Captain. Every dog’s hammered hard home!” He paused for several deep breaths, then added, “I’ll do the other one in a minute.” But he had no need. Bartley took the hammer from him, himself floundered through the water to the port eddy. Fortunately, with the water there not so deep, the Chief Engineer was submerged only to his chin when he doubled over to feel for the dogs and then drove them up till they hit the stops and would drive no more. At that, he straightened up, from his neck down as much a mess as Brown. As soon as the roiled oil and water had settled enough to make an observation possible, I flashed my light hopefully to where the eddies had been, port and starboard. My heart sank. There were both eddies again, so far as I could judge, bubbling about as much as ever. We hadn’t accomplished much, though now for certain we knew the manhole covers were dogged down as hard as possible. But they were still leaking. “What’s the matter with those manhole covers, Chief?” I asked dully. “Gaskets gone?” “No, Captain,” said Bartley gloomily, looking at those rippling eddies which were spelling out the doom of his ship, “they’re just too light to stand much. I felt the one I worked on; it’s bulging up from the water pressure under it. It’s too thin for the job.” I nodded. I understood, all right. Destroyers were rightly enough slangily denominated as “tin cans.” To save weight they were built practically of paperthin steel. At points where the designer thought he could get away with it, he went even farther and used practically tissue-paper thinness. Here on these manhole covers he had guessed wrong, and the tissue-paper just wasn’t taking it. Those too thin manhole covers were going to cost Britain and her Allies a badly needed destroyer. Bleary-eyed Jock Brown and oil-smeared Robert Bartley gazed dismally at the eddying surfaces sharply spot-lighted in the gloom by our flashlights.
Damn the designer of that destroyer anyway! Such a little thing to lose a ship over. Ten pounds more of steel on those two hatches and the ship would have been safe! “Well,” I said, “we haven’t stopped those leaks much. There are only two things now’ll save her, either pumps to keep ahead of this leakage, or shores to stop it. Jock, you get on deck, get together with the ship’s carpenter, and see if you can rig some wedges and a couple of shores to hold those bulging manhole covers down and maybe choke off the leaks; partly, anyway. And you, Chief, come with me while we look into the pump situation.” I had noted a hand-operated little handy-billy pump on deck as we went below. Perhaps if the destroyer had enough of them, we might by vigorous hand pumping manage to hold her stern up till we got her in. I went up the ladder on to the open deck, to blink momentarily in the daylight above till I got used to it. Brown and Bartley followed me. Oil-soaked and dripping from the waist down, I looked a wreck, but compared now to either Brown or Bartley, I was Beau Brummell himself. Jock Brown started in search of the carpenter. Bartley and I looked at the handy-billy. It had already been in use, but had clogged with debris and quit. Some seamen had dismantled it, cleaned it out, and it was about ready to go again. The suction hose was dropped again into the wardroom, a seaman this time sent down to keep debris as clear of the strainer as possible. Two other sailors on the handles started pumping vigorously. The handy-billy swiftly caught a suction and started to discharge. I turned away in disgust. Such a piddling stream was coming from the handy-billy as to be ludicrous on a sinking ship if it had not been tragic. Possibly a dozen of those little hand-operated pumps might be of some good in keeping up with the water—one was worthless. “Got any more?” I asked Bartley. He shook his head glumly, “No; one’s our allowance.” “Got anything else at all on this bucket in the way of a portable pump?” I queried in desperation. Bartley nodded. “There’s a portable electric-driven centrifugal pump we’re running now off our emergency diesel generator,” he replied. “But that’s already in use forward. We’ve got it down with the boilers on the other side of the flooded machinery spaces, taking care of the leakage coming through into the
stokehold from the engine room right aft of it.” My heart literally leaped. An electric-driven portable pump aboard and emergency power available to drive it! Why wasn’t it aft on the sinking stern where obviously it was most needed? Why hadn’t it been mentioned to me before? But this was no time for argument or discussion. I ran forward, disregarding the dangerous going, singing out to Bartley behind me, “Come on, Chief! I want to see that pump and those leaks forward!” Still running, I came abreast the boiler room hatch near the smokestack, just forward of the flooded engine room, clambered hurriedly down through the double-doored airlock, then down again on the steep vertical ladder to the fireroom floorplates. In front of me was the after boiler, secured of course, since there was no use for steam. On the floorplates, more alluring to my eyes at that moment than a sight of Aphrodite herself, sat a compact portable pump, beautiful to behold! And running too, on that otherwise dead ship! For on my way down, I had spotted on a platform high up in the boiler room that small diesel-driven emergency generator, big enough to supply the necessary electricity. That destroyer designer, God bless his soul, had at least put some of the weight he had saved by skimping elsewhere, into that heavenly emergency diesel generator and thus to me absolved himself of all his other sins. Here was exactly what I needed! For as I had suspected (from the fact that the bow half of the destroyer must be fully buoyant, being high out of water) the leakage coming forward through the steel bulkhead from the engine room into the boiler room was of no great moment in the circ*mstances. Hastily I sized up the leaks, squirting in fine streams here and there through the strained bulkhead. It would take half a day at least for them seriously to endanger the ship, and that electric portable pump before me was just loafing on the job of keeping the boiler room bilges dry. By then, Bartley had worked himself through the airlock also and was down beside me. “Chief,” I ordered, “get this pump out of here four bells, and get it aft! We won’t even bother with what water leaks into here the next few hours! After that, if we have to, your little handybilly’ll do everything that’s wanted here!” Bartley looked at me dubiously. After all, to any engineer, protecting his boilers from damage is of primary importance. But I didn’t see it that way on the Porcupine. Suppose the water in the fireroom did rise high enough meanwhile to flood his dead fireboxes, soak his firebrick, and ruin the boiler insulation? What of it? Of what use was it to save the boilers intact if in doing
so, we lost the ship, boilers and all? But I sensed the doubt in his eyes and squelched it instantly. “Shake it up now, Chief! There’s no time to lose!” Bartley uttered not a word, turned to comply. After all, his captain had ordered him to do whatever I wanted. What happened now to the boilers was on my head, no longer on his. In a few minutes that pump was shut down, its special electric cable disconnected and hurriedly coiled for shifting, and half a dozen wearied British seamen, as many as could get a hand on it, were mule-hauling that quarter ton of steel and copper up the narrow ladder, through the airlock out of the fireroom, and aft along the treacherously listed deck. Others meanwhile were just as hastily rushing aft the portable electric cable for it, its suction hoses, its strainer and foot-valve, and a length of discharge hose. In not over ten minutes from the time I first sighted it on the fireroom floorplates, that portable pump, lashed to the awash deck aft over the wardroom, was fully hooked up again, its suction line primed with water, and ready to go. “Start her up, Chief!” I sang out. Bartley waved to a stoker stationed far forward over the fireroom. The latter poked his head down the hatch there, told the electrician below to throw in the switch to the. emergency generator. In an instant, the pump was up to full speed, purring smoothly. In another moment, it caught a suction and a fine, solid stream of water, 200 gallons a minute at least, started to shoot out the discharge hose and overboard. I looked at Bartley, Bartley looked at me, and a beatific smile wreathed his oil-smeared face (and mine too, I suppose). That stream would do it; the Porcupine was saved! The next hour proved it so; that is, we were safe at least from sinking or capsizing, though not saved yet either from breaking in two or of being torpedoed again. To help matters aft, Jock Brown, aided by Bartley and the carpenter, got some makeshift shores wedged down on the manholes aft which certainly reduced their bulging and apparently somewhat reduced the leakage through them but didn’t stop it altogether. Still, to my chagrin, the most that electric pump was able to do, in spite of the fine stream of water it was throwing overboard, was to hold the water level about steady. It no longer rose on us, which was the main thing; but it didn’t go down much either, which would have given us some margin of safety.
That I couldn’t understand, since almost certainly we were ejecting water faster than it could possibly be still leaking in through those shored-down manhole covers. But the enigma was shortly resolved for me. A young sublieutenant, hearing me question Bartley on the possibilities of finding and stopping other leaks aft, gave me the answer. “My stateroom, Captain, is below here to starboard. The airport in it can’t be closed tight; it’s always leaked in a storm even when it’s dogged down. Right now it’s submerged. The sea must be just pouring through that airport.” He pointed out to me to starboard the spot below which lay his flooded stateroom. I looked. At that location, the water on deck was a couple of feet deep over the starboard gunwale. His airport in the side of the ship must be at least five feet below the surface. Inside I knew the starboard side staterooms were flooded outboard to the deck beams overhead. There wasn’t a chance in the world, either inside or outside the Porcupine, for any of us to get to that airport to try some emergency method of sealing it off. That now must be the major leak—just a defective airport. Why, I thought bitterly to myself, couldn’t ship’s officers see that at least known defects in watertightness were remedied before their ships went to sea in wartime? But I said nothing; I knew only too well by experience that the same damned carelessness existed in our own Navy. So there we were. We were at least keeping up with the leakage, the stern was no longer sinking, the listing to starboard which shortly would have capsized us, had stopped. It was 3 P.M., we were still about three hours away from safe haven at Arzeu, we had about three hours more of daylight. If now we did not break in half and if we did not get torpedoed again, we should get in while we still had the blessed daylight to give help to that zigzagging destroyer and to a second patrol plane (which had come out to join the first one) in keeping the U-boat off us. If—if—The “if” relating to the U-boat and its torpedoes was wholly outside my control; how about the “if” relating to our breaking in half? I left Bartley and Brown aft to see that nothing happened to that all-important pump, and went myself amidships to watch the working of the fractured Porcupine. I should have stayed aft, where ignorance at least was bliss. I hardly dared breathe as I looked again for the first time in nearly two hours at the damage amidships. She had seemed bad enough before—never had I seen so little left holding together any vessel, and I had seen innumerable blasted ships. But now it seemed to me the cracks from the wholly ruptured deck to port had gone still further through what little corrugated but otherwise intact steel plating yet
remained to starboard on her deck. I watched her work, the bow and the stern halves seeming to rise and fall against the horizon line independently of each other in the seaway, with the corrugated plating holding the parts together opening and closing like a hinge. At that moment, Commander Stewart, coming down from his bridge for a look aft himself, joined me. He already knew, of course, that we had caught up with the leaks aft—the Porcupine was not going to sink or capsize before she got in. He thanked me wholeheartedly, then made a request. “Captain,” he said, his own wan face lending weight to his statement, “my crew’s all done in and half-frozen besides. And the sight of their shipmates there,” he pointed significantly to the dead engineers visible in the water below through the machinery hatch before us, “isn’t helping any. I want to serve out a double ration of rum now to brace them up, and maybe warm them up a trifle too. Any objections?” “Of course not, Commander,” I answered. “I’ll have a shot myself; I’m as wet and cold as anybody. But it’s your ship anyway; why should I object?” “Oh,” he explained, “I thought you understood where the rum’s stowed. That’s the whole point. The rum locker ’s in the lazarette in the fantail. With the wardroom half-flooded, the only way we can get to the rum now is down the after deck hatch into the compartment just abaft the wardroom. That space is free of water; the watertight door between it and the wardroom’s holding fine. Once we’re in that after space, we open a manhole cover in the lower deck there to get into the rum locker below. Seeing how she’s flooded aft, I didn’t want to open that lower manhole into the lazarette without your knowing it.” It was now my turn to exclaim, “Oh!” For but too well I knew that the only real buoyancy aft which was keeping the stern afloat, lay wholly in that unflooded after compartment, in the lower deck of which was the manhole he wished to open to get to the rum. I had already battened down hard the main deck hatch to that after compartment, lest a wave sweeping higher than usual across the awash stern, go down that hatch and sink us. And worse yet, if the lazarette below in which the rum was stowed should be open to the sea and flooded under pressure, either from the shaft alleys or otherwise, and if the manhole cover to the lazarette should get away from them, a geyser of water would shoot upward, promptly flooding the compartment above. The stern would sink like a chunk of lead, and either in one piece or in two the Porcupine would swiftly disappear beneath our feet. I shook my head.
“No, Commander; don’t do it. It’s taking too much of a chance. I’m sorry, but I must object.” Stewart looked keenly disappointed, but said nothing and went aft. I turned back to watching the ship work. The longer I watched, the surer I felt she would never stand it for the three hours longer it would take us to get in. That strain would have to be eased or we should have saved the Porcupine from sinking only to have her break in two on us instead. I looked around. Ahead of us, slowly pitching to the oncoming waves, was our sister destroyer at the far end of both of the Porcupine’s chain cables, shackled together to give the longest possible towline with the greatest possible shock-absorbing qualities, to ease the towing strain. That towline, sagging into the water, was already 240 fathoms long and fairly heavy—nothing further could be done to improve it. I glanced at the sea. The white-capped waves there weren’t any worse than when I had boarded the Porcupine two hours before, but they weren’t any better either. And the waterlogged Porcupine’s condition, always bad, had unfortunately grown even worse till we had that electric pump running aft and stopped further sinking. But more than that was required if the ship, having escaped one fate, was not certainly to fall victim to another. Harsh as the cure might seem to the survivors on the Porcupine, already near the breaking point from long-continued exposure to the imminent danger in the fiery blast of another torpedo of joining the ghastly figures of their shipmates in the engine room before me, still that cure would have to be undertaken. We must slow down—there was no other way out—and not only lengthen out the period of exposure to torpedoing again but, worse even, by the delay in reaching Arzeu, stretch that period of exposure into the oncoming night when our patrolling planes overhead would be useless and the U-boat would have far better opportunity of attacking again with impunity. Commander Stewart, having had a quick look-see aft, came back abreast me. I stopped him. “I’m sorry, Commander, to have to advise this, but I must. You’re making three knots; it’s too much for your ship. Signal the destroyer ahead to slow down immediately to two knots.” Commander Stewart, already haggard and heartsick, winced as if I had struck him. As well as I, he saw instantly all the implications. But he made no complaint. “Aye, aye, sir,” he gulped out, and went forward to his bridge to semaphore
the signal. Hand flags started to wigwag from the port wing of his listed bridge; from far ahead of us, other flags waggled back. In a minute or two, the sagging chain between the two destroyers took a deeper sag—the tow had slowed down by a third. Anxiously over the next few minutes I watched the bow and the stern of the Porcupine rising and falling against the line of the far horizon. It seemed to me the motion had eased as compared to formerly; certainly the corrugations before me on the deck were hinging less than before. There was no certainty even so that they would last through, but at least the chances were better. And thus, to the eye hardly making any headway at all toward the dimly visible shore still some ten miles off, we moved slowly onward towards Arzeu, our haven of safety if we could ever make it. Hour after hour the grotesque procession crawled imperceptibly along over the heaving Mediterranean, with the Porcupine, sickeningly listed, stern awash, stem almost out of water, dragging along far astern of her towing sister, hard put to it to hold down to two knots. Overhead roared the two patrol planes in lazy circles, as slowly as they dared go, depth charges ready to release, sometimes near, sometimes a few miles off, with their pilots and bombardiers scanning the white-capped waves below for any sign of an ominous feather of spray which would denote the U-boat periscope moving in for the kill. And moving irregularly all around, at a speed which made us look as if we were stock still, zigzagged our other sister destroyer, constantly feeling with her high-pitched Asdic beneath the waves, now near the surface, now deeper down, for the hull of that unseen U-boat. Somewhere behind the heavy overcast, the sun, invisible to us, sank at last below the horizon. Twilight came, then darkness. The protecting planes, useless now, for the last time circled low to roar over us waggling their wings in farewell, and vanished into the night. With their passing, silence came as well as darkness to add to our sad state; the roar of those engines in the sky, whether a real protection or not, had been an unutterable comfort to the souls of the worn seamen on the Porcupine below. Now in solitude, in eerie silence, in complete darkness (for no one on deck dared even for an instant press a flashlight button), abandoned by our best protectors, we were left on the slippery deck of the Porcupine, groping blindly each time we took a step on that treacherous slope for something to clutch to keep from sliding overboard. Somewhere, we knew, off in the darkness, completely blacked out herself and invisible to us, our solitary remaining guard still circled, feeling endlessly
beneath the sea with her Asdic for the enemy. But that was slight comfort to any man aboard the Porcupine. The Asdic had not saved her from that first devastating torpedo; what hope then that it would do any better now? Before in the daylight, the hours had seemed endless to us as we dragged along; now in the silence and in the darkness, the minutes seemed like hours. But there was no help for it. Stolidly we clung to whatever was nearest, straining our eyes through the night for some sign of the coast. A shadowy form came from aft, stopped alongside where, shivering in my wet khaki, I clung to the torpedo tube mount, as close as I could get to the hinging deck which I could no longer see. A voice, which I recognized as that of one of the British petty officers who had been tending the pump aft, sounded in my ear, “’Ere, Cap’n, ’ave a drink o’ this. It’ll warm ye up a mite.” Gratefully I fumbled for the proffered cup. Somehow the ship’s cook must have made hot coffee; it would be welcome. But the cup didn’t feel hot when I gripped it; as I brought it to my lips I smelled not hot coffee but, of all things— rum! I was so startled I nearly dropped it. So the skipper had gambled after all on undogging the rum locker! And since there was the rum, he had won the gamble—the lazarette must have been empty of water. I could only conclude that faced by the added terrors of the coming night, he had decided his crew must have a bracer to stand up to it. And there was my share. I thanked the seaman who had brought it, gulped it down, practically a whole cupful. Almost immediately the night seemed less dark and I certainly felt warmer and much better. Perhaps the skipper had been right and I had been too cautious; at any rate, there was no gain in my ever mentioning the subject to him again. Off to starboard, a vague shadow loomed up against the dark horizon; we were abeam Cape Carbon and soon were in its lee. Only three more miles to go! And best of all, with some shelter now from that cape not far off, the sea calmed almost magically, our heaving to it eased perceptibly, and I was able to send word to the skipper on the bridge that he could safely speed the tow up to three knots again. Our second danger was passed; the Porcupine was no longer likely to break in two. I breathed a sigh of deep relief. Now we had left only the U-boat to be concerned over. We started to move appreciably faster through the sea. I had little doubt but that the skipper of the towing destroyer, as much concerned and still as much exposed as we to the sole remaining danger, was construing that three knots
very liberally. I didn’t blame him. The lights of unblacked-out Arzeu started to twinkle through the darkness ahead of us. Safety was almost within our grasp; involuntarily we began to hold our breaths lest that torpedo should come along now after all our struggles, to knock it from our very fingertips. The minutes started to slip by faster, the lights of Arzeu became brighter. In no very great interval, compared to the way the hours before had dragged along, we were only a mile away. Just one more mile and our torture would be ended. The last mile! And then we stopped. I knew we were going to have to stop; so did every other man jack aboard. For it was clear to everyone that such a long tow could not possibly be taken into Arzeu, after all only a small harbor with slight room for maneuver inside. The stop had been prepared for. A trawler was waiting one mile outside Arzeu to pass us a short towline and haul us in on that. Meanwhile we would cast loose that 240 fathoms of anchor chain forming the sea towline, which the destroyer ahead of us was to heave in, recover, and at some later day, deliver again to us. For the Porcupine herself had no power to winch her irreplaceable anchor cables back aboard. Every fathom of them, port and starboard, was paid out in that towline. We stopped. Now came the crucial moment. We were still in deep water a mile offshore, plenty deep enough for U-boat operation. We had hoped before to make that stop in daylight, with both planes and our destroyer circling us to keep off the enemy. But now it had to be made in darkness, the planes were gone altogether, and our protecting destroyer could only weave back and forth well astern of us. In such close waters zigzagging on either beam or ahead of us was out of question. It must, we felt, have been as evident to the U-boat captain as to any of us, that a stop would have to be made to reform the tow before it could enter Arzeu. And that stop would give him his golden opportunity—two destroyers tied together dead in the water as his targets, darkness to work in, and water shallow enough closer inshore to bottom his sub safely after his attack and play ’possum a while to avoid depth charges should the search for him afterwards grow too hot. Perhaps exactly that situation was what he had been waiting for, delaying his attack, playing with us as a cat does with a mouse which darts frantically here and there in its futile efforts. We knew all this. We felt the U-boat captain knew it too. The only thing we could do was to make the stop as brief as possible. All had been prepared. The trawler sidled up in the darkness along our high port bow, caught a heaving
line from our forecastle. Stewart’s seamen there, revived by the rum, animated by the nearness of escape, spurred by the danger, smartly heaved aboard the trawler ’s towline, made it fast. The trawler sheered away, taking a slight strain on the towline, ready to tow instantly we were free of the other towline out ahead. A shielded signal lantern, visible only dead ahead to the destroyer there, flashed out in dots and dashes from the Porcupine’s bridge, signaling our sister to stand by to heave in the cables; we were about to let go. We got an answering flash in acknowledgment. “Let go!” sang out Stewart to his forecastle gang. Back amidships, still at my now useless post over the broken engine room, I caught the order, waited painfully each second following for the rattling of the chain out the hawsepipe which would show we were free, end our torment of being a dead duck, let the trawler (in smooth water now) drag us that last mile through the deep sea into the harbor as fast as God and her engines would let her take us. Not a rattle. The seconds dragged out into minutes, still nothing happened. We lay there, motionless in the darkness. I could stand it no longer. I sloshed through the water to starboard lapping over the submerged gunwale onto the deck, felt my way forward past the smokestack, fumbled in the night for the listing ladder to the bridge, climbed it as hurriedly as I dared. Once on the bridge, I made out several shadowy figures leaning forward, all apparently staring down through the darkness at the forecastle. I looked forward myself; it was, however, next to impossible to make out anything save a few dim forms clustered there, all evidently huddling low just ahead of the anchor windlass. But I could hear plenty-occasional hammer blows and a steady stream of heartfelt British oaths and seagoing curses floated aft to the bridge. Nobody on the bridge had paid the slightest attention to my arrival—it was too dark to see much and besides they were all otherwise engrossed. I picked out the largest shadow in sight—that would be Commander Stewart. “What’s wrong, Commander?” I asked anxiously, shuffling up to him. Stewart turned, looked down, made out who it was. “It’s that bloody shackle!” he cursed. “It won’t come apart! The cable’s out to the bitter end, and it’s our port cable we rarely use that’s on this end of the towline. The last shackle there on deck is rusted and frozen solid! The bosun can’t get it free! He’s sloshed it with oil, soaked it in paraffin, smacked it with the biggest sledge on the ship, but still that God-damned locking pin won’t
drive out!” He paused for breath. I considered. Every second’s delay meant endangering not only ourselves but our undamaged sister, fatally tied to us and unable to get clear till we slipped that cable. I saw only one swift solution; dangerous, yes. If we tried it, we should as instantly expose our position as if we had lighted a flare. But the skipper had already taken one gamble and got away with it. The other dangers warranted his gambling again to get us quickly free. “Get out your acetylene torch, Commander, and burn that chain cable in half! We can’t wait!” “I’d thought of that too, Captain,” muttered Stewart sadly, “but we’ve nothing like a torch aboard. It’s no go; I’ve got to leave it to the bosun and his mates!” “O.K., skipper. But for God’s sake, get ’em to shake it up! This is dangerous!” I turned away, started down the ladder. Stewart said nothing, went silently back to peering down at his cursing men around that shackle. He needed no reminders as to how dangerous that totally unlooked-for delay could be. I went back amidships, to shuttle back and forth over the sloping oily deck from the electric pump alongside the after deckhouse, still smoothly and unconcernedly pushing overboard the sea as fast as it spurted in through our leaks, to the fractured deck over the engine room, where the corrugations, with the ship now stopped and in smooth water, were at last wholly quiescent. Nothing in either spot profited by my solicitude, but I just couldn’t take it any longer standing still. Apparently the destroyer ahead couldn’t either. Shortly a shielded signal lamp, sharply focused on the Porcupine’s bridge to be visible on that line only, started to flicker out through the night in staccato flashes. The Porcupine answered; for a few minutes an animated discussion ensued. I learned the destroyer skipper ahead suggested slipping his end of the cable, thus at least letting him go free to get out of danger. The Porcupine objected—that would leave her with 240 fathoms of her cable, all she had, dangling from her bow and dragging on the bottom, effectively preventing any movement by her at all unless and until she managed to cut it free. She had no power whatever to heave in any of it and thus free herself of the drag on the bottom so she could be towed. If with the other end slipped, she then cut loose her end to free herself for towing, she would lose every shot of both her precious anchor cables. Stewart wouldn’t think of it. Evidently the other skipper saw his logic. Danger in wartime a British
captain apparently accepted philosophically (or at least as philosophically as he could); but the loss of a couple of anchor cables was something obviously not to be thought of with things as scarce in England as they seemed to be. Stewart’s opposite number acquiesced, shut down his signal lamp, hung on. And that left us as before, with the bosun struggling fruitlessly to drive out the locking pin on the frozen shackle. My eyes wandered about in the darkness, from the lights of Arzeu dancing tantalizingly ahead of us to the black waters all about. Was there a U-boat out there somewhere, angling about beneath the surface for a fine shot, waiting only for a careless gleam of light to fix his target for him? We wouldn’t know till an exploding torpedo gave us the answer. There very probably was—the set-up for attack was perfect. Under far worse conditions earlier in the war, Lieutenant Prien had taken his U-boat in the darkness through the defenses of Britain’s main naval harbor, right into Scapa Flow itself. There nonchalantly taking his time, he had selected his target, the super-dreadnought Royal Oak lying in the middle of the whole fleet, and blasted her with a torpedo. Not satisfied with the results of that shot, which had hit forward and consequently might not be fatal, and in spite of the hubbub in the harbor caused by the explosion, he had calmly taken the next twenty minutes to get his U-boat into a position which suited him better. Then he let go with three more torpedoes together, all of which, hitting the already wounded Royal Oak amidships, promptly sank her. After that, Prien and his Uboat had escaped unscathed, leaving British faces as red as ours probably were after Pearl Harbor. It would take no second Lieutenant Prien to dispose of the Porcupine and of her sister, helplessly tied together outside Arzeu. Any run-of-the-mill U-boat captain could do it. And we certainly had somewhere in our vicinity an undetected U-boat captain who already, by daring to attack a flotilla of destroyers looking for him, had demonstrated he was better than run-of-themill. 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 Uboat 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. I looked at it. It was an intelligence report, giving in some detail recent data on what was going on in French circles in Oran, and it certainly waved a red flag respecting actions which denoted a marked lack of enthusiasm in some of the top figures in the French naval command for real co-operation in the Allied cause. I was no intelligence expert, but it seemed important to me. I looked up inquiringly at Reitzel after hastily scanning it. “I wanted your opinion on whether I should turn that in, Captain,” he explained. “I don’t see why not, Reitzel, though that’s no longer your job. If what you say here is true, it looks important to me.” “It’s true, all right,” Reitzel assured me. “It’s O.K. with me then. Turn it in.” “Aye, aye, sir,” said Reitzel. “I’ll send it right along.” We parted, Reitzel in his ramshackle collection of French junk to see about getting the compressors delivered, I in my jeep to do some more work towards setting up at least a semblance of a salvage organization in the ports to the eastward of Oran. Having no other office (and, of course, no yeomen nor other office help at all, nor any typewriter) I turned to in my cramped room at the Grand Hotel on writing longhand letters. First came some instructions and encouragement to Lt. Comdr. White, already among the bombs in Bône and facing a tough task there practically bare-handed. A few British divers had been raked out of the British forces afloat; they should shortly report to him if they hadn’t already. And I was sending him a little other salvage equipment, some from the King Salvor, more that had been arranged for in Algiers to be turned over to him by the Royal Engineers. But it wasn’t much; I could send him mainly only my faith in him and my best wishes till my salvage squadron arrived from the Red Sea and we really had decent equipment to work with. Then more instructions to the other assistants I had picked up. In Algiers, I had been given two young British lieutenants, both earnest enough but of little salvage experience. In Philippeville, I had another British youngster, Lt. Strange, little better off for acquaintanceship with his job but struggling wholeheartedly on it. In Bougie, a bad spot, I had nobody, but I intended to send there the King Salvor’s sister, the Salvestor, whose arrival I was optimistically
expecting any day. At any rate, I could write to my British assistants at Bône, at Philippeville, and at Algiers to let them know they weren’t forgotten and to cheer them a little with the thought of all the salvage gear aboard those three ships circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope from Massawa in the Red Sea. (I never learned till much later that not one of those ships had yet left Massawa and that the first one didn’t even get started till practically January.) By the time I had those letters all written, it was evening and time for dinner. I climbed down a few flights of stairs to the mezzanine to the special dining room run as a mess for the American naval officers stationed in Oran. Dinner, a fairly boisterous event with most of the naval staff present, was the one relief in the usually hectic day, since the conversation, for security reasons due to the French civilian waiters, was always on home (meaning, of course, the girls we’d left behind us, married or unmarried), never the ordinary shop talk of the war either by land or by sea. This evening was no exception, save at its end. As I was leaving the dining room, one of the other captains drew me aside. “Say, Ellsberg, can I talk to you about that intelligence report your Lieutenant Reitzel turned in this afternoon?” “Why, certainly,” I replied. “I gave him permission. I’m no judge, but it looked like hot stuff to me. What about it?” “Just this. Will you tell him he’s to lay off intelligence for good? He’s been warned already; maybe you can make him believe it and keep him out of trouble. Do him a favor and convince him it’s meant, if he wants to stick around here, and maybe avoid a court for disobedience of orders besides. Intelligence is being handled otherwise. Here’s that report he turned in. Mind giving it back to him and telling him he’s to lay off? This is unofficial, but it’s the straight dope from the top down and the last word before the ax falls.” I took the report, thanked him for the tip, promised to convey it and do my best to make Reitzel, over whom I had no actual authority, see it. I climbed the stairs back to my room deeply puzzled. What could there be so different about the ramifications of intelligence that made a serious report, no matter what the source, unwelcome? It was all beyond me. But it was nevertheless perfectly clear Reitzel was going to have to stop or, without any gain to anybody, there’d be trouble both for him and for me—for him, because he’d certainly be shipped home, if nothing worse; and for me, because I’d lose him when he was adaptable enough to be of considerable help to me in many ways in salvage. And heaven alone knew how badly I needed help in every way. Even a freshcaught seaman, 2c, as a messenger boy, would have been highly welcome, and
Reitzel’s capabilities were infinitely above that. I hoped he’d see the light and lay off, difficult as it might be for him with his training to ignore what was going on in Oran under his very nose. Next morning early I caught Reitzel on the quay and passed the word along to him, at the same time returning his report. His face fell. “I’m sorry, Reitzel. I can’t understand it any more than you do, but do me a favor and quit,” I begged. “At least that way you’ll still be able to do your bit with the salvage gang. Otherwise you’ll get nowhere at all and catch it in the neck besides. I’d hate to see that.” Reitzel swallowed the blow, promised me faithfully he’d do nothing more in intelligence, no matter what he learned. We separated, Reitzel to shepherd the hired compressors down to quay, I to board the King Salvor and check Harding’s arrangements to secure them to his deck for use next day. Within two hours, Reitzel had broken his solemn promise to lay off intelligence. He came rushing back to me on the salvage quay, full of what he had put together out of a few stray bits of casual information picked up from some French stevedores, and was pouring it into my ear. Immediately I was boiling with rage, but not at Reitzel, to whom I felt deeply grateful. In a moment, madder than hell, I was on my way to see the American Captain of the Port. For what Reitzel had deduced was that the French Commandant du Port was arranging to bring the French passenger ship Ardois into the inner harbor that afternoon. She was a large but completely empty and light Mediterranean passenger vessel which had been brought from some other minor port to Oran after its capture, and had since been lying there idle with no steam up, moored in the outer harbor. Now the French were preparing that afternoon to tow her through the gap between the Pigeon and the Spahi into the inner harbor for some purpose Reitzel had been unable to learn, but which obviously could not be of any great immediate importance. I was determined it shouldn’t be done. The Ardois was much broader in the beam than any Liberty and required more clearance for safe passage. Besides she was much longer and much higher out of water than the Libertys and consequently considerably more difficult for tugs to handle with any assurance in the tight channel. That any French pilot and the tugs available would bring the Ardois through without hitting something I considered highly unlikely. Whether the Ardois herself got hurt was none of my business, and about what happened to the scuttled Pigeon, I cared even less. But if the Spahi, which we
were preparing to raise within two days, was damaged in her watertightness by collision with the Ardois and we consequently couldn’t raise her, that was my business—it was everybody’s business from General Eisenhower ’s and Admiral Cunningham’s on down. Nobody was going to gamble with our chances of quick removal of the harbor bottleneck stopper, just to get a French passenger ship which hadn’t done anything for months and wouldn’t do anything for months more yet, from the outer to the inner harbor a few days sooner. Let them wait till we had the Spahi out of there—after that the French could take whatever they pleased through; so could anybody—even the Queen Mary could safely pass then. Once again my jeep leaped like a mountain goat from pothole to pothole as it took the bumps racing down the road to the Port Captain’s office at the head of the harbor. Unceremoniously I burst in on him to ask whether he knew if the Ardois were to be shifted inside that afternoon. He looked blankly at me; his office had heard nothing of it. He would inquire. An aide called by telephone the office of the Commandant du Port, in a few minutes reported yes, it was so. But we needn’t concern ourselves; the French were handling the matter themselves completely as she was a French vessel, they were using their own tugs and pilot, and (implied but not so stated) Oran was a French port so why not? He hung up. I explained to the Port Captain, a four-striper very much junior to me, why not. He saw the point, himself called the Commandant du Port, the gentleman who had scuttled everything in the harbor, to request him to wait a few days. There ensued a lively conversation in French, but I suspected my request was falling on very unsympathetic ears. When the Port Captain finally hung up and again turned to me, he confirmed my suspicions. The Commandant du Port refused to delay the movement of the Ardois—all preparations had been made on the ship, with the tugs, with the pilot, at the berth inside the harbor. But we need have no cause for worry; the Commandant du Port had every confidence in his French pilot who had assured him it was easy—there was no danger. I swallowed none of it. I had seen over-confident pilots before strand ships in tight places. In fact, I had learned by sad experience that the more confidence in himself and the less fear of the hidden dangers a pilot exhibited, the less confidence I was entitled to put in his ability to avoid them. I told the Port Captain it wouldn’t do, I wasn’t having any part in gambles. As he was as Port Captain responsible for ship movements, he must stop it. He could go to Rear
Admiral Bennett, he could go to the French vice admiral (the Commandant du Port’s one and only superior), but the Ardois must not be moved till we had cleared the Spahi out of the entrance. I’d leave it to him. But he must bear in mind that stopping the Ardois was very important. I went back to the salvage quay, where the commandeered air compressors were beginning to be delivered in army trucks. One by one, Harding picked them off the trucks with his cargo boom forward, and swung them aboard the King Salvor’s forecastle. I watched, never getting far from the salvage shack on the quay, where our solitary telephone was installed. The morning slipped away, there were no calls. Distrustful of how matters might be going, I called the Port Captain’s office myself shortly before noon. I learned Rear Admiral Bennett was working on the problem, endeavoring to persuade the French vice admiral to delay the movement. There was no decision yet; the vice admiral wanted to discuss it further with Capitaine de Frégate Duprès, his Commandant du Port. We should know early in the afternoon. I had lunch on the King Salvor with Harding, Ankers, and Reitzel. To all of us, what might happen to the Spahi if the Ardois were brought through was of first importance. I brought the others up to the minute on the situation. Reitzel listened, frankly pessimistic. He knew best the personalities involved. “I tell you, Captain,” he said bitterly, “the Ardois will move. That French vice admiral is a complete nonentity; Duprès will wind him round-his little finger and do what he pleases. Duprès is the French high command around here. Unless Bennett can issue a flat order stopping it, the Ardois will move because Duprès wants to move her.” “Why,” I queried, “should Duprès insist? Why can’t he wait a few days? Who’s hurt by any delay?” Reitzel shrugged his shoulders, “Who knows Duprès’ motives? But the Ardois will move.” Reitzel was correct. A little before one o’clock, I got a telephone call so informing me. Admiral Bennett had done his best in persuasion, but unsuccessfully. The French insisted. I must remember the French were our friends and allies, Oran was not occupied enemy territory, we could not order them to do or not to do anything. Short of issuing a peremptory order and then backing it up by force, which would cause widespread repercussions all over North Africa in our relations with the French, Bennett could do nothing further. We must hope the French pilot was as good as he claimed and that no damage
to the Spahi resulted. The Ardois would move at 2 P.M. Sorry. I hung up the telephone, went back aboard the King Salvor to break the bad news, reflecting cynically on the old adage, “God save me from my friends; my enemies I can take care of myself!” Long before 2 P.M., every officer in the salvage party was out on the diving float over the Spahi. Diving was discontinued, the float itself hauled well away from the channel toward the Spahi’s stern to keep it out of danger. Beyond in the outer harbor, we could see the French tugs puffing round the Ardois, getting their lines aboard. At 2 P.M. as per schedule, the Ardois cast loose, the tugs began heaving. After some pushing and hauling, they got her swung about, pointed fair for the channel, started her for the narrow entrance. They hadn’t far to go, not over a quarter of a mile, so our anxiety in watching didn’t last long. It was perfectly obvious as she came on that the pilot, whether intentionally or not, was holding her over to port, away from the sunken Pigeon whose masts and stack he could see, and towards the Spahi, of which he could see nothing whatever save the marker buoy over her indicating the limit there of safe navigation. In a few minutes more, there was nothing for it but to watch in horror as the massive Ardois came on, so far out of the center of the safe channel that it did not seem possible it could be by accident. On she came, light and high out of water, towering majestically far above us, looking like the biggest ocean liner afloat. She couldn’t miss the Spahi below her now. She didn’t. Not fifty feet from where we stood on the float, we heard a grating and a screeching and the noise of tearing steel as the protruding port bilge keel of the Ardois cut into the submerged Spahi’s side. Simultaneously the Ardois slowed, lost her momentum, came swiftly dead in the water in spite of the laboring tugs. She was stranded hard and fast on the torn Spahi. Far up on the bridge of Ardois, now nearly abreast us, I could see the French pilot, blowing his whistle and waving both arms for the tugs to stop heaving ahead, to start hauling her astern. On the float Ankers, Harding, Reitzel, and I looked at each other, livid. About us the divers and the mechanics who had struggled to make the Spahi watertight and airtight were shaking their fists at the pilot above, wholeheartedly and obscenely cursing him. The tugs ahead stopped pulling, those astern started to heave madly. There came again through the water the screech of tearing steel, a sound causing us to whom the Spahi meant so much as keen anguish as if it were our own
bleeding bodies that were being cut to pieces by the relentless Ardois. With some difficulty, the Ardois was dragged free and about a hundred yards astern. There the pilot straightened her up again, a little more now to the starboard side of the channel, and came on once more. This time, as he might as well have done the first time had he so intended, he came squarely down the middle of the marked channel, passed clear of the Pigeon and over the bow of the Spahi without touching either, and continued on up the inner harbor to his assigned berth beyond the Môle Millerand. There, I presume, he was able to report, “Mission accomplished,” or whatever its equivalent was in French. As for us, we dragged the diving float back to its working position, Ankers dressed one of his divers, sent him down below to learn what had happened to the Spahi. In about half an hour the diver was back on the float, his helmet off, describing what he had found. He had walked or crawled all over the port side of her hull, her high side. There was, thank God, only one hole in her uppermost side, but that was bad enough. It was about two yards wide, rather long, with the edges of the remaining steel plates badly jagged. Ankers and I looked glumly at each other. The Spahi would now no more than a sieve, hold any of the air from the compressors we had been gathering up. We would not raise the Spahi and clear the harbor entrance next day. We couldn’t tell yet how long it might be before we could get that gaping opening in the hitherto undamaged side of the Spahi patched reasonably airtight so we could proceed with her removal. But there would be a substantial delay. Ankers put the helmet back on his diver, sent him down again to get more accurate measurements of the hole and a better idea of the broken steel around it, so we might go to work on figuring out how to patch it. I went up the harbor road to make a vitriolic report to our local top command as to what had happened and to demand that the French pilot at least be permanently disqualified and imprisoned for gross incompetence, if not shot out of hand, as seemed well warranted, for deliberate wartime sabotage. A few days went by. Ankers and his divers struggled in the chilling water below, lacing reinforcing steel over the new hole in the Spahi, building a large wooden form to hold the cement that we would pour all over the cavity to form a thick patch which we earnestly hoped would prove reasonably tight when the compressed air was pumped in. We had neither the means nor the material to burn away underwater the jagged and bent edges of the broken steel below and fit a tight steel patch.
A continuous stream of oaths enveloped our diving float—no diver went down without first cursing the pilot who was the cause, nor came up after tangling with the sharp edges of the broken steel which the Ardois had left without cursing him even more luridly. Nor was this situation helped any when we learned the second day that that pilot was continuing actively to pilot—the only punishment he got (if he really got that even) was a slap on the wrist in the form of an oral admonition from Capitaine de Frégate Duprès that he must be more careful in the future. Four days from the accident went by. It was now mid-December and increasingly cold. By working inhuman hours in the cold and foul harbor waters off that dismal float, Ankers and his men, driving themselves feverishly, finished the interlacing steel, completed the wooden form to hold the cement for the patch. Reitzel had somewhere commandeered a cement mixer and procured the necessary quick-setting cement and gravel. That fifth afternoon we would mix and pour the cement. Giving the cement two days after that to set, we hoped on the seventh day, a week later now than we had anticipated originally, to raise the Spahi, clear the entrance, and be free then to go about other urgent wartime business. 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 hardworking 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. 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 T HE 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. 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 water, 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 T HAT 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. Bill Reed, more than old enough to be Perrin-Trichard’s father, beamed paternally on him as they shook hands. Perrin-Trichard gazed respectfully into Reed’s bronzed face; the French have apparently far more reverence for their elders than we. I felt the two of them would get along fine; as a matter of fact, they always did. The discussion on the Grand Dock started. I had one general blueprint of the dock already; Perrin-Trichard had brought more with him, showing it in all its details. We fell to studying the blueprints, with Perrin-Trichard translating the French notes on them for us, when necessary. The plan for raising the dry dock was worked out—it would be done with compressed air, as we had raised the Massawa docks. But this was a vast dock, with over fifty separate compartments to be made airtight for blowing. Aside from the holes to be patched and the innumerable other openings to be sealed off, miles of air hose would be required, whole skyfuls of air, and more portable air compressors to provide it than North Africa had ever contained, even before the Nazis had looted it. As for hose, we were fortunate; Captain Harding volunteered the information he had considerable amongst the salvage stores in his hold. But where we were to get enough air compressors, I couldn’t imagine—those Reitzel had procured for the Spahi would be only a drop in the bucket on the Grand Dock. But I felt the Lord would provide when the time came—He always had in Massawa. Perrin-Trichard broke timidly in. He had moved all his men from la Bretagne at Mers-el-Kebir to the Grand Dock. He had them now working from
open boats with hand pumps surveying the Grand Dock; they would do their best for M’sieu Reed, but, please, could I get them only a few decent diving dresses? Theirs were so worn he felt like an assassin when he asked one of his men to go down in the mass of patches that with them passed for a diving dress. I had to agree with him. I had seen the dilapidated French dresses; I wouldn’t want to dive in one of them myself. So I told Reed he would have to give Perrin-Trichard two of the dresses he had brought from Massawa; I would get him a replacement for one from Ankers—after that, his crew and Ankers’ crew would each have to go short a diving dress apiece, but we would share with our new French shipmates, and not ask them to work under conditions more dangerous than we faced ourselves. Reed ungrudgingly agreed. There wasn’t much more. Reed needed a power boat and something to dive from. Reitzel undertook to provide them. As for a diving air compressor, Reed felt surely that by tomorrow, his would arrive from Yum Dum, but I cherished no such illusion. I told Reitzel to see that the scow he hired was big enough to float one of the larger compressors we wouldn’t be needing on the Spahi for a couple of weeks yet. Reed could use that oversized unit for the present, and every time he broke his back cranking it up to start it, probably curse himself for his overtrustfulness in air force colonels. So with that the second conference broke up. Reed and Williams left to go to their new quarters with Perrin-Trichard and give him the promised diving dresses; Reitzel started out to find a suitable boat and scow for Reed; and Harding and I went out to see how Ankers was getting along with his new problem. On the float, Ankers explained to us he had temporarily suspended work on the patch to use his two best men on the first hogshead; after they had worked out the method, he trusted his second string divers could do the underwater stevedoring while the best men went back on the patch again. That way he hoped the overall task wouldn’t be stretched out any. Gatchell and Lynch were at the moment both overboard, dangling in their cumbersome diving rigs alongside the vertical deck in front of the fore hold hatch, trying with crowbars to work a hogshead sideways out the hatch. Ankers had the earphones on Gatchell’s line over his own head; Ensign Leo Brown, near by, was listening in similarly on Lynch. I reflected. In the nearly twenty years since I had started salvage work, I had had divers doing almost everything conceivable under water from acting as plumbers to acting as undertakers. But I could not remember that I had ever
before had any acting as the brewer ’s big horses in hauling about hogsheads of hootch. Then another thought struck me. “Say, Ankers, when Red and George between them get that cask of wine clear of the cargo hatch and out into the open, what’s it going to do? Will it sink on them, or will it float up?” Ankers, swift to see the implications, paused before he answered. If it floated, all well and good; but if it sank, it meant that the divers would have to sling each cask below before it came free, and we would have to rig some sort of a derrick off something to hoist the cask to the surface. We couldn’t leave a thousand hogsheads cluttering up the ocean floor alongside the Spahi; they’d interfere with our work. And if we had to sling and hoist them, a job, bad already, would immediately get far worse. Ankers’ brow wrinkled up as he thought it over. “Well Captain, it ought to float. Those hogsheads are full of wine, and wine’s partly alcohol, and alcohol’s lighter than water. So it ought to float up; and it damned well better had, too, or we’re in for a hell of a lot more work.” “Your logic’s all right, Ankers; but that’s not the whole story. Maybe it won’t float. You’ve covered the wine, but how about the hogsheads themselves? They’re probably made of oak staves, and oak is heavier than water, and besides those casks must have steel hoops round ’em, and those hoops are plenty heavier than water. The hogshead by itself’ll probably sink. Now whether there’s enough extra buoyancy in that wine to compensate for the excess weight of the hogshead or not is a question. There’s no certainty about it. This damned salvage business is getting just too complicated for comfort any more. But I guess we’ll know the answer before long. Let’s all pray she floats!” So while Gatchell and Lynch cursed and pried and tugged in the submerged wreck below us, trying to work free a hogshead from a ship in such a position that any self-respecting stevedore would have thrown up the job in disgust and gone home immediately unless he got higher wages, shorter hours, and double-time for dirty work, plus a few other fringe concessions, their shipmates on the float above started to scratch their heads trying to figure out what that hogshead was actually going to do when it was finally shoved clear of the hatch coamings. At last came word from below. Over Red’s diving phone came the message to Ankers, “Stand by on the topside for that barrel! One more shove down here and
she’s all clear!” I laughed. Red’s faith that it would float was refreshing. Apparently he’d been too busy below to concern himself over the relative buoyancies in sea water of wine, oak, and steel, and their various possible combinations in that actual hogshead. But in a moment now, we’d know. It floated. I almost cheered. But it didn’t float by much. With barely a ripple to mark its rising, that hogshead came to rest on the surface with nothing more of it rising above water than might easily be mistaken for an oversized flapjack which somebody had heaved overboard. In a huge hogshead weighing all told around half a ton, there wasn’t over five pounds positive buoyancy keeping it afloat. Had the water in Oran harbor been a little less brackish and more like fresh water, it would certainly have sunk. “O.K., Red!” sang out the exuberant Ankers to his diver below. “She’s up! Can you get out any more this dive?” “A couple more, maybe,” phoned up Gatchell. “The next one oughta come easier!” So it proved. The hogsheads in that hold were like a bottle of olives; once the first one was out, the others did come easier. When Ankers finally called time on his divers, they had sent up five casks all told. Ankers sent out his workboat, towed the five hogsheads to the quay, and there the King Salvor took hold of them with her boom and landed them, each on end, on the stone coping opposite her forecastle. Once out of water, those hogsheads proved huge. They must each have held over three ordinary barrels; 140 gallons of wine apiece at least. Shortly Ankers and his men all knocked off for the day and came ashore for supper. Ankers told me that next day, Gatchell and Lynch would go back on the patch. From what they had learned about manhandling those casks out, any ordinary diver should have no great trouble thereafter in carrying through the cargo unloading. But when I came back in the morning to watch the progress on the patch before going out on the Grand Dock, I found a very disgruntled salvage officer waiting for me on the quay. There were no divers out on the float, there weren’t any on the quay waiting to go out to the Spahi. “Sorry, Captain,” apologized Ankers, “but there’ll be no diving today. I was just a plain damned fool to have left those hogsheads on the quay last night. Somebody broached one of ’em in the dark, and this morning everybody’s so
dead drunk in his bunk I don’t dare trust a man of ’em overboard. Harding’s crew on the King Salvor’s in about the same shape, only they don’t have to dive. Those casks hold too damned much for safety. But it’s mighty fine wine, even if it has been submerged over a month. Try some, Captain,” and he offered me a flask he’d himself filled with it. I tipped up the flask. It was good wine; excellent, I thought. The Algerian vineyards were certainly turning out a good product. Somehow I couldn’t blame the men, with five unguarded casks of it right under their noses. After all, even the Bible says something about not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn; still, I wished that they had gone a little more lightly on their guzzling of the grapes that they had trodden out from beneath the sea. “O.K., Ankers, you’re right about it,” I agreed, giving him back the flask. “It’s good.” “That’s what the boys must’ve thought,” continued Ankers, “for one of those casks is about empty. How my gang ever managed that, I can’t figure, for even taking in the King Salvor’s whole crew, that’s over two gallons a man. I just can’t make out how they held it all.” “They probably didn’t,” I muttered. “After all, they may have friends around here, or they’ve laid some away for a rainy day, or maybe both things happened. You’d better search that salvage shack, or you’ll never get any more work done. That Spahi is going to be the ruination of us; I certainly wished she’d been loaded with olive oil! This can’t go on or we’ll all be shot yet for sabotaging our own job. You have Reitzel make arrangements with General Larkin” (Larkin had succeeded Fredendall in the Army command in Oran) “to send down an army quartermaster and a squad of G.I.s with rifles and bayonets to tally in and take charge of what’s left here in those five casks, and of all the rest of that lot from now on as we bring it ashore. After that, if we get the whole United States Army drunk on the Spahi’s cargo, it’ll be Larkin’s funeral, not ours. But I’m going to be damned sure my salvage outfit stays sober enough hereafter, so we can work.”
CHAPTER
18 SEEING THERE WOULD BE NOTHING on the Spahi that day, I went out at once with Reed’s gang to get them going on the Grand Dock. Reed’s men, being all quartered up on the heights in Oran itself, far from the quay and the salvage shack, had been no parties to the orgy of the night before. They were all quite fit for work; a fact they deeply regretted as they enviously inhaled the rich breath of the snoring sleepers in the salvage shack just before we all shoved off. Reitzel had procured a small but broad-beamed and decked-over French scow which made a good working platform, and a power boat to tend it. Harding had lowered on to its after deck one of the rented compressors, an Ingersoll-Rand of 110 cubic foot capacity, bearing a French nameplate. The compressor seemed to be in fair shape, so whether it was actually French-built or merely an American machine with a French label, we didn’t care. I had sufficient faith in Ingersoll-Rand to believe that whatever they turned out, even in France, would be reliable enough to risk men’s lives on in diving. Its only drawback was that it was too big for the job, and even on that barge took up too much of the available working space. Once over the port side of the Grand Dock with the scow, we picked out a spot a little beyond the submerged deckhouse with its flagstaff, and Bill Reed, who was a very practical seaman, managed to drop a weighted line with a running bowline in its end, down over a submerged stanchion on the dock below so we could anchor ourselves to it while we worked. I elected to make the first dive on the dock myself. I felt some first hand information on diving conditions in Oran, as well as on the Grand Dock, would be helpful to me in sizing up what to expect. So I peeled off my army O.D.s, dragged on another suit of heavy wool underwear over the one I was already wearing, pulled on another pair of wool socks, and I was ready to be dressed.
Buck and Al served as valets. They dropped me expertly into a stiff canvascovered rubber-lined diving dress, and after soaping my wrists, worked them one by one through the tightly fitting rubber cuffs and snapped on the sealing wristlets. Then they slid the heavy bronze breastplate over my head onto my shoulders and turned to, both of them, on bolting the top of the dress watertight to it. That done, they went to work harnessing me into a lead belt while Ervin Johnson slid my feet, one after the other, into the heavy lead-soled diving boots and proceeded to lace them and my trouser-legs up with sections of signal halyard for lacings. The rest went quickly. Jim Buzbee, a wizard with such things, managed to crank up and start the French air compressor without too many curses at it. The air hose was coupled to my helmet, the earphones put over my head and jacked into the helmet receptacle, the helmet tested out and dropped down over my head. Then with Buck gripping my shoulders to brace the breastplate, Al gave the helmet a sharp twist to lock it into place, and I was all ready. Completely cased in, I turned on the air valve a trifle to get something to breathe, and immediately my suit swelled out like a balloon. Buck and Al took me by both shoulders to hold me up, for I was now draped with over 200 pounds of lead and copper, and dragged me to the gunwale, to which a short ladder had been secured leading a few feet down into the water. Laboriously they hoisted me and all my weights over the gunwale and onto the ladder. Clumsily I started down it till, on the last step, I was wholly immersed beneath the surface and stopped a moment to test out everything before dropping down the descending line dangling in the water from the barge. No longer was my canvas suit ballooning out. Now the sea about me was pressing it hard against my body, lovingly embracing every last square inch of me in the kind of over all hug one may dream of but which no woman, however affectionate, is quite capable of matching. That embrace was a little too complete; I could hardly breathe from the pressure on my chest. I opened my air valve a trifle more, screwed down a bit on the exhaust valve on the back of my helmet from which my air was gurgling out and upward through the water. In a moment the slightly added air pressure started to swell my suit out over my lungs so breathing became freer. With that adjustment I could work, though from my waist down, my suit was still as tightly pressed in on me as before. I wound my legs about the descending line, gripped it with one hand, and with the other signaled to Bill Reed, who was tending me, to lower away. My lifeline slacked off above. With the surface undulating over my head like
a silvery sheet, I started to drop through the water. The light, never very good in winter in northern waters, started to fade perceptibly, the water pressure began to increase as I went deeper. A few fathoms down, and I signaled for a stop. There in the water before me loomed up vertically the massive steel wall of the port side of the Grand Dock, stretching away several fathoms in both directions from me and there seeming to dissolve imperceptibly into the sea. What I could see of it was only a blank precipice, topped a little above my helmet by a steel railing, and broken a little below my feet by a narrow platform protruding horizontally from the sheer side, a working platform, no doubt, for sailors while docking ships. Since everything seemed to match the blueprints and there was no damage visible in that vicinity, I signaled to be lowered again. This time, I made no further stop till I hit bottom. Down the line I slid, watching through my faceplates the steel wall in front of me continuously dissolving in the water over my head and continuously materializing seemingly out of nothing below my feet as I dropped. All the while, the light from above grew steadily dimmer and dimmer. My lead-soled boots touched something, I stopped dropping. Barely visible under my feet, I could see the steel floor of the Grand Dock. “On the bottom!” I sang out to Reed above. “Give me some more slack!” Immediately my lines eased off, leaving me free for movement. At my feet was the heavy lead weight holding the lower end of the descending line. I looked carefully round to mark its location, then upward to see my lifeline and air hose weren’t fouled round it. Up that line I must finally rise again. It was about one fathom inboard of the vertical port inside wall of the dock, but there was nothing else within sight to identify the spot more particularly. I would have to count my steps in every direction as I went from it, so I could retrace my path later. I looked around. I was on the deck of the dock in about ten fathoms of water, not bad for diving work, except that the illumination for seeing what one was about was poor. The visibility, I judged, was perhaps three or four fathoms. Of course I couldn’t see the far starboard side of the dock, over a hundred feet away through the water, nor even the line of center keel blocks, only half that far from me. Carefully I turned myself till my back was squarely set to the port wall of the dock behind me, to give me my direction, then started cautiously to breast my way through the water toward the line of invisible keel blocks halfway across the dock.
The water, I thanked my stars, was cold. Diving around Oran was not going to be the torture to the men that it had been in the Red Sea, the hottest and saltiest body of water on earth. In the Red Sea, between the hot water he was immersed in and the hot and humid air pumped down to him, a diver might preferably have been in a Turkish bath. If he went down stripped naked to try to keep a little cool, the coarse inside layer of the diving dress sandpapered his perspiring skin off in large patches, which promptly became terribly infected. Paradoxical as it may seem, we always dived on the wrecks in the Red Sea clad in full suits of heavy woolen underwear and woolen socks, to avoid being flayed alive by our own diving dresses; and as a consequence, we nearly drowned instead in our own sweat inside them. But here in Oran, at least a man could dive in comfort, with only the normal diving dangers, plentiful enough, to battle. A formless shadow, breast high, loomed up ahead in the semi-twilight. A few more steps and I was up against the long fore and aft row of heavy oaken blocks, set one on another to a height of about four feet, which formed the center line of keel blocks on which a ship was docked. They were too close together to pass between. Inflating my suit with a little more air to give me greater buoyancy, I half-climbed, half-floated myself to the top of that barrier, and then after making myself again sufficiently heavy for safety, started to plod aft through the water, using that row of keel blocks as an elevated walkway and counting my steps as I went. The massive oak blocks. were all in place—none had floated up, none had been knocked over in the scuttling of the dock. Satisfied of that at last after going some distance, and seeing no signs of other damage to the near by dock floor on either side, I retraced my steps, counting as before to come back to the starting point of my walk down the blocks. Then down I slid to the dock floor and started to push my way through the sea to port for the far dock side wall which I couldn’t see through the water. But, of course, I knew that I’d ultimately bump into it if I didn’t lose my sense of direction and start traveling in aimless circles on the ocean floor. I found I’d been fairly accurate; when I ended with that steel wall again in front of me, I wasn’t a fathom away from the descending line. I could have spent some hours traveling over the floor of that huge dock at the slow pace at which a diver must go, without covering all of it, but there was no object in trying. I’d seen enough to appreciate conditions and to understand what the men might be talking about as they worked below. I seized the descending line, signaled to be hauled up.
Reed, who had been taking in the slack of my long lines as I came back, promptly answered the signal. My lifeline immediately came taut; in another moment I was heaved off the dock floor and was on my way up through the sea. Not having been down under pressure at ten fathoms any great length of time, I required only slight decompression on my way up. At about four fathoms depth, the heaving up stopped and I was left dangling on the end of my lifeline for five minutes to allow what air might have dissolved under pressure in my blood to work itself out without forming dangerous bubbles to give me “the bends.” During that period, willy-nilly, I could do nothing but study the upper part of the steel side wall of the dry dock, near which I hung. I noted almost in front of my faceplate a round opening in the vertical dock wall, perhaps eight inches in diameter. That, I reflected, would be the outlet of the air vent pipe to the dock compartment far below, to allow air to escape from it while that compartment was being flooded in normal docking operation. We should have to plug that opening solidly, together with many more like it, if we ever hoped to keep compressed air in the dock to lift it. I kicked myself forward through the water close enough to push a hand into that hole and feel around inside it to see what was what. The results were discouraging. There was a sharply curved steel gooseneck fitted to the inside of that opening. It made such a quick turn inside that it was dubious that the wood plugs I had already had turned out for the job would drive in far enough to stop up the holes and ever really seal them off airtight. I sighed. Probably we should have to plug them all, fifty of them, by pouring in cement—a damned nuisance to run in under water to start with, and even more of a nuisance to get out of the pipes once it had hardened and after the dock was lifted so we could operate the dock again. But there was no help for it. More work for my meager crew. A jerk on my lifeline. My brief decompression time was over, they were ready above to haul me to the surface. I signaled back, then once again I started to rise with the light swiftly increasing about me. In another minute I could see the barnacled bottom of the diving scow floating over my head; right above my helmet was the ladder. I seized a rung, started to climb it, no great effort so long as I was still wholly submerged. In a moment, my helmet popped through the surface, then my shoulders. As I emerged, no longer water-borne, down on my shoulders again came the full weight of that 200 pounds of lead and copper draping me and I was helpless to lift myself further; while instantly, no longer
held in by the counterbalancing water pressure, my suit billowed out about me as if ready to burst. Hastily I clamped down on my air valve and slacked off on my exhaust valve to avoid that. Simultaneously from above Buck and Al seized me by both shoulders, passed a safety line under my arms and about my chest to prevent losing me and letting me drown in case I slipped from their grip during the next operation, and then removed my helmet. With that off, and free to breathe in the open air again, they let me rest a moment longer on the ladder before once again grabbing me by my breastplate and heaving me up bodily onto the deck of the scow to be finally undressed. A few minutes later, freed of the diving armor and clothed again in my army O.D.s, I went over with Bill Reed and Lloyd Williams, what they were to do. Buck Scougale, who was to dive next, and Al Watson after him, might as well start driving into the air vents below those huge tapered wood plugs we had made. If they went solidly enough in before the goosenecks stopped them, they would probably serve. Otherwise, we might as well give up the plugs and go to cementing up the holes instead. We would soon know. With that, while Buck was being dressed, I left them on the scow and went ashore. Next morning I should know whether we were in for a big cementing job on the Grand Dock as well as on the Spahi.
CHAPTER
19 HOWEVER, NEXT MORNING, DECEM ber 21, I did not find out. Having some office work to do first in my hotel room, I didn’t come down to the quay till midmorning, to find then that Reed’s crew were already across the harbor in diving position over the Grand Dock. Since the Spahi diving float was closer, I decided to go out on that first to watch Ankers’ now sobered up crew resume operations on their preparations for their cementing job, a real cement filling for a Gargantuan cavity all in one piece. Hardly had I landed on their float, though, than from across the water I heard shouts from the King Salvor’s bridge, and turning to see what might be the trouble there, I saw a considerable commotion and semaphore flags starting to wave. I didn’t wait for the signal to come through; instead I leaped back into the small boat I had just come out in and shoved off for the King Salvor, less than a quarter of a mile off alongside the quay. In a few minutes we were under her rail. Captain Harding leaned down from his bridge to tell me the telephone in the salvage shack (the only one near by) had started ringing wildly with an urgent call for me. I clambered from the small boat to his deck, crossed it to the quay, then ran for the shack, about a hundred feet away, to pick up the telephone receiver. The American Port Captain was on the other end. “Ellsberg,” he started off instantly I had answered, “we’ve just got a message a big British troopship, Strathallan, with about 6000 aboard, mostly American troops for Algiers, was torpedoed in convoy early this morning sixty miles due north of here. She’s hit in her engine room, port side. She’s reported sinking. The British are sending out about half a dozen destroyers from Mersel-Kebir, all they’ve got there, to try and take off the troops. Get going!” “Aye, aye, Captain! We’ll be underway with the King Salvor in no time at all!” I sang out, banging the receiver back on its hook as I dashed towards my salvage ship.
Harding on the King Salvor, suspecting some such message, already had his whole crew at quarters and was busy singling his mooring hawsers. He looked inquiringly down from his bridge at me as I hurdled his gunwale on the run from the quay. “O.K., Captain! Cast off, four bells!” I shouted up to him. Harding needed nothing more. Overboard went the heavy towing hawsers he had out to the Spahi, then the remaining mooring lines, save one only on his port quarter to hang to as he worked himself clear of the quay. Bells started to clang in his engine room, the water foamed violently up under his stern, already he was backing on his last hawser to swing himself clear. In hardly a minute more, the last line was tossed free and the King Salvor was underway, steaming on one boiler with thick black smoke pouring from her stack as the engineers below opened wide all their burners to shoot heavy jets of oil into the fires, bringing their other boiler as swiftly as possible up to full power. By that time, after helping on the hawsers, I was up on the bridge myself. For a few minutes more, not a word was spoken. Harding, a very phlegmatic Englishman, was too busy swinging in a half circle to starboard, first dodging the wrecks of the Hartland and of the Boudjmel, then making sure he was pointing squarely for the middle of the narrow channel between the Pigeon and the Spahi, to pay the slightest attention to anything else, however curious he might have been about the whys and wherefores of it all. We swept by close aboard the float over the Spahi, rocking it violently. Lieutenant Ankers and his men could have been in no doubt as to what our hurried departure and that heavy cloud of smoke pouring from the little King Salvor’s stack meant. As we steamed past, we caught from the men there, unsteadily trying to balance themselves on the heaving float, a ragged chorus, “Good luck to you!” I waved back to them. Harding, his eyes glued now on the two buoys marking the tight channel between the wrecks, paid no attention. We passed clear between the buoys, straightened away eastward for the jetties forming the much wider exit from the outer harbor. In a few minutes we were out in the open sea, under the high cliff topped by Ravin Blanc Battery frowning down on us as we swung under its guns, heeling far over in a 90 ° hard turn toward the north. Once we had settled on course o ° by gyro compass, Harding turned the deck over to Teddy Brown, First Mate. Then with a last word over the voice tube to Andy Duncan, Chief Engineer, down below, to keep pouring on the oil till the
safety valves were ready to pop, he relaxed a bit and looked at last toward me for the explanation. “Who got it this time, Captain?” he asked. “The Strathallan, British troopship bound for Algiers with about 6000 American G.I.s aboard, 60 miles north of here. She says she’s sinking. Know anything about her?” I inquired anxiously, for to me the name Strathallan meant nothing. She couldn’t ever have run transatlantic, or I’d have known of her. Harding’s shaggy eyebrows lifted instantaneously, an expression of deep pain contorted his face. Evidently that name meant a lot to him. “The Strathallan, eh? What a bloody shame! She’s a P. & O. liner, running peacetime to India. Biggest thing they’ve got. Around 25,000 tons she is. There’s not many ships afloat on any ocean bigger ’n the Strathallan. New, too. Where’d she catch it?” “In the engine room, port side,” I answered. “That’s all the information I got before we shoved off, except she reports herself sinking. Sounds to me just like the Porcupine torpedo job—same side, same spot, and to hell with any destroyers convoying her—exactly the same attack tactics. It’s got all the earmarks of that same U-boat captain. He’s sure good, but I’d like to strangle him! He’s too damned good for our good!” Harding nodded glumly in agreement, then another thought struck him and he looked mournfully at me. “Six thousand troops aboard, you said? She’ll never have boats for anything like that number; maybe not even rafts enough for a lot of ’em; and the water ’s too cold for a man in a life preserver for very long. How about those troops? Even if we pile ’em six deep, we can never start to get half that many aboard the King Salvor! A hell of a lot of men are going to drown!” “Don’t worry yourself over that one, anyway, Harding,” I assured him. “There was one more bit I heard I forgot to tell you. Your Vice Admiral Syfret is sending all the destroyers he has in Mers-el-Kebir out to take off the troops. They ought all to be along soon,” I finished, looking aft toward the coastline astern of us and a little to port towards Mers-el-Kebir. They were. Already I could see plumes of smoke and steam emerging from Mers-el-Kebir harbor. It was taking the destroyers longer to get underway and to get clear of the intricate series of defensive booms and nets shielding Mersel-Kebir than it had taken us, but after that they swiftly made up the difference. At twelve knots now, all she could do on both boilers, the stubby King Salvor
with a bône in her teeth was pushing northward through moderate head seas. But in twenty minutes, British destroyers began to stream by us, full out with forced draft blowers roaring, all making over thirty-six knots, shooting past us so fast it seemed the poor King Salvor, left rocking violently in their tremendous wakes, must be anchored. One after another they streaked by through the water, a magnificent sight to watch. There were five of them, all in an extreme hurry. The destroyers were in no formation at all, simply strung out helter-skelter at whatever intervals they had cleared Mers-el-Kebir; after that apparently it was every destroyer for herself in the race to get to the Strathallan and take off her troops before she sank. In fifteen minutes more the last of those five destroyers was hull down on the horizon ahead of us, making knots north. Like a plow horse trying to keep up with Kentucky thoroughbreds, we plodded along in their wakes at twelve knots, seemingly an even slower speed now than it had appeared shortly before those hurtling destroyers had shot by us, going like projectiles themselves. But it was every last fraction of a knot that Andy Duncan, with his safety valves occasionally popping off, could get out of the King Salvor, and with that I had to be satisfied. She was doing her best. I began to do a little mental figuring. It would take the destroyers about an hour and a half from the time they passed us to get to the Strathallan; I prayed earnestly that they might be in time. I could not recall any troopship with that many men aboard ever having been torpedoed before. And in World War I, the losses off troopships torpedoed while carrying far less men had been sickening. As for ourselves on the King Salvor, if the Strathallan stayed afloat that long, it would take us about four hours yet to get to her. Assuming she did stay afloat, she would probably be badly waterlogged by then and in a very precarious position, requiring instant attention and all the aid we could give her crew to help save her. I told Harding to turn to with his deck force, breaking out of the holds all his portable salvage pumps, his suction hoses, his discharge hoses. Everything was to be rigged for immediate action with all his booms cleared, ready to swing aboard and start pumping out the Strathallan the instant we laid alongside her—assuming there still remained above water any Strathallan to lay alongside of. It was about noon. Cutting short the meal hour, Harding and his Third Mate, Sid Everett, with all the men they had on deck, fell eagerly on the task. The
wide deck hatches were undogged, swung back. To the creaking of the steam winches, a stream of heavy salvage pumps started up and out of the holds with the swaying pumps and their gasoline engines dangling from the booms, carefully guided lest as the ship rolled they smash themselves on the hatch coamings or smash some unwary seaman acting as a buffer for them, into jelly. After the pumps came the massive lengths of discharge hose and the even more massive lengths of reinforced suction hose, to be landed in everincreasing heaps on the King Salvor’s decks till there was no longer room to put a foot down anywhere without clambering on salvage gear. In a little under three hours, it was all out of the holds; every gasoline-driven salvage pump had been started up and tested to make sure it would start again when wanted; the ponderous suction and discharge hoses had been coupled up into as long sections as we could possibly mule-haul about the decks of a wreck. The King Salvor’s salvage pumps were all readied for action—it would be a big pumping out job that that outfit of portable pumps couldn’t handle. If there was enough of the Strathallan still left above water to set all those pumps on when we reached her, with the aid of the whole crew of that torpedoed ship in handling the pumps, we’d save her. The little knot of panting British seamen who had been working like fiends breaking out the holds, now got a few minutes rest while the King Salvor, shaking furiously all over from the excessive load on her propeller, pounded along northward at her best gait. The wornout sailors flung themselves down on the mountains of heavy rubber hose to ease their aching muscles, the while they (and all those on the bridge) speculated on what was happening ahead of us, in which situation we were now all ready to take a hand. Very shortly we spotted light smoke on the horizon a little on our port bow. In a few minutes more, that smoke had materialized into two destroyers, one close astern the other, headed shoreward at full power. They would pass us abeam some miles off to port. Through binoculars I scanned them as they drew abeam. They were too far off to make out much detail through the glasses, but their decks seemed to be crowded with men. Apparently they had taken everything aboard they could hold and were now rushing in to unload, possibly to come out again for more. But their distance from us disturbed me; perhaps we were steering the wrong course for quickest contact. I asked Harding to signal the second destroyer, “Where is Strathallan and what is her condition?”
A signalman flashed that out on an Aldis lamp pointed at the second destroyer ’s bridge, now broad off our beam. By the time the message had gone through, that scurrying tin can was well back on our port quarter. By the time the message had been given her skipper and he had written out his answer and given it to his signalman to flash back to us, what with our twelve knots in one direction and his thirty-six in the opposite one, he was so far away astern I doubted we’d be able to get any of his reply. Our signalman did manage to catch the first two words, “DEAD ASTERN—” But whatever else was sent, we never got. I had to rest content with that. “Dead astern,” eh? Presumably of him, since he was coming from her. We then must be heading too much to starboard. After a little figuring on his chart, Harding changed course about half a point westward to port, to settle on 354 ° instead of due north. At about 3 P.M., we sighted more light smoke, this time almost dead ahead. Apparently our change in direction had put us on the true course. In a few minutes we made out the sharp bows of three more destroyers, each wreathed in spray, coming our way. These, without question, were going to pass us close aboard, also to port. I gave Harding another signal to send, asking him to aim it at the last destroyer as soon as he could make out her bridge, so that we might have the longest possible interval for communication. And this time, for brevity, I cut my message in two. I was no longer interested in the Strathallan’s position; I felt I knew that well enough for our purposes. As soon as the bow of the third destroyer was sufficiently clear of the two leading her to allow a sight of her bridge, our signal lantern started to flash out, “What is Strathallan’s condition?” We got an answering flash in acknowledgment. As it would take a minute or two for the answer to be prepared, I turned my attention momentarily to the two leading destroyers, now rapidly bearing down on us. One so close astern the other as to be running in its foaming wake, both hardly two hundred yards off so that no glasses were needed, those two destroyers flashed past us. I gazed, open-mouthed in astonishment—never had I imagined anything like those two tin cans. No longer did they look like duncolored warships or like warships of any color. From their gunwales up, they
seemed to have been repainted, standing vividly out in unbroken olive drab, in startling contrast to their war-colored lower hulls. From stem to stern on each of them nothing met the eye save an unbroken mass of khaki. They were packed so solidly with soldiers all over every inch of their topsides that nothing else was visible—no superstructures, no guns, no torpedo tubes, no racks of depth charges—everything had wholly disappeared beneath those avalanches of khaki from the Strathallan that had flowed aboard to engulf both ships! No wonder that although inward bound they were making top speed—speed was their only protection now, for otherwise they were totally helpless. They couldn’t fire a gun, launch a torpedo, or drop a depth charge in their own defense, even should a U-boat surface close enough aboard them to hit it with a biscuit! Nobody could possibly lift even an arm on those overcrowded decks to throw the biscuit. There must have been far more than a thousand men jamming the decks and superstructures of each of those lean warships. I wondered the soldiers on them could even breathe, so tightly were they packed together. In another instant, almost before my sagging jaw could close, the two leading destroyers had swept by and were dropping astern. Still dazed by that spectacle, but thankful that our troops had obviously been saved, I looked forward toward the third destroyer. Her signal lamp, trained on us, was beginning to flash. Before the message was completed, she also, as solid with troops as her two sisters, had shot past us and was well astern. Our signalman spelled out the answer as it came in, while the quartermaster copied it down: “STRATHALLAN HEAVILY ON FIRE AND COMPLETELY ABANDONED BY CREW AS TOTAL LOSS. ALL TROOPS OFF.” My insides seemed progressively to be turning to lead as I stared at the message, forming letter by letter, as the quartermaster jotted it down. Heavily on fire—completely abandoned by crew—total loss—! By the time the quartermaster got to that, paralysis was complete. With my stomach tied in a hard knot, I could hardly read the rest of it. I sagged at the knees, gripped the near by engine telegraph to support myself. Why in God’s name hadn’t the Strathallan sent in correct information about her condition before we started, so we might have come out decently prepared for what faced us? Why no mention of the fire? We had been rushed out to sea
prepared to help a sinking ship and here instead was one wholly abandoned because she was on fire! Those low pressure salvage pumps littering our decks were totally useless to cope with fire. What was going to be urgently needed was high pressure fire pumps and several hundred men at least to fight that fire. While the King Salvor had some fire pumps also, she had not over fifty men in her entire ship’s complement. So it came as the final crushing blow that the Strathallan’s own officers and crew, which must have comprised 600 men at the very minimum, instead of waiting for the help that was on the way, had all ingloriously abandoned their ship to the flames as soon as the troops were off. Lost probably in that flood of khaki I had just seen, they must at that moment be on those five destroyers on their way ashore! There would be nobody at all on the huge Strathallan to help the pitiful little handful of men on the King Salvor in their fight for her!
CHAPTER
20 WITH THE SOUTHBOUND TROOP laden destroyers rapidly shrinking into insignificant specks on the sea astern to leave us wholly alone in the middle of the heaving ocean, the King Salvor plodded on northward. When my intestines had unknotted themselves sufficiently to let me think again in some fashion, I turned to Harding on the bridge alongside me, dully ordered, “Well, skipper, you might as well start your crew striking down into the holds again those salvage pumps and hoses they just finished hoisting out. We’ll have to clear your decks for other things. Leave a couple of the smaller pumps and a little hose for ’em on the topside for emergencies; all the rest’ll have to go below again. Then start breaking out instead all the fire hose you’ve got on the ship and we’ll begin coupling it up into long lengths, say about 500 feet in each length to start with. How’re you fixed for fire pumps? She’s completely dead. There’ll be no pumps going at all on her to give us water. Got any gasoline-driven portables we can lift aboard ’er?” Harding shook his head wearily. “No, nothing but what’s part o’ the ship; only our own steam-driven high pressure fire pumps down in the engine room. But we’re well enough fixed that way; the King Salvor’s got steam pumping capacity to feed a dozen fire hose lines all at once and some to spare. And I’ve got plenty of fire hose to run aboard ’er, too. It’s none o’ that I’m thinking of, Captain. It’s only where’s a’ the men a’ coming from now to fight this fire with?” Harding looked at me; I looked at Harding. I knew as well as he that his question was purely rhetorical. Both of us knew perfectly well that all the men that were going to fight that troopship fire, from which over a dozen times our number had already fled, were coming off the King Salvor because there just wasn’t any other place now they could come from. Including his black gang and all his officers, he had just fifty men aboard; fifty-one, including myself. Some men, of course, would have to be left aboard the King Salvor to fire the
boilers and keep her pumps and machinery going, while the rest of us boarded the abandoned Strathallan to fight the fire. Possibly we could throw thirty men aboard the wreck—thirty men to fight a conflagration on a 25,000 ton ship reported heavily on fire and abandoned because of it. I didn’t even bother to answer Harding’s question, and Harding who expected no answer, didn’t even wait for one. He turned to call down on deck to Sid Everett, his Third Mate, who, like all his seamen already worn out from handling cargo, was sprawled out with them on the heaps of suction hoses, all trying to catch their breath again. Those men, together with a few engineers, would shortly have to constitute our whole fire-fighting force. What they all desperately needed most right now was a complete rest in preparation for what faced them. “Sid!” sang out Harding to his mate. “Rouse up all your lads there and turn to with ’em striking below those salvage pumps and the hoses you just broke out! We just learned we got a fire instead of a flood to fight! When you’ve got the decks cleared, Sid, send up every last length o’ fire hose you can find below! Shake a leg, now! It won’t be long till we’ll all be fighting a big fire on the Strathallan!” Sid Everett, as well as all the sailors who of course had heard the orders from the bridge as clearly as their mate, gaped a moment at the captain; then he dragged himself up to station his men for stowing below the salvage gear—a harder job than breaking it out. But there were no complaints; they were all good salvage men who had learned long since to expect anything—usually, the worst. But I observed that Harding was a good enough practical psychologist to have suppressed something which would have caused plenty of hard words. He had made no mention to his own men that after breaking their backs twice handling cargo, they were immediately going to have to wade into that big fire —alone. Each of those dog-tired seamen, as he turned to wearily on sending below the heavy equipment which he had hardly finished sending up, visualized, of course, the hundreds and hundreds of sailors who would naturally comprise the crew of a huge liner like the Strathallan, the biggest vessel the Peninsular and Oriental Company had, waiting for us at their ship’s rails. They would do all the actual firefighting, expecting of us only to send aboard them extra fire hoses and the high pressure water we should be able to pump through those hoses, of both of which they would obviously enough be short. There was going to be a sad awakening soon, but at the moment Harding
wasn’t taking any chances on his exhausted men curling up on him over the prospect. With the little deck force once again on the vibrating King Salvor’s topsides busy with the winches and the booms, both Harding and I turned our attention to studying through spyglasses a large cloud on the horizon far ahead which we had casually taken for granted as only a cloud. Now we knew better; it must be a cloud of smoke from the burning Strathallan. Harding ordered his helmsman to forget the compass course; he was to steer directly for the windward side of that cloud. The helmsman shifted course about two degrees more to port to bring it dead ahead. I judged that in about an hour, we should be there. At 4:30 P.M. on December 21, the shortest day of the year, we arrived, having been underway five and a half hours since leaving our berth in Oran. We were ready again. All except two of the salvage pumps and their hoses had been struck below; all the fire hose and the hose nozzles the King Salvor owned were coupled up and laid out on deck—over a mile of it, made up in twelve separate runs. The sight of that ominous cloud of smoke ahead, increasing in size, growing plainer and glowing a brighter red every minute as we bore down on it, had acted as a spur to the jaded seamen. In little over an hour, straining as neither threats nor promises of reward could have made them, they had done as much as in the three hours before when there had been nothing visible to any of us save the empty ocean. We arrived, still having an hour or so of daylight of that brief December day left to us, with a moderate sea running and the wintry wind blowing over a cold gray ocean from the westward, about force 2, not bad. A weird scene met our eyes. Lying in the trough of the sea and rolling sluggishly to it, broadside to the wind and pointing north, was the drifting Strathallan, a towering passenger liner, with huge tongues of red and yellow flame leaping fiercely skyward in a long fire front extending from her bridge all the way aft to the end of her passenger superstructure—about two-thirds her whole length. Across the water to us came the roaring and the crackling of the flames while a vast cloud of heavy black smoke rose lazily in the light wind to drift away to leeward, curling in a backdraft down her starboard side, spreading over the sea there, rising again to fill the entire sky to the eastward. The Strathallan had a list to port of about 10 ° , no very bad list; and she was undoubtedly down a few feet by the stern also, but not much. As we first passed
close aboard along her port side (the windward one and consequently clear of all smoke), we could see no sign at all above water in her hull of the hole the torpedo had blasted in her engine room. Disregarding the fire for a moment, I scanned the hull of the Strathallan with a strictly professional eye as the King Salvor slowly passed down her port side from her stern toward her bow. The Strathallan, hours after her torpedoing, wasn’t in the slightest danger of sinking from the damage the torpedo had caused her; she never had been in any such danger. Her captain or whoever had so reported her, must have been a panic-stricken fool. One torpedo, it was true, had practically broken the Porcupine in half and put her on her last legs, but there was an immense difference between what one torpedo could do to a 1900 ton tin can like the Porcupine and an enormous 25,000 ton liner like the Strathallan, one of the dozen largest ships afloat. “Disregarding the fire for a moment—” But how could anyone, however strictly professional, disregard that raging fire even for a moment? Four hours before, her crew had abandoned her because of that fire, leaving it since then to spread uncontrolled, and it certainly had. Now the sight of those flames reaching toward high heaven was enough to strike terror to any heart. As my eyes swung back from her waterline to gaze again at her blazing topsides, I caught the full measure of the picture of disaster she presented. Hanging limply down from her bow into the sea were two heavy manila towing hawsers, cast adrift now, idly rising and falling to the waves sweeping by, fit enough symbols of her utter abandonment. Her high port side from forecastle to poop was almost invisible—it was completely covered with a mass of scramble nets enveloping her as in a web from gunwales down to waterline. Down those nets from the soaring decks above the cataract of troops must have poured in a khaki-colored Niagara to swamp the topsides of the rescuing destroyers as one after another they had run directly alongside the Strathallan to take the men off. The Strathallan could not possibly have been so badly afire then or this could never have been done. To add to the forlorn scene, high up on the flame-enveloped boat deck, pointing drunkenly in all directions but mostly skyward, was a row of A.A. guns, and interspersed with them a line of swungout boat davits from which swayed like long pendulums the fully payed-out boatfalls, slapping their heavy disengaging blocks crazily in and out of the sea below as the heaving Strathallan rolled to it. All her lifeboats were gone, every one. Where, I wondered? For neither full nor empty, could I see a single boat drifting about
anywhere in the sea. But if the lifeboats were all gone, none of her massive metal liferafts were. They, as well as the lifeboats, had all been shoved overboard, but there were all the liferafts in the water, swinging aimlessly by the dozens at the ends of long painters close aboard the side in tangled masses that must have driven the destroyer captains wild as they maneuvered to lay their thin-shelled vessels alongside without getting themselves sunk. We came abreast the drifting liner ’s bow. Harding looked at me inquisitively. What did I wish next? I told him. “We’ll have to board her, of course, from port, her windward side, and near her stern, Captain. That’s our only chance. But before we try it, swing down her lee side on your way round to her port quarter and let’s have a look at her to starboard so we know what’s what all around. We’ll not have a ghost of a chance to size her up once we’re aboard. And as you swing round her bow, Harding, keep well clear of her so’s you don’t foul your screw in those towing hawsers floating there.” Harding nodded, turned to his helmsman to con the ship around. We stood on a little, turning gradually to starboard, meanwhile keeping a sharp eye on those long hawsers undulating like snakes in the seas till we were clear of their free ends, then swung in a closer circle to starboard to get on her lee side. As we came about to head in the opposite direction, not quite so close to her this time because of the thick masses of smoke flowing down her lee side like flood waters going over a high dam, I got a surprise. I saw we were not alone with the Strathallan. Well to leeward of her in the smoke, sometimes hidden, sometimes clearer, was a large British destroyer, H.M.S. Laforey, leader of the destroyer flotilla originally guarding the entire troopship convoy. She had evidently remained behind with the torpedoed Strathallan and her troops while all the rest of the troopships and the remaining destroyers with them had continued on toward Algiers. And near the Laforey were two armed trawlers, H.M.S. Restive and Active, which must also have been part of the convoy screen. All three were zigzagging erratically about in the smoke, to make themselves as poor targets as possible. I scanned them through my binoculars. That they were still there was surprising. It was understandable enough that the Laforey and her two smaller consorts (which evidently must have been the vessels once on the far ends of those two adrift towing hawsers) should stand by to protect the Strathallan from further attack while the troops were aboard
and to try to tow her so long as her crew were trying to save their ship. But once the troops were off and the crew had abandoned her as a total loss and they had cut the towing hawsers adrift, leaving the deserted hulk to burn or to founder or both, why were they further hazarding themselves by remaining where they knew a U-boat was about? But I soon found out. We had hardly shown up on the same side through the smokethat enveloped them, than the Laforey’s signal lantern started to flash on us. That lantern flashed dimly and unevenly, sometimes scarcely visible in the billowing smoke, but in spite of the interferences our signalman managed to catch the signal. He handed me the form: “FOR PSVO, KING SALVOR. CAN ANYTHING BE DONE? ” I was PSVO. Why the V had even been thrown in except possibly to make a four-letter signal out of my title initials, I never knew. Admiral Cunningham had himself personally chosen them when he had designated me as Principal Salvage Officer; possibly he had tossed in the V for Victory—the British, from Churchill himself on down, were strong on that. At any rate, I was PSVO and the signalman with no hesitation passed me the signal. I looked at it. I could see now why the Laforey was still around. She must have been informed by radio from ashore that we were on our way, and was only waiting for me to write off the Strathallan as finished before she and her attendants sought safer waters. But the message made me swear. To ask a salvage man, when he can plainly see the smokestacks of a ship still above water, whether anything can be done, is pure insult. I seized the pencil and his pad of signal blanks from the signalman and dashed off the reply: “FROM PSVO TO COMMANDING OFFICER LAFOREY. WE WILL TRY. PLEASE CONTINUE TO STAND BY.” I hesitated a moment before giving the reply to the signalman while I eyed again that “PLEASE.” Should I send that along with the rest? That Commander, R.N., whoever he might be, who was skipper of the Laforey had grossly insulted me and all my men. But then I handed it to the signalman unchanged. This was no time for quibbling over amenities. If I could cajole the skipper of the Laforey into staying around (I couldn’t order him to) he might save us from a torpedo. After all, there was the sad episode after the Battle of Midway only a few months before, of the little Hammann alongside our torpedoed and
burning aircraft carrier Yorktown, valiantly trying to help her big sister extinguish the flames by pumping water to her. In had sneaked a Japanese submarine with more torpedoes, with a single salvo to sink both Good Samaritan and burning victim together in one vast eruption of flame and water. I should prefer to avoid an encore in the Mediterranean. Our signal lantern started to flash back the answer, “PLEASE” and all. I could not afford to deny our U-boat friend somewhere about in the seas beneath us credit for as much tenacity as that Jap in the Pacific. The Laforey flashed acknowledgment, then in a moment flashed us an affirmative. She would continue to stand by to protect us. I forgot the Laforey, and turned my attention again to what little could be made out of the Strathallan’s lee side. We had completely rounded her bow and were standing down her starboard side, enveloped in hot and choking fumes from burning fuel oil that set us all to coughing violently and our smarting eyes to watering profusely. We couldn’t see much of the Strathallan. Her superstructure was completely engulfed in fire and smoke. Occasionally through rifts in the rolling red-tinged clouds tumbling down to leeward, we could make out sections of her precipitous hull, draped as was her port side with scramble nets, festooned with run-out boatfalls, cluttered all along her waterline with badly tangled masses of empty liferafts, more even than there had been on her weather side. But all the time, roughly in way of her smokestacks, we could see even through the thick smoke, patches of her steel shell a little above water glowing a bright red. Her firerooms, with all the fuel oil there now ablaze inside, must be roaring furnaces to heat the hull almost to incandescence. Shielding our tear-filled eyes as best we could, which wasn’t very much, we continued peering through the smoke at the Strathallan as the King Salvor steamed slowly down her starboard side. I thought I saw something move on one of the liferafts floating close alongside in way of her forward smokestack. I swung up my binoculars, stared intently at the spot. I couldn’t be sure—there was too much smoke wreathing everything. I pointed out the raft, asked Harding to look. Through glasses, both of us carefully scanned the rafts tossing there against the Strathallan’s hot side. Neither of us could make out anything definite, but again I thought I saw something slowly and laboriously swinging up from that liferaft. It might be the life-raft painter tautening momentarily, it might be an abandoned life-jacket floating upward in the backdraft—but it might also be an
arm. There was no telling. “Stop her, Harding!” I sang out sharply. “Lower a boat and send it in alongside that raft! We’ll see!” The King Salvor stopped, backed her engines briefly to take the headway off her. Down from our starboard davits swiftly dropped our power lifeboat, manned by Teddy Brown, First Mate, and half a dozen seamen, to disappear into the rolling smoke between us and the Strathallan. Finally I caught a vague glimpse of them through my glasses, heaving up and down in the sea for a brief moment alongside that crazy confusion of liferafts against a background of red-hot steel and curling flame, then they were underway again, once more to be swallowed up in the smoke. In a few minutes our boat was sheering in alongside our lee counter, everybody in it nearly asphyxiated. From the lifeboat, our staggering men were tenderly passing up to their shipmates on the fantail a limp and inert form. They had rescued somebody from that raft! Teddy Brown and his half-dead boat’s crew were then dragged aboard themselves, and the lifeboat (which Harding decided he’d leave in the water) secured astern on a short painter. Harding rang up “Slow Ahead,” and immediately we were underway again, pushing our way through the smoke. Down on deck, I could see the motionless figure of the man we’d rescued being carried forward to the wardroom, where some seamen would administer first-aid, trying to revive him. (The King Salvor had neither surgeon nor sickbay.) As he was hurried by into our wardroom just below, I looked curiously down from the bridge to see whether that unconscious last survivor, abandoned together with the abandoned Strathallan, might be an American G.I. or a British seaman. I got another surprise. Very evidently he was neither—I was looking down into the limp but swarthy face of a very tall turbaned and tightlytrousered Hindool “How come, skipper?” I asked in bewilderment of Harding who had also momentarily stepped aft on his bridge for a look. “What would a Hindoo like that be doing on a troopship bound from England for this war zone?” Harding was in no way puzzled. “It’s quite all right, Captain; nothing queer at all about it. He’s one of her crew. The Strathallan’s a P. & O. boat, an East Indiaman. They always have white officers but Lascar crews; probably kept most o’ the Lascars even when she began running transport after the war started; those Lascars make good
sailors. Most likely when that lousy white skipper took his crew off the Strathallan in such a bloody rush to get his worthless carcass aboard those destroyers, this poor devil must have been somewhere below and they left him. Wonder how he felt when he came on deck to find himself last man on a deserted and burning ship with all the boats gone? And then trying to get away from the fire, crawled down the painter to that raft just to be roasted there instead? Well, Sid Everett’ll go to work on him now till he has to board the Strathallan himself. Sid’s good at that. But that Hindoo’d better come to in a hurry, because Sid won’t have much time.” Harding stepped back alongside his helmsman. We were well aft on the Strathallan’s starboard quarter by then. Harding started to swing his own little ship to starboard to circle her stern and come up under her counter on the windward side. A little more in the open there, while we could still see the Laforey to leeward, I sent another signal to her, asking that the trawlers pick up again the drifting towing hawsers, swing the Strathallan 180 ° , and head south for Oran with her and us while we fought the fire. The Laforey blinked back in acknowledgment. Dead slow, we rounded to in the heavy swell rolling by under the stern of the Strathallan towering high above us and sidled up alongside her port quarter, just abaft the break of her superstructure. From there aft to her stern on the windward side, she wasn’t afire yet. But getting aboard her to secure ourselves was still a problem. There wasn’t anyone on her to catch our heaving lines and haul aboard our hawsers or to send us down any of their own; and her decks were so high above ours, we couldn’t jump to hers. To make matters worse, our superstructure was pounding heavily against the thick sides of the transport as we rolled to seas which affected her hardly at all. The King Salvor was going to take a bad beating and plenty of damage to her topsides before we got through with the Strathallan, but there was no help for it. She’d have to take it. Teddy Brown, still under the weather from his boat trip, settled the mooring problem by scrambling to the signal platform over our bridge, the highest point on the King Salvor, and leaping in a frenzied broad jump from there to the railing of the Strathallan’s well deck, her lowest. With Teddy scurrying back and forth amongst the bitts as the Strathallan’s whole deck force, we soon had lines enough aboard her to hold us close alongside, with our own stern protruding slightly aft of hers and our stem just abaft her burning superstructure. With other seamen soon clambering up those hawsers to help, our limp fire hoses began to uncoil from our own deck and snake upward over
our rails and up the high sides of the Strathallan. I started to climb to the platform over the bridge to leap aboard her myself. Harding stopped me, “Here, take this, Captain. You’ll need it.” He passed me a tin hat. “What for?” I asked him. “You’ll find out bloody quick! Put it on!” I was in a hurry. Presumably Harding felt that G.I. tin hat was the best substitute available for a fireman’s helmet. With no further argument, I took it, tossed aside my navy cap, slid the steel helmet down over my head, buckled the strap under my chin, climbed to the platform above, and waiting only for the King Salvor to rise to the next wave to put me as high as possible, dived for the Strathallan’s teak rail. I slid over it on my stomach, dropped down to land on her main deck, her lowest passenger deck. Just aft of me Teddy Brown and half a dozen British sailors were frantically hauling aboard the hose lines. It would take them a few minutes yet to get slack enough on those hoses over the Strathallan’s rail to run them forward and get into action. It was up to me in that interval to decide where they had best go. I looked about. Right aft on the stern rose a sizable steel deckhouse surmounted by a 6-inch naval gun, trained dead aft, deserted of course. Right forward of me, rising two decks higher yet to the boat deck, was her huge superstructure, the main passenger quarters, all ablaze athwartships from port to starboard and up to the boat deck. I was in a sort of well deck space abaft the superstructure, with the upper decks in my vicinity not quite the full width of the ship and all open at the sides. A little inboard of me on the center line was a considerable open-air swimming pool, green tiled, full of water, looking cool and inviting in otherwise rather hot surroundings. I took a few steps inboard to look forward up the passageway inside the superstructure, off which the port side staterooms opened. That corridor was one solid mass of yellow flame. So was the similar corridor to starboard, when I crossed the deck to examine it. We wouldn’t be doing any going forward on that deck, either on the windward or the leeward side. I started up one of the broad well deck ladders to sight conditions on the next deck above. Halfway up, I paused, startled. Through the roaring of the flames, I suddenly caught the sound of guns firing in short bursts, 20-mm. guns at least, coming from directly over my head. Then interspersed with the staccato explosions of the guns came the rattling of shrapnel on the steel decks above me with bits of flying steel ricocheting past me down the ladder. Planes must be strafing us
from the air! Involuntarily I shot the rest of the way up that ladder to seek shelter nearer the center line, under the next deck up, well inboard of the exposed ladder well. The firing ceased a moment, then recommenced. So did the hail of shrapnel, which I could see now as fragments of exploded shells plentifully littering the outer edges of the deck, with more pouring down. But it was all completely unbelievable. That Nazi planes had come out to strafe us I could imagine, for a troopship is an inviting target, though I had seen no planes about, not even ours. But why should they want to strafe an abandoned troopship? However, accepting that as a possibility due to lack of knowledge on the enemy’s part, the rest was still wholly inconceivable. How could anybody possibly live on that flaming boat deck overhead amidships (where as we had passed alongside in the King Salvor, I had seen the A.A. guns poking skyward through the smoke) to man those guns and fire back at the planes? And even if men could, who could they be? There wasn’t a living soul aboard the Strathallan to fire them, save we few who had just boarded her, and we certainly were not. It just couldn’t be! But it was. The guns close by over my head on that deserted ship started firing again. It was too much. My tin-helmeted head sagged down into my hands. I must be crazy; all alone on the abandoned Strathallan, I must suddenly have cracked up at last to be so imagining such an unimaginable occurrence. There were those I had left behind me in Massawa who had been telling me I was on the verge of it. Now it had happened. Probably if I could see my own face now, it would be as void of all semblance of human intelligence as those of some of the gibbering idiots, battle shell-shock cases, whom I had seen in Egypt coming out of the line after taking too much in the desert. My twitching hands fingering my tin hat brought something to my memory. Harding had insisted I wear that helmet, that I’d need it, that I’d find out why damned soon. Harding must have had a reason; he was a very phlegmatic person, given to no brainstorms; he must already have observed something I’d missed with my mind on other matters. Suddenly, in a wave of blessed relief, I saw the answer. I wasn’t crazy after all! Those guns were firing, all right, and continuing to fire even though there wasn’t anybody up there in the flames to fire them. And no ghosts were doing it, either. The flames themselves were doing it! For those were all automatic A.A. guns which must have been left loaded and at the “Ready” when the ship was abandoned. Now as the cartridge in each breech got hot enough and the
powder exploded, even though no trigger was ever pulled, it automatically ejected its empty case and reloaded the gun with the next cartridge in the belt, which in its turn when it got hot enough, repeated the performance. No one gun fired more than one round at a time, but there were dozens of those 20-mm. guns up there, enough to give the impression of intermittent short bursts as they went off erratically, depending on how the flames licked their breeches. It was all very rational indeed. Harding must have observed it before we secured alongside, to have forced that tin hat on me. Now I too knew why, though possibly it had taken me longer than Harding had figured to find out. There weren’t any strafing planes, there weren’t any ghostly gunners to worry about, I could rest assured I was at least as sane as when I had shoved off from Oran. But the shrapnel from overheated shells bursting practically at muzzlemouth was real enough. That was going to be something for those of us who had to fight the fire out on the open decks to worry about. Silently I thanked Harding for my tin hat. I wished I had a breastplate also.
CHAPTER
21 WITH NOT A SINGLE GROUSE FROM any man, wholly undaunted by that terrifying conflagration, the little group of worn-out British seamen off the King Salvor, led by Captain Harding personally, swarmed aboard the Strathallan and waded fiercely into the fire. Twelve pulsating hose lines were strung over the Strathallan’s main deck rail, every hose swelled hard as iron now with water from the King Salvor’s engine room pumps. Dragging those twelve hoses, the sailors turned to to drive that fire forward and contain it there till we could tow the burning troopship into port, a twenty-hour task at least—if we didn’t stop another torpedo sooner or perhaps a whole salvo of them and, trapped inside, go down with her like a rock. The men were set as I wanted them. Four hose lines, each shooting a powerful jet from a two and a half inch diameter fire nozzle onto the flames, were deployed on each of the Strathallan’s three upper decks. Two seamen were clinging to each nozzle and playing it on the fire practically under their noses. Except up on the boat deck, we were now right inside the burning superstructure itself at close quarters with the fire, working our way up the flaming passages. Two hose lines and four seamen were deep inside each passageway. A fifth man was at the after entrance to each corridor, keeping anxious watch through the smoke and the steam on his shipmates lest they suddenly be overwhelmed in there with no one knowing it, and taking turn about with those inside on the hoses in spelling them for a breath of air. Altogether, we had thirty men aboard the Strathallan, aside from Harding and me. Our nineteen remaining men under the Chief Engineer, Andy Duncan, were left on the King Salvor to keep her auxiliaries and pumps going to feed us the water on which the lives of most of that thirty now wholly depended, and to keep watch on our surging mooring lines and hoses lest they be parted between the two erratically rolling ships.
The first half hour had been tough and uncertain as to results, in getting the hoses run out and in fighting for a foothold on the two lower decks so we could even get a start. It had been a man-killing job dousing the flames pouring out each one of those corridor entrances sufficiently to get inside them to begin playing water on the fire beyond. We had no smoke masks, we had no asbestos suits, we had nothing but leather gloves and tin hats in the way of protective equipment. There had been a fierce battle at every corridor entrance, with one pair of sailors playing their hose on their shipmates, the other pair, to keep the latter from being incinerated as they stood practically in the fire at the entrance working the second hose around inside enough to let them enter and get going. But they had finally all made it. Now in every corridor, our seamen were well inside and steadily working their hoses forward. But it was inhuman work, better suited to demons out of hell. As I groped my way along the lower port passageway to inspect things there, guided only by the two canvas-covered hose lines writhing in the hot embers on the still hotter steel deck under my feet, I might as well have been in a furnace myself. On both sides of me and overhead, even though the fire had been smothered there, the warped bulkheads and deck beams still glowed red with the charred woodwork all smoldering, furnishing more light than was desirable in view of the intolerable heat being radiated with it from all about. Shortly I came up to the four men manning the nozzles there, playing them on the flames crackling ahead and in the staterooms each side of them. Here indeed and no mistake was hell itself—leaping flames, choking smoke, and vast clouds of scalding steam which the jets of water had turned into almost instantly the moment they hit the red hot bulkheads and the decks overhead and underfoot. I peered through the sizzling fog at the four men there enveloped in the steaming mist—they were clinging like grim death to their hose nozzles, eyes closed most of the time, their sweating torsos naked to the waist glowing red themselves in the reflection of the flames. I thought I recognized one—I winked my eyes violently to clear them a bit, then looked closer. Yes, it was Jock Brown, Fourth Engineer, manning the leading nozzle— Jock, whom I had last worked with on a wreck diving in the oil and the water in the flooded wardroom of the sinking Porcupine to seal off her leaking manhole covers. I might have expected it would be that Scotchman Jock and his gang I should find farthest inside the flaming inferno that was the Strathallan. I didn’t recognize any of his mates—others in the King Salvor’s black gang, I supposed. Well, they were now all black, all right, except where they were red,
for from their tin helmets down, their blistered but glistening bodies were streaked with charcoal from burning embers which had hit them. I didn’t stay to say hello. They seemed to be doing all right, since, though they all blinked momentarily at me, they were all too busy even to open their tightly clenched jaws. Besides, I was sufficiently cooked myself for the moment. That was the fourth (and last) burning corridor I had just dragged myself through to check progress, and I needed to cool off. I turned, and keeping my stinging eyes closed as much as I dared without falling flat on my face on the scorching deck, and breathing as little as I could of the mingled smoke and superheated steam that formed all there was for atmosphere in that passageway, I stumbled back along the fire hoses for a guide to the well deck aft. Out in the open again where at least the air was mostly air though it was still infernally hot, I leaned against the athwartship superstructure bulkhead. Halfblinded, I gasped like a fish out of water, sucking vast quantities of oxygen into my scorched lungs. Then I went in search of Harding. He was on the boat deck. On the boat deck, things had been different, though it was hard to say whether they’d been any better. Up on the boat deck, it wasn’t so hot—there the men were merely getting seared by radiation from the flames forward and overhead instead of being roasted from hot steel all around as in the ovens down below. And there was certainly more air. But to offset these advantages, they were all the while exposed to the shrapnel from bursting 20-mm. shells. That eerie performance of those damned unmanned sky-guns was still automatically going on and there was nothing we could do to ring down the curtain and stop it—at least for all the guns beyond easy range of our hoses— those we couldn’t reach with a stream of water to cool down occasionally. Fortunately for us, while everybody’s tin hat had caught plenty coming down from overhead and several men had already been hard hit by hot shrapnel coming in at flatter angles, none of the wounds had been serious enough yet to knock any of the men on the boat deck more than temporarily out of action. That, I supposed, was due to the fact that all the shell bursts were low order explosions from overheated TNT, not high order detonations from the impact fuses. Consequently the velocities of the flying fragments were much less than normal. At any rate, that strafing from the unmanned guns forward of us hadn’t yet driven us off the boat deck, and apparently wasn’t going to, much as it kept all hands on the topside ducking involuntarily each time the guns commenced firing again.
Nevertheless Harding was greatly worried, and as soon as I hove in sight up the ladder, he let me have it. He was afraid of a major explosion right aft which would send us all sky high any moment, as well as sinking the King Salvor close alongside. Conditions had changed since we had first boarded the Strathallan. The armed trawler Restive had picked up both towlines and aided by the other trawler, the Active, pushing directly on the Strathallan’s stem, had slowly swung her around roughly 180 ° through the wind. Now with the turn finally completed, both trawlers were towing her directly for Oran sixty miles away, speed between three and four knots, all they could make with such a heavy drag astern. So now we had the wind on the starboard side of the Strathallan, not on her port side as in the beginning, and as an unwelcome result the King Salvor was to leeward of her. For unfortunately, due to the course we had to steer to make port, the wind was no longer directly abeam as when the vessel had been drifting free, broadside to it. Now it was to a fair degree from ahead, on her starboard bow. That had immediately made matters on the topside worse for everybody, but there was no help for it. For now the flames and smoke from forward were being swept diagonally aft on the boat deck right over our heads and over the King Salvor secured to the new lee quarter. While we had successfully driven the fire forward somewhat on the boat deck, as well as below, still the flames from amidships were sweeping right over us, carrying sizable burning embers with them in a fierce updraft, and dropping some of the heavier of them not only on the boat deck astern of us not yet afire but also on the King Salvor. About the King Salvor, Harding wasn’t concerned. His signalman and a couple of seamen left there to tend lines, were frenziedly working with buckets of sea water, scurrying around to souse every burning brand as it came down on her topsides. He was confident they could keep the King Salvor from becoming another Strathallan on a tiny scale. It was the Strathallan herself that had him worried. “Look at that, Captain!” he burst out the moment I showed up on the boat deck. He pointed dead aft. I looked. Harding was pointing at the deserted 6-inch gun on a wide circular platform right on the Strathallan’s stern. The gun platform, like everything else about, was littered with shrapnel and glowing embers. But that gun platform was all steel; I didn’t see how it could catch fire, and of course the
gun couldn’t. “What about it?” I asked, very puzzled, for it wasn’t like the unemotional Harding to get wrought up over anything. “The deckhouse that gun’s standing on is the main magazine aft! I’ve sighted it all around to be sure!” he shouted to make himself heard above the uproar of the fire and of the exploding A.A. guns. “It’s jammed full o’ 6-inch powder charges, as well as shells for that gun! There’s five tons o’ smokeless powder at least in that magazine, let alone the TNT filling all the shells for that hundred-pounder there! And it’s blasted hot in that magazine already, with the paint on the outside starting to blister. If it gets any hotter there from this damned backdraft and all the hot stuff raining down on it, that magazine’ll go up and we’ll all go with it! We’d better turn all hands to heaving that ammo overboard, four bells, before she blows on us!” I took another look, then shook my head. Probably the usually stolid Harding was right enough in his unusual perturbation over the new danger. With the wind as it now was, it was only a question of time till those cordite charges got hot enough to explode the magazine. And probably also there were the five tons of powder that he feared in that magazine, and some fifteen tons of 6-inch shells beside, twenty tons all told of mingled high explosives that would take all our men to handle. Even with all of them working on it, it could well take us more than half an hour to jettison over the stern the contents of that magazine. But I couldn’t see it. If we did that, we might as well quit. For if we dragged the men off their hoses for half an hour to jettison powder and shell, we’d lose everything we’d already gained on the fire, maybe more, and have to make a completely fresh start on it outside the reignited superstructure when we’d finished manhandling overboard that twenty tons of cordite and steel. However, aside from the added fatigue by then, I doubted if any man could bring himself to go through that battle at the corridor entrances a second time to break in against the flames and then have to fight his way forward again over ground he’d once cooked himself to gain and then had thrown away—not now when he knew what it meant. Willing as they all were, I was sure they’d all wilt at that prospect. I couldn’t ask them to do it. Still, something had to be done about the magazine, and that soon, or unquestionably that twenty tons of ammunition would blow up exactly as Harding feared. Of course, when that happened we could quit worrying about the fire and could write off the Strathallan, except that we wouldn’t any of us
be around to be doing either any worrying or any writing off. There was, however, another way out, though it had drawbacks. We could take a couple of the hose lines working forward of us on the boat deck, turn them aft, and keep them playing on the magazine decks and bulkheads to hold its temperature within safe bounds. However, if I did that, we’d not only quit making progress on the boat deck but it was dubious that we’d be able to hold what we’d already gained there. Still, it seemed the only alternative, and something had to be done immediately. I told Harding I would not quit fighting the fire to jettison the ammunition; we would avoid explosion by playing hoses on the magazine instead. He could take one hose line from forward for a start; if that didn’t cool things down enough to suit him, he could take two. But no more. The idea appealed to Harding and after pondering it a moment he acquiesced. But when he turned forward to consider which of his four hose lines he could best spare to turn about for the job, the sight of that awesome fire front amidships sweeping up to enshroud the smokestacks and then curving in a vast ruddy arc aft over our heads, made him decide he couldn’t spare any. He promptly thought up a better idea. Just abaft the King Salvor’s bridge was a latticed steel tower surmounted by a fire monitor, a large fire nozzle mounted with training and elevating gears so it could be swung about like an A.A. gun. We weren’t using it, because it didn’t have range enough from where the low King Salvor was tied up well astern effectively to reach the fire far up on the boat deck and forward on the superstructure. But it should be able to cover the Strathallan’s stern like a fountain, and it had the further advantage that when once set in train and elevation, it required no attendance thereafter. It was just the thing to give that magazine on the stern a generous shower bath, and to keep on doing it! Harding started on the run down the ladders from the boat deck to board his ship again and swing that fire monitor into action. In a few minutes it was going, shooting a thick stream of water almost vertically into the air, aimed to come down in a heavy spray all over the Strathallan’s near by stern, drenching the 6-inch gun and its platform, and streaming down the four sides of the magazine to cool it beautifully. I gave up worrying further about the magazine; so did Harding, who shortly rejoined me up on the boat deck where I, as well as the magazine, was cooling off in that heaven-sent shower. That fixed everything. We no longer had any worries. We were gaining
steadily on the fire, we had washed out the danger of a magazine explosion in our rear, we were sure to win and get the Strathallan into port. I had the measure of that fire now. Ultimately we could extinguish it in the superstructure, keep it from getting a foothold either in the stern or in the bow, and hold it to the blazing fire-rooms deep in the bowels of the ship below. The fire there we could not hope to extinguish at sea—it was fed by fuel oil streaming into the firerooms from strained oil bunkers all about them, and against burning oil, water was worse than useless. That flaming oil could be put out only by smothering those firerooms in thick blankets of firefoam spread all over the blazing liquid surfaces. We had no foam equipment on the King Salvor for such a task, nor the tons and tons of foam powder it would take for the job. But at least after we had knocked out the fire in the superstructure, we could contain that burning fuel oil to the firerooms by continuous work with our hoses till we got in and keep it from reigniting the rest of the ship. Once in port, with all the foam equipment there, we could then smother the conflagration in the fire-rooms and our task would be over. There was nothing further for us to worry ourselves about—save the stark fact that it would take eighteen hours more at least of battling the flames before we got into port and it was a certainty that before two hours more of those eighteen were out, we wouldn’t have a single seaman left on his feet able to hold a nozzle, if any one of them lasted even that long. We had everything we needed to save that huge troopship—except men enough. Without at least an equal number to our little force to spell all our men at the hoses, two hours on, two hours off, we must lose. However willing, however dogged, there were limits to what human flesh could stand for long. We had to have more men at once or the Strathallan was lost. There was only one possible place we could get any—the Laforey. For the first time in the hour since we had boarded the Strathallan, I looked about again over the sea for her. What struck me first was how dark it was getting; that short December day was fading and night was coming on rapidly, though before with the splendid artificial illumination we were receiving on our job, I hadn’t observed it. It wouldn’t be long now till the blacked-out Laforey would be invisible somewhere off in the darkness, though neither she nor any solicitous U-boat hanging about would have the slightest difficulty in seeing us all through the night. There was the Laforey in the dusk, at the moment about a mile away, zigzagging to the northward of us off our stern, clear of the smoke.
“Come on, Harding,” I suggested. “Let’s signal the Laforey and ask her to send forty men to alternate with us. She ought to have two hundred at least aboard; certainly she can spare us forty to help save this ship.” Together we started down the ladder from the boat deck, a little regretful at having to get out from under our cooling shower. On the next deck down, I spotted Sid Everett, taking his brief spell standing watch outside at the starboard corridor entrance. Sid looked ghastly from his last turn inside with the fire. “How’d you make out with that Hindoo, Sid?” I asked in passing. “Did you bring him to?” “I did, Cap’n, right enough,” mumbled the exhausted third mate, “an’ lively too! I soaked ’is nose in ammonia, shoved a shot o’ Scotch between ’is teeth, an’ ’e gasped an’ opened his eyes, four bells an’ a jingle. I ’ad to leave ’im then. But I’m bloomin’ sorry I wasted the Scotch on ’im, Cap’n; I could bloody well use it on m’self right now. I might ’a done the job on that Hindoo just with the ammonia!” I nodded commiseratingly at Sid, continued down the ladders to the main deck below. Well, at least we had revived our rescued Lascar; that was something. Harding, who had descended first, was waiting for me at the foot of the ladder. I started for the King Salvor’s upper platform heaving alongside us to port, which was about all I could see of our little ship above the Strathallan’s main deck rail even when she lifted to a wave crest. But Harding stopped me. “Cast your eye on that, Captain,” he said bitterly, pointing inboard toward the Strathallan’s swimming pool. I had hastily noted in passing the existence of that swimming pool full of water my first few seconds aboard, but since then in all the hubbub I had paid no further attention to it. Now I looked at it again, more closely. “That,” to which Captain Harding was pointing, was a beautiful new gasoline motor-driven portable fire pump on rubber-tired wheels, standing close to the far side of the swimming pool. Its heavy suction hose was coupled up, all ready to drop into the water of the pool, and a few lengths of fire hose lay on deck, limp, of course, but also coupled to one of the discharges of the pump. So after all, Harding had had a portable fire pump on the King Salvor. And now he had it aboard the Strathallan, ready to go, though without anybody to man the extra hoses it could supply. “Looks good to me, skipper,” I said approvingly, wondering why all the
sarcasm in Harding’s voice. “We can use that too when we get some more men from the Laforey. But I thought you told me you didn’t have any?” “That’s right, and that’s the meat of it, blast it all!” cursed Harding. “That fire pump belongs to the Strathallan, not to me, and it’s been a’standing there by that swimming pool ready to go all the while. Y’ might ’a thought the crew o’ the Strathallan’d abandoned her ‘cause their engine room was flooded and maybe they had no pumps at all anywhere else to hold down that fire below, mightn’t y’ now? But there’s that portable—all set to go alongside that swimming pool and never even run before! There’d never been a drop o’ water through that pump. When first I sighted it that way I thought o’ course she must be broken down and wouldn’t pump so I didn’t bother with it. But later when we were all set, I got curious and I took a minute off to see. So Teddy Brown and I turned to on it and she started when we cranked ’er up with no trouble at all and ran four bells. Just to make sure of ’er for an anchor to windward, we even dropped the suction hose into that big pool for a minute and she grabbed a suction right off and pumped fine. But seeing as I hadn’t anybody to man any more hoses, I shut ’er down again so’s not to waste the water in that pool; which may come in handy yet!” Harding paused a moment for breath in his efforts to make himself heard, then finished caustically, “An’ to think they abandoned a fine ship like this, without even trying to use what they had in their hands to fight the fire! An’ when they shoved themselves off on those destroyers, the fire on the topside anyway couldn’t ’a been much. There’s lots else besides I’ve sighted since I came aboard that shows what kind o’ sailors they must ’a been!” So embittered that if he hadn’t already been scorched a fiery red he would have been blue in the face, Captain Harding turned away from that idle fire pump to board his own tiny ship. I followed him silently. He had covered the situation—nothing could be added to his scornful castigation of that panicstricken crew. Watching till the heaving signal platform of our ship synchronized with the wide teak railing of the Strathallan, we leaped across. Harding sang out to his signalman to belay for a moment chasing about after embers with his bucket, to get his signal lantern again, and to accompany us aft to the fantail where we could see the Laforey. Shortly we were all there, and our signal lantern was flashing through the dusk to the distant destroyer astern, asking her to send us forty seamen to alternate with ours in fighting the fire. There was an immediate acknowledging flash, then a short interval, and the answer came blinking back,
“CERTAINLY. CAN YOU SEND YOUR BOAT FOR THEM ?” That seemed reasonable enough, since we already had a boat in the water, and the Laforey, compelled to keep moving at considerable speed, hadn’t. So I replied it would be sent at once. Harding immediately broke one of Andy Duncan’s scant remaining engineers off the auxiliaries below, took one of his even scantier deck force off chasing fires on his own topside, and sent them both away in the boat to bring back with them the promised assistance. “And your mates on the Strathallan’ll thank y’ kindly to shake a leg going both ways with their reliefs!” he shouted to his men in the boat as they shoved off. “They’re all about cooked by now!” We watched the boat for a few minutes rising and falling crazily to a quartering sea as it chugged off at six knots, its best speed. It was a good boat, not fast, but roomy and seaworthy; it would be just about big enough to take the forty men off the Laforey in one trip. However, it wasn’t a quarter of a mile along on its way when I began to regret I hadn’t gone in it myself for a discussion with the Laforey’s skipper over the arrangements for the night which was rapidly closing in, both in case we got torpedoed again, and in case we didn’t, but various other contingencies arose. This would especially be necessary if anything should happen requiring quick communication with the towing trawlers. We couldn’t see them nor could they see us because of the fire between, though the Laforey could keep us both, well illuminated by the fire, in view most of the time. But it was undesirable to delay the arrival of those imperative reliefs by calling the boat back for me. And besides if it were ready to shove off from the Laforey with the relief party before I finished the discussion with her skipper, I should be in the unwelcome position either of delaying the reliefs again or of leaving our arrangements only half settled. I decided I had better go in a separate boat. Harding had another which could be lowered quickly from his port davits, his clear side. I would act as coxswain; all that would be required for crew would be one other man as engineer so as to deplete the King Salvor’s remaining skeleton of a ship’s force as little as possible. So far as the Strathallan herself was concerned, everything was well in hand and she could safely be left to Harding to carry on during the hour I should probably be gone. Harding had only one objection. The engine in his port boat badly needed a
thorough mechanical overhaul, was unreliable, and might break down, leaving me adrift in the open ocean. That would be especially bad if it occurred on my return trip, which would have to be made when it was completely dark and nobody could see me nor dare to turn on a searchlight to do any looking for a drifting boat. I considered that a moment, then decided it had to be hazarded. I should take a pair of good flashlights in the boat with me so at least I could flash an SOS roundabout if we broke down completely, and trust that the Laforey might see it and rescue us. I should warn that destroyer to keep a bright lookout for signals during my return trip. One more engineer was stripped out of the black gang, leaving poor Andy Duncan wondering whether the semi-conscious Hindoo sailor lying in our wardroom could be kept on his feet long enough to warrant turning him to with an oil can. But leaving that unsettled, the engineer and I climbed up into the boat. With some difficulty, between us we got the engine coughing spasmodically. At that, Harding and his signalman swung out the boat and lowered it away till it splashed into the sea. We two in it hurriedly cast it loose from the boatfalls lest it swamp, even at only three knots headway on the tow. The engineer leaped from the forward disengaging block to throw in his clutch; with equal haste, when the after block was freed, I seized the tiller to sheer off. In another moment, we were tossing badly in the seaway, swinging in a half circle to head aft for the Laforey. Very promptly I saw that the sea which had seemed only moderate from the Strathallan and not so bad even from the King Salvor, was a rough sea for a small boat, even when taking it on the quarter. It kept me fully occupied at the tiller to hold a reasonable course for the destroyer in that corkscrewing boat. Long before I was through I ached for a steering oar to hold her steady, instead of that tiller and a rudder half the time out of water and worthless. There were other troubles. The Laforey, starting to fade into only a shadow in the dusk, was underway for her own safety and steering no fixed course herself. I had to guess where she was going to be at the end of the next fifteen minutes, which was the time I estimated it would take us for the trip. But as the Laforey was purposely maneuvering to make such a guess extremely inaccurate for a U-boat bent on using her as a target, she wasn’t making it very simple for me and my tossing little craft aiming also for an interception. As the last straw, our worn-out engine (which had not once made a complete revolution firing on all cylinders and over which my engineer was constantly
tinkering, trying to improve matters) caught a heavy sheet of spray coming over our weather quarter and quit cold. In a moment, in spite of my best efforts at the tiller, we were swung broadside to the seas, there to wallow heavily among the breaking waves and driving spray as we drifted helplessly dead to leeward before wind and sea in the increasing darkness. The engineer stopped tinkering with the carburetor he had been trying to adjust, and started to crank frantically. Not even a cough. I dropped the useless tiller, ripped a one-quart fire extinguisher from out its bracket beneath the sternsheets, twisted the handle to unlock it, and began furiously to spray carbon tetrachloride all over the spark plugs, the ignition wiring, and the magneto, to dry them out, meanwhile with my body shielding the engine as best I might from a further bath. It worked. A few more revolutions and the engine began to fire unevenly, no better than before, but at least to fire again. Hastily I dropped the open metal engine covers down about the engine to protect it from any more spray, and told the engineer we’d go the rest of the way with the engine limping along as well as it could, but at least limping; we’d quit striving for improvement. Then I leaped back for the tiller to straighten out the boat again. About five minutes later we were alongside the Laforey, which had obligingly sheered over toward us and slowed briefly to let us catch up. Her port side ladder was overboard. Our first boat was already secured to that and we secured directly alongside the destroyer herself, astern and inboard of our other boat, after which the Laforey speeded up again. I clambered across and into the other boat, then climbed the side ladder, followed by my engineer. He said he would try to obtain from the destroyer ’s stores a set of new spark plugs (“sparking” plugs to him) which he felt might improve things for our return trip. I was wholeheartedly willing to let him try; it was too bad, I thought, in that short interval that he couldn’t procure a whole new engine instead. As I came over the rail, the Laforey’s executive officer, a lieutenant commander, met me. He apologized; his captain, he said, dared not leave the bridge. Would I mind stepping up there to talk with him? I wouldn’t, of course, but I paused first a moment. Lined up on deck just abaft the port gangway opening was the fire party, about ready to embark for the Strathallan. I looked them over in the last remnants of the fast-fading twilight. There was just light enough left now to make things out at close quarters. It was a fine looking fire party, all husky British seamen, and beautifully
fitted out. With all those well-equipped men as reliefs on the hoses, we should certainly save the Strathallan now. Some of the seamen carried smoke masks, a few others had rolled-up asbestos suits draped over their shoulders, all had tin hats and in addition smoke goggles for eye protection. They even had a rescue breathing apparatus in a heavy case to revive a man knocked out by smoke, and the British equivalent of a hospital corpsman to take care of the injured. As I looked them over, they began to stream by me down the side ladder and into our waiting boat. Last of all went the two officers in charge of them, a sublieutenant and a lieutenant, R.N. I stopped the lieutenant, the last man, to give him some brief instructions. “You’ll find Captain Harding of the King Salvor in charge when you get there, Lieutenant. Lay alongside her and report yourself to him. Have your men relieve his crew immediately on the hoses aboard the Strathallan; they’ll have had a two-hour stretch at it by then. After that, you’re to alternate with his men —two hours on, two hours off, on the hoses till we make port. Understand, Lieutenant?” He nodded. He understood. It was quite simple. He dropped down the side ladder into the boat. The Laforey slowed again momentarily to let them cast off; as they swung clear, she speeded up once more. Accompanied by her exec, I started up her port side for the bridge. As I went, I looked briefly about. The Laforey was a huge destroyer, one of the two largest Britain had. Specially built as one of a pair for squadron leaders, she was practically a young light cruiser, with her three main turrets, her numerous heavy A.A. guns, and her eight torpedo tubes in two quadruple mounts. I judged my first guess on her had been correct; she must easily have had at least two hundred men in her crew. Raking up forty for a fire party could have been no difficult task for her, though no doubt it stripped her of most of her gun crews. Following the exec as a guide, I entered the superstructure forward and climbed an interior ladder to come out on her enclosed bridge, even darker there than it had been on deck. No light showed anywhere but a faint glow coming from the compass. The exec introduced me to his captain. Even in the gloom I was surprised to note, he was a captain—a four-striper, R.N., from the gold lace and curl over it on his overcoat shoulder marks. Before, I had assumed I would find at most a commander, as destroyer skippers ordinarily were when they were not just lieutenant commanders. But, I reflected, the Laforey was a squadron leader, not an ordinary destroyer; this skipper was
really commodore for a large number of destroyers, hence the assignment of an officer with considerably more than normal rank to that command. But if I was surprised when introduced to the Laforey’s commanding officer, that surprise was nothing to the one I got when the latter promptly turned about and introduced me to another shadow on his bridge—the captain of the Strathallan! So of all persons, the captain of the deserted Strathallan was standing by as a spectator, watching his ship burn while others fought for her! And never signaling the King Salvor offering to come aboard her to help us with information as to his ship’s layout, if nothing more! We checked our position on the chart and stepped off the distance to land. With luck and the speed the trawlers were then making, and no increase in the wind and the sea, we should make Oran by around nine or ten o’clock next morning, a little better than I had hoped for. It was then somewhat past 6:30 P.M.; we should have about fifteen hours more of it—always providing there were no more torpedoes. On that contingency the skipper of the Laforey was noncommittal. He would do his best with his Asdic and his depth charges to protect both himself and us during the night but—He shrugged his shoulders. No more comment on that was necessary. He and all the other destroyers under his command had been doing exactly that when the Strathallan, the biggest and most valuable ship in their convoy, had been selected by the U-boat as target for the first torpedo. Whether he could do any better alone now with his Asdic, remained to be seen—much depended on that U-boat captain. Had he considered his torpedoed and burning victim already a loss and sought greener pastures? Or was he skeptical of results and following to watch, willing to attack again if we got the Strathallan close enough to port to make her rescue certain? This last wasn’t the case yet; we were still far out to sea. The captain of the Laforey doubted that the U-boat would expend any more torpedoes on the Strathallan for some hours yet, at least until the flames were visibly much reduced in volume. But of course his own case was very different. A large destroyer like the Laforey was always an enticing target for a U-boat captain brave enough to risk attacking one. If this were the same U-boat which had attacked the Porcupine eleven days before, then he was brave enough, no question. The dark hours now enshrouding us would tell. They favored the U-boat captain in attacking the Laforey; even more so, if he wished to attack the slow-moving Strathallan again. She stood out in the night now like a huge torch, a perfect target for a long range shot which could be made almost with impunity whenever the U-
boat captain considered it worth another torpedo or several of them. To minimize that danger, the Laforey would shortly begin circling us in zigzags at high speed and at somewhat over extreme torpedo range as well as closer in, trying to search out beneath the sea the whole possible area of attack with her Asdic. And at my request, her captain agreed to keep close watch on the King Salvor for any signals, ready to communicate them if necessary to the towing trawlers. Long before we had covered all this, we could see in the lurid glare from the Strathallan that our first boat had reached the King Salvor and discharged the new men. I sighed with relief at that. They had reached her nearly two hours after we had started fighting the fire; those first two hours would unquestionably have been the worst of all. Harding’s men must have been made of cast iron if, after turning over their hose nozzles to the fresh seamen, they had been able to stagger down the fiery passages on their own feet on their way back to their bunks aboard the King Salvor. I could never have stood it myself half so long. We had been none too soon with reliefs for them. A seaman fumbled his way up on the now totally dark destroyer bridge to tell the captain that my boat would be ready in about twenty minutes more. It seemed some of the motor mechanics on the Laforey were helping my man not only to change the spark plugs but also to tune up the whole ignition system and the carburetor; when they finished, the boat should be good enough for the return trip, anyway. I thanked the captain for his help. The discussion was over. The captain of the Laforey turned back to conning his ship through the darkness on her weaving track. Had my boat been ready, I should have left immediately. But as I had no option except to wait till the mechanics got my engine tied together again, I felt I might as well learn what more I could of how many separate firerooms the Strathallan had, and how they were laid out. The knowledge would help when it came to smothering the fire below. The sole source of information was that vague shadow apparently trying to efface itself in the blackness against the after bridge bulkhead. I hardly blamed the man for that. Could it be that now when he had left his ship in the face of danger, he might at leisure be remembering the British skipper of a sister P. & O. liner, the Rawalpindi? And how that captain had conducted himself earlier in the war when he was suddenly confronted in the Arctic twilight off Iceland by a Nazi battleship, heavily armored, bristling with triple-turrets and 11-inch guns against which his own few 6-inch rifles were but popguns and his unarmored
merchant ship sides but cheese? Against that powerful battleship, the Rawalpindi had not the chance of a snowball in hell, unless she turned instantly and fled off into the dusk where between her own high speed and the falling night, she could reasonably hope to escape unharmed. But that P. & O. skipper had also an obligation as a seaman from which he did not flinch even in the face of certain death. There were dozens of far more poorly armed and very slow freighters with him which would all die like sheep before a ravening wolf if he abandoned them by running to save himself. He was a seaman. While the freighters separated to flee in all directions into the night, he steamed directly for that battleship to engage her—of a more valiant act, the long history of war at sea has no record! Of course the Rawalpindi was shot to pieces and went down before those flaming 11-inch turret guns, a fiery coffin for her captain and most of his crew. But before that finally happened, the sheep were well scattered in the long night, saved, most of them, from the fangs of the wolf which had to be satisfied mainly with the hollow victory over the Rawalpindi. Dead now, the captain of that P. & O. liner and the Rawalpindi and her crew would live forever in the hearts of British seamen. I turned to the captain of the Rawalpindi’s much bigger sister to ask him a question about his abandoned Strathallan. With some difficulty, I made him out enough to step over to his side. “Captain,” I asked, “how many firerooms has the Strathallan, and which ones caught fire from the torpedo explosion? And why didn’t you report that fire right off, instead of just the torpedo damage?” “Not any of ’em,” came the surprising reply. “The torpedo hit us in the engine room, where it killed my Chief Engineer. But it didn’t set any stokeholds afire. There wasn’t any fire to report till hours after.” “The torpedo didn’t light you off?” I asked incredulously. “What did then?” The skipper sought to explain. It was rather involved. His Chief Engineer was dead, his engine room was flooded, his ship was stopped. Not knowing what might happen, he busied himself getting away all his lifeboats in the darkness; it was 2 A.M. when he was hit. He managed that successfully, he said; about a thousand troops, including a hundred or more American women nurses, were shoved clear in the boats. That had gone all right. That left him with about 5000 others aboard, including his crew. No boats for any of them. There were still the rafts, which he started launching. But the ship showed no
sign of sinking by then; he decided to wait till daylight. Dawn came, late of course, it being the winter solstice. Still no danger of sinking, nor any other danger save that of another torpedo. He decided to wait further before loading rafts, especially as all his boats had drifted from sight during the night. On the rafts it would be worse in the cold seas; he would take to them only as a last resort. Meanwhile through leaking bulkheads below some water was coming into the fireroom just forward of the flooded engine room; not enough, apparently, to endanger the ship by sinking her; enough, however, to be troublesome. But his Chief Engineer was dead; the other engineer fellows were taking care of it as well as they could, which was poorly; he himself knew little about what was going on below (and, I judged, had never gone below himself to find out). It seemed there was some heavy fuel oil from badly leaking oil bunkers floating on top of the water in the bilges (I had seen the like on the Porcupine recently, where in his fireroom Bartley had extinguished his fires); those engineer fellows must have been careless; it would have been different if the Chief had been alive. They had allowed the water with the fuel oil on it to rise so high it had swashed into the boiler fireboxes (Why in the name of common sense, I wondered, hadn’t someone ordered those boiler fires put out long before the water rose that high? They didn’t need steam for the engines any more, and not much for anything.) with the result that it had lighted off and started a bad fire in the firerooms. Unable to extinguish the fires in the boiler rooms (though they were pretty well confined to those spaces) he had concluded that with his engine room flooded from the torpedo damage and his boiler rooms aflame, the ship was a total loss. When the destroyers came alongside, he had abandoned her with the troops. For some reason I never got, he had himself boarded the Laforey, instead of going in on the other destroyers. And that was it. I turned away. Apparently it had never entered the skipper ’s head that even a desperately wounded ship is still the captain’s business to fight for while she floats, even if it no longer is necessarily considered the captain’s business to go down with her. I shuffled forward through the darkness to the bridge windows where, till I could go to rejoin them, I could at least watch some men fighting to save the ship, even at the eleventh hour. But in a moment I received another jolt. For on the very stern of the Strathallan, dimmed somewhat in the smoke, a signal lamp started to blink at
us. A signal quartermaster took down the message, passed it to the Laforey’s captain. The latter, shielding his flashlight, stooped low beneath his bridge rail to read it, then passed it to me. I did the same. “CONSIDER IT TOO DANGEROUS TO REMAIN. REQUEST PERMISSION TO RETURN LAFOREY.” It was signed by the Laforey’s lieutenant in charge of her fire party. I was so stunned, I could hardly pass the message back once I had read it. Too dangerous to remain on the Strathallan after we on the King Salvor had got over the worst of it and established a solid bridgehead inside her superstructure from which to battle that fire? How could any sailor claim so? Dangerous, yes; nearly everything in wartime was dangerous. But too dangerous? I couldn’t believe my eyes! “Sorry, Captain; I’ll have to withdraw my men,” I heard as I handed back to the skipper of the Laforey his signal. “You can’t do that!” I objected vehemently. “It’s no more dangerous for your men than for mine, and mine’re willing to stick it! If you take yours off, it leaves us with no reliefs at all and the Strathallan’s lost! You just can’t do it!” But he could and he would, in spite of my arguments and my pleas. If his lieutenant, whom he trusted, felt it was too dangerous, then it was too dangerous. He couldn’t hazard his forty men—he might be in action the next day, any day. He couldn’t fight the Laforey without those men; he wasn’t going to hazard them and his ship to save the wreck of the Strathallan. Bitterly I regretted that I was up against another four-striper, my equal in rank and possibly even a captain senior to me, rather than a commander or a lieutenant commander. One of the latter I might have overawed by an assumption of responsibility due to greater rank; whatever happened would be on my head, not his, as I was Senior Officer Present. But with this four-striper, it wouldn’t work. I had to rely on argument and even on pleading with him. I tried to point out that the Allies had several hundred destroyers about equal to the Laforey; they had not over a dozen transports as good or better than the Strathallan. Even to sacrifice the Laforey to save the Strathallan was worth it. He couldn’t see it; to him the Strathallan was only a torpedoed and burning wreck, not worth much even if towed in. In desperation I launched my last argument. He might lose some of his men; he certainly wouldn’t lose all of them. We were gaining on it all the while; the
fire wasn’t as bad as his lieutenant thought. The skipper of the Laforey crouched down to look once again at the signal in his hand, then straightened up to gaze a moment at that volcano of flame that was the Strathallan, twice as lurid now against the blackness of the night skies. Then I got his last word. My men and I could do what we pleased about the Strathallan. Salvage was our business but it wasn’t his. He wasn’t hazarding his men on her. He had to keep ready for action. Sorry. His blinker lantern started to flash out through the night the answer, “WITHDRAW IMMEDIATELY.”
CHAPTER
22 ON MY WAY BACK IN MY BOAT TO the King Salvor, I passed close aboard in the darkness her other boat going in the opposite direction, laboring heavily through the seas, deeply loaded down with the ex-fire party, their lieutenant in the sternsheets alongside the coxswain. Silently the two boats passed each other in the night. I had salvaged a little of the situation in a final compromise with the Laforey’s skipper, but not much. I had persuaded him this time not to order the trawlers to cut the Strathallan adrift again; they were to keep on towing her, even though we could no longer fight the fire. If the King Salvor’s men ever recuperated enough, we’d tackle it again by ourselves when we could. And if they never did, the Strathallan was to be towed anyway till we got to Oran where I could get help from ashore to fight what of course by then would be a far worse fire even than we had first encountered. We would save what then was left of the burning troopship. Wan and worn in body but far sicker even at heart, I sheered my boat in alongside the port counter of the King Salvor. Captain Harding himself caught the painter the engineer tossed aboard, made it fast. I clambered wearily up over the low rail. I had left for the Laforey an hour before confident of victory; I returned wholly crushed. I had lost, we had lost. Danger, DANGER, DANGER! Run away from it, keep away from it! What, I wondered, was danger anyway? Harding and all his seamen on the King Salvor were apparently too stupid to discern what all sensible men, like the skipper of the Strathallan and that lieutenant off the Laforey, recognized instantly they saw it, even from a distance. I looked up from the King Salvor’s low fantail to the high side of the Strathallan against which, as usual, the King Salvor’s superstructure was pounding heavily. Everything was about as I had left it an hour before, including, to my astonishment, those twelve hard-as-iron fire hoses still
writhing continuously as the King Salvor’s engine room pumps pounded the water at high pressure through them to the Strathallan. “How come, skipper?” I questioned, pointing to the hoses. “What’s the good of pumping more water through those hoses? We’re just wasting fuel. Shut down and salvage the abandoned hoses if you can. The Laforey’s men who were manning those nozzles last must be just about boarding their own ship by now.” “Those hoses ain’t abandoned, Captain; they’re still manned with my own men still hanging to ’em! There never was a Laforey man on a single one o’ those hoses. They never touched ’em an’ they none of ’em ever got near the fire!” “They never manned the hoses? Why, I personally ordered their lieutenant to do exactly that the minute he got aboard here; that’s all we needed ’em for! What, for Christ’s sake, did he do then with all those men all that time they were aboard here?” “He went four bells for that after deckhouse magazine no sooner he was aboard. He seemed to know all about it, an’ he says to me he’s going to jettison the ammo before it blows up. I told him not to worry about that magazine; we had it well cooled down with our fire monitor; it’d never blow up; for the love of God, let that magazine alone an’ relieve my poor lads on the hoses! But I might as well ’ve saved my breath. He an’ his men went at that magazine door with a sledge, smashed off the lock, then the whole lot of ’em turned to pitching powder cases an’ shell over the stern. “I thought, well, at least when they finish that, they’ll turn to on the nozzles, so I kept my lads who’d been a’thinkin’ they were about to be relieved, hangin’ on to ’em. But I’ll be goddamned, Captain, if that lieutenant, when the last case o’ powder went over the side, didn’t grab the signalman he’d brought along with him and start signaling his ship it was too dangerous to remain! I could hardly believe it! And then they get an affirmative from their ship, and the whole bloody lot of ’em, fire equipment an’ all, shoves off again without ever having done a blasted thing to help us, leaving my crew still on the hoses!” I gazed at the captain of the King Salvor. Poor devil! How much, I wondered, is a man supposed to have to stand before he’s led off in a strait-jacket? I really didn’t know. “So your men are still on those hoses!” I muttered wearily. “Well, now let’s see if we can get ’em out o’ there before they all drop and burn to death!” But Harding couldn’t see it. He was berserk now—he and his crew were
going to stay with that fire and save the ship; they were not going to drop the hoses, reliefs or no reliefs, till we got her in! Over Harding, at least, I had real authority; I didn’t have to argue. If killing his men and himself too would put out that fire in the superstructure and assure me of getting that 25,000-ton troop-ship into port, it was worth the lives of fifty men. After all, commanders in wartime have sacrificed the lives of far more than that for far less gain—sometimes for only a few miles of worthless sand in the desert. But the gain wasn’t there to be won by the sacrifice; an hour more, probably less, and Harding and all his men would have collapsed in the flames; at best it would be fourteen hours yet till we could make port. And when we got in with the Strathallan, if we ever did, I needed most of all Harding and his men to resume the fight. I ordered Harding to withdraw his men. Broken-hearted, Harding obeyed. With hardly any life in him any more, he scaled the high sides of the Strathallan once again, there to get hold of Teddy Brown on the boat deck, Sid Everett on the next below, and Jock Brown on the main, and order a retreat. I went with him to see he didn’t double-cross me in the order and tell them to stand firm instead. We got all the men out, singed, blistered, blinded, bleeding—hardly men any more—just horrible looking seared carcasses barely able to stagger to the lower rail, there to be helped down onto the King Salvor’s deck. The roaring fire, with the wind ahead, followed us aft in our retreat off the boat deck, down the passageways. The King Salvor’s fire monitor was swung forward to cover the withdrawal; the hose nozzles were all left going for what little good they might do thrashing about spurting water to help check the advance of the flames while the men stumbled aft, too weak to drag the heavy fire hoses backwards with them. When the last man of the fire party was lowered over the side down onto the King Salvor, the few seamen on her deck were thrown aboard the Strathallan to drag back what hoses they could from the burning corridors and the boat deck. We managed to salvage about half the lines in the face of rapidly advancing flames. With the unrestrained fire sweeping down on her, hanging on alongside on the lee quarter was now becoming impossible for the King Salvor; Harding needed what few seamen he had left to cast loose. The rest of the hose was abandoned, the pumps below hurriedly shut down except to the fire monitor, the mooring hawsers cast off the troopship’s bitts, and the last seaman on her
deck made a wild leap for the King Salvor’s topside before the sea opened too wide a gap. A bell clanged below. The propeller started to churn astern, dragging us clear, while at the starboard rail, the signalman and a few others hacked furiously with axes at the remaining hose lines to free us of the Strathallan. Over all, our fire monitor, pointed vertically upward now, showered the King Salvor herself in a heavy spray to keep her from going afire till she was clear.
CHAPTER
23 ABOUT A QUARTER OF A MILE TO leeward of the Strathallan and dead abeam her, the King Salvor steamed slowly southward through the night on the troopship’s port side, her low side. We were making about four knots; so also was the tow, which had speeded up a little once the trawlers ahead were relieved of the slight extra drag of towing the King Salvor as well as the torpedoed liner. All was quiet as well as dark on the blacked-out salvage ship, short-handed both on her bridge and below in the machinery spaces, running only with the few men as watch standers who had not been on the hoses. The latter thirty, worn even beyond the power to groan over their miseries, were all silently stretched out in their bunks, though I doubted that any might be enjoying the blessed mercy of sleep. Harding had the watch on the bridge, where I had taken station also to keep an eye on the Strathallan. Somewhere, far out in the darkness where the glare from the troopship would not give her away, the invisible Laforey must be zigzagging through the night, listening endlessly on her Asdic for any echo of a ping coming back to her from beneath the seas. I had not seen the Laforey again since I had left her. Astern of us dragged both our small boats; we had not men to spare to hoist them aboard. Ahead, at the end of the two long hawsers, the trawlers were clearly visible straining on the towlines, dragging their flaming burden through the seas toward faraway Oran. The Strathallan, off to starboard of us where we could observe her better, was now a sight almost beyond description. In the two and a half hours we had been aboard her, we had driven the fire forward about a quarter of the distance to her bridge. Within ten minutes after we had quit playing our hoses on her superstructure, it was all aflame again from end to end. And now that fire rolling upward in the night was unimaginable. It had seemed horrible enough to look upon when we had first come to grips with it during the last fading hour of daylight; now against the night sky, it was truly
terrifying to behold, even from a distance. My feelings toward that young lieutenant off the Laforey eased a bit—perhaps it had been too much to expect of him that the sight of that seething sea of fire at close range for the first time against the darkness of the night, would not paralyze him altogether. All roundabout the Strathallan the breaking waves were gleaming red and orange, reflecting as in countless moving mirrors the leaping flames above. Overhead the rolling clouds of smoke glowed on their under sides a more fiery scarlet than any sunset I had ever seen. And in between the reddened sea and the ruddy clouds, flamed the Strathallan, her dark steel hull an immense devil’s cauldron from which a mass of erupting flame leaped skyward, to envelop superstructure, smokestacks, and masts alike as it roared upward. And as the last touch, now that the night skies furnished a better background, long streaks of fiery red tracers darted off in all directions to cut the sky to pieces and give the whole the appearance of a gigantic setpiece at a fireworks display—the ack-ack guns were still firing on the boat deck, with minor stores of explosives occasionally going off en masse. We steamed on through the night. I wasn’t much worried over torpedoes any more—at least not on the Strathallan. If the U-boat were following us, the Laforey might have cause enough for worry about herself. But if the U-boat captain were using as a criterion the amount of fire visible on the Strathallan as he eyed her through his periscope, then he certainly was justified in withholding any further torpedoes for a long time yet. Midnight came. There was no changing of the watch. We had nobody to change with. We kept on southward. Thirty-six more miles to go yet; nine more hours. Completely sick at heart, I watched the Strathallan as we plodded along by her side, to my sad eyes no spectacle, but an irreplaceable troopship which meant much to us in the winning of the war. Steadily she was being consumed in the unopposed flames gutting her, while I wondered how much of her, aside from her bare hull, might finally be left to fight for once we had men enough to resume the fight again. For now the fire was slowly working its way forward of the bridge toward the foremast and the forecastle, even in the face of a moderate head wind. And of course she was aflame all the way to her stern in which direction the wind was pushing the fire. Two a.m. Still we plodded southward. Still twenty-eight more miles to Oran; seven more hours.
The flames below her main deck were spreading forward and aft now to compartments and holds other than her already flaming firerooms, lighted off without doubt from above by the newly ignited upper hull above them. For the first time something I had never observed before, became startlingly prominent. Long horizontal rows of airports in the dark sides of her lower hull began to glow like a hundred rising suns, each illuminated from inside by the fire spreading there. A new fear clutched my heart. Before I had never doubted (saving always more torpedoes) that we should at least get the hull of the Strathallan into port, badly burned out though it might be. But now I was no longer so sure, as I stared at that multitude of newly lighted up airports. One row especially, the lowest row, could hardly be a foot above her waterline on the side toward us, her port side, the torpedoed side, and the side toward which she was listed and deepest in the water. For the fiery glow now showing through all those airports proved that the heavy inside metal battle covers (which every ship carries on her airports) were not swung down over the glass airports and dogged down hard, as they should be always on every vessel entering the war zone. And especially should that be so on a troopship at night, which had been the Strathallan’s condition when torpedoed. But they weren’t—not one, high or low. And with the list on the port side of the ship bringing the lowest row of glass ports there practically to the water ’s edge, a danger I had never imagined had leaped suddenly into prominence. For when the cold waves lapping the hull outside hit those glass ports, the glass would shatter after it got hot enough from the fire inside, leaving a row of large open holes right at the waterline through which the heaving seas would pour through and soon end everything. Those ports should every one have been sealed inside by their metal covers. What kind of officers had she had to let her enter the war zone with thousands and thousands of troops aboard and not a battle port in her lower hull sealed down? I almost wept at the sight. This had put her wholly beyond the power of men to save. God help the Strathallan now! Fascinated, Harding and I watched those glowing airports. They became brighter and brighter. Then a strange thing happened. From one after another, starting with those higher up where it was undoubtedly hottest, a sudden gush of molten fire seemed to spout, culminating in a torrent of fiery metal streaming downward into the sea.
The first time it occurred left me incredulous that my eyes were any longer honest with me. How could steel, hot though that fire might be, melt and run that way? But after the second or third spout of such molten streams, I understood. There was no steel melting and running there, much as it looked like it. What we were seeing were the thick glass airport lenses, one after another, melting suddenly from the flame inside and pouring down the side of the ship—fiery molten glass! One after another, I watched the airport lenses melt out and gush into the sea, first the upper rows, then those halfway down, last of all every port in that row right on the waterline! On these last, the molten glass hardly had a chance to start pouring down before it soused into the water, extinguished. There was no longer any hope at all—not in a rough sea with all those open holes right on her waterline and Oran still twenty-five miles away. I was very tired. I turned to Harding, “Have me called, please, Captain, just before she goes. I’m stretching out for a little in my stateroom.” Harding nodded, said nothing. I stepped aft into the starboard cabin just abaft the bridge, flung myself, clothes and all, on the bunk, in an instant must have been dead to the world. In another instant, so it felt to me, I was being rudely shaken to bring me to again. In the glare from outside, I made out Harding himself roughly yanking me by both shoulders. “Turn out, Captain, if y’ want to see the last of ’er! She’s going!” I rolled stiffly from the bunk, hardly able to open my eyes. “What’s the rush?” I protested. “I haven’t been here a minute yet and you’re turning me out already. She can’t have got worse that fast.” “It’s nearly four, an’ y’ve been asleep well over an hour. Shake a leg! She won’t last long now!” I staggered from the cabin, in a few steps was on the bridge. I noted we weren’t moving any longer, merely heaving idly to the sea. Looking ahead, I saw the trawlers weren’t moving either; on their sterns I could make out sailors frenziedly swinging axes on the heavy manila hawsers going over their gunwales, hacking the cables in half. One look abeam showed why clearly enough. Evenly, majestically, the vast bulk of the Strathallan was rolling over on its port side. Already her port rail was under water, the side there with all its melted airports was submerged and no longer visible. There was flame enough
still spouting high to furnish more illumination than seemed needful, but nothing like what had been. I wondered perhaps if the sea already half filling her had not engulfed her firerooms and so drowned out the worst of that inferno. The terrific list was too much for her top hamper. The foremast leaned crazily over and collapsed into the forward well deck which was now almost vertical, a glowing mass of white-hot steel. First one stack, then the other, tore loose and skidded down the steeply sloping boat deck into the sea. Relentlessly she continued to capsize, the sea lapped higher on her fiery decks, clouds of steam rose up from the waves as they hit the sizzling steel, to mingle with the smoke above. Farther and farther over she went; the dazzling glow from her incandescent topsides, from the flames, and from the lurid clouds of smoke and steam above began sharply to decrease, then suddenly was wholly extinguished like a snuffed candle. It was night again, completely dark both near and far. The Strathallan had sunk. Only a huge cloud of black smoke, scarcely distinguishable from the black sky overhead as it rose slowly clear of the surface, marked the spot from which a moment before that splendid vessel had started for the bottom, one thousand fathoms down, twenty miles still to Oran. Slowly the smoke lifted higher, leaving only the undisturbed sea, no different there than anywhere under the night skies. With wet eyes, and not from smoke either, I stared sadly at that spot. The Strathallan was gone after all our efforts. We had done our best. But we had failed.
CHAPTER
24 BY 8:30 A.M., DECEMBER 22, 1942, the King Salvor was back in her berth in Oran alongside the salvage quay, practically a dead ship once she was tied up, with all hands except one man on deck and two men below turned in. I prayed that nothing more got torpedoed immediately in our area; we were in no condition just then to tackle another wreck at sea. Completely washed up myself, I crawled ashore, reported briefly by telephone to the Flag-Officer-in-Charge, Oran, that we had failed to save the Strathallan, asked him to relay that to Admiral Cunningham, and made my way back to my room at the Grand Hotel. There, too stiff and weary for anything else, I flung myself out on the bed, trying to forget the nightmare I had just been through. Next morning I was on my way by air to Algiers, to report to Admiral Cunningham and to try to put some dynamite under a salvage problem there that was making no progress at all and which the Naval Commander-in-Chief’s office was urging I look into personally. In Algiers we had a large Cunarder, the 20,000 ton Scythia, which had come in some weeks before with a huge hole blasted in the starboard side of her number two hold forward. Like the Strathallan, she had caught a U-boat torpedo while laden with troops steaming in convoy through the Mediterranean on her way to Algiers. Fortunately, unlike the Strathallan, her machinery spaces had escaped damage, and though as badly flooded, and considerably down by the head besides from the waterlogged hold forward, she had made Algiers under her own power and discharged all her troops and all her cargo, save that in the flooded hold. Since then she had been lying motionless in Algiers harbor, by far the biggest vessel in the port, an alluring target for Nazi bombs, and sure, if she stayed long enough, to catch some which would finish her off in one of the almost nightly raids being staged on the harbor. The Scythia had to get out of there. Algiers was too hot a spot for her to
remain long, injured or uninjured. But nothing could be done to repair her in Algiers. The largest dry dock in the port, a graving dock built of stone, not a floating dry dock, could at most take in the 6000 to 8000 ton bulk of freighters like Liberty ships. The 20,000 ton Scythia, with a vast hole in her starboard side, was hopelessly oversize for that dry dock. And not only for the dry dock in Algiers but for any elsewhere in all North Africa—except for that 25,000 ton Grand Dock lying on the bottom of the sea in Oran, the one which I had Bill Reed and some Frenchmen trying to pull up exactly for cases of her sort. But the Scythia wasn’t getting out of there in spite of the obvious fact that if she didn’t soon, any morning now there might not be enough Scythia left ever to get out. That was what had Admiral Cunningham and all his staff as far up in the air as stolid Englishmen ever get. For the poor Scythia was more firmly held by red tape and ancient maritime custom to the quay alongside which she lay in Algiers than she was by her mooring cables. The Scythia was a merchant ship, a sizable transatlantic passenger liner with a merchant crew and under merchant rules. War or no war, those rules were as inflexible and unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Lloyd’s agents in Algiers, standing on the rules, wouldn’t let her go to sea—she wasn’t seaworthy so much down by the bow and with that tremendous hole in her side; anybody could see that with half an eye; they wouldn’t issue a certificate of seaworthiness. The Scythia’s merchant captain, standing on the rules, wouldn’t take his ship to sea without the required certificate of seaworthiness from Lloyd’s, which he couldn’t get. If he did so and she foundered on him for any reason at all, the British Board of Trade, also standing firmly on those rules, would strip him of his master ’s ticket; they’d lift it anyway, even if she didn’t founder, just for his sailing without that certificate. He wouldn’t do it. So the Scythia remained tied up to the quay in a port everyone freely recognized as extremely hazardous; five smaller ships already had been destroyed there. That she would ultimately fall a victim to Axis bombs was highly probable, but break those ancient rules to save her? It was not to be thought of. If the bombs got her, that would be altogether according to Hoyle— she could go up in smoke or go down with more holes blasted in her hull and everyone’s face would still be saved—except the Scythia’s. Admiral Cunningham was tearing his hair over that impasse. He couldn’t order Lloyd’s or its civilian agents to do anything; he had no authority at all over them. And he couldn’t order the Scythia’s merchant captain to take her to sea to a safer port westward, either; he could issue the order, all right, but the
order just wouldn’t be obeyed, and nowhere could the Naval Commander-inChief lay hands in his scant forces on the necessary naval officers and men to man the Scythia and sail her to safety. In Admiral Cunningham’s office at the St. George the moment I stepped into it the morning of December 23, that problem was put up to me. What, as Principal Salvage Officer, could I do, and hurriedly, to the Scythia that would persuade Lloyd’s agents to issue a certificate, any kind of a certificate no matter how shot full of holes, on which she might be sailed to Oran by her own crew? Her master, I was assured, wasn’t afraid of the danger at sea; he was simply afraid of the Board of Trade and of his ticket; he was perfectly willing to sail the Scythia out on any kind of a certificate that wouldn’t hazard his master ’s ticket—too much. What could I do about it? Here was a torpedoed ship foundering in an ocean of red tape as inexorably as had the Strathallan in an ocean of water. I was a salvage man; saving torpedoed vessels was my business. I smiled wryly. After all, I reflected, I had just failed to save the Strathallan, a bigger ship. Why should more be expected with the Scythia? But, I supposed, I was a last straw at which they were clutching. So I said I’d go down to the wharves and look the situation over, though inwardly I felt hopeless about it. I had had experience enough already with American red tape, even in wartime, to take the guts out of anybody; as for the British variety, it had had opportunity down the centuries to age to a tenacity which made our brand only of gossamer flimsiness. I’d sooner fight the sea any time for a ship; against the sea, sometimes you could win. Down on the Algiers waterfront again, I was soon aboard the Scythia, threading its endless corridors on my way forward and below to the flooded hold. With me were the Scythia’s First Officer, her Chief Engineer, Lloyd’s surveyor for the port, and the senior of the two Royal Navy lieutenants who were my salvage assistants in Algiers. We got to the lower deck in the number two hold, the lowest deck still above water. That deck and all those above had been troop spaces, filled with metal bunks, tiered four high, in which the soldiers slept on the voyage. The metalstanchioned tiers of bunks had already all been cleared out of there, leaving a large rectangular open ’tween decks space, about seventy-five feet athwartships, about the same length fore and aft, and about nine feet high. There must have been some 600 Tommies (she happened to be carrying British troops when struck) berthed in that compartment the night the torpedo
exploded just below them. I looked at the deck on which I was standing, which formed the top of the actual cargo hold below. There was a large cargo hatch, about twenty feet square, framed by a heavy steel coaming, in the middle of it. The steel deck beneath my feet was bulged up badly, with a number of small shrapnel holes in it to starboard. The wooden hatch covers were all missing—you could look right down on the sea flooding in practically to the under side of that lower deck. And through the water you could see the glow of light coming from the sea outside through the hole the torpedo had blasted, where the starboard side wasn’t any more. Those wooden hatch covers must have lifted like an elevator when the torpedo let go below them, thus venting the explosion into that troop compartment and saving the entire lower deck from tearing away altogether instead of merely bulging badly upward. But I hated to think what had happened to the tiers and tiers of Tommies sleeping over those hatch covers when they suddenly shot upward in a burst of flame from half a ton of TNT, let alone to all the other Tommies in that compartment even clear of the hatches. I didn’t ask the Scythia’s First Officer at my side what had happened to the Tommies; it was obvious enough without discussion. Instead, I turned to, studying the physical damage to the Scythia herself and what, if anything, might be done with our negligible salvage forces and equipment in Algiers to get her a certificate. One look into the open cargo hatch and I washed out any thought I might have had about temporarily patching the side. That hole was at least sixty feet long fore and aft; probably it was over twenty-five feet deep. It would take months, and divers I didn’t have anyway, to put even a temporary patch over that hole so we could pump out the flooded hold. If ever the Scythia moved out of Algiers again, she was going to have to move with that hold flooded and her side as wide open to the sea as it was then. But since Lloyd’s wouldn’t give her a certificate in that condition, it all looked hopeless, not even worth arguing about with the surveyor. If I couldn’t produce some very tangible improvement in the Scythia which would at least save everybody’s face even if it really didn’t make much difference in the ship, there certainly wasn’t going to be any certificate. I took out my pocket slide rule and started to figure diligently. (A slide rule always impresses, giving to the bystanders a feeling that the user thereof knows what he’s about and will shortly come up with the answer.) However, I
was actually trying to get an answer to something which was peculiar. To me, the Scythia was considerably more down by the head, and consequently so much less seaworthy, than just one flooded hold should put her. Was it so? I pushed my slide rule back and forth, computing volumes, weights, displacement, trimming moments, and what trim by the head should result. It was so. When I finished pushing my slide rule around, it appeared that the Scythia certainly was more down by the head than the flooded hold before me should put her. I asked her First Officer what might be wrong with her that I could not see. He told me. Though there was no very visible sign of it, his number three lower hold, which was composed of deep tanks intended for liquid cargo only, was also flooded up to the very tops of the deep tanks. And that, in spite of the fact that the hole in the starboard side didn’t extend aft enough to rupture that hold. So we all climbed up several decks, went a little aft, and then came down the ladders in the number three hold to finish up on the solid steel deck which formed the top of the deep tanks for liquid cargo. The rather large bolted down square manhole covers were slightly bulged up and leaking a bit here and there, but not much. They must be under moderate pressure from the sea below now pressing upward on them, trying to rise higher. My eyes lighted up when they fell on those flooded deep tanks—here was just what the doctor ordered to save the patient. It was in the bag now; with those deep tanks I’d have no trouble at all wangling from Lloyd’s the allimportant certificate, regardless of the huge hole left wide open in her side! Out came my slide rule again. I did some more hasty computing. It came out that there must be at least 2300 tons of sea water now in those deep tanks, a whole lot of sea water. I could imagine how it had got in—there must be some shrapnel holes punched by fragments of the exploding torpedo in the steel bulkhead between the deep tanks and the flooded number two hold. But those shrapnel holes couldn’t be large and they couldn’t be many, and I could cope with them. Those holes high up near the top of the bulkhead, I could get to with a diver on the forward side and plug off; those lower down which a diver couldn’t get to because of the submerged cargo left in the number two hold, wouldn’t cause me any great trouble; as a matter of fact, they’d be a help. For the answer was compressed air—in my life, the answer to nearly everything that couldn’t easily be solved otherwise. I’d make a diving bell out of those deep tanks. All that was necessary (after I’d plugged those upper
shrapnel holes, using a British diver) was to get a few air compressors aboard the Scythia. With those, I could push most of the water in the deep tanks out through the unplugged shrapnel holes closer to the bottom and get rid of most of that unwelcome load of 2300 tons of sea water in the number three lower hold. That would bring her bow up out of the sea at least five or six feet; by shifting other loads I was sure we could lift her bow a total of eight feet at least and the whole ship between two and three feet higher out of water. She would then visibly be in fine condition to go to sea. Her bow would be high out of water, her draft about normal for full load. All you would have to do was to imagine that that sea water still in the flooded number two hold was just liquid cargo you were carrying there instead of in the regular deep tanks just aft them. That wouldn’t be difficult for anyone to imagine, once he got a little used to the idea. Assured in my own mind of all that, I sprang it on the Lloyd’s surveyor and on the Scythia’s officers. It was all right with the Chief Engineer; the First Officer was certain it would be all right with his captain. But the surveyor was dubious; he granted that I could put the ship in the condition I stated and make her really seaworthy for a short voyage, but even for a short voyage, would she stay that way? For instance, the compressed air would put a heavy pressure on the flat tank tops which they had never been built to stand; already I could see that the rectangular manhole covers were bulging upward under a very low pressure. With all the pressure I was going to put on them, the tank tops themselves were likely to rupture suddenly at sea and release all the air. And even if they didn’t, suppose they only leaked somewhat on the voyage and lost the precious compressed air I’d put in ’em? What then? In either case, the sea would refill those deep tanks, and the ship at sea would find herself down by the head again, just as unseaworthy as she was then. How about all that? Inwardly I began to feel better; now the surveyor was arguing with me about details, it was all right. I didn’t open on the surveyor with any counters to his objections. Instead I tried another tack. “If I convince you to your own satisfaction on the points you’ve raised, will you issue the certificate?” I asked of him. The surveyor reflected on that; it seemed fair enough. They were his own objections under consideration; he alone was to be the judge. And after all, he was no more anxious to sacrifice the Scythia than anybody else; he just had rules to meet and he needed colorable reason to show at Lloyd’s in London
he’d met them should anything go wrong. “W-w-e-ll, y-y-e-s,” he answered finally, reluctantly dragging out the words. “But only a strictly limited certificate, mind; only for the trip to the nearest safe port, Oran, and only for a good weather passage, well convoyed, and only in case she keeps within five miles o’ shore, so she can be beached if need be. Now what’s your proposal on my objections? I’m a hard man, mind y’.” I could have cheered. I was glad he thought of himself as a hard man. Once a hard man makes a decision, he sticks by it; there’s no more dilly-dallying. I didn’t mind; the certificate was as good as in the skipper ’s hands; the Scythia could sail! His limitations were all reasonable enough and easily met. “Well, I want you to be wholly satisfied. First, I’ll get a lot of Royal Engineer carpenters aboard and we’ll shore down with heavy shores these tank tops and the after bulkhead to stand the greatest pressure they can possibly get. Then as soon as my diver ’s plugged the holes, we’ll put on the air pressure. You can watch; if the deck bulges anywhere we’ll put in more shores—just as many as you say and no argument. That’ll take care o’ strength. “Now for the leaks. I’ll not only put the air compressors aboard to push the water out of these deep tanks, but leave ’em aboard the Scythia for the whole voyage to Oran, as well as good men to tend ’em night and day and watch the pressure gauges to make good any leakage. And if there’s anything else, you say so and I’ll do that too!” He was satisfied; there wasn’t anything else he could think of. All I had to do was to put the Scythia in the condition I’d promised and let him witness the tests and inspect to see it was so; I could then rely on him to issue the certificate, limited as he’d stated, so the ship could sail. I shook his hand gratefully; had he been French instead of English, I should also have kissed him on both cheeks. The Lloyd’s surveyor left, together with the ship’s officers. I turned to right there with my British salvage lieutenant, outlining to him carefully what he was to do and how he was to do it. I couldn’t stay in Algiers long enough to see it through myself. The job would take perhaps four or five days; in two days I should be back in Oran; it would be wholly in that young lieutenant’s hands. But he was a good youngster. He’d do it. So shortly saying goodby to him also, not to see either him or the Scythia again that visit, I started up the hill once more to report to Admiral Cunningham that within a week the Scythia would sail, perhaps sooner. I felt better. Never before, with only a slide rule, a few well-chosen words, and in only a few hours, had I had the luck to salvage even a rowboat, let alone a
torpedoed 20,000-tonner. A week after that discussion, the wounded Scythia steamed safely into Oran, there to moor in the outer harbor near the Ardois and await two things—the removal of the Spahi so she could get into the inner harbor and the raising of the Grand Dock so she could be repaired.
CHAPTER
25 I HAD NOTHING OF THE AFTERNOON left after the ensuing session with the Admiral and his aides. But I had come back to the St. George at an auspicious moment; aside from the good news I bore regarding the Scythia, Admiral Cunningham had just received word that His Majesty, the King, George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, etc., had thought fit to nominate and appoint him Admiral of the Fleet, the very highest rank in the Royal Navy. He was equivalent now to a five-star admiral (four-star was the highest rank we then had in our own Navy) and to a Field Marshal in the British Army. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, G.C.B., R.N., naturally enough was all smiles over his new honor, though also naturally enough, he made no personal mention of it. Its major effect for him, aside from the honor, would be that he must now rake up from somewhere the needful gold lace to add another stripe to those already covering each of his threadbare sleeves; whether they could be added (assuming he could find some in Algiers) without running up over his elbows, was going to be a tough problem. But if I knew Cunningham (and by now I thought I did) he would have been considerably more gratified if His Majesty had been able to bestow on him instead of the promotion a few scores of capable divers, four or five decent salvage ships, and a warehouse full of salvage equipment, to cope with all the wrecks already in sight, let alone those sure to come. But if the new Admiral of the Fleet had nothing himself to say on the matter of his promotion, his staff had plenty to say in the way of rejoicing, and I heartily agreed with them. No man in any Allied service, land, air, or sea, had more richly earned his rank. I added my congratulations to those of his British staff before we got down to other business, mostly headaches. There was the U.S.S. Thomas Stone, a fine new American naval armed transport, first torpedoed, then bombed, and now hard and fast aground in Algiers’ outer harbor. What could be done about her? Because she was a
regular naval vessel of the United States Navy, Cunningham was particularly anxious she get attention. I had to say, nothing yet; she must lie as she was unless I pulled everything I had in Oran, including the King Salvor, out of there. Since that obviously was not in order, she must lie untouched till at least we cleared the Spahi from the entrance to Oran. All right; scratch the U.S.S. Thomas Stone off for the present. Commodore Dick, Chief of Staff, accordingly scratched her off. How about the Spahi; when would she be clear, to open up Oran harbor? I explained the sad story of the Spahi; possibly in two more weeks, I hoped. Cunningham smiled grimly, made some notes of his own, told me we should have no further troubles over the Spahi other than strictly salvage ones. The Grand Dock? Without the Grand Dock, we might as well let the Scythia and any more big ones like her burn, sink, or blow up—they were all otherwise total losses the minute they were damaged. I had to answer I didn’t know too much about the Grand Dock yet to be certain; a month more and some luck and I hoped to have her on the surface. Then there was the Moyen Dock in Oran; that sunken U-boat off Tenes to be searched; the Strasbourg in Algiers; the Glenfinlas in Bougie; the Aurora in Philippeville; the Cameronia, the Ithuriel, the Novelist, the Recorder, and the Meriel in Bône. They were all salvageable, all badly needed, especially the big Cameronia, all shrieking for immediate attention, not to mention several score more of other wrecks in all the ports up and down the whole coast which were more difficult problems. How about all of them? I had to shake my head sadly. I would give the Cameronia, the biggest of the lot, some thought; something might be done to get her out of Bône. As for all the others, it was not worth my while yet even to go and look at them; there was nothing with which to work on any of them. For every solitary diver I had, there were at least half a dozen wrecks already. If I dissipated my slight force trying to cover more, I'd never get anything accomplished. Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham nodded in agreement, commended me for the Porcupine, extended his commiserations over the Strathallan, congratulated me on the Scythia. Then he assured me that both he and General Eisenhower (who was personally following very closely events at sea though just then he was on the Tunisian fighting front) felt that salvage was going pretty well. He would himself give more thought to the difficulties my salvage forces and I were staggering under. Perhaps he could find a way to ameliorate them a bit, particularly any more situations such as had arisen with the Laforey
over the salvage of the Strathallan. The discussion ended. I left. Already it was dark outside. I had dinner at the Aletti with Rear Admiral Murray, R.N., Fleet Engineer, and Captain King, R.N., Fleet Constructor, both of Cunningham’s staff. Murray, an engineer rear admiral, and King, a naval constructor captain, were in charge of all repair work on damaged ships, once they had been dragged into port. They had both returned only the day before from Oran, where they had gone to examine H.M.S. Porcupine, out of water on the Petit Dock. The Porcupine had shocked them. They had gone to Oran (where of course they knew she couldn’t really be repaired) with the idea simply of having heavy steel girders welded temporarily along her torpedoed port side over the hole in her engine room, so she could hold together during the long tow back to England to be refitted. But once they saw all of her out of water, they hadn't found enough of the Porcupine left intact to give them anything to start from. How she had ever held together, waterlogged and in a seaway, long enough to get her into Arzeu, they couldn’t imagine. So their decision had been, instead of trying to tie the Porcupine together, to finish cutting her completely in half as she lay on the dry dock, not much of a job; carefully seal up all leaks in the bulkheads at the after end of the bow half and at the forward end of the stern half, shore up those bulkheads, and take her off the dry dock in two pieces. That was being done. When the unjointed bow and stern, both watertight and both absolutely light, came off the Petit Dock, they would then be towed back to England separately (the stern half, of course, stern first) where the Porcupine would be fitted together once more, a new port engine installed, and she would once again be a fighting ship. A most peculiar case, that Porcupine, they both agreed. She would, they felt, become a seagoing legend like the Flying Dutchman. Dinner over, I started upstairs to wander through the Aletti, seeing whether, for a change, I might come across some civilians, press correspondents recently from home, who might give me some off the record and authentic (and undoctored-up for morale purposes) news of what actually was going on along the home front. The war correspondents were all billeted at the Aletti. I finished up in the room assigned to the representative for Time. We had a drink. He thought things on the war front were lousy; every decent story you couldn't send home; the enemy had to be kept in the dark. That Strathallan story, for instance; it had just come bursting in. Algiers was full of thousands of survivors who had just been brought in special trains from Oran; you could
pick up personal experience stories by the hundreds—all wonderful. But he wasn't bothering even to listen to any; as a newspaper man, they merely gave him stomach ulcers because not a word could he wire home, not even the bare fact that a huge transport had been torpedoed although garnished with the good news that our troops aboard had mostly, or perhaps all, been saved. The enemy must be kept in the dark that they had successfully torpedoed a big transport. I had to laugh. When I thought of how the Strathallan had lighted up the night skies over the Mediterranean like Vesuvius in eruption, we certainly were keeping the enemy in the dark all right. Even the fish knew all about it; nobody could possibly now be in the dark regarding the Strathallan save the people back home. But to hell with the war front, I told him. How about the home front—how were things really in the United States which I hadn't seen since right after we got kicked into the war? They were bad there too, I learned. If I thought all Americans were wholeheartedly exerting themselves in the war effort, I had another think coming. Plenty saw the war only as a chance to put on a squeeze. For instance, on the very day the newspapers were announcing in flaring headlines on the front page the final surrender at Bataan of the pathetic remnants of Wainwright’s starving, fever-ridden, and bleeding G.I.s who had been fighting for months night and day, finally could fight no longer, on an inside page they were carrying another story that would drive any fighting man to the thought of murder. At General Motors, wholly given over to turning out fighting equipment, the workmen, already getting much higher pay than ever before and time and a half for overtime, had presented an ultimatum. They demanded shorter hours and double time for work on Sundays or they were all walking off the job and no discussion about it! Then, aside from that, everything at home was tightly rationed—for Americans a bitter pill to swallow. Worst of all, we’d lost so many tankers to U-boat torpedoes off our own coasts, people with oil burners couldn’t get fuel oil enough on their drastically curtailed rations to keep themselves safely warm, nor could they convert back to coal. I gnashed my teeth over that one. Gasoline rationing I didn’t mind. But my house had an oil burner, and worse yet, a rather old one; that ancient burner ordinarily consumed oceans of oil to keep our house reasonably warm. On tightly rationed oil, my wife must be freezing! With that, I thanked my informant for all his news but told him he could stop.
I’d rather discuss the war instead; it was less distressing to me. So we got back to the war front again. There was a big push on the Tunisian front going to break any day now; all the correspondents knew all about it. Once it broke, they’d have a story at last the censors would let them wire home. Eisenhower himself had left Algiers for the front. He was going to push through in one big smash, seize all Tunisia, and end everything by New Year ’s Day before Rommel and his Afrika Korps, falling rapidly back through Tripolitania, could possibly arrive to join forces with von Arnim and bolster up Bizerte and Tunis. At that point, without any knock, the door of that Aletti room flew back. I glanced up momentarily; into the skimpily lighted room walked two air force captains, looking for a drink, most likely. I started to ignore them; I was off everybody in the air force, from colonels on down. But something about one of them, in spite of the dim light, caught my eye. Even for an air force officer, that one was unusual. I looked again. Well, I’ll be damned, I thought! The air force has put over another one on us in making itself even more attractive—they’ve got women flyers in the war zone now! For before me, in cap, tunic, trousers and service shoes, complete with wings, service ribbons, and combat stars, stood an air force captain, a woman! And a good-looking one, too, I had to admit. Staring open-mouthed at her, I got another jolt. Why, I knew her; she was Margaret Bourke-White! We’d met several times before the war in New York. She was no flyer; she was a press photographer, maybe a press correspondent also. What in hell was she doing in that air force uniform? She recognized me also and began to laugh at my very evident bewildered stare. “Don’t worry, Captain, they haven’t got down yet to relying on me to scare the enemy with bombs instead of flash bulbs! I’m just a forlorn survivor off the Strathallan—that’s the why of these clothes! But I do look nice in ’em; don’t you think so?” I had to concede that. The other air force captain, the real one, was introduced. We all had another drink at Time’s expense; then she explained. Pieced out with much that I learned later from other survivors, this was what had happened. Margaret Bourke-White had been on her way from London to the Tunisian front to cover the impending offensive as press correspondent and photographer for Life; they’d put her on the Strathallan along with nearly two
hundred American army nurses, as well as all those G.I.s. Then had come the big moment in her life as a press photographer—she was on a gigantic troopship loaded with troops when it was torpedoed! Instantly the torpedo exploded (and she found herself still completely intact) she seized her camera and her flash bulbs, and not waiting for anything else, rushed out on deck in her negligee to get the pictures that would make press history! Then had begun complete frustration. It was 2 A.M., it was completely dark, the ship was, of course, blacked out. She couldn’t get a picture of the tumult on the crowded decks, of the frenzied G.I.s swarming up from the crowded holds below, of the crew frantically struggling to swing out the lifeboats, of anything at all—without exploding a flash bulb to illuminate the scene for her picture! For she realized that if she pressed the button for even one picture, she would illuminate as by a flare for the U-boat captain who was undoubtedly still staring through his periscope at them to discover the results of his shot. And undoubtedly also, she’d instantly be pitched over the side, camera and all, by the crazed men all about her whom she’d exposed by that flash to the danger of an immediate second torpedo, maybe morel She didn’t take any pictures; she wept instead over the lost opportunity. She was on the boat deck, the best spot to get pictures, but there weren’t going to be any. Shivering there in the darkness, it came to her she had next to nothing on; she started back for her stateroom in the superstructure below her to get some clothes. She hadn’t a chance. The ship was listing slowly to port, the lifeboats were being loaded, already from forward of where she stood, they were being lowered away. Against the masses of G.I.s who had abandon ship stations in those lifeboats, all of whom (plus plenty more who had no boat assignments) were flowing up on the boat deck, there wasn’t a chance in the world to go counter-current. So willy-nilly, still clutching her precious camera, clad only in her negligee, she struggled toward the boat to which she had been assigned. That boat happened to be on the port side, about amidships. Her boat and the one just abaft it were the abandon ship stations for all the women nurses aboard and for a few surgeons also belonging to their hospital unit. Amidst the shouts and cries of men and women on the jammed and listing boat deck trying to find their boats in the utter darkness and the confusion, she fought through finally to hers. She made the rail on the port side abreast her boat. She was late for the boat, most of those in its assigned load were there before her. But confusion there
(and on the next boat astern) was, if possible, worse than anywhere. Most of the passengers were huddled just inboard of the gunwale, refusing to get into the boat, pleading with the few sailors manning it and the davits to do something. She swiftly found out why. Her boat was full of water up to the thwarts! The boat astern was even worse. With some sixty to eighty people loaded into each of them, they were likely to sink the moment they hit the sea; they would certainly go awash to their gunwales, swiftly then to swamp with the first wave that washed over them. Apparently the exploding torpedo, hitting the engine room directly below, had shot an immense geyser of water into the air; coming down, it had practically filled those two lifeboats as they lay in their chocks on the open boat deck. All around her, nurses and doctors, whom she couldn’t see except as vague shadows in the night, were pleading with the ship’s officers loading the boats, even with the few sailors in them and at the lowering lines, for God’s sake to do something about all the water in those two boats before they lowered them. They got nowhere. Amidst cries from all around that the ship was sinking and gruff orders to quit bellyaching and get in or the boats would go without them, they were pushed into the waterlogged boats. She and all those with her, mostly women, found themselves jammed amongst the thwarts, packed so tightly they could hardly move, in cold water over their hips. The boatfalls started to whine, the boatblocks over their heads began to groan. In the blackness, that already flooded and overloaded boat, swaying drunkenly as the boatfalls ran out, dropped swiftly down the towering side of the ship toward the black sea far below, with the boat astern of them starting down just after them. They hit the sea; as expected, they nearly submerged immediately. A prayer of thankfulness went up from the passengers; there remained, thank God, an inch or two of freeboard at their gunwales! While the seamen at bow and stern, badly hampered by lack of elbow room in which to move, strove to cast loose the massive disengaging blocks and get free of the boatfalls, off the heads of every woman and the few men in that boat came their tin hats. Those who could somehow bend over enough to reach down, started frantically to bail the boat with those tin hats to help gain freeboard. Their prayers of thankfulness almost immediately turned to curses and shrieks, even from the women. Down into their boat, almost at the point of foundering anyway, came, from overhead a solid stream of water, almost like a hose stream, to add to their peril. Looking up, even in the darkness they could
see it was shooting down on them from the bottom of the next boat aft, beneath which they had drifted the moment their boatfalls had slacked a little. Someone had knocked the plug out of the bottom of that boat, already halfway down the ship’s side, trying to drain it out before it hit the sea! From far over their heads, they could hear agonized feminine shrieks from that boat, crying to the sailors on the boat deck of the Strathallan above them to quit lowering, for the love of God to hold the boat there till it drained out and they had the plug back in! In their own boat, the sailors got the blocks disengaged, pushed frenziedly off with boathooks to get clear of the ship’s side before either they swamped from the water coming down or the other boat dropped on them. They came free, drifted away in the darkness. Still looking up horror-stricken, they could see the lifeboat abaft them, water still pouring down in a heavy jet from the open hole in its bottom, inexorably being lowered toward the sea. The sailors on the boat deck above either had not heard or had paid no attention to those piercing screams to hold that boat! Then everything faded wholly from their view in the dark night and they were alone on the heaving ocean, bailing madly as best they could with their tin hats to try to gain a little freeboard before a real wave hit them and they swamped. But if they could see nothing at all, they could hear plenty. Aside from the wild uproar coming across the water to them from the listing Strathallan, somewhere in the blackness not so far away they began to catch the heartrending shrieks and piercing screams of drowning women, mingling with the agonized groans of a few dying men, all strangling and freezing in spite of life preservers in the cold seas breaking over them. For the lifeboat astern of them, lowered without a stop with its drain plug still out (it had been impossible for anyone in that flooded and jammed boat ever to replace it), had been pushed clear only to drift off into the night, fill completely, and swamp. There was nothing they could do about it save listen and shout to make their own whereabouts known. So packed was their boat that no one could get out any oars to go to the rescue, let alone swing them if ever they got them out. Gradually the screams of the drowning nurses died away and they were left at last in silence as well as in darkness to bail their own boat. It was more necessary now than ever; clinging to the gunwales of that waterlogged boat were perhaps half a dozen women and a man or two; strong swimmers who guided by cries in the night had managed to get to the side of their boat. But they couldn’t be taken aboard yet; first, there was no room for a single added
passenger, and second, till the boat was bailed completely, any extra load would swamp it altogether. So those hanging to the gunwales over the side had to stay there in the darkness, trying to strike a hairline balance between keeping enough out of water not to drown and keeping as much as possible submerged so as not to sink the last straw between themselves and quick death for everybody. Finally, after an anguished eternity in that precarious position, what water could be reached by those inside was all bailed out, a few more inches was added to the freeboard. One by one, the exhausted hangers-on were cautiously dragged over the side, somehow packed in with the others. Motionless then, wet, cold, and heartbroken for the friends they had lost, those in the boat, mostly nurses, waited in the darkness for the dawn. Day came at last. They looked about them. From their low position, their horizon extended only a few miles. Here and there, not so far away, drifted the other boats, all jammed as full as theirs. The Strathallan was no longer anywhere in sight; they could only conclude she must have sunk. Nobody commented. Helpless to help themselves, they drifted forlornly over the empty ocean. In some of the boats, all loaded with G.I.s, a pair of oars was somehow got out and some very awkward rowing attempted to get closer to the others; possibly by propinquity to lessen the general misery. Hours more passed. Along about noon, two destroyers showed up on the southern horizon, guided to them perhaps by radar. Shortly the destroyers were among them, one after another emptying the jammed boats till finally all were rescued; then the destroyers headed directly for Oran. Those must have been the first two destroyers I’d seen returning; only the other three, then, could have gone directly to the Strathallan to take off the mass of troops still on her. As for Margaret Bourke-White, some surgeon in her boat had loaned her his coat to keep her from freezing to death; when dawn came, she had got a few pictures of the other boats. They would be worthless she thought; packed in as she was, it had been impossible to get decent camera angles or composition. Anyway, it didn’t matter much. The censors wouldn’t let her use them for months yet and even then the ship’s name and the location and what finally had happened to that troopship would all be suppressed. Everything about the Strathallan was strictly hush-hush, including the fifty American nurses, more or less, who had been pushed over the side in an obviously unseaworthy boat to perish in the sea. They, most of all, were strictly hush-hush. As regards the air force uniform she was wearing, when she got to Algiers
one of the surviving nurses had drummed up this captain who was about her height; he had loaned her a spare uniform till she could get some women’s clothes somewhere in Algiers. And that was everything. And that was everything about the Strathallan and her passengers. It was many a long week before, either day or night even amongst the newer and fresher horrors of the war on sea and land, the Strathallan, though a thousand fathoms deep beneath the sea, quit haunting my thoughts, waking or sleeping.
CHAPTER
26 NEXT MORNING WAS THE DAY BEfore Christmas, my first in the war zone. I started early up the hill to G.H.Q. at the St. George. Christmas morning I was returning to Oran; I should have much to cover on this day in Algiers. I had lain awake most of the night, with vivid images of blasted ships, some I’d seen and more I hadn’t yet, fighting each other for the undivided attention of what confused and worn-out senses I had left. I had tried to concentrate on the Cameronia, that 16,000 ton transport just torpedoed off Bône. Admiral Cunningham, much against his own better judgment, had reluctantly consented to send her to Bône to carry almost up to the fighting line thousands of troops who could never get there in time overland, so that in the imminent offensive other thousands of G.I.s and Tommies should not be slaughtered for want of all possible reinforcements. The result had been what was almost certain. Off Bône the Cameronia had stopped a Nazi torpedo. That torpedo had hit far aft, missing all the machinery spaces, to explode in and flood the after lower hold, not a large one. Fortunately the hit was not far enough aft to injure either rudder or propellers. The Cameronia had been able to limp the last few miles into Bône to discharge her troops and practically all their fighting equipment close up to the front lines where Eisenhower needed them. So far as the army was concerned, the Cameronia’s mission was accomplished. But so far as Admiral Cunningham was concerned, it looked as if he had expended a big 16,000 ton troopship in the accomplishment. For staying in Bône even a few days (the normal turn around for a transport was in and out the same day and don’t wait for darkness) was for a big ship equivalent to sure death from bombs. On the average, forty high explosive bombs came down every night on Bône harbor. And the Cameronia, so it was reported to Algiers, couldn’t move out as she was.
With the Cameronia, it wasn’t any case of seaworthiness or of certificates as it had been with the larger Scythia. The flooded hold aft wasn’t large enough to affect her seaworthiness seriously in anybody’s mind. The difficulty was that flying shrapnel from the exploding torpedo had pierced the steel bulkheads of the propeller shaft alley passing through that flooded after hold. As a result those holes had solidly flooded the shaft alley also. That had immersed completely in sea water the long propeller shafts going down that tunnel and had made it impossible for anyone to get in there to oil the numerous bearings carrying those massive steel shafts, as big around as a man’s body. And that was what was immobilizing the Cameronia in Bône. If she went to sea seeking safety, she would melt out all the babbitt metal in her unlubricated shaft bearings, freeze the shafts in the bearings, and unable to turn her propellers, become a helpless target for the first U-boat or the first flight of Axis bombers which discovered her. And there would not be much of an interval in that front line area before she would certainly be discovered by snooping planes and subjected to all the bombers which both near by Sicily and Bizerte could send out till she was finally sunk. That was the dilemma. Another night or two in Bône and she would be sunk there. And injured as she was, if she went to sea in that condition, she’d break down and even more surely be sunk. Over that dilemma I had tossed sleeplessly all night long. Unless the salvage forces in Bône could do something for her swiftly, she was lost. But the negligible salvage forces in Bône couldn’t possibly do anything for her in that short time available. For poor Lieutenant Commander White, whom I’d sent to Bône, had no means whatever to patch up the big torpedo hole in the after hold and pump out both the hold and the shaft alley. That didn’t even warrant discussion. There was no solution. The salvage forces couldn’t save her. But nevertheless as I went up the hill toward the St. George, I wasn’t particularly unhappy over the Cameronia. Assuming she had managed to survive the usual bombing of the night just passed, she wasn’t lost. Nobody could do anything for her, but all that was necessary to get her to safety was to discard all orthodox thinking on what lubrication and lubricants were, and what they weren’t. Shortly I was elaborating on that theme to Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham, to Rear Admiral Murray, his Fleet Engineer, and to others of his aides. It so happened it was a topic I could talk about with some authority. Aside from
having been myself, along with various deck duties, a marine engineer in our Navy, after I had left the regular service I had been for nine years Chief Engineer for The Tide Water Oil Company. In that task, I had personally had a hand in making more barrels of fine lubricating oil than all the ships then in the Mediterranean, including the Cameronia, could possibly carry if all their holds were loaded with nothing but barrels of lubricating oil. My point was peculiar for one who had always felt the best lubricant was none too good. Now I was urging that any liquid was in a sense a lubricant; the question at issue was only whether that liquid was reasonably satisfactory for the lubricating task in hand. We couldn’t get oil to the shaft bearings on the Cameronia. Granted; let’s forget the oil then and use instead sea water as a lubricant there. There was plenty of sea water available for the job—in fact, the apparent difficulty we faced was that we couldn’t keep it out of those bearings if we tried. So let’s all quit trying to do the impossible and make that sea water serve us. It would do the job if only we gave it a chance. The bearings couldn’t possibly get hot enough in that flooded shaft alley ever to melt or wipe out. There was now a whole ocean of cold sea water with access to those bearings submerging them to keep them cooled down. And the water would certainly get into the bearings continuously to give them that very necessary film of protection. It had behind it all the pressure of the sea rising high above those shafts, to force out all the water which might get heated in the bearings from friction as the shafts turned and constantly to replace that heated water with heavier and colder water right out of the sea. Sea water didn’t have as low a coefficient of friction as oil. Consequently, more heat would be generated in the bearings. But to offset that, there was a whole ocean of water (instead of only a few gallons of oil) to carry away the heat that was generated, and the extra power lost in turning the shafts we weren’t worrying about. I wasn’t recommending to His Majesty’s Navy (or to the Anchor Line either) that they save money by quitting the use of expensive oil and flooding all their shaft alleys with sea water instead as a regular thing, but I was strongly recommending that nobody worry over doing it on the Cameronia for one 250 mile voyage from Bône to Algiers where she could in more safety stay the week required till British divers could take care of her there. As for the Cameronia, heavily convoyed, of course, she ought to move at the slowest speed possible during her passage westward, not to press matters too far on her bearings. But if she were attacked either by planes or U-boats, as
long as it was necessary to maneuver at full speed to avoid danger, she could go all out and I would stake my life those water-lubricated shaft bearings would stand up under it. The only sensible thing to do was to give the Cameronia a strong escort and order her immediately out of Bône, just as she was. Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham, as willing as any man to try the unorthodox in a tight place, ordered exactly that. In a few days the Cameronia was safe in port far to the westward of Bône, having her shaft alley made watertight by divers. From there, running on oil again and able to make full speed all the way, she went back to England to have the torpedo hole repaired. Now, years later, the Cameronia still plows the ocean, none the worse for having demonstrated that when necessary to escape bombs, sea water (as long as there is plenty of it) makes a perfectly good lubricant. That finished my discussion at Allied Naval Headquarters. As I left, I was invited to come back during the afternoon; the naval staff were having a sort of day before Christmas tea. I dropped in on the next floor to see Jerry Wright again; Jerry, as liaison between Allied Force Headquarters and Washington, always knew what was going on in both places. Jerry wasn’t particularly happy that morning over what he knew. Things in Washington might be as good as could be expected, but right there in Algeria, they weren’t; as a matter of fact, they were terrible. That big Tunisian offensive, for which Eisenhower had strained every nerve and stripped the back areas, including Oran, of all soldiers possible to make them available on the fighting line and crush the enemy before he became too powerful; that offensive, for which Cunningham had just hazarded the Cameronia, which had been jammed full of those troops, to get them up to the line; that offensive, which was due to be launched that very morning, December 24, with high hopes of overrunning all Tunisia by New Year ’s Day, was already a complete fiasco—it wasn’t even being launched. For the word had come back two days before from General Anderson of the British Army, overall field commander, that everything was bogged down in the mud—planes, tanks, artillery, even such light equipment as dispatch rider ’s motorcycles, not to mention the poor infantrymen themselves who stuck helplessly in the mud simply trying to cross an open field. Orders or no orders, there could be no Allied offensive; nobody could possibly move forward on the Tunisian front.
Eisenhower realized that mud conditions could only get worse over the ensuing winter months, not better. If he delayed that offensive till spring came to dry the ground, it could result only in a junction of von Arnim’s forces with those of Rommel and a buildup during the winter from near by Sicily of both those Axis armies so that by spring the military problem he would have to face would be infinitely worse. Instantly on hearing from Anderson, Eisenhower had himself departed posthaste from Algiers for the front, determined that if any man could even drag one mud-clogged foot after another, he should drag it and the offensive would be launched. Word had just come in that Eisenhower had personally discovered that a man couldn’t even lift his feet out of the Tunisian mud, let alone drag them along through it. On that day on which the big push to settle everything was to have been launched, Eisenhower had been forced to cancel it indefinitely. There could be no offensive till spring. God alone knew what would happen to us all by then in the face of the steady Axis build-up from Sicily and under a rain of Axis bombs from good allweather Tunisian airfields while our own planes couldn’t lift themselves out of the mud. As usual, it would, of course, be up to God and the Navy, British and American, to save the situation for the land and air forces. Meanwhile, the gloom at Allied Force Headquarters that day before Christmas among those who already had learned the sad news was so oppressive it was sickening.
CHAPTER
27 WHILE JERRY WRIGHT AND I WERE glumly discussing this unhappy situation, in walked a classmate of Jerry’s, Captain Olton Bennehoff, U.S.N., commanding officer of that U.S.S. Thomas Stone about which Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham had been so concerned the day before. Within ten seconds of the time Bennehoff’s eyes lighted on me, I realized perfectly well why Cunningham had been so concerned—nobody, regardless of his rank, who was within reach was going to be allowed to remain unconcerned when Bennehoff’s ship needed attention. Without even a ranging shot to see if he were on the target, Bennehoff promptly opened up on me with full salvos—I was Principal Salvage Officer for the Torch theater; if ever a ship in the Torch area needed (and was entitled to) the services of a salvage officer, his ship was it. What was I going to do about it? Nothing—yet, I had to tell him. General Eisenhower had himself set the order of priority. If he could get General Eisenhower to put the new U.S.S. Thomas Stone ahead of an ancient French tub loaded with casks of wine and called the Spahi, it was all right with me. I’d turn to then with all hands on the Thomas Stone and let the Spahi go hang; otherwise not. Well, when then would I get to the Thomas Stone? In a few weeks, I assured him; just as soon as I got the Spahi out of the entrance to Oran harbor and off my chest. I was personally as anxious as he was himself to see an important naval vessel like the Thomas Stone back helping to win the war; so was Admiral Cunningham, I knew. What more could he ask? His was the number two job. Bennehoff, “Benny” ever since his Naval Academy days, was stumped. His slight figure, wholly a bundle of nerves and iron resolution, vibrated dissent; for him, nothing took precedence over getting his ship swiftly back into the fight. But since for the moment at least, General Eisenhower wasn’t within reach to be convinced of his mistake, Benny did the next best thing. There still
was I. Would I take lunch with him aboard the Thomas Stone? She wasn’t alongside any quay; she wasn’t even in the harbor, really, but we could get there quickly. I’d need hardly more than a good pair of hip boots to get aboard her from the sandy beach on which she now lay stranded. The invitation, I felt, was more a stratagem on Benny’s part to get me where a sight of his necessities would overwhelm my better judgment and put me on his side for a joint assault on Eisenhower, rather than any real social courtesy, but I accepted. Sooner or later, I’d have to see the Thomas Stone; the lugubrious occasion might as well be now when it could be garnished with a decent meal which was unobtainable anywhere ashore. So saying good-by to Jerry Wright, both of us started down the steep hill in a staff car for Algiers Bay. Shortly we were passing on our right the Palais d’Etat. It was quite a building, set back a little from the road and surrounded by a high iron picket fence. Before that fence, at the only gate and flanking each side of it, stood rigidly at “Attention” a pair of Spahi sentries, gorgeous in their gaily colored uniforms topped with flowing Arab turbans. That building was the seat of Darlan’s government, as well as his personal residence. Considering the turbulent state of French opinion in North Africa, I thought those Spahi sentries right on Darlan’s doorstep, with their wicked-looking bayoneted rifles, might well be necessary. Finally we had dropped down the hill enough to turn eastward along the waterfront, leaving behind us to the westward the enclosed artificial harbor with all its jam of shipping. We skirted the empty beaches of Algiers Bay, a vast open crescent circling northeast toward Cape Matifou, some eight miles from the enclosed harbor. About half way along the southern edge of this crescent, where the city of Algiers was beginning to thin out to open country, we came to where lay the U.S.S. Thomas Stone, masked from our view from the road by the high oil tanks and buildings of a considerable bulk petroleum terminal belonging to Shell Oil. We left the car to thread our way on foot down to the beach along a narrow sandy alley between the walls protecting the oil tanks. If Captain Bennehoff had anticipated that a sight of his distressed ship herself would make an impression, he was decidedly not disappointed. Before me, rising abruptly on that beach almost out of the sand at my feet with no great stretch of water in between, was the towering bulk of the Thomas Stone. Not till eighteen months later on the Omaha Beach in Normandy, after
an 80-mile hurricane which hit us a few days after D-day, was I ever to see a ship stranded so high and dry. There had been little exaggeration about our getting aboard her in hip boots; had Benny and I both been about as tall as Jerry Wright or, anyway, Giraud, we might just about have made her bow in wading suits. But inasmuch as we had neither hip boots nor wading suits, Benny simply sang out to his Officer of the Deck, easily within hearing distance, to send a boat in for the captain. Swimming out would have been much quicker. In very few minutes we were climbing the high side ladder of the Thomas Stone, unusually high because she was so far out of water. In a few minutes more, I was seated in the cabin with Captain Bennehoff. The messboy began serving lunch; after that, I would inspect the ship herself. The Thomas Stone saga I knew already from end to end from various other sources. An unkind Fate, more vindictive than the ancient Furies, had dealt the Thomas Stone, one after another, a series of deuces off the bottom of the deck. And the end was not yet. The U.S.S. Thomas Stone, a new armed naval transport, had been specially designed for carrying assault troops and their landing craft, including tanks, close up to an enemy beachhead. She had been provided with special gear for getting the heavily loaded boats swiftly away on their mission. She had been heavily armed with naval guns, large and small, to smother opposing fire on the beaches while her brood of ducklings swam in as the first assault wave. She had been destined for the Pacific to go to work on the Japs, with endless coral and palm-fringed island beachheads envisioned in her future. Hardly had Captain Bennehoff finished the intensive training of his crew for that novel warfare and made ready to sail for the Pacific, than his ship was temporarily diverted to the Torch operation instead, where there would also be beaches to assault. On October 26, she had sailed from the Clyde in Scotland in a fast convoy loaded with British and American troops bound for Algiers, carrying herself 1400 troops of the 39th U.S. Infantry, intended as the first assault wave on the beaches just to the eastward of Algiers. Heavily escorted by patrolling planes, cruisers, destroyers, and corvettes (all British), the Thomas Stone and her troop-laden convoy had negotiated the Atlantic part of the voyage successfully, so timed as to put them through the Straits of Gibraltar during the dark hours of the night of November 5-6. This was of particular importance; it was obvious that any news available to Spanish sources of their passage or composition would as instantly be received in
Berlin and Rome as if we had radioed it in ourselves. So far all still went well. Once through the Straits and into the widening Mediterranean, the convoy, strengthened now by battleship and aircraft carrier support, took the route normally used by ships bound for Axis-beleaguered Malta, trusting that any snooping Axis planes or periscopes would be deluded thereby as to their objective. They were, incidentally. Both Rome and Berlin believed the objective was either Malta or Sicily; North Africa never entered their minds. All that day and all night through they steamed onward for Malta; only at the last moment were they to turn abruptly southward to their real objective, Algiers. Daylight came on November 7. They were off Cape Palos, Spain, about 300 miles beyond Gibraltar and with only 150 miles left to their assault positions off Algiers at H-hour, twenty hours yet. Against the dawn just breaking to the eastward over the Mediterranean the Thomas Stone stood beautifully outlined, the finest ship in the convoy. She paid for the distinction. A torpedo wake was sighted to port, close aboard. Even before the rudder could be put over to dodge, it struck, exploded with terrific violence aft, killed or wounded nine seamen, tore away the rudder and rudder post and the lower hull thereabouts, broke the propeller shaft, and left the Thomas Stone wholly helpless to move or to steer. The other transports steamed off with all the escorts, leaving their wounded sister alone to fight it out with that U-boat, with only H.M.S. Spey, a British corvette, remaining behind to lend what aid she could. Bennehoff, a very pugnacious officer, was perfectly willing to fight it out with his hidden antagonist, though the latter now held all the trumps. He prepared to do so. But Benny had for the moment more important matters than that lurking U-boat on his mind—the only reason for the Thomas Stone’s being in the Mediterranean at all was to land 1400 assault troops at H-hour on the beaches east of Algiers, and by God, he was going to land them there! Conventional tactics required him to launch his landing craft a mile or two off the beach a little before H-hour. Nothing he knew of prohibited him from launching his attack from 150 miles off the beach twenty hours before, so long as in either case the boats with their assault troops were on the beach at H-hour, or as soon thereafter as they could get there. Immediately, even while the convoy was fast disappearing to the eastward, leaving him as a sacrifice to hold the wolves, he began launching landing craft. The weather was good, the sea smooth, the boats were intended to make eight knots. In somewhere around
twenty hours, if the weather got no worse, they should arrive. But the boat compasses were all unreliable for so long a voyage over the open sea. And should the U-boat choose to follow the landing craft instead of playing tag with him, once they were out of his sight, it could surface and slaughter all the troops in those boats at leisure and with impunity. To prevent that, to guide the boats, and to help them should the weather get worse in passage, he ordered H.M.S. Spey, the sole guard he had, to abandon him and steam off, convoying his flotilla of twenty-four troop-laden landing craft! “A notably courageous decision!” exclaimed Admiral Cunningham when he heard of it by radio at Gibraltar. That left Benny and his helpless ship completely alone on the bosom of the ocean, but not so helpless as she might have looked. The Thomas Stone might be so wounded she couldn’t move, but she still had fangs and Benny bared them. Fortunately, at least, it was daylight; he could keep a good watch. His sky guns were manned against prowling vultures from the air seeking to pick the bones of an easy victim. His few remaining landing craft were loaded with depth bombs and put over the side to patrol the seas all roundabout and drop those high explosive charges on any U-boat if Benny’s submarine detection gear (our equivalent of the British Asdic) showed the near presence of one, or if the feather wake of a periscope, easily detectible on that smooth sea now that it was light, appeared anywhere. The landing craft and H.M.S. Spey disappeared over the horizon to the southeast, night came, both the danger and the watchfulness increased. Finally at 9 P.M., a burst of cheers rose from the darkened decks of the Thomas Stone. Two British destroyers, H.M.S. Velox and H.M.S. Wishart, dispatched by Admiral Cunningham from Gibraltar, 300 miles away, raced up through the night to help! With the Wishart circling about as guard, the Velox passed them a towline and they started once more for Algiers. But being unable to steer, the bulky Thomas Stone yawed erratically; finally the hawser parted. The Wishart sheered in, picked up another hawser from the Thomas Stone, towed on through the night while the Velox guarded. At daybreak on November 8, a British tug, the St. Day, also sent out by Admiral Cunningham from Gibraltar, caught up with them and took a hand. But by now wind and sea had kicked up; towing conditions were terrible. Every possible towing combination was tried out but heavy hawsers snapped like threads and time and again the Thomas Stone went adrift. Still all hands stuck
doggedly to the task; for four nights and three days they fought the seas and struggled haltingly onward toward Algiers. Finally on the morning of November 11, the Thomas Stone was brought safely into harbor at Algiers, there to unload directly on the quay all the precious heavy equipment and especially the priceless tanks she was carrying. And there Captain Bennehoff learned also that H.M.S. Spey had arrived with all the troops he had sent out, late for H-hour, but still in time for the ensuing combat, had there been any. But there had not been. In Algiers, the French army (not dominated as in Oran or Casablanca by French admirals with peculiar ideas of l’honneur) had accepted our assurance that “We came as friends” and had surrendered after only token resistance. Benny’s assault forces had therefore no need to land on the open beaches; the Spey had landed them all dryshod on the quays of Algiers’ inner harbor. So when the last tank and the last gun of the army’s heavy artillery had been hoisted out of his capacious holds and landed on the quay to be delivered into army hands, Captain Bennehoff could heave a sigh of relief and report to Admiral Cunningham, “Mission accomplished.” It had been. All his troops and all their fighting equipment had been delivered safely in North Africa, ready now for the next phase, the overland assault on Tunisia for which they were urgently needed. But poor Benny himself had plenty to sigh over aside from relief. While his sister transports might start home for the green pastures beckoning in the Pacific where special assault ships such as his were wanted badly to work north on the island beaches from Guadalcanal toward Tokyo, there wasn’t any immediate starting home for him and the Thomas Stone. With her rudder gone, her propeller hanging by a broken shaft, her underwater stern blasted away, and some forty feet of her above water fantail no longer supported by anything below and drooping wearily like last week’s bouquet of flowers, she wasn’t going anywhere. Not till a powerful ocean going tug or an ocean going ship and a super-extra towline could be obtained from somewhere to tow her, not the 150 miles only to Algiers, but this time the long 4100 miles across the Uboat infested Atlantic to Hampton Roads where she could get a new stern. The Thomas Stone was 95 per cent intact and uninjured, but that missing 5 per cent of her astern was vital. Benny needed it badly to get back into action. But the particulars of the tow home were a matter for the higher American
naval authorities to decide. Till the word came from Washington, he must wait in Algiers with his ship. All that, on top of what he’d been through, was trying enough to the exhausted skipper of the Thomas Stone who for four days and nights had had next to no sleep, but worse followed immediately. Hardly had the last heavy army tank been lifted out of his hold and swung ashore, to leave him light and clear of all cargo, than a group of puffing little French tugs appeared to swarm around the Thomas Stone, a naval officer from the Port Captain’s office showed up to direct the casting loose from the quay of his mooring lines, and a French pilot clambered up on his bridge. “What’s all this for?” asked the astonished Benny of the officer down on the quay. “We need the quay space you’re occupying here in the harbor for unloading other ships!” came the reply. “We’re moving you from the harbor to an anchorage in the bay outside!” “Like hell you are!” snapped out Benny. “You just hold everything till I get the Captain of the Port!” and he dashed down his side ladder to the quay and the nearest telephone. But he might have saved his breath. He learned only, as I had, that Port Captains whether going by the name of Commandant du Port or its English equivalent, are bureaucrats who see nobody’s problems but their own. The Port Captain stuck by his decision; he needed the quay space, the Thomas Stone must leave the protected harbor for an anchorage in the open bay till she could be moved onward to the United States. In vain Captain Bennehoff protested that his ship was helpless, that she had no engine power to help herself in case of storm. Nothing made any difference. The Thomas Stone must move to the open bay; the quay space she was taking up was needed urgently for unloading other ships. Benny was no person to take lying down any “no” from a Port Captain; he burned up that telephone line going all the way up the naval line, then up the army command to the top, violently objecting. But everywhere poor Benny was thrown back on the Port Captain. The Port Captain was responsible for getting the cargoes ashore; if he, having heard all Benny’s objections, still felt he had to have that quay space, he would be backed up from above. Benny went back to the Port Captain with his final appeal; it was rejected. There was nothing further he could do. Heart-broken, he climbed back up his side ladder, stood silently by while he was cast free and towed out of the harbor to the open bay to be anchored there in the open roadstead, completely exposed to every wind blowing off the Mediterranean to the northward of him
and no longer sheltered by the powerful defenses of Algiers harbor from air attack. Except that the water was shallower, he might as well have been out in the open sea again. Benny prepared for the worst. Fate might have it in for him, he might be powerless to defeat it in the end, but before it got through with him, even inexorable Fate was going to know it had been in a battle. He made sure his anchor had a good grip on the bottom, paid out plenty of cable to make assurance doubly sure, personally checked his other anchor and cable to be certain they were ready for quick letting go. Then he stationed all his gun crews for round the clock action and posted extra lookouts, in boats as well as aloft, to keep an eye out for both U-boats and planes. He had not long to wait. That night there was a heavy air raid on Algiers. As usual, the harbor and all its shipping disappeared beneath a blanket of smoke. As usual the sky guns around the harbor put up a terrific umbrella of bursting shells and tracers over the harbor. As usual, the bombers, gun shy, circled the harbor outside that umbrella before undertaking even to dare its fringes (there were as yet no night-fighters in the defense picture). But not as usual, there in the light of chandelier flares dropped from the circling planes, was the anchored Thomas Stone out in the open bay, unprotected by the harbor guns. From above, where her underwater stern damage was invisible, she was a perfectly good ship and a large and inviting target, well worth anybody’s bombs. Understandably enough, the bombers promptly forgot all about Algiers harbor, to concentrate on the Thomas Stone, which now went through an ordeal by bombs such as few ships have ever suffered singly and survived. Heavy bombs burst all about her, showering her topsides with water and with shrapnel. The Thomas Stone, of course, was at a terrible disadvantage. She couldn’t maneuver either to dodge bombs or to throw off the aim of the bombardiers. She was a perfect sitting duck. But those bombers learned swiftly they had caught a Tartar. Benny wasn’t taking it sitting down. With every searchlight swung up and every sky gun he had (and for a ship he had plenty) swung heavenward, all divided into sectors and with his group controls working beautifully, the Thomas Stone went into action, spouting fire like a fountain. She was no sitting duck but a coiled cobra, with fiery fangs lashing out in all directions at the bombers swooping down on her to unload.
The uproar was terrific. Amidst the pandemonium of detonating bombs and exploding guns, the deafening exhausts of airplane engines and the unearthly shriek of falling missiles, all lighted up by lurid tracers, rapidly moving searchlights, bursting shells, and erupting tons of TNT, Benny and his men, eyes glued to gun sights or control gear, fought doggedly back, tracking one plane after another, sometimes half a dozen at once, as the bombers streaked in for the kill. They never got it. Bombardier after bombardier faltered in his aim or his pilot swerved sharply off as he closed to escape the flaming death coming at him from that verdämt ship below. One bomb only out of dozens finally found the target, to come screaming down on deck somewhere aft and explode there with a thunderous crash. On the bridge, Benny’s heart sank; any damage from a heavy bomb, on top of what already he had, would finish him. With that solitary hit, the bombers were wholly content; surely they had polished off the target at last. They departed eastward through the night doubtless so to report, meanwhile licking their own wounds. Suddenly the smoking guns were silent, though warily the gun crews stuck by them, ready, should the planes come back, to open up again till the stricken Thomas Stone vanished from beneath their feet and they no longer had any guns to fight. Leaving his exec on the bridge, Captain Bennehoff rushed aft to see what was necessary now to save his ship. But this time, the joke was on his assailants; nothing at all was necessary, though undoubtedly one of the largest caliber bombs the Nazis had, had crashed through his decks to detonate below. Almost unbelievingly he gazed at what had happened. The bomb, a thousand pounder from the size of the holes it left, had come down at a sharp angle on his port quarter, torn out the bottom of a lifeboat swinging there in its davits, hit the main deck leaving a hole some twenty inches in diameter, crashed through the next two decks below, leaving similar holes, and then below that had exploded—where his underwater stern should have been. Only there wasn’t any stern there any more; a Nazi U-boat captain off Cape Palos, Spain, had beaten his Luftwaffe brethren over Algiers to that stern with his torpedo. The bomb had exploded only in open water where the stern used to be. The only additional damage from that 1000 pounds of TNT was a lost lifeboat and three holes which meant nothing at all in the already sagging fantail!
Next morning, Benny was on his way ashore in a small boat to see the Captain of the Port again, grimly determined to have the Thomas Stone moved back inside the harbor where she might get the protection of the harbor defenses to which she was as much entitled as anybody. Single-handed, he couldn’t fight off the Luftwaffe every night; sooner or later, they’d surely get him, and next time not in his missing stern either. One battle like that was enough in anybody’s lifetime. Once again he got a flat refusal; flatter this time even than before. Now it was bolstered up with the added information that there was no berth for him inside the harbor; every quay was occupied by ships unloading. His spirit of fair play was appealed to—surely he wouldn’t want to push another ship out into the open bay to make room inside for his? That, countered Benny, was exactly what he was sure of. And furthermore, he didn’t give a damn which one it might be, just so long as it was big enough to let him squeeze the Thomas Stone into its vacated berth. For any other ship would at least have engine power to get underway and not have to sit immobilized to take the strafing—surely it wasn’t cricket to spoil the Nazi bombers by giving them only sitting ducks to practice on. If the Captain of the Port thought war was a sport in which the spirit of fair play counted for anything, then let him make it sporting for both sides by sending out some other ship able to make a proper game of it. As for himself and his men, they’d had enough. To hell with the spirit of fair play! All they wanted was a cushy berth inside the harbor breakwater under the protection of the harbor smoke pots and its comforting ack-ack batteries. Benny didn’t get it. All he got was compliments on the magnificent battle his ship had put up, witnessed by everybody from the sharply rising slope of Algiers as from a grandstand, and the reiterated statements from the naval and army higher commands that the Port Captain must be the final judge as to what the situation required. Aside from that, he received only a large supply of A.A. ammunition to replace what he had expended the night before. Reflecting bitterly on that, he returned to his ship feeling like a Roman gladiator; all anyone would do for him was to furnish him with the wherewithal to put on another spectacle in that vast arena formed by the open bay and the rising crescent of Algiers against its steep hill. Benny replenished his magazines, refilled all his ready service ammunition boxes, sent as many of his crew as he dared below to rest up for the inevitable renewal of the battle, and threw his weary frame down on his berth to catch a
little sleep himself. He was worn out. But before the day faded into night, Captain Bennehoff knew he would have no worries about bombs that night at least; no planes would take the air, enemy or otherwise. For the barometer was falling rapidly, the sea was kicking up, the wind off the open Mediterranean was starting to blow hard from the northwest to strike him squarely in his exposed position. A real storm was brewing, something unusual for that season off the Algerian coast. Benny signaled in one last frantic appeal to the Port Captain—his ship was helpless without engine power to fight the coming storm; for God’s sake, send tugs to take him inside the harbor before it struck! His appeal was denied; there was no room inside the harbor; he must rely on his anchors. The afternoon slipped away into night, the wind increased in strength to a gale, finally to a whole gale. Before that happened, Benny prudently heaved in on his cable as much as he dared without starting the anchor he already had down, then let go also his other anchor, and veered out chain on both cables to full scope so that he might get and keep the best possible grip on the bottom. Then as the storm increased in fury and the seas rolling in on him off the open ocean started to crash down on his heaving bow in thunderous blows while the howling wind beating against his topsides strove to drive him down to leeward, he could do nothing further but pray. The ordinary resource of the seaman, to steam slowly ahead against the oncoming seas to relieve the strain on his cables, was denied him. His propeller shaft was broken; he had no engine power to help him. All that a man might do, he had done to meet this new peril to his ship. It was now up to his ground tackle, which was good, and the value of the bottom of Algiers Bay as holding ground, which was dubious. Once again in the darkness Captain Bennehoff took station on the bridge with all his crew at quarters. This night again there would be no sleep for anyone—all hands were in for another battle against the worst enemy of all, the sea. Carefully Bennehoff himself took cross bearings and ranges on various lights ashore in unblacked out Algiers to mark the position of his gyrating ship, then stationed other officers at the alidades to keep constant watch on those ranges and inform him if any showed signs of change. Amidst the roaring of the wind and the deep bass singing of his wire rigging, no very long time elapsed before alarmed cries came from the watchers at the alidades at both starboard and port wings of his bridge. The ranges were opening out, the bearings were changing, undoubtedly the Thomas Stone was dragging her anchors, both of them!
Bennehoff sprang to the port alidade himself to check, found it was so. As he sighted through that alidade, he could see the range of lights he had it focused on, steadily opening out. Before that storm, his ship was drifting inexorably down to leeward toward the open beach some miles astern yet! There was no question about it, the value of the bottom of Algiers Bay as holding ground was no longer dubious; it was worthless! Sooner or later before that storm still rising in intensity, they would be driven high and dry on the beach! And there was nothing further he could do on the Thomas Stone to prevent it. But Benny was no person to give up while he still lived. Although there was nothing further he could do on the Thomas Stone to avert disaster, there was still a thin chance to escape and he clutched at it. There was, damn him, that broken reed, the Captain of the Port, who had got him into all this—he had tugs! It was too late now ever to hope tugs could get him into the harbor, but at least they might serve in place of his dead engines to help hold him up against the seas and keep him off the beach. The Thomas Stone’s signal lantern started to flash out through the night a message of distress across the tumbling seas toward Algiers harbor. She was steadily dragging both anchors, all she had, toward the beach. She must instantly have tugs, the best they had, if possible all they had, to help hold her against the storm and save her from destruction! They got an immediate acknowledgment, then shortly an affirmative. Tugs would be sent out to help. There was an agonized period of waiting for the tugs while the anchors dragged, the lights ashore fringing the beach grew brighter and brighter and they began to hear, mingling with all the assorted shrieks and concussions of wind and sea, the thunder of the surf breaking on the beach astern. The tugs, tossing like corks in the mountainous waves, arrived at last. They were in plenty of time; the beach was still half a mile astern. Benny switched on his cargo lights to illuminate his side and help them get secured. On a night like that no blackout was required; he had nothing to fear except the sea. But as the tugs came into the circles of light from his cargo reflectors, his heart sank—there were only two tugs, both French, and neither very large nor very powerful. Algiers had far more tugs than that, he knew, but probably all the others were even smaller and dared not face the stormy seas lest they founder out of hand. He must get along with those two. He waved to the tugs to come alongside him, one each side, and he would pass them lines to secure themselves there and start heaving him ahead. He
could not risk giving them towlines to try to tow ahead of him. Both his anchor cables were streamed out from his bows; there the tugs and their towlines could do nothing save swiftly foul themselves in the anchor cables. The French tugboat captains waved back they understood everything. They were good seamen; they got alongside as directed, took the hawsers and passed them round their bitts. Immediately then they opened wide their throttles, went full out straining on the lines to hold the Thomas Stone up against wind and sea while they themselves tossed wildly up and down alongside her to the seas rolling by. No sooner had the tugs a maximum strain on the lines than Captain Bennehoff was squinting again through an alidade at the lights ashore, picking out a new set for ranges to show him whether with the tugs helping, the anchors finally had taken a solid bite and were holding. He watched in anguish a few minutes and then straightened slowly up. All hope was dead. The Thomas Stone was still inexorably dragging toward the beach, a little more slowly now perhaps, but just as steadily as before. In spite of heavy anchors trying to dig into the bottom and hold there, in spite of tugs almost tearing their engines off their bedplates driving furiously ahead, the implacable wind and sea were continuously pushing him and the Thomas Stone shoreward. Louder and louder grew the roar of the breakers, brighter and brighter gleamed the lights of the houses ashore. The water grew much shallower, the steep seas became even steeper, the tugs began to slide up and down them as on a gigantic seesaw. His stern entered the breakers. Benny signaled to his deck force to cast loose both tugs and get them clear. Keeping them longer, once the Thomas Stone was in that terrific surf, would only swamp the tugs. They could do nothing further for him. As the tugs, freed, plunged ahead into the screeching night to save themselves, Benny, high above them on his bridge, waved cheerily to their captains for the valiant effort they had made to save him. Then he turned to peer aft through the darkness and watch helplessly while those tremendous storm waves drove his ship aground. The stern, falling away in a trough, struck with a staggering thud that shook the whole vessel. The drifting stopped. Instantly the captain spun about, straining his eyes forward through the blackness. Now if only the anchors, still streaming forward, held, it would not be so bad. The stern was already heavily damaged; no pounding on the bottom could make it any worse.
But to his dismay, the stern had hardly gone aground than the seas crashing against his bow began to swing the stem around, anchors or no anchors. In another instant, the ship was broadside to the breaking waves, hard on the beach her whole length, shuddering convulsively under the impact of titanic sledge hammer blows. One after another those thundering waves roared in to smash squarely against her steel side and then leap skyward in solid masses of hundreds of tons of green water that came tumbling down on the decks as if to crush them in. Now at last had come the end; it seemed inconceivable that any ship could hold together long under that irresistible battering. All hands watched each instant to see her disintegrate into a mass of broken steel to leave them strangling in that maelstrom where lifebelts were worthless and no small boat could possibly survive long enough to get it launched. But she was a stout ship, the Thomas Stone. Somehow she held together through it all while the pounding seas kept swinging her still further round till it was her bow, no longer her stern, that was pointed directly shoreward, with the whole ship grounded from end to end. Each monstrous sea now as it rolled in picked up the Thomas Stone as if she were but a chip of wood and flung her quivering hull bodily farther up the beach till at last it seemed to her numbed captain that one more such thrust would push his stem right in amongst the brilliantly illuminated oil tanks he could see rising close before him on the shore. But there, high and hard aground, she stuck at last, with next to no water left under her as each wave receded. Dazedly he turned to look down at the surf breaking all about him, surprised still to be alive. First the U-boat with its torpedo, then the planes with their bombs, now the sea itself with this last crushing blow—all had done their worst to destroy him. He had fought them all. While he lived, he would keep on fighting for his ship. The messboy cleared away the coffee cups, lunch was over. Captain Bennehoff rose from the table. “Come aft with me now, Captain, and you can see for yourself what’s required in the way of a salvage job to put my ship back in action. My crew and I’ll give you all the help possible.” I rose to follow him out on deck.
CHAPTER
28 I LEFT THE “THOMAS STONE” AFTER my inspection to go back up the hill in a navy jeep assigned to the stranded transport. We ran a few miles along the waterfront into the center of Algiers past the Monument aux Morts where I had first seen Admiral Darlan and General Giraud, then swung sharp left and soon were climbing the steep hill headed for the St. George and my day before Christmas tea date with the Royal Navy staff. I had little thought left for anything except the Thomas Stone and what might be done to help her and her valiant captain. She would be a tough problem; she was practically high and dry, aside from all her other injuries. I sighed over the manifest injustice of life. Bennehoff was an exceptionally able captain, yet nothing but disaster had come his way; it was damned unfair. Well, when we got the Spahi clear, what salvage forces I had should go all out for Benny and his ship. We were once again passing the Palais d’Etat; my eyes always got a rest gazing on those gaudily clad Spahi sentries. I glanced to the left at them as the jeep, pulling hard up the long hill, slowly went by the entrance gate. Evidently something was wrong, decidedly wrong there. Instead of being stiffly at “Attention” as usual, the two Spahis, clutching their rifles at the “Ready,” were swung nearly about, peering, both of them, into the courtyard just inside the gate. Standing inside there by the marble steps leading into the building, was a large limousine, Darlan’s unquestionably, with the driver just dashing up the steps to a milling group of men a bit inside the open double doors. My jeep crawled on by, no longer could I see through the gate. It looked to me like a brawl in there, with that French chauffeur going in four bells to take a hand and the Arab sentries decidedly puzzled as to where they came in in a gentleman’s squabble, if at all. Possibly Giraud and Darlan had at last come to blows; it seemed likely enough.
But I had troubles enough of my own without adding French politics to my headaches; I pushed that brawl out of my mind and went back to considering the Thomas Stone again as we chugged the rest of the way up the hill to the portico of the St. George. Soon, a few flights up, I was with Cunningham’s Royal Navy staff. Our new Admiral of the Fleet had gone to his quarters. But most of the rest were there—Rear Admiral Murray, Commodore Dick, Captain Shaw, Captain Dorling, Captain King, a few other captains, and my recent shipmate in distress, Commander Stewart, lately of the Porcupine, who now that his ship was decommissioned and cut in two, had been added temporarily to the staff. The tea proved to be rather a dismal affair, a wholly forced attempt to seem a little cheerful on the day before Christmas. A few quarts of Scotch and some water turned out to be the tea. Nobody seemed interested in taking much, and certainly it showed no signs of having cheered anybody up in the slightest. The news of the collapse of the Tunisian offensive which had cost the navy plenty to help mount, was an effective enough wet blanket. Still even without that, I doubt there would have been any real gaiety. For every officer there, excepting myself, the war had started not a year before, but nearly three and a half years before. Most had been away from home and family practically all those terrible years. Everyone could foresee two or three years more of the same before home became again something more than a cherished but dimming memory. None of us there were young any more—past fifty, most of us now, when every year counts for much. What was there to be merry about? The others, looking back over the Christmases at home they had missed, and all of us looking ahead to those which we were bound to miss, provided we even lived to miss them, felt decidedly down in the mouth. After a drink or two, more for form’s sake than anything else, the party soon broke up into gloomy little knots discussing technical matters, then everyone began drifting out, headed for his own billet, to dream in solitude of a Christmas at home with wife and children and peace—would any of it ever again prove more than a dream? I started back for the Aletti. It was growing dusk, Christmas Eve had arrived. I contemplated it bitterly—Christmas Eve in Algiers, with everything completely missing that had any connection whatever with that star which had glowed over Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve so long ago—peace on earth, goodwill towards men, home, family, friends. Roundabout me were nothing but death, destruction, and strangers, and no great hope for any
change; not soon, anyway. I wanted only to crawl into my bed at the Aletti as soon as I got there, pull the bed in after me, and try to forget that it was Christmas Eve. Dinner be damned; I didn’t want any. I reached the Aletti, went into the lobby, started for the elevator to realize my sole desire. One of the junior officers of the naval staff (he hadn’t been at that tea; not enough rank, I suppose) stopped me, drew me well aside. “Don’t go out again tonight, Captain, if you don’t have to, and don’t go out at all alone. And if you must go out, go armed! That’s an order from the top!” I looked at him in astonishment. I hadn’t gone armed yet in North Africa; as a matter of fact, I didn’t even have a Colt .45 automatic to wear if I wanted to. My sole protection so far had been my tin hat. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why all the sudden need for artillery?” He considered a moment, looking at me. After all, I was one of the top members of the naval staff; including Cunningham himself, there were but three higher in rank. He decided he could risk it. “I’m supposed only to alert the staff, not to give out why. I’ll tell you, but for heaven’s sake don’t pass it along till it’s released—it’s top secret yet while they’re taking precautions. Darlan’s just been assassinated! It may mean a French uprising against us. Don’t take any chances!” I looked at him with widening eyes as that sank in. Darlan assassinated? It flashed across my mind that what I had seen earlier in the afternoon as I passed the Palais d’Etat, which I had taken for a brawl, must have been instead a scuffle with the assassin the moment after his attack! I thanked the lieutenant, told him I’d observe the warning; I wasn’t going out again that night, armed or unarmed. I stepped into the waiting elevator, started up to my room, stripped hurriedly, and fell into bed, wholly exhausted physically and mentally. Christmas Eve! Darlan’s assassination and all his death might mean was the last drop needed to make that Christmas Eve utter gall and wormwood.
CHAPTER
29 I WAS IN THE AIR EARLY CHRISTMAS Day, on my way from Maison Blanche in Algiers to Tafaraoui in Oran. As usual, I was in a twin-motored army transport, unarmed as they all were. Whatever the reasons, there was no fighter convoy to fly with any part of the way; we were making the journey wholly unaccompanied and unguarded. The pilot, completely on his own, had no faith in anybody’s goodwill, even on Christmas Day. He elected to make the flight entirely over water, avoiding the land route, and hugging the precipitous coastline, to fly only a few feet above the surface of the sea. That way, I presume, he figured he was least likely to be spotted by any Nazi fighters out celebrating the joyous Christmas season, and safest from any trying to dive down on his tail. We had a very light passenger list; a few army officers going back to Oran, a few officers of the Royal Navy bound for their ships at Mers-el-Kebir. The talk, of course, was centered wholly on the news of the assassination of Darlan, now officially released and both officially and unofficially spreading like wildfire all over North Africa. Already from both Rome and Berlin, the Axis radio was bellowing that the perfidious English, no longer needing Darlan as a tool, had murdered him as an obstacle to their further devilish machinations. So far as I was concerned, I knew now I had witnessed the last scene in that swift drama; the time jibed exactly with my passing of the Palais d’Etat. What I had seen was those about Darlan closing on the assassin the moment after he had fired. What had happened, I also knew now, was as incredible as everything else in French politics. A young French student, a Corsican, had entered the vestibule of the Palais d’Etat the morning before Christmas, demanding an audience with Darlan. With no investigation at all of the request, he had been informed simply that Darlan was out; if he cared to return about mid-afternoon, Darlan should be back by then. He had taken care to return early. Since Darlan had not
yet returned, he was asked to take a seat in the vestibule and wait. He did. When Darlan’s automobile arrived and Darlan, descending from it followed by his Chief of Ordnance, le Commandant Heurcade, entered the vestibule and turned to open the door of his office, his visitor rose and without a word opened fire on him with a small-caliber pistol, hitting him twice, once in the mouth, once in the side. Le Commandant Heurcade, who had started to enter his own office, turned, first to try to support his falling chief, then to fling himself upon his assailant, only to catch two more bullets himself, the more serious one in the thigh. But he clung on; others dashing in disarmed the assassin and made him prisoner. Darlan had, of course, been rushed immediately to a hospital, where on the operating table an hour later without ever having regained consciousness, he died. Those were the facts, but not the explanation. Why had Darlan been assassinated? Who really was responsible? What was going to happen now the only strong man in French Africa, the only man whose word had been law, had been rubbed out? Over the answers to those questions, with the news out, not only all North Africa but every Allied capital was pondering furiously. And as might have been expected, Goebbels, from both Axis capitals, was pouring all the poison he could into the wound to make sure it festered rather than healed. Everyone else was speculating, but Rome and Berlin knew—of course it was the villainous English! One of my fellow passengers, a Royal Navy commander, was discussing that philosophically. Why get heated up over the Axis accusation? It might even be true; the British had something to gain by Darlan’s death. And so had the Americans, and the Vichy French, and the Giraudists, and the de Gaulleists, and most of all, the Axis powers themselves. In fact, Darlan had enemies in every country, including his own, in every camp, in every faction; he had succeeded thoroughly in his career at one time or another since the Fall of France in giving nearly everybody good cause for wishing to see him dead. With everybody having a motive to want him out of the way, finding the actual group behind the murderer going was to be a task which might baffle even the late lamented Sherlock Holmes. Of course, continued that commander, the British weren’t behind the assassin; much as Darlan was hated in England, they just didn’t do things that way. It was his opinion, seeing that the assassin was a young Corsican, that when all the turmoil and all the secret investigations seeking conspiracies and
conspirators were over, it would turn out to be an act of purely personal vengeance—the Corsicans were as notorious for vendettas as the Sicilians. (And it may be said here that that was exactly the ultimate outcome.) We flew on over the sea, the discussion went on endlessly. It turned from who killed Darlan to what was going to happen now he was dead. We had left behind us Algiers, all alerted, all in arms ready to meet by force an anti-Ally uprising if that was what Darlan’s death signified. Nobody, of course, had any positive answer to that, or indeed to any part of the enigma which was Darlan. Finally I went forward to look at the flight chart in the pilot’s cabin. My eye lighted on the fact that in about twenty minutes we should be passing the promontory off Tenès, near which lay that scuttled U-boat which Admiral Cunningham was so anxious I search with divers for the existence of radar equipment or anything similar. Since we were flying over the sea anyway, why not improve the occasion by sighting that U-boat and surveying it from the air? I explained to the pilot what I wanted; the few other passengers, forgetting Darlan for the moment, gathered round to listen. The pilot was willing to take a little time to help me out. I sketched out to him and to the others what had happened to that U-boat. Two days after D-day in North Africa, two British planes, patrolling the sea lanes well off the coast between Oran and Algiers, had sighted a surfaced Uboat late in the afternoon some distance away. Immediately they swooped down for it, hoping at least to be able to let go a depth bomb or two before it managed to submerge so deeply as to escape altogether. They closed, but to the astonishment of both pilots diving down on it, that Uboat made no attempt at all to submerge. They never learned why; perhaps it had a particularly bellicose captain who was spoiling for a fight and saw no reason to run away from a few planes. At any rate, it didn’t submerge. Instead, with fine afternoon visibility conditions to favor its gunners, its two sky-guns were manned hurriedly. The two pilots diving down on it with depth charges, found themselves flying straight into two streams of heavy incendiary tracers. There was no percentage in that; they might get close enough in to drop a depth charge before they disintegrated or went afire, but the chances were they wouldn’t. Hurriedly both pilots pulled out of their dives and zoomed off sideways to save themselves. What was happening below was not according to Hoyle. Any proper U-boat should start submerging promptly the instant it sighted a plane and seek to escape under water while they dropped depth bombs on it; it wasn’t
supposed to stay on the surface and fight back. But if the U-boat wanted to fight it out with guns, those two British pilots were perfectly willing to oblige and to make a gun battle of it. Leveling off a little out of range, they gabbled a bit back and forth over the radio as to their tactics. Incidentally they sent out also a wild radio call for the nearest British destroyer to rush to the spot and take a hand, for the business at issue was destroying U-boats and chivalry was no part of it. Then they went to work. From different angles to divide the enemy fire, but always simultaneously to avoid giving him a chance to concentrate on either plane, they came screaming down out of the sky, twisting and rolling, with their own guns blazing away at that U-boat superstructure from the instant they came within range until they were out of it again. But the U-boat skipper was not so bad himself. He steered a straight enough course while the planes were circling out of range, but the instant they started to come within it, his U-boat with both her diesel engines full out, began to swerve all over the ocean in a dizzying snake dance that made him a target almost impossible to hit effectively, the while his own guns spat back fire at the twisting planes. For nearly two hours thus the furious combat kept up—a draw. The planes were almost certain they had put some projectiles through the superstructure of the U-boat; they could see their tracers sending up spray all about it each time they dived in. But they were certain, without any almost, that they had taken as much in return from the U-boat—their wings were well ventilated where enemy tracers had gone through plentifully and their fuselages had suffered several hits, fortunately none yet in a vital spot. But it was getting dark, their gasoline was getting low, and their ammunition was giving out. And still no destroyer on the horizon; the nearest one, hours away at the beginning, was racing full speed for them, meanwhile urging them by radio to keep the U-boat engaged till it might arrive. The pilots did their best in the gathering dusk. Finally it was so dark, they could no longer see their target. There was nothing to be gained by staying longer. They couldn’t track the U-boat in the darkness, even if it stayed surfaced, which was unlikely; the only sure result of trying to was that they would shortly both have to ditch in the sea, out of fuel themselves. So with a farewell report to the destroyer, still an hour away, they started for their home airfield. The destroyer finally arrived, searched all the rest of the night, both
underseas with its Asdic and above water with its lookouts and radar. When day came, it continued the search over a wide area, aided again by planes, but found nothing. Both planes and destroyer had regretfully to report the U-boat had escaped. Late that same afternoon, the day Oran surrendered, an infantry company of G.I.s from Oran, moving slowly eastward in open order to clear the outlying country of the last fragments of French resistance, met some Arabs who volunteered the amazing information that a considerable force of armed Germans was hiding out in a near by barn! The company commander swiftly encircled the barn with his troops, trained some machine guns on it, then loudly (from a safe position flat on his stomach in the stubble as were also all his men) called on the Germans to surrender or take the consequences. They surrendered. That infantry captain was the most surprised man in all North Africa as the Nazis marched out, arms in the air, crying “Kamerad!” to find he’d captured a U-boat crew of thirty-eight sailors, complete from captain to cook! And all that nowhere near the sea, twenty miles at least inland! There they all were, all armed with rifles and in addition with the two heavy machine guns with which they’d fought off those planes. With that collection of arms they could have given their captors a terrific battle, but once ashore, they must have felt out of their element, and seeing soldiers coming at them, they had surrendered without a shot. What did it all mean? Simply that the U-boat captain had made a terrible blunder in electing to fight it out on the surface with those planes. When night came and the planes had to depart, he found he’d thrown away his U-boat—her upper watertight hull and conning tower were so riddled by aircraft projectiles, he couldn’t possibly ever submerge again without going immediately to the bottom with all hands. And on the surface, once daylight came again, he’d be certain soon to be discovered by searching destroyers that would polish him off in no time at all and probably also kill him and most of his crew while they were about it. So while the destroyer which first arrived spent the night scouring the combat area for him, he fled off in the darkness on the surface for the nearest land, off Tenès, thirty miles away. There, about fifty yards offshore, after ferrying most of his men in several trips of a little rubber boat to the beach, he had scuttled his U-boat in fairly shallow water, then gone ashore himself with the last load. After that, gathering his crew, he had made a forced march of some twenty miles directly inland by
the time the late dawn caught him. Then he and his men had all holed up for the day in that barn, only to be turned in by the Arabs whom his arrogant demands for food had antagonized. The captives, the first of any branch of the Nazi armed services to be taken in North Africa, had been rushed in trucks to Oran by their elated G.I. captors, much set up over having beaten the Navy to the first such catch. There General Fredendall, just taking possession of Oran itself, had radioed to Eisenhower at Gibraltar, stating he had thirty-eight German U-boat prisoners and asking instructions as to disposition. Eisenhower instantly radioed back to put the s.o.b.s on the first convoy back to the United States, with his earnest hopes that if any vessel in that convoy got torpedoed by a U-boat, it’d be the one they were on. So there now, somewhere off Tenès, lay a scuttled U-boat in shallow water which I had orders to search with divers when I could. We rounded the last promontory to the eastward of Tenès. The co-pilot gave me his seat to get the best possible view all around from the nose windows for my aerial survey. Everybody else crowded up close behind, eager for a look also at the first U-boat knocked out in the Torch invasion. As we swung left into a little bay, the co-pilot, standing behind me, pointed excitedly. Half a mile ahead in the surf off an empty beach, was something protruding. The pilot throttled down as much as he dared and headed directly for it. We swung low over it, not fifty feet above the surface. It was a U-boat, all right. There was the chariot bridge, completely out of water, and even about half of the conning tower exposed; so much exposed I could make out the insignia painted on it—some sort of griffon, claws ferociously upraised. That seemed to express the spirit of its late commander; his spirit as long, anyway, as he had his U-boat under his feet, though not on land. The U-boat was badly heeled to starboard; so considerably heeled down that its port handrail showed occasionally as the surf broke over the deck. That was all that was visible. The pilot circled it three or four times, banking heavily to keep it in view as much as possible, with a final pass directly over it at about 500 feet altitude so that I might get a good view directly down on it through the water. I surrendered my seat, with many thanks to both pilot and co-pilot for their help, and retired to my aluminum bench aft in the fuselage to think and to make a. few notes for future reference.
It was evident to me that that U-boat captain had been either a very smart chap indeed, or had profited by an extraordinary stroke of dumb luck, which was unlikely—he could not possibly have scuttled his U-boat in a position which both better suited his needs and at the same time made it more difficult for divers to go through his boat for search purposes. If he sank his sub in water deep enough to be beyond any diving depth, he would have jeopardized his own escape after the scuttling with only a small rubber boat to get his crew ashore. And running her hard up on the beach, while it would have made escape very simple, would have left the vessel an easy object of search. Instead he had elected to scuttle her in about twenty feet of water, where escape was still simple, but where, in the midst of even everyday surf, diving was almost impossible even though the depth of itself was nothing for any diver. There in that surf, the radical-and rapid variations in pressure on the diver below as the waves rolled in to break over him, would immediately burst his eardrums and subject him to intolerable agony under which he couldn’t possibly work. Even if I had had divers galore (which, of course, I hadn’t) there could be no internal search of that U-boat without first dragging her closer inshore into water shallow enough to expose her deck hatches fully; or dragging her farther offshore into such deep water we would be clear of the surf; or waiting for a day so calm there would be no surf at all; this last, a hopeless event until summer came. Under any conditions, regardless of Cunningham’s desires, it was clear to me there was going to be no search inside that U-boat for months yet, if ever. A very versatile officer, that U-boat captain; evidently he knew all about diving and divers, too.
CHAPTER
30 WE GOT TO TAFARAOUI AIRFIELD about noon. As usual, it was a sea of deep mud off the runways. There was my own jeep waiting, not very close. As always, I had to flounder through clinging mud to get to it. We drove off to the Grand Hotel d’Oran. Hardly had I entered the lobby than a sentry informed me that under orders from Algiers, Oran was in a state of extreme alert. Every military unit was standing to under arms; all passes for Christmas had been canceled. No officer was to leave his quarters except on the most urgent business. He was to stand by there awaiting orders, and he must stand by always armed, even inside his quarters. Inasmuch as I had no firearms at all, I was nonplused as to how I might comply till the corporal of the headquarters guard offered to lend me a spare rifle from the guard room rack till next day I could draw a pistol. I checked the rifle to make sure it was fully loaded and at the “Ready”; then after a bite of lunch, with a few extra clips of rifle cartridges, I clambered up the dingy stairs to my cold room. So this was Christmas Day! A Merry, Merry Christmas to us all, I muttered cynically. There being nothing else I could do, first I carefully locked the door so that the assassins evidently anticipated by the higher command from all their precautions, might be delayed a bit in breaking in on me. Then I took off my shoes, climbed into bed to avoid freezing during my enforced long stay in that room, and placed my loaded and ready rifle close alongside my pillow so there might be no seconds lost in going into action with it if required. There was one offset. Now at last, for the first day since my arrival in North Africa, I had plenty of time to finish a letter home to my wife, which letter I had started in pencil in the plane, expecting it as usual to be brief. Propped up on the pillows, covered by all the blankets I had and my overcoat, fountain pen in right hand and rifle muzzle nuzzling comfortingly into my left side, I
started. By the time midnight arrived, with time out only for dinner, that haltingly written letter which poured out my heart that Christmas Day in yearnings for home had run to ten closely written sheets of ordinary business size paper. Finally on sheet number ten, my paper having given out, I closed with, “And now it being practically midnight, and Christmas nearly over on the most un-Christmaslike Christmas I have ever seen, I shall end by saying with Tiny Tim on Christmas Day, ‘God bless us, every one!’ and may He give us Christmas Days to come on which we may be merry.” I felt a little better. Words were not much as substitutes for a living and loving presence, but at least they were a slight tie and all that remained available to me. I rolled over, made sure that rifle was still conveniently close alongside me on the bed, and wearily went to sleep. Next morning I rose to learn that the state of “Alert” was over. Nothing else untoward had occurred anywhere in North Africa; no signs of any real conspiracy had been unearthed; apparently Darlan’s murder was an act of personal vengeance, for which indeed shortly after Christmas Day the murderer paid with his own life. Giraud had taken over after much bickering among the exVichyite governors, admirals, and generals who still ruled in French North Africa, as to who should succeed Darlan. Certainly Giraud was the best choice; he, at least, was not tarred with the Vichy stick. But the only reason he was finally agreed upon was apparently that other more powerful candidates feared to expose themselves to Darlan’s fate. Giraud, on the contrary, really was a French military hero with few enemies, though to counterbalance that, he had little influence and few friends, and except Eisenhower, no powerful supporters at all. At any rate, the fears of a widespread plot to assassinate all Allied officers and turn the country over again to Axis control, were past. I gave my rifle back, with thanks, to the corporal of the guard. Nor was there any need now for me to draw a Colt .45, which if left in my room, would certainly and swiftly be stolen for resale on the black market, and if worn, would be a damned incumbrance to me in getting about wrecks, and fine ballast to help sink me in case I fell overboard. I went down to the salvage quay for an inspection. Everything appeared to be going as well as might be expected. On the Spahi, Lieutenant Ankers’ second string divers were busily engaged below the sea in rolling out the barrels. These, now piling up in a large storeroom ashore under armed military guard,
began to give the place quite a bonded warehouse appearance. I told Ankers my figures showed about 500 hogsheads should be enough, they were so large. Long before his first string divers finished with the patch, Ankers assured me he would have that many out; there would be no delay on that account. Captain Harding and his crew on the King Salvor I found all still nursing their burns, their blisters, their bruises, and their wounds, but all up on deck again. They had turned their salvaged Hindoo in to the military hospital ashore, but all hands were very much down in the mouth that they didn’t have the Strathallan there in the outer harbor to go with him. I gave Captain Harding a letter of commendation to his crew to be read out at quarters, each man then to be furnished a copy of it for his record. As for Harding himself, I told him I’d recommended him to Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham for a decoration, which Cunningham had assured me he was certain His Majesty, the King, would be happy to bestow on him. He’d earned it. The rest of the day I spent out over the Grand Dock with Bill Reed, his crew, Perrin-Trichard, and his French contingent. Except that Reed had discovered that the wooden plugs I’d furnished him wouldn’t drive in solidly enough to plug the air vents tightly and consequently he’d have to build forms and pour cement into the whole lot of vent pipes to seal them off, he was getting along all right. He had the job nicely organized on an international basis. PerrinTrichard and his French divers, much happier now with their two much worn but serviceable Made-in-America diving suits, were doing all the plumbing work on the vast system of air lines that had to be laid at the bottom of the sea to carry compressed air to the fifty widely spread compartments in that vast dock. Meanwhile, Reed and his American divers from Massawa had assumed the burden of sealing up the innumerable openings all over the dock which required to be made airtight so as to retain the compressed air to be pumped in ultimately to lift the dock. Both tasks were tough on the divers, but Reed’s was the more dangerous— his men would have to get inside the compartments of that wrecked dock to get at much of what they had to seal off. And in some cases, it was going to be terrible; some spots to which the men would have to worm their way amongst the criss-crossed steel ribs inside that dock were next to impossible of access even in an unfiooded condition to a man unincumbered by a ponderous diving rig.
But all hands, American and French, seemed satisfied with their assignments and were going at them hammer and tongs. They wanted, all of them, to see the Grand Dock speedily afloat again. Reed had only one grievance. His diving air compressor hadn’t shown up from Yum Dum and he’d lost all hope. Glumly he admitted to me he’d been swindled by a silver-eagled sharper; his faith in human nature had suffered a sad shock. I made no comment; there was no gain in rubbing it in. I simply congratulated him on how well he had things going—his job was certainly one spot in French North Africa where Allied co-operation was 100 per cent. Bill Reed’s face lighted up at that; he explained, “Y’see, Cap’n, it’s simple; all y’ have to do is to treat ’em as if y’ were one of ’em. I just talk French to ’em all now and they appreciate it. I always say ‘Monsour ’ to that French lieutenant and ‘Bon swar ’ to all his divers and we all get along fine.” I thought so. I had noted in Massawa that after long months of contact with the Eytie prisoners of war who made up most of our labor force, Bill’s Italian had never with them got beyond “Bono!” and “No bono!”; this last phrase usually with some profane English expletive inserted between the two Italian words, more clearly to express his meaning to some Eytie who was botching the job. I should have fallen dead of heart failure if in only one week in Oran he had really gone much further in French. But I only looked at him in admiration. “Bill,” I said, “you’re doing wonderful! You’ve certainly got it on me! I can’t talk to ’em myself in French at all, and I’ve been here four times as long as you. When I’m up against it, all I can do myself is to talk to ’em in Spanish; lots of ’em here in North Africa understand that. And that’s my limit. But French! That’s something!” Bill’s one eye gazed at me dubiously. Was I kidding him? But I gazed back very soberly; he decided not. So we parted for a few days. I should be busy next day with other matters; after that I had to go to Casablanca to look over the situation there. The following day, December 27, I spent mostly on doing my own office work, finishing up finally with Commander Robert Bell, U.S.N., who had recently been rushed over from the United States to take charge in Oran of the repairs to damaged vessels, once the salvage forces delivered them where they might be repaired. He had just completed bracing up the two halves of H.M.S.
Porcupine for their voyage back to England. Now he had another damaged limey to cope with on the Petit Dock, which was just lifting it out of water. That vessel, H.M.S. Enchantress, ex-Admiralty yacht, stripped now of all her yacht-like fittings and converted to use as an armed sloop, was somewhat smaller than our own destroyer escorts, but intended for the same purposes— convoying and anti-submarine patrol. The Enchantress, badly damaged but still fully able to get into port on her own for repairs, had just come in with a convoy. She needed repairs all right, but for once before I was through, I eyed with pleasure the damages to a friendly warship. As the Petit Dock floated her up completely out of water, her whole bow was exposed to my gaze, as badly smashed in from her waterline all the way down to her keel as if she had hit a stone quay going full speed. She looked terrible. Alongside me at the head of the dry dock were a number of her seamen, stout-looking fellows, all staring with evident relish at the wrecked bow, crumpled up like a folded accordion for at least twenty feet back from where her stem once had been. “What did you hit?” I asked of the nearest British seaman. Collisions were common in convoy work, especially at night. “Oh, we just rammed a U-boat,” he replied. A U-boat, eh? That was better. I took another look at what was left of that bow, then observed, “Bad smash you got out of it. What happened to the U-boat?” “She’s down below,” was his laconic reply. And that was all I could get out of him or any of his mates. But I didn’t doubt him; not only must that U-boat now be down below, but unquestionably it must be down there in two well separated pieces. I looked again at the slim, yacht-like lines of the graceful little vessel called the Enchantress. Everything fitted her name. But the terrific punch she packed in her bow? What’s in a name? I wondered. She should have been named the Joe Louis.
CHAPTER
31 NEXT DAY, WITH EVERYTHING IN Oran going all right, I took off from Tafaraoui to go westward this time. Casablanca on the Atlantic was the western limit of the Torch theater and of my responsibilities, though by now it was not of great military value or importance any longer. Georgie Patton, tough, swaggering, belligerent, had seen to that very swiftly, both with his actual French antagonists in its taking and with his potential antagonists, the Spaniards, to the north of it directly afterwards. If peace existed, even nominally, when Patton arrived anywhere, it existed thereabouts in fact thereafter. But since I knew I should be working shortly mostly from Algiers eastward up to Tunisia, I seized the opportunity to check on Casablanca before I left the Oran area. It was a moderately long hop to Casablanca, about 500 miles. Not having started very early, I didn’t arrive till late afternoon. Casablanca had one advantage on both Oran and Algiers which I noted the moment I disembarked —there was no mud to bog down in. It certainly was unfortunate for Eisenhower that his campaign now against the Nazis had to be fought out in muddy Tunisia instead of in dry Morocco. But in what for me at the moment was of major importance, Casablanca in Morocco resembled its sister cities of Oran and Algiers in Algeria; it was just as jammed. By the time a billet was finally arranged for me on the eighth floor of the Hotel Plaza, directly overlooking the harbor and all its shipping, it was completely dark and too late for any inspecting. I could do nothing more than report my presence to Rear Admiral James Hall, U.S.N., Flag-Officer-inCharge, Casablanca. Jimmy Hall, whom I had known ever since both of us were midshipmen, big, rangy, slow-spoken, an excellent commanding officer, faced what physically was a very dismal outlook in his command, though he wasn’t unduly wrought up over it. He was getting along all right, he felt, though it was depressing to look at all the wrecks dispersed about Casablanca. Fortunately, the harbor was
unblocked and to a high degree usable; that was the major point. Removing wrecks in his harbor was only a convenience, not a necessity. All the wrecks in Casablanca harbor were the results, not of French sabotage as in Oran, but of French resistance. One of the most powerful battleships in the world, the French Jean Bart, had been lying in Casablanca ever since the Fall of France. As big and fast and intended to be about as heavily armed as anything afloat at that time, she had been sent hastily, not yet quite completed nor wholly armed, to Morocco when France started to crumble before Hitler ’s onslaught in May, 1940. There, able to steam but as yet fitted only with half her main battery turret guns, she had since been berthed against a quay in Casablanca harbor, with her forward turret, carrying four 15-inch guns, pointing directly seaward, still a formidable antagonist. To take care of the Jean Bart, the fleet convoying Patton’s assault forces had been given our own new battleship, the Massachusetts, flagship of Rear Admiral Giffen, of exactly the same size as the Jean Bart but, of course, carrying all of her own nine 16-inch guns. As matters stood, the Massachusetts had over twice as powerful a battery as her presumed antagonist. Admiral Michelier, the French commandant at Casablanca, refused personally to see our emissary on D-day and scornfully spurned our statement that “We come as friends.” His reply was in the form of salvos from every battery he had afloat or ashore, including the main battery guns of the Jean Bart. As they let go at our ships, one of Michelier ’s aides remarked to our emissary bearing the friendly invitation to Admiral Michelier to join us and co-operate against the only enemy France really had, the Nazis, “Voilá votre réponse!” Very well then. Rear Admiral Giffen on his flagship, the Massachusetts, well out at sea, opened up on the Jean Bart at ranges varying from ten to fourteen miles and fired some seventy 16-inch armor-piercing shells at her. The Massachusetts’ gunnery was excellent as to range, but unfortunately as a target the Jean Bart was very poor. She was completely lost to view from seaward amongst all the other shipping on both sides of her in the inner harbor. In addition, the high buildings directly behind her and only across the street from her (amongst which my own billet, the Hotel Plaza, was one) gave no background against which even her masts stood out. So to insure hitting the Jean Bart, the Massachusetts played her salvos all up and down the inner harbor on both sides of her objective. She hit the Jean Bart
all right—five times—and silenced her. The shell which did that within fourteen minutes of the opening of the engagement, the fifth and last hit, struck the Jean Bart’s forward turret which was then busily engaged in firing at the Massachusetts, a much better target. That shell jammed the turret, put it out of action, ricocheted off still unexploded, and finished up practically intact lying in the city streets behind. There Admiral Michelier, still full of fight, retrieved it, promptly set it up in front of his office building on shore, and lest anyone in Casablanca should doubt his estimate as to who really were the friends of France, sarcastically placed against that shell a placard bearing (in French, in large letters) the inscription, “WE COME AS FRIENDS!” The Jean Bart was silenced and the Massachusetts soon quit firing at her, being fully occupied thereafter, together with our cruisers and destroyers, in taking care of various French cruisers, destroyers, and submarines which Michelier sent out from the harbor to sink the transports busily engaged in landing Patton’s troops north of the harbor. But, reflected Jimmy Hall, now Flag-Officer-in-Charge at Casablanca, as he gazed sadly at the wreckage, he wished the Massachusetts had stayed home. For her heavy shells, feeling alongside every quay for the Jean Bart, had sunk pretty nearly everything else then in the harbor, merchantmen mostly. The Massachusetts and her 16-inch shells had very thoroughly washed up French shipping in Casablanca. The fighting, both afloat and ashore, had lasted for three days, but everything was well in hand by the morning of November 11 th. By then, Patton, having surrounded Casablanca on the land side, was all set for the final assault when Darlan’s order to cease resistance came through and Admiral Michelier, recognizing his master ’s voice, promptly obeyed it. However, in spite of three days of continuous fighting on land and sea and some very sharp engagements in both places, it finally happened that we lost far more men on the decks of the little Hartland alone in the assault on Oran harbor than the entire campaign in Morocco cost us. I said goodnight to Jimmy Hall and retired to my room at the Hotel Plaza. Being rather high up, on the eighth floor and facing the harbor, I got a beautiful night view of the harbor and all its shipping, all lighted up (except the wrecks) and spread out before me. Casablanca and its harbor were never blacked out. Being about 1000 miles from the nearest enemy territory in Tunisia or Sicily, and over 800 miles from
Occupied France, with neutral Spain in between, it apparently considered itself beyond bomber attack range. There had never been an enemy air raid on Casablanca, though looking down from my window, I could see across the street in the dock area and a trifle to my right, a new A.A. battery manned by our troops and surrounded shoulder high by a parapet of sandbags as a protection. Almost directly before me I could look down on the Jean Bart, stern toward me, seemingly in as good condition as before D-day, the most brilliantly illuminated ship in the harbor. She was quite impressive, but I spent little time on her or anything else. I was too tired. Tomorrow, close aboard and in daylight, I could get a better view. I spent the next two days looking over Casablanca and its harbor. There was unquestionably a fine collection of wrecks in Casablanca, French warships and French merchantmen, all resting on the bottom except the Jean Bart. There were even a few of our own merchant ships and one of our destroyers, all torpedoed but all still afloat and awaiting temporary repairs so they could go home. However, after assuring myself that for our purposes the harbor was usable, I lost interest. I was getting weary of seeing wrecks; if keeping them afloat or getting them out of the way was not imperative to our war needs, then they could stay wrecks for all of me. In all this I was accompanied by Captain William A. Sullivan of our Navy, locally in charge of salvage. But only one thing he pointed out to me in Casablanca really caught my eye, and that was a warehouse, not a wreck. My pulse started to race madly when we entered that warehouse. There before me, already in Africa, was the realization of all my dreams—a warehouse floor covered with salvage equipment—diving suits, salvage pumps of all sizes, hose galore, air compressors, tools, practically everything I needed for the Torch theater and had been beating my brains out trying to get from America! And I had just had to rob my Americans in Oran of two of their scant supply of diving dresses in order that half a dozen of my French divers might have at least that many safe suits to dive in! Feverishly I started to estimate mentally how much of all that Casablanca really needed; the rest should be divided up immediately between Bône, Bougie, Philippeville, Algiers, and Oran so that we might start effectively to cover the salvage problem in the really hot war theater, the Mediterranean. But Sullivan, seeing me starting to count everything, correctly interpreted the reason and brought me down out of the clouds with a thud. Neither he nor
all that salvage gear really belonged to Torch, he said; they were there only temporarily. His real assignment was supervising for the Navy a commercial salvage company working on the capsized Normandie in New York harbor; all the equipment I was looking at, while Navy equipment, belonged to the Normandie job also. Both he and it had been loaned only temporarily for the most urgent work in Casablanca; the patching up mainly of our own damaged vessels so they could go home. As soon as that was completed, both he and all the gear and all the American divers (he had brought plenty from the Normandie) would all have to go back to work on her. He could not permit any of that Normandie salvage gear to be taken out of Casablanca and used elsewhere; he had no authority to do so. I left that warehouse feeling like a man perishing of thirst in the desert within sight of an oasis of water which he knows he will never have strength enough to reach alive. I knew that never would any of that profusion of American salvage equipment get where it was most needed. The Normandie didn’t need it; that monument in New York harbor to the stupidity, ignorance, and cowardice which had caused her loss, even if raised again, could never take any part in this war. And Casablanca, already left in the backwash of war, a thousand miles away from the fighting front and next to useless now in the war effort, didn’t need it either. However, Casablanca was on the Atlantic and could have it, needed or not. But Bône, Bougie, Philippeville, Algiers, and Oran—all the ports that Eisenhower desperately needed now more than ever for a build-up to counter the Axis in a spring campaign—they couldn’t have it, even though American lives depended on those ports. They were in the Mediterranean, an area of British responsibility! Red tape, RED TAPE, RED TAPE! It was harder to fight than the enemy. I walked silently out of the warehouse. I had seen enough of Casablanca; too much, in fact, for my morale. It was December 30. I went directly from that warehouse to the army transport service to see when I could get a seat for a flight eastward to Oran. There proved to be nothing available till New Year ’s morning; I put myself down for that. Till then, I might as well stay in my hotel room and recuperate from the shock I had just received. I couldn’t stand much any more. I had been about finished off when I came out of Massawa. The last month, at sea and ashore in the Mediterranean, hadn’t helped any in building me up again. Right after dinner, with the idea of spending all next day in bed also, I turned in. I was so far gone, I fell asleep immediately.
A tremendous explosion which nearly knocked me out of bed awakened me. Everything was shaking violently; I expected next instant to feel the ceiling and the walls of the room come crashing down on me. I recognized that sound all right—a heavy bomb had hit the hotel! Instinctively I leaped through the darkness from the bed to the front wall, the heaviest one structurally and the wall most likely to remain standing when the rest collapsed; before I reached it, everything started rocking afresh from two more explosions. But nothing collapsed. I was right by the window; I looked out into the night. Almost under my nose so it seemed, though up a bit, was a huge four-engined Nazi bomber, zooming seaward low over the harbor! It had just released three bombs. I could see the dust and smoke still rising from the crater where the first had struck between me and the harbor; the nearest, I saw now, was not an actual hit on the hotel. It had landed very close by, hardly fifty feet short of that sandbagged parapet shielding the A.A. battery, peppering it with sand and shrapnel. And no doubt, wakening the men there as it had wakened me, for the guns of that battery were just beginning to fire at the tail of the big bomber streaking low across the harbor away from them. Hardly a few seconds more and the bombardier pulled his releases again, to let go three more bombs. But so narrow was the harbor that these three hit beyond the far side of the seaward breakwater, to explode there, damaging nothing. That bombardier had thoroughly botched his job. He and his heavy bomber had caught Casablanca wholly unawares, all lighted up, a perfect target. There had been no alarm, no blackout, no smoke pots going to hide the ships, no sirens to alert the guns. He might have picked any target in the harbor or more than one and smacked it with his bombs as at target practice. But too nervous with his trigger finger, he had let go the first three bombs in an open area just short of the harbor where they did no damage, and then realizing his mistake, had quit releasing for a moment, only to make another mistake by misjudging the width of the harbor and holding his second stick of bombs till too late to hit anything with them either. All he had accomplished was thoroughly to alert a sleeping harbor; the air raid sirens were wailing now, but they weren’t needed. Every searchlight was coming on; every A.A. gun, ashore and afloat, was starting to fire at that swastika-decorated, four-engined plane which was now banking hard left to circle the harbor on the far side. Of course they didn’t hit him. It shortly disappeared into the darkness on the landward side. Now came the roar of more airplane engines, four-motored jobs like the
first one. I stuck my head out the window and looked upward, but could see nothing. There was a solid cloud ceiling at about 3000 feet; these new planes were apparently above it and invisible. Of course, the harbor was also invisible to them. The guns from all around the harbor perimeter, plus all those on the ships before me, including the Jean Bart, were now firing at those hidden planes; radar-controlled, I suppose. That umbrella of bursting iron apparently discouraged the new attackers; none got over the harbor, no further bombs were dropped, the beat of engines died away, and in about twenty minutes the “All Clear” sounded. I dressed, put on my tin hat, and went up on the roof. No doubt there would be a renewal; it was only 3:30 A.M., and those planes, if not others also, would certainly come back. What the devil had happened, I wondered? Why no air raid warning before the bombers came in? Casablanca must have as good radar protection as Algiers; the radar watchers should have picked up those huge planes at least twenty minutes before their arrival and alerted everything to be ready for them. Had the Germans not bungled their attack, they could have flattened out all shipping in Casablanca, caught just as unawares as our fleet at Pearl Harbor. If all their heavy planes had come in at once under that cloud ceiling on the unalerted ships, the results would have been horrible; the ships would all have been flaming wrecks before they could begin to man their guns. But the Nazis, I suppose, had not believed we could be such dumbbells twice in succession. They had grossly underrated our capacity for stupidity and had sent in only one plane to scout the situation under the cloud ceiling before the main attack, and that plane had bungled its mission as badly as we our preparedness for attack. At 4 A.M., the second wave of bombers struck, some above the clouds, some below it. By then, of course, the defense was prepared to meet them. A literal fountain of fire covered the harbor; neither the planes above nor below the ceiling dared enter it. Particularly did it intrigue me to watch the Jean Bart, which not so long before had been flinging 15-inch shells at us, spouting tracers upward in vast profusion at the Nazis. Two planes below the ceiling, caught in the searchlights and plainly visible —whirling propellers, wide-spread wings, swastika markings—were so low and so huge it seemed one could hardly miss them with a rock. And yet a heavy volume of tracer fire concentrating on them as they circled the harbor, afraid to get over it, wasn’t hitting either of them—it was all falling short astern their
tails. On its second circuit, the tracers did start to creep up on the tail of one of those planes flying about half a mile inland of the harbor. The crew of that Nazi plane must have come to the conclusion that our men were learning a little something; shortly the guns might catch up. At any rate, they decided to lighten up and get out; suddenly they let go all their bombs in one stick right where they were. Down came the shrieking bombs to land in the native quarter of Casablanca, explode with a terrific series of detonations, and light up the skies with an unearthly white fire which lasted some twenty minutes—incendiary bombs, evidently. The plane itself, suddenly lightened up, streaked away inland in the darkness, apparently unhit. That ended the second attack. About 5 A.M. came a third wave, but by now the bombers were wary. They stayed high up, dropped their bombs at random well clear of the harbor and even of the city, and did no damage. Shortly they disappeared also, the “All Clear” sounded again, and the first and last enemy air raid that Casablanca ever had, was finally over. I went below and turned in again. The raid changed my plans. Instead of spending December 31 in bed, I went out after breakfast to inspect the damage. I learned a lot. First I learned that it had been the blundering at Pearl Harbor all over again. A false sense of security had once more let the enemy in on an unsuspecting harbor full of ships. The army radar watch had picked up the first wave of four-engined bombers north of Port Lyautey, over ninety miles and at least twenty minutes flying time away. Without checking, without forcing an identification, and of course without giving any alarm, the officer in charge of the radar watch had assumed the planes were friendly and had done nothing at all save track them southward all the way to Casablanca. Those first three exploding bombs had been his first inkling that his conclusions were erroneous. That Casablanca harbor was not completely destroyed as a result was not his fault. I ran into General Patton and his aides out inspecting damage also. We met on opposite sides of the considerable crater in the roadway near the sandbagged A.A. battery. His aides were busy salvaging bomb fragments from the hole; Patton seemed absorbed in studying the blast and shrapnel effect on the impromptu parapet around that battery. Then he moved off inland to see what the bombs had done to the native quarter while I went in the opposite
direction toward the shipping to see if any damage at all had resulted there. The raid turned out to be a draw—we had hit no planes, the planes had hit no ships. Except for some eighty inoffensive Arabs killed and many more wounded by that Nazi bomber jettisoning all its bombs over the native quarter, there was no damage discoverable on either side. But military circles were seething over our being caught unawares. As Georgie Patton put it at the time in a letter (later published) to his wife, in which naturally he had to be reticent, “About ten o’clock I had a meeting of all aviators and antiaircraft officers to discuss the scheme of defense and to make the necessary corrections. We were of the opinion that everything had gone satisfactorily, but that a few changes were desirable. These have now been made.” If I knew anything about Patton, I had little doubt that the “necessary corrections” and the “few desirable changes” exploded about the heads of the derelict radar watch officers and of the ineffective A.A. gunnery officers with a blast to which that of the first bomb was but a firecracker. That last sentence of his, “These have now been made,” was significant in its very brevity. Next to the dead Arabs, I believe those officers of his comprised the major casualties in the raid. Having taken care of his own men at ten o’clock that morning, Patton turned next to consideration of the Arabs. The man who had the reputation of never opening his mouth in public without putting his foot into it; of being “Old Blood and Guts,” an inhuman warrior; of having not the slightest glimmering of political sagacity, on this occasion at least rose to the heights with a bit of humanity that endeared him to every native in North Africa and a diplomatic stroke that Talleyrand himself might well have envied. The Arabs all over North Africa, whether in Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia, had been on the fence ever since D-day, neither helping us nor opposing us. On the face of things, our entrance into the picture could only result in riveting a tottering French rule more firmly on their countries; they were the vast majority. On the other hand, Hitler ’s agents had been wooing them (as well as Egypt), promising a bright and independent Arab future should they assist him. What should they and their Emirs, Pachas, and Sultans do? They had as yet come to no conclusion about it. When Georgie Patton got through with them after that air raid, they promptly made up their minds. First, that day he personally visited the smashed Arab quarter to condole with those who had escaped and to mourn with the relatives of those who had
died; then he went to the hospitals to cheer the wounded. But that was not all. Kind words alone heal no wounds, feed no orphans. Out of his own pocket, with no hope whatever of reimbursem*nt from his government, he gave the sum of 100,000 francs for the immediate relief of the wounded and the families of the dead, that then, that very day, not weeks or months later, they might have aid, food, bandages, attendance. The more immediate needs of the distressed Arabs having been taken care of by him, he launched his master stroke. Who shall say that when necessity arose, George Patton was not as good a diplomat as the best America ever produced, Benjamin Franklin, for instance? He issued a ringing proclamation to the Arabs, till then wavering in indecision as to which side they should favor. It was brief, it was to the point, it was decisive. It took the form of an open letter to the Pacha of Casablanca which was broadcast over the Arab world: Your Excellency: Will you permit me to express to you, and through the kind medium of Your Excellency, to the friends and relatives of your coreligionists so brutally murdered in the Nouvelle Medina, my profound sorrow and my solicitude. This assault, as unwarranted as it was barbarous, upon an inoffensive quarter, devoid of all military objectives, is but a fresh manifestation of the brutal and cruel character of our common enemy. May God destroy him! In writing this letter, I express not only my own sentiments but those also of my immediate chief, General Eisenhower. I have the honor of remaining very sincerely, GEORGE S. PATTON , JR., Major General, U. S. Army. There wasn’t an Arab in North Africa, after hearing in his bazaars what Patton had done and reading in strange Arabic characters that letter, who had the slightest doubts any longer as to who were his friends and who were his enemies. From then on, all over North Africa, the Arabs were solidly on our side.
CHAPTER
32 EARLY ON NEW YEAR’S MORNING I took off from Casablanca for Oran. Something struck me; again it was a holiday. The next holiday would be February 12, Lincoln’s Birthday. Where, I wondered, if I were still all in one piece, would I be bound in a plane on that holiday? For each of the last three holidays had found me in the air, flying around Africa. Thanksgiving Day, I had been jumping across the Sahara from Khartoum to Accra; Christmas Day, I had hopped from Algiers to Oran; New Year ’s Day found me flying from Casablanca to Oran. What would the next holiday bring? On this flight, we flew fairly high, at around 9000 feet, and above a very heavy cloud bank a good part of the journey over Morocco. We crossed the rugged Atlas Mountains, all snow-covered, with one peak, somewhat resembling the Matterhorn, sticking through our cloud bank like an island floating on a fleecy blanket. It was very cold in the plane. It was a relief therefore, a little after noon, to come down on Tafaraoui Airfield, where it was merely normally cold, and, of course, muddy as usual. I plodded through the mud to my jeep and ordered my colored sergeant to drive me directly to the King Salvor. I was anxious to catch up with what had been done during my absence and besides I could get a bite to eat more easily at that hour on the ship than at the Grand Hotel. We started on our fifteen mile trek to Oran. I looked around. In the vicinity of Oran, at least, the New Year had begun auspiciously—overhead it was cloudless, there was no wind, a bright sun lent a cheerful aspect to everything. In half an hour we were rolling through the depressing streets of Oran towards the harbor. We came to the northerly precipice below which lay the harbor, and swung left to descend the steep incline. But hardly had we made the turn and dropped a yard or two than I told the driver to haul to the right side of the road and stop a few minutes. Before me, looking out to sea from that high elevation was such a heavenly scene, hardly to be glimpsed once in a lifetime,
that I wanted to absorb it more at leisure. Stretching away on the right to the northward was the Mediterranean, clearly visible out to the sharp horizon at least ten miles off, sparkling under a clear and cloudless sky, an azure blue sea which warmed the heart. And to complete the picture, there some three miles out, steaming slowly eastward parallel to the coast line, was a long line of freighters, evenly spaced, twelve of them, with the sun glistening against their starboard sides, the sides toward me. The leading ship was just turning hard right to head for the outer harbor of Oran; none of the others in that long line yet had started to swing in her gleaming wake. A little beyond them zigzagged a few destroyers, overhead lazily circled some guarding planes, shepherding into port at last that heavily laden convoy which they had brought to haven safely after a 4000 mile journey across the dangerous Atlantic and through the Straits. I scanned those ships and the calm blue seas about them appreciatively, enchanted by the quiet beauty of the gray ships, the splendor of the ocean, the radiance of the sky. It was a scene to quicken the pulse of any man who loved the sea and the ships which float upon it. I leaned back to drink it in. But as I gazed, the middle ship in that long line suddenly erupted from end to end in a volcanic burst of belching flame billowing luridly upward perhaps a quarter of a mile with incandescent streaks of fire rising even above that like a thousand rockets streaming skyward! And then the rolling flames which for a few seconds had curtained the whole horizon with the crimson fires of hell itself, vanished, to be succeeded instantly by a rapidly rising pillar of smoke boiling upward into the skies like a titanic geyser, shooting to a height of well over a mile in no time at all, there to mushroom widely out in all directions over the heavens. As that pillar of smoke lifted lazily clear of the surface of the sea, there was the clear horizon again and no sign whatever of that ship, only the others steaming calmly on toward port with a wide gap in the line now where seconds before had been a ship like all the rest—a ship with all her crew rubbed out in a twinkling within easy sight of the harbor entrance after its battle of weeks across the Atlantic to get safely inside that final haven. “Give her the gun, sergeant!” I gasped. “The King Salvor, four bells now!” We shot down the precipitous incline, took the curves at the bottom on two wheels, covered the mile and a half down the pot-holed harbor road to the salvage quay as we had never before raced over it. Already, on the King Salvor mooring hawsers were flying off the bitts and going overboard, clouds of
black smoke were beginning to pour from her stack, she was steaming up furiously. Harding and his whole crew had happened to be watching those inbound ships as well as I; they had seen it all. I shouted to Harding on her bridge as the jeep jolted to a sudden stop alongside; he looked down, surprised to see me there. “Hold her a minute, skipper!” I ordered. “I want to call the Port Captain first!” Harding, about to cast loose, belayed the heaving overboard of the last lines. I dashed for the telephone in the salvage shack, called the Captain of the Port, reported the King Salvor ready to shove off immediately, asked for information. I got it. The leading destroyer was just radioing in; in a minute they’d have the whole message; wait. The wait wasn’t long; soon I had the word right from where that ship had been. There was no use our going out; there wasn’t a floating scrap visible anywhere of that vessel, the American Liberty ship Arthur Middleton, which had been laden with 5000 tons of ammunition. They were searching the waters surrounding the scene of the explosion for possible survivors; so far they had seen none. There was nothing to salvage; no assistance was needed nor could any be rendered; the Arthur Middleton and all her crew had just completely vanished. With a heavy heart, I hung up the receiver. A large ship and all her seamen, probably comprising a hundred men all told including the navy Armed Guard contingent on her, had disappeared before my eyes and nothing could be done about it. Half stunned, I went back to the quay, with that gap in the line of ships, more eloquent of what had happened than a thousand radio messages with details, indelibly burned into my memory. “Belay everything, Harding!” I called out in a choking voice. “We’re not going out. There’s nothing left!” But I found it wasn’t as simple as all that. The King Salvor’s deck force crowded about me, pleading for me to cast off. Surely, there was something they could do; they just couldn’t let other seamen drown practically right under their noses without at least a try to help them. Sid Everett, Third Mate (soon to die himself in a flaming explosion inside another wreck), was nearly hysterical over not being permitted to go out. Harding personally had to drag him below to prevent him from casting off our last hawsers. Surrounded by the tear-stained faces of those Englishmen I now knew so
well from fighting by their sides on the Strathallan, I explained, argued, sympathized. What aid, if any, might be given to anybody found floating in the sea, would certainly be rendered by the destroyers we could see out there searching now. Another vessel tossed in among the searchers would only complicate matters, not help anybody. We weren’t going out. Sadly the little group of seamen dispersed, as stricken, each one of them, as if it had been his own brother he had just seen enveloped in that blazing inferno while he must stand idly by, impotent to help. So started off a twenty-four-hour period which was wholly unbelievable. Immediately after the destruction of the Arthur Middleton, the British vice admiral in Mers-el-Kebir sent out a flotilla of six destroyers, all he had including those which had been guarding the convoy, to scour the seas off Oran. If a U-boat torpedo (though no one had seen a torpedo wake) had been responsible for setting off the cargo of ammunition in the Arthur Middleton and disintegrating her in a fraction of a second, then they were to find that Uboat no matter how long it took. It didn’t take long. I got another telephone call a few hours later about the King Salvor, but only again to tell me not to bother about casting off with her. The U-boat had found the flotilla. A torpedo had exploded amidships against one of the destroyers. She had not the luck of the Porcupine. The explosion had broken her completely in two. Both halves had sunk in not much over a minute. One of the other destroyers had picked up what survivors there were and was on her way into Mers-el-Kebir with them. Meanwhile the remaining four destroyers were continuing the search. I rubbed my aching head. What in God’s name was the matter with the Asdic, that for a month now off Oran we had been subjected to a reign of terror, most likely all at the hands of the same U-boat? And not once (including this latest episode) had any Asdic ever made contact with that U-boat either before or after any torpedoing. There were the Manxman, the Porcupine, the Strathallan, the Arthur Middleton, now this last destroyer, and not a single contact! What was wrong? One of my British shipmates at Mers-el-Kebir whom I went to see, immediately explained it to me; the explanation made me feel sicker than had my previous ignorance. We were all totally helpless to defend ourselves; the Asdic, any submarine detective device, was worthless in those waters; the British had known it for some time now and had hoped to keep the knowledge to themselves. But unfortunately this U-boat captain also had discovered it and
had skill and courage enough to exploit his knowledge to the full. If only they could catch him on the surface, they’d polish him off in a hurry, but evidently he was too shrewd ever to give anybody an opportunity. The difficulty was that we were having a most unusual winter that year in and off Oran. That I already knew; never had there been such cold rains and such mud. The weather had immobilized the army and the air force, but it had affected the undersea defense equipment even more. For the unprecedented winter had stratified the water in the Mediterranean thereabouts like a layer cake; there was a layer of water about a hundred feet thick on the surface with a layer below sharply differing from the top layer in temperature and as sharply separated from it as if they had been two entirely different liquids, oil and water, for instance. The interface between the two layers was acting exactly like a mirror—the “ping” from the Asdic hitting it, bounced back towards the surface just as light waves are reflected back from a mirror, and the “ping” never penetrated to seek out the hull of a submarine swimming below the interface. That U-boat captain operating off Oran had discovered this extraordinary situation and fashioned his tactics to suit. He stayed below the interface, safe from the Asdic, listening only for propeller noises from above. Whenever he heard what suited him, he maneuvered roughly for position well submerged below the interface, then rose swiftly to periscope depth, rectified his position for a shot, fired one torpedo only, and then, hit or miss (hit, usually) he plunged hurriedly down below the interface again, safe from detection even though a hundred destroyers with Asdics were searching for him. He could keep it up till his torpedoes gave out; he must by now be reaching the end of the dozen or fourteen he carried. Then he would go home for more; if only some destroyer could knock him off before he started back to base with that deadly secret of his, the destroyer captain that did it would probably be made a Duke at least as a reward, so my informant told me. But it was highly unlikely he’d be caught off Oran. However, on his way home, after he left the peculiar waters of the Oran area, somebody might nail him. All hands in Mersel-Kebir were praying for that; it was our only hope. That was that; nothing could be done about it. Sunk in gloom, I drove back to Oran. By now it was night. Shortly I was in bed, trying to recuperate from what New Year ’s Day (and I hadn’t had a single drink, either) had done to give me a splitting headache. But New Year ’s Day wasn’t over yet. Around 10 P.M., the telephone alongside my bed at the Grand Hotel woke me
up. It was ringing violently. I grabbed off the receiver. What now? It was the Captain of the Port’s office. A big British transport, the Empress of Australia, loaded with troops for Oran, had tried to peel off in the night from an Algiers bound convoy. In the darkness with every ship blacked out another transport keeping on full speed for Algiers had rammed her squarely as she made her turn and torn a big hole in her side. The Empress of Australia was flooding, in danger of capsizing, and with her engine power fast going and nearly all gone. For God’s sake, get out there right away with the King Salvor and save her if possible. She was only a few miles out. There were no destroyers near by to take off troops; they were all far out at sea scouring it for that U-boat, hoping to catch her on the surface, charging batteries. My jeep was always parked at night across from the hotel. I had a spare set of keys. I started hurriedly for the lower harbor. The King Salvor, also alerted by the Port Captain’s office, was for the second time that day steaming up furiously when I got alongside. Already all her lines were singled; no sooner had I hurdled the gunwale than the last lines went overboard and we were underway through the darkness, cautiously fingering out with our searchlight the marker buoys over the Pigeon and the Spahi. Once clear of those, off went the searchlight and our little ship blacked out completely as we cleared the torpedo defense booms and nets and stood out in the night into the open sea. The waters outside Oran harbor were no place in which to make yourself any more conspicuous than need be; not with that fiendish U-boat somewhere about. And then commenced another nightmare at sea in the darkness with a sinking ship. It was rough outside; wind and waves had kicked up; gone now was all the loveliness of sea and sky of the earlier New Year ’s Day. About three miles due north, a vast shadow loomed up ahead of us in the night. That, no doubt, would be the Empress of Australia. She was, of course, totally blacked out also. We first ran down her port side, fairly close aboard, while Harding and I scanned that side through night glasses. What struck us instantly was that she had a startling list to starboard. She was a big one, 22,000 tons. As we passed down her port side toward her stern, we got a good view of her profile against the night sky with her three enormous stacks standing boldly out. She was German-built, I knew; some years after World War I she had been constructed as part of the reparations due Britain. And that was going to be bad. German designers had peculiar ideas.
With them comfort for landlubberly passengers came before the utmost in safety. All German-built ships, like all French vessels, to make them slow rollers in a seaway, were highly unstable. When anything went wrong, they were likely to capsize on you at the slightest excuse, as had the Normandie. And this one had a dizzying list to starboard already; it looked bad. To make matters worse, she had some four or five thousand soldiers aboard. We could see them even in the darkness jamming her topsides, all in lifebelts, and all probably wondering how soon they might be swimming. But up on the topsides, instead of down in the holds where they should have been, unfortunately they were all helping to make her topheavy and even more likely to capsize. Frankly, however, no one could blame them for wanting to stay up on the open decks on that heavily listed ship. It would take far more discipline and better officers than raw troops ever possessed to drive them all down below into the holds, even though that added to their real safety. You could never make them see it. The topsides represented at least a chance to swim; the holds looked like nothing but rat traps with no escape if the ship capsized. So there they all were—between 400 and 500 tons of human ballast high up where it would do the most harm to the vanishing stability of the Empress of Australia. The port side of her showed no damage. Satisfied of that, we swung the King Salvor under her high stern and headed up parallel to her on the other side to inspect for damage there before boarding. Hardly had we straightened away again, this time on the weather side, when the damage came into view—on her starboard quarter, a little aft her third stack, was a huge V-shaped gash in her steel side extending from her upper deck to well below her water-line. And that terrifying list to starboard was deeply submerging that wide open hole. Very obviously she was steadily flooding aft, with the ocean pouring into her through that ugly gash. She was heeling constantly to starboard, with capsizing becoming ever more imminent. Her engine room, I knew, was filling; her boiler power was dying; with the last few pounds of steam left her she was slowly floundering shoreward through the night with her cargo of troops. Before we could even get alongside in the rough seas which made maneuvering difficult, her feeble wake vanished altogether, her main engines gave out completely. She started to drift briskly down to leeward, broadside before a stiff northwest wind, her high sides acting as a beautiful set of sails. Harding sheered off and circled to come up alongside her amidships to
starboard, a little forward of the hole. She drifted sidewise away from him. He sheered off for another circle off her beam. Hardly had he started his turn away, when that vast bulk towering over our heads and leaning toward us, for no apparent reason at all suddenly rolled heavily to port, changing her list from her stricken side to her undamaged one. That promptly brought a great part of the open V, visible as an even blacker shadow against her black side, partly out of water. “Thank God for that!” I murmured. “If only we can keep her that way, she’ll be saved!” Harding completed his second turn, swung the King Salvor hard in against the high side of the Empress of Australia. Someone above dropped him a line; I shouted upward through the gloom for a Jacob’s ladder. Down it came. I told Harding to hang on there, started to climb myself. I struggled up the steep steel precipice clinging to that precarious ladder. At the rail the ship’s First Officer and her Chief Engineer met me, all of us practically invisible to each other in the murk and all nearly lost immediately in a crowd of olive-drab soldiers packing the bulwarks. The First Officer confirmed my suspicions that the ship was dead and drifting. They had been trying to make Mers-el-Kebir. The engines hadn’t lasted. Could we in the King Salvor tow them the rest of the way in; it wasn’t far now? I told him, no. We couldn’t, nobody could; not such a big ship. For Mers-elKebir was a difficult harbor for a large vessel; at night, an impossible one to tow into. But for God’s sake, tell the captain to anchor instantly! The Empress of Australia was drifting straight down and that swiftly on the seaward breakwater fringing Oran harbor. They couldn’t see it; it was low in the water and blacked out, but it was there in their lee. Not much longer now and their helpless vessel would drift hard on the jagged rocks forming that long breakwater, to have her bottom torn wide open by the seas pounding her against the rocks the moment she grounded. The First Officer ran for the bridge; in brief minutes I heard the chain cable of the Empress of Australia rattling out the hawsepipe; a most welcome sound. One wreck hard on the beach, the Thomas Stone, was enough for me; I wanted no more. I turned to the Chief Engineer, Henry Pratt, to congratulate him on a most brilliant stroke; rolling the Empress of Australia to port was exactly what she needed to help save her; nobody could have done it better; how had he achieved
it? His reply astonished me. He hadn’t done it; he didn’t know why it had happened; the ship had just rolled to port on her own. The ship was just highly unstable with all that free water in her; nobody could tell what she’d do next. She was quite as likely next second to list back to starboard again. She was listing from side to side like a drunken sailor; already several times she’d reversed her heel; only each time she’d listed over more than before. The next time to starboard might finish her for all anybody could tell; that hole in her side was going deeper under each time the starboard side heeled down. “Come on, Pratt!” I said, forgetting all about the King Salvor. “Let’s get below! We’ve got to hold her down to port this time and keep as much of that starboard hole out of water from now on as we can! Nothing else counts for anything!” That Chief Engineer was good. We started. Immediately we were inside the superstructure, he switched on a pocket flashlight, began to guide me down the stairways in the passenger quarters, heading below. Not a pleasing prospect; while we were down there in her bowels, she might turn turtle on us. The topside was safer. It was blacker inside the ship than on deck; a perfect blackout both inside and out. But why? She should be lighted up inside, especially now to facilitate the troops escaping. “Where’re all your lights?” I asked the Chief Engineer. “Why the blackout here, too?” “Everything’s dead!” he replied laconically. “After engine room’s flooded, every bloody generator I’ve got’s submerged down there; there’s no juice for anything; not a single lamp. All my electric auxiliaries are out too. No power for ’em. That’s what’s killed the boilers; can’t get air to my boiler fires any more; the electric blowers are deader ’n a kippered herring. And the lower part o’ my engine room’s flooded too; that finished the main engines even before they completely lost the steam. It’s all a bloody mess!” Well, it didn’t make any difference whether she had power to steam any more; she wasn’t going anywhere; she was anchored. And if that U-boat didn’t come nosing too close inshore, there was nothing to worry about that way. All that mattered now was to keep her from capsizing. I hoped there’d be steam enough to run a few ship’s pumps, but if not, Harding had plenty of portable salvage pumps right alongside. One way or another we’d make out for pumps if we needed them, but I wasn’t worried about that.
For the only thing that concerned me was not to get any water out of her, but to get more water into her and that fast. It sounded suicidal and crazy to take a flooding ship and flood her some more, but it was her only hope. She must never list to starboard again! The only way to insure that was to flood so heavily some large port compartments that she stayed heeled hard down to port and the harder the better—it would lift more of that open hole in her starboard side out of water. We did it. That Chief knew his business—a brave man and a capable one. Working by flashlight far down in the black cavern that was his main engine room, already flooded over the floor plates, and with the after engine room abaft us completely flooded to the height of the waterline far above and spurting sea water down on us through the badly strained bulkhead between, he and his engineer assistants started to flood empty port compartments, empty port double bottoms, empty port storerooms—everything to port still empty of sea water that we could get the sea into quickly. Meanwhile over our heads the water was coming through the hole and spreading forward and aft along the lower deck there. This inflow if free to flow to either side would ultimately destroy her stability and capsize her. But now it also all ran to port as we heeled her down, and all of it helped to hold her there. I suggested to the Chief that it would be a good idea also to flood his port shaft alley—that shaft alley would take a lot of water very low down, add to our stability, and help considerably to hold us over. He agreed; he started to flood it, only to find to his amazement, he couldn’t—it was already solidly flooded! Apparently the shaft alley sliding watertight door had not been seated tightly or something else had leaked and that shaft alley (thank God it wasn’t the starboard one) had already flooded from the lower engine room. It must have been that which had given her the port list just before I came aboard! We worked all night. We got her so well down to port all hell couldn’t have listed her back to starboard again. And we lifted the gash in her starboard side (it came abreast the after engine room) so far out of water that with the little head of steam the Chief Engineer could maintain with next to no air going to his boilers, we were able to keep up with all the fresh inflow from the sea. We sluiced it through a partly opened sliding watertight door from the wholly flooded after engine room, to come pouring like Niagara into the partly flooded main engine room, a hair-raising sight. There the huge condenser circulating pump, running all out, managed to suck it up and push it overboard again as fast as it came in.
Dawn came at last on January 2. The ship was heavily heeled down to port and looked terrible, but looks didn’t matter; she was safe. Slowly the anchor was heaved in by the steam-starved anchor windlass. Then with a stout hawser from her bow, the King Salvor took station out ahead of her, and with every French tug in Oran alongside pushing also, proudly dragged the towering Empress of Australia the last few miles through the sea to Mers-el-Kebir. Then came the tortuous and difficult passage amongst the torpedo-defense nets into Mers-el-Kebir harbor, past the submerged and capsized hulk of the French battleship la Bretagne, till at last she was pushed by the puffing tugs gently up against the quay, starboard side to, safe finally with all her troops! After that, while we all watched, the Empress of Australia disembarked them alongside the quay there, exactly on her original schedule; over four thousand soldiers more and all their equipment, for Eisenhower ’s build-up to meet the rising threat of von Arnim and Rommel in Tunisia! Hastily I got Lieutenant Ankers and some of his divers over from the Spahi. We worked all the rest of that day while the troops were disembarking and all night too and part of the next day. When finally on January 3 we finished, we had a heavy temporary wood patch (built by divers over the underwater part of the hole) all set as a watertight cofferdam for Commander Bell’s shore party to pour a thick concrete patch completely up to her main deck. And we had all the water pumped out of her so once more she was dry, stable, and on an even keel. With the work the shore repair gang would shortly do to clean up her machinery, pour concrete, and install a temporary diesel electric generator, she could steam full speed back to England for permanent repairs. With that, I went back to my room at the Grand Hotel and crawled into bed. It had been a long New Year ’s Day.
CHAPTER
33 JANUARY 4 CAME. ANKERS AND ALL his divers were back at the harbor entrance. Their diving float now more resembled a factory construction site; two powerdriven mixers were busily mixing concrete. Into their churning maws went bag after bag of quick-setting cement, gravel by the ton, crushed rock almost in mountains, all generously seasoned with fresh water. Thirty tons, all told, of concrete went down through the sea into that patch to seal the cavity the Ardois had left in the upper side of the Spahi. Down below, divers spread the concrete as it came down to them in the form they had built, as usual cursing fluently all the while the pilot, the Commandant du Port, the Ardois, and those Americans who might have stopped the Ardois but hadn’t. My impression, listening on the diving telephones, was that for each ton of concrete we sent down, we got back from below at least another ton of heartfelt imprecations. But neither I nor Ankers said anything—divers on a wreck must have some release for their emotions or they’ll crack up. By noon, we had all the concrete leveled off below. The divers came up, the topside crew turned to to clear away the mess the mixers and the materials had made of the float. We had nothing more to do now save to wait a few days for the cement to harden so we could start the lifting operation. All the 500 hogsheads of wine required to be removed (plus a few dozens more for safety) were already safely ashore under guard in the warehouse. January 5 we spent in rigging air hoses to the various compartments of the Spahi, all running below to her from a single control manifold on the diving float. Meanwhile, the King Salvor began to rig herself for her part. The long idle air compressors were once again lifted off the quay to her decks, secured there, tested out, piped up to supply the air. Harding broke out his heaviest towing hawsers—steel cables thick as a man’s wrist, which were to be used in towing the Spahi clear. Reitzel arranged for a few French tugs to help. At last came January 7, the day on which we were to put all to the touch. Very
early, all hands, men and ships, took station. But January 7 was such a day as I had never seen before in any climate, in any season. The heavens opened to send down such a downpour as no one there had ever witnessed. It seemed to be coming down in a solid mass, no separate raindrops at all distinguishable. You could practically swim in it. In no time at all, the whole harbor area was flooded solidly with all traffic halted. From one vast lake ashore, the overflow poured in a continuous waterfall more than six inches thick over the quays into the harbor like a river going over a spillway several miles long. That kept up all through the day; it seemed that the skies were determined to wash Oran completely into the Mediterranean. Drenched in spite of raincoats and boots, we all took our stations. The King Salvor lay close by the bow of the Spahi, her air hoses running to the control manifold on diving float, hawsers secured from her stern to the bow of the sunken Spahi, more hawsers run out from her bow to the salvage quay a quarter of a mile off toward which we should tow the lifted Spahi. With great difficulty we finally got all the watersoaked portable air compressors going, the King Salvor started up her own compressors below, and we began to pump compressed air. Some hours went by. With all those compressors pounding, the King Salvor sounded like a boiler factory. On the diving float, Ankers and I took the air from her, distributed it from the control manifold to hose lines to the wreck below, watched the few pressure gauges we had. Wet, cold, miserable, nearly drowned, we stayed there in the open, tending the air manifold, while all about us, seeking what little shelter could be improvised out of tarpaulins, were the rest of the salvage crew, just as miserable, standing by for eventualities. The hours dragged along, the compressors throbbed, we tended the manifold, and all the while we shivered in the cold flood. It seemed incomprehensible that mere clouds could ever hold that much water; I could have sworn that somehow the whole Mediterranean outside the harbor was being pumped skyward in a solid mass to be dumped on us there inside. A little before noon, the pressure gauges showed we had driven the water down inside the Spahi’s holds so that shortly something should rise. No ship can ever be raised evenly; one end or the other will come up first, no matter how fine the control. And our control I knew was very crude; I wasn’t even going to attempt it. I elected to raise the bow first, then the stern, then to tow the whole wreck, still lying half-capsized on its starboard side, toward the shore
out of the channel, and sink her where she could never again interfere with the entrance. After that, once the war was over, if the French wanted either the rest of those hogsheads of wine or the Spahi herself, they were welcome to do what they pleased with her. So far all was going well; the leakage of air from the submerged Spahi was negligible; our big concrete patch was holding splendidly. I shut off the compressed air to the stern, put everything we had into the bow, and particularly into the forepeak tank, to raise the bow end first. It worked. In a few minutes more, the hoses to the bow started to slack off and rise in snaky coils undulating on the surface. A few seconds later, there was the bow of the Spahi, looking like the rounded side of a whale, bobbing on the surface of the sea, only a few feet above water! That was fine. Now for the stern, and the job was done. I quit blowing air forward, sent every cubic foot of compressed air we had aft and amidships to raise the after end. But that didn’t work. Apparently with the vessel on a steep slant now, bow up, stern down, the athwartship bulkheads weren’t tight enough to hold the air in the compartments aft into which it was being pumped. The air leaked forward and uphill; soon we saw as much air bubbling up through the sea in line with the forward cargo hatches as we were pumping down into the stern compartments. I had always suspected those ancient bulkheads as being practically worthless for watertightness or airtightness—now they were proving it. It was no go. I had to give up. But, I thought, it might be possible to do it if we reversed the process; that is, if we raised her stern first. So I tried that. I quit pumping air down below altogether, and instead opened wide the vent valves to the floating bow to let the compressed air there escape to the atmosphere and the sea to flood it again. Soon we saw the bow of the Spahi disappear beneath the sea. Shortly it hit bottom again. With that, I sealed off the bow air lines and started once more to pump air down to the stern. In no very long time, the stern floated up, exposing part of her propeller as well as her starboard counter. Now for the bow once more. Again all the air was shifted forward to lift that. But it no more worked that way than in reverse. The bow didn’t rise; instead all the air leaked aft and began to escape from the after cargo hatches. There in that pouring rain, I gazed at the stern of the Spahi and cursed her fluently for a leaky tub which should have been sent to the boneyard decades before.
But that was all the good it did me. Several times more I juggled that ship, seesawing her up and down, first one end up, then the other, but never could I get both ends up together. She just wouldn’t hold air well enough. Finally I gave up trying. My job was to open the harbor of Oran and I wasn’t tied down as to how I did it. I sank the Spahi again entirely and sent Ankers away with a pair of French tugs to get a 100-ton floating French crane that belonged in the harbor, the only crane left afloat in the place. Shortly he was back with it. We towed the crane into place over the once again sunken bow of the fully submerged Spahi; the divers went down and secured the crane hook to the heavy towing bridle we already had around the Spahi’s bow. Then I ordered the crane crew to take their maximum lift and they started to heave till their full 100-ton pull was being exerted. With that pull for insurance to make certain the Spahi didn’t develop any idiosyncrasies and roll upright on us to spill out all the air during what was to follow, again I blew air into the bow, lightening it till the crane was just able to pull it to the surface, leaving the ship with her stern down and as a whole somewhat negatively buoyant this time. When once again the bow showed above the sea, we went to work to pull the stopper out of the harbor bottleneck. I had no further idea of trying to raise the stern. Instead, with the King Salvor heaving on hawsers to the Spahi’s bow and to that floating crane over it, we started to swing the Spahi’s bow inboard into the inner harbor, letting her pivot on her sunken stern like a gate. Round she came, smoothly and slowly, for I had no desire by rushing matters to tip her so she might spill trapped air out her cargo hatches and get heavy enough again to tear away from us. In the midst of all that, the rain turned suddenly to hail! Down came that hail in stones big enough to knock us all dizzy in no time at all, if, as always, we hadn’t had our tin hats handy. On they went; after that, to the rattling of shrapnel from the heavens on our tin roofs, we proceeded. We got the Spahi swung round a good 90 ° , opening wide the harbor gate. For good measure, we swung her about 20 ° more. After that, the King Salvor went full out on everything she had—full ahead on her propeller, winching in meanwhile full power on the hawsers she had over her bow to the quay a quarter of a mile ahead. With all that, caring no longer what the Spahi did nor what happened to her, we dragged her by main strength along the bottom, sliding her submerged stern through the mud till finally she stuck and would budge no further shoreward. When that occurred, we slacked away on the
crane, released the air from her bow, and for the last time let her bow sink again. All hands had had enough of her and everything connected with her— the Ardois, the Commandant du Port, his French pilot. With no tears at all to mark her going, Ankers and his men and all the others who had had their very hearts torn out struggling with that wreck, watched the Spahi take her final plunge and disappear. Oran harbor was wholly open at last. A wide channel, full depth, existed again. Anything could come through now—completely loaded Libertys, even the Queen Elizabeth with 12,000 troops, if they cared to send her to Oran. Hardly had the last curve of the Spahi’s bow disappeared beneath the sea than I was headed shoreward through the rain and hail to breast my way through the lake between the quay and the telephone in the salvage shack and radio the news to Algiers. The major mission for which I had been brought from the Red Sea to Algeria was accomplished. No more Spahi! I felt as intoxicated as if I had myself swallowed the entire contents of one of those huge hogsheads of wine!
CHAPTER
34 I GAZED SPECULATIVELY OVER THE remaining collection of wrecks in Oran harbor. Only the Grand Dock now was of major importance to the war effort. Captain Reed and his international assortment of divers would take care of that dock. Now Lieutenant Ankers and his men could move on to Algiers and go to work on the Thomas Stone. In that, they should need the King Salvor also. I issued the orders. Captain Harding began to collect his gear to steam east; Ankers and his men started to tear down their salvage shack and to pack their slight equipment to go with him. Lieutenant Reitzel had at last been detached from his former nominal assignment and officially turned over to the Salvage Forces. I ordered him to proceed with them to Algiers also and set up an office in the St. George for Allied Salvage Headquarters from which, I hoped, all our future operations might shortly be directed. The little expedition steamed out of the harbor, all happy to see the last of Oran. For a sailor, for anybody, Algiers was an exotic city to be remembered —Oran was merely a large collection of docks, of dismal streets, and of unattractive synthetic redheads, who in spite of an infinite number of beauty parlors, offered slight attraction to a seaman on liberty. I turned to on the Grand Dock with no rest interval available for me after the Spahi. For Bill Reed and his crew had been going at that scuttled dry dock like demons, trying to break their Massawa records. They had it nearly all sealed up; in a few days more we might attempt to raise it. A vast amount of preparatory work had been done. My major worry over the Grand Dock originally had been where we might get compressors enough to supply the tremendous quantity of air we should need. But I had found some time back I might have spared myself the concern—it was simply answered. That abortive salvage job, la Bretagne, to which I had so rudely put a period, filled the need. Looking that capsized battleship over in Mers-el-Kebir, I had discovered something. Months before D-day, with the blessings of the Nazi
Control Commission which no doubt had hoped ultimately to profit thereby either with la Bretagne as a refitted Axis battleship or as a source of scrap steel, Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard had been permitted to transfer from a power house ashore some ancient but very large electrically driven air compressors, together with a few newer sizable diesel-powered sets. All these PerrinTrichard had long since fitted up inside a huge floating barge, forming a clumsy but powerful portable compressor plant, which had been moored over the capsized la Bretagne pending the day he might be ready to try to float her. All that was required was to tow Perrin-Trichard’s massive air factory from over the wreck of la Bretagne at Mers-el-Kebir, to the inside of Oran harbor and connect it to the power mains on the breakwater near by. That was swiftly done; through the courtesy of the Nazis and la Bretagne, our needs were beautifully taken care of. We worked feverishly the next few days over the final sealing up. Buck Scougale and Al Watson performed wonders in snaking themselves through that dry dock into submerged death traps so tight-fitting around a diving rig the French divers threw up their hands in horror at the mere thought of wedging themselves or anybody else into them. But time and again Buck and Al went in, worming themselves inside vertical steel shafts so small they could neither use a sledge nor bend over, and had to drive in wood plugs standing straight up in their diving rigs, using their lead-soled diving boots as hammers. However, one thing which I desperately needed for the task, I couldn’t get. That was a set of fifty low pressure gauges with large scale dials, so I might read accurately within half a pound the air pressure inside each compartment of the Grand Dock as we pushed compressed air into it and forced the water out. If ever I was to know the water level in each compartment, to control the lifting operation safely, I had to have those fifty low pressure gauges. I had struggled for weeks getting those gauges. There were none in Oran, there were none in Algeria. I tried the British; they had none in Africa, in Gibraltar, in England. Finally in desperation I had a long cable dispatch prepared, setting forth the need, asking that fifty such gauges be shipped us immediately by air from the United States. There, I knew, there must be gauges of all kinds by the thousands; all assigned, no doubt, in a wartime construction program, but where could there be greater immediate need or more to be gained than on the Grand Dock? I might as well have saved loading up the undersea cables with my message —I got the expected answer—there were no unassigned gauges in America; if
we wanted any, we should look to the British; the Mediterranean was an area of British responsibility. With a heavy heart I tore into fine bits my copy of that answer and threw them into the harbor. Whose responsibility was it anyway to keep the damaged ships afloat and repaired, so that Eisenhower might have ammunition and supplies enough to prevent American soldiers from being massacred in Tunisia by Axis generals who were totally unconcerned over paper trifles regarding areas of responsibility? But there was nothing further I could do about it. I must either abandon lifting the Grand Dock and with that abandonment all chance of repairing large ships torpedoed in our area, or go at it practically blind with no gauges to control the operation—for such a huge mass of submerged steel, no very alluring prospect. However, it was that or nothing; I decided to undertake it, proper gauges or no gauges. So on the morning of January 11, three weeks to the day after my eight-man crew from Massawa began working on it, we started on the lifting of the Grand Dock. From Perrin-Trichard’s floating air compressor plant, six massive hoses led over the water to the air manifolds connected to each section of the involved grid of piping laid out on the ocean floor with individual connections from the manifolds to each of the fifty flooded compartments below. I had only half a dozen high pressure gauges which were all I could steal off machinery here and there in Oran, all unsuitable for the task, all inaccurate for low pressure work, totally inadequate in number for the job. But they were a little something. With them I could get a foggy idea of what was going on below; about as good an idea as a surgeon might get who had a delicate brain operation to perform but who was compelled to work with an almost opaque pair of dark glasses over his eyes while he sawed away on his patient’s skull, uncertain as to whether he was still working on the top of the cranium or had already cut through to the chin. We pumped air down into that unseen dry dock all day long. I had only the vaguest notion of how much water we were pushing out of any given compartment below. But one thing I knew very well—I must get one end of that immense U-shaped dry dock lifted far above the surface and well dried out to give it stability before the other end started to rise. Otherwise the whole dry dock, with both ends off the bottom at once and a great deal of free water swashing about inside it, would certainly capsize on us on its way up through the deep water, and become a second Normandie, a total loss, not only for this
war but probably forever because the water there was so deep. That hazard at least I could avoid. By keeping one end of the dock too heavy to float while I pumped compressed air into the other end, I could be sure the end I wanted would come up first so I could thoroughly free it of water before raising the other and heavier end. The drawback to all that was that the heavy end, once the dry dock was on a tilt, might be too heavy, with more weight resting on its submerged lower edge than it could safely carry in that position without damage. That was what the low pressure gauges were for—to make certain the low end was not light enough to float up too soon, nor so heavy on the bottom as to cause damage to the airtightness of the dock and perhaps prevent the low end from ever rising. But I didn’t have the gauges. The air compressors throbbed, the air hoses writhed in the sea, the compressed air whistled through them on its way down into the dry dock, and I stood in a small boat moving slowly about over the water, gazing at gauges which gave me no reliable information, guessing at what was going on down below and hoping for the best. About the middle of the afternoon, while I was still certain there wasn’t air enough below to raise either end yet, but hoped there was enough already down to lighten the bow end sufficiently for safety while I raised the stern end, I quit altogether pumping air down to the bow. From then on, I sent all I had aft to the stern end, desirous of raising that end first. The hours dragged along. Over the surface of the sea, Captain Reed and Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard went in other small boats from manifold to manifold, anxiously scanning the dials of the six high pressure gauges we had, getting no better knowledge from them than I had. The needles on those stiffspringed gauges wouldn’t even start to indicate the pound or two of difference in pressure that meant to us the whole difference between success and disaster. We kept on pumping compressed air. We had our reward. As night fell over Oran harbor, the air hoses to the stern compartments began to slack away. Slowly, ponderously, like leviathan himself rising from the deep, the stern of the Grand Dock broke surface—first the huge steel side walls forming the sides of the U, like two immense sunken buildings, starboard and port, burst through to rise steadily and continuously till they towered forty feet above the sea, then the wide flat deck of the dry dock itself emerged to greet our entranced eyes. I took a deep breath. Half our task was done—now for the second and more difficult half! Darkness had fallen. Hurriedly we boarded that floating stern, strung
temporary electric wires all over it to light the job, then went to work with all hands, French and American alike. There was much to do. We closed off opened flood valves through which water had been expelled from aft. We unbolted manhole covers in the now exposed deck of the dock, trundled around heavy salvage pumps which the King Salvor had left us, dropped suction hoses down into the vast caverns fifteen feet deep forming the bottom compartments of the Grand Dock, sucked out the deep pools of water which the compressed air had failed to expel from them. Gradually, as we got rid of that water, the stern rose higher and higher above the sea. By midnight, the drying out job was done. Every compartment we could get to with a salvage pump was dried out and resealed. My slide rule, working overtime, indicated to me from my computations that we had stability enough —the dry dock couldn’t possibly capsize now when we finally lifted the bow off bottom and she came freely afloat once more. With that, all the compressed air we had was turned into the still submerged sections, amidships of the dock and at the bow. I figured it should take at most four hours more to float the bow; less, I earnestly hoped. But it was with a very heavy heart that I went about it. For as night finally fell on Oran, the weather which had been good all day, took a marked turn for the worse. By ten o’clock, as we still struggled with our salvage pumps in the drying out, it was blowing a gale. Long before midnight, when at last we might start on the lifting of the bow, we were caught in a storm with whitecaps running all over the harbor, and the just-lifted stern of the Grand Dock rising and falling heavily to the waves breaking over its deck like a ship at sea. I could visualize the submerged bow of that dock below me working like a hinge on the bottom, taking now not only the whole weight of that end of the dock, whatever it might be, but also the thunderous jolts coming through the steel structure as the floating end plunged up and down in the seaway. How much weight was there still on that submerged and grounded end, battering it on the bottom? I didn’t know. God help us now! No one else could. At midnight I was able at last to swing open the air valves once more, to send all the air we could possibly get out of our compressors down to the sunken bow to lighten it up and relieve the strain on it, and, I hoped, finally to float it up. I began to pray. Steadily all through the rest of the night we pumped down air. The weary hours dragged along in darkness and in storm. As best we could, all of us
huddled now on the lifted floor of the stern of the dry dock, tried to shield ourselves behind keel blocks from the green seas and the heavy spray breaking continuously over the low deck, praying for the storm which was battering our dock to die away, praying for the bow to rise, praying for the dawn. Only the dawn came at last to answer our prayers. The storm did not abate, the bow did not rise. Instead, in the growing light illuminating the turbulent waters of the harbor, we saw amongst the waves a sight to numb our very souls —there over the sunken bow, the whole area of the sea was one white mass of frothing bubbles bursting through the surface. All the compressed air we were pumping down into the bow was leaking out and rising as fast as we pushed it down! Glumly we looked at that—elderly Captain Reed, young Lieutenant PerrinTrichard, all the divers, French and American alike, who had struggled to lift that dry dock. Without a word of discussion, all hands knew the answer—the bow end of the dock was somehow damaged, it was no longer airtight, it wasn’t going to rise. Perrin-Trichard’s French divers were still in the best shape physically. One of them was dressed, lowered away from a small boat in the stormy waves over the sunken bow to learn more exactly what had happened twelve fathoms down below and what, if anything, might be done to cure it. He was down about half an hour. He rose, was dragged into the boat, was partly undressed. In excited French, using both arms even more than his tongue, he started to tell Perrin-Trichard what he had found. As rapidly as possible, as his wildly gesticulating diver poured out his story, Perrin-Trichard translated to Reed and to me. The Grand Dock was irretrievably ruined. It would never be lifted now. The overhanging bow section of the dry dock, protruding sixty feet beyond the high side walls, must have been resting too heavily on the bottom. Under the pounding it was getting from the sea, it had buckled athwartships all the way across the dock from starboard to port, a distance of 140 feet, its full width, right at the point where the vertical side walls ended. There was a very bad wrinkle across the dock there in the heavy steel plating of the deck. That wrinkle had opened up every joint it crossed in the steel deck plates and thousands of rivets besides. Air was pouring out along the line of that wrinkle in vast quantities. There were innumerable leaks all the way from one side of the dock across to the other. The diver stopped waving his arms. His tale was told. His tenders began to
get him out of the rest of his diving rig. Silently Reed and Perrin-Trichard, who together had supervised all the preliminary work on the Grand Dock, looked at each other and then both looked at me. Their conclusions were as visible in their woebegone faces as if they had spent an hour in expounding them. That French seaman who had just come up to report was a reliable diver; what he said, we could accept as so. All those bubbles on the water roundabout us in the boat confirmed him. The dock was ruined in tightness. We couldn’t raise it, at least not without a far more extensive diving job on it to seal all these new leaks than we had already gone through on that dock; it would take months yet. And we couldn’t do that—all our few divers had reached the end of their string; they must have a long rest now before they could tackle a major job in deep water again. We might as well sink the stern we had afloat before worse happened, and call it a day. We could do nothing else. I shook my head. I did not concur. “Keep the compressors going, Lieutenant,” I said to Perrin-Trichard. “She’ll come up yet.” We kept on pumping. The morning faded away to afternoon. Still we kept on pumping. Nothing happened. We had pounded down enough compressed air into that bow to have floated it up six times over, but it didn’t rise; it was plainly obvious to all that the air was leaking out as fast as it went down. The storm moderated, the seas died down, but that no longer made a difference. The damage was done. As the afternoon wore away, Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard, who possibly at first may have thought I had a trump up my sleeve, lost all hope, and suggested we shut down. I refused. We kept on pumping. Night fell again. Still nothing happened, the bow showed not the slightest sign of rising. Captain Reed gave up. It was no longer any use. While we still had a few men, bedraggled though all of us were, on our feet, we might as well sink the stern and call it off. We had done the best we could with the equipment we had been given. We had failed. It wasn’t our fault. I refused. We kept on pumping. Down went the air through the pulsating hose lines, up it came again through the sea in vast masses of bubbles as fast as we pounded it down. But I had seen strange things happen in salvage; it would take a miracle now to lift the Grand Dock, but I had faith a miracle could happen to save us. Everything I could do myself to lift the Grand Dock had been done; there was nothing further I could do except to keep on pumping air and have
faith. I kept on pumping. Under the weird light of the few electric bulbs we had illuminating the canyon between the side walls of the dock, Reed came to me again. His men were all practically dead; so was he. Did I object if they all went ashore to try to get a night’s rest? I had no objection. I knew they needed it. So did I. They went ashore. So did most of Perrin-Trichard’s men, except Perrin-Trichard himself—he was young. Perrin-Trichard and I picked out some coils of wet hawsers on the dock floor. We would sleep there. After assuring myself that Perrin-Trichard had relief engineers enough in the compressor barge to keep on going, and warning him the compressors must not stop, I crawled on top my coiled down hawser and curled up myself. The compressors kept on pounding, more audible now in the quietness of the night. Nothing happened to that canted dry dock. The hours dragged along, midnight came again. I couldn’t sleep. For the first time, I felt like going to Admiral Cunningham and throwing up my command; I was through; I couldn’t stand any more. None of this need ever have happened; a few gauges, not over a thousand dollars’ worth, would have avoided it all. I was sick of working in an area of British responsibility, a complete orphan so far as America and its tremendous war resources were concerned; I was sick of everything; I’d had enough. In the morning, I should do it. Let them get someone else to try to make for them bricks without straw. I couldn’t any longer; I was through helping to kill off other men trying it. The compressors kept on pounding, the air whistled down, somewhere forward of me, I could hear it gurgling upward through the sea. Nothing was happening, nothing now could happen to the bow of the Grand Dock to lift it. Finally the medley of unceasing noises put me to sleep. Dawn broke again, the third day now. Across the water came the hammering of the air compressors, near by was that everlasting foaming on the sea where the air was bubbling up, nothing had changed. I rolled stiffly off the top of the coiled hawser. A small boat soon brought back Captain Reed and all his men, all the French contingent. They boarded the floating stern of the dock, looked eagerly forward at the marker poles sticking up through the sea over the sunken bow for any sign of its having risen a little during the night. There wasn’t any symptom of a rise; not the slightest. Apathetically they broke up into small groups to wander disconsolately over the steeply sloping deck at the stern. We kept on pumping. But nobody had any hope any more, save I, who,
wholly without reason for it, now that it was day again began once more to hope and to pray for a miracle. The morning dragged along. The men looked at me curiously as they passed near the coil of rope against which I leaned, too tired to stand upright any more. How much longer did I mean to keep up this useless pumping? If any one of them had dared ask me directly, I couldn’t have answered him. Midmorning came. My eyes, as nearly always, were fixed on the marker pole rising through the sea over the starboard side of the sunken bow. It seemed to stir a trifle. I rubbed my haggard eyes to clear them a little, looked again. Yes, undoubtedly it seemed to me to be wavering a bit. But I doubted my eyes—they were worn and red and bloodshot from lack of sleep and plenty more besides these last three days. Reed was near by; I asked him to look. But there was no longer any need of confirmation. When I turned back again, that pole was rising, and I could feel the steel floor of the dock under my feet moving also. Very slowly, that pole and its mate to port rose through the sea to be followed at constantly increasing speed by the high steel sides and then by the massive bow of the Grand Dock. In seconds thereafter, there was the Grand Dock, fully afloat from end to end in all its majestic bulk, overshadowing all else in Oran harbor, lazily rocking on the surface, risen at last from the depths! A prayer of thanksgiving poured from my heart. I had witnessed a miracle.
CHAPTER
35 T HE GRAND DOCK CAME UP ON JAN uary 13. Two days later, I was back in Algiers, with the urgent salvage work in Oran all completed except for the raising of the Moyen Dock, on which Reed was to start next. Reitzel, now officially Executive Officer, already had an office set up for our salvage headquarters in the St. George; a bare room across the hall and a few doors down from the office of the Admiral of the Fleet. Ours was the only office on that long corridor holding Americans. All the others on both sides of the hall housing the naval staff contained only British officers and their office personnel, mainly Wrens, the British equivalent of our Waves. I looked at my new office. It was completely bare of everything—bare walls, bare windows, bare floor—a totally barren room except for a telephone, a battered desk and three rickety chairs Reitzel had managed to procure, and a portable typewriter which was his personal property. We needed another piece of furniture. Out of a few rough boards and with the assistance of a British marine, we knocked together a long table on which we might spread out plans of damaged ships (if we ever got any plans). Finally there was only one thing more necessary for a really efficient office —someone to do the office work and answer our telephone when both Reitzel and I were out. I looked around Allied Headquarters. It was hopeless to expect a navy yeoman; Jerry Wright, liaison officer, had the only one in Algiers. I asked the army; after all we were running a co-ordinated war. Could the army give me anything from a private, second class, up to a sergeant, who could handle our simple office work, and possibly also type a report? I learned the army hadn’t a single man who had ever even looked through an office door, who wasn’t already battling with the mountains of reports in the adjutant’s offices; they couldn’t spare one. But, the adjutant assured me, they were anxious to help; salvage meant something to the army. That day a company of WACs, the very first to be sent to Africa, was arriving in Algiers;
sorely as the strictly army paper war required the services of all of them, I should be assigned a WAC for Salvage Headquarters. I thanked the adjutant wholeheartedly; it was obvious to me how much it meant to him to release even one WAC. Next morning our WAC reported. Reitzel introduced her to the portable typewriter, instructed her in the simple routine of our new office. He carefully impressed on her that her number one job was answering the telephone and swiftly getting hold of him or me, wherever we might be in Africa, whenever a new wreck was reported. She turned to on the typewriter to copy a brief longhand report on the raising of the Grand Dock. It was evident she was only a so-so typist; I sighed and hoped she might show at least average intelligence when it came to the telephone. I turned to studying the problem of the Thomas Stone. Several hours later, the first report was typed; it was passable. More to make conversation than otherwise, and to make this girl just dumped down in Africa feel a little more at ease, I asked perfunctorily where she came from. She told me. Her answer took all the perfunctoriness out of my question. “Well, isn’t that fine!” I replied. “Your town’s hardly ten miles from my own home; I’ve been through there often. Maybe I know your friends there?” But her face fell. Apparently she didn’t consider it so fine. To come all the way from the Atlantic seaboard to Africa and then to find herself assigned to the office of a middle-aged and cadaverous-looking captain who lived only ten miles away from her own parents, took all the romance out of war. She made no comment at all. Lunch time came. Our WAC went. Lunch time was over. Our WAC didn’t come back. I gave her a couple of hours’ leeway to get back on the job, then called up the head WAC, a sergeant, to find out what had happened to our new office force. Didn’t the WACs have any better discipline than to join immediately The Three Hours For Lunch Club? I learned from the head WAC that our WAC had reported herself as not elated over her assignment with the navy; she thought she might do more effective work elsewhere, preferably on strictly army matters. Huh, I grunted. So I hadn’t misinterpreted that look when my WAC discovered I lived practically next door to her family. The head WAC continued. I was not to worry. She would consider carefully all the girls she had in her company, and I could rest assured that tomorrow
morning I should have another WAC. It was too late anyway that afternoon to send me a replacement. Could I get along till tomorrow? I thanked her, told her I’d try. And inasmuch as I’d managed to survive with no help at all since coming to Algeria, I thought the chances of holding out through one more afternoon were fair. Next morning came. Shortly after Reitzel and I, who were very early birds, had unlocked the room and started working, in came our new helper. I looked up. A right hand swung smartly up in the most military salute I’d ever received, a musical voice announced, “Private Stacy reporting for duty, sir.” I stared at Private Stacy. Lovely blond hair protruding in intriguing curls beneath her military cap, a slim figure strikingly set off by her uniform, a complexion such as women spend fortunes at Elizabeth Arden’s trying to achieve, sparkling eyes—a beautiful girl if I’d ever seen one. I looked her over glumly; no girl with all that would ever be worth a damn doing prosaic salvage office work or hammering a typewriter. I sighed; no help after all; war was certainly hell. Gruffly I indicated the portable typewriter. She removed her cap, revealed fully her honey-colored hair (all natural, too), and once again Reitzel turned to explaining what our office work required. She could start by typing from my crude longhand notes a detailed inventory of the salvage equipment—pumps, hoses, compressors, diving rigs—we had scattered over Algeria from Oran to Bône. I went back to studying the Thomas Stone. Reitzel went out. She started typing. By and by the steady rhythm of typewriter keys and of her flying fingers began to penetrate my concentration on the Thomas Stone. The girl was good as well as good-looking—she was an excellent typist and she was certainly exceptionally intelligent too—confronted by a technical list of wholly unfamiliar machinery and strange terms, she was arranging and hammering it out without constantly asking me a myriad of questions, or indeed, any at all. Apparently she was just as good as a helper as she might be as an illustration on a magazine cover. Well, I figured, I might as well know the worst. If it turned out that she too lived only a few streets away from me back in the U.S., she was bound to learn of it soon anyway, and I’d be out a second WAC, a good one this time. So I
interrupted her. “Where’re you from, Miss Stacy?” I asked. It was all right. She was from Honolulu—about as far from my town as possible, and still be under the American flag. “So you must have been there Pearl Harbor day?” I quizzed her. Yes, she’d been there the day the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and seen the aftermath of that massacre; she’d joined the WACs as soon thereafter as there were any WACs to join; she had a brother in the army fighting in the Southwest Pacific with MacArthur, where things were pretty tough. She went back to her typing; I leaned back in my flimsy chair and, much relieved, went back to considering the case of the Thomas Stone. I wasn’t going to have this girl walk out on me. She was good, and to her the war had a deep personal meaning; it was evident if she’d been put to scrubbing floors, so long as it might help the war effort, she’d scrub them cheerfully, and clean too. Soon thereafter I went out, first informing Miss Stacy of where to look for me if the phone rang. The corridor, not very wide, was crowded with Royal Navy personnel; I had to elbow my way through to get to the stairs on my way to Jerry Wright’s office, where I hoped to pick up some recent information on Algiers. About half an hour later, I came back. Scarcely had I descended the last stair to my own floor, when out of an office near by popped Captain Shaw, R.N., one of Cunningham’s top aides, to buttonhole me. Evidently he’d warned the Royal Marine on sentry duty there to inform him the instant I hove in sight again. What ship’s stopped a torpedo this time, I wondered? “What’s wrong now?” I asked him. “Cast your eyes on that!” he replied, pointing down the hall. I looked. “You see that mob in front of your office?” I saw it, all right, the same crowd I’d elbowed my way through on my way out without paying any particular attention to it then. But it was still there, only bigger now. “See here, Ellsberg,” he continued, “you’ll have to do one thing or I’ll have to do another, or we’re going to lose the war. That girl in your office has completely disrupted the Royal Navy. Every officer we’ve got from commander down to sub-lieutenant has been standing in a trance outside your office door all morning looking at that girl, and though she doesn’t even look up at ’em, we haven’t been able to get a blasted thing done. The war ’s stopped on dead center around here, and I leave it to you what we do to get it underway again. Either you’ll have to keep your office door closed so they can’t see her,
or the Admiral will have to station a Royal Marine sentry outside your door with orders to see everybody goes by there on the double! Which’ll you have?” I looked down the hall at the jam blocking it in front of my office. There were dozens of Wrens in the Royal Navy offices all up and down the corridor but I saw no moonstruck groups at the other doors peering in—apparently the Wrens weren’t giving Private Stacy much competition. “I’ll keep the door closed, Shaw,” I decided. “We won’t call out the Marines unless I need help to keep it closed. You tell the Admiral the war can now proceed.” I went down the hall a bit, shoved my way again through the gaping crowd, entered my office, and slammed the door in the faces of practically the whole Royal Navy banked six deep outside. Private Stacy, still pounding expertly away on that inventory, didn’t even look up. I thanked my stars it was not my obligation, once she was off duty, to keep either Americans or British, no longer allies, shooed away from her doorstep. Personnel problems, especially international ones, could be more racking even than wrecks, as I’d already learned in Oran. I looked at her. I decided I needn’t worry. Private Virginia Stacy, T/5, was just as deeply interested in helping win the war as I was; maybe even more so, seeing that she had a longer-term stake in the outcome. I concentrated once more on the Thomas Stone. Already I had Lieutenant Ankers and Captain Harding of the King Salvor working with Captain Bennehoff of the Thomas Stone on the problem of getting his ship off the beach. Considering the elaborate equipment needed for such a task, most of which we didn’t have and couldn’t get, the chances looked poor for success till someone somewhere furnished us the wherewithal to go about it properly. Meanwhile, I was willing to try with what we had, but success in that case would depend not so much on us as on what the floor of Algiers Bay turned out to be. A three ring circus was in full swing around the Thomas Stone. Somewhat offshore from her in deep water, Ankers and his divers were blasting holes in the solid rock floor which we had discovered comprised the bottom of Algiers Bay, so that into those holes we might drop anchors which would hold when we commenced pulling on the Thomas Stone. On the stranded ship itself, Bennehoff’s crew were working day and night lightening up and barging ashore everything they possibly could get out of her without tearing her hull apart—stores, water, fuel oil, boats, heavy guns, concrete ballast, ammunition—everything removable except her A.A. guns and
the ammunition for them. Roundabout the Thomas Stone, every small boat Bennehoff had was out with quartermasters and leadlines, sounding carefully each few feet the waters between his stranded ship high on the beach, and a line offshore with water deep enough to float his stranded ship. Every part was important. With a multitude of anchors, steel hawsers, and heavy four-fold sheave blocks, rigged luff on luff to multiply the purchase, we should be able to exert a pull on the stern of the Thomas Stone equal to that pushing along the Queen Mary with all her engines going full power at 30 knots. But to take such a terrific pull, the bottom of Algiers Bay as holding ground was worthless; that was why we needed the holes blasted in the solid rock beneath a thin cover of a few inches of sand and mud to give our anchors a solid grip. Lightening up to the limit the scarcely waterborne Thomas Stone was obvious. But even with everything out of her, so little was the sea buoying her up, she would still be resting with a weight of 2000 tons on the bottom—a bottom of solid rock with the sand cover nowhere over six inches thick. Whether she would move or not, even under the 1000-ton pull we could exert on her, depended on the friction between her bottom and the rock and sand forming the bottom of the bay. If that friction was less than 50 per cent, she’d move; otherwise not. But we’d never know till we’d tried; it couldn’t be computed in advance. Finally and most important of all, were the soundings to seaward. Unless they showed a reasonably fiat surface over the rock bottom in some direction all the way out to deep water, it was useless to move her. If, with all that weight on the bottom, we straddled her over even one moderate ridge of rock, we’d break her back and then she would be only scrap iron. It was a very complicated situation, to be handled with great tenderness if the valuable Thomas Stone were not to be wrecked completely instead of saved in the salvage attempt. On this, all hands were working like beavers above and below the sea—blasting, laying out hawsers, lightering weights, sounding, and not least important, pushing slide rules to compute where all of it might get us. The third day after my return to Algiers, a little before noon I was with Jerry Wright, discussing the possibilities of a tow home for the Thomas Stone if we dragged her clear. His telephone rang. He answered it, listened a moment, growing more red in the face each instant, hung up the phone. He turned again to me.
“Sorry, but I’ve got to cut this short and get down to the Thomas Stone four bells. Want to come along?” “Certainly!” I answered. After all, the Thomas Stone was my own major problem. We started out. “But what else is wrong now on the Thomas Stone?” “Too much! Bennehoff’s in trouble up to his neck this time! The top brass hat in the Fleet Air Arm of the R.A.F. was on that phone. The Thomas Stone in broad daylight has just shot down a British Swordfish torpedo plane and its crew over Algiers Bay! They’re madder ’n hornets in the Fleet Air Arm and they want Benny hanged, drawn, and quartered for it right now!” I looked at Jerry speechless. Poor Benny! This on top of all else! It’d ruin him. We started down the hill, roared eastward along the shore front. But I couldn’t believe it. There must be a mistake; Benny was too good a captain and had his crew under too good control for them to get trigger-happy and shoot down a friendly plane. It must have been some other ship which had done it. We reached the beach, grabbed an LCVP there, in another minute or two were climbing the high side ladder to the Thomas Stone’s quarter-deck. Benny met us at the gangway. One look at Benny’s face indicated that however wrathful the British might be, their rage was amiability itself compared to the fury contorting his features. He judged correctly the reason for Jerry’s unscheduled call and beat him to the punch. “Yes, I shot down that Swordfish! And you can go straight back to the British Air Marshal or Admiral or whoever sent you and tell ’im that the next one that tries to come over the Thomas Stone like that, ’ll get shot down too!” Jerry Wright had not been selected as liaison officer for nothing; he was a good diplomat as well as a good sailor. Expertly he calmed down his infuriated classmate, learned what had happened. Not thirty minutes earlier, somewhat before noon, Benny’s radar lookouts had reported an unidentified plane approaching from the eastward, the enemy direction. Benny had instantly sounded the General Alarm; all hands had gone to action stations. Benny himself, armed with binoculars, had taken his command post. Shortly, through his glasses he could make out the plane, apparently a sizable bomber, still hardly more than a dot in the sky coming from easterly, right in line with the sun, the normal enemy approach. Neither he nor his exec nor his gunnery officer was able to make it out clearly, masked as that plane was by the sun right behind it. It answered no recognition signals, it made none of its own. Friendly planes were strictly forbidden to fly over or
near our ships; this one was certainly headed for him. He kept on trying to identify it up to the last second when it reached the point where if he delayed further, it could dive on him to release torpedoes or bombs. Still no identification. He wasn’t taking chances with “friendly” enemy planes—too many other skippers had to their sorrow. He gave the order, “Commence firing!” His gunners were good—they’d had lots of practice. In no time at all, that plane came tumbling down out of the sky to crash into Algiers Bay about half a mile to the eastward of him. Not till the spinning plane was low over the water and out of the sun were they able to make it out as a British Swordfish. He had sent a boat to the scene promptly; they had fished its crew out of the wreckage —three British flyers, all still alive. They were below in his sickbay right then; his naval surgeons were working over them. One was badly wounded but would recover; the other two were suffering from shock and submersion only —they’d be all right soon. The smashed Swordfish itself had sunk quickly; it was a total loss. And if the British wanted to lose any more Swordfish, let ’em repeat what that plane had done. Benny would shoot the next one down too. We left. The shoe was on the other foot; that Swordfish had violated every rule; Benny was certainly justified; it was the British whose faces should be red. And as a matter of fact, they were. It appeared by the time they got through investigating their end, even the poor Swordfish was wholly innocent—the blunder had occurred ashore. The Swordfish had been sent in to practice exactly what it was doing—a simulated aerial torpedo attack on the shipping in the harbor. Only, to avoid trouble, the harbor guns and all the shipping in the harbor had been notified—all, that is, except the Thomas Stone. Being stranded far outside the harbor, the ground control forces had forgotten all about her as a ship. Benny had received no notification. The Swordfish paid. The sequel had its comical aspects. A few days later, I bumped into Benny ashore. He invited me to accompany him. I couldn’t; I was busy on the waterfront; what was up? Benny explained. He was on his way to Allied Headquarters. The Admiral of the Fleet himself was to pin a British decoration on him as recognition of his skill, determination, and courage for bringing in the shattered Thomas Stone and all her troops. I congratulated him; he’d earned it. Benny grinned at me as we parted; I grinned back. Both of us knew that ordinarily a decoration like that took months for all the red tape to be unwound between the deed and the decoration. Without question in his case, the mortified
British, trying to make amends for the Swordfish, had made hash of their hallowed routine in their haste to make the award then instead of months or years later. I was sorry I couldn’t go to see it. It would be a little something to compensate Captain Bennehoff for all the anguish he’d been through.
CHAPTER
36 I HAD A DISCUSSION WITH THE ADmiral of the Fleet concerning what had been done afloat and ashore and our problems in handling the remaining wrecks and harbors up and down the coast. The long-awaited sister to the King Salvor, the Salvestor, with Commander Hewett, R.N.R., as her salvage officer, had just arrived in Algiers. Temporarily, I had detailed the Salvestor to working on S.S. Strasbourg, a freighter which had come into Algiers with a large hole in her bow as a result of an aerial torpedo dropped by an unidentified plane which her naïve crew had allowed to circle them in the most friendly manner several times, till unexpectedly it had let go a torpedo. After patching up the Strasbourg, the Salvestor would go to Bougie, where we had nothing in the way of salvage forces. The difficulties encountered around Oran in the past were gone over. Admiral Cunningham felt a solution was in order. Both because the importance of the command justified it, and in recognition of what had been accomplished, he would recommend me for promotion to Rear Admiral. Naturally I was gratified that he felt it warranted, and especially at this mark of his appreciation, but I was none too optimistic the recommendation would get anywhere, seeing I was in the American Navy and he was British. But he had no doubts over it; the recommendation would go forward as from General Eisenhower, Allied C-in-C, and in the very strongest terms Eisenhower could put it. I was uncertain of that and told Cunningham so. After all, Eisenhower probably didn’t know of my existence, having long since forgotten our brief meeting. But Cunningham felt otherwise. Eisenhower, he told me, had personally followed our salvage work, knew as much about it as he himself, and had taken the keenest interest in it; there was no question as to his making the recommendation. It would go in very shortly; the higher rank would avoid
repetition of some past difficulties. I thanked Cunningham and left, treading on air. With more rank than the captains I should normally have to deal with, my salvage path should be smoother in the future. January 19 I started over the road on a 500-mile trip eastward toward Tunisia for my first personal inspection of the minor harbors close up to the stalemated fighting line. My colored sergeant (who had brought my jeep over the road from Oran) was driving as usual. Not as usual, we went armed, both of us. East of Algiers, it was compulsory. One was always likely, especially in a small car traveling alone and without the protection of a convoy, to fall in with Nazi paratroopers dropped behind our lines to lurk near the roads for pot shots at miscellaneous targets. The sergeant had a carbine snuggled close up against the steering wheel; I had a Colt .32 which Ankers had loaned me because it was handier to get about with than the regulation Colt .45. We followed the coast road eastward. It was gorgeous scenery along the various Grande Corniches cut into cliff faces looking out over the Mediterranean—scenery to make the French Riviera on the other side of the Mediterranean, which I had also driven over, look decidedly second-rate. But I had no time to dawdle over scenery. We raced eastward with our jeep going all out, except on the innumerable occasions when we fell astern of and had to crawl past interminable convoys of army trucks, tanks, and half-tracks all moving eastward toward the fighting line. Mile after mile we went at snail’s pace by them—it seemed that everything America had on wheels or on tractor treads was moving up to reinforce the front. No wonder back home gasoline was strictly rationed—everything landed at Oran and Algiers was moving overland pushed by gasoline up to where it was soon to go into action against von Arnim and Rommel. And the long convoys were stretched out even longer because they were all moving under battle conditions—fifty-yard intervals between trucks, every fourth truck or tank with an A.A. gun mounted on top, manned and ready to meet Nazi fighting planes attempting to strafe the convoys. We got to Bougie. I had as yet nobody at all in Bougie for salvage. Bougie was terrible to look upon. The outer bay was a forest of masts and stacks sticking up through the surface. Below in deep water, completely submerged, lay the hulls of over half a dozen British troopships, all sizable ones, sunk by Nazi bombs shortly after they had landed the troops to seize Bougie. That was in our desperate rush to the east right after D-day to take all those ports and Bizerte before the Nazis got there.
The inner harbor of Bougie was as bad—side by side with moderate intervals of water between lay four other ships, all wrecks. Alongside the quay was the British freighter Glenfinlas, bow submerged, with her starboard side forward near her bilge blasted out by a Nazi bomb. Next outside her, flat on the bottom but with all her upper hull and superstructure exposed, lay a fair-sized French passenger ship, sunk by a bomb which also had gutted her above water by fire. Beyond her lay the prize exhibits of Bougie—two large French Mediterranean passenger liners, like miniature Normandies, both capsized and lying facing each other, one on her starboard side, one on her port side, with their horizontal stacks and masts lovingly interlaced just above the surface. What had happened to these last two ships I completely refused to believe till I had heard it verified from unimpeachable naval sources. The Nazis hadn’t sunk them; their own owners had, and not for sabotage either. When the first Nazi air raid after the Allied occupation of Bougie occurred, and the two ships closest inshore had been hit and sunk by bombs with one of them also set afire, the owners of the other two, though both were reasonably distant from the burning vessel, attempted in a panic to scuttle their two ships to keep them from catching fire! What followed might have been expected. Both ships, being French, naturally capsized long before enough water from opened sea valves had entered to sink them, to lie on their sides, half in the shallow water, half out, practically unsalvageable except at terrific cost. Incidentally, on neither ship had the half exposed above water, caught fire. It was hard for me to believe that even an excitable Frenchman would think of sinking his own ship and surely losing her to avoid the possibility of having her damaged by fire, but there they were—it had actually happened! Only the Glenfinlas seemed worth tackling, both to recover the ship and to clear the berth at the quay, but I had no salvage equipment or men in Bougie. I learned, however, that a company of Royal Engineers stationed in Bougie and commanded by a Scotch lieutenant, were figuring on tackling the job. To me, any help was welcome; I didn’t mind who salvaged ships so long as they were salvaged. I looked over the lieutenant’s plans. I had to tell him that in turning out salvage plans, he was about as good as I might be in designing his specialty, military bridges. Short of all the crane facilities of New York harbor, his plan was unrealizable. It would take a huge floating derrick, unobtainable on that coast, to handle the tremendous one piece patch he was figuring on
building ashore with his engineers and then installing over the hole in the Glenfinlas’ starboard side. But there was a much easier way. I pointed it out to him. It was unnecessary to bother with the submerged hole. All that was required to float the Glenfinlas was to seal off the exposed upper cargo hatch over her punctured hold by welding steel plates over it. No divers were required. The work could be done wholly above water by his engineers. After that, we could get some air compressors, blow the water out the Glenfinlas’ bow through the bomb hole below, float her up on a huge bubble of air, and she could then steam, hole and all, under her own power on her undamaged machinery to Algiers to be docked and have the hole patched up. It was very simple. I would send a salvage officer down later to supervise the actual lifting. The Scotch lieutenant, a very eager young engineer, cast aside his designs for a patch and started out instead to get the materials for sealing off the cargo hatch. I spent the night in Bougie with the British captain commanding there. It was an unusual night—no bombs. Next morning I started eastward again for Philippeville. Philippeville I found not as bad as Bougie. There were fewer wrecks there. The main problem was the Dutch Aurora, bow sunk by a bomb, stern afloat, right in the middle of the harbor, obstructing the fairway. I had a British assistant, Lieutenant Strange, there. He had sized up the Aurora correctly, and with his solitary diver and hardly anything else, was going about floating her. That he was making slow progress was not his fault. When I could get him some men and gear to work with, the Aurora would come bouncing surfaceward in a hurry. That night was passed in Philippeville. Life there and in Bougie was evidently tough; bombs came down almost nightly. There wasn’t a house left in either place with a sound roof; the bomb blasts had shattered the roof tiles everywhere when they hadn’t shattered the houses also. There was the usual nightly raid; I was tired and slept through it. In the morning we moved on towards Bône, making even slower progress than before because of almost continuous truck convoys now five to ten miles long we had to pass on the narrow roads. In Bône, only a few miles short of the fighting line, I saw again Lieutenant Commander White, R.N.V.R., whom I had sent there from Oran, and was able to cheer him up with the news that the King
Salvor and all her salvage gear should be along in a week or two to rejoin him —just as soon as she finished with the Thomas Stone. White needed cheering up that morning. After a struggle of some weeks, he had managed the day before to refloat H.M.S. Alarm, a moderate-sized warship, which some time before had been sunk inside the harbor by a near miss bomb which had left her leaking like a sieve. And then last night, in the usual air raid, another bomb had gone right through her engine room to explode underneath and sink her again! Now poor White had the whole job to do over again. But he was taking it well—far more phlegmatically than I could have. I went over his situation and most of his wrecks with him. Bône, though not so large, was a sad looking sight, both in its harbor and in the town. It was getting a terrific pasting from the Nazis near by—to them a trip to Bône was just a five-cent trolley ride—twenty minutes transit time. One bomber could make half a dozen round trips a night to unload on Bône. There were many wrecks we didn’t even board—the sweet by-and-by would be soon enough to look them over. It was obvious White had a man-sized job in Bône even if not another bomb ever fell to add other wrecks to his collection. It took me all afternoon to inspect even what wrecks I boarded in Bône harbor. By dusk I was finished. White informed me we could expect the first wave of bombers in about an hour or so. Just to sleep in a bed in Bône didn’t seem to me to warrant subjecting myself to another bombing when it wasn’t imperative. I decided that instead of leaving Bône in the morning, I’d get out right then, even though it meant sleeping in an open field that night. There was no chance in a blacked-out car running counter to blacked-out convoys, of getting westward to the next town. So against a background of wrecked ships and wrecked houses, I said goodby to White and shoved off in the growing darkness in my jeep. By midmorning, January 23, we were back in Algiers. My sergeant turned in his carbine; I gave Ankers back his Colt automatic. We had had no occasion to use them.
CHAPTER
37 MY RETURN TO ALGIERS WAS JUST in time to go to work again without a lost minute. Everything had just been completed for heaving on the Thomas Stone; we might try moving her whenever it suited me. A real storm above everything would have been a godsend to us in piling up the water along the shore to ease the weight to be dragged. But there was no immediate hope of a storm of any kind. There was even less hope of one such as came only once in ten years and had laid her up on the beach. So I concluded we might as well try immediately. The soundings showed ridges in the rock bottom all about the Thomas Stone except in one direction. Along that one line, though it wasn’t the most direct route astern of her to deep water, the rock bottom was reasonably flat. But it wasn’t a straight line; we should have to drag her seaward part way, then swing her round about 30 ° and finish the pull to deep water at a considerable angle to the shore line. All hands took stations. In addition to the hawsers laid out astern, the King Salvor took another line to add the power of her propeller to the drag, and two British destroyers were set to run back and forth just to seaward of all the lines and make as heavy waves as they could to help lift her. We started. Every winch on the Thomas Stone began heaving in on the wire lines from the multiple purchases, the King Salvor heaved furiously on her hawser, the destroyers steamed back and forth making waves. Very slowly, almost at a glacial pace, about a hundred yards in a hundred years, the Thomas Stone crept seaward. But it was swiftly evident that the friction on the bottom was so great that all the power we could exert was barely able to move her. We kept on heaving all the rest of the day, with frequent enforced pauses to rerig our purchases every time the sheaves came two-blocks and would haul no farther. But when the day finally ended and a check showed we had moved the ship seaward hardly a ship length, I decided it safest to discontinue. I wasn’t interested in dragging the Thomas Stone off the beach just as a stunt;
I wanted a repairable ship when we got her afloat. And to keep on with the dragging while her bottom was riding as hard as it evidently was over solid rock, and with that difficult turn to be made still ahead of us, could only result in the ship’s having no bottom at all to keep her afloat when she finally got to deep water. And if we took the shorter and direct route to deep water, we’d ride her over a ridge of rock which would break her back. It was no go. We should have to wait till more elaborate equipment, preferably submersible pontoons which could take most of the load off the bottom, was available to us. It hurt to break the news to Benny. It would at best be months yet till pontoons could be obtained from the United States; unless we could persuade the authorities there to remember that the Thomas Stone was an American warship and to forget that she was stranded in an area of British responsibility, it would be never. I told Benny we must suspend operations or we’d ruin his ship. He’d have to wait again; how long, I couldn’t say. I’d do my best to get lifting pontoons as quickly as possible so we could make another try with success assured that way. He took it philosophically; at least he was no longer neglected; some day we’d get his ship afloat again. Gloomily all hands began to unrig the hauling tackle. We were still at it next morning when just before noon I got a message that the Admiral of the Fleet wanted to see me. Dressed as usual in my nondescript collection of army woolen olive drab, I left the Thomas Stone and went up the hill to the St. George. I was shown in to Cunningham’s office. For once he was alone; usually his Chief of Staff was there. He smiled genially at me, asked me to be seated. “Now, Ellsberg,” he began, “at last you’ll have to wear your blue uniform again.” I sat up with a jolt. Now I was finally going to catch it. Several of his staff captains had already warned me that no one was ever allowed to see the admiral save in his best blues, worn out though they might be. They had always marveled he hadn’t thrown me out before, for never except on the one occasion I had first reported to him had he seen me in navy blue, the solitary such uniform I had in Africa. Ever since that day, with that uniform always in Oran, I had seen him only in my army working clothes, all I ever wore. And he’d never said a word about it. However, with my headquarters now in Algiers, I guessed he’d concluded I could begin to toe the line with all the Royal Navy. But he took a different tack. “Yes,” he continued, “you really ought to wear it this time. General
Eisenhower has asked me to tell you you’re invited to tea at his villa this afternoon, and to dinner with him later. And I think you’ll meet an old friend of yours there. So you’d better wear your blue uniform. That’s all.” I left to get back to my quarters and drag out my one and only set of blues. They looked rather wrinkled from overlong stowage in bulging canvas aviation bags. But it was too late to get them pressed; I flattened them out as best I could, shoved them under the mattress, and sat on them in hopes that might help a bit. After all, Cunningham was right; if the C-in-C was honoring me with an invitation to dinner, I ought not to discredit the Navy any more than I could help. I passed up lunch to sit on that uniform. When I finally dragged it out from under the mattress, it did look a trifle smoother. But all the while I sat, I was puzzling over Cunningham’s cryptic statement. Who might the old friend be for whose benefit, as well as for General Eisenhower ’s, I ought to dress up? I couldn’t even hazard a guess. So I concentrated on my clothes. Once completely attired, I went back to the St. George to have Private Stacy first pass judgment on me. She looked me over critically, finally concluded that as the lighting even in the general’s villa would probably be dim anyway, I might pass. Besides, she pointed out, I’d lost so much weight the uniform was too big for me now, and anyone would naturally (and charitably) conclude that the wrinkles I hadn’t eliminated resulted from that cause. I could safely chance it. So, stamped with Private Stacy’s much-qualified approval, I set out, though I judged she wouldn’t herself have been found dead with her uniform in no better state of press than mine. I had only a vague notion as to where Eisenhower ’s villa was, other than that it was somewhere in a garden adjoining the St. George. So I asked one of his military aides for sailing directions. I should have had a pilot. There were barbed wire entanglements all over the place, with the path leading through harder to follow than the channel threading the torpedo-defense nets guarding Mers-el-Kebir against U-boats. Then in addition, there were vicious-looking armed sentries popping out at unexpected moments from the shrubbery, demanding to see my pass. It was evident that between the barbed wire and the sentries, no Nazi paratroopers dropped thereabouts were going to have an easy time kidnaping or killing the C-in-C, nor was any deluded French student going to be allowed, unquestioned, to take a seat at the General’s doorstep and shoot him, a la Darlan, when he came home. I didn’t blame Eisenhower, but it caused me trouble.
Finally, a little late, I made it. Lieutenant Commander Butcher, naval aide, greeted me to say the General would be down before long, but meanwhile there was someone else who’d like to see me. Still wondering who that might be, I was let into a long living room. I received a first class surprise. There, hand outstretched in greeting, was Ernie King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, Chief of Naval Operations, and the highest ranking admiral in our Navy! I could hardly believe my eyes. What could he be doing in an area of British responsibility, where besides we had no active warships of our own? But I was certainly happy to see him again. We’d first met long years before on a salvage job, when he, a captain, had been Officer-in-Charge of the Salvage Squadron detailed to raise the sunken submarine S-51, and I, a lieutenant commander, had been his assistant as Salvage Officer on her. Since then our paths had crossed many times, the last occasion in Washington a few days after Pearl Harbor when he’d just been dragged in from sea to take command of the whole Navy and this time to salvage a nation. I’d said goodby to him then just before I shoved off myself for Massawa, feeling that if any man could save America from disaster, Ernie King could. I had worked under him in time of stress before; to me, he was the best allaround officer the Navy had. And there wasn’t a man on earth I was gladder to see at that moment than Ernie King. We sat down, Butcher left. My astonishment at seeing Admiral King in Africa was so apparent, he explained. He’d just come from the Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill. My eyebrows lifted again; I hadn’t heard the slightest whisper around Algiers of any such conference. And in Casablanca, he went on to tell me, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty (and Ernie King’s opposite number in the Royal Navy) had taken occasion to thank him for the salvage results I’d produced in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. “Well, Ellsberg,” continued Admiral King, “I told him it was only what I’d expected of you; you were the best salvage officer in the world. And he heartily agreed with me.” Though at the moment he didn’t know it, Ernie King was playing right down my alley; soon enough he’d find it out—what I wanted of him was not compliments but a little help and some badly needed pontoons for saving the navy’s best attack transport, the U.S.S. Thomas Stone. We talked on about other things; how different the situation was then from
the day when last we’d parted when it seemed all but hopeless between the Japanese tide flooding westward toward India and Rommel starting his victorious rush eastward across Africa towards Suez. Now, only the day before Tripoli had surrendered, Rommel was fleeing into Tunisia. At the Coral Sea and Midway we had smashed the Japanese advance and were starting on the road back ourselves with the result no longer doubtful—only how much longer would it take. King looked me over critically. Evidently my appearance didn’t suit him. He suggested I take things a bit easier now. That was my cue. “Admiral,” I replied, “I could, if I had some help in keeping up with the wrecks. You send me six young officers with engineering training to lend a hand; I don’t care if they’ve had no salvage experience. I’ll make salvage officers out of them. And I desperately need a dozen salvage pontoons right now for the Thomas Stone!” and I explained why. King was, of course, keenly interested. Right there I turned to, making pencil sketches of exactly the kind of pontoons I wanted, very simple ones, but big. I outlined also my requirements for officer assistants. He made a note of that, slipped my pontoon sketches into his pocket. Then he explained to me that it was a tough situation—the Mediterranean was wholly an area of British responsibility. But for what little I so badly wanted, I needn’t worry. He would see the six officers were shortly sent to help me; he personally would see that from some navy allotment somewhere was squeezed out the few hundred tons of steel necessary to build the salvage pontoons to save the Thomas Stone now and other wrecks later. The officers would be along in a few weeks; the pontoons, just as swiftly as they could be built and shipped—two months perhaps. At that moment, General Eisenhower came down, our tete-a-tete on salvage ceased abruptly. Eisenhower welcomed me genially, congratulated me on getting Oran open again, and we all sat down to tea. King steered the conversation in a different direction—what did Eisenhower think of Darlan? He couldn’t apparently have touched a subject to open Eisenhower up more vehemently. Eisenhower, still smarting under heavy attack from American opinion, told him. Knowing what he now knew, if he had it all to do over again, he’d do exactly the same. It had been the right and the only move open to him to get along with the war against the Nazis. As for Darlan himself, whether he had been a patriot or merely a turncoat anxious to be on the winning side, Eisenhower would not pretend to pass judgment. All he knew for a fact was that
from the moment he and Darlan had reached an agreement, Darlan had always played square with him to the day of his death, wholeheartedly and effectively co-operating in a difficult situation to defeat our enemies and the enemies of France. No man could have done more. What were his motives? Only God knew; Eisenhower would not presume to judge; Darlan was dead now—his conduct with us entitled him to the benefit of all doubts. Once again there was an interruption. In through the front door came General Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of the British Eighth Army, still in dusty battle dress, hot off the desert from the taking of Tripoli not twenty-four hours before! Apparently generals could come to tea in working clothes, even if it were inadvisable for salvage officers to try it. Eisenhower introduced him to King and to me, and poured some tea for him. The conversation shifted to Rommel and the conditions of desert warfare, where sand, not mud, was the problem. But that wasn’t all. Very shortly down the stairs from the second floor came to join us the Army Chief of Staff, General Marshall! My eyes bugged out. I had certainly hit into something. Eisenhower, Alexander, Marshall, King—the Allied Commander-in-Chief for Torch, the British Commander-in-Chief for all the rest of Africa, the Army Chief of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations— what a collection! If a rain of Nazi paratroopers had descended from the skies just then to seize Eisenhower, they would have fallen dead at the sight of their actual bag. I understood better now why I had run into so many tough-looking sentries amongst all the barbed wire entanglements outside. I was introduced to General Marshall, then Eisenhower proceeded to pour more tea. The conversation began again, all shop talk-how quickest to win the war with the least loss of men. I listened silently. But as the afternoon waned and the little knot around the tea table broke up, in all probability to give Eisenhower and Alexander a chance for a private discussion as to how best they might now squeeze Rommel in Tunisia between the two of them, I became a little uneasy. After all, though I’d been invited for dinner also, this was more than I had bargained for. I drew Admiral King aside and suggested that I might be a trifle out of place at dinner with all the gold lace and silver stars gleaming around there; I could easily excuse myself on urgent salvage business and leave them freer for top echelon discussion. But King said no; I must stay. Nobody would be embarrassed. So I stayed for dinner.
CHAPTER
38 WE HAD A BUSY SESSION IN MY office next day. I had brought Lieutenant Ankers ashore once the Thomas Stone was unrigged, to start working with the Royal Navy staff on making up our salvage program for the assault on Bizerte when spring came. There was to be no repetition of the unpreparedness at the taking of Oran. We should have an overland salvage party and their gear all loaded in trucks to enter Bizerte on the heels of the army, ready to cope with sabotaged ships. The King Salvor and the Salvestor (with other salvage ships if by then we had any more) were to be lined up to enter instantly from the sea side when the city fell. A large amount of preparatory work was necessary for the set-up. Ankers turned to on it. Meanwhile the King Salvor was hurriedly preparing to sail at long last for Bône to rejoin her regular salvage officer. I spent some time in instructing Captain Harding on the situation there. In the midst of these discussions, in walked Captain Bennehoff to say goodby to me. He had just been detached from the Thomas Stone and ordered to Arzeu to take command on the beaches there and train landing craft crews in amphibious warfare—that had been his speciality. Where would the men he trained work? My guess was the next beachhead assault would be on Sicily, once Tunisia was taken. But Benny was non-committal—my guess was too good to make discussion safe. Whether Benny was glad or sorry, was hard to make out. He was certainly sorry to leave his ship still on the beach; unquestionably he was glad to have an active assignment again, even if only with flotillas of small craft. I wished him luck. Then a dispatch came in from Captain Reed in Oran. Once the Grand Dock was up, before leaving Oran I had started Reed’s men on the lifting of the Moyen Dock, capsized with the capsized French submarine Danaë on top of it. Reed wired that he had run into a peculiar salvage situation. Could I come back to Oran? The instructions I’d left him didn’t fit conditions he’d found on his
new wrecks. Leaving Ankers and Reitzel to run the Algiers office, I returned next morning to Oran. Shortly I was out in a small boat over the sunken port side of the capsized Moyen Dock. Somewhat to my left was the starboard side wall of the dock, mostly out of water. Beneath me, completely invisible, was the sunken Danaë. Bill Reed explained to me his problem; Buck Scougale and Al Watson filled in the details. After a brief rest from their labors on the Grand Dock, they had turned to on the Moyen Dock. It was a shallow water job, hardly thirty feet down and comparatively simple. It lay close to the quays, to the right of the Môle Millerand. My instructions had been to waste no time in sealing up the submarine Danaë or in attempting to raise her first. They were to disregard her, seal up the sunken side of the Moyen Dock, and blow that to the surface with compressed air, bringing the sunken submarine up with it. That had been the idea and they had tried, but it wouldn’t do—they couldn’t. It appeared that the Danaë in rolling off the keel blocks to port inside the dry dock, had capsized about three-quarters round and her conning tower had punched a hole in the steel floor of the dry dock, making it non-watertight. When they blew compressed air into the dry dock, all the air amidships promptly blew out that hole and the dock wouldn’t float up. They had tried to get to the hole to patch it, but in that they’d been baffled also. The capsized submarine was lying so close on top the hole, an eel couldn’t get to it. Both Buck and Al had tried to worm their way under the sub to that hole but they just couldn’t squeeze in; it was wholly inaccessible. There was no way out except to lift the submarine off the dock first to expose the hole so it could be patched. Reed had done all the preparatory work toward that already, but so long as I was available, he felt I should know before he went contrary to my orders. Did I mind if he lifted the submarine first? It was that or nothing. Of course I didn’t mind. They could begin right away; I’d watch. Reed started up his air compressors and began to blow air into the almost upside down submarine. It wasn’t a very big one; around 600 tons. But after a little on the spot figuring, I doubted it would float up. Reed could get only about 400 tons buoyancy into it before the air started to escape from the open conning tower hatch which he couldn’t get to to batten down. That was what happened. In less than an hour, air started to bubble up freely but the sub hadn’t floated. Still, the remaining weight of the Danaë couldn’t be
great; a big floating crane should be able to lift either end. We sent tugs for the only crane Oran had, the one we had used on the Spahi. Soon they were back with it. By that time, the divers had put a heavy wire sling around the submarine’s tail. The crane hooked on to that and with no great effort heaved the Danaë’s stern to the surface. But at that point, all hands started to scratch their heads. We had the Danaë by the tail, all right, but what next? There was only one crane in Oran. If we let go the stern to lift the bow with the only crane there was, the stern would promptly sink back again on top the Moyen Dock. We were stymied. The French captain of the crane got tired of hanging on to the Danaë’s tail and asked me what I wished of him next. In Spanish we fought the situation out. It appeared there was nothing to be done except for him to slack away and let the stern sink again while I thought it over. Reed and I finally concluded there was only one way out. There was no other crane. We must find some sort of scow or barge in Oran harbor which could float a load of about 100 tons. With that available, we could lift the stern to the surface again with the crane, then carefully transfer the load to slings on the scow, let go with the crane, shift the crane over the bow, lift the bow, tow the whole floating assembly of crane, submarine, and scow off the Moyen Dock, and then sink the Danaë in the mud somewhere near by where she wouldn’t annoy us any further while we proceeded to raise the Moyen Dock. That looked all right. In my best Spanish, I told the crane skipper to stand by till morning; by then we’d have a scow and would proceed. Reed landed me on the Môle Millerand and shoved off immediately in the boat to scout Oran harbor and Mers-el-Kebir for a suitable scow. I went back to the Grand Hotel. I had a few other matters to clean up in Oran, so it was not till nearly 9 A.M. next morning that I got back to the Môle Millerand. When I got there, all hands were out on the water over the Moyen Dock, so with no boat I couldn’t join them. But I wasn’t immediately concerned over that. I stared dumbfounded out over the harbor—there before my eyes were indubitably two 100-ton floating derricks maneuvering into position over the sunken Danaë, one at either end! Over her sunken bow, just hooking on, was the big French crane we’d had the day before. Over the submerged stern, an exact duplicate of that crane was being jockeyed about to take hold there. How could that be? I knew for a fact there was only one such crane in Oran. You couldn’t any more conceal another such towering mass of steel anywhere in the harbor than you could conceal the
Washington Monument! But there was another one! However it had got there, now we were fixed to do the job right. I started to shout to Reed, busy on the slings to the submarine, to send a boat in for me. While I was waiting for the boat, I became conscious of an army major at my elbow on the quay, scanning that mysterious crane as closely as I. Apparently he knew me, though I had no recollection of ever having seen him before. He spoke first, asking quite innocuously, “You’re Captain Ellsberg, aren’t you?” I admitted it. “Fine floating derrick you’re handling out there. Where’d you get it?” I had to confess I didn’t know. I’d never seen it before till a couple of minutes ago; in fact, I could still hardly believe it wasn’t just a mirage I was looking at. “Well, I can enlighten you then, Captain,” he continued drily. “That crane belongs to the army. We had it towed in here this morning from about a hundred miles westward down the coast where we’d commandeered it to help unload General Sherman tanks from half a dozen newly arrived Libertys we’ve got alongside the quays here. How you got your hands on it, I don’t know. We’re supposed to start heaving out those tanks by noon with that crane. Now you’ve got it. I’m phoning General Larkin, Area Commander, about this right now!” “I’m certainly sorry to hear that, Major,” I apologized. “I didn’t know anything about it, and I still don’t know how it got here instead of alongside your ships. But it’s just what we need for our salvage job. In an hour we’ll be through with it; you’ll have it back before noon. Mind asking General Larkin if we can keep that crane for an hour yet?” He said he didn’t mind passing along my message. He left to find a telephone; I shoved off in our boat which had just come in for me. In a few minutes, I was in another boat over the sunken Danaë with Reed, Buck Scougale, and most of the rest of the little salvage crew. “Bill,” I asked, “how’d you get that crane?” Reed was so convulsed with laughter he could hardly get out an intelligible sentence. Finally I made out part of it. He’d been unable, in spite of a careful search, to find any scow around Oran that we could safely hang the stern of the Danaë from while we lifted her stem. He’d come back to the job that morning completely sunk, wondering how we’d ever get the Danaë up so he could raise the Moyen Dock. While he was pondering that, what should he sight being
towed into the harbor from seaward but the answer to a maiden’s prayer, another 100-ton French crane, exactly what we needed to save the situation! And just in the nick of time, too! Bill started laughing again so hard he became completely useless. Finally he managed to gasp out, “Ask Buck! He’ll tell you the rest!” I turned to Buck. Never had I known Buck Scougale except as strictly business; no foolishness about him. There wasn’t any now. No matter what it might be about that crane that was doubling Bill Reed up in stitches, Buck was still as sober as a judge. “All right, Buck. Out with it! How’d you get that crane?” “Well, Cap, it was this way,” he answered very seriously. “We was all out here stewing over what we’d do with that frog pigboat down there, seeing as Bill couldn’t find a scow, when that new crane showed up coming through the harbor entrance with a couple o’ French tugs towing it, just like Bill says. At first we all thought we’d had, too much French red-eye, but she was real enough. So after Bill came to again enough to talk, he says to me, “‘Buck, you can parley voo with these frogs better ’n I can. You take the other boat, run out on the water to that crane four bells, and no matter where she’s headed nor what it takes, you see she steers right in here. I leave it to you.’ “So,” continued Buck, “I hops into the other boat and in no time at all I’m alongside that crane. There’s them frogs, tugboats and everything, all of ’em strangers to Oran, wondering what quay they’re supposed to lay alongside of with the crane. I asks the chief frog, the skipper o’ the crane, where he’s bound with it. He says it’s for le général somebody or other, he doesn’t know his name. Where should he take it? “So I says I’ll show ’im. I’m from General Delivery, I says, an’ the general wants this crane right away for a hurry-up job alongside that other crane he can see ahead. Well, to that frog, one general’s as good as another, so he heads in here with the crane. An’ there she is, Cap; just what we need, on orders from General Delivery!” Buck, still with a straight face, stopped explaining. Bill Reed doubled up again, guffawing over Buck’s stratagem. I had to admit myself it was ingenious. But there were other aspects. “See here, boys, this is serious!” I exclaimed. “That’s General Larkin’s crane you’ve swiped. I’m going to get hanged for it. One of his majors is phoning him right now that we’ve shanghaied it. For Christ’s sake, Bill, quit laughing
and get going with that crane on the Danaë’s tail! We’ve got to finish this job before they take it away from us, and there’s damned little time!” That brought Reed to. He sobered up instantly, went to work with all his men helping the new crane to hook on to the heavy sling round the Danaë’s stern. But a massive floating crane is no rowboat to be juggled swiftly into lifting position; it took some minutes to get the ponderous lifting hook engaged. After that, it would take roughly thirty minutes more for that crane, just in from sea, to adjust its water ballast tanks to stand a maximum lift. From then on, the lift itself would go swiftly. In an hour everything would be all over. Nervous as a cat, I watched, hoping that that morning Brigadier General Larkin, Area Commander, whom I’d never met, might be somewhere out in the field with his troops where his major couldn’t get him quickly. I had no such luck. While the crane hook was being engaged, I heard a loud voice calling me from the quay. It was no use pretending I couldn’t hear; we were so close inshore, hearing was easy. I looked shoreward. There was the major calling me. “General Larkin wants to talk to you!” he shouted. “He’s waiting on the phone!” None too hopefully, I played for time. “Tell him I’m busy out on the water over a wreck!” I bellowed back. “I’ll be through in about an hour and I’ll come ashore and call him then!” “He knows damned well where you are!” was the answer. “He says you’re to drop everything and get on that phone right now!” It was no use. I couldn’t afford openly to flout the orders of the army’s Area Commander, especially as he was senior to me. I told Reed, for the love of God, to shake things up; I’d do my best with Larkin to get him the rest of the hour he needed. Then I clambered into a boat and was swiftly ashore. The major was waiting for me; he indicated a near by tool room on the quay where the phone was. I entered; the receiver was off the hook; I picked up the phone; Brigadier General Larkin, madder than hops, was on the other end, waiting. Very icily, very formally, the general told me off. I had stolen his crane. I tried to explain. There was no need to explain; he knew all about it from his major (only, unfortunately, I knew the major didn’t know all about it, though he did know too much); there was no call for explanations, for discussion. I was to discontinue instantly whatever I was doing with that crane and turn it over immediately to his major to be towed elsewhere. The crane belonged to the army; it was to be delivered to the army at once!
I tried to get in a word edgewise, pleading for the use of the crane for only one hour; it would still get to its army assignment in time. The general wasn’t discussing it; the stolen crane was to be turned over instantly. After his representatives had it in their possession ready to move it away, if I had anything further to say in extenuation of the theft, he’d listen; not before. The conversation ended. The major was just outside. I told him to wait on the quay; when we had the crane completely cast loose and clear of our wreck, he could come aboard and take it where he pleased. I shoved off in the boat. The crane was all hooked on, its ballast tanks already half filled aft in preparation for counter-balancing the heavy load to be taken over its bow. In about ten minutes more, it would be ready to lift. I ordered Reed to belay everything; I’d lost; General Larkin wouldn’t let us keep the crane even for what was left of the hour we needed. All I could hope for was that by letting go now, I could persuade him to loan us the crane for an hour some days later when the army finished with it, before it went back west where it belonged. Even that was doubtful, if I was any judge of Larkin’s feelings. My divers, listening, gazed at me incredulously, then let go an obscene chorus of objections. How could anyone, even a general, act like that? After all, wasn’t it everybody’s war? What the hell were we raising the Moyen Dock for, if not to help the Army? It wasn’t helping our Navy any; we had no warships in the Mediterranean. But I wasn’t discussing anything. I motioned Reed to accompany me aboard the new crane; we’d order it to cast loose. We boarded the crane. I got hold of its skipper, a bearded Frenchman, very busy on shifting ballast. As best I could in Spanish, I explained the job was suspended; he was to cast loose. When he was clear, General Larkin’s representative (I indicated to him the major on the quay) would board him and show him where he was to go next. The Frenchman stared at me completely bewildered, then opened up with both arms and a profane mixture of Spanish and French. Were the Americans in Oran crazy? Here he had hardly poked his nose into the harbor when he had been rushed across it to make an emergency lift; now he was nearly ready for the lift, he must not make it! First le Général Delivery tells him to come here, then le Général Larkin tells him to go there! Which general should he obey? Didn’t American generals know what they were about? How then was a poor French skipper to know what he was to do?
As well as I could, I told him I was very sorry, and tried to get over to him that in Oran General Larkin considerably outranked General Delivery and had just countermanded the latter ’s orders; perhaps, even in France, the same thing sometimes happened? That mollified the skipper; he’d seen plenty of such. With an expressive shrug of his shoulders and a philosophical, “Oui, mon capitaine!” he turned to to unrig his derrick and prepare her for towing again. The lifting job was off indefinitely. I got in the boat once more and went ashore. I would salvage what I could from the situation with General Larkin. On the quay, I told the major that when the crane was unrigged, she was all his and he could board her. The crane skipper had been told to take the major ’s orders from then on. I went back to the phone and called Larkin again, bitterly regretting that I didn’t yet have the rear admiral’s rank Cunningham was going to get for me against situations exactly like this one. Under those conditions, I’d outrank a brigadier general and we might discuss matters; as it was, he outranked me, and in his frame of mind, the discussion would no doubt be very one-sided. It was. I got Larkin again. Had I ordered the stolen crane unhooked and turned back? I had. Well then, what else did I want? For himself, he saw no reason for further discussion; he was willing to forget my dereliction; the subject was closed. For me it wasn’t. I told him briefly why not; why we needed that crane. Couldn’t I have it for just an hour ’s use when he’d finished with it? The general couldn’t see it. When he finished with it, it had to go back immediately where it came from. It couldn’t be delayed to help us. It seemed evident to me that from what he’d heard from his major, he was convinced I had myself deliberately stolen the crane and was lying to him when I said I personally knew nothing of it till afterwards, though I was, of course, responsible for what my men did. He seemed exceedingly disinterested in discussing anything with a liar and a thief. He had his crane back and was willing to let it go at that. Wasn’t that enough? I reflected. As a general, it was probable he didn’t know how much even a moderate sized dry dock meant to all the wrecks needing docking in North Africa. But I did. I just couldn’t let it go at that, no matter what happened to me personally. I kept at him. Finally I got a compromise. I suggested that I turn over to him immediately the crane I already had (and with which alone I could do nothing) so he could use both cranes to unload his General Sherman tanks
and very much speed up that work. He agreed to let me have the use of his crane when that task was done before it went back west, for the lifting of the Danaë. The discussion ended. I went back and told Bill Reed that not only was the crane he’d stolen being turned over to the army, but that in penance, we were turning the other cheek and surrendering ours also. His men would just have to loaf now a week or more, doing nothing, to make up for the thirty minutes or so the army’s crane had been in our hands. After that, we’d get them both back briefly and he could finish the clearance of the Danaë and the lifting of the Moyen Dock. I couldn’t wait in Oran for that; he could handle it. Next day I was going back to Algiers. The sequel was unexpected. Reed and his men, with nothing whatever left to do save to watch those cranes, reported to me in Algiers that for four days after we had been caught red-handed with the stolen crane, neither crane lifted anything; they both just lay idle in Oran harbor. Whatever the reasons, whether other cargo had to be handled out first or for some other cause, not a tank was lifted out by either crane, though I have little doubt that the officious major who had caused us so much trouble by his rectitude, never bothered to inform General Larkin of that. After a four-day idle spell, both cranes made short work of the General Sherman tanks. Then with both cranes back in his hands for a few brief hours, Reed yanked the obnoxious Danaë off the Moyen Dock, and a few days later had the Moyen Dock itself, the last wreck of any military importance in Oran, floated up again. At that, Reed and his whole salvage crew, all civilians, with their contract time in Africa well served out, packed their bags and went home. They’d had enough of Africa, whether in Massawa or Oran. All of them, except Reed who was too old, were going to ship in the navy, with the idea that when next they went diving, they’d be sent to a combat area where America had interest enough to furnish them the wherewithal, not where it made thieves of them to serve their country’s needs. As for me, nerves on edge, I went back to Algiers with an intolerable headache and the implications of General Larkin’s acid tones still rankling in my breast, wishing to God that General Delivery had stayed at home in the postoffice of whatever town in California Buck Scougale came from.
CHAPTER
39 T HE NIGHT I GOT BACK TO ALGIERS, January 28, 1943, there was no sleep for anyone, least of all for me who was cracking up for want of it. The most effective air raid yet staged on Algiers harbor hit us. Whatever the cause, for the first time in my experience in many raids there, the bombers got over the harbor. One heavy bomb came crashing down on the forecastle of S.S. Strasbourg, already torpedoed, alongside which I had the Salvestor working under Commander Hewett, R.N.R. Fortunately for the Strasbourg, the bomb struck squarely atop her anchor windlass, a massive piece of machinery on the forecastle near the bow. There wasn’t much left of that windlass after the explosion, but at least it saved the rest of the ship below from appreciable additional damage. However, the blast effects were terrible— the Strasbourg’s chief engineer was hurled against a bulkhead in his superstructure stateroom so violently it killed him. And on the Salvestor, tied alongside the Strasbourg’s bow, the only reason my salvage officer, Commander Hewett, wasn’t similarly killed, was that on the line the blast sent him hurtling across his cabin, there was an open door. Through this he was flung to land on the deck outside so badly bruised and shaken I doubted he’d be worth much for some time, if ever. Two other ships caught it also, both remarkably enough, also salvage jobs from previous torpedoes, on which we were already working. Neither was hit directly, but in one case, a bomb exploding close alongside, lifted that ship right up out of the water and set her down again with such a smack she ended with a bad corrugation in her heavy steel plating completely encircling her amidships. In the other case, a bomb exploded squarely in line with the ship’s stern but a little distance aft of it. The stern of that ship above water looked as if a titanic shotgun had been fired into it-it was riddled with hundreds of small shrapnel holes. But both ships stayed afloat, and as salvage jobs weren’t too much worse off afterwards than before.
However, the Nazi bombers paid dearly for it. Off the far end of the harbor, the searchlights caught one bomber flying low, and it went down into the sea riddled with tracers from Oerlikons tracking it from all sides. Then we learned later that, thoroughly enraged by what had happened over Algiers, the nightfighters from every field eastward between us and Bône (including a new squadron just arrived at Didjelli) had risen to engage the returning bombers and had had a field day in the dark skies. The result was that more than half of all the bombers over Algiers that night were shot down on their way home. It was unlikely the Nazis would ever repeat that raid. But shot-down bombers or not, the raid left me and my few men with plenty more to do. Wearily I went about it. In the midst of all that, I had word the Admiral of the Fleet wanted to see me. I left the harbor, went back to the St. George. What now? It was enough in my then state of mind. Very glumly, Cunningham told me he had bad news for me. The day after my dinner at General Eisenhower ’s, Cunningham, thinking to seize a golden opportunity while he had our Chief of Naval Operations still in Algiers, had told Admiral King he and Eisenhower were going to recommend me for promotion to rear admiral; would King please see that the recommendation got a fair wind and speedy action when it got to Washington? The result had been wholly unexpected. King had told him that so far as he was concerned, nothing would give him greater pleasure. But it just couldn’t be done. No longer in the regular Navy, I was now a naval reserve officer. Congress, by law, had restricted the Naval Reserve to exactly one officer in the rank of rear admiral; there already was one, a much older officer than I, holding down a desk job in Washington. No more could legally be made. Greatly distressed at such an unfair situation, Cunningham told me he, of course, had to agree with King that it was useless to make the recommendation. Our Congress was as much beyond King’s control as Parliament was beyond his own. Much as he, as well as Admiral King regretted it, I must remain a captain. As for himself, aside from all other aspects of this fiasco due to our strange laws, it was unfortunate to leave the command situation on future wrecks in quite undesirable shape. But there was nothing he could do about it. I thanked the Admiral of the Fleet both for his goodwill and for his intentions; it certainly wasn’t his fault nor General Eisenhower ’s. I would continue to do the best I could. I said goodby and went back to my newly bombed wrecks in the harbor, very
low in spirits. My own country had done next to nothing in helping out with materials or anything else the few men it had sent to fight its war on the sea in the Mediterranean. Why did Congress have to make a bad situation worse by discriminating against some officers because they were reserves, and forbid them rank enough to cope properly with the situations the war tossed them into? It wasn’t so in the Army; it wasn’t so in the Air Corps. Both had nonregulars by the dozens wearing the silver stars of brigadiers and major generals, and even of lieutenant generals; all needed them for the jobs they had. But apparently naval reserve officers were a completely different and inferior breed of cats; Congress didn’t think enough of us to let us have rank equal to our war zone jobs. Under such conditions, no wonder anybody with a little more rank in any other service, kicked us around. I was still wincing under the latest set of black and blue marks I’d got myself. However, as well as I could I shrugged my shoulders, told myself “C’est la guerre!” and went back to Algiers harbor to board my wrecks, feeling somewhat as if a bomb had just exploded right under my stern also. I was still busily engaged next day on those wrecks when in the afternoon, I got word from the Admiral of the Fleet’s office there was trouble to the eastward. A very sketchy radio dispatch had come in indicating there had been a battle at sea off Bougie between a convoy bound east and Nazi torpedo planes. While they had succeeded in saving their accompanying merchant ships from any harm, both of the warships protecting the convoy—the Javelin class destroyer H.M.S. L 06, and the anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Pozarica— had been torpedoed and badly damaged. Both were trying to make Bougie; their safe arrival was uncertain; too little was known of their condition. What could be done to help? I had no salvage forces at all in Bougie; no ship, no men. All I could do was to order the Salvestor to stand by to cast loose from the Strasbourg and steam for Bougie if she got further word. There was no use ordering her to start immediately; she couldn’t possibly get clear and arrive for more than twentyfour hours yet; she would be much too late. There was only one other thing possible; to start overland for Bougie myself. It was about 110 miles away; in three hours I could get there. So taking only Lieutenant Ankers with me (both of us hastily grabbing guns and very little else), I headed eastwards out of Algiers in my jeep. Meanwhile, Captain King, R.N., of Cunningham’s staff, the Fleet Naval Constructor, started soon after us in another car.
Ankers drove all the way, nearly hiding the steering wheel with his huge paws. It was very cold in that open jeep with the wintry wind getting a free sweep at us. Long before we got to Bougie, Ankers’ hands on the wheel, in spite of his gloves, were so frozen they were numb lumps of flesh. Jammed into what little space his massive frame left me of the front seat, I myself was frozen so stiff I could hardly move. Even with the many truck convoys we had to pass, Ankers made Bougie in not much over two hours. We roared through the town to the waterfront just as dusk was falling, to haul up finally on the outer quay overlooking the Mediterranean. Our reception in Bougie was disheartening. As we drew up in the semidarkness on the stone quay, hoping to find some fast boat awaiting us on which we might get out to sea, a whole flotilla of miscellaneous small boats swung in alongside the quay and began to disgorge shipwrecked British seamen. There was the whole crew of H.M.S. Pozarica from captain on down, over four hundred men, scrambling up on the quay around us. Evidently the major ship we had come to save had sunk; engulfing our jeep was her whole ship’s company bearing on their backs what little of their belongings, mainly clothes, they had managed to escape with. I spotted her captain; from his gold lace, a regular Royal Navy four-striper, as suited a cruiser command. With difficulty, I slid my numbed legs out of the jeep, went up to him, introduced myself. Obviously, his ship had foundered; but how about the L 06, that destroyer with him? Was she, at least, still afloat, so we could do anything for her? I learned I had jumped to a wrong conclusion. Yes, the L 06 was still afloat. But so also was his ship, the Pozarica, though she wouldn’t be much longer. If it weren’t so dark, I might perhaps still be able to see part of her forecastle some miles out in the bay where they’d finally abandoned her. With her stern wide open to the sea, she was on the point of capsizing or foundering or both; you couldn’t tell which first. Her propeller shaft was bent and useless, her rudder and part of her fantail had been blown off by the torpedo which had hit her squarely astern; what was left of her aft was already fourteen feet under water; she had a terrific list to port, an ungodly trim by the stern, and was about to go down. He had finally ordered her abandoned; there he was with his whole crew except the casualties from the exploding torpedo. I needn’t bother about his ship; she was beyond hope. And I needn’t bother about the destroyer either; she didn’t need any help. She’d been hit forward, leaving her machinery all
intact; while badly damaged, she was still safely afloat and would remain so. That sounded better. One sinking ship at a time was enough to keep Ankers and me busy. We could concentrate on the Pozarica. I peered out across the wide Bay of Bougie for a glimpse of her. But it was already too dark; I could make out nothing. I turned again to her commanding officer. “Well, Captain,” I said, “you pick out about thirty or forty of your ratings here that’ll do the most good in saving her, and we’ll start right back. We’ll bring her in yet!” On that quay in Bougie, my education was finally completed. Her captain wasn’t going back to try to save his ship; neither was he ordering any of his crew back aboard. She was already a total loss; why bother with her further? I had spotted hovering about on the fringe of the mob of shipless sailors, that Scotch lieutenant of Royal Engineers (together with a few of his khaki-clad enlisted men) who had taken such an interest in salvaging the half-sunken Glenfinlas when I had been in Bougie only the week before. I was sure I could rely on that British army lieutenant for the men I needed. His soldiers were at least all mechanics; he himself was a good engineer. So I didn’t argue with the Pozarica’s skipper; it was no use. He had four stripes; as many as I. I couldn’t claim to be Senior Officer Present and order him to do anything; I didn’t have rank enough to try it; I never should have. And there didn’t seem to be any value in wasting what slight energy I had left in pleading with him; he had clearly enough stated his ideas. I beckoned to the Royal Engineer lieutenant; he pushed his way through to me. Would he and his soldiers, two or three squads of them, go out to sea with me to try to save the abandoned cruiser Pozarica for the Royal Navy? To my joy (I knew he’d do it), he said he would. He went even further, to tell me that in anticipation of help coming, he’d already started out a small flat barge with a sergeant and some of his soldiers on it and one of the only type of pump he had—a high pressure gasoline-driven fire pump. He had another such pump coming down to the quay very shortly; those pumps were intended only for fighting air raid fires in Bougie; they weren’t high capacity low pressure salvage pumps, but they might be of some help on a ship. Anyway, those two were all the portable pumps of any kind in Bougie; would I look at the one soon to arrive and tell him whether it was worth sending out? The other one was just like it. Here was a man! I forgot all about the Pozarica’s captain; I didn’t need him any more. I turned to on that engineer lieutenant, instructing him to get as much
suction hose for his two fire pumps as he could; we’d need it all, as well as his pumps, which while not suited to the job, were at least something. But if I’d forgotten the skipper of the Pozarica, he hadn’t forgotten me. Now that he saw I had some men to help, even though they were only unseagoing British soldiers, and that we were going out, he thrust his way through his own milling seamen to my side, to give me the most severe shock of my entire salvage career. He tried to persuade me not to go out to try to save his sinking ship! Now I had seen everything in salvage. Never again could I have a new experience, unless it should be my ill-luck to go down trapped inside a foundering ship myself—as soon seemed likely from the arguments of the Pozarica’s captain. But if I couldn’t order that captain to do anything, no more was he in any position to give me any orders. He couldn’t keep me off the Pozarica; she wasn’t his any more; he’d abandoned her. I turned away to continue my instructions to the army lieutenant and some of his sergeants. We had to wait a bit for the second fire pump and the additional suction hose to arrive. We got a bite to eat while we waited, and a drink to thaw Ankers and me out. While we waited, we acquired some new recruits. A Royal Navy lieutenant (interestingly enough, a reserve lieutenant), pushed up to tell me he was one of the junior engineers on the Pozarica; he and some half dozen of his enlisted engineering ratings wanted to go back with me to help save their ship; they knew her and could be useful; would I take them with me? I would; neither I nor they put whatever nautical nuances might be involved in that proceeding, up to their skipper. If they or I ever got court-martialed for it, the court would have to decide on the ethics of our action. I wasn’t bothering; neither were they. Shortly, jammed in amongst her deck torpedo tubes, we shoved off in the darkness on a British MTB carrying the second fire pump on its rubber-tired carriage, about a dozen soldiers, the few men belonging to the Pozarica and their lieutenant, Ankers, the Scotch lieutenant, and myself. Our pockets were bulging with all the flashlights we could scavenge around Bougie—we’d need them inside the pitch-black hull of the dying Pozarica, a strange ship to most of us. The sub-lieutenant commanding the MTB gave her the gun once he was clear of the quay. We roared out through the harbor defense nets into the wide Bay of Bougie, practically the open sea. Even in the darkness, the speedy MTB
made short work of the few miles to sea where the abandoned cruiser lay. On our way, we passed the destroyer L 06 not far off, anchored by her stern now somewhat closer to shore but well outside the harbor. She was, of course, wholly blacked out. I could vaguely make out her profile as we shot by her in the night—there was only half a destroyer there; the stern half. From her bridge forward, she just didn’t exist any more. No torpedo alone could have done that; her forward magazine must have exploded also and blown her bow half to bits. But so far as I could judge, the rest of her was on an even keel at about normal draft. Her watertight bulkheads beneath her bridge must still be intact; there was no indication that she was making any water aft. It was remarkable, but what I’d been told seemed true. I didn’t need to bother about her; she was evidently safely afloat and would stay so. The Pozarica would be our only problem; she would be enough. The MTB raced on by the amputated L 06, then began to swerve sharply in the darkness, first to starboard, then to port, heeling crazily each time as she swung. Her skipper was evidently dodging the protruding masts of the numerous troopships bombed and sunk earlier off Bougie; I couldn’t see them till each in succession flitted by us in the night but he knew where they were. The Bay of Bougie was already a considerable graveyard for British ships. I reflected grimly that the Pozarica’s skipper had brought her to an appropriate enough spot in which to bury her; she would, so far as he was concerned, have much company there on the ocean floor. Very soon we made out the shadow which was the waterlogged hulk of the anti-aircraft light cruiser H.M.S. Pozarica, with the deserted guns of her two forward turrets still pointing futilely skyward. The MTB slowly circled her so that I might look her over. In the darkness, I could see but little, but that little was enough. We should have the tiger by the tail if we boarded the Pozarica now. If we did, and ever saw Bougie again, with or without that cruiser, it would be more luck than we had any right to expect. She was lying with even the heavy gun atop her after deckhouse completely submerged and the sea already lapping up against her midships superstructure. Her quarterdeck had wholly vanished beneath the waves; her after end must be entirely flooded. She had an ominous trim by the stern; so much so, it seemed any minute she was about to slide stern first into the sea and disappear altogether. So heavily was she trimmed down aft, her stem had been lifted wholly out of water, exposing her forefoot and a good part of her keel
forward. To top off all, she had a hellish list to port; her tripod masts and her stack were leaning far over. It was evident that between that list and her trim, keeping any footing at all on her tilted decks would be a problem even for a monkey. Why in that condition she still remained afloat was a puzzle. I judged her after engine room bulkhead must still be holding against the sea, giving her buoyancy enough amidships and forward to keep her afloat and relatively still right side up. How long that bulkhead might continue to do so was anybody’s guess; if it let go, she’d go down like a rock. All in all, the abandoned Pozarica, inert, dark as a tomb, awash, fearfully heeled over, with an alarming trim aft, was an awesome sight to look upon, a frightening object to dream of boarding. As I first saw her, shrouded in darkness, engulfed in the blackness of the night, seemingly about to be swallowed up by the inky sea already washing over her aft, she was an even more terrifying ship to board than the blazing Strathallan. There at least the roaring flames gave an illusion of life and more light than we ever had any need for; here on the careened Pozarica all seemed only cold death and ghastly darkness waiting us. We boarded the Pozarica, climbing up one of the scramble nets draped down her starboard side. I told the MTB skipper to hang on there for further orders. A little aft of where we came alongside was the float sent out before, practically fair with the ship’s gunwale at the awash deck. I asked the Scotch lieutenant to start heaving his two fire pumps up on deck and as far aft as he still had any deck left to stand them on; he wouldn’t have much of a lift in doing it nor far to go. While he was busy on that, Ankers, the Pozarica’s engineer lieutenant, and I, would survey her inside and below and see what she needed. With our flashlights boring holes in the ebony blackness, the three of us, led by the Royal Navy man who knew the ship, threaded our way over the co*ckbilled decks inside the midships superstructure, then down a deck, then inboard to the bulkhead door leading below to her engine room. I shined my light inside there, peered down on a mass of tilted gratings, drunkenly inclined ladders, and grotesquely heeled over machinery. Followed by Ankers and the other lieutenant, I started down the narrow steel ladder into the black cavern below, clinging with one hand to a precarious hold on the oily ladder, with the other swinging my torch all about. The after bulkhead was squirting stinging jets of water at us; the ship must be completely
flooded on the other side of that bulkhead. Down three flights of steel ladders I went; a fearful climbing job. Those steep and slippery engine room ladders with all their winding turns would have been bad enough with the ship in normal trim and fully illuminated; as she was, it was a feat for an acrobat to get down them with an unbroken neck. By the time I got near the floor plate gratings, I knew where I was at with the Pozarica. That after engine room bulkhead was all that was keeping her afloat; she was solidly flooded aft of it all the way to its top; those high pressure leaks all over it proved that. So long as that bulkhead held, she wouldn’t sink, except gradually. But she was surely going to capsize long before she was ready to sink bodily unless something was done swiftly. For aside from all the fine leaks, there was a continuous flow of water entering the lower engine room around the propeller shaft where it passed through the after bulkhead, and even more water was streaming steadily in around the bulging watertight door to the flooded shaft alley. That low down near her keel, the weight of the sea pressing from way above the submerged quarterdeck, was too much for both watertight door and shaft stuffing box—they’d never been built to hold any pressure like that, and they weren’t holding against it. I took a second look at that bulging shaft alley door; it was the weakest spot on the bulkhead. If it let go, God help us! But nothing could be done about it just then, except to ignore it and hope it might hold till we could get around to shoring it. The incoming water had already flooded her up to the lower engine room gratings and was steadily rising, all running to port, of course, where it was constantly increasing her heel. How much more of that could she stand before she suddenly rolled over on us? Who knew? I swung my light around in the utter blackness, scanning the rising water to port, the leaks aft, the dead machinery all about me. She was a diesel-driven ship—no steam, no boilers. All the way over to port against her heeled-down side, I could see a small room, door open, housing an auxiliary diesel-driven electric generator. The water had already flooded through the door into that room; the generator was useless. But to starboard, the high side of the ship, the thin shaft of light from my torch showed a similar room and a similar diesel-driven generator. The water hadn’t risen high enough yet on that side to flood in there, but it would before too long. If we could start that diesel, we could get power enough to give us light all over the ship; an inestimable boon for working. And if I could get a
pump going down in that engine room to get rid of the water already there and also what was coming in, preferably before it flooded out the starboard generator also, we could save her from capsizing on us. And if I could do that, it would give us time to empty at least some submerged compartments aft and keep her from sinking. And we’d save her. But first, some light. I turned to the Pozarica’s junior engineer beside me. Could he and his seamen start that starboard diesel generator, throw in the proper circuits, and light up the ship amidships and forward, so we could work? And dispel the soul-chilling darkness in which we were shrouded? He could. He and they promptly did, too. In a few minutes, that starboard diesel was throbbing, electric lights flashed on all about us, the dying Pozarica seemed not quite so nearly dead. From up on deck, we heard a cheer. Things began to look a little hopeful. At least, if now we died far down inside the Pozarica, it wouldn’t be in darkness. There was some comfort in that. Now to get rid of the water in the engine room which shortly would be the death of her unless ejected. Could we start a ship’s pump next, I asked her lieutenant? We couldn’t; her pumps were all flooded out there beneath our feet and useless, every one of them. Well, there still were those two portable army fire pumps up on deck. Could they do the job, I wondered? I glanced upward. It was certain they couldn’t. The engine room was so deep from the floor plates to the entrance door far above us, that no pump set on the deck outside that door could possibly suck water up that high; the laws of Nature just wouldn’t permit it. And as for getting one of those fire pumps down into the engine room close enough to the water where it could pick up a suction and then push the water up and overboard, that was impossible also. My heart sank as I realized that both of those gasoline-driven army fire pumps were so bulky, even if we took the wheels off their carriages, that they could not possibly be squeezed through the narrow door in the steel bulkhead into the upper engine room, let alone ever be got far enough down those steep ladders so they could suck. Those pumps were built for use in the wide outdoors where there was plenty of elbow room; not for inside the close confines of any ship. If they were set on deck and used on some of the flooded after compartments, they might perhaps save her from sinking immediately. Still, what good would it do us to save her from sinking now or later, if she capsized on us meanwhile, as assuredly she would before long if we couldn’t cope with the water rising in the engine room and heeling her farther and
farther over? It all seemed hopeless; every man of us, sailor or soldier alike aboard the Pozarica, was risking his life for no gain. It began to look as if her skipper were right in washing his hands of her. I racked my fuddled brains for an answer. There must be one; my experience in salvage had taught me there always was some way out, unconventional though it might seem. All that was necessary usually to find the answer was a little imagination and no inhibitions. The answer came to me. The answer was the L 06, that near by shattered warship I’d passed not long before on my way out from Bougie. The L 06 was a British destroyer, even though she was now only the after half of one. And British destroyers, as I’d learned on the Porcupine, all carried a beautifully compact portable electrically driven centrifugal pump! And there to starboard of me on the Pozarica was the electricity—that is, it was there provided I could get a pump down and going before the water rose high enough to flood that generator also. All I needed now was the electric pump—fast! The L 06, blasted in half herself, was going to furnish the wherewithal to save her sorely stricken big sister—if only I could move fast enough. Telling Ankers to do what he could aft with the Royal Engineers’ fire pumps while I was gone, I went flying up those dizzying, greasy ladders out of the engine room, raced out on deck. I grabbed six of the nearest soldiers, ordered them to follow me, shot down the scramble net to the MTB alongside. There was no time to waste. “The L 06, four bells!” I gasped, completely out of breath from climbing. “Shake a leg!” The MTB skipper was a good lad. We were underway in no time, threading a path again in the night amongst other wrecks. In a few minutes we were alongside the after half of the L 06. She was absolutely black and silent. I couldn’t see a soul on her deck anywhere. However, not bothering about that, I leaped aboard her stern from the MTB, telling the soldiers to wait where they were. I went up her deck, peering with my torch into her after deckhouse. I found inside a very sleepy quartermaster, the only man not turned in on that wreck. Where, I asked of him, was the Officer of the Deck? It appeared that he was it; all hands (those yet alive, that is) were thoroughly knocked out from what they’d been through. The captain’d given everybody permission to turn in. That was all right with me; all I wanted of the quartermaster was first a little information, then maybe to be led to the captain.
As for the information; had they had a portable electric pump on the L 06 and where had they kept it stowed? They had, and thank God, they’d always kept it stowed amidships! It was on the part of the L 06 which was still there. That was fine, I said; now take me to the captain. He did. We found the captain dead to the world, stowed away in a cabin still intact under what was left of his bridge. With very great difficulty, we managed to get the captain half awake. I told him what I wanted; why I needed it; could I have it? I doubt if the skipper half realized what was being asked of him; he was too far gone in utter exhaustion. Without even rolling over to face me, he mumbled I could have anything I wanted on the ship so long as it didn’t involve turning out any of his crew to get it, and for the love of God, not to bother him again— nor his men either. That was still all right with me; I’d brought my own crew. I certainly sympathized with his desires—no one, even in the darkness, could look at the forlorn remnant of his destroyer and not heartily agree with him. I ran aft for my six soldiers. In a few minutes they were struggling to get that heavy cylindrical pump down out of the midships skids where it was stowed, and aft aboard our MTB. It took all six of them to lug it. Meanwhile the quartermaster was helping me with the special electric cable for it and with the special hoses, without which it would be useless. I demurred over the hoses—there wasn’t enough; only one short length of suction hose and one fifty-foot length of discharge hose. We had nothing on the Pozarica which would fit that very special pump. Didn’t the L 06 have any more hose for their pump? The quartermaster assured me that was all there was; there had been more once, but no longer; what I saw was the whole story. I had to be content with that. In another few minutes our MTB was plunging through the night again, threading its way back to the Pozarica. By now I had a slight knowledge of the inside layout of our cruiser, but the knowledge gave me little comfort. Six husky soldiers, three on each side of that pump, had had trouble enough lugging it along the level open deck of the L 06. On the Pozarica there were no level wide decks; we should have to lug that pump aft along a very narrow lower deck passage where there wasn’t room for men to walk abreast and where the decks had a crazy rake that made you seasick just to try to walk on them. And then those terrible ladders down into the lower engine room, on which a man could hardly hold himself, let
alone help manhandle down over a quarter of a ton of pump! We had a pump, all right, small enough to go through the engine room door. But how were we ever going to get it to that door in time, to say nothing of getting it below afterwards where it might do some good? It was a labor to baffle Hercules himself. How I was going to get that pump below in time, I couldn’t figure out. We ran the MTB this time in alongside the heeled-down side of the Pozarica, her low port side. There at a spot where the height of the MTB’s deck just matched the gunwale of the cruiser, we skidded the heavy pump across onto the cruiser ’s deck; that wasn’t too bad. Nor did we have too much difficulty till we had the pump down inside her on the lower deck passageway and started aft. Then trouble hit us with a vengeance. I watched gloomily as first with soldiers alone, then with sailors substituted for some of them, the straining men struggled to get aft with the pump. Time was running out on me; the list on the Pozarica was decidedly worse than when I’d left her to get the pump. The men just couldn’t do it; there wasn’t room in that narrow passage to get alongside the pump and take a grip on it. When they changed their tactics, using three men at each end instead of any alongside, the men at the front end of the pump were unable all at the same time to keep a grip on the pump, walk backwards, and hold any footing on the inclined deck—they fell all over each other. The pump crashed to the deck. I sent a sailor up on the topside to see if he could find a block and tackle anywhere on that deserted wreck; perhaps we’d have better luck trying to drag the pump with the line, and later we’d need the block and tackle anyway to lower the pump below. But the sailor was dubious; after all, he was in the engineer force, not a seaman. Where the lines might be kept on the ship, he didn’t know; neither did any of his mates. But he’d try to find one. He left. I started almost to sweat blood. Every second counted now. I urged the men left to try again. They did; the results were terrible; there just wasn’t room enough to work for all the men it took to lift the front end of that pump. Ankers was behind me in the passage. As well as I, he knew the need for haste. He did something about it. “Get the hell out of the way!” he ordered the three sailors struggling a third time at the front end of the pump to get a grip on it. “Let me at that pump!” Before they even realized what it was he wanted, he sent them all flying down the passage clear of the pump end, seized it himself, lifted it clear of the deck! I gazed at him, awestruck. Over an eighth of a ton at least on that end, and
he was holding it all alone. Here was Hercules himself going into action to save the Pozarica. Thank God, I had brought a giant along with me! “Come on now, men!” he sang out to the three British soldiers, all huskies, holding up the other end of that pump. “Let’s get cracking!” They got underway, Ankers going backwards, the other three forward. In very little time, the pump moved a hundred feet aft along that cramped passage, came opposite the door leading below to the engine room. They set the pump down again. Inside the door were those impossible ladders. Now we’d have to wait for the block and tackle. Even with that, it would be very dubious. But there was no other way. I looked at the sickening angle of the bulkheads. Would that sailor never get back to us with the lowering tackle? Or had he finally decided it was more prudent, now that he was there, to stay up on the topside where he had a chance at least? The seconds dragged away. Ankers lost patience. “To hell with the blocks, Captain! We can get it down without them. Come on, lads!” He picked up his end of the pump again, the soldiers obediently picked up theirs, he went backwards through the engine room door to the head of the topmost ladder, set the pump down, went a few rungs down the ladder, gripped the pump once more. “For God’s sake, don’t try that, George!” I sang out to him. “You’ll get killed, sure!” But George Ankers said nothing. Perhaps he felt he might as well get killed while doing something as while doing nothing; I never knew. He merely clenched his teeth, took a firmer grip on the lower end of the pump, motioned with his head to the soldiers above to lower it away to him. The next few minutes were the most agonizing of my life as I watched that pump going down those crazy ladders, almost wholly supported from below by Lieutenant Ankers, with the three straining soldiers above, their neck muscles standing out like flutes on a column, clinging grimly to their end lest the pump weight they were supporting get away from them to knock clear and to crush the man perilously balancing himself on the ladder beneath. First down one ladder, then down the second, finally down the third, went that pump. How Ankers ever managed it on those terrifying engine room ladders without smashing the pump, let alone himself, I don’t know yet. But he did. And hardly had he finally landed the pump safely just clear of the water
lapping over the lower gratings, than he was bending over it, feverishly starting to couple up the suction hose while I coupled on the discharge hose and the Pozarica’s lieutenant, together with one of his men who was an electrician, began to couple up the special electric cable to drive it. In another minute the pump was running, sucking up water hardly a few inches away from it. And none too soon either. The water had risen almost to the doorsill of the room housing that starboard generator on whose continued running everything depended. But I swiftly discovered we weren’t out of the woods yet. We were pumping out water, all right, but to no purpose save to make matters worse. The soldier on the top grating who had had orders to run the other end of the discharge hose up on deck and overboard, shouted down to me, “The bloody hose ain’t long enough, Captain! It won’t reach the open deck! Y’re only flooding the passage up here!” That was bad. Free water high up in a ship is even more dangerous to her stability than the same water low down in her bilges; it helps to make her topheavy and more likely to capsize. And the Pozarica needed very little encouragement in that. I scrambled up to the ladders to cure the situation. If the hose (of which I could get only one length from the L 06) wasn’t long enough to get up on deck with the water we were pumping, I’d open a lower deck airport near by and shove the end of the hose out that. But I found I couldn’t. There weren’t any airports. The side of the Pozarica was armored all the way up to her main deck; there wasn’t a single airport in her side, near or far! And already I was standing in that lower deck passageway in deepening water that we were pumping up from below! Now we were up against it! In a frenzy, I rushed up a hatchway to the main deck lest I be too late. There a little aft of me in the open were those two army fire pumps, sucking away through an after hatch on some compartment just below where Ankers had placed them. Near by on deck was that Royal Engineer lieutenant. “Quick, Lieutenant!” I ordered. “Get one of your pumps up here!” I indicated the hatch through which I’d just come. The lieutenant, his sergeant, a few soldiers, all seized the pump, still running, yanked up its suction hose, rolled the pump up the steeply sloping deck to the new location (not too hard a task since it was on wheels). Then they dropped its suction hose down to the deck below into the lake of water there
coming up from the engine room. In a moment, it had caught suction and was picking that water up out of the passageway to push it overboard in fine style. We were using two pumps in tandem to do the job of one, but thank God, we had the two pumps! I wiped my sweating brow, sagged back against the carriage of that fire pump. Now the situation was at last in hand; the Pozarica wasn’t going to get a chance to capsize on us. We could finally proceed in some order to keep her from sinking. The worst was over. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t so late; we’d hardly been aboard her an hour yet. But I felt as if I’d lived nearly a whole lifetime in that hour. We slaved all the rest of that night, all the next day, all the second night, and well into the third day on the Pozarica. We saved her. When the third day dawned at last on a completely bleary-eyed, gaunt, and utterly worn out little company of soldiers and sailors on the Pozarica, she was no longer in danger. All her list was gone; she stood erect, heeled neither to starboard nor to port; she would never capsize. And we had emptied enough of her flooded stern compartments so that we had brought her after gun and part of her after deckhouse above the sea and reduced her trim sufficiently to put her bow once more into the water and make her keel invisible. She was safe from sinking. Her deck aft was still under water; she still had such a trim by the stern as to cause any seaman looking at her to open his eyes wide in astonishment; but she was safe. Ninety-eight per cent of H.M.S. Pozarica was intact, undamaged, and wanting only dry docking to get rid of the remaining water aft and the rebuilding of her rudder, her propeller shaft, and a bit of her fantail to make a fighting ship of her again. With the cruiser in that condition, her captain who had helped us not at all to save His Majesty’s Ship Pozarica, came back (with most of the rest of his crew; a few had drifted back sooner) to take command again of his vessel. As I had no authority to deny it to him, he took command. Early in the afternoon, under his command and once again wholly manned by her own crew, the Pozarica started in tow the last few miles into Bougie harbor. I rode as a passenger, but I soon wished I hadn’t. Going through the wide gate between the harbor nets, her skipper managed to keep too close to the starboard side of the channel, tangled his bent propeller shaft in the nets there, and went into the harbor dragging with him half the net defenses of
Bougie. I was too far gone myself to help him any further. The British salvage ship Salvestor, which I had sent for, had just that day arrived from Algiers. Wearily I got hold of Commander Hewett, R.N.R., her salvage officer. I told him to take over with his divers the task of cutting away with underwater torches or with wire cutters the steel wire anti-submarine nets in which the Pozarica’s skipper had succeeded in enmeshing himself, so the ship could be towed to Algiers for docking and repairs. Hewett took over. I went ashore. There was little more for me in Bougie. I personally thanked the lieutenant of Royal Engineers and every one of his soldiers for what they had done for their country and for their Allies. It is a keen regret to me I have no record of that young Scotch engineer lieutenant’s name—he was an honor to the Royal Engineers, to Britain, and to his comrades in arms, of whom I felt proud to count myself one. He was a man. Lieutenant George Ankers, as soon as I was able, I should recommend for a Navy Cross. No man in action had better earned one. But I doubted that, in spite of my most earnest recommendation, he’d ever actually get it. There had been no banners flying, no bugles blowing, nothing at all of the glory of war about the setting, nothing at all but danger when Ankers had taken his life in his hands far down inside that sinking ship to save the torpedoed Pozarica. Not one man in thousands would have had the strength and skill to do it; not one in millions would also have had the courage to dare it. But it was only salvage; in Washington that wouldn’t seem worth a major decorafion. I ordered Ankers to stay in Bougie, and when he had recuperated sufficiently, to take over the salvage of the half-sunken Glenfinlas, aided by the local Royal Engineers. I left him my jeep, as the only help I could give him. I may add that between him and that Scotch lieutenant, the Glenfinlas’ bow was shortly floated on a bubble of air and she went westward for dry docking. As for myself, I crawled into Captain King’s car when I left the Pozarica, and behind his chauffeur, the two of us were shortly on our way back over the road to Algiers, to report to the Admiral of the Fleet that H.M.S. Pozarica had been saved, no thanks to her captain. The Fleet Naval Constructor for the Royal Navy, who was my companion on the ride back, had arrived in Bougie shortly after me, just in time to witness the scene there when the Pozarica’s skipper had endeavored to persuade me not to go out to his abandoned ship. Captain King had seen most of what had gone on afterwards. He told me he was going to recommend to the Naval Commander-in-Chief that the Pozarica’s captain be
tried by court-martial. I hardly heard him. In my condition, I cared no longer what happened to that skipper, to me, to anybody.
CHAPTER
40 WE GOT TO ALGIERS. I LEFT ALL the reporting to Captain King. I went straight to my quarters and sprawled out on the bed. I needed a rest. But I didn’t get it. I couldn’t sleep, not then, not that night, not the next day. The Pozarica had been one wreck too many. Now all that ran in a jumble through my dazed mind, driving me wild for want of sleep, were wrecks. All kinds of wrecks—wrecks about to break in two, obstinate wrecks that wouldn’t come off the beach, wrecks wrapped in flames with ghostly guns firing from them, sabotaged wrecks that wouldn’t come up, wrecks torn wide open in collision, wrecks torpedoed and on the verge of sinking, teetering wrecks about to capsize, wrecks in port, wrecks at sea with U-boats skulking about, angling for a finishing shot. I struggled subconsciously with all of them as my worn out body tossed on the mattress, while consciously I tried to put them all out of my mind so I could get some desperately needed sleep. It was no use; I couldn’t sleep. The second day, I went to the sickbay to be given something so I might obtain a little rest. The army surgeon there took a look at me, promptly put me on the sicklist and off duty, and carted me over to deposit me as a patient in the Algiers army hospital. There they stowed me away in bed, gave me something so I might sleep, and then spent the next four days going over me—all sorts of army surgeons and all sorts of tests, concluding with a special examination by the senior surgeon himself of General Eisenhower ’s staff. The net result was that on February 8, the colonel commanding the hospital reported to General Eisenhower: “It is our opinion that the condition is the result of excessive strain upon the heart … and in view of the possibility of complete cardiac failure, we advise that the patient have absolute rest of from four to five weeks completely away from the theater of operations.”
I looked at the copy of that report furnished me. That “complete cardiac failure” caught my eye; what did that mean in plain English? To me it indicated that he meant I might suddenly fall dead. I doubted it; I didn’t feel that bad; if only I could get a real rest, I’d be all right again. A little later, with that report in his hands, General Eisenhower sent for me. They let me up out of bed; I went to his office; the Admiral of the Fleet was also there. Both Eisenhower and Cunningham agreed with the surgeon that I needed the absolute rest and was entitled to it. Where did I prefer to be sent—to Marrakech in Morocco where there was an army hospital fairly well out of the war zone, or home to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda near Washington? It was completely a rhetorical question; they knew the answer even before I could get a word out of my mouth. General Eisenhower considered the question further. Evidently he had the future of my naval career at heart. He didn’t want to do anything that might affect it adversely. He said it would be inadvisable to send me home a hospital case; that wouldn’t look good. It would be better if I were merely detached, duty completed. He’d get Washington unofficially immediately so it would be all right; I could go home simply as detached; in Washington I’d be hospitalized on arrival. If, for the record, I’d request a change of duty, he’d handle everything else. Cunningham agreed that that was best. I went back to the Algiers hospital and wrote out a request for a transfer. After that, things moved with amazing rapidity. The Admiral of the Fleet forwarded it with a letter of his own: COMMANDER-IN -CHIEF, ALLIED FORCE. 1. I forward herewith, with the liveliest regret, the application of Captain E. Ellsberg, U.S.N.R., to be relieved of his duties as Principal Salvage Officer in the Torch area. 2. Captain Ellsberg has performed immeasurable service in the last 15 months, both during his performance in salvage in the Massawa area and in the last months in the Torch area, where I have had the opportunity of seeing his work at first hand. Not only has the work itself been of the highest order, but it has been accompanied by a display of great energy and consistent courage; the latter most noticeably in the attempt to save the burning S.S. Strathallan. 3. In face of this record I feel that Captain Ellsberg has a right to a change of appointment if he so desires and I feel that I must not stand in his way, however
much I regret his loss. I trust that he will be given an appointment in keeping with his fine record. 4. If, however, Captain Ellsberg finds that his need is primarily a rest from his recent arduous duty, I should welcome his return to this station at any time and the sooner the better. Matters may for the moment be on a more routine basis as regards salvage, but that state of affairs is unlikely to continue and we shall badly need the services of so outstanding a salvage expert, if his services can possibly be spared. A. B. CUNNINGHAM Admiral of the Fleet. General Eisenhower acted at once. Before that afternoon was out, there was laid on my hospital bed a letter from him: ALLIED FORCE HEADQUARTERS Office of the Commander-in-Chief 8 February, 1943. MY DEAR CAPTAIN ELLSBERG: It is with the greatest regret I approve your request that you be relieved from your duties as Principal Salvage Officer of the North African Theater of Operations, but I concur with Admiral Cunningham that the immeasurable service you have rendered in the past fifteen months entitles you to a change in assignment when you request it. Your work here has been crowned with outstanding success and speaks for itself as a job well done, from which you must derive great satisfaction. Through your untiring efforts the ports of North Africa, which are so essential to our efforts here, have been cleared, and numerous ships have been salvaged. On the eve of your departure may I offer you my personal thanks for your outstanding efforts and wish the utmost success in your new assignment. Sincerely, DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER. Sitting up in bed, scanning those letters from the Admiral of the Fleet and from the Allied Commander-in-Chief, I felt almost as if I’d received a stiff shot of adrenalin; well enough, in fact, to tackle immediately another torpedoed wreck. But I wasn’t going to have a chance to try that—there accompanying
Eisenhower ’s letter were the orders detaching me from Torch and the flight schedule made out for me by the Army Air Transport Service for my return, starting from Algiers next morning. I examined that flight schedule. My eyes lighted up. Last New Year ’s Day, I had been on my way back by air from Casablanca to Oran. Recalling at that time that on the previous holidays, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, I had been also in the air kiting about Africa, I had wondered vaguely where the next holiday, Lincoln’s Birthday, would find me bound. Now I knew. On February 12, Lincoln’s Birthday, I should be in the air over the South Atlantic, with all Africa far behind me, bound home!
THE END
HISTORICAL NOTE T HIS IS THE STORY, MOSTLY ON THE sea, of a few men fighting with no arms in their hands and with very little of anything else, to help keep the first front in the European war a front. It is the story of the war at sea, under the sea, and in harbor to open and to keep open the way for the bridge of ships without which there could be no front. This is that story as seen through the eyes of the Principal Salvage Officer for General Eisenhower in North Africa. It is set down from memory mostly, because the author, along with hundreds of thousands of other cogs in the machine, was prohibited from keeping any diary, lest it fall into the hands of the enemy if he were captured. The author does not presume to believe that he has made no errors, though he believes they are few, as most of the events set down are thoroughly burned into his memory. Nor does he believe that some of the happenings described may not to a few others have seemed different; their point of view was not his. He can only remember them as one of a little group of men, mostly British and American, struggling in desperation to make bricks without straw that the invasion edifice might have a more solid foundation, or indeed, any foundation at all. No pretense is made that the conversations as put down are verbatim; there were no stenographers about on torpedoed and bombed ships nor on scuttled wrecks, to take them down. He has attempted to set them down in such manner as most faithfully reflects the gist of what was said. Here and there, particularly ashore, in a few minor instances a remark attributed to one man may actually have been made by another. The names are those of the actual participants; the identity of no one has been masked under a fictitious name. When no name is used, it is because the actual name was either never clearly known or in the intervening years has faded out in the rush of events of the later war campaigns. To a few individuals who must therefore here remain nameless, the author owes an apology. The names of ships are all actual, with one exception. Of the name of the
French vessel designated as the Ardois, the author now has no record. For convenience, he has in this account called her the Ardois; he trusts that no delver into Lloyd’s Register will bother to write him that no such French vessel existed, least of all in Oran. For those who may be interested in the subsequent history of the U.S.S. Thomas Stone, which the author under compulsion of military surgeons was forced to leave behind him still stranded on the beach outside Algiers harbor, it is here related. After his departure from Africa and the detachment of her devoted and heroic captain, an attempt was made by others who then took over to drag the Thomas Stone off the beach without awaiting the arrival from the United States of the pontoons promised. As a result, still resting far too heavily on the bottom for safety, she was dragged across a ridge of rock and her back was broken, leaving her only junk. She was later sold as she then lay, to be broken up by the French as scrap iron. The reactions under stress of a few figures of varied nationalities in this narrative and the conditions imposed on some others, were not wholly in promotion of the war effort. As this account is history and not fiction, it has seemed best to set them down nevertheless as the author witnessed them, that those at home may better realize what went on, and what, if anything, may be done in the future to improve conditions on the war front for the great majority striving their utmost to do the job their countries may toss again into their feeble arms. EDWARD ELLSBERG.
About the Author Edward Ellsberg (1891–1983) graduated first in his class from the United States Naval Academy in 1914. After he did a stint aboard the USS Texas, the navy sent Ellsberg to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postgraduate training in naval architecture. In 1925, he played a key role in the salvage of the sunken submarine USS S-51 and became the first naval officer to qualify as a deep-sea diver. Ellsberg later received the Distinguished Service Medal for his innovations and hard work.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. Under the Red Sea Sun copyright © 194 6 by Edward E. Pollard and Ann P. Heilakka The Far Shore copyright © 1960 by Edward Ellsberg and Lucy Buck Ellsberg No Banners, No Bugles copyright © 194 9 by Edward Ellsberg and Lucy Buck Ellsberg Cover design by Amanda Shaffer ISBN: 978-1-504 0-4 714 -2 This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. 180 Maiden Lane New York, NY 10038 www.openroadmedia.com
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Contents
1. 2. 3. 4.
Cover Page Title Page Contents Under the Red Sea Sun 1. Title Page 2. Dedication 3. Perface 4. Chapter 1 5. Chapter 2 6. Chapter 3 7. Chapter 4 8. Chapter 5 9. Chapter 6 10. Chapter 7 11. Chapter 8 12. Chapter 9 13. Chapter 10 14. Chapter 11 15. Chapter 12 16. Chapter 13 17. Chapter 14 18. Chapter 15 19. Chapter 16 20. Chapter 17 21. Chapter 18 22. Chapter 19 23. Chapter 20 24. Chapter 21 25. Chapter 22
26. Chapter 23 27. Chapter 24 28. Chapter 25 29. Chapter 26 30. Chapter 27 31. Chapter 28 32. Chapter 29 33. Chapter 30 34. Chapter 31 35. Chapter 32 36. Chapter 33 37. Chapter 34 38. Chapter 35 39. Chapter 36 40. Chapter 37 41. Chapter 38 42. Chapter 39 43. Chapter 40 44. Chapter 41 45. Chapter 42 46. Chapter 43 47. Chapter 44 48. Chapter 45 49. Chapter 46 50. Chapter 47 51. Chapter 48 52. Chapter 49 53. Chapter 50 54. Chapter 51 55. Chapter 52 56. Chapter 53 57. Chapter 54 58. Chapter 55 59. Chapter 56 60. Chapter 57 61. Epilogue 62. Image Gallery
5. The Far Shore 1. Title Page 2. Dedication 3. Chapter 1 4. Chapter 2 5. Chapter 3 6. Chapter 4 7. Chapter 5 8. Chapter 6 9. Chapter 7 10. Chapter 8 11. Chapter 9 12. Chapter 10 13. Chapter 11 14. Chapter 12 15. Chapter 13 16. Chapter 14 17. Chapter 15 18. Chapter 16 19. Chapter 17 20. Chapter 18 21. Chapter 19 22. Chapter 20 23. Chapter 21 24. Chapter 22 25. Chapter 23 26. Chapter 24 27. Chapter 25 28. Chapter 26 29. Chapter 27 30. Chapter 28 31. Chapter 29 32. Chapter 30 33. Chapter 31 34. Chapter 32 35. Chapter 33 36. Chapter 34
37. Chapter 35 38. Chapter 36 39. Chapter 37 40. Chapter 38 41. Glossary 6. No Banners, No Bugles 1. Title Page 2. Dedication 3. Chapter 1 4. Chapter 2 5. Chapter 3 6. Chapter 4 7. Chapter 5 8. Chapter 6 9. Chapter 7 10. Chapter 8 11. Chapter 9 12. Chapter 10 13. Chapter 11 14. Chapter 12 15. Chapter 13 16. Chapter 14 17. Chapter 15 18. Chapter 16 19. Chapter 17 20. Chapter 18 21. Chapter 19 22. Chapter 20 23. Chapter 21 24. Chapter 22 25. Chapter 23 26. Chapter 24 27. Chapter 25 28. Chapter 26 29. Chapter 27 30. Chapter 28 31. Chapter 29
32. Chapter 30 33. Chapter 31 34. Chapter 32 35. Chapter 33 36. Chapter 34 37. Chapter 35 38. Chapter 36 39. Chapter 37 40. Chapter 38 41. Chapter 39 42. Chapter 40 43. Historical Note 7. About the Author 8. Copyright Page
