Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Under the Red Sea Sun

  Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg

  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

  THIS 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 self-sacrificingly 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

  THE 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-than-air 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 re
d 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

  THE 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 circumstances. 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 l
egions 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.