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 a
re 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.
Under the Red Sea Sun Page 10