Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  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, sinc
e 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.