Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  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 str
apped 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 cockpits 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 five-mile 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 ill-advised 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 ar
rived 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.