Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  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 cockeyed 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-shatteri
ng 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 Abd-El-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

  THE 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 instal
led 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 man-made 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.