Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  We drove off the peninsula and that ended the naval base area. On the mainland, we were shortly passing the salt pans, vast shallow rectangular diked-in ponds, into which the Red Sea waters were pumped. There under the blazing sun, the water soon evaporated, leaving the salt.

  This, I learned, was the only major natural industry of Massawa, which before the war exported salt in huge quantities, especially to Japan. Massawa was an ideal spot for it, as the Red Sea water is the saltiest of any of the oceans and the sun obligingly provided a superabundance of no cost heat for the evaporation process.

  Beyond the salt pan area we passed through the native Eritrean quarter—terrible-looking hovels with signs at frequent intervals,

  OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALL TROOPS,

  and frequent sentries to see that the order was enforced. Apparently the brothel, probably for medical reasons, had an officially enforced monopoly of the oldest trade in the world.

  At the end of the native city, we made a sharp left turn onto a long causeway leading to ancient Massawa itself, which stands really on an island, not on the mainland. And now I began to see wrecks in profusion on both sides of me as we crossed the causeway.

  To my right was the south harbor, where perhaps most of them lay, though that was hard to say. In a long string stretching across the south harbor lay seven large vessels—some erect with only masts and stacks visible, some on their sides, some apparently bottom up. One, on its starboard side in the middle of that sad-looking string, was a huge passenger liner, apparently as large as anything under the American flag, with a large hole blown in its exposed port bilge and what damage below water only divers could tell. Scattered at random outside that line of scuttled ships were masts and stacks all over the place—one set of masts far off on the horizon.

  To my left in the commercial harbor, I could see one large ship on its side right at the entrance. Inside the commercial harbor were others right side up, marked as usual by stacks and masts protruding sickeningly from invisible hulls. As a variation, alongside one of the main quays, the massive steel work of a gigantic floating crane rose from the water, looking like a distorted Eiffel Tower with nothing to support it. Somewhere below lay the hull of that crane, no longer floating. And elsewhere in that harbor were the invisible hulks of smaller ships, some alongside the quays, others most anywhere.

  Here certainly was a salvage man’s paradise, with all kinds of salvage jobs to suit all tastes—wrecks laid out in neat rows, wrecks sunk individually, wrecks on their sides, wrecks right side up, wrecks upside down, wrecks wholly submerged, wrecks partly awash, large wrecks, small wrecks, medium-sized wrecks, wrecks of merchant ships, wrecks of warships, wrecks of docks—wrecks everywhere, enough to make a wreck of any man contemplating all that wreckage, knowing how scant would be his equipment, how few would be his men, how terrible would be his working conditions.

  A little sick at heart, wishing more than ever that I had chosen Iceland, I ordered the driver to turn about and go back to the naval base.

  CHAPTER

  19

  I HAD LUNCH AT THE BRITISH NAVAL Officers’ Mess (which I had joined) in the building which had served the same purpose under the Italian flag. It was located as well as might be for the purpose, right on the edge of the open Red Sea, with a very wide veranda actually out over the water. There was no beach there—the rugged coral formations formed a miniature cliff against which the waves broke beneath the veranda in music pleasing to any sailor’s ear.

  There I met the British naval officers on Captain Lucas’ staff, some ten of them altogether—Commander Callwell, Executive Officer, a slight, mild person; Lieutenant Hibble, the Base Engineer Officer, tall and what was unusual for an Englishman, garrulous; Lieutenant Fairbairn, officially the pilot for the port, about my own size, which meant he wasn’t very large, who was exceedingly serious in looks and in speech; Lieutenant Maton, whom I had seen before as Communications Officer but whose main task turned out to be Intelligence Officer; and half a dozen others, including the naval surgeon, with none of whom did it turn out I ever had much to do.

  All wore the universal costume for Massawa, khaki shorts, khaki shirts open at the neck, sun helmets (which temporarily lay on a table near the inevitable bar), and all had gold-striped shoulder marks attached to their shirts (not an American naval custom) to denote their rank. In distinction to them, in accordance with American regulations, I wore pinned to my shirt collar on each side, a tiny silver oak leaf, designating my rank, which designation I shortly discovered meant nothing to either Italians or natives in Massawa, where the American Navy and its symbols were both equally unknown.

  The major-domo at this officers’ mess was an Italian (so also was the bartender) who had evidently run the place in Fascist days; the servants were all turbaned Arabs. The food was both scant and poor—partly obtained as rations from the British Army commissary, partly purchased in the open market which had little to offer that was safe to eat. Very clearly my British shipmates were used to an austere diet since I heard no complaints from any of them, and naturally I made no criticisms. If this was the best war conditions in Eritrea permitted them, I could stand it as well as they. I may add here, that in my long stay with that mess, the only decent meals we ever got was when we had fish, of which the Red Sea furnished an abounding variety. The drawback to having more fish was that the Arab and Eritrean fishermen were shy on boats and very scary of risking themselves and what few boats they still had in fishing, since the waters outside the harbors were thickly sowed with Italian mines—one could never tell when a net or a line might set one off.

  Lieutenant Fairbairn, on being introduced to me as the new American salvage officer for Massawa, looked me over with much gravity, then said sympathetically,

  “My best wishes, Commander. I hope you manage to live longer than the first salvage officer we had here.”

  “The first salvage officer?” I asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know there’d been one here before. I understood my predecessor was stopped at Pearl Harbor and never got here at all.”

  “Oh, yes, there was one,” affirmed Fairbairn. “A Royal Navy Commander, tophole chap in salvage, best we had in England, with a fine salvage ship, too. He spent some time in Massawa last summer after the surrender making a diving survey here, those sunken dry docks particularly. He was going to do this job—that is, what could be done. I was on his ship when we went out to lend assistance to some British ship that had beached herself around the Daklak Islands—they fringe Massawa some forty miles out. There are a lot of Italian wrecks around Daklak but we weren’t bothering with them that day. You haven’t seen those wrecks yet, Commander?”

  I had to confess I hadn’t seen the wrecks on the Daklak Islands yet, only those in Massawa harbor itself.

  “You simply must see them, Commander; they’re a fine lot of wrecks—six big ships or more scuttled in the harbors in those islands,” Fairbairn assured me gravely, as if he feared I might run short of wrecks to keep me occupied. “Well, to get along with it, we pulled the ship off the beach, she wasn’t on hard, but by the time she was all clear in deep water and on her way again bound for Aden, it was dark. There weren’t any lighthouses going out there and the charts are none too reliable, either, so we were in a hurry to get clear ourselves and back to Massawa before it got too black. The commander took her into what looked like a wide channel between two low islands, and then we hit an Italian mine. Ever hit a mine in a salvage ship, Commander?” he asked.

  I had to admit I hadn’t—yet.

  “It’s wicked, when you’re on such a small vessel. Tore her all to pieces. Killed the commander on the bridge. Most of the rest of the crew, too. Terrible explosion. All I know is there I was in the water, wondering why I was alive. No sign of our ship any more—just four or five other chaps like me, bobbing about, trying to keep afloat. We did, too, all night long, managing to stay together for company, while we shed what little clothes we had on to make the swimming easier.

  “In
the morning, we spotted land a mile or so off, one of those low, uninhabited Daklak Islands. We swam toward it. Tough swim, but the tide helped us, fortunately. As we got closer, we saw we were in luck. There on what we’d supposed was a deserted island were a lot of Arabs, white robes, white turbans, squatting on the beach, watching us. That gave us heart—only half a dozen cables’ lengths or so more and we’d have no more worries—we’d get help.

  “When we were perhaps only a cable’s length from the beach, all those Arabs lazily took wing and flew away—they were just a flock of big white pelicans! Devilish feeling it gave us. We made the island, all right, but before we got through with it, I give you my word, Commander, we wished we’d all been blown to hell in a hurry like our shipmates. There wasn’t a drop of water on that island. It was small, flat, only a few feet above sea level, all coral sand, with not a palm tree, not a shrub, not a sign of shade anywhere, and we had no clothes to speak of—a few undershirts among the lot of us. We were on that island three days—I won’t weary you with the details—three days with no water and no shade. The sun was horrible—I’ll never see the like of it again this side of hell. The fourth day, an Arab dhow bound from Yemen to Massawa saw us waving, sheered in, and took us off.”

  Fairbairn rose from the lunch table.

  “I’ve got a ship to shift berth this afternoon, so I must leave. Better luck to you in salvage than the first commander had.” He picked up his sun helmet and walked out.

  “Good man, Fairbairn,” commented Lieutenant Hibble, as the pilot disappeared. “Takes things too seriously, though, for his own good. You should see him piloting a ship in or out of the commercial harbor among all those wrecks. He takes it so gravely you’d think he was the Archbishop of Canterbury trying to get the crown front side to at the Coronation.”

  I had nothing to say. Fairbairn was evidently grave by nature, but certainly his experiences had given him no reason for levity. Nor me either. It was news to me, but not pleasant, that the British Navy had undertaken itself the salvage task till that Italian mine had put a period to their efforts. I wondered casually how many mines were left about to send me to join my Royal Navy predecessor.

  Lieutenant Hibble and I left the mess table together. As Base Engineer Officer, he had the keys to all the locked-up Italian naval base shops, and was to accompany me on a tour of inspection of those shops.

  We saw them all, in each under the watchful eye of some Sudanese sentry with bayonet fixed who had orders to see that nothing was stolen and meant to insure that no one, uniformed or not, violated his orders. Those Sudanese (there was no talking with them, they understood only Arabic) descendants of the fuzzy-wuzzies who had hurled themselves regardless on the murderous machine guns of Kitchener’s squares at Khartoum, were intensely proud of the British uniforms they wore now and made fine soldiers. Long before I was through with Massawa, I was willing to add my “Amen” to Kipling’s verse:

  So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan;

  You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;

  An’ ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air—

  You big black boundin’ beggar—for you broke a British square!

  The condition inside the shops was about as I’d been told. In every one, the electric driving motors of every piece of machinery had been smashed by Italians swinging sledge hammers with fiendish, glee, judging by the results. In addition, driving gears here and there were broken, and others were missing, apparently tossed into the Red Sea. All machinery was rendered useless, both by destruction of driving power and destruction of essential parts.

  That was the condition in the machine shop, the carpenter shop, the electric shop, the boat shop, the shipfitter’s shop, the pipe shop, and the foundry, except that in the foundry there were also the shattered fragments of its indispensable and irreplaceable graphite crucibles.

  Other than the destruction, I noted the complete absence of any sign of small hand tools like hammers, saws, or chisels. The insides of those naval shops thoroughly warranted the bitter comment which the first Royal Navy Board to survey Massawa made of them:

  “The whole of the machinery of the Depot and workshops, all cranes, portable plant and tools and equipment were firstly effectively sabotaged by the Italians; secondly, thoroughly looted by the Free French and remaining Italians; thirdly, anything portable of value left has been appropriated by the Army.”

  There was sufficient cause for the statement which had come to us in Washington that a complete outfit of new machinery must be furnished Massawa to make it operative again as a naval base.

  Our tour of the naval shops took some hours. As we left each shop, it was carefully relocked and the sentry posted there resumed his vigil outside. But why it was necessary was not very clear—unless one wanted to steal something for scrap iron, what was there inside to steal?

  About three in the blistering afternoon, Lieutenant Hibble and I concluded our inspection tour and drove back to the British naval headquarters. There I had my first experience with the Eritrean telephone system—all Italian equipment and Italian operators, save for the British seaman running the small telephone board at the naval base itself. I gave him the call. It took him about an hour, going through the main Italian boards in Massawa and Asmara and the various villages between, to get me Colonel Claterbos in Asmara, seventy miles away. What that seaman went through with the Italian operators in both cities and villages in getting the connection, I could easily judge by listening near by. If he had not been English, I’m sure he would have gone raving mad before finally he looked up at me in triumph and announced,

  “You’re through, sir.”

  I picked up the Italian hand phone, a gingerbready affair with the Italian coat-of-arms in colors decorating it, and to my delight I found I actually had Colonel Claterbos!

  However, I might well have saved myself my enthusiasm. Before I got through with that conversation, fifty minutes had passed, the connection had been broken somewhere at least seven times, and seven times in the midst of a sentence I found myself suddenly listening to or talking to some unknown Italian, Englishman, or American somewhere else in Eritrea. Each time my English sailor came stoically to my rescue and re-established the connection or the conversation with Colonel Claterbos would have foundered ingloriously. As it was, I finally managed to convey piecemeal to Colonel Claterbos that I had quarters arranged, both for the military assistants promised and the civilian supervisors, and had heard enough in driblets from him to assure me that next morning they would be sent to join me in Massawa.

  With that hard-won understanding established, I hung up the phone at my end, feeling as if I had been through a major engagement, saved only from annihilation by the traditional tenacity of the Royal Navy in doggedly reinforcing me at crucial moments.

  “’Ard going, sir, with all them bloomin’ Eyties on the line,” sympathetically observed my seaman as I swabbed my brow, “specially in all this ’eat. But we ’as ’opes, sir, as ’ow the Signal Corps will take over soon.”

  It couldn’t be too soon for me, fervently I assured the long-suffering sailor as I thanked him and departed for my new quarters, determined to stand under my shower till dinner time. For the water in my new domicile, I’d found, wasn’t so hot—only somewhere around 90° to 100° F. Apparently it was brought down to lukewarm proportions by being exposed to evaporation to cool it in a vast open wooden tank sheltered by a well-ventilated adjacent building intended only for that purpose.

  I had a bad night.

  My room, as good a one as Building 108 afforded and probably as well located as any for comfort, had two large windows looking directly eastward over the Red Sea and two others facing south. In addition, it had a large door opening to the corridor on the west side. Since all these openings were without glass, shielded only by heavily built slatted shutters, the room was as exposed to cross ventilation as it was possible to make it, and in addi
tion there was a large overhead ceiling fan to stir up the air. The fan, I may say, was never stopped. It ran night and day.

  There were, however, no screens over any opening, possibly on the theory that screens shut out the air. At any rate, flies, mosquitoes, and gnats had free access also, but they were to be taken care of otherwise. Before I turned in, Ahmed sprayed the room thoroughly with a Flit gun to take care of uninvited insects, and I had a complete fine mesh mosquito net over my bed, which as a bed was not much, being an Italian affair slightly better than a folding army cot.

  Lying in the bed, I carefully sprayed the inside of my net-enclosed area to finish off any mosquitoes which might have gained access there, then shoved the Flit gun down on the floor and hurriedly re-secured the netting on that side under the mattress. Thus protected, I hauled my sheet over my pajama-clad form and rolled over. Ahmed, meanwhile, stretched himself out on the floor in the corridor outside the door, ready at hand in case he should be called (which he never was).

  I didn’t go to sleep. Very swiftly I came to the conclusion that a sheet over me was unnecessary and I shoved it off, wapsing it up at the foot of the bed. Once more I tried to doze off, but found it impossible. I was too hot and too wet. It was clear I didn’t need or want the pajamas which were already soaked in sweat. Off they came, to join the unused sheet at my feet. Completely naked now, I lay only on the bottom sheet, quite well exposed to what air there might be moving under the impetus of that ceiling fan or a night sea breeze.

  If any air was stirring, I couldn’t feel it inside my mosquito net, and with no outside screens, I did not dare to push aside the net. Restlessly I tossed from side to side all night through, simmering gently in the heat, while the sheet and mattress beneath me got wetter and wetter from sweat dripping off my body, which didn’t get any wetter only because it was completely wet to start with. If I slept at all, I was unaware of it. Fully awake, at long last I watched the sun rise over the Red Sea, a burnished ball of fire from the instant its upper limb appeared above the distant sea horizon.