Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Wearily I pushed aside the mosquito netting, dragged myself into the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a long stay there, I came back into my room to stand directly beneath the fan while I tried to dry myself. I took a look at my bed. The lower sheet and the mattress were so soaked they looked as if a set of month-old, undiapered quintuplets had occupied that bed since birth. I glanced at my khaki clothes which I had hung over a chair beneath the fan to dry. They were as wet as I had left them the night before.

  I reflected. This was only April 1. It couldn’t possibly get any more humid, but it could get much hotter. Still there were limits to the amount of suffering one could consciously appreciate—beyond a certain point the body couldn’t differentiate any longer. That was comforting. I started to dress.

  About the middle of the morning, the first contingent from Asmara arrived to join me, having made an early start from there. Had I had the slightest spark of brotherliness, I should have met them waving a yellow quarantine flag, warning them to turn about and flee back to Asmara while yet they were well and hearty. But instead, feeling inwardly like a fiend, I stood silently by and let them toss their luggage out of their cars.

  Under the chilling gaze of the two Cable and Wireless men, who looked on this new Yankee invasion with frigid disapproval, the newcomers hastily took over the remaining vacant rooms on the second floor, and part of those below.

  I found I had drawn one officer assistant—Captain David Plummer of the Medical Corps as surgeon for the Naval Base. In addition, Patrick Murphy had come down as Construction Superintendent for the contractor, together with several civilian supervisors.

  With the one officer given me, and some of the civilians, the United States Naval Repair Base at Massawa was put in commission.

  I started the job of recruiting a Naval Base working force—Italians, Eritreans, Arabs, anybody I could hire except Americans, of whom there would be none available for us. All the American mechanics who had come over with me were earmarked for the contractor’s various construction projects in Eritrea. Unfortunately for my purposes, these were the air base at Gura on the plateau first, housing at the mountain village of Ghinda and elsewhere second, and construction at Massawa (housing again, mainly) a poor last, since no machinery for Massawa was expected for a long time.

  I had also the job of getting the shops going without waiting for the machinery from America. My inspection of the Italian shops had convinced me that no matter how thorough a job the Italians thought they had done, as saboteurs they had committed a terrible blunder which left the door open to us for a quick rehabilitation of all the smashed machinery. I meant to take advantage of it.

  Helping on this I had six of the contractor’s civilian supervisors whom the contractor was glad to lend me temporarily at least, since in his construction projects in Massawa he had as yet no equipment for them to work with. These six men—Austin Byrne, master machinist; James Lang, electrical superintendent; Herman Weinberg, sheet-metal foreman; Pierre Willermet, pipe foreman; Paul Taylor, electrical foreman; and Fred Schlachter, carpenter foreman—worked like Trojans for me; with their help I managed to give the Axis its first shock in sabotaged Massawa.

  For I had observed that while there wasn’t an unsmashed electric driving motor on any machine, the smashing had not been symmetrically done. On some motors they had smashed one end, on others the opposite end, on still others the main frame. There were hundreds of motors involved of different sizes, but of each size there were dozens at least.

  That situation was the key to our solution. If only we could disassemble all the broken motors, out of some dozens of broken motors of a given size, I was sure we could find enough undamaged parts of every kind needed to reassemble a few complete motors at least.

  Aided by the local British military and naval authorities, I started to hire workmen. Eritreans were not hard to get—there were hundreds available as laborers. A few dozen Italian workmen were obtained, some of them ex-mechanics of the naval base, some P.O.W.s eager to exchange the meager fare of the concentration camps for square meals at the American Naval Base, plus real wages, more than they had ever earned in Italy or Eritrea, either as soldiers or civilians.

  Then in the beginning we got some Arabs also—carpenters, all of them, for apparently none of the Arabs had ever had a chance at machinery. But they were good carpenters, and Fred Schlachter, foreman in that shop, hailed them with glee.

  Now I ran into other troubles—I had a plan, I had some workmen, but we had no hand tools for them to work with, even on the simple tasks which must come first. Unbelievable as it may seem, we found ourselves practically in the position of primitive man; the commonest hand tools—saws, hammers, screwdrivers, monkey wrenches—which all of our lives we had taken as a matter of course, we didn’t have and we couldn’t get in Massawa. The American solution, going around to the nearest hardware store and buying any tool wanted, was as remote as America, 13,000 miles away from us. There were no hardware stores, there were no tools for sale in Massawa.

  That was a problem that had to be solved immediately. I took Fred Schlachter in my car and we started for Asmara. Surely there must be some tools there. And at the same time, I sent off all the other foremen I had in Army cars to scour the hinterland of Eritrea—the shut-down Italian gold mines, the cement mills, the little village repair shops over which the tide of war and looting had not swept. They were to commandeer for the United States whatever in the way of tools they could find, and pay the owners whatever was demanded.

  Up and down again over that seventy-mile mountain drive to Asmara I went myself, more slowly this time, since I had some real control over the driver. In Asmara, after appealing to the British and the American army quartermasters and going through several Italian plants taken over by the occupying forces, we acquired a few tools—two saws, four hammers, a few screwdrivers, files, and chisels, and one wrench. Had I been given the British crown jewels, I could not have been more jealous of them as we stowed these few precious tools beneath the back seat cushion for our return trip, held down by Schlachter and me, sitting on them to make sure they did not mysteriously disappear before we got them to Massawa.

  Coming back from Asmara, I had a better chance to scan the scenery than on my first ride. It was magnificent—vast precipices, sheer mountainsides, long vistas, opening continuously, as cautiously we swung around the mountain switchbacks. Now and then we passed a laden camel train or a solitary burro, almost hidden by a huge load several times bigger than himself.

  But what struck me most was neither the scenery nor the primitive transport bearing produce to Asmara—it was the decorations with which the Fascisti had lined that mountain road. Every hundred yards at least on some prominent rock or cliffside, where it could not escape attention, was carefully and professionally painted in large letters,

  “W il Duce!”

  which my driver assured me meant “Viva il Duce.”

  Very carefully spaced, one to every ten “W il Duces,” was

  “W il Re!”

  and again, roughly in the ratio of one to every hundred “W il Duces,” was

  “W il Duca de Aosta!”

  From all this it was apparent that Mussolini had had little intention of letting any Italian in Eritrea forget him, or forget who was boss, he or the King of Italy, whom evidently he rated as worth only ten per cent of regimented Fascist vivas. As for the Duke of Aosta, cousin of the King, Commander of the Italian East African Army, and Governor of Eritrea, one per cent of the painted cheers would do for him.

  None of these “spontaneous” cheers for il Duce had been painted out or defaced by the British, even though they had been in occupation for nearly a year. Nothing, I thought, so showed British contempt for Mussolini and all he might yet attempt as those uneffaced self-testimonials. No Italian in Eritrea could travel that road now without blushing. No American or Britisher could travel it without laughing at that clown, Mussolini.

  We got back to Massawa in the lat
e afternoon, feeling twice as uncomfortable as when we had left, for the few brief hours in cool Asmara made the hot coast seem even more intolerable. I resolved to go to Asmara as little as I could—the flames of hell are not made more bearable by short vacations in heaven.

  Soon my other foragers were all back—some with fair luck, some with none. But when we inventoried our acquisitions, it looked as if we had enough hand tools to get perhaps two dozen mechanics going.

  Next morning we got under way. In every shop, a few Italians were turned to, unbolting smashed motors from machine beds. Crews of Eritreans carried them to the electric shop, where other Italians started to disassemble them, making heaps of all similar parts that were still good. Still other Eritreans were set to work on the huge scrap and junk piles behind the foundry, instructed to sort out every undamaged gear, every piece of anything in an undamaged condition that looked like a piece of machinery.

  Meanwhile, Austin Byrne, master mechanic, started a careful piece by piece scrutiny of every machine in every shop. Each machine had, aside from the smashing of its driving motor, been rendered unserviceable by smashing some vital gear, sometimes more than one, or removing some vital part; but not every gear on every machine had been either smashed or removed.

  Byrne’s task resolved itself into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle—it was his job in the wide assortment of still undamaged gears and parts to see if he could find somewhere in cannibalizing that damaged collection of machinery, enough unbroken gears and parts to assemble at least one good lathe and one good milling machine—more, of course, if possible.

  It worked out marvelously. By the second day, Lang and Taylor in the electrical shop had reassembled completely half a dozen three and five-horsepower electric motors from what had once been parts of some twenty-five other damaged motors. Within the same time, Byrne had refitted completely the driving trains on an eighteen-inch lathe and on a milling machine. Two of our first batch of reassembled electric motors were bolted to those two machines, belted up, power thrown on the lines, and we were ready to go. It was a happy moment for all hands when Byrne pressed the button and our first lathe began to spin perfectly.

  Oddly enough, no American there seemed any happier than the delighted Italian machinist who had been assigned to that lathe—one of the very Italians who the year before had helped swing the sledges which had destroyed everything. Now he positively beamed on the ingenious Americans who had given him that smashed machine in working order again.

  From then on, the rehabilitation literally snowballed up. On the junk piles we had found three discarded graphite crucibles from the foundry. They were old and thin and cracked about the rims, but they were whole, and with delicate handling, usable. Literally I thanked God when we found those crucibles, saved miraculously from being smashed by having been tossed out previously as junk too worn for use. Nowhere in all the Middle East (for I had contacted every Allied warehouse and shop) were there any crucibles available to us—without them the foundry was useless.

  But with those heaven-sent crucibles in our hands, we went to town. Using broken gears as patterns (or where there were none, then patterns carved by hand by Schlachter and his Arabs) we cast what new gears we needed to complete the next machine. We didn’t try to cast in iron or steel—we weren’t ready for that—but only in brass or aluminum, which were easier both to cast in the foundry and to machine afterwards.

  Hardly was the first gear casting cool enough to break out of the molding sand when it was rushed to the machine shop, where on our one lathe it was turned true, faced, and bored, and then shifted over to our solitary miller to have its teeth cut. That large gear and another smaller one, when finished, went immediately into place to give us a third machine in working order—a boring mill.

  Each machine, as it went back into service, increased our capacity to make new parts for others—vital parts we couldn’t find. Soon we were casting in aluminum or brass and machining parts to replace broken parts of electric motors that we needed and couldn’t find in our heaps of disassembled parts—end bells mainly.

  Each new motor made another machine serviceable; each new machine widened perceptibly our ability to make parts for other motors and other machines. The enthusiasm in the shops among our heterogeneous collection of workmen as, one after another, they saw additional machines starting to turn over and produce, rose feverishly—it was amazing to watch the Italians especially, jabbering delightedly to each other as, one by one, in ever shortening periods those smashed machines came to life again.

  The rehabilitation had another unexpected effect. After a few days it became obvious to every Italian that the few energetic Americans bossing them had neither any intention of locking Massawa up till autumn cooled it off a bit nor of waiting till new machinery arrived from America—in spite of heat and in spite of destruction, those Americans were going to have everything sabotaged going again and that before long. Such being the case, what was the value to the Italians in holding out information they had till it was worthless to them, since its lack was doing us no great hurt?

  Evidently they saw no value in it any more. Privately, so that none of their co-workers saw them, one after another of our Italian mechanics sought out his own foreman, Austin Byrne, or me, always with the same story. He knew where this or that missing gear or part had been secreted against the return of the Fascisti. But now he was himself sure the Fascisti were not coming back. Perhaps we should like to know where that part was? Maybe we might pay a little something for the information? But we would be willing to keep it a secret for fear of Fascist reprisals on his family in Italy?

  Always the answer was the same—we should be happy to know, we should be glad to pay, our secrecy could be relied on. The policy brought gratifying results. Missing parts by the dozen miraculously reappeared, for which we paid up to 1000 Italian lira (about ten dollars) apiece, and in a few cases, considerably more.

  The net effect of our efforts in heat too intolerable for work was to produce the first Massawa miracle. One American officer and six American supervisors, using nothing—labor or materials or tools—that was not on hand in Massawa or thereabouts when we arrived, in only one month after my arrival had every sabotaged Italian shop in the naval base working at at least the full capacity intended by the Italians themselves; in some cases more. The United States Naval Repair Base at Massawa was fully ready for business the first week in May, 1942, and yet not one of the new outfit of shop machines ordered in America to make it serviceable had as yet been loaded for shipment out of New York!

  Our naval base went right to work, not a week too soon either, for in Libya, Rommel was crashing eastward and soon was to be knocking at the gateway to Egypt.

  CHAPTER

  20

  FROM THE SECOND DAY OF MY ARRIVAL in Massawa, I had another pressing problem literally staring me in the face each time I looked out the windows of my room at the Red Sea. Lying in the open roadstead outside the naval harbor, swinging to one anchor only, was what looked like a sizable white elephant which had been the immediate cause of the crack-up of the first British liaison officer sent to Massawa.

  It seems that the year before, both Axis partners had been urgently concerned in stirring up revolt in Iran and Irak against British influence, hoping immediately to shut off oil to Britain and later to acquire it themselves. Meanwhile, also, in Iran they would shut the back door for supplying Russia. The Iranian government, very partial to Axis ideas, had co-operated enthusiastically, so also had elements in Irak. Fighting broke out. But Britain had reacted energetically. With tanks and planes and infantry, her Middle East forces had swiftly flattened out the Axis co-operators and in Persia particularly, a new government more favorably disposed toward Great Britain had hastily taken over.

  Looking over now quiescent Persia with access to its archives in Teheran, British officials discovered an interesting situation. Lying in the Persian Gulf, practically never used because of a sad miscalculation in the depth of water available
for its operation, was a medium-sized floating steel dry dock. On the face of things, this dry dock had been purchased some six years before by the then Persian government from Italy, where it was built to order, but an inspection of the treasury archives in Teheran indicated that not one cent had yet been paid the Italian builders for the dock.

  In British eyes, this situation had promising possibilities which she promptly proceeded to turn into realities. From captured Massawa was a report from her own salvage expert (later killed) based on his diving survey, that the salvage of the two scuttled Italian docks there was impossible. Britain badly needed a dry dock, any kind of a dock, if Massawa were ever to function at all. Here in the Persian Gulf was a dry dock the Persians couldn’t use anyway for lack of water, and which they didn’t own either, since they had never paid for it, even partly. Ownership under those conditions lay with the unpaid builders who were Italians (and presumably the Italian government which for reasons not too obscure, had never pressed for payment). The Italians were enemies who had treacherously declared war on Britain; Italian property anywhere within reach was subject to seizure, and certainly that dry dock was now within reach of Britain’s Navy.

  Given all these facts, there was only one conclusion to be drawn and the British drew it. The Royal Navy seized the dry dock as an Italian prize of war. All I had to do was to gaze out of my window in Massawa to see it swinging to one anchor in the outer roadstead, where it had arrived after a 2000-mile tow several weeks before I had.

  If that floating dry dock had been a useless white elephant and a problem to the Persians, it was still quite as useless a white elephant and just as much a problem to the British in Massawa, though for different reasons.

  Temporarily it was anchored in the open roadstead where the ocean-going tugs which had brought it had dropped it and promptly fled from Massawa. It could neither be used where it was nor left there, no matter how many moorings were put down to hold it. In that exposed location the first heavy blow, either from the sea or the desert, was bound to take that high, flat-sided dry dock and pile it up on the coral-fringed shore, a total loss.