Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  The logical answer, of course, was immediately to tow it into the sheltered naval harbor, which was the only spot the dry dock could be operated, and moor it permanently there for use. But there were obstacles to logic. Two sunken Italian docks already occupied the only logical spots for floating dry docks, even though they were no longer floating. Whether a third spot existed inside that harbor with water enough and a usable approach for ships being docked, was an unanswered question. Then part of the mooring chains for the dry dock had been lost on the long tow—she no longer had chain enough for a safe mooring job anywhere.

  Finally, there was the actual problem of towing the new dry dock through into the sheltered naval harbor, now too sheltered, unfortunately, with five ships scuttled across it to block the entrance.

  My first British liaison officer, faced in my absence with all these problems, had earnestly striven to find the answers before the first severe storm came along and added the wreck of the Persian dry dock to all the Italian and German wrecks, with which Massawa waters were already too liberally bestrewn. He tried to obtain mooring cables from the British Naval Base in Alexandria. He received, instead of chain cable, the stereotyped Middle East answer to everything which I very soon learned by heart,

  “There is none available.”

  In desperation he then sought to figure out a way of taking the dry dock into the harbor between the scuttled wrecks, of finding some place inside the sheltered harbor at least to anchor her. He got nowhere. Between the Massawa heat, the demoralizing sight of all the wrecks roundabout, and the vision haunting him night and day of that valuable dock gone to join the existing wrecks, he cracked up. A nervous wreck himself, he was shipped off to the hospital in the hills shortly before my arrival. Now I had the problem of that dry dock, along with all my other Massawa problems. Since the U.S. Naval Base was now in commission, the Royal Navy had turned over the Persian dry dock to me as part of it.

  How long did I have to find an answer? No one could tell me. Even though it was early April, it was not too late for occasional heavy blows from the Red Sea. After early May, quite as severe sandstorms could be expected off the desert. Something must be done immediately, or I should now be responsible for the loss of the dock.

  So while I was in the midst of my hectic start in getting the rehabilitation of the sabotaged shops under way, I had also to undertake to save that dry dock. Accompanied by Lieutenant Fairbairn of the Royal Navy, I went out in the ex-Italian launch which served him as a pilot boat to survey the wrecks which lay across the channel entrance to the naval harbor.

  Looked at from the sea, from left to right the wrecks were those of the Acerbi, Impero,.Oliva, XXIII Marzo, and Moncalieri. It was immediately apparent that while these vessels had been stretched out before scuttling in a string across the channel, bow to stern, to block it, the Italians had not succeeded too well in their intentions. Evidently in going down, the Oliva had rolled over on its side and in so doing had swung its stern away from the bow of the XXIII Marzo.

  At any rate, a clear channel, certainly wide enough to pass an ordinary ship, existed between the hulks of the Oliva and the XXIII Marzo, provided the entering ship was brought in at an angle to the line of wrecks. Was the clearance great enough also to pass the dry dock, which was far wider in the beam than any ordinary vessel, as well as being far more unwieldy since it was box-shaped, had no rudder and no power, and in a tow was likely to sheer about unpredictably, particularly at low speed?

  By careful measuring with a sounding line, Fairbairn and I determined the passage between the two wrecks gave us a few fathoms clearance for the beam of the dock between the bow of the XXIII Marzo and the stern of the Oliva—if only we could bring the dock in at the proper angle and hold her steady on that angle till her entire length, about 400 feet, had passed both wrecks. There was not clearance enough to allow passage with a tug secured to one side (let alone both sides) to help hold the dock steady—our unwieldly dock with all the grace and maneuverability of an overgrown rectangular cracker box would have to be handled by tugs secured to her only by lines ahead and astern.

  To me, bringing the dock through looked possible. But Fairbairn, shaking his head dubiously, pointed out the dangers. He was in a bad way for tugs to handle even an ordinary tow, let alone one requiring the very highest degree of tugboat skill. All he had to work with was two tugs, when the job obviously required at least four, and six would be better.

  Then, of the two tugs he did have to lean on, one he could only regard as a broken reed, and the other as at best a somewhat flexible one. His first tug, a Royal Navy craft sent down from Port Sudan, was manned by a set of officers wholly incompetent for tugboat work—they were big ship sailors, tossed against their will onto a tug which they despised with no wish at all to acquire the skill they lacked, and intent only on escaping Massawa at the earliest moment.

  “When those chaps are secured to the end of a towline, Commander, I nearly always have heart failure wondering what they’ll do with it the minute my back’s turned,” confided Fairbairn. “They’ve already crumpled the bow of their own tug, ramming a ship they should have been backing away on. Only the Lord knows what they’ll do next time.”

  The other tug he had more faith in, but even about that one he was none too sure.

  “You see, Commander, she’s a Chinese tug, manned completely by Chinamen, excepting only her skipper, who’s English and quite a decent chap. She belongs in Hong Kong; when the Japs assaulted that last December and it surrendered, that Chinese tug, the Hsin Rocket, was the only thing that managed to escape the harbor—quite a smart performance considering all the warships the Japs had blockading the port. Why she ended up in Massawa, of all the places she might have gone, I can’t explain. Now the Hsin Rocket’s a good tug and her Chinese crew know their business, but I’m always a little afraid that in a tight spot her skipper may lose some precious seconds in translating my orders into Chinese for his crew, and land me in a jam.”

  Fairbairn went on to point out to me, as he previously had to the first Royal Navy liaison officer, that due to insufficient tugs, to the possible inept handling of the two tugs he had, to the unpredictable action of that box-shaped dock coming in across the tidal current due to the oblique course he must steer, and worst of all, to a possible sudden slew of the high-sided dock if a gust of cross wind hit her, there was grave danger of ramming one wreck or the other coming through with the possibility of the dock being sunk in the only opening now existing in that line of wrecks, blocking off the naval harbor completely.

  From Lieutenant Fairbairn’s launch, I scanned what showed above water of the capsized Oliva and the upright XXIII Marzo, the Scylla and Charybdis between which the Persian dock must pass if it were to be saved. I made up my mind. If ever I went to join that first liaison officer in the hospital as another nervous wreck, it was going to be as a result of doing something, not of doing nothing.

  “I’m responsible now, Lieutenant,” I told Fairbairn. “I’ll take the risk. Whatever happens, the fault will be mine. I’ll survey the inner harbor this afternoon for the best anchorage, and tomorrow you get your tugs and take her through at slack tide. I know you can do it,” and I meant that, too, for by now I was beginning to acquire a great deal of respect for sober-faced Lieutenant Fairbairn.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he responded, unemotional as always. “I’ll have the tugs round from the commercial harbor and we’ll move at eleven tomorrow morning. That will give me an hour to get her straightened away outside so we can hit the entrance right at high water slack. But mind you, Commander,” he warned me earnestly, “not if it’s blowing tomorrow. I won’t touch her in any wind. And I want a flag marker buoy with no slack planted exactly on the sunken bow of the XXIII Marzo and the sunken stern of the Oliva to mark the clearance for me.”

  I spent the afternoon in a broad-beamed heavy launch, which in contradiction to her scowlike lines, was elegantly named the Lord Grey. The Lord Grey, manned now by an Italian cre
w, had been brought from Alexandria and was the only power boat that went with my newly acquired Naval Base.

  From the Italian chart of the harbor, there was a spot with six fathoms of water at low tide just to the northeast of where the two Italian docks were scuttled. This offered the only remaining area in which the Persian dock could possibly be operated, though even there, when flooded down at low tide to take a ship, the dock would probably touch bottom. To make matters worse, the approach was bad. A ship coming in to be docked, would first, of course, have to sidle through between the wrecks at the entrance. After that, it would have to dodge a three-fathom shoal spot on its port side while it made a sharp 90° turn to starboard to line up for going onto the dock. All this was going to be very tricky seamanship in handling each ship for docking and undocking, but there was no help for it. It was that one spot for the Persian dock, or nothing.

  It remained to be seen whether in that solitary available spot showing six fathoms on the Italian chart, there really were six fathoms of water and, more important, to discover whether in the area the dry dock would cover, there were any high spots which might pierce the bottom of our dry dock when it was flooded down to take a ship.

  With a British quartermaster and half a dozen British seamen to do the work, I put in a very hot afternoon while the Lord Grey cruised slowly back and forth and circled about over the proposed site and the British naval ratings sounded, dragged grappling hooks, and swept drags in circles over the entire area. Finally, I was willing to call it a day. The chart soundings were correct; our drags had caught on nothing that indicated any coral pinnacles below.

  I visited the dry dock swinging at its anchor off the seaward face of the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula. It was a fair-sized dock, capable of lifting a dead weight of 6000 tons, enough to take the average merchantman if it came in light—that is, with no cargo aboard to speak of. I met the dock crew, and my eyebrows lifted as I learned that the range of nationalities to be employed at the U.S. Naval Repair Base was widening out. The supervisors recently provided by the British with the dock, were English—Mr. Spanner, dockmaster; Mr. Reed, assistant dockmaster; and Mr. Hudson, engineer. But the operating crew of the dock were its original Persian complement—nine Persians, only two of whom spoke any English, plus about a dozen Hindoos who spoke no English at all.

  This took me somewhat aback, as docking ships, particularly in floating dry docks, is a delicate business, not unlike in many ways the problem of safely delivering an infant. How in heaven’s name, I wondered, was I going to make these men understand in a pinch what was wanted? Already I had Arabs, Chinese, Eritreans, Italians, Somalis, Maltese, and Sudanese to deal with. Now Persians and Hindoos! But I pushed that worry away for the moment. The present problem was a tow for the dock and mooring her inside. Docking ships would have to await its turn in my string of pressing problems.

  There was also temporarily aboard the dry dock the Master Rigger from the Royal Naval Base at Alexandria, sent down from there to moor the dry dock if ever she got inside the harbor and provided also he ever found gear enough to moor her with. My discussion was mainly with him.

  The towing problem was first gone into. I must arrange to borrow from Captain Lucas every one of his seamen not actually on watch, twenty at least, to handle lines and later to help handle the anchor cables. I will not go into the details, they were many, but that English Master Rigger knew his business and we got along beautifully on the towing arrangements and the preliminary anchoring once we got the dock inside (if we ever did).

  What bothered the Master Rigger was how to moor the dock permanently in place. She required eight heavy anchors with three-inch thick chain cables to hold her; she now had only five since three of her cables had been lost while being used as towing bridles on the long tow from the Persian Gulf. Where, this side of Portsmouth Dockyard on the English Channel, was he going to get those three missing cables?

  I told him not to worry, the Bible gave the answer: “Seek and ye shall find.” While on my surveying party in the Lord Grey that afternoon on the far side of the harbor from the Naval Base, my eye had lighted on a solitary Italian building standing on the deserted far shore. Very evidently that building, from all the huge concrete mooring blocks lying in front of it, had been the Italian mooring and submarine defense net depot. I had taken the Lord Grey over for a closer look. Stretched out, half buried in the sand near that building were heavy chain cables in great variety, apparently undamaged. The Italians had neither been able to sabotage that massive chain nor to dispose of it—all that under the hot Massawa sun would have been too much work for the saboteurs. We need no longer search—the Lord (in co-operation with the Italians) had provided for all our needs.

  Leaving to the Master Rigger the task of planting the marker buoys on the wrecks and the additional marker buoys on the site I had indicated on the chart for the dock, I went ashore, inordinately thirsty and, as usual, completely soaked in sweat. My car was waiting at the Naval Base dock, and I made a bee line for the shower before tackling anything else.

  After that and dinner, I went to see Captain Lucas about borrowing his seamen for the work in shifting the dock. He was very willing to help and there was no difficulty on that score, but obviously he was much embarrassed over something. Finally he blurted out,

  “I am ashamed to have to say so, Ellsberg, but that liaison chap in Asmara has outmaneuvered me. He isn’t coming to Massawa. The moment he got my message, instead of starting here as ordered, he reported in at our military hospital in Asmara. And would you believe it, the Army surgeons there admitted him as a patient! Remarkable case of triumph of mind over matter—you know—the kind of thing that puts so many blighters that have never even been under fire in the hospitals with shell shock. I wouldn’t have believed it of a commander in the Royal Navy! Bloody fool he’s made of me! I had to wireless the Commander-in-Chief in Alex that the second liaison fellow had cracked up before he even got here; to send another one posthaste. A reply came this morning—they’re ordering a third commander; he should be here day after tomorrow. I trust he lasts longer than the others. My apologies, Ellsberg; the Royal Navy makes a better go of things usually than it’s done on this.”

  I had to laugh. Captain Lucas stared at me nonplused—he could see nothing humorous in the tribulations of His Majesty’s Navy.

  Next day, as scheduled, we went out to move the Persian dry dock. Lieutenant Fairbairn had quite a time deciding which arrangement of his two tugs involved the least danger. Finally he concluded to let the Hsin Rocket, the Chinese tug, tow ahead, supplying the power for the tow and its direction, while the British tug dragged astern where it could cause the least amount of trouble, to help as best it might in steering.

  The tugs picked up their respective towing bridles at bow and stern, we weighed anchor on the dry dock, and hauled away from the coral-fringed shore toward the open sea. Fairbairn rode on the dry dock; so also did I, with naval signalmen posted on the dock and on both tugs for communication, though Fairbairn depended most on a very shrill whistle, always clenched between his teeth, for his signals.

  We made a very wide swing out into the open sea, so that Fairbairn might have a good opportunity to get well lined up on his approach course and settled down on it before we got into close waters where every inch of clearance might count.

  Nobody said anything. Ahead, the Hsin Rocket puffed valiantly at its load, churning up a vast wake which eddied and broke erratically against the square flat bow of the slowly moving dry dock. Astern, the second tug dragged along on its line to our stern bridle, keeping everything taut so that at least it might attempt to help sheer us one way or the other when required. Occasionally semaphore flags waved or the whistle in Fairbairn’s teeth shrilled out, as he directed the tugs in our wide circle.

  Two miles out we finished our circle and came about on our final course, 239° or SW by W¼W (true), pointed for the narrow gap between the wrecks which both Fairbairn and I were watching through binoculars.


  Weather conditions were perfect for our attempt. There was only a slight sea and a gentle breeze from seaward, practically astern of us; according to our tidal data, it would be slack water at the entrance in half an hour when we got to the wrecks again, so we should have no crosscurrents to bother us.

  The thirty minutes following passed very slowly and in complete silence on the dry dock as the Hsin Rocket, holding straight as an arrow herself, bore down from seaward on the narrow pass with the dry dock yawing gently as it followed. We went slowly by the sunken Moncalieri on our starboard hand, clearing her side parallel to us, by hardly twenty feet. That was good; about correct to give us the slightly less clearance we wanted in passing through the gap when abreast the next wreck.

  Fairbairn glanced ahead at the two wrecks forming the gate, then astern at the tug there. She was still dragging along, holding the stern line taut. Once more his eyes came back to the Hsin Rocket churning up the sea ahead; she was now in the gap marked by the two flag buoys on the wrecks, and exactly in the center of that gap.

  Fairbairn, for the first time, released the grip of his teeth on his whistle, let it drop from his mouth to dangle on the lanyard round his neck. A cool pilot, Fairbairn, I reflected, watching him. When nothing could be done, he had no intention of balling up the situation by shrieking orders. And nothing could be done now that would make any further difference—the unwieldy tow must proceed as it was, come what might.

  Another couple of minutes and the square bow of the dry dock was entering the gap between the side of the XXIII Marzo and the stern of the Oliva, both submerged, of course. Looking down from the high port side of the dry dock, almost forty feet above the sea, both wrecks could be seen through the clear water, the upright XXIII Marzo to starboard parallel to us, and the capsized Oliva to port, at about a 45° angle. Apparently we were beautifully splitting the gap between them. It would take two minutes for the long length of the dry dock to pass clear; if we didn’t swing either way now, we should be all right.