Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Keeping pace with the slow speed of the tow, I walked aft along the top of the port side wall of the dry dock, holding myself abeam of the Oliva’s stern as the dry dock slid ahead under my feet, my eyes glued on the few feet of eddying water between our steel side and the flag buoy exactly on the submerged stern of the wreck. If that distance either opened out or narrowed down we should be in trouble instantly with one wreck or the other—if Scylla didn’t get us, Charybdis would, and one more bottleneck impeding the war effort would be solidly plugged, to impede it even more effectively.

  The inertia of our massive dry dock held her steady against what little wind or current there may have been—foot by foot we went through with no appreciable change in our clearance! On the stern of the dock at last (which brought my walk aft to an abrupt halt) I watched the submerged stern of the Oliva draw slowly away from us; in another moment we were clear also of the bow of the XXIII Marzo, safely inside the naval harbor with our precious dock.

  From far forward on the bow of the dock, I heard Fairbairn’s whistle shrilling out orders again to the tugs. He was starting his sharp 90° turn to starboard to clear the shoal and the two sunken Italian dry docks which lay ahead a little on the starboard bow. I wiped the streams of sweat from my face and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The 6000-ton load of the Persian dry dock was off my shoulders. I could safely entrust the placing of it in its permanent berth to Lieutenant Fairbairn, and the permanent mooring of it there (about a ten days’ job) to the British Master Rigger, now that I had shown him where he could find the mooring cables he was short of.

  CHAPTER

  21

  ONCE THE PERSIAN DRY DOCK WAS inside the harbor, all my attention for the next few weeks was concentrated on the restoring to service of the Naval Base shops and on gathering together for it a sufficient operating personnel.

  We went through all the records available to the British as to what had happened to the former Italian personnel; a few dozen we were able to retrieve from P.O.W. and concentration camps and from other occupations into which they had drifted. Some other Italians with mechanical skills we were able to get from the P.O.W.s who had never worked in Massawa; but on the whole, the results were disappointing; we got no more than half as many as we needed.

  We swiftly learned we were up against too much competition for skilled labor. The Army’s contractor at Asmara was hiring all the Italians he could for his construction programs at Gura, at Asmara, at Ghinda, and at other places on the plateau or in the mountains. Massawa’s reputation hung like a millstone round our necks—why should any Italian, P.O.W. or not, voluntarily go to work in Massawa when he could get just as good a job with the American contractor in comfort 3000 to 8000 feet up in the cool mountains? The climate bonus of 20 per cent which we were authorized to pay in Massawa over other areas in Eritrea, never proved attractive enough. We paid the Italians fifty lira (fifty cents) a day. Highly skilled mechanics received seventy-five.

  With native Eritreans, we were more fortunate; we could hire them by the hundreds. Those who belonged in Massawa neither knew nor cared about the rest of the world. For thousands of years they had lived on that arid coast, and they looked it. Not for two thousand years at least did it seem that any coastal Eritrean had had a square meal. For these people, akin to the Ethiopians and with clear-cut features intelligent in appearance, lived in what has aptly been called, “One of the world’s less promising deserts.”

  All were reasonably tall, but I doubt if the average adult Eritrean weighed 100 pounds. They were so generally emaciated, I never saw one whose skinny calf or bicep I could not have encompassed in one hand. This condition, a combined result of countless generations facing starvation rations and that steaming heat, made the ordinary Eritrean a very poor workman—he simply had not the strength to do very much. I have seen one American easily move a pump that six adult Eritrean laborers were struggling vainly to budge.

  We hired the Eritreans, who worked on the ancient tribal system, in tribes. The deal was always made with the sheikh of the tribe, who was above working himself, but bossed the rest of his tribe, received all orders about the tasks required, and, of course, collected the wages due. In fairness to the sheikhs, however, who were generally quite patriarchal, I have every reason to believe the money was fairly divided, and that every member of the tribe, even though too ill or too old to work, received a share of what the tribe earned. The standard wage for Eritreans was twenty-five lira (twenty-five cents) a day.

  Next above the Eritreans in the scale of laborers, came the Sudanese. They were big, strapping fellows, excellent as laborers, and we hired all we could, but as they were foreigners in Eritrea, there were few available. Naturally, in view of their much greater strength, they were paid more than the Eritreans, about thirty-five lira a day, which was a source of continuous irritation to the Eritreans who objected to other blacks getting more than they in their own country. However, except to get the entry of further Sudanese laborers barred by the British, they were unable to get anything done to equalize the wage scale.

  Next came the Arabs. There were no Arab laborers in Massawa—all were either merchants, sailors, or artisans. The Arab merchants didn’t interest me; I had no need for Arab sailors (who were sailors in the strict sense of that word, being acquainted only with sail, not with engines); but we hired all the Arab artisans we could get and our carpenter and boat shops had no other workmen—just Arabs. Fine carpenters they were, too, fully sensitive to the dignity of their ancient trade even working on modern power-driven machines. They were paid the same as the Italian mechanics.

  By American standards, all Italian and native labor was very low paid, but the wage standards were all set by the British Military Government; we abided by their rules.

  While we were rounding up a working force and putting them to work on our ever growing number of repaired machines, I struggled with the problem of some office help. If I were going to run a Naval Base on any basis other than that of growing chaos, I simply had to have a secretary who could type a letter and handle the office files.

  As usual, there was none available. The contractor would not part with any of his civilian clerks, the Army could not part with any of their few enlisted clerks, and as for my getting a navy yeoman from far-off Washington, that was hopeless.

  In this dilemma, the Royal Navy saved the situation, though indirectly. Lieutenant Maton, the Intelligence Officer for the British Naval Forces, had his wife with him in Massawa. This odd situation (for there were no white wives in Eritrea save those of Italians) had come about before the war when Mrs. Maton had left England to join her husband on the then peaceful Mediterranean Station. Stranded in Malta by the outbreak of hostilities, she had been moved for safety to Egypt, and later, when he was ordered to Massawa, she had been permitted to join him there, where now she was housekeeping in the cottage next the one I had been assigned but had never occupied.

  Mrs. Maton, tired perhaps of housekeeping as her only diversion in a spot where servants were plentiful, volunteered to serve as secretary to the new American Naval Base. She could type, she said (and she could), and thought she might make a fair clerk. So, being neither an enemy alien nor a native, she was hired at the going rate for an American typist in the Middle East and promptly began to draw more pay than her husband received as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Whether this ever caused her any trouble at home, I don’t know, but as the Matons were a very devoted couple, I doubt it.

  Mrs. Maton (in her early twenties, slight, brunette, and reserved) turned out to be a very efficient secretary, whom, for every reason but one, I was always glad to have. That one reason was that her husband was Intelligence Officer for the Royal Navy. We never had any secrets from the British, for whose benefit our Naval Base was being operated, but occasionally American affairs with respect to our relations with the contractor’s supervisory personnel in Asmara went none too smoothly. I should have preferred to have had all knowledge of these family squabbles kept st
rictly in the family, maintaining the fiction before our British friends that all Americans were 100 per cent engaged in forwarding the joint war effort in all ways. However, with the British Intelligence Officer’s wife right in my office, handling my telephone, handling all my correspondence, I’m afraid the Royal Navy soon learned some Americans, even in the war zone, had other interests which came first.

  The first half of April passed along with the heat increasing daily. Bathed all the time in perspiration, out in the sun a great part of each day, trudging from shop to shop or on the dry dock where the mooring work was progressing, I began to lose weight rapidly; so did my few American associates who were struggling fiercely along with me to get things going. As regards the Naval Base, I threw all the Massawa legends and traditions to the winds—the Middle East situation was getting more serious each day as Rommel fought his way further eastward across the Libyan sands, increasing the threat to Alexandria. It was that summer or never, if Massawa was going to have any influence on the war.

  So I cast into the discard the hoary belief that the white man can’t stand the tropics—in Massawa, the hottest spot on earth, he was going to have to, or shortly land in a Nazi concentration camp.

  The first Massawa custom to go by the board was that of working only three hours in the morning and two in the early evening—instead, a ten-hour working day was instituted for the Naval Base, commencing at 7:00 A.M. and ending at 6:00 P.M., with an hour only out at noon for lunch. I had a theory (which I still believe to be correct) that giving a man six hours off in the middle of the day, from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., resulted only in his putting in six more hours sopping up all the liquor or beer he could lay hands on in his free time, ostensibly at least trying to quench his thirst in the torrid heat. After six extra hours a day spent that way, it needed no proof to demonstrate that the white man can’t stand the tropics. He went to pieces in a hurry.

  Now there could be no argument about the reality of the thirst—somehow the loss of body liquids apparent in the profuse perspiration had to be made good, or a man would shortly be a bleached-out mummy, especially if he were engaged in active outdoor work. But as long as a man was kept on the job, he could be made to drink water and nothing else to quench his abnormal thirst.

  As to prostration from the extraordinary heat, a common cause of collapse in Massawa previously, we had a preventative for that also, administered under the supervision of Captain Plummer, our Army medical officer. This had been fairly well proved out in American industrial practice. In blast furnaces and steel mills, where the workers were exposed to unusual heat from molten iron, salt tablets had greatly reduced cases of heat collapse. The theory of this was that excessive perspiration, no matter how well replaced by copious water drinking, shortly leached out from the body all its mineral salts, leaving the body in condition unable to maintain normal resistance to fatigue or the sun’s heat. The answer was to replace the lost salts constantly by taking a salt tablet (looking very much like an aspirin tablet) with every few drinks of water.

  In Massawa, at any rate, it worked out fairly well. We drank huge quantities of water, swallowed salt tablets by the dozens, dripped perspiration constantly day and night, wiped the crust of salt exuding from our pores off our hides whenever it became a nuisance, and worked ten hours a day constantly, including Sundays, sometimes more.

  By the middle of April, the eight moorings on our Persian dry dock had all been laid out and the dock permanently secured in working position. The Persian crew, superintended by Mr. Hudson, the English dock engineer, began to get the long-disused pumping and other machinery of the dry dock back into operating condition. On shore, the sabotaged naval shops were assuming such shape that I could hope in a few weeks to commence actual operations on docking and repairing ships to lift some of the load off Alexandria.

  I finally had also a liaison officer, Commander W. E. C. Davy, Royal Navy, the third British candidate for that post in a month. Commander Davy had been Engineer Officer of the battered battleship Queen Elizabeth, which for some weeks past had been, and for some months yet to come was to be, the occupant of the large naval dry dock in Alexandria while that vast hole blown in her bottom was being repaired. Since under those conditions the immobilized Queen Elizabeth had little need for an engineer officer, Commander Davy, who had distinguished himself in keeping her from going down when she was mined, was seized on by the British Commander-in-Chief as being both available and most likely to stand the gaff in Massawa. I hoped with him, the merry-go-round of British liaison officers through Massawa would come to a stop.

  Commander Davy impressed me favorably for the task, He was an engineer officer in the Royal Navy, good training for Massawa, since battleship engine rooms are always hot and usually sticky. Then physically he was well fitted also; he was tall and thin and unemotional, little given to complaints about anything. Later I learned (but not from him) that he was a descendant of Sir Humphry Davy, most famous of British chemists of over a century before. Long before I was through with Massawa I had no cause to regret the chain of circumstances that had brought Commander Davy to Massawa.

  Davy’s first job as liaison officer was to arrange with the naval authorities in Alexandria for the initial ships to be sent to Massawa for us to work on. I considered that by the first few days in May, we should be ready to turn to.

  But hardly had he started on this matter than we received a heartbreaking setback. When I started for the Officers’ Mess for dinner on the evening of April 17, it was raining, not very hard, but unquestionably it was raining. A little skeptical over this phenomenon, fearing another mirage effect, I waited a moment before emerging, for I had been assured that rain in Massawa was most unusual. All the dry river beds I had seen on the hot coastal desert between Massawa and the mountains supported that belief—the whole area gave sound backing to the saying that when you fell into a river in Eritrea, you got up and dusted yourself off.

  Now undoubtedly here was rain, it was no mirage. As I had just put on a dry shirt and some dry khaki shorts, hoping to enjoy a brief period of dryness while I dined, I went back for my raincoat before setting out. Dinner, as usual, was served on the open veranda out over the water, and started off wonderfully with a real breeze fresh off the Red Sea to cool things down, the first time I had felt comfortable in Massawa.

  But shortly the breeze became so fresh it began first to blow rain in on us, which we didn’t mind much, and then to blow everything off the table, which was a nuisance. Dinner had to be suspended while the Arab servants cleared the outside tables, reset everything on tables inside the building, and hurriedly closed all the window shutters.

  This turned out to be useless. Before the inside tables could even be set, the wind had risen to gale proportions and the rain had turned into a downpour. In spite of closed shutters on the sea side, rain was driving in through the slatted shutters, soaking everything. Then the lights went out. The electrical effects accompanying the storm were evidently too much for our power system. Using flashlights, the native servants attempted to carry on, but this was quickly seen to be an idle gesture. Even if they could get the tables reset, there was not going to be anything to eat. The kitchen for the mess was in a latticed basement directly below us, with a flight of concrete steps ten feet wide leading down to it. Down those steps a real Niagara was pouring, a torrent of water eight inches deep at least, completely obliterating all vestiges of the stairs in a roaring cascade.

  We gave up all thought of dining. The wind swiftly increased to hurricane force till it was blowing at least 100 miles an hour and our masonry building quivered as if it might blow away. A terrific electrical display, with lightning flashing all about and the deafening roar of thunder, added to the tumult of the wind. In spite of my raincoat, which I had hastily donned inside the room, I was soon drenched through, for the rain, driven by hurricane winds now, came through the shutters with such force it drove horizontally completely across the forty-foot interior of the building, attackin
g from an angle which made a raincoat practically useless and flooding everything inside.

  Huddled silently inside the room, momentarily expecting that stout building to collapse about our ears or the next bolt of the vivid lightning striking all around us to get a direct hit on our mess building, we waited, while outside the tables literally took off in the wind to crash ominously somewhere in the dark. From farther away, between the ear-splitting thunderbolts, we heard the dull thud of one roof after another, torn free of its building, collapsing somewhere in the open.

  I could not keep my mind off that Persian dry dock. Had it remained swinging to one anchor in the Red Sea before our building, where previously it had been, we should long since have had it practically in our laps, pounding itself to pieces on the coral cliffs fringing the Officers’ Mess as the waves broke fiercely over them. How was it faring now, even enclosed in the harbor with the surrounding shores and the artificial breakwater made of wrecks to shelter it from the force of the seas? For its high, flat sides, rising far above the low coast, had no shelter from the roaring winds; would those eight heavy moorings we had just completed hold it safely, or had it perhaps already torn adrift to be wrecked even inside the harbor? From where I was, I had no view of the naval harbor—despite the lightning flashes illuminating everything, I could not see the answer.

  Sick at heart over the mounting disaster outside, I huddled in my raincoat, bracing my legs for support against the wind. That hurricane was making a wreck of Massawa ashore, perhaps had already made a wreck of our precious Persian dock. And there was nothing anyone could do to mitigate damage. There was not available to us even the slight personal solace of tobacco—all my cigarettes were thoroughly water-soaked; so were all those of the British naval officers about me.