And then, mirabile mirabilis, it started to hail! In hot Massawa, which had never known snow or ice in any form, huge hailstones began to beat down, hailstones large enough to have killed a man had any been fool enough to remain exposed in that storm! But fortunately, this phase lasted only a few minutes.
Soon after the hail ceased, there came a sudden lull in the wind, which had been blowing from the east. It was of short duration. In a brief space of time, the wind was shrieking past us again, strong as ever, this time from the west, threatening now to tear our building off its foundations and toss it into the Red Sea. The rain came down in bucketfuls as before, isolating us on the land side in a vast lake which poured down our basement steps and flooded in an unbroken sheet over the cliff tops each side of us.
The storm lasted two hours. By 10:00 P.M. the worst was over and the wind gradually died away. It took another hour for the lake outside to drain away sufficiently so the servants might dare the cascade and re-establish contact with our kitchen. By that time everything was hopeless, for the galley ranges had long since been drowned out. What food had not been washed away was uneatable. There would be no dinner for anyone that night.
Guided by my flashlight, I stepped out of the Officers’ Mess and waded back to my quarters, dodging as well as I could the debris strewn everywhere. Wires were down all over, the darkness was complete, it was useless to try anything that night. Clearance would have to wait for dawn.
Daybreak disclosed a dismal scene. Not a road on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula was passable to any vehicle—the wreckage of roofs covered everything on the ground. The roof on the seaward side of our newly established office building was gone, my office and all its papers were completely waterlogged. Buildings which had come unscathed through a dozen R.A.F. bombing raids on Massawa now looked as if direct hits had been scored on all their roofs—the destruction was beyond belief. Nothing all the British bombing had done to Massawa approached one per cent of the damage that hurricane left in its wake.
But my precious Persian dry dock, toward which my eyes had first turned when the earliest rays of the sun lighted up the horizon, was still safe. There it lay in the naval harbor, moored as before in place, apparently undamaged. Our heavy moorings had held and saved it; my speed in getting it inside and secured with all the cables it required, had got that task done none too soon. A later check with instruments showed that it had dragged even with all its moorings some fifty feet out of position before its anchors dug in deeply enough to stop further motion, but that endangered nothing.
Work on the rehabilitation of all sabotaged machinery stopped abruptly, of course. All hands, American, Italian, and native, turned to on the task of opening up the roads again, clearing away debris, restringing broken electric power wires, and repairing our many roofless buildings, using any and all materials we could get—tile, transite sheets, asphalt sheathing, and finally, even corrugated iron, which normally we would have shied away from as from the devil, since it transmitted the heat of the sun without resistance.
A week went by before our shops were again under shelter comparable to what we had had the night the hurricane hit us, and power and light had been restored to all of them. Not till then were we able to resume rectifying the man-made damage inside the shops. And it took about that long also to get the soggy mass of papers that had once been my plans and office records dry enough to refile.
Inquiry among the native sheikhs disclosed that not for thirty years at least had any hurricane at all comparable to this struck Massawa. That was comforting. As I went about the task of restoring order, it was pleasant to reflect that it was unlikely I should have such a chore every month or two. Long before the conclusion of the thirty-year cycle which might bring the next hurricane, I was sure I should have lost all interest in whatever might strike Massawa.
CHAPTER
22
ON MAY 8, 1942, FIVE AND ONE-HALF weeks after my arrival in Massawa, the United States Naval Repair Base, Massawa, commenced operations. The only thing naval about it was its Commanding Officer. The only things American about it were, in addition to the Commanding Officer, one Army officer as assistant and six civilian supervisors on loan. We had none of the new American machinery, we had no American mechanics, either military or civilian. We had only the refitted Italian equipment and the Persian dry dock seized from Italy, with the Naval Base working force composed now of a few Englishmen, a fair number of Italians, hundreds of Eritreans, and a conglomeration of Sudanese, Arabs, Maltese, Persians, Somalis, Chinese, Greeks, and Hindoos.
With nothing but equipment seized from the enemy and with our skilled working force made up mostly of enemy prisoners of war, we turned to under the American flag (except that I had then not even an American flag we could hoist over our Base) to do our bit in Massawa to stop the Axis.
The British Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, K.C.B., O.B.E., Royal Navy (victor over the Nazi Graf Spee in the battle off the River Plate), gave us our orders. He was struggling to supply Tobruk, 400 miles west of Alexandria, and the British Eighth Army in the desert to the westward of Tobruk. His only means of supplying them was a fleet of armed freighters plying between Alexandria and Tobruk, always under Axis air attack, often under submarine attack. Not for over two years had a single one of these supply ships been dry-docked or overhauled; now in the warm waters of the Mediterranean their bottoms were so fouled with barnacles and grass as to cut their speed in half. Too many ships were being lost due to their slow speed—maneuvering to avoid bombs was impossible to them; they were so slow now even a submerged submarine could easily overhaul any of them. In addition, the carrying capacity of the fleet was sadly reduced; it took each ship an ungodly length of time for a round trip to Tobruk, even if it escaped attack.
Alexandria had its large dry dock tied up with the Valiant and the Queen Elizabeth from the previous December to some unforeseeable date in the late summer. Its smaller dry dock was as a consequence continuously occupied by British cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, undergoing imperative cleaning and repairs of war damages to maintain their fighting efficiency—it could not be spared even for a moment for any of the supply ships, no matter how desperate the need. And with Durban in South Africa, 5000 miles from Alexandria, the nearest spot where war conditions permitted docking merchantmen, it had been out of the question to send any of the supply ships on that 10,000-mile voyage to be docked—the mere journey to Durban and back would take two months and waste a terrific amount of precious coal.
So the first task assigned Massawa by Admiral Harwood was restoring the Mediterranean supply train to some degree of efficiency. Later, depending on how the war developed, we should get a chance at destroyers, which were the largest warships the Persian dry dock would take, and perhaps a chance to overhaul cruisers where dry-docking was not involved.
We were ready. Beneath my feet, the Persian dry dock was flooded well down—only a few feet of its side walls on either side showed above the sea. Just coming through the gap in the line of wrecks at the harbor mouth, towed by the Hsin Rocket and steadied astern by the other tug, was our first customer, the S.S. Koritza, an armed Greek steamer which had arrived the night before from Alexandria. Lieutenant Fairbairn was on her bridge, piloting her through.
On the dock, we prepared to receive her. Spanner, the English dockmaster, posted his Persian and Hindoo operators at the winches. Hudson, the English engineer, stood by with his Persian staff to operate the machinery. Along the top of each dock wall was a large squad of Eritreans to help handle lines to the ship while she was being warped into the dock.
The dry-docking went smoothly enough. Fairbairn made a sharp turn to starboard with the Koritza, dodged the shoal spot inside, and lined her up for the dry dock with her bow only a few hundred feet away. At this point, the pilot boat ran out the head line, a six-inch hawser, the Koritza picked it up, the Hsin Rocket let go and steamed clear, and we began to wind the Koritza into the dock. I acted a
s docking officer.
I found that the Persians, and particularly the head Persian who spoke English, knew their business. In their hands, heaving lines flew smartly through the air to the Koritza and the steadying lines rapidly followed. The head Persian moved back and forth, shouting orders in languages I didn’t understand but the results were standard—Persians, Hindoos, and Eritreans dashed up the dock as the bow of the Koritza came slowly forward, shifting the steadying lines from bitt to bitt, holding her centered.
In less than half an hour, we had the Koritza in proper position inside the dry dock, secured there by bow and quarter lines, and the dock slowly pumped up till she touched the keel blocks fore and aft. Then the side spur shores (massive square timbers which on this dock were mechanically operated) were run in to brace her against heeling as the dock was lifted further. When she was solidly on the keel blocks, the sliding bilge blocks were hauled in under her bilges and Hudson was given the word to pump up the dock full speed. Water started to go overboard from the dock pumps at over a hundred tons a minute; the dry dock and the ship in it commenced a steady rise. In about another hour, we had the Koritza lifted completely out of the water, ready to begin operations on her bottom.
By then I had learned a great deal. I could rely on Hudson; he was a stolid, slow-spoken, steady-going Englishman who evidently was a good engineer. Hudson gave few orders to his Persian assistants, but when he did, they were obeyed with alacrity. As for the Persians themselves, they were all first-class, intelligent men who knew their jobs; so also were the Hindoos. Reed, the assistant dockmaster, had not had much to do but at least he had had little to say while doing it.
But Spanner, the dockmaster, I would have sold then and there for two cents if there had been any market. Theoretically, he might know all about docks and his trade as a shipwright, but practically he didn’t belong on an operating dry dock. He was rather slight, with sharp, birdlike features which reminded me of a sparrow, and his manner was exactly that as he hopped about excitedly when there was no cause. I was sure he would blow up in a crisis, of which there are many in docking and undocking, instead of acting as a steadying influence when things were going wrong.
Still, all of that remained for the future. Right now, the Koritza was high and dry on the dock, her superstructure and hull towering far above even its high sides, and her foul bottom needed immediate attention.
I had hired two hundred Eritreans and their sheikhs for work on ships in the dry dock, a special deal handled through an English shipping agency in Massawa harbor in order not to cause a crisis in the supply of longshoremen in the port. Now the Eritreans were swarming aboard the floor of the dry dock from the Arab dhows which had brought them out. Swiftly they were divided up into groups, each under its own sheikh, and distributed starboard and port from bow to stern of the Koritza to scrape its bottom.
The bottom of the Koritza, when exposed, was a terrible sight. Barnacles covered it to a depth of several inches, the older layers hardened practically into limestone by their years of growth; long streamers of marine grasses hung like moss from her plates. With a bottom like that, it was plainly evident why she could make no more than the five or six knots which was now her top speed.
Armed with steel scrapers, most of which had been forged out for the job in our new blacksmith shop, the Eritreans turned to. The scrapers were of all lengths—short ones for the men working under her flat bottom where no one could stand erect, medium ones for work around the curved bilges, and long-handled ones on wood poles for scraping high up the sides till we could get staging rigged.
The work of scraping went disappointingly slowly. The grasses came off easily enough, but when it came to scraping off barnacles, the Eritreans just weren’t there. I knew they were weak—that was why I had hired twice as many as the job really required—but even for weaklings they were getting little done.
I went to the superintendent who had been provided to boss the Eritreans by the British shipping agency, through whom I had hired them. He was a large, beefy, very red-faced Englishman in white shorts, equal in weight to about three Eritreans. He had spent years in the Middle East and was well acquainted with native labor. I objected to what was going on.
“See here,” I pointed out to him while both of us stood on the floor of the dry dock, adjacent to the barnacled bilges of the Koritza, “these men aren’t working. You’ve got to get some punch into them.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What can you expect of Eritreans?” he countered. “Now if I had a gang of Sudanese or even of Gyppos, I’d get cracking.”
I refused to take that for an answer. He knew as well as I that Sudanese or Egyptian laborers were for us in Massawa unrealizable dreams; we should have to get along with Eritreans.
“Get after those sheikhs,” I ordered. “Make them get their men’s backs behind those scrapers. We’re just wasting time this way.”
Dubiously he set off to gather the sheikhs together and talk to them. I walked aft along the floor of the steaming dock to its stern, where I boarded the Lord Grey to go ashore, leaving him an uninterfered with chance to get some action.
Ashore, I gave Commander Davy a message to be wirelessed to the Commander-in-Chief in Alexandria:
“S.S. Koritza successfully dry-docked at Massawa at 0900. Expected time on dock three days. S.S. Athos to follow,” for we had word that the second supply ship, also a Greek freighter, had sailed from Alexandria and would arrive at Massawa that evening, ready to go on the dock the minute the Koritza came off, with no idle time between.
There was some repair work also the Koritza wanted—some sea chests, which could only be opened in dry dock, to have the valves reseated, and some pump rods and cylinders to be turned true so she might quit wasting steam. Austin Byrne, master mechanic, went off in the Lord Grey with a dozen Italian machinists to dismantle the valves and pumps and bring the parts ashore for the new machine shop to work on that night.
Also there was another matter. The Greek captain of the Koritza, happy over his brief respite from the nerve-racking run to Tobruk and proud of being chosen as the vessel to inaugurate service at the first American Naval Base in the East, wanted to bother us as little as possible. Still he had a number of leaky rivets in his hull from near miss bombs. Could we caulk them up for him?
I had no ironworkers among the Italian mechanics I had picked up; some welders, yes. As a last resort, I was willing to try welding, using a worn-out Italian portable welding machine we had patched up, but I preferred caulking (or redriving rivets, if necessary) to get a solid watertight job on underwater rivets.
I went to see Pat Murphy, who was superintending the contractor’s construction projects in Massawa. Could he lend me an ironworker who could caulk, and if necessary, drive rivets, for a day? I could provide Italians as helpers and holders-on.
“Got any air?” asked Pat skeptically.
I assured him the Persian dry dock had a small air compressor as part of its diesel engine starting equipment, and some air banks. It could furnish enough air.
“Got a gun?” he asked next.
I reassured him on that score also. We had found both an Italian pneumatic riveting hammer and a caulking hammer previously hidden in a warehouse; they were useless when found, due to missing parts, but our machine shop and forge shop had already made good the missing parts. They would work.
“Well,” said Murphy, “in that case I could lend you Cunningham for a day. I’m using him for a rigger over in the commercial port just now, but he’s an ironworker. Remember Bill Cunningham? He’s not much good.”
I remembered Bill Cunningham, all right. I was sorry to hear Murphy didn’t think much of him; I had hoped Cunningham would make out well in Massawa. But I accepted the offer; anybody who knew rivets at all could do the job on the Koritza.
“He’ll do, Pat. Have him on the wharf in the morning for the seven-o’clock trip of the Lord Grey. I’ll see everything he needs is there in the boat for him.”
Next morning, I shoved off at 7:00 A.M. on the Lord Grey for the first trip to the Koritza to see how the work was progressing. The Lord Grey, for all her forty-foot length and broad beam, was jammed, mostly with Eritreans she was taking out, partly with Italian mechanics. I noted that a complete riveting and caulking outfit was in the stern-sheets; air hammers, chisels, hoses, forge, rivets, and even coke for the forge. Crouched over his equipment was Cunningham, apparently guarding it from any itching fingers in the mob surrounding him.
I squeezed into the boat alongside the Italian coxswain and we shoved off for the mile-long trip over the harbor to the dock. Once we were under way, I greeted Cunningham, attired only in shorts and a sun helmet, whom I had not seen since the day we made Lagos in the Pig’s Knuckle.
“How are you making out, Cunningham?” I asked.
“Not so hot, Commander,” he replied mildly in that oddly soft voice of his which I so well remembered. “Nothing much for me in my trade in the kind of wood and masonry building they’re doing round here. They got me rigging now; I don’t care a lot for it. Glad to take on this riveting job for you today. It’ll be a relief, to get a gun in my hands again.”
“Having any trouble?” I persisted, wondering what lay behind Pat Murphy’s lack of enthusiasm for him.
“No, nothing to speak of, Commander. Too many limey M.P.s around the town at night, but they haven’t bothered me—much,” he concluded lamely but honestly enough.
I wondered how much he had bothered the British M.P.s. I had been so busy at the Naval Base peninsula, I had not yet once been in the town of Massawa in the evening, so I knew little of what went on there, though I could guess from the glimpses of the Italian cafes I had seen on my few daylight visits.
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