Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  The week after my arrival in Massawa, Captain Lucas had shown me an inquiry from the British Admiralty in London:

  “Request you have American salvage experts examine scuttled Italian dry docks and obtain their opinion as to possibility of salvage.”

  I smiled inwardly when I read that inquiry. So London, in spite of all the expert opinion it had received regarding the hopelessness of that task, was still cherishing the faint hope that something might yet be done to recover the richest prizes in all Africa.

  I had already cruised slowly many times over and around the two sunken Italian dry docks, the larger one particularly, in the Lord Grey, peering down through the quiet sea-green waters of Massawa harbor at what I might see of those two hulks from the surface. It had not been much; I could see down into the water on the smoothest days only some five to ten feet.

  I had also studied the report of the first British salvage officer (later killed off the Daklak Islands) on his diving survey of the docks and the terrific damage he had found—seven huge holes had been blasted in the cellular horizontal main hull structure of the large dock, tearing out the bottom, the floor of the dock overhead, the intermediate bulkheads. The damage was described in considerable detail—the Italians had intended to make an end of that dock forever to prevent it from serving their enemies. In their eyes, in his eyes, in the eyes of every salvage expert in Africa and in England who had studied that report, all of them with wide experience on scores of war-torn ships, the Italians had succeeded.

  But not in mine. A study of that report had convinced me I could raise that dry dock; what little I could see of the dock, leaning over the gunwale of the Lord Grey had confirmed me in my belief.

  But sure as I might be in my own mind over what could be done, when I was shown that inquiry from London, I was still an expert without any of the tools of my profession to make the examination requested on which my opinion was to be based. So at the time I had simply told Captain Lucas he might report to the Admiralty,

  Commanding Officer American Salvage Forces considers salvage possible. An attempt will be made when men and salvage equipment arrive.

  Now that some men but no equipment to speak of had finally arrived, the time had come to make the attempt. As I tossed about naked on my soaked sheet inside my mosquito net and oozed perspiration all through that Saturday night, I laid my plans. There was underwater work enough on the blasted hull of the large Italian dry dock to keep fifty divers, several hundred surface mechanics, and several well-equipped salvage ships working a year or more to patch up the damage so the dock could be pumped out and lifted—as it was put in one British report,

  Upon consideration of all reports received, the Admiralty have abandoned all idea of salvage. The salvage work would be long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful.

  That statement was correct. There was bomb damage enough to that one dry dock to have sunk swiftly seven large ships.

  But even while I was looking over the sunken dry dock, I knew I should never have anything like fifty divers to work with, nor the hundreds of skilled men and well-equipped ships needed to back them up. At most, I could count on only seven divers all told, two trifling tugboats, and an ill-equipped base ship, if everything arrived safely.

  Now I didn’t have even the two tugs, the base ship, nor what equipment they carried. But I did have fifteen men to command at last, two of whom at least, Reed and Williams, I knew were good; the others I hoped were. Before they all cracked up in the increasing Massawa heat, waiting for ships and equipment to arrive which might be sunk on the way, I intended to lift that dry dock. With our bare hands, with such mechanical help as my Naval Base shops could render, and with only such equipment as had been lying around Massawa for months or years, available to anybody, we would tackle it.

  For from all the surveys made of that sunken dock and its damage, I saw a way of raising it that had never entered the minds of the Italians who had scuttled it, nor of all the salvage experts all the way from Massawa through Alexandria to London who had knitted their brows over the problem. Instead of a task which had to be abandoned because it “would be long, difficult, and probably unsuccessful,” I intended to make it short, easy, and certain. I had to. I had no means to do it the hard way, even if I had wanted to, as some salvage jobs have been done for the publicity value and the profit of the salvors.

  I was little concerned over the opinions of all the experts who had rated it impossible. I was, as a matter of fact, somewhat irritated by seeing myself denominated an “American expert” in the Admiralty inquiry. For I didn’t consider myself an “expert” in anything and besides I had a very low opinion of “experts” anyway. “Experts” are people who know so much about how things have been done in the past that they are usually blind to how they can be done in the future.

  CHAPTER

  25

  ON SUNDAY, WHILE REED, WILLIAMS, and their men were learning firsthand for themselves what Massawa was and getting themselves unpacked and settled, I docked the Athos in the morning and put in the rest of the day with my foremen. I outlined for them the materials and the men I wanted them to gather up round the Naval Base for the salvage job—plenty of drinking water and lots of ice first of all; then a thousand feet of Italian steel pipe together with connecting fittings; some lumber; a few thousand feet of electric wire and several dozen light sockets; about a dozen Italian mechanics, pipefitters mainly, with a few electricians; half a dozen Arab carpenters; and about thirty Eritreans for laborers. In addition, five Maltese we had, who had been exiled from the Alexandria Naval Base in disgrace and sent to Massawa as a punishment, whom I had observed to be good riggers, were to be sent out for handling weights and materials. They set out on their tasks.

  A floating dry dock resembles, looked at end on, a huge capital U. The horizontal part at the bottom may be likened to a tremendous hollow rectangular raft, fifteen feet deep, a hundred feet wide, six hundred feet long. It is watertight, of course, strongly braced with steel girders inside to carry the weight of a ship lifted out of the water and resting on wood keel blocks along the fore and aft center-line of the floor of the dock. The buoyancy of this bottom section is tremendous, sufficient to float the weight of the dry dock itself as well as that of the ship it has lifted clear of the water.

  The vertical parts of the U are the two dry dock side walls. These run fore and aft on each side of the dry dock for its entire length. They are massive hollow steel walls, fifteen feet thick, thirty-five feet high above the floor of the dry dock. Their major purpose is to give the dry dock stability and hold it vertical and upright, so that while the horizontal raft section is completely submerged in order first to take aboard the ship to be docked and later to lift it up out of the water, the dry dock will not tilt or capsize and spill the rising ship off the keel blocks.

  In the normal operation of a floating dry dock, the upper few feet of the side walls always remain above water; the dock is so built, in fact, that it cannot be flooded down far enough to submerge the side walls completely (unless damaged).

  By their very nature, harbors are not usually very deep. A harbor with a clear depth of water of fifty feet is fortunate. The usual trouble with using a floating dry dock is to find a spot in the harbor with water deep enough to sink the dry dock far enough down to take on a laden or damaged ship. Massawa harbor happened to have one fifty-foot deep clear spot; that was the spot chosen by the Italians for mooring their large dry dock and that spot naturally when they blasted it with bombs, was where it sank till it touched bottom in some eight fathoms of water.

  As it rested on the bottom, the tops of both side walls at the stern of the dry dock were awash at high tide; from there forward, the tops of the side walls were a few inches clear of the water all the way to the bow. At low tide (the average tide in Massawa ran only from one to two feet in range with a maximum range of three feet) the entire top decks of the side walls from bow to stern were a little exposed, giving us something to stand on while we
worked, which was fortunate, as we had no salvage ships to work from.

  On Monday morning, May 11, the salvage job on the large Italian dry dock began. I took Bill Reed, Lloyd Williams, and their little party, thirteen all told, out to the dry dock in the Lord Grey, together with Reed’s diving gear. We clambered aboard the exposed port side wall of the dock and sent the boat back to the Naval Base wharf to bring out what materials had already been procured.

  With the waves lapping round our feet, I sat down on a box on deck the dock, stripped off my khaki but prudently kept on my sun helmet, and the tenders began to dress me in one of Reed’s two suits—I would make the first dive myself to examine the dock and start the job off.

  While I stood dressed only in a pair of light cotton drawers, two tenders commenced sliding me inside a stiff canvas-covered rubber diving dress. For once, I looked forward to a dive with some pleasure. The water in the Red Sea was very warm—about 95° F. I had done most of my salvage diving in cold water, in the practically freezing water of the cold North Atlantic off the New England coast in wintertime. There the major problem had always been to keep the diver from freezing to death in the ice water surrounding him. Three suits of heavy woolen North Woods underwear pulled on one over another, two pairs of thick woolen socks, and a pair of heavy woolen mittens were the standard clothing one put on, before the diving dress with watertight gloves went on over them. Even so I had always come up after a dive numbed and stiff from the cold, requiring a powerful “submarine cocktail,” a pint of hot coffee and whisky, mixed half-and-half, to help thaw me out.

  Now all of that was past—no more cumbersome woolen underwear, no more hands so encased in woolen mitts and stiff rubber diving gloves as to be practically worthless as hands, no more freezing. Massawa had one good point: the Red Sea, the hottest ocean on earth, was so warm a man could dive in it in comfort, with his bare hands exposed outside his rubber watertight cuffs so he could use them.

  On went the bulky diving dress, the copper breastplate, the massive lead-weighted diving belt, the heavy lead-soled shoes, expertly draped over my perspiring body by Al Watson and Melvin Barry, acting as tenders. Meanwhile, Captain Reed poured gasoline into the tank of his little diving air compressor, started it up, and laid out the diving hose and a manila lifeline, ready for use. There was no diving telephone set; all communication would have to be by signaling on the lifeline or air hose.

  The helmet with the diving hose attached was next tested out; compressed air was coming through. On went the helmet; Al Watson gave it a vigorous quarter turn to lock it in place to the breastplate, while Melvin Barry braced my shoulders to prevent my being twisted into a knot during the helmet-locking operation. I tested out my air inlet valve and my exhaust valve; everything appeared to be in working order.

  Held up by Watson and Barry, for now I was draped with 200 pounds of lead and copper, I dragged myself laboriously to the inboard edge of the port side wall and the two tenders lowered me over the side into the water inside the dock. Once the sea rose over my helmet and I was fully submerged, they ceased lowering a moment and held me, hanging on my lifeline, while once more I checked all my valves to insure their operation, and adjusted both inlet and exhaust air valves so to inflate my diving dress as to make me only slightly negative in weight. That settled satisfactorily, I signaled to lower away, and swiftly down I went through the Red Sea.

  It was about six fathoms down to the floor of the dry dock; not a bad water pressure to work in. In considerably less than a minute I was on the floor of the dock, peering out through my faceplates into the sea. The visibility was none too good. The light, six fathoms down, was fair, but the sea was peopled by myriads of amoebae, giving the water a somewhat milky translucent effect which prevented seeing clearly more than a few fathoms. To make matters worse, the moment I started to walk, my lead-soled shoes stirred up the thick mud with which the floor of the dock was covered, leaving it to rise in lazy clouds floating in the sea above the dock floor, obscuring that from my sight.

  Still keeping close to the vertical port side wall of the dock towering above me in the water, I walked aft slowly through the sea, my head tilted back so I could look up through the upper faceplate of my clumsy helmet. For the method I intended to use in raising that dry dock, the condition of the steel floor and of the steel bottom of the dry dock and the holes blasted in them were of no great moment to me; but the condition of those steel side walls was all important. Were they also damaged, or had they, as I imagined and the lack of contrary evidence in the previous surveys indicated, been left untouched as of no importance by the Italians in their orgy of destruction?

  With each step as I plodded laboriously along through the sea, straining my eyes upward, I felt better. I could see farther looking up towards the surface than in any other direction and what I saw was decidedly cheering. The side wall of the dry dock alongside me was heavily covered by mussels and barnacles, growing in a solid mass all over it; I couldn’t actually see the steel plates themselves, but I could see that wall rising straight toward the surface with not a sign anywhere of an explosion—no torn steel or bulging plates or vast holes blasted in that vertical wall such as bombs or torpedoes always leave in their wake.

  Satisfied that my theory of raising the dock would work out, I left the port side wall, and started walking inboard toward the centerline of the broad dock floor to see for myself what the Fascisti had done to the dry dock. A few steps inboard and that vast outside wall faded from my sight altogether in the murky water. From then on, I had great difficulty in maintaining any sense of direction and my course, as indicated on the surface by the stream of air bubbles floating upward from my helmet, must have seemed that of a drunkard zigzagging homeward under grave difficulties.

  To make matters worse, I began to stumble over unseen obstacles in my erratic path. Close inspection, mostly by feel, for not much could be seen in the muddy water, indicated they were massive blocks of wood, five or six feet long, over a foot square. Undoubtedly these were the oaken keel blocks of the dry dock, tossed by the explosions helter-skelter over the floor of the dock, where they had remained, too heavy and too waterlogged to float away.

  Somewhat further inboard, I approached something looking vaguely like the crater of a volcano. Here one of the bombs must have exploded beneath the floor. Ragged steel plates, twisted steel girders, all barnacle-encrusted, rose from the mud-covered dock floor in fantastic shapes, curled back like tissue paper. Beyond the fringe of broken and bent plating I could dimly make out an irregular black spot some fathoms across in the otherwise gray-green water—the hole in the dock floor that explosion had made.

  I didn’t investigate that hole any further—it was big enough to have driven a huge truck through and it was garnished round its rim with sufficient torn steel to make any diver wary about cutting open his rubber suit on its jagged edges. Besides, that hole in the sunken dry dock floor made little difference to me; I had no intention of bothering with it or of doing any of the terrific amount of diving work required to patch it up on the bottom before we raised the dry dock. That vast hole and its six mates, the sight of which had left aghast the original salvage officer and all who had seen his report since, was a matter of no moment to me in salvaging the dock.

  I turned aft with the thought of taking a look at the floor of the dock near the stern. The dock floor was built of eight separate watertight steel sections. Seven of them, from the bow aft, had been blasted open by bombs; the eighth section at the stern was reported undamaged. Apparently the bomb which must have been placed there had failed to explode when the other seven forward of it had gone off. I thought I might see some signs of that unexploded bomb, so we could remove it before it blew up in our faces while we worked. And at any rate, I was desirous of checking for myself that the stern end section was the undamaged one—that made some difference, though not a vital one, to my plans.

  Keeping a little to port of the line of keel blocks, I started aft through the water
. By now, I was no longer so sure of the advantages of diving in the Red Sea; I began to long for the icy waters of the North Atlantic where I could freeze to death, or at least into numbness, in comfort. The inside of my diving suit was nearly intolerable. The water outside was practically at body temperature; it was doing nothing to cool me off. I was nearly drowned in perspiration, for the hot air coming down to me from the compressor, thoroughly saturated already with moisture when it started down, was not only not doing anything to evaporate the sweat from my body but was adding profusely to it. I was practically blinded also by sweat running off my forehead into my eyes; with my head totally enclosed in that diving helmet, there was no way I could get my hands or anything else to my eyes to wipe them clear. And as a final torture, hot as I was, I saw that I had made a serious blunder in not putting on a complete suit of woolen diving underwear. The stiff canvas folds of my diving dress, pressed in against my body by the weight of the sea which had me in its grasp; worked like a rasp on my skin each time I moved, removing cuticle by the square inch. Over these raw spots in my hide, salt sweat was percolating downward continuously, irritating me frightfully. In hot water or not, neither I nor anyone else was going to make another dive in the Red Sea except encased in a full suit of woolen underwear for skin protection.

  Cursing volubly inside my helmet as the only means of relieving my distress, I plodded aft over the dock floor, hardly able to see anything any more. Then on the flat muddy floor before me, a darker strip than usual loomed dimly up through the water. Before I could stop and appraise the significance of that, I had stepped off into nothingness and felt myself going down, engulfed instantly in blackness. With my lead boots still feeling nothing beneath them, I was brought to in that Stygian darkness by a sharp jerk as the slack in my lifeline took up suddenly and left me dangling on it somewhere in the bowels of that dock.