Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  I didn’t laugh. There wasn’t anything about the situation that was funny; having to communicate with anyone in Asmara over the Imperial Italian Telephone lines was the last straw necessary to break completely the spirit of the sweltering talker in blazing Massawa and make him a ready candidate for Mai Habar hospital up in the hills.

  Byrne listened for a moment, and then hung up the telephone. His eyes gleaming in triumph a little more than usual, he swung about and faced me.

  “Those Eyties nearly threw me for a loss,” he announced, “but I made it anyway, even with seven Eytie operators pulling plugs all over Eritrea trying to stop me.” He went over to the water cooler, and in quick succession, swallowed a salt tablet and four glasses of water to make up for the sweat he had oozed during his hour’s torture on the telephone.

  “Now, here’s the dope, Commander,” he continued when at last he could hold no more water. “Colonel Claterbos says they’ve got two Eytie air compressors that Colonel Clark of the Ordnance Corps has just finished overhauling in an ordnance repair shop he’s fixed up in Asmara. They’re nothing to brag about—two 150 cubic feet a minute Eytie jobs, old as the hills, semi-diesel drives—but at least Colonel Clark claims they’ll run now he’s overhauled them. That’s all there is till Colonel Clark and his ordnance men turn out some more, so I grabbed ’em. Colonel Claterbos says he’ll have ’em loaded on a big Eytie truck late this afternoon and started down, so you’ll have ’em tonight if the truck makes all the curves coming down that mountain road. Where do you want ’em unloaded at this end—if they get here?”

  I told him to arrange that with Davy; to have the truck routed into the commercial harbor to the point on the quay most convenient for the Danish salvage tug to swing the Italian compressors with its salvage boom directly from the truck onto its own deck, after it had taken aboard the two Ingersoll-Rands Davy was to procure.

  Byrne nodded, then asked,

  “Can I borrow your car, Commander? I think I’d better get over to the Royal Naval Base and see how Davy’s making out with Captain Lucas.”

  “Certainly, I won’t be using it a while. I’m going out in the Lord Grey again to see how they’re making out on the Persian dock with that second Greek ship. She’s supposed to be undocked tonight. After that I’ll stop off on the way back to see how my salvage gang is coming along.”

  That gave Byrne, who was about to depart, a thought. He paused in the doorway to remark,

  “By the way, speaking of salvage, if you want to get anything done on your sunken dry dock, skipper, you’d better get cracking, as our limey friends say. This Naval Base is going to turn into a good imitation of The Deserted Village any day now. ‘No pay, no eat, no work.’ I’ve learned enough dago and Arabic to make out that’s how the Eyties and the natives around here feel about it. And who can blame them?” Byrne vanished.

  I groaned, but I saw no answer to my master mechanic’s parting question. To the contractor in Asmara, busy with big schemes, whether a lot of assorted dagos and niggers in Massawa got paid now or next year was too trifling a matter to cause him to cut the Gordian knot of his accounting complexities. And I could do nothing about it save wait for the blow to fall; everything I could possibly say had already been said to everybody involved, directly or indirectly. Thank God, the crew of Eritreans I had on the Persian dry dock had neither been hired nor were they being paid through our American contractor in Asmara. The British contractor with whom I had that deal, with only one Mohammedan clerk on the dock to handle all the lack of paper work and absence of complex accounting, was paying off daily, as was the Eritrean custom with the poverty-stricken natives. What a black eye to the idol of American efficiency!

  I dared not venture near the naval shops to see myself how matters stood for fear of being besieged by a mob of hungry natives begging for their pay. Instead, as I followed Austin Byrne out of the office door, I said briefly to Mrs. Maton,

  “I’ll be out on the water the rest of the day, till after the Athos is undocked. Signal me out there if you need me for anything.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  OUT ON THE SUNKEN DRY DOCK, things were moving fast. My new American workmen, less inhibited than I, who had spent a good part of Sunday in the Torino Bar over in the old town of Massawa, where they had mingled with British soldiers and sailors, McCance’s salvage crew, various Italians, and other Americans who had preceded them to Massawa, had picked up a great deal of fact and fiction about the scuttled wrecks. The wrecks were all booby-trapped for divers—close an innocent-looking submerged valve anywhere and you’d blow yourself to bits. The wrecks (but not the dry docks) were loaded with alluring treasures—gold, cases of champagne, cases of whisky, cases of beer—whatever you were most interested in. And, of course, they had learned all about the impossibility of raising the dry dock they were to work on. Some of them, with firm faith in themselves and their salvage officers, had made some bets on that with pessimistic Englishmen who had more faith in British reports than in American ingenuity.

  I laughed as I listened to their tales while all of us munched sandwiches and guzzled bottled water during our brief pause for lunch. Booby-traps in the dry dock? Ridiculous! The idea could never have entered the minds of the Fascisti, who would have considered them completely unnecessary. As for the fabulous cargoes in the sunken ships, that was all moonshine, too. Those ships had all been in blockaded Massawa harbor a year or more before they were scuttled; their cargoes, especially cased liquors, must all have been removed for use ashore long before they were sunk.

  As for the impossibility of raising the dry dock, they had it under their feet now; two of them, Barry and Doc Kimble, had already been down after me and had seen it for themselves. They all knew the damage and they knew my plan for the dock. Only one question was asked regarding the dock’s raising. Bill Reed asked it.

  “Can you get any air compressors, skipper?”

  “Four of ’em, Bill! Two big new Ingersoll-Rands and two old Eytie compressors, total air capacity 700 cubic feet a minute, will be on deck this dock tomorrow,” I replied confidently. “They’ll push the water out from inside this dock ten tons a minute, excepting always air leaks.”

  “It’s in the bag then, boys,” said Reed gleefully. “We’ll make monkeys out of them limeys over in the Torino Bar who’re betting we can’t raise it.”

  Lunch didn’t take long. In a few minutes everyone was working again and in spite of no shelter at all from the burning midday sun, all hands, stripped to the waist for ventilation, were hard at work. By late afternoon, when I had to go over to the Persian dock to undock the Athos, both of the long air mains had been strung and the pipe coupled up, running the complete length of the dry dock on each side. In addition, most of the small branch lines to feed air to the sixteen separate side wall compartments were piped up, tapped into blank steel flanges which I had had made in the machine shop to go in place of the six-inch mushroom vents atop each of those compartments. These blank flanges killed two birds with one stone—they sealed off the air vents from the side wall tanks, and at the same time gave us an easy connection for pushing compressed air down into the tops of those tanks.

  Laying the cross-connection air main from the starboard to the port side of the dock across the eighty feet of water between, was harder, but even that was finished also by evening. To carry it, Whitey Broderick and the Maltese riggers had strung two half-inch wire cables, supported on each side high above the side wall decks, across the water. From these cables they had hung a wooden foot walk across the water, giving us both a suspension bridge to get from one side to the other without a boat, and a support for our athwartship air main. It wasn’t long before some wag draped a sign on the side of the foot walk marked,

  “George Washington Bridge. New York, 13,000 miles,” with an arrow beneath it pointing westward.

  Meanwhile, the divers had closed all the airports in the upper part of the submerged hull and plugged all of the other openings they co
uld find in the side walls, scupper holes mostly. Into such openings, they sledged home tapered wood plugs, mostly six-inch-diameter ones, that Fred Schlachter had turned up for us on a lathe in his carpenter shop. We made no investigation as to the purpose of any hole we found in the submerged side walls; so long as the hole was round and the diver could get a plug to fit it, a sledge hammer promptly drove it in hard after he had cleaned away the barnacles from inside the hole so the tapered plug would seat tightly enough to hold air.

  I undocked the Athos at 6:00 P.M. and then went back again to the sunken dock, to which all the American salvage crew returned also after an hour off for supper ashore. Our electrician, Charley Hoffman, had salvaged from the electric shop ashore a small gasoline-driven generator which he hooked up to the electric light wires and the lights which he and the Italian electricians had strung on impromptu poles erected by Buck Schott and the Arab carpenters. When we got back from supper, the little generator set was already chugging away and our crudely hung lights were already on. We needed them, for in the tropics the twilight is brief and night falls early.

  We worked till 10:00 P.M., putting in a fifteen-hour day, with all hands soaking up drinking water like sponges and exuding it from their pores like sieves. I drank twelve bottles of water, three whole gallons, myself. When finally we all knocked off, all the piping was completed, ready to connect up the air compressors; and all the openings the divers could find, several dozen, were plugged. There would be plenty more holes discovered, I felt sure, and innumerable leaks, but they could wait until the compressed air hit them. After that, they would make their locations plain immediately by the streams of air bubbles rising through the water.

  It was a very hot and a very weary crew of salvage men that embarked with me on the last trip ashore for their last night ashore in some time, but a very satisfied one. Every man felt he knew that dry dock now and that it belonged to him, but he also knew that once the compressors started, the salvage job was going to be an around-the-clock performance for every one of them.

  We turned to again at 7:00 A.M., but I had to dock the third vessel on the Persian dock before I could join the salvage crew. By that time, the Danish salvage ship was feeling its way cautiously alongside the nearly submerged port side wall of the sunken dock to avoid what we knew must be a hidden menace to navigation close aboard there. For in scuttling the dry dock, the Italians had also capsized overboard the two large traveling cranes which ran on tracks atop each side wall of the dock. We could tell where they had gone over the sides—there were two huge gaps in the pipe railings guarding the upper decks. One gap was a little forward of amidships on the port side outboard; there the port crane had been flipped over into the sea, and looking down in the water, a vague shape ten or fifteen feet down could be seen near the dock, probably the top of the steel crane boom. The salvage ship coming in had to avoid that or it would tear its bottom out.

  The starboard crane, from the evidence of the broken railing on that side, had been tipped inboard into the dry dock itself, where completely invisible in the water, it lay with its boom broken, on the floor of the dock, constituting no present danger to anybody except the divers who might get fouled up in it.

  That Danish vessel had its quarterdeck completely covered with air compressors—there were the two shining Ingersoll-Rands and two somewhat dilapidated-looking (by contrast) Italian Fiats. Commander Davy had evidently functioned 100 per cent as a liaison officer—he had got both the desired compressors and the ship to transport them—no simple task I perfectly well knew. I learned later he had persuaded Captain Lucas to order McCance to turn them over to us, not allowing him any option as to whether he wanted to or not. Captain Lucas had personally guaranteed that the compressors would immediately be returned should McCance have need of them. Over that guarantee, I never worried. I felt sure I should long since be finished with them before McCance, at the pace he was going, could possibly have any need of those compressors, more especially as it was evident McCance showed no signs of knowing the value of compressed air in salvage work; he was wholly relying on pumps in what he was attempting in the commercial harbor.

  Under my directions, the Dane backed slowly in, stern first against the port side wall, while we on the dock handled lines for him. Shortly his salvage boom was swinging aboard us one after another, two compressors weighing several tons each—nasty objects to have to handle aboard had we not had his husky boom to do it for us. After landing the two compressors, one Ingersoll-Rand and one Italian Fiat, alongside our new air main compressor connections, he cast loose and steamed slowly around to the starboard side of the dock, where he likewise deposited the other two.

  That completed, the only bit of salvage work in months his fine ship had been permitted to do, her Danish captain gave us a friendly parting wave. From his wistful expression he would have given his right leg for a chance to remain and help. Then in English which surprised me, he sang out,

  “Good luck to the Americans!” as he steamed clear of us and headed back through the wrecks to his berth inside the commercial harbor and more enforced idleness.

  It didn’t take long to couple up the air compressors—we used no pipe, only lengths of two-inch rubber air hose to give us flexible connections so the vibrations of the pounding compressors wouldn’t shake our rigid air mains to pieces. In less than an hour after they had been landed, we had fresh water in their radiators, fuel in their tanks, lubricating oil in their crank cases, and both Ingersoll-Rand machines running, throbbing rhythmically as they pounded compressed air into our mains and then into the tops of the side dock compartments.

  I breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction—the full-throated bass of those massive Ingersoll-Rands hammering compressed air into the sunken dock beneath my feet was heavenly music to my ears—I wouldn’t have traded it for any symphony on earth!

  Getting the two Italian compressors going was another matter—they were a primitive semi-diesel drive type requiring the insertion of a slow-burning chemical cartridge into the tops of some of the engine cylinders to start combustion while somebody cranked them over by hand. I had never seen anything like that before, neither had any of my salvage crew, and we should have wasted hours figuring out how to start them had not one of our Italian mechanics who was watching our strong man, Buck Schott, in his futile efforts at cranking, come to our rescue.

  Tony, which was the only name I ever knew him by, though I doubt that was really his name, knew no English at all, but he knew all about those Italian compressors and indicated by signs that he would be happy to show us. He looked into the compressor tool box and found there a package of small square sheets of paper, apparently impregnated with some chemical. Rolling one of these into a tight tube, he unscrewed a cap from on top an engine cylinder, inserted one end of his newly made cartridge into a recess inside the cap, lighted the other end. It didn’t burn, it merely glowed dully like a piece of Chinese punk. Tony screwed the cap, glowing fuse and all, back into the cylinder top and then started to crank furiously.

  It was lucky Tony had a stout right arm, a stout heart, and oceans of determination, for he used up half a dozen cartridges, all his Italian cuss-words, and most of his strength on the crank before finally that semi-diesel gave in, coughed sporadically and then decided to keep on rolling over. Tony, naked to the waist and a limp wet rag by then, stepped back proudly.

  “Bono, Tony!” I exclaimed (that and “no bono” being all the Italian I knew) as I patted him enthusiastically on his dripping back. “I’ll put you in charge of these compressors! Now you go over there,” and I pointed across the suspension bridge to the starboard side where alongside the quivering Ingersoll-Rand the other Italian compressor stood idle, “and you start that one, too.”

  Tony smiled cheerfully at me and nodded that he understood what was wanted.

  “Si, signor Commandante!” he beamed as he started across the swaying footpath. “Immediamente!”

  I had no doubt Tony meant immediately, and c
ertainly his intentions and his will were of the best, but Tony was in for a battle. Before the other compressor also was running, he had used up practically all the chemical cartridges that had come with both compressors and Tony was a wreck, hanging gasping over the rail.

  “Huh,” I remarked to Lloyd Williams, who also was in bad shape, having spelled Tony on the crank of the second machine, “let’s hope these damned Eytie compressors never stall! It’s a day’s work for a man just to start one of ’em. Now you see Tony gets promoted right away to foreman for this and find someone who can tell him that in Italian. That’ll give him seventy-five lira a day instead of fifty—if he ever gets anything. He’s worth all of that and lots more to us out here. And, Lloyd,” I concluded, “send someone ashore to rustle up a lot more of those chemical cartridge sheets. We’re going to need ’em by the dozens.”

  Hour after hour under the hot sun, the laboring compressors pounded away, pushing in the compressed air. It was going to take a whole skyful of air, rammed down into that dry dock, before we could push out enough water from inside it to make any impression. My major concern was whether the smoking compressors would stand up long enough under the terrible operating conditions to do the job. With the only air available for cooling them the hot blast atmosphere of Massawa far over 100° F., how effective would their radiators be in keeping the engines and the compressors cool enough to avoid overheating and seizing of the pistons?

  They weren’t any too effective, we swiftly found out, when all the radiators shortly started to boil. After that, we learned that those radiators gulped down more water than we did, and it had to be fresh water, too, all brought from shore. Shortly we had to provide a 1000-gallon tank to store fresh water on the dock for radiator refilling, and the refilling job kept the four Italians whom I gave Tony to help him, busy all the time. Aside from that, and replenishing frequently the crank-case oil (for the hot engines also used that up at a terrific rate), we had at first no great trouble—the Ingersoll-Rands ran beautifully. The Italian Fiats, however, as befitted their age and antiquated design, vibrated very badly; so badly they would shortly have waltzed themselves off the dock into the sea had we not chocked them solidly beneath their wheels and then lashed them securely down to the deck.