Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  “Ridiculous!” countered General Maxwell. “I can’t leave you here this way! Tell me what you need, not what the Navy won’t give you. Getting them for you will be up to the War Department.”

  “Aye, aye, sir, but I’m not hopeful. What I need for Massawa is seven naval officers: one lieutenant commander as general assistant, two lieutenants for engineering assistants, two lieutenants as hull assistants, one lieutenant as docking officer, and one lieutenant as supply officer and paymaster. That’s the least I need to run this Base; it’s not much. Captain Lucas over at the Royal Naval Base next door has ten British naval officers from commander down to lieutenant to help him, and he’s got no ships, no shops, no docks, and no salvage to look after—just piloting, communications, intelligence, and guard duties. That’s the story.”

  General Maxwell noted down my list.

  “I’ll get on this the moment I get back to Cairo,” he said. “No question you need them badly.”

  I stood at “Salute” as General Maxwell and the others climbed into their cars. In a moment, with friendly farewell waves from my visitors, the four Army cars shot out of Massawa, bound for the cool mountain plateau.

  I wondered as I watched them go, if anyone had noticed the flag. No one, British or American, had commented on its presence. I was sure, however, I should have heard comments enough had there been none. But comments or no comments, it gave me a lift as I looked up at those beautiful stripes and that starred blue field waving over my Naval Base. Even in God-forsaken Massawa, it made us still a part of far-away America.

  CHAPTER

  30

  NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT BUT AT least the most pressing problem I had on my mind was where my few Army officers and myself and all the American supervisors, both for the Naval Base and for the contractor, were going to sleep shortly. (The little cottage, once assigned to me as quarters, had long since been reassigned to Commander Davy, liaison officer, as his quarters.) For in a few days, in spite of Captain Lucas’ recommendations and their approval by Admiral Harwood, the British C.-in-C. in Alex, the answer on the housing problem came back negative from London. We must all get out of Building 108, the promise to Cable and Wireless was to be kept, the building given to them exclusively unless they voluntarily agreed to some other arrangement, which in Massawa their representatives refused to do.

  Where could we go? There was no building in any condition for occupancy, least of all any intended as quarters. Of the other abandoned Italian buildings, I picked out Building 35 as the least objectionable—a two-storied masonry building used once by the Italians as an engineering office building. It was vastly inferior in location, ventilation, and coolness to Building 108.

  It had no water supply, no plumbing, and especially no shower baths, without which life in Massawa was intolerable. (Normally, when ashore, I took from three to five shower baths a day to keep myself going.) It stood as far from the sea as was possible on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, in the middle of a dusty plain where no sea breeze ever penetrated, but plenty of fine dust always did. Still, it was that or nothing. I arranged with Pat Murphy, construction superintendent for the contractor, to take some of his men, particularly pipefitters, off building construction elsewhere and do what he could to pipe up that dilapidated Eytie office building with showers and toilets and cut it up inside into rooms.

  Pat estimated that at best the job would take him three weeks. The sole concession I could get out of the Cable and Wireless nabobs in Massawa was to defer our eviction date from June 1 to June 14. Murphy dragged some men off the job of building a badly needed new and larger shipfitter shop for me at the Naval Base and turned them to on the conversion job on Building 35.

  To add to my distresses, now that June was approaching and the already unbelievably hot weather was getting still hotter, we who were working outdoors began to suffer from a tropical affliction. It wasn’t any of the dread diseases we had all been inoculated against—typhus, yellow fever, typhoid, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, or even malaria, against which there was no inoculation. It was none of these; it was something peculiar apparently to Massawa—prickly heat. I had always laughingly regarded prickly heat as something you dusted a baby’s delicate skin with talcum powder for, against minor skin irritations in the summertime.

  In Massawa, we found prickly heat was no laughing matter, to be eased by talcum powder. There was no easing at all of the Massawa variety. Bathed all day and all night in perspiration, a raw irritation burst out all over us and stayed there, giving our skins the appearance of a coarse grade of Scotch pebble-grained leather. Talcum powder was no palliative for the terrible itching—the sweat washed it away immediately. Lotions and salves did no good either against the salt sweat exuding continuously from every swollen pore.

  There was no help for any man working in the open except to grin and bear it if he could, or to bear it without grinning if he couldn’t. But for everyone working on salvage, especially the divers, the situation was even worse. The mud, the filth, the decaying barnacles, infected the prickly heat eruptions, causing major boils at random on the body, nearly driving the victim wild. Captain Plummer did all he could, lancing boils, bandaging where possible, but that afforded negligible relief. All my salvage men suffered continuously the tortures of the damned.

  I was lucky even to conclude the swift salvage of the dry dock before my divers began to crack. Long, lanky Jess Enos went first. With his whole body a mass of unbelievable sores, his arms swollen to twice normal size, Jess was carted off to Mai Habar Hospital up in the mountains, a sad case. He never came back to us. Months later, with his original skin all gone and what had taken its place from beneath looking like something run through a hot-calendering machine, he was shipped back to the United States.

  Next went Melvin Barry. Between the prickly heat and the heat in general, aggravated by the terrible diving conditions, his blood pressure shot sky-high and his heart showed signs of trouble. He went to join Jess at Mai Habar; soon he also was on the way home. My first salvage job had cost me two out of the only five divers I had; that wasn’t all. “Tex” Powell, carpenter, gashed his leg badly, slipping on a float in the half-raised dock. The deep gash landed him also in Mai Habar. A month later, however, when he came out of the hospital, he had had enough of Massawa and never came back to us either. Instead, while convalescing, he got himself assigned temporarily as paymaster in Asmara where he could wear a gun while traveling in the contractor’s pay car. That gun simply fascinated “Tex” and he refused ever to come back to work in Massawa. “Whitey” Broderick, rigger, quickly had enough, too; he was transferred to a job ashore where life was not so exacting.

  So in about two weeks I had lost permanently four of my little salvage crew of thirteen; quite a casualty rate. The others, together with most of the men I had or ever got, afloat or ashore, spent approximately 25 per cent of their time from then on in the hospital being treated for aggravated prickly heat. We had a rough time with it.

  Meanwhile, the older men began to crack up. Colonel Claterbos had informed me, while on his visit to Massawa with General Maxwell, that he also was through, that he was being shipped back to the United States as soon as transportation was available. I looked at Claterbos incredulously when he told me that—no American in all Africa could match his magnificent physique. But it was so, he assured me—his heart was going bad, the doctors wouldn’t let him stay. A little later, when I visited Mai Habar to see my own men, there was the huge colonel, himself a patient in a wheel chair, hospitalized till departure. I commiserated with the colonel over what Eritrea had so swiftly done to him, but he corrected me.

  It wasn’t Eritrea, he assured me bitterly, that had broken him down; it was the interminable bickering with the American contractors (of whom, I could thank God, I had only one to deal with; he had several) which had done the trick. Eritrea was merely the climatic background which had made it impossible for him to stand up physically under the strain. I was sorry. I had worked with Claterbos back
in New York on Mission plans before either of us had come to Africa; since then, he had done everything he could to lend me a hand.

  Then shortly Pat Murphy vanished from the Massawa scene, also to take a bed in Mai Habar, never to return except in the fall on brief inspections. Murphy, rather elderly, had been knocked out by the Massawa heat. That also was a calamity to me, I felt; Pat Murphy had worked hard from the beginning on the Massawa construction projects, always strictly on the job. His successor as construction superintendent, sent down by the contractor, was a much younger man.

  But there were a few things on the brighter side over the last weeks of May and the early part of June.

  A few days after the inspection visit to Massawa, I received a letter from Colonel Chickering, General Maxwell’s Chief of Staff. In it was a copy of Major General Hutchinson’s letter to our Commanding General. As General Officer, Commanding His Majesty’s Troops in Sudan, General Hutchinson took occasion officially to repeat to General Maxwell what he had said to me in the Lord Grey.

  But that was not all. In the same envelope was a pink routing slip of the North African Mission, bearing in Colonel Chickering’s handwriting a note,

  General Maxwell desired that this copy of radiogram be furnished you. We all join in the chorus.

  W. E. C.

  Attached to the routing slip was a green carbon copy of a very long radiogram from General Maxwell to the War Department in Washington. The gist of the radiogram was that the War Department request the Navy Department to promote me to Captain in the Navy without delay for “most outstanding service with this Mission.” The bulk of the radiogram was given over to General Maxwell’s relation of the outstanding services (apparently while he had said very little on his inspection trip, there wasn’t much he had missed); the rest of it to his reasons for prompt action.

  In remarkably few days, considering the difficulties of communication between the Middle East and Washington and the normal interminable routine of any inter-departmental actions in Washington itself, a wire was received in reply. The rising of that dry dock must have stirred up more commotion in Washington than it had done in the waters of Massawa harbor, so to have short-circuited all usual delays. By direction of the President, I was promoted immediately to the rank of Captain in the Navy. Six months before, I had entered the Navy from civil life as a Lieutenant Commander. Now, almost as rapidly promoted as if I had joined the Air Corps instead, I was a Captain. For the Navy, that was something.

  I hastened to get an Arab tailor over in Massawa to change the gold stripes on my shoulder marks from three to four. Those shoulder marks (which I now always wore on my shirt like the British so the Sudanese sentries about the Base might recognize me in the dark as a naval officer and not shoot me) were the only insignia of my rank that needed changing. It was folly to bother about changing the sleeve stripes on my solitary blue uniform which in Massawa would never be worn. In fact, to get the extra gold stripes for the shoulder marks, I had the Arab tailor strip a stripe off my unused blue uniform, the only available source of gold lace in Massawa.

  So now I was a Captain; that had its advantages. No longer would I have to salute every colonel, American or British, who rolled through Massawa. Better yet, in the eyes of all the natives and all the Italians, the commanding officer of the American Naval Base was the equal in rank of the commander of the Royal Naval Base near by. In the East, that counted for something.

  But other than those imponderables, my promotion made little difference. It didn’t affect my pay except negligibly. If financial reward had been a factor, I might have bettered myself considerably more by resigning my commission altogether and taking a job with the contractor as a civilian mechanic. There was hardly an American workman I had whose pay didn’t exceed mine. As for the contractor’s major executives, luxuriously ensconced in the best hotel in cool Asmara, who were the bane of my Massawa existence, my salary as a naval captain (subject to American income tax which heavy war tax they wholly escaped in Eritrea) was simply not to be mentioned in the same breath with theirs.

  But I felt very proud of my promotion nevertheless. I had received it as a reward “for outstanding service,” not as a merely routine matter after having managed to live the required number of years without being court-martialed, until some vacancies occurred to which someone had to be promoted. And the greatest thrill I got from it came not from receiving the congratulations of all the senior British officers, Army and Navy, in Massawa, cordial though they were, but when I lifted the telephone in my office to make my first call the morning the news came through. Before I could say more than the number I wanted, the British seaman (whom I knew only as a voice) manning the switchboard on the naval peninsula, before he started to get the number paused to say,

  “My ’earty congratulations, Cap’n Ellsberg. All us lads ’ere at the Royal Naval Base are ’appier at seeing you promoted Cap’n ’n if we’d all been rated up ourselves!”

  The same day I got another surprise, quite as welcome as my promotion. A British military transport plane landed on the seldom-used ex-Italian airport on the fringe of Massawa. Out of it, still in full battle equipment—tin hats, rifles, bayonets, cartridge belts, and mess kits—piled ten South African soldiers, fresh from the Libyan battle front just west of Tobruk, all in charge of a sergeant with orders to report to me! I could hardly believe it. That South African Major General had made good on what I had taken only as a polite but meaningless gesture! He had combed a South African regiment immediately on his arrival in Libya, picked out ten men who were ironworkers before they became soldiers, piled them all into the first transport plane he could lay hands on, and started them off for Massawa to help someone he felt badly needed help.

  There was a man! If ever he should see this, he will know I have never forgotten him, even though our solitary meeting was so casual I have no record of his name. But there is one American at least who will always cherish in his heart a warm spot for South Africa for what her soldier son and the men he sent did to help the U.S. Naval Repair Base at Massawa when it terribly needed help.

  That was much more than our own America did for us. A few days later General Maxwell received a reply to his other radiogram asking for the seven American naval officers badly wanted for the Massawa Naval Base. The answer was no; no more American naval officers would be sent to Massawa. I wasn’t particularly disappointed; I had expected no help. But General Maxwell, shocked, couldn’t believe it and again, pressed for help. However, in spite of all his efforts, he came out exactly where he went in. To the end of my tour in Massawa, no other American naval officer was ever detailed there to help me. I might have four gold stripes now, but in spite of all the dignity that might go with my new rank, I was left just as free to crack up in hot Massawa without assistance as when I had only three.

  CHAPTER

  31

  EARLY IN JUNE, PUSHING UP A HUGE bow wave that resulted in a report from the British naval lookout station that a destroyer was coming in full speed, my salvage tug, the Intent, arrived safely in Massawa. Three months on the way from Port Arthur, Texas, she had circumnavigated Africa, sailing 13,000 miles with her General Motors diesel pushing her steadily along. Always a mere lone speck on the face of the ocean, now with all the 1200 horsepower of her diesel electric machinery driving her, she came at full speed, eleven knots, into Massawa, her tiny hull invisible behind the foaming bow wave her stubby stem pushed up.

  Edison Brown, skipper and salvage master, H. M. Keith, chief engineer, and their little crew of twelve men had done a fine job in bringing their trifling cockle-shell of a harbor tug half the distance round the world, mixing their seasons scandalously on the way. They had left Port Arthur in late winter, arrived in Capetown in mid-autumn, and reached Massawa in early summer. I welcomed them enthusiastically as they maneuvered slowly in against the pier at the Naval Base, both for their voyage and for this reinforcement to my sadly depleted salvage gang. In addition, I looked with pleasure on the two .50 calib
er anti-aircraft guns I had ordered mounted on top the Intent’s bridge; now if we had an air raid on Massawa, I should at least have something to shoot back with at the bombers.

  The next few days, so far as the Intent was concerned, were spent first in arranging quarters ashore in wooden barracks for her crew, since her stuffy little forecastle was uninhabitable beneath the Massawa sun and in taking her captain and engineer into Building 108 with me; and second in breaking out from the storeroom under her fantail, the salvage gear she was carrying. Naturally, being very small, she wasn’t carrying much—one small air compressor for diving use, a small electric generator lighting set, her diving rigs, four small salvage pumps, and some miscellaneous tools—enough to work with.

  I had a salvage job already picked out for her. Two days after her arrival I took her over to the south harbor and introduced Captain Brown, Keith, her Chief Engineer, and their twelve shipmates to their first task, the scuttled S.S. Liebenfels, a large German freighter sunk at the south end of the line of seven wrecks strung out in a line there.

  The Liebenfels, sunk to block the approach to the oiling pier for the large oil tank storage in the desert near by, had gone down as intended as a block ship. Her hull was well submerged; only her superstructure amidships and a little of her forecastle and poop showed above water, three little islands rising from the sea. Ahead of her lay the S.S. Colombo, capsized, and five more wrecks.

  The British diving survey indicated that the Liebenfels had one large hole blasted in her hull on the port side forward. From the damage and the way she looked on the surface, I sized up the Liebenfels as a routine salvage job—not easy, but one on which normal salvage methods together with hard work should assure results.