Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Brown had three divers. “Buck” Scougale, a small, wiry individual, was the only one rated a first class diver (which he swiftly proved he was). Wiard, a husky, athletic young man, and Dorcy, tall, fairly heavy, and rather studious in appearance, were the other two. They were rated divers, second class, and so they were, though Dorcy, at least, gave all he had to the task. Wiard, after his first wreck, decided he had had enough of diving in Massawa.

  Buck Scougale made the first dive to inspect the hole torn in the Liebenfels, and finally came up from his initial dive bathed in sweat to describe to me in crisp, incisive phrases what he had seen. The bomb had evidently been placed in the port forward bilges of the number two cargo hold, all the way outboard of the double bottom, and against the after side of the heavy steel bulkhead separating the number two hold from the number one hold just forward of it.

  The Nazis had chosen with great care the most damaging point possible for their heavy bomb. In the explosion, they had blown a huge hole in the ship’s side about twenty feet long, laying wide open the side in both the number one and the number two holds. They had destroyed the lower outboard corner of the vertical bulkhead inside between the two holds; they had blown out the bottom of the ship in that vicinity; they had torn wide open the double bottom compartments near the point of explosion in both holds. Roughly two-thirds of all the damage was in hold number two (the largest hold on the ship); hold number one (smaller because the ship started there to narrow down towards the bow) was laid open only half as much as number two.

  While the two remaining divers in succession went over the side of the Intent to make sure there were no holes blown in the Liebenfels elsewhere, I discussed with Brown as salvage master, what I wanted him to do. We would make no attempt at all to seal up the big hole in the number two hold. A rough calculation indicated to me that if we sealed up the hole in number one hold, which was easier, and closed off all the sea chests on the ship which had undoubtedly been opened to help scuttle her, and then pumped out all holds except number two hold, we should have buoyancy enough, with a fair margin for contingencies, to float up the Liebenfels. That was work in plenty for his three divers and the slight crew he had to assist. I was sure we could lift the ship with the biggest cargo hold in her still flooded and wide open to the sea; we would attempt no more under Massawa conditions than would permit me to raise the Liebenfels in waterlogged condition and immediately put her in dry dock for repairs.

  On that plan, Brown proceeded. Early each morning, the Intent sailed out of the naval harbor for her station alongside the Liebenfels; late each evening she came back so her crew might have ashore in the barracks, while not so good, at least the best chance for sleep Massawa afforded.

  To seal up the hole in the number one hold we had to install a huge cement patch, a cement filling, so to speak, containing over thirty tons of concrete, all of which had to be placed under water by divers.

  In addition to patching the hole, there were about a dozen sea chest openings in the way of the boiler room and the engine room which had to be made watertight. A cursory inspection in the engine room of the one sea chest valve Buck Scougale in a diving suit could at great risk to himself even get to amidst the mass of machinery there, showed the Nazis had sabotaged the valve by removing its insides and cover, leaving that open sea connection impossible to close. Undoubtedly they had done the same to all the sea chest valves in the crowded bilges to which we couldn’t get a diver close enough to inspect, even by feel. No doubt the Nazis figured even trained eels, once cased in cumbersome diving suits, could never get to those dismantled valves to seal them against the sea.

  But we easily beat them at that. While Buck, by far the best diver, was working on the hole forward aided by Dorcy, Wiard was given the simple task of sealing off the sea chests from outside the ship, not from the inside, where even the best diver could not get at them. All Wiard had to do was to locate in the shell plating down near the bilges just above where the Liebenfels rested in the mud, the perforated grating in the outer shell covering each sea chest connection. Then on a thin wood batten which he carried down with him into the sea, he marked with a diving knife the height and the width of that grating, and if there was any curvature to the shell in that vicinity, he carved one side of the thin batten to a shape to fit that curvature.

  Up on deck, under the direction of Scotty McLay, the Intent’s energetic first mate, the ship’s carpenter swiftly knocked together a heavy canvas-covered wood frame to dimensions slightly exceeding those of the perforated grating, and chiseled the edges of the frame to suit its curvature. The four edges of the frame, which were to go against the side of the ship, were covered with canvas stuffed with oakum to make a somewhat flexible soft pad which would seat tightly against the steel plating of the ship all around the sea chest grating.

  A couple of long iron hook bolts, made by Keith, the engineer, completed the assembly. These had hooked ends inside, small enough to pass through the perforations in the sea chest gratings and catch inside them. On the outside, these hook bolts were threaded, with a washer and a nut where they passed through the canvas-covered frame.

  When the first frame, about two feet wide and three feet high and slightly curved, was done, it was weighted so it would just sink and was lowered down the side to Wiard. Far below us in the water, he was standing on a little diving stage hung against the side of the wreck just below the main sea injection for the condenser, which that frame was to seal off.

  The installation went swiftly. In less than half an hour Wiard had got the frame over the grating, hooked the two bolts into the grating, and set up the two nuts tightly against the canvas-covered frame so that its oakum pudding was bearing hard against the steel shell plates, completely sealing off the opening from the sea to the largest valve inside the ship. We had no need for any further worry about that sabotaged valve inside; no great amount of water would ever leak by that seal outside when we started pumping.

  In that manner, every sea chest opening in both sides of the ship was plugged off; most of them took smaller frames than the one just described.

  There was one other diving task that had to be done, a very difficult one. Each cargo hold on the ship had to be separated as watertight as possible from all others, especially forward, where number two hold was to remain waterlogged. To do this required closing the drainage manifold valves, difficult of access but reachable, which stood on the floorplates of the submerged engine room. Buck, who if any diver could get in, could do it. He wormed his way down the maze of steep ladders to the engine room floorplates. There by feel in that black water he closed all the drainage valves he could find, driving tapered wood plugs hard into the seats of all the valves whose bonnets were missing so they couldn’t be closed. With that I figured, the inter-connecting piping systems were fairly well sealed off.

  We had one further major job, as well as a number of minor ones. There were five large cargo hatches to the holds of the ship, all but one of which hatches lay wide open to the sea in the well-submerged decks. (The fifth hatch was out of water in the superstructure amidships.) We couldn’t start to pump out the three holds, one forward and two aft, which we had to dry out (together with the amidships hold, the engine room, and the boiler room) while those three huge cargo hatches lay open beneath the sea. To take care of that problem, we had to build three heavy rectangular vertical wood cofferdams (large vertical trunks, open at both ends) to go over each of the three submerged hatches. Each of these vertical cofferdams, anchored watertight to the hatch coaming below, rose some ten feet through the sea to just above the high tide line, to form a watertight shaft from the tops of the holds below to the open air above.

  Each of these cofferdams was of the size of the cargo hatch below it, about twenty feet athwartships and eighteen feet fore and aft. Made of tongue and grooved planks two inches thick, their construction and installation, partly with divers, partly from the surface, was a slow and laborious task.

  On these instal
lations, both amidst the wreckage and the mud down on the ocean floor and the blazing heat up on the surface, Brown and his crew, only fourteen men all told, labored day after day, no time out for Sundays or anything else, that stifling June for three weeks.

  Meanwhile, as the Intent’s little crew was getting along all right, I was with them only part of the time in the south harbor, having considerable in other directions to attend to, but at least I received now some officers to help me with it.

  General Maxwell, since he could get no aid for me from the Navy, decided to do as well as possible with Army officers. So he seized on two young officers, one of whom had been sent out to the Libyan Desert as an observer on tank warfare and the other as an engineer, and ordered them to Massawa to report to me—Captain Paul Morrill of the Infantry and First Lieutenant David Woods of the Corps of Engineers.

  Promptly I assigned Morrill as my Executive Officer and Woods as Shop Superintendent. I found I had been lucky in the two officers given me, both young men, of course. Morrill was a stocky, bull-dog-jawed pugnacious individual of excellent organizing ability; Woods, a slightly-built, slow-spoken, phlegmatic young engineer (a Southerner, I think, from his drawl, though I was never sure). Neither of them know nor pretended to know anything about ships. But they both had what was most important—enthusiasm, ability and a desire for action. That was all I needed, and I turned them both to at once, where they relieved me of most of the shore load.

  Afloat, I had the problem of repairs to the salvaged Italian dry dock. On that, which I considered the most important repair job of all confronting the Naval Base, I put Lloyd Williams, salvage master mechanic, in charge. I gave him the remnants of Reed’s original salvage crew, three divers, and the six American mechanics he still had left himself, plus the ten South African ironworkers who had just arrived, together with a few Italian mechanics from our shore base and a large gang of Eritreans for laborers.

  I suspended all further salvage by Captain Reed’s crew for the present, feeling it more important to use him and his divers to help the repair gang on repairs under the dock floor where only divers could get at the bottom. Normally such a repair job as that Italian dry dock presented would have been solved by dry-docking her in an even larger dry dock; for Massawa that was impossible. There was no larger dry dock in Africa or elsewhere which could be taken for the job, even if she could be towed there. The Queen Elizabeth was tying up the only dock in Alexandria which could take her; her sister, the Valiant, was tying up in Durban in South Africa the only other Allied dry dock big enough for the task.

  So it was up to us to repair our salvaged dry dock as she lay afloat in Massawa harbor, a devilish job under the circumstances, which Lloyd Williams uncomplainingly took over. But there were complications even in Massawa to that procedure. We needed several hundred skilled mechanics; we had only a couple of dozen, mainly South Africans. We needed a great deal of steel; there was only a trifling amount in Massawa. I radioed America to ship several hundred tons of steel for the job and at least fifty shipbuilding mechanics. Very promptly I received an answer—no. America was too busy on its own shipbuilding program requiring some ten million tons of steel a year to spare any men or a few hundred tons of steel for us. We were in “an area of British responsibility”—Britain must furnish us both the steel and any men needed.

  By what process of logic anyone in Washington could reconcile the sending of our Mission to the Middle East to help hard-pressed Britain, with the statement to us that we must look to Britain for help in materials and men, I couldn’t figure out. Who was to help whom was another “Alice in Wonderland” problem. But so it was. In Washington, we weren’t even step-nephews of Uncle Sam; apparently we were completely orphans.

  I had Commander Davy go to work on the British C.-in-C. in Alex to get us some steel and some more men, seeing America had washed its hands of us. Very soon we had an answer—the C.-in-C. would be glad to help but every ton of ship steel in Africa, which wasn’t very much, was already being swallowed up in repairing the vast holes, in the battleships Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant, on the dry docks in Alex and Durban, respectively. All the shipbuilding mechanics in Africa were similarly tied up; none were available to us. Steel for us would be ordered in England, overwhelmed already with demands for steel, but God alone knew when we might get it. Then the delivery would take three months, even after some were pinched from England’s meager stocks. However, we were informed there might be a few stray steel plates and beams in Port Sudan.

  Commander Davy promptly flew to Port Sudan to find out. He came back, having arranged for the shipment from there of what he could find—fifty tons all told perhaps. That cleaned out Port Sudan.

  I started an intensive search of Massawa itself. We found a little in some unexpected places which I had explored. The Fascisti had taken all the steel ship plates and steel channel bars there were in Massawa and used them to construct the roofs of underground airraid shelters. Buried beneath tons of overlying coral rock, I found what ship steel Massawa had possessed. With bulldozers borrowed from the contractor, we tore all the air-raid shelters on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula to pieces to recover that precious steel—perhaps fifty tons more—leaving us naked under heaven should we be raided ourselves. We should have nothing save tin hats (if only we could get some tin hats) for protection against bombs or air strafing should it come—now no very remote possibility as events swiftly proved.

  But so great was our need for steel I have no doubt I should still have demolished those shelters for it even under a rain of bombs. Out from beneath the coral overlay it came, to be turned over to Lloyd Williams. With that immediately at hand, and the little which arrived in a week from Port Sudan, he started his repair job. We should need vastly more to finish. Where it might come from, only a crystal gazer might foretell.

  But for the moment, I had everything going. On the Persian dry dock, we were running merchant ships over the keel blocks at a pace averaging now a ship every day and a half—the jungle ballet of my Eritrean natives wielding scrapers and paint brushes was dizzying to behold. On the Italian dry dock, Lloyd Williams and his assorted crew (the South Africans having laid aside their bayonets) were busy with acetylene torches cutting away blasted steel. In the Naval Base shops, all hands were busy on repairs for the ships in dry dock, fabricating materials for Williams’ job on the Italian dock, salvage materials for the Liebenfels, and on miscellaneous orders from all over Eritrea.

  Meanwhile, it was getting hotter; now was the time when the Italians had always locked up Massawa and retreated to the high hills for the summer. I had been curious about the Massawa heat and humidity ever since my arrival, but having nothing with which to measure them, I had written my wife to procure a hygrometer, and a thermometer reading up to 150° F., and mail them to me. The first week of June, they arrived—a wet and dry bulb hygrometer and the special thermometer. The hygrometer I saw at once would be of no use to me in the daytime, at least; its two thermometers read only up to 110° F. As regards the thermometer, Mrs. Ellsberg wrote in a note contained in the first class package, that she had been unable to get a 150° F. thermometer; they either stopped at 110° F. or else ran very much higher. The one she was enclosing, a technical thermometer, read up to 220° F., made for testing boiling water; it was the best she could do.

  I took the thermometer the day it arrived, June 6, out to where the men were working on the floor of the Italian dry dock, and as unostentatiously as possible, held it a few minutes at the level of the keel blocks in the center of the dock, about head high. In spite of my precaution, in a moment there were gathered round me half a dozen American and South African workmen, attracted irresistibly the instant they saw the thermometer; they were curious, too, about the temperature.

  When I swung the thermometer round and took off my sun glasses to scan the reading, I tried to keep it a secret but it was no use; everybody grabbed at the thermometer to read it. It read 149° F.!

  That, of course, was in the
sun, but so also were all the workmen.

  Retrieving my thermometer from alien hands, I then laid the thermometer on the steel plates of the dry dock floor. When I took it up from there, it read 163° F.! That steel, I knew before was far too hot to touch without heavy gloves or for the natives to go barefooted on; now I knew why.

  This was only early in June. It kept getting hotter as June dragged along into July and August but I never again dared drag out my thermometer to check what the July and August temperatures had risen to. My little experiment immediately cost me several hours’ work on the part of all Americans and South Africans; 149° in the air; 163° on the steel floor! Everyone instantly began to swab himself and look for some shaded spot, feeling twice as hot as he had been a moment before. How was any white man expected to live, let alone work, in temperatures like that, they asked me?

  I really didn’t know; all I knew was that there was a war on and that we had to. But I didn’t argue with any of the poor, half-naked devils before me suffering with prickly heat; I let them loaf in the shade, shouting for the water boys and some ice water till finally after guzzling a few bottles apiece, they recovered enough from the shock to go back to work. But that thermometer never saw the Massawa sun again. We were close enough to the temperature of hell already to suit me; if I ever actually knew that it was any hotter, I doubted that I could stand up myself under the knowledge.

  CHAPTER

  32

  ON JUNE 14, WE WERE EVICTED FROM Building 108. Our substitute quarters, Building 35, were not completely ready, but were at least habitable and we all went, but not without the bitterest hard feeling, especially on the part of the civilian supervisors. They did not hesitate profanely to say what they thought about being thrown out, over a dozen of them, from the only half decent quarters in Massawa so the same space might some day be used by three or four of Cable and Wireless’ British mechanics.