Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  So mutually admiring each other’s efforts in our widely different fields, the dinner progressed through the fish to the roast, then finally to the coffee for which we retired to another room where the dismal situation in trying to provision beleaguered Malta by sea got some attention. All the time I was wondering how I could toss my scheme for the Dido into the admiral’s prodigious lap. But since nobody else mentioned her or anything relative to her, I finally bluntly dragged her in myself.

  “I understand, Admiral,” I said, “you’re sending the cruiser Dido to Durban for dry-docking and repairs.”

  “Why, yes, Ellsberg,” said the admiral, a little startled at the sudden change of subject. “She’s waterlogged aft; the dockyard chaps say there’s nothing for it except to send her away for docking. You see, Rommel won’t let us dock her here.”

  “So I understand, Admiral, but Durban’s a long way off. Why not let me do the job at Massawa? It’s much closer.”

  Admiral Harwood looked at me somewhat puzzled, then turned to his Chief-of-Staff.

  “Didn’t the dockyard staff tell us, Edelstein, that Massawa can’t take her? The dock there’s too small, I thought they said.”

  “That’s correct, Admiral. Our constructor, Commander Mann, has been all over that. She’s too big for Massawa; she’s got to go to Durban.”

  “I understand all that, Admiral,” I interjected. “I’ve been over that part myself this morning with both Mann and your Captain of the Dockyard; fact is, I first learned of the Dido from them. They’re right, the dry dock at Massawa is too small—ordinarily. But I’ve given it a little thought and I’ve figured out a way to do it at Massawa. You give me the Dido at Massawa, Admiral, and I’ll give her back to you repaired in no time at all compared to Durban! Where’s a pencil? Look!”

  And with pencil and paper which the Flag Lieutenant hurriedly brought me, I drew sketches to show Admiral Harwood and his Chief-of-Staff how I was going to dry-dock a 7500-ton cruiser in a dry dock for which she was both far too heavy and far too long—a seeming impossibility.

  Admiral Harwood gazed at the scheme in open wonder, but he was cautious. Would it endanger the Dido? He could take no chances. Did I know how few ships he had in his fleet now?

  “Not many, I hear, Admiral. No battleships; that I know, but that’s about all I know for certain.”

  “It’s top secret information and if the enemy knew it, the Eytie fleet would slaughter us, but seeing your Naval Base is involved I’ll tell you. My whole fleet, including the Dido, consists of exactly four light cruisers! And two others, the Euryalus and the Cleopatra, her sisters, out of those four, are damaged exactly as the Dido is, only not quite so badly. We’re praying their sterns will hang together till the Dido gets back here; one ship at a time is as much as I dare send out of the Mediterranean for repairs. If you could only do the lot of them at Massawa, it would be a godsend to me!”

  So? Now there were three cruisers instead of one Massawa could work on.

  “Admiral,” I assured him earnestly, “you send me those three cruisers in succession and I’ll repair all of them for you! And fast, too! All I ask of you is that you furnish from Alex the steel and the men for the repair work; they can come down with the Dido. I’ve got no steel at all for the job, and next to no men in Massawa.”

  “Sinclair,” ordered Harwood sharply, “send for the fleet constructor right away!” He turned to me while his flag lieutenant hurried out to send an orderly after Commander Mann. “You see, Ellsberg, I don’t claim to know anything myself about docking ships, neither does Edelstein here; but Mann, of course, does. If he says there’s the slightest chance of doing it your way, the Dido goes to Massawa. If you do her successfully, then you get her two sisters also. It will be wonderful! You’ll have to pardon my sending for Mann, old chap, but I’m in a tight hole, and I’ve got to be cautious. You explain it to Mann; he’ll understand you better than I; it’s his business. When I’ve heard what he’s got to say, I’ll give you an answer right off!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I agreed. “If I can’t convince Mann, then my plan’s no good and neither am I. You can forget it.”

  While we were waiting for the fleet constructor who was quartered a considerable distance away, the talk went back to the River Plate. From his own lips, I listened fascinated while Admiral Harwood related to me his weird battle tactics in defeating the Graf Spee.

  Then he told me how a short time before, two of his light cruisers escorting a convoy of freighters through the eastern Mediterranean to the relief of Malta, had found across their path in broad daylight an Italian superdreadnought, and in addition an Italian cruiser force in itself far outgunning them. Escape for anyone was hopeless unless the fast cruisers fled immediately, leaving their slow convoy to be sunk. By wireless the situation had been reported to him in Alex by his commodore at sea; he had wirelessed back what to do. And then while he waited in agony to learn what his losses were, he heard that his commodore had outbluffed the vastly superior enemy force and escaped without a fight, cruisers and precious freighters all saved!

  At that moment the fleet naval constructor arrived and all other discussion promptly ceased while Admiral Harwood ordered Commander Mann to attend closely to my scheme for dry-docking the Dido at Massawa instead of sending her to Durban.

  I showed Mann the sketches, explained the operation. Mann was evidently a skilled naval constructor; it took slight explanation only for him to grasp the novel idea. He gazed in admiration at the rough penciled sketches, then turned to his Commander-in-Chief.

  “No reason at all why it can’t be done that way, Admiral,” he agreed. “Odd it never occurred to anyone else. All it requires is skillful handling of the dry dock during the lifting operation.”

  “Topping!” exclaimed Admiral Harwood. “That settles it, Ellsberg; the Dido goes to Massawa! Mann, you find out from Ellsberg in the morning what he needs at his dockyard in the way of materials and men for the job, and get cracking yourself on loading them all on the Dido. Edelstein, you change the Dido’s orders to Massawa instead of Durban, notify them in Durban she isn’t coming, and see the Dido gets under way as soon as Mann has her loaded. And now I guess we’d better all turn in; there’ll be plenty to do tomorrow—for all of us.”

  After an early breakfast, I returned to the dockyard to work with Mann. He would send me the blueprints for the task, see all the steel necessary loaded on the Dido, together with one Royal Navy lieutenant commander to advise me, and thirty British mechanics, two British civilian superintendents, and four foremen put aboard the Dido to do the actual repair work under my direction. He offered to send me more men, but thirty, I thought, should be enough to work three shifts around the clock. It would be a close quarters job around that damaged stern; more men would only get in each other’s way and slow up the work.

  All that settled, I went to Admiral Harwood’s headquarters to bid him good-by.

  “Everything arranged regarding the Dido?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. It’ll take your dockyard a few days yet to collect the men and the steel; after that, she’ll be right along, Admiral.”

  Admiral Harwood shook my hand warmly in farewell, then added fervently,

  “Good luck to you and my thanks for what you’ve already done for us. But for God’s sake, Ellsberg, be careful with the Dido! She’s one quarter of my whole fleet!”

  CHAPTER

  42

  HARDLY HAD I LEFT THE COMMANDER-in-Chief’s headquarters and started in my Army car for his residence to retrieve my aviation bag, than the air raid sirens began to shriek all over Alexandria. When I got to the house, all the personnel there had already retreated to the shelters, but I was so treading on air myself over the prospect of what Massawa was going to do for the Mediterranean fighting fleet, that a minor thing like an air raid didn’t concern me.

  I went up to my room, heaved all the clothes in sight into my bag, and was about to close it when the ground guns opened up and the bombs began to
explode. From all the noise, Alexandria was certainly putting up a terrific barrage with its guns—what I had heard in Cairo was nothing to this ack-ack. And for their part, the Nazis were surely unloading far more bombs. Presumably the Alexandria dockyard was a much more worth-while target to them than the Heliopolis airport.

  I lugged my bag downstairs through the deserted house and tossed it into the back of the sedan the Army had given me, then hurriedly climbed aboard myself alongside the chauffeur.

  “We’d better make knots away from this place!” I ordered the driver. “Let the limeys attend to those Stukas; I’ve got no more business here!”

  In another moment, with no other traffic moving to bother us, we were racing out of Alexandria bound for the open desert, praying that no ill-aimed bomb would come our way. None did; very shortly we were clear of the city and its mingled roar of thundering A.A. guns and detonating bombs.

  It Wasn’t long, however, before our progress was sadly impeded by endless convoys of military trucks headed for El Alamein, only forty miles to the westward of us. I should have liked to have gone there myself to look over the Nazi lines and I had all the rest of the day for it, but I couldn’t. That was the one area my passes wouldn’t get me into. Even Colonel Chickering by no stretch of his imagination could camouflage a naval officer into an American military observer, entitled to enter the British Eighth Army’s fighting lines.

  I tried to achieve it by indirection, purposely losing my way, taking a wrong turn, and heading for El Alamein to the west, instead of Cairo to the southeast. But the first military road block we ran into, ruined the scheme. There the British M.P.s, after examining my papers, very courteously pointed out my error, apologized for the poor road signs that must have caused it, indicated the roads to take to get back on the main road to Cairo, and then over my objections that they should go to so much trouble to help, obligingly put an M.P. on my running board to guide us till we came to the main road and were again headed southeast along it towards Cairo.

  So I had to give up a visit to El Alamein, and after finally dropping our helpful M.P. to board a convoy headed west for his return journey, we kept on towards Cairo.

  There I reported to General Maxwell what had happened in Alex—that I was to get seven Royal Naval officers as assistants, two hundred British workmen, also what materials they could spare. All, of course, subject to the approval of the Admiralty in London, which would take some time to get; and to the volunteering of a sufficient number of the dockyard civilians, which I feared would take a major miracle to bring about. Still it looked promising—I might ultimately get an officer or two, a couple of dozen mechanics, and perhaps a few tons of steel—it would all help.

  My major news, I saved for the last—that Massawa had done Durban out of the cruiser Dido and was now to blossom forth as an actual Naval Base, directly supporting the fighting ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, taking the place of shut-down Alexandria.

  General Maxwell glowed over that—that was what in his plans Massawa had been intended for originally. And to think that it had been achieved with none of the shipyard machinery supposedly required from America to make it possible, yet delivered in Massawa! The general wished me luck with my first warship, warned me to take care of myself and not crack up in the Massawa heat now at its midsummer height, and gave me permission to start back the second day following, August 11. That would give me just about a week’s vacation from Eritrea.

  He also ordered one other thing. I was directed to show up next morning at his headquarters for an interview with all the press representatives in Cairo (which they had just requested) on what had been going on in Massawa. A little perturbed at this, for I couldn’t get by the censors in letters to my wife that I was even in Massawa, I asked him how free I should be to answer questions.

  I learned to my astonishment that I was free to answer any questions whatever and the general would be pleased if I told the whole story.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me. “Every war correspondent’s story will be submitted to the censors here before anything goes out. Whatever the censors want concealed, they’ll cut out. Leave that to them.”

  So next morning I met all the correspondents, American and British, in Cairo, plus a battery of photographers. They received free answers to their questions—the rehabilitation of the Naval Base, the salvage of the large Italian dry dock, the raising of the Liebenfels.

  It was interesting to note what the censors passed—not a word on the Liebenfels, not a word on the re-establishment of the sabotaged base, but the story of my dry dock salvage went out in full. That night the air waves were full of Massawa. The British Broadcasting Corporation put it on the air from London, telling the world in English of that dry dock, and to make sure our enemies didn’t miss it, beaming the news to Berlin in German and to Rome in Italian!

  And in New York the same story went out over the air on all our networks and on short wave to the forces abroad. As I afterward learned, it made the front page in every New York newspaper, as well as the one in Cairo which I saw the next day.

  After that, I concluded it wasn’t a military secret any more that I was in Massawa, but nevertheless it still happened that whenever I mentioned the place in any letters home, the censors continued carefully to excise the name. Probably they were all too busy with their razor blades ever to listen to the home radio or read our own newspapers.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Chickering took care of my transportation next day back to Massawa to see that BOAC should not suddenly pull my seat out from under me—it was arranged I was to go back via Port Sudan again, only a one day’s journey as against the two days via Khartoum.

  On the morning of August 11, I took off for Massawa. At Port Sudan where as usual we made an intermediate stop, the airfield commanding officer agreed to send a wireless to Asmara, asking to have my car sent up from Massawa to meet me at the airport.

  When in the very late afternoon, I alighted at the Asmara airfield, Garza and my car were both there. Since I had no desire to run the mountain road in the darkness any more than was necessary, we started back promptly for Massawa. About two-thirds of the way down, darkness caught us. After that we went quite slowly with surprisingly little resistance from Garza; I judged my Somali must have raced up those mountains so fast he was content for the day.

  We arrived at the Naval Base about 9:00 P.M. I disembarked in front of Building 35, bursting to find my assistants and tell them that our establishment was about to take over from Alex, and so enthusiastic over our prospects I totally ignored my sudden reintroduction to the blast furnace temperatures I had been spared for eight days. So I was delighted to find Captain Morrill waiting for me inside my own air-conditioned room when I entered it. But before I could tell him anything, he started to tell me instead.

  “Damned glad to set eyes on you once more, Captain!” he burst out. “Till I got your radio this afternoon asking for your car, I never expected to see you again and was wondering where I should send your clothes. There’s hell to pay around here! Look at that!”

  He shoved a paper under my nose. It was on the stationery of our civilian contractor, dated at Asmara, August 10, 1942, the day before. It read:

  To: All concerned.

  From: Assistant Foreign Manager.

  Subject: Assignment of Personnel.

  Effective immediately, Capt. Edison Brown is placed in complete charge of all Red Sea salvage operations for this company.

  Morrill continued angrily:

  “Hell’s sure popping around here over that! On the face of it, you’re relieved, Brown’s in charge! Of course I never expected to see you again; neither did anybody else. Here the contractor, who everybody figured had eased you out of Eritrea, was already designating Brown as your successor on salvage! Was there an explosion over that! Captain Reed, Lloyd Williams, and all their men say they’re quitting—they’re damned if they’ll work for Brown! Then you don’t know it, but your big salvage ship, the Chamberlin, finally arri
ved yesterday from San Diego, and her skipper, Captain Hansen, says he never signed on to work for Brown, and he guesses he’ll quit, too! Everything’s in a hell of a mess around this Base! Thank God, you’ve come back; you’re staying, aren’t you?”

  I had to have a few minutes to think, so I said nothing while once again I read that brief order from the contractor, addressed to all hands in Asmara as well as in Massawa. Whether rage or mirth was my predominating reaction at that moment, I still don’t know. The idea of a civilian contractor working for the War Department issuing such an order in wartime and in the war zone! They were undertaking to relieve a naval officer designated both by the Navy, Department and by the Commanding General in Africa as Officer in Charge of Salvage Operations, by one of his own civilian subordinates! Shades of “Alice in Wonderland”! Had they completely lost their senses?

  Finally I turned from the typewritten order to look into Morrill’s wrathful face again.

  “Morrill,” I said, “if it were not for the serious morale effect this has already had on my salvage crews, I’d say nothing I’ve seen in Eritrea since I first laid eyes on all those ‘W il Duce!’ signs on the road between here and Asmara, strikes me as so funny! I’ll flatten this out so fast it’ll make its sponsors dizzy! I gave them credit for having more finesse. The only thing I’m really concerned about is, What did Brown have to do with it? Is he any party to this thing?”

  Morrill only shrugged his shoulders. I looked at my watch. It was a little after 9:00 P.M. Brown should be in his room, just around the corner on that same floor in Building 35.

  “Bring Brown in here,” I ordered Morrill.

  I sat down at my desk, took another look at that unbelievable notice. Another mirage, perhaps? No, on the third reading, it still read the same.