Morrill returned, with Brown trailing him.
“Brown,” I said abruptly, handing him the notice, “what do you know about that? Are you any party to this proceeding?”
Brown gave the order only a perfunctory glance to identify it. He had, of course, seen it before.
“No, sir,” answered Brown promptly. “I had nothing to do with it. I never saw it before till I received it yesterday like everybody else. I don’t know anything about it.”
“That’s all then, Brown; you can go back to your room. Don’t bother to act on that order. It’s worthless and illegal; the contractor had no right to issue it. Just for the record, you’ll see it rescinded in no time at all. Good night!”
Brown left.
“Well, that lets Brown out, Morrill. I should have been damned sorry to have found him mixed up in all this mess,” I said. “Now all that’s necessary is to squelch that order for what effect it’ll have in undoing all the harm it’s done.”
I picked up the telephone to call Asmara, asking for Lieutenant Colonel Knapp, the Area Engineer, whose approval as contracting officer for the Army, the contractor had to have before he could issue any personnel change orders. Knapp, I knew, could never have approved any such order. I got Knapp, to find he didn’t even know any such order was in contemplation, let alone had approved it.
The rest of the story was short, covered in two more brief orders.
Asmara, Aug. 12, 1942
Assignment of Personnel.
Assistant Foreign Manager.
1. Reference to your letter August 10, 1942, appointing Captain Brown in complete charge of the Salvage Operations.
2. You are directed to rescind this order at once as this change was not authorized by the contracting officer.
RALPH E. KNAPP,
Lt. Colonel, Corps of Engineers,
Area Engineer, Eritrea Area.
The next day the following order from the contractor reached Massawa:
Asmara, Aug. 13, 1942
To: All concerned.
From: Assistant Foreign Manager.
Subject: Assignment of Personnel.
Reference is made to memorandum from this office, dated August 10, 1942, assigning Capt. Edison Brown in complete charge of all Red Sea Salvage operations for this company.
Effective this date, the order is rescinded.
So that ended that. Whatever, I wondered, could have motivated that contractor in such a crudely conceived maneuver, so easily defeated? Was it simply to annoy me? Was it intended to get Brown in trouble? But I had a war on my hands and no time to bother my head over contractor maneuvers, crude or otherwise, regardless of how much time his men in Asmara might have on their hands with nothing better to do in the middle of a war than to think them up. And I had the shattered morale of my whole salvage force to restore, none of them in either Captain Reed’s old crew or the newly arrived force under Captain Hansen on the Chamberlin willing to believe that their associate, Captain Brown, had not been mixed up in the scheme somehow, trying to make himself their overall commanding officer.
All of this was bad at that moment, for the Chamberlin had brought practically all the rest of my salvage equipment in her large holds, several more divers, and a moderate-sized crew of salvage mechanics; I had expected on their arrival to get salvage going on a much larger scale than before.
The effect on the Chamberlin’s crew, from her captain down, was particularly bad. They had arrived the very day that order had been posted in Massawa, to find themselves in the middle of an uproar, with their expected Officer in Charge of Salvage vanished from the country, the wildest rumors flying about concerning him, and with all certainty as to who was running the operation knocked sky-high. If that was the way things were run in Eritrea, they had better look out for themselves—next time the contractor might be more skillful in his tactics and they would find themselves being directed by someone of whose qualifications for the task they were doubtful and of whose loyalty they were suspicious. It took their hearts out of their work; never was I able to make a really effective salvage force out of the Chamberlin’s crew.
The only real assistance I ever got out of my biggest and most expensive salvage ship came from her as a repair ship, and from the materials she was carrying in her holds and the few men I was able to detach from the ship for assignments elsewhere.
In a material way, the Chamberlin brought me plenty. She delivered a beautiful set of salvage pumps of all sizes. She brought some air compressors, including one tremendous Sutorbilt low pressure salvage air compressor that could by itself deliver more compressed air than all four of the borrowed compressors I had used on the big Italian dry dock. In the way of salvage material, she brought practically everything I had ever ordered in New York; no longer should I have to bother about borrowing anything from reluctant Captain McCance.
Then further to help out, she brought several fine heavy motor launches for work boats for salvage, and a fast motorboat for me—this last a beautiful launch suitable for a captain’s gig in which I could speedily get about on salvage work between all the harbors, and when I again had official visitors, take them out in it without apologies. With all those boats at my command, the Lord Grey was promptly relegated to the task of harbor workhorse, for which she had been built.
One of the men who had shipped out as a seaman on the Chamberlin was assigned as coxswain of my boat—he proved to be an unusual person. Glen Galvin, lately a backfield man on Howard Jones’ University of Southern California football team and himself a participant in Rose Bowl battles, was trying his hand in an entirely different kind of broken field running and against decidedly different opposition.
I chose Galvin myself for the job; he seemed about the most intelligent and willing member of the Chamberlin’s crew. From then on Glen, with his powerful athletic figure, was always alongside me on wrecks, clambering aboard to lend the salvage crews a hand whenever I boarded a wreck. I think Glen did everything in salvage except dive himself.
As my coxswain, Glen Galvin gave me a strong lift. He was proud of the United States himself and he both ran and rigged his boat so everyone who ever saw her in Massawa would have equal cause to be proud of his country also.
With the aid of two very black, very tall, and very thin Eritreans as his boat crew, both always immaculately rigged out in white turbans and breechcloths setting off their glistening torsos beautifully, Glen Galvin made his boat and his boat’s’ crew into something to make any skipper happy.
It took some weeks to unload the Chamberlin’s holds and get her ready to try salvage work herself—a very unfortunate circumstance since it gave her salvage crew too much time to pick up all the gossip of Massawa.
And then as the final blow to the Chamberlin’s salvage effectiveness, her best diver, Wilford Wood, went ashore shortly after her arrival looking for a secluded spot where he might hang his diving dresses to dry them out after a long sea voyage. Unable to read Italian, and unacquainted with the Naval Base, he wandered into the second floor of what he thought was an abandoned building but which actually was a live high voltage power substation. Hanging up his diving suits, he touched some power wires, and 3000 volts of high tension current hit him with a blinding flash. Fortunately that lightning jolt flung him clear of the wires, though unconscious; why he wasn’t instantly killed no one could ever tell. His moans after a while attracted attention. Horribly burned, he hovered for weeks in the hospital between life and death; finally, badly crippled forever, he was shipped home.
If anything more had been necessary to destroy the effectiveness of the Chamberlin’s salvage crew, the sad accident crippling Wood furnished it, both from my losing him as a diver and from the effect it had on his shipmates.
CHAPTER
43
IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS TURMOIL, I received word H.M.S. Dido was on her way through the Suez Canal bound for Massawa and would arrive late on August 18. I had to make immediate preparations to quarter ashore somewhere
the British supervisors and mechanics she was carrying. All the decent quarters I had ashore in the ex-Italian naval barracks were now well filled, mainly by our contractor’s American workmen on shore construction projects. I couldn’t put the Englishmen with the Americans; there was no room for them there.
It was undesirable also for various reasons to quarter the British coming temporarily to Massawa with the Americans—the major reason was my fear that should the newcomers hear too much regarding the horrors of staying long in Massawa, that on their return to Alexandria, they would effectively kill off any volunteering there with their tales of the place. Their personal experiences would be bad enough to combat; I didn’t want them augmented by accounts of what had happened to various Americans.
There was only one possible place I could quarter the newcomers—one I long ago had had my eye on. So I went to Colonel SundiusSmith of the British Forces and asked that he clear all the black girls out of the military brothel for colonial troops at the foot of the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula and give me the building. The colonel agreed; the building was hastily evacuated.
I turned to a large gang of native laborers in it, scrubbing it and disinfecting it thoroughly with chemicals furnished by our medical officer. Then a new set of cots, mattresses, sheets, and mosquito nets was hurriedly installed, and our new quarters building was ready for occupancy. It really was quite a fine masonry stuccoed building, equal in interior finish to the late-lamented Building 108, though not nearly so well located near the sea. The only reminder left of its former use was the barbed wire entanglement surrounding it. I merely had the gate removed and didn’t attempt the nasty task of clearing away the barbed wire; I hadn’t time.
On the early afternoon of August 18 we undocked our last supply ship; no more were to arrive until we reported the day the Dido would leave. Then with great care we prepared the keel blocks and the bilge blocks of the Persian dry dock to suit the shape of the Dido’s underwater hull from a plan of her previously sent us. All was ready, ashore and on the dry dock, to receive the Dido and the workmen she carried.
About the middle of that afternoon H.M.S. Dido arrived and anchored in the outer roadstead, just beyond the wrecks guarding the entrance to the naval harbor. Immediately she sent ashore in her boats the civilian working force she was transporting and the steel she had brought.
My first concern was to house the British workmen—two superintendents, four foremen, and thirty mechanics. I loaded the workmen into trucks, the supervisors into my own car, and transported them to their waiting quarters where all disembarked with their baggage.
All hands from Alex were definitely pleased. They were sweltering—that they had expected to stand a while. But their murmurs of appreciation over the beautiful building they got for quarters—something they had never expected—were plainly audible, particularly when they saw the large refrigerator jammed with bottles of cold water I had provided for them. The supervisors received individual rooms. The mechanics were housed barracks style. All were told to make themselves at home till next morning when their labors would begin. Several were curious as to the why of all the barbed wire surrounding their new domicile, but on that I remained noncommittal.
Then I departed to board the Dido for a discussion with her captain on the work. I came aboard that British warship in my new boat, expertly landed alongside her starboard gangway by Glen Galvin and his two mostly naked but very nautical Eritreans, to be received on her quarterdeck with the usual naval ceremonies—side boys, bos’n’s pipe, Officer of the Deck, and all the other accessories to life in the Navy whose existence my long stay in Massawa had almost made me forget.
I was welcomed aboard by the Commanding Officer, Captain H. W. U. McCall, R.N.; we promptly retired from his hot quarterdeck to his not much cooler but much fan-ventilated cabin. There he sent for his Executive Officer, his Engineer Officer, and his First Lieutenant, and we immediately got down to brass tacks on what was to be done to the Dido. Also present was Commander Mole, R.N., of the engineering dockyard staff in Alex, sent down from there with the Dido to advise me technically concerning the design of that particular ship.
We went into the details of what was needed—the new steel stringers to be installed in the stern to make it stronger for the future, the new steel hull plating required to replace her cracked shell plates which now were allowing her stern to flood. I informed the ship of what was wanted of them in the way of assistance in docking the Dido.
Then I learned to my great surprise that after a careful diving examination of her damage by the British before her departure, we were to be allowed twelve days on the dock for the repair job before starting the Dido back to the Mediterranean.
I promptly vetoed that.
“Nothing doing on twelve days,” I announced. “I can’t spare the dock that long on one ship—too many other ships waiting to dock here. Right on that dock, we repaired a huge bomb hole in the Liebenfels with fewer men than you brought, all of them inexperienced in ship work, in eight days. The Dido can’t be as bad as the Liebenfels. The Dido will go off repaired in eight days—no more. And maybe after I’ve lifted her and seen the actual damage myself, I’ll cut that even further, but it’ll not be increased.”
There were immediate objections from Commander Mole and from the Dido’s officers. Commander Mole pointed out that the Alexandria dockyard with all its machinery couldn’t do the job in less than twelve; neither could Durban, had she been sent there. To figure that Massawa, far inferior in size and equipment to either of these dockyards and further handicapped by intolerable working temperatures, could do it in less, was unsafe.
Captain McCall, skeptical of my statement, pointed out the disastrous effects on his crew of an underestimate in time. Living conditions in the crew’s quarters below decks on his ship, veritable steel ovens already in Massawa and bound to be worse when the ship was lifted out of water on the dry dock and more of her hull exposed to the sun, were so bad he was sending half his crew that afternoon in trucks to a British military camp in Asmara on the high plateau for the first half of the repair period. The other half of his crew was to be sent there during the last half of the repair time after the first party came back.
If my guess was wrong, as both he and Commander Mole of the Alex dockyard felt assured it was, and he brought his second party back at the end of eight days, he would have his whole crew jammed aboard during the remaining four days of the job—longer even than that if the task took more than twelve days which he thought possible. That would practically kill off his whole crew—when sailing day came, he wouldn’t have men’ enough left on their feet to take his ship out of Massawa, still less any able to fight on their return to the Mediterranean if he ever got there.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” I told McCall, “but I’m giving you the facts; you’ll have to accept responsibility for how long you send your first party away. If you send your first party away for six days, the second party may never even start for the hills. At best they’ll only have a day there before they must return. I tell you the Dido will be on the Massawa dry dock not over eight days. Tomorrow after I’ve lifted her, I’ll tell you definitely how much less than that, if any, she’ll be here. The pilot will be aboard at 7:00 A.M. to take you in; you’ll go immediately on the dock. And remember, you’ll be on the dock not over eight days!”
The next morning, early on August 19, H.M.S. Dido, the longest ship yet to make the passage, was cautiously piloted by Lieutenant Fairbairn through the line of wrecks and swung hard to starboard to clear the shoal spot and line her up for the dock. The Persian dry dock was, as usual for a large ship, fully but not abnormally flooded down. Excessive draft was not a problem in docking the Dido—it was her gross overweight and her excessive length that were the difficulties to be overcome.
The Persian dry dock could lift a maximum of only 6000 tons; her keel blocks could support a length of only 410 feet.
H.M.S. Dido displaced (or weighed) over 7500 tons; her length was 530
feet.
It was on the face of things my job to dry-dock a ship of 7500 tons displacement and 530 feet in length in a dry dock which could lift only 6000 tons and support a length of only 410 feet.
Of course, I could not do that. No one but God himself could have done it. I had no intention of even trying to do it. The thing that had struck me like a flash in Alex the day I was pondering the problem was that it wasn’t necessary to do it in order to repair completely the damage to the Dido. It so happened that the damage to the Dido was wholly at her stern. To repair it, all that was required was that I lift her stern clear of the water. I didn’t have to lift her bow out of the water also, as is normally done in docking any ship—there wasn’t any damage to the bow. And not having to lift her bow out of the water (which I couldn’t do simultaneously anyway) solved the other dilemma of the inability of the short dry dock to support such a long ship lest the unsupported part break off. The bow of the Dido was going to remain floating in the water at practically its normal draft forward, supported almost as usual by the sea, while I lifted only the stern clear of the water to repair the damage there.
The whole result was going to be that when docked for repairs, the Dido (and, of course, also the dry dock with her) was going to be on considerable of a slope as if sliding downhill towards her bow. The effect was to be about as if some titanic derrick had taken hold of that long cruiser at the stern and lifted that warship’s stern well out of water while leaving her bow afloat and undisturbed.
In the actual operation, the dry dock would not have to lift even 6000 tons’ worth to get the stern completely out of water; it would be easy for the dry dock. The only dangers involved were in getting too much of the lift needed, towards the bow of the dry dock—that might strain the ship there; and in getting the ship on such a steep slope that she would slide forward down the incline and capsize the keel blocks on the floor of the dry dock. The first danger could be avoided by not lifting too much with the bow compartments of the dry dock. The second danger could be eliminated by not lifting the stern any higher than necessary to repair the damage and by securing the Dido to the dry dock by stout fore and aft steel hawsers, hauled taut, so she had no chance to slide forward in the dry dock.
Under the Red Sea Sun Page 42