Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  And that was how H.M.S. Dido was dry-docked in a dry dock too small to take her. She came into the dry dock as for any normal dry-docking, but was hauled through it till about 110 feet of her bow overhung the forward end of the dry dock altogether. Then the dry dock was pumped up with the ship level fore and aft, no trim on her, till the keel blocks of the dry dock touched for their entire length.

  At that point, the sliding bilge blocks were run in under the ship and the side spur shores run in against her sides to keep her from listing to either side as her stern lifted. At the same time, the steel hawsers to keep her from sliding forward were hauled taut.

  After that, the dry dock was pumped up on a slant, with far more buoyancy aft than forward, till the stern of the Dido came clear of the water, leaving the overhanging bow afloat practically as usual. I stopped lifting when the stern was clear, leaving about four feet of water over the dry dock floor aft—no more than a man could wade in and reducing the slant of the ship by that much.

  At that point the docking operation was completed and the repair job could start. I must admit that anyone looking across the harbor at that crazily slanted cruiser and dry dock would have concluded there was something cock-eyed going on in Massawa. And he would have been right.

  Once the sea had dropped far enough down around the stern, carpenters working from boats began to rig scaffolding on both sides around her after end. But I didn’t wait for any scaffolding to stand on to make my inspection. Crossing in a small skiff myself, I got close in under her exposed counters, supporting myself first by her propeller blades, later by standing on her shafts, and made a close examination of her troubles. I found them worse than the British diving examination had reported.

  In way of the starboard after propeller, a huge piece (about as large as a garage door) of her Steel hull, made of two thicknesses of plating, was cracked completely through and through and all around; nothing seemingly supported it any longer. Why it had not fallen out already was a mystery. On the port side, a somewhat similar cracking existed in way of the port after propeller, but it had not gone quite so far.

  Swiftly but carefully I went over the damage outside while the scaffolding was being rigged. Then I clambered back aboard the Dido, and dropped through a small manhole alongside her steering machinery into the stern compartment beneath, from which by now most of the sea water there had been drained out the way it had come in—through the wide open cracks in her sides.

  In that confined stern hold, a devil of a place to try to get about in because of its narrowing triangular shape between the propellers outside, I crawled around over wet steel. With a flashlight I examined cracked girders which would have to be replaced, the difficulties involved in building in the new girders wanted in a space already so full of interlacing steel one could hardly move about, and our chances of getting at the inside welding and riveting that would be required. It was going to be tough, much more difficult to get to than when the ship was first built, for then the workmen did not have the deck overhead to seal them in. We, however, would not only have that deck as an interference to our every movement, but in addition nearly everything needed in that cramped space, men and materials, would have to enter through a manhole so small a man had difficulty in getting through. In hot Massawa, once we started welding and riveting inside that jammed-up hold, the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta would be the very acme of cool comfort in comparison. But it could be done, and, of course, it had to be.

  Back up on deck, smeared with rust and slime (I was wet through anyway from perspiration so the water in the hold had made me no wetter), I gathered up the two top British dockyard superintendents, Mr. Smith and Mr. Edwards, and also Commander Mole. With them all, I went to see Captain McCall of H.M.S. Dido to inform him how long his ship would be under repair on the dry dock.

  “Captain,” I said, “I have carefully examined the damage from all causes to your ship both inside and outside. It’s worse now that it can be seen in the light of day than reported by your divers, whose ability to inspect was naturally limited. I’ve sized it up against other damage jobs I have handled, and particularly against the Liebenfels bomb repair job recently done on this dry dock. I find my estimate of yesterday of eight days for this job needs revision. The estimate was too generous. The Dido will be repaired and off this dry dock in six days. You can all make your plans accordingly.”

  I got repercussions. Captain McCall, who had been reluctant to arrange his leave parties to Asmara on an eight-day limit, felt that arranging them on a six-day basis was taking a grave risk of putting his whole crew out of action. If we failed, the results would be tragic.

  I told him that was my responsibility as Commanding Officer of the Naval Base; I was informing him of what was going to happen; I would shoulder all responsibility in seeing it happened. He was going out in six days; it would be wise to act accordingly.

  The two British dockyard superintendents—Mr. Smith, the elder, very wiry but grown grizzled in the British dockyard service, and Mr. Edwards, middle-aged, somewhat stout, but also a very experienced supervisor—both objected strenuously. They had considered eight days highly improbable but had made no vocal objection; they had been willing on that to try, and perhaps finish in ten. But six days for the job was completely out of question—they knew their men, all good mechanics, better than I did. They couldn’t do it in six days; it wasn’t even worth trying.

  I had a simple answer to that.

  “Gentlemen,” I countered, “you’ve got four foremen and thirty good British shipyard mechanics with you for this task. Over on that salvaged Italian dry dock I’ve got one American superintendent, Lloyd Williams; about six American ironworkers and welders; and ten South African ironworkers. Not one of them, including Williams, ever worked on a ship before in his life until he saw Massawa. I know what they can do. If you and your men, twice as many as they, don’t want to tackle this Dido job on a six-day basis, you can all start back toward Suez tonight without tackling it at all. I’ll bring my Americans and South Africans over from that dry dock, and Lloyd Williams will see they do it in six days. It’s going to be done in six days, whether you do it or not. I’m merely offering you the chance. If you don’t want it, say so right now. I’ve no time to waste.”

  Those two Englishmen looked from me to each other, conferred privately a moment. Then they proved they were of the same breed as their countrymen facing Hitler alone after Dunkirk.

  “We’ll have a go at it, anyway, Captain,” announced Smith, the elder, laconically.

  “Fine!” I sang out. “That’s all I ask of you. You’ll do it, and no trouble. Now, you and your men get cracking; I’ll be with you on the staging in a few minutes.”

  Both superintendents left. I looked at Captain McCall, who, of course, had been listening, but he had no further comment. So I motioned Commander Mole, who was as skeptical as the dockyard superintendents in spite of his silence while they spoke, and we both left the skipper’s cabin.

  “They won’t do it,” said Mole, who as an engineer commander, had had considerable experience in British dockyards.

  “They’ll do that job in six days,” I replied, “unless I’m badly disappointed in what British mechanics can do.”

  “You’ll be disappointed, then,” answered Mole.

  CHAPTER

  44

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE VERY hectic ones under the stern of the Dido. Night and day around the clock, without intermission, three shifts of British mechanics labored in the Massawa heat. Rivet guns rattled like machine guns firing in action. Acetylene torches cutting away damaged steel sent trails of scintillating sparks flaming across the dock like ack-ack tracers in the night sky. Pneumatic drills groaned and hummed as they bored through thick warship steel. Crackling electric welding arcs cast a weird unearthly bluish light over everything as molten steel flowed from their electrodes to knit steel plates together—electric arcs rivaling the sun on which it was wise not to look unless one wanted to go blind.<
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  Inside and outside, the light cruiser Dido’s stern was a tight spot in which to work. On the scaffoldings outside there was room for only a few men to stand at once, and that few had to be careful of their every movement lest they knock a fellow worker off the staging into the dry dock below. Inside the stern, where the ship narrowed down practically to a knife edge at the rudder post, hardly two men at a time could enter, and one of them normally had the other man’s elbows or his feet in his stomach. It was stifling in that confined space from the outside heat, from red-hot rivets to be driven, from smoke and gas fumes from cutting torches and welding arcs.

  I did what I could to make it bearable. On the quarterdeck I installed an American electrically operated water cooler; one of two just brought us by the Chamberlin. Cold water flowed on tap—to my thirsting Englishmen a boon from heaven. Inside the lower hold, I got what electric blower fans I could to force down fresh air and to exhaust the gases. Otherwise the few men down there would have been asphyxiated in short order.

  I found all those Englishmen exceptionally skilled workmen—they knew ships, they knew their trades. I found all of them, superintendents, foremen, and mechanics alike, very willing workers, and soon I was calling them by their first names—Willie, Alf, ’Erbert, Eddie, or Tom—how could you do anything else when you were sweating with them cheek by jowl jammed together in a tight hole trying to figure out how a particularly impossible-to-get-at rivet was to be driven, or a piece of cracked girder cut away with an acetylene torch without burning also into a good steel plate that would be hell to renew if accidentally it were burned into also?

  Very swiftly I ran into the reason why Commander Mole felt assured the job could never be done in six days—British trade union rules and British trade customs ingrained in all these men by a century of labor conditions and labor battles in England. I met that issue head on the first few hours when first it arose on the starboard scaffolding, over sending up on deck for another mechanic to perform the next operation on removing a damaged steel plate—it wasn’t the trade of the man on the staging with me then, Alf, to do that operation, it was ’Erbert’s trade. ’Erbert, who was on deck the Dido, would be sent for while Alf got off the staging to make room so ’Erbert could work when he arrived. Half an hour would be lost while the shift was being made, and another half hour also when ’Erbert got through and Alf had to be sent for to resume.

  We lost the first half hour then and there, but it was the last half hour we lost on the Dido over that. I knocked off everybody, gathered them all, superintendents and mechanics alike, on the Dido’s quarterdeck. I told them they’d work like everybody else that worked for me in Massawa—every man would do anything he could as well as he could every time he could regardless of his trade or anybody else’s. This wasn’t England, it wasn’t a British dockyard—it was Massawa in wartime where neither I nor anybody else had time or energy to waste on trade union rules or customs, British or American. It was too damned hot where we were and we were fighting Hitler and Mussolini, neither of whom was paying any attention to rules of any kind, union or otherwise.

  “That’s all, men,” I concluded. “You’re good mechanics, every one of you knows enough of the other man’s trade to do a bit of it when it means either doing it or stopping the job a while. Now get back to work, and nobody pulls any more rules on me! We don’t stop for anything in Massawa!”

  The men went back to work, and to the undisguised astonishment of very British Mr. Smith, veteran of many a trade union dockyard controversy over rule technicalities, they did exactly what I asked of them. He shook his head incredulously as he watched them.

  “I could never get them to do that! You couldn’t either, Captain, if this was a British dockyard. But even here, I can’t see how you’re getting by with it without their quitting on you. You don’t know how sacred them rules is to all these men!”

  But I didn’t care. It wasn’t a British dockyard; I wasn’t interested in hampering rules. Massawa’s resources were too limited ever to get anything done if I went by the rule book in labor or in anything else.

  We got along with the job. Around and around the clock, night or day the same to us. The damaged steel was cut away; cracks which could safely be welded up again were welded; patterns (templets) were made to be sent ashore to the Naval Base shops from which to fabricate there all the new steel plates and girders required. The Lord Grey was busy all the time bringing us materials.

  I had a careful schedule made of when each new plate, each new piece of girder had to arrive from the shops and be installed to keep us on my six-day timetable. Those Englishmen took as much interest in keeping on that schedule on their warship as I did.

  The third day went by, all the damaged structure was removed and new steel began to arrive to replace it. The fourth day of that scorching August vanished and more steel came out. By morning of the fifth day, we had the holes in the sides of the Dido plated up and riveting guns and welding arcs going all over the stern securing the new plating and girders together.

  My British workers were all tired and wan from the heat by then but since they were working only one shift a day each, at least they got ashore when their shift was over to sprawl out on their cots under their mosquito nets and get what rest they could in the heat (which wasn’t any too much). I felt they would last out.

  The fifth day, on the Dido’s quarterdeck, I tried to do a little missionary work on elderly Mr. Smith and youngish Mr. Edwards towards getting them and as many of their men as possible to volunteer permanently for Massawa, instead of returning to Alex. There would be a good bonus in it for the volunteers. Mr. Edwards seemed interested and promised to give it consideration, but first he would go back to Alex anyway.

  But with graying Mr. Smith there was not a chance.

  “I’m too old for this place, Captain,” he assured me. “And then I’m too old for you; you’re too much of a driver for me to keep up with long. It takes younger men, like Mr. Edwards here.” Then he seized me by my unbuttoned shirt near my throat as if to choke me, and continued. “Besides, what do you mean by deceiving a poor old man like me? Remember I asked you when we came here about the barbed wire around that fine building you’ve put us all in, and you didn’t answer me? A fine building it is, all right! What’ll my good wife back in Portsmouth say when she hears I’m living in Massawa in a brothel? And mind you, Captain, a black brothel at that! I’ll never live it down!”

  I had to laugh. So did Smith.

  “So you’ve found out, eh? I wondered how long it would take for the scandalous truth to leak out!”

  But both Smith and Edwards promised to do what they might to get me some volunteers from among the thirty men they’d brought, so with that we all turned to again.

  The fifth day dragged along. Everybody—British workmen and British officers on the Dido—could see the task was so well, advanced there was little doubt we’d finish within the six days set. Captain McCall, astonished but pleased, so reported to the Commander-in-Chief back in Alex and went about getting the second section of his crew which had gone to Asmara only the morning before, back aboard by next night in preparation for final undocking and departure.

  Meanwhile, the Eritrean natives, who had already scraped clean the exposed portion of the Dido aft (she wasn’t very foul), began to apply the first coat of underwater paint. The idea was that when all the repairs were completed and all the exposed stern painted, the cruiser would be floated, shifted aft inside the dry dock till the stern overhung about 150 feet, and then the bow end lifted out of water for swiftly scraping and painting that. When we were all through, except for a small part of the bottom amidships which would never come out of water during any part of the liftings, we should have the Dido not only wholly repaired but mostly freshly cleaned and painted also when she left Massawa.

  Late in the evening of the fifth day, all the new plating was secured in place except the last plate on the starboard side, an outer course plate or doubler. This was an
especially thick steel plate for which we could not lift a templet till all the plating beneath it was riveted and welded up.

  The shipfitters went to work then against the side of the ship to make their templet, a pattern of thin wood strips to the exact size and shape of the required steel plate. On a large scale, the job resembled a dressmaker’s laying out of a paper pattern for a section of a dress, cut to match all adjoining seams. It was a fair-sized steel plate we would need—about six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and around three-quarters of an inch in thickness. The shipfitters worked with great care on that templet; the rigid steel of the new plate would have to match exactly all the seams and rivet holes of the plating beneath it.

  About midnight the templet was finished and sent ashore in the Lord Grey to the plate shop where the new plate was to be fabricated during the night. My plate shop, unfortunately, had rather scanty machinery; the Italians had had no great amount of plate fabricating machinery in Massawa and none of the beautiful equipment for that shop (or any shop) had yet reached us from America. The Italian plate shop in Massawa had been their most poorly equipped shop.

  I saw that the shop foreman and his Italian assistants got started on the steel plate, and then went home to Building 35 for a rest myself. The new plate should be ready to ship out about 6:00 A.M.

  About 6:30 A.M., beginning the morning of our sixth and last twenty-four hours, I was back on the dry dock. So also was that final steel plate, hanging from the traveling crane of the dry dock, ready to be swung into place against the Dido’s starboard side. On the scaffolding in way of the starboard after propeller where that plate was to go, were all the workmen, but no one seemed to be doing anything towards swinging that plate over in place.