Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  At 3:30 A.M. the port side showed signs of movement, then began to float up as before somewhat by the stern. Instantly, with Bill Reed helping me twirl valves, we shut off air from the port side, shot everything we had in the way of compressed air from both compressors forward into the bow compartment on the starboard side to hold it up in spite of the tendency of the rising stern to trim it down into the sea again.

  It worked. This time the bow never went under as the port side broke surface and then after bobbing about in a mass of broken water settled down with the whole dry dock on a fairly even keel.

  Savagely, in the darkness the salvage crew shifted our 3-inch pumps across the water over to the port side, hurriedly to pump out the now exposed upper compartments there and ensure enough buoyancy to avoid that side’s sinking again. Meanwhile, to help the same end, I redistributed the flow of compressed air all over the dry dock to hold it as level as possible.

  When dawn came not long afterwards and the flaming sun went to work on us again, we had won. Both sides of the dry dock were high out of water, all danger past, and rising rapidly from all the compressed air now being poured in. The salvage task was over. In sixteen days, by September 15, with somewhat less than half the men used to raise the large dry dock in nine days, Captain Reed and his little crew had salvaged its smaller sister, just as badly blasted by bombs.

  But the dawn brought us no feeling of triumph as we gazed on our handiwork. For Horace Armstrong was dead. At midnight my boat had brought out to us the sad news. At 11 P.M., after seven hours of continuous first aid in resuscitation, at first by hand in the boat, later by pulmotor ashore, whatever faint signs of life Armstrong had manifested had vanished completely, and Dr. Salmeri sadly had to admit there was no longer any hope of revival. Our shipmate was gone. As I remembered Horace Armstrong, swinging a huge sledge hammer under the stern of HM.S. Dido, together with his comrade Bill Cunningham, showing the Middle East what an American could do when it was necessary, I wept when I heard that he was dead.

  CHAPTER

  47

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, JUST AFTER WE had started salvage on the smaller Italian dry dock, my second salvage tug, the Resolute, finally arrived in Massawa, some three months out from Port Arthur over that same 13,000 miles of open sea that her sister, the Intent, before her had successfully traversed.

  I gazed on the Resolute with mixed feelings. Her skipper, Captain Byglin, while a good seaman, knew nothing of salvage, and was of no help to me that way. Acting as her first mate was Captain Frank Roys, hastily flown to Trinidad to join her there for the rest of the voyage, and to serve as her Salvage Master on arrival. Roys was a good salvage man; I knew him and had tried myself to engage him before my departure from New York, but he was then not free to go. Now he had arrived with the Resolute but the Resolute had brought not a single diver with her! What good to me was another salvage ship and even another salvage master, when they had no divers with them to work on salvage?

  My predicament regarding divers was distressing. I had fewer available to me than in early June. The Chamberlin, having lost her best diver, Wood, was in a bad way for divers herself. After several weeks spent unloading her holds, she was ready to go to work, but being highly unmaneuverable, she could not safely be moored alongside any wreck. So I had selected for her to work on, the XXIII Marzo, one of the wrecks to the right of the entrance to the naval harbor, a ship which had her bottom badly blown out fore and aft and was a tough wreck to raise. But she was one of the few where the cumbersome Chamberlin could moor herself safely close enough to send boats over to work from without fouling up any channels needed for harbor entrance.

  Captain Hansen of the Chamberlin had now only four divers for his task, not enough for the vast amount of underwater work required; of these four, while two were very willing workers, none were expert divers. Hansen was going to have a rough time with his wreck, I knew; he couldn’t spare any divers for the Resolute.

  By now, I had already lost four divers permanently, but I had received one other good diver, who had applied by mail to me for a job while I was in New York. However, before his letter reached me, I had sailed. So Mr. Flanagan, my dynamic assistant in New York, had hired him, and sent him out by ship alone. He had finally arrived a short time before and had turned to temporarily with Reed’s crew, proving himself a fine diver. I had hoped to use him on the Resolute, which I had been informed was coming without divers.

  But that scheme had shortly blown up in my face. He had come to me to quit; he could go home and make more money diving than he was getting in Massawa; or, better yet in his eyes, the contractor had agreed to give him a job as a construction foreman ashore at considerably more than his diving pay. Unless I could better either offer, he was through diving for me.

  I refused. I couldn’t pay him more than the other divers were getting. And as for letting him go, that I wouldn’t either. He had asked for the job himself; he had signed a contract to dive in Massawa for nine months on the very terms he was getting; besides, I desperately needed him as a diver; he couldn’t back out.

  But he and the contractor between them quickly showed me that he could. Contract or no contract, he quit and walked off the job. Short of trying to put him in jail, I could do nothing about it. Then strangest of all, in spite of my violent protests, the contractor himself who was a party to the very contract my diver had so cavalierly disregarded, after a brief interval took him on as one of his supervisors at a considerable increase in pay. So the rest of my divers got a stiff jolt to their morale—while they dived under heartbreaking conditions, there was one of their former mates in a cushy job ashore at more money—truly an excellent situation to encourage them in risking their lives undersea.

  At any rate, there I was with the salvage ship Resolute and no divers for her. All I could do was to break Ervin Johnson off diving work on the repairs to the large Italian dry dock whenever he could be spared there and lend him to the Resolute for her to work with Johnson on what could be done under such conditions on the wreck of the Moncalieri, scuttled ahead the XXIII Marzo on which the Chamberlin had started.

  So from the beginning to near its end, the month of September drifted hectically along. The Resolute arrived on September 3 and started on the Moncalieri the same day the Chamberlin began operations on the XXIII Marzo. Over in the south harbor, all through the month the Intent was struggling with the Frauenfels. On September 5, we dry-docked the Euryalus for repairs; on September 9, we undocked her. On September 14, the wreck of the smaller Italian dry dock came up and sank again and Horace Armstrong was killed; on September 15, we finally raised that dry dock. (I might add here, that the day after Armstrong’s death, I had learned that he had not drowned, which at least eased a bit my mental torture that if only I had been a little quicker, he might have been resuscitated like the two men I had brought up after him. Dr. Salmeri, after an autopsy, had discovered that Armstrong had died, not of drowning, but of ruptured lungs. Apparently, first man at the steel door of the booby hatch, as he was emerging, the rush of water pouring down had slammed the steel door to on him. The closing door had hit him a terrible blow across the chest, injuring his lungs so he died as a result. Then the swinging door had jammed closed on his arm, blocking the solitary exit to Larsen and Jones behind him.)

  On September 19, I dry-docked the Cleopatra in the Persian dry dock and then had to fly to Alexandria for a conference. On September 24, I returned to Massawa to find the Cleopatra had made hash of my Persian dry dock. From September 24 to 28, we worked frantically to restore that dry dock to service. On September 28, we succeeded and resumed docking on the never-ending stream of supply ships flowing to us from the Mediterranean.

  Normally, that might have been considered a sufficiently full month for any naval base, even for far better manned ones than ours, but more was added.

  I have previously mentioned that the British had another salvage operation going in the commercial harbor, which harbor was exclusively assigned for salva
ge to Captain McCance and his British co-workers. His company had received its contract in October of 1941; in December, 1941, it was reported to the British Admiralty that excellent progress was being made; by early September, 1942, nothing had yet been floated and the Admiralty, considering all the salvage equipment furnished and all the money it had paid out, was becoming somewhat discouraged with the results McCance was achieving.

  To make matters worse, McCance had twice tried to salvage the huge floating crane sunk alongside the Massawa commercial wharfs, and twice had failed. That crane was a sore point with me. It had been scuttled simply by opening its sea valves; no explosives had been used in it to damage its hull. As it lay in about forty feet of water alongside the quay, it should at most have been a few weeks’ work or less for any competent salvage master to recover, undamaged as it was, and restore it to service where it would have been of tremendous value on the multitude of small salvage jobs in Massawa.

  But McCance was not competent, or if he was, he was never on the scene long enough properly to supervise. Whatever the cause, nine months after salvage operations had started on that crane, it was still on the bottom. And what was worse, in his two bungling attempts to raise that crane, McCance had thoroughly ruined the watertight-ness of its previously undamaged main deck, and had finally, after his second failure, given it up as hopeless of salvage.

  At that point, in late August, he had cabled his company in London, reporting the crane impossible to raise. He recommended that it be demolished by explosives as it lay on the bottom, thereby at least clearing the berth alongside the quay which it was blocking, as the Italians had intended.

  The Admiralty demurred at granting permission for demolition. Next to the two Italian dry docks, that huge crane was the most valuable piece of marine equipment in the Red Sea, if only it could be recovered. Instead of acquiescing, they cabled Captain Lucas, ordering him to get in touch with me to request me to advise McCance on how to raise that crane, assuming I still thought it possible after all the added damage to it.

  So Captain Lucas, laying the whole sad tale before me, asked me if I thought the crane could still be lifted. I told him I did. Then he requested me, as the Admiralty had ordered him, to advise McCance on how to do it.

  I refused. I told Captain Lucas he could advise the Admiralty I saw no value in giving McCance any advice. I had no authority over McCance and couldn’t make him take my advice after I’d given it to him. All that would happen would be that the bungling McCance would by distant control from Asmara bungle the job a third time and then blame my plan for failure. I could carry out my own plan to raise the crane with men over whom I had authority. I wouldn’t trust it to McCance under any circumstances, nor to any others whom I could merely advise, not direct, regardless of who they were. If the British Admiralty wanted to turn the lifting of that sunken crane over to me, though now it was a far harder task than originally, requiring peculiar methods to overcome the damage McCance had inflicted on that crane, I’d lift it for them. Otherwise, they could leave me out of it.

  Captain Lucas reported by cable to the Admiralty the results of his discussion. But nothing happened. Apparently the Admiralty couldn’t turn over to me the salvage of that badly needed crane without canceling wholly the contract McCance’s company held. And they couldn’t bring themselves to that. Neither would they acquiesce in the demolition by explosives of the crane. So matters remained in the status quo. The crane stayed on the bottom, all work on it abandoned. The berth it was blocking remained blocked. McCance, monocle and all, continued in misdirection of salvage in the commercial harbor of Massawa, operating mainly from Asmara, for it was damned hot in Massawa where I was laboring under the hallucination that the place for a salvage officer is where the wrecks are.

  Then early in September, a remarkable thing happened; something I should hardly have believed had I not witnessed it. McCance and his men almost salvaged a wreck!

  What happened, had it not been tragic, would have been humorous. Lying in the middle of the commercial harbor was the scuttled wreck of the Italian steamer Gera, a little smaller than the Frauenfels on which Brown was then working with the Intent in the south harbor, and almost identically damaged—both had two bomb holes blasted in their sides. But whereas I expected Brown and his little crew to finish so we could lift the Frauenfels about ten or eleven weeks after he started on her, McCance’s company, with a far larger force than Brown had, had been working on the Gera over six months, and more probably around nine.

  After six to nine months on what should have been about a six to nine weeks’ job, McCance’s men finally got the holes in the Gera patched up with cement, and McCance came down from Asmara, monocle and all, in white as usual, to supervise the pumping out of the Gera to lift her. As McCance, I knew, had a whole warehouseful of British pumps, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t, assuming his men had done a decent patching job, which they certainly had taken time enough to do.

  About September 4, the pumping on the Gera started. Since I wasn’t invited to witness the operation and would have been too busy anyway to have accepted even had I been invited, I noted it only casually morning and evening, looking out from the second floor of Building 35, which had a good view over the commercial harbor about a mile away on the west side of the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula.

  Roughly on September 5, the Gera lifted her main deck above water. If McCance had got that far, the ship should soon be high enough to tow around to the naval harbor for docking to repair her damaged hull, and I began to wonder vaguely where I might fit her into the docking schedule between the Euryalus, due to arrive in a few days, and the Cleopatra, soon to follow the Euryalus. I wanted to dock her in the brief interval, ten days, between those two cruisers, while still I had all the temporary British mechanics in Massawa. Otherwise, repairing her would put a severe crimp in the other Massawa repair operations.

  But I soon found I had no cause for concern. By September 7, the Gera was fairly afloat but very badly heeled over, unfit for dry-docking, and that was as far as McCance ever got with her. The next ten days, every time I looked out over the commercial harbor, the only matter in doubt was whether the Gera was about to capsize to starboard, or whether this time it was her port side she was about to roll over on, making of her a worse obstruction to traffic in the harbor than originally she had been.

  Considering that McCance had plenty of men and plenty of pumps, within four days at the outside he should have dried her out and straightened her up, light enough for dry-docking. But it didn’t happen. Day after day she wobbled from side to side, making everyone about the harbor seasick to look at her. The cruiser Euryalus came and went; the small Italian dry dock came up, went down, came up again; all the period in which I might have dry-docked the Gera faded day after day; finally came September 18, the day before the Cleopatra was due. When she left, all my extra British mechanics were going with her. It was too late now to dry-dock the Gera before the Cleopatra; and after that warship left I should no longer have workmen to handle the job conveniently.

  On September 18, I received a telephone call from Captain Lucas at the Royal Naval Base. From him I learned that McCance was in desperate straits with the Gera; every pump he had in his overflowing warehouse had in succession been put aboard the Gera in the past two weeks and every one of them now was broken down, leaving him helpless with his wreck, which now he was sure was going to capsize on him unless he got more pumps. Would I be so kind as to lend McCance four salvage pumps to save the situation? I told Lucas I’d be glad to and as swiftly as possible deliver them to him aboard the Gera.

  Hurriedly, I dragged the Resolute, my nearest ship, away from her wreck, loaded four new American pumps, two 6-inch and two 4-inch Jaegers, aboard her, steamed at full speed out of the naval harbor and around the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula into the commercial harbor to deliver them. We steamed in alongside the Gera, which was badly heeled to port, and there was McCance, monocle still in his eye, but his beautiful white clothes r
ather soiled, clinging to a bulkhead grab rod to avoid sliding overboard.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, curious as to why in two weeks’ time he hadn’t got his wreck erect and pumped dry. It should long ago easily have been done with far fewer pumps than were in sight on deck the Gera. McCance mistook my question.

  “All my pumps have broken down,” he answered. “The blighters I’ve got aboard here have been dipping salt water up out of the holds and putting it into the radiators instead of coming up the ladders to get fresh water; every pump engine below has frozen up as a result of all that salt in its cylinder jackets.”

  I said nothing. If McCance didn’t know enough to observe what was happening before it went too far, it was his funeral, not mine. And if he didn’t have sense enough as salvage officer not to wear white aboard a wreck, he probably was spending too much time trying to keep his clothes clean to notice what kind of water went into the radiators.

  “Where do you want these pumps?” I asked, preparing to have Frank Roys, salvage master on the Resolute, swing them over with his boom.

  “Just a minute, Captain Ellsberg,” answered McCance. “What are your conditions? I’ve got to know them before I can accept the pumps.”

  I stared at McCance in blank amazement. Conditions? I hadn’t thought of any conditions; I was merely lending a man in trouble some desperately needed pumps. Then it dawned on me. As a commercial salvage man himself, McCance was afraid I might enter a salvage claim against the Gera for salvage for having helped save a vessel in desperate condition from capsizing, and thus force him to divide his salvage fee for the salvage of the Gera. He wanted to know how much I was going to hold him up for before he took the pumps.