Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  No explosives, I knew, had been used on any of the wrecks scuttled in the Daklak Islands—they had been sunk in as deep water as possible simply by opening seacocks. But the Eyties had certainly bungled the job on the Tripolitania. Easily observed from the air, she lay right on the edge of a shelf off which the water deepened suddenly. But in going down, she had hit bottom on the shelf, not off it, and there she lay with her main deck hardly awash at low tide, no holes in her. All that was necessary to lift her was to seal off seachests outside as usual, close a lot of open airports in her hull, and pump her out. Of course, the usual precautions to avoid her capsizing while she was being lifted would be required, but that was all. Almost all that was necessary to lift the Tripolitania was a diver to seal up outside and some buckets to bail her out with.

  I came back with Feathers in his plane from the Daklak Islands with the Tripolitania in my mind as a job to be held in reserve for a rainy day—a task on which I should some day send out a salvage crew when my men got so worn from real wrecks in Massawa that they needed a rest.

  So after listening to Brown’s comments on the refusal of his crew to face the dangers on the Brenta, I decided a fine solution for many reasons would be to send both Brown and the Intent out to salvage the Tripolitania. No salvage man could with a straight face refuse to work on her. And while the job lasted, about a week more or less, Brown and his ship, the storm center of all my morale troubles, would be far removed in the Daklak Islands from any communication with those ingenious thinkers in Asmara till after Major MacAlarney had arrived in Massawa and squelched that morale-shattering order.

  I gave Brown the Tripolitania job and his orders regarding her. I wasn’t going out to her; there was no necessity for it on such a simple job. After loading up a barge for him with all the pumps and salvage gear he might conceivably need for the job, I sent him away toward the end of October, towing the barge, headed for the Daklak Islands and the Tripolitania.

  Meanwhile, I had to advise Commander Davy and the explosives lieutenant that unfortunately the Brenta was delayed a couple of weeks; however, after that, we’d certainly recover that mine, so as not to disappoint our connoisseur in explosives. He left for Alex, to return when advised.

  CHAPTER

  51

  ON OCTOBER 14, THE DAY AFTER THE abortive attempt of the contractor to take over control of salvage, I decided the time had come to undertake the lifting of the sunken derrick alongside the quay in the commercial harbor. This was the ex-Italian floating crane which Captain McCance had twice failed to raise, and the demolition of which he had consequently recommended to the British Admiralty. With McCance’s contract canceled, the crane was now mine to salvage and I concluded that with all my salvage forces back from Asmara, I had better start on it or the British might think I was no better than McCance, who had wasted some nine months on it.

  The lifting of that crane, with its main deck irreparably damaged in its watertightness and airtightness by McCance in his two failures, presented now a very unusual salvage problem. In its original undamaged condition, as it lay on the bottom scuttled with open sea valves, it might easily have been prepared for lifting and lifted by any competent salvage officer who understood the factors involved, in any one of three ways.

  The simplest way would have been to have used compressed air, as I did on the two sunken dry docks, with the addition of proper air escapes to take care of decreasing outside water pressures as the hull of the crane floated up. This required considerable knowledge of how compressed air acted on a wreck.

  The next simplest method would have been by a combination of pumping and compressed air, still requiring considerable skill.

  The hardest method, though the one which would ordinarily be used by a man knowing little of salvage, would be by sealing up the hatches in the submerged main deck, shoring up inside, and pumping out. This was the method McCance had twice tried and twice failed on, damaging the deck of the crane badly, though a good salvage man could, with considerable intelligent diving work before lifting, have done it successfully.

  But now, all three of these methods were out, for no longer could the main deck of the crane hull be made either airtight or watertight—not after McCance and his men got through with it. There was no longer any chance of making the crane buoyant, either by pumping or by using compressed air, so that it would float up of itself.

  There remained only one other possible way to raise that crane-it had to be lifted from the bottom of the sea as a dead weight of some 400 to 600 tons (its exact weight was unknown to anybody). But there wasn’t a crane in Massawa that could lift over 15 tons, and very few anywhere in the world that could even lift 300 tons, so using floating cranes or derricks for the lift was out. Since also there wasn’t any tide in Massawa to speak of (only one to three feet rise and fall), no help could be expected of the tide (a favorite British salvage method) by using surface barges secured to the wreck at low tide and lifting with it as the tide rose.

  There remained as the solitary means of raising that derrick, the use of submersible pontoons. These are huge specially built horizontal steel cylinders, which can be flooded and sunk down alongside the wreck, secured to it by cradle slings of heavy wire or chain passed under it, and then made to lift the wreck by expelling all the water from inside the pontoons with compressed air. If everything is handled properly, the buoyant pontoons will then rise to the surface, bringing up the wreck with them hanging in its cradle of slings.

  It so happened that my first (and most prominent) salvage job had been the submarine S-51 back in 1925, where I had used the pontoon method to raise a 1200-ton smashed submarine sunk in deep water in the open Atlantic off Block Island. On that difficult pioneer task, I, then a lieutenant commander, had been Salvage Officer; and interestingly enough the Officer in Charge of the Salvage Squadron, then Captain Ernest King, was now, as Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy.

  At any rate, on that task, I had learned all about pontoons and their idiosyncrasies (which are many, and which on the S-51 nearly stumped me and my divers). After successfully raising the S-51, I had finished my career in the regular Navy by designing pontoons which didn’t have any idiosyncrasies. It was the pontoons I had used on the S-51, rebuilt to that design, which later were used by the Navy in lifting the sunken submarine S-4 off Provincetown and the Squalus off Portsmouth. So if there was anything at all on which I might claim to be an “expert,” it was on pontoons and their use. (The average salvage officer knows very little about them or their behavior in action.)

  The only drawback to the use of pontoons in lifting that sunken derrick in Massawa was that there weren’t any pontoons in Massawa. Nor so far as could be discovered, were there any pontoons anywhere else in Africa, nor could any be obtained from elsewhere. And it was perfectly obvious to anyone that there wasn’t available anywhere the steel out of which to build pontoons either, not to mention the lack of skilled labor also. It would take a lot of both.

  So the problem of raising that invaluable sunken derrick came down to raising it with pontoons that didn’t exist and couldn’t be built, or in not raising it at all. I suppose it was at that point in his reasoning that Captain McCance had arrived when he advised the Admiralty to demolish the crane with explosives, and at least clear the berth it was blocking.

  I determined to use pontoons to lift the derrick and to provide them shortly in spite of the non-existence of pontoons and of the steel and labor needed to build any.

  So, in preparation for the task, I broke the Resolute off the salvage job on the Moncalieri, and sent her around with Ervin Johnson, her solitary diver, to the commercial harbor to begin work on the sunken crane. I put Captain Reed, my most experienced and competent salvage master, in charge of the operation, gave him Captain Roys, salvage officer on the Resolute, as his assistant, and started them off. Their first job would be to sweep under the sunken crane four one-inch diameter steel wires which later could be used to haul under her hull the muc
h heavier wire hawsers needed for the actual cradle slings. Getting those four messenger wires under the hull was going to be a very tough job, requiring them to be sawed back and forth through the mud, coral, and debris, on which that sunken crane was resting, till they were under her in the proper positions.

  I figured that getting those wires sawed underneath would take Bill Reed and Frank Roys and the Resolute’s whole crew a couple of weeks, by the end of which time, I’d have the pontoons necessary to go ahead with the job.

  For oddly enough, all the pontoons required for that job had been lying right there in Massawa under everybody’s nose for over a year, unused for anything. The difficulty had been that no one had ever recognized them as pontoons. Every time anyone looked at them (and they were so big you couldn’t avoid seeing them), they had always thought they were looking at a row of huge horizontal cylindrical storage tanks for aviation gasoline.

  On the edge of Massawa was the very large ex-Italian military airfield (unused since the surrender) which had received the careful attention of the R.A.F. during the bombardments from the air prior to Massawa’s capitulation. Squadron Leader Featherstonehaugh himself had flown one of the attacking bombers; whether it had been he or one of his fellow pilots who had scored the hit, I didn’t know. But at any rate, one of them had succeeded in scoring a direct hit with a moderate-sized bomb on one of a row of eight mammoth horizontal cylindrical tanks which the Eyties had provided on the edge of the airfield for storing their aviation gasoline.

  The results of that bomb hit must have been startling. The bomb had knocked out the head of one of those eleven foot diameter by forty-five foot long cylindrical tanks, each capable of holding 30,000 gallons of gasoline, and had poured thousands and thousands of gallons of gasoline out on the ground where, of course, it promptly all ignited from the bomb. The effects of the ensuing conflagration were still visible on the seven unhit tanks. They had all been instantly enveloped in a sea of flames, which must have made them all red-hot for the steel plates forming the upper part of every one of those cylinders was now corrugated like a gigantic washboard.

  That disaster had ended the usefulness of the airfield. With no-storage there for gasoline any more, the R.A.F., when it had taken over, had never seen fit to repair the gasoline storage tanks for use again, and they, together with the airfield, had lain unused now for eighteen months.

  When shortly after my arrival in Massawa, my eye had first lighted on those idle gasoline tanks, I recognized them instantly for what they were to a salvage man—pontoons ready at hand for my use should I. ever need any for a salvage job. Of course, they would need some modifications and repairs to fit them for use, but it would be only a minor job. Now that I needed some pontoons, there they still were waiting for me, the biggest pontoons I had ever seen, far larger than those used on submarine salvage operations. Each tank, as a pontoon, could exert a lift of a little over 100 tons.

  Of course, there were drawbacks to their use. The Eyties, when building them simply as gasoline storage tanks, had neglected also to provide them with the hawsepipes necessary for their use as pontoons, with the internal bulkheads required for stability, and with the lifting eyes and the air connections required, but so much of that as was absolutely imperative, my mechanics in the Naval Base shops could easily install. That didn’t concern me much.

  What really was a drawback, was that I neither owned the airfield nor its gasoline storage tanks, none of which, not being on the Abd-El-Kader Peninsula, was under my jurisdiction. It must, of course, all belong now to some one of the various British military organizations in Eritrea, and I set out to learn which, so that I could obtain official permission to take the unused tanks off the airfield and use them as pontoons for a while.

  I wasted three whole days trying to find out who legally owned those damaged tanks. Everybody passed. Colonel Sundius-Smith, British Army Commander in Massawa, didn’t own them. Captain Lucas of the Royal Navy didn’t own them. The R.A.F. senior officer in Asmara didn’t own them. Neither did Brigadier Longrigg, the Military Governor of Eritrea. I finally learned they were probably under the jurisdiction of an R.A.F. lieutenant in Massawa, attached to headquarters in Cairo, where the R.A.F. air marshal was reserving them for future R.A.F. use in Egypt.

  I went to see the R.A.F. lieutenant to get his permission to take the tanks for a month or so, only to learn he’d gone a few days before somewhere into the Sudan, and wouldn’t be back for two or three weeks.

  Since I couldn’t afford to wait two or three weeks, I concluded the best solution was to steal the gasoline tanks without further ado. Since nobody owned them, nobody could give me permission to take them, but they could, and without doubt would, stop me from taking them if I were to ask any non-owner’s permission. The other way, the worst that could happen if I were caught at it before I got through, was to make me put them back in the airfield and if they did that, the Royal Navy would never get its floating derrick.

  Now stealing half a dozen gasoline tanks, each as big as a Pullman car, is nothing lightly to be undertaken. It requires some equipment, and I had none. But Pat Murphy, the first construction superintendent in Massawa, who was back on his feet again and sympathetic toward anyone still suffering in Massawa, occasionally visited the scene of his own early troubles, and I persuaded him to lend me some of the contractor’s heavy equipment for a few days and say nothing about it. (Not that I made him an accomplice by informing him I was stealing the tanks.) So Pat arranged for me with his successor as construction superintendent, the loan of a couple of heavy crawler cranes, some low-bodied trucks, and the necessary men.

  With all this equipment, in two days, I stole six gasoline tanks off their concrete foundations near the deserted airfield, brazenly hauled them in broad daylight some four miles down Massawa’s main street, and unloaded all six of them on the quay close alongside the sunken derrick. There, with a locomotive crane belonging on the quay, I could lift them overboard into the water whenever I had the changes finished that I required to make them into pontoons.

  While Bill Reed and Frank Roys were struggling to saw messenger wires under the sunken derrick, I brought Lloyd Williams and a few salvage mechanics over from repairs to the Italian dry docks and started them on making pontoons out of Italian gasoline tanks in stead.

  The main job was to insert vertically in each tank, one near each end, a pair of hawsepipes to take the lifting slings. These were simply eleven-foot lengths of heavy ten-inch diameter steel pipe, welded watertight top and bottom into the gasoline tanks to give a vertical hole through them through which the cradle slings might pass.

  Then, we also welded lifting eyes to each end on top, securing eyes to each end on the bottom, provided connections for one-inch air hoses on top of each tank, and fitted a six-inch valve at each end on the bottom. These last were to allow the water to flow out at the bottom of the tank when we forced compressed air in at its top, thus making the tank buoyant when we wanted it to rise.

  I didn’t do anything to those huge gasoline tanks that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping the work down to the barest minimum that would give me a set of six of the crudest and flimsiest pontoons that any salvage man ever saw. They would be full of idiosyncrasies when it came to handling them, but that had to be expected.

  I had been working on the conversion of these tanks about a week after I had purloined them, and had even got so far as to try one of them out under the sea (with none too encouraging results either) when it occurred to me one morning that there was one other possibility of ownership I hadn’t thought of. Considering that I ought to keep salvage on as reputable a basis as possible, I decided to investigate that avenue at once and, if possible, get formal authority, which long since I had learned in dealing with the formal British, was of major importance.

  So, on going to my office, I called up the local representative of the Shell Oil Company, the official British source of supply in Eritrea for all petroleum products. After all, my new pontoons h
ad once been meant for oil tanks; perhaps the Shell Oil Company knew who officially owned them.

  At last, I found I had hit the right people. Strange, I had not thought of them before. Yes, Shell was acting as representative of the R.A.F. headquarters in Cairo; the Shell manager in Asmara knew all about those tanks; if I called him there, he had complete power over them.

  So, with the usual delays, Mrs. Maton got the Shell manager in Asmara on the phone for me. Yes, he controlled the airfield gasoline tanks as agent for the R.A.F. in Cairo. His orders with respect to them were that in a month or two, when a ship with a big enough deck was available, he was to get them to the waterfront, load them aboard ship, and send them all to Alex, where they were to be sent by rail to some new R.A.F. airfield then building in the Sudan.

  I asked him to lend six of them to me for a month for my salvage job, pointing out the great advantages that would accrue, both to the Royal Navy and to himself from such a loan. The Royal Navy would get the sunken derrick. As for himself, if he approved the loan, I would save him all the trouble of getting the tanks from the airfield down on the quay (which he had to agree would be a troublesome job), repair all the leaks in them for him, and deliver them to him all ready for use again as gasoline tanks—all this without the slightest labor on his part. That all of these things were already done to those tanks, I felt it unwise to advise him of, trembling in my boots meanwhile that he might want to come from Asmara to Massawa to look the tanks over on the airfield before deciding.

  To my great relief, however, my proposal sounded so attractive to him, that as agent for the R.A.F., he gave me immediate permission to proceed to remove the tanks, which permission he would immediately confirm by letter. I thanked him and hung up. Everything with my new pontoons was now according to Hoyle; I was an honest man again. I had that most valuable of all things in dealing with military authorities—official permission from someone on high, authorized to grant it.