Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  I decided to try with only four pontoons. If I failed on that, there would be nothing for it save to stand the gaff and run through a third pair of slings fore and aft for the third pair of pontoons.

  So in late October, I started to lower pontoons against a changing war background. For on the day I started, Montgomery and Alexander with the British Eighth Army opened up the long-awaited assault on Rommel’s positions before El Alamein. While under the hot Red Sea sun I labored in Massawa on that crane, before far-away El Alamein, wheel to wheel for miles on end, British guns started to pound Field Marshal Rommel’s whole forty mile long position between the Mediterranean and the Quattaro Depression.

  The war in the Middle East was about to move westward, I felt sure. If I didn’t want to be marooned in the backwash, I’d better hurry and get that crane afloat, so not only it but I also could depart for pastures new where there would be more going on shortly than there would be in Massawa.

  Interrupted somewhat by the need of saving the Gera, taking care of the incoming Tripolitania, and getting the Brenta clear of that mine, I stuck nevertheless mainly to the problem of getting pontoons down and that crane up.

  The last few days in October, with the first two pairs of cradle slings in place, I decided to try lowering the first pontoon to see how it would act. It had, I knew, every idiosyncrasy that a pontoon could have, for I had neither the materials, the men, nor the time to build inside it the intricate steel bulkheads and piping systems to make it controllable in the water, as a pontoon should be. This pontoon was devoid of all the inside compartments it required—it was as uncomplicated inside as an empty tin can, which on a huge scale, it resembled.

  It acted terribly.

  With the biggest locomotive crane in Massawa to lift its 15 ton bulk off the quay and overboard, we put it in the water, where completely light, it floated in deceptive docility, looking even bigger than it had on the quay.

  We towed it around to the starboard side of the crane (the side away from the quay), threaded through its hawsepipes the guide wires attached below under water to the starboard ends of a pair of cradle slings, opened the flood valves at the bottom of each end of that pontoon, opened the air vents on top to let the air out as the water flowed in, and proceeded to sink the pontoon.

  Meanwhile, I shackled in to the lifting eye provided on top at each end of the pontoon, a six-inch manila hawser. With those two manila hawsers, when the pontoon got heavy enough to sink, we would lower the pontoon away from alongside the Resolute, to whose bitts those hawsers were led.

  There was, as anticipated, trouble in making the pontoon go down horizontally, that is, both ends together and level.

  Anyone will swiftly determine this who cares to experiment with a soup can emptied of soup with both heads in place and with two holes punched top and bottom in one end (or in both ends if he or she prefers) floating in the bathtub so that water can enter at the bottom hole while the air inside escapes from the top hole. That soup can will start by floating horizontally at first, but it will be impossible to get it to go down horizontally as it fills.

  Regardless of how carefully you try to balance it, as soon as water enough has entered, the water will run to one end or the other, and the can will go down, not horizontally, but one end first.

  With a soup can, that isn’t serious. But with a pontoon as long as a four-story building is high, it is, especially when the pontoons weigh about 15 tons each, as these did.

  From my previous experience, I knew I should have plenty of trouble getting that pontoon to go down horizontally, and I had all I anticipated and plenty more. My salvage men, most of whom had never seen pontoons in action before, were aghast at the antics of that leviathan alongside the Resolute, bent only on obeying the laws of nature and going down on end, while I insisted that it violate them and go down horizontally so that it might be of some use to me.

  After various hair-raising maneuvers on the part of the pontoon (without here going into the technical details of how it was done) I outwitted the pontoon and got it sunk horizontally just above the starboard forward deck edge of the sunken crane. While from the Resolute with the manila hawsers we held the heavy brute from sinking further, Ervin Johnson went overboard in his diving rig and passed through the loop of wire of each cradle sling now protruding just above the tops of the two hawsepipes in that pontoon, a heavy steel pin (if it can be called such) five inches in diameter and two and a half feet long. These two massive steel pins, straddling the tops of the hawsepipes inside the loops of cradle wire, were intended to take the 100 ton lift on the slings that the pontoon would exert upwards when we blew all the water out of it.

  As those pins weighed several hundred pounds each, Johnson had quite a time under water threading them through the wire loops. We helped him with lines to the surface, where we might take some of the weight off his hands.

  With the locking pins in place, Johnson then had to put his life in considerable jeopardy by lying down on deck the sunken crane with that vast pontoon hanging only a foot or two above him, while he secured to its bottom a pair of wire straps already attached to the crane hull, and intended to hold that pontoon properly aligned in position just above the crane after we on the Resolute let go of it, and moved on to devote our attention to its companion pontoons.

  If, during that time, while Johnson, down there in the water, was sandwiched in between the deck of the sunken crane and the pontoon, anything carried away on the Resolute or she rolled suddenly from the wash of a passing ship, the heavy pontoon would come down on Johnson and very neatly flatten him out. Johnson knew that and so did I; I took what precautions I could and Johnson trusted to me.

  He succeeded in getting the pontoon secured beneath, and dragged himself out to come up for a while.

  The heavy pontoon being secured from below, we held it level from the Resolute, while gradually I blew compressed air into it to push water out to lighten it up enough so it would just float horizontally above the derrick hull on its own buoyancy, tugging lightly upward at each end on the two wire straps Johnson had just attached to it. Each one of those wire straps would take a pull of about five tons only; they weren’t intended to lift the derrick with, only to hold the slightly buoyant pontoon in position after we let go of it from the Resolute.

  I blew in only enough compressed air so that the strain on the manila hawsers from the pontoon to the Resolute just vanished. The pontoon was floating now on its own buoyancy, a vast submerged cylinder just above the sunken derrick, pulling gently upward on the steel straps under it.

  Johnson dived again, first to shut tight the flood valves on the bottom of the pontoon, and second to cast loose the manila lines from its top to the Resolute. This left the work on that pontoon completed, so that we might move the Resolute and proceed with the placing of the other three. Johnson came up.

  These proceedings took all day and part of the early evening. Meanwhile, I had smoked up some three packages of Camels (my whole week’s ration) steadying my nerves, which badly needed steadying, and if my allowance had permitted and I’d had them, I should probably have disposed that day of a whole carton.

  At any rate, we were through. I swabbed off my half-naked torso with a towel and started to put on my khaki shirt so I might go back presentably to the Naval Base, when that pontoon struck back at me.

  A passing ship being piloted out the commercial harbor, sent her wake sweeping across the water to rock the Resolute violently. I had my boat out in the harbor to stop any ship movements while Ervin Johnson was beneath the pontoon, but of course I couldn’t keep harbor traffic stopped all the time.

  Whether the Resolute now rocked or not made little difference, but that propeller wash, sweeping far below the surface, did. The current hit the side of our submerged pontoon, gave it a heavy jolt, and broke loose the pad welded at its after end to hold the securing straps there.

  The after end of the now light pontoon started promptly to float surfaceward. The moment it did, al
l the water still inside the pontoon ran to the low end forward, and that end, suddenly heavy, even more promptly started for the bottom.

  Before I could barely get in some adequate profanity to express my feelings, there was the pontoon I had just put in the whole day securing horizontally below, now in the position it preferred—that is, on end! In just about forty-five feet of water, there now it stood—its forward end in the mud, its after end just clear of the surface, our carefully placed heavy cradle slings dragged out of position, and everything, in plain words, in a hell of a mess!

  Such, I reflected as philosophically as I could, is the life of a salvage man when he has to handle pontoons with idiosyncrasies. Oh, if only I had there in Massawa some of my own pontoons, designed so they would placidly float and sink horizontally without protest! But my properly designed pontoons were at the Submarine Base in New London, as unattainable to me in Massawa as if they’d been on the moon.

  There was nothing to do except to take off my half-on khaki shirt and go to work again. All day, my men and I had worked on that pontoon—now we could work on it all night also.

  We did. It took most of the night, with Ervin Johnson uncomplainingly doing all the diving in the dark water below while we struggled on deck with air compressors and airhoses, to get the pontoon cast loose of the cradle slings and floated up to the surface. There completely light and empty, it floated horizontally once more, as if trying to delude us into the belief that it might again be persuaded to do that submerged.

  All we had left now to do, was to go through that fight with the bulldozers again to get our cradle slings back into position once more. But as it was already 3 A.M., and all of us were a little tired, I decided it would be better to tackle that task next morning.

  However, it so happened the next day, October 29th, was the day the Gera elected to attempt to sink on us, so Captain Reed and I, being otherwise engaged for most of the day, weren’t able to get back on the Resolute. Captain Roys, nothing daunted, undertook the job himself with the bulldozers and managed to carry it through in spite of the fact that in the midst of his struggles my boat arrived to take most of his men away from him to help save the sinking Gera.

  CHAPTER

  55

  WITH REPAIRS ON THE “GERA,” NOW dry-docked, started under Lloyd Williams’ direction, I came back with Captain Reed on October 30 to resume my battle with the Eytie gasoline tanks masquerading as pontoons.

  As a first step, we lifted our first pontoon out of water back onto the quay, to reweld to its bottom the clip which had carried away on us and caused us all the trouble. It appeared from the break that the welder, probably weary in the hot October sun, had done none too good a welding job.

  So not only did I make sure that clip was solidly welded back, but had the welder go back over all the clips with extra beads of welding on the second pontoon also to make sure that this time everything was certainly solid. Since now Lloyd Williams had nearly every man who was any sort of mechanic working on the Gera, it took the solitary welder I could keep on the commercial quay some days to get all the welding work done.

  On November 5, we were ready to go again with the pontoons. It so happened that the night before, Montgomery smashed through Rommel’s lines at El Alamein, destroyed most of his tanks, and captured about 50,000 men, mostly Italians, whom Rommel deserted as he turned to flee westward with the battered remnants of his Afrika Korps. Rommel was proving himself the military idiot I felt he was when he tossed away his golden opportunity late the June before, to grasp at Tobruk. Now he was falling back on it. Shortly he would find, I had no doubt, how worthless to him in defeat was that bauble for which he had traded decisive victory.

  But what it all certainly meant was that the long war in the Middle East had finally actually started westward. And if I knew the Libyan Desert, it was going to move that way fast. Time was running out for Massawa.

  Once again I had placed my first pontoon in the water and at 6 A.M. we started in on it. We had all the troubles we’d had the first time. Whoever starts to buck the laws of nature has his hands full, and I did again with that pontoon. All morning long, I juggled it, first one end up, then the other, before finally I succeeded in getting a balance good enough to get both ends under water at once and heavy enough for it to sink. Then it took all the rest of the day to get it secured in position over the sunken crane before finally late in the evening we could cast it loose.

  This time it stayed down.

  While next day, Frank Roys got the second pontoon overboard and rigged for lowering, I put in my time on the Gera, with Lloyd Williams, a day interrupted somewhat by the need of stowing away the newly-arrived Tripolitania and getting the Intent set for renewing her attack on the Brenta’s mine.

  November 7, I was back on the Resolute, all set to sink the second pontoon, which was to go down to port. The second one showed all the difficulties we’d encountered on the first one, with some troubles added. At least on the first pontoon, when it was down, we could secure it in place to its cradle slings by having the diver shove a heavy steel pin through a loop in the sling, where the wire had been doubled over.

  But on the second pontoon, on the port side, we couldn’t do that. There the two parts of the wire near its ends lay simply side by side—there wasn’t any loop. To secure the wire in place over the hawsepipe, we had to put on wire clamps—massive steel castings made to fit the lay of the two-inch diameter wire and hold two parts of it together without slipping.

  For a diver to get these heavy castings fitted underwater to the wires just above the hawsepipes and bolted together with inch-and-a-half bolts is a task—poor Ervin Johnson was nearly dead before he succeeded in getting three such clamps, one above the other, on the end of each cradle sling just above the hawsepipes.

  Meanwhile, since all hands on the Resolute were badly knocked out by their tussle with the first pair of pontoons, I decided to give them all a rest for a few days, while I myself spent them on the Brenta wrestling with that mine.

  When I got back from the first day on the Brenta, I heard the best news I’d heard since December 7, 1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

  It was November 8, 1942. My radio when I turned it on greeted me with Eisenhower’s landing in North Africa that morning!

  Literally I cheered! At last America had quit defending itself and had started to fight! And in North Africa! That spelled the end of Rommel and all his dreams of conquest. With Montgomery and the Eighth Army chasing him westward and Eisenhower landed in his rear, Rommel had no escape now, with his deflated Afrika Korps, except by swimming. I doubted he was any better a swimmer than he was a strategist. The end in the Middle East could now not be far off!

  Later that day I received some radio orders from the Navy Department, forwarded by the War Department, that made me decidedly less happy.

  I was ordered to proceed on an inspection trip from Massawa to Durban in South Africa, there to survey the needs of that port for some additional floating dry docks which would, if I decided they were needed, be built in the United States and towed to Durban.

  Then when I had completed my survey in Durban, I was to proceed to Freetown in Sierra Leone on the West African Coast, and make a similar survey of the dry dock needs of that port.

  After that, I was to return to Massawa, make out my report and recommendations, and send them to the Navy Department in Washington.

  I reached for a map of Africa and scanned it hurriedly. I should have to go all over Africa to do that. It involved a journey of 14,000 miles from East Africa to South Africa to West Africa and back again to East Africa. Africa is a big continent. I couldn’t possibly do it, even with the best air priorities I could get, in less than two to three weeks.

  Badly upset, I considered those orders. What would happen in Massawa if now I should leave for even two weeks? The past record offered no consolation. The first time, in August, I had been ordered to Cairo for a conference, the contractor had seized the opportunity t
o try to relieve me of my command. By great good luck, I had returned only next day and squelched that before too much damage was done. The second time, in September, when I had been ordered to Alex, my dockmaster had dropped the Cleopatra in the dry dock, smashing all the keel blocks, and then reported that our dry dock was going to be out of commission for from four to six weeks! And it would have been, too, had I not returned that day to squelch that situation.

  Now, of all times, when I was right in the middle of the salvage of the sunken derrick, by far the most complicated salvage operation undertaken in Massawa, to be carried out by makeshift pontoons, ludicrous gasoline tanks on which I had staked everything, I was ordered to leave again. The British had failed twice on that job; the eyes of everyone in the Royal Navy from the Admiralty in London through Alex down to Captain Lucas in Massawa were on that sunken crane. I had promised them I should do it. I could trust no one else whatever to carry it through in my absence, and I didn’t want to come back from traipsing all over Africa to find that through some perfectly excusable calamity all my flimsy pontoons were ruined and I had nothing left to try it over again with. That would be no excuse for me in anybody’s eyes for my failure to lift that crane!

  Of all the blows I had received in Massawa since first I saw the place late the previous March, those orders were the worst! Completely miserable, I scanned those orders again. I couldn’t refuse to obey. But was there perhaps any out for me in them? Word by word, I went over them again, and then, thank God, my eyes lighted on two insignificant words that in my first reading had been overshadowed by Durban, Freetown, dry docks, and the important instructions in those long orders. I was to proceed on the survey “when convenient.”

  I began to breathe again. It wouldn’t be convenient to leave Massawa till that sunken derrick was up, in one to two weeks perhaps. After that I could leave.

  So I sent an answering dispatch to the Navy Department, via the War Department, stating it would not be convenient for me to leave Massawa for that survey for roughly two weeks yet; after that, if I heard nothing further, I should start as ordered. But I also pointed out that with not much more mileage to fly, an officer from Washington could make the survey, and there would be in such a case the advantage that on his return to Washington he would be available to answer any questions anyone might ask of him there. I would appreciate Washington’s comments on this, but if I heard nothing further, I would in two weeks start myself.