No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  No Banners, No Bugles

  Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg

  FOR

  MY DAUGHTER,

  MARY ELLSBERG POLLARD

  CHAPTER

  1

  IT WAS RATHER COLD ALONG THE shores of Algeria and Morocco that early morning of November 8, 1942, when “We came as friends” to the coasts of North Africa.

  Along the shores of the Red Sea on the other side of Africa at that same moment, it was rather hotter—in fact it might have been called with no exaggeration infernally hot. There in the Red Sea, I was struggling that morning on the bottom of the ocean with an Italian naval mine apparently rigged inside a scuttled vessel as a booby trap to blow us all to hell if we dared to try to recover that sabotaged Italian ship.

  In Massawa, stewing in the unbelievable heat of the Red Sea sun even in November, we had no illusions as to who our friends were. It was plain enough we had none, or we should never have been sent, war or no war, there to Massawa, the hottest spot on this earth, and then left forgotten till we were as thoroughly “cured” as desiccated fish beneath that inhuman Red Sea sun.

  That Italian mine in the flooded forehold of the submerged Brenta, dimly visible to the heavily weighted diver who cautiously breasted his way about it on the sea floor, was not too much of a worry either to the diver on the bottom or to the rest of us on the surface just over him. He knew and we knew that one incautious contact with those deadly acid-filled leaden horns or the delicately balanced hydrostatic piston protruding from that steel, TNT-laden sphere which the Italians had evidently rigged out with loving care for our destruction, and we should all suddenly have our troubles ended together in a volcanic eruption of flame and water shooting us skyward.

  Still we weren’t too much concerned. Long months of torture in the blazing heat and incredible humidity of Massawa had left us apathetic and drained of hope of escape. If we succeeded in removing that mine from inside the sunken ship and its half ton of TNT without detonating it, we might then recover the precious Brenta for Allied use. If we didn’t and we touched off that booby-trapped mine in the process, we should be the gainers anyway. In one flaming instant our sufferings would be ended instead of being excruciatingly drawn out minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, over still more agonized months till the flaming sun above us, as certainly but less mercifully, achieved the same result.

  The diver, wiry little Buck Scougale, without ever having touched the mine, came up as instructed to report to me on the surface its description and what the Italians had done to it, so far as he could determine in the dim light of the ocean floor, and especially to its hydrostatic piston, to convert it to a booby trap for our destruction. After listening to his agitated account at some length, I called off all further diving on the Brenta and steamed back with my salvage crew to Massawa. There in the seclusion of my room ashore I might study more at leisure the blueprints (furnished me from Cairo by British Naval Intelligence) showing the normal workings of that death trap planted in the Brenta’s forehold, and figure what I might do, if anything, to outwit the Italians by removing the mine without exploding it.

  Half-naked, soaked from head to foot with sweat, and oozing perspiration from every pore, I entered my room, tossed aside my sun helmet and my dark glasses. That room after a session outside beneath the Red Sea sun was always a shock. Inside it was only 95° F. because two large Westinghouse air-conditioning sets were running night and day with never a stop, to cool it down and dehumidify it. Coming in to that 95° after exposure to the ordinary Massawa heat and humidity outdoors was like being plunged abruptly into ice water. In spite of the heavy bathrobe in which I made haste to wrap myself, I shivered violently a few minutes from the chill. Then as I grew slowly accustomed to it, I locked all the doors to my room, unlocked the massive iron chest containing those highly confidential blueprints filched from the Italians in Rome itself by British espionage agents, and spread out the plans for inspection.

  My knowledge of Italian was poor and I made very heavy weather deciphering the technical notes which explained the workings of that mine when rigged for normal operation beneath the sea to blow up any vessel unfortunate enough to pass over it.

  A little music, I reflected, might ease my mental strain the while I sought to unravel the combined complexities of both unfamiliar Italian and even less familiar Italian naval ordnance.

  Over my desk was a very fine short-wave radio set I had bought some months before from an officer of the Royal Navy, a Lieutenant Hibble. Hibble, till then one of my shipmates in misery in Massawa, had been so hurriedly detached between two suns that he had been forced to leave behind his most prized possession in his sudden departure by plane. I have no doubt, however, that if it had been essential to him in making the weight limit on that plane, Hibble would gladly have jettisoned all his clothes also down to his skin and departed Massawa in only his sun helmet and his dark glasses.

  At any rate, there was the short-wave radio set, all mine for twenty pounds sterling in the swiftest radio deal on record.

  Ordinarily now I shrank from turning it on. The set was good enough (where I was on the Red Sea) to bring in clearly every station in the eastern hemisphere. But at practically every point on the dial from all over Europe and Asia about all I ever heard was voices in German, Italian, or Japanese alternating in English with assorted traitors from Lord Haw Haw through Axis Sally and Ezra Pound to Tokyo Rose, broadcasting triumphantly the latest British or American disasters and usually in those days with no need to embellish them much with any lies.

  Squeezed closely in on the dial between two Axis stations was B.B.C. in London, the solitary audible radio station on the dial still remaining in Allied hands. With care I could get B.B.C., but getting it was hardly any more comfort to me, for even B.B.C. had to admit the disasters, and the natural British regard for conservatism prevented it from fabricating any victories as an offset to cheer its listeners.

  There in the Middle East on the shores of the Red Sea we were sandwiched in during, most of 1942 between two enemies. The Japanese tide was running in full flood from the east and promising to break through India to engulf us. Rommel and his invincible Afrika Korps were rushing irresistibly from the west across the Libyan Desert to the gates of Egypt. From there he was confidently expected hourly to crash through a demoralized British Eighth Army to overwhelm us. As a consequence, our position had never been one from which we might listen with any great nonchalance either to Lord Haw Haw on the one side or to Tokyo Rose on the other pouring into our ears from the radio the latest news of our increasingly hopeless situation and our inexorable doom.

  To us few Americans in Massawa sent to struggle with the mass of wrecks littering its harbors, the pitiless sun overhead was as much our actual enemy as either of those to the east or to the west of us, and was as inexorably draining us of life. Then what inducement was there to turn on the radio to learn how much closer our human enemies had closed on us since yesterday, unless it might be to satisfy an idle curiosity as to which of our three enemies would spell our end soonest?

  A wan and shrunken captain in the Navy, long since nervously exhausted in Massawa in the battle against the sun, the sea, and those mercenary Americans (in safe and comfortable mountain billets far from the superheated Red Sea shores) who should have helped us but instead interfered, I had no such curiosity. I was resigned to whichever fate should first overtake us, hoping only in the interim to get as much done as was possible of the task we had been sent to Massawa to accomplish.

  Still I reached to turn on the radio before I leaned my naked torso over to concentrate once again on those Italian plans. Even the Axis stations baited their triumphant propaganda programs with music (good music too, and so
me of it occasionally American) to entice their wearied and battle-worn enemies to tune in. After the music they hoped to hold their listeners while insidious propaganda destroyed what little morale still remained in their audience. Hoping I might get music to soothe my nerves on some station, enemy or not, it made no difference, and figuring on switching stations to dodge the propaganda and the inevitable bad news, I turned on the radio switch. After a moment I began to swing the selector knob.

  One after another distant stations came in as I swept across the dial. No music anywhere, worse luck. Instead, highly excited and violent voices were angrily shouting in German, in French, in Dutch, in Italian, even in Rumanian, Polish, and Greek, all Axis and all enemy of course. They seemed interested only in hammering home something of importance to their own nationals, since not one of the large stable of British and American traitors was pouring out at the microphone his usual poison in English. Evidently something out of the ordinary was up which had chased both music and English completely off the Axis air. I was left with a Babel of foreign tongues which were all Greek to me whether they came from Athens or Antwerp or any one of the multitudinous Axis stations in between.

  Nothing remained to me then but B.B.C. in London, 3500 miles away, the most distant European station. Getting B.B.C. was always a delicate problem for me, especially in daytime, because the Axis had so carefully placed a station of its own close alongside B.B.C.’s wave-length on each side, which made the extricating of B.B.C. a difficult feat for most radio sets.

  But my late British shipmate’s set was up to it. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of raucous and animated German pouring loudly out on either side, I finally isolated B.B.C.

  The next instant my chair was flying from beneath me across the room, I was on my feet shrieking deliriously. Both that booby-trapped mine inside the Brenta and its Italian plans on the desk before me were swept from my mind. Flowing from my radio set from B.B.C. in smooth, clipped, unexcited English were coming the sweetest words I ever heard over the air:

  “An Allied Expeditionary Force has landed in North Africa. Powerful American and British armies under Lieutenant General Eisenhower, supported by British and American battleships, have already taken Algiers and are advancing on Casablanca and Oran. All is going well. We come as friends. Only token resistance is expected from the French, whom we have come to liberate.”

  AT LAST!

  America was on the offensive, we had struck! And of all places, in North Africa! Rommel now, our arch enemy, was surely caught between Montgomery just starting savagely to strike his front from El Alamein in Egypt and Eisenhower landing in great force in Algeria in his rear! The Afrika Korps was doomed! The danger to us from the Libyan Desert was ended!

  Dazedly I listened, dumb now after that first irrepressible shriek which had numbed my vocal cords. How could that Englishman on B.B.C. pour out the heavenly news so unexcitedly, how could anyone? Why didn’t he shout as I had, even at the risk of being stricken speechless? B.B.C. had plenty of other broadcasters to carry on after him one after another. Why weren’t they all bellowing like the Axis broadcasters, whom I now saw had ample reason for the violence and the unbridled torrents of anger in unknown tongues which I had just heard from every Axis capital? Then it came to me. He was English.

  But I wasn’t. Still trembling and in a delirium which only those who had gone through the same agony with me in Massawa might wholly understand, I listened tensely, my ear close to the loudspeaker lest I miss something. But there was no additional news-only the same announcement repeated over and over again. Finally I shut down the radio, retrieved my overturned chair, and sank into it.

  Dazzling visions of escape from Massawa to a more human climate flashed one after another across my mind. With Eisenhower (who, anyway, was Eisenhower? I’d never heard of him) and an American army campaigning on the livable side of Africa three thousand miles from the burning shores of the Red Sea, surely we should all instantly be sent to help. An amphibious expedition such as his meant wrecks from bombs, mines, torpedoes and sabotage, and wrecks meant salvage and salvage meant my outfit. There in the Red Sea I had certainly the best salvage crew anywhere in Africa.

  Subconsciously I started to edge toward the tinny Italian telephone on the left side of my desk. I half expected any moment now the ring from our army headquarters in distant Asmara, high in the Eritrean mountains, which would bring news of my detachment. I made ready to pounce instantly on that phone lest even a split-second should be lost in my getaway.

  But no such ring came—not that hour, not that day, not that week. Eisenhower was making fine progress, the French resistance (so the radio kept repeating) was only of a token nature. In three days Oran was on the point of capitulation, Casablanca (as well as Algiers which we already had) was delivered into our hands by Admiral Darlan, and the French in North Africa were co-operating with us and the British, accepting the fact that “We had come as friends.” It became more evident each day from the radio news that Eisenhower apparently had no need of salvagers such as we to assist him.

  Dully I resumed my former life, my iridescent dream of escape from Massawa and the Red Sea burst in my face like a child’s soap bubble. With an effort, as a first step I forced myself again to the study of the Italian mine plans.

  A few days later, with only three men anywhere near the Brenta (Buck Scougale on the bottom and Commander Davy of the Royal Navy and myself on the surface, to reduce the loss to three only if I were wrong), we three, handling that mine more tenderly than any newborn babe, cautiously snaked it up and out of the Brenta and turned it over ashore to a British explosives expert to disarm it. That done, we proceeded in more routine fashion with a full crew to the salvage of the Brenta herself, a job requiring perhaps two months with my worn-out men.

  With that started under the supervision of Edison Brown and his crew on the salvage tug Intent, I turned to myself in earnest with my most experienced salvage master, Bill Reed, and the crew of a sister salvage tug, the Resolute, on my last important and my most difficult salvage task in Massawa. This was the recovery of a 90-ton capacity floating crane. The Italians in sabotaging everything had sunk this in the harbor alongside an important quay where (aside from the loss of that invaluable derrick itself) it would do the Allies the most harm by making the berth unusable for shipping.

  On that task, a British salvage company had already struggled nine months that year, had failed dismally in two successive lifting attempts, and had finally thrown the job up as impossible, recommending the demolition of the crane by explosives as the only means of at least making usable the badly needed berth. But the British Admiralty, which needed the crane intact for future use even more than it needed the berth, refused to concur immediately in that defeatist recommendation. Though it had no great hope for success, the Admiralty had instead canceled the British contract and requested me and my salvage forces to attempt the recovery before it gave up altogether.

  As much as an opiate to deaden the raw hurt from the collapse of my visions of escape as for any other reason, I now plunged head over heels into this problem. By outrageous improvisations, as the conversion of ex-Italian aviation gasoline tanks (pilfered from the Royal Air Force) into salvage gear, enough to make any salvage man blush to relate his methods in more orthodox salvage circles, on November 18, ten days after Eisenhower’s landing on one side of Africa, we floated that priceless 90-ton crane to the surface on the other side, and turned it (as well as the cleared berth) over to the astonished and grateful British who had great need of it.

  When that was done and the first flush of enthusiasm over our success was dissipated, which didn’t take long under the Massawa sun, life lost all meaning as well as all hope of release. The last task of the many required to make Massawa into a usable base for British naval operations was now completed. Several dozens more of scuttled Italian and German wrecks (including the Brenta) remained around Massawa but only as an incubus now. These were valuable of course as ships if we
could recover them, but obviously there were wrecks enough to occupy the scant forces given me for several normal lifetimes.

  In view of that endless succession of wrecks what hope was there for us of living through another summer toiling on those blasted and sunken hulks? We were condemned to labor under conditions compared to which those faced by the French convicts on notorious Devil’s Island were the height of comfort. No one, whether Eritrean black or European white, had ever been expected even by the Italians to work from April to October in Massawa beneath that fiendish sun. And no Italians in their half a century of occupation before had even attempted to remain in Massawa throughout that season. The high hills about Asmara, always cool and comfortable 8000 feet above the steaming coast, was the normal refuge for them then.

  But in that terrible year of 1942, it had been the summertime or never if the Mediterranean were to be saved, and my men and I had done what had not ever been attempted before in Massawa. We had worked feverishly there throughout the season when traditionally white men could not remain alive there even in idleness. Some who had come with me were dead and buried now in the baked coral dust of Massawa. Others, completely broken already, were on their way back to America, human wrecks. About a quarter of the force was always in the hospital suffering the tortures of the damned from what the sun had done to them. It had been a costly effort.

  But we had succeeded in our aim. Although the Italians had sabotaged Massawa with fiendish skill before its surrender beyond any hope of restoration we had made it once again into a usable naval base. And what was more (and more unusual in 1942) in time too. God alone knew (or cared) what it had cost us. But when Alexandria ceased operating as a British naval base, under threat of imminent capture by Rommel, Massawa was ready by the grace of God and the efforts of a few American salvage men. Massawa took over as the solitary remaining naval base in the Middle East from which the crucial defensive war in the Mediterranean could be supported till the Allies were ready to strike offensively.