No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  The French admiral indignantly rejected all the alternatives offered him. The British opened fire. The French were in no position to fire back. A salvo of 15-inch shells from H.M.S. Hood, Valiant and Resolution had landed on la Bretagne and she had promptly and ingloriously turned turtle and gone down. Which was exactly what that ancient ark could be counted on to do again if anyone ever raised her and put her back in a battle line against modern warships.

  So I informed Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard that the lifting of la Bretagne must be suspended for the duration. When the war ended, if the French wished to raise and refit her for the next war, they might resume operations. But pending defeat of the Nazis, I would assign him and his men a salvage task that meant something in this war. Tomorrow I would let him know his assignment.

  Once again, completely hardhearted this time, I gazed into the stricken eyes of Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard. Then, voiceless, he departed as before, to report, I suppose, to M’sieu I’Amiral what that unfeeling Principal Salvage Officer sent by the Naval Commander-in-Chief was about—unswervingly bent on leaving the submerged French Navy submerged.

  I was by now, I felt, completely beyond possibility of further shock. So, having settled the British-American imbroglio at about the same time as I polished off la Bretagne, I set to work to try to accomplish something constructive. That meant first the Spahi.

  In a small boat in the harbor entrance, I held a discussion about the Spahi with Lieutenant Ankers, with his two best divers, with Lieutenant Reitzel, his assistant, and with Captain Victor Harding, Merchant Navy, skipper of H.M.S.V. King Salvor. I learned from Ankers that his two divers, “Red” Gatchell and George Lynch, had already made a fairly thorough diving survey of the inside of the Spahi and what they had learned was not very encouraging.

  It seemed that the Spahi, an ancient French tub of a freighter, had been fully loaded with hogsheads of wine in all holds, fore and aft, and had been about to sail for Marseilles where the wine was to be delivered to the Nazis, when she was instead taken to the harbor entrance and scuttled by opening her sea valves. She had filled slowly, her stern had sunk first, and finally in going down completely, she had rolled on her side and lay now on the bottom, flat on her starboard side. That made it very bad, both for the lifting of her and for the divers working on her.

  Gatchell and Lynch, both good divers, had been through her, so far as conditions permitted. They had already located the opened sea valves and had plugged them (their bonnets had been removed). But so far as they could discover in the murky water below, she had few bulkheads and those were of very doubtful watertightness. The cargo holds were solid with huge wooden hogsheads of wine and were inaccessible to the divers.

  Getting around on the half-capsized Spahi was exceptionally difficult—her decks were now all vertical instead of horizontal and of course could not be walked on; all her companion way ladders were now horizontal instead of vertical and could not be descended. A diver had a tough time in the black water and the tangled mess of wreckage inside the topsy-turvy Spahi with no footing to get about on.

  To make matters worse, there were no plans or blueprints available of or in the Spahi to tell us anything about her or her interior arrangements. Lieutenant Reitzel who was acting as liaison for the salvage party with the French assured me that this was not because the French were holding anything out on us, but because the vessel was so old her plans had long since disappeared from her files (the divers had searched fruitlessly her chartroom and captain’s cabin) and no French shipping office in Oran had any duplicates.

  So it appeared that if we wanted to know anything about the Spahi we could find out (maybe) by having a diver play blindman’s buff inside the murky and opaque water filling her. Submarine lamps were useless; even with them a man could hardly make out his hand in front of his faceplate. The indispensable measurements to figure with some accuracy what buoyancies I might get to refloat her, we could learn only by having divers try to measure her while dangling in the water below at the ends of their lifelines alongside her now vertical decks.

  Altogether, the Spahi was a very dubious subject for a quick lifting operation. There was no salvage gear for lifting available then in Oran nor to be expected for months yet. It was obvious that if we were to uncork the harbor mouth, the Spahi, a mystery ship so far as we were concerned, would have to float herself out of the entrance. I trusted she would oblige. With the dimensions of her which Ankers already had obtained from looking her up in Lloyd’s Register—her length, beam, and depth of hold—I adjourned the conference afloat and we all went ashore to the salvage shack on the quay at Môle Ravin Blanc where I might better do a little rough calculation.

  The plan I desired to try involved dividing the ship up into five separate watertight compartments (if we had any luck making her ancient bulkheads, now probably sieves, watertight) blowing compressed air into her hull till we had expelled all water down to the upper edges of her now vertical cargo hatches, and hoping that way to get buoyancy enough in her to float her off the bottom, still lying on her starboard side so she would not spill out all our precious compressed air as she rose. From the dimensions of her which Ankers gave me, and the best guesses I could make of the probable sizes of her cargo hatches, her own weight, and the weight of her cargo, it figured out there might be a fighting chance.

  I estimated that about a week’s work by all hands in Ankers’ party should put us in position to try a lift with compressed air. So Ankers and his men, working off floats moored over the Spahi, turned to.

  Captain Harding meanwhile started to rig the King Salvor for a rather unusual towing job, that of a vessel to be towed while on her side. And Lieutenant Reitzel turned to on raking up all the portable air compressors he could find in Oran, no matter who owned them. We should need a great deal of compressed air.

  I left the salvage shack with Lieutenant Reitzel to go back to Oran. It was raining as usual, a cold, dismal rain. Alongside the stone quay near by, the King Salvor was moored. A little farther out, a few broken steel plates barely showing above water marked the remains of the Hartland and her still entombed dead.

  In one way, it wasn’t a bad location for that salvage shack quartering Ankers’ men. Almost a hop, skip, and a jump from it were wrecks enough, including the Spahi, to suit anybody. No diver was ever going to get rich on portal to portal pay going from his bunk to his job.

  Lieutenant Reitzel had an ancient, low-slung French roadster, looking like an ex-racing car, which somehow he had finessed for the salvage party. We crawled under its canvas top into the bucket seats, to find the watersoaked canvas above literally resting on our caps. Reitzel got the contraption underway, quite a tricky accomplishment with everything wet, and we started to drag through the deep mud down Môle Ravin Blanc to a paved road some hundreds of yards away. We made it.

  I studied Lieutenant William Reitzel curiously as we went along the waterfront. Working with a salvage party was the last place I might have expected to find an officer of his type—he was slight, somewhere around thirty-five years old, obviously a student, certainly never trained in engineering or mechanics, or for that matter, even in seamanship.

  Reitzel, I had learned from Ankers, was a volunteer addition to his salvage party, on a somewhat informal basis. Lieutenant Reitzel had come to North Africa, not for salvage work for which he had no training at all, but as a naval intelligence officer, for which by education and temperament he was extremely well fitted. Oran, after its capture, was an excellent spot for intelligence work, with its intrigues, its communists, its Vichyites, its location close to totalitarian controlled Spain and Spanish Morocco on the one side and to the fighting line on the other, offering splendid opportunity to Nazi espionage agents, far superior to much publicized Tangier or Casablanca. Lieutenant Reitzel, with his exceptional knowledge of French, had turned to whole-heartedly on it on his arrival with the invading forces.

  However, through no fault of his own, he had promptly come a cropper. Unfortuna
tely for him, he was in the American Navy, and once Algeria was taken, intelligence work was no longer any part at all, apparently, of our naval interest or function there. All responsibility for intelligence work, of which there was still great need, was left to the British who already had a well-established Mediterranean network, or to our Army which had done the preliminary intelligence work for the invasion (I’affaire Giraud was one of its fruits) and was presumably now spreading its system of army agents ashore. In rather blunt terms, Lieutenant Reitzel, U.S.N.R., had been told to forget it and find something else to interest himself in.

  That had been quite a blow to Reitzel and he still did not wholly believe it. With all the intrigue about, to tell a trained intelligence officer that he must take no notice, was, I suppose, like trying to convince a quivering pointer in a stubble field full of quail that it was to do no pointing. At any rate, he had as philosophically as possible looked about Oran at what activities the Navy still had an interest in. He had then volunteered to help Ankers who badly needed help in his contacts with the French, where Reitzel’s knowledge of French could be very useful. So there was Lieutenant Reitzel at my side in his shaky French rattletrap roadster (itself in the circumstances concrete proof of his ability to get results), an impromptu salvage officer.

  We bumped along a terribly worn-out French pavement fronting the quays, with Reitzel weaving his car cautiously in and out amongst a series of waterfilled potholes, trying to avoid dropping a wheel into one of them. In between potholes, Reitzel told me of what he had learned in his early intelligence work regarding the personalities of the French higher command. In return, I suggested to him leads which might profitably be explored in looking for air compressors—contractors and road builders preferably, though the road we were on gave very little encouragement to the idea that road builders still existed around Oran. Reitzel nodded seriously, taking mental notes.

  We came finally to the head of the harbor, like the rest of it studded with sorry looking smokestacks and masts sprouting directly from the water, and swung sharply left toward the steep incline (fortunately with its paving in better condition) leading up the side of the cliff to the city above. To our right lay Fort Lamoune, still French manned; to our left the wide road with heavy streams of trucks, mostly military, ascending or descending and having great difficulty in avoiding skids on the very slippery pavement. It struck me that if the temperature got only a little colder and the never-ceasing rain froze on that slope, Eisenhower would find his army as effectually blocked off by land from Oran harbor as by water owing to the Spahi. But perhaps it never actually froze there in the winter—it merely felt as if it were momentarily on the verge of it. Or most likely the trouble lay wholly in my shivering self—any temperature much less than the 130° or 140° F. of Massawa probably felt near freezing to me.

  We managed to get safely up the long slope into the city, where Reitzel deposited me at the Grand Hotel, and circling the Place de la Bastille, himself set out in search of air compressors. I pushed my way past the sentries outside to the lobby crowded mainly with army officers, ignored the antediluvian hydraulic elevator which offered a lift service so slow and occasional as to be worthless (no down service was permitted), and climbed three flights of stairs to my unheated room. There, first making sure I was safe from intrusion by locking the door, I cautiously removed from my raincoat pocket a 60-watt light bulb I had just acquired from Ankers’ salvage stores at Môle Ravin Blanc and with a somewhat guilty feeling substituted it for the 25-watt electric bulb which (by courtesy) illuminated my room. I had work to do and needed light enough at least to make out the markings on my slide rule. Then I turned to in earnest on calculating buoyancies on the Spahi.

  CHAPTER

  12

  MY FIRST WEEK IN ORAN MOVED briskly along. We had some night air raid alarms and a few bombs but no damage. Evidently the Nazis had enough targets more favorably located closer to their home fields in Tunisia to bother sending major bombing squadrons over Oran. They raided us just enough to keep ack-ack batteries pinned down in Oran which would have caused them more trouble if sent further east. Oran very obviously they intended to take care of in other ways.

  The first intimation of this came a few days after my arrival. Into the naval harbor of Mers-el-Kebir limped at slow speed the fast British mine-layer, H.M.S. Manxman, with a sizable hole in her port side. She had just been torpedoed by a U-boat off Oran. Fortunately for her, the torpedo must have been making practically a surface run, for the hole was close to her waterline where it did the least damage. Even more fortunately, it was fairly well aft, leaving her vital machinery spaces and engines intact so she could still steam. Evidently the Manxman’s skipper was the darling of the gods, for an even more astonishing bit of luck had attended her torpedoing. The exploding torpedo had taken the port side mine track and mine passage just above the point of explosion and made hash of them—a smashing jolt which inevitably should have detonated every one of the long string of powerful naval mines stowed on that track, and torn the Manxman into shreds. Probably that was why the canny U-boat captain had fired high and aimed at that spot instead of at the normally more inviting machinery spaces farther forward. But the Manxman happened to have had not a single mine aboard—she had just laid all her deadly eggs before returning to Oran! It must have been a very much nonplused U-boat captain who, peering through his periscope, saw the mine-layer Manxman, instead of disintegrating as expected, calmly steam off before he could get in another shot!

  There wasn’t anything we could do for the Manxman in Oran—we had no steel plates as yet to patch the hole in her. But she didn’t need much. While down a little by the stern from the flooded compartments there, she was still safely afloat. She could steam, and she could go back to England under her own power where permanent repairs could be made. So after we had shored some bulkheads below to make sure they didn’t give way on her passage, she departed for home, with every seaman watching her go, hoping that when his turn came, he might be blessed with as much luck.

  The Manxman gave me cause for plenty of thought. My orders from Admiral Cunningham made me responsible for all ships torpedoed or bombed at sea and needing help, as well as for the harbors. But with what? There was a long coast to cover; I had only the King Salvor, a very slow ship, to handle anything with. I made sure that Captain Harding at least kept up enough steam to cast off instantly should he get orders. To my gratification I found my concern was unnecessary. Like a good salvage man, that was exactly what already he was doing—from Andy Duncan, Chief Engineer, to Jock Brown, 4th Engineer, his engine room officers (all Scotch, of course) were ready and rarin’ to go.

  We had not long to wait. The British vice admiral commanding afloat, with U-boats operating on his doorstep, undertook to meet the menace. He sent immediately to sea a flotilla of British destroyers, all fitted with Asdic, the highly secret British underwater submarine detection device, on a search for what U-boats were lurking off Oran.

  A day went by. Then next day, December 10, the searching flotilla found the U-boat, but in an undesired manner. In the late morning I got word that in code, a radio message from the destroyer flotilla commander had been received in Oran:

  “H.M.S. Porcupine torpedoed port side in engine room, completely disabled and sinking. Position Lat. 36° 05’ N., Long. 00° 20’ W. Am attempting to take her in tow for Oran.”

  Evidently the hunter had become the quarry. Asdic or no Asdic, the U-boat captain had got home the first torpedo, and might well get in more before it was over. With a stricken destroyer to be taken care of by her sisters, the advantage now lay on his side.

  In a few minutes I was in the office of the American Port Commandant at the head of the harbor, poring over charts with Captain Ansel, Captain Lewis, and Commander Andrews, all of Admiral Bennett’s staff. Hurriedly we plotted the position given. It was almost due north of Cape Carbon to the eastward of us and something over thirty miles by sea from Oran.

  I did some hasty m
ental calculating. A torpedoed destroyer in a seaway could hardly be towed faster than three knots. It would take ten hours yet at that speed to get her to Oran. No destroyer with a torpedo hit in her engine room and reported as sinking was likely to remain afloat ten hours. Was there any port or even any land closer to her than Oran?

  There was. About fifteen miles south from the position of the sinking Porcupine lay the little harbor of Arzeu, just eastward of Cape Carbon and the closest point of land to her where a destroyer could even be beached. If only she could be kept afloat five hours more, she might make Arzeu. There we had a small naval base subsidiary to Oran and twenty-five miles from it by road.

  The problem was to keep the Porcupine afloat for that five hours. I grabbed my cap, told Captain Ansel I was on my way to Arzeu overland, the quickest way to get there. I asked him to have Admiral Bennett request the British to order the destroyer towing the Porcupine to change course and head for Arzeu—under no conditions to try to make Oran. And finally I asked Ansel to see that the American Base Commander at Arzeu had an MTB (a British Motor Torpedo Boat, similar to our PT’s, and very fast) waiting at the quay for me to take me to sea to board the Porcupine. Then I dashed down the stairs from the office to the quay below.

  Waiting there for me was an army jeep, which Lieutenant Reitzel had the day before persuaded the Army to assign for my personal use as Principal Salvage Officer. Along with it went a colored sergeant assigned as driver. I jumped in alongside him, ordered him to make knots for the King Salvor, a mile and a half way away at the other end of the harbor. He did.