No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  “DEAD ASTERN—”

  But whatever else was sent, we never got. I had to rest content with that.

  “Dead astern,” eh? Presumably of him, since he was coming from her. We then must be heading too much to starboard. After a little figuring on his chart, Harding changed course about half a point westward to port, to settle on 354° instead of due north.

  At about 3 P.M., we sighted more light smoke, this time almost dead ahead. Apparently our change in direction had put us on the true course. In a few minutes we made out the sharp bows of three more destroyers, each wreathed in spray, coming our way. These, without question, were going to pass us close aboard, also to port. I gave Harding another signal to send, asking him to aim it at the last destroyer as soon as he could make out her bridge, so that we might have the longest possible interval for communication. And this time, for brevity, I cut my message in two. I was no longer interested in the Strathallan’s position; I felt I knew that well enough for our purposes.

  As soon as the bow of the third destroyer was sufficiently clear of the two leading her to allow a sight of her bridge, our signal lantern started to flash out,

  “What is Strathallan’s condition?”

  We got an answering flash in acknowledgment. As it would take a minute or two for the answer to be prepared, I turned my attention momentarily to the two leading destroyers, now rapidly bearing down on us.

  One so close astern the other as to be running in its foaming wake, both hardly two hundred yards off so that no glasses were needed, those two destroyers flashed past us. I gazed, open-mouthed in astonishment—never had I imagined anything like those two tin cans. No longer did they look like dun-colored warships or like warships of any color. From their gunwales up, they seemed to have been repainted, standing vividly out in unbroken olive drab, in startling contrast to their war-colored lower hulls. From stem to stern on each of them nothing met the eye save an unbroken mass of khaki. They were packed so solidly with soldiers all over every inch of their topsides that nothing else was visible—no superstructures, no guns, no torpedo tubes, no racks of depth charges—everything had wholly disappeared beneath those avalanches of khaki from the Strathallan that had flowed aboard to engulf both ships!

  No wonder that although inward bound they were making top speed—speed was their only protection now, for otherwise they were totally helpless. They couldn’t fire a gun, launch a torpedo, or drop a depth charge in their own defense, even should a U-boat surface close enough aboard them to hit it with a biscuit! Nobody could possibly lift even an arm on those overcrowded decks to throw the biscuit. There must have been far more than a thousand men jamming the decks and superstructures of each of those lean warships. I wondered the soldiers on them could even breathe, so tightly were they packed together.

  In another instant, almost before my sagging jaw could close, the two leading destroyers had swept by and were dropping astern. Still dazed by that spectacle, but thankful that our troops had obviously been saved, I looked forward toward the third destroyer. Her signal lamp, trained on us, was beginning to flash. Before the message was completed, she also, as solid with troops as her two sisters, had shot past us and was well astern. Our signalman spelled out the answer as it came in, while the quartermaster copied it down:

  “STRATHALLAN HEAVILY ON FIRE AND COMPLETELY ABANDONED BY CREW AS TOTAL LOSS. ALL TROOPS OFF.”

  My insides seemed progressively to be turning to lead as I stared at the message, forming letter by letter, as the quartermaster jotted it down.

  Heavily on fire—completely abandoned by crew—total loss—! By the time the quartermaster got to that, paralysis was complete. With my stomach tied in a hard knot, I could hardly read the rest of it. I sagged at the knees, gripped the near by engine telegraph to support myself.

  Why in God’s name hadn’t the Strathallan sent in correct information about her condition before we started, so we might have come out decently prepared for what faced us? Why no mention of the fire? We had been rushed out to sea prepared to help a sinking ship and here instead was one wholly abandoned because she was on fire! Those low pressure salvage pumps littering our decks were totally useless to cope with fire. What was going to be urgently needed was high pressure fire pumps and several hundred men at least to fight that fire. While the King Salvor had some fire pumps also, she had not over fifty men in her entire ship’s complement.

  So it came as the final crushing blow that the Strathallan’s own officers and crew, which must have comprised 600 men at the very minimum, instead of waiting for the help that was on the way, had all ingloriously abandoned their ship to the flames as soon as the troops were off. Lost probably in that flood of khaki I had just seen, they must at that moment be on those five destroyers on their way ashore! There would be nobody at all on the huge Strathallan to help the pitiful little handful of men on the King Salvor in their fight for her!

  CHAPTER

  20

  WITH THE SOUTHBOUND TROOPladen destroyers rapidly shrinking into insignificant specks on the sea astern to leave us wholly alone in the middle of the heaving ocean, the King Salvor plodded on northward. When my intestines had unknotted themselves sufficiently to let me think again in some fashion, I turned to Harding on the bridge alongside me, dully ordered,

  “Well, skipper, you might as well start your crew striking down into the holds again those salvage pumps and hoses they just finished hoisting out. We’ll have to clear your decks for other things. Leave a couple of the smaller pumps and a little hose for ’em on the topside for emergencies; all the rest’ll have to go below again. Then start breaking out instead all the fire hose you’ve got on the ship and we’ll begin coupling it up into long lengths, say about 500 feet in each length to start with. How’re you fixed for fire pumps? She’s completely dead. There’ll be no pumps going at all on her to give us water. Got any gasoline-driven portables we can lift aboard ’er?”

  Harding shook his head wearily.

  “No, nothing but what’s part o’ the ship; only our own steam-driven high pressure fire pumps down in the engine room. But we’re well enough fixed that way; the King Salvor’s got steam pumping capacity to feed a dozen fire hose lines all at once and some to spare. And I’ve got plenty of fire hose to run aboard ’er, too. It’s none o’ that I’m thinking of, Captain. It’s only where’s a’ the men a’ coming from now to fight this fire with?”

  Harding looked at me; I looked at Harding. I knew as well as he that his question was purely rhetorical. Both of us knew perfectly well that all the men that were going to fight that troopship fire, from which over a dozen times our number had already fled, were coming off the King Salvor because there just wasn’t any other place now they could come from. Including his black gang and all his officers, he had just fifty men aboard; fifty-one, including myself. Some men, of course, would have to be left aboard the King Salvor to fire the boilers and keep her pumps and machinery going, while the rest of us boarded the abandoned Strathallan to fight the fire. Possibly we could throw thirty men aboard the wreck—thirty men to fight a conflagration on a 25,000 ton ship reported heavily on fire and abandoned because of it.

  I didn’t even bother to answer Harding’s question, and Harding who expected no answer, didn’t even wait for one. He turned to call down on deck to Sid Everett, his Third Mate, who, like all his seamen already worn out from handling cargo, was sprawled out with them on the heaps of suction hoses, all trying to catch their breath again. Those men, together with a few engineers, would shortly have to constitute our whole fire-fighting force. What they all desperately needed most right now was a complete rest in preparation for what faced them.

  “Sid!” sang out Harding to his mate. “Rouse up all your lads there and turn to with ’em striking below those salvage pumps and the hoses you just broke out! We just learned we got a fire instead of a flood to fight! When you’ve got the decks cleared, Sid, send up every last length o’ fire hose you can find below! Shake a leg, now! It won�
�t be long till we’ll all be fighting a big fire on the Strathallan!”

  Sid Everett, as well as all the sailors who of course had heard the orders from the bridge as clearly as their mate, gaped a moment at the captain; then he dragged himself up to station his men for stowing below the salvage gear—a harder job than breaking it out. But there were no complaints; they were all good salvage men who had learned long since to expect anything—usually, the worst.

  But I observed that Harding was a good enough practical psychologist to have suppressed something which would have caused plenty of hard words. He had made no mention to his own men that after breaking their backs twice handling cargo, they were immediately going to have to wade into that big fire—alone. Each of those dog-tired seamen, as he turned to wearily on sending below the heavy equipment which he had hardly finished sending up, visualized, of course, the hundreds and hundreds of sailors who would naturally comprise the crew of a huge liner like the Strathallan, the biggest vessel the Peninsular and Oriental Company had, waiting for us at their ship’s rails. They would do all the actual firefighting, expecting of us only to send aboard them extra fire hoses and the high pressure water we should be able to pump through those hoses, of both of which they would obviously enough be short. There was going to be a sad awakening soon, but at the moment Harding wasn’t taking any chances on his exhausted men curling up on him over the prospect.

  With the little deck force once again on the vibrating King Salvor’s topsides busy with the winches and the booms, both Harding and I turned our attention to studying through spyglasses a large cloud on the horizon far ahead which we had casually taken for granted as only a cloud. Now we knew better; it must be a cloud of smoke from the burning Strathallan. Harding ordered his helmsman to forget the compass course; he was to steer directly for the windward side of that cloud. The helmsman shifted course about two degrees more to port to bring it dead ahead. I judged that in about an hour, we should be there.

  At 4:30 P.M. on December 21, the shortest day of the year, we arrived, having been underway five and a half hours since leaving our berth in Oran. We were ready again. All except two of the salvage pumps and their hoses had been struck below; all the fire hose and the hose nozzles the King Salvor owned were coupled up and laid out on deck—over a mile of it, made up in twelve separate runs. The sight of that ominous cloud of smoke ahead, increasing in size, growing plainer and glowing a brighter red every minute as we bore down on it, had acted as a spur to the jaded seamen. In little over an hour, straining as neither threats nor promises of reward could have made them, they had done as much as in the three hours before when there had been nothing visible to any of us save the empty ocean.

  We arrived, still having an hour or so of daylight of that brief December day left to us, with a moderate sea running and the wintry wind blowing over a cold gray ocean from the westward, about force 2, not bad.

  A weird scene met our eyes.

  Lying in the trough of the sea and rolling sluggishly to it, broadside to the wind and pointing north, was the drifting Strathallan, a towering passenger liner, with huge tongues of red and yellow flame leaping fiercely skyward in a long fire front extending from her bridge all the way aft to the end of her passenger superstructure—about two-thirds her whole length. Across the water to us came the roaring and the crackling of the flames while a vast cloud of heavy black smoke rose lazily in the light wind to drift away to leeward, curling in a backdraft down her starboard side, spreading over the sea there, rising again to fill the entire sky to the eastward.

  The Strathallan had a list to port of about 10°, no very bad list; and she was undoubtedly down a few feet by the stern also, but not much. As we first passed close aboard along her port side (the windward one and consequently clear of all smoke), we could see no sign at all above water in her hull of the hole the torpedo had blasted in her engine room.

  Disregarding the fire for a moment, I scanned the hull of the Strathallan with a strictly professional eye as the King Salvor slowly passed down her port side from her stern toward her bow. The Strathallan, hours after her torpedoing, wasn’t in the slightest danger of sinking from the damage the torpedo had caused her; she never had been in any such danger. Her captain or whoever had so reported her, must have been a panic-stricken fool. One torpedo, it was true, had practically broken the Porcupine in half and put her on her last legs, but there was an immense difference between what one torpedo could do to a 1900 ton tin can like the Porcupine and an enormous 25,000 ton liner like the Strathallan, one of the dozen largest ships afloat.

  “Disregarding the fire for a moment—” But how could anyone, however strictly professional, disregard that raging fire even for a moment? Four hours before, her crew had abandoned her because of that fire, leaving it since then to spread uncontrolled, and it certainly had. Now the sight of those flames reaching toward high heaven was enough to strike terror to any heart. As my eyes swung back from her waterline to gaze again at her blazing topsides, I caught the full measure of the picture of disaster she presented.

  Hanging limply down from her bow into the sea were two heavy manila towing hawsers, cast adrift now, idly rising and falling to the waves sweeping by, fit enough symbols of her utter abandonment. Her high port side from forecastle to poop was almost invisible—it was completely covered with a mass of scramble nets enveloping her as in a web from gunwales down to waterline. Down those nets from the soaring decks above the cataract of troops must have poured in a khaki-colored Niagara to swamp the topsides of the rescuing destroyers as one after another they had run directly alongside the Strathallan to take the men off. The Strathallan could not possibly have been so badly afire then or this could never have been done.

  To add to the forlorn scene, high up on the flame-enveloped boat deck, pointing drunkenly in all directions but mostly skyward, was a row of A.A. guns, and interspersed with them a line of swungout boat davits from which swayed like long pendulums the fully payed-out boatfalls, slapping their heavy disengaging blocks crazily in and out of the sea below as the heaving Strathallan rolled to it. All her lifeboats were gone, every one. Where, I wondered? For neither full nor empty, could I see a single boat drifting about anywhere in the sea. But if the lifeboats were all gone, none of her massive metal liferafts were. They, as well as the lifeboats, had all been shoved overboard, but there were all the liferafts in the water, swinging aimlessly by the dozens at the ends of long painters close aboard the side in tangled masses that must have driven the destroyer captains wild as they maneuvered to lay their thin-shelled vessels alongside without getting themselves sunk.

  We came abreast the drifting liner’s bow. Harding looked at me inquisitively. What did I wish next?

  I told him.

  “We’ll have to board her, of course, from port, her windward side, and near her stern, Captain. That’s our only chance. But before we try it, swing down her lee side on your way round to her port quarter and let’s have a look at her to starboard so we know what’s what all around. We’ll not have a ghost of a chance to size her up once we’re aboard. And as you swing round her bow, Harding, keep well clear of her so’s you don’t foul your screw in those towing hawsers floating there.”

  Harding nodded, turned to his helmsman to con the ship around. We stood on a little, turning gradually to starboard, meanwhile keeping a sharp eye on those long hawsers undulating like snakes in the seas till we were clear of their free ends, then swung in a closer circle to starboard to get on her lee side. As we came about to head in the opposite direction, not quite so close to her this time because of the thick masses of smoke flowing down her lee side like flood waters going over a high dam, I got a surprise. I saw we were not alone with the Strathallan.

  Well to leeward of her in the smoke, sometimes hidden, sometimes clearer, was a large British destroyer, H.M.S. Laforey, leader of the destroyer flotilla originally guarding the entire troopship convoy. She had evidently remained behind with the torpedoed Strathallan and her troops
while all the rest of the troopships and the remaining destroyers with them had continued on toward Algiers. And near the Laforey were two armed trawlers, H.M.S. Restive and Active, which must also have been part of the convoy screen. All three were zigzagging erratically about in the smoke, to make themselves as poor targets as possible. I scanned them through my binoculars.

  That they were still there was surprising. It was understandable enough that the Laforey and her two smaller consorts (which evidently must have been the vessels once on the far ends of those two adrift towing hawsers) should stand by to protect the Strathallan from further attack while the troops were aboard and to try to tow her so long as her crew were trying to save their ship. But once the troops were off and the crew had abandoned her as a total loss and they had cut the towing hawsers adrift, leaving the deserted hulk to burn or to founder or both, why were they further hazarding themselves by remaining where they knew a U-boat was about? But I soon found out.

  We had hardly shown up on the same side through the smokethat enveloped them, than the Laforey’s signal lantern started to flash on us. That lantern flashed dimly and unevenly, sometimes scarcely visible in the billowing smoke, but in spite of the interferences our signalman managed to catch the signal. He handed me the form:

  “FOR PSVO, KING SALVOR. CAN ANYTHING BE DONE?”

  I was PSVO. Why the V had even been thrown in except possibly to make a four-letter signal out of my title initials, I never knew. Admiral Cunningham had himself personally chosen them when he had designated me as Principal Salvage Officer; possibly he had tossed in the V for Victory—the British, from Churchill himself on down, were strong on that. At any rate, I was PSVO and the signalman with no hesitation passed me the signal. I looked at it.

  I could see now why the Laforey was still around. She must have been informed by radio from ashore that we were on our way, and was only waiting for me to write off the Strathallan as finished before she and her attendants sought safer waters. But the message made me swear. To ask a salvage man, when he can plainly see the smokestacks of a ship still above water, whether anything can be done, is pure insult. I seized the pencil and his pad of signal blanks from the signalman and dashed off the reply: