No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  “FROM PSVO TO COMMANDING OFFICER LAFOREY. WE WILL TRY. PLEASE CONTINUE TO STAND BY.”

  I hesitated a moment before giving the reply to the signalman while I eyed again that “PLEASE.” Should I send that along with the rest? That Commander, R.N., whoever he might be, who was skipper of the Laforey had grossly insulted me and all my men. But then I handed it to the signalman unchanged. This was no time for quibbling over amenities. If I could cajole the skipper of the Laforey into staying around (I couldn’t order him to) he might save us from a torpedo. After all, there was the sad episode after the Battle of Midway only a few months before, of the little Hammann alongside our torpedoed and burning aircraft carrier Yorktown, valiantly trying to help her big sister extinguish the flames by pumping water to her. In had sneaked a Japanese submarine with more torpedoes, with a single salvo to sink both Good Samaritan and burning victim together in one vast eruption of flame and water. I should prefer to avoid an encore in the Mediterranean. Our signal lantern started to flash back the answer, “PLEASE” and all. I could not afford to deny our U-boat friend somewhere about in the seas beneath us credit for as much tenacity as that Jap in the Pacific.

  The Laforey flashed acknowledgment, then in a moment flashed us an affirmative. She would continue to stand by to protect us. I forgot the Laforey, and turned my attention again to what little could be made out of the Strathallan’s lee side. We had completely rounded her bow and were standing down her starboard side, enveloped in hot and choking fumes from burning fuel oil that set us all to coughing violently and our smarting eyes to watering profusely.

  We couldn’t see much of the Strathallan. Her superstructure was completely engulfed in fire and smoke. Occasionally through rifts in the rolling red-tinged clouds tumbling down to leeward, we could make out sections of her precipitous hull, draped as was her port side with scramble nets, festooned with run-out boatfalls, cluttered all along her waterline with badly tangled masses of empty liferafts, more even than there had been on her weather side. But all the time, roughly in way of her smokestacks, we could see even through the thick smoke, patches of her steel shell a little above water glowing a bright red. Her firerooms, with all the fuel oil there now ablaze inside, must be roaring furnaces to heat the hull almost to incandescence.

  Shielding our tear-filled eyes as best we could, which wasn’t very much, we continued peering through the smoke at the Strathallan as the King Salvor steamed slowly down her starboard side. I thought I saw something move on one of the liferafts floating close alongside in way of her forward smokestack. I swung up my binoculars, stared intently at the spot. I couldn’t be sure—there was too much smoke wreathing everything. I pointed out the raft, asked Harding to look.

  Through glasses, both of us carefully scanned the rafts tossing there against the Strathallan’s hot side. Neither of us could make out anything definite, but again I thought I saw something slowly and laboriously swinging up from that liferaft. It might be the life-raft painter tautening momentarily, it might be an abandoned life-jacket floating upward in the backdraft—but it might also be an arm. There was no telling.

  “Stop her, Harding!” I sang out sharply. “Lower a boat and send it in alongside that raft! We’ll see!”

  The King Salvor stopped, backed her engines briefly to take the headway off her. Down from our starboard davits swiftly dropped our power lifeboat, manned by Teddy Brown, First Mate, and half a dozen seamen, to disappear into the rolling smoke between us and the Strathallan.

  Finally I caught a vague glimpse of them through my glasses, heaving up and down in the sea for a brief moment alongside that crazy confusion of liferafts against a background of red-hot steel and curling flame, then they were underway again, once more to be swallowed up in the smoke.

  In a few minutes our boat was sheering in alongside our lee counter, everybody in it nearly asphyxiated. From the lifeboat, our staggering men were tenderly passing up to their shipmates on the fantail a limp and inert form. They had rescued somebody from that raft!

  Teddy Brown and his half-dead boat’s crew were then dragged aboard themselves, and the lifeboat (which Harding decided he’d leave in the water) secured astern on a short painter. Harding rang up “Slow Ahead,” and immediately we were underway again, pushing our way through the smoke. Down on deck, I could see the motionless figure of the man we’d rescued being carried forward to the wardroom, where some seamen would administer first-aid, trying to revive him. (The King Salvor had neither surgeon nor sickbay.)

  As he was hurried by into our wardroom just below, I looked curiously down from the bridge to see whether that unconscious last survivor, abandoned together with the abandoned Strathallan, might be an American G.I. or a British seaman. I got another surprise. Very evidently he was neither—I was looking down into the limp but swarthy face of a very tall turbaned and tightly-trousered Hindool

  “How come, skipper?” I asked in bewilderment of Harding who had also momentarily stepped aft on his bridge for a look. “What would a Hindoo like that be doing on a troopship bound from England for this war zone?”

  Harding was in no way puzzled.

  “It’s quite all right, Captain; nothing queer at all about it. He’s one of her crew. The Strathallan’s a P. & O. boat, an East Indiaman. They always have white officers but Lascar crews; probably kept most o’ the Lascars even when she began running transport after the war started; those Lascars make good sailors. Most likely when that lousy white skipper took his crew off the Strathallan in such a bloody rush to get his worthless carcass aboard those destroyers, this poor devil must have been somewhere below and they left him. Wonder how he felt when he came on deck to find himself last man on a deserted and burning ship with all the boats gone? And then trying to get away from the fire, crawled down the painter to that raft just to be roasted there instead? Well, Sid Everett’ll go to work on him now till he has to board the Strathallan himself. Sid’s good at that. But that Hindoo’d better come to in a hurry, because Sid won’t have much time.” Harding stepped back alongside his helmsman.

  We were well aft on the Strathallan’s starboard quarter by then. Harding started to swing his own little ship to starboard to circle her stern and come up under her counter on the windward side. A little more in the open there, while we could still see the Laforey to leeward, I sent another signal to her, asking that the trawlers pick up again the drifting towing hawsers, swing the Strathallan 180°, and head south for Oran with her and us while we fought the fire. The Laforey blinked back in acknowledgment.

  Dead slow, we rounded to in the heavy swell rolling by under the stern of the Strathallan towering high above us and sidled up alongside her port quarter, just abaft the break of her superstructure. From there aft to her stern on the windward side, she wasn’t afire yet. But getting aboard her to secure ourselves was still a problem. There wasn’t anyone on her to catch our heaving lines and haul aboard our hawsers or to send us down any of their own; and her decks were so high above ours, we couldn’t jump to hers. To make matters worse, our superstructure was pounding heavily against the thick sides of the transport as we rolled to seas which affected her hardly at all. The King Salvor was going to take a bad beating and plenty of damage to her topsides before we got through with the Strathallan, but there was no help for it. She’d have to take it.

  Teddy Brown, still under the weather from his boat trip, settled the mooring problem by scrambling to the signal platform over our bridge, the highest point on the King Salvor, and leaping in a frenzied broad jump from there to the railing of the Strathallan’s well deck, her lowest. With Teddy scurrying back and forth amongst the bitts as the Strathallan’s whole deck force, we soon had lines enough aboard her to hold us close alongside, with our own stern protruding slightly aft of hers and our stem just abaft her burning superstructure. With other seamen soon clambering up those hawsers to help, our limp fire hoses began to uncoil from our own deck and snake upward over our rails and up the high sides of the Strathallan.

>   I started to climb to the platform over the bridge to leap aboard her myself. Harding stopped me,

  “Here, take this, Captain. You’ll need it.” He passed me a tin hat.

  “What for?” I asked him.

  “You’ll find out bloody quick! Put it on!”

  I was in a hurry. Presumably Harding felt that G.I. tin hat was the best substitute available for a fireman’s helmet. With no further argument, I took it, tossed aside my navy cap, slid the steel helmet down over my head, buckled the strap under my chin, climbed to the platform above, and waiting only for the King Salvor to rise to the next wave to put me as high as possible, dived for the Strathallan’s teak rail. I slid over it on my stomach, dropped down to land on her main deck, her lowest passenger deck.

  Just aft of me Teddy Brown and half a dozen British sailors were frantically hauling aboard the hose lines. It would take them a few minutes yet to get slack enough on those hoses over the Strathallan’s rail to run them forward and get into action. It was up to me in that interval to decide where they had best go.

  I looked about. Right aft on the stern rose a sizable steel deckhouse surmounted by a 6-inch naval gun, trained dead aft, deserted of course. Right forward of me, rising two decks higher yet to the boat deck, was her huge superstructure, the main passenger quarters, all ablaze athwartships from port to starboard and up to the boat deck. I was in a sort of well deck space abaft the superstructure, with the upper decks in my vicinity not quite the full width of the ship and all open at the sides. A little inboard of me on the center line was a considerable open-air swimming pool, green tiled, full of water, looking cool and inviting in otherwise rather hot surroundings.

  I took a few steps inboard to look forward up the passageway inside the superstructure, off which the port side staterooms opened. That corridor was one solid mass of yellow flame. So was the similar corridor to starboard, when I crossed the deck to examine it. We wouldn’t be doing any going forward on that deck, either on the windward or the leeward side. I started up one of the broad well deck ladders to sight conditions on the next deck above.

  Halfway up, I paused, startled. Through the roaring of the flames, I suddenly caught the sound of guns firing in short bursts, 20-mm. guns at least, coming from directly over my head. Then interspersed with the staccato explosions of the guns came the rattling of shrapnel on the steel decks above me with bits of flying steel ricocheting past me down the ladder. Planes must be strafing us from the air! Involuntarily I shot the rest of the way up that ladder to seek shelter nearer the center line, under the next deck up, well inboard of the exposed ladder well.

  The firing ceased a moment, then recommenced. So did the hail of shrapnel, which I could see now as fragments of exploded shells plentifully littering the outer edges of the deck, with more pouring down. But it was all completely unbelievable. That Nazi planes had come out to strafe us I could imagine, for a troopship is an inviting target, though I had seen no planes about, not even ours. But why should they want to strafe an abandoned troopship? However, accepting that as a possibility due to lack of knowledge on the enemy’s part, the rest was still wholly inconceivable. How could anybody possibly live on that flaming boat deck overhead amidships (where as we had passed alongside in the King Salvor, I had seen the A.A. guns poking skyward through the smoke) to man those guns and fire back at the planes? And even if men could, who could they be? There wasn’t a living soul aboard the Strathallan to fire them, save we few who had just boarded her, and we certainly were not. It just couldn’t be!

  But it was. The guns close by over my head on that deserted ship started firing again. It was too much. My tin-helmeted head sagged down into my hands. I must be crazy; all alone on the abandoned Strathallan, I must suddenly have cracked up at last to be so imagining such an unimaginable occurrence. There were those I had left behind me in Massawa who had been telling me I was on the verge of it. Now it had happened. Probably if I could see my own face now, it would be as void of all semblance of human intelligence as those of some of the gibbering idiots, battle shell-shock cases, whom I had seen in Egypt coming out of the line after taking too much in the desert.

  My twitching hands fingering my tin hat brought something to my memory. Harding had insisted I wear that helmet, that I’d need it, that I’d find out why damned soon. Harding must have had a reason; he was a very phlegmatic person, given to no brainstorms; he must already have observed something I’d missed with my mind on other matters. Suddenly, in a wave of blessed relief, I saw the answer. I wasn’t crazy after all!

  Those guns were firing, all right, and continuing to fire even though there wasn’t anybody up there in the flames to fire them. And no ghosts were doing it, either. The flames themselves were doing it! For those were all automatic A.A. guns which must have been left loaded and at the “Ready” when the ship was abandoned. Now as the cartridge in each breech got hot enough and the powder exploded, even though no trigger was ever pulled, it automatically ejected its empty case and reloaded the gun with the next cartridge in the belt, which in its turn when it got hot enough, repeated the performance. No one gun fired more than one round at a time, but there were dozens of those 20-mm. guns up there, enough to give the impression of intermittent short bursts as they went off erratically, depending on how the flames licked their breeches.

  It was all very rational indeed. Harding must have observed it before we secured alongside, to have forced that tin hat on me. Now I too knew why, though possibly it had taken me longer than Harding had figured to find out. There weren’t any strafing planes, there weren’t any ghostly gunners to worry about, I could rest assured I was at least as sane as when I had shoved off from Oran. But the shrapnel from overheated shells bursting practically at muzzle-mouth was real enough. That was going to be something for those of us who had to fight the fire out on the open decks to worry about. Silently I thanked Harding for my tin hat. I wished I had a breastplate also.

  CHAPTER

  21

  WITH NOT A SINGLE GROUSE FROM any man, wholly undaunted by that terrifying conflagration, the little group of worn-out British seamen off the King Salvor, led by Captain Harding personally, swarmed aboard the Strathallan and waded fiercely into the fire. Twelve pulsating hose lines were strung over the Strathallan’s main deck rail, every hose swelled hard as iron now with water from the King Salvor’s engine room pumps. Dragging those twelve hoses, the sailors turned to to drive that fire forward and contain it there till we could tow the burning troopship into port, a twenty-hour task at least—if we didn’t stop another torpedo sooner or perhaps a whole salvo of them and, trapped inside, go down with her like a rock.

  The men were set as I wanted them. Four hose lines, each shooting a powerful jet from a two and a half inch diameter fire nozzle onto the flames, were deployed on each of the Strathallan’s three upper decks. Two seamen were clinging to each nozzle and playing it on the fire practically under their noses.

  Except up on the boat deck, we were now right inside the burning superstructure itself at close quarters with the fire, working our way up the flaming passages. Two hose lines and four seamen were deep inside each passageway. A fifth man was at the after entrance to each corridor, keeping anxious watch through the smoke and the steam on his shipmates lest they suddenly be overwhelmed in there with no one knowing it, and taking turn about with those inside on the hoses in spelling them for a breath of air.

  Altogether, we had thirty men aboard the Strathallan, aside from Harding and me. Our nineteen remaining men under the Chief Engineer, Andy Duncan, were left on the King Salvor to keep her auxiliaries and pumps going to feed us the water on which the lives of most of that thirty now wholly depended, and to keep watch on our surging mooring lines and hoses lest they be parted between the two erratically rolling ships.

  The first half hour had been tough and uncertain as to results, in getting the hoses run out and in fighting for a foothold on the two lower decks so we could even get a start. It had been a man-killi
ng job dousing the flames pouring out each one of those corridor entrances sufficiently to get inside them to begin playing water on the fire beyond. We had no smoke masks, we had no asbestos suits, we had nothing but leather gloves and tin hats in the way of protective equipment. There had been a fierce battle at every corridor entrance, with one pair of sailors playing their hose on their shipmates, the other pair, to keep the latter from being incinerated as they stood practically in the fire at the entrance working the second hose around inside enough to let them enter and get going. But they had finally all made it.

  Now in every corridor, our seamen were well inside and steadily working their hoses forward. But it was inhuman work, better suited to demons out of hell. As I groped my way along the lower port passageway to inspect things there, guided only by the two canvas-covered hose lines writhing in the hot embers on the still hotter steel deck under my feet, I might as well have been in a furnace myself. On both sides of me and overhead, even though the fire had been smothered there, the warped bulkheads and deck beams still glowed red with the charred woodwork all smoldering, furnishing more light than was desirable in view of the intolerable heat being radiated with it from all about.

  Shortly I came up to the four men manning the nozzles there, playing them on the flames crackling ahead and in the staterooms each side of them.

  Here indeed and no mistake was hell itself—leaping flames, choking smoke, and vast clouds of scalding steam which the jets of water had turned into almost instantly the moment they hit the red hot bulkheads and the decks overhead and underfoot. I peered through the sizzling fog at the four men there enveloped in the steaming mist—they were clinging like grim death to their hose nozzles, eyes closed most of the time, their sweating torsos naked to the waist glowing red themselves in the reflection of the flames. I thought I recognized one—I winked my eyes violently to clear them a bit, then looked closer. Yes, it was Jock Brown, Fourth Engineer, manning the leading nozzle—Jock, whom I had last worked with on a wreck diving in the oil and the water in the flooded wardroom of the sinking Porcupine to seal off her leaking manhole covers. I might have expected it would be that Scotchman Jock and his gang I should find farthest inside the flaming inferno that was the Strathallan. I didn’t recognize any of his mates—others in the King Salvor’s black gang, I supposed. Well, they were now all black, all right, except where they were red, for from their tin helmets down, their blistered but glistening bodies were streaked with charcoal from burning embers which had hit them.