No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  I almost wept at the sight. This had put her wholly beyond the power of men to save. God help the Strathallan now!

  Fascinated, Harding and I watched those glowing airports. They became brighter and brighter. Then a strange thing happened. From one after another, starting with those higher up where it was undoubtedly hottest, a sudden gush of molten fire seemed to spout, culminating in a torrent of fiery metal streaming downward into the sea.

  The first time it occurred left me incredulous that my eyes were any longer honest with me. How could steel, hot though that fire might be, melt and run that way? But after the second or third spout of such molten streams, I understood. There was no steel melting and running there, much as it looked like it. What we were seeing were the thick glass airport lenses, one after another, melting suddenly from the flame inside and pouring down the side of the ship—fiery molten glass!

  One after another, I watched the airport lenses melt out and gush into the sea, first the upper rows, then those halfway down, last of all every port in that row right on the waterline! On these last, the molten glass hardly had a chance to start pouring down before it soused into the water, extinguished.

  There was no longer any hope at all—not in a rough sea with all those open holes right on her waterline and Oran still twenty-five miles away. I was very tired. I turned to Harding,

  “Have me called, please, Captain, just before she goes. I’m stretching out for a little in my stateroom.”

  Harding nodded, said nothing. I stepped aft into the starboard cabin just abaft the bridge, flung myself, clothes and all, on the bunk, in an instant must have been dead to the world.

  In another instant, so it felt to me, I was being rudely shaken to bring me to again. In the glare from outside, I made out Harding himself roughly yanking me by both shoulders.

  “Turn out, Captain, if y’ want to see the last of ’er! She’s going!”

  I rolled stiffly from the bunk, hardly able to open my eyes.

  “What’s the rush?” I protested. “I haven’t been here a minute yet and you’re turning me out already. She can’t have got worse that fast.”

  “It’s nearly four, an’ y’ve been asleep well over an hour. Shake a leg! She won’t last long now!”

  I staggered from the cabin, in a few steps was on the bridge. I noted we weren’t moving any longer, merely heaving idly to the sea. Looking ahead, I saw the trawlers weren’t moving either; on their sterns I could make out sailors frenziedly swinging axes on the heavy manila hawsers going over their gunwales, hacking the cables in half. One look abeam showed why clearly enough.

  Evenly, majestically, the vast bulk of the Strathallan was rolling over on its port side. Already her port rail was under water, the side there with all its melted airports was submerged and no longer visible. There was flame enough still spouting high to furnish more illumination than seemed needful, but nothing like what had been. I wondered perhaps if the sea already half filling her had not engulfed her firerooms and so drowned out the worst of that inferno.

  The terrific list was too much for her top hamper. The foremast leaned crazily over and collapsed into the forward well deck which was now almost vertical, a glowing mass of white-hot steel. First one stack, then the other, tore loose and skidded down the steeply sloping boat deck into the sea. Relentlessly she continued to capsize, the sea lapped higher on her fiery decks, clouds of steam rose up from the waves as they hit the sizzling steel, to mingle with the smoke above.

  Farther and farther over she went; the dazzling glow from her incandescent topsides, from the flames, and from the lurid clouds of smoke and steam above began sharply to decrease, then suddenly was wholly extinguished like a snuffed candle. It was night again, completely dark both near and far.

  The Strathallan had sunk.

  Only a huge cloud of black smoke, scarcely distinguishable from the black sky overhead as it rose slowly clear of the surface, marked the spot from which a moment before that splendid vessel had started for the bottom, one thousand fathoms down, twenty miles still to Oran. Slowly the smoke lifted higher, leaving only the undisturbed sea, no different there than anywhere under the night skies.

  With wet eyes, and not from smoke either, I stared sadly at that spot. The Strathallan was gone after all our efforts. We had done our best.

  But we had failed.

  CHAPTER

  24

  BY 8:30 A.M., DECEMBER 22, 1942, the King Salvor was back in her berth in Oran alongside the salvage quay, practically a dead ship once she was tied up, with all hands except one man on deck and two men below turned in. I prayed that nothing more got torpedoed immediately in our area; we were in no condition just then to tackle another wreck at sea.

  Completely washed up myself, I crawled ashore, reported briefly by telephone to the Flag-Officer-in-Charge, Oran, that we had failed to save the Strathallan, asked him to relay that to Admiral Cunningham, and made my way back to my room at the Grand Hotel. There, too stiff and weary for anything else, I flung myself out on the bed, trying to forget the nightmare I had just been through.

  Next morning I was on my way by air to Algiers, to report to Admiral Cunningham and to try to put some dynamite under a salvage problem there that was making no progress at all and which the Naval Commander-in-Chief’s office was urging I look into personally.

  In Algiers we had a large Cunarder, the 20,000 ton Scythia, which had come in some weeks before with a huge hole blasted in the starboard side of her number two hold forward. Like the Strathallan, she had caught a U-boat torpedo while laden with troops steaming in convoy through the Mediterranean on her way to Algiers. Fortunately, unlike the Strathallan, her machinery spaces had escaped damage, and though as badly flooded, and considerably down by the head besides from the waterlogged hold forward, she had made Algiers under her own power and discharged all her troops and all her cargo, save that in the flooded hold. Since then she had been lying motionless in Algiers harbor, by far the biggest vessel in the port, an alluring target for Nazi bombs, and sure, if she stayed long enough, to catch some which would finish her off in one of the almost nightly raids being staged on the harbor.

  The Scythia had to get out of there. Algiers was too hot a spot for her to remain long, injured or uninjured. But nothing could be done to repair her in Algiers. The largest dry dock in the port, a graving dock built of stone, not a floating dry dock, could at most take in the 6000 to 8000 ton bulk of freighters like Liberty ships. The 20,000 ton Scythia, with a vast hole in her starboard side, was hopelessly oversize for that dry dock. And not only for the dry dock in Algiers but for any elsewhere in all North Africa—except for that 25,000 ton Grand Dock lying on the bottom of the sea in Oran, the one which I had Bill Reed and some Frenchmen trying to pull up exactly for cases of her sort.

  But the Scythia wasn’t getting out of there in spite of the obvious fact that if she didn’t soon, any morning now there might not be enough Scythia left ever to get out. That was what had Admiral Cunningham and all his staff as far up in the air as stolid Englishmen ever get. For the poor Scythia was more firmly held by red tape and ancient maritime custom to the quay alongside which she lay in Algiers than she was by her mooring cables.

  The Scythia was a merchant ship, a sizable transatlantic passenger liner with a merchant crew and under merchant rules. War or no war, those rules were as inflexible and unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Lloyd’s agents in Algiers, standing on the rules, wouldn’t let her go to sea—she wasn’t seaworthy so much down by the bow and with that tremendous hole in her side; anybody could see that with half an eye; they wouldn’t issue a certificate of seaworthiness. The Scythia’s merchant captain, standing on the rules, wouldn’t take his ship to sea without the required certificate of seaworthiness from Lloyd’s, which he couldn’t get. If he did so and she foundered on him for any reason at all, the British Board of Trade, also standing firmly on those rules, would strip him of his master’s ticket; they’d lift it anyway, even if she
didn’t founder, just for his sailing without that certificate. He wouldn’t do it.

  So the Scythia remained tied up to the quay in a port everyone freely recognized as extremely hazardous; five smaller ships already had been destroyed there. That she would ultimately fall a victim to Axis bombs was highly probable, but break those ancient rules to save her? It was not to be thought of. If the bombs got her, that would be altogether according to Hoyle—she could go up in smoke or go down with more holes blasted in her hull and everyone’s face would still be saved—except the Scythia’s.

  Admiral Cunningham was tearing his hair over that impasse. He couldn’t order Lloyd’s or its civilian agents to do anything; he had no authority at all over them. And he couldn’t order the Scythia’s merchant captain to take her to sea to a safer port westward, either; he could issue the order, all right, but the order just wouldn’t be obeyed, and nowhere could the Naval Commander-in-Chief lay hands in his scant forces on the necessary naval officers and men to man the Scythia and sail her to safety.

  In Admiral Cunningham’s office at the St. George the moment I stepped into it the morning of December 23, that problem was put up to me. What, as Principal Salvage Officer, could I do, and hurriedly, to the Scythia that would persuade Lloyd’s agents to issue a certificate, any kind of a certificate no matter how shot full of holes, on which she might be sailed to Oran by her own crew? Her master, I was assured, wasn’t afraid of the danger at sea; he was simply afraid of the Board of Trade and of his ticket; he was perfectly willing to sail the Scythia out on any kind of a certificate that wouldn’t hazard his master’s ticket—too much. What could I do about it? Here was a torpedoed ship foundering in an ocean of red tape as inexorably as had the Strathallan in an ocean of water. I was a salvage man; saving torpedoed vessels was my business.

  I smiled wryly. After all, I reflected, I had just failed to save the Strathallan, a bigger ship. Why should more be expected with the Scythia? But, I supposed, I was a last straw at which they were clutching. So I said I’d go down to the wharves and look the situation over, though inwardly I felt hopeless about it. I had had experience enough already with American red tape, even in wartime, to take the guts out of anybody; as for the British variety, it had had opportunity down the centuries to age to a tenacity which made our brand only of gossamer flimsiness. I’d sooner fight the sea any time for a ship; against the sea, sometimes you could win.

  Down on the Algiers waterfront again, I was soon aboard the Scythia, threading its endless corridors on my way forward and below to the flooded hold. With me were the Scythia’s First Officer, her Chief Engineer, Lloyd’s surveyor for the port, and the senior of the two Royal Navy lieutenants who were my salvage assistants in Algiers.

  We got to the lower deck in the number two hold, the lowest deck still above water. That deck and all those above had been troop spaces, filled with metal bunks, tiered four high, in which the soldiers slept on the voyage. The metal-stanchioned tiers of bunks had already all been cleared out of there, leaving a large rectangular open ’tween decks space, about seventy-five feet athwartships, about the same length fore and aft, and about nine feet high. There must have been some 600 Tommies (she happened to be carrying British troops when struck) berthed in that compartment the night the torpedo exploded just below them.

  I looked at the deck on which I was standing, which formed the top of the actual cargo hold below. There was a large cargo hatch, about twenty feet square, framed by a heavy steel coaming, in the middle of it. The steel deck beneath my feet was bulged up badly, with a number of small shrapnel holes in it to starboard. The wooden hatch covers were all missing—you could look right down on the sea flooding in practically to the under side of that lower deck. And through the water you could see the glow of light coming from the sea outside through the hole the torpedo had blasted, where the starboard side wasn’t any more.

  Those wooden hatch covers must have lifted like an elevator when the torpedo let go below them, thus venting the explosion into that troop compartment and saving the entire lower deck from tearing away altogether instead of merely bulging badly upward. But I hated to think what had happened to the tiers and tiers of Tommies sleeping over those hatch covers when they suddenly shot upward in a burst of flame from half a ton of TNT, let alone to all the other Tommies in that compartment even clear of the hatches. I didn’t ask the Scythia’s First Officer at my side what had happened to the Tommies; it was obvious enough without discussion. Instead, I turned to, studying the physical damage to the Scythia herself and what, if anything, might be done with our negligible salvage forces and equipment in Algiers to get her a certificate.

  One look into the open cargo hatch and I washed out any thought I might have had about temporarily patching the side. That hole was at least sixty feet long fore and aft; probably it was over twenty-five feet deep. It would take months, and divers I didn’t have anyway, to put even a temporary patch over that hole so we could pump out the flooded hold. If ever the Scythia moved out of Algiers again, she was going to have to move with that hold flooded and her side as wide open to the sea as it was then. But since Lloyd’s wouldn’t give her a certificate in that condition, it all looked hopeless, not even worth arguing about with the surveyor. If I couldn’t produce some very tangible improvement in the Scythia which would at least save everybody’s face even if it really didn’t make much difference in the ship, there certainly wasn’t going to be any certificate.

  I took out my pocket slide rule and started to figure diligently. (A slide rule always impresses, giving to the bystanders a feeling that the user thereof knows what he’s about and will shortly come up with the answer.) However, I was actually trying to get an answer to something which was peculiar. To me, the Scythia was considerably more down by the head, and consequently so much less seaworthy, than just one flooded hold should put her. Was it so? I pushed my slide rule back and forth, computing volumes, weights, displacement, trimming moments, and what trim by the head should result.

  It was so. When I finished pushing my slide rule around, it appeared that the Scythia certainly was more down by the head than the flooded hold before me should put her. I asked her First Officer what might be wrong with her that I could not see.

  He told me. Though there was no very visible sign of it, his number three lower hold, which was composed of deep tanks intended for liquid cargo only, was also flooded up to the very tops of the deep tanks. And that, in spite of the fact that the hole in the starboard side didn’t extend aft enough to rupture that hold.

  So we all climbed up several decks, went a little aft, and then came down the ladders in the number three hold to finish up on the solid steel deck which formed the top of the deep tanks for liquid cargo. The rather large bolted down square manhole covers were slightly bulged up and leaking a bit here and there, but not much. They must be under moderate pressure from the sea below now pressing upward on them, trying to rise higher.

  My eyes lighted up when they fell on those flooded deep tanks—here was just what the doctor ordered to save the patient. It was in the bag now; with those deep tanks I’d have no trouble at all wangling from Lloyd’s the all-important certificate, regardless of the huge hole left wide open in her side!

  Out came my slide rule again. I did some more hasty computing. It came out that there must be at least 2300 tons of sea water now in those deep tanks, a whole lot of sea water. I could imagine how it had got in—there must be some shrapnel holes punched by fragments of the exploding torpedo in the steel bulkhead between the deep tanks and the flooded number two hold. But those shrapnel holes couldn’t be large and they couldn’t be many, and I could cope with them. Those holes high up near the top of the bulkhead, I could get to with a diver on the forward side and plug off; those lower down which a diver couldn’t get to because of the submerged cargo left in the number two hold, wouldn’t cause me any great trouble; as a matter of fact, they’d be a help.

  For the answer was compressed air—in my lif
e, the answer to nearly everything that couldn’t easily be solved otherwise. I’d make a diving bell out of those deep tanks. All that was necessary (after I’d plugged those upper shrapnel holes, using a British diver) was to get a few air compressors aboard the Scythia. With those, I could push most of the water in the deep tanks out through the unplugged shrapnel holes closer to the bottom and get rid of most of that unwelcome load of 2300 tons of sea water in the number three lower hold.

  That would bring her bow up out of the sea at least five or six feet; by shifting other loads I was sure we could lift her bow a total of eight feet at least and the whole ship between two and three feet higher out of water. She would then visibly be in fine condition to go to sea. Her bow would be high out of water, her draft about normal for full load. All you would have to do was to imagine that that sea water still in the flooded number two hold was just liquid cargo you were carrying there instead of in the regular deep tanks just aft them. That wouldn’t be difficult for anyone to imagine, once he got a little used to the idea.

  Assured in my own mind of all that, I sprang it on the Lloyd’s surveyor and on the Scythia’s officers. It was all right with the Chief Engineer; the First Officer was certain it would be all right with his captain. But the surveyor was dubious; he granted that I could put the ship in the condition I stated and make her really seaworthy for a short voyage, but even for a short voyage, would she stay that way? For instance, the compressed air would put a heavy pressure on the flat tank tops which they had never been built to stand; already I could see that the rectangular manhole covers were bulging upward under a very low pressure. With all the pressure I was going to put on them, the tank tops themselves were likely to rupture suddenly at sea and release all the air. And even if they didn’t, suppose they only leaked somewhat on the voyage and lost the precious compressed air I’d put in ’em? What then? In either case, the sea would refill those deep tanks, and the ship at sea would find herself down by the head again, just as unseaworthy as she was then. How about all that?