No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Inwardly I began to feel better; now the surveyor was arguing with me about details, it was all right. I didn’t open on the surveyor with any counters to his objections. Instead I tried another tack.

  “If I convince you to your own satisfaction on the points you’ve raised, will you issue the certificate?” I asked of him.

  The surveyor reflected on that; it seemed fair enough. They were his own objections under consideration; he alone was to be the judge. And after all, he was no more anxious to sacrifice the Scythia than anybody else; he just had rules to meet and he needed colorable reason to show at Lloyd’s in London he’d met them should anything go wrong.

  “W-w-e-ll, y-y-e-s,” he answered finally, reluctantly dragging out the words. “But only a strictly limited certificate, mind; only for the trip to the nearest safe port, Oran, and only for a good weather passage, well convoyed, and only in case she keeps within five miles o’ shore, so she can be beached if need be. Now what’s your proposal on my objections? I’m a hard man, mind y’.”

  I could have cheered. I was glad he thought of himself as a hard man. Once a hard man makes a decision, he sticks by it; there’s no more dilly-dallying. I didn’t mind; the certificate was as good as in the skipper’s hands; the Scythia could sail! His limitations were all reasonable enough and easily met.

  “Well, I want you to be wholly satisfied. First, I’ll get a lot of Royal Engineer carpenters aboard and we’ll shore down with heavy shores these tank tops and the after bulkhead to stand the greatest pressure they can possibly get. Then as soon as my diver’s plugged the holes, we’ll put on the air pressure. You can watch; if the deck bulges anywhere we’ll put in more shores—just as many as you say and no argument. That’ll take care o’ strength.

  “Now for the leaks. I’ll not only put the air compressors aboard to push the water out of these deep tanks, but leave ’em aboard the Scythia for the whole voyage to Oran, as well as good men to tend ’em night and day and watch the pressure gauges to make good any leakage. And if there’s anything else, you say so and I’ll do that too!”

  He was satisfied; there wasn’t anything else he could think of. All I had to do was to put the Scythia in the condition I’d promised and let him witness the tests and inspect to see it was so; I could then rely on him to issue the certificate, limited as he’d stated, so the ship could sail. I shook his hand gratefully; had he been French instead of English, I should also have kissed him on both cheeks.

  The Lloyd’s surveyor left, together with the ship’s officers. I turned to right there with my British salvage lieutenant, outlining to him carefully what he was to do and how he was to do it. I couldn’t stay in Algiers long enough to see it through myself. The job would take perhaps four or five days; in two days I should be back in Oran; it would be wholly in that young lieutenant’s hands. But he was a good youngster. He’d do it.

  So shortly saying goodby to him also, not to see either him or the Scythia again that visit, I started up the hill once more to report to Admiral Cunningham that within a week the Scythia would sail, perhaps sooner. I felt better. Never before, with only a slide rule, a few well-chosen words, and in only a few hours, had I had the luck to salvage even a rowboat, let alone a torpedoed 20,000-tonner.

  A week after that discussion, the wounded Scythia steamed safely into Oran, there to moor in the outer harbor near the Ardois and await two things—the removal of the Spahi so she could get into the inner harbor and the raising of the Grand Dock so she could be repaired.

  CHAPTER

  25

  I HAD NOTHING OF THE AFTERNOON left after the ensuing session with the Admiral and his aides. But I had come back to the St. George at an auspicious moment; aside from the good news I bore regarding the Scythia, Admiral Cunningham had just received word that His Majesty, the King, George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, etc., had thought fit to nominate and appoint him Admiral of the Fleet, the very highest rank in the Royal Navy. He was equivalent now to a five-star admiral (four-star was the highest rank we then had in our own Navy) and to a Field Marshal in the British Army.

  Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, G.C.B., R.N., naturally enough was all smiles over his new honor, though also naturally enough, he made no personal mention of it. Its major effect for him, aside from the honor, would be that he must now rake up from somewhere the needful gold lace to add another stripe to those already covering each of his threadbare sleeves; whether they could be added (assuming he could find some in Algiers) without running up over his elbows, was going to be a tough problem. But if I knew Cunningham (and by now I thought I did) he would have been considerably more gratified if His Majesty had been able to bestow on him instead of the promotion a few scores of capable divers, four or five decent salvage ships, and a warehouse full of salvage equipment, to cope with all the wrecks already in sight, let alone those sure to come.

  But if the new Admiral of the Fleet had nothing himself to say on the matter of his promotion, his staff had plenty to say in the way of rejoicing, and I heartily agreed with them. No man in any Allied service, land, air, or sea, had more richly earned his rank. I added my congratulations to those of his British staff before we got down to other business, mostly headaches.

  There was the U.S.S. Thomas Stone, a fine new American naval armed transport, first torpedoed, then bombed, and now hard and fast aground in Algiers’ outer harbor. What could be done about her? Because she was a regular naval vessel of the United States Navy, Cunningham was particularly anxious she get attention. I had to say, nothing yet; she must lie as she was unless I pulled everything I had in Oran, including the King Salvor, out of there. Since that obviously was not in order, she must lie untouched till at least we cleared the Spahi from the entrance to Oran. All right; scratch the U.S.S. Thomas Stone off for the present. Commodore Dick, Chief of Staff, accordingly scratched her off.

  How about the Spahi; when would she be clear, to open up Oran harbor? I explained the sad story of the Spahi; possibly in two more weeks, I hoped. Cunningham smiled grimly, made some notes of his own, told me we should have no further troubles over the Spahi other than strictly salvage ones.

  The Grand Dock? Without the Grand Dock, we might as well let the Scythia and any more big ones like her burn, sink, or blow up—they were all otherwise total losses the minute they were damaged. I had to answer I didn’t know too much about the Grand Dock yet to be certain; a month more and some luck and I hoped to have her on the surface.

  Then there was the Moyen Dock in Oran; that sunken U-boat off Tenes to be searched; the Strasbourg in Algiers; the Glenfinlas in Bougie; the Aurora in Philippeville; the Cameronia, the Ithuriel, the Novelist, the Recorder, and the Meriel in Bône. They were all salvageable, all badly needed, especially the big Cameronia, all shrieking for immediate attention, not to mention several score more of other wrecks in all the ports up and down the whole coast which were more difficult problems. How about all of them? I had to shake my head sadly. I would give the Cameronia, the biggest of the lot, some thought; something might be done to get her out of Bône. As for all the others, it was not worth my while yet even to go and look at them; there was nothing with which to work on any of them. For every solitary diver I had, there were at least half a dozen wrecks already. If I dissipated my slight force trying to cover more, I'd never get anything accomplished.

  Admiral of the Fleet Cunningham nodded in agreement, commended me for the Porcupine, extended his commiserations over the Strathallan, congratulated me on the Scythia. Then he assured me that both he and General Eisenhower (who was personally following very closely events at sea though just then he was on the Tunisian fighting front) felt that salvage was going pretty well. He would himself give more thought to the difficulties my salvage forces and I were staggering under. Perhaps he could find a way to ameliorate them a bit, particularly any more situations such as had arisen with the Laforey over the salvage of the Strathallan. The discussion ended. I left. Already it was dark outside.
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br />   I had dinner at the Aletti with Rear Admiral Murray, R.N., Fleet Engineer, and Captain King, R.N., Fleet Constructor, both of Cunningham’s staff. Murray, an engineer rear admiral, and King, a naval constructor captain, were in charge of all repair work on damaged ships, once they had been dragged into port. They had both returned only the day before from Oran, where they had gone to examine H.M.S. Porcupine, out of water on the Petit Dock.

  The Porcupine had shocked them. They had gone to Oran (where of course they knew she couldn’t really be repaired) with the idea simply of having heavy steel girders welded temporarily along her torpedoed port side over the hole in her engine room, so she could hold together during the long tow back to England to be refitted. But once they saw all of her out of water, they hadn't found enough of the Porcupine left intact to give them anything to start from. How she had ever held together, waterlogged and in a seaway, long enough to get her into Arzeu, they couldn’t imagine. So their decision had been, instead of trying to tie the Porcupine together, to finish cutting her completely in half as she lay on the dry dock, not much of a job; carefully seal up all leaks in the bulkheads at the after end of the bow half and at the forward end of the stern half, shore up those bulkheads, and take her off the dry dock in two pieces. That was being done. When the unjointed bow and stern, both watertight and both absolutely light, came off the Petit Dock, they would then be towed back to England separately (the stern half, of course, stern first) where the Porcupine would be fitted together once more, a new port engine installed, and she would once again be a fighting ship. A most peculiar case, that Porcupine, they both agreed. She would, they felt, become a seagoing legend like the Flying Dutchman.

  Dinner over, I started upstairs to wander through the Aletti, seeing whether, for a change, I might come across some civilians, press correspondents recently from home, who might give me some off the record and authentic (and undoctored-up for morale purposes) news of what actually was going on along the home front. The war correspondents were all billeted at the Aletti.

  I finished up in the room assigned to the representative for Time. We had a drink. He thought things on the war front were lousy; every decent story you couldn't send home; the enemy had to be kept in the dark. That Strathallan story, for instance; it had just come bursting in. Algiers was full of thousands of survivors who had just been brought in special trains from Oran; you could pick up personal experience stories by the hundreds—all wonderful. But he wasn't bothering even to listen to any; as a newspaper man, they merely gave him stomach ulcers because not a word could he wire home, not even the bare fact that a huge transport had been torpedoed although garnished with the good news that our troops aboard had mostly, or perhaps all, been saved. The enemy must be kept in the dark that they had successfully torpedoed a big transport.

  I had to laugh. When I thought of how the Strathallan had lighted up the night skies over the Mediterranean like Vesuvius in eruption, we certainly were keeping the enemy in the dark all right. Even the fish knew all about it; nobody could possibly now be in the dark regarding the Strathallan save the people back home.

  But to hell with the war front, I told him. How about the home front—how were things really in the United States which I hadn't seen since right after we got kicked into the war?

  They were bad there too, I learned. If I thought all Americans were wholeheartedly exerting themselves in the war effort, I had another think coming. Plenty saw the war only as a chance to put on a squeeze. For instance, on the very day the newspapers were announcing in flaring headlines on the front page the final surrender at Bataan of the pathetic remnants of Wainwright’s starving, fever-ridden, and bleeding G.I.s who had been fighting for months night and day, finally could fight no longer, on an inside page they were carrying another story that would drive any fighting man to the thought of murder. At General Motors, wholly given over to turning out fighting equipment, the workmen, already getting much higher pay than ever before and time and a half for overtime, had presented an ultimatum. They demanded shorter hours and double time for work on Sundays or they were all walking off the job and no discussion about it!

  Then, aside from that, everything at home was tightly rationed—for Americans a bitter pill to swallow. Worst of all, we’d lost so many tankers to U-boat torpedoes off our own coasts, people with oil burners couldn’t get fuel oil enough on their drastically curtailed rations to keep themselves safely warm, nor could they convert back to coal. I gnashed my teeth over that one. Gasoline rationing I didn’t mind. But my house had an oil burner, and worse yet, a rather old one; that ancient burner ordinarily consumed oceans of oil to keep our house reasonably warm. On tightly rationed oil, my wife must be freezing!

  With that, I thanked my informant for all his news but told him he could stop. I’d rather discuss the war instead; it was less distressing to me. So we got back to the war front again.

  There was a big push on the Tunisian front going to break any day now; all the correspondents knew all about it. Once it broke, they’d have a story at last the censors would let them wire home. Eisenhower himself had left Algiers for the front. He was going to push through in one big smash, seize all Tunisia, and end everything by New Year’s Day before Rommel and his Afrika Korps, falling rapidly back through Tripolitania, could possibly arrive to join forces with von Arnim and bolster up Bizerte and Tunis.

  At that point, without any knock, the door of that Aletti room flew back. I glanced up momentarily; into the skimpily lighted room walked two air force captains, looking for a drink, most likely. I started to ignore them; I was off everybody in the air force, from colonels on down. But something about one of them, in spite of the dim light, caught my eye. Even for an air force officer, that one was unusual. I looked again.

  Well, I’ll be damned, I thought! The air force has put over another one on us in making itself even more attractive—they’ve got women flyers in the war zone now! For before me, in cap, tunic, trousers and service shoes, complete with wings, service ribbons, and combat stars, stood an air force captain, a woman! And a good-looking one, too, I had to admit.

  Staring open-mouthed at her, I got another jolt. Why, I knew her; she was Margaret Bourke-White! We’d met several times before the war in New York. She was no flyer; she was a press photographer, maybe a press correspondent also. What in hell was she doing in that air force uniform?

  She recognized me also and began to laugh at my very evident bewildered stare.

  “Don’t worry, Captain, they haven’t got down yet to relying on me to scare the enemy with bombs instead of flash bulbs! I’m just a forlorn survivor off the Strathallan—that’s the why of these clothes! But I do look nice in ’em; don’t you think so?”

  I had to concede that. The other air force captain, the real one, was introduced. We all had another drink at Time’s expense; then she explained. Pieced out with much that I learned later from other survivors, this was what had happened.

  Margaret Bourke-White had been on her way from London to the Tunisian front to cover the impending offensive as press correspondent and photographer for Life; they’d put her on the Strathallan along with nearly two hundred American army nurses, as well as all those G.I.s.

  Then had come the big moment in her life as a press photographer—she was on a gigantic troopship loaded with troops when it was torpedoed! Instantly the torpedo exploded (and she found herself still completely intact) she seized her camera and her flash bulbs, and not waiting for anything else, rushed out on deck in her negligee to get the pictures that would make press history!

  Then had begun complete frustration. It was 2 A.M., it was completely dark, the ship was, of course, blacked out. She couldn’t get a picture of the tumult on the crowded decks, of the frenzied G.I.s swarming up from the crowded holds below, of the crew frantically struggling to swing out the lifeboats, of anything at all—without exploding a flash bulb to illuminate the scene for her picture! For she realized that if she pressed the button for even one picture
, she would illuminate as by a flare for the U-boat captain who was undoubtedly still staring through his periscope at them to discover the results of his shot. And undoubtedly also, she’d instantly be pitched over the side, camera and all, by the crazed men all about her whom she’d exposed by that flash to the danger of an immediate second torpedo, maybe morel

  She didn’t take any pictures; she wept instead over the lost opportunity. She was on the boat deck, the best spot to get pictures, but there weren’t going to be any. Shivering there in the darkness, it came to her she had next to nothing on; she started back for her stateroom in the superstructure below her to get some clothes. She hadn’t a chance.

  The ship was listing slowly to port, the lifeboats were being loaded, already from forward of where she stood, they were being lowered away. Against the masses of G.I.s who had abandon ship stations in those lifeboats, all of whom (plus plenty more who had no boat assignments) were flowing up on the boat deck, there wasn’t a chance in the world to go counter-current. So willy-nilly, still clutching her precious camera, clad only in her negligee, she struggled toward the boat to which she had been assigned.

  That boat happened to be on the port side, about amidships. Her boat and the one just abaft it were the abandon ship stations for all the women nurses aboard and for a few surgeons also belonging to their hospital unit. Amidst the shouts and cries of men and women on the jammed and listing boat deck trying to find their boats in the utter darkness and the confusion, she fought through finally to hers.