No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  Oran harbor was wholly open at last. A wide channel, full depth, existed again. Anything could come through now—completely loaded Libertys, even the Queen Elizabeth with 12,000 troops, if they cared to send her to Oran.

  Hardly had the last curve of the Spahi’s bow disappeared beneath the sea than I was headed shoreward through the rain and hail to breast my way through the lake between the quay and the telephone in the salvage shack and radio the news to Algiers. The major mission for which I had been brought from the Red Sea to Algeria was accomplished.

  No more Spahi! I felt as intoxicated as if I had myself swallowed the entire contents of one of those huge hogsheads of wine!

  CHAPTER

  34

  I GAZED SPECULATIVELY OVER THE remaining collection of wrecks in Oran harbor. Only the Grand Dock now was of major importance to the war effort. Captain Reed and his international assortment of divers would take care of that dock. Now Lieutenant Ankers and his men could move on to Algiers and go to work on the Thomas Stone. In that, they should need the King Salvor also.

  I issued the orders. Captain Harding began to collect his gear to steam east; Ankers and his men started to tear down their salvage shack and to pack their slight equipment to go with him. Lieutenant Reitzel had at last been detached from his former nominal assignment and officially turned over to the Salvage Forces. I ordered him to proceed with them to Algiers also and set up an office in the St. George for Allied Salvage Headquarters from which, I hoped, all our future operations might shortly be directed.

  The little expedition steamed out of the harbor, all happy to see the last of Oran. For a sailor, for anybody, Algiers was an exotic city to be remembered—Oran was merely a large collection of docks, of dismal streets, and of unattractive synthetic redheads, who in spite of an infinite number of beauty parlors, offered slight attraction to a seaman on liberty.

  I turned to on the Grand Dock with no rest interval available for me after the Spahi. For Bill Reed and his crew had been going at that scuttled dry dock like demons, trying to break their Massawa records. They had it nearly all sealed up; in a few days more we might attempt to raise it.

  A vast amount of preparatory work had been done. My major worry over the Grand Dock originally had been where we might get compressors enough to supply the tremendous quantity of air we should need. But I had found some time back I might have spared myself the concern—it was simply answered. That abortive salvage job, la Bretagne, to which I had so rudely put a period, filled the need. Looking that capsized battleship over in Mers-el-Kebir, I had discovered something. Months before D-day, with the blessings of the Nazi Control Commission which no doubt had hoped ultimately to profit thereby either with la Bretagne as a refitted Axis battleship or as a source of scrap steel, Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard had been permitted to transfer from a power house ashore some ancient but very large electrically driven air compressors, together with a few newer sizable diesel-powered sets. All these Perrin-Trichard had long since fitted up inside a huge floating barge, forming a clumsy but powerful portable compressor plant, which had been moored over the capsized la Bretagne pending the day he might be ready to try to float her.

  All that was required was to tow Perrin-Trichard’s massive air factory from over the wreck of la Bretagne at Mers-el-Kebir, to the inside of Oran harbor and connect it to the power mains on the breakwater near by. That was swiftly done; through the courtesy of the Nazis and la Bretagne, our needs were beautifully taken care of.

  We worked feverishly the next few days over the final sealing up. Buck Scougale and Al Watson performed wonders in snaking themselves through that dry dock into submerged death traps so tight-fitting around a diving rig the French divers threw up their hands in horror at the mere thought of wedging themselves or anybody else into them. But time and again Buck and Al went in, worming themselves inside vertical steel shafts so small they could neither use a sledge nor bend over, and had to drive in wood plugs standing straight up in their diving rigs, using their lead-soled diving boots as hammers.

  However, one thing which I desperately needed for the task, I couldn’t get. That was a set of fifty low pressure gauges with large scale dials, so I might read accurately within half a pound the air pressure inside each compartment of the Grand Dock as we pushed compressed air into it and forced the water out. If ever I was to know the water level in each compartment, to control the lifting operation safely, I had to have those fifty low pressure gauges.

  I had struggled for weeks getting those gauges. There were none in Oran, there were none in Algeria. I tried the British; they had none in Africa, in Gibraltar, in England. Finally in desperation I had a long cable dispatch prepared, setting forth the need, asking that fifty such gauges be shipped us immediately by air from the United States. There, I knew, there must be gauges of all kinds by the thousands; all assigned, no doubt, in a wartime construction program, but where could there be greater immediate need or more to be gained than on the Grand Dock?

  I might as well have saved loading up the undersea cables with my message—I got the expected answer—there were no unassigned gauges in America; if we wanted any, we should look to the British; the Mediterranean was an area of British responsibility. With a heavy heart I tore into fine bits my copy of that answer and threw them into the harbor. Whose responsibility was it anyway to keep the damaged ships afloat and repaired, so that Eisenhower might have ammunition and supplies enough to prevent American soldiers from being massacred in Tunisia by Axis generals who were totally unconcerned over paper trifles regarding areas of responsibility?

  But there was nothing further I could do about it. I must either abandon lifting the Grand Dock and with that abandonment all chance of repairing large ships torpedoed in our area, or go at it practically blind with no gauges to control the operation—for such a huge mass of submerged steel, no very alluring prospect. However, it was that or nothing; I decided to undertake it, proper gauges or no gauges.

  So on the morning of January 11, three weeks to the day after my eight-man crew from Massawa began working on it, we started on the lifting of the Grand Dock.

  From Perrin-Trichard’s floating air compressor plant, six massive hoses led over the water to the air manifolds connected to each section of the involved grid of piping laid out on the ocean floor with individual connections from the manifolds to each of the fifty flooded compartments below. I had only half a dozen high pressure gauges which were all I could steal off machinery here and there in Oran, all unsuitable for the task, all inaccurate for low pressure work, totally inadequate in number for the job. But they were a little something. With them I could get a foggy idea of what was going on below; about as good an idea as a surgeon might get who had a delicate brain operation to perform but who was compelled to work with an almost opaque pair of dark glasses over his eyes while he sawed away on his patient’s skull, uncertain as to whether he was still working on the top of the cranium or had already cut through to the chin.

  We pumped air down into that unseen dry dock all day long. I had only the vaguest notion of how much water we were pushing out of any given compartment below. But one thing I knew very well—I must get one end of that immense U-shaped dry dock lifted far above the surface and well dried out to give it stability before the other end started to rise. Otherwise the whole dry dock, with both ends off the bottom at once and a great deal of free water swashing about inside it, would certainly capsize on us on its way up through the deep water, and become a second Normandie, a total loss, not only for this war but probably forever because the water there was so deep.

  That hazard at least I could avoid. By keeping one end of the dock too heavy to float while I pumped compressed air into the other end, I could be sure the end I wanted would come up first so I could thoroughly free it of water before raising the other and heavier end. The drawback to all that was that the heavy end, once the dry dock was on a tilt, might be too heavy, with more weight resting on its submerged lower edge than it could
safely carry in that position without damage. That was what the low pressure gauges were for—to make certain the low end was not light enough to float up too soon, nor so heavy on the bottom as to cause damage to the airtightness of the dock and perhaps prevent the low end from ever rising. But I didn’t have the gauges.

  The air compressors throbbed, the air hoses writhed in the sea, the compressed air whistled through them on its way down into the dry dock, and I stood in a small boat moving slowly about over the water, gazing at gauges which gave me no reliable information, guessing at what was going on down below and hoping for the best.

  About the middle of the afternoon, while I was still certain there wasn’t air enough below to raise either end yet, but hoped there was enough already down to lighten the bow end sufficiently for safety while I raised the stern end, I quit altogether pumping air down to the bow. From then on, I sent all I had aft to the stern end, desirous of raising that end first.

  The hours dragged along. Over the surface of the sea, Captain Reed and Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard went in other small boats from manifold to manifold, anxiously scanning the dials of the six high pressure gauges we had, getting no better knowledge from them than I had. The needles on those stiff-springed gauges wouldn’t even start to indicate the pound or two of difference in pressure that meant to us the whole difference between success and disaster. We kept on pumping compressed air.

  We had our reward. As night fell over Oran harbor, the air hoses to the stern compartments began to slack away. Slowly, ponderously, like leviathan himself rising from the deep, the stern of the Grand Dock broke surface—first the huge steel side walls forming the sides of the U, like two immense sunken buildings, starboard and port, burst through to rise steadily and continuously till they towered forty feet above the sea, then the wide flat deck of the dry dock itself emerged to greet our entranced eyes. I took a deep breath. Half our task was done—now for the second and more difficult half!

  Darkness had fallen. Hurriedly we boarded that floating stern, strung temporary electric wires all over it to light the job, then went to work with all hands, French and American alike. There was much to do. We closed off opened flood valves through which water had been expelled from aft. We unbolted manhole covers in the now exposed deck of the dock, trundled around heavy salvage pumps which the King Salvor had left us, dropped suction hoses down into the vast caverns fifteen feet deep forming the bottom compartments of the Grand Dock, sucked out the deep pools of water which the compressed air had failed to expel from them. Gradually, as we got rid of that water, the stern rose higher and higher above the sea.

  By midnight, the drying out job was done. Every compartment we could get to with a salvage pump was dried out and resealed. My slide rule, working overtime, indicated to me from my computations that we had stability enough—the dry dock couldn’t possibly capsize now when we finally lifted the bow off bottom and she came freely afloat once more.

  With that, all the compressed air we had was turned into the still submerged sections, amidships of the dock and at the bow. I figured it should take at most four hours more to float the bow; less, I earnestly hoped. But it was with a very heavy heart that I went about it.

  For as night finally fell on Oran, the weather which had been good all day, took a marked turn for the worse. By ten o’clock, as we still struggled with our salvage pumps in the drying out, it was blowing a gale. Long before midnight, when at last we might start on the lifting of the bow, we were caught in a storm with whitecaps running all over the harbor, and the just-lifted stern of the Grand Dock rising and falling heavily to the waves breaking over its deck like a ship at sea.

  I could visualize the submerged bow of that dock below me working like a hinge on the bottom, taking now not only the whole weight of that end of the dock, whatever it might be, but also the thunderous jolts coming through the steel structure as the floating end plunged up and down in the seaway. How much weight was there still on that submerged and grounded end, battering it on the bottom? I didn’t know. God help us now! No one else could.

  At midnight I was able at last to swing open the air valves once more, to send all the air we could possibly get out of our compressors down to the sunken bow to lighten it up and relieve the strain on it, and, I hoped, finally to float it up. I began to pray.

  Steadily all through the rest of the night we pumped down air. The weary hours dragged along in darkness and in storm. As best we could, all of us huddled now on the lifted floor of the stern of the dry dock, tried to shield ourselves behind keel blocks from the green seas and the heavy spray breaking continuously over the low deck, praying for the storm which was battering our dock to die away, praying for the bow to rise, praying for the dawn.

  Only the dawn came at last to answer our prayers. The storm did not abate, the bow did not rise. Instead, in the growing light illuminating the turbulent waters of the harbor, we saw amongst the waves a sight to numb our very souls—there over the sunken bow, the whole area of the sea was one white mass of frothing bubbles bursting through the surface. All the compressed air we were pumping down into the bow was leaking out and rising as fast as we pushed it down!

  Glumly we looked at that—elderly Captain Reed, young Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard, all the divers, French and American alike, who had struggled to lift that dry dock. Without a word of discussion, all hands knew the answer—the bow end of the dock was somehow damaged, it was no longer airtight, it wasn’t going to rise.

  Perrin-Trichard’s French divers were still in the best shape physically. One of them was dressed, lowered away from a small boat in the stormy waves over the sunken bow to learn more exactly what had happened twelve fathoms down below and what, if anything, might be done to cure it.

  He was down about half an hour. He rose, was dragged into the boat, was partly undressed. In excited French, using both arms even more than his tongue, he started to tell Perrin-Trichard what he had found. As rapidly as possible, as his wildly gesticulating diver poured out his story, Perrin-Trichard translated to Reed and to me.

  The Grand Dock was irretrievably ruined. It would never be lifted now. The overhanging bow section of the dry dock, protruding sixty feet beyond the high side walls, must have been resting too heavily on the bottom. Under the pounding it was getting from the sea, it had buckled athwartships all the way across the dock from starboard to port, a distance of 140 feet, its full width, right at the point where the vertical side walls ended. There was a very bad wrinkle across the dock there in the heavy steel plating of the deck. That wrinkle had opened up every joint it crossed in the steel deck plates and thousands of rivets besides. Air was pouring out along the line of that wrinkle in vast quantities. There were innumerable leaks all the way from one side of the dock across to the other.

  The diver stopped waving his arms. His tale was told. His tenders began to get him out of the rest of his diving rig.

  Silently Reed and Perrin-Trichard, who together had supervised all the preliminary work on the Grand Dock, looked at each other and then both looked at me. Their conclusions were as visible in their woebegone faces as if they had spent an hour in expounding them. That French seaman who had just come up to report was a reliable diver; what he said, we could accept as so. All those bubbles on the water roundabout us in the boat confirmed him.

  The dock was ruined in tightness. We couldn’t raise it, at least not without a far more extensive diving job on it to seal all these new leaks than we had already gone through on that dock; it would take months yet. And we couldn’t do that—all our few divers had reached the end of their string; they must have a long rest now before they could tackle a major job in deep water again. We might as well sink the stern we had afloat before worse happened, and call it a day. We could do nothing else.

  I shook my head. I did not concur.

  “Keep the compressors going, Lieutenant,” I said to Perrin-Trichard. “She’ll come up yet.”

  We kept on pumping. The morning faded away to afternoon
. Still we kept on pumping. Nothing happened. We had pounded down enough compressed air into that bow to have floated it up six times over, but it didn’t rise; it was plainly obvious to all that the air was leaking out as fast as it went down.

  The storm moderated, the seas died down, but that no longer made a difference. The damage was done. As the afternoon wore away, Lieutenant Perrin-Trichard, who possibly at first may have thought I had a trump up my sleeve, lost all hope, and suggested we shut down. I refused. We kept on pumping.

  Night fell again. Still nothing happened, the bow showed not the slightest sign of rising. Captain Reed gave up. It was no longer any use. While we still had a few men, bedraggled though all of us were, on our feet, we might as well sink the stern and call it off. We had done the best we could with the equipment we had been given. We had failed. It wasn’t our fault.

  I refused. We kept on pumping. Down went the air through the pulsating hose lines, up it came again through the sea in vast masses of bubbles as fast as we pounded it down. But I had seen strange things happen in salvage; it would take a miracle now to lift the Grand Dock, but I had faith a miracle could happen to save us. Everything I could do myself to lift the Grand Dock had been done; there was nothing further I could do except to keep on pumping air and have faith. I kept on pumping.