“Too much! Bennehoff’s in trouble up to his neck this time! The top brass hat in the Fleet Air Arm of the R.A.F. was on that phone. The Thomas Stone in broad daylight has just shot down a British Swordfish torpedo plane and its crew over Algiers Bay! They’re madder’n hornets in the Fleet Air Arm and they want Benny hanged, drawn, and quartered for it right now!”
I looked at Jerry speechless. Poor Benny! This on top of all else! It’d ruin him.
We started down the hill, roared eastward along the shore front. But I couldn’t believe it. There must be a mistake; Benny was too good a captain and had his crew under too good control for them to get trigger-happy and shoot down a friendly plane. It must have been some other ship which had done it.
We reached the beach, grabbed an LCVP there, in another minute or two were climbing the high side ladder to the Thomas Stone’s quarter-deck. Benny met us at the gangway. One look at Benny’s face indicated that however wrathful the British might be, their rage was amiability itself compared to the fury contorting his features. He judged correctly the reason for Jerry’s unscheduled call and beat him to the punch.
“Yes, I shot down that Swordfish! And you can go straight back to the British Air Marshal or Admiral or whoever sent you and tell ’im that the next one that tries to come over the Thomas Stone like that, ’ll get shot down too!”
Jerry Wright had not been selected as liaison officer for nothing; he was a good diplomat as well as a good sailor. Expertly he calmed down his infuriated classmate, learned what had happened.
Not thirty minutes earlier, somewhat before noon, Benny’s radar lookouts had reported an unidentified plane approaching from the eastward, the enemy direction. Benny had instantly sounded the General Alarm; all hands had gone to action stations. Benny himself, armed with binoculars, had taken his command post. Shortly, through his glasses he could make out the plane, apparently a sizable bomber, still hardly more than a dot in the sky coming from easterly, right in line with the sun, the normal enemy approach. Neither he nor his exec nor his gunnery officer was able to make it out clearly, masked as that plane was by the sun right behind it. It answered no recognition signals, it made none of its own. Friendly planes were strictly forbidden to fly over or near our ships; this one was certainly headed for him. He kept on trying to identify it up to the last second when it reached the point where if he delayed further, it could dive on him to release torpedoes or bombs. Still no identification. He wasn’t taking chances with “friendly” enemy planes—too many other skippers had to their sorrow. He gave the order,
“Commence firing!”
His gunners were good—they’d had lots of practice. In no time at all, that plane came tumbling down out of the sky to crash into Algiers Bay about half a mile to the eastward of him. Not till the spinning plane was low over the water and out of the sun were they able to make it out as a British Swordfish. He had sent a boat to the scene promptly; they had fished its crew out of the wreckage—three British flyers, all still alive. They were below in his sickbay right then; his naval surgeons were working over them. One was badly wounded but would recover; the other two were suffering from shock and submersion only—they’d be all right soon. The smashed Swordfish itself had sunk quickly; it was a total loss. And if the British wanted to lose any more Swordfish, let ’em repeat what that plane had done. Benny would shoot the next one down too.
We left. The shoe was on the other foot; that Swordfish had violated every rule; Benny was certainly justified; it was the British whose faces should be red. And as a matter of fact, they were. It appeared by the time they got through investigating their end, even the poor Swordfish was wholly innocent—the blunder had occurred ashore. The Swordfish had been sent in to practice exactly what it was doing—a simulated aerial torpedo attack on the shipping in the harbor. Only, to avoid trouble, the harbor guns and all the shipping in the harbor had been notified—all, that is, except the Thomas Stone. Being stranded far outside the harbor, the ground control forces had forgotten all about her as a ship. Benny had received no notification. The Swordfish paid.
The sequel had its comical aspects. A few days later, I bumped into Benny ashore. He invited me to accompany him. I couldn’t; I was busy on the waterfront; what was up? Benny explained. He was on his way to Allied Headquarters. The Admiral of the Fleet himself was to pin a British decoration on him as recognition of his skill, determination, and courage for bringing in the shattered Thomas Stone and all her troops. I congratulated him; he’d earned it.
Benny grinned at me as we parted; I grinned back. Both of us knew that ordinarily a decoration like that took months for all the red tape to be unwound between the deed and the decoration. Without question in his case, the mortified British, trying to make amends for the Swordfish, had made hash of their hallowed routine in their haste to make the award then instead of months or years later. I was sorry I couldn’t go to see it. It would be a little something to compensate Captain Bennehoff for all the anguish he’d been through.
CHAPTER
36
I HAD A DISCUSSION WITH THE ADmiral of the Fleet concerning what had been done afloat and ashore and our problems in handling the remaining wrecks and harbors up and down the coast. The long-awaited sister to the King Salvor, the Salvestor, with Commander Hewett, R.N.R., as her salvage officer, had just arrived in Algiers.
Temporarily, I had detailed the Salvestor to working on S.S. Strasbourg, a freighter which had come into Algiers with a large hole in her bow as a result of an aerial torpedo dropped by an unidentified plane which her naïve crew had allowed to circle them in the most friendly manner several times, till unexpectedly it had let go a torpedo. After patching up the Strasbourg, the Salvestor would go to Bougie, where we had nothing in the way of salvage forces.
The difficulties encountered around Oran in the past were gone over. Admiral Cunningham felt a solution was in order. Both because the importance of the command justified it, and in recognition of what had been accomplished, he would recommend me for promotion to Rear Admiral. Naturally I was gratified that he felt it warranted, and especially at this mark of his appreciation, but I was none too optimistic the recommendation would get anywhere, seeing I was in the American Navy and he was British. But he had no doubts over it; the recommendation would go forward as from General Eisenhower, Allied C-in-C, and in the very strongest terms Eisenhower could put it.
I was uncertain of that and told Cunningham so. After all, Eisenhower probably didn’t know of my existence, having long since forgotten our brief meeting. But Cunningham felt otherwise. Eisenhower, he told me, had personally followed our salvage work, knew as much about it as he himself, and had taken the keenest interest in it; there was no question as to his making the recommendation. It would go in very shortly; the higher rank would avoid repetition of some past difficulties. I thanked Cunningham and left, treading on air. With more rank than the captains I should normally have to deal with, my salvage path should be smoother in the future.
January 19 I started over the road on a 500-mile trip eastward toward Tunisia for my first personal inspection of the minor harbors close up to the stalemated fighting line. My colored sergeant (who had brought my jeep over the road from Oran) was driving as usual. Not as usual, we went armed, both of us. East of Algiers, it was compulsory. One was always likely, especially in a small car traveling alone and without the protection of a convoy, to fall in with Nazi paratroopers dropped behind our lines to lurk near the roads for pot shots at miscellaneous targets. The sergeant had a carbine snuggled close up against the steering wheel; I had a Colt .32 which Ankers had loaned me because it was handier to get about with than the regulation Colt .45.
We followed the coast road eastward. It was gorgeous scenery along the various Grande Corniches cut into cliff faces looking out over the Mediterranean—scenery to make the French Riviera on the other side of the Mediterranean, which I had also driven over, look decidedly second-rate.
But I had no time to dawdle over
scenery. We raced eastward with our jeep going all out, except on the innumerable occasions when we fell astern of and had to crawl past interminable convoys of army trucks, tanks, and half-tracks all moving eastward toward the fighting line. Mile after mile we went at snail’s pace by them—it seemed that everything America had on wheels or on tractor treads was moving up to reinforce the front. No wonder back home gasoline was strictly rationed—everything landed at Oran and Algiers was moving overland pushed by gasoline up to where it was soon to go into action against von Arnim and Rommel. And the long convoys were stretched out even longer because they were all moving under battle conditions—fifty-yard intervals between trucks, every fourth truck or tank with an A.A. gun mounted on top, manned and ready to meet Nazi fighting planes attempting to strafe the convoys.
We got to Bougie. I had as yet nobody at all in Bougie for salvage. Bougie was terrible to look upon. The outer bay was a forest of masts and stacks sticking up through the surface. Below in deep water, completely submerged, lay the hulls of over half a dozen British troopships, all sizable ones, sunk by Nazi bombs shortly after they had landed the troops to seize Bougie. That was in our desperate rush to the east right after D-day to take all those ports and Bizerte before the Nazis got there.
The inner harbor of Bougie was as bad—side by side with moderate intervals of water between lay four other ships, all wrecks. Alongside the quay was the British freighter Glenfinlas, bow submerged, with her starboard side forward near her bilge blasted out by a Nazi bomb.
Next outside her, flat on the bottom but with all her upper hull and superstructure exposed, lay a fair-sized French passenger ship, sunk by a bomb which also had gutted her above water by fire. Beyond her lay the prize exhibits of Bougie—two large French Mediterranean passenger liners, like miniature Normandies, both capsized and lying facing each other, one on her starboard side, one on her port side, with their horizontal stacks and masts lovingly interlaced just above the surface.
What had happened to these last two ships I completely refused to believe till I had heard it verified from unimpeachable naval sources. The Nazis hadn’t sunk them; their own owners had, and not for sabotage either. When the first Nazi air raid after the Allied occupation of Bougie occurred, and the two ships closest inshore had been hit and sunk by bombs with one of them also set afire, the owners of the other two, though both were reasonably distant from the burning vessel, attempted in a panic to scuttle their two ships to keep them from catching fire!
What followed might have been expected. Both ships, being French, naturally capsized long before enough water from opened sea valves had entered to sink them, to lie on their sides, half in the shallow water, half out, practically unsalvageable except at terrific cost. Incidentally, on neither ship had the half exposed above water, caught fire. It was hard for me to believe that even an excitable Frenchman would think of sinking his own ship and surely losing her to avoid the possibility of having her damaged by fire, but there they were—it had actually happened!
Only the Glenfinlas seemed worth tackling, both to recover the ship and to clear the berth at the quay, but I had no salvage equipment or men in Bougie. I learned, however, that a company of Royal Engineers stationed in Bougie and commanded by a Scotch lieutenant, were figuring on tackling the job. To me, any help was welcome; I didn’t mind who salvaged ships so long as they were salvaged. I looked over the lieutenant’s plans. I had to tell him that in turning out salvage plans, he was about as good as I might be in designing his specialty, military bridges. Short of all the crane facilities of New York harbor, his plan was unrealizable. It would take a huge floating derrick, unobtainable on that coast, to handle the tremendous one piece patch he was figuring on building ashore with his engineers and then installing over the hole in the Glenfinlas’ starboard side.
But there was a much easier way. I pointed it out to him. It was unnecessary to bother with the submerged hole. All that was required to float the Glenfinlas was to seal off the exposed upper cargo hatch over her punctured hold by welding steel plates over it. No divers were required. The work could be done wholly above water by his engineers. After that, we could get some air compressors, blow the water out the Glenfinlas’ bow through the bomb hole below, float her up on a huge bubble of air, and she could then steam, hole and all, under her own power on her undamaged machinery to Algiers to be docked and have the hole patched up. It was very simple. I would send a salvage officer down later to supervise the actual lifting.
The Scotch lieutenant, a very eager young engineer, cast aside his designs for a patch and started out instead to get the materials for sealing off the cargo hatch.
I spent the night in Bougie with the British captain commanding there. It was an unusual night—no bombs. Next morning I started eastward again for Philippeville.
Philippeville I found not as bad as Bougie. There were fewer wrecks there. The main problem was the Dutch Aurora, bow sunk by a bomb, stern afloat, right in the middle of the harbor, obstructing the fairway.
I had a British assistant, Lieutenant Strange, there. He had sized up the Aurora correctly, and with his solitary diver and hardly anything else, was going about floating her.
That he was making slow progress was not his fault. When I could get him some men and gear to work with, the Aurora would come bouncing surfaceward in a hurry.
That night was passed in Philippeville. Life there and in Bougie was evidently tough; bombs came down almost nightly. There wasn’t a house left in either place with a sound roof; the bomb blasts had shattered the roof tiles everywhere when they hadn’t shattered the houses also. There was the usual nightly raid; I was tired and slept through it.
In the morning we moved on towards Bône, making even slower progress than before because of almost continuous truck convoys now five to ten miles long we had to pass on the narrow roads. In Bône, only a few miles short of the fighting line, I saw again Lieutenant Commander White, R.N.V.R., whom I had sent there from Oran, and was able to cheer him up with the news that the King Salvor and all her salvage gear should be along in a week or two to rejoin him—just as soon as she finished with the Thomas Stone.
White needed cheering up that morning. After a struggle of some weeks, he had managed the day before to refloat H.M.S. Alarm, a moderate-sized warship, which some time before had been sunk inside the harbor by a near miss bomb which had left her leaking like a sieve. And then last night, in the usual air raid, another bomb had gone right through her engine room to explode underneath and sink her again! Now poor White had the whole job to do over again. But he was taking it well—far more phlegmatically than I could have.
I went over his situation and most of his wrecks with him. Bône, though not so large, was a sad looking sight, both in its harbor and in the town. It was getting a terrific pasting from the Nazis near by—to them a trip to Bône was just a five-cent trolley ride—twenty minutes transit time. One bomber could make half a dozen round trips a night to unload on Bône. There were many wrecks we didn’t even board—the sweet by-and-by would be soon enough to look them over. It was obvious White had a man-sized job in Bône even if not another bomb ever fell to add other wrecks to his collection.
It took me all afternoon to inspect even what wrecks I boarded in Bône harbor. By dusk I was finished. White informed me we could expect the first wave of bombers in about an hour or so. Just to sleep in a bed in Bône didn’t seem to me to warrant subjecting myself to another bombing when it wasn’t imperative. I decided that instead of leaving Bône in the morning, I’d get out right then, even though it meant sleeping in an open field that night. There was no chance in a blacked-out car running counter to blacked-out convoys, of getting westward to the next town. So against a background of wrecked ships and wrecked houses, I said goodby to White and shoved off in the growing darkness in my jeep.
By midmorning, January 23, we were back in Algiers. My sergeant turned in his carbine; I gave Ankers back his Colt automatic. We had had no occasion to use them.
CHAPTER
37
MY RETURN TO ALGIERS WAS JUST in time to go to work again without a lost minute. Everything had just been completed for heaving on the Thomas Stone; we might try moving her whenever it suited me.
A real storm above everything would have been a godsend to us in piling up the water along the shore to ease the weight to be dragged. But there was no immediate hope of a storm of any kind. There was even less hope of one such as came only once in ten years and had laid her up on the beach. So I concluded we might as well try immediately. The soundings showed ridges in the rock bottom all about the Thomas Stone except in one direction. Along that one line, though it wasn’t the most direct route astern of her to deep water, the rock bottom was reasonably flat. But it wasn’t a straight line; we should have to drag her seaward part way, then swing her round about 30° and finish the pull to deep water at a considerable angle to the shore line.
All hands took stations. In addition to the hawsers laid out astern, the King Salvor took another line to add the power of her propeller to the drag, and two British destroyers were set to run back and forth just to seaward of all the lines and make as heavy waves as they could to help lift her.
We started. Every winch on the Thomas Stone began heaving in on the wire lines from the multiple purchases, the King Salvor heaved furiously on her hawser, the destroyers steamed back and forth making waves. Very slowly, almost at a glacial pace, about a hundred yards in a hundred years, the Thomas Stone crept seaward. But it was swiftly evident that the friction on the bottom was so great that all the power we could exert was barely able to move her. We kept on heaving all the rest of the day, with frequent enforced pauses to rerig our purchases every time the sheaves came two-blocks and would haul no farther. But when the day finally ended and a check showed we had moved the ship seaward hardly a ship length, I decided it safest to discontinue.
No Banners, No Bugles Page 35