“See here, your Admiral in London, the one you threw out of Washington, is making a bloody nuisance of himself, poking his nose into military matters our Royal Engineers are handling. We told him off most politely a month or so ago, but now the blighter’s at it again. Take him out of here, will you?”
And most likely, within a day or so, Harold Stark would find himself ordered as Naval Attaché to Switzerland—or put on the retired list.
So what, I wondered, would Admiral Stark do? Once again dutifully question, but only perfunctorily, the capabilities of the Royal Engineers, and then play it safe by accepting the almost certain “No” for his answer? Or go all out to force a change regardless and risk the loss of his command?
Still, if he didn’t oppose, if he took the “No,” and for want of the Mulberries the invasion foundered in a sea of blood as inevitably it must, how much good would it be to him, or to anybody, to be Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe? On the other hand, while the loss of his command could be counted as a certain result of pugnacious but unsuccessful opposition, might it not happen if he let matters take their course, the invasion would somehow be successful despite the missing Mulberries? Was anything inevitable? Sometime miracles happened, in military matters as in others. It might be best, after all, in Stark’s situation not to be belligerent in opposition to the point of risking any reprisal. It might be advisable for him to accept “No” for the answer and hope for the best.
I looked again at the Mulberries, half buried in the sea. Admiral Stark’s naval career now might very well hang on them. So certainly did the lives of uncounted soldiers from D-day on. What, I wondered, would Harold Stark do now? It was a very complicated situation.
CHAPTER 9
By early evening, Lieutenant Fred Barton had his Phoenix safely parked on the sea floor and was back on the beach with me. Unless another Phoenix should appear wholly unannounced during the night, which was possible, he was through for the day. So, should I excuse his unorthodox appearance, he would be glad to have me go home with him, have supper with him, and stay the night—longer, should it suit me.
His manner intrigued me—in dealing with a captain in his own Navy, he seemed slightly unsure of himself, and uncertain of the proper etiquette expected of a lieutenant. Though it was obvious that merely the rank itself did not bother him—NOIC, a captain in the Royal Navy, he treated as less than the sand under his feet on Selsey beach.
I thanked him for his invitation. I’d be delighted to accept. And as for his lack of uniform, he could quit bothering—we were in a war, not on parade. But I had to admit I was puzzled—where in all the desolation of this deserted village, was home? I scanned again all the boarded up cottages, the solitary unboarded building, which was NOIC’s British headquarters. That, certainly, the sole thing I could see occupied, could not be home for Barton.
Barton would show me. We plodded across the sand, skirted the western side of NOIC’s headquarters along a road leaving the beach, turned left behind the line of boarded-up cottages, pushed along for perhaps a hundred yards on their landward side through overgrown brush and shrubbery untouched in the four years since Dunkirk—and there on our left was home. The backs of two adjacent cottages there were unshuttered, the yards behind them had a very lived-in appearance, and clotheslines from which still hung the day’s wash decorated both yards. From the clothesline to starboard dangled some socks, some khaki shirts, and, some heavy underwear—all very naval; from the one to port—this startled me—some quite flimsy feminine lingerie. Women—on this deserted beach?
Barton indicated the cottage to starboard.
“This is it. Come on in.”
We entered. I looked around. I’d seen the exact like of that cottage on many American beaches—a flimsy shingled shell, unsheathed inside, wooden partitions running only head high, all decidedly en famille—standard beach shacks.
“How’d you get this?” I asked.
“Nobody was using it, so I just took the shutters off the back side and moved in,” answered Barton. “What’ll you have for supper?”
So that was my introduction to home life on Selsey Bill. Barton’s cookery was crude, but at least equal to what he had to work on—army field rations and what he could obtain by barter with the few farmers still domiciled inland from Selsey—the barter being the exchange for American cigarettes of such strictly unobtainable items in English food shops as eggs still actually in their own shells (not powdered), and a little real butter and bacon.
While both of us were washing up the dishes afterwards, I asked Barton about his neighbors. Were there really women on this abandoned beach, as that laundry line next door indicated?
Barton nodded. There were. Tough case, too. Two young girls, sisters, both married, one of them with two tiny children, husbands now soldiers, both in the British army, he didn’t know where. The older one, the one with the children, both under three, had had her home in London hit by a bomb. Literally that house, came crashing down around her ears. She’d lost an eye as a result—she and the children were lucky to have come out of the rubble still alive. But with their home in London a wreck, and nowhere else there to shelter them, they’d come down to their long-abandoned summer cottage on this beach, which the children had never seen, taken off the land side shutters, and made out as best they could on that deserted beach. After all, it was a roof over their heads, even though it did have barbed wire right up against the locked front door, and the mother was desperately afraid her babies might somehow elude her and get out on those enticing sands to play, only to be blown to bits by undiscovered mines. A little later, her younger sister had joined her, partly because housing in London was getting extraordinarily tight, partly to help her care for the children till their husbands came back and all of them might live again under more civilized conditions.
That had been a number of months back. Imagine the surprise of this little Swiss Family Robinson group, self-marooned on Selsey beach, when Selsey Bill was unexpectedly designated by the C-in-C, Portsmouth, as the main assembly point for Mulberry, when strange shapes began to mushroom out of the seas, and the deserted sands came suddenly alive with sailors, soldiers, and Seabees, some of which unwary newcomers were almost as suddenly swiftly dead from straying off the well-beaten Dukw tracks across the sands, until the survivors learned to believe in signs. To on pair of such unfortunates, that had happened directly in front of their very cottage.
The coming of all that personnel to such a lonely spot might ordinarily have been a blessing to the refugees from London. At least, it had brought them friendly neighbors in the persons of Barton and of a young lieutenant, his assistant, who had promptly emulated those sisters by taking down the rear shutters and making themselves at home next door in some other still absent Englishman’s castle.
But the coming of the Mulberries had been no blessing. Before, the beach at Selsey had been unworthy of enemy attention—now it suddenly interested them, and regularly on every raid directed at either Portsmouth or Southampton, the Nazi flyers first dropped a few sticks of bombs while passing over Selsey Bill.
“Those girls next door are a damned nuisance every time we get bombed,” complained Barton. “They just go into hysterics. You’ll see. A man can’t get any sleep. They ought to go back to London.” But even Barton freely conceded there wasn’t any place in London they could go back to, now that the coming of Mulberry had made Selsey Bill as great a torture for them as London had ever been.
Those poor girls, I thought. The only thing they can look forward to, to bring them relief, is D-day, which will get the Mulberries away from here—so I hope, I hastily qualified. But on the other hand, D-day, as well those girls knew, would see both their husbands thrown into the assault against the Nazi machine guns and tanks and God knows what else waiting them on the Far Shore—maybe those two girls weren’t looking forward to D-day with such mad enthusiasm, after all.
Well, there was nothing I could do about it—c’est le guerr
e. Where should I sleep? Barton indicated one of the two makeshift rooms semi-partitioned off from the central living space—in there. It seemed his assistant, that other lieutenant he had mentioned, was elsewhere in the Channel on Mulberry business for a few days. I could use his bed.
The bed, it turned out, was standard summer cottage furniture—the castoffs of a former era elsewhere, an old iron bed with a mattress to match its antiquity. Still, it was a bed.
We had a quiet night. No air raid sirens, no bombs.
In the morning, we had breakfast—a better breakfast than any I’d ever been able to get in London. Barton produced some of his authentic eggs and some bacon. The rate of exchange thereabouts on eggs, I learned, was one package of Camels per egg, or for wholesale transactions when that many eggs were available all at once, one carton of cigarettes per dozen eggs.
Swiftly thereafter, Barton, regretting he couldn’t accompany me, put me aboard the U.S.S. Diver, then anchored on the outer fringe of the Mulberry parking lot. Coming over the Diver’s rail, I met her skipper, a young senior lieutenant, and his junior officers. The skipper welcomed me most respectfully—he’d had a signalled message from Stanford warning him of my coming, and the visit of a four-striper to so unpretentious a vessel of war was quite unusual. In the presence of so many young officers and of so much obvious respect, I began to feel my age unduly—after all I wasn’t so old, even as captains go. But to these youngsters, I might as well have been Noah himself.
However, down to business. What was their trouble in floating up a Phoenix? Hadn’t their pumps functioned properly? Or was it something else?
The skipper explained. No, it wasn’t the pumps. They had a good set. They’d all worked all right, pumped fine. From his calculations, they had pumped water enough out of the Phoenix to give it positive buoyancy, so that it should have floated up, only it hadn’t, even with the tide rising to full flood outside. And from that point on, further pumping was useless, as the tide outside the Phoenix fell faster than the pumps could lower the water level inside. The result was that the Phoenix, which hadn’t lifted anyway, was from then on continuously losing buoyancy instead of gaining any, in spite of their furious pumping. So at that point, the lifting attempt, wholly an unofficial trial, had been abandoned.
And since it wasn’t their business anyway, and the British were bringing in for the task some vessels with a pumping capacity far outranging theirs, there had been no second attempt. That was how things stood. However, he’d be glad to try again. Whatever I desired of him, he’d do it as I wished.
I found that skipper a pleasure to work with. He knew already about all the Navy’s salvage school could teach him. What he still lacked was more actual experience with wrecks—in salvage, as in all else, there is quite a gap between theory and practice. So far as I know, nothing closes that gap like tangling with a lot of real wrecks.
We picked out a Phoenix conveniently located for the Diver to lay alongside of, steamed over, and tied up to it. The tide was falling. Most of the Diver’s crew turned to with booms and winches to swing their salvage pumps over the gunwales and aboard the Phoenix, landing them in the narrow shelf which formed a slight deck roughly halfway up the concrete hull. For speed in getting started the pumps were landed on this shelf, rather than being hoisted over the top and down the holds, for all of which added work it might have taken us another day to rig up. At that time, this shelf was well above the surface of the sea. Other seamen clambered to the top operating platforms, far up the concrete sides, there to open wide all the seacocks. Our idea was, of course, to get rid of as much water inside as we could-as the tide fell, while we were rigging up to pump.
The Diver’s pumps were all portable, self-contained, gasoline-driven pumps, especially built for salvage. Their special feature, aside from their self-contained portability, was their self-priming ability—that is, unlike the centrifugals on the Dutch schuits, the peculiar internal design of these pumps enabled them to develop and hold a powerful suction, and that very rapidly. They were a salvage man’s dream—you could take them with you aboard a wreck, lower them down any hold to within convenient suction distance of the water level, start their gasoline engines, and there you were, in business—pumping out the water through short suction lines.
Their only drawback was that to insure portability they had to be within the capabilities of the salvage men, as riggers, to handle them over the side of their own vessel and aboard a wreck and then, if need be, lower them away inside her holds. That limited their weight, and consequently their capacity. Probably all the salvage pumps on the Diver, taken together, had not one-quarter the capacity of those huge centrifugals on the schuits. But the Diver’s pumps, at least, could be placed where needed, to make sure that they would take a suction and deliver that quarter.
The Diver’s men got her pumps all placed on the Phoenix shelves, with their rubber suction hoses lowered through manholes down into the water-filled holds below. Then they closed off the seacocks at about low tide, and we started pumping. The pumps, as expected, all took suction immediately, and seawater started furiously to cascade overboard, giving that Phoenix the appearance of a very modernistic fountain. Until the tide should reverse and the incoming sea rise high enough again to flood the shelf on which our pumps stood (unless the Phoenix lifted sooner) we had about six hours in which to work to get her afloat.
At the rate at which we were pumping, that Phoenix should come afloat in about four hours—if only lack of buoyancy was what was holding it down. But very clearly, lack of buoyancy wasn’t the only problem. I sat down with the Diver’s skipper and his first lieutenant to consider why they hadn’t raised their Phoenix the first time, and how to avoid such a failure on this trial.
Since the Phoenix had not floated up when they felt that their pumping had given it sufficient buoyancy on their first attempt, the reason obviously was bottom suction. Or to put it in plainer language, she was just stuck in the mud. And that such was the case, was, of course, not extraordinary, considering that the Phoenix had an absolutely flat bottom, ideal for suction, and that furthermore it had been sitting there long enough to give the sea bottom, like an octopus engaging its tentacles, all the time it needed to get a firm suction grip.
That ancient saw, “a regular old stick-in-the-mud” respecting someone (of course, always excluding yourself) who can’t be moved, even by reason, expresses the wisdom of the ages on the subject—nothing sticks like something stuck in the mud. And it is an unfortunate fact that with wrecks stuck on the bottom, the direct force necessary to break bottom suction may greatly exceed in tons the buoyancy necessary simply to float the ship up. Many a salvage man, to his utter despair, has learned this truth.
Since in the average case, there is trouble enough providing even sufficient buoyancy simply to float a wreck, providing in addition that extra buoyancy required to break bottom suction, should he encounter it, is the salvage man’s nightmare.
I had myself found long ago there was no profit in trying to lick bottom suction by brute force, that is, by direct added lift. The only sensible thing to do was to outwit it. The method I used ordinarily was to employ the principle first enunciated some thousands of years ago by Archimedes—that a small force at the long end of a lever (as of a crowbar) would easily move a weight that a vastly greater direct force couldn’t budge. In practice, on wrecks, this consisted usually of using the wreck itself as the lever, by lightening first one end only (either bow or stern) till that end was buoyant enough to tend to lift a bit and gradually, a little at a time due to its leverage, then to break loose the suction all the way along the bottom to the other end; thus presenting me finally with a break, which if attempted all at once by direct lift, I could probably never get.
In the case of this Phoenix, the major drawback to that method (always the surest) was that it took rather a long time—you had to allow sufficient time, after lightening the first end, for the water gradually to seep in beneath the lightened end and then
to work its way toward the other end, bit by bit to break the suction and permit the lightened end finally to lift. And then there was the time required after that to pump out and float up the other end. Since in this case we had at most only about six hours till high water would flood over our pumps sitting on the Phoenix shelf, it seemed better on this rush experiment to use a second method. Instead of trying to get force enough to break the suction by the principles of leverage, we could attempt to destroy the suction, or at least, to destroy enough of it to let us lift the Phoenix with what excess buoyancy we might obtain by high tide time.
We started immediately on that. The Diver, designed as a salvage ship, had air compressors, big ones, both for supplying air for her divers and for use on a large scale in salvage, should the task require it. We should jet streams of high pressure air in under the bottom of the Phoenix in a number of spots on each side, blowing away the mud there, freely admitting the sea water which (we hoped) would seep both fore and aft and athwartships, further destroying the bottom suction. Could we get enough such spots freely open to the sea beneath her, the suction would vanish and we’d have only buoyancy to struggle with.
So soon, alow and aloft, the Diver’s salvage men were furiously attacking that Phoenix. On the top side, with pumps madly churning away, sucking out water from inside the flooded hull compartments. And on the bottom, with improvised lances made of galvanized pipe secured to the ends of air hoses, probing in the mud beneath her, jetting in streams of highly compressed air which came out again from underneath as vast clouds of expanding bubbles laden with mud.
It was nip and tuck as the water inside went down and the tide outside, running flood now, began to rise, helping to increase our buoyancy, but reaching up also to our pumps. What would happen first? Would she tear loose and rise before the tide reached our pumps? Or would the sea, flooding the shelf, force us to quit and remove the pumps before the mud let go?
The Far Shore Page 8