ARMY & NAVY: The Wreckers

ARMY & NAVY

Manila Bay was still unbeautiful. West of the tragic wreck that was Manila, sunken Japanese ships still littered the bay’s muddy floor, many thrusting gaunt masts and rusted superstructures out of the water. But Manila Bay had come back to life: last week plump Liberty ships tied up to the scaly hulks, rode at anchor or nestled at waterfront berths. Their cargoes moved on shuttling Army ducks and landing craft, in rumbling trucks. The world’s worst-cluttered harbor was back in business, handling more tonnage than before the war.

It had taken four months of prodigious labor by bald, burly Commodore William Aloysius Sullivan, the Navy’s chief of salvage, and the thousand-odd officers & men of his Manila-Subic Harbor Clearance Group. In clearing approach channels, the slips and the Pasig River (where wrecks lay three deep in spots) they had fished up more than 400 Jap craft, large & small. A few they had beached for salvage; many they had refloated with big air bubbles pumped into the holds, to be hauled away bottoms-up and sunk again.

Now Sullivan’s beaver-busy wreckers worked to clear the inner harbor, so ships could maneuver inside Manila’s sea wall. After that they would move on, to tidy some other grisly graveyard. Danger was their business — Sullivan had picked some of his veterans out of the New York fire department. He had trained all his officers and 150 of his men to be divers, at the Pier 88 salvage school and in the dank holds of the capsized Normandie three years ago. Their graduate work had been done in the choked harbors of Casablanca and Oran, at Salerno and Naples and Cherbourg.

At Manila, where U.S. Navy carrier planes set an all-time mark for destruction, they went to work while Japs still spat bullets from behind grass-grown earth works on dead ships. Flamethrowers disposed of the Japs; then Sullivan’s men methodically disposed of the snips. Sixty salvagers, half of them divers, had formed the first team, clearing 45 “sugar Charlies,” (small Jap freighters) from Slip 2 in the north harbor, so LCTs could land ammunition and food. Soon 20 teams swarmed over the harbor’s hulks.

The Commodore. The boss of this crack crew is a ruddy, restive 50-year-old with twinkling china-blue eyes and eloquent white brows, who is more at home in a diving suit or on a burning deck than behind his Washington desk. No Annapolis man, Commodore Sullivan studied architecture at M.I.T., entered the Navy in World War I and stayed.

Between wars he learned salvage techniques in U.S. navy yards, in China, in London, where, the winter before Pearl Harbor, he saw how British salvagers freed the Thames when bombed ships clogged the river. When the Normandie lay wearily on her side at a Manhattan pier, Sullivan mapped and got under way the job of righting her.

It was his last home-front job for a long time. One day in 1942 he had a 6 o’clock cocktail date with his wife. A few minutes before 6 he got a telephone summons from the Navy. Sullivan rushed off, learned that his assignment was to salvage the U.S.S. Wakefield, then burning off the Newfoundland coast. He flew to the ship, took her in to a beach he had picked out from the plane, later brought the Wakefield home. Mrs. Sullivan, whom he stood up that evening in New York, has seen him only three days since.

At Sullivan’s right hand in Manila is Commander Byron S. Huie Jr., 40, a former Treasury attorney whose salvage units rescued 2,340 men from the waters off Omaha Beach in the first 48 hours after Dday. Both the Commodore and his executive officer work right alongside their men in easy informality, sometimes have to argue their zealous divers into knocking off work. The strangest fruit they have plucked out of Manila harbor: a Jap ship filled with glass marbles.