World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EGYPT: Service Entrance

A U.S. naval officer, taking a breather in Cairo last week, perspired comfortably and wished that the Italians could see what had happened at the Red Sea port of Massaua.

Italian seamen had boasted that they did a thorough job of destruction when they scuttled or burned or smashed everything useful in Massaua harbor. Massaua, in Eritrea, had once been one of Mussolini’s biggest naval bases outside of Italy. When the victorious British arrived its waterfront shops were in ruins, its waters choked with sunken ships.

The U.S. naval officer was modest, soft-spoken Captain Edward Ellsberg, salvager of the submarine S-51 off Block Island in 1926. Ellsberg had arrived in Massaua in March. Principal item of wreckage in the harbor which Allied officials were anxious to recover was a floating dock capable of handling 10,000-ton cruisers. The British said recovery was impossible. But 50-year-old Captain Ellsberg put on a diving suit and took a look. The dock, he discovered, had eight watertight compartments, into each of which the Italians had dropped a 200-lb. bomb. Undiscouraged, Ellsberg went to work with meager equipment and a handful of experts. In nine days he had the dock floating.

That was not all there was in Eritrea to make Italian eyes widen. When it was decided last year to set up bases there for Lend-Lease material, U.S. laborers, recruited in New York, were rushed to the fever-ridden little country on the Red Sea. To escape the heat of the lowlands, where the temperature sometimes reaches 120°, they were housed 4,000 feet above sea level on the inland plateau and transported every day to the sweltering seacoast.

How much they accomplished in nine months of labor is a military secret. But wrecked machine shops are in operation once more. Supplies to reinforce Auchinleck’s army in Egypt are flowing through rebuilt quays and warehouses. Mechanized equipment, shot up and damaged in the desert war, are repaired there. The U.S. Army’s Major General Russell Maxwell, closemouthed commander of the base which has become one of the most vital in a far-flung chain of United Nations supply depots, admits that the base at Massaua, little-publicized service entrance to Egypt and the Middle East, is in operation.