In early 1942, one of the darkest periods of the Second World War, US Navy Salvage officer Commander Ellsberg, recently rejoined, was given a vital project. The Eritrean port of Massawa was the only potential maintenance facility between Alexandria, which was under imminent threat from Rommel, and Durban, 10,000 miles from the front in South Africa. Also, the drydocks at Alexandria were tied up keeping the two sabotaged British dreadnoughts afloat, meaning that no other ship could be repaired. Cargo ships, their hulls covered with years of barnacles and seaweed, were reduced to sailing at 6 knots--sitting ducks for Axis submarines. The fighting cruisers and destroyers of what was left of the British Mediterranean Fleet could not repair damage, and were being attrited to uselessness.

Unfortunately, Massawa had been comprehensively sabotaged by the Italians before it was captured. Every single machine in the shops had been battered with sledgehammers and vital parts thrown into the sea. The harbor was chock full of wrecked ships, with bombs blasted in their side. The floating crane was sunk, and both floating drydocks had been sunk with eight charges apiece to make sure they stayed at the bottom.

For this critical mission, Ellsberg's resources were practically nil: himself, and any civilians he could scrape up. Every single American Navy salvage diver and mechanic was at Pearl Harbor, getting the battleships back in action. The British had nothing they could offer, stretched as they were. And worse, Massawa was a legendarily awful station, combining brutal tropical sun with sweltering humidity.

Ellsberg is a talented memoirist, and makes the drama of engineering at the ends of the earth and the absurdity of his situation come alive. There is plenty of absurdity. The troop transport he took to Africa was comprehensively blacked out as a precaution against U-boats, except for the red and green running lights, which its rigid captain refused to shut off in case they collided with another ship at night. Ellsberg had to beg, borrow, and steal materials, while there was an entire warehouse of new salvage equipment under control of an incompetent British contractor (a monocled, safari-suit wearing Colonel Blimp) that he couldn't touch. The American contract seemed to be actively sabotaging Ellsberg, building two entire useless base housing facilities before starting on industrial buildings, messing up payroll for over six weeks in a row until a full-blown strike occurred, and illegally issuing orders replacing Ellsberg.

Against these obstacles, with a bare handful of American salvage professionals and a motley labor force of Eritreans, Italian POWs, Arab carpenters, and miscellaneous Sudanese and Indians, he somehow accomplished miracles. To give an example, he and his small crew went through every fragment of machinery the Italians had left behind and managed to assemble a working lathe and mill, which they then used to machine parts to repair the rest of the machinery. Work was accomplished under the most brutal conditions, broiling on steel decks under the sun and inside stifling compartments at well over 120 degrees (he brought out a thermometer once-and the reading was enough to prompt everybody to knock it off for the day) to patch holes and make various wrecks water and airtight so they could be salvaged.

This is a story of endurance under the worst conditions, because it had to be done, and of leadership and persuasion. One anecdote sticks out. Ellsberg had hired large numbers of Eritreans as scrapers and painters, since they were the only group available in the numbers needed for this key jobs. The British regarded the Eritreans as some of the worst laborers in their entire Empire, and objectively, the average Eritrean of 1942 was scrawny, undernourished, entirely uneducated, and had spent their entire life get cooked by tropical heat. They were not doing their jobs, and could not be berated into working at any pace faster than a crawl. And their payrate was fixed at a miserable sum that could not be increased. Ellsberg gathered their sheiks (hiring was collective by tribe and managed by the sheiks) and explained that this job took three days. If it was not done on three days, they'd be fired and never hired again. If it was done faster than three days, they got paid for three. The Eritreans did it in two.

As he put it, "There is no worst labor in the world. Touch the proper chords-pride, incentive to produce, whatever fits the situation--and men will be found men, whatever their color, whatever their physique."