After working miracles at Massawa, Ellsberg's reward was a promotion and new posting as Chief Salvage Officer for the Mediterranean, supporting Operation Torch. If Massawa was an outer circle of hell, as documented in Under the Red Sea Sun, North Africa was pandemonium. On the positive side, Ellsberg would no longer be at the tail end of one of the longer supply chains of the war. On the negative side was an inter-allied diplomatic and command SNAFU. The Mediterranean was a British naval theater, and as an American Ellsberg had few friends and little pull with the Admiralty. American army officers were friendlier, but entirely unschooled about ships. And the whole territory was French, and the French were very much mixed on who they wanted to win.

The main work was much the same, fixing up ports that had been sabotaged, although more hastily than Massawa. Oran was Ellsberg's main focus, where the French commander had sunk all the floating dry docks and blocked the main channel with ships. The same man was still in command of the port, and on two occasions, just when Ellsberg's divers were ready to refloat and move one of the blockships, he ordered a cargo ship on an unnecessary movement, "accidentally" smashing up the ship and delaying the reopening of the port by months!

That is not to say that every Frenchman was a Nazi sympathizer. The French divers in Oran worked just as hard as anyone on the team, especially after Ellsberg got them new diving suits to replace the patches upon patches they had been diving in.

There was plenty of insanity across the entire Alliance. An American Air Force colonel stole one of Ellsberg's prized air compressors in transit. Later, one of Ellsberg's divers got temporary revenge, diverting a 100 ton floating crane to a salvage job en route to unloading Sherman tanks. When the American general in command of the armored regiment found out, he threatened everyone involved with a court-martial until Ellsberg mollified him by giving up his crane temporarily. Of course, Ellsberg only needed the second crane for another half hour, and the two cranes sat idle for four days while other cargo was unloaded.

A torpedoed British troop transport sat unmoving in a harbor where it would surely be bombed to pieces in a few days because the civilian captain refused to sail without a certificate of seaworthiness from Lloyd's, and the Lloyd's representative refused to grant one because "Look at the giant hole in the side!" The fact that the ship could sail now and would be sunk if it didn't, was irrelevant to paperwork which could see both civilians in trouble if they bent the rules. Ellsberg, of course, managed a technical solution.

More sadly, there was the matter of the Strathallan, another large liner which suffered a major, but not fatal torpedo hit. A botched and premature abandoned ship order saw a lifeboat full of American nurses drown. Then due to non-existent damage control, the Strathallan caught fire. Ellsberg and a token crew of fifty British salvage sailors managed to get a start on the fire at immense personal cost, but a second team from a British destroyer deemed the fire impossible to fight, though Ellsberg's men had been fighting it for two hours, and the Strathallan was lost due to cowardice and incompetence.

After another hair-raising rescue job on a torpedoed freighter, Ellsberg suffered a nervous breakdown. He went to a military hospital to ask for a sleeping pill, or something so he could get a good night's rest, and the medical staff promptly confined him to bed and concluded that he was on the brink of a complete cardiac failure due to overwork and exhaustion. Eisenhower had him reassigned stateside with gratitude, completing a 15 month African tour.

Having read all three of Ellsberg's World War 2 books, though in a cockamamie order, my favorite is Under the Red Sea Sun, which manages the tightest and most unique narrative. They're all worth reading for any fan of military history or technical triumphs.