How Massawa, Eritrea Helped Defeat the Nazis in North Africa
In 1941, the British captured Massawa, Eritrea — only to find one of the most strategically important harbours on the Red Sea deliberately wrecked.
Before surrendering, the Italians had scuttled ships across the harbour, destroyed equipment and sabotaged the port’s vital dry docks. At the same time, Rommel’s advance across North Africa was putting increasing pressure on Alexandria and the British Mediterranean Fleet.
Massawa suddenly mattered.
Into this wreckage came Commander Edward Ellsberg, an American naval engineer and legendary salvage expert, with an extraordinary assignment: bring the port back to life.
He had no proper shipyard, limited equipment and a strange collection of civilian contractors, Hollywood divers, mechanics, ironworkers and local labourers.
And Massawa itself was brutal.
Scorching heat. Near-total humidity. Harbour water contaminated by sewage and fuel oil. Divers working in suffocating canvas suits while breathing air pumped down from the surface. Wounds becoming infected. Equipment deteriorating in the heat and salt.
Yet Ellsberg and his men improvised.
Divers hammered timber into underwater blast holes, allowing the wood to swell and seal damaged structures. Workers sealed hatches and deck plates before pumping compressed air into submerged compartments to force the water out. Without the machinery needed to properly shape replacement hull plates, workers built wooden templates and cold-formed thick steel by hand with sledgehammers.
And sometimes the greatest obstacle wasn't engineering at all.
Ellsberg repeatedly found himself fighting peacetime regulations, union rules and colonial bureaucracy while trying to solve wartime problems — confrontations that occasionally required threats, improvisation and even the possibility of involving the American press.
Against the odds, wrecks began rising.
A supposedly ruined port began functioning again.
This episode tells the remarkable story of Edward Ellsberg's salvage operation at Massawa — and how engineers, divers and workers armed with little more than experience, ingenuity and sheer determination helped transform a devastated Red Sea harbour into a valuable Allied naval base.
It is a story of war fought not only with tanks, aircraft and battleships, but with pumps, timber, compressors, diving helmets, welding torches and sledgehammers.
Sometimes history turns on the people who figure out how to make the impossible work.
#Eritrea #Massawa #EdwardEllsberg #EritreanHistory #WorldWarII #WWII #AfricanHistory #MilitaryHistory #NavalHistory #RedSea #Engineering #HistoryPodcast
