Word: massaua
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this the peace? Of the world's 2,000,000,000 people, at least 1,900,000,000 just did not care what became of Massaua's flea-bitten port, or of sun-baked Leros, or of Venezia Giulia's ragged purple mountains, or of dusty Kalgan, or of the fog-soaked Kurils. What the people did care about was tomorrow's bread or hunger, day-after-tomorrow's peace...
This was the second African stronghold one of our TIME & LIFE News Bureau men stumbled into ahead of the Army. Two years ago (eight months before Pearl Harbor) George Rodger strolled out the causeway to Massaua, the last seaport held by the Italians in Eritrea, was escorted to the Italian general's headquarters, found to his amazement that the Italians were still looking for someone to surrender to. He had dinner that night with the Italian commander, was on the friendliest of terms with the vanquished before the surrender ceremonies next...
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...
...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, 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...