Aircraft and Submarines Part 24

It was not long before we sighted a mine trawler, steaming for the harbour, and speeded up to overtake her.

"Pikers!" said our commander, as we circled twice around the trawler; "they can't find us."

Five men on the trawler were scanning the sea with gla.s.ses looking for submarines. We could follow all their motions, could tell when they thought they had found us and see their disappointment at their mistakes, but though we were never more than five hundred yards from them, I did not think they were pikers because they did not find us. I had tried that hunt for the tiny wave of a periscope.

"No use wasting a torpedo on those fellows," said our commander.

"We will use the gun on them."

"How far away can you use a torpedo?" I asked.

"Two hundred yards is the best distance," he said. "Never more than five hundred. A torpedo is pure guesswork at more than five hundred yards."

We crossed the bow of the trawler, circled around to her starboard quarter and came to the surface, fired nine shots and submerged again in forty-five seconds.

The prey secured, we ran submerged through the mine field and past the net barrier to come to the surface well within the harbour and proceed peacefully to our mooring under the shelter of the guns of the land forts.

Life and work on a German submarine is known to us, of course, only from descriptions in German publications. One of these appeared, previous to our entry in the war, in various journals and was translated and republished by the New York _Evening Post_. It reads partly as follows:

"U-47 will take provisions and clear for sea. Extreme economical radius."

A first lieutenant, with acting rank of commander, takes the order in the grey dawn of a February day. The hulk of an old corvette with the Iron Cross of 1870 on her stubby foremast is his quarters in port, and on the corvette's deck he is presently saluted by his first engineer and the officer of the watch. On the pier the crew of U-47 await him. At their feet the narrow grey submarine lies alongside, straining a little at her cables.

"Well, we've our orders at last," begins the commander, addressing his crew of thirty, and the crew grin. For this is U-47's first experience of active service. She has done nothing save trial trips. .h.i.therto, and has just been overhauled for her first fighting cruise. Her commander snaps out a number of orders. Provisions are to be taken in "up to the neck," fresh water is to be put aboard, and engine-room supplies to be supplemented.

A mere plank is the gangway to the little vessel. As the commander, followed by his officers, comes aboard, a sailor hands to each a ball of cotton-waste, the sign and symbol of a submarine officer, which never leaves his hand. For the steel walls of his craft, the doors, and the companion-ladder all sweat oil, and at every touch the hands must be wiped dry. The doorways are narrow round holes. Through one of the holes aft the commander descends by a breakneck iron ladder into the black hole lit by electric glow-lamps. The air is heavy with the smell of oil, and to the unaccustomed longsh.o.r.eman it is almost choking, though the hatches are off. The submarine man breathes this air as if it were the purest ozone. Here in the engine-room aft men must live and strain every nerve even if for days at a time every crack whereby the fresh air could get in is hermetically sealed.

On their tense watchfulness thirty lives depend.

Here, too, are slung some hammocks, and in them one watch tries, and, what is more, succeeds in sleeping, though the men moving about b.u.mp them with head and elbows at every turn, and the low and narrow vault is full of the hum and purr of machinery. In length the vault is about ten feet, but if a man of normal stature stands in the middle and raises his arms to about half shoulder height his hands will touch the cold, moist steel walls on either side. A network of wires runs overhead, and there is a juggler's outfit of handles, levers, and instruments. The commander inspects everything minutely, then creeps through a hole into the central control station, where the chief engineer is at his post. With just about enough a.s.sistance to run a fairly simple machine ash.o.r.e the chief engineer of a submarine is expected to control, correct, and, if necessary, repair at sea an infinitely complex machinery which must not break down for an instant if thirty men are to return alive to the hulk.

Forward is another narrow steel vault serving at once as engine-room and crew's quarters. Next to it is a place like a cupboard, where the cook has just room to stand in front of his doll's house galley-stove. It is electrically heated, that the already oppressive air may not be further vitiated by smoke or fumes. A German submarine in any case smells perpetually of coffee and cabbage. Two little cabins of the size of a decent clothes-chest take the deck and engine-room officers, four of them. Another box cabin is reserved for the commander--when he has time to occupy it.

At daybreak the commander comes on deck in coat and trousers of black leather lined with wool, a protection against oil, cold, and sea-water. The crew at their stations await the command to cast off.

"Machines clear," calls a voice from the control-station and "Clear ship," snaps the order from the bridge. Then "Cast-off!"

The cables slap on to the landing-stage, the engines begin to purr, and U-47 slides away into open water.

A few cable-lengths away another submarine appears homeward bound. She is the U-20 returning from a long cruise in which she succeeded in sinking a ship bound with a cargo of frozen mutton for England.

"Good luck, old sheep-butcher," sings the commander of U-47 as the sister-ship pa.s.ses within hail.

The seas are heavier now, and U-47 rolls unpleasantly as she makes the light-ship and answers the last salute from a friendly hand. The two officers on the bridge turn once to look at the light-ship already astern, then their eyes look seaward. It is rough, stormy weather. If the egg-sh.e.l.l goes ahead two or three days without a stop, the officers in charge will get no sleep for just that long. If it gets any rougher they will be tied to the bridge-rails to avoid being swept overboard. If they are hungry, plates of soup will be brought to them on the bridge, and the North Sea will attend to its salting for them.

Frequently this "meal" is interrupted by some announcement from the watch, such as: "Smoke on the horizon off the port bow." Then--so we are told:

The commander drops his plate, shouts a short, crisp command, and an electric alarm whirs inside the egg-sh.e.l.l. The ship buzzes like a hive. Then water begins to gurgle into the ballast-tanks, and U-47 sinks until only her periscope shows.

"The steamship is a Dutchman, sir," calls the watch officer. The commander inspects her with the aid of a periscope. She has no wireless and is bound for the Continent. So he can come up and is glad, because moving under the water consumes electricity, and the usefulness of a submarine is measured by her electric power.

After fifty-four hours of waking nerve tension, sleep becomes a necessity. So the ballast-tanks are filled and the nutsh.e.l.l sinks to the sandy bottom. This is the time for sleep aboard a submarine, because a sleeping man consumes less of the precious oxygen than one awake and busy. So a submarine man has three princ.i.p.al lessons to learn--to keep every faculty at tension when he is awake, to keep stern silence when he is ash.o.r.e (there is a warning against talkativeness in all the German railway-carriages now), and to sleep instantly when he gets a legitimate opportunity. His sleep and the economy of oxygen may save the ship. However, the commander allows half an hour's grace for music. There is a gramophone, of course, and the "ship's band"

performs on all manner of instruments. At worst, a comb with a bit of tissue paper is pressed into service.

Another American who suffered an enforced voyage on an _unterseeboot_ made public later some of his experiences. His captor's craft was a good sized one--about 250 feet long, with a crew of 35 men and mounting two 4-1/2 inch guns. She could make 18 knots on the surface and 11 submerged and had a radius of 3200 miles of action. Her accommodations were not uncomfortable. Each officer had a separate cabin while the crew were bunked along either side of a narrow pa.s.sage. The ventilation was excellent, and her officers declared that they could stand twenty-four hours continuous submergence without discomfort, after that for six hours it was uncomfortable, and thereafter intolerable because of the exudation of moisture--or sweating--from every part. At such times all below have to wear leather suits. The food was varied and cooked on an electric stove. The original stores included preserved pork and beef, vegetables, tinned soups, fruits, raisins, biscuits, b.u.t.ter, marmalade, milk, tea, and coffee. But the pleasures of the table depended greatly on the number of their prizes, for whenever possible they made every ship captured contribute heavily to their larder before sinking her. Of the tactics followed the observer writes:

It appears that 55 per cent., or more than half, of the torpedoes fired miss their mark, and with this average they seem satisfied.

Once they let go at a ship two torpedoes at 3000 yards' range, and both missed, the range being too long but they did not care to come any nearer, as they believed the ship to be well armed.

They prefer to fire at 500 to 700 yards, which means that at this range the track or "wake" of a projectile would be discernible for, say, twenty-five to thirty seconds--not much time, indeed, for any ship to get out of the way. At 100 yards' range or less they do not care to fire unless compelled to, as the torpedo is nearly always discharged when the submarine is lying ahead of the object, _i. e._, to hit the ship coming up to it; it follows that a gun forward is more useful than one aft, the gun aft being of real service when a submarine starts sh.e.l.ling, which she will do for choice from aft the ship rather than from forward of her, where she would be in danger of being run over and rammed.

CHAPTER XVI

SUBMARINE WARFARE

At the moment of writing these words the outcome of the greatest war the world has ever known is believed by many to hang upon the success with which the Allies can meet and defeat the campaign of the German submarines. The German people believe this absolutely.

The Allies and their sympathizers grudgingly admit that they are only too fearful that it may be true.

To such a marvellous degree of military efficiency has the ingenuity of man brought these boats which so recently as our Civil War were still in the vaguest experimental stage and scarcely possessed of any offensive power whatsoever!

Nevertheless these machines had reached a degree of development, and had demonstrated their dangerous character so early in the war that it was amazing that the British were so slow in comprehending the use that might be made of them in cutting off British commerce. It is true that the first submarine actions redounded in their results entirely to British credit. In September of 1914 a British submarine ran gallantly into Heligoland Bay and sank the German light cruiser _Hela_ at her moorings. Shortly after the Germans sought retaliation by attacking a British squadron, but the effort miscarried. The British cruiser _Birmingham_ caught a glimpse of her wake and with a well-aimed shot destroyed her periscope. The submarine dived, but shortly afterwards came up again making what was called a porpoise dive--that is to say, she came up just long enough for the officer in the conning tower to locate the enemy, then submerged again.

Brief, however, as had been the appearance of the conning tower, the British put a sh.e.l.l into it and in a few minutes the submarine and most of her crew were at the bottom of the sea.

Soon after followed the attack upon and sinking of the three cruisers by the submarine under the command of Lieutenant Commander Otto von Weddigen, the narrative of which we have already told. But while after that attacks upon British armed ships were many, successes were few. There were no German ships at sea for the British to attack in turn, but some very gallant work was done by their submarines against Austrian and Turkish warships in the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles. All this time the Germans were preparing for that warfare upon the merchant shipping of all countries which at the end they came to believe would force the conclusion of the war. It seems curious that during this early period the Allies were able to devise no method of meeting this form of attack. When the United States entered the war more than three years later they looked to us for the instant invention of some effective anti-submarine weapon. If they were disappointed at our failure at once to produce one, they should have remembered at least that they too were baffled by the situation although it was presented to them long before it became part of our problems.

About no feature of the war have the belligerents thrown more of mystery than about the circ.u.mstances attending submarine attacks upon battleships and armed transports and the method employed of meeting them. Even when later in the war the Germans apparently driven to frenzy made special efforts to sink hospital and Red Cross ships the facts were concealed by the censors, and accounts of the efforts made to balk such inhuman and unchristian practices diligently suppressed. In the end it seemed that the British, who of course led all naval activities, had reached the conclusion that only by the maintenance of an enormous fleet of patrol boats could the submarines be kept in check. This method they have applied unremittingly. Alfred Noyes in a publication authorized by the British government has thus picturesquely told some of the incidents connected with this service:

It is difficult to convey in words the wide sweep and subtle co-ordination of this ocean hunting; for the beginning of any tale may be known only to an admiral in a London office, the middle of it only to a commander at Kirkwall, and the end of it only to a trawler skipper off the coast of Ireland. But here and there it is possible to piece the fragments together into a complete adventure, as in the following record of a successful chase, where the glorious facts outrun all the imaginations of the wildest melodrama.

There were suspicious vessels at anchor, one moonless night, in a small bay near the Mumbles. They lay there like shadows, but before long they knew that the night was alive for a hundred miles with silent talk about them. At dawn His Majesty's trawlers _Golden Feather_ and _Peggy Nutten_ foamed up, but the shadows had disappeared.

The trawlers were ordered to search the coast thoroughly for any submarine stores that might have been left there. "Thoroughly" in this war means a great deal. It means that even the bottom of the sea must be searched. This was done by grapnels; but the bottom was rocky and seemed unfit for a base. Nothing was found but a battered old lobster pot, crammed with seaweed and little green crabs.

Probably these appearances were more than usually deceitful; for shortly afterward watchers on the coast reported a strange fishing boat, with patched brown sails, heading for the suspected bay. Before the patrols came up, however, she seemed to be alarmed. The brown sails were suddenly taken in; the disguised conning tower was revealed, and this innocent fishing boat, gracefully submerging, left only the smiling and spotless April seas to the bewildered eyes of the coast guard.

In the meantime signals were pulsing and flashing on land and sea, and the U-boat had hardly dipped when, over the smooth green swell, a great sea hawk came whirring up to join the hunt, a hawk with light yellow wings and a body of service grey--the latest type of seaplane. It was one of those oily seas in which a watcher from the air may follow a submarine for miles, as an olive green shadow under the lighter green. The U-boat doubled twice; but it was half an hour before her sunken shadow was lost to sight under choppy blue waters, and long before that time she was evidently at ease in her mind and pursuing a steady course.

For the moment her trail was then lost, and the hawk, having reported her course, dropped out of the tale.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by U. & U.

_A British Submarine._]

The next morning in the direction indicated by that report several patrol boats heard the sound of gunfire and overhauled a steamer which had been attacked by a submarine. They gave chase by "starring" to all the points of the compa.s.s, but could not locate the enemy. A little later, however, another trawler observed the wash of a submarine crossing her stern about two hundred yards away. The trawler star-boarded, got into the wake of the submarine and tried to ram her at full speed. She failed to do this, as the U-boat was at too great a depth. The enemy disappeared, and again the trawlers gathered and "starred."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Permission of _Scientific American_.

_Sectional View of the Nautilus._]