The U-boat hunters Part 1

The U-boat hunters.

by James B. Connolly.

FOREWORD

What a great thing if we could do away with war!

But men are not cast in that mould. We shall continue to have wars; and some day the world is going to have a war to which the present will serve only as a try-out.

When that war comes our country will probably have to bear the burden for the western hemisphere. In that war our navy will be our first line of defense; and what we do for our navy now will have much to do with what our navy will be able to do for us then.

Our navy to-day is made up of good ships and capable, courageous, hard-working officers and men. There are some fuddy-duddies and politicians among them, but most of them are on the job every minute.

Their highest hope is the chance to serve their country. The chapters in this book which tell of their U-boat hunting only prove once more their great qualities.

There are chapters in this book which have nothing to do with U-boat hunting, but have much to do with the navy. Such are the two opening chapters and the three closing chapters. The motive of four of those chapters will probably be obvious; the chapter on the workings of a submarine is included in the hope of interesting our young fellows in that type of craft.

The need of such a chapter? Take this ill.u.s.tration of what people do not know about submarines: Three years ago an admiral on the other side was called into conference on the U-boat problem. When it came his turn to speak he said: "Gentlemen, it is child's talk to say that the U-boats will ever amount to anything! Disregard them utterly!" Only three years ago that was, and that naval officer was considered for commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet! Three years ago, and last year the U-boats sank 6,600,000 tons of shipping!

Right now Germany probably contemplates, or is actually constructing, U-boats with armor and guns heavy enough to engage on the surface any war craft up to the battle-cruiser cla.s.s. How far from that to fighting the heaviest of surface craft--even to the battleships?

In the event of invasion--we might as well face that; refusing to think about it certainly will not eliminate the possibility,--in the event of invasion by a powerful foe our first line of defense will be our navy.

The navy will always be our first line of defense; and so the need to-day of interesting in our navy young men,--progressive young men, who will learn from the past but prefer to live in the future.

J. B. C.

NAVY SHIPS

More than one-third of our naval force was being reviewed by the President. A most impressive a.s.sembly of men-o'-war it was, in tonnage and weight of metal the greatest ever floated by the waters of the western hemisphere.

The last of the fleet had arrived on the night before. From the bluffs along the sh.o.r.e they might have been seen approaching with a mysterious play of lights across the shadowy waters. In the morning they were all there. Hardly a type was lacking--the last 16,000-ton double-turreted battleship, the protected and heavy-armored cruisers, monitors, despatch-boats, gun-boats, destroyers, attendant transport, and supply ships. Fifty ships, 1,200 guns, 16,000 men: all were there, even to the fascinating little submarines with their round black backs just showing above the water.

It was that chromatic sort of a morning when the canvas of the sailing-boats stands out startlingly white against the drizzly sky and the smoke from the stacks of the steamers takes on an accented coal-black, and, drooping, trails low in a murky wake. Rather a dull setting at this early hour; but not sufficiently dull to check the vivacity of the actors in the scene.

The President comes up the side of the _Mayflower_ and, arrived at the head of the gangway, stands rigid as any stanchion to attention while his colors are shot to the truck and the scarlet-coated band plays the national hymn. Then, ascending to the bridge, he takes station by the starboard rail with the Secretary of the Navy at his shoulder. The clouds roll away, the sun comes out, and all is as it should be while he prepares to review the fleet, which thereafter responds aboundingly to every burst of his own inexhaustible enthusiasm.

And this fleet, which is lying to anchor in three lines of four miles or so each in length, with a respectful margin of clear water all about, is, viewed merely as a marine pageant, magnificent; as a display of potential fighting power, most convincing. No man might look on it and his sensibilities--admiration, patriotism, respect, whatever they might be--remain unstirred. To witness it is to pa.s.s in mental review the great fleets of other days and inevitably to draw conclusions. Beside this armament the ill-destined Armada, Von Tromp's stubborn squadrons, Nelson's walls of oak, or Farragut's steam and sail would dissolve like the glucose squadrons that boys buy at Christmas time. Even Dewey's workman-like batteries (this to mark the onward rush of naval science) would be rated obsolete beside the latest of these!

It was first those impressive battleships; and bearing down on them one better saw what terrible war-engines they are. Big guns pointing forward, big guns pointing astern, long-reaching guns abeam, and little business-looking machine-guns in the tops--their mere appearance suggests their ponderous might. A single broadside from any of these, properly placed, and there would be an end to the most renowned flag-ships of wooden-fleet days. And that this frightful power need never wait on wind or tide, nor be hindered in execution by any weather much short of a hurricane, is a.s.sured when we note that to-day, while the largest of the excursion steamers are heaving to the whitecaps, these are lying as immovable almost as sea-walls.

It is, first, the flag-ship which thunders out her greeting--one, two, three--twenty-one smoke-wreathed guns--while her sailormen, arm to shoulder, mark in unwavering blue the lines of deck and superstructure.

Meantime the officers on the bridge, admiral in the foreground, are standing in salute; and in the intervals of gun-fire there are crashing out over the waters again the strains of the "Star Spangled Banner." And the flag-ship left astern, the guns of the next in line boom out, and on her also the band plays and men and officers stand to attention; and so the next, and next. And, the battleships pa.s.sed, come the armored cruisers, riding the waters almost as ponderously as the battleships and hardly less powerful, but much faster on the trail; and they may run or fight as they please. After examining them, long and swift-looking, with no more s.p.a.ce between decks than is needed for machinery, stores, armament, and lung-play for live men, the inevitable reflection recurs that the advance of mechanical power must color our dreams of romance in future. Surely the old ways are gone. Imagine one of the old three-deckers aiming to work to windward of one of these in a gale, and if by any special dispensation of Providence she was allowed to win the weather berth, imagine her trying, while she rolled down to her middle deck, to damage one of these belted brutes, who meantime would be leisurely picking out the particular plank by which she intended to introduce into her enemy's vitals a weight of explosive metal sufficient in all truth to blow her out of water.

After the cruisers pa.s.sed the craft of comparatively small tonnage and power follow--the gun-boats, transports, and supply ships; and, almost forgotten, the monitors, riding undisturbedly, like squat little forts afloat, with freeboard so low that with a slightly undulating sea a turtle could swim aboard. And after them the destroyers, which look their name. Most wicked inventions; no shining bra.s.swork nor holy-stoned quarter, no decorative and convenient companionway down the side--no anything that doesn't make for results. Ugly, wicked-looking, with hooded ports from under which peer the muzzles of long-barrelled weapons that look as if they were designed for the single business of boring, and boring quickly, holes in steel plate.

So the _Mayflower_ steams down the four long lines in review; and always the batteries and bands in action, the immortal hymn echoing out like rolling thunder between the flame-lit broadsides. From sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e the cannon detonate and our fighting blood is stirred. On the pleasure craft skirting the line of pickets like vaguely outlined picture boats in the dim, perspective haze, the people seem also to be stirred. We dream of the glory of battle; but better than that, the hymn which has stirred men to some fine deeds in the past, and shall to just as brave in the future, mounts like a surging tide to our hearts:

"Oh, say, can you see?"

it is asking. And we can see--no need of the gla.s.s--ahead, astern, abeam, aloft, some thousands of them streaming in the fresh west wind, and within signal distance of their beautiful waving folds a mult.i.tude of men and women in whom the sense of patriotism must have become immeasurably deepened for being within call this day.

The vibration of bra.s.s and pipe, the music and the saluting, one ship and the next, and never the welcome of one died out before the tumult of the next began. It was like the ceaseless roar of the ever-rolling ocean, with never an instant when the ear-drum did not vibrate to the salute of cannon, the blood tingle to the call of the nation's hymn. One felt faith in ships and crews after it; and later, when in the cabin of the _Mayflower_ the admirals and captains gathered, to meet them and to listen was to feel anew the a.s.surance that this navy will be ready when the hour comes to do whatever may be deemed right and well by the people.

The admirals and the _attaches_ having departed and dinner become a thing of the past, it was time to review the electric-light display.

We were almost abreast of the first in line, and she was like a ship from fairyland. Along her run the bulbed lights extended, and thence to her turrets, and, higher up, followed the outline of stacks and tops and masts, with floating strings of them suspended here and there between.

Most striking of all, her name in gigantic, flaming letters faced forward from her bridge. Now one ship decked in a multiplicity of jewels on this clear calm night would have been a beautiful sight--but where there were forty-odd of them----!

It was a sailor of the fleet, lurking in the shifting shadows of the bridge, that he might enjoy his surrept.i.tious cigarette and not suffer disratement therefor, who reviewed the illuminations most illuminingly.

"Man, but they do blaze out, don't they? They make me think of the post-cards we used to buy in foreign ports. You held them up before the light and they came out shining like a Christmas-tree. But no ships of cards these--and that's the wonderful thing, too. Seeing them to-day, with their batteries in view, 'twas enough to put the fear o' G.o.d in a man's heart, and now look at them--like a child's dream of heaven--that is, if we don't sheer too close and see that the guns are still there.

And, look now, the tricks they're at!"

Outlined in incandescents, the semaph.o.r.es of a dozen ships were being worked most industriously. "Jerk up and down like the legs and arms of the mechanical dolls at the theatre, don't they? But these here could be dancing for something more than the people's amus.e.m.e.nt if 'twas necessary. And what are they saying? Oh, most likely it's 'The compliments of the admiral, and will you come aboard the flag-ship and try a taste of punch?' And 'With pleasure,' that other one is saying.

And they'll be lowering away the launch and no doubt be having a pleasant chat presently. And they could just as easily be saying (if 'twas the right time), 'Pipe to quarters and load with sh.e.l.l'--just as easy; and they could revolve the near turret of that one, and ten seconds after they cut loose you and me, if we weren't already killed by rush of air, would be brushing the salt water from our eyes and clawing around for a stray piece of wreckage to hang on to. Just as easy--but look at 'em now again!"

The search-lights were paralleling and intersecting, now revealing the perpendicular depths beside the vessel, and now flooding the sky. Twenty of them, simultaneously flashing, were sweeping the surface of the Sound, one instant outlining the arbored Long Island sh.o.r.e, the next betraying the beaches of Connecticut. One, beaming westerly, disclosed a loaded excursion steamer half-way to h.e.l.l Gate, and, a moment later, turning a hand-spring, picked up in its diverging path the Fall River steamer miles away to the eastward.

"The torpedo-boats'd have the devil's own time trying to lay aboard to-night, wouldn't they? And yet if 'twas cloudy 'twould be the submarines! Did you see them to-day? Weren't they cute--like little whale pups setting on the water--yes. They say they've got them where they turn somersaults now. Great, yes--but terrible, too, when you think they're liable to come your way some fine day. Imagine yourself, all at once, some night when you ought to be sound asleep in your hammock, finding yourself, afore you're yet fair awake, so high in the sky that you can almost reach out and take hold of the handle of the Dipper! And when you come down and get the official report, learning that one of those cute little playthings had been making a subaqueous call.

"It's ninety-odd years since the American navy proved it could do a good job; for, of course, none of us count Spain, who wasn't ready to begin with, and wasn't our size, anyway. And yet, we mightn't make out so bad 'gainst a bigger enemy at that. Our fellows can shoot, that's sure.

There's a gun crew in this ship we're breasting now, and I saw them awhile ago put eight 12-inch shot in succession through that regulation floating target we use, and it was as far away as the farther end of that line of cruisers there, and the target was bobbing up and down, and we steaming by at 10 knots an hour. Not too bad--hah? And a hundred crews like 'em in the navy. That's for the shooting."

He flicked the end of another fleeting cigarette over the rail. "Yes, the American navy has fought pretty well, and this navy, no fear, will fight too. There's more different kinds of people in it than ever before, they say--though as to that I guess there were always more kinds of people in the navy than the historians ever gave credit for. Now it's all kinds like the nation itself, I suppose. And that ought to make for good fighting, don't you think?"

NAVY MEN

The foregoing occasion was the first of several naval spectacles staged by Theodore Roosevelt during his presidency to show the public that we had a growing navy, and not too small a navy, and a navy that, ship for ship, need ask for no odds in its equipment at least.

More than any President we ever had did Theodore Roosevelt work for a big navy. To no President before him in our country did the prospect of a great European war loom so near; a war which meant our partic.i.p.ation, not so much through any will of our people as by the pressure of happenings from the other side.

Hence, the need of the country for as large a navy as we could get together. With an eye for this future need President Roosevelt asked for 4 battleships a year. There were men in Congress who believed that to talk of war was foolish; there would be no more war; so, instead of 4, Congress gave him 2, and the famous "big stick" had to come into play before they gave him even the two.

During these years I had the privilege from President Roosevelt of cruising on United States war-ships--gun-boats, destroyers, cruisers, battleships (later, through the good offices of Secretary Daniels, I became acquainted with submarines and navy airplanes).

The war-ships were an interesting study, and the life aboard a war-ship then was even more interesting, for after all, men, not materials, were the chief thing. Almost any fairly well-trained bunch of mechanics will turn out a pretty good machine to order. But there is no turning out good men to order; only good-living generations can do that.

If it was a matter of machinery alone, then the Prussian idea would have this war already won. But that alone cannot prevail, can never prevail for the long run. It is the spirit which must win.

The personnel of the navy, officers and men, seemed always so much more interesting to me, that for one hour I spent in looking over ship equipment, I probably spent forty in observing the men; and when you are locked up in ships for weeks or months with a lot of men you must, where your heart and mind are not closed, come away in time with some sort of knowledge of them.