The U-boat hunters Part 14

One day last summer a group of our destroyers were sent across the Atlantic. It was a night-and-day strain for all hands--watching out for raiders, watching out for U-boats, watching out for everything, and grabbing s.n.a.t.c.hes of sleep when they could.

Arriving at their naval base, every skipper of the little fleet felt pretty well used up. But every worth-while skipper thinks first of his men. One we have in mind pa.s.sed the word to his crew that whoever cared to take a run ash.o.r.e to stretch his legs and forget sea things for a while, why--to go to it. And stay till morning quarters if they wished.

As fast as they could clean up and shift into sh.o.r.e clothes they were going over the side. Our young captain felt then that perhaps there was a little something coming to himself; so he turned in, and he was logging great things in the sleeping line when the anchor watch, who was also a signal quartermaster, woke him up with:

"Signal from the admiralty, sir."

"Read it."

The S. Q. M. read it--an order to proceed at once to an oil dock and take oil.

It was nine o'clock at night when our skipper had come to moorings. It was now one in the morning, and he knew he could have slept for another week; however, orders were to oil up.

He turned out and mustered what remained aboard of his crew. There were about a dozen. He sent three to the fire-room, three to the engine-room, one here, another there, himself took the wheel, and with his signal quartermaster acting as a sort of officer of the deck, set out to find the oil dock.

He had never seen that harbor before that night, but he sheered close in to every ship's anchor light he saw and hailed for the course to the oil dock. Most of them did not know, but one now and then pa.s.sed him a word or two, and so he b.u.mped along and by and by made the oil dock.

Officers who have business with it will tell you that the naval organization of the British is pretty complete. Our young skipper found everything ready for him now. Men ash.o.r.e made fast his lines, connected up his pipes, filled his tanks--all in good order. Sister destroyers were oiling up with him, and with tanks filled they all b.u.mped their way back to moorings, again without sinking anything along the way.

It was then daylight, and right after breakfast they all had to report to the admiralty, so no use trying to sleep any more. Arrived at the admiralty, the officer in command complimented them on their safe run across, and then went on to say that of course they had had a trying pa.s.sage, and naturally their ships, especially engines and boilers, would have to be overhauled--all very natural and proper--and of course the needful time for overhauling, and for officers and crew--two, three, four days, whatever it was--would be granted; but (they knew the need) the question was: How long before they would be ready to go to sea?

The young destroyer commanders had discussed that and other possibilities in the reception-room outside, so when the senior of the group looked from one to the other of his colleagues they had only to nod, for him to turn to the admiral and say:

"We are ready now, sir."

Which remark should become one of the historic remarks of this war.

At this time--at the gates to the North Sea, the English Channel, the Irish coast--the U-boats were collecting frightful toll. In the Mediterranean they were running wild. Five ships from one convoy in one day--three of them big P. & O. liners--was one of their records in the Eastern Mediterranean.

To the natural question, Why haven't you checked them? almost any young British naval officer felt like saying: "Check 'em? Try it yourself and check 'em! You go out there and keep your ship zigzagging full speed night and day for three years and see how you like it! Go out there in rough weather and fog with not a minute's let-up, and see if you get to where the fall of a bucket of a dark night will make you jump three feet in the air or not! Our ships were not built, and our chaps were not trained, to beat their rotten game."

So things were when our fellows took hold, and hearing no word from them for a long time and then but a meagre one, it may be that many a citizen on this side was saying to himself:

"Well, they're gone, that little flotilla, swallowed up in the mists of the Atlantic, and that is all we know about them. And now I wonder what they're doing over there? Are they doing great work or are they tied up to a dock at the naval base, and their officers and crews roistering ash.o.r.e?"

I can say from several weeks' observation later that they were not doing too much roistering ash.o.r.e. Before leaving this side I found no evidence that anybody in Washington wished to suppress the record of what that little fleet was doing. Secretary Daniels and Chairman Creel of the Committee on Public Information believed with me that our little fellows over there were doing things worth recording. This fact is set down here because many people last summer believed there was too much suppression of the news of our fighting forces; and suspicion of suppression breeds distrust. Our fellows perhaps were not doing well. If they were doing well, wouldn't we be told more?

But they have ideas of their own on these matters over on the other side, and it is the other side which has most to say of what shall or shall not be given out for publication. In a previous chapter I have reported the answer of the British admiral in charge to my request to be allowed to cruise on an American destroyer. The reply was a flat and immediate: "No." They did not allow British writers on British ships; why should they allow an American writer on an American ship?

It had to be explained that despite what they allowed or did not allow, English papers did publish praiseful items about the deeds of the British navy; and even if they did not publish such items, conditions governing publicity in the United States and the British Isles were not equal. The British navy was a tremendous one and it was operating just off their own sh.o.r.es; officers and men were regularly going ash.o.r.e by the thousands and to their friends and families, if to n.o.body else, they talked of what was going on; and it does not take long for thousands of bluejackets to spread the gossip in a country where no spot in it is more than forty miles from tide-water, whereas our nearest Atlantic ports were three thousand miles from our base of operations in Europe, and it was another three thousand miles to our west coast.

It also had to be pumped into the admiralty over there that possibly the American and British publics did not hold to quite the same ideas about their respective navies. It was possible that the 110,000,000 people of the United States looked on our navy as not altogether the property of the officers and men in it; possibly our 110,000,000 people over here looked on the navy as their navy, that they had a right to know something of what it was doing; and so (this item had to be pointed out to one of our own topside officers, too) as that same public were paying the bills of the navy, no harm perhaps to let them in on a few things or, this being the twentieth century, they might take it into their heads some day to have no navy at all.

It took the foregoing talk and something more before I could get the permission of the British Admiralty to cruise on one of our own destroyers over there. This isn't so much a criticism of the British Admiralty as to show that their point of view differs from ours; and to show that it was not Washington which was holding up news of our navy over there.

As to what they have been doing! They have been doing great work. I cruised over there on one of our destroyers. She was five years old, yet one day during an 85-mile run to answer an S O S call she exceeded her builder's trial by half a knot. Incidentally, she saved a merchantman which had been sh.e.l.led for four hours by a U-boat and her $3,000,000 cargo; also she ran the U-boat under--one of the new big U-boats with two 5.9 deck guns. On the same day two other destroyers of our group took from a sinking liner 503 pa.s.sengers without the loss of a life. One of these destroyers lashed herself to the sinking ship the more quickly to get them off; and as the liner went down our little ship had to use her emergency steam to get away in time. A fourth destroyer of ours got the U-boat which sank the liner. That was the record of one little group of destroyers in one day; and it is detailed here because the writer happened to be present when these things happened.

When our fellows first went over they had to learn a few things from the British. We had first to get rid of some childish ideas about depth charges. We brought over a toy size of 50 to 60 pounds. They showed us a man's size one--300 pounds of T N T, a contraption looking so much like a galvanized iron ash-barrel with flattened sides that they call them "ash-cans."

These ash-cans do not have actually to hit the U-boat; to explode one anywhere near is enough. When our fellows let go one of them, the ship has to be going 25 knots to be safe. One of our destroyers was making 11 knots one night--the best she could do under the weather conditions--and an ash-can was washed overboard by a heavy sea. Our destroyer's stern came so near to being blown off that her crew thought sure she was gone; she had to feel the rest of the way most carefully to port.

This U-boat hunting has been found so wearing on men's nerves that the British Admiralty has a law that our destroyers must remain in port after every cruise for periods that average about two-thirds of their time at sea. Once our destroyers are back to port and tied up to moorings, a U-boat might come up and sink a ship at the harbor entrance and our fellows not allowed to up-steam and at 'em. It was only after a hard experience against U-boats that they evolved this law to save men from breaking down.

It is a dangerous, hard service on one of the roughest coasts in the world--a coast where for seven months or so in the year wind and sea and strong cross tides seem to be their daily diet; a service where for days on a stretch it is nothing at all for destroyer crews not to be able to take a meal sitting down, not even in chairs lashed to stanchions and one arm free hooked around a stanchion; a service where officers live jammed up in the eyes of the ship and never think at sea of taking off their clothes, and where they sleep (when they do sleep) mostly by s.n.a.t.c.hes on chart-house or ward-room transoms.

And for watches: eight hours in every twenty-four, night and day watching of their convoy, of their colleagues, of periscopes. (The prospect of collision with their close-packed convoy and themselves is a bad chance in itself.) On a destroyer convoying ships the officer of the deck has to stand with one eye to the compa.s.s ordering, say, two hundred changes of course in every hour. And one watch-officer of every destroyer has the extra job of acting as chief engineer of the ship; and when a watch-officer had to go aboard a torpedoed ship, or to go in the crow's nest in a critical time, to spend hours, it may be, the time so spent is in addition to his regular eight hours.

If he is the executive officer he must also act as navigator; and as it is important to know just where the ship is any moment of the day or night, the navigator does not figure on sleep in any long stretches.

About twenty waking hours out of twenty-four is his portion. As for the skipper: Every single waking hour of his is a heavy strain. I went to sea with the commander of the alert, intense type. Most of them are of that type, but this one particularly so, with eyes, ears, nerves, and brain working always at full power. Three hours in twenty-four was a pretty good lay-off for him.

Lively? Our destroyers are about 11-1/2 times as long as they are wide; which does not mean that they cannot keep the sea. They can keep the sea. Put one of them stern-on to a 90-mile breeze and all the sea to go with it, give her 5 or 6 knots an hour head of steam, and she will stay there till the ocean is blown dry. But they are engined out of all proportion to their tonnage, with their great weight of machinery deep down; which means that they roll. Oh, but they do roll! Whoopo--down and back like that! Most any of them will make a complete roll inside of six seconds. Ours was a 5-1/4-second one. When she got to rolling right, she would snap a careless sailor overboard as quickly as you could snap a bug off the end of a whalebone cane. There is one over there which rolled 73 degrees--and came back.

Take one of them when she is hiking along at 20 knots, rolling from 45 to 50 degrees, and just about filling the whale-boat swinging to the skid deck davits as she rolls! See one dive and take a sea over her fo'c's'le head and smash in her chart-house bulkhead maybe! Their outer skin is only 3/16 of an inch thick. See that thin skin give to the sea like a lace fan to a breeze! Watch the deck crawl till sometimes the deck-plates buckle up into V-shaped ridges! See them with the seas sloshing up their low freeboard and over their narrow decks, so that men have to make use of a sort of trolley line to get about. A man is aft and has to go forward, say. He hooks onto a rope loop, the same hanging from a fore-and-aft taut steel line about seven feet above deck, and when her stern rises he lifts his feet and shoots and fetches up Bam!--up against the fo'c's'le break. He is forward and wants to go aft--he hooks onto the loop, waits for her bow to rise, lets himself go and there he is--back to her skid deck.

That sounds like rough work. Sometimes it gets rougher than that, and then you hear of the wireless operator who was held in his radio shack for forty hours. He got pretty hungry, but he preferred the hunger to coming out and being washed overboard.

But let a machinist's mate tell you in his own way of the night he was standing a fire-room watch--this with all due respect to the chart-house bulkhead, the trolley line, the buckling decks, and the radio operator who was confined--this night he was on watch in the fire-room. Was it rough? He thought so. When he looked down at his feet, there were the fire-room deck-plates folding in and out like a concertina.

Destroyer crews do not loaf overmuch around deck. They can't. They live below decks mostly, strapped in when it is rough to a stretch of canvas laced to four pieces of iron pipe, set on an angle down against the ship's sides, and called a bunk. Even strapped in so they are sometimes, when she has a good streak on, hove out into the pa.s.sageways. It was a young doctor of the flotilla who said that, except for their broken arms and legs, his ship's crew were disgustingly healthy.

Our officers over there volunteer for this service, and for every one who went, there were a dozen who wanted to go. And there is a lot of difference between men who go to a duty because they are ordered to go, and men who go because they want to go. These officers and men--there is no beating them, except by blowing them off the face of the waters. And even then they are not always beaten. One of our destroyers was cut down one night by collision. (With so many ships being crowded into a small steaming area, collisions are sure to happen.) All hands had to take to the rafts in a hurry. It was about two in the morning, one of those summer nights in the North when the light comes early. They watched her going under. Her deck settled level with the sea, and as it did so a young irrepressible one sang out: "What do you say, fellows, to having a race around the old girl before she flops under?" Away they started, four or five gangs of them, paddling their life rafts with their hands around the sinking ship at two in the morning.

That is youth; and there is no beating youth. We have had stories of our soldiers singing a song that has become very popular since we entered the war. We have been told of them singing it under the most varying conditions: as they camped on the granite blocks of the Hoboken water-front; as they climbed over the gangways of ships bound across; debarking from ships in European ports; singing it from behind the drawn shades of coaches rolling across France. There were even those who sang it while waiting to step into the life-boats on a torpedoed troop-ship; but for light-hearted courage has any one beaten that destroyer lad who was torpedoed one night last winter?

When the torpedo struck his ship the two depth charges astern were exploded also. Two 300-pound charges of T N T they were. The little ship seemed to be lifted out of the water. There was just time to throw over a few life rafts and take a high dive after the rafts. There was no time to get an S O S message away before the ship went down; so there they were--a November night in northern waters, more than half their crew known to be dead, their ship sunk, no other ship near and no hope of one coming near. It was about as tough a case as men could be expected to face and hope to live. But there was a boy there--he was jouncing up and down in the water to keep warm, and jouncing up and down he was singing (from out of the dark they heard him), singing cheerfully:

"O boy, O boy, where do we go from here!"

It is the thing spoken of in the early part of this book. Material is a great thing; but personnel has it beaten a dozen ways. Paul Jones with his capable seagoers in his little sloop-of-war could raise the devil with the enemy. Paul Jones with a line of battleships and forty crews of men without spirit would not have caused them ten minutes' loss of sleep. That singing lad in northern waters was worth a dozen guns.

Our destroyers went over there at a time when the U-boats were sinking more tonnage in one month than Great Britain was building in four; and because of U-boat activities the loss of ships in the usual marine ways was far beyond normal. To the weary British our fellows brought a fresh vigor, a new aggressiveness.

Only half a dozen were in that first group, but other groups followed, and groups are still following. They have not driven the U-boats from under the seas, but they have made it possible for merchant ships to live in that part of the ocean they are covering.

Somebody has broken into print somewhere to say that Germany has trouble getting U-boat crews; that men have to be driven into U-boats to man them. What a queer idea of human courage people who say such things have! There are always volunteers, probably always will be--plenty of volunteers for any dangerous service. If the U-boat crews were the kind that have to be driven to sea, there would be no great harm in them. But they are not that kind. They have courage, and they have skill, and because they have courage and skill they are dangerous.

After a year of the U-boat drive England saw a danger of being some day starved out; and with England starved out, our army might as well have stayed on this side last summer; but though the drive is still on, England is not yet starved out, for much of which comfort they can thank the officers and men of our little destroyer flotilla.

At a time when England was worn and weary with the U-boat game, our fellows went over to hearten them up; and they are still heartening them up; and, besides heartening them up, they are getting the U-boats regularly. How many they are getting I could not say, even if I knew; but one of our vice-admirals has publicly stated that they once got five in one day. And with malice toward none, let us hope for more days like it.

THE MARINES HAVE LANDED----

It was a little girl at home, not old enough to read long words, but able to read a picture, as she put it; and there was a print of a company of marines leaving one of our navy-yards, and she said: "The marine soldiers going away--more trouble somewheres, isn't there, papa?"