Our Navy in the War Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by Brown Brothers_. A SUBMARINE-CHASER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration; _From a photograph by Brown Brothers_. A TORPEDO-DESTROYER.]

This depth-bomb, by the way, is a wonderful invention, and with its perfection began the great decrease in submarine losses. The bomb is cylindrical and has in the top a well in which is fitted a small propeller. As the water comes in contact with the propeller the sinking motion causes it to revolve. As it revolves it screws down a detonator which comes in contact with the charge at ten, fifteen, twenty, or forty or more feet as designated by the hand of an indicator on the bomb. The hand of this indicator is, of course, set by the officer before the bomb is released either from a gun or from tracks along the deck.

Then there have been a number of tricks; some of them Yankee tricks, some of them the creatures of the equally fruitful British tar. One day in the North Sea a British patrol-vessel came across a trawler. It resembled the ordinary British trawler, but there were points of difference, points that interested the inquisitive--and suspicious--commander of the war-vessel. Chiefly there were a lot of stores upon her deck. She flew the Norwegian flag, and her skipper said he was neutral. But the British commander decided to take a chance. He arrested the crew, placed them in irons, and manned the trawler with a crew of French and English navy men.

The trawler hovered about in the same locality for three days, and then one morning, lo and behold, a periscope popped up close alongside.

Seeing the waters clear of enemy s.h.i.+ps, the U-boat came to the surface and frisked blithely up to the trawler. She was greeted by a shower of machine-gun bullets, and surrendered without ado. There was really nothing else for the surprised skipper to do. For when he had last seen that trawler she was the parent s.h.i.+p of the submarine flotilla operating in that vicinity. In all, before the week was over, that trawler had captured six submarines without the loss of a life, and no one injured.

Thereafter the parent-s.h.i.+p trawler was seized whenever the British could capture one, and the same expedient was tried. But after a time the Germans became wary of approaching parent-s.h.i.+ps until they were convinced that their parenthood was more real than a.s.sumed.

Then one day after the Americans arrived a three-masted schooner was commandeered. They put a deck-load of lumber on her; at least it was an apparent deck-load. It was really a mask for a broadside of 3-pounder guns, different sections of the deck-load swinging open to admit of free play of the guns, as levers were pulled.

The schooner, commanded by a Maine skipper and his crew, was turned loose in the North Sea. Astern towed a dingy; from the taffrail flew the American flag. Before long out popped a submarine. Aha! A lumber-laden vessel--American! The German commander, grinning broadly, stepped into a gig with a bombing crew; torpedoes were not wasted on sailing-vessels.

"Get into your dingy," he cried, motioning toward the craft dangling astern.

The Maine skipper, in his red underclothes, besought, and then cursed--while the German grinned the more broadly. Finally, however, the irate--sic--skipper and his crew of five clambered into their dingy as ordered by the commander of the submarine. And then! No sooner had the schooner crew cleared the wind-jammer than the deck-load of lumber resolved itself into a series of doors, and out of each door protruded a gun. It was the last of that submarine, of course. The schooner got five submarines before another submarine happened to witness the destruction of a companion craft.

Next day when the schooner approached a submarine the undersea boat let drive with a torpedo, and the joyous days of that particular wind-jammer were at an end. But thereafter the Germans seldom tried to bomb a sailing craft.

Airplanes have played their important part in the work of our navy in combating the submarine. Seaplanes are sent on patrol from regular bases or from the deck of a parent-vessel, a steams.h.i.+p of large size. Flying at a height of 10,000 feet, an airplane operator can see the shadow of a submarine proceeding beneath the surface. Thus viewing his prey, the aviator descends and drops a depth-bomb into the water. Our airmen have already won great commendation from the British Admiralty and aerial commanders. Whatever may have been the delays in airplane production in this country, the American Navy has not been at fault, and Secretary Daniels's young men went into British seaplanes when American planes were not at hand. From British Admiralty sources have come many tales of the skill and courage of the American aviators. There was one recent instance noted of an American pilot scouting for submarines who spotted a periscope. He dropped a bomb a few feet astern and a few feet ahead of that periscope, both bombs falling perfectly in line with the objective.

He circled and then dropped a bomb in the centre of a disturbance in the water. Up came oil in great quant.i.ties.

Another American pilot managed the rare feat of dropping a bomb precisely upon the centre of the deck of a submarine, and had the unhappy experience of seeing it fail to explode--as recently happened in the submarine fight off Cape Cod, near Chatham.

In hunting for the submarines the American destroyers have patrolled an area as wide as that bounded roughly by the great V formed by New York, Detroit, and Knoxville, Tenn. And while patrolling they have become skilled in the use of the depth charges, in establis.h.i.+ng smoke screens so as to hide vessels of a convoy from the periscope eye, and in marksmans.h.i.+p. One gun crew not long ago saw the spar of a sunken s.h.i.+p which they at first took to be a periscope. They shattered that spar at a distance of 2,000 yards--more than a mile.

Filled with the enthusiasm of each new encounter with the enemy, the Americans have not been slow to build upon their experience, devising more effective methods against the next affray. For example, two officers working on designs for new destroyers have introduced many new ideas gained from their experiences in submarine-hunting. Suggestions relating to improved gun-fire and the like are always arising from the men of the fleet, and often they are accepted and applied.

A new appliance--I don't know by whom invented--is an improved microphone, by which the revolutions of a propeller are not only heard, but the direction also is indicated, while the force of the under-water sound-waves are translated on an indicator in terms of proximity. The great drawback to this is that the submarines are also equipped with microphones of the sort--or at least are said to be.

It is usually a grim business on both sides; but occasionally a bit of humor comes out of the seas. A case in point was the message received almost every night by an American destroyer in European waters. The radiogram said:

"My position is ---- degrees north, and ---- degrees west. Come and get me; I am waiting for you."

"HANS ROSE."

Now Hans Rose was the name of the German submarine commander who visited Newport, October, 1917, as we have already narrated. Twice the destroyer proceeded swiftly to the location, but never did Hans Rose keep his appointment. If he had the American sailors would not have given Captain Rose's crew beer upon that occasion, as they did when Rose and his U-boat dropped into Newport harbor.

Then there is a submarine commander known throughout the American flotilla as "Kelly." He commands a mine-laying submarine, which pays frequent visits to the district patrolled by the American destroyers.

When he has finished his task of distributing his mines where they will do the most harm, he generally devotes a few minutes to a prank of some sort. Sometimes, it is a note flying from a buoy, scribbled in schoolboy English, and addressed to his American enemy. On other occasions Kelly and his men leave the submarine and saunter along a desolate stretch of Irish sh.o.r.e-line, always leaving behind them a placard or other memento of their visit.

But the most hazardous exploit, according to gossip of American forecastles, was a visit which Kelly made to Dublin, remaining, it is said, for two days at one of the princ.i.p.al hotels, and later rejoining his boat somewhere on the west coast.

His latest feat was to visit an Irish village and plant the German flag on a rise of land above the town. One may imagine how the Irish fisherfolk, who have suffered from mines, treated this flag and how ardently they wished that flag were the body of Kelly.

But Kelly and his less humorously inclined commanders have been having a diminis.h.i.+ng stock of enjoyment at the expense of the Allied navies in the past year. Senator Swanson, acting chairman of the Naval Committee in Congress, said on June 6, after a conference with Secretary Daniels and his a.s.sistants, that the naval forces of the Entente Powers had destroyed 60 per cent of all German submarines constructed, and that they had cut the s.h.i.+pping losses in half. Lloyd George in his great speech last July, said that 150 submarines had been sunk since war began and of this number 75 were sunk in the past 12 months. Truly an extraordinary showing.

CHAPTER VIII

Perils and Triumphs of Submarine-Hunting--The Loss of our First War-s.h.i.+p, The Converted Gunboat "Alcedo"--Bravery of Crew--"Ca.s.sin"

Struck by Torpedo, But Remains in the Fight--Loss of the "Jacob Jones"--Sinking of the "San Diego"--Destroyers "Nicholson" and "Fanning"

Capture a Submarine, Which Sinks--Crew of Germans Brought Into Port--The Policy of Silence in Regard to Submarine-Sinkings

But as in the pursuit of dangerous game there is always liable to be two angles to any experience--or say, rather, a reverse angle, such as the hunted turning hunter--so in the matter of our fight against the submarine there are instances--not many, happily--where the U-boat has been able to deal its deadly blow first.

The first of our war-s.h.i.+ps to be sunk by a submarine was the naval patrol gun-boat _Alcedo_, which was torpedoed shortly before 2 o'clock on the morning of November 5, 1917, almost exactly seven months after we entered the war. She was formerly G. W. Childs Drexel's yacht _Alcedo_, and Anthony J. Drexel Paul, an officer in the Naval Reserve, was on her at the time. The vessel was the flag-s.h.i.+p of one of the patrol-flotillas, and for months had performed splendid service in the North Sea.

The torpedo that sunk the vessel came without warning, and so true was the aim that the war-s.h.i.+p went down in four minutes, carrying with her one officer and twenty of the crew. Commander William T. Conn, U.S.N., who commanded the vessel, in telling later of the experience, paid a high testimonial to the coolness and bravery of the crew. Eighty per cent of the men were reserves, but regulars could have left no better record of courage and precision.

"Here," said Commander Conn, "is a story that indicates the kind of men we have in the navy. I had a young lad in my crew, a yeoman, and one day I sent for him and told him that if we were ever torpedoed he was to save the muster-roll, so that when it was all over it would be possible to check up and find who had been saved. Well, the _Alcedo_ was torpedoed at 2 o'clock one morning, and in four minutes she disappeared forever. Hours afterward, when we were waiting to be picked up, I saw my yeoman, and I said:

"'Son, where is my muster-roll?'

"'Here it is,' he replied, as he reached inside his s.h.i.+rt and pulled it out.... And that same boy, in the terrible minutes that followed the loss of our s.h.i.+p, found a broken buoy. He was holding on to it when he saw one of our hospital stewards, who was about to give in. He struggled to the side of the steward and with one hand held him above the water while with the other he clung to the buoy. He held on until both were saved."

While the _Alcedo_ was the first war-vessel to be sunk by a submarine, the first war-s.h.i.+p to be stricken in torpedo attack was the destroyer _Ca.s.sin_, one of the vessels that raced out of Newport to rescue the victims of the ravages of the German U-boat off Nantucket, in October, 1916. The _Ca.s.sin_ was on patrol duty and had sighted a submarine about four miles away. The destroyer, in accordance with custom, headed for the spot, and had about reached it when the skipper, Commander Walter H.

Vernon, sighted a torpedo running at high speed near the surface, and about 400 yards away. The missile was headed straight for the mids.h.i.+p section of the war-s.h.i.+p. Realizing the situation, the commanding officer rang for the emergency full speed ahead on both engines, put the rudder hard over, and was just clear of the torpedo's course when it broached on the water, turned sharply and headed for the stern of the vessel.

Here stood Osmond Kelly Ingram, gunner's mate, at his gun. He saw that if the torpedo struck at the stern it would, aside from working initial damage, cause the explosion of munitions stored on the after deck.

Thereupon, knowing that the torpedo was going to strike about where he stood, he ran to the pile of munitions and tumbled them into the sea.

The explosion occurred as he was at work, and he was blown into the ocean and lost. But he had not died in vain, for the secondary explosion that he feared was averted by his act of supreme sacrifice.

Fortunately, only one engine was disabled by the explosion, and the destroyer was thus permitted to remain under way. She zigzagged to and fro, hoping to get a chance at her a.s.sailant, and in about an hour the German submarine commander decided that it was a good time to come to the surface for a better look at the destroyer. As the conning-tower came into view the _Ca.s.sin's_ gunners delivered four shots, two of which fell so close to the U-boat that she submerged and was not seen again.

In the meantime the crew, with splendid team-work, set about repairing the damage and attending to the five men who were wounded, none seriously.

After a while British war-s.h.i.+ps came up and the _Ca.s.sin_ returned to port. Admiral Sims mentioned Commander Vernon and his officers in despatches to Secretary Daniels, and more than a score of the seamen were cited for coolness and efficiency.

Our second war-s.h.i.+p definitely known to be sunk by the German submarines was the destroyer _Jacob Jones_, which was struck at 4.12 o'clock on the afternoon of December 6, last. The destroyer was on patrol, and nothing was known of the proximity of the submarine until the torpedo hit the vessel. The _Jacob Jones_, which was commanded by Lieutenant-Commander David Worth Bagley, a brother-in-law of Secretary Daniels and brother of Ensign Worth Bagley, who was killed on the torpedo-boat _Winslow_ in the fight at Cardenas in the Spanish-American War, went down in seventeen minutes after she was struck. Gunner Harry R. Hood was killed by the explosion, but the remainder of the company got safely overside in rafts and boats. The submarine appeared after the sinking and took one of the survivors aboard as a prisoner. Lieutenant-Commander Bagley, with five others, landed in a small boat on the Scilly Islands while other survivors reached sh.o.r.e in various ways. The _Jacob Jones_ was regarded by superst.i.tious navy men as something of a Jonah, she having figured in one or two incidents involving German spies while in this country.

The first and to date the only American war-s.h.i.+p lost in American waters as a result of submarine attack was the armored cruiser _San Diego_--formerly the _California_--which was sunk by a mine off Point o'

Woods on the Long Island coast on the morning of July 19, 1918. Facts a.s.sociated with the disaster, involving the loss of some fifty lives, are illuminated with the light of supreme heroism, gallantry, and utter devotion. In no single instance was there failure on the part of officers or crew to meet the unexpected test in a manner quite in accordance with the most glorious annals of the United States Navy.

Point will perhaps be given to this if we picture Captain Harley H.

Christie pus.h.i.+ng his way about the welter of wreckage in a barrel, reorganizing some 800 of his men, who were floating about on every conceivable sort of object, into the disciplined unit that they had comprised before they were ordered overside to take their chances in the ocean. Or again, taking the enlisted-man aspect of the situation, there was the full-throated query of a husky seaman, clinging to a hatch as the _San Diego_ disappeared:

"Where's the captain?"

Then a chorus of voices from the water:

"There he is! See his old bald head! G.o.d bless it! Three cheers for the skip!"