He then outlined to them the story of the hunt and attack, showing the significance of what they had done. Then with a final word of congratulation he left them and went forward. Whatever else those men forgot about the war in after years, they never forgot that.
The men on all the ships were tired; the depth charges were so nearly expended that had another submarine been found they couldn’t have attacked her with much hope of success. Therefore they laid their course for Punta Delgada and in the early dawn, twenty-six hours later, slipped into the harbor and tied up to their moorings.
Commander Fraser submitted to the Force Commander a report of the hunt, which was a model of instructive exposition. Copies of it were distributed among all the destroyer captains for their enlightenment and for the instruction of the officers under them. It made a great stir, and was the chief topic of wardroom talk for the best part of a week. Those skippers who studied it intelligently, grasped the lesson taught, and then prepared their own ships to follow the lead, soon began to harass the enemy submarines. Two or three squadrons, conscientiously practicing the method indicated, actually had encounters in which they sank their victims. Those skippers who lacked the imagination and faith to see and do the thing right continued to grope listlessly in the dark, and laid the success of the others to luck.
One result of all this was that the enemy began to realize they were losing submarines at an increasing rate; and consequently they studied carefully the reports of those that came back damaged. This study led the submarine commanders to operate with greater caution, to zigzag, and especially to refrain as far as possible from using their radio. And soon the upshot of this was that, while the Allied shipping had gained materially in the restrictions placed on their ability to do damage, the enemy submarines became almost as hard to find as ever.
CHAPTER VII
THE FLEET ARRIVES
In August the preparation of Punta Delgada as a base for the entire fleet was completed, and the fleet arrived. In supreme command was Admiral Johnson, a distinguished figure, a man of commanding personality, well trained in his profession, and conspicuous for his faculty of maintaining the morale of the fleet at its best.
The change at Punta Delgada was impressive. Hitherto the informality of the destroyer had characterized the life there; now all the pomp and ceremony of the battleship pervaded the place. Where once the most typical sight had been officers and men, in old and paint-smooched uniforms or in dungarees, working among the torpedo tubes and engine hatches on the cramped deck of a lean destroyer, now the eye turned to the mighty dreadnaught with her vast expanse of quarter-deck, immaculately clean, on which paced to and fro officers in faultless uniform. The sea was dotted with these great ships and with scouts and armored cruisers and a host of auxiliary craft. Liberty parties came and went, and the picturesque old town swarmed with American blue-jackets, interspersed with the sailors of the British and French navies.
It is the pride of radio officers and radio chiefs in the fleet to be able to deal with their own problems when away from the home Navy Yard—to be independent of outside help. So it was with the fleet at Punta Delgada. Problems they had, but it would not occur to the radio personnel of a battleship to look for help in their solution to the mother-ship of a destroyer flotilla. Yet it wasn’t long before the radio chiefs on the battleships discovered that the radio test shop where Evans worked was a place worth visiting. Interesting things were to be seen there, and ideas and hints could be informally picked up which somehow helped them make their apparatus work when they got back to their own ships. Thus the little laboratory came more and more to be sought as an oracle. As a consequence of this, Evans soon came to be welcome in the radio rooms of the various battleships and cruisers where problems existed.
Lieutenant Larabee, under whom Evans was technically supposed to perform his duties, naturally felt that his handy gunner belonged to the flotilla, and he was prone to demur a bit at his digressions into the battle fleet. But he had come to feel that Evans’s activities were somewhat difficult to control, and that after all it was just as well not to try to control them too rigidly. Besides, Larabee had sense enough to see that, if Evans’s services could be really useful to the fleet, the fleet had better have them.
Evans found the radio equipment in too many of the ships in a disappointing condition, the more modern apparatus was badly installed and very poorly understood by the personnel. The new British vacuum-tube transmitter on very few ships was giving the efficient service and satisfaction of which it was capable. He soon discovered to his dismay that just where perfection of apparatus was of most vital importance to the entire fleet—where it ought to count for as much as in all the other ships put together—in Admiral Johnson’s flagship—there all the best efforts of the Bureau of Engineering to make the nerve center of the fleet perfect had been slighted. His first visit to the flagship made his heart sink. Because of her supreme importance in directing the whole fleet, her radio room had been enlarged and equipped with apparatus more highly developed than had ever been seen aboard ship. Special methods had been devised to expedite the handling of the great and complex volume of dispatches to all branches of the fleet which in a great naval action must go on without interference or confusion. The initial installation had been made, but the space needed for using it properly had been encroached upon for miscellaneous storage purposes, and the most valuable features of the installation had been neglected and abused till it was woefully crippled. The plan of fleet control so carefully worked out in the Bureau was frustrated at its central point, in the flagship.