Submarine Warfare of To-day / How the Submarine Menace Was Met and Vanquished, with Descriptions of the Inventions and Devices Used, Fast Boats, Mystery Ships, Nets, Aircraft, &c. &c., Also Describing the Selection and Training of the Enormous Personnel Used in This New Branch of the Navy

by Charles W. Domville-Fife

After seamanship came gunnery. Each of the different types of heavy but finely made weapons had to be learned in detail—a feat of memory when it came to the watch-like mechanism of the Maxim. Guns were disabled and had to be put right. They missed fire and were made by the instructors—old naval gunners—to play every dastardly trick conceivable. The final test which had to be successfully passed was the dismantling of each type of gun used in the auxiliary fleet and the reassembling of it.

With gunnery came also the marks and uses of the different kinds of ammunition, the systems of "spotting" and "range-finding." Every gun had its officer crew and the rapidity of fire was recorded. Each man in turn was chosen to give the necessary orders and to judge the ranges and deflections. In this way not only was the practical work learned by heart, but also the theory of naval gunnery, so far as it related to the smaller types of weapon.

The use of the depth charge, both mechanically and tactically, was expounded and practically demonstrated, together with that of the torpedo, the mine, mine laying and sweeping, and the peculiarities of various explosives. Rifle and revolver practice was encouraged, and morse and semaphore signalling formed part of the daily routine.

The training was not entirely preparatory for work afloat. Squad and company drill, rifle and bayonet exercise, and man[oe]uvring in extended order formed a part of the comprehensive training. One day, not many weeks after their arrival, the officers whose fortunes have been followed found themselves shouting orders and directing by arm and whistle lines of dusty camarades advancing over a common in the most approved military fashion.

The training was not all hard work. The gathering of so many men from all quarters of the world, with a wealth of experience and adventure behind them, was in itself a source of mutual interest—and incidentally an education in modern British Imperialism. Scarcely any part of the world went for long unrepresented in either the wardroom or gunroom of the old cruiser Hermione in those days of war, and many were the yarns told of Alaska days, hunting in Africa, experiences in remote corners of North America, pearling in the Pacific and life on the Indian frontier, to say nothing of wild nights on the seven seas. Grey heads and round, boyish faces, the university and the frontier, with a camaraderie seldom equalled.

The period of training in the old cruiser was drawing to a close when each officer was appointed to "Boat Duty." There were five launches on duty at a time, and their crews had to be instantly ready day and night. The most coveted were the two 21-knot boats, used almost exclusively for the conveyance of pilots to and from the hospital ships and transports. Then came the patrol boat, a slow old tub with a comfortable cabin, and work out on Southampton Water at night. The three "duty boats" were for emergency use and were held at the disposal of the naval transport officer.

The duties on each boat varied and were in the nature of training. The pilot boat was required to lie alongside the cutter, out beyond the harbour, and to convey the pilots at high speed to and from the stream of shipping. It was a pleasant duty which entailed alternate nights in the generous, breezy company of the old sea-dogs of the cutter, with occasional races at half-a-mile a minute through the darkness and spray to the moving leviathans of the ocean.

The patrol ambled up and down the sheltered waterways during the day and night, examining the "permits" of fishermen and preventing the movement of small craft during the hours of darkness, when the long lines of troop-ships were leaving for France.

The work of the duty boats varied from day to day, but there was always the morning and evening mail to be collected from and delivered to the ships of the auxiliary fleet lying out in the fair-way.

When this spell of water-police work was over there came a few days' practice in the handling of the fast sea-going patrol launches, or "M.L.'s," about which so much has since been written in the daily papers.