The sea mounted higher and higher in the lonely prison cell. Officers and crew tried to staunch the inflow, to stop the leaks with tow and other likely material. These devices held for a little, then burst away. Some sought to make their escape through the conning-tower, as Goodhart of the British Navy had done;[[18]] others tried to force a way out via the torpedo-tubes. Bolts were wrenched off, fastenings filed through. The doors held firm. The mighty efforts of the men met with no reward. They fell back exhausted and covered with sweat. The pressure from without would have thwarted a score of Samsons. The hatches remained immovable.
They read the handwriting on the curved walls of their prison: “No hope!” The crew must have cursed the Hohenzollerns then. Despair robbed them of reason. One fellow went mad, then another, followed by a third. A man plunged into the water, now up to his knees. His overwrought brain could stand the terrible strain no longer. He drowned in two feet of water. Nobody moved to pull him out. The place became a Bedlam. A comrade tried to shoot himself. The revolver merely clicked. In a passion of rage he flung both weapon and himself into the rising flood. Death was the most desired of all things.
A plate burst, letting in a Niagara. The swirl of waters increased the pressure of air against the hatches. One of them burst open. Those who remained alive were carried off their feet and hurled through the aperture. The blind forces of Nature succeeded where man had failed. A mangled mass of human flotsam was flung to the surface. Two maimed bodies alone had life in them when a British trawler steamed by. A boat was lowered, the half-dead forms fished out of the sea. Then the enemy, potential victims of these men but an hour before, did what they could to alleviate their agony. That is the spirit and the tradition of the British Sea Service, though the sufferer be the Devil himself.
A survivor of a neutral ship blown up by a U-boat, who was kept swimming about for ten minutes before being rescued because the officers wanted to take some snap-shots, avowed that he and his mates were compelled to lend a hand with the ammunition. That was the Huns’ method of making them pay their way. Their ‘dungeon,’ to quote the narrator, was “furnished with tubes, pressure gauges, flywheels, torpedoes, and the floor paved with shells.” The life he characterized as “monotonous.” During their stay of twelve days five vessels were sunk.
As “a recognition of meritorious work during the war” the Kaiser created a special decoration for officers, petty officers, and crews of submarines on the completion of their third voyage. That did not make them any the more enamoured of mines and wasserbomben.
CHAPTER III
Germany’s Submersible Fleet
“The submarine is the hunted to-day.”—Sir Eric Geddes.
In the first phase of the Underseas War torpedoes were the favourite weapons of the U-boat. The work was done more effectively and quicker than was possible with the comparatively small guns then mounted. Later, the number of ships attacked by shellfire rapidly increased. This was due to several reasons. The second method of attack was considerably less expensive, for a torpedo costs anything from £750 to £1000. Comparatively few merchant vessels had any means of defence, for ramming was seldom practicable, and other dodges, such as obscuring the vessel by voluminous smoke from the funnels, and steering stern on, thus presenting a relatively small target, were equally uncertain. Altogether the submarine had things very much her own way. She could carry an augmented provision of ammunition, and the difficulties of supply were more easily met. It takes longer to make a torpedo than to turn a shell; to train a torpedo expert than a gunner. If no British patrol were at hand, the German commander could safely risk waging war on the surface. He did not have to return to his base so frequently for the purpose of replenishing empty magazines, and he was saving money for the dear Fatherland. With increasing range of action the necessity for conserving torpedoes became more pronounced. The menace grew to such proportions in the Mediterranean that it was found necessary to send vessels by the long Cape route instead of via the Suez Canal.
When slow-moving John Bull at last bestirred himself and decided to arm merchantmen, the risks of an exposed U-boat were considerably increased. The torpedo again came into her own. As Mr Winston Churchill told the House of Commons,[[19]] “the effect of putting guns on a merchant ship is to drive the submarine to abandon the use of the gun, to lose its surface speed, and to fall back on the much slower speed under water and the use of the torpedo. The torpedo, compared with the gun, is a weapon of much more limited application.”
Germany’s maritime faith being based on the U-boat, despite the Kaiser’s dictum that “our future lies on the water,” many keen scientific brains there had a part in its recent evolution. Whereas in 1914 the latest type, such as U 30, could travel 300 miles submerged or 3500 miles entirely on the surface—the latter trip an impossibility, of course, with the British Navy in being—at least 8800 miles were traversed by the submarine which in 1918 bombarded Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. This is assuming that she returned to her home port in Europe.