"To hell with her—ram her anyway!" snapped Lanahan.
The deck officer had not once taken the glasses off the periscope. Suddenly he let drop his glasses, grabbed the wheel and pulled it hard toward him.
Lanahan had stepped to the wing of the bridge and was leaning far out to get a glimpse of the U-boat. What he saw beneath him as his ship scraped by was not a U-boat, but a great white mine. He watched it slide safely past the bridge, past his quarter, past his stern. Then, turning around, he said gravely to his deck officer:
"You're right—it was a mine."
There was another young officer—Chisholm call him—who played poker occasionally. He commanded a flivver, which is the service name for the smaller class of destroyers, the 750-ton ones.
In our navy there are plenty of young officers who will tell you that they never built destroyers which keep the sea better than that same little flivver class. Young Captain Chisholm of the 323 was one.
One morning, having convoyed a fleet of merchant ships safely up the channel, the 323 was one of a group of destroyers making the best of their way to their base port. Officers and men who have been hunting U-boats for a week or so do not like to linger along the road home; so it was every young captain giving his ship all the steam she could stand and let her belt.
It was breaking white water all around when they started. It grew rougher. Chisholm in the 323 was going along at twenty knots when a poker-playing chum came along in his big 1,000-ton destroyer. Her nose hauled up on the quarter of the 323; up to her beam; up to her bridge. As he passed the 323—and he passed quite close to let all hands view the passing—the poker-playing friend leaned out and megaphoned across:
"What you making, Chiz?"