The commander of one group named his boats in jingles or phrases. Three boats, as I have stated, constituted a submarine hunting unit. One set he designated as "red-white-blue," another as "corn-meal-mush," and a third as "high-low-jack." "Quack! Quack! Quack!" meant "operate at once."
The men were fond of making parodies on "Mother Goose" and other familiar rhymes, applicable to their job of hunting the U-boats. One of these, paraphrasing "The Spider and the Fly," went this way:
"Won't you come into my area?" said the chaser to the "sub";
"I'll treat you just as kindly as I would a tiger cub;
"I will listen to your motors, I will catch you without fail,
"And then I promise I will put some salt upon your tail."
What do you suppose the Germans thought of all this queer stuff that was coming over the radiophone? I should have liked to have seen the U-boat captains under water, and code experts in Berlin searching the books and racking their brains to find out its meaning, for no boats or calls or orders were ever phrased in such language before.
The sub-chasers put the Navy flag signals into words instead of letters. "Able-Boy!" was the code to "Take hunt formation; distance 500 yards." They had a word for every letter in the alphabet: Able, boy, cast, dog, easy, fox, George, have, item, jig, king, love, Mike, Nan, oboe, pup, quack, rot, sail, tare, unit, vice, watch, X-ray, yoke, zed.
Almost any necessary order or information could be transmitted by radiophone by means of this code. Here is a typical instance of how it worked when a submarine was heard:
Listener of Boat No. 1 reports: "Submarine, 90 degrees."