Our Navy in the War

by Lawrence Perry

The trawler hovered about in the same locality for three days, and then one morning, lo and behold, a periscope popped up close alongside. Seeing the waters clear of enemy ships, the U-boat came to the surface and frisked blithely up to the trawler. She was greeted by a shower of machine-gun bullets, and surrendered without ado. There was really nothing else for the surprised skipper to do. For when he had last seen that trawler she was the parent ship of the submarine flotilla operating in that vicinity. In all, before the week was over, that trawler had captured six submarines without the loss of a life, and no one injured.

Thereafter the parent-ship trawler was seized whenever the British could capture one, and the same expedient was tried. But after a time the Germans became wary of approaching parent-ships until they were convinced that their parenthood was more real than assumed.

Then one day after the Americans arrived a three-masted schooner was commandeered. They put a deck-load of lumber on her; at least it was an apparent deck-load. It was really a mask for a broadside of 3-pounder guns, different sections of the deck-load swinging open to admit of free play of the guns, as levers were pulled.

The schooner, commanded by a Maine skipper and his crew, was turned loose in the North Sea. Astern towed a dingy; from the taffrail flew the American flag. Before long out popped a submarine. Aha! A lumber-laden vessel—American! The German commander, grinning broadly, stepped into a gig with a bombing crew; torpedoes were not wasted on sailing-vessels.

"Get into your dingy," he cried, motioning toward the craft dangling astern.

The Maine skipper, in his red underclothes, besought, and then cursed—while the German grinned the more broadly. Finally, however, the irate—sic—skipper and his crew of five clambered into their dingy as ordered by the commander of the submarine. And then! No sooner had the schooner crew cleared the wind-jammer than the deck-load of lumber resolved itself into a series of doors, and out of each door protruded a gun. It was the last of that submarine, of course. The schooner got five submarines before another submarine happened to witness the destruction of a companion craft.

Next day when the schooner approached a submarine the undersea boat let drive with a torpedo, and the joyous days of that particular wind-jammer were at an end. But thereafter the Germans seldom tried to bomb a sailing craft.

Airplanes have played their important part in the work of our navy in combating the submarine. Seaplanes are sent on patrol from regular bases or from the deck of a parent-vessel, a steamship of large size. Flying at a height of 10,000 feet, an airplane operator can see the shadow of a submarine proceeding beneath the surface. Thus viewing his prey, the aviator descends and drops a depth-bomb into the water. Our airmen have already won great commendation from the British Admiralty and aerial commanders. Whatever may have been the delays in airplane production in this country, the American Navy has not been at fault, and Secretary Daniels's young men went into British seaplanes when American planes were not at hand. From British Admiralty sources have come many tales of the skill and courage of the American aviators. There was one recent instance noted of an American pilot scouting for submarines who spotted a periscope. He dropped a bomb a few feet astern and a few feet ahead of that periscope, both bombs falling perfectly in line with the objective. He circled and then dropped a bomb in the centre of a disturbance in the water. Up came oil in great quantities.

Another American pilot managed the rare feat of dropping a bomb precisely upon the centre of the deck of a submarine, and had the unhappy experience of seeing it fail to explode—as recently happened in the submarine fight off Cape Cod, near Chatham.

In hunting for the submarines the American destroyers have patrolled an area as wide as that bounded roughly by the great V formed by New York, Detroit, and Knoxville, Tenn. And while patrolling they have become skilled in the use of the depth charges, in establishing smoke screens so as to hide vessels of a convoy from the periscope eye, and in marksmanship. One gun crew not long ago saw the spar of a sunken ship which they at first took to be a periscope. They shattered that spar at a distance of 2,000 yards—more than a mile.