I gave him a “lead” for the U-boat yarn he had lured me there to hear, and he launched into it at once. This is the story the young signalman of U.S.S. Sherill told me, the while the red squares of the cottagers’ windows blinked blandly along the bank in the lengthening twilight and the purple shadows of the western hills piled deeper and duskier upon the “quiet waters of the River Lee.”
“We were out on convoy,” he said, speaking the first words slowly between the teeth which held the string of the tobacco sack from which the gently manipulated paper in his hand had been filled. “It was some kind of a slow convoy—probably a collier or an oiler or two—and there were only two of us on the job—the McSmall and the Sherill. It was
just the usual ding-dong sort of a drudge up to about four in the afternoon of the first day out, when the McSmall made a signal that she had sighted a submarine on the starboard bow of the convoy, distant about five miles, and immediately stood off to the west to see if anything like a strafe could be started. She was more than hull-down on the horizon when I saw, by the way the angle of her funnels was changing, that she was manœuvring to shake loose a few ‘cans’ into the oil-slick she had run into, but I remember distinctly that I felt the jolt of the under-water explosions stronger than from many we had kicked loose from the Sherill, and which had detonated only a hundred yards or so off. It’s just a little trick the depth-charge has. The force of it seems to shoot out in streaks, just like an explosion in the air, and you may feel it strong at a distance and much less at fairly close range. So far as we ever learned, this opening salvo did not find its target.
“Meanwhile the Sherill was escorting to the best of her ability alone. Or at least we thought we were alone. About half an hour after the McSmall had laid those first ‘cans,’ however, one of the quartermasters reported sighting a periscope on the port quarter of the convoy, about five hundred yards distant, and headed away. We signalled its presence to the convoy, turned eight points to port, and drove at full speed for the point where the wake of the moving finger had pinched out.
“We had received a report that morning to the effect that two submarines were operating in these waters, and there is just the chance, therefore, that this was a joint attack. Everything considered, however, we have been inclined to believe that the Fritz we were now starting to make the acquaintance of was the same one which the McSmall was still assiduously hunting some miles off to the westward. It was a mighty smart piece of ‘Pussy-wants-a-corner’ work, shifting his position like that under the circumstances; but it was quite possible if the Fritz only had the guts for it, and that I think you’ll have to admit this particular one had.
“It’s seconds that count in a destroyer attack on a U-boat, and the captain hadn’t lost a tick in jumping into this one. The dissolving ‘V’ which the ducked-in periscope had left behind it was still visible in the smooth water when the Sherill’s forefoot slashed into it, and it was only a few hundred yards beyond that a slow undulant upcoiling of currents marked, faintly but unmistakably, the under-water progress of the game we were after. There was no oil-slick, understand, because an uninjured submarine only leaves that behind—except through carelessness—when it dives after a spell on the surface running under engines. Then the exhausts cough up a lot of grease and oil, and a layer of this, sticking to the stern, leaves a trail that rises for some little time after submergence,
and which almost any kind of a dub who has been told what to look for can follow.
“The spotting of the surface wake of a deep-down submarine, and the holding of it after it almost disappears with the slowing down of the screws that make it, is quite another thing. That takes a man with more than a keen eye—it takes instinct, mixed with a lot of common sense. It’s a common thing to say of a successful look-out that he has a ‘quick nose for submarines.’ The expression is used more or less figuratively, of course; and yet the nose—the sense smell—is by no means a negligible factor in detecting the presence, and even the bearing, of a hunted U-boat. I will tell you shortly how it figured in this particular instance.