To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

by Lewis R. Freeman

Going aft to breakfast, I was hailed by Korvettenkapitän M—— (the officer commanding all Baltic air stations who was accompanying us to Warnemünde and Rügen), warming himself at the engine-room hatchway, and informed that the ship just sighted was "the famous raider, Moewe, that has been so many times through the English blockade." It was he that was correct, as it turned out. We found the Moewe anchored three or four cables' lengths on the port bow of the Hercules when we returned to Kiel the following evening.

They were two thoroughly typical specimens of their kind, the pilot and the flight commander, so much so that either would have been pounced on with delight by a cartoonist looking for a model for a figure of "Hun Brutality." The former claimed to have served most of the war in U-boats, and from the fact that he was only a "one-striper," one reckoned that he was a promoted rating of some kind. He was tall, dark, and powerful of build, with hard black eyes glowering from under bushy brows. He talked of his submarine exploits with the greatest gusto, among these being (according to his claim) the launching of the torpedo which damaged the Sussex. It is possible that he was quite as useful a U-boat officer as he said he was (for he looked fully capable of doing a number of the things one had heard of U-boat officers doing); but he turned out, as the sequel proved, only an indifferent pilot.

The flight officer is easiest described by saying that he was like what one would imagine Hindenburg to have been at thirty-five or thereabouts. The resemblance to the great Field-Marshal was physical only, for the anti-type, far from having the "bluff, blunt fighter" air of the former, was a subtle intriguer of the highest order. Just how "subtle" he was may be judged from the fact that within ten minutes of coming aboard that morning he had drawn one of the British officers aside to warn him of the menace to England in Wilson's "fourteen points," and that, a quarter of an hour after the snub this kindly advice won him, he had cornered one of the American officers to bid him beware of the inevitable attack his country must very soon expect from England and Japan.

"HINDY" (LEFT) AND GERMAN PILOT WHO CLAIMED TO HAVE LAUNCHED THE TORPEDO WHICH DAMAGED THE "SUSSEX"

A half-hour more "by luck and lead" took us out of the fog, and an almost normal visibility made it possible for the Viceroy to increase to her "economic" cruising speed of seventeen knots. The red roofs of the summer hotels along Warnemünde's waterfront began pushing above the horizon a little after noon, and by one we were heading in to where the mouth of a broad canal opened up behind a long stone breakwater. A large ferry steamer, flying the Danish flag, was just rounding the end of the breakwater and turning off to the north-west, and from the word "Armistice" painted on her sides in huge white letters we took it she was engaged in repatriating Allied prisoners by way of Copenhagen. As we closed her, this impression was confirmed by the sight of two men in the unmistakable uniforms of British officers pacing the after-deck arm-in-arm. Surprised that they appeared to be taking no notice of the Viceroy, with the White Ensign at her stern doing its best to flap them a message of encouragement, I raised my glass and scanned them closely. Then the dark glasses both were wearing, and their slow uncertain steps, at once suggested the sad explanation of their indifference. There was no doubt the sight of both was seriously affected, and that they were probably hardly able more than to feel their way around. As nothing less than "Rule Britannia" or "God Save the King" on the syren would have given them any hint of how things stood, we had to pass on unrecognized.

Running a quarter of a mile up the canal, the Viceroy went alongside the wall a hundred yards above the railway station. The news of our arrival had spread quickly in the town, and among a considerable crowd which assembled along the waterfront were a number of British prisoners, most of them in their khaki. Several German sailors—one or two of them with white bands on their arms—to whom the Tommies had been talking, kept discreetly in the background, but the latter, grinning with delight and exchanging good-natured chaff with the bluejackets, caught our mooring lines and helped make them fast. They looked in extremely good condition and spirits, the consequence—as we learned presently—of having had a considerable accumulation of prisoners' stores turned over to them since the armistice. Beer, they said, was the only thing they were short of, and this difficulty they seemed in a fair way to remedy when I left with the "air" party for the seaplane station.

The great Warnemünde experiment station occupied the grounds of what appeared to have been some kind of a pre-war industrial or agricultural exposition. Crossing the canal in a launch, a few steps took us to and through a somewhat pretentious entrance arch, from where it was several hundred yards to the first of a long row of wood and steel hangars. The Commander of the station had received us at the landing; the rest of the officers met us in the roadway in front of the first shed to be inspected. Evidences of the resentment they undoubtedly felt over having to give way in the matter of the visit (it had been the German contention that Warnemünde, not being a service station, was not liable to inspection under the terms of the armistice) were not lacking, but as these were mostly confined to scowling glances they did not interfere seriously with the work in hand.

As the Allied Commission, in the conference of a couple of days previously at Kiel, had insisted on the visit to Warnemünde on the grounds of satisfying itself that what the Germans claimed was an experiment station was not used for service work, inspection was limited to the comparatively perfunctory checking over of the machines against a list furnished in advance, seeing that they displayed no evidences of having been used for anything more than experimental flights, and ascertaining that they had been properly disarmed. This, as soon as it became evident that the station was in fact quite what the Germans had claimed it to be, was done very rapidly, the inspection of well over a hundred machines, housed in eight or ten different sheds, being completed within three hours.

The machines were, of course, an extremely interesting assortment, for practically all of them were either new designs or else old ones in process of development. There was the last word in steel pontoons, with which the Germans have been so successful, and also a number of the very striking all-metal Junker machines, in the construction of which wood, and even fabric, has been replaced by the light but tough alloy called "duraluminum." One of the German officers volunteered the information that the principal advantage of the latter over the ordinary machine was the fact that more of it could be salved after a crash. The fact that there was nothing to burn sometimes rendered it possible to save an injured pilot entangled in the wreckage, where the wood and fabric of an ordinary machine would have made him a funeral pyre. Against these advantages, he added, stood the handicap of greater weight and the fact that the metal wings occasionally deflected into the pilot or petrol tank a bullet which would have passed harmlessly through wood and fabric.