Under the periscope

by Mark Herbert Joseph Bennett

‘“Flood the auxiliary,” he shouted, and I knew by his voice that something was wrong. “Take her down,” he cried, “lively now.”

‘Then I heard an E.R.A. calling for a wheel-spanner, and I ran aft to find that the Kingston had jammed and they couldn’t open it, and all the time the noise was getting louder and louder. We flooded the buoyancy and speeded up, and she was just going down (you know we always carried a light trim in those old boats) when the rumbling grew into a roar and there was a terrific clang for’ard and a rush of water, and we knew that some one’s propeller had cut clean through the skin. The lights went out and there was another bang and spout of water in the after compartment, and down we went.

‘“Control room, men,” yelled Belton. “Close the engine-room bulkhead.”

‘Somebody brought it to, and as the engine-room wasn’t pierced we knew we had that much buoyancy at any rate, and with the water pouring in in sheets we hit the bottom and the men tumbled into the control room and banged the doors. There was a good four feet of water there by then, and we’d filled the bilge.

‘Luckily some one had brought an emergency lamp with him, and we switched it on down there in the darkness. The depth-gauge was steady at 48 feet, and the crew was packed in that small air-lock. We could hear the water rising on both sides of us, and spurts of it came through the watertight doors. Then by-and-by the sound ceased, and we knew that save for the engine-room and the control room the boat was full up to the hatches.’

‘My God,’ I grunted involuntarily, as Allison paused to drink.

‘We mustered the crew,’ he continued, ‘and found that two were missing: a stoker named Howell who had been on watch doing some job or other in the engine-room, and had been shut in when the bulkhead door was closed, and the T.I., who had been with me at the tubes.

‘The stoker, of course, would be all right so far, and as it happened he saved himself and is in hospital now recovering from shock. The T.I., we knew, was dead. He must have tripped over something in the darkness on his way aft, and the door had been closed before he could get to it. Poor devil, there was a gash about two feet long in the hull, and he must have watched the water rising till it jammed him up against the arch of the roof and drowned him as it rose.

‘Poor old Belton looked anxious; he had the lives of all of us on his hands, and the men just stood round and said nothing.

‘We blew what we could, but she hadn’t got a central control like we have in the later boats, and of course nothing happened. The depth-gauge stuck at 48 feet, and the air was getting bad already. There were fourteen of us in the control room—a space about seven feet by nine.