The yacht had three hundred yards to go before she passed over the spot. Her keel failed to strike and rip through the thin plates of the German craft which was, perhaps, thirty feet beneath the sea, but a bubbling wake was visible and into it the depth charges began to drop from the stern of the Corsair. The gunner’s mates played no favorites, but let go an English “ash can” with 120 pounds of TNT, then two French “Grenades Giraud,” and finally an American Sperry bomb.
All four of the Allied gifts for Fritz functioned with terrific effect. The Corsair, charging ahead at full speed to avoid being hoisted herself, was shaken as though she had hit a reef. The sea was violently agitated in a foaming upheaval. The men asleep below decks came spilling up through the hatches, convinced that the ship had been blown up. One of the French fishermen vowed that he had a glimpse of the shadowy shape of the submarine as it passed directly under the Corsair. It seemed reasonable to assume that the four depth charges had been placed where they would do the most good. Nothing could survive the destructive effect of the solid wall of water impelled by these explosions. And the submarine had been near enough, in all probability, to receive the force of these rending shocks.
The Corsair moved ahead for five minutes, along the track which the U-boat had taken when it submerged. There was the hope that it might rise to the surface disabled, but the moonlit surface of the sea was unbroken. The mist had cleared and the sky was bright. Swinging about, the Corsair retraced her path on the chance of finding some sign or token of a shattered U-boat. Soon she ran through a spreading oil slick, a patch of greasy calm amid the glinting waves, and the smell of mineral oil was strong. They sniffed it greedily aboard the Corsair and the French fishermen forgot to mourn the Eugene Louise. It was their belief that the glorious American Navy had evened the score with the Boche. The bluejackets were of the same opinion and felt confident that the Corsair would be awarded a star to display on her funnel, the Croix de Guerre of the sea, to show that she had bagged her submarine.
The officers were not quite so cock-sure. Daylight might have disclosed some bits of débris, enough wreckage to substantiate the claim beyond a shadow of doubt, but the mere presence of floating oil was no longer admitted as final proof either by the American Navy Department or the British Admiralty. Submarines were apt to leak a certain amount of fuel oil, or to blow it through the exhaust when running on the surface, and it was suspected that Fritz had learned the trick of opening a valve in order to delude the pursuers into the belief that they had crippled or smashed him.
In this instance, however, the circumstantial evidence was very strongly in favor of the Corsair, even though officials ashore might decline to give her documentary credit. The submarine had been unusually close aboard, almost under the ship, when four depth charges were let go and all exploded perfectly. Commander Kittinger was so reluctant to claim too much that he presented no more than the terse facts and let the matter rest with that. Earlier in the war, destroyers had been granted the star on a funnel for evidence no more conclusive than this—depth charges dropped within a fatal radius and the presence of abundant fuel oil as the aftermath.
GUNNER’S MATES BARKO AND MOORE, AND A DEPTH CHARGE
WATCHING THE APHRODITE GO OUT ON PATROL “HOPE SHE GETS A SUB”
It is highly probable that the Corsair wiped one U-boat from the active list on this moonlit night in the Bay of Biscay and her crew had the right to feel pride in the exploit. That careful, well-poised petty officer, Quartermaster Augustus Smith, who saw the whole show from his station at the wheel, took pains to write down his own observations which confirmed, in every respect, the conclusions of Commander Kittinger and his officers: