It was now 3.35 P.M., and the armed trawler Sarba was seen approaching. Mr. Britton reported what he had been doing to Lieutenant Astbury, who at once stopped his own engines and used his hydrophone. Then, as he too could hear no sign of life, he took a sounding, found sixteen fathoms and a sandy bottom, and decided that the enemy must be still there, alive or dead. Accordingly he steamed clear of the position, turned and came back over it at full speed. He determined to set his depth-charge for eighty feet, in spite of the shallowness of the water, because, with the boat on the bottom at ninety-six feet, he would be absolutely certain of getting a very close explosion. The charge detonated, and he returned at once to the spot. Large bubbles of air and quantities of oil were coming up, and within a short time the oil was covering a very wide area. Sarba stood by all night, using her hydrophone frequently.
It was now evident that the enemy was dead; but the more the circumstances were reflected upon, the more difficult it was to explain them. Next morning, when T.B. 055 had ‘proceeded to sea in accordance with programme,’ Lieutenant Astbury, in Sarba, was left alone, with nothing but two buoys and an oil patch to give so incredible a story any kind of reality. He got out a sweep wire with a sinker of 1¾ cwt. and took a sweep along the position. The sweep brought up on an immovable obstruction, and the incredible seemed once more possible. At 2.0 P.M. arrived the armed drifter Sunshine and T.B. 058. They found Sarba lying as near as possible in the position where she had exploded her depth-charge, and where her sweep had brought her up. They took a ground sweep under her, and their sweep wire also fouled the same obstruction. Sarba, like a faithful dog, remained on guard during the following night. At last, at 2.30 P.M. on November 2, the divers arrived.
‘The diver who first went down found the submarine lying on her side.’
Before the day was out, all uncertainty was removed. The diver who first went down found the submarine lying on her side. When visited a second time, she had been righted by the tide or some shifting of weight; but she and all her crew were dead. The main fact was thus proved; but the mystery remained and still remains inexplicable and haunting. Possibly the answer, to the first of the two questions involved, may be a simple one. The U-boat may have got into the channel in a fog, and finding herself there when the weather cleared, she may have dived for safety and decided to remain on the bottom till it was dark enough to steal away. But the sounds cannot be explained to the satisfaction of those who know most about submarine war. The U-boat commander must have realised the enormous risk he was incurring, when he allowed those noises to be made at such an hour of day. He must have known that the British Patrol is well equipped with hydrophones, with depth-charges, and with sweeps. Either he had some serious injury to repair, and no time to wait; or else his boat was completely disabled at the bottom, and the hammering and other noises were the desperate attempts of the crew to draw attention in the hope of being rescued. ‘There is also,’ said the Admiral of the station, ‘the third possibility, that the boat carries inside her a tragedy that will never be known.’
CHAPTER XIV
Q-BOATS
Everyone who has ever thought about war must know that secrecy is one of the first conditions of military success, whether on land or sea. Yet the secrecy practised by our Government and our Higher Command has often been the subject of complaint. The complaint is not the cry of mere sensationalism or curiosity, deprived of its ration of news. Often it is the most patriotic and intelligent who are the most distressed at being kept in the dark. They understand the dangers of a great war, and they desire, above all things, not to live in a fool’s paradise. They know that they can bear to hear the worst, and they feel that they deserve to hear the best. The anti-submarine campaign has especially tried their patience. There has been great anxiety to know the exact figures of our mercantile losses; and on the other hand, when naval honours have been given without the usual account of the actions by which they were earned, there has been a tendency to grumble that we are not being helped to bear the strain of war, even when events are in our favour.
These complaints are not justified. Those who make them have failed to realise the deadly earnestness of the struggle we are carrying on. It is hard on the patriotic student of war that we should go short of facts, and hard on the anxious that they should lack encouraging information; but how much harder would it be for our seamen and submarine crews, if the secret of their tactics were given away to an enemy only too quick to take advantage of what he can succeed in overhearing? When one interesting paragraph in a newspaper may possibly mean the sacrifice of many lives, what statesman or staff officer would take the responsibility of passing it for publication? But the secrets of the Admiralty in this war have not been timidly or unintelligently kept. In spite of the tradition of ‘the Silent Service’—which only means that ‘the Navy doesn’t advertise’—there is no general feeling against telling the truth and the whole truth, when it can be done to the advantage of the country. Those in power have been for the most part in favour of ‘taking the lid off’ when the right time has come; and in this very matter of the mysterious honours, it was the First Lord himself who at last told the public what could no longer be valuable information for the enemy. So long as the use of disguised Special Service ships, or Q-boats, was a new method, indispensable to us and unsuspected by the Germans, or at least unfamiliar to them, so long was it highly undesirable that we should speak or write publicly of their successes. But now that after many losses, and some escapes, from Q-boats, the enemy’s submarine service has found out all their secrets, our own Navy has naturally ceased to rely on this kind of surprise, and has invented new devices, even more deadly and more difficult to evade. Of these we are, very reasonably, forbidden to write; but of the old and well-known hunting methods—of the work of destroyers, patrol-boats, trawlers, submarines, aircraft and Q-boats—we may now give illustrations; for we shall be telling nothing that the enemy does not know to his cost already. The very name, Q-boat, is as familiar in Germany as in this country. The submarine which escaped from the Dunraven carried away a very complete understanding of the work of these Special Service ships, and the Illustrierte Zeitung of July 12, 1917, contained a full description of a fight between a U-boat and a ‘submarine trap,’ which took place on February 22 of that year.