He was just about to give the order to blow the tanks and come up and stalk the Fritz, when two heavy underwater explosions shook his boat. He remained on the bottom. He listened for a long time. But with the explosions the propeller noises had ceased abruptly and did not start again. Finally he came up to periscope depth, took a good look around, saw nothing, and broke water.
He said: "I started in for Harwich on the surface. I hung out all my signal flags, let some of the crew stand on deck, and looked as friendly as possible."
While the E-boat was down at the bottom of the sea and the Fritz was up above churning up the muddy water with her twin propellers, a Beef Trip was threshing along on the surface, and up in the air, in the sunlight, were the flying-boats.
The pilots of the two flying-boats, on their way out to the Beef Trip, saw the Fritz on the surface and whooped over to investigate.
But the pilots of the first boat to pass over him, knowing our own submarine was expected to be in the vicinity at this time, and not identifying the submarine as a German, passed over without bombing him. They did not know that the Commander of the E-boat was lying snug on the bottom.
The Commander of the U-boat, who was out after the Beef Trip, when he saw the first boat pass over, gave orders to dive and waited for the bombs which did not come.
Billiken and Dickey, in the second boat, got into position when only the light-grey conning-tower, with a tumble of white water behind it, was showing. But they recognised him as a Fritz and let him have two bombs. They circled over the spot for some time, and finally saw oil coming up, which spread, and spread, and spread.
Things now moved rather fast. On September 15 Young and Barker bombed a submarine. Poor Young, almost at the very end of the war, was shot at the controls of his boat in a fight against heavy odds off Borkum. He landed the boat safely in spite of the terrible wound, and died before the boat had stopped running on the water. The rest of the crew were made prisoners, setting the boat on fire before being taken off.
On the same day Perham and Gooch had a brush with three enemy seaplanes, and Hallinan and Hodson in one boat, and Gordon and Faux in another, dropped four bombs on a Fritz on the 25th.