Somehow we felt peppy. I guess it was thinking about the Fourth and what it stood for. Seemed queer to be in mid-ocean on the night before the Declaration of Independence was signed—yep, in the middle of a blooming black sea, with nothing in sight but a dash of white foam against your keel, where you cut along through a swell.
I'd just glanced at my radium watch and blessed the girl who gave it to me. It was nine. I glanced up. Not fifty yards away was a ribbon of white foam flung out on the water like a scarf, and, sticking straight out, by God, was the periscope of a German submarine.
No one waited for the command, "Fire when ready. . . ."
The ship was action electrified. I never saw a crew work like that. They fired point-blank and sent that periscope straight up to where all good periscopes go. Ripped her clean off.
We weren't sure we'd sunk her, but we figured we had. How did we feel? How do you think? That was celebrating the Fourth right and proper!
Mac, sweating like a horse, panting from excitement, managed to breeze by and chuckle.
"Didn't I tell you we'd shoot one off to show 'em who's who?"
It was a great night. We were heroes. We had knocked the stuffings out of a periscope; it stood to reason we'd sunk her.
We figured out how it happened. The submarine, when she was 'way out on the horizon line, must have seen us coming. She had evidently made a long detour, plotting our course and planning to arrive where she could take good aim and fire. What happened was that we changed our course, so that when she popped up she was plumb across our bow. Surprised! Wow! I bet her commander, if he's alive, hasn't closed his mouth yet!
It was something like this: