"How far away can you use a torpedo?" I asked.
"Two hundred yards is the best distance," he said. "Never more than five hundred. A torpedo is pure guesswork at more than five hundred yards."
We crossed the bow of the trawler, circled around to her starboard quarter and came to the surface, fired nine shots and submerged again in forty-five seconds.
The prey secured, we ran submerged through the mine field and past the net barrier to come to the surface well within the harbour and proceed peacefully to our mooring under the shelter of the guns of the land forts.
Life and work on a German submarine is known to us, of course, only from descriptions in German publications. One of these appeared, previous to our entry in the war, in various journals and was translated and republished by the New York Evening Post. It reads partly as follows:
"U-47 will take provisions and clear for sea. Extreme economical radius."
A first lieutenant, with acting rank of commander, takes the order in the grey dawn of a February day. The hulk of an old corvette with the Iron Cross of 1870 on her stubby foremast is his quarters in port, and on the corvette's deck he is presently saluted by his first engineer and the officer of the watch. On the pier the crew of U-47 await him. At their feet the narrow grey submarine lies alongside, straining a little at her cables.
"Well, we've our orders at last," begins the commander, addressing his crew of thirty, and the crew grin. For this is U-47's first experience of active service. She has done nothing save trial trips hitherto, and has just been overhauled for her first fighting cruise. Her commander snaps out a number of orders. Provisions are to be taken in "up to the neck," fresh water is to be put aboard, and engine-room supplies to be supplemented.
A mere plank is the gangway to the little vessel. As the commander, followed by his officers, comes aboard, a sailor hands to each a ball of cotton-waste, the sign and symbol of a submarine officer, which never leaves his hand. For the steel walls of his craft, the doors, and the companion-ladder all sweat oil, and at every touch the hands must be wiped dry. The doorways are narrow round holes. Through one of the holes aft the commander descends by a breakneck iron ladder into the black hole lit by electric glow-lamps. The air is heavy with the smell of oil, and to the unaccustomed longshoreman it is almost choking, though the hatches are off. The submarine man breathes this air as if it were the purest ozone. Here in the engine-room aft men must live and strain every nerve even if for days at a time every crack whereby the fresh air could get in is hermetically sealed. On their tense watchfulness thirty lives depend.
Here, too, are slung some hammocks, and in them one watch tries, and, what is more, succeeds in sleeping, though the men moving about bump them with head and elbows at every turn, and the low and narrow vault is full of the hum and purr of machinery. In length the vault is about ten feet, but if a man of normal stature stands in the middle and raises his arms to about half shoulder height his hands will touch the cold, moist steel walls on either side. A network of wires runs overhead, and there is a juggler's outfit of handles, levers, and instruments. The commander inspects everything minutely, then creeps through a hole into the central control station, where the chief engineer is at his post. With just about enough assistance to run a fairly simple machine ashore the chief engineer of a submarine is expected to control, correct, and, if necessary, repair at sea an infinitely complex machinery which must not break down for an instant if thirty men are to return alive to the hulk.