Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/215

1918] until, in the last month of the war, their officers were obliged to force them into the submarines at the point of a pistol. The records showed, the Austrian high officers said, that the Germans had lost six submarines on the Otranto barrage in the last three months of the war. These figures about correspond with the estimates which we had made; just how many of these the British sank and just how many are to be attributed to our own forces will probably never be known, but the fact that American devices were attached to all the Allied ships on this duty should be considered in properly distributing the credit.

We have evidence—conclusive even though somewhat ludicrous—that the American device on a British destroyer "got" one of these submarines. One dark night this vessel, equipped with the C-tube, had pursued a submarine and bombed it with what seemed to have been satisfactory results. However, I have several times called attention to one of the most discouraging aspects of anti-submarine warfare: that only in exceptional circumstances did we know whether the submarine had been destroyed. This destroyer was now diligently searching the area of the battle, the listeners straining every nerve for traces of her foe. For a time everything was utterly silent ; then, suddenly, the listener picked up a disturbance of an unusual kind. The noise rapidly became louder, but it was still something very different from any noise ever heard before. The C-tube consisted of a lead pipe—practically the same as a water pipe—which was dropped over the side of the ship fifteen or twenty feet into the sea; this pipe contained the wires which, at one end, were attached to the devices under the water, and which, at the other end, reached the listener's ears. In a few seconds this tube showed signs of lively agitation. It trembled violently and made a constantly increasing hullabaloo in the ears of the listener. Finally a huge German, dripping with water like a sea lion, appeared over the side of the destroyer and astounded our British Allies by throwing up his arms with "Kamerad!" This visitant from the depths was the only survivor of the submarine which it now appeared had indubitably been sunk. He had been blown through the conning tower, or had miraculously escaped in some other way—he did not himself know just what had taken place—and while floundering around in the water in the inky dark-