No more shore leaves were granted the men because two perfectly good operators had gone ashore and two miserable good-for-nothing operators had returned. Hart hovered between life and death for weeks but he finally pulled through though he never will be as good a man as he was. I came along all right but my hand seemed paralyzed from the wrist down and it was many a moon before I could use a key again with my right hand. I guess you see now why I like those greasers so well.
Our marines remained on duty until the end of the month when General Funston arrived from Galveston with about four thousand troops and took possession of the port. It was hard to see what turn affairs would take next for Huerta had an army of 5,000 men not very far from Vera Cruz. But I guess he had heard of General Funston before and he didn’t care about being captured as Aguinaldo, the Philippine leader, was.
Instead of having some small war the diplomats of the A B C governments of South America, as Argentine, Brazil and Chile are called, offered to try to negotiate a friendly settlement between the United States and Mexico. President Wilson, who liked peace and hated war, at once accepted their kind offer and agreed to send representatives to their proposed conference. The following day Huerta agreed to send his representatives to the A B C conference which was to be held in the town of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river.
Finally, when all the representatives met, the first thing that was done was to have an armistice signed by the United States and Huerta’s government. As soon as this was done Huerta’s representatives tried to have the United States withdraw its forces from Vera Cruz and the United States forego the salute for the insult to our flag. The representatives of the United States asked only that Huerta resign.
After deliberating for five weeks the representatives of all the countries agreed that a provisional government should be established in Mexico, and that Huerta should resign; that the United States should not ask Mexico to pay an indemnity nor to ask for a salute or other apology for the insult to the flag at Tampico and that our troops were to remain at Vera Cruz.
In the meantime Huerta was being hard pressed by Carranza on the north and the rebel Zapata on the south and with our troops occupying Vera Cruz it evidently suited him very well to resign. So on the 10th of July Huerta appointed Chief Justice Corbajol to be president in his place.
It was common talk among the blue-jackets on our ship that Huerta had some 3,000,000 dollars deposited in banks somewhere in Europe and that he planned to go there. Be that as it may he handed in his resignation to the Chamber of Deputies a week later and left for Puerto, Mexico, on a special train under heavy guard. From there he sailed for Jamaica and thence for Europe.
Thus it was that Huerta, the Indian descendant of the Aztecs, who always went one way and came back another, got out of saluting our flag and probably saved his life.
CHAPTER IX—ON A SUBMARINE CHASER
Very shortly after Huerta resigned the presidency of Mexico and made his get-away, the ex-Kaiser let loose the war-dogs of Europe and here I was signed up for four years in the Navy and, I figured, didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of breaking into the fight. It seemed to me a pretty tough deal that old Huerta could resign his job while I, a free American citizen, couldn’t quit, resign, go-over-the-hill, or anything.
What I wanted to do was to get over to England and sign up there for it was dollars to doughnuts in my mind that there would be some small bickerings going on between the British and the German navies and it would be well worth while to see those big guns get into action. I hadn’t the remotest idea, then, that the Imperial German Navy, as those boches so loved to call it, would be afraid to come out in the offing and put up a fight. But when it came to torpedoing unarmed passenger ships loaded with women and children, or hospital ships carrying wounded soldiers they were right there Fritzy-on-the-spot with their blackheads as they called their Whitehead torpedoes.
While the ex-Kaiser’s navy could not be induced to leave its mine-protected harbors and do battle with the British fleet—no, not even if all Germany starved to death—crafty, old Admiral von Tirpitz began to build up a frightful fleet of U-boats with the avowed intention of sinking every merchant ship, no matter what flag she flew, if she carried foods or munitions to England and her Allies.
As the United States was shipping cargoes of both of these commodities to Great Britain and France, which was entirely within her rights according to international law, it was not long, as you can imagine, before the German U-boats were sinking our ships and killing our men.
It was bewhiskered Admiral von Tirpitz who figured out and showed the ex-Kaiser that the only way left open for Germany to win the war was to sink every ship afloat that did not fly the German flag, and soon after this program was agreed to by the war-lords they seemed in a fair way to succeed, for they were sinking ships faster than the Allies and the United States could replace them.
Any number of schemes to beat the U-boats were thought up and while most of them were quite impracticable there were a few that proved effective when put to the test. One way was to build more merchant ships every month than the U-boats could sink and when Uncle Sam put the job into Mr. Schwab’s hands this was done. Another plan was to hunt down the U-boats with submarine chasers. A submarine chaser is a small, high-speed boat carrying one or more rapid fire guns.
As you know a submarine can shoot a torpedo at the biggest ship afloat and if it hits her she is sure to sink in a few minutes and yet it is the easiest thing in the world to send a U-boat to the bottom if you can only get a chance to land a shell on her.
Just before we got into the war Germany built two great submarines each of which was over 300 feet long. One of these U-boats was the Deutschland and the other was the U-53, and both had a cruising radius of about 5,000 miles, that is, they could travel that distance without having to take on food or fuel.
No one here ever thought that a submarine could make a trip across the ocean but the Deutschland did it. She left Bremen, Germany, and submerged while in the river, then she slipped out into the seaway under the British fleet that had the German warships bottled up, made the passage of the North Sea on and under the water, thence through the English Channel going this dangerous route entirely under water and across the Atlantic Ocean during which she submerged only when she saw some of the Allies’ warships.
Then one fine morning, 16 days later, she came to the surface in Chesapeake Bay and docked at Baltimore. There she unloaded a cargo of dye-stuffs and synthetic gems and took on a cargo of rubber, and, what was of more importance, secret papers which Count von Bernsdorf, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, could not trust to go any other way. On sailing she made her way to the mouth of the bay, submerged to escape the British ships which were laying in wait for her beyond the three mile limit and returned to her home port. Later on she made another round voyage with equal success.
When we got into the war it was clear that we had a war-zone right here at home and one that was not to be sneezed at, for, since a submarine could be built large enough to travel the whole distance from Europe to America without having to be convoyed by a base, or mother-ship as she is called, Germany could as easily send over to our shores one or a dozen submarines as large as the Deutschland, fitted out with rapid-fire guns and torpedoes and do a lot of damage to our shipping and even to our cities. The Navy Department believed that the best way to protect our coast was to build a large fleet of U-boat chasers and this work was gone ahead with as fast as possible.
Now while I can use a key with my left hand nearly as well as I could with my right, still my arm pained me a good deal and I could have gotten a long leave of absence if I had asked for it. So when I told the commander I wanted to be transferred to a U-boat chaser he fixed it O. K. for me and I was assigned to the Second Naval District which patrolled from Newport to the First and Third Naval Districts.
The chaser I was assigned to was a brand-new one just off the ways and of the very latest type; she had a length of 110 feet, a beam a little under 15 feet and a draft of about 4 feet. She was built chiefly of wood but she had a pair of steel masts and a crow’s nest for the lookout whose job it was to watch for U-boats. She was powered with a steam engine but instead of coal she burned oil under her boilers. Her large size made her very speedy and she could do 25 knots, if she had to, which was twice as fast as the fastest U-boat could do.
The aerial was stretched between her masts and the leading-in wire was connected to it near the rear mast and followed it down to the deck where it passed through an insulator in the latter, and on into the operating room. This was about the smallest space I ever got into which was graced by the name of an operating room but I had no kick coming as we were not afloat all the time.
The sending set had a ½ kilowatt transformer and the receiving set was fitted with both crystal and vacuum detectors; the whole space taken up by them was probably not more than 5 cubic feet. Well, so much for the chaser.
There were only 14 men in our crew and there was far less formality on board than on a battleship. Bill Adams and I got to be pretty good pals. The first time I met him he was trying out one of her Hotchkiss semi-automatic guns and I was watching him.
“Where did you get that chunk of mud?” he queried as he pointed the gun at an imaginary U-boat.
“Speaking to me?” I asked in turn.
“You said it,” he replied bluntly.
“If you refer to the sparkler on my annularis finger I have to inform you, sir, that it came from the land of the Raripunas about 1500 miles up the Amazon river,” I explained with great perspicacity.
You see, I had had the diamonds cut that Princess Mabel gave me and the one I wore was a regent weighing about 2 carats and it was mounted in a Tiffany setting. In fact it was altogether too big a diamond for any ordinary blue-jacket to come by honestly.
“That’s where it came from, but I’m askin’ you, as man to man now, where did you get it?”
“Right where it came from,” I put it straight back to him.
If it hadn’t been for my game arm I guess Bill and I would have settled the mooted question as to where my chunk of mud came from by referring it to the court of last resort, by which I mean the manly art of hit-’em-again, gob.
“Put up your dukes,” commanded Bill at the same time striking an attitude of a gas-house slugger.
Now to get my right hand up I had to lift it with my left and when Bill saw this he yelled, “time, you win!”
Then his eyes softened, his voice lost its harshness and he became sympathetic. He wanted to know how it happened and all about it. And then we got the matter of the chunk of mud straightened out to Bill’s satisfaction. From that time on Bill and I were pals and we used to swap stories. He had been in every corner on the face of the earth except South America and his stock of experiences was a large one. To keep even with him I had to manufacture tales out of raw material as I went along and I often thought he did the same thing. Say, he certainly put over some regular crawlers. He never got tired of talking about the prospects of mining diamonds in Brazil and all I had to do to get him going was to flash my sparkler on him and he was transported as if by magic to equatorial South America.
Like dozens of other fellows I have met, Bill was a strange contradiction of brains in that he was a natural born hard boiled egg and yet when a fellow needed a friend he was as compassionate as a Salvation Army lass in a trench under fire; again he was ignorant, yet wanted to learn. For instance he wanted me to teach him wireless; it was all vague and intangible to him. He had to have something he could see in three dimensions instead of having to visualize it in his mind; his one big talent lay in his being able to hit a target with a projectile of small or large size and accordingly he was able to serve his Uncle Sam nobly and with telling effect.
You may or may not know it but a fellow can join the navy and live aboard ship a long time and still know but very little about any part of her, except his own particular branch, unless he keeps his eyes and ears open and talks with fellows who know and can and will answer his questions intelligently. Bill was ignorant when it came to book-learning but he knew all about submarines and submarine chasers from their bottoms up.
I had asked him why it was that a torpedo from a U-boat couldn’t hit a submarine chaser and also to tell me something about the fighting qualities of U-boats.
“You see, matey,” explained Bill wisely, “the torpedoes made for the Kaiser’s U-boats are adjusted so that after they are shot from their tubes they run through the water at an even depth of between 8 and 9 feet below the surface. Now a boat of any size draws far more water than this and, of course, if the torpedo hits her at all it will be below the water line and she goes down. But this chaser of ours draws only 4 feet of water and so a torpedo, if it behaves itself, would pass clean under her and never touch her.
“The trouble is,” he went on, “that there never was a torpedo made that stuck to its course and it is liable to shift to the port or starboard or to come to the surface and for this reason we never take a chance but dodge them. You can always tell when a torpedo is coming by the thin white wake she makes on top of the water and while a ship can’t get out of its way, a speedy little boat like ours can make a quick turn and give it a wide berth.”
“Who got up the idea of a submarine chaser?”
“Well, that I don’t know about, matey, but I do know that when Germany sent out her first U-boats to the coast of Great Britain to sink her ships, all sorts of motor boats which had a length of 40 feet and over were pressed into service; these boats had guns mounted in them and they combed the sea in search of the submarine enemy.
“The first German U-boats were slow old craft and they stuck close to the coast where the ships were the thickest. This made it easy for the British armed motor-boat patrols to hunt them out and send them to the bottom. It was soon seen that larger and faster patrol boats carrying heavier guns were needed to keep up with the newer and faster U-boats that were sent to take the place of those the British sunk and so speedy 80 foot boats were built specially for patrolling.
“By the time we got into the war the U-boats were so big and fast that to catch them we had to have regular torpedo boats, except they are without torpedoes, built to run them down and this is exactly what this chaser we are now on is. With our chaser we can go twice as fast as any U-boat the Germans ever sent out and I’m telling you, matey, that if I ever spot a U-boat coming to the top and she is inside the range of this Hotchkiss her crew might just as well kiss the Kaiser good-night.”
The way the submarine chasers work is like this: A base is set up on shore close to that part of the coast waters, or zone as it is called, that a squadron, which is formed of a dozen chasers has to patrol. The shore base is fitted up with living quarters for the crews of the chasers, besides reserve crews who may be needed in an emergency, and there are also artificers, that is mechanics, carpenters, painters, etc., who stayed on shore so that when we were relieved from duty and came in, our boats were looked after as carefully and overhauled as thoroughly as a millionaire’s automobile.
The base also has a wireless station and any chaser can get in touch with it should occasion arise for her to do so. Each base also has one or more destroyers which carry heavier guns and these are stationed near by so that should the enemy loom up and prove too much for the guns of our chasers the larger boats can be signaled to help.
When a squadron of chasers leaves its base for the zone it is to patrol it is split up into two divisions of six boats each and a division officer is in charge of each one. Each chaser is given a certain area to patrol and she works with all the other chasers in her squadron, the shore station and ships at sea. If a U-boat has been sighted at sea, the ship who has picked her up immediately sends a wireless message to the base which in turn informs the commander of the squadron.
Should a U-boat venture into one of our zones the chasers get as busy as hornets and scout around until she either slips away or comes to the top to enable her commander to take a look around through his periscope to see if there is a ship in sight worth using a torpedo on.
Besides the regular wireless set each submarine chaser is fitted with a sound conduction signalling system and this is used to detect the presence of a U-boat when it is submerged and cannot be seen, though to do this the enemy boat must be near-by. This conduction scheme is very simple and you’ll get me fine as I explain it.
Water, as you know, conducts sound waves to much greater distances than air does. You must have often made the experiment when in swimming of ducking your head under water and listening while another fellow would strike a couple of stones together under water at a distance of thirty or forty feet away from you; and yet you could hear them click as they struck each other as plainly as you could in air a couple of feet away.
Now, signalling between submerged submarines or a submarine and a chaser is carried on on exactly this same principle, that is by the conduction of sound waves through the water. To do this kind of wireless signalling each submarine has a high-frequency sound producing apparatus, or oscillator as it is called, attached to the hull. It consists of a diaphragm, or disk, that is set into very rapid vibration by means of an electromagnet, just as the diaphragm of a telephone receiver is made to vibrate by its electromagnet.
The disk, or diaphragm, which is very much larger than that of a telephone receiver, sets in the water and when it is made to vibrate by closing the circuit with the key it sends out trains of sound waves to considerable distances through the water.
The other submarine, or chaser, is fitted with a like disk which is fixed to a microphone, or telephone transmitter, and to this a battery and telephone receiver is connected. When the high frequency sound waves from one submarine reaches the second submarine they impinge on the disk of the microphone when it vibrates; this varies the battery current flowing through the microphone and you hear the dots and dashes in the receiver.
Now when a U-boat, or any other kind of a power vessel, gets within a certain range of the chaser the hum of the machinery in her sets the hull into vibration and you can hear it in the receivers. So, you see, whether a U-boat is afloat or submerged it is pretty hard for her to escape the eternal vigilance of the chaser.
We had received word by wireless that a U-boat had been sighted about a hundred miles off the coast and that she was one of gigantic size. We swept our area with great zeal, the lookouts in the crow’s nest being changed every two hours; the gunners were at their guns ready for instant action and John Paul Jones Boggs, the other operator and I took turn about listening-in.
I don’t want to brag about myself but I found out a long time ago when I was a kid operator back home that I had a more sensitive ear than any of the other fellows, that is, I could differentiate dots and dashes and take down messages that they could only get as a jumble of signals. Later on I began to experiment with head-phones and tried out every make I could get hold of in order to find one that was particularly sensitive and especially suited to my ear.
When I was chief wireless operator on the Andalusian I met operators from all over the world. Once when I was in London I scraped up an acquaintance with a young Swede and he had about half-a-dozen pairs of head-phones that he had picked up in different countries. Telephone receivers for wireless work are like violins in that no two of them are alike and you can’t tell by their appearance what they are really worth; like violins, too, telephone receivers improve with age provided the magnets are made of the right kind of steel and properly tempered.
One of the pairs of head-phones this Swede operator showed me was made in Sweden by the Ericsson Telephone Manufacturing Company, and it was by far the most sensitive phone I had ever used. I bought the pair off him for a sovereign but they are worth their weight in gold. With this pair of Ericsson’s on my head I was listening-in for all I was worth. I kept this up intermittently for about 6 hours when I was rewarded by hearing the faint whirring sound of a propeller. I reported it to my commander and he said it was a U-boat all right.
He had our engine stopped so that I could hear her to the best advantage. The sound of her machinery through the water got a little louder and then stopped entirely and we guessed that she was resting. Not to be fooled we stuck right to our posts another five hours but there was nary a sound from her.
Then the lookout in the crow’s-nest telephoned down that he had sighted the periscope of a U-boat. Did you ever see a field of race horses just before the signal was given them to start? Well, every man-jack of us felt just as high strung and spirited only we didn’t show it. The commander ordered me to signal all the other U-boat chasers of our squadron to join us.
The U-boat had come to the surface so that her captain could take a look around and see if there was a ship in sight that was worth sinking. Seeing nothing but our little boat the U-boat came awash, that is her conning tower projected above the water and her deck was just level with the surface of the sea. The captain of the U-boat was evidently observing us through a port from the inside of the conning tower and seeing that our guns were manned and that we were making for her at full speed he had ordered her guns to be brought into action. Each gun was mounted on her deck in a gun-well and was hoisted into place together with its gunner by a plunger worked by compressed air.
We closed in on her and then the shells began to fly. A high sea was running so that it was well nigh impossible for her gunners to hit us or for ours to hit her, but soon a shell, bad luck to it, carried away one of our masts and my aerial with it. I rushed up on deck and there I saw eight or ten of our little chasers heading for the U-boat, which was the U-53, the largest submarine that Germany had turned out with the exception of the Deutschland.
As each chaser came up the fight got hotter but the U-boat stayed in the game until her captain saw our destroyer coming and then he concluded it was time to submerge her. We knew her captain had given the order to his wheelsman to make her dive for her guns and gunners began to disappear in the deck-wells and in a few seconds the covers closed down on the latter watertight. Her hatches were closed and her engines, which had been started, propelled her slowly through the water which must be done to make her dive at the proper angle.
Just as her bow submerged Bill put over a shell with a bow trajectory, that is, he aimed his gun so that when he fired the projectile shot high into the air and seemed as if it would go far over the U-boat. But Bill knew what he was doing and the shell fell squarely on the U-boat’s deck just aft her conning tower.
Having found the range he planted three more shells on her with marvelous accuracy; the last one went through her bow and must have exploded in her torpedo room for a bright flash of blue fire shot up through the hole for fifty feet and this was followed by a dense greenish smoke that rolled out as though she was a blast furnace.
After a couple of misses Bill landed another shell on her stern and this one ripped an awful hole in her; the water poured into her and amid a series of explosions that threw steaming water into the air like young geysers, with much sizzling and hissing she went down stern-end on never to rise again.
A great hurrah went up from all hands on our boat and our Commander commended Bill on his excellent shots.
“Three cheers for big Bill,” I shouted and the gobs responded with mighty lung-power.
“That’s the way to swat ’em, eh, matey?” remarked Bill with grisly joy as we were cleaning away the wreckage.
“I say it is, Bill,” I made reply.
CHAPTER X—A SIGNALMAN ON A SUBMARINE
Don’t think for a moment that Germany was the only country that had a fleet of submarines. The reason that her U-boats came to be so well known was because they had torpedoed the Lusitania and sunk helpless ships right and left no matter who was on them or what they carried.
England and France had fleets of submarines, too, but as their warships had blockaded Germany’s ports there was nothing to torpedo. And when we declared war on the Kaiser, Uncle Sam began to build submarines just as he did chasers, merchant ships and everything else. Except airplanes, did you say? There was no such fizzle made of building submarines as for a time was made of building airplanes in the beginning of the war. Within a short time after we got started our Navy Department was able to turn out a brand-new submarine every two weeks. Think of it! Once the kind and the size of the submarine we needed had been agreed upon by our naval experts, that is, standardized as it is called, machines and jigs were made by which each part was stamped out of a solid sheet of metal, and this was done, not in one or a dozen factories, but in hundreds of factories scattered all over the country and each of which made a single part.
These parts were shipped to docks at various ports on the Atlantic seaboard and there artificers of all kinds were ready to assemble them, that is, to put them together. Thus it was that in two weeks after the ore was mined it was made into parts, assembled and the submarine was ready for its perilous cruise.
While the building of submarines was thus speeded up there was another factor that made for their efficiency as a destructive engine of war which was just as important as the boats themselves and that was the crews to man them. Aye, and there was the rub, for a crew could not be trained for this highly specialized work in less than two months’ time and sometimes it took three or four months.
Because the submarine job was considered an extra-hazardous one, volunteers were called for to man the boats and as an inducement for bluejackets to do so a good bonus, that is, extra pay was offered. Now Bill Adams knew all about submarines, as I think I told you before, for he had worked for the Holland Submarine Boat Company long before the world-war started.
“Let’s me and you go to it, matey,” he said, in one of his bursts of patriotism; “it isn’t quite as soft a snap as we’ve got on this here chaser but we gets more time ashore and then we helps our Uncle Sammy. Besides I’ve made up me mind to buy me mother a flivver; all the washladies in our neighborhood is ridin’ to and from work in them baby land-tanks of Mr. Ford’s, and I guess what they can do she can do, eh, matey?”
“Why not?” I allowed. “She’s got a better right to ride in a motor car than a lot of those high-falutin’ women who live in glass conning towers on Fifth Avenue and never had a son to fight for Uncle Sam. They take everything and they give nothing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t quite say that, matey,” Bill answered thinking hard within the limits of his ability; “I used to be a kind of anarchist myself, I guess, as I always felt as how I’d like to throw a bomb—no, not a bum—into some of them swell places, but I’ve got all over it. Why? Because if it wasn’t for them big bugs, them rich Janes, there wouldn’t be any Red Cross, see? Every last one of ’em that is over eight and under eighty is handin’ out the coin, givin’ the glad hand and workin’ like gobs holystonin’ the decks and scrapin’ cable for us guys what’s in the navy and army. But I’m askin’ you, as man to man, matey, will you volunteer with me for submarine duty?”
“I’m willing to try anything once, Bill, and I’ll take a chance with you on this submarine deal,” I told him.
So Bill and I signed up for submarine service and after the crew to which we belonged had had intensive training for several weeks we were assigned to the H-24 and we went down to Newport to man her. There the first time I saw her she was swinging from a crane high in the air for this was the way they launch these sea babies. She was simply lifted bodily from the dock where she was assembled, swung over the water and gently deposited on the surface.
It was a good thing that I had had experience on a submarine chaser for the quarters of this submarine were so small I couldn’t for the life of me see how her complement of men, of whom there were 36, including officers and seamen, could get into the boat, much less live and do their work. I suffered a good deal at first because when we were all inside her there wasn’t anywhere to go, not even out, when she was submerged. In fact I felt very much as though I was riding in the drawing room of a Pullman, or locked up in jail, which is about the same thing.
As when we were on the chaser, I was the wireless man and Bill was the gunner whose business it was to work the rapid fire gun on deck. Bill didn’t mind being in the close quarters of the submarine at all and I took it that he must have been one of those kids who thought it great fun to snake his way through a fifteen foot length of gas-pipe main that was just big enough around to let his body pass providing he didn’t get stuck.
Do you know I always thought I was a sailor until I went on my first cruise in that submarine. But no, I’m no sailor and you can take it from me there were precious few of the others of our crew besides the commanding officer and Bill who were sure-enough tars of the old Neptune stripe. I’ll bet you a dollar to a glass of grape-juice that of the thirty-six men on board—or shall I say in board—thirty of them were sea-sick. Of all the rolling and pitching a boat ever did I’ll give the cake to H-24.
Not only that but when we were running light, that is when she was as high out of the water as she could get with all the water out of her ballast tanks, and we had rough weather I had to strap myself in my chair to keep from being thrown around the room. As one of the torpedo men used to sing, “Mr. Captain, stop the ship I want to get out and walk,” and, indeed, I would have given my pay and the bonus to boot to have had my old job back again on the chaser. It was all Bill’s fault and I didn’t mind telling him so either.
“I should worry, matey,” he would say, and that’s all the satisfaction I could get out of him.
After the rookies got over being seasick we went out on practise trips when each man was taught all about the machinery and how to work it. This was done so that in case a man was put out of action another could take his place. It didn’t take me very long to get hep to all the tricks for I already knew the A B C of oil engines, which again came in handy; storage batteries were right in my line and the rest of the machinery was pie for me.
The H-24 has a hull that is very much like a huge catfish, that is it has a blunt round head and the torpedo tubes, one on either side, look for all the world like a pair of great eyes; the body tapers off gracefully to a point at the tail and on this the direction rudder is attached. Two horizontal rudders, or hydroplanes as they are called, by which the submarine is given its diving angle, are fastened one to each side of her head and give the appearance of a pair of great lateral fins.
Her hull is built up of thin but exceedingly strong sheets of steel and these are riveted together in the same fashion as the hull of any steel ship. When you consider that the hull of a submarine must be able to stand a pressure of at least 200 pounds to the square inch—as much as a high pressure steam boiler—without collapsing when it is fully submerged it must be clear that the strongest steel plate which can be made must be used.
A steel deck, or superstructure as it is called, covers the top of the hull from bow to stern, nearly, and on its middle sets the conning tower. A steering wheel and compass are fixed to the side of the conning tower so that the boat can be steered from the outside when she is running light or awash.
A short mast, called a stanchion, is also fixed to the conning tower and this carries the signal lights and holds one end of the aerial, the other end being fastened to the stern. It isn’t much of an aerial but as our submarine was built for coast patrol cruising we were never very far from shore.
The inside of the hull is partitioned off into rooms, or compartments, and these can be shut off from each other by means of bulkhead doors and so made watertight. The purpose of these watertight compartments is to prevent the water from filling the whole boat if she should be unlucky enough to be hit by a shell or rammed by a ship. To my way of thinking watertight compartments seem to be of little use whether the boat be a submarine or the largest ship. For instance when the Titanic was scrapped by an iceberg and the Lusitania was hit by a U-boat torpedo they both went down in a few minutes.
I won’t try to tell you what all the different compartments have in them but some of them are most uncommonly interesting and these you should know about. The first is the conning tower with its periscope. When the submarine is running either light or awash and the weather is good the commander can see what’s what around him from the deck or from the bridge, as we call the top of the conning tower. When the weather is rough or an enemy is nigh he takes a look around through the ports, that is, watertight windows, in the conning tower.
Should, however, the boat be submerged and the captain wants to size up the situation he permits only the top of her periscope to project out of the water and through this he scans the sea. Whenever I got a chance I used to look through the periscope. At first it was hard for me to make out a vessel on the surface because the field of view was small and what with the boat rolling from port to starboard it seemed to me I was always looking at the water or the sky; but after awhile I got so I could take in whatever there was to see in between times.
Our submarine had two periscopes, one of the older kind that you have to turn around in order to see the whole horizon, and the other, which was the latest style, showed the whole horizon at once with a magnified view of the ship or other vessel in the distance in the center. This scheme was a great invention as it prevented us from being attacked from behind unawares. It was like having a third eye in the back of your head.
Inside the conning tower are also speaking tubes and an electric system of lights and bells worked by pushbuttons and these run into all the compartments; by means of these intelligence transmission systems our captain could get in touch instantly with the chiefs of the crew in the engine, diving, torpedo and wireless rooms.
There are also several instruments in the conning tower and among these is a depth meter, that is, a device that shows just how far below the surface of the water the boat is. An inclinometer which points out the angle at which the diving rudder, or hydroplane is set, and a tell-tale, that is a bank of miniature lamps, each of which is connected to a detector in a compartment. Now if the boat should spring a leak the detector closes the current and the lamp is lit.
Then there is another electrical system that closes all the bulkhead doors by electricity. The instant the tell-tale lamp lights up and shows that a compartment is leaking the commander presses a button which rings a bell in it and this warns any of the crew who may happen to be in it to get out; by throwing a switch the current operating the motors which work the bulkhead door is cut in and the door is screwed down watertight. Should a shell put the conning tower out of commission the boat can still be steered from the navigating room in her hull.
The power plant that drove the H-24 was a big 12-cylinder oil burning engine that developed, I should say, about 3,000 horsepower and it worked on the same general plan as a motor car engine. Now when the boat runs light or awash the engine drives her propeller direct and at the same time the engine runs a dynamo and this charges a large storage battery.
But when the boat is running submerged the engine has to be shut down because the burnt gases cannot exhaust into the water as the pressure of the latter is too great. A powerful electric motor is coupled to the propeller shaft and this is energized by the current from the storage battery.
The ballast tanks into and from which water is pumped to make the boat sink and rise is in the middle of the bottom of the hull. The torpedo room is for’ard in the bow of the boat, our sleeping quarters aft of this and my wireless room lay between our sleeping quarters and the navigating room.
While life on the submarine was not exactly what you would call a pleasure bout still we were all keyed up to the point where we wanted to get in our fine work on the boches. Finally the time came when we received orders to move and while only the officers knew where to or for what purpose at the time of departure we were all let into the secret after we had got under way.
At the beginning of the war the Germans had vessels of various sizes in all parts of the world. Those that were in our ports were interned while some of the smaller ones that were at sea became pirate ships, technically known as raiders. They flew the flag of Germany when it suited them to do so but they hoisted any flag that would best help out their diabolical plans.
These raiders scoured the seven seas and whenever they ran across an unarmed merchant ship bound for any port of the Allies they promptly shelled and sunk her and, more often than not, without giving the ill-fated crew enough time to take to the life boats. As Bill Adams used to say, “I calls it murder.”
Of course if the raiders could have taken their prizes to their own ports they would gladly have done so for Germany sorely needed whatever cargoes they carried, but the raiders could not do this for the Allies had blockaded every port of the Central Powers. This being true the next best thing to do from the German point of view was to sink the ship and drown the crew.
There were two or three of these German raiders steaming up and down our Atlantic coast and they operated a few hundred miles off shore and out of the beaten paths. It seemed likely that they worked, part of the time at least, in conjunction with U-boats for whenever a ship went forth armed a torpedo sank her but if she was unarmed the raider’s guns sent her to the bottom.
Uncle Sam was getting mighty tired of this sort of business and so he hatched up a little scheme. A small steamer, the Henrietta, was fitted out without guns, painted a sea-gray and flew the stars and stripes when she was sent to sea. Our submarine was sent with her, not exactly as a convoy for she was not sailing for any overseas port but instead she was sent out simply as a decoy.
We followed her at a distance of about a mile and as long as there were no other ships in sight we ran light, though the way the waves broke over her she seemed to be running awash most of the time. This made no difference to us and it was a great relief to come up from our stuffy holes and walk the deck. Of all my sea-going experiences I liked this much the best.
Why? You know how a city chap with a drop of red blood in his veins likes to get out in the woods and walk, eat and sleep on the ground. He does it simply because he gets as close to nature as he ever can and know about it. Well, when I walked the bit of deck of the H-24 I got just as close to the sea as I could and yet stay above water and there was a mighty fascination about it too.
We cruised about most of the time in a light condition, though we occasionally had to submerge and tagged around after the Henrietta which acted as a base, or mother-ship to us. It was a curious thing how merchant ships that made every effort to keep out of the way of raiders would run right into them and that the Henrietta who was out for this very purpose couldn’t meet up with anything more dangerous than a sea-gull.
But hold, matey, what’s that the Captain of the Henrietta sends over by wireless? We can’t see the ship for we set too close to the water but he can make it out very well with his glasses. We dive until we are completely submerged but still following in the wake of the Henrietta according to a prearranged scheme.
“Ship headed for us,” the Henrietta’s Captain signaled our Commander by our sound conduction system.
“She flies the French flag,” he sent to us next.
Then later on I got this and handed it to our commander:
“Believe she’s a German raider.”
Every man was at his post and ready and anxious to do his duty. When the raider, which was the Koln and one of the worst offenders of her kind, was within half-a-mile of the Henrietta she sent a shot over her bow and signaled her to stand by. This she did and then the Captain of the Koln signaled that he would send his officers to examine her papers and cargo—to get whatever gold she might have—and this he promptly did. At the same time he had her guns trained on the helpless Henrietta to prevent her from trying to steam away or putting on all speed and ramming her with her sharp bow.
Just as the officers of the Koln were being lowered in a launch the Captain of the Henrietta signaled our commander just two words and these were: “Torpedo her.”
We came to the surface about a thousand feet from and on the port side of the Koln and took her completely by surprise. Her gunners began blazing away at us but they had evidently not been trained in the gentle art of swatting submarines for the trajectory of their shells was way too flat, that is it was not curved enough and with, possibly, two exceptions they struck the water and instead of sinking they ricocheted, that is they were thrown from it again on the same principle that a flat stone skips along on the water when you throw it nearly parallel to its surface.
Bill was right there with his semi-automatic and dropped a couple of shells on the deck of the Koln. In less time than it takes to tell it to you our commander had swung our submarine round so that one of her torpedo tubes was pointed directly at the Koln and gave the signal to the officer of the torpedo crew to shoot the torpedo. He turned on the compressed air which drives the torpedo from its tube and it shot out and into the sea. We watched it with all eyes as it traveled like a blue streak under its own power below the surface and dead on for the broadside of the Koln.
The German crew saw the white trail it left behind and they must have become panic-stricken for some of them jumped overboard, others manned the life-boats and bungled the job so that two of the boats capsized before they ever touched the water. In less than a minute the torpedo struck the hull amidships, passed through it to the inside and exploded with a terrific report.
It looked to me as if the whole ship was thrown bodily out of the water by the sheer force of the explosion and then parted in her middle. As she settled down on the water a great black cloud of smoke poured out of her hold and when the air struck her she caught fire and was soon a solid, seething sheet of flame. It was the most magnificent spectacle I have ever seen from longitude 0 to 70 degrees west of Greenwich and from the Equator to the Pole.
Different from the German idea of kultur, instead of letting the crew of the Koln drown, the Captain of the Henrietta sent out boats and stood by until all of them were picked up and on board his ship.
We then sailed back to our naval base where the German crew was taken off and interned in a concentration camp until the war ended. Their fighting days were over while on the other hand mine had just commenced.
CHAPTER XI—WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY IN FRANCE
The strain from being cooped up in the small and stuffy quarters of the H-24 was beginning to tell on me and the blind way in which we had to manœuver did not make me care for the life so I bethought me it would be a nice change to get into the flying game.
Moreover my arm had begun to pain me considerably at times and so I determined to get a disability discharge. This was not a hard thing to do for any one with a heart need not be told that a man with a game arm should not be made to continue in active service if he didn’t want to.
Consequently in February I received my discharge and after seeing my folks I concluded it would be best to have my arm operated on to remove the stiffness. This I did and after the plaster casts that had been around it for a month were removed I was once again the owner of two good, strong, healthy arms and in every way fit for service of any kind should I care to enlist again.
To get a commission as a lieutenant in the Flying Corps was not as easy as I thought it would be and I found the whole machinery of making an application so clogged with red-tape that the farthest I was able to get was to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of military authorities as to everything pertaining to myself, parents and even down to the dimensions of my great grandmother’s left ankle. I was simply out of luck!
The more I thought about it, though, the more I was determined to get to France where the big game was going on. So one bright May morning I went down to a recruiting station at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, New York, with an entirely original idea and that was to enlist in the cavalry. I picked the cavalry because I thought the outdoor life would help to build me up and that riding a horse would not make my feet as sore as marching.
While I could have enlisted in the Signal Corps as a wireless operator I believed my chances for seeing red blooded life overseas were better if I joined one of the common or line branches of the service. Having eaten a salt mackerel for breakfast and washed it down with a bucket of water (I was a little underweight) I went down to the recruiting station. In a crowded downstairs room filled with a crew of other fellows waiting to enlist I filled out a card giving my age, residence and consent to be enlisted should I pass the physical examination which was held every couple of hours.
We were stripped of our clothes, lined up in a row and one by one we were examined by the recruiting officer who put us through eye, foot, breathing and other like tests. I had hard work to keep my game arm from failing me but I came through all right. Finally I was weighed in, cautioned against the extreme penalties of lying and then asked all about my past life. The officer in charge of the station was next called in and gave each of us a little physical inspection of his own, with the result that he threw out a few of the candidates as being unfit. Sixteen had been accepted and—oh, joy—I was one of them.
This done we dressed, signed a register which showed we had been accepted, were given sealed orders and transportation and told to report to Fort Slocum, on New York Harbor. After a long ride on the subway, trolley and government ferry I arrived at Fort Slocum. It is located on an island in the harbor and is formed chiefly of houses for the officers, regular barracks for the infantrymen, or doughboys as they are called, who are stationed there all the time, and a lot of wooden shacks and tents for the recruits who come in.
The examination I was given at the recruiting station wasn’t a marker to that which I received at Fort Slocum and as a result it was not until the night of the day after I got there that I was sworn in and duly became a recruit in the cavalry of the United States Army.
I stayed at Fort Slocum for the better part of two weeks waiting patiently for the time when I should hear my name called among the others of the daily outgoing list, and be one of the recruits to go away to be trained. I had hoped to be sent to Texas for my training but when at last I was on the outbound list it was for Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming.
After a four-day ride on a troop train we arrived at Fort Russell which is about three miles from Cheyenne. There our cars were switched onto a siding and we landed just as the sun was setting in the golden west. And say, man, as far as the eye could reach except in one direction, where there were mountains, the land was as level as the sea in a doldrum. Oh, why, oh, why, did I ever leave my happy berth on the H-24?
Up to the time of our arrival the Fort had not been occupied except by the officers and a few old service men from the Mexican border who were to act as non-commissioned officers while we were being trained. A few of the officers were at the post station and we—there were about 200 all told—were marched over to headquarters where the troop commanders were waiting for us.
Teamsters, horseshoers, clerks and recruits having other trades of a useful kind were picked from the bunch and assigned to troops. If I had wanted to I could have been a troop-clerk which carries with it a Corporal’s warrant but since I had enlisted I made up my mind to go in as a common trooper and get my share of riding and my fill of drilling—both of which I did—like the rest of them. So it came about I was assigned to M Troop, 315th Cavalry, U. S. A.
Now Wyoming is different from the Amazon country in that there are no trees and the ground is covered with short, sunburned buffalo grass. From the post I could see the Rocky Mountains a hundred miles away and from this you may conclude that after Nature got tired of making all the other countries she made Wyoming—but not so, for Arizona came after.
To make up for whatever the scenery may have lacked the post was a marvel and neither money nor labor had been spared to make it comfortable. I’ve been in apartment houses on Riverside Drive that couldn’t hold a candle to it. There were large two story brick barracks with big squad rooms where we bunked and a big mess hall where we ate. In front of the barracks was the drill ground and there for an hour and a half every morning we did the dismounted drill of the cavalryman and then the rest of the morning was given over to equitation, which in every day American means riding.
Our horses were of the genuine western variety and—woe be me—most of them had never been ridden before except once or twice perhaps, by the wranglers of the remount stations. This being true the eastern recruits spent the best part of the time between the horses’ backs, the air and finding a soft place to land. A fellow could lash himself to a stanchion in a submarine but never to the back of a bucking broncho.
Along about this time Cheyenne held its annual Frontier Day. This consists of gathering the best riders and ropers from all over the United States who compete for the glory there is in it though not overlooking the big purses offered. All through Frontier Day—or week, it should be called—Cheyenne slipped back half a century. The city was filled with booted and spurred cowpunchers from every ranching state in the Union. They wore sombreros and shirts of every color the rainbow affords. Then out at the race track at Frontier Park I saw such feats as squaw races, trick riding and fancy roping; roping, throwing and hog tying a steer in 23 seconds—the world’s record—and bull-dogging a steer. I pined for my old pal Bill Adams to see these landlubber stunts.
After four months of drill and riding, pistol and rifle practise on the target range, in fact just as we were beginning to consider ourselves old cavalrymen, we were given a sudden jolt by being told that no more cavalry would be sent overseas and that we would be changed to light field artillery. Now there are a couple of lines in an old army song that run like this:
“The Infantry for bravery,
The Artillery for slavery.”
We were a badly disappointed crew, but a good soldier is one who obeys orders no matter how tough they are and we were good soldiers. In due course of time we were shipped to West Point, Kentucky, where we were to receive our artillery training in seventy-two days and then go overseas.
Because I had been a wireless, or radio, operator as it is now more often called, and because wireless is an important part of artillery I was immediately picked to go to the radio-school. I laughed at the idea of my going to radio-school. What’s the use when I am already an expert operator and had been in the Navy? But I found out there were still a few things I could learn about wireless.
In the artillery the eyes of the army, which is the aviation section, provides the artillery with airplane and balloon service and in order to cooperate successfully with them the wireless operator must have a special training. For three weeks or so we did nothing but buzzer practise; that is a buzzer, which is an electric bell without the bell, is connected in circuit with a battery, a telegraph key and some twenty head-phones. The beginners put on the receivers and an instructor worked the key.
As I could easily take twenty words a minute I was made an instructor. Then there were lectures on the elements of electricity and magnetism and by the end of the first month the class was ready for the fundamentals of wireless telegraphy. All of that was old stuff for me and as they say in the army it was pickin’s.
The time came when we were introduced to the real wireless apparatus and although the sets were portable and of shorter range than any I had handled since I was a kid operator they were certainly beauties. There were three different types or wireless sets; each one was designed to cover a certain distance, and each sending set had its special receiving set. The range of the smallest set was about a mile, while that of the largest was about twenty-five miles. These are very short ranges but enough for army purposes where messages are sent from the trenches through one operator after another or relayed until they reach headquarters.
As I said before the purpose of the wireless stations is to cooperate with airplanes and balloons and aid in the control of artillery fire. So in the months that followed our work was to go out on the firing range with the batteries and to cooperate with the airplanes and balloons.
I had been warranted as Corporal in charge of the 2nd Battalion Radio Detail. You know, I suppose, that a regiment consists of two battalions, each battalion of three batteries, each battery of four guns and the complement of about 200 odd men necessary for their action, So my detail was responsible for coordinating the eyes, that is the airplanes and balloons of the three batteries in the second battalion, with the guns.
Possibly you may wonder why it is necessary for airplanes to work with the batteries and here is the answer: the guns, or pieces as they are called, were American 75’s, that is, the bore of the gun is 75 millimeters in diameter, and as the range they are fired over is seldom less than two miles some one must spot the fire, that is see just where the shells hit around the target and then tell the gun crew so that they can point their guns more accurately, all of which is called directing the fire.
Now an airplane can do this to perfection but there must be some kind of communication established between it and the battery, and this is where we came in with our wireless. I had five men in my detail, there being two operators and three panelmen and of the latter and their work I will tell you later.
Our regular performance each day was like this: The batteries would go out to the range in the morning, place their guns and set up their B. C. stations, that is, Battery Commander stations where the Battery Commander would be located within a few feet of the pieces to work out any problems that might arise in aiming them.
With the detail and accompanied by a second lieutenant, who was the officer in charge, we would arrive at the range a few minutes before one o’clock which was the time the batteries were scheduled to fire. The operators and the panelmen would get busy setting up the aerial wire system. This consisted of two jointed masts about fifteen feet high and each one of which was made in five sections.
The masts would be set up about a hundred yards apart and a single aerial wire was stretched between them. The leading-in wire was then connected to a receiving set and the latter to the ground. This was formed of a pair of wires stretched on the ground directly under the aerial wire and to each of their free ends a copper mat was fixed with a little dirt thrown over it.
The whole equipment is so built that we used to set it up ready for work in from three to five minutes. The operators then adjusted their head-phones and were ready to tune-in the incoming signals from the airplane as soon as it should come in sight. You see, our detail on the ground only received wireless signals from the airplane while the operator in it, or observer as he is called, only sent wireless signals. This one sided arrangement had to be used because the propeller makes so much noise that the operator in the airplane would have trouble in reading the signals. In order to signal to the airplane as she flew above us we used a system of panels.