Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
On a Submarine Chaser
VERY shortly after Huerta resigned the presidency of Mexico and made his getaway, 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 mothership 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 mes-sages 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 of 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 water-tight. 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.