"Two very fast and heavily-armed German raiders attacked a convoy in the North Sea, about midway between the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian coast, on October 17th. Two British destroyers--H.M. ships _Mary Rose_ (Lieutenant-Commander Charles L. Fox) and _Strongbow_ (Lieutenant-Commander Edward Brooke)--which formed the anti-submarine escort, at once engaged the enemy vessels, and fought until sunk after a short and unequal engagement. Their gallant action held the German raiders sufficiently long to enable three of the merchant vessels to effect their escape. It is regretted, however, that five Norwegian, one Danish, and three Swedish vessels--all unarmed--were thereafter sunk by gunfire without examination or warning of any kind and regardless of the lives of their crew or passengers.... Anxious to make good their escape before British forces could intercept them, no effort was made to rescue the crews of the sunk British destroyers or the doomed merchant ships, but British patrol craft which arrived shortly afterward rescued some thirty Norwegians and others of whom details are not yet known.... The enemy raiders succeeded in evading the British watching squadrons on the long dark nights, both in their hurried outward dash and homeward flight. "It is regretted that all the eighty-eight officers and men of H.M.S. _Mary Rose_ and forty-seven officers and men of H.M.S. _Strongbow_ were lost. All the next-of-kin have been informed." A few days later a second Admiralty report announced that ten survivors of the _Mary Rose_ had reached Norway in an open boat, and also gave a few further particulars of the action in which she had been lost. From this it appeared that she had been many miles ahead of the main convoy when the latter was attacked, and that, possessed of the speed, with many knots to spare, to have avoided an action in which the odds were a thousand to one against her, she had yet deliberately steamed back and thrown down the gage of battle to the heavily armed German cruisers. Just why her captain chose the course he did was not, and never will be, fully explained. He went down with his ship, and to none of those who survived had he disclosed what was in his mind. It was certainly not "war," the critics said, but they also agreed that it was "magnificent" enough to furnish the one ray of brightness striking athwart the sombre gloom of the whole disheartening tragedy. "He held on unflinchingly," concluded an all-too-brief story of the action issued to the public through the Admiralty, some time later, "and he died, leaving to the annals of his service an episode not less glorious than that in which Sir Richard Grenville perished."