The Silent Watchers: England's Navy during the Great War: What It Is, and What We Owe to ItCopplestone, Bennet
History
The Silent Watchers: England's Navy during the Great War: What It Is, and What We Owe to It
Copplestone, Bennet
Great Britain. Royal Navy; World War, 1914-1918 -- Naval operations
“So should I. But Fritz didn’t. He roamed about the harbour, blind,
keeping as deep down as he could safely go. Above him scoured the patrol
boats and destroyers, and above them again flew the seaplanes. Now and
then the air observers would get a sight of him and once or twice they
dropped bombs, but this was soon stopped as the risk to our own boats
was too great. Regarded as artillery practice bomb dropping from
aeroplanes is simply rotten. One can’t possibly aim from a thing moving
at fifty miles an hour. If one may believe the look outs of the
destroyers the whole harbour crawled with periscopes, but they were
really bully beef cans and other rubbish chucked over from the warships.
When last seen, or believed to be seen, Fritz was blundering towards the
line of battleships lying under the deep gloom of the shore, and then he
vanished altogether. Night came on, the very long Northern night in
winter, and it seemed extra specially long to us in the big ships.
Searchlights were going all through the dark hours, the water gleamed,
all the floating rubbish which accumulates so fast in harbour stood out
dead black against the silvery surface, and the Officers of the Watch
detected more periscopes than Fritz had in his whole service. The hunt
went on without ceasing for, at any moment, Fritz’s batteries might
peter out, and he come up. It was a bit squirmy to feel that here cooped
up in a narrow deep sea lock were over a hundred King’s ships, and that
somewhere below us was a desperate German submarine which couldn’t
possibly escape, but which might blow some of us to blazes any minute.”
“Did any of you go to sleep?” asked the Pongo foolishly.
The Sub-Lieutenant stared. “When it wasn’t my watch I turned in as
usual,” he replied. “Why not?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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