Full Speed Ahead: Tales from the Log of a Correspondent with Our Navy

A London day of soft and smoky skies darkened every now and then by capricious and intrusive little showers was drawing to a close in a twilight of gold and grey. Our table stood in a bay of plate glass windows over-looking the embankment close by Cleopatra's needle; we watched the little, double-decked tram cars gliding by, the opposing, interthreading streams of pedestrians, and a fleet of coal barges coming up the river solemn as a cloud. Behind us lay, splendid and somewhat theatric, the mottled marble, stiff, white napery, and bright silver of a fashionable dining hall. Only a few guests were at hand. At our little table sat the captain of a submarine who was then in London for a few days on richly merited leave, a distinguished young officer of the "mother ship" accompanying our under water craft, and myself. It is impossible to be long with submarine folk without realizing that they are a people apart, differing from the rest of the Naval personnel even as their vessels differ. A man must have something individual to his character to volunteer for the service, and every officer is a volunteer. An extraordinary power of quick decision, a certain keen, resolute look, a certain carriage; submarine folk are such men as all of us pray to have by our side in any great trial or crisis of our life.

Guests began to come by twos and threes, girls in pretty shimmering dresses, young army officers with wound stripes and clumsy limps; a faint murmur of conversation rose, faint and continuous as the murmur of a distant stream.

Because I requested him, the captain told me of the crossing of the submarines. It was the epic of an heroic journey.

"After each boat had been examined in detail, we began to fill them with supplies for the voyage. The crew spent days manoeuvring cases of condensed milk, cans of butter, meat, and chocolate down the hatchways, food which the boat swallowed up as if she had been a kind of steel stomach. Until we had it all neatly and tightly stowed away, the Z looked like a corner grocery store. Then early one December morning we pulled out of the harbour. It wasn't very cold, merely raw and damp, and it was misty dark. I remember looking at the winter stars riding high just over the meridian. The port behind us was still and dead, but a handful of navy folk had come to one of the wharves to see us off. Yes, there was something of a stir, you know the kind of stir that's made when boats go to sea, shouted orders, the splash of dropped cables, vagrant noises. It didn't take a great time to get under way; we were ready, waiting for the word to go. The flotilla, mother-ship, tugs and all, was out to sea long before the dawn. You would have liked the picture, the immense stretch of the greyish, winter-stricken sea, the little covey of submarines running awash, the grey mother-ship going ahead casually as an excursion steamer into the featureless dawn. The weather was wonderful for two days, a touch of Indian summer on December's ocean, then on the night of the third day we ran into a blow, the worst I ever saw in my life. A storm.... Oh boy!"

He paused for an instant to flick the ashes from his cigarette with a neat, deliberate gesture. One could see memories living in the fine, resolute eyes. The broken noises of the restaurant which had seemingly died away while he spoke crept back again to one's ears. A waiter dropped a clanging fork.

"A storm. Never remember anything like it. A perfect terror. Everybody realized that any attempt to keep together would be hopeless. And night was coming on. One by one the submarines disappeared into that fury of wind and driving water; the mothership, because she was the largest vessel in the flotilla, being the last we saw. We snatched her last signal out of the teeth of the gale, and then she was gone, swallowed up in the storm. So we were alone.

We got through the night somehow or other. The next morning the ocean was a dirty brown-grey, and knots and wisps of cloud were tearing by close over the water. Every once in a while a great, hollow-bellied wave would come rolling out of the hullaballoo and break thundering over us. On all the boats the lookout on the bridge had to be lashed in place, and every once in a while a couple of tons of water would come tumbling past him. Nobody at the job stayed dry for more than three minutes; a bathing suit would have been more to the point than oilers. Shaken, you ask? No, not very bad, a few assorted bruises and a wrenched thumb, though poor Jonesie on the Z3 had a wave knock him up against the rail and smash in a couple of ribs. But no being sick for him, he kept to his feet and carried on in spite of the pain, in spite of being in a boat which registered a roll of seventy degrees. I used to watch the old hooker rolling under me. You've never been on a submarine when she's rolling--talk about rolling--oh boy! We all say seventy degrees because that's as far as our instruments register. There were times when I almost thought she was on her way to make a complete revolution. You can imagine what it was like inside. To begin with, the oily air was none too sweet, because every time we opened a hatch we shipped enough water to make the old hooker look like a start at a swimming tank, and then she was lurching so continuously and violently that to move six feet was an expedition. But the men were wonderful, wonderful! Each man at his allotted task, and--what's that English word, ... carrying on. Our little cook couldn't do a thing with the stove, might as well have tried to cook on a miniature earthquake, but he saw that all of us had something to eat, doing his bit, game as could be."

He paused again. The embankment was fading in the dark. A waiter appeared, and drew down the thick, light-proof curtains.

"Yes, the men were wonderful--wonderful. And there wasn't very much sickness. Let's see, how far had I got--since it was impossible to make any headway we lay to for forty-eight hours. The deck began to go the second morning, some of the plates being ripped right off. And blow--well as I told you in the beginning, I never saw anything like it. The disk of the sea was just one great, ragged mass of foam all being hurled through space by a wind screaming by with the voice and force of a million express trains. Perhaps you are wondering why we didn't submerge. Simply couldn't use up our electricity. It takes oil running on the surface to create the electric power, and we had a long, long journey ahead. Then ice began to form on the superstructure, and we had to get out a crew to chop it off. It was something of a job; there wasn't much to hang on to, and the waves were still breaking over us. But we freed her of the danger, and she went on.

We used to wonder where the other boys were in the midst of all the racket. One was drifting towards the New England coast, her compass smashed to flinders; others had run for Bermuda, others were still at sea.

Then we had three days of good easterly wind. By jingo, but the good weather was great, were we glad to have it--oh boy! We had just got things ship-shape again when we had another blow but this second one was by no means as bad as the first. And after that we had another spell of decent weather. The crew used to start the phonograph and keep it going all day long.

The weather was so good that I decided to keep right on to the harbour which was to be our base over here. I had enough oil, plenty of water, the only possible danger was a shortage of provisions. So I put us all on a ration, arranging to have the last grand meal on Christmas day. Can you imagine Christmas on a little, storm-bumped submarine some hundred miles off the coast? A day or two more and we ran calmly into ... Shall we say deleted harbour?

Hungry, dirty, oh so dirty, we hadn't had any sort of bath or wash for about three weeks; we all were green looking from having been cooped up so long, and our unshaven, grease-streaked faces would have upset a dinosaur. The authorities were wonderfully kind and looked after us and our men in the very best style. I thought we could never stop eating and a real sleep, ... oh boy!

"Did you fly the flag as you came in?" I asked.

"You bet we did!" answered the captain, his keen, handsome face lighting at the memory. "You see," he continued in a practical spirit, "they would probably have pumped us full of holes if we hadn't."

And that is the way that the American submarines crossed the Atlantic to do their share for the Great Cause.