“It is not possible to prevent
the occasional appearance of enemy submarines within
the range of our shores, but I can give an assurance
that the measures which have been and will be taken
are such as to render proceedings of this sort increasingly
dangerous to the submarines.” DR.
MACNAMARA, Financial Secretary to the Admiralty.
They looked an orderly little squadron
of six as they steamed jauntily out towards the open
sea in single line ahead through the grey-green, tide-ripped
waters of the most thickly populated river estuary
in the world.
They were prosaic, snub-nosed-looking
little craft, short and squat, with high, upstanding
bows, prominent wheelhouses, and stumpy mizzen-masts
abaft all. They hailed from many ports and still
bore the letters and numbers of their peace-time vocation:
F.D. for Fleetwood, G.Y. for Grimsby, B.F. for Banff,
and P.D. for Peterhead. They were steam herring
drifters in the ordinary, common, or garden, piping
times of peace; little vessels which went to sea for
days on end to pitch, wallow, and roll at the end
of a mile or a mile and a half of buoyed drift-net,
in the meshes of which unwary herring, in endeavouring
to force a way through, presently found themselves
caught by the gills.
But now, each one of them flew the
tattered, smoke-stained apology for a once White Ensign,
and they were men-of-war, very much men-of-war.
They had been at the game for nearly twenty-four months,
and, through long practice, they elbowed their way
in and out of the traffic with all the fussy, devil-may-care
assertiveness of His Majesty’s destroyers.
Their admiral, a Royal Naval Reserve
lieutenant, who, in peaceful 1914, was still the immaculate
third officer of a crack Western Ocean passenger liner,
looked out of his wheelhouse windows and surveyed the
potbellied, lumbering cargo carriers steaming by with
all the kindly tolerance of the regular man-of-war’s
man. He, though he did not look it, for they
had been coaling an hour before and he was still grimy
about the face, was the only commissioned officer in
the squadron, fleet, flotilla, or whatever you like
to call it. All the other craft were commanded
by skippers, ex-peacetime-captains of the fishing craft,
who were used to the sea and its vicissitudes, and
knew the ins and cuts of their vessels far better
than they could tell you. The men, for the greater
part, were also fishermen enrolled in the Reserve,
with here and there an ex-naval rating in the shape
of a seaman gunner or signalman.
They may have lacked polish.
They knew little about springing smartly to attention
and nothing whatsoever about the interior economy of
a 6-inch gun. Their attire was sketchy, to say
the least of it. Even the admiral wore grey
flannel trousers, a once white sweater, and coloured
muffler, and it is to be feared that an officer from
a battleship might have referred to them collectively
as a “something lot of pirates.”
Pirates they may have been, but at the best of times
a strict adherence to the uniform regulations is not
a fetish of those serving on board the vessels of
the Auxiliary Patrol. They are, it is perfectly
true, granted a sum of money by a paternal Government
wherewith to purchase their kit, but brass buttons
and best serge suits do not blend with life on board
a herring drifter at sea in all weathers. Sea-boots,
oilskins, jerseys, and any old thing in the way of
trousers and headgear are far more fashionable.
Indeed, one may occasionally happen upon a skipper
wearing an ancient bowler hat when well out in the
North Sea and away from the haunts of senior officers
who might possibly take exception to his battered tile.
But they all took their job seriously,
though, like most sailor folk, light-heartedly.
They were inured to the sea and its hardships; many
of them were part owners of their own craft, even the
man in the red Salvation Army jersey tittivating the
six-pounder gun in the last little ship of the line.
Exactly how they “strafed”
the immoral and ubiquitous Hun submarine it is inexpedient
to say. They had their little guns, of course,
but were full of other ‘gilguys’ evolved
for the same laudable purpose during a period of nearly
two years of war. Moreover, the men were experts
in their use, and that their ‘gadgets’
often worked to the detriment of Fritz may be deduced
from that gentleman’s extreme unwillingness to
be seen in their vicinity, and a casual inspection
of the records of the Auxiliary Patrol probably locked
up somewhere in Whitehall. Some day these records
may be made public, and then we shall read of happenings
which will cause us to hold our breath, and our hair
to bristle like a nail-brush. Who has not heard
the story of the unarmed fishing boat which attacked
a hostile periscope with nothing more formidable than
a coal hammer, or the ex-fisherman who attempted to
cloud Fritz’s vision with a tar brush?
Striving to encompass the destruction
of the wily submarine is by no means a one-sided game.
Our small craft generally manage to have a credit
balance on their side, but Fritz is no fool, and is
not the sort of person to go nosing round an obvious
trap, or to walk blindfold into a snare. Sometimes
he mounts larger and heavier guns than his antagonists,
and may come to the surface out of range of their weapons
and bombard them at his leisure. In such cases
the hunters may become the hunted, and may perchance
be ‘strafed’ themselves. Then there
are always mines, contact with one of which may pulverise
an ordinary wooden drifter into mere matchwood.
The work is fraught with risk.
It is every bit as dangerous as that of the mine-sweepers,
and casualties, both in men and in ships, are simply
bound to occur. But little is made of them.
A few more names will appear in the Roll of Honour,
and in some obscure newspaper paragraph we may read
that “on Thursday last the armed patrol vessel
-- was blown up by a mine” or was “sunk
by gunfire from a hostile submarine,” and that
“ members of her crew escaped in
their small boat and landed at --.”
That is all; no details whatsoever, nothing but the
bare statement.
But the game still goes on.
The men who cheerfully undergo these
risks in their anxiety to serve their country, were
not professional fighters before the war: they
are now; but in the palmy days of peace they were
fishermen, seamen through and through, who, year in
and year out, fair weather or foul, were at sea in
their little craft, reaping the ocean’s harvest.
Their life was ever a hard and a dangerous one, and
the hazards and chances of war have made it doubly
so.
They have none of the excitement of
a fight in the open. Much of their work in protecting
the coastwise traffic is deadly in its monotony, and,
as we have become used to it, has come to be looked
upon as a matter of course.
Their gallant deeds are rarely the
subjects of laudatory paragraphs in the newspapers,
and the great majority go unrewarded. Even if
we do happen to meet a man wearing a little strip
of blue and white ribbon on his coat or jumper and
ask him why he was decorated, he merely laughs, wags
his head, and says nothing.
It is very unsatisfactory of him.