Chapter XI: "fishing"

A young executive officer who had discovered that I came from his part of the world, took me there for tea. I fancy that few of the destroyer folk will forget the principal hotel at the Navy's Irish base. We sat in worn plush chairs in a vast rectangular salon lit by three giant sash windows of horrible proportions. Walls newly decked with paper of a lustrous, fiery red showered down upon us their imaginary warmth. The room was cold, horribly cold, and a minuscule fire of coke burning in a tiny grate seemed to be making no effort whatsoever to improve conditions. The little glow of fire in the nest of clinkers leered with a dull malevolence. Cold--a shivery cold. My eye fled to the pictures on the fiery wall. How in the d----l did these particular pictures ever land in this particular corner of south Ireland? Two were photographic studies of ragged Alabama darkies, pictures of the kind that used to be printed on calendars in the eighteen nineties. One was entitled "I want you, ma honey" (this being addressed to a watermelon), the other being called "I'se just tired of school." These two were varied by an engraving of a race horse, some Charles I cavaliers, and a framed newspaper photograph of the 71st New York Guards en route for Tampa in 1898!

Sugar excepted, there is still plenty of good food in Ireland. The Exec. and I sat down to a very decent tea. I told all that I knew about the Exec.'s friends, that A was in a machine gun company; B in the naval aviation; C in the intelligence department and so forth. And when I had done my share of the talking, I demanded of the Exec, what he thought of his work "over there."

He answered abruptly, as if he had long before settled the question in his own mind:

"It's a game. Some of the sporting fishermen in the flotilla say that it's much like fishing ... now you use this bait, now that, now this rod, now another, and all the time you are following ... following the fish.... It's a game, the biggest game in all the world, for it has the biggest stakes in all the world. There's far more strategy to it than one would suspect. You see, it's not enough to hang round till a periscope pops up; we've got to fish out the periscope."

"Fishing, then," said I. "Well, how and where do you fish?"

"On the chequer board of the Irish Sea and the Channel. You see the surface of the endangered waters is divided up into a number of squares or areas, and over each area some kind of a patrol boat stands guard. She may be a destroyer, ... perhaps a 'sloop.' Now let's suppose she's out there looking for 'fish.'"

"Yes, even as a fisherman might wade out into a river in which he knows that fish are to be caught. But how is your destroyer fisherman to know just what fish are to be caught, and in just what bays and inlets he ought to troll?"

"That's the function of the Naval Intelligence. Have you realized the immense organization which Britain has created especially to fight the submarine? You'll find it all in the war cabinet report for 1917. Before the war, there were only twenty vessels employed as mine sweepers and on auxiliary patrol duties; to-day the number of such craft is about 3,800, and is constantly increasing. And don't forget the sea planes, balloons, and all the other parts of the outfit. So while our destroyer fisherman is casting about in square x, let us say, all these scouting friends of his are trying to find the 'fish' for him. So every once in a while he gets a message via wireless, 'fish seen off bay blank,' 'fish reported in latitude A and longitude B.' ... If these messages refer to spots in his neighbourhood, you can be sure that he keeps an extra sharp lookout. So no matter where the fish goes, there is certain to be a fisher." _During a recent month the mileage steamed by the auxiliary patrol forces in British home waters exceeded six million miles_.

"Now while you are beating the waters for them, what about the fish himself?"

"The fish himself? Well, the ocean is a pretty big place, and the fish has the tremendous advantage of being invisible. A submarine need only show _three inches_ of periscope if the weather is calm. She can travel a hundred miles completely submerged, and she can remain on the bottom for a full forty-eight hours. Squatting on the bottom is called "lying doggo." But she has to come up to breathe and recharge her batteries, and this she does at night. Hence the keenness of the night patrol. And here is another parallel to fishing. You know that when the wind is from a certain direction, you will find the fish in a certain pool, whilst if the wind blows from another quarter, you will find the fish in another place? Same way with submarines. Let the wind blow from a certain direction, and they will run up and down the surface off a certain lee shore. You can just bet that that strip of shore is well patrolled. Moreover, submarines can't go fooling round all over the sea, they _have_ to concentrate in certain squares, say the areas which lie outside big ports or through which a great marine highway lies."

"Suppose that you manage to injure a fish, what then?"

"Well, if the fish isn't too badly injured, he will probably make for one of the shallows, and lie doggo till he has time to effect repairs. Result, every shallow is watched as carefully as a miser watches his gold. And sea planes have a special patrol of the coast to keep them off the shallows by the shore."

"Sometimes, then, in the murk of night, a destroyer must bump into one by sheer good luck?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. Not long ago, a British destroyer racing through a pitch dark rainy night cut a sub almost in half. There was a tremendous bump that knocked the people on the bridge over backward, a lot of yelling, and then a wild salvo of rain blotted everything out. I think they managed to rescue one of the Germans. Pity they didn't get the fish itself. You know it's a great stunt to get your enemy's codes. We get them once in a while. Ever seen a pink booklet on any of your destroyer trips? It's a translation of a German book of instructions to submarine commanders. On British boats they call it 'Baby-Killing at a Glance or the Hun's Vade Mecum.' Great name, isn't it? Tells how to attack convoys and all that sort of thing. Lots of interesting tricks like squatting in the path of the sun so that the lookout, blinded by the glare, shan't see you; playing dead and so on. That playing-dead stunt, if it ever did work, which I greatly doubt, is certainly no favourite now."

"Playing dead? Just what do you mean?"

"Why, a destroyer would chase a sub into the shallows and bomb her. Then 'Fritz' would release a tremendous mess of oil to make believe that he was terribly injured, and lie doggo for hours and hours. The destroyer, of course, seeing the oil, and hearing nothing from 'Fritz' was expected to conclude that 'Fritz' had landed in Valhalla, and go away. Then when she had gone away, 'Fritz,' quite uninjured, went back to his job."

"And now that stunt is out of fashion?"

"You bet it is. Our instructions are to bomb until we get tangible results. Before it announces the end of a sub, the Admiralty has to have unmistakable evidence of the sub's destruction. Not long ago, they say a sub played dead somewhere off the Channel, sent up oil, and waited for the fishers to go. In a few seconds, 'Fritz' got a depth bomb right on his ear, and up he came to the top, the most surprised and angry Hun that ever was seen. Bagged him, boat and all. He must have had a head of solid ivory.

"Got to be cruising along, now. It's four o'clock, and our tender must be waiting for me at the pier."

"Going fishing?" I asked politely.

"You bet!" he answered with a grin.