Part 15

The officers of the Iris, which was in trouble ahead of the Vindictive, describe Captain Carpenter as handling her like a picket boat. The Vindictive was fitted along her port side with a high false deck, from which ran eighteen brows or gangways by which the storming and demolition parties were to land.

The men gathered in readiness on the main lower decks, while Colonel Elliott, who was to lead the marines, waited on the false deck just abaft the bridge. Captain Halahan, who commanded the bluejackets, was amidships. The gangways were lowered, and they scraped and rebounded upon the high parapet of the mole as the Vindictive rolled in the sea-way.

The word for the assault had not yet been given when both leaders were killed, Colonel Elliott by a shell and Captain Halahan by machine-gun fire which swept the decks. The same shell that killed Colonel Elliott also did fearful execution in the forward Stokes mortar battery. The men were magnificent; every officer bears the same testimony.

The mere landing on the mole was a perilous business. It involved a passage across the crashing and splintering gangways, a drop over the parapet into the field of fire of the German machine guns which swept its length, and a further drop of some sixteen feet to the surface of the mole itself. Many were killed and more wounded as they crowded up the gangways, but nothing hindered the orderly and speedy landing by every gangway.

Lieutenant H. T. C. Walker had his arm shot away by shell on the upper deck, and lay in darkness while the storming parties trod him under. He was recognized and dragged aside by the commander. He raised his remaining arm in greetings. "Good luck to you," he called as the rest of the stormers hastened by. "Good luck."

The lower deck was a shambles as the commander made the rounds of the ship, yet those wounded and dying raised themselves to cheer as he made his tour. * * *

Heroic Work on the Iris

The Iris had troubles of her own. Her first attempts to make fast to the mole ahead of the Vindictive failed, as her grapnels were not large enough to span the parapet. Two officers, Lieut. Commander Bradford and Lieutenant Hawkins, climbed ashore and sat astride the parapet trying to make the grapnels fast till each was killed and fell down between the ship and the wall. Commander Valentine Gibbs had both legs shot away and died next morning. Lieutenant Spencer, though wounded, took command and refused to be relieved.

The Iris was obliged at last to change her position and fall in astern of the Vindictive, and suffered very heavily from fire. A single big shell plunged through the upper deck and burst below at a point where fifty-six marines were waiting for the order to go to the gangways. Forty-nine were killed. The remaining seven were wounded. Another shell in the ward-room, which was serving as a sick bay, killed four officers and twenty-six men. Her total casualties were eight officers and sixty-nine men killed and three officers and 103 men wounded.

Storming and demolition parties upon the mole met with no resistance from the Germans other than intense and unremitting fire. One after another buildings burst into flame or split and crumbled as dynamite went off. A bombing party working up toward the mole extension in search of the enemy destroyed several machine-gun emplacements, but not a single prisoner rewarded them. It appears that upon the approach of the ships and with the opening of fire the enemy simply retired and contented themselves with bringing machine guns to the short end of the mole.

BLOCKING THE CANAL

Describing operations of the three block ships, the official narrative says:

The Thetis came first, steaming into a tornado of shells from great batteries ashore. All her crew, save a remnant who remained to steam her in and sink her, already had been taken off her by a ubiquitous motor launch, but the remnant spared hands enough to keep her four guns going. It was hers to show the road to the Intrepid and the Iphigenia, which followed. She cleared a string of armed barges which defends the channel from the tip of the mole, but had the ill-fortune to foul one of her propellers upon a net defense which flanks it on the shore side.

The propeller gathered in the net, and it rendered her practically unmanageable. Shore batteries found her and pounded her unremittingly. She bumped into the bank, edged off, and found herself in the channel again still some hundreds of yards from the mouth of the canal in practically a sinking condition. As she lay she signaled invaluable directions to others, and her commander, R. S. Sneyd, also accordingly blew charges and sank her. Motor launches under Lieutenant H. Littleton raced alongside and took off her crew. Her losses were five killed and five wounded.

The Intrepid, smoking like a volcano and with all her guns blazing, followed. Her motor launch had failed to get alongside outside the harbor, and she had men enough for anything. Straight into the canal she steered, her smoke blowing back from her into the Iphigenia's eyes, so that the latter was blinded, and, going a little wild, rammed a dredger, with her barge moored beside it, which lay at the western arm of the canal. She was not clear, though, and entered the canal pushing the barge before her. It was then that a shell hit the steam connections of her whistle, and the escape of steam which followed drove off some of the smoke and let her see what she was doing.

Main Object Attained

Lieutenant Stuart Bonham Carter, commanding the Intrepid, placed the nose of his ship neatly on the mud of the western bank, ordered his crew away, and blew up his ship by switches in the chart room. Four dull bumps were all that could be heard, and immediately afterward there arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine room during the explosion, and reported that all was as it should be.

Lieutenant E. W. Bullyard Leake, commanding the Iphigenia, beached her according to arrangement on the eastern side, blew her up, saw her drop nicely across the canal, and left her with her engines still going, to hold her in position till she should have bedded well down on the bottom. According to the latest reports from air observation, two old ships, with their holds full of concrete, are lying across the canal in a V position, and it is probable that the work they set out to do has been accomplished and that the canal is effectively blocked. A motor launch, under Lieutenant P. T. Deane, had followed them in to bring away the crews and waited further up the canal toward the mouth against the western bank.

Lieutenant Bonham Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with the floor of a grating. Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine gun a few hundred yards away giving him its undivided attention. What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct Intrepid still was emitting huge clouds of smoke which it had been worth nobody's while to turn. He managed to catch a rope, as the motor launch started, and was towed for awhile till he was observed and taken on board.

THE VINDICTIVE'S STORY

Commander Alfred F. B. Carpenter, who commanded the Vindictive and who was made Captain for his successful work, gave an Associated Press correspondent an interesting description of the episode. During the attack he was at the end of the bridge in a small steel box or cabin which had been specially constructed to house a flame thrower. The Captain, with his arm in a sling, standing on the shell-battered deck of the Vindictive, said:

Exactly according to plan we ran alongside the mole, approached it on the port side, where we were equipped with specially built buffers of wood two feet wide. As there was nothing for us to tie up to, we merely dropped anchor there, while the Daffodil kept us against the mole with her nose against the opposite side of our ship. In the fairly heavy sea two of our three gangways were smashed, but the third held, and 500 men swarmed up this on to the mole. This gangway was two feet wide and thirty feet long. The men who went up it included 300 marines and 150 storming seamen from the Vindictive, and fifty or so from the Daffodil. They swarmed up the steel gangway, carrying hand grenades and Lewis guns. No Germans succeeded in approaching the gangway, but a hard hand-to-hand fight took place about 200 yards up the mole toward the shore.

The Vindictive's bow was pointed toward the shore, so the bridge got the full effect of enemy fire from the shore batteries. One shell exploded against the pilot house, killing nearly all its ten occupants. Another burst in the fighting top, killing a Lieutenant and eight men, who were doing excellent work with two pompoms and four machine guns.

The battery of eleven-inch guns at the end of the mole was only 300 yards away, and it kept trying to reach us. The shore batteries also were diligent. Only a few German shells hit our hull, because it was well protected by the wall of the mole, but the upper structure, mast, stacks, and ventilators showed above the wall and were riddled. A considerable proportion of our casualties were caused by splinters from these upper works.

Meanwhile the Daffodil continued to push us against the wall as if no battle was on, and if she had failed to do this none of the members of the landing party would have been able to return to the ship.

Twenty-five minutes after the Vindictive had reached the wall the first block ship passed in and headed for the canal. Two others followed in leisurely fashion while we kept up the fight on the mole. One of the block ships stranded outside of the canal, but the two others got two or three hundred yards inside, where they were successfully sunk across the entrance.

Fifteen minutes after the Vindictive arrived alongside the mole our submarine exploded under the viaduct connecting the mole with the mainland. The Germans had sent a considerable force to this viaduct as soon as the submarine arrived, and these men were gathered on the viaduct, attacking our submersible with machine guns. When the explosion occurred the viaduct and Germans were blown up together. The crew of the submarine, consisting of six men, escaped on board a dinghy to a motor launch.

Early in the fighting a German shell knocked out our howitzer, which had been getting in some good shots on a big German seaplane station on the mole half a mile away. This is the largest seaplane station in Belgium. Unfortunately, our other guns could not be brought to bear effectively upon it. The shell which disabled the howitzer killed all the members of the gun crew. Many men were also killed by a German shell which hit the mole close to our ship and scattered fragments of steel and stone among the marines assembling on the deck around the gangway.

Half an hour after the block ships went in, we received the signal to withdraw. The Vindictive's siren was blown, and the men returned from all parts of the mole and thronged down the gangway. We put off after having lain alongside just about an hour. The Germans made no effort to interfere with our getaway other than to continue their heavy firing.

RESCUE FROM BLOCK SHIPS

One of the most thrilling incidents was the rescue by two American-built motor launches of nearly 200 members of the crews of two block ships sunk at the entrance to the Bruges Canal. The feat was accomplished under a heavy fire and the actual transfer was made in less than five minutes. One launch delivered ninety-nine men to the destroyer.

The dead and wounded could not all be brought away, but the loss of personnel in this way was declared to be remarkably small.

Stoker Bendall of the submarine which blew up the Zeebrugge mole said:

It was silent and heavy business. We were going full tilt when we hit the viaduct. It was a good jolt, and we ran right into the middle of the viaduct and stuck there, as we intended to do. I don't think anybody said anything except, "Well, we are here all right."

We lowered a skiff and stood by while the commander touched off the fuse and then tumbled into the skiff and pushed off. By bad luck the propeller fouled the exhaust pipe and left us with only two oars and two minutes to get away. The enemy lights were on us, and the machine guns were firing from the shore.

Before we made 200 yards the submarine went up, and there was a tremendous flash and roar, and lots of concrete from the mole fell around us. Luckily, we were not struck.

Photographs taken from an airplane a few days later showed that the effort to block the canal entrance had been successful. The Intrepid and Iphigenia had reached the precise positions in which they were intended to be sunk, while the exploded submarine had blown a gap of sixty to a hundred feet in the shore end of the mole. The Frankfurter Zeitung, in commenting on the affair, said: "It would be foolish to deny that the British fleet scored a great success through a fantastically audacious stroke in penetrating into one of the most important strongholds over which the German flag floats."

ATTACKS AT OSTEND

At Ostend the operations on the same night were unsuccessful, largely owing to a shift of wind. Small craft with smoke apparatus ran in according to program, set up a screen, and lit two large flares to mark the entrance to the harbor for the two concrete-laden cruisers that were to be sunk in the channel. Before the cruisers could arrive, however, the wind shifted and blew away the smoke screen, after which the German gunfire quickly destroyed the flares. The cruisers tried to proceed by guesswork under heavy fire, but their efforts were in vain. One of the block ships was sunk, but not in a position to obstruct the channel.

A second attempt to close the Ostend harbor was made on the night of May 9-10, when the battered old Vindictive, which had borne the brunt of the shellfire at the Zeebrugge mole, was sunk in the channel with her inside full of concrete. A member of the expedition gave this account:

As the Vindictive neared Ostend it became apparent that the Germans had got wind of our presence, for suddenly there was a regular pyrotechnic display of star shells. The effect was brilliant, but quite undesirable from our point of view. Immediately guns of all sizes opened fire on us, and there was a terrific din.

The Vindictive and one or two other vessels received hits, and a few casualties were caused by this gunfire. The firing was heavily returned by our ships. Most of the crew of the Vindictive were taken off when the ship was at a little distance from the Ostend piers, only a few officers and men being left to navigate her between the piers and sink her there. A motor launch which was assisting in picking up the crew was hit several times by shellfire, and was in a sinking condition when it came alongside the Admiral's vessel, the destroyer Warwick, to which they were transferred. The motor launch had extensive damage in the fore part, and by order of the Admiral was sunk, as it was apparent that it could not get back to Dover. There was a heavy explosion when the Vindictive sank between the piers.

The casualties in the second Ostend raid were forty-seven, of whom eighteen were killed or missing, the rest wounded.

* * * * *

The British Admiralty, in its official report of the second Ostend action, issued May 14, stated that the Vindictive was "lying at an angle of about 40 degrees to the pier, and seemed to be hard fast." Commander Godsal, who was on deck during the critical moments, was missing and was believed to have been killed; Lieutenant Crutchley blew up the auxiliary charges in the forward 6-inch magazine from the conning tower. Lieut. Commander William A. Bury, who blew up the main charges by a switch installed aft, was severely wounded. The Admiralty reported that the sunken ship would make the harbor impracticable for any but small craft and difficult for dredging operations.

German U-Boat Claims

Address by Admiral von Capelle

_German Naval Secretary_

Admiral Von Capelle, the German Secretary of the Navy, delivered an address before the Reichstag, April 17, 1918, in which he asserted that the submarine warfare of Germany was a success. In the course of his speech he said:

"The main question is, What do the western powers need for the carrying on of the war and the supply of their homelands, and what amount of tonnage is still at their disposal for that purpose? All statistical calculations regarding tonnage are today almost superfluous, as the visible successes of the U-boat war speak clearly enough. The robbery of Dutch tonnage, by which the Anglo-Saxons have incurred odium of the worst kind for decades to come, is the best proof of how far the shipping shortage has already been felt by our opponents. In addition to the sinkings there must be added a great amount of wear and tear of ships and an enormous increase of marine accidents, which Sir J. Ellerman, speaking in the Chamber of Shipping recently, calculated at three times the peace losses. Will the position of the western powers improve or deteriorate? That depends upon their military achievements and the replacing of sunken ships by new construction."

Dealing briefly with Sir Eric Geddes's recent speech on the occasion of the debate on the naval estimates, Admiral von Capelle declared:

"The assertion of the First Lord of the Admiralty that an unwillingness to put to sea prevailed among the German U-boat crews is a base calumny."

LOSSES AND CONSTRUCTION

As regards the assertions of British statesmen concerning the extraordinarily great losses of U-boats, Admiral von Capelle said:

"The statements in the foreign press are very greatly exaggerated. Now, as before, our new construction surpasses our losses. The number of U-boats, both from the point of view of quality and quantity, is constantly rising. We can also continue absolutely to reckon on our military achievements hitherto attained. Whether Lloyd George can continue the naval war with prospects of success depends, not upon his will but upon the position of the U-boats as against shipbuilding. According to Lloyd's Register, something over 22,000,000 gross register tons were built in the last ten years before the war in the whole world--that is, inclusive of the construction of ourselves, our allies, and foreign countries. The entire output today can in no case be more, for difficulties of all kinds and the shortage of workmen and material have grown during the war. In the last ten years--that is, in peace time--800,000 gross register tons of the world's shipping was destroyed annually by natural causes. Now in wartime the losses, as already mentioned, are considerably greater. Thus, 1,400,000 gross register tons was the annual net increase for the entire world. That gives, at any rate, a standard for the present position. America's and Japan's new construction is to a certain extent destined for the necessities of these countries.

"In the main, therefore, only the figures of British shipbuilding come into question. About the middle of 1917 there was talk of 3,000,000 tons in official quarters in Great Britain. Then Lloyd George dropped to 2,000,000, and now, according to Bonar Law's statement, the output is 1,160,000 tons. As against, therefore, about 100,000 tons monthly put into service there are sinkings amounting to 600,000 tons, or six times as much. In brief, if the figures given are regarded as too favorable and new construction at the rate of 150,000 tons monthly--that is, 50 per cent. higher--be assumed, and the sinkings be reduced to 450,000 tons, then the sinkings are still three times as large as the amount of new construction.

THE COMING MONTHS

"One other thing must especially be taken into consideration for the coming months. Today every ship sunk strikes at the vital nerve of our opponents. Today, when only the absolutely necessary cargoes of foodstuffs and war necessities can still be transported, the sinking of even one small ship has quite a different significance as compared with the beginning of the U-boat war. Moreover, the loss of one ship means a falling out of four to five cargoes. In these circumstances even the greatest pessimist must say that the position of our opponents is deteriorating in a considerably increasing extent and with rapid strides, and that any doubt regarding the final success of the U-boat war is unjustified."

Replying to a question of the reporter, Admiral von Capelle said:

"Our opponents have been busily endeavoring to strengthen their anti-submarine measures by all the means at their disposal, and, naturally, they have attained a certain success. But they have at no time had any decisive influence on the U-boat war, and, according to human reckoning, they will not do so in the future. The American submarine destroyers which have been so much talked about have failed. The convoy system, which, it is true, offers ships a certain measure of protection, has, on the other hand, also the great disadvantage of reducing their transport capabilities. The statements oscillate from 25 to 60 per cent.

"For the rest, our commanders are specially trained for attacks on convoys, and no day goes by when one or more ships are not struck out of convoys. Experienced commanders manage to sink three to four ships in succession belonging to the same convoy."

THE STEEL QUESTION

Admiral von Capelle then dealt with the steel question as regards shipbuilding, which, he said, "is practically the determinative factor for shipbuilding." He continued:

"Great Britain's steel imports in 1916 amounted to 763,000 tons, and in 1917 only amounted to 497,000 tons. That means that already a reduction of 37 per cent. has been effected, a reduction which will presumably be further considerably increased during 1918. Restriction of imports of ore from other countries, such as America, caused by the U-boat war will also have a hampering effect on shipbuilding in Great Britain. It is true that Sir Eric Geddes denied that there was a lack of material, but expert circles in England give the scarcity of steel as the main reason for the small shipbuilding output.

"American help in men and airplanes and American participation in the war are comparatively small. If later on America wants to maintain 500,000 troops in France, shipping to the amount of about 2,000,000 tons would be permanently needed. This shipping would have to be withdrawn from the supply service of the Allies.