Part 37

“About 2 a.m.—We reach the third obstruction, which runs parallel to the jetty, without encountering that running from the jetty on the right of the guard boat to the large opening of the port. The obstruction now to be overcome is made up of a row of metal cylinders, with tops projecting about twenty centimeters above the water, supporting, about sixty centimeters below the water level, a metal cable to which a net is attached. Given the distance between buoys, and the depth at which the net begins, it is easy to pass this barrier. About ten meters behind it is a second, and then a third, all parallel and of the same type. These are passed without real difficulty, though we have lost time between the second and third series. A boat was moored not more than thirty meters from us, and we had to move with extreme caution and very slowly.

“It is easy to know where we are. Ahead and to our left, I can recognize Valmaggiore and the rocky mass near the curve toward the interior of the port. We consult the pocket compass, but it is full of water and will not work. Once past the third section of this obstruction, I steer in an oblique line to the right, the direction in which I believe we shall find the last series of obstructions—those projecting from the north coast and running perpendicular to the jetty.

“The first big ships—dark, shadowy forms—are barely visible on our right. Going forward, we can see three other ships, further in, that show lighted cabins and portholes, and that have white deck-lights.

NEARING THE SHIP

“About 3 a.m.—We reach and pass, without trouble, a triple series of obstructions similar to the preceding ones. Sure of our position, I steer so as to pass between the north coast and the line of big ships, along which we move for about 200 meters, now always fighting against the current.

“It is late, and we fear that the air pressure of 120 atmospheres will not be sufficient to insure our return to the chaser. After consultation, we agree to continue as far as the flagship, which had been pointed out to us as of special importance. After sinking this we will endeavor to land on the north coast, sink our apparatus and dispose of our waterproof suits. Then, in the uniform of Italian naval officers, which we wear underneath the waterproof, we will try to reach a place called Fontaine, near Rovigno, where it has been agreed that a motor boat will wait for us each night from the 2d to the 7th of November.

“As we move toward the ship I detach a small device that had been added at the last moment. It is supposed to insure an easy mooring for the propelling apparatus, but fails to work. To rid ourselves of this incumbrance I unsheathe my knife, lose the sheath, and am obliged to stick the knife into the wooden cover of the apparatus. (I mention this merely because it will explain why, later, I was so long under the _Viribus Unitis_.)

“At this time an incident occurs that very nearly puts an end to the whole business. We find that, with no apparent cause, our apparatus is gradually, unmistakably, sinking—especially at the stern, where I am. Greatly disturbed, I endeavor to counteract this sinking by crossing my legs beneath the stern, and by accelerating the motor, at the same time working to open the little valve that lets air into the balance tank at the stern. After a hurried examination, I find that the valve for flooding the afterpart is open; how it happened I cannot imagine. The valve is finally closed, and when air is readmitted the apparatus returns to its normal condition. Without doubt these were the most exciting moments of the trip.

“We continue slowly and cautiously until 4.30 when we find ourselves at the bow of the _Viribus Unitis_, the last of the six ships that are drawn up in line. At about 100 meters from the ship’s bow the motor is stopped, and I move to the head of our apparatus and prepare the first weapon of offense. The time for the explosion must be calculated from 4.30 a.m., and the mine is so regulated that it will go off four hours from that time. This, however, is changed before finally sinking the mine.

“It takes from 4.30 until 4.45 to detach the mine from our propelling apparatus. Meanwhile the current carries us along parallel to the right side of the ship at a distance of sixty meters. We have drifted too far toward the stern so, by using our arms as in swimming, and by putting the propeller very gently into action, we succeed in turning our apparatus and in getting back toward the bow of the ship near the lower boom, at a distance of about twenty-five meters from the right side. After another slight change of position toward the rear, on account of the current, I detach the mine, and, swimming, push it before me until it touches the hull.

ALL LIGHTED UP

“The ship is lighted up and shows all the movement that is usual during the night. Some one speaks on the bridge (also lighted); some one is walking the deck. The spot toward which I am swimming is between the second and third of the 150-millimeter guns—counting from the stern—which corresponds roughly to the position of the principal motors. It is a convenient position for the sure sinking of the ship.

“On the weapon of offense is a contrivance for fixing the machine to the hull of the ship. It is connected by a small rope that must be loosened or cut. I set to work, but the knot is intricate and my knife is sticking in the wooden cover of the apparatus. Consequently, as the rope is wet and my hands numb with cold, it takes a long time to untie that knot. Finally, after about twenty minutes, the knot yields. I then attach the device to the hull, and also fasten it to a rope that I find secured to the ship at this point. During the operation (it is about 5.15) I hear the morning bugle—it is sounded repeatedly—soon followed by the noise of all hands on board awake and moving. Ashes are thrown out close to me, and more steps sound on the deck. I must hasten and complete the work. I change the clockwork regulating the explosion from 4 to 2; consequently the explosion should take place at 6.30. I detach the bandage of linen and cork that has floated the mine, and sink it. It is now 5.30.

“I swim away from the ship as quickly as possible; the sky is cloudy, but in the east are signs of dawn. It is a question whether I can succeed in reaching our apparatus or whether I must swim ashore and try to make my way to the point where they will be waiting for us. Happily, on my right I soon see Dr. Paolucci and the apparatus about fifty meters from the ship, and I soon reach them.

“Again taking command, I send the apparatus as rapidly as possible toward the bow of the ship, and parallel to it, hoping to get away from her and to gain the north coast as we had planned. The ship’s crew is now awake, and they must have discovered us by the excessive natural phosphorescence, which was increased by the more rapid movement of our apparatus. Suddenly a searchlight is operated upon the bridge and the light is thrown on us. We remain breathlessly still for a few moments, hoping against hope that we may not be seen. The light remains stationary on us and we move very slowly, for, although no shot has been fired, we understand that we have been discovered and that a boat will now be sent out to us.

“Dr. Paolucci, at the bow, now prepares the second mine, while I open the valves that will sink the apparatus. In this way, while a motor boat is leaving the ship and approaching, we abandon our apparatus which drifts slowly forward—sinking—with the mine that will destroy it. Our mission is ended.

TAKEN ON BOARD

“The motor boat reaches us, paying no attention to our apparatus, and they take us on board. It is 5.45. We are recognized as Italians and they take us to the ladder on the port side of the ship. A crowd of sailors receives us at the top of the ladder. We feel it our duty to shout ‘_Viva l’Italia!_’ This demonstration, contrary to what might be expected, is received in a spirit rather more cordial than hostile. To our surprise we notice the new Jugoslav insignia on the caps. We are asked, in Venetian dialect, how we come to be here. We answer (as Commander Ciano had suggested) that we lighted on the water in a hydroplane which we had afterward sunk. In the meantime they are escorting us aft. The friendly reception and the changed nationality of the fleet cause us to hesitate a bit; we consult and come to a decision, asking to speak with the Captain on a very important and urgent matter. The Captain is called, and it is 6 o’clock when he receives me in his cabin. I give him Dr. Paolucci’s knife, which I find myself still holding, and inform him that his ship is in immediate and very serious danger. The Captain inquires the nature of the serious danger and asks if other ships are in the same peril. I answer that I cannot disclose the nature of the danger and that no other ship is involved.

“The Captain picks up his lifebelt and leaves the cabin at once, giving loud orders in German that all should leave the ship. We follow him up on deck, where he repeats the order—obeyed, scatteringly, by all. I ask the Captain to permit Dr. Paolucci and myself to leave the ship. He consents, and we go down the ladder at the right and swim off toward the ship’s stern with the current, but impeded by the great weight of our clothing. Numbers of swimming sailors pass us, as well as boats loaded with members of the crew. Searchlight signals are flashed to the nearest ship, _Tegethoff_, which sends boats to our assistance.

“About 6.20 a boat picks us up and takes us back to the ladder on the right of the _Viribus Unitis_, where a large boat is waiting for the remainder of the crew. When we reach the deck we are received with threats, though the men are not especially violent. I lose sight of Dr. Paolucci in the crowd. It seems that they no longer believe in our warning or in the danger. A sailor begins to rip up my waterproof suit with his knife; others go through my pockets.

“There is a short, smothered thunderclap; the ship shivers violently, while a crest of foam is thrown up all along her starboard side. External damage is very slight, but the ship heels over to the right, at first very rapidly, then more slowly, but steadily. Most of the crowd has left us; a few, however, now close in, threatening to shut us up on board. The Captain, who stands a few meters off, shows no interest in our fate. I appeal to him, reminding him that we are prisoners of war; that what we have done, as belligerents, gives us the right to have our persons respected; that the threatened treatment is contrary to rules of war. The Captain acknowledges the justice of my protest, again gives permission for us to leave, and gives orders in German for a boat within hailing distance on the left of the stern to return and take us off the ship. I succeed meanwhile, with the help of Dr. Paolucci, in ridding myself of my waterproof suit, which had hampered me in swimming and which the sailors had ripped open.

“Dr. Paolucci and I let ourselves down into the water on the port side of the stern. We are both pulled into the boat and can watch the end of the _Viribus Unitis_. She is still settling on the right. When the water almost reaches the deck—although the ship is still high out of the water—she suddenly heels over with remarkable rapidity. In a few seconds nothing is visible save the flat bottom of the keel and the four screws—encircled by smoke, flames, and fragments of shattered wood—while the sea all around is lashed up into frothy waves. One sailor in our boat gives vent to his grief in a most touching manner; all the others appear indifferent. If my calculations are correct not ten minutes elapsed between the explosion and the end.

“I have learned with sincere grief that Captain Ianko Vukovic de Podkapelski of the _Viribus Unitis_ was wounded by a fragment of the sunken ship while swimming to a place of safety. He was picked up and carried to the hospital in Pola but died a few hours afterward. Throughout, he was most chivalrous, and treated us with all the consideration that one could expect from an honorable enemy.

FREED AFTER THE ARMISTICE

“We were landed on the neighboring shore and taken, under escort, on board the _Hapsburg_. There we were despoiled of our clothing and given Austrian uniforms. Then we were removed to the arsenal, where we arrived at 8. From that moment we became prisoners of war, but for four days only. On the signing of the armistice with Austria, Italian naval forces entered Pola—and we were free.”

RESCUE EXTRAORDINARY

The Impossible Done in Saving Fifty Lives from the Flooded and Sunken Submarine _K-13_

One of the most dramatic episodes of the war, one in which the tragedy of suspense was exemplified with thrilling intensity, had nothing to do with siege or battlefield, though it partook of the nature and perils of both. It was the salving of the _K-13_. The story was first made public in its completeness, two years after the event, by Bennet Copplestone, who presented the facts, as he obtained them at first hand, in a vivid article contributed to the _Cornhill Magazine_.

The story, which could not be released until the war ended, is of such absorbing interest that it is here reproduced with little abbreviation. Mr. Copplestone begins:

“I was in Scotland when this happened that I write of, and I took the details in all their intimate simplicity from the mouths of the chief actors—from the salvors who sweated blood that they might be in time to pluck live men out of a steel coffin; from those who lay below and who, drugged by poisoned air, remained throughout indifferent to the issue, whether of life or death. It was a queer paradox of a fight in which the salvors, not those saved, got all the excitement and all the thrills.

“_K-13_ was a fleet submarine of a new type, more like a submersible destroyer than an ordinary underwater boat. Fairfields of Govan built her, and even now it were unwise to be too explicit in description. But some few details are necessary for an understanding of my story. She was over three hundred feet long and displaced two thousand tons when submerged. Unlike most submarines, which are driven on the surface by internal combustion engines, _K-13_ was a turbine-engined steamer with two funnels fitted with watertight covers for closing when she dived. The ventilators which fed air to her boiler room were also equipped for rapid closing down. A bulkhead cut off the boiler and engine rooms from the central control room, and another bulkhead forward divided the control room from the foc’sle. Thus, like Cæsar’s Gaul, _K-13_ was divided into three parts. Of her armament, which does not concern us here, I will observe a discreet silence, though to me it was of absorbing interest. But I must say something of her upper works. The conning tower was large and humped forward, so that a man could stand upright under the hump yet needed to stoop to reach the hatch, which was on the lower unhumped portion. Above the conning tower was a chart-house and bridge, and, of course, a mast stayed in the usual fashion. For a submarine, therefore, the _K-13_ had a lot of top hamper, and a passage from the conning-tower hatch, when the submarine was under water, towards the upper air was thickly studded with perils from the chart-house roof and the stays of the bridge and the mast. Yet two men did pass out; one was caught and killed; the other’s luck held—he was not killed.

“At noon on Monday, January 29, 1917, _K-13_ left her builders’ yard to carry out diving trials in the Gareloch. A large party was on board. In charge of her was Commander Herbert—‘Baralong’ Herbert—and with him went Commander Goodheart, who had been appointed skipper of another K of similar type. Many of Fairfields’s staff were there, for _K-13_ had not yet been taken over by the Admiralty. There were Percy Hillhouse, the yard’s Naval Architect, Bullen, the draughtsman in charge of submarine construction—a man who knew every nut and bolt that went to her—Searle, the Admiralty overseer, and McLean, the yard manager of the K submarines. It was no complement of amateurs which manned the _K-13_ upon her fatal trip. While steaming down the Clyde she grounded slightly at Whiteinch, but suffered no hurt. No harm was done, and _K-13_ went on to the Gareloch, and there passed successfully through her trials. She was accepted for the Royal Navy by the Admiralty officials.

“ONE MORE DIVE”—THEN SUNK

“Then it was that the unexpected happened, as it always does at sea. Herbert decided to take one more dive—perhaps just for luck, perhaps to satisfy himself upon some nicety of trim. He gave the order to close down and dive and the _K-13_ dived. Though the order had been given to close down, and the reply received that the order had been carried out, the ventilators had been left open. Instantly the water poured into the engine and boiler rooms, drowning those within, and _K-13_ sank by the stern. The water flowing towards the control room bulkhead compressed the air in the room and indicated immediately what had happened to the alert senses of Commander Herbert. ‘Our ears began to sing’ say those who were within the belly of the ship.

“All this occupied a space of time measured in seconds. In a few more seconds Herbert had all compartments closed tight and the forward tanks blown. The hydroplanes, too, were set to rise, but the resources of seamanship could not overcome the loss of buoyancy. Overweighted by her flooded boiler and engine rooms _K-13_ sank to the bottom, grounding upright on the mud in twelve fathoms of water. No blowing of ballast tanks could bring her up, for the calculations of her builders showed that with all tanks empty she would still be too heavy by four hundred tons to float. There is very little reserve of buoyancy about even the biggest of submarines.

“While Herbert in _K-13_ had been struggling to rise, his efforts were detected and understood by skilled seamen above. An E submarine had been attending the trials, and her officers saw at once from the surging mass of air-bubbles that Herbert was blowing his tanks and was in grave difficulties. Submarines dive when trimmed to float awash, and descend or ascend by delicate movements of the horizontal rudders (hydroplanes). In this trim when diving they are lighter than the water displaced, and do not need to blow tanks in order to rise. Much time was saved by the presence of the E-boat, for, when _K-13_ did not rise, and quite evidently could not rise, she dashed off at once to gather assistance. Had Herbert and Goodheart down below known how quickly help was being summoned above they might not have made that fatal though most gallant effort to pass out through the conning-tower hatch.

HURRYING TO THE RESCUE

“It was at 3.30 in the afternoon that _K-13_ came to rest upon the bottom of the Gareloch, and the short winter’s day in the North was drawing towards sunset. As soon as the commander of the E-boat had marked the spot where _K-13_ lay, he pressed at full speed for Greenock, flashing as he went aerial signals to the Senior Naval Officer in Glasgow. A salvage steamer, which was lying at Greenock, went off at once and picked up two hoppers and two tugs as consorts. Telegrams were dispatched to Fairfields and to Glasgow, and the news spread quickly through those circles whose business it is to be well informed. Not a moment was lost by those upon whose shoulders rested the responsibility of the salvage operations. By the early hours of Tuesday, long before daylight, a fleet of seven vessels had collected at the spot below which, seventy feet down, _K-13_ rested motionless in the mud. There were the Greenock salvage steamer, the two tugs, the two hoppers, and two E-boats. With them, in charge of everything and responsible for everything, was the S. N. O., Captain (now Rear-Admiral) Brian Barttelot, and with him was his naval assistant, Captain Corbett.

“The problem before the salvors bristled with novel difficulties. In peace and war we had lost many submarines, but never had a live man been taken out of one which had sunk. Barttelot was limited by what was mechanically possible. He had not—as I confess now that I had when composing ‘The Last of the Grenvillas’—the guiding light of a precedent. First he had to get into continuous communication with the survivors of _K-13’s_ company, for without their coöperation he was helpless to aid them. Then he had to devise a rapid and effective means to supply them with air and food for a period which might stretch into days. And, lastly, he had to get them out. That was the worst of his problems—how to get them out. For remember _K-13_ was a great bulky double-skinned lump of a vessel of two thousand solid tons and of more than three hundred feet in length. She was not the kind of craft which could easily be raised.

“But although Barttelot’s difficulties were great his advantages were greater. He had nothing to fear from bad weather—the Gareloch is narrow and well sheltered. He had within reach the incalculable resources of the biggest shipbuilding center in the world. And there in Glasgow he had, too, just round the corner, the builders of _K-13_, who knew the work of their own hands as a man knows the picture which he has painted or the book which he has written. There was yet another advantage, and one which was not small. There inside _K-13_, if they could be got at, were four of Fairfields’s experts who would supply that intimate technical knowledge of the craft which the salvors themselves could not possess. Once communication had been established, Fairfields in Glasgow and Fairfields in _K-13_ would be linked to the chain of salvage, and would lift success from the barely possible up to the almost probable.

TUBES FOR AIR AND FOOD