U-BOAT CAMOUFLAGE.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 82, 6 April 1918, Page 13

U-BOAT CAMOUFLAGE.

NO MATCH FOR THE SEAPLANE FIVE MINUTES TO SITRRENDER. (By JOHN S. MARGERISON.) With a whirr of ,her propellers and a squatter of water, the seaplane, which, until now, had lain like some gigantic dragon-fly basking idly in the sun, rose from the sea and headed westward. Right onward into the dim obscurity she fled, until the watchers on shore saw her but as a speck. The observer, strapped into his seat, and wearing a telephone headpiece, shouted a word into his transmitter, and the pilot raised the 'plane still higher. Below, looking like toy 6hips on a painted ocean, were some half-score vessels—sonic, with colours painted brazenly upon their sides and decks, neutrals; some dingy in their unrelieved blackness, units of Britain's merchant navy. A couple of submarines, keeping pace with the convoy on either side, twirled their periscope heads in greeting to their sister of The-Navy-That-Flies, and passed on upon their lawful occasions; a drifter, busily sweeping for mines, flung a joyful piece of bunting to the wind; and a squat trawler, nosing around a long-discarded U-boat runway, waved to her in welcome. But the giant se_-bird passed over all these without a returned signal; she had other and more pressing matters in hand. Anon she rose or banked steeply; anon she swept lower to make sure that some dimly discerned patch on the sea bed was' not an enemy submarine trying to disguise herself as a mudbank —a process that involves lying on the bottom and keeping one's propellers lazily revolving so that they will stir up a hazy patch of muddy water all around one's hull. One such suspected object turned out to be a patch of seaweed; a second was a submarine^—but only a British instructional boat getting its crew used to the confined spaces of a craft under water. LUCK AT THE THIRD TIME. "No luck," laughed the observer. "Or maybe the third time will be different. Keep on, anyway." He got his reward a little later, for, camouflaged as I have mentioned, the unmistakable outline of a U-boat appeared silhouetted on the sea-bed. Instantly the observer's finger commenced to tap a key—and, ten miles away, a long, lean destroyer and four squat trawlers detached themselves from a pack of hounds working a covert, and hastened to the kill. Meanwhile, the seaplane circled round, but when the surface ships arrived her instructions, delivered by wireless, were curt and precise. Acting upon them, the trawlers stationed themselves at the four corners of a wet quadrangle, while the destroyer kept her guns ready to talk to .Fritz should he appear above the surface.

The trawlers at the corners of the wet quadrangle got out their sweeps—long wire hawsers of an incredible stoutness, with a heavy "kite" in the centre to keep their bights doivn on the sea-bed —and began to steam towards each other. As the pairs of vessels met, their wires simultaneously engaged themselves under tho U-boat's bow arid stern, and began to work their sinuous way between her hull and the sea bottom. It was then that a strange thing happened. Two round, black objects seemed to detach themselves from her hull and float surfacewards, to hover a second, and then to begin bobbing down the tide— bobbing down towards a lane much frequented by those ships which brought food, munitions of war and hundreds of other things to England's shore. "Minelayer, eh?" called seaplane's observer. "That's it, lad," came the telephoned answer. "But her eggs can wait for a minute." HELD IX A WIRE CRADLE. The trawlers, still steaming toward each other, now crossed, and their dependent cables held the U-boat in a kind of wire cat's-cradlc. She seemed to suddenly wake to her danger, for, with a bound, she tried to disengage herself from the meshes which held her. But it was no use; the trawlers had been too long al, the game to leave any loophole, and the submarine was doomed. "Got him," signalled the seaplane. "Thanks," replied the destroyer. ■'We'll give him five minutes to come up and breathe—but no longer. . ." The time passed, and still Fritz made no move. At a flagged signal from the destroyer the port foremost trawler and the starboard after one clipped a small red tin of high explosive to the bar-taut wire, and allowed it to slide downward until it touched the U-boat's hull. It | was the seaplane's turn to wave a flag— ! and immediately there followed the crashing of two fists upon two firing keys; | the uprising of two grey mounds of [water, and a rumbling muflled explosion. The wires snapped in the middle, and the trawlers' crews flew to coil them down. The seaplane circled twice above the patch of rising oil, ascertained that Fritz had been destroyed, and notified the destroyer of the fact. Then, with her observer slipping a drum of cartridges into his machine gun, she sped off after -'uose objects bobbing down tide. A burst of rapid-firing—and the first of the devil's eggs, itß buoyancy chamber punctured, sank with a gurgle; the second gave a better show, for it exploded grandly—and harmlessly—as the bullets •reached him. And the seaplane, well content, slewed on her tail and headed for home, leaving the destroyer and the trawlers to rejoin the pack that hunts the unterseeboot in all seasons and all waters —leaving also, on the bed of age-old ocean, a steel tomb for those who had sallied forth to strafe with bomb and mine, torpedo and shell, such luckless, helpless ships as happen to cross her path on her commercial, noncombatant errand to the Mistress of the Seas. . -