GERMANS WERE FIRST

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 106, 31 October 1931, Page 22

GERMANS WERE FIRST

Q-SHIPS IN THE WAR

That Germany employed Q-ships against British submarines, long before Great Britain used similar decoys to trap the German U-boats, is a secret now disclosed for the first time, writes Hector Bywatcr in the London "Daily Telegraph." The claim is made by dipt. Lautcrbacli, formerly an officer of the raider Enideii, who relates how, in Dcccm-1 bcr, 1015, he commissioned the first. German "mystery ship" Mane for service) in the Baltic. "There has (he writes) been much said of the British mystery ships, but I am under the impression that Germany was the country tfiat introduced them, and I happened to command the first one of all. During the early part of the war the Allied submarines, particularly the British, did much damage to our shipping in the Baltic, and the mystery ship—a vessel as changeable us tho chameleon and as peaceful-appearing as the dove —was proposed, to decoy them into close range and sink them." In view of tho bitterness with which German war writers have criticised Britain's "treachery" in using Q-ships, this authoritative avowal that the "mystery ship" was a German invention is decidedly interesting. It appears in "Lauterbach of the China Sea" by Lowell Thomas. Captain Lauterbaeh claims to have destroyed throe Allied submarines in the Baltic—one Russian autl two British— and he gives a most detailed and vivid account of the sinking of the British bdats, viz., E. 6 and E. 15. But official records show his claim to be quite unfounded. At no time during the Great War did we lose any subi marine! in the Baltic, apart from those

destroyed by their own crews at Helaingfors in April, 191S, to avoid capture. Iv the official return of British Navy Losses (Com. 200, 19th Aug, 1919), E. 15 is shown to have been wrecked in the Dardanelles in April, 1915, and E. 6by a mine in the North Sea in December, 1915. Tot for "sinking" these two British submarines with his mystery ship in the Baltic, Captain Lauterbaih was not only decorated by Prince Henry of Prussia with the Cross of Hohcnzollern, but received a reward of £12,500 from tho firm of Krupp! A possible explanation is that he mistook German .submarines for British and sank two of them. As, on his own admissiun, he did nut stop to pick up the "many members of tho crew who were swimming iv the water" ("Prisoners would only be in our way, and fishingboats were already headed for the spot"), he remained in ignorance of what appears to have been a tragic blunder, twice repeated. Either that, or the whole story is apocryphal. Other yarns in this book impose a severe strain on our credulity, .such as Captain Lauterbach's account of how he instigated the mutiny at Singapore in 1910. It is possible, of course, that Mr. Lowell Thomas is responsible for producing this unfortunate effect on the mind of a discerning reader. The same author, it will be remembered, was recently at pains to whitewash the German submarine commanders, and even had the effrontery to assert that there was no satisfactory evidence of any U-boat having sunk a merchantman without, first giving it warning.