ON MYSTERY SHIPS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6867, 23 March 1929, Page 15 (Supplement)

ON MYSTERY SHIPS

EPIC STORIES OF, COURAGE CORDITE ON FLOATING FURNACE Rear-Admiral Gordon Campbell, V.C., whose wonderful exploits as a mystery ship commander in luring U boats to destruction at the hands of apparently harmless tramp steamers provide one leisure since retiring from flag rank of the golden pages in the annuals of the naval war, has employed his by writing the story of “My Mystery Ships.” The methods by which he sank three submarines are now well known, but the ordeal which he and his crews underwent during these actions has never yet been thoroughly appreciated. Here is one undying picture he gives of the crew of the fore gun of the mystery ship Dunraven during her engagement with the U.C. 71: — “They sat on the deck when it was getting red-hot, knowing the magazines were underneath. One young fellow —1 think it was Martindale—tore up his shirt to stuff up their mouths to keep the fumes out; others lifted the boxes of cordite off the deck on to their knees to delay them exploding. They knew all the time they must be blown up, and they also knew that if they moved (thereby revealing to the enemy their presence on a supposedly abandoned ship) they might spoil the show.”

This cameo of courage was shown on a ship alone in the Bay of Biscay, on fire, sinking, torpedoed, with depth charges exploding and magazines going off at odd intervals. FLOATING FURNACE The men lay uncomplainingly on the deck, of the floating furnace, hoping against hope that the submarine would show herself long enough for them to get in a shot. The aft gun crew fared little better. Their magazine exploded under them, blowing gun and entire crew into the air. By a stroke of good fortune not a single man was killed, one of them finishing up in the sea, while the others landed on camouflage trucks, made of canvas and wood on deck. Even in this predicament discipline was uppermost in their minds. "Bonner, who had landed on the trucks, crawled on to the bridge, in spite of being badly wounded in his head, and burnt on his hands, and said to me, ‘I am sorry, sir for leaving my gun without orders. I think I must have been blown up’!” Admiral Campbell gives a further example of this wonderful discipline. Drilling his crew in preparation for U-boat attacks he always gave two orders, “Torpedo coming” and “Torpedo hit." After the second, the “panic” party had to rush for the boats and abandon ship.

One day came a real attack, and the order, “Torpedo coming” was duly given. A moment later the torpedo exploded with a crash that shook the ship from stem to stern and threw many of the crew off their feet. “I saw some of the men rushing for the boats, but on looking over the front of the bridge I saw a group of men still smoking and lolling over the side when they ought to have been ‘panicking’! I shouted out to know why the something something they weren’t rushing for the boats.

"The reply was, ‘Waiting for the order, sir. Torpedo hit!” That was not the oDly comic aspect of an action that resulted in the sinking of ÜB3. THE SHIP’S CAT When it was all over and the mystery ship herself was in grave danger of going to the bottom, Campbell and his chief officer, armed only with a candle, were down in the waterlogged, dark bunkers looking for the ship’s cat. It was the same black cat which earlier in the fight was blown overboard, swam to the stern then under water, and thus regained the ship.

Admiral Campbell relates how having sunk his first submarine, U6B, he paraded his crew immediately after the action and read to them the “Prayer of Thanksgiving for Victory,” followed by three cheers for the King. Before he had time to dismiss the parade, “one of the wags had produced the gramophone and put on the record, ‘Down Among the Dead Men Let Him Lie’!” During this cruise, Campbell, in his disguise as the skipper of a tramp steamer, had grown a “very fine ginger beard which I was very proud of.” He retained it when he went ashore on leave, and “expected my wife would greet me in the approved picture paper fashion, by throwing her arms round my neck and weeping down my back. But not a bit of it! All 1 got was, ‘Shave off that dirty thing at once, and then I will kiss you!’ What a reward for my labours.”