SUBMARINE TRAGEDY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 229, 28 September 1931, Page 7

SUBMARINE TRAGEDY

GRIM STORY OF THE WAR. GERMAN CREW SUFFOCATED. LONDON, Sept. 15. The talc of how a German submarine, with a dead crew oxi board, drifted about the seabed for a month, is disclosed by Captain Ernst Hashagen, a former German naval officer, in a book, the “Log of a U-Boat Commander.” Ptarol vessels on the cast coast of England in the sumnler of 1915 suddenly saw the conning-tower of a submarine show up in shallow water inshore and vigorously opened fire. There being no respdnso from tho submarine, which rolled further inshore, it was boarded. Although there was no sign that the submarine had been in combat, it was a steel-clad cemetery. Most of the corpses lay in bunks and hammocks, and some had nearly fallen out. Two forms, crouched in the corner of tho control-room showed that two of the crew had turned on the oxygen. Apparently, an excess of oxygen stupefied all the crow before they died of suffocation, and the U-boat was transformed into a marine Pompeii. Captain Haahaben was tho guest in England in 1929 of Commander Lewis, formerly a British naval officer, whoso “Q” bot he torpedoed during tho war, killing the occupants of tho enginerooig and stokehold. He spoke at Reading Town Hall on behalf of the League of Nations Union, and was well received, in spite of protests from parents of men who had lost their lives in the submarine campaign.