Smoke and Mirrors

by Deborah Lake

  Berger made off. The crew of the Zylpha convinced themselves they had badly damaged the enemy. At Queenstown, her return set off a spate of rumours. Marine Hayward recorded that Q6 ‘was very lucky in action of 17th, having two torpedoes and 37 shells fired at her, only one shell hit, one sub sunk and another damaged’. McLeod went on to command the only ship specifically built for decoy work, the 600-ton HMS Hyderabad.

  On 22 April 1917 Lieutenant Harold Auten took over HMS Heather, also known as Q16. She was one of the first Flower sloops built to look like a merchant ship. Her previous captain was killed by a shell splinter when Heather fought Kapitänleutnant Waldemar Haumann and U 52, west of Ireland.

  Auten was not enamoured of HMS Heather as a decoy. He thought the Germans would recognise her as a trapship because of her earlier encounter. He was probably right. The Imperial German Navy made sure that their U-boat commanders received every ounce of information available about enemy warships.

  Sir Lewis Bayly realised that the unrestricted U-boat campaign had changed the ground rules. ‘German submarines’, he wrote in March 1917, ‘are now very cautious as to approaching a merchant ship, even when stopped and abandoned. Torpedoing ships without warning has become much more common, and when a torpedo is not used, the ship is shelled at long range for a considerable period.’

  Heather’s new captain had a fertile imagination, full of bright ideas. Auten claimed to have personally invented the scheme to pack holds with timber for extra buoyancy. Several other officers made identical claims. Auten also considered that he originated the concept of smoke pots, tubs of dried seaweed, placed at careful intervals around the deck. These were set alight when under fire, the notion being to fool the enemy into thinking he had scored hits. Others also demanded credit for the concept. In the closed world of decoys, like that of U-boats, discussions went the rounds. One man’s orphan thought became another’s mature idea.

  May. June. July. August. September. Auten and Heather patrolled the Irish Sea with no success. The distant ripple of a periscope rarely disturbed the monotonous cruising, back and forth, back and forth. Colliers sank to the north, to the south. Coastal steamers blew up to the east and to the west when torpedoes smashed into them. HMS Heather sailed on, undisturbed. Auten decided that his ship was a liability, not an asset.

  In September 1917, Auten bearded Sir Lewis in person. Bayly was an extremely approachable admiral, always prepared to listen to the men who did the actual dirty business of fighting the war.

  Auten suggested that a small collier, a favourite target among the U-boat fraternity, would serve the purpose better than his own all too familiar convoy sloop. Carefully converted so her lines remained unchanged, she would have a better chance of success. To Auten’s surprise, Bayly promptly agreed. ‘I will send you away to the Bristol Channel ports,’ Sir Lewis decreed. ‘See if you can find a ship that is suitable. In the meantime, I will inform the Admiralty.’

  The lieutenant found his ship on his first day in Wales. She lay at anchor in Cardiff Docks: Stock Force, a 361-ton collier. For the look of the thing, Auten visited Penarth, Newport, and Swansea but nothing matched his original choice. With a 29ft beam, she was a good 6ft wider than many contemporaries, able to take a pair of 4in guns without altering her lines.

  After three months of back-breaking work that saw extra bulkheads installed, timber ‘cargo’ properly stowed, two 4in guns, two 12-pounders, one 3-pounder and two 14in torpedo tubes stationed and disguised, Stock Force looked exactly as she had done twelve weeks earlier. She was ready for action.

  Auten, though, was not. Not merely imaginative, he was also a perfectionist. He wanted extra detail. He decided to improve his panic party with a black sailor. Non-white ratings were non-existent in the Royal Navy although many merchant steamers had them. After several interviews, Auten found his man. He had been torpedoed three times and did not suppose that another would harm him. ‘He was a sportsman,’ Auten wrote later, ‘and that was what I wanted.’ An English middle class male could deliver no higher praise. To be a good sport was to be one of the best.

  In a final act of legerdemain, Auten and two trusted workmen created a further deceit. Imitation wooden sides appeared. They filled in the forward deck. A dummy boat, upside down, occupied the main hatch area. It looked for all the world as if it concealed a gun. The trio altered the rigging. They removed the mizzen mast. Spectators nudged each other. It was clear where the gun was hidden and the altered outline made her an obvious decoy.

  As a final touch, Auten asked for false sailing orders. He then slipped out of harbour two days early. As soon as the collier was safe from prying eyes, the dummy boat went overboard, the bogus bulwarks smashed to splinters and the mizzen mast and rigging restored. Stock Force became just another grubby workhorse.

  Auten had barely worked up his gun crews when new and secret orders sent him up the west coast of Ireland. The Irish question had haunted British politics for centuries. The Republican Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 might have been suppressed. The agitator and traitor, in English eyes, Sir Roger Casement might have been hanged at Pentonville in August of the same year. Despite these deterrents, Whitehall continued to fear Irish revolution. Germany, it was believed, might try to land men and weapons by U-boat on some remote shore on Ireland’s west coast. Stock Force, an innocent collier, was the ideal vessel to trail up and down in a hunt for gunrunners.

  After several weeks, without a sight of a U-boat or even a rowing boat laden down with Mauser rifles, Auten and his men returned to decoy duty in July 1918.

  Many people had already decided that the U-boat was effectively beaten. They had become a nuisance, not a menace. Monthly sinkings remained serious but containable. U-boat losses rose. Worse, from the German viewpoint, success rates fell. The big boats of the High Seas Fleet, the backbone of the campaign against Britain, enjoyed a strike rate in March 1917 of roughly one ship destroyed every two days. By June 1918, it had fallen, to one ship every two weeks.

  Nobody, however, told the men of the Unterseebootflottillen that they faced defeat. Among the Zeebrugge boats, where losses cut deep, a captured officer mentioned that it was a point of honour to volunteer for the Flanders Flotilla. Morale remained high.

  The German Naval Command certainly believed that victory was possible despite the deteriorating situation on the Western Front and the imminent collapse of her allies. Scheer was personally convinced the U-boats could and would succeed. In June 1918, a new construction programme for forty U Class boats, forty-four improved UB III boats and forty UC III pattern went forward. To help it along, 50,000 workers moved from Army contracts to U-boat production. Not only the Imperial Navy believed that U-boats were the key: the German government agreed.

  On 19 July 1918, the U-boats showed they had lost none of their resolve. Kapitänleutnant Otto von Schrader in UB 64 attacked the America-bound Convoy OLX39. Its seven ships included the 32,000-ton liner-turned-troopship Justicia, in dazzle-painted camouflage. The convoy had seven destroyers as escorts. About 23 miles south of Skerryvore Rock, itself 11 miles south of Tiree in the Hebrides, von Schrader stopped the Justicia with a single torpedo. The destroyers depth-charged busily without causing damage. Two hours later, as the liner came under tow, UB 64 tried again. Her torpedo frothed harmlessly past. The destroyers, angrier, dropped more depth charges. UB 64 stayed in position although the tin plates and mugs in the galley rattled. After another three hours, a third torpedo again missed the listing target. This time, the depth charges forced von Schrader to break off the action and head home.

  By dawn the next morning, twelve destroyers, two sloops, two armed yachts and eight trawlers surrounded Justicia as she was towed to safety. The Kaiserliche Marine tried again. At 0910, Oberleutnant zur See Hans Oskar Wutsdorff, in command of UB 124 on her first war patrol, put two torpedoes into her. That ended the career of Statendam II, of the Holland-Amerika Line, requisitioned, still unfinished, by Britain from the Harland and Wolff yard in 1915. She was rename
d Justicia, intended as a replacement for the Lusitania, but Cunard had no crew for her on completion. Anxious to use her as a troopship, the government passed the liner to the White Star Line. Their flag flew as she sank.

  Wutsdorff’s men were gallant but inexperienced; the U-boat lost her trim. She surfaced, submerged again as the now infuriated destroyers plastered the sea with depth charges, and then plunged to the bottom, hurt although not beaten. UB 124 stayed submerged all day. At 1750, she surfaced to find HMS Marne and HMS Millbrook waiting impatiently. Chlorine gas was seeping through the boat. Battery acid had leaked into the bilges. Despite this, Wutsdorff dived, followed by a clutch of depth charges. Thirty minutes later, the U-boat came to the surface once more. With the diesels giving the best they could, UB 124 headed for home. Marne and Millbrook intercepted her. Unable to dive, Wutsdorff scuttled his command.

  Back in the Irish Sea in July 1918, Stock Force soon brushed with a U-boat. On a wet, rain-filled midnight, with a fierce wind and high seas, the officer of the watch saw the streak of a torpedo heading straight for the collier. It arrived – and came out on the other side, passing directly under the engine room. Decoy and U-boat feinted for position. At 0230, the U-boat fired another torpedo, its track sparkling white in the dark water. It swished by, 3ft in front of the bow. The night’s excitement slowly died away.

  Auten’s next clash with the enemy, when the torpedo interrupted his tea, was not so inconclusive. The day was marked by minor irritation. The sun rose that morning on a placid sea. Overnight mist burned away as Stock Force plodded along the coast of northern France. To the left, sunlight glinted off the acres of glass houses that were Guernsey’s fruit and flower trade.

  Morse code yammered into the wireless room. A U-boat sighting. The enemy was working roughly on the line between the Casquets, a group of rocks 8 miles north west of Alderney, to 20 miles south of Start Point in Devon. Stock Force turned her nose to pass 5 miles south of Lizard Point, just another small collier trudging between Le Havre and Cardiff.

  The French joined in at about 1000hr. Two Curtiss flying boats buzzed overhead, dropping messages to warn of a U-boat in the area. They advised the collier to clear out of the area. Auten waved, smiled, held his course.

  The aircraft dropped bombs on an oil slick. Dead fish floated to the surface. An annoyed Auten knew full well that no U-boat would surface as long as aeroplanes were around. Eventually, at about noon, one of the Curtiss boats smacked onto the water, only to take off again short minutes later. At last, the aviators left for lunch.

  The collier carried on. The afternoon ticked by. The watch changed. Auten retired to the saloon with the off-duty officers for tea.

  The bridge watch saw the track of a torpedo heading directly at them. The alarm rattled throughout Stock Force. Over went the helm. The engines were rung to full astern. Auten reached the bridge in time to see the torpedo 50yd away. Almost at the end of its range, it seemed to move slowly through the water, innocent, harmless.

  Until it struck.

  It detonated directly on the second watertight bulkhead, blowing it through to the other side of the ship. Derricks splashed overboard, the deck twisted, planks and debris, shells and shackles flew through the air. Part of the bridge disappeared. Every man on it, with the exception of Auten, was wounded. Auten recollected only that he went up in the air with the blast and came to earth underneath the chart table.

  A moment later, sea water, thrown up by the explosion, drenched every man on the bridge. Spluttering, nauseous, anticipating disaster, they moved to their action stations. Auten, stumbling to his feet, felt astonished and relieved to discover that none of the crew had died. Men took the wounded below. One man could not be moved. An officers’ steward, Reginald Starling, lay pinned beneath a heap of wreckage and a 12-pounder gun.

  To free the steward would take an hour or more. Time was not on Auten’s side. Stock Force was settling, bow down, in the water. Auten told the wounded man that he would have to leave him for the time being.

  Auten ordered the panic party to abandon ship. Below deck, the doctor worked frantically with the wounded. If the ship foundered, neither he nor his patients had a chance of escape.

  Auten moved aft to the gun house. Both 4in guns remained unscathed. The roof shielding the foremost one had almost collapsed when the water spout descended. Water poured over the telescopic sights and cordite. Lieutenant Edward Grey, the Number One, in charge of the guns, promptly organised some men to hold up the roof with oars. If the roof gave way completely, it would expose the gun in all its glory for observers on the U-boat to admire.

  And watchers there were. Kapitänleutnant Max Viebeg, commander of UB 80 of the First Flanders Flotilla, took no unnecessary risks. The Pour le Mérite holder observed. He waited.

  Auten observed. Auten waited. He could see all round his ship except for dead ahead. There, his panic party rowed around. There, the U-boat surfaced, 800m distant.

  The conning-tower hatch opened. Two men came out. They observed. They waited. For fifteen minutes, long minutes. Stock Force sank lower in the water. Finally, UB 80 moved forward delicately, slowly. The panic party pulled down the port side of Stock Force. They hoped to lure the U-boat after them. Under the collier’s guns. UB 80 followed. She crept into Auten’s vision, 400yd distant, within the sights of one gun.

  Auten held his fire. If she continued to move forward, both guns would bear. Three hundred yards distant. Beam on. In range. In sight of both guns.

  ‘Submarine bearing red 90, range 300 yards. Stand by.’ Auten whispered the command down the voice pipe. A moment’s pause. ‘Let go!’

  The gun shutters collapsed. The White Ensign fluttered out. Both 4in guns opened fire. The after gun’s first shot, the gun captain, Assistant Paymaster Athol Davis recalled, ‘seemed to skim the conning tower’. Auten reckoned it took away the periscope and wireless mast. The second shot burst in the centre of the conning tower. One man, ‘evidently the commanding officer’ in Auten’s words, went into the water.

  The foremost 4in gun joined in. One shot smacked into the hull below the conning tower. Grey remembered that a ‘lot of blue smoke came out of her and her bow went up in the air a bit, making a better target than ever. . . . We continued to fire, putting shells in as hard as ever.’

  UB 80 went below the waves. Auten reckoned his guns scored twenty direct hits. By his account, wreckage littered the water. Grey saw the top of a table and what he thought were dead bodies. Not a man on board Stock Force doubted that they sent the U-boat to its doom.

  The Kriegstagebuch of UB 80, the war diary, tells the story briefly and with several differences. Among them is the disconcerting thought that Viebeg identified the 361-ton collier as a tanker five times the size:

  Attack on 1,500 ton approx. steamer (tanker). Course Guernsey to Lizard.

  Fired G6AV torpedo. Hit. Range 1,200 metres. Remained at periscope depth and observed steamer that seemed suspicious and only sank slowly.

  After about 15 minutes, the steamer started to sink at the bow. Surfaced at about 400 metres distant.

  The steamer opened fire with several concealed guns. Crash-dive. During the dive, the boat took two hits. Went to 11 metres depth, fired a second torpedo despite inability to raise either periscope.

  Remained submerged until dusk. Surfaced. One shot had penetrated the bridge shield and the periscope support. Both periscopes had broken lenses, were filled with seawater and useless. . . .

  Without periscopes, the boat had to return round the north of England because of the light nights and the necessary use of a periscope for the Channel route.

  Viebeg reckoned his boat took two hits, not twenty. He reported no casualties. The table that Grey saw may have been a piece of the bridge shielding. Certainly, Stock Force hit the conning tower to put both periscopes out of action.

  Max Viebeg was hardly chastened by the experience. On his way home, on the long haul north, he took on what he estimated was an 8,000-ton ship escorted by tw
o destroyers. He did not sink it; his torpedo failed to explode. Clearly, however, UB 80 was no badly wounded casualty.

  Auten called back his panic party. Stock Force was in a bad way. After the action, she listed heavily to starboard, her trim upset. Not a single compass survived. The wireless did not work. Steering meant pointing the bow in the direction of land in the hope of reaching it before the ship sank.

  Auten’s first job, once Stock Force was under way, became the rescue of Reginald Starling. He lay unconscious beneath the 12-pounder. One of his last memories before he slipped into oblivion was seeing the ship’s black cat. She had been buried under waterlogged wreckage. Starling watched her fastidiously climb onto a plank, shake herself so that water sprayed in all directions, before she picked her way to a dry spot.

  Auten’s men dragged Starling clear before the water that seeped steadily into the ship reached him. They moved the other wounded, also menaced by the creeping sea, up ladders to the deck. After that, every fit man, walking wounded or not, bailed for their lives with hand pumps, buckets, saucepans, any containers that held water. As bailing developed a rhythm, Auten detached a few men to make some rafts. The boats could not take everybody.

  The water rose faster than the crew could clear it. The 40ft hole in the side, the slow collapse of the bulkhead between engine room and stoke hold, gave Stock Force mere hours to live. Only the timber, packed with such care into the hold, stopped the collier from slipping under.

  Hearts lightened at about 1830hr. Smudges of smoke appeared on the port bow. Two trawlers, drawn by the sound of gunfire, bustled up. One immediately took the wounded and most of the survivors, including a damp cat. Auten, Grey and a small group of volunteers remained to try and save the ship.

  Two torpedo boats arrived. In the engine room, the water reached the boilers. The chief engineer and his men came on deck. Now it was when she would sink, not if she would. With a lurch, Stock Force heeled further over to starboard. The lifeboat on that side was all but afloat. Auten ordered his remaining crew to abandon ship. He and Grey waited for the end. It was not long coming.