The
Germans took all the fresh fish they wanted, sank the trawler, smashed
up her boats, and put the fishermen on the submarine's deck. Then they
slammed-to the hatch of the conning tower and sank very slowly, washing
the fishermen off. Then they rose again to laugh at them drowning. An
avenging destroyer came racing along and picked up the sole survivor.
But the German jokers, seeing it coming, had gone. No wonder the
seafaring British sometimes "saw red" to such a degree that they would
do anything to get in a blow! And sometimes they did get it in, when
the Germans least thought it was coming. When a skipper suddenly found
a German U-boat (_Unterseeboot_ or under-sea-boat) rising beside him,
just as his engine-room mechanic had come up with a hammer in his hand,
he called out, "look sharp and blind her!" Without a moment's
hesitation the mechanic jumped on her deck and smashed her periscope to
pieces, thus leaving her the blinded prey of gathering destroyers.
The Germans put their wits to work with hellish cunning. They wanted
to surround Great Britain with a sea of death so full of mines and
submarines that no ship could live.
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