History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0468/04684.txt

Text File | 1992-10-12 | 12KB | 230 lines

$Unique_ID{how04684}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{True Stories Of The Great War
Through The Jaws Of Death In A Sunken Submarine}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Vedel, Emile}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{monge
boat
feet
water
austrian
submarine
told
last
morillot
sinking}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       True Stories Of The Great War
Book:        Through The Jaws Of Death In A Sunken Submarine
Author:      Vedel, Emile
Date:        1917
Translation: Benington, Arthur

Through The Jaws Of Death In A Sunken Submarine

I - Story Of The Prisoners In Bohemia

Told by Emile Vedel in L'Illustration, Paris

[Many a novelist and some dramatists have tried to imagine the last agonies of
the crew of a submarine boat that has received a mortal wound and sunk.  Here
is a first-hand account of the dreadful reality, told by men who actually
experienced the tragedy.  How these men slipped out from the very jaws of
death just as they were closing on them, even they cannot fully explain; but
some strange freak of the machinery made their submarine bob back to the
surface after the water pouring into it had sent the vessel down 200 feet.
Emile Vedel, who is writing the story of the French naval operations in the
Adriatic and publishing it serially, under governmental authority in
L'Illustration, obtained the facts from the signed statements of two petty
officers of the boat.  Translated by Arthur Benington in the New York World.]

     A composite flotilla of French, British and Italian gunboats and
submarines attacked an Austrian flotilla which had sneaked out from the
Bocche di Cattaro, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic and shelled the port
of Durazzo.  The engagement resulted in the sinking of an Austrian destroyer.
The following day the French picked up some sailors from another Austrian
destroyer, the Llka, which had struck a mine and sunk.  These sailors told
them that in attacking the Austrian fleet the Allied boats had narrowly
escaped killing the survivors of a French submarine that had been sunk and
the crew of which had been rescued by Austrian gunboats.

     What submarine it was they were at a loss to know, but as time passed
and nothing was heard from the Monge, they became convinced that it must have
been she.  This conviction was strengthened two months later, when Mme.
Roland Morillot, wife of Lieut. Morillot, commander of that boat, received
a letter signed "Crew of the Monge," mailed from the concentration camp for
prisoners at Deutsch Gabel, Bohemia, of which the following is a translation
of a part:

     "Notwithstanding the distance, we unite our grief with yours in weeping
over the memory of him who in spite of all will ever remain our captain.
Stricken by a blow of fate just when victory smiled most brightly, Commandant
Morillot died like a hero, after having accomplished the almost impossible
to save his vessel and his crew."

     More months elapsed; then Chief Master Electrician Joffry and
Quartermaster Mahe, both of the Monge, were returned to France from Austria
in an exchange of prisoners.  And they told the story.

II - Story Of A Collision At 30 Knots

     The Monge belonged to the class of submarines that have to use a steam
engine for recharging their diving accumulators.  It had been scouting ahead
of the rest of the flotilla and had crept close to the Bocche di Cattaro that
night when the Austrian fleet came out.  At 12.15 A. M. Commandant Morillot
sighted the lights of the Austrian vessels.  How many he couldn't tell, nor
how far away they were.  He submerged to 20 feet, leaving the night periscope
above the surface.  Suddenly he was aware of a rapidly approaching huge black
mass, and was giving orders to fire a torpedo from the port tube when a
hitherto unseen vessel passed at 30 knots right over the Monge.  Its keel
struck the submarine; the shock was terrific.  The little boat rolled almost
over.  The conning tower was smashed and the sea poured in through a gaping
hole.

     The crew of the Monge tumbled in heaps against the partitions of the
compartments in which they happened to be.  The stern dropped, the bows rose,
and the boat began sinking stern foremost at an angle of 30 or 40 degrees.
Abominable gases rose as the sea water flooded the tanks of sulphuric acid.

     The electric lights went out.  The Monge wabbled downwards in pitch
darkness.

     It is such moments as these that test master and men.  How both were
equal to the emergency, let Chief Electrician Joffry relate:

III - Two Hundred Feet Beneath The Sea

     "Clutching the periscope table," he said, "the Commandant faces this
blow.  He is a man whom nothing disconcerts.  He orders that all submerging
tanks be emptied.  Several times he repeats the order to discharge the water.
But the compressed air is not powerful enough to expel it, and we continue
to sink.  The hull creaks all over, but especially astern, for the stern, by
reason of the angle at which we are going down, is sixty feet lower and under
a pressure of two atmospheres greater than the bow.  It is the steel heart
of the Monge that is groaning.  We must have at least 180 or 200 feet of
water above us.  Believing that this is the end, we sing the 'Marseillaise.'"

     Quartermaster Mahe says the electric batteries were short-circuited by
the crash and the inrush of water.  The turbines stopped at the moment the
lights went out.

     "But if we see nothing, we can hear," adds the brave Mahe.  "We hear
everything, and every noise echoes like a knell: dull murmurs of surging
water, nerve-wracking falls of men and things; questions anxiously spoken,
crash of objects upon each other, sinister creakings of the hull under the
terrible and ever increasing pressure.  The smell of burning, the vile
emanations of chlorine - fore-runners of asphyxia - are inhaled everywhere,
and grip our throats.  Tango, the bob-tailed Arab dog, is stuck somewhere
between the boilers."

IV - The Song Of Death - From Down Below

     All at once in this antechamber of death there rises a song!  To the
steel heart of the Monge the even more highly tempered hearts of the French
sailors are replying.  They are singing!  If the plates are springing, these
hearts do not give way.  Like their ancestors, the ancient Gauls, they fear
nothing; and they prove it by intoning a hymn for France at 200 feet below
the surface of the ocean.  Yes, in their half overturned, flooded cage which
threatens to crush like an eggshell, they sing!  No audience is theirs and,
so far as they know, none will ever know how they met their end.  But no
matter, it is for themselves they sing, possessed by the sublime exaltation
that makes martyrs and heroes.

     Groping about, they manage to make a lamp flash for a few seconds.  This
reveals the full gravity of the situation, for it shows the pointers of the
manometers standing still at their limit, proving that they are far below the
greatest depth permitted to the Monge.

     Commandant Morillot's hand is upon the lever that controls the lead
ballast, his last resource, but he hesitates to release it.  If the leads be
released the submarine will rise to the surface, but must be captured at
once, for she will then be unable to submerge again.  He looks at the men in
the fitful light of the flashing lamp, questioning them with his eyes, as he
thinks: If it is good to live it is also good to die for one's country.
Their silence responding to his immobility expresses their acquiescence in
the sacrifice.

     But at last, under the direction of the Commander, the engineers get the
turbines working again.  The creaking diminishes, then it ceases.  Ensign
Appell strikes a match and holds it to the manometer.  The pointer moves from
its maximum (135 feet).

     "Courage!" he cries, "we are rising!"

     Quick to the periscopes!  Alas, one of them has gone, and the other is
blind!

     Still they rise.  Suddenly a crash above, and then another.  Four shells
explode right overhead.  They are at the surface, and the Austrians are
firing on them!

     There is nothing for it but to submerge again, come what may.  Scarcely
has the Commandant given the order than a shell bursts right in the port
periscope chamber, tearing a great hole in the hull.  This time nothing can
save the Monge.  Only now does the captain let go the lead ballast.  Since
his vessel is lost, he will profit by the brief respite this lightening will
give to save the crew.  After closing the water valves he orders the forward
hatchway opened and leads his men to it.

     "Not that way, my boys," he says to those who take the wrong direction,
"this way.  As soon as you get out, leap overboard to show that the Monge is
sinking and stop the enemy's fire."

V - Good-By To The "Monge"

     Flashes from a lighthouse on shore show the men leaping overboard and
the boat sinking lower and lower.  The Austrians have ceased their fire.

     "We marched forward singing the 'Marseillaise,'" said Joffry, "and with
a cry of 'Vive la France!' we jumped.  Then, nothing under our feet.  Good-by
Monge!"

     We felt the shock of an explosion.  The floating debris of the deck
helped us to swim.  Twelve of us clung to a floating gangway, swimming with
our feet, for half an hour.  Quartermasters Morel and Goulard were missing.

     At last boats from the enemy destroyers came and picked us up.

     And Morillot?  He went down with the Monge.  The details of his end are
uncertain, but it is not difficult to reconstruct them. Joffry says: "He did
not come up on deck.  He remained at his post.  Very calmly he stood watching
the manometer reveal the gradual sinking of the vessel under him.  He was
surely saying in his heart 'If only my men can get away in time!' He told the
last of us to hurry, and he helped us to find our way.  What he did when he
saw us all safe I do not know, but it seemed to me that the Monge sank more
swiftly.  He might have opened the water ballast valves to make her sink
before the hand of the Boches could touch her.  That is undoubtedly what he
did, but I did not see him, nor did any one."

     And Mahe, who was in the control chamber, says: "The captain told us:
'Our poor Monge is lost, but you have yet time.  Come this way, my lads.' He
opened the door and added: 'Au revoir, and courage, my lads!' I dared not
tell him to come up with us, for I saw he had made up his mind to die with
his ship, as he had already told some of us he would."

VI - The Last Torpedo

     The captain of the Austrian gunboat Balaton told the survivors that he
had delayed launching boats to pick them up, because a torpedo had been fired
at his boat from the Monge as she went down.  He believed that Commandant
Morillot, having seen all his men safely overboard, had gone below alone and
deliberately fired a last torpedo.  That is possible, or it may be that a
torpedo was accidentally discharged from the sinking boat.  Joffry spoke of
feeling an explosion after getting into the water.

     In an order of the day published as soon as the facts became known,
Admiral the Duke of the Abruzzi paid tribute to the "heroic sacrifice in
which Lieut.  Morillot decided to remain on board his sinking boat," and
added: "To do honor to this deed of the purest marine valor, his Majesty the
King has deigned to confer upon him, motu proprio, the gold medal for valor."
This was the first time this rare distinction had been conferred since the
war began.  In transmitting this notice to the French Admiral, Vice-Admiral
Cutinelli-Rendina added:

     "His memory will ever remain for us an object of admiration and
worship."