Word: u-boats
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...pair of reporters of the Philadelphia Record, hearing of the shocking exploit of two British Security policemen who toured a London suburb in Nazi uniforms unmolested (TIME, Feb. 2), decided to see whether it could happen here. Dressed as German U-boat commanders, William B. Mellor Jr. and Frank Toughill wandered about downtown Philadelphia, talked German in a crowded automat, peering suspiciously at defense plants, asked a traffic cop questions in broken English. Only interest they aroused was from a small boy on roller skates. Said he: "Oh, boy! Join the Navy and see the world...
...Canadian liner Lady Hawkins skittered across a slick, black ocean. Scarcely 100 yards away a U-boat reared up out of the sea for the brief space of 60 seconds. The raider fingered the Lady coldly with a pair of searchlights. Then the Lady Hawkins shuddered under the impact of a torpedo. Her forward mast crashed. Over on her side careened the 7,988-ton liner. Passengers and crew tumbled into the sea. A second torpedo exploded in the Lady Hawkins' engine room and her career ended...
...some 300 who had been aboard. Among the missing: 27 men (out of 40) from St. Joseph, Mo., who had jumped at an opportunity to go to Bermuda on a construction job. Shocked, St. Joe's News-Press cried out a curse on submarines: "May the U-boat that struck by stealth, bringing death to more than a score of St. Joseph citizens, meet with such a fate. . . . Before the sinking of the Lady Hawkins this would have seemed a savage and un-American wish...
...British unofficial estimates: "Several thousand" U-boat prisoners, a "minimum of 250" German and Italian submarines sunk...
...Karl Doenitz' followers call him Chief Mussel Sniffer. One day two years before the war, dissatisfied with British Admiralty official reports on currents around the Portland naval base, he boarded U-37 and went to see for himself. The destroyer Wolfhound spotted the strange sub, dropped a couple of practice detonators, scared the German visitor to the surface. While Doenitz fumed in the torpedo room, the U-boat commander made proper apologies. Then the U-boat went home. Doenitz reportedly confided to a fellow officer that, on hearing the depth charges, he thought the "raving idiot in Berlin...