Word: u-boats
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...People on the American Farmer, which rescued 29 from the torpedoed British freighter Kafiristan, told about a British light bomber, the U-5-K appearing from nowhere while the submarine still lay by watching the rescue. A half-dozen men were on the U-boat's deck when the diving plane raked it with machine-gun fire. The submarine dived frantically, perhaps with its conning tower still open. The bomber, swooping twice again, dropped charges which almost certainly demolished the U-boat...
Among scores of grey shapes playing hide & seek in deadly earnest through the coastal waters around Great Britain was H. M. S. Courageous, oldest vessel of Britain's six aircraft carriers. Her broad, windswept flight deck was busy with planes coming & going to scout for U-boats. Last Sunday evening, just before the dusk hour at which the Athenia was sunk two Sundays prior, the eyes that saved others were not quick enough to save the Courageous. "There were two distinct bangs at intervals of about a second" (said a survivor) and the 22,500-ton craft - torpedoed squarely...
After the Courageous blow, the British Government announced that "many submarines" had been found and attacked "with little opposition from the German Air Force." The account of a British flier was released, telling how he spotted a U-boat two miles off, sneaked up on it behind a cloud. He opened fire at a man on the conning tower and let go a flight of bombs. These hit the water ahead of the submarine, which was diving. The explosions blew it back to the surface and "the nearest bomb of my second salvo was a direct hit on the submarine...
Only amazement was added to horror last week by the continued insistence of official Berlin that the torpedo must have been British, fired to arouse U. S. indignation. Most charitable theory entertained by neutrals about "Atrocity No. 1" of World War II was that, while Germany's U-boats may have had orders to prey like gentlemen, the Athenia's destroyer was a Nazi hothead who could not control his trigger finger. Suspicion that a sharp order to other U-boat captains may have been issued by Berlin was aroused by the contrasting conduct of a captain...
...Berlin's suburb of Dahlem, two years ago last week, the Gestapo (secret police) arrested Rev. Martin Niemoller, onetime U-boat commander, took him to Moabit prison. Pastor Niemoller was no Marxist, no pacifist, no libertarian. He had, indeed, been an early supporter of Naziism, and the .bourgeoisie and old army families who made up his congregation accepted, broadly, a Nazi view of "the Jewish problem." But for Martin Niemoller, Naziism could go just so far. When "German Christians" sought to Nazify the Evangelical Church, when the Reich sought to apply the "Leader Principle" to church government...