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As I have confessed to doing a foolish thing, I give myself the pleasure of recording a cleverer move on my part. I anticipated depth-charge attack as a matter of course, but instead of going down to twenty-five metres, I kept her at twelve.
U-boat, that we are somewhere near you, and here is a depth-charge just to tell you that we haven't lost you yet." The incident of the depth-charges every half-hour was known as "Tickling up." Probably the patrol only heard faint noises from him.
I did not dare venture to the surface, and thus missed my 1 a.m. signal from Headquarters. I wanted a charge badly, and so proceeded at the lowest possible speed. At regular intervals our enemy dropped one depth-charge somewhere astern of us, but these reports always seemed the same distance away. At dawn I very cautiously came up to periscope depth, and had a look.
The apparently simple words, heavy with sinister significance, sank like a depth-charge into Mr. Prohack's consciousness. "Among other things," said Mr. Prohack to himself, "this fellow is very obviously after a free lunch." Now Mr.
I felt as if I was in an invisible net, and though I endeavoured to conceal my apprehension from the crew, I could see from the listless way they went about their duties that they realized that once again we were near the end of our resources. All the forenoon we crept along at thirty metres, until the tension was broken at 1 p.m. by a furious depth-charge attack.
Worsley, known to his intimates as Depth-Charge Bill, owing to his success with that particular method of destroying German submarines, has the Distinguished Service Order and three submarines to his credit.
As we dived I ordered the helm hard a starboard, to counteract the expected depth-charge attack. We must have been a hundred and fifty metres from the first charge and a little below it, five others followed in rapid succession, but were further away, and we suffered no damage beyond a couple of broken lights. The situation was now extremely unpleasant.
I consulted the chart, but could find no bottoming ground within fifty miles, a distance which was quite beyond my powers. At 11 p.m. I simply had to come up again and get a charge on the batteries. From 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., at regular half-hourly intervals, a depth-charge had gone off somewhere within a radius of two miles of me.
I gradually altered course to north-east, but after half an hour's run I almost ran on top of a group of patrols in the dusk. I crash-dived, and they must have seen me go down, as a few minutes later the boat was violently shaken by a depth-charge. We were at twenty metres, still diving at the time.
As an hour had elapsed since the last depth-charge, I felt fairly happy at coming up, and on making the surface I was delighted to find a pitch-black night and a considerable sea. From 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. I actually had three hours of peace, and in this period I managed to cram a considerable amount of stuff into the batteries.
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