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Updated: April 30, 2025
Off went the mine-sweeper after she had taken her boat aboard, tugging heartily. She tugged too heartily for the length and size of the hawser. It parted. They did it all over again the lowering the boat in the rough sea, the passing the line, the bending on of the bigger line, the attempt to tow. And again it parted. Wouldn't that test men's faith in their good luck? The 343 thought so.
There are days when a mine-sweeper captain, who is continually running the gauntlet of death, reckons that he has been fortunate. Usually this is when he just escapes being blown to bits with his vessel or sees what can happen to a steamship when it strikes one of the enemy mines planted at random in the North Sea. There are days when he goes out and sees nothing worth while.
Merely as a sporting proposition, their own lives not depending on it, the 343's people would have been praying for that boat to get safely away. The boat managed at last to get away from the side of the mine-sweeper, and in time, pitching down on the rollers, they made out to heave a line aboard the 343. And on the deck of the 343 they were right there to grab it and bend it on to a hawser. Fine.
However, despite the great danger, unseen and unheard until all is over, these mine-sweeper men guide their vessels out daybreak after daybreak, with the same old carefree air, to perform their allotted task in this war.
We had been in the open harbour for about twenty minutes when the bows of the ugly vessel came slowly on. An instant later all the small craft were ready to speed to their respective berths in their turns, and it was not so very long before the mine-sweeper was tied to her part of the dock. The commander of the sister vessel to the one I had been aboard came over to us. "Good ship that of yours?"
Stenhouse, who commanded the 'Aurora' after Mackintosh landed, was with Worsley as his second in command when one of the German submarines was rammed and sunk, and received the D.S.C. for his share in the fight. He was afterwards given command of a Mystery Ship, and fought several actions with enemy submarines. Clark served on a mine-sweeper. Greenstreet was employed with the barges on the Tigris.
"Suppose you press one of those little feelers and blow us all to pieces get away, I tell you!" The mine-sweeper skipper looked up "Feelers, sir?" and then looked down at the mine. "Feelers, sir? Oh-h, you mean them little 'orns stickin' out on 'er? Bly-mee, sir, I thought I'd knocked 'em all hoff afore I lashed her alongside.
For one hour, two hours, three, four, five, six hours they drifted. Their wireless kept going out of commission, and their radio operator kept patching it up and getting it going again. S O S he never let up with that call. It was midnight when a British mine-sweeper bore down and hailed. By then they could hear the high seas breaking on the rocks abeam.
But the affairs of that Sunday were not yet complete. Twenty minutes after the mine had been exploded a great rumble was heard way out at sea, and soon it was ascertained by the captain of the mine-sweeper that a Scandinavian tramp had met her doom by striking a German mine. "We went off to see if we could pick up some of the poor chaps," observed the skipper.
When he woke in the morning, a white girl a sister was standing beside his bunk. He was shy he felt so rough. It seemed ages since he had seen a woman. At ten o'clock, the light cases for Lemnos transferred to a mine-sweeper, and thence to a fleet-sweeper.
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