Terrible Tub

THE CRUISE OF THE RAIDER "WOLF"--Roy Alexander--Yale ($2.75).

On Nov. 30, 1916, a trim, single-funneled, 5,809-ton German freighter, deep grey and black, slipped quietly out of Kiel, nosed through cold, thick fog toward the Norwegian coast, headed at top speed (eleven knots) into the teeth of the North Sea blockade. She was the commerce raider Wolf, commanded by stocky, hand some, canny Karl August Nerger. Cunningly concealed behind hinged steel side she carried a wicked assortment of 5.1 guns, torpedo tubes, machine guns, 45: mines. Her orders: to mine the chief British colonial ports.

Fifteen months later, a battered, be draggled ghost ship, the Wolf again dodged through the British blockade and limped home to her base. Of all German raiders she had outlived all but one.* She had cruised 64,000 miles, through every ocean and most of the British patrols of the world. Not once had she touched port nor spoken another German raider. Her victims totaled 135,000 tons. According to plan, she had mined England's chiel colonial ports, including Singapore. And until one month before her miraculous return the British Admiralty did not even possess a description of her.

Until last week, English readers were in about the same case as the British Admiralty. Unlike his fellow captain Luckner's writings, Captain Nerger's book on his raiding exploits was not generally known outside Germany. The first account in English is by one of his prisoners. Roy Alexander, an Australian wireless operator, spent nine months in one of the two mine compartments which served as brig for the Wolfs sardined, polyglot prisoners (100 when he,arrived, 400 at the peak).

Through rivet holes in an after bulkhead new prisoners were shown neat stacks of barrel-sized mines; adjacent were the powder magazines. What would happen if a mishap or an enemy shell touched that hold was something they all thought about, seldom spoke of. Other anxious moments came as they listened to the ticklish task of minelaying, or as they waited in the blue, corpselike light when buzzers called the crew to battle stations.

With such diverting thoughts, the Wolfs prisoners did not complain of the tropic heat that turned their filthy prison into a fetid Turkish bath, nor of their grim diet, nor of the dhobie itch and typhus brought aboard by Japanese prisoners, nor even of scurvy, which began to rot them on the voyage home, through a hurricane that left the Wolf leaking 40 tons of water an hour, through the ice-jammed Arctic and the dreaded North Sea blockade. Eventually they felt for Captain Nerger the respectful gratitude due a hero who had saved their lives.

*Only other raider to return to her base was Count Dohna-Schlodien's Moewe (Gull), a converted freighter like the Wolf and deadliest German raider (her bag was about 50 ships, including the battleship King Edward VII).

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