Hit & Run

One murky morning last week a British patrol surprised a pack of German E-boats in the English Channel. The swift little E-boats ran for safety: from the guns of the careening British, shells pursued them. Two E-boats were blown to bits. It was the start of a running fight which the British fought with E-boats for two days.

Besides their torpedoes, fired from deck tubes, German E-boats carry anti-aircraft cannon, machine guns and depth charges. They cannot hide as submarines can, but they can run. They are cheaper and quicker to build than submarines, and they are fine for hit-&-run raids on shipping not far from shore. The Germans are building a lot of them--just how many, the British would like to know.

After dark on the day of the Channel skirmish, the Germans sent another pack of speedsters against a British convoy in the North Sea. Again British destroyers blew two E-boats to flotsam, but this time the Germans fought back, spitting torpedoes. One torpedo punched the frail hull of the Vortigern, a 1,090-ton oldtimer, and she went down. The British patrol sloop Guillemot, a 580-tonner which can do little better than 20 knots, spotted an E-boat lying in ambush, crept up within 50 yards before the German crew woke up. The Guillemot sent a 4-in. shell into the E-boat's water line and hosed its deck with machine-gun bullets. "It is considered," said the Admiralty communique, "that this boat was sunk."

Next morning three British motor gunboats--about the same size as the E-boats but slightly slower, more heavily gunned and carrying no torpedoes--caught an E-boat off the German base at Ijmuiden on the Dutch coast and left it sinking. In another engagement a British vessel fought off three E-boats until its ammunition was gone, damaged one, retired. A squadron of Spitfire fighters sighted four E-boats, one of them crippled from a previous clash. The Germans put up a screen of flak, but the British planes dived right through it, opening up with their 20-mm. cannon. All four of the Germans were hit and one caught fire. The German fusillade punched 150 holes in one of the Spitfires and broke its elevator cable. But its pilot kept it in the air for a hundred homeward miles and landed safely. Reconnaissance planes found only a litter of wreckage mingled with Nazi corpses, bobbing up & down on the water.

Final score: at least six German speedboats bagged; one British destroyer sunk.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.