Old Game

Last week, after the sinking of the 5,051-ton British freighter Clement in the South Atlantic, merchant mariners under the Union Jack had a fearful old familiar phrase on their tongues. Red-faced first mates on the British India boats chunkin' to Rangoon, the paler men who dodge growlers on the foggy way to Greenland, big men on the cold Cape haul--all were nervous on the watch and reminiscent at mess because of a capricious, romantic, dangerous ghost that was out kissing British ships again: the German raider.

In that other war, reminisced these veterans, there was nothing at sea like Germany's raiders. They behaved far differently from submarines. The raiders' game was almost merry: a game of masquerade, chase, chivalry, a game with rules,--grim outlawry with a face of fun and even a little virtue. Take, for instance, the old Emden.

On August 2, 1914, the cruiser Emden lay in the tranquil, mountain-embraced harbor of Tsingtao, China, with its crew assembled on deck. Captain Karl von Mueller, a man of Prussian gallantry and Goth insolence, read to the sailors a wireless message announcing war's declaration.

Then, ordering that the decks be cleared for action, he gave a fiery speech in which he even ranted a little Shakespeare.

The three-funneled Emden put to sea. A few weeks later a cruiser flying a British flag and carrying four funnels (one of them was made of deck runners), easily mistakable for the British Yarmouth, showed up in the Indian Ocean. The counterfeiting Emden took as her first prize a Greek, loaded to the Plimsoll with coal for British ports. The Emden did not sink her but kept her by as a bunker ship to be crowded with captured crews and finally sent to Germany. A fantastic series of sinkings, captures, cripplings began. What made them particularly fantastic was the gallantry, as well as the ingenuity, of Captain Miiller. He used tricks to attract the enemy, but in battle he proudly flew his own flag. Sometimes he had five or six boats gathered around him in various stages of sinking. He was so ubiquitous that many people seriously believed that the Germans named several cruisers Emden. He sent to the bottom more than 74,000 tons of shipping without killing one man.

Aboard the Emden his captives lived like kings. The larder was always full. Pet kittens, two pigs, some lambs, a pigeon, geese had the run of the ship. There was a band concert every afternoon. Finally the ship had so much victual booty that an extra meal was served: afternoon coffee with bonbons.

On November 8, 1914, the Emden was caught off Cocos Islands by the Australian cruiser Sydney and set afire. Captain Miiller was captured, but his crew escaped ashore, hid in the jungle for weeks, found an old whaler, the Ayesha, refitted her, sailed 12,000 miles home around the Cape, dodging British destroyers through the Channel in a providential fog.

British merchant mariners were nervous last week, when they learned that raiders were abroad again, because 1939 is not 1914. No gallant Emden was at sea. The new raider they heard of was so mysterious, so peremptory, so cruel that she might have been a submarine--and first reports of the sinking of the Clement led the world to believe it had been attacked by a U-boat. Survivors told a different story. Bound with a cargo of gasoline from Pernambuco, Brazil, to Bahia, standing about 70 miles offshore (580 miles inside the neutral zone set up by the Panama Conference; TIME, Oct. 9), the Clement was plugging along at her weary ten-knot pace when members of the crew heard an airplane. The plane circled around, shot bursts of machine-gun fire into the air. Captain F. C. P. Harris stopped ship. A "warship" came up from nowhere, hove to, ordered the men into four boats, captured Captain Harris and his chief engineer, took still and moving pictures of the victims and their craft, and then "fired 25 shots into the Clement and finally torpedoed her."

The raider, whoever she was, did not think for another moment of the Clement's crew. With good weather and luck, all of them reached shore. All 47 were immediately asked a question everyone wanted answered. What ship attacked? One man, apparently a spokesman, replied with assurance: "The attacking ship came so close I could read the name Admiral von Scheer." Either his eyesight or his memory was bad: the name he had meant to speak was Admiral Scheer.

If the Admiral Scheer was really the culprit, the Allies had a mean raider to track down. She is one of Germany's three pocket battleships.* Limited under the Treaty of Versailles to "coast defense" vessels not exceeding 10,000 tons, the ingenious Germans effected economies such as substituting welding for riveting, alloys for heavy metal, then armed the vessels to the crow's nests.

The sharp-eyed survivor notwithstanding, there was considerable doubt at week's end that the attacker could have been the Admiral Scheer. Chief substantiating circumstance was the presence of an airplane. But a cruiser might have launched it. Fishiest point of all was the 25 shots she was said to have fired. One shot from the Admiral Scheer's secondary battery of 5.9-inch guns could have put a hole as big as a room in the Clement; and one from her 11-inchers a hole as big as a house.

Whatever the raider, the incident raised one challenging question. Where was she based? The attack occurred at least 6,000 miles from German waters, and even the Admiral Scheer could cruise only 10,000. Fuel and supplies must have come from either a South American or West Indian port.

Possibility: the base was a ship at sea. Last week the world's largest submarine, France's Surcouf, claimed capture of a German merchantship 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic. The raider also may have had a rendezvous with the 13.615-ton passenger vessel Cap Norte, one of the fastest German ships in the South Atlantic service, unreported since she sailed from Pernambuco fortnight ago heavily loaded with fuel and accompanied by two German freighters carrying fuel and foodstuffs.

Another possibility: the Germans were getting supplies from the Dominican Republic, whose dictator, General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina has been called pro-Nazi. It was reported last week, and quickly denied, that Dominican Coast Guard Cutter No. 3 had been sunk off Samana Peninsula "in an accidental collision with a French cruiser." Private advices in Manhattan were that the cutter had been caught piping fuel into German submarines, and was sunk by gunfire from the French ship; that furthermore, stations had been set up on shore for submarine repairs.

In London, Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that the Admiralty was already putting into operation a "prearranged plan" to cope with all this. The plan was apparently to send out part of Britain's American squadron, the cruisers York, Berwick, Exeter, to look for the raider.

*The other two were supposedly in German waters last week: the Deutschland had been bombed by Loyalist Spanish airmen off Iviza, Balearic Islands, the Admiral Graf Spec by the British in their raid on the Wilhelmshaven base.

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