Return of the Sea Devil?

In their excitement, the men in the little motorboat could hardly tumble out a coherent story to the port authorities at Kavieng, New Guinea. They had crossed the 85 miles from Emirau Island, they said, to get help for some 500 prisoners of war, marooned there by German sea raiders. Help was needed quickly. Some of the castaways were badly torn by shrapnel and steel splinters. Seventy women and children were nearly exhausted. All of them were dirt-encrusted, hollow-eyed, half-starved.

By the time a rescue ship had picked up the tired, haggard little colony, taken them safely on to Australia, the garbled accounts had begun to make sense. They traced the voracious course of an armed Nazi merchantman with its prison and supply ships, the Manyo Maru and the Tokyo Maru, which had been shooting up Pacific shipping lanes for weeks, bagging at least ten New Zealand, British, French and Norwegian vessels.

East of Singapore. Earlier victims told of shuttling back & forth across the South Seas in their below-decks prison, while they heard the guns above them hammering away at new game. The Turakina went down about twilight, bathed in flames, but not until two-thirds of her 58-man crew had been killed. The Komata took eight German shells amidships, which killed the chief officer and wounded the captain, when her radio operator defied orders to close down his wireless. The Rangitane was trapped by the raider's searchlight, sank flaming, with the loss of 13 crew members, six men and seven women out of 100 passengers.

Other ships fell victim as the cruise continued: the Holmwood, Notou, Ringwood, Triona, Triadic, Triaster, Vinni. Most male prisoners were jammed into the Tokyo Maru under machine-gun guard. Once 132 of them were kept under hatches for three days without fresh water, bedded down with a herd of pigs. Their food was black bread, raw sausage and bacon. Aboard the Manyo Mam the women fared little better. Fifteen of them were crowded into a 12-by-10-foot cubbyhole below the water line, with no water for bathing, scanty food. Once they were allowed to go on deck to see the funeral of a woman who had died of shrapnel wounds. Those lucky enough to stay on the raider itself had it easier, were allowed to play cards and listen to the radio, but their food was no better.

The Germans carried recording equipment to make transcriptions of prisoners' comments for propaganda uses. A microphone was hidden in the women's prison to pick up stray bits of information. Officers pumped them for details on sailing dates and destinations. When a diminishing food supply forced the Germans to land some of the prisoners at Emirau, the men were ordered to sign a declaration pledging themselves to noncombatancy for the rest of the war. Those who refused were kept on the prison ship, along with the crews of three other vessels.

Luckner? Though none of the prisoners could identify the captors, survivors of an Indian Ocean sinking who reached Hong Kong reported that the biggest troublemaker in the Pacific was the onetime British-owned Glengarry, a 7,100-ton merchantman captured by the Germans at Copenhagen and fitted out as an auxiliary cruiser. Its skipper: Count Felix von Luckner, who hoodwinked the British for eight months in World War I, while his Seeadler ran up a score of 15 ships in the Atlantic and Pacific, who boasted his exploits had never cost a life.

The old sea raider had prepared himself well for his World War II job. In 1930 he poked about the Caribbean for two months with a crew of 46 U. S. youngsters, to teach them "a love of the sea." By 1937 he was back in his World War I hunting grounds on a two-year round-the-world junket. With his sailing yacht Seeteufel he slipped through Australian waters, taking soundings, making a picture record of his trip with the help of a Nazi Government photographer. A New Zealander who accompanied him from Auckland to Sydney discovered the Seeteufel buttressed with steel braces, stocked with arms and munitions. By the time war broke out the Count had even mapped and charted possible bases in the Marquesas and Society Islands.

Preparations for South Atlantic raiding --this time by submarines--were as well laid. From the U. S. Algic, 900 miles off Angola, crackled the message: "Sighted suspicious vessel, large, white-painted, built similar to tanker, surrounded by four small craft, apparently submarines." Same day the tanker British Zeal was torpedoed farther north, off the Cape Verde Islands; two days later the Nalgora went down in the same waters.

British convoy ships had been able to cut total losses for the week ending Dec. 23 to 43,300 tons (worst week, Oct. 14-21: 146,528 tons). But the Admiralty had few ships to spare for countering the expanding eastern flank of the counter-blockade. Its Home Fleet was still chained to British Isles bases by invasion threats (see p. 24). Its Mediterranean Fleet was busy choking off supplies intended for Italy's armies in Libya and Albania.

From Washington came hints of a partial solution. The U. S. Maritime Commission was mulling a swap of trade routes: let U. S. merchantmen carry British traffic in the Pacific, so that British ships could be transferred to the Atlantic.

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