End of a Lady

At last America's war with Japan has made us free to act. Now we shall see what our U-boats may achieve-Adolf Hitler last week.

The Canadian liner Lady Hawkins skittered across a slick, black ocean. Scarcely 100 yards away a U-boat reared up out of the sea for the brief space of 60 seconds. The raider fingered the Lady coldly with a pair of searchlights. Then the Lady Hawkins shuddered under the impact of a torpedo. Her forward mast crashed. Over on her side careened the 7,988-ton liner. Passengers and crew tumbled into the sea. A second torpedo exploded in the Lady Hawkins' engine room and her career ended.

One lifeboat got away. Somehow 76 people, some in night clothes, hair matted with oil, managed to scramble into it or were pulled up from the sea. It was built to carry only 63. Jammed in so tightly that they could not sit down, they floated wretchedly through the rest of the night and into the morning. Rain drenched them, salt spray covered them. There were mornings after mornings. Five died, pleading for coffee or water. They were dropped into the sea.

Daily rations were one biscuit, one-quarter of a cup of water, two teaspoonfuls of condensed milk. The youngest, and one of the most stoical, of the forlorn voyagers was two-year-old Janet Johnson.

Her father, a British foreign service attache, had paddled away from the sinking Lady Hawkins with Janet in his arms and his wife struggling beside him. When Janet became feverish, Chief Officer Kelly gave her a spoonful of brandy. Janet began to laugh. Her shipmates laughed with her--the only time they laughed. Most of the time they prayed. For five days the little company floated on the Atlantic, until the S.S. Coamo spotted them.

The Coamo put them ashore in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As far as was known at week's end, they were the only survivors of the Lady out of some 300 who had been aboard. Among the missing: 27 men (out of 40) from St. Joseph, Mo., who had jumped at an opportunity to go to Bermuda on a construction job. Shocked, St. Joe's News-Press cried out a curse on submarines: "May the U-boat that struck by stealth, bringing death to more than a score of St. Joseph citizens, meet with such a fate. . . . Before the sinking of the Lady Hawkins this would have seemed a savage and un-American wish."

In two and a half weeks the reported toll of submarine operations along the East Coast was twelve ships, some 350 lives. The day the Lady Hawkins' fate became known coast guardsmen landed at Chincoteague, Va. a handful of near-dead seamen, survivors of the torpedoed tanker Francis E. Powell. Reports that two Axis subs are operating in the Gulf of Mexico brought a complete blackout along 100 miles of Texas coast. The success of counter-measures was the Navy's own secret. Just one hint was allowed to slip through. The Navy released a terse report of one unnamed flyer: "Sighted sub, sank same."

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