A Twist Of Sand

"Fresh air and speed," he went on quietly. "Yes. Four words tell the whole story. The Germans are getting the answers, too. They are well ahead of us."

The Flag Officer (S) stirred slightly in his chair. The burden of that terrible summer and its more terrible winter in the North Atlantic lay heavily on his heart. Half a million tons a month sunk, they said.

"They seem to have given priority to air," the easy voice went on. "They are working on a kind of hollow tube that will supply air to the vessel while it remains submerged" He consulted his mind. "The Dutch had something of the sort at the outbreak of war. They called it something like… ah, yes, snort or snorchel."

I listened in amazement. "Why" I exclaimed, "give a submariner a thing like that and, and…"

"Precisely," he smiled. "And one poses a whole new series of tactical problems of the greatest import. I am simply a glass through which rays of information shine, I hope not too dully." He smiled faintly at the stern eyed man at the other side of the desk.

"Now the Blohm and Voss people" — he said it as one might name a favourite tailor of close acquaintance — " have evolved a prototype which they are calling Type XXI. It is fully streamlined and is fitted with what we will conversationally call a snort. It will do sixteen knots submerged, has six bow tubes and carries twelve spare torpedoes. I evaluate its firing power at eighteen torpedoes — I think kipper is a distressing piece of naval slang — in thirty minutes."

The man behind the desk stirred again. That schoolmasterly voice meant, translated into the practical, a burning hell of tankers sinking, men dying in agony, or freezing to death in perishing seas. The cold eyes were so cold that years later I was still to remember them.

"The Type XXI also has a new kind of range-finder — again, well in advance of us or the Americans — which enables him to fire his torpedoes from thirty-five metres down without using his periscope at all."

I jumped to my feet. "No, that's impossible!"

My informant looked at me mildly. "By no means, my dear Lieutenant-Commander. It is a reality. By this coming winter in the North Atlantic there will be scores of the Type XXI at work. I assure you you have no reason to doubt my information."

I looked at the glum face of the man in the chair and accepted, as best I could, what the chief of Intelligence was saying.

"Air and speed, you said Lieutenant-Commander," he went on.

My words tumbled out: "But the Type XXI solves them both sir — all the air you want, and all the speed."

"By no means," he replied. "Both are a step forward, But by no means absolute."

"What do you mean by absolute, sir?" I asked with heavy humour. "My boat might make a single burst of nine knots in an emergency, but three or four would be more like it. I'd have to charge batteries the next night when the air was foul anyway. This Type XXI — why, it's unbelievable."

"Your problem," he replied dogmatically, "is having to come absolutely to the surface, stop and recharge, or run on the surface and recharge. The Blohm and Voss beauty sails below at snort depth, runs her diesels and charges her batteries. She is still vulnerable, and that snort is vulnerable too. Her motive power is only an improved version of the old — ours, for example."

"Give me a boat like that, and I'd go damn near anywhere, sir," I said vehemently, for the idea fired me. Think, if I had had a fast, manoeuvrable ship like that for that battleship attack…

"I say the Type XXI is quite vulnerable," he said. quietly, "and I am sure with — ah developments — we shall be able to cope with it."

This high-level talk was sweeping me off my feet.

"But you know, Lieutenant-Commander, the Germans are an imaginative lot. If we had had the initiative to develop the Type XXI, we would have concentrated exclusively on it. But the German is a perfectionist. He wants something better than that. So instead of concentrating, he diversifies his energies. Air and Speed. Absolutely. I can say that the Type XXI is obsolescent.

Astonishment robbed me of speech. I gestured feebly at the Flag Officer (S). He nodded curtly.

"Not that she won't go into service," went on the evenly moderated voice. "She's quite lethal you know."

OF all the gross understatements, that surely took the biscuit, I thought. It made Trout and her like seem like things used in the Napoleonic wars.

"What do you know about hydrogen peroxide, Lieutenant-Commander?"

A flippant reply about ladies' hairdressers rose to my lips, but died without utterance at the abstracted face before me.

"Only what I learned at school, and that I've almost forgotten," I replied.

"The Germans arc using it to propel yet another experimental type," he said coolly. I wondered if the effects of the depth-charging and the long flight were really making me rather addle-headed. Hydrogen peroxide!