_The account continued._
All my hopes of getting up again that night, both for the purpose of
charging and of getting the 3 a.m. signal, were doomed to be
disappointed, as the hydrophone operator kept on reporting the noise of
destroyers overhead. Occasional distant thuds seemed to indicate a
never-ending supply of depth-charges, but they were about four or five
miles from me. Perhaps some other unfortunate devil was going through
the fires of hell.
At daylight on the second day my position was still miserable. The
battery was getting low again, the sea had gone down, and when I put my
periscope up at 9 a.m. the horizon seemed to be ringed with patrols. I
felt as if I was in an invisible net, and though I endeavoured to
conceal my apprehension from the crew, I could see from the listless
way they went about their duties that they realized that once again we
were near the end of our resources.
All the forenoon we crept along at thirty metres, until the tension was
broken at 1 p.m. by a furious depth-charge attack. In some
extraordinary way they had located me again and closed in upon me. The
first charges were some little distance off, and as they got closer a
feeling of desperation overcame me, and I seriously contemplated ending
the agony by surfacing and fighting to the last with my gun.
Curiously enough, the procedure that I adopted was the exact opposite.
I decided to dive deep. I went down to 114 metres. At this exceptional
depth, three rivets in the pressure hull began to leak, and jets of
water with the rigidity of bars of iron shot into the boat.
Pages:
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143