Across the Channel, in back of the hill that
you can see, they are cleaning the great barrel, studying charts, making
reports, churning with Geopolitik.
MINESWEEPER
LONDON, July 7, 1943—Day after day the
minesweepers go out. Small boats that in peacetime fished for herring and cod.
Now they fish for bigger game. They are equipped with strange, new fish lines.
The crews are nearly all ex-fishermen and whalers and the officers are from the
same tough breed. Theirs is an unromantic and unpublicized job that must be
done and done very thoroughly. The danger lurks without flags and firing. Very
few decorations are awarded to the minesweeping men.
They usually sail out of the harbor in a line,
three boats to sweep and two to drop the buoyed flags, called dans, which mark
the swept channel. Once on the ground to be swept, three of the boats deploy
and travel abreast at exact and set distances from one another. The space
between them is the area that can be reached by their instruments. The little
boats are searching for the two kinds of mines which are usually planted—the
magnetic mines which explode when a ship with its self-created magnetic field
sails over, and the other kind which is exploded by the vibration of a ship’s
engines. The sweepers are equipped with instruments to explode either kind and
to do it at a safe distance from themselves.
The three abreast move slowly over the area to
be cleared of mines and behind them the dan ships follow at intervals, putting
out the flags. At the end of their run they turn and come back, overlapping a
little on the old course and the dan ships pick up the flags and set them on
the outer course again.
All the boats are armed against airplanes. The
gunners stand at their posts and search the sky constantly, while the radio
operator listens to the spotting instruments on the shore. They take no chances
with the planes. When one comes near them they train their guns in that
direction until they recognize her. And even the friendly planes do not fly too
close. For these men have been bombed and fired on from the air so often that
they will fire if there is any doubt at all. Sticking up out of the water are
the masts of many ships sunk early in the war when the German planes ranged
over the Channel almost with impunity. They do not do it any more.
The voice of the radio man comes up through the
speaking tube to the little bridge. “Enemy aircraft in the vicinity,” he says,
and then a moment later, “Red alert.” The gunners swing their guns and the crew
stands by, all eyes on the sky. From the English coast the Typhoons boil out
angrily, fast and deadly ships that fly close to the water. In the distance the
enemy plane is a spot. It turns tail and runs for the French coast. The radio
man calls, “All clear,” and the crew relaxes.
