Fifteen minutes later, a steamship appeared, heading in U-20’s direction. It was still far off but looked to be a vessel of significant tonnage. Schwieger ordered a dive to periscope depth and prepared his attack. He placed U-20 at a 90-degree angle to the ship’s course, to set up what he called a “clean bow shot,” and once again selected a bronze torpedo.
As the ship approached, however, it seemed to shrink in size. Something about the fading light and mist had produced an optical illusion that made the vessel at first look large, but the closer it got, the smaller it got. Schwieger estimated its tonnage at a mere 1,500 tons. Still, it was something. He maneuvered so that when the ship’s course intersected his, he would be just 300 meters away. The target was still a mile off.
And then, as he watched through the periscope, the ship sheered from its course. At that distance, there was no chance for him to catch up.
Even in the spare prose of his log, Schwieger’s frustration was evident. “It was impossible that the steamer could have seen us,” he wrote. He identified the ship as a Swedish vessel, the Hibernia, “with neutral signs, without flag.”
Schwieger brought U-20 back to the surface, and continued south, through a night he described as being exceptionally dark.
LONDON; BERLIN; WASHINGTON
COMFORT DENIED
ON THAT WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, BRITAIN’S TOP NAVAL official, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, left London for Paris. He could do so with relative safety because a combination of protective measures—sea mines and submarine nets at the eastern end of the English Channel and heavy patrols along its length—had made the channel too dangerous for submarines to traverse on a routine basis. Although Churchill traveled incognito and checked into his hotel under a false name, there was little mystery about his visit. He was to meet with Italian and French officials to determine how the Italian navy should be used in the Mediterranean Sea, now that Italy—on April 26—had joined the war on the side of Britain, France, and Russia. Afterward, as he had done on previous occasions, Churchill planned to travel to the front to spend time with Field Marshal Sir John French—Sir John Denton Pinkstone French—commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France.
With Churchill absent, the Admiralty became a much quieter place. Ordinarily, he kept a very close hand on naval matters, including details of day-to-day operations that, at least in theory, were supposed to be left to the number two Admiralty official, the First Sea Lord. This put the forty-year-old Churchill in direct conflict with the seventy-four-year-old occupant of that post, Adm. Jacky Fisher.
If Churchill resembled a bulldog, Fisher was a large bulb-eyed toad, dead ringer for a future actor named László L?wenstein, better known by the stage name Peter Lorre. Like Churchill, Fisher was strong-willed and tended to consume himself with the minute details of naval operations. When both men were present, tension was the order of the day. One naval official wrote to his wife, “The situation is curious—two very strong and clever men, one old, wily and of vast experience, one young, self-assertive, with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together, they cannot both run the show.” Churchill seemed bent on usurping Fisher’s role. Churchill’s “energy and capacity for work were almost frightening,” wrote intelligence chief Blinker Hall. “Notes and memoranda on every conceivable subject would stream forth from his room at all hours of the day and night. What was worse, he would demand information which would ordinarily and properly have gone only to the First Sea Lord or Chief of Staff, a fact which more than once led to some confusion and an unmerited word of rebuke.”
What made their relationship still more turbulent was the fact that Fisher seemed to be tottering on the verge of madness. Wrote Hall, “Gradually we in the Admiralty could not help becoming aware that the Fisher we had known was no longer with us. In his place was a sorely harassed and disillusioned man who was overtaxing his strength in the attempt to carry on. He might still on occasion show the old flashes of brilliance, but, beneath the surface, all was far from being well.… At any moment, we felt, the breaking-point would come.” Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, likewise grew concerned. “The state of affairs at Head Quarters,” he wrote, in an April 26 letter to a fellow officer, “is as bad or worse than I feared. It is lamentable that things should be as they are, and there is no doubt whatever that the Fleet is rapidly losing confidence in the administration.”