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946 ILLUSTRATED WORLD
TRAPPING THE
(Continued J, 'om page 831)
These buoys, spaced two hundred
yards apart, would be, in fact, stationary
submarines and lookout posts combined.
Each would be a floating steel or iron
shell, ovoid or spherical in shape, and
large enough to contain just one man as
"crew" and the necessary apparatus.
The apparatus which the observer
would have at his command would be
one miniature torpedo tube, capable of
firing a missile sufficiently large to destroy
an enemy submarine or any other
small vessel that might approach. Besides
this, a one-pound rapid fire gun
would be mounted on the surface.
This much would enable one man to
give a good account of himself in any
fight on the surface, and at the same
time, to give the alarm.
Because the major portion of his work
would consist in lookout duty, the torpedo
buoy would have to be equipped
with a small periscope, both above the
water and below. The underwater periscope
doubtless would have to be long
enough to enable him to see clearly all
that was going on under him. In some
cases this would mean an extreme length
of somewhat over one hundred feet, but
fortunately, the ocean floor between
Scotland and Norway rarely is this far
below the level of the waves.
Finally, the last and most important
of the torpedo buoy's defensive apparatus
would be a storage battery and a
system of wiring reaching from a
switchboard inside the buoy to a series
of explosive mines set at varying depths
about the one hundred yard radius to be
guarded.
The moment a submarine raider was
spied, the man in the buoy would judge
whether to attempt to destroy the vessel
with a torpedo, or to wait until it came
near to one of the explosive mines. In
the latter case, the lone sea sentinel
would have the choice of fifteen or
twenty explosion centers from which to
attack his submerged enemy. Because
the crushing force of a mine explosion
PIRATE U-BOAT
under water creates a disturbance, irresistible
to the thin plates of a U-boat,
over a wide horizontal plane and all the
way to the surface in a vertical direction,
the submarine, once sighted, would have
almost no chance of escape.
Other forces, also, were set in motion
at the time the underwater pirate was
seen. A distress signal was flashed—
heliograph or any other previously deterrr.ned
means would do—along the
line of buoys to the place where destroyers
and "swatters" were waiting. Even
supposing that the enemy submarine
slipped past, the squadron, with its aeroplane
assistance, would locate and destroy
him.
To establish this chain would require
approximately 2,200 of these buoys and
33,000 of the tri-nitro-toluol bombs.
This seems enormous, but when it is
considered that the expense would probably
be less than one-tenth the amount
that Germany is putting into submarines,
that 2,200 men with an equal number
of reserves to spell them off as alternates
and a thousand extra to replace
losses could hold the line successfully.
and that this would release the most
powerful of our allies from the vital
danger which now threatens her, it does
not seem like extravagance.
Another of the plans which was followed
earlier in the submarine campaign
with some success, and wdiich still lures
a few of the more unsophisticated German
U-boat commanders into fatal difficulties,
is the "blind pocket" net.
For this a decoy vessel, usually a
dummy merchantman, is used. A circle
of steel nets, a mile in diameter, is submerged.
The mouth is left open. The
dummy merchantman cruises about
until it is suspected that a submarine is
in close chase; then it heads into the
circle of nets. Immediately it becomes
a certainty that the enemy has fallen
into the trap, the mouth of the nets is
closed. Then there is no alternative-to
{Continued on page 948)