Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 184
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 184]
that an American patrol had captured three Hun ships, which had tried to escape, and that one of the three had fallen to the Melbourne. We congratulated her on doing a useful piece of work at last.
These sheltering merchantmen were a continual sorce of worry to us. There were always rumours probably inspired by Germans that certain ships were raising steam and preparing for a dash to sea. One never knew whether the reports were true, or whether it was merely a ruse to get Sydney or some other ship off a certain port while duty work was done elsewhere. A favourite trick was for a ship to put to sea from one port keep within the three mile limit and make another farther up or down the coast. It sometimes happened that one of our cruisers would see the performance and accost the Hun with the range finder trained on him watching for any excursion outside the neutral zone in which case the value of the ship would have gone to swell the prizemoney which is collecting at the Admiralty, and which every Navyman hopes to dip into when the war is over.
But the Germans were too wily, and did not essay cruises where the channel was so cut up by reefs or banks, as to make risk of capture a necessity. Our fleet always played the game, and the Germans knew this, and traded on it, and led our unfortunate patrol a lively dance.
We paid for being a law abiding people. One can just imagine a German man-o-war leaving a British merchantman unmolested, say in Dutch waters. The unhappy Briton would soon have joined with her colleagues in Hamburg or Bremerhafen & which on one pretext or another the German Admiralty detained before war with England was