The Sunken Gold by Joseph A. Williams

Author:Joseph A. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Commander Damant’s next viable case came on June 26. He had received word from the senior naval officer at Harwich, a port town in Essex, England, north of Dover, that a patrol boat had witnessed an explosion. The boat went to the spot and found a German officer flailing in the sea. It was the UC-11’s commanding officer, Oberleutnant Kurt Utke.

Utke claimed he was fifteen meters below the surface when his U-boat suddenly suffered a violent explosion. As the UC-11 rapidly filled with water, he managed to open the conning tower hatch and get out—he was the only survivor. He informed his interrogators that he had already completed his mission by laying all the U-boat’s mines. He had been homeward bound.

The day after the sinking, Damant arrived to find that sweepers thought they had hooked on the U-boat. The next morning, June 28, he went out on a diving boat (he had come ahead of the Moonfleet with Blachford and Clear) and found that the sweepers had caught upon the sinkers and mooring wires of some old German mines. Suspecting that this was related to the UC-11, Damant continued the search assisted by experts who used electric underwater metal detectors. They soon found the wreck, and Damant dove to survey it.

The spring tides, after a new or full moon when the difference between high water and low water was greatest, did not allow much time to work underwater. But Damant was able to gather enough information on the wreck to form a plan. The UC-11 was rather small, about 111 feet in length, and had been damaged with a large fracture just behind the conning tower. Since it was a minelayer, it had six chutes toward the bow. Each one of those chutes could contain two mines.

Damant surmised what had happened. The U-boat had fouled in the mooring wires of some old German mines. It may well have been mines the submarine itself had laid on prior missions. The Admiralty, for its part, sometimes let old mines be, with Blinker Hall’s unit sending out misinformation that the seas had been swept clean to set as a trap.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.