LITMIR.BIZ

      Zeebrugge.

      To grapple the Mole was very difficult; the outer wall was high and there was a heavy swell rolling the ships. The Iris was ahead; but the Daffodil, being close astern of the Vindictive, was able to push her into place with her bows and hold her there most gallantly. The Vindictive ran out the "brows" or high gangways with which she was specially fitted, and the storming parties were ready to land. At this moment a shell fell among them and killed Colonel Bertram Elliot of the Marines, while Captain Henry Halanem, who was commanding the bluejackets, fell to machine-gun fire. But their men were unchecked. They rushed upon the brows, which were tossing and crashing on the wall, and with all their heavy accoutrements, bombs, and Lewis guns, cleared the leap down the steep fall to the floor of the Mole, and began fighting their way along it under cover of a barrage from the ship's howitzers. The Iris meantime was grappling the Mole farther ahead, with dearly bought success; the Daffodil's men jumped across to the Vindictive and joined her storming party.

      The charge was irresistible; the batteries were taken, the dug-outs cleared, the hangars fired, the store-sheds blown up, and those of the enemy who escaped into a destroyer were sent to the bottom in her by a bombing attack from the parapet. All this was done in fifteen minutes; then followed a tremendous explosion at the shore end of the Mole. The C3, manned by half a dozen officers and men under Lieutenant R. D. Sandford, R.N., had made straight for the piles of the viaduct under the searchlights of the enemy, who seem to have thought that she was bent on passing through to attack the ships in the harbour, and was therefore sure to be trapped among the struts and piles. Then, when they saw her crew reappear in a tiny motor-boat they opened fire with machine-guns; but they had only wounded and not disabled their quarry, for immediately C 3 exploded and destroyed the viaduct and all upon it, cutting off the Mole from communication with the shore. Lieutenant R. D. Sandford, with his five companions, was picked up by a steam pinnace commanded by his brother, Lieutenant-Commander Sandford, and brought away safely. Both as tactics and as a moral reinforcement their exploit was of the highest value.

      Ten minutes afterwards the block-ships, the Thetis (Commander R. S. Sneyd), the Intrepid (Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter), and the Iphigenia (Lieutenant V. W. Billyard-Leake), were seen rounding the lighthouse and heading for the entrance of the canal. The Thetis was leading, and received the concentrated fire of the enemy; she ran aground on the edge of the channel and was sunk partially across it, signalling to her consorts, as she went down, to avoid the nets which had fouled her own propeller. The Intrepid and the Iphigenia thereupon passed straight up the canal to a point at which they were two or three hundred yards inside the shore lines and actually behind the German guns on the Mole. They were then blown up and sunk across the channel, and their crews took to the boats and got away out to sea, where they were eventually taken on board the destroyers.

      An hour had now passed and the work was done. Even the lighthouse had been sacked, for Wing-Commander Brock, who was in charge of the smoke-screen operations, had not only led the charge into the big gun battery, but had made a special objective of the range-finder in the lighthouse top and came down laden with an armful of spoil. He was last seen lying desperately wounded under the parapet wall of the Mole; but this was not reported until afterwards, and his fate remained uncertain. The siren was shrieking the recall, half drowned by the noise of gun-fire; it was twenty minutes before the word could be given to cast off.

      The Vindictive, the Iris, and the Daffodil got away at full speed, and the German salvos followed them with remarkable regularity, but always a few yards behind; the ships were soon covered too by their own smoke. Of the three destroyers two came safely off; the third, the North Star, was sunk by gun-fire near the block-ships, but her men were brought away by the Phoebe. Of the motor-boats (under command of Captain R. Collins) many performed feats of incredible audacity at point-blank range, and all but two returned. The co-operation of all forces was from first to last beyond expectation and beyond praise; a mortal enterprise could hardly come nearer to perfection, whether of foresight, daring, or execution.

      During the Zeebrugge attack the wind shifted and blew the smoke off shore. This helped to cover the retirement, but at Ostend it caused a partial failure of the blocking operations. Commodore Hubert Lynes successfully laid his smoke screen, and sent in the Sirius and the Brilliant to be sunk between the piers of the harbour mouth. But the enemy sighted and sunk the motor-boats and their guide lights; the block-ships missed the entrance and were blown up 2,000 yards to the east. The Germans, to guard against a renewal of the attempt, removed the buoy at the entrance and kept a patrol of nine destroyers in the harbour. But on the night of 9th May, Commodore Lynes took in a larger flotilla, and this time the Vindictive herself was the block-ship. In spite of fog and darkness her commander (Godsal, late of the Brilliant), piloted by Acting-Lieutenant Cockburn in a motor-boat, ran her 200 yards up the channel and then ordered her to be sunk. He died in the act, but the work was completed by Lieutenant Crutchley and Engineer-Lieutenant Bury. The losses were heavy, for the Germans had a fair target; but even when day broke the nine destroyers made no attempt at a counterstroke, and the expedition returned triumphant.

      This whole attack was a legitimate enterprise planned only for a definite and practical purpose, but in the result it proved a greater affair than had been foreseen: the moral effect of so splendid a feat of arms came as a timely gift from the Navy to the Allied cause.