HIGH SEA ASSASSINS

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 188, 29 April 1918, Page 6

HIGH SEA ASSASSINS

A BLACK RECORD OF GERMAN CRIMES TEN THOUSAND MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN MURDERED Much new light was thrown on Ger-. man submarine warfare in a lecture recently delivered in Cleveland, Ohio, by .Afr. Wesley Frost, formerly American. Consul at 'Quccii.stown, now assigned to tho Department of State. Jfr. I'rost was an eye-witness of many of tlie events described in his address. llr. tfroat said in the couije of hio address :— Ten thousand men, women and children have now been killed by German, submarines. Every month- sees losses equal to those of tho Lusitania horror;, and every day the death of ii innocent civilians. At this moment the poor felI lows from two or threo vessels are fight. 1 ing for breath. The ocea'i south of IrcI laud is tho most crowded highway of commerco in tho world, and on a fine day 1 have seen merchant ships in all. directions like a vast parade. As Consul ijjt Quoenstown for the three years end- | ing last June, 1 reported to our Government on tho destruction by submarines of 81 different ships carrying American. - citizens. I collected at first-hand much, of the evidence upon which America has entered the war, and placed this evidence on record in legal form. The witnesses usually came to the Consulate straight from the sea, with the cries of dead comrades still ringing in their ears; and their statements were checked .up individually against ono another, and againat the depositions of the surviving officers. "An Inferno of Blood." In the first place, tako the cases is which there .were so-called "warnings" by the submarine. This "warning" consists simply in bombarding the unfortunate victim without pause or pity, ilea and women aro mangled by shell-fire after they have surrendered, and aro doing all in their power to comply with, the submarine's desires. The Madura, a little Russian barque, cut down her mainsail upon the submarine'e first shot, to ehow submission; but when her lifeboat was rescued it was a perfect shambles. The captain, a huge black-bearded Finn, sat ia the stern sheets with his wife, and at their feet two dead eailors lay weltering in blood, while another was just: gasping out his lifo. The four other eailore were all wretchedly wounded. These inoffensive working men were slaughtered while trying frantically to do anything tho eubmanne wanted. I can name you caee after case where a harmless sailing ship has heaved to and signalled obedience, lfke a small dog that turns ovor on hie back and holds up his v paws, and then has been mercilessly raked with shrapnel till it was a. ghostly inferno, of blood. On a dismal February day I saw the dismembered fragments of tho captain of the Anglo-Calofornian carried ashore m a gunny-bag, and the mutilated corpses of eight of his men. Their .crime consisted in having tried to run away from destruction! In the Eave6toney.se, the submarine deliberately turned its gr.n upon the lifeboats when they wore well awav from their sinking ship, end , shot down tho captain and tour men. And so in the Rowanmore case, t.ud others. ■When the firing failed to produce murder owing to distance or to the roughness of tho sea, tho submarines showed their cowardly spite by committing other abominations. They seized a lifeboat of the Cairnhill, and placed its 19 men on the submarine's decV They then threw overboard from the lifeboat the food, water, and sails. To point their hideous ioke they even filled the water cask vith salt water. When they returned to the submarine they went below and submerged instantly, leaving our boys no James "Weygand.

No Warning. Now turn to the cases where do warnin GO seconds, so that out of "I^ A feature of these wnmingloss torhorrors worse than shrapnel. I saw a. after time, I listened to .these engine?om stories of the most s,ckemne r character, where fine men, often Americans, were blown into ribbons or boiled to death in live steam. T . h % Lu sT" e ,: ■carrying naphtha, was struck .without wYrnirJ at 2 o'clock in the morning, and Lr crew stumbled on deck into daszlmg ■moonlieM, only to be overcome by the naphtha fumes, so ™ perished miserably. Another Air » horse transport, was torpedoed four times n succession, the torpedoes among the lifeboats while they were being taken to. ~ ~ When the submarine has wrought its dastardly work, where does i leave such victims as survive the shelling and the foundering? Tossed m tiny boats at tbe nierev of the most cruel ocean in the world! 'Two, three, o-d even four himdied miles out upon the boundless wastes of water! In scores pf instances only one or two boats reach land to tell how thev separated from comrades who aro never heard from. The T°wergato was sunk in a roaring tempest, 200 miles off the Blasquot Islands, weskof Ireland, in March, and I saw the single boatload of survivors five .days later at Limerick.

■V case which .stands out in my memory was that of the Marina, a horse tranfport, attacked in a November hurricane. Two boats, laden with American muleteers, fought the wild dements for 36 hours. After nightfull on the second day they found themselves driving before a howling wind into the rocky bay of Ballinskelligs. the most notoriously cruel of the Irish fjords. Their last red flares strove to pierce the spindrift at 10 o'clock. Their doom seemed sealed. But at 11 o'clock a plucky little British Admiralty tug which had been searching through tho storm nosed its way between them and the racing surf, not a quarter of a milo off, and lifted the exhausted young men, now weak as infante, out of the very jaws of an awful death. All honour'to tho gallant and : ndefatigable Uritiel\ Navy, which, night and day, year in and year out, lias been intrepidly hunting down these jackals of tho sea. I could give you a catalogue of arresting instances in whitih the. Germans abandoned frail "lifeboats to the fury of tho elements far from land. 1 coma picture to you tho aged skipper of the Galgorm Castle, with his bravo wife. by his side, praying fervently and fighting earnestly'through a night and ; day of demoniac tempest, from which his other lifeboat never survived. I <ould let you of tho crippled I'cltria, whose boats throughout the night tried to shelter themselves in tho sinking vessel's ice, and in the morning found but 20 iren remaining out of 73. I could describe the icy tempest which smote, a lifotoat of tho'Ainsdaie, so that in 10 hours onefifth of its occupants were frozen doul. In countless instances tho submarines refused tho pipns of these Hfeb.Mte for lowa«e. After destroying a Belgian relief ship, for example, the submarine savagely denied a prayer for towago, which it could have given with t-nsc ami safety, and, as a result, a ship's officer died from exposure. In only two of the cases did the Germans tow lifeboats towards land, and then thoy submerged without warning, leaving tho lifeboats to cut their tow-rope in the nick of time to escape boing drawn down ii'to the depths.