GERMANY'S LOST LINERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 January 1918, Page 3

GERMANY'S LOST LINERS.

NOW USED AS AMERICAN TRANSPORTS. 11UW ENGINE,;! WERE DAMAGED AND REPAIRED. When Gcriuuny forced war on the United States she kindly solved the early phase of the transport problem. Lying in American harbors were 100 German and fourteen Austrian ships. The day ruthless submarine warfare was resumed, orders were Hashed to' every commander to Wreck his engines according to previous instructions. In one day the whole fleet was put out of commissKih for as much as a year and a-half—-so the Germans thought. To-day fDee.. 1), says .a. writer to the New' York Tribune, the ships are all seaworthy, and practically all of them are in serviee. Thereby Germany provided the United States with transport for 59.-000 soldiers and a million tons of freight a trip, or, roughly ,500,000 soldiers and 8,000,000 tons of freight a year, allowing as much as seven weeks for a round trip across the Atlantic.

The total outlay for repair and renovation was only' £0,000,000. Four weeks nfter war was declared 'Me first repaired ship was put into commission, and after that they took to the sea at the rate of two or tliree a week, and finally at such a rats' that by the end of October not only were repairs completed, but all the passenger boats hid been converted into transports. While the President wrote" that last Note, the Note with the fangs, and while Washington still hoped that the mad empire would back down, Germany struck what she thought would be a decisive blow at American transport. Rernstorff flashed the signal from Washingron, arid almost simultaneously from Tinston to Uoilo 'and from San Juan to Honolulu, the powerful engines of great ships were Wrecked. ENGINEER LOVES HIS ENGINE. There were scenes of mingled sadness and exultation in the engine rooms of the German liners. The engineer loves his engine. To many a bluff sailor the order to wreck the engine was as a command to stab his sweetheart, Each engineer had been instructed in advance just .what to do to put his engines out of commission, and as he put the tackle in place for the cruel job he felt like an unwilling hangman preparing the gallows. Engineers and firemen wept as the cylinders crashed, and many a sentimental fellow was prompted to record his love for his mistress of power. Wiu chalk they scrawled their sentiments on the great machines they were first to mnim and then to leave.

"Farewell, sweetheart, till we meet again,'' wrote one engineer. "To break yOu_ is to break my heart," scribbled anithcr.

"May the parting be brief, dear one," said a third.

There is no doubt that mnny engines would have been wrecked far worse than they wore tot for this love of the engineers and mechanics for their fine mechanisms. However, no such sentiment nfl'ected the masters of the policy of rnthlessnpss; with them it was a question of pure logic and cold calculation.

Should the engines and the ships them selves he all but destroyed?

Or should the injuries tie such that if the ships came back into German hands it would not lie a very long or very expensive task to fit them for the sea again? -

To the German mind the chances were that there would be no war. It was held that the American worm was of a new species that would not turn. So it was decided to treat the ships on the theory that they would soon revert to their original owners.

That theory being adopted, the ne:;t step was to find a way to wreck.the engines in such a manner that they could be quickly repaired by their owners, but only slowly and tediously and at great expense by the Amcricanß.

It was decided that smashing the cylinders was the thing. It would'take the Americans a long time an* a mint of money to build new cylinders of so mnny different sizes and types, whereas it was an easy matter to "have new cylinders made in the shops i n Germany that built the old ones. So. with German thoroughness, new cylinders were ordered from German shops the. moment it was decided to destroy those in tlie ships It is said that by the time war was declared the replacing cylinders, as well as other parts of fche machinery that were destroyed or thrown overboard, were all ready in Germany for shipment to America.

Numerous hut essential parts of the engines were removed. Tliese thin™ however, were merely annoving. The smashmg of Inc cylinders wits the main form of sabotage. The plans of nil the ships had been destroyed or taken away, so it was a laborious process to trace and inspect all the elaborate and intricate structure and mechanism of such a ship as tlie Valeriana, with its length of more than •'"0 feet and its hundreds of compartments of one kind and anotlier. It was a tedious job. but not difficult. There was nothin-r baffling in making repairs except in the main engines. REPAIRING THE DAMAGE. At first it was thought that it would be impossible to patch up many of the evlmders, and that new ones must be lateil. The dismay of the Board of Survey when it first inspected the damaged fl Vr n " f- aV ; e P' aee t0 confidence S'T, ]mAn CoUld be Patched. Ed ~n d j" repnir was Vkkly decided n pon> a)ld with , n a fp w y German ship m the North Atlantic was at a shipyard or a machine shop. m ™? Ca T^ f t he Vi,te rt«nd, which one member of the Board of Survey described ns the most superb piece, of marine archihat'of "m f :r sflen - tfat f ™ that of all the other steamships because she had turbine.instead of reciprocal PlfsHf ,fi tW >" ,B * "> Vsml plest of all engines to wreck. A little piece of steel dropped into th, jacket will tear oft t he thousands of littflo blades agamst which the steam passes. The Vaterland's turbines were wrecked in this manner, and. as each of the blade, lonl '°m- PM Wtcly. it v*/*! long and tedious process, hut in time It I was accomplished. n \ Within a f„ w (iavs afler thp s I was completed every German port of New York swarmed wilK'ork «on Here nhd elsewhere there were at one time more than i«ow lkmPn r " .pairing, overhauling and renowthp the boats which, aside f rnm wnnlm , ?* ™ e had greatly deteriorated ,>„„!„„ „'„"£ three years of idleness. The first shin was rea-dv within four weeks and hi- thl end of October all were rehired and nt tlie same time the passenger boats we're converted into transports. The repairing of tW cylinder* W

patching was so thorough that, though {practically all of the ships are now i« 5 !use—and some of tiiem have made many Voyages across the Atlantic—not a .single engine has broken down or givendtrouble.. 'lndeed, the ships wi]l probably be ÜBedi •as they are to t|ie end of their days. (il'\*ks U.S. VAST TRANSPORT FLEET. ._ . i Altogether IOJ Germua ships and U Austrian were taken over, refitted and | repaired. Their total gross tonnage is j 770,000, equivalent to about 1,100,000 ! tons dead weight, which is 400,000-more. than the entire niarchant tonnage built in the United States in llHti, about equal to the entire ocean-going merchant marine of Japan before the war ond;almost one-third of the American tonnage as of June 1 last. All this was attained at a coat-of only alvaut f^OOOjOOO—about equal to the cost of two super-dreadnoughts. As many of the German ships were both passenger and-freight boats, there conversion to America's war uses sobred in largo measure the. problem of troop j transports. It is the irony of fate that German ships will convey to France fhel major portion of the vigorous new armsg, that is counted upon to smash th'e«Ger-v. man war machine. I The great German liners that were the : wonders ofjhe sea before the war were ' designed so that thy could he easily • converted into troop transports. Pos->: sihly the designers had in mind that some day thev might carry troops westward J across the Atlantic, perhaps to collect sj, , great indemnity from the United States; I perhaps to lay the foundations of a German overseas empire somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Certainly, the? never dreamed the day would come wlien advantage would be taken of their plans to expedite the movement of American troops to Europe' for the ultimate purpose of eliminating for ever.the dream of empire to be a£ tained through Mood and iron. But that is what fate has wrought. Thanks to'■ German ships, the mighty blow of the , Republic will the quicker fall upon the German legions. The Vaterland (now the Leviathan) alone was capable of carrying 20,000 soldiers at a trip. Tl.i? first suggestion for her conversion was to fit her' for carrying 12.000 men, hut even that number' was considered too manv men to risk in one ship, and as finally reconstructed she has an actual capacity for SBOO sol- [ diers. .»