MINE SWEEPING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 February 1940, Page 6

MINE SWEEPING

BRITISH TRAWLERS’ EPITAPH

MEN AND SHIPS WHO DIE.

OBSCURITY THEIR DESTINATION. This is a story of a little ship that will never sjail again—a tale of eight fishermen whose women never again will wait at Grimsby Basin for their men to come home from the fishing grounds, writes Robert P. Post in the “New York Times." The Washington, a minesweeping trawler of only 200 tons: a tiny cog in the tremendous machine that is British sea power, blew up on a German mine the other day in the North Sea with a loss of eight—all but one of hetcrew. She. like the others of her class, was engaged in clearing the lanes for Britain’s merchant ships. When the toll this war takes of the British Navy is finally reckoned, the Washington, in peace time a humble fishing boat, will not be worth mentioning with the big ships that Britain has lost and will lose. She will be only a single unit in totals in the back of naval histories, one of many lost little craft too small to be mentioned separately. She was 30 years old and this was her second war. Her place in the line was easily filled, almost before the last shreds of what was a ship before the mine blew her literally to bits had reached the bottom. Similarly the eight fishermen who were erased, leaving nothing to tell where they died, will only be an item for a statistician to note when he adds up the British war dead. There are no heroes in a service where all men are heroes and perhaps something more. For it takes more than heroes to endure mine sweeping—a job that is at once one of the dangerous, dirtiest and most monotonous that war can show. These men face wind and snow and ice, dirty seas, wild currents and the hell that is produced when the two meet, as a matter of course. In peace they sweep the seas for what lies below and in war they do the same but with the certainty that that which they are seeking to destroy will infallibly destroy them if they once come a fraction of a foot too near it. A SPLINTER IN WAR. Ashore they live hard and at sea they die fast. And in peace as in war they go to sea —the men in these little ships without which big ships cannot move —that the people of these islands may eat. Proud liners and stuffy freighters are the monuments to the eight men who died in the Washington, moving up and down the ocean, bringing home food without which Britain must starve.

And for one brief moment, part of busy London paused for their epitaph. In the great hall of the Ministry of Information a bell rang that sometimes announces as tragic news as any heralded by the Lutine Bell at Lloyds. It rang three times to tell of an important announcement and a hush fell over the room as men reached for their pencils.

“The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce that His Majesty's trawler Washington, 207 tons, was sunk yesterday, December 6, in the North Sea by a mine with the loss of eight lives," the microphone said. "The next of kin have been informed."

In her death under the while ensign of the Royal Navy, the Washington was recognised as she never had been afloat under the “rod duster" of the fishing fleet. Between the words "His Majesty’s" and "trawler” there was a little pause and reporters tensed in the hope it would be a good story. It was not a good story. The loss of the ship, the sorrow of the men’s families, was only an infinitesimal splinter in the debris of modern war.