Axis on the Spot

The Victoria affair looked as if it might really put the Axis on the spot in Argentina.

It was like this. With her blue-&-white Argentine merchant flag floating free, ARGENTINA and a painted flag enormous on her flanks, the brand-new, U.S.-built, 12,500-ton tanker Victoria, Felix G. D. Salomone, Master, tanks blown full of Argentine linseed, was clipping along northbound 300 miles off Cape Hatteras. Just before sundown one day, a torpedo smacked into her 30 feet aft of amidships. Deck plates buckled, but her all-welded Albany hull stood up: the bulkheads of the tanks were unbreached.

Captain Salomone broke out complete identification flags and proceeded. Fifty minutes later a second torpedo smashed into the portside.

Believing her doomed, her unhurt 39-man crew pulled off, beefing at her as a Jonah (on this her maiden northbound voyage--motors dead off Punta del Este; motor repairs at Rio; propeller trouble at Recife; 41 days for a 16-day run). The captain and part of his crew were mildly embarrassed when a U.S. man-of-war picked them up after two nights and a day, informed them that cranky, stubborn Victoria had refused to sink and was drifting derelict, and put them back aboard her. There they found the rest of the crew, calmly awaiting their arrival. Under her own steam the $1,000,000 Jonah limped into New York, berthed in Edgewater. "Miraculous," said the crew.

Sniffed unyieldingly neutral Argentine Acting-President Castillo: "Nothing concrete is available except some vague versions which naturally cannot be taken into account. . . . Whatsoever judgment is made before knowing the result of this investigation would be adventurous. Furthermore, it would be imprudent." The Argentine Foreign Office stiffly suggested that the matter was not serious because: 1) the ship had not sunk; 2) no one was killed. In Washington Attache Alberto Brunet was ordered to go cast a professionally analytical eye on the damage.

From Germany, usually prompt with glib explanations, came only thick, embarrassed silence.

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