Invitation to Destruction

The U.S. cargo ship's skipper ordered Sparks to relay the S. O. S. Neither the captain, the first officer nor Sparks saw anything suspicious about the signal reporting a ship in distress some 30 miles distant in the South Atlantic. Soon night closed down over the unruffled sea and the third officer spotted lights about three miles away. Swiftly the lights grew closer to starboard. At three-quarters of a mile the approaching ship opened fire. Shells from 8-in. guns tore into the cargo vessel, quickly putting its deck guns out of action. Torpedoes from the deck tubes of the attacker plowed through the sea. On the victim's port side, tracer bullets slashed the darkness.

It was a trap, baited with cynical confidence that a U.S. merchant ship would observe the law of the sea and relay a distress signal, thereby revealing her position. As the lifeboats were lowered, machine-gun fire forced the occupants to leap into the sea and swim for a raft. Later the captain said he was sure the raider had launched at least two motorboats because the attack came from three sides. Within half an hour the cargo ship went down. Out of the darkness the raider loomed closer to the spot.

"We slid over the side of our raft and held on," said the second officer. "We heard a voice saying in perfect English: 'Come alongside boys.' After a while somebody said in German: 'There's nobody on this one.' Then the raider disappeared. Later we found lifeboats with their oars shipped, indicating that some of the men had accepted the invitation to go alongside and had been taken prisoner aboard the raider."

At least 15 of the crew were killed by gunfire. Some 20 were taken prisoner. The rest, after making 450 miles in five days in a sail-equipped lifeboat, were picked up and taken to an African port. They were the first survivors to confirm the presence of an armed surface raider in the South Atlantic.

>Though German and Italian U-boats also were intensifying their South Atlantic depredations, anti-submarine measures were increasingly effective. U.S. patrol planes operating off now-belligerent Brazil blasted seven more U-boats.

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