"Oh, Mother!"

In the grim game of blockade and counter-blockade, which is Great Britain's deepest strategy against Germany, Britain continued last week to score herself far ahead of the enemy with 338,000 tons of "contraband'' cargoes seized at control ports to 174,000 tons of shipping lost (as of Oct. 17).* Winston Churchill announced for his Admiralty, moreover, that 29,000 tons of enemy bottoms had been captured and 104,000 tons of new British ships brought into service. Convoys for British shipping were now organized in the Seven Seas. Across the Atlantic a series of radio patrols two hours apart was substituted for transoceanic convoys. S. S. Cameronia arrived "going from lamp post to lamp post" as her commander put it.

All of which annoyed Adolf Hitler, who last week called for fiercer action by his U-boats and Air Force to enforce his counter-blockade against Britain. Neutral ships were warned against joining Allied convoys. Scandinavians in the Baltic were advised to use the Kiel Canal to facilitate German search and seizure. And out over the North Sea sped squadrons of Nazi planes to attack the Allied convoys, a new phase of World War II. In the first two encounters of this sort last week, British escort warships held the Nazis off with gunfire until British fighters could arrive from their land bases. Four Germans were reported shot down, the merchantmen untouched.

Meantime, as rescue ships reached port, stories of U-boat successes outside the convoy lanes continued to swell the grisly sea record.

> Into Bordeaux steamed the U. S. Independence Hall with survivors of the City of Mandalay, which was torpedoed as she stood by to rescue survivors of the torpedoed Yorkshire after both ships got separated from their convoy. A U-boat had followed the Yorkshire all day. When the Independence Hall hove to for its double rescue, the U-boat surfaced and its commander, in excellent English, called "Thank you!" He had killed 67 persons in sinking the two ships.

> Mess-boy Frank Elders of the British freighter Heronspool described that ship's running night fight with a U-boat. Excerpts:

". . . The sub came up and it was so close that we could see men smoking in the turret. It looked as though we were looking right into the mouth of its gun. But when he fired, the shot fell a few yards short of us. ... We fired about eight shots at long intervals. Couldn't do more because we couldn't see her.

"I hung out near the gun and got the men coffee. That's all I could think of doing. I heard somebody say 'Here he is' and then came an explosion. Oh, mother! I'll never hear another like that. Our mainmast went down and the whole centre of the bridge and all the steering apparatus.

"The whole bow of the ship seemed to go up sky-high."

> A British cruiser last week chased the German freighter Havelland into Manzanillo on the west coast of Mexico where she evidently intended to pick up gas and oil supplies. Same day the German tanker Emmy Friederich slid out of Tampico on Mexico's other coast, carrying 39,500 barrels of oil and a lot of livestock, lumber and cloth. She said she was bound for Malmoe, Sweden, but observers guessed she had a U-boat rendezvous.

> Survivors of the British steamer Sneaton told how they were forced at pistol-point to pose smiling in their life boat while U-boat officers took their pictures.

> This week Tass, official Russian news agency, reported that a German cruiser had seized the U. S. Maritime Commission's 4,963-ton vessel City of Flint (which rescued survivors of the Athenia), bound from Manhattan to Manchester with a contraband cargo of foods, cotton, sewing machines, plows, tractors, coffee, hair and feathers. The report said that 18 Germans had boarded the City of Flint and sailed her up around Scandinavia to Kola Bay, where Murmansk lies. The German Admiralty denied all knowledge of the incident.

*Allied and neutral losses Oct. 17 to 24 were 39,500 tons.

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