The Army's Gulls

> White faces stared up from the U-boat's deck. Men rushed to the conning tower and clambered in. The U-boat crash-dived. Down through the Atlantic's summer sky Pilot Thomas H. Isley's U.S. Army Liberator screamed in an eight-mile dive at a target of agitated water. From the plane's belly dropped a depth charge. The swirling sea gushed forth black blobs of oil.

> Not far off, Pilot Walter S. McDonnell had spotted another surfaced raider and had put his big, four-motored Liberator into a dive. Also caught by surprise, that German crew' chose to fight it out. They turned deck guns on McDonnell's plane. The bombardier, navigator, co-pilot and assistant radio operator were wounded; McDonnell leveled off only a few feet above the waves, his wounded bombardier dropped depth charges which straddled the wriggling chattering sub. In a mass of smoke and fire it broke in two and sank.

These and other incidents were recounted last week by the Army Air Forces Anti-Submarine Command, which has been operating in land-based Liberators as far as 1,000 miles from shore. It was the most illuminating report the U.S. has yet had of the part which the Army has played, and is still playing, in breaking the back of the U-boat campaign. In 13 battles which the Army saw fit to reveal, the Army's cautious claims (Isley's attack was listed as "probable damage") were five subs sunk, five damaged, three chased away from nearby shipping.

Few details were given. It was still the Army's secret where the Liberators were based, how the lumbering, deadly gulls operated, or how they spotted their prey on the broad Atlantic.

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