The Mauretania camouflaged - Public domain book illustration

Identifier: literarydigesthi09hals (find matches)
Title: The Literary digest history of the world war, compiled from original and contemporary sources: American, British, French, German, and others
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Paul Thompson. Halsey, Francis W. (Francis Whiting), 1851-1919, comp
Subjects: World War, 1914-1918
Publisher: New York, London, Funk & Wagnalls Company
Contributing Library: Columbia University Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN



Text Appearing Before Image:
g to plan, the ship ran alongside the mole, approaching it on the port side, equipped with specially built buffers of wood two feet wide. As there was nothing to tie to, the Vindictive merely dropt anchor, while the Daffodil, with her nose against the opposite side of the ship,kept her against the mole. In a fairly heavy sea, two of the three gangways were smashed, but the third held, and 500 men swarmed up on the mole. This gangway was two feet wide and thirty feet long. The men who went across included 300 marines and 150 storming seamen from the Vindictive, and fifty or so from the Daffodil. They carried hand grenades and Lewis guns. A hard hand-to-hand fight took place along the mole for two hundred yards toward the shore. As the Vindictives bow was pointed toward the shore, the bridge got the full effect of enemy fire from shore batteries. One shell exploded against the pilot house, killing nearly all its ten occupants. Another burst in the fighting To an Associated Press correspondent. 372
Text Appearing After Image:
Image caption: The Mauretania camouflaged, she could carry on each trip thousands of American soldiers. 373 IN THE GERMAN COLONIES AND ON THE SEA top, killing a lieutenant and eight men who were doing excellent work with two pompoms and four machine-guns. Only a few German shells hit the hull, because it was well protected by the wall of the mole, but the upper structure, masts, and ventilators, which showed above the wall, were riddled. Twenty-five minutes after the Vindictive reached the wall,the first block-ship passed in and headed for the canal. Two others followed in leisurely fashion, while the men kept up the fight on the mole. One of the block-ships stranded outside the canal, but the two others got two or three hundred yards inside, where they were successfully sunk across the entrance. Air-observations showed that a clear break twenty yards in width had been made in the mole at the inner end, and that a sunken object blocked the greater part of the channel in the harbor of Ostend. Not only was the mouth of the canal at Zeebrugge blocked, but every gun on the mole was destroyed, sheds th