Norwich bulletin., 1918-07-19
FRANK E. ULMER DESCRIBES
 FIGHT WITH SUBMARINE
Submarine Carried Five-Inch Guns
 and Used Shrapnel Shells.

and Used ShrapneI Shells.
 In a letter to his father, Frank E. Clmer of this city writes graphically of a fight with one of the Hun super submarines. The fight lasted 20 min utes and was very thrilling according to MT, Ulmer's account which follows:
 At Sea, July Sth, 1918.
 Dear Father: Just line to you be- fore we reach port, as I have some spare time just now to write and la ter 1 may not have the spare moments at hand. This trip has been a harder one than all the other three trips across put together, but the weather this. time has been ideal and that is a great deal of a help.
 Needless to say I enjoyed Scotland and England o. K and of that I shall tell you later in a longer letter. 1 saw Uncle William Eccles, as he has pro- bably written you by this time and 1 most certainly did surprise him as well as Auntie May.
 At 7.20 D. m. July 5th, one day too late to celebrate with guns on the Fourth, a super-submarine sent his best regards to us in the form of four sErapnel shells and we sent him our pest wishes with two three-inch solid and eleven five-inch solid shells The action cnly lasted twenty minutes, but it was Tery interesting from beginning 10 end and very different from the torpedo attack last June when we took the first troops over to France The sub this time suddenly rose to the surface on the horizon and came toward us at a very high speed. She was so large that we took her for an cil tanker at first, but as she came nearer she seemed like a fishy looking oil tanker and we trained cur loaded guns on her With quick turn to port her propellers kicked up a white commotion in the water and I could see the water roll off her bow as she rose up and down in the swell and very smooth sea that was running at the time.
 She was proceeding north, and us Isouth. No sooner had she turned than she cut loose with five inch shell from a gun in her coming tower and we fired with the order. Fire at will 1 We fired our three-inch a second af- | ter I saw her flash and big ring of black powder. Her shell passed with q whistle between our foremast and l rigging and struck and burst in the water forty feet off our starboard bow. i The sup sure did have our range all most correct and mo mistake about it either. I kept right on her and aim 1 ed for the coming tower as it was so large that it made the best target l We nearly hit her with the first shell
 at 1900 yards and fired the second shell at 7.7GO yards, just a second af-
 ter she fired her second she'll Our three-inch went off at the exact frac- i tion of a second that her second shell l in hA fay. biTfx- our port side foreward. The two go- ing off together and our five-inch gur a second later made some noise and compressed the air considera ble HeI shell sent water in spray fifty feet in to the air and shrapnel and water rained on the port wing of the bridge and on matches one and two. The shrapnel was soon picked Up for sou venirs. The captain has the brass nosC Of the shell with a fragment of stee attached to it and so we knew b!
 that that she was firing f1ve-inch a
 US. One piece struck and put den
 i'll the mainmast and in glancing Of
 raked paint off the shippers cabin.
 is a miracle that the shrapnel strucl
 no one or didn't break the glass win
 dows on the bridge. It did pepper tn
 port outer bulkhead, though, when tn shell burst I was looking through tn
 telescope sight and got a closeup view of flying steel and water. Afte her second shot we turned to star
 board so as to make less of. a targe of ourselves and to give the. five-inc | on our stern chance. Owing to tn ; change of position our three-inc could do no more but we were satis : fled that the second three-inch she ! didn't quite reach her, so our five-inc increased the range to 5000 yards an fired very rapidly. Either the Ger , mans have instructions to not for
 around with Yankee five-inch guns 0 : else they got hit, for when the sec ond five-inch shell went whizzing a i her with that whining, sizzling nois' she threw up her smoke screen an
 we saw her no more. If she was hi she couldn't submerge and the smok . screen certainly hid her well. Mayb she wanted to submerge well hidden S ; we couldn't hit her submerging. How ever, our fve-inch continued to fir t at 10000 yards with her smoke scree , until the distance became too great { 7 fire any longer. Her screen was Il Il beauty-just like cloud in the six. 5 We used smoke pots thrown into th | water but they weren't worth a bun ker plate (English penny). The vel
 ! low smoke wasn't dense enough an the wind being with us, it didn't hel
 much. The last two shots of the [ 5 boat went between our mainmast an aftermast and kicked up the water fc
 over on our starboard side Had ht . second shell been solid it would hay ! gone through out forward hold and course it's well that it wasn't
 judged the sub. to be between 250 ar
 Se0 feet long, but it's pretty hard
 judge well at distance of five mi,t g and she may have been larger. Ht k periscopes, a large one forward and h smaller one aft of that. were well A the air and back by her stern was = tube out of which a brown smoke WE q curling upward. That tube smol = helped make us think her an oil tanl r er.. I could see no war paint on he d In color she was brown and eviden
 ly rusty from being at sea long tim