General DDT

Everyone has heard of the greatest Russian general of all time—General January.  And I have written several times about how General Yellow Fever dramatically changed the course of American history.  Today, I have an addition to the list, though this “general” had a relatively short career:  General DDT.

Before we get into what happened in the past, it is important to note that while DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was effective in controlling disease-carrying insects, its long-term environmental and health impacts led to its eventual restriction and discontinuation in many countries. Concerns over its persistence in the environment, toxicity to non-target organisms, and its potential harm to human health led to the development of alternative insecticides and a shift towards safer pest management strategies.  General DDT was very effective for a while, then was permanently (and justifiably) retired from active duty.

Throughout 1943, Allied bombing pounded the Italian city of Naples, part of the effort to weaken the Nazi defenses before General Mark Clark’s forces could move up the peninsula and take the city from the Germans.  As the Allied offensive stalled, the bombing continued, eventually making the city the most heavily bombed area in Italy.  Perhaps because the Germans were obviously unsuccessful in preventing the bombing, Naples was the first major Italian city to rebel against the Nazi occupation.

The civilians protested en mass, despite frequent arrests and brutal retaliation.  At one point, the German Army even fired indiscriminately into crowds.  The result was an ever more aggressive, armed resistance movement, with some of the partisans as young as nine years old battling the Nazi Army in the streets of the ancient city.

While the resistance was violent, this disorganized response by poorly armed civilians could not pose a serious threat to the German Army, but it was sufficient to enrage the soldiers against these erstwhile allies.  Without orders from Berlin, the Nazis burned down the town’s libraries and archives, destroying centuries of priceless records (including some of the papers of Thomas Aquinas, who had once taught at the University of Naples).

Then, in what can only be called a depraved criminal act under any definition of the laws concerning warfare, the Germans set about systematically blowing up the city’s water supply and sewage systems.  As the aqueducts and reservoirs were destroyed, the Nazis pulled out of the town in September 1943, confident that the lethal results of the destruction would continue long after their departure. 

As the German Army moved north, they moved through the Pontine Marshes just south of Rome.  Until shortly before the war, this marsh had been almost uninhabitable because of the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases.  Shortly before the war, Benito Mussolini had been successful in draining the swamps, making the land habitable.  (It’s an urban legend that Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time, but the evil putz did drain that swamp.)  The Nazi army blew up the protective dikes and reflooded the swamp so that it was immediately reclaimed by mosquitoes.  This posed a real danger to the advancing American troops since throughout the Italian campaign, diseases had killed more American troops than enemy action had.

Just as the Master Race had intended, epidemics of typhus and cholera soon broke out in the city of over a million people.  Thousands of people were affected because of the lack of sanitation and the spread of body lice, with one in four residents succumbing to the disease.  For the first time in the hundreds of years since the time of the Black Death, carts again removed corpses of the dead that were stacked in the streets.

Not knowing how to fight this type of enemy, General Dwight Eisenhower cabled Washington for assistance in saving the people of Naples.  Luckily, the War Department had a secret weapon.

In the early days of the war, particularly at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than to enemy action.  At one point, the entire Marine 1st Division was judged unfit for combat duty because of mosquito-borne diseases.   The military Office of Scientific Research and Development awarded large contracts to chemical companies to begin production of the newly developed insecticide, and large quantities were rushed to the American army in Italy.

Infantry “delousing units” were sent into Italian towns to dust the populace with DDT.  At the same time, trucks were equipped to spread the dust as they drove through the streets of the towns and cities.  The swamps were dusted from the air.  The effects were immediate.  Not only did the epidemics in Naples immediately stop, but the mosquitoes in the Pontine Swamp were eliminated.  

As the Allied armies moved across Europe, they encountered millions of victims of Nazi “ecological aggression”:  Concentration camp survivors, starving civilians forced to live under the harsh conditions of occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and civilians living in the remains of towns whose infrastructure had been destroyed by combat.  But, as the War Department proudly proclaimed, “DDT marches with the army.”  Exactly how many lives the pesticide saved can never be determined, but during World War II alone, it must be in the millions.

It was for this reason that Paul Muller, the Swiss scientist who developed DDT, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948.  It would have been equally justified if he had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

Lest anyone think that the benefits of DDT stopped when the war stopped, I should include the results of its postwar use in the American South.  In the years immediately preceding World War II, the yearly number of cases of malaria there was between one and six million, with the differences in numbers being due to the varying weather conditions year to year.  In the years following the war, American health authorities used the pesticide as aggressively as it had been used on the Italian peninsula.  

As a result of this aggressive prevention policy, only two Americans caught malaria in 1952.

Out of Great Sorrow

In 1982, I taught an evening class of computer science at a small community college on the Texas coast.  The class had about a dozen students eager to learn about those newly developed personal computers.  The class was held at night because most of the class was made up of local businessmen looking for ways to lower costs or improve efficiency at work. 

Compared with today’s classrooms, this was a rather primitive teaching environment—there were no computers in the room, and most of the material was presented using an overhead projector or was scribbled on a chalkboard.  Only twice did I take the time and trouble to drag a computer (one I owned personally) to the classroom and set it up for the students to use.  The college had no computer labs, no computerized classrooms, and—as far as I knew—had not one, single computer of its own.

One night during class, a typical coastal thunderstorm developed quickly, causing wind and rain to lash at the building.  Just as one of the students remarked that the lightning sounded very close, there was a bright flash, followed by a resounding boom, and then the lights in the building went out.   As our eyes recovered from the flash, we could see out of the classroom windows that the corner of our building at which the utility lines were connected was on fire.  

It wasn’t a very big fire, and since we were all used to living on the coast with frequent storms, we weren’t too worried.  Still, we all knew that we had to leave the building.  Just enough light came through the windows so that we could make our way out to the hall and to the nearby fire exit located in the far corner of the building.  The building did not have emergency lights but a few of us had cigarette lighters and we carefully made our way to the stairs and down the single flight to the ground floor—where we discovered that the double exit doors had a padlocked chain wrapped around the push bar, so we could not leave the building.  Nor could we return to the interior of the building, since the exit doors into the fire escape stairs had locked behind us.

We were all seriously pissed.  A student and I used a metal torpedo-shaped trashcan to break a large window beside the exit doors and we all escaped.  I went to a nearby gas station to call the fire department (this was long before cell phones) and we then returned to the campus to explain to the fire department about the locked exit.  I learned later that campus security, not knowing about the night class, had locked those doors like it did every evening at the end of their shift.  This practice was suspended after the local fire marshal held a lengthy donkey barbecue.  (That’s Texan for an ass chewing.)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Sunderland Disaster, a tragedy that produced lifesaving changes that we see almost every day, which should have prevented those doors at that community college being locked.  In Sunderland, England, a special magic show was held for the children of the town, with the promise of prizes and gifts of toys.  On June 16, 1883, over 1500 children showed up at the Victoria Hall Theatre for the performance, each paying a single penny for a ticket.  The crowd of children, most of whom were younger than 10 years old, filled up all three levels of seating in the hall, but they were accompanied by very few adults.

The show was a great success, except for the minor problem of a few children becoming sick due to the chemical smoke used by one of the magicians.  At the end of the performance, it was announced that lucky holders of tickets with certain numbers would receive a prize as they left the theater.  At the same time, the performers began throwing handfuls of candy and trinkets into the crowd.

It was tossing the candy and toys that triggered the disaster:  The candy and small toys had very little weight, so the little gifts all landed in the ground floor seating area and none reached the two balcony seating areas.  The children in the upper levels—rightfully believing they were missing out on some of the prizes—rushed to the stairs leading down to the ground floor.  The wide staircase had a single turn halfway down, after which the stairs led to a landing with the exit door on the left side of the landing.

This inward-opening door had been bolted in a slightly open position, leaving a gap only twenty inches wide.  Presumably, this had been done to allow an usher to examine the tickets of the children as they entered the theater and had been left open accidentally.  As the children rushed down the steps, they hurriedly pushed those in front of them.  Since only one child at a time could squeeze through the narrow opening, a bottleneck developed on the landing.  Those at the top of the stairs could not see what was happening on the landing because of the turn in the staircase.  Those in front were soon trapped by the crush from behind, unable to move toward the door even as more children pushed down the steps.

When attendants in the theater realized what was happening, they tried in vain to push open the inward-swinging door, but its opening by now was blocked by the bodies of children who’d fallen in front of it.  Nor could the attendants release the bolt holding the door open because it was located on the inside of the doorway.  One survivor, William Codling, Jr., later wrote:

“Soon we were most uncomfortably packed but still going down. Suddenly I felt that I was treading upon someone lying on the stairs and I cried in horror to those behind "Keep back, keep back! There's someone down." It was no use, I passed slowly over and onwards with the mass and before long I passed over others without emotion.”

All that the attendants could do was to pry one child at a time through the narrow opening.  "Don't let go of my hand, as someone is standing upon my face," whispered six-year-old Charlie Dixon to his big brother Alfie.  Alfie later remembered feeling tired, then being dragged through the barely open doorway by a strong man.  His brother Charlie was less fortunate, later being discovered down in the pile of children who died during the crush.

Eventually, one man—perhaps under the influence of adrenaline—wrenched the door off its hinges, allowing the adults to begin removing the hapless, helpless children, who by this time were piled as much as twenty small bodies high.  While hundreds were injured, 183 children between the ages of 3 and 14 had died of compressive asphyxia—a situation in which there is so much pressure on the body that the victim suffocates because they cannot expand their chest sufficiently to inhale.

The public was shocked at the tragedy, with sufficient donations pouring in to pay for the funerals of all of the children as well as to pay for a monument to the dead.  The monument, portraying a grieving mother holding the lifeless body of her child, was erected near the theater.

Parliament passed laws requiring all public buildings to have sufficient exits—with outward-swinging doors only.  Those laws are still in force in England; similar laws were passed in most of the countries of the world.

The Victoria Hall was equipped with new doors and remained in use until 1941, when a German naval bomb, dropped by parachute, destroyed the brick theater.  The people of Sunderland had no interest in restoring a building that had been the sad reminder of such a terrible loss and they choose, instead, to pull down what remained of the building.

There is, however, one more result of the tragedy, that lasts to this day.  Robert Alexander Briggs was a fifteen-year-old boy living in Sunderland the day of the tragedy.  A little too old to attend the performance, he was horrified at the loss of so many of his friends’ siblings.  When he grew up, he studied engineering and, just nine years after the disaster, he was granted a patent on his safety door-locking mechanism, which featured an interior horizontal bar that automatically unlocks a door when someone presses against it.  Called a panic bar or a crush bar, this is the type of door lock found today in most public buildings around the world.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

One of my favorite books is a tiny bound volume of the "Collected Letters of Abraham Lincoln", printed over a century ago.  Its value as a collector’s item probably should prevent anyone intelligent from using it as I do:  carrying it in the outer pocket of my jacket to read during funerals, weddings, or the innumerous school functions where my attendance was mandatory while my attention was not.  While sitting through graduation ceremonies, I would pull out my little copy of Lincoln’s letters to the frowning disapproval of my colleagues, only to later hear them whisper to me not to turn a page yet as they were reading over my shoulder.

Another century from now, I have no idea what historians will do, since it seems unlikely that there will be a publication of “The Collected Tweets, Text Messages, and Social Media Posts of President Whose-It”.  The art of letter writing is dead, dead, dead.

The joy of taking the time to write a real, ink-and-paper letter is exceeded only by the gift of having a letter arrive in your real-not-virtual mailbox.  It is more than simple communication—it is a sign that the writer has cared enough to connect with you.  A letter is always an expression of love (Well, except for “poison pen” letters and those from lawyers and bill collectors).

Technology is to blame for the death of letters, of course.  I think about half of the communications I have from my sons, What’s-His-Name and the The-Other-One, consist of short messages they’ve rapidly composed with their thumbs.  While I love hearing from my sons, those messages are not exactly prose.  The short, abbreviated texts read like telegrams from a century ago, when the sender was charged by the word.  

I believe that the quality of a letter’s content is linked with the speed with which the message is created.  I’ve noticed that the quality of my own writing improves when I compose by hand instead of using a computer.  In short, the faster you write, the less time you have to think about the words you are putting on paper.  If Thomas Jefferson had used one finger and a cell phone to compose the Declaration of Independence, the entire document would consist of: “George,  we be gone, bro—deal with it”.  Tom would probably include a couple of emojis—perhaps the purple eggplant or something.  (Don’t ask me about emojis, the only one that I use is the thumbs up one, which according to the New York Times is a symbol of toxic masculinity.  Hey, New York Times, if it wasn’t for toxic masculinity, your whiny ancestors would have been eaten by wolves.)

If my theory (the one that is completely untested and lacks any confirming data) is correct, perhaps the best letters were written back when writing required a quill pen to produce the content.

Quill pens were not the first implements to be used in writing, but I think we can skip the history of pointed sticks.  Somewhere between the 5th and 7th century, someone discovered that the larger wing feathers of a large bird (say a goose), could be used as an improved pen.  The English word pen comes from the Latin word penna, meaning feather.  The tip of the feather was scraped clean, the end cut off and then the vanes are removed from the first five or six inches, creating the pen’s grip.  

The feather then had to be cured.  The easiest way was to heat a pan full of loose clean sand, fill the hollow quill with the heated sand and then submerge the pen into the hot sand up to the top of the grip for roughly a minute, then remove the quill and allow it to cool.  The shaft of the pen should now be hardened.  Using a sharp knife (your ‘pen knife’), the top of the shaft was split for about an inch, then cut at an angled diagonal so that the top of the shaft was about three quarters of an inch long.  The top end was sharpened so that the pen quickly narrowed to a point, then the point was carved into a chiseled tip for writing.  The slit in the tip separated the tip into two tines, and the allowed the ink to flow while writing.  The harder the pressure on the tip, the wider the slit became, allowing more ink to flow.

While several different types of feathers could be used, the most common types used were goose, turkey (after about 1700 when the American turkey became more common in Europe), crow and raven (the last two were more commonly used for finer and more decorative work).  Since feathers are slightly curved, right-handed users selected feathers from the left wing of a bird, while left-handed writers used the feathers from the right wing.  

Note.  When I learned about which birds provided the best feathers, I immediately wondered if Edgar Allen Poe preferred to write with raven feathers.  My wife, The Doc, on the other hand, wondered if Shakespeare preferred crow feathers to compose his plays and this is why his envious rival, Robert Greene insultingly called the playwright an ‘upstart crow’.  Despite spending more time on these questions than is rational, the answer to the first question is that no one has any idea what kind of pen Poe preferred to use, so we can only hazard a guess.  

In 1592, Greene published a pamphlet called "A Groatsworth of Wit" in which he criticized Shakespeare and other emerging playwrights of the time.  In the pamphlet, Greene referred to Shakespeare as an "upstart crow," suggesting that he was an ambitious and presumptuous newcomer to the theatrical scene.  The term "upstart" implied that Shakespeare was an up-and-coming figure who had risen to prominence relatively quickly, while "crow" was likely a play on words, possibly alluding to Shakespeare's physical appearance or his bold and attention-seeking nature.

Supposing that you wanted to write a letter and had a supply of suitable feathers, you would sit for a few minutes thinking about what you wanted to write while you sharpened your quill pen.  Then carefully selecting the ink, you placed your paper on a desk with an angled top and carefully wrote your letter.  A flat desk would have meant that, as the pen fit your hand, it would be almost vertical, causing the ink to flow too fast.  Every two to three letters, you would have to pause and reflect while you dipped your pen into the ink, tapping the pen against the side of the bottle to remove the excess, before resuming your letter.  The pen had to held lightly and used carefully to allow just the right amount of ink to flow onto the paper. 

The result of all this careful deliberation and slow writing produced a letter that did more than communicate—it could connect emotionally with the reader.  No wonder, then, that such letters were so frequently treasured and carefully stored away. 

Unfortunately, technological progress began to ruin this process.  First, steel-nibbed pens were invented in both America and Europe at the start of the nineteenth century.  By the 1880’s, the steel pens that held enough ink for the writer to write several words before re-inking had almost completely replaced the use of quills.  By the dawn of the twentieth century, fountain pens with reservoirs of ink and steel nibs were all the rage. The newfangled pens held enough ink so that even the most committed letter writer had to refill his pen only once a day.  This pen was, in turn, made obsolete at the end of World War II by the ballpoint pen, that could hold enough ink to last for weeks.

Today, of course, we have computers and tablets and writing has been replaced by word processing, and our processed prose—much like processed cheese—has lost all flavor and charm.  By the time the average student graduates from high school, they can type between 40 and 60 words a minute, producing drivel that no one ever reads.

Lewis Carrol said that the “proper definition of a man was an animal that writes letters.”  What then is the definition of an animal who communicates with emojis and tweets?

The Fatal Chance Encounter

The history of armed merchantman ships goes back to the days of sail when ships carrying valuable cargo frequently were equipped with a limited number of cannons as a defense against pirates.  Since most pirate ships could only successfully attack defenseless ships, even a few cannons on a private vessel would frequently be all that was needed to convince pirates that it was more profitable to attack a different, defenseless ship.

For hundreds of years, if a ship captain could seize a merchant vessel from a belligerent nation and manage to take the captured ship to a friendly port, it was a quick path to unbelievable wealth.  Even if you were not a citizen of one of two countries at war, it was possible to obtain a ‘Letter of Marque’—more or less a license to be a pirate—and engage in warfare for profit against your newfound enemy’s merchant ships.  

Europe finally realized that legally sanctioned piracy was disrupting profitable free trade and outlawed it in 1856 under the Declaration of Paris.  However, the United States refused to be a signatory until the Civil War began and the Confederacy began issuing Letters of Marque against Northern shipping—then the North set a speed record for signing the agreement.  Still, several European countries built lightly armed, high-speed cargo ships that were designed specifically to run the Northern blockade of Southern ports.  (If you’ve watched Gone With the Wind, this is how Rhett Butler amassed his fortune.)

By the end of the 19th century, the idea of armed merchant vessels changed.  While it was no longer conceivable that a merchant vessel—no matter how many guns were added to its decks—could fight off a conventional steel-hulled warship, civilian merchant ships and passenger liners were designed so they could be converted into auxiliary cruisers in times of war.  This concept actually met with some success:  the civilian ships lacked the heavy armor plating of warships, so they were much faster.  Used to protect shipping during times of war, these ships could outrun anything they couldn’t outgun.

World War I changed everything, including bringing the end of the “cruiser rules”.  According to several international conventions dating back to the 17th century, armed vessels could not attack unarmed merchant vessels without warning.  Generally, this meant that the armed vessel would approach and fire a round or two across the bow of the civilian ship, at which point the civilian ship would stop and haul down its flag, symbolizing surrender.  After the surrender, the warship’s crew could board it to search for contraband, or could possibly even sink the vessel, after giving the passengers and crew time to board lifeboats.  Even after the vessel was sunk, it was the responsibility of the attacking ship to ensure that the lifeboats had sufficient supplies and equipment to reach safety.

In the early days of World War I, the first British ship to be sunk by a German submarine was the SS Glitra.   The German sub, U-17, surfaced, fired a warning shot from her deck gun across the bow of the ship, which promptly surrendered.  The U-17 gave the crew of the Glitra time to board lifeboats, sank the steamship with its deck gun, then towed the lifeboats to shore.  

Armed merchant class ships accompanying cargo ships prevented submarines from being able to use their deck guns, which were far more reliable than those early torpedoes.  Unable to surface and force the surrender of unarmed merchant vessels, German subs were forced to attack with torpedoes while submerged.  Torpedoes were expensive and a submarine was limited in the number it could carry, while the ammunition for deck guns was cheap, accurate, and in plentiful supply since the submarine could carry a large number of rounds.

England, responded to the threat by developing the Q-ships.  These were merchant vessels with concealed cannons, such as deck guns hidden behind wooden panels designed to look like large crates.  Typically, a submarine would spot what was believed to be an unarmed cargo ship and surface, then fire a round from the deck gun across the bow of the merchant vessel.  The Q-ship would stop its engines and sailors disguised as civilians would begin to lower their lifeboats.  As the submarine drew closer, suddenly the wooden panels and nets hiding numerous deck guns would drop and begin to fire at the submarine and its single deck gun while sailors raised the Royal Navy Flag.  Since even a single hit on the submarine was enough to prevent the sub from being able to dive to safety, the fight was usually over quickly.

Q-ships ranged in size from large cargo ships down to the tiny HM Inverlyon, an unpowered fishing trawler that sank the UB-4 so rapidly that all of the sub’s crew was lost.

The success of the Q-ships forced both sides to abandon the cruiser rules and it also forced Germany to try something different.

One of those British merchant vessels designed to be converted into auxiliary cruisers was the RMS Carmania, launched in 1905.  She was a two-stacked Cunard passenger liner about 80% the length and half the size of the Titanic.  Chiefly used on the New York/Liverpool run, she was converted into an armed merchant ship, the HMS Carmania with the start of World War I and sent to protect British merchant ships in the South Atlantic.

Since Great Britain depended on imports of beef, grain, and leather from Australia and Argentina, interrupting British commercial shipping was a vital war goal for Germany, who sent submarines to the South Atlantic to attack Allied shipping without warning.  And this brings us to the strangest encounter between any two ships of the war.

In 1913, The Hamburg Süd Line launched the SS Cap Trafalgar, a luxurious passenger liner equal in size, tonnage, and speed to the Carmania.  Also—like the British ship—she was designed to be converted into an armed merchant liner during wartime.  When war broke out, the Cap Trafalgar was in Buenos Aires.  Requisitioned by the German Imperial Navy, she was sent to Montevideo, which was a more or less neutral port used by the German Navy, and then sailed to the remote island of Trindade, which was technically a possession of Brazil, but was being used clandestinely as a coaling station for Germany.  Along the way, the crew was replaced with Imperial Navy officers and sailors while the ship underwent a transformation to disguise her.  

The ship’s third funnel was a dummy, so it was removed and the ship was repainted to resemble the Carmania.  The plan was for the Cap Trafalgar, disguised as the Carmania, to approach British shipping, then open fire on the unsuspecting British ships without warning.  The plan was almost foolproof since the two ships were almost identical.  Really, there was only one ship that could correctly identify the disguised German ship.

Since the only German territory in the South Atlantic was in German-occupied Africa, the British suspected that German ships were being secretly resupplied by colliers operating in a protected harbor somewhere along the coast of South America, so they sent the Carmania to investigate some of the islands off the coast of Brazil.  Rounding the edge of the harbor at Trindade, lookouts quickly located the Cap Trafalgar and the German collier Eber.  Somehow the crew of the Carmania just instantly realized the other ship was not the real Carmania.  The odds of the real Carmania discovering the ersatz Carmania beggar my poor math skills!  

The captains of both ships realized that they needed room for the impending battle, so both ships sailed a few miles from the island, lined up abreast of each other and began firing, with the Carmania firing first at too great a range, allowing the Cap Trafalgar to land the first hits while the British ship reloaded.

This battle was something out of the history books and was not at all dissimilar to the famous sea battles of the Napoleonic era.  (The Cap Trafalgar was even named for the cape near the site of Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the combined navies of France and Spain.).  While both ships had an equal number of modern guns, neither had a mechanized reloading system, meaning that sailors had to manhandle shells from below decks up to the guns.  Neither ship had armor plating and neither had a modern fire control system, so that gunners had to “fire as she bore”.  

The battle was horrific, lasting over two hours while each ship pounded the other, causing both ships to catch fire.  Early on, the Carmania suffered the worst, being hit 79 times, including destroying the bridge and holing the ship below the waterline.  At this point, the two ships had drifted so close together that crews on both ships lined the rails and fired machine guns at their enemies.  Just as it seemed the Carmania was lost, the Cap Trafalgar lowered lifeboats as the ship listed hard over to port.  A British shell had exploded below decks and the ship rapidly rolled over and sank.  Survivors were rescued by the German collier which put them ashore at Buenos Aires where the men were interned for the duration of the war.

The crew members of neither ship were sufficiently prescient to use their cellphones to video the battle but the painting at right by Charles Dixon gives you a good idea of how the two ships looked engaged in what is known as the Battle of Trindade.  The closest ship is the Carmania…. Or is it the Cap Trafalgar?

The exact casualty list is still debated.  The Germans lost somewhere between 16 and 51 killed, (including the captain of the Cap Trafalgar), with 279 captured.  The British claimed 9 dead.  Neither side reported the number of wounded sailors.

Fearing German reinforcements would soon arrive—both sides had announced the battle by radio—the Carmania limped away to make repairs.  Even as the badly damaged ship struggled away, a second German merchant cruiser came within view, but the captain of the German ship feared a trap and left without firing a shot.  The Carmania undoubtedly would have sunk had not a British ship rendezvoused and helped make repairs while they pumped water from the injured ship.  

The Carmania was towed to Gibraltar, was repaired and was active for the rest of the war, participating in the failed Gallipoli campaign.  After the war, she returned to passenger service until the Great Depression ended the need for a luxury liner.

If all this sounds like ancient history, I would remind you that armed merchant vessels were used again, not only in World War II, but also by both Great Britain and Argentina during the brief Falklands War.  And we may yet see them again.  Recently, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul introduced a bill called the "Marque and Reprisal Act of 2008" that aimed to issue letters of marque and reprisal to private individuals or entities, allowing them to capture or neutralize pirates in international waters.  

The bill failed, but I’m still hoping that Greenpeace would be issued a letter of marque to be used against Japanese whaling boats.… Something along the lines of a surplus Russian attack submarine flying a green Jolly Roger flag.  I’d donate to that cause.