World War: AT SEA: Raiders

"Do not use wireless or I will shoot mast down. I am going to shoot at stores and phosphate jetties." This message, flashed ashore by lamp signals, was received one dawn last week on Nauru, a tiny British-mandated atoll just under the equator, 2,000 miles northeast of Australia. The sender was a merchantman raider which, just before making good its threat, hauled down the Japanese flag, ran up the Nazi swastika. None of Nauru's 3,400 inhabitants (194 Europeans) was hurt, but warehouses and platforms loaded with Nauru's main product—guano (seabird droppings) for explosives and fertilizer—were thoroughly shot up. British naval circles identified the marauder as one of several German ships known for weeks to be operating in the western Pacific, probably supplied from Japan or Japan-controlled China ports. A Japanese spokesman said that the reported use of Japan's flag was, if true, a "serious matter."

Berwick v. Hipper. Somewhere in the North Atlantic on Christmas morning, the fast 10,000-ton British cruiser Berwick gave chase to a Nazi raider which attacked the Berwick's convoy with torpedo and shellfire. In stormy murk the enemy, which the British guessed by its speed to be a cruiser of the Admiral Hipper class, got away, but not without an 8-inch hit amidships from the Berwick. The latter also sustained damage (five casualties) but remained at sea. During the chase, the Berwick came upon the raider's supply ship, the freighter Baden, which set herself afire, had to be sunk.

With its hands full in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy has an insufficient force in the Pacific for an all-out raider hunt, although the Australian press has been hollering for one for months.