Throughout history, the sailors life has always involved risk and peril. In World War one. A terrible new danger was introduced. The submarine attack. In the following letter, a young Navy sailor from Texas, Hugh Alexandra Leslie, tells his family about the sinking of the USS President Lincoln. Actor Edward Giraud reads a selection from Leslie’s June 1917 letter.
My dearest and beloved parents and brothers and sisters, I received your most kind and appreciated letters since I hit the old USA. Again, I suppose you read about us losing our good ship Lincoln by two torpedoes from an enemy sub. Also, the lives of 24 of our shipmates. I sent you a telegram as soon as I drove in New York.
I just written all down as a 26 page letter when I got in for. He wanted to know all about the sinking of our home. The President Lincoln. We was 480 miles off the coast of Brest, France at 9:00 am. While we were stirring the brine to the tune of about 12 knots an hour, she sank in 37 minutes after the two torpedoes hit forward and aft parts of the ship.
Explosions of the gun cotton was so violent it stunned a number of the crew and tore enormous large holes in her hole on the port side. I and the other ship’s cooks were on watch in the galley when the first one hit forward. And just as I stepped out the galley, the second one hit right on to the aft galley, where we had just had dinner.
All set. It knocked me flat on the deck, and a shower of salt water and wreckage of hatch covers came falling all round me. It tore the galley upside down and wounded some of the fellows in their. She looked like a large animal, or a cow, or a horse that was shot on the left side and groaning for help as they go down side with the same with our ship.
Look as if she knew she was sinking. There wasn’t a man left the ship until the order was given to abandon ship by the captain. The cooks and bakers of the ninth Division were busy throwing off life rafts until the waves were almost washing over the deck, and all the paymaster would do was run up and down the deck, rubbing his hands.
I told him to jump off and grab a line to the lifeboat or raft if he couldn’t swim. I told him she was sinking rapidly. The last I saw him and the others was going as high as they could on the ship. I jumped and swam to a raft, took some good swimmer to swim. One of those rafts in the choppy sea.
Is that some of the rafts were lashed to the ship, and with the ship, some of our best friends lost their lives when she went down. I was within 15ft of it when she disappeared. We were in the water 15 hours before the destroyer picked us up that night. You could take it from me. I was glad to be back here we are, a crew without a ship or a dog with a home.
I’ll knock off at present, as ever HA.
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