Berlin, September 29

At midnight tonight I did a microphone interview with Germany's ace submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze. It turned out much better than I expected. During the afternoon and evening I had had many doubts and a big headache. With the help of some naval officer friends, I cornered Schultze in the Admiralty this afternoon. He was just back from his first "killing". He turned out to be a clean-cut fellow of thirty, hard as nails and full of that bluff self-confidence which you get, I suppose, when you gamble daily with your own life and the lives of others.

He was a little afraid of his English, he said, and after listening to a specimen, I was too. In fact, I couldn't understand a word he said and we had to converse in German. Someone suggested that his English would improve during the afternoon, that he was merely a little rusty. This offered hope, and I cabled New York that the interview was on for tonight. I put my questions to him and the captain sat down to write out answers in German. When he had finished a page, I dictated an English translation to an Admiralty secretary who for some reason wrote English faultlessly but had great difficulty in understanding it when spoken. We sweated away all afternoon - four hours - and finally achieved a fifteen-minute script.

There were two points in the script, the very ones which made it most interesting, which added to my own perception. The captain told a story of how he had torpedoed the British ship Royal Sceptre, but, at the risk of his own skin, had arranged rescue of those aboard by another British vessel, the Browning. Now, a few days before, I remembered, London had reported that the Royal Sceptre had been torpedoed without warning and that the crew and passengers, numbering sixty, had presumably perished. I wondered who was right.

Captain Schultze, as we worked out our interview, also mentioned that he was the U-boat commander who had sent a saucy radio message to Mr. Winston Churchill advising him of the location of a British ship which he had just sunk so that the First Lord might save the crew. But only a day or two before, Mr. Churchill had told the House of Commons that the German submarine commander who had sent him that message had been captured and was now a prisoner of His Majesty's government.

I reminded the captain of that, and asked him if he could give me the text of his message. His logbook was at Kiel, but we telephoned there and had the message read back to us. That made me feel a little better. Shortly before the broadcast this evening something else happened which made me feel better still. As we were leaving the Admiralty, an officer brought us a Reuter dispatch saying that the Browning had just landed at Bahia, Brazil, with the crew and passengers of the Royal Sceptre all safe.

One good break followed another. To my surprise, as our broadcast got under way, the captain's English did indeed improve, just as predicted. His accent was terrific, but in some way his words poured out very distinctly. You could understand every syllable. Most men of his type, I've found, when put before a microphone, read their lines mechanically. But to my delight he proved to be a natural speaker, talking as though we had never written a line.

(Later the British Admiralty confirmed his version of both the Royal Sceptre episode and the saucy message to Mr. Churchill, including the fact that Schultze had not been captured). *