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The Victory At Sea

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Title: The Victory At Sea

Author: William Sowden Sims
        Burton Jesse Hendrick


        
Release date: January 15, 2012 [eBook #38587]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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Produced by David Edwards, Barbara Kosker and the Online
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THE VICTORY AT SEA

REAR-ADMIRAL W. S. SIMS
U.S. NAVY




THE VICTORY AT SEA

[Illustration: _Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims U.S. Navy_
_G. Vandyk Ltd. photographers_]




THE
VICTORY AT SEA




BY REAR-ADMIRAL WILLIAM SOWDEN SIMS
U.S. NAVY

COMMANDER OF THE AMERICAN NAVAL FORCES OPERATING
IN EUROPEAN WATERS DURING THE GREAT WAR




IN COLLABORATION WITH
BURTON J. HENDRICK

WITH PORTRAIT AND PLANS




LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1920




FIRST EDITION        _November 1920_
_Reprinted_              _December 1920_

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Printed by Hasell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England._




TO

THE GALLANT OFFICERS AND MEN

WHOM I HAD THE HONOUR TO COMMAND

DURING THE GREAT WAR

IN

GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF

A LOYAL DEVOTION TO THE CAUSE

THAT GREATLY LIGHTENED THE

RESPONSIBILITY

BORNE BY

"THE OLD MAN"




PREFACE


This is not in any sense a history of the operations of our naval forces
in Europe during the Great War, much less a history of the naval
operations as a whole. That would require not only many volumes, but
prolonged and careful research by competent historians. When such a work
is completed, our people will realize for the first time the admirable
initiative with which the gallant personnel of our navy responded to the
requirements of an unprecedented naval situation.

But in the meantime this story has been written in response to a demand
for some account of the very generally misunderstood submarine campaign
and, particularly, of the means by which it was defeated. The interest
of the public in such a story is due to the fact that during the war the
sea forces were compelled to take all possible precautions to keep the
enemy from learning anything about the various devices and means used to
oppose or destroy the under-water craft. This necessity for the utmost
secrecy was owing to the peculiar nature of the sea warfare. When the
armies first made use of airplane bombs, or poison gas, or tanks, or
mobile railroad batteries, the existence of these weapons and the manner
of their use were necessarily at once revealed to the enemy, and the
press was permitted to publish full accounts of them and, to a certain
extent, of their effect and the means used to oppose them. Moreover, all
general movements of the contending armies that resulted in engagements
were known with fair accuracy on both sides within a short time after
they occurred and were promptly reported to an anxious public.

But this situation bore almost no resemblance to the struggle between
the U-boats and the anti-submarine forces of the Allies. Barring a few
naval actions between surface vessels, such as the battles of Jutland
and of the Falkland Islands, the naval war was, for the most part, a
succession of contests between single vessels or small groups of
vessels. The enemy submarines sought to win the war by sinking the
merchant shipping upon which depended the essential supplies of the
allied populations and armies; and it was the effort of the Allies to
prevent this, and to destroy submarines when possible, that constituted
the vitally important naval activities of the war. By means of
strategical and tactical dispositions, and various weapons and devices,
now no longer secret, such as the depth charge, the mystery ship,
hydrophones, mine-fields, explosive mine nets, special hunting
submarines, and so forth, it was frequently possible either to destroy
submarines with their entire crews, or to capture the few men who
escaped when their boats were sunk, and thus keep from the German
Admiralty all knowledge of the means by which their U-boats had met
their fate. Thus the mystery ships, or decoy ships, as the Germans
called them, destroyed a number of submarines before the enemy knew that
such dangerous vessels existed. And even after they had acquired this
knowledge, the mystery ships used various devices that enabled them to
continue their successes until some unsuccessfully attacked submarine
carried word of the new danger back to her home port.

Under such unprecedented conditions of warfare, it is apparent that the
Allied navies could not safely tell the public just what they were doing
or how they were doing it. All articles written for the press had to be
carefully censored, and all of these interesting matters ruthlessly
suppressed; but now that the ban has been removed, it is desirable to
give the relatives and friends of the fine chaps who did the good work
sufficient information to enable them to understand the difficulty of
the problem that was presented to the anti-submarine forces of the
Allies, the manner in which it was solved, and the various means
invented and employed.

The subject is of course largely technical, but an effort has been made
to present the story in such form that the layman can readily understand
it. As it is difficult, if not quite impossible, for a naval officer to
determine just which of the details that are a part of his daily life,
and what incidents of sea experience would interest his civilian
friends, the story has been written in collaboration with Mr. Burton J.
Hendrick, to whom I am greatly indebted for invaluable assistance; and
who, being an experienced hand at this writing business, deserves all
the credit the reader may be disposed to accord him for both the form
and such graces of descriptive style as he may be able to detect.

While opinions may differ to a certain extent as to the influence
exerted upon the campaign by the various forms of tactics, the means and
weapons employed, and the general strategy adopted, I have given what I
believe to be a consensus of the best informed opinion upon these
matters; and I have taken advantage of all of the information now
available to insure accuracy in the account of the conditions that
confronted the European naval forces, and in the description of the
various operations that have been selected as typical examples of this
very extraordinary warfare.

It is probably unnecessary to add that this book is published with the
full approval of the Navy Department. My correspondence on this subject
with the Secretary will be found in the Appendix.

W. S. S.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                        PAGE

   I. WHEN GERMANY WAS WINNING THE WAR                            1

  II. THE RETURN OF THE "MAYFLOWER"                              40

 III. THE ADOPTION OF THE CONVOY                                 78

  IV. AMERICAN DESTROYERS IN ACTION                              99

   V. DECOYING SUBMARINES TO DESTRUCTION                        141

  VI. AMERICAN COLLEGE BOYS AND SUBCHASERS                      168

 VII. THE LONDON FLAGSHIP                                       204

VIII. SUBMARINE AGAINST SUBMARINE                               224

  IX. THE AMERICAN MINE BARRAGE IN THE NORTH SEA                244

   X. GERMAN SUBMARINES VISIT THE AMERICAN COAST                266

  XI. FIGHTING SUBMARINES FROM THE AIR                          275

 XII. THE NAVY FIGHTING ON THE LAND                             289

XIII. TRANSPORTING TWO MILLION AMERICAN SOLDIERS TO FRANCE      294

      APPENDIX                                                  316

      INDEX                                                     347




THE VICTORY AT SEA




CHAPTER I

WHEN GERMANY WAS WINNING THE WAR


I

In the latter part of March, 1917, a message from the Navy Department
came to me at Newport, where I was stationed as president of the Naval
War College, summoning me immediately to Washington. The international
atmosphere at that time was extremely tense, and the form in which these
instructions were cast showed that something extraordinary was
impending. The orders directed me to make my visit as unostentatious as
possible; to keep all my movements secret, and, on my arrival in
Washington, not to appear at the Navy Department, but to telephone
headquarters. I promptly complied with these orders; and, after I got in
touch with the navy chiefs, it took but a few moments to explain the
situation. It seemed inevitable, I was informed, that the United States
would soon be at war with Germany. Ambassador Page had cabled that it
would be desirable, under the existing circumstances, that the American
navy be represented by an officer of higher rank than any of those who
were stationed in London at that time. The Department therefore wished
me to leave immediately for England, to get in touch with the British
Admiralty, to study the naval situation and learn how we could best and
most quickly co-operate in the naval war. At this moment we were still
technically at peace with Germany. Mr. Daniels, the Secretary of the
Navy, therefore thought it wise that there should be no publicity about
my movements. I was to remain ostensibly as head of the War College,
and, in order that no suspicions should be aroused, my wife and family
were still to occupy the official residence of its president. I was
directed to sail on a merchant vessel, to travel under an assumed name,
to wear civilian clothes and to take no uniform. On reaching the other
side I was to get immediately in communication with the British
Admiralty, and send to Washington detailed reports on prevailing
conditions.

A few days after this interview in Washington two commonplace-looking
gentlemen, dressed in civilian clothes, secretly boarded the American
steamship _New York_. They were entered upon the passenger list as V. J.
Richardson and S. W. Davidson. A day or two out an enterprising steward
noticed that the initials on the pyjamas of one of these passengers
differed from those of the name under which he was sailing and reported
him to the captain as a suspicious character. The captain had a quiet
laugh over this discovery, for he knew that Mr. Davidson was
Rear-Admiral Sims, of the United States Navy, and that his companion who
possessed the two sets of conflicting initials was Commander J. V.
Babcock, the Admiral's _aide_. The voyage itself was an uneventful one,
but a good deal of history was made in those few days that we spent upon
the sea. Our ship reached England on April 9th; one week previously
President Wilson had gone before Congress and asked for the declaration
of a state of war with Germany. We had a slight reminder that a war was
under way as we neared Liverpool, for a mine struck our vessel as we
approached the outer harbour. The damage was not irreparable; the
passengers were transferred to another steamer and we safely reached
port, where I found a representative of the British Admiralty,
Rear-Admiral Hope, waiting to receive me. The Admiralty had also
provided a special train, in which we left immediately for London.

Whenever I think of the naval situation as it existed in April, 1917, I
always have before my mind two contrasting pictures--one that of the
British public, as represented in their press and in their social
gatherings in London, and the other that of British officialdom, as
represented in my confidential meetings with British statesmen and
British naval officers. For the larger part the English newspapers were
publishing optimistic statements about the German submarine campaign.
In these they generally scouted the idea that this new form of piracy
really threatened in any way the safety of the British Empire. They
accompanied these rather cheerful outgivings by weekly statistics of
submarine sinkings; figures which, while not particularly reassuring,
hardly indicated that any serious inroads had yet been made on the
British mercantile marine. The Admiralty was publishing tables showing
that four or five thousand ships were arriving at British ports and
leaving them every week, while other tables disclosed the number of
British ships of less than sixteen hundred tons and more than sixteen
hundred tons that were going down every seven days. Thus the week of my
arrival I learned from these figures that Great Britain had lost
seventeen ships above that size, and two ships below; that 2,406 vessels
had arrived at British ports, that 2,367 had left, and that, in
addition, seven fishing vessels had fallen victims to the German
submarines. Such figures were worthless, for they did not include
neutral ships and did not give the amount of tonnage sunk, details, of
course, which it was necessary to keep from the enemy. The facts which
the Government thus permitted to come to public knowledge did not
indicate that the situation was particularly alarming. Indeed the
newspapers all over the British Isles showed no signs of perturbation;
on the contrary, they were drawing favourable conclusions from these
statistics. Here and there one of them may have sounded a more
apprehensive note; yet the generally prevailing feeling both in the
press and in general discussions of the war seemed to be that the
submarine campaign had already failed, that Germany's last desperate
attempt to win the war had already broken down, and that peace would
probably not be long delayed. The newspapers found considerable
satisfaction in the fact that the "volume of British shipping was being
maintained"; they displayed such headlines as "improvement continues";
they printed prominently the encouraging speeches of certain British
statesmen, and in this way were apparently quieting popular apprehension
concerning the outcome. This same atmosphere of cheerful ignorance I
found everywhere in London society. The fear of German submarines was
not disturbing the London season, which had now reached its height; the
theatres were packed every night; everywhere, indeed, the men and women
of the upper classes were apparently giving little thought to any danger
that might be hanging over their country. Before arriving in England I
myself had not known the gravity of the situation. I had followed the
war from the beginning with the greatest interest; I had read
practically everything printed about it in the American and foreign
press, and I had had access to such official information as was
available on our side of the Atlantic. The result was that, when I
sailed for England in March, I felt little fear about the outcome. All
the fundamental facts in the case made it appear impossible that the
Germans could win the war. Sea power apparently rested practically
unchallenged in the hands of the Allies; and that in itself, according
to the unvarying lessons of history, was an absolute assurance of
ultimate victory. The statistics of shipping losses had been regularly
printed in the American press, and, while such wanton destruction of
life and property seemed appalling, there was apparently nothing in
these figures that was likely to make any material change in the result.
Indeed it appeared to be altogether probable that the war would end
before the United States could exert any material influence upon the
outcome. My conclusions were shared by most American naval officers whom
I knew, students of warfare, who, like myself, had the utmost respect
for the British fleet and believed that it had the naval situation well
in hand.

Yet a few days spent in London clearly showed that all this confidence
in the defeat of the Germans rested upon a misapprehension. The Germans,
it now appeared, were not losing the war--they were winning it. The
British Admiralty now placed before the American representative facts
and figures which it had not given to the British press. These documents
disclosed the astounding fact that, unless the appalling destruction of
merchant tonnage which was then taking place could be materially
checked, the unconditional surrender of the British Empire would
inevitably take place within a few months.

On the day of my arrival in London I had my first interview with Admiral
Jellicoe, who was at that time the First Sea Lord. Admiral Jellicoe and
I needed no introduction. I had known him for many years and for a
considerable period we had been more or less regular correspondents. I
had first made his acquaintance in China in 1901; at that time Jellicoe
was a captain and was already recognized as one of the coming men of the
British navy. He was an expert in ordnance and gunnery, a subject in
which I was greatly interested; and this fact had brought us together
and made us friends. The admiration which I had then conceived for the
Admiral's character and intelligence I have never lost. He was then, as
he has been ever since, an indefatigable worker, and more than a worker,
for he was a profound student of everything which pertained to ships and
gunnery, and a man who joined to a splendid intellect the real ability
of command. I had known him in his own home with his wife and babies, as
well as on shipboard among his men, and had observed at close hand the
gracious personality which had the power to draw everyone to him and
make him the idol both of his own children and the officers and jackies
of the British fleet. Simplicity and directness were his two most
outstanding points; though few men had risen so rapidly in the Royal
Navy, success had made him only more quiet, soft spoken, and
unostentatiously dignified; there was nothing of the blustering seadog
about the Admiral, but he was all courtesy, all brain, and, of all the
men I have ever met, there have been none more approachable, more frank,
and more open-minded.

Physically Admiral Jellicoe is a small man, but as powerful in frame as
he is in mind, and there are few men in the navy who can match him in
tennis. His smooth-shaven face, when I met him that morning in April,
1917, was, as usual, calm, smiling, and imperturbable. One could never
divine his thoughts by any outward display of emotion. Neither did he
give any signs that he was bearing a great burden, though it is not too
much to say that at this moment the safety of the British Empire rested
chiefly upon Admiral Jellicoe's shoulders. I find the absurd notion
prevalent in this country that his change from Commander of the Grand
Fleet to First Sea Lord was something in the nature of a demotion; but
nothing could be farther from the truth. As First Sea Lord, Jellicoe
controlled the operations, not only of the Grand Fleet, but also of the
entire British navy; he had no superior officer, for the First Lord of
the Admiralty, the position in England that corresponds to our Secretary
of the Navy, has no power to give any order whatever to the fleet--a
power which our Secretary possesses. Thus the defeat of the German
submarines was a direct responsibility which Admiral Jellicoe could
divide with no other official. Great as this duty was, and appalling as
was the submarine situation at the time of this interview, there was
nothing about the Admiral's bearing which betrayed any depression of
spirits. He manifested great seriousness indeed, possibly some
apprehension, but British stoicism and the usual British refusal to
succumb to discouragement were qualities that were keeping him
tenaciously at his job.

After the usual greetings, Admiral Jellicoe took a paper out of his
drawer and handed it to me. It was a record of tonnage losses for the
last few months. This showed that the total sinkings, British and
neutral, had reached 536,000 tons in February and 603,000 in March; it
further disclosed that sinkings were taking place in April which
indicated the destruction of nearly 900,000 tons. These figures
indicated that the losses were three and four times as large as those
which were then being published in the press.[1]

It is expressing it mildly to say that I was surprised by this
disclosure. I was fairly astounded; for I had never imagined anything so
terrible. I expressed my consternation to Admiral Jellicoe.

"Yes," he said, as quietly as though he were discussing the weather and
not the future of the British Empire. "It is impossible for us to go on
with the war if losses like this continue."

"What are you doing about it?" I asked.

"Everything that we can. We are increasing our anti-submarine forces in
every possible way. We are using every possible craft we can find with
which to fight submarines. We are building destroyers, trawlers, and
other like craft as fast as we can. But the situation is very serious
and we shall need all the assistance we can get."

"It looks as though the Germans were winning the war," I remarked.

"They will win, unless we can stop these losses--and stop them soon,"
the Admiral replied.

"Is there no solution for the problem?" I asked.

"Absolutely none that we can see now," Jellicoe announced. He described
the work of destroyers and other anti-submarine craft, but he showed no
confidence that they would be able to control the depredations of the
U-boats.

The newspapers for several months had been publishing stories that
submarines in large numbers were being sunk; and these stories I now
found to be untrue. The Admiralty records showed that only fifty-four
German submarines were positively known to have been sunk since the
beginning of the war; the German shipyards, I was now informed, were
turning out new submarines at the rate of three a week. The newspapers
had also published accounts of the voluntary surrender of German
U-boats; but not one such surrender, Admiral Jellicoe said, had ever
taken place; the stories had been circulated merely for the purpose of
depreciating enemy _moral_. I even found that members of the Government,
all of whom should have been better informed, and also British naval
officers, believed that many captured German submarines had been
carefully stowed away at the Portsmouth and Plymouth navy yards. Yet the
disconcerting facts which faced the Allies were that the supplies and
communications of the forces on all fronts were threatened; that German
submarines were constantly extending their operations farther and
farther out into the Atlantic; that German raiders were escaping into
the open sea; that three years' constant operations had seriously
threatened the strength of the British navy, and that Great Britain's
control of the sea was actually at stake. Nor did Admiral Jellicoe
indulge in any false expectations concerning the future. Bad as the
situation then was, he had every expectation that it would grow worse.
The season which was now approaching would make easier the German
operations, for the submarines would soon have the long daylight of the
British summer and the more favourable weather. The next few months,
indeed, both in the estimation of the Germans and the British, would
witness the great crisis of the war; the basis of the ruthless campaign
upon which the submarines had entered was that they could reach the
decision before winter closed in. So far as I could learn there was a
general belief in British naval circles that this plan would succeed.
The losses were now approaching a million tons a month; it was thus a
matter of very simple arithmetic to determine the length of time the
Allies could stand such a strain. According to the authorities the limit
of endurance would be reached about November 1, 1917; in other words,
unless some method of successfully fighting submarines could be
discovered almost immediately, Great Britain would have to lay down her
arms before a victorious Germany.

"What we are facing is the defeat of Great Britain," said Ambassador
Walter H. Page, after the situation had been explained to him.

In the next few weeks I had many interviews with Admiral Jellicoe and
other members of the Admiralty. Sitting in conference with them every
morning, I became, for all practical purposes, a member of their
organization. There were no secrets of the British navy which were not
disclosed to their new American ally. This policy was in accordance with
the broad-minded attitude of the British Government; there was a general
desire that the United States should understand the situation
completely, and from the beginning matters were discussed with the
utmost frankness. Everywhere was manifested a willingness to receive
suggestions and to try any expedient that promised to be even remotely
successful; yet the feeling prevailed that there was no quick and easy
way to defeat the submarine, that anything even faintly resembling the
much-sought "answer" had not yet appeared on the horizon. The prevailing
impression that any new invention could control the submarine in time to
be effective was deprecated. The American press was at that time
constantly calling upon Edison and other great American inventors to
solve this problem, and, in fact, inventors in every part of two
hemispheres were turning out devices by the thousands. A regular
department of the Admiralty which was headed by Admiral Fisher had
charge of investigating their proposals; in a few months it had received
and examined not far from 40,000 inventions, none of which answered the
purpose, though many of them were exceedingly ingenious. British naval
officers were not hostile to such projects; they declared, however, that
it would be absurd to depend upon new devices for defeating the German
campaign. The overshadowing fact--a fact which I find that many naval
men have not yet sufficiently grasped--is that time was the
all-important element. It was necessary not only that a way be found of
curbing the submarine, but of accomplishing this result at once. The
salvation of the great cause in which we had engaged was a matter of
only a few months. A mechanical device, or a new type of ship which
might destroy this menace six months hence, would not have helped us,
for by that time Germany would have won the war.

I discussed the situation also with members of the Cabinet, such as Mr.
Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, and Sir Edward Carson. Their attitude to me
was very different from the attitude which they were taking publicly;
these men naturally would say nothing in the newspapers that would
improve the enemy _moral_; but in explaining the situation to me they
repeated practically everything that Jellicoe had said. It was the
seriousness of this situation that soon afterward sent Mr. Balfour and
the British Commission to the United States. The world does not yet
understand what a dark moment that was in the history of the Allied
cause. Not only were the German submarines sweeping British commerce
from the seas, but the German armies were also defeating the British and
French on the battlefields in France. It is only when we recall that the
Germans were attaining the high peak of success with the U-boats at the
very moment that General Nivelle's offensive had failed on the Western
Front that we can get some idea of the real tragedy of the Allied
situation in the spring of 1917.

"Things were dark when I took that trip to America," Mr. Balfour said to
me afterward. "The submarines were constantly on my mind. I could think
of nothing but the number of ships which they were sinking. At that time
it certainly looked as though we were going to lose the war."

One of the men who most keenly realized the state of affairs was the
King. I met His Majesty first in the vestibule of St. Paul's, on that
memorable occasion in April, 1917, when the English people held a
thanksgiving service to commemorate America's entrance into the war.
Then, as at several subsequent meetings, the King impressed me as a
simple, courteous, unaffected English gentleman. He was dressed in
khaki, like any other English officer, and his manner was warm-hearted,
sincere, and even democratic.

"It gives me great pleasure to meet you on an occasion like this," said
His Majesty, referring to the great Anglo-American memorial service. "I
am also glad to greet an American admiral on such a mission as yours.
And I wish you all success."

On that occasion we naturally had little time to discuss the submarines,
but a few days afterward I was invited to spend the night at Windsor
Castle. The King in his own home proved to be even more cordial, if that
were possible, than at our first meeting. After dinner we adjourned to a
small room and there, over our cigars, we discussed the situation at
considerable length. The King is a rapid and animated talker; he was
kept constantly informed on the submarine situation, and discussed it
that night in all its details. I was at first surprised by his
familiarity with all naval questions and the intimate touch which he was
evidently maintaining with the British fleet. Yet this was not really
surprising, for His Majesty himself is a sailor; in his early youth he
joined the navy, in which he worked up like any other British boy. He
seemed almost as well informed about the American navy as about the
British; he displayed the utmost interest in our preparations on land
and sea, and he was particularly solicitous that I, as the American
representative, should have complete access to the Admiralty Office.
About the submarine campaign, the King was just as outspoken as Jellicoe
and the other members of the Admiralty. The thing must be stopped, or
the Allies could never win the war.

Of all the influential men in British public life there was only one who
at that time took an optimistic attitude. This was Mr. Lloyd George. I
met the Prime Minister frequently at dinners, at his own country place
and elsewhere, and the most lasting impression which I retain of this
wonderful man was his irrepressible gaiety of spirits. I think of the
Prime Minister of Great Britain as a great, big, exuberant boy, always
laughing and joking, constantly indulging in repartee and by-play, and
even in this crisis, perhaps the darkest one of British history, showing
no signs of depression. His face, which was clear in its complexion as a
girl's, never betrayed the slightest anxiety, and his eyes, which were
always sparkling, never disclosed the faintest shadow. It was a picture
which I shall never forget--that of this man, upon whose shoulders the
destiny of the Empire chiefly rested, apparently refusing to admit, even
to himself, the dangers that were seemingly overwhelming it, heroically
devoting all his energies to uplifting the spirits of his countrymen,
and, in his private intercourse with his associates, even in the most
fateful moments, finding time to tell funny stories, to recall
entertaining anecdotes of his own political career, to poke fun at the
mistakes of his opponents, and to turn the general conversation a
thousand miles away from the Western Front and the German submarines. It
was the most inspiring instance of self-control that I have ever known;
indeed only one other case in history can be compared with it; Lloyd
George's attitude at this period constantly reminded me of Lincoln in
the darkest hours of the Civil War, when, after receiving news of such
calamities as Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville, he would entertain his
cabinet by reading selections from Artemus Ward, interlarded with
humorous sayings and anecdotes of his own. Perhaps Lloyd George's
cheerfulness is explained by another trait which he likewise possessed
in common with Lincoln; there is a Welsh mysticism in his nature which,
I am told, sometimes takes the form of religious exaltation. Lloyd
George's faith in God and in a divine ordering of history was evidently
so profound that the idea of German victory probably never seized his
mind as a reality; we all know that Lincoln's absolute confidence in the
triumph of the North rested upon a similar basis. Certainly only some
such deep-set conviction as this could explain Lloyd George's serenity
and optimism in the face of the most frightful calamities. I attended a
small dinner at which the Premier was present four days after the
Germans had made their terrible attack in March, 1918. Even on this
occasion he showed no evidences of strain; as usual his animated spirits
held the upper hand; he was talking incessantly, but he never even
mentioned the subject that was absorbing the thoughts of the rest of
the world at that moment; instead he rattled along, touching upon the
Irish question, discussing the impression which Irish conscription would
make in America, and, now and then, pausing to pass some bantering
remark to Mr. Balfour. This was the way that I always saw the head of
the British Government; never did I meet him when he was fagged or
discouraged, or when he saw any end to the war but a favourable one.

On several occasions I attempted to impress Mr. Lloyd George with the
gravity of the situation; he always refused to acknowledge that it was
grave.

"Oh, yes, things are bad," he would say with a smile and a sweep of his
hand. "But we shall get the best of the submarines--never fear!"

The cheerfulness of the Prime Minister, however, was exceptional; all
his associates hardly concealed their apprehension. On the other hand, a
wave of enthusiasm was at that time sweeping over Germany. Americans
still have an idea that the German Government adopted the submarine
campaign as the last despairing gambler's chance, and that they only
half believed in its success themselves. There is an impression here
that the Germans never would have staked their Empire on this desperate
final throw had they foreseen that the United States would have
mobilized against them all its men and resources. This conviction is
entirely wrong. The Germans did not think that they were taking any
chances when they announced their unrestricted campaign; the ultimate
result seemed to them to be a certainty. They calculated the available
shipping which the Allies and the neutral nations had afloat; they knew
just how many ships their submarines could sink every month, and from
these statistics they mathematically deduced, with real German
precision, the moment when the war would end. They did not like the idea
of adding the United States to their enemies, but this was because they
were thinking of conditions after the war; for they would have preferred
to have had American friendship in the period of readjustment. But they
did not fear that we could do them much injury in the course of the war
itself. This again was not because they really despised our fighting
power; they knew that we would prove a formidable enemy on the
battlefield; but the obvious fact, to their eyes, was that our armies
could never get to the front in time. The submarine campaign, they said,
would finish the thing in three or four months; and certainly in that
period the unprepared United States could never summon any military
power that could affect the result. Thus from a purely military
standpoint the entrance of 100,000,000 Americans affected them about as
much as would a declaration of war from the planet Mars.

We confirmed this point of view from the commanders of the occasionally
captured submarines. These men would be brought to London and
questioned; they showed the utmost confidence in the result.

"Yes, you've got _us_," they would say, "but what difference does that
make? There are plenty more submarines coming out. You will get a few,
but we can build a dozen for every one that you can capture or sink.
Anyway, the war will all be over in two or three months and we shall be
sent back home."

All these captives laughed at the merest suggestion of German defeat;
their attitude was not that of prisoners, but of conquerors. They also
regarded themselves as heroes, and they gloried in the achievements of
their submarine service. For the most part they exaggerated the sinkings
and estimated that the war would end about the first of July or August.
Similarly the Berlin Government exaggerated the extent of their success.
This was not surprising, for one peculiarity of the submarine is that
only the commander, stationed at the periscope, knows what is going on.
He can report sinking a 5,000 ton ship and no one can contradict his
statement, for the crew and the other officers do not see the surface of
the water. Not unnaturally the commander does not depreciate his own
achievements, and thus the amount of sunken tonnage reported in Berlin
considerably exceeded the actual losses.

The speeches of German dignitaries resounded with the same confidence.

"In the impending decisive battle," said the Kaiser, "the task falls
upon my navy of turning the English war method of starvation, with which
our most hated and most obstinate enemy intends to overthrow the German
people, against him and his allies by combating their sea traffic with
all the means in our power. In this work the submarine will stand in the
first rank. I expect that this weapon, technically developed with wise
forethought at our admirable yards, in co-operation with all our other
naval fighting weapons and supported by the spirit which, during the
whole course of the war, has enabled us to perform brilliant deeds, will
break our enemy's war will."

"In this life and death struggle by hunger," said Dr. Karl Helfferich,
Imperial Secretary of the Interior, "England believed herself to be far
beyond the reach of any anxiety about food. A year ago it was supposed
that England would be able to use the acres of the whole world, bidding
with them against the German acres. To-day England sees herself in a
situation unparalleled in her history. Her acres across sea disappear as
a result of the blockade which our submarines are daily making more
effective around England. We have considered, we have dared. Certain of
the result, we shall not allow it to be taken from us by anybody or
anything."

These statements now read almost like ancient history, yet they were
made in February, 1917. At that time, Americans and Englishmen read them
with a smile; they seemed to be the kind of German rodomontade with
which the war had made us so familiar; they seemed to be empty mouthings
put out to bolster up the drooping German spirit. That the Kaiser and
his advisers could really believe such rubbish was generally regarded as
absurd. Yet not only did they believe what they were saying but, as
already explained, they also had every reason for believing it. The
Kaiser and his associates had figured that the war would end about July
1st or August 1st; and English officials with whom I came in contact
placed the date at November 1st--always provided, of course, that no
method were found for checking the submarine.[2]


II

How, then, could we defeat the submarine? Before approaching this
subject, it is well to understand precisely what was taking place in the
spring and summer of 1917 in those waters surrounding the British
Isles. What was this strange new type of warfare that was bringing the
Allied cause to its knees? Nothing like it had ever been known in
recorded time; nothing like it had been foreseen when, on August 4,
1914, the British Government threw all its resources and all its people
against the great enemy of mankind.

Leaving entirely out of consideration international law and humanity, it
must be admitted that strategically the German submarine campaign was
well conceived. Its purpose was to marshal on the German side that force
which has always proved to be the determining one in great international
conflicts--sea power. The advantages which the control of the sea gives
the nation which possesses it are apparent. In the first place, it makes
secure such a nation's communications with the outside world and its own
allies, and, at the same time, it cuts the communications of its enemy.
It enables the nation dominant at sea to levy upon the resources of the
entire world; to obtain food for its civilian population, raw materials
for its manufactures, munitions for its armies; and, at the same time,
to maintain that commerce upon which its very economic life may depend.
It enables such a power also to transport troops into any field of
action where they may be required. At the very time that sea power is
heaping all these blessings upon the dominant nation, it enables such a
nation to deny these same advantages to its enemy. For the second great
resource of sea power is the blockade. If the enemy is agriculturally
and industrially dependent upon the outside world, sea power can
transform it into a beleaguered fortress and sooner or later compel its
unconditional surrender. Its operations are not spectacular, but they
work with the inevitable remorselessness of death itself.

This fact is so familiar that I insist upon it here only for the purpose
of inviting attention to another fact which is not so apparent. Perhaps
the greatest commonplace of the war, from the newspaper standpoint, was
that the British fleet controlled the seas. This mere circumstance, as I
have already said, was the reason why all students of history were firm
in their belief that Britain could never be defeated. It was not until
the spring of 1917 that we really awoke to the actual situation; it was
not until I had spent several days in England that I made the
all-important discovery, which was this--that Britain did _not_ control
the seas. She still controlled the seas in the old Nelsonian sense; that
is, her Grand Fleet successfully "contained" the German battle squadrons
and kept them, for the greater part of the war, penned up in their
German harbours. In the old days such a display of sea power would have
easily won the war for the Allies. But that is not control of the seas
in the modern sense; it is merely control of the _surface_ of the seas.
Under modern methods of naval warfare sea control means far more than
controlling the top of the water. For there is another type of ship,
which sails stealthily under the waves, revealing its presence only at
certain intervals, and capable of shooting a terrible weapon which can
sink the proudest surface ship in a few minutes. The existence of this
new type of warship makes control of the seas to-day a very different
thing from what it was in Nelson's time. As long as such a warship can
operate under the water almost at will--and this was the case in a
considerable area of the ocean in the early part of 1917--it is
ridiculous to say that any navy controls the seas. For this subsurface
vessel, when used as successfully as it was used by the Germans in 1917,
deprives the surface navy of that advantage which has proved most
decisive in other wars. That is, the surface navy can no longer
completely protect communications as it could protect them in Nelson's
and Farragut's times. It no longer guarantees a belligerent its food,
its munitions, its raw materials of manufacture and commerce, or the
free movement of its troops. It is obviously absurd to say that a
belligerent which was losing 800,000 or 900,000 tons of shipping a
month, as was the case with the Allies in the spring of 1917, was the
undisputed mistress of the seas. Had the German submarine campaign
continued to succeed at this rate, the United States could not have
transported its army to France, and the food and materials which we were
sending to Europe, and which were essential to winning the war, could
never have crossed the ocean.

That is to say, complete control of the subsurface by Germany would have
turned against England the blockade, the very power with which she had
planned to reduce the German Empire. Instead of isolating Germany from
the rest of the world, she would herself be isolated.

In due course I shall attempt to show the immediate connexion that
exists between control of the surface and control of the subsurface;
this narrative will disclose, indeed, that the nation which possesses
the first also potentially possesses the second. In the early spring of
1917, however, this principle was not effective, so far as merchant
shipping was concerned.

Germany's purpose in adopting the ruthless submarine warfare was, of
course, the one which I have indicated: to deprive the Allied armies in
the field, and their civilian populations, of these supplies from
overseas which were essential to victory. Nature had been kind to this
German programme when she created the British Isles. Indeed this tight
little kingdom and the waters which surround it provided an ideal field
for operations of this character. For purposes of contrast, let us
consider our own geographical situation. A glance at the map discloses
that it would be almost impossible to blockade the United States with
submarines. In the first place, the operation of submarines more than
three thousand miles from their bases would present almost insuperable
difficulties. That Germany could send an occasional submarine to our
coasts she demonstrated in the war, but it would be hardly possible to
maintain anything like a regular and persistent campaign. Even if she
could have kept a force constantly engaged in our waters, other natural
difficulties would have defeated their most determined efforts. The
trade routes approach our Atlantic sea-coast in the shape of a fan, of
which different sticks point to such ports as Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Norfolk, and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico. To destroy
shipping to American ports it would be necessary for the enemy to cover
all these routes with submarines, a project which is so vast that it is
hardly worth the trial. In addition we have numerous Pacific ports to
which we could divert shipping in case our enemy should attempt to
blockade us on the Atlantic coast; our splendid system of
transcontinental railroads would make internal distribution not a
particularly difficult matter. Above all such considerations, of course,
is the fact that the United States is an industrial and agricultural
entity, self-supporting and self-feeding, and, therefore, it could not
be starved into surrender even though the enemy should surmount these
practically insuperable obstacles to a submarine blockade. But the
situation of the British Isles is entirely different. They obtain from
overseas the larger part of their food and a considerable part of their
raw materials, and in April of 1917, according to reliable statements
made at that time, England had enough food on hand for only six weeks or
two months. The trade routes over which these supplies came made the
submarine blockade a comparatively simple matter. Instead of the sticks
of a fan, the comparison which I have suggested with our own coast, we
now have to deal with the neck of a bottle. The trade routes to our
Atlantic coast spread out, as they approach our ports; on the other
hand, the trade routes to Great Britain converge almost to a point. The
far-flung steamship lanes which bring Britain her food and raw materials
from half a dozen continents focus in the Irish Sea and the English
Channel. To cut the communications of Great Britain, therefore, the
submarines do not have to patrol two or three thousand miles of
sea-coast, as would be necessary in the case of the United States; they
merely need to hover around the extremely restricted waters west and
south of Ireland.

This was precisely the area which the Germans had selected for their
main field of activity. It was here that their so-called U-boats were
operating with the most deadly effect; these waters constituted their
happy hunting grounds, for here came the great cargo ships, with food
and supplies from America, which were bound for Liverpool and the great
Channel ports. The submarines that did destruction in this region were
the type that have gained universal fame as the U-boats. There were
other types, which I shall describe, but the U-boats were the main
reliance of the German navy; they were fairly large vessels, of about
800 tons, and carried from eight to twelve torpedoes and enough fuel and
supplies to keep the sea for three or four weeks. And here let me
correct one universal misapprehension. These U-boats did not have bases
off the Irish and Spanish coasts, as most people still believe. Such
bases would have been of no particular use to them. The cruising period
of a submarine did not depend, as is the prevailing impression, upon its
supply of fuel oil and food, for almost any under-water boat was able to
carry enough of these essential materials for a practically indefinite
period; the average U-boat, moreover, could easily make the voyage
across the Atlantic and back. The cruising period depended upon its
supply of torpedoes. A submarine returned to its base only after it had
exhausted its supply of these destructive missiles; if it should shoot
them all in twenty-four hours, then a single day would end that
particular cruise; if the torpedoes lasted a month, then the submarine
stayed out for that length of time. For these reasons bases on the Irish
coast would have been useful only in case they could replenish the
torpedoes, and this was obviously an impossibility. No, there was not
the slightest mystery concerning the bases of the U-boats. When the
Germans captured the city of Bruges in Belgium they transformed it into
a headquarters for submarines; here many of the U-boats were assembled,
and here facilities were provided for docking, repairing, and supplying
them. Bruges was thus one of the main headquarters for the destructive
campaign which was waged against British commerce. Bruges itself is an
inland town, but from it two canals extend, one to Ostend and the other
to Zeebrugge, and in this way the interior submarine base formed the
apex of a triangle. It was by way of these canals that the U-boats
reached the open sea.

Once in the English Channel, the submarines had their choice of two
routes to the hunting grounds off the west and south of Ireland. A large
number made the apparently unnecessarily long detour across the North
Sea and around Scotland, going through the Fair Island Passage, between
the Orkney and the Shetland islands, along the Hebrides, where they
sometimes made a landfall, and so around the west coast of Ireland. This
looks like a long and difficult trip, yet the time was not entirely
wasted, for the U-boats, as the map of sinkings shows, usually destroyed
several vessels on the way to their favourite hunting grounds. But there
was another and shorter route to this area available to the U-boats. And
here I must correct another widely prevailing misapprehension. While the
war was going on many accounts were published in the newspapers
describing the barrage across the English Channel, from Dover to Calais,
and the belief was general that this barrier kept the U-boats from
passing through. Unfortunately this was not the case. The surface boats
did succeed in transporting almost at will troops and supplies across
this narrow passage-way; but the mines, nets, and other obstructions
that were intended to prevent the passage of submarines were not
particularly effective. The British navy knew little about mines in
1914; British naval men had always rather despised them as the "weapons
of the weaker power," and it is therefore not surprising that the
so-called mine barrage at the Channel crossing was not successful. A
large part of it was carried away by the strong tide and storms, and the
mines were so defective that oysters and other sea growths, which
attached themselves to their prongs, made many of them harmless. In
1918, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes reconstructed this barrage with a new type
of mine and transformed it into a really effective barrier; but in the
spring of 1917, the German U-boats had little difficulty in slipping
through, particularly in the night time. And from this point the
distance to the trade routes south and west of Ireland was relatively a
short one.

Yet, terribly destructive as these U-boats were, the number which were
operating simultaneously in this and in other fields was never very
large. The extent to which the waters were infested with German
submarines was another particularly ludicrous and particularly prevalent
misapprehension. Merchant vessels constantly reported that they had been
assailed by "submarines in shoals," and most civilians still believe
that they sailed together in flotillas, like schools of fish. There is
hardly an American doughboy who did not see at least a dozen submarines
on his way across the Atlantic; every streak of suds which was caused by
a "tide rip," and every swimming porpoise, was immediately mistaken for
the wake of a torpedo; and every bit of driftwood, in the fervid
imagination of trans-Atlantic voyagers, immediately assumed the shape of
a periscope. Yet it is a fact that we knew almost every time a German
submarine slunk from its base into the ocean. The Allied secret service
was immeasurably superior to that of the Germans, and in saying this I
pay particular tribute to the British Naval Intelligence Department. We
always knew how many submarines the Germans had and we could usually
tell pretty definitely their locations at a particular time; we also had
accurate information about building operations in Germany; thus we could
estimate how many they were building and where they were building them,
and we could also describe their essential characteristics, and the
stage of progress they which had reached at almost any day.

It was not the simplest thing to pilot a submarine out of its base. The
Allies were constantly laying mines at these outlets; and before the
U-boat could safely make its exit elaborate sweeping operations were
necessary. It often took a squadron of nine or ten surface ships,
working for several hours, to manoeuvre a submarine out of its base
and to start it on its journey. For these reasons we could keep a
careful watch upon its movements; we always knew when one of our enemies
came out; we knew which one it was, and not infrequently we had learned
the name of the commander and other valuable details. Moreover, we knew
where it went, and we kept charts on which we plotted from day to day
the voyage of each particular submarine.

"Why didn't you sink it then?" is the question usually asked when I make
this statement--a question which, as I shall show, merely reflects the
ignorance which prevails everywhere on the underlying facts of submarine
warfare.

Now in this densely packed shipping area, which extended from the north
of Ireland to Brest, there were seldom more than eight or ten submarines
engaged in their peculiar form of warfare at one time. The largest
number which I had any record of was fifteen; and this was an
exceptional force; the usual number was four, six, eight, or perhaps
ten. Yet the men upon our merchant convoys and troopships saw submarines
scattered all over the sea. We estimated that the convoys and troopships
reported that they had sighted about 300 submarines for every submarine
which was actually in the field. Yet we knew that for every hundred
submarines which the Germans possessed they could keep only ten or a
dozen at work in the open sea. The rest were on their way to the hunting
grounds, or returning, or they were in port being refitted and taking on
supplies. Could Germany have kept fifty submarines constantly at work on
the great shipping routes in the winter and spring of 1917--before we
had learned how to handle the situation--nothing could have prevented
her from winning the war. Instead of sinking 850,000 tons in a single
month, she would have sunk 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 tons. The fact is that
Germany, with all her microscopic preparations for war, neglected to
provide herself with the one instrumentality with which she might have
won it.

This circumstance, that so few submarines could accomplish such
destructive results, shows how formidable was the problem which
confronted us. Germany could do this, of course, because the restricted
field in which she was able to operate was so constantly and so densely
infested with valuable shipping.

In the above I have been describing the operations of the U-boats in the
great area to the west and south of Ireland. But there were other
hunting fields, particularly that which lay on the east coast of
England, in the area extending from Harwich to Newcastle. This part of
the North Sea was constantly filled with ships passing between the North
Sea ports of England and Norway and Sweden, carrying essential products
like lumber and many manufactured articles. Every four days a convoy of
from forty to sixty ships left some port in this region for Scandinavia;
I use the word "convoy," but the operation was a convoy only in the
sense that the ships sailed in groups, for the navy was not able to
provide them with an adequate escort--seldom furnishing them more than
one or two destroyers, or a few yachts or trawlers. Smaller types of
submarines which were known as UB's and UC's and which issued from
Wilhelmshaven and the Skager Rack constantly preyed upon this coastal
shipping. These submarines differed from the U-boats in that they were
smaller, displacing about 350 and 400 tons, and in that they also
carried mines, which they were constantly laying. They were much handier
than the larger types; they could rush out much more quickly from their
bases and get back, and they did an immense amount of damage to this
coastal trade. The value of the shipping sunk in these waters was
unimportant when compared with the losses which Great Britain was
suffering on the great trans-Atlantic routes, but the problem was still
a serious one, because the supplies which these ships brought from the
Scandinavian countries were essential to the military operations in
France.

Besides these two types, the U-boats and the UB's and UC's, the Germans
had another type of submarine, the great ocean cruisers. These ships
were as long as a small surface cruiser and were half again as long as a
destroyer, and their displacement sometimes reached 3,000 tons. They
carried crews of seventy men, could cross the Atlantic three or four
times without putting into port, and some actually remained away from
their bases for three or four months. But they were vessels very
difficult to manage; it took them a relatively long time to submerge,
and, for this reason, they could not operate around the Channel and
other places where the anti-submarine craft were most numerous. In fact,
these vessels, of which the Germans had in commission perhaps half a
dozen when the armistice was signed, accomplished little in the war. The
purpose for which they were built was chiefly a strategic one. One or
two were usually stationed off the Azores, not in any expectation that
they would destroy much shipping--the fact is that they sank very few
merchantmen--but in the hope that they might divert anti-submarine craft
from the main theatre of operations. In this purpose, however, they were
not successful; in fact, I cannot see that these great cruisers
accomplished anything that justified the expense and the trouble which
were involved in building them.


III

This, then, was the type of warfare which the German submarines were
waging upon the shipping of the Allied nations. What were the Allied
navies doing to check them in this terrible month of April, 1917? What
anti-submarine methods had been developed up to that time?

The most popular game on both sides of the Atlantic was devising means
of checking the under-water ship. Every newspaper, every magazine, every
public man, and every gentleman at his club had a favourite scheme for
defeating the U-boat campaign. All that any one needed for this engaging
pastime was a map of the North Sea, and the solution appeared to be as
clear as daylight. As Sir Eric Geddes once remarked to me, nothing is
quite so deceptive as geography. All of us are too likely to base our
conception of naval problems on the maps which we studied at school. On
these maps the North Sea is such a little place! A young lady once
declared in my hearing that she didn't see how the submarines could
operate in the English Channel, it was so narrow! She didn't see how
there was room enough to turn around! The fact that it is twenty miles
wide at the shortest crossing and not far from two hundred at the widest
is something which it is apparently difficult to grasp.

The plan which was most popular in those days was to pen the submarines
in their bases and so prevent their egress into the North Sea.
Obviously the best way to handle the situation was to sink the whole
German submarine fleet; that was apparently impossible, and the next
best thing was to keep them in their home ports and prevent them from
sailing the high seas. It was not only the man in the street who was
advocating this programme. I had a long talk with several prominent
Government officials, in which they asked me why this could not be done.

"I can give you fourteen reasons why it is impossible," I answered. "We
shall first have to capture the bases, and it would be simply suicidal
to attempt it, and it would be playing directly into Germany's hands.
Those bases are protected by powerful 15-, 11-, and 8-inch guns. These
are secreted behind hills or located in pits on the seashore, where no
approaching vessel can see them. Moreover, those guns have a range of
40,000 yards, but the guns on no ships have a range of more than 30,000
yards; they are stationary, whereas ours would be moving. For our ships
to go up against such emplacements would be like putting a blind
prize-fighter up against an antagonist who can see and who has arms
twice as long as his enemy's. We can send as many ships as we wish on
such an expedition, and they will all be destroyed. The German guns
would probably get them on the first salvo, certainly on the second.
There is nothing the Germans would so much like to have us try."

Another idea suggested by a glance at the map was the construction of a
barrage across the North Sea from the Orkneys to the coast of Norway.
The distance did not seem so very great--on the map; in reality, it was
two hundred and thirty miles and the water is from 360 to 960 feet in
depth. If we cannot pen the rats up in their holes, said the newspaper
strategist, certainly we can do the next best thing: we can pen them up
in the North Sea. Then we can route all our shipping to points on the
west coast of England, and the problem is solved.

I discussed this proposition with British navy men and their answer was
quite to the point.

"If we haven't mines enough to build a successful barrage across the
Straits of Dover, which is only twenty miles wide, how can we construct
a barrage across the North Sea, which is 230?"

A year afterward, as will be shown later, this plan came up in more
practical form, but in 1917 the idea was not among the
possibilities--there were not mines enough in the world to build such a
barrage, nor had a mine then been invented that was suitable for the
purpose.

The belief prevailed in the United States, and, to a certain extent, in
England itself, that the most effective means of meeting the submarine
was to place guns and gun crews on all the mercantile vessels. Even some
of the old British merchant salts maintained this view. "Give us a gun,
and we'll take care of the submarines all right," they kept saying to
the Admiralty. But the idea was fundamentally fallacious. In the
American Congress, just prior to the declaration of war, the arming of
merchant ships became a great political issue; scores of pages in the
_Congressional Record_ are filled with debates on this subject, yet, so
far as affording any protection to shipping was concerned, all this was
wasted oratory. Those who advocated arming the merchant ships as an
effective method of counteracting submarine campaigns had simply failed
to grasp the fundamental elements of submarine warfare. They apparently
did not understand the all-important fact that the quality which makes
the submarine so difficult to deal with is its invisibility. The great
political issue which was involved in the submarine controversy, and the
issue which brought the United States into the war, was that the Germans
were sinking merchant ships without warning. And it was because of this
very fact--this sinking without warning--that a dozen guns on a merchant
ship afforded practically no protection. The lookout on a merchantman
could not see the submarine, for the all-sufficient reason that the
submarine was concealed beneath the water; it was only by a happy chance
that the most penetrating eye could detect the periscope, provided that
one were exposed. The first intimation which was given the merchantman
that a U-boat was in his neighbourhood was the explosion of the torpedo
in his hull. In six weeks, in the spring and early summer of 1917,
thirty armed merchantmen were torpedoed and sunk off Queenstown, and in
no case was a periscope or a conning-tower seen. The English never
trusted their battleships at sea without destroyer escort, and certainly
if a battleship with its powerful armament could not protect itself from
submarines, it was too much to expect that an ordinary armed
merchantman would be able to do so. I think the fact that few American
armed ships were attacked and sunk in 1917 created the impression that
their guns afforded them some protection. But the apparent immunity
extended to them was really policy on Germany's part. She expected, as I
have said, that she would win the war long before the United States
could play an effective role in the struggle. It was therefore good
international politics to refrain from any unnecessary acts that would
still further embitter the American people against her. There was also a
considerable pacifist element in our country which Germany was coddling
in the hope of preventing the United States from using against her such
forces as we already had at hand. The reason American armed merchantmen
were not sunk was simply because they were not seriously attacked; I
have already shown how easily Germany could have sunk them if she had
really tried. Any reliance upon armed guards as a protection against
submarines would have been fundamentally a mistake, for the additional
reason that it was a defensive measure; it must be apparent that the
extremely grave situation which we were then facing demanded the most
energetic offensive methods. Yet the arming of merchant ships was
justified as a minor measure. It accomplished the one important end of
forcing the submarine to submerge and to use torpedoes instead of
gunfire. In itself this was a great gain; obviously the Germans would
much prefer to sink ships with projectiles than with torpedoes, for
their supply of these latter missiles was limited.[3]

In April, 1917, the British navy was fighting the submarine mainly in
two ways: it was constantly sowing mines off the entrance to the
submarine bases, such as Ostend and Zeebrugge, and in the Heligoland
Bight--operations that accomplished little, for the Germans swept them
up almost as fast as they were planted; and it was patrolling the
submarine infested area with anti-submarine craft. The Admiralty was
depending almost exclusively upon this patrol, yet this, the only means
which then seemed to hold forth much promise of defeating the submarine,
was making little progress.

For this patrol the navy was impressing into service all the destroyers,
yachts, trawlers, sea-going tugs, and other light vessels which could
possibly be assembled; almost any craft which could carry a wireless, a
gun, and depth charges was boldly sent to sea. At this time the vessel
chiefly used was the destroyer. The naval war had demonstrated that the
submarine could not successfully battle with the destroyer; that any
U-boat which came to the surface within fighting range of this alert and
speedy little surface ship ran great risk of being sunk. This is the
fundamental fact--that the destruction of the submarine was highly
probable, in case the destroyer could get a fair chance at her--which
regulated the whole anti-submarine campaign. It is evident, therefore,
that a proper German strategy would consist in so disposing its
submarines that they could conduct their operations with the minimum
risk of meeting their most effective enemies, while a properly conceived
Allied strategy would consist in so controlling the situation that the
submarines would have constantly to meet them. Frankness compels me to
say that, in the early part of 1917, the Germans were maintaining the
upper hand in this strategic game; they were holding the dominating
position in the campaign, since they were constantly attacking Allied
shipping without having to meet the Allied destroyers, while the Allied
destroyers were dispersing their energies over the wide waste of waters.
But the facts in the situation, and not any superior skill on the part
of the German navy, were giving the submarines this advantage. The
British were most heroically struggling against the difficulties imposed
by the mighty task which they had assumed. The British navy, like all
other navies, was only partially prepared for this type of warfare; in
1917 it did not possess destroyers enough both to guard the main
fighting fleet and to protect its commerce from submarines. Up to 1914,
indeed, it was expected that the destroyers would have only one function
to perform in warfare, that of protecting the great surface vessels from
attack, but now the new kind of warfare which Germany was waging on
merchant ships had laid upon the destroyer an entirely new
responsibility; and the plain fact is that the destroyers, in the number
which were required, did not exist.

The problem which proved so embarrassing can be stated in the simple
terms of arithmetic. Everything, as I have said, reduced itself to the
question of destroyers. In April, 1917, the British navy had in
commission about 200 ships of this indispensable type; many of them were
old and others had been pretty badly worn and weakened by three years of
particularly racking service. It was the problem of the Admiralty to
place these destroyers in those fields in which they could most
successfully serve the Allied cause. The one requirement that
necessarily took precedence over all others was that a flotilla of at
least 100 destroyers must be continuously kept with the Grand Fleet,
ready to go into action at a moment's notice. It is clear from this
statement of the case that the naval policy of the Germans, which
consisted in holding their high seas battle fleet in harbour and in
refusing to fight the Allied navy, had an important bearing upon the
submarine campaign. So long as there was the possibility of such an
engagement, the British Grand Fleet had to keep itself constantly
prepared for such a crisis; and an indispensable part of this
preparation was to maintain always in readiness its flotilla of
protecting destroyers. Had the German fleet seriously engaged in a great
sea battle, it would have unquestionably been defeated; such a defeat
would have meant an even greater disaster than the loss of the
battleships, a loss which in itself would not greatly have changed the
naval situation. But the really fatal effect of such a defeat would have
been that it would no longer have been necessary for the British to
sequestrate a hundred or more destroyers at Scapa Flow. The German
battleships would have been sent to the bottom, and then these
destroyers would have been used in the warfare against the submarines.
By keeping its dreadnought fleet intact, always refusing to give battle
and yet always threatening an engagement, the Germans thus were penning
up 100 British destroyers in the Orkneys--destroyers which otherwise
might have done most destructive work against the German submarines off
the coast of Ireland. The mere fact that the German High Seas Fleet had
once engaged the British Grand Fleet off Jutland was an element in the
submarine situation, for this constantly suggested the likelihood that
the attempt might be repeated, and was thus an influence which tended to
keep these destroyers at Scapa Flow. Many times during that critical
period the Admiralty discussed the question of releasing those
destroyers, or a part of them, for the anti-submarine campaign; yet they
always decided, and they decided wisely, against any such hazardous
division. At that time the German dreadnought fleet was not immeasurably
inferior in numbers to the British; it had a protecting screen of about
100 destroyers; and it would have been madness for the British to have
gone into battle with its own destroyer screen placed several hundred
miles away, off the coast of Ireland. I lay stress upon this
circumstance because I find that in America the British Admiralty has
been criticized for keeping a large destroyer force with the Grand
Fleet, instead of detaching them for battle with the submarine. I think
that I have made clear that this criticism is based upon a misconception
of the whole naval campaign. Without this destroyer screen the British
Grand Fleet might have been destroyed by the Germans; if the Grand Fleet
had been destroyed, the war would have ended in the defeat of the
Allies; not to have maintained these destroyers in northern waters would
thus have amounted simply to betraying the cause of civilization and to
making Germany a free gift of victory.

Germany likewise practically immobilized a considerable number of
British destroyers by attacking hospital ships. When the news of such
dastardly attacks became known, it was impossible for Americans and
Englishmen to believe at first that they were intentional; they so
callously violated all the rules of warfare and all the agreements for
lessening the horrors of war to which Germany herself had become a party
that there was a tendency in both enlightened countries to give the
enemy the benefit of the doubt. As a matter of fact, not only were the
submarine attacks on hospital ships deliberate, but Germany had
officially informed us that they would be made! The reasons for this
warning are clear enough; again, the all-important role which the
destroyers were playing in anti-submarine warfare was the point at
issue. Until we received such warning, hospital ships had put to sea
unescorted by warships, depending for their safety upon the rules of the
Hague Conference. Germany attacked these ships in order to make us
escort them with destroyers, and thereby compel us to divert these
destroyers from the anti-submarine campaign. And, of course, England
was forced to acquiesce in this German programme. Had the Anglo-Saxon
mind resembled the Germanic in all probability we should have accepted
the logic of the situation; we should have refused to be diverted from
the great strategic purpose which meant winning the war--that is,
protecting merchant shipping; in other words, we should have left the
hospital ships to their fate, and justified ourselves and stilled our
consciences by the principle of the greater good. But the British and
the American minds do not operate that way; it was impossible for us to
leave sick and wounded men as prey to submarines. Therefore, after
receiving the German warning, backed up, as it was, by the actual
destruction of unprotected hospital ships, we began providing them with
destroyer escorts. This greatly embarrassed us in the anti-submarine
campaign, for at times, especially during the big drives, we had a large
number of hospital ships to protect. As soon as we adopted this policy,
Germany, having attained her end, which was to keep the destroyers out
of the submarine area, stopped attacking sick and wounded soldiers. Yet
we still were forced to provide these unfortunates with destroyer
escorts, for, had we momentarily withdrawn these protectors, the German
submarines would immediately have renewed their attacks on hospital
ships.

Not only was the British navy at that time safeguarding the liberties of
mankind at sea, but its army in France was doing its share in
safeguarding them on land. And the fact that Britain had to support this
mighty army had its part in making British shipping at times almost an
easy prey for the German submarines. For next in importance to
maintaining the British Grand Fleet intact it was necessary to keep
secure the channel crossing. Over this little strip of water were
transported the men and the supplies from England to France that kept
the German army at bay; to have suspended these communications, even for
a brief period, would have meant that the Germans would have captured
Paris, overrun the whole of France, and ended the war, at least the war
on land. In the course of four years Great Britain transported about
20,000,000 people across the Channel without the loss of a single soul.
She accomplished this only by constantly using many destroyers and other
light surface craft as escorts for the transports. But this was not the
only responsibility of the kind that rested on the overburdened British
shoulders. There was another part of the seas in which, for practical
and political reasons, the British destroyer fleet had to do protective
duty. In the Mediterranean lay not only the trade routes to the East,
but also the lines of supply which extended to Italy, to Egypt, to
Palestine, and to Mesopotamia. If Germany could have cut off Italy's
food and materials Italy would have been forced to withdraw from the
war. The German and Austrian submarines, escaping from Austria's
Adriatic ports, were constantly assailing this commerce, attempting to
do this very thing. Moreover, the success of the German submarine
campaign in these waters would have compelled the Allies to abandon the
Salonika expedition, which would have left the Central Powers absolute
masters of the Balkans and the Middle East. For these reasons it was
necessary to maintain a considerable force of destroyers in the
Mediterranean.

For the British navy it was therefore a matter of choice what areas she
would attempt to protect with her destroyer forces; the one thing that
was painfully apparent was that she could not satisfactorily safeguard
all the danger zones. With the inadequate force at her disposal it was
inevitable that certain areas should be left relatively open to the
U-boats; and the decision as to which ones these should be was simply a
matter of balancing the several conflicting interests. In April, 1917,
the Admiralty had decided to give the preference to the Grand Fleet, the
hospital ships, the Channel crossing, and the Mediterranean, practically
in the order mentioned. It is evident from these facts that nearly the
entire destroyer fleet must have been disposed in these areas. This
decision, all things considered, was the only one that was possible;
yet, after placing the destroyers in these selected areas, the great
zone of trans-Atlantic shipping, west and south of Ireland, vitally
important as it was, was necessarily left inadequately protected. So
desperate was the situation that sometimes only four or five British
destroyers were operating in this great stretch of waters; and I do not
think that the number ever exceeded fifteen. Inasmuch as that
represented about the number of German submarines in this same area, the
situation may strike the layman as not particularly desperate. But any
such basis of comparison is absurd. The destroyers were operating on the
surface in full view of the submarines; the submarines could submerge at
any time and make themselves invisible; and herein we have the reason
why the contest was so markedly unequal. But aside from all other
considerations, the method of warfare adopted by the Allies against the
U-boat was necessarily ineffective, but was the best that could be used
until sufficient destroyers became available to convoy shipping. The
so-called submarine patrol, under the circumstances which prevailed at
that time, could accomplish very little. This little fleet of destroyers
was based on Queenstown; from this port they put forth and patrolled the
English Channel and the waters about Ireland in the hope that a German
submarine would stick its nose above the waves. The central idea of the
destroyer patrol was this one of hunting; the destroyer could have sunk
any submarine or driven it away from shipping if the submarine would
only have made its presence known. But of course this was precisely what
the submarine declined to do. It must be evident to the merest novice
that four or five destroyers, rushing around hunting for submarines
which were lying a hundred feet or so under water, could accomplish very
little. The under-water boat could always see its surface enemy long
before it was itself seen and thus could save its life by the simple
process of submerging. It must also be clear that the destroyer patrol
could accomplish much only in case there were a very large number of
destroyers. We figured that, to make the patrol system work with
complete success, it would be necessary to have one destroyer for every
square mile. The area of the destroyer patrol off Queenstown comprised
about 25,000 square miles; it is apparent that the complete protection
of the trans-Atlantic trade routes would have taken about 25,000
destroyers. And the British, as I have said, had available anywhere from
four to fifteen in this area.

The destroyer flotilla being so small, it is not surprising that the
German submarines were making ducks and drakes of it. The map of the
sinkings which took place in April brings out an interesting fact:
numerous as these sinkings were, very few merchantmen were torpedoed, in
this month, at the entrance to the Irish Sea or in the English Channel.
These were the narrow waters where shipping was massed and where the
little destroyer patrol was intended to operate. The German submarines
apparently avoided these waters, and made their attacks out in the open
sea, sometimes two and three hundred miles west and south of Ireland.
Their purpose in doing this was to draw the destroyer patrol out into
the open sea and in that way to cause its dispersal. And these tactics
were succeeding. There were six separate steamship "lanes" by which the
merchantmen could approach the English Channel and the Irish Sea. One
day the submarines would attack along one of these lanes; then the
little destroyer fleet would rush to this scene of operations.
Immediately the Germans would depart and attack another route many miles
away; then the destroyers would go pell-mell for that location. Just as
they arrived, however, the U-boats would begin operating elsewhere; and
so it went on, a game of hide and seek in which the advantages lay all
on the side of the warships which possessed that wonderful ability to
make themselves unseen. At this period the submarine campaign and the
anti-submarine campaign was really a case of blindman's buff; the
destroyer could never see the enemy while the enemy could always see the
destroyer; and this is the reason that the Allies were failing and that
the Germans were succeeding.


IV

To show how serious the situation was, let me quote from the reports
which I sent to Washington during this period. I find statements like
these scattered everywhere in my despatches of the spring of 1917:

     "The military situation presented by the enemy submarine campaign
     is not only serious but critical."

     "The outstanding fact which cannot be escaped is that we are not
     succeeding, or in other words, that the enemy's campaign is proving
     successful."

     "The consequences of failure or partial failure of the Allied cause
     which we have joined are of such far-reaching character that I am
     deeply concerned in insuring that the part played by our country
     shall stand every test of analysis before the bar of history. The
     situation at present is exceedingly grave. If sufficient United
     States naval forces can be thrown into the balance at the present
     critical time and place there is little doubt that early success
     will be assured."

     "Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are
     losing the war."[4]

And now came another important question: What should the American naval
policy be in this crisis? There were almost as many conflicting opinions
as there were minds. Certain authorities believed that our whole North
Atlantic Fleet should be moved immediately into European waters. Such a
manoeuvre was not only impossible but it would have been strategically
very unwise; indeed such a disposition would have been playing directly
into Germany's hands. What naval experts call the "logistics" of the
situation immediately ruled this idea out of consideration. The one fact
which made it impossible to base the fleet in European waters at that
time was that we could not have kept it supplied, particularly with oil.
The German U-boats were making a particularly successful drive at
tankers with the result that England had the utmost difficulty in
supplying her fleet with this kind of fuel. It is indeed impossible to
exaggerate the seriousness of this oil situation. "Orders have just been
given to use three-fifths speed, except in case of emergency," I
reported to Washington on June 29th, referring to scarcity of oil. "This
simply means that the enemy is winning the war." It was lucky for us
that the Germans knew nothing about this particular disability. Had they
been aware of it, they would have resorted to all kinds of manoeuvres
in the attempt to keep the Grand Fleet constantly steaming at sea, and
in this way they might so have exhausted our oil supply as possibly to
threaten the actual command of the surface. Fortunately for the cause of
civilization, there were certain important facts which the German Secret
Service did not learn.

But this oil scarcity made it impossible to move the Atlantic Fleet into
European waters, at least at that time. Since most oil supplies were
brought from America, we simply could not have fuelled our
super-dreadnoughts in Europe in the spring and summer of 1917. Moreover,
if we had sent all our big ships to England we should have been obliged
to keep our destroyers constantly stationed with them ready for a great
sea action; and this would have completely fallen in with German plans,
for then these destroyers could not have been used against her
submarines. The British did indeed request that we send five
coal-burning ships to reinforce her fleet and give her that
preponderance which made its ascendancy absolutely secure, and these
ships were subsequently sent; but England could not have made provision
for our greatest dreadnoughts, the oil burners. Indeed our big ships
were of much greater service to the Allied cause stationed on this side
than they would have been if they had been located at a European base.
They were providing a reserve for the British fleet, precisely as our
armies in France were providing a reserve for the Allied armies; and
meanwhile this disposition made it possible for us to send their
destroyer escorts to the submarine zone, where they could participate in
the anti-submarine campaign. In American waters these big ships could be
kept in prime condition, for here they had an open, free sea for
training, and here they could also be used to train the thousands of new
men who were needed for the new ships constructed during the war.

I early took the stand that our forces should be considered chiefly in
the light of reinforcements to the Allied navies, and that, ignoring all
question of national pride and even what at first might superficially
seem to be national interest, we should exert such offensive power as we
possessed in the way that would best assist the Allies in defeating the
submarine. England's naval resources were much greater than ours; and
therefore, in the nature of the case, we could not expect to maintain
overseas anywhere near the number of ships which England had assembled;
consequently it should be our policy to use such available units as we
possessed to strengthen the weak spots in the Allied line. There were
those who believed that national dignity required that we should build
up an independent navy in European waters, and that we should operate it
as a distinct American unit. But that, I maintained, was not the way to
win the war. If we had adopted this course, we should have been
constructing naval bases and perfecting an organization when the
armistice was signed; indeed, the idea of operating independently of the
Allied fleet was not for a moment to be considered. There were others in
America who thought that it was unwise to put any part of our fleet in
European waters, in view of the dangers that might assail us on our own
coast. There was every expectation that Germany would send submarines to
the western Atlantic, where they could prey upon our shipping and could
possibly bombard our ports; I have already shown that she had submarines
which could make such a long voyage, and the strategy of the situation
in April and May, 1917, demanded that a move of this kind be made. The
predominant element in the submarine defence, as I have pointed out, was
the destroyer. The only way in which the United States could immediately
and effectively help the Allied navies was by sending our whole
destroyer flotilla and all our light surface craft at once. It was
Germany's part, therefore, to resort to every manoeuvre that would
keep our destroyer force on this side of the Atlantic. Such a
performance might be expected to startle our peaceful American
population and inspire a public demand for protection; and in this way
our Government might be compelled to keep all anti-submarine craft in
our own waters. I expected Germany to make such a demonstration
immediately and I therefore cautioned our naval authorities at
Washington not to be deceived. I pointed out that Germany could
accomplish practically nothing by sporadic attacks on American shipping
in American waters; that, indeed, if we could induce the German
Admiralty to concentrate all its submarine efforts on the American
coasts, and leave free the Irish Sea and the English Channel, the war
practically would be won for the Allies. Yet these facts were not
apparent to the popular mind in 1917, and I shall always think that
Germany made a great mistake in not sending submarines to the American
coast immediately on our declaration of war, instead of waiting until
1918. Such attacks, at that time, would have started a public demand for
protection which the Washington authorities might have had great
difficulty in resisting, and which might have actually kept our
destroyer fleet in American waters, to the great detriment of the Allied
cause. Germany evidently refrained from doing so for reasons which I
have already indicated--a desire to deal gently with the United States,
and in that way to delay our military preparations and win the war
without coming into bloody conflict with the American people.

There were others who thought it unwise to expose any part of our fleet
to the dangers of the European contest; their fear was that, if the
Allies should be defeated, we would then need all our naval forces to
protect the American coast. This point of view, of course, was not only
short-sighted and absurd, but it violated the fundamental principle of
warfare, which is that a belligerent must assail his enemy as quickly as
possible with the greatest striking power which he can assemble. Clearly
our national policy demanded that we should exert all the force we could
collect to make certain a German defeat. The best way to fight Germany
was not to wait until she had vanquished the Allies, but to join hands
with them in a combined effort to annihilate her military power on land
and sea. The situation which confronted us in April, 1917, was one which
demanded an immediate and powerful offensive; the best way to protect
America was to destroy Germany's naval power in European waters and thus
make certain that she could not attack us at home.

The fact is that few nations have ever been placed in so tragical a
position as that in which Great Britain found herself in the spring and
early summer of 1917. And I think that history records few spectacles
more heroic than that of the great British navy, fighting this hideous
and cowardly form of warfare in half a dozen places with pitifully
inadequate forces, but with an undaunted spirit which remained firm even
against the fearful odds which I have described. What an opportunity for
America! And it was perfectly apparent what we should do. It was our
duty immediately to place all our available anti-submarine craft in
those waters west and south of Ireland in which lay the pathways of the
shipping which meant life or death to the Allied cause--the area which
England, because almost endless demands were being made upon her navy in
other fields, was unable to protect.

The first four days in London were spent collecting all possible data; I
had no desire to alarm Washington unwarrantably, yet I also believed
that it would be a serious dereliction if all the facts were not
presented precisely as they were. I consulted practically everyone who
could give me essential details and wrote a cable despatch, filling four
foolscap pages, which furnished Washington with its first detailed
account of the serious state of the cause on which we had embarked.[5]

In this work I had the full co-operation of our Ambassador in London,
Mr. Walter Hines Page. Mr. Page's whole heart and mind were bound up in
the Allied cause; he was zealous that his country should play worthily
its part in this great crisis in history; and he worked unsparingly with
me to get the facts before our Government. A few days after sending a
despatch it occurred to me that a message from our Ambassador might give
emphasis to my own. I therefore wrote such a message and took it down to
Brighton, where the American Ambassador was taking a little rest. I did
not know just how strong a statement Mr. Page would care to become
responsible for, and so I did not make this statement quite as emphatic
as the circumstances justified.

Mr. Page took the paper and read it carefully. Then he looked up.

"It isn't strong enough," he said. "I think I can do better than this
myself."

He sat down and wrote the following cablegram which was immediately sent
to the President:

     From: Ambassador Page.
     To: Secretary of State.
     Sent: 27 April 1917.

     Very confidential for Secretary and President.

     There is reason for the greatest alarm about the issue of the war
     caused by the increasing success of the German submarines. I have
     it from official sources that during the week ending 22nd April, 88
     ships of 237,000 tons allied and neutral were lost. The number of
     vessels unsuccessfully attacked indicated a great increase in the
     number of submarines in action.

     This means practically a million tons lost every month till the
     shorter days of autumn come. By that time the sea will be about
     clear of shipping. Most of the ships are sunk to the westward and
     southward of Ireland. The British have in that area every available
     anti-submarine craft, but their force is so insufficient that they
     hardly discourage the submarines.

     The British transport of troops and supplies is already strained to
     the utmost, and the maintenance of the armies in the field is
     threatened. There is food enough here to last the civil population
     only not more than six weeks or two months.

     Whatever help the United States may render at any time in the
     future, or in any theatre of the war, our help is now more
     seriously needed in this submarine area for the sake of all the
     Allies than it can ever be needed again, or anywhere else.

     After talking over this critical situation with the Prime Minister
     and other members of the Government, I cannot refrain from most
     strongly recommending the immediate sending over of every destroyer
     and all other craft that can be of anti-submarine use. This seems
     to me the sharpest crisis of the war, and the most dangerous
     situation for the Allies that has arisen or could arise.

     If enough submarines can be destroyed in the next two or three
     months the war will be won, and if we can contribute effective help
     immediately it will be won directly by our aid. I cannot exaggerate
     the pressing and increasing danger of this situation. Thirty or
     more destroyers and other similar craft sent by us immediately
     would very likely be decisive.

     There is no time to be lost.

PAGE.

But Mr. Page and I thought that we had not completely done our duty even
after sending these urgent messages. Whatever might happen, we were
determined that it could never be charged that we had not presented the
Allied situation in its absolutely true light. It seemed likely that an
authoritative statement from the British Government would give added
assurance that our statements were not the result of panic, and with
this idea in mind, Mr. Page and I called upon Mr. Balfour, Foreign
Secretary, who, in response to our request, sent a despatch to
Washington describing the seriousness of the situation.

All these messages made the same point: that the United States should
immediately assemble all its destroyers and other light craft, and send
them to the port where they could render the greatest service in the
anti-submarine campaign--Queenstown.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The statements published were not false, but they were inconclusive
and intentionally so. They gave the number of British ships sunk, but
not their tonnage, and not the total losses of British, Allied, and
neutral tonnage.

[2] See Appendices II and III for my cable and letter to the Navy
Department, explaining the submarine situation in detail.

[3] See Appendix IV for my statement to Washington on arming merchant
ships.

[4] For specimens of my reports to the Navy Department in these early
days see Appendices II and III.

[5] See Appendix II.




CHAPTER II

THE RETURN OF THE "MAYFLOWER"


I

The morning of May 4, 1917, witnessed an important event in the history
of Queenstown. The news had been printed in no British or American
paper, yet in some mysterious way it had reached nearly everybody in the
city. A squadron of American destroyers, which had left Boston on the
evening of April 24th, had already been reported to the westward of
Ireland and was due to reach Queenstown that morning. At almost the
appointed hour a little smudge of smoke appeared in the distance,
visible to the crowds assembled on the hills; then presently another
black spot appeared, and then another; and finally these flecks upon the
horizon assumed the form of six rapidly approaching warships. The Stars
and Stripes were broken out on public buildings, on private houses, and
on nearly all the water craft in the harbour; the populace, armed with
American flags, began to gather on the shore; and the local dignitaries
donned their official robes to welcome the new friends from overseas.
One of the greatest days in Anglo-American history had dawned, for the
first contingent of the American navy was about to arrive in British
waters and join hands with the Allies in the battle against the forces
of darkness and savagery.

The morning was an unusually brilliant one. The storms which had tossed
our little vessels on the seas for ten days, and which had followed them
nearly to the Irish coast, had suddenly given way to smooth water and a
burst of sunshine. The long and graceful American ships steamed into the
channel amid the cheers of the people and the tooting of all harbour
craft; the sparkling waves, the greenery of the bordering hills, the
fruit trees already in bloom, to say nothing of the smiling and cheery
faces of the welcoming Irish people, seemed to promise a fair beginning
for our great adventure. "Welcome to the American colours," had been the
signal of the _Mary Rose_, a British destroyer which had been sent to
lead the Americans to their anchorage. "Thank you, I am glad of your
company," answered the Yankee commander; and these messages represented
the spirit of the whole proceeding. Indeed there was something in these
strange-looking American ships, quite unlike the British destroyers,
that necessarily inspired enthusiasm and respect. They were long and
slender; the sunlight, falling upon their graceful sides and steel
decks, made them brilliant objects upon the water; and their
business-like guns and torpedo tubes suggested efficiency and readiness.
The fact that they had reached their appointed rendezvous exactly on
time, and that they had sailed up the Queenstown harbour at almost
precisely the moment that preparations had been made to receive them,
emphasized this impression. The appearance of our officers on the decks
in their unfamiliar, closely fitting blouses, and of our men, in their
neat white linen caps, also at once won the hearts of the populace.

"Sure an' it's our own byes comin' back to us," an Irish woman remarked,
as she delightedly observed the unmistakably Gaelic countenances of a
considerable proportion of the crew. Indeed the natives of Queenstown
seemed to regard these American blue-jackets almost as their own. The
welcome provided by these people was not of a formal kind; they gathered
spontaneously to cheer and to admire. In that part of Ireland there was
probably not a family that did not have relatives or associations in the
United States, and there was scarcely a home that did not possess some
memento of America. The beautiful Queenstown Roman Catholic Cathedral,
which stood out so conspicuously, had been built very largely with
American dollars, and the prosperity of many a local family had the same
trans-Atlantic origin. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when
our sailors landed for a few hours' liberty many hands were stretched
out to welcome them. Their friends took them arm in arm, marched them to
their homes, and entertained them with food and drink, all the time
plying them with questions about friends and relatives in America. Most
of these young Americans with Irish ancestry had never seen Ireland,
but that did not prevent the warm-hearted people of Queenstown from
hailing them as their own. This cordiality was appreciated, for the trip
across the Atlantic had been very severe, with gales and rainstorms
nearly every day.

The senior officer in charge was Commander Joseph K. Taussig, whose
flagship was the _Wadsworth_. The other vessels of the division and
their commanding officers were the _Conyngham_, Commander Alfred W.
Johnson; the _Porter_, Lieutenant-Commander Ward K. Wortman; the
_McDougal_, Lieutenant-Commander Arther P. Fairfield; the _Davis_,
Lieutenant-Commander Rufus F. Zogbaum; and the _Wainwright_,
Lieutenant-Commander Fred H. Poteet. On the outbreak of hostilities
these vessels, comprising our Eighth Destroyer Division, had been
stationed at Base 2, in the York River, Virginia; at 7 P.M. of
April 6th, the day that Congress declared war on Germany, their
commander had received the following signal from the _Pennsylvania_, the
flagship of the Atlantic Fleet: "Mobilize for war in accordance with
Department's confidential mobilization plan of March 21st." From that
time events moved rapidly for the Eighth Division. On April 14th, the
very day on which I sent my first report on submarine conditions to
Washington, Commander Taussig received a message to take his flotilla to
Boston and there fit out for "long and distant service." Ten days
afterward he sailed, with instructions to go fifty miles due east of
Cape Cod and there to open his sealed orders. At the indicated spot
Commander Taussig broke the seal, and read the following document--a
paper so important in history, marking as it does the first instructions
any American naval or army officer had received for engaging directly in
hostilities with Germany, that it is worth quoting in full:

     NAVY DEPARTMENT

     Office of Naval Operations
     Washington, D. C.

     _Secret and Confidential_

     To: Commander, Eighth Division, Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet,
     U.S.S. _Wadsworth_, Flagship.

     Subject: Protection of commerce near the coasts of Great Britain
     and Ireland.

     1. The British Admiralty have requested the co-operation of a
     division of American destroyers in the protection of commerce near
     the coasts of Great Britain and France.

     2. Your mission is to assist naval operations of Entente Powers in
     every way possible.

     3. Proceed to Queenstown, Ireland. Report to senior British naval
     officer present, and thereafter co-operate fully with the British
     navy. Should it be decided that your force act in co-operation with
     French naval forces your mission and method of co-operation under
     French Admiralty authority remain unchanged.

     Route to Queenstown.

     Boston to latitude 50 N--Long. 20 W to arrive at daybreak then to
     latitude 50 N--Long. 12 W thence to Queenstown.

     When within radio communication of the British naval forces off
     Ireland, call G CK and inform the Vice-Admiral at Queenstown in
     British general code of your position, course, and speed. You will
     be met outside of Queenstown.

     4. Base facilities will be provided by the British Admiralty.

     5. Communicate your orders and operations to Rear-Admiral Sims at
     London and be guided by such instructions as he may give you. Make
     no reports of arrival to Navy Department direct.

JOSEPHUS DANIELS.

No happier selection for the command of this division could have been
made than that of Commander Taussig. In addition to his qualities as a
sailor, certain personal associations made him particularly acceptable
to the British naval authorities. In 1900, Commander Taussig, then a
midshipman, was a member of the naval forces which the United States
sent to China to co-operate with other powers in putting down the Boxer
Rebellion and rescuing the besieged legations in Pekin. Near Tientsin
this international force saw its hardest fighting, and here Commander
Taussig was wounded. While recovering from his injury, the young
American found himself lying on a cot side by side with an English
captain, then about forty years old, who was in command of the
_Centurion_ and chief-of-staff to Admiral Seymour, who had charge of the
British forces. This British officer was severely wounded; a bullet had
penetrated his lung, and for a considerable period he was unable to lie
down. Naturally this enforced companionship made the two men friends.
Commander Taussig had had many occasions to recall this association
since, for his wounded associate was Captain John R. Jellicoe, whose
advancement in the British navy had been rapid from that day onward. On
this same expedition Captain Jellicoe became a sincere friend also of
Captain McCalla, the American who commanded the _Newark_ and the
American landing force; indeed, Jellicoe's close and cordial association
with the American navy dates from the Boxer expedition. Naturally
Taussig had watched Jellicoe's career with the utmost interest; since he
was only twenty-one at the time, however, and the Englishman was twice
his age, it had never occurred to him that the First Sea Lord would
remember his youthful hospital companion. Yet the very first message he
received, on arriving in Irish waters, was the following letter, brought
to him by Captain Evans, the man designated by the British Admiralty as
liaison officer with the American destroyers:

     ADMIRALTY, WHITEHALL
     1-5-17.

     MY DEAR TAUSSIG:

     I still retain very pleasant and vivid recollections of our
     association in China and I am indeed delighted that you should have
     been selected for the command of the first force which is coming to
     fight for freedom, humanity, and civilization. We shall all have
     our work cut out to subdue piracy. My experience in China makes me
     feel perfectly convinced that the two nations will work in the
     closest co-operation, and I won't flatter you by saying too much
     about the value of your help. I must say this, however. There is no
     navy in the world that can possibly give us more valuable
     assistance, and there is no personnel in any navy that will fight
     better than yours. My China experience tells me this.

     If only my dear friend McCalla could have seen this day how glad I
     would have been!

     I must offer you and all your officers and men the warmest welcome
     possible in the name of the British nation and the British
     Admiralty, and add to it every possible good wish from myself. May
     every good fortune attend you and speedy victory be with us.

     Yours very sincerely,
     J. R. JELLICOE.

At this same meeting Captain Evans handed the American commander another
letter which was just as characteristic as that of Admiral Jellicoe. The
following lines constitute our officers' first introduction to
Vice-Admiral Bayly, the officer who was to command their operations in
the next eighteen months, and, in its brevity, its entirely
business-like qualities, as well as in its genuine sincerity and
kindness, it gave a fair introduction to the man:

     ADMIRALTY HOUSE,
     QUEENSTOWN,
     4-5-17.

     DEAR LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER TAUSSIG:

     I hope that you and the other five officers in command of the U.S.
     destroyers in your flotilla will come and dine here to-night,
     Friday, at 7.45, and that you and three others will remain to sleep
     here so as to get a good rest after your long journey. Allow me to
     welcome you and to thank you for coming.

     Yours sincerely,
     LEWIS BAYLY.

     Dine in undress; no speeches.


The first duty of the officers on arrival was to make the usual
ceremonial calls. The Lord Mayor of Cork had come down from his city,
which is only twelve miles from Queenstown, to receive the Americans,
and now awaited them in the American consulate; and many other citizens
were assembled there to welcome them. One of the most conspicuous
features of the procession was the moving picture operator, whose
presence really had an international significance. The British
Government itself had detailed him for this duty; it regarded the
arrival of our destroyers as a great historical event and therefore
desired to preserve this animated record in the official archives.
Crowds gathered along the street to watch and cheer our officers as they
rode by; and at the consulate the Lord Mayor, Mr. Butterfield, made an
eloquent address, laying particular emphasis upon the close friendship
that had always prevailed between the American and the Irish people.
Other dignitaries made speeches voicing similar sentiments. This welcome
concluded, Commander Taussig and his brother officers started up the
steep hill that leads to Admiralty House, a fine and spacious old
building.

Here, following out the instructions of the Navy Department, they were
to report to Vice-Admiral Bayly for duty. It is doing no injustice to
Sir Lewis to say that our men regarded this first meeting with some
misgiving. The Admiral's reputation in the British navy was well known
to them. They knew that he was one of the ablest officers in the
service; but they had also heard that he was an extremely exacting man,
somewhat taciturn in his manner, and not inclined to be over familiar
with his subordinates--a man who did not easily give his friendship or
his respect, and altogether, in the anxious minds of these ambitious
young Americans, he was a somewhat forbidding figure. And the appearance
of the Admiral, standing in his doorway awaiting their arrival, rather
accentuated these preconceptions. He was a medium-sized man, with
somewhat swarthy, weather-beaten face and black hair just turning grey;
he stood there gazing rather quizzically at the Americans as they came
trudging up the hill, his hands behind his back, his bright eyes keenly
taking in every detail of the men, his face not showing the slightest
trace of a smile. This struck our young men at first as a somewhat grim
reception; the attitude of the Admiral suggested that he was slightly in
doubt as to the value of his new recruits, that he was entirely willing
to be convinced, but that only deeds and not fine speeches of greeting
would convince him. Yet Admiral Bayly welcomed our men with the utmost
courtesy and dignity, and his face, as he began shaking hands, broke
into a quiet, non-committal smile; there was nothing about his manner
that was effusive, there were no unnecessary words, yet there was a real
cordiality that put our men at ease and made them feel at home in this
strange environment. They knew, of course, that they had come to
Ireland, not for social diversions, but for the serious business of
fighting the Hun, and that indeed was the only thought which could then
find place in Admiral Bayly's mind. Up to this time the welcome to the
Americans had taken the form of lofty oratorical flights, with emphasis
upon the blood ties of Anglo-Saxondom, and the significance to
civilization of America and Great Britain fighting side by side; but
this was not the kind of a greeting our men received from Admiral Bayly.
The Admiral himself, with his somewhat worn uniform and his lack of
ceremony, formed a marked contrast to the official reception by the
Lord Mayor and his suite in their insignia of office. Entirely
characteristic also was the fact that, instead of making a long speech,
he made no speech at all. His chief interest in the Americans at that
time was the assistance which they were likely to bring to the Allied
cause; after courteously greeting the officers, the first question he
asked about these forces was:

"When will you be ready to go to sea?"

Even under the most favourable conditions that is an embarrassing
question to ask of a destroyer commander. There is no type of ship that
is so chronically in need of overhauling. Even in peace times the
destroyer usually has under way a long list of repairs; our first
contingent had sailed without having had much opportunity to refit, and
had had an extremely nasty voyage. The fact was that it had been rather
severely battered up, although the flotilla was in excellent condition,
considering its hard experience on the ocean and the six months of hard
work which it had previously had on our coast. One ship had lost its
fire-room ventilator, another had had condenser troubles on the way
across, and there had been other difficulties. Commander Taussig,
however, had sized up Admiral Bayly as a man to whom it would be a
tactical error to make excuses, and promptly replied:

"We are ready now, sir, that is, as soon as we finish refuelling. Of
course you know how destroyers are--always wanting something done to
them. But this is war, and we are ready to make the best of things and
go to sea immediately."

The Admiral was naturally pleased with the spirit indicated by this
statement, and, with his customary consideration for his juniors, said:

"I will give you four days from the time of arrival. Will that be
sufficient?"

"Yes," answered Taussig, "that will be more than ample time."

As we discovered afterward, the Admiral had a system of always "testing
out" new men, and it is not improbable that this preliminary interview
was a part of this process.

During the period of preparation there were certain essential
preliminaries: it was necessary to make and to receive many calls, a
certain amount of tea drinking was inevitable, and there were many
invitations to dinners and to clubs that could not be ignored. Our
officers made a state visit to Cork, going up in Admiral Bayly's barge,
and returned the felicitations of the Mayor and his retinue.

Naturally both the Americans and their ships became objects of great
interest to their new allies. It was, I think, the first time that a
destroyer flotilla had ever visited Great Britain, and the very
appearance of the vessels themselves aroused the greatest curiosity.
They bore only a general resemblance to the destroyers of the British
navy. The shape of their hulls, the number and location of smoke pipes,
the positions of guns, torpedo tubes, bridges, deckhouse, and other
details gave them quite a contrasting profile. The fact that they were
designed to operate under different conditions from the British ships
accounted for many of these divergences. We build our destroyers with
the widest possible cruising radius; they are expected to go to the West
Indies, to operate from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and in general to
feel at home anywhere in the great stretch of waters that surround our
country. British destroyers, on the other hand, are intended to operate
chiefly in the restricted waters around the British Isles, where the
fuelling and refitting facilities are so extensive that they do not have
to devote much space to supplies of this kind. The result is that our
destroyers can keep the sea longer than the British; on the other hand,
the British are faster than ours, and they can also turn more quickly.
These differences were of course a subject of much discussion among the
observers at Queenstown, and even of animated argument. Naturally, the
interest of the destroyer officers of the two services in the respective
merits of their vessels was very keen. They examined minutely all
features that were new to them in the design and arrangement of guns,
torpedoes, depth charges, and machines, freely exchanged information,
and discussed proposed improvements in the friendliest possible spirit.
Strangely enough, although the American destroyers carried greater fuel
supplies than the British, they were rather more dainty and graceful in
their lines, a fact which inspired a famous retort which rapidly passed
through the ranks of both navies.

"You know," remarked a British officer to an American, "I like the
British destroyers better than the American. They look so much sturdier.
Yours seem to me rather feminine in appearance."

"Yes," replied the American, "that's so, but you must remember what
Kipling says, 'The female of the species is more deadly than the male.'"

The work of the Americans really began on the Sunday which followed
their arrival; by this time they had established cordial relations with
Admiral Bayly and were prepared to trust themselves unreservedly in his
hands. He summoned the officers on this Sunday morning and talked with
them a few moments before they started for the submarine zone; the time
of their departure had been definitely fixed for the next day. In the
matter of ceremonial greetings the Admiral was not strong, but when it
came to discussing the business in hand he was the master of a
convincing eloquence. The subject of his discourse was the
responsibility that lay before our men; he spoke in sharp, staccato
tones, making his points with the utmost precision, using no verbal
flourishes or unnecessary words--looking at our men perhaps a little
fiercely, and certainly impressing them with the fact that the work
which lay before them was to be no summer holiday. As soon as the
destroyers passed beyond the harbour defences, the Admiral began, death
constantly lay before the men until they returned. There was only one
safe rule to follow; days and even weeks might go by without seeing a
submarine, but the men must assume that one was constantly watching
them, looking for a favourable opportunity to discharge its torpedo.
"You must not relax attention for an instant, or you may lose an
opportunity to destroy a submarine or give her a chance to destroy you."
It was the present intention to send the American destroyers out for
periods of six days, giving them two days' rest between trips, and about
once a month they were to have five days in port for boiler cleaning.
And now the Admiral gave some details about the practical work at sea.
Beware, he said, about ramming periscopes; these were frequently mere
decoys for bombs and should be shelled. In picking up survivors of
torpedoed vessels the men must be careful not to stop until thoroughly
convinced that there were no submarines in the neighbourhood: "You must
not risk the loss of your vessel in order to save the lives of a few
people."

The Admiral proclaimed the grim philosophy of this war when he told our
men that it would be their first duty, should they see a ship torpedoed,
not to go to the rescue of the survivors, but to go after the submarine.
The three imperative duties of the destroyers were, in the order named:
first, to destroy submarines; second, to convoy and protect merchant
shipping; and third, to save the lives of the passengers and crews of
torpedoed ships. No commander should ever miss an opportunity to destroy
a submarine merely because there were a few men and women in small boats
or in the water who might be saved. Admiral Bayly explained that to do
this would be false economy: sinking a submarine meant saving far more
lives than might be involved in a particular instance, for this vessel,
if spared, would simply go on constantly destroying human beings. The
Admiral then gave a large number of instructions in short, pithy
sentences: "Do not use searchlights; do not show any lights whatever at
night; do not strike any matches; never steam at a slower rate than
thirteen knots; always zigzag, thereby preventing the submarine from
plotting your position; always approach a torpedoed vessel with the sun
astern; make only short signals; do not repeat the names of vessels;
carefully watch all fishing vessels--they may be submarines in
disguise--they even put up masts, sails, and funnels in this attempt to
conceal their true character." The Admiral closed his remarks with a
warning based upon his estimate of the character and methods of the
enemy. In substance he said that were it not for the violations of the
dictates of humanity and the well-established chivalry of the sea, he
would have the greatest respect for the German submarine commanders. He
cautioned our officers not to underrate them, and particularly
emphasized their cleverness at what he termed "the art of irregularity."
He explained this by saying that up to that time he had been unable to
deduce from their operations any definite plan or tactics, and advised
our commanders also to guard against any regularity of movement; they
should never, for example, patrol from one corner to another of their
assigned squares in the submarine zone, or adopt any other uniform
practice which the enemy might soon perceive and of which he would
probably take advantage.

At the very moment that Admiral Bayly was giving these impressive
instructions the submarine campaign had reached its crisis; the fortunes
of the Allies had never struck so low a depth as at that time. An
incident connected with our arrival, not particularly important in
itself, brought home to our men the unsleeping vigilance of the enemy
with whom they had to deal.

Perhaps the Germans did not actually have advance information of the
arrival of this first detachment of our destroyers; but they certainly
did display great skill in divining what was to happen. At least it was
a remarkable coincidence that for the first time in many months a
submarine laid a mine-field directly off the entrance to Queenstown the
day before our ships arrived. Soon afterward a parent ship of the
destroyers reached this port and encountered the same welcome; and soon
after that a second parent ship found a similar mine-field awaiting her
arrival. The news that our destroyers had reached Queenstown actually
appeared in the German papers several days before we had released it in
the British and American press. Thanks to the vigilance and efficiency
of the British mine-sweepers, however, the enemy gained nothing from all
these preparations, for the channel was cleared of German mines before
our vessels reached port.

The night before the destroyers arrived, while some of the officers of
my staff were dining with Admiral Bayly, the windows were shaken by
heavy explosions made by the mines which the sweepers were dragging out.
Admiral Bayly jokingly remarked that it was really a pity to interfere
with such a warm welcome as had apparently been planned for our
crusaders. Even the next night, while the destroyer officers were dining
at Admiralty House, several odd mines exploded outside the channel that
had been swept the previous day. This again impressed our men with the
fact that the game which they had now entered was quite a different
affair from their peace-time manoeuvres.

The Germans at that time were jubilant over the progress of their
submarine campaign and, indeed, they had good reason to be. The week
that our first flotilla reached Irish waters their submarines had
destroyed 240,000 tons of Allied shipping; if the sinking should keep
up at this rate, it meant losses of 1,000,000 tons a month and an early
German victory.

In looking over my letters of that period, I find many references that
picture the state of the official mind. All that time I was keeping
closely in touch with Ambassador Page, who was energetically seconding
all my efforts to bring more American ships across the Atlantic.

"It remains a fact," I wrote our Ambassador, "that at present the enemy
is succeeding and that we are failing. Ships are being sunk faster than
they can be replaced by the building facilities of the world. This
simply means that the enemy is winning the war. There is no mystery
about that. The submarines are rapidly cutting the Allies' lines of
communication. When they are cut, or sufficiently interfered with, we
must accept the enemy's terms."

Six days before our destroyers put in at Queenstown I sent this message
to Mr. Page:

     Allies do not now command the sea. Transport of troops and supplies
     strained to the utmost and the maintenance of the armies in the
     field is threatened.

Such, then, was the situation when our little destroyer flotilla first
went to sea to do battle with the submarine.


II

Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, who now became the commander of the American
destroyers at Queenstown, so far as their military operations were
concerned, had spent fifty years in the British navy, forty years of
this time actually at sea. This ripe experience, combined with a great
natural genius for salt water, had made him one of the most efficient
men in the service. In what I have already said, I may have given a
slightly false impression of the man; that he was taciturn, that he was
generally regarded as a hard taskmaster, that he never made friends at
the first meeting, that he was more interested in results than in
persons--all this is true; yet these qualities merely concealed what
was, at bottom, a generous, kindly, and even a warm-hearted character.
Admiral Bayly was so retiring and so modest that he seemed almost to
have assumed these exterior traits to disguise his real nature. When our
men first met the Admiral they saw a man who would exact their last
effort and accept no excuses for failure; when admitted to more intimate
association, however, they discovered that this weather-beaten sailor
had a great love for flowers, for children, for animals, for pictures,
and for books; that he was deeply read in general literature, in
history, and in science, and that he had a knowledge of their own
country and its institutions which many of our own officers did not
possess. Americans have great reason to be proud of the achievements of
their naval men, and one of the most praiseworthy was the fact that they
became such intimate friends of Admiral Bayly. For this man's nature was
so sincere that he could never bring himself to indulge in friendships
which he deemed unworthy. Early in his association with our men, he told
them bluntly that any success he and they might have in getting on
together would depend entirely upon the manner in which they performed
their work. If they acquitted themselves creditably, well and good; if
not, he should not hesitate to find fault with them. It is thus a
tribute to our officers that in a very short time they and Admiral Bayly
had established relations which were not only friendly but affectionate.
Not long after our destroyers arrived at Queenstown most of the British
destroyers left to reinforce the hard-driven flotillas in the Channel
and the North Sea, so that the destroyer forces at Queenstown under
Admiral Bayly became almost exclusively American, though they worked
with many British vessels--sloops, trawlers, sweepers, and mystery
ships, in co-operation with British destroyers and other vessels in the
north and other parts of Ireland. The Admiral watched over our ships and
their men with the jealous eye of a father. He always referred to his
command as "my destroyers" and "my Americans," and woe to anyone who
attempted to interfere with them or do them the slightest injustice!
Admiral Bayly would fight for them, against the combined forces of the
whole British navy, like a tigress for her cubs. He constantly had a
weather eye on Plymouth, the main base of the British destroyers, to see
that the vessels from that station did their fair share of the work.
Once or twice a dispute arose between an American destroyer commander
and a British; in such cases Admiral Bayly vigorously took the part of
the American. "You did perfectly right," he would say to our men, and
then he would turn all his guns against the interfering Britisher.
Relations between the young Americans and the experienced Admiral became
so close that they would sometimes go to him with their personal
troubles; he became not only their commander, but their confidant and
adviser.

There was something in these bright young chaps from overseas, indeed,
so different from anything which he had ever met before, that greatly
appealed to this seasoned Englishman. One thing that he particularly
enjoyed was their sense of humour. The Admiral himself had a keen wit
and a love of stories; and he also had the advantage, which was not
particularly common in England, of understanding American slang and
American anecdotes. There are certain stories which apparently only an
upbringing on American soil qualifies one to appreciate; yet Admiral
Bayly always instantly got the point. He even took a certain pride in
his ability to comprehend the American joke. One of the regular features
of life at Queenstown was a group of retired British officers--fine,
white-haired old gentlemen who could take no active part in the war but
who used to find much consolation in coming around to smoke their pipes
and to talk things over at Admiralty House. Admiral Bayly invariably
found delight in encouraging our officers to entertain these rare old
souls with American stories; their utter bewilderment furnished him
endless entertainment. The climax of his pleasure came when, after such
an experience, the old men would get the Admiral in a corner, and
whisper to him: "What in the world do they mean?"

The Admiral was wonderfully quick at repartee, as our men found when
they began "joshing" him on British peculiarities, for as naval attache
he had travelled extensively in the United States, had observed most of
our national eccentricities, and thus was able promptly "to come back."
In such contests our men did not invariably come off with all the
laurels. Yet, despite these modern tendencies, Admiral Bayly was a
conservative of the conservatives, having that ingrained British respect
for old things simply because they were old. An ancient British custom
requires that at church on Sundays the leading dignitary in each
community shall mount the reading desk and read the lessons of the day;
Admiral Bayly would perform this office with a simplicity and a
reverence which indicated the genuinely religious nature of the man. And
in smaller details he was likewise the ancient, tradition-loving Briton.
He would never think of writing a letter to an equal or superior officer
except in longhand; to use a typewriter for such a purpose would have
been profanation in his eyes. I once criticized a certain Admiral for
consuming an hour or so in laboriously penning a letter which could have
been dictated to a stenographer in a few minutes.

"How do you ever expect to win the war if you use up time this way?" I
asked.

"I'd rather lose the war," the Admiral replied, but with a twinkle in
his eye, "than use a typewriter to my chiefs!"

Our officers liked to chaff the Admiral quietly on this conservatism. He
frequently had a number of them to breakfast, and upon one such occasion
the question was asked as to why the Admiral ate an orange after
breakfast, instead of before, as is the custom in America.

"I can tell you why," said Commander Zogbaum.

"Well, why is it?" asked the Admiral.

"Because that's what William the Conqueror used to do."

"I can think of no better reason than that for doing it," the Admiral
promptly answered. But this remark tickled him immensely, and became a
byword with him. Ever afterward, whenever he proposed to do something
which the Americans regarded as too conservative, he would say:

"You know that this is what William the Conqueror used to do!"

Yet in one respect the Admiral was all American; he was a hard worker
even to the point of hustle. He insisted on the strictest attention to
the task in hand from his subordinates, but at least he never spared
himself. After he had arrived at Queenstown, two years before our
destroyers put in, he proceeded to reorganize Admiralty House on the
most business-like basis. The first thing he pounced upon was the
billiard-room in the basement. He decided that it would make an
excellent plotting-room, and that the billiard-tables could be
transformed into admirable drawing-boards for his staff; he immediately
called the superintendent and told him to make the necessary
transformations.

"All right," said the superintendent. "We'll start work on them
to-morrow morning."

"No, you won't," Admiral Bayly replied. "We propose to be established in
this room using these tables to-morrow morning. They must be all ready
for use by eight o'clock."

And he was as good as his word; the workmen spent the whole night making
the changes. At the expense of considerable personal comfort he also
caused one half of the parlour of Admiralty House to be partitioned off
as an office and the wall thus formed covered with war maps.

These incidents are significant, not only of Admiral Bayly's methods,
but of his ideals. In his view, if a billiard room could be made to
serve a war purpose, it had no proper place in an Admiralty house which
was the headquarters for fighting German submarines. The chief duty of
all men at that crisis was work, and their one responsibility was the
defeat of the Hun. Admiralty House was always open to our officers; they
spent many a delightful evening there around the Admiral's fire; they
were constantly entertained at lunch and at dinner, and they were
expected to drop in for tea whenever they were in port. But social
festivities in the conventional sense were barred. No ladies, except the
Admiral's relatives, ever visited the place. Some of the furnishings
were rather badly worn, but the Admiral would make no requisitions for
new rugs or chairs; every penny in the British exchequer, he insisted,
should be used to carry on the war. He was scornfully critical of any
naval officers who made a lavish display of silver on their tables;
money should be spent for depth charges, torpedoes, and twelve-inch
shells, not for ostentation. He was scrupulousness itself in observing
all official regulations in the matter of food and other essentials.

For still another reason the Admiral made an ideal commander of American
naval forces. He was a strict teetotaller. His abstention was not a war
measure; he had always had a strong aversion to alcohol in any form and
had never drank a cocktail or a brandy and soda in his life. Dinners at
Admiralty House, therefore, were absolutely "dry," and in perfect
keeping with American naval regulations.

Though Admiral Bayly was not athletic--his outdoor games being limited
to tip-and-run cricket in the Admiralty grounds, which he played with a
round bat and a tennis ball--he was a man of wiry physique and a
tireless walker. Indeed the most active young men in our navy had great
difficulty in keeping pace with him. One of his favourite diversions on
a Saturday afternoon was to take a group on a long tramp in the
beautiful country surrounding Queenstown; by the time the party reached
home, the Admiral, though sixty years old, was usually the freshest of
the lot. I still vividly remember a long walk which I took with him in a
pelting rain; I recall how keenly he enjoyed it and how young and nimble
he seemed to be when we reached home, drenched to the skin. A steep hill
led from the shore up to Admiralty House; Sir Lewis used to say that
this was a valuable military asset--it did not matter how angry a man
might be with him when he started for headquarters, by the time he
arrived, this wearisome climb always had the effect of quieting his
antagonism. The Admiral was fond of walking up this hill with our young
officers; he himself usually reached the top as fresh as a daisy, while
his juniors were frequently puffing for breath.

He enjoyed testing out our men in other ways; nothing delighted him more
than giving them hard jobs to do--especially when they accomplished the
tasks successfully. One day he ordered one of our officers,
Lieutenant-Commander Roger Williams, captain of the _Duncan_, a recent
arrival at Queenstown, to cross the Irish Sea and bring back a ship. The
joke lay in the fact that this man's destroyer had just come in with her
steering gear completely out of commission--a circumstance which Admiral
Bayly well understood. Many officers would have promptly asked to be
excused on this ground, but not this determined American. He knew that
the Admiral was trying to "put something over on him," and he rose to
the occasion. The fact that Queenstown Harbour is long and narrow, not
wide enough for a destroyer to turn around in, made Commander Williams's
problem still more difficult, but by cleverly using his engines, he
succeeded in backing out--the distance required was five miles; he took
another mile and a half to turn his ship and then he went across the sea
and brought back his convoy--all without any steering gear. This officer
never once mentioned to the Admiral the difficulties under which he had
worked, but his achievement completely won Sir Lewis's heart, and from
that time this young man became one of his particular favourites.
Indeed, it was the constant demonstration of this kind of fundamental
character in our naval men which made the Admiral admire them so.

On occasions Admiral Bayly would go to sea himself--something quite
unprecedented and possibly even reprehensible, for it was about the same
thing as a commanding general going into the front-line trenches. But
the Admiral believed that doing this now and then helped to inspire his
men; and, besides that, he enjoyed it--he was not made for a land
sailor. He had as flagship a cruiser of about 5,000 tons; he had a way
of jumping on board without the slightest ceremony and taking a cruise
up the west coast of Ireland. On occasion the Admiral would personally
lead an expedition which was going to the relief of a torpedoed vessel,
looking for survivors adrift in small boats. One day Admiral Bayly,
Captain Pringle of the U.S.S. _Melville_, Captain Campbell, the
Englishman whose exploits with mystery ships had given him worldwide
fame, and myself went out on the _Active_ to watch certain experiments
with depth charges. It was a highly imprudent thing to do, because a
vessel of such draft was an excellent target for torpedoes, but that
only added to the zest of the occasion from Admiral Bayly's point of
view.

"What a bag this would be for the Hun!" he chuckled. "The American
Commander-in-Chief, the British Admiral commanding in Irish waters, a
British and an American captain!"

In our mind's eye we could see our picture in the Berlin papers--four
distinguished prisoners standing in a row.

A single fact shows with what consideration Admiral Bayly treated his
subordinates. The usual naval regulation demands that an officer, coming
in from a trip, shall immediately seek out his commander and make a
verbal report. Frequently the men came in late in the evening, extremely
fatigued; to make the visit then was a hardship and might deprive them
of much-needed sleep. Admiral Bayly therefore had a fixed rule that
such visits should be made at ten o'clock of the morning following the
day of arrival. On such occasions he would often be found seated
somewhat grimly behind his desk wholly absorbed in the work in hand. If
he were writing or reading his mail he would keep steadily at it, never
glancing up until he had finished. He would listen to the report
stoically, possibly say a word of praise, and then turn again to the
business in hand. Occasionally he would notice that his abruptness had
perhaps pained the young American; then he would break into an
apologetic smile, and ask him to come up to dinner that evening, and
even--this was the greatest honour of all--to spend the night at
Admiralty House.

These dinners were great occasions for our men, particularly as they
were presided over by Miss Voysey, the Admiral's niece. Miss Voysey, the
little spaniel, Patrick, and the Admiral constituted the "family," and
the three were entirely devoted to one another. Pat in particular was an
indispensable part of this menage; I have never seen any object quite so
crestfallen and woe-begone as this little dog when either Miss Voysey or
the Admiral spent a day or two away from the house. Miss Voysey was a
young woman of great personal charm and cultivation; probably she was
the influence that most contributed to the happiness and comfort of our
officers at Queenstown. From the day of their arrival she entered into
the closest comradeship with the Americans. She kept open house for
them: she was always on hand to serve tea in the afternoon, and she
never overlooked an opportunity to add to their well-being. As a result
of her delightful hospitality Admiralty House really became a home for
our officers. Miss Voysey had a genuine enthusiasm for America and
Americans; possibly the fact that she was herself an Australian made her
feel like one of us; at any rate, there were certain qualities in our
men that she found extremely congenial, and she herself certainly won
all their hearts. Anyone who wishes to start a burst of enthusiasm from
our officers who were stationed at Queenstown need only to mention the
name of Miss Voysey. The dignity with which she presided over the
Admiral's house, and the success with which she looked out for his
comfort, also inspired their respect. Miss Voysey was the leader in all
the war charities at Queenstown, and she and the Admiral made it their
personal duty to look out for the victims of torpedoed ships. At
whatever hour these survivors arrived they were sure of the most
warm-hearted attentions from headquarters. In a large hall in the Custom
House at the landing the Admiral kept a stock of cigarettes and tobacco,
and the necessary gear and supplies for making and serving hot coffee at
short notice, and nothing ever prevented him and his people from
stationing themselves there to greet and serve the survivors as soon as
they arrived--often wet and cold, and sometimes wounded. Even though the
Admiral might be at dinner he and Miss Voysey would leave their meal
half eaten and hurry to the landing to welcome the survivors. The
Admiral and his officers always insisted on serving them, and they would
even wash the dishes and put them away for the next time. The Admiral,
of course, might have ordered others to do this work, but he preferred
to give this personal expression of a real seaman's sympathy for other
seamen in distress. It is unnecessary to say that any American officers
who could get there in time always lent a hand. I am sure that long
after most of the minor incidents of this war have faded from my memory,
I shall still keep a vivid recollection of this kindly gentleman,
Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., C.V.O., Royal Navy, serving
coffee to wretched British, American, French, Italian, Japanese, or
negro sailors, with a cheering word for each, and afterward, with
sleeves tucked up, calmly washing dishes in a big pan of hot water.

I have my fears that the Admiral will not be particularly pleased by the
fact that I have taken all these pains to introduce him to the American
public. Excessive modesty is one of his most conspicuous traits. When
American correspondents came to Queenstown, Admiral Bayly would receive
them courteously. "You can have all you want about the navy," he would
say, "but remember--not a word about Lewis Bayly." He was so reticent
that he was averse to having his picture taken; even the moving picture
operator detailed to get an historic record of the arrival of our
destroyers did not obtain a good view of the Admiral, for whenever Sir
Lewis saw him coming he would turn his back to the camera! My excuse for
describing this very lovable man, however, is because he became almost
an object of veneration to our American officers, and because, since for
eighteen months he was the commander of the American forces based on
Queenstown, he is an object of legitimate interest to the American
people. The fact that the Admiral was generally known to our officers as
"Uncle Lewis," and that some of those who grew to know him best even
called him that to his face, illustrates the delightful relations which
were established. Any account of the operations of our navy in the
European War would thus be sadly incomplete which ignored the splendid
sailor who was largely responsible for their success.

Another officer who contributed greatly to the efficiency of the
American forces was Captain E. R. G. R. Evans, R.N., who was detailed by
Admiral Jellicoe at my request to act as liaison officer with our
destroyers. No more fortunate selection could have been made. Captain
Evans had earned fame as second in command of the Scott Antarctic
expedition; he had spent much time in the United States and knew our
people well; indeed when war broke out he was lecturing in our country
on his polar experiences. A few days before our division arrived Captain
Evans had distinguished himself in one of the most brilliant naval
actions of the war. He was commander of the destroyer-leader _Broke_--a
"destroyer-leader" being a destroyer of unusually large size--and in
this battle three British vessels of this type had fought six German
destroyers. Captain Evans's ship sank one German destroyer and rammed
another, passing clear over its stern and cutting it nearly in two. The
whole of England was ringing with this exploit, and it was a decided
tribute to our men that Admiral Jellicoe consented to detail the
commander of the _Broke_. He was a man of great intelligence, great
energy, and, what was almost equally to the point, he was extremely
companionable; whether he was relating his experiences at the South
Pole, or telling us of active life on a destroyer, or swapping yarns
with our officers, or giving us the value of his practical experiences
in the war, Captain Evans was always at home with our men--indeed, he
seemed to be almost one of us.

The fact that these American destroyers were placed under the command of
a British admiral was somewhat displeasing to certain Americans. I
remember that one rather bumptious American correspondent, on a visit to
Queenstown, was loud in expressing his disapproval of this state of
affairs, and even threatened to "expose" us all in the American press.
The fact that I was specifically commissioned as destroyer commander
also confused the situation. Yet the procedure was entirely proper,
and, in fact, absolutely necessary. My official title was "Commander of
the U.S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters"; besides this, I was
the representative of our Navy Department at the British Admiralty and
American member of the Allied Naval Council. These duties required my
presence in London, which became the centre of all our operations. I was
commander not only of our destroyers at Queenstown, but of a destroyer
force at Brest, another at Gibraltar, of subchaser forces at Corfu and
Plymouth, of a mixed force at the Azores, of the American battle
squadrons at Scapa Flow and Berehaven, Ireland, certain naval forces at
Murmansk and Archangel in north Russia, and of many other contingents.
Clearly it was impossible for me to devote all my time exclusively to
any one of these commands; so far as actual operations were concerned it
was necessary that particular commanders should control them. All these
destroyer squadrons, including that at Queenstown, were under the
command of the American Admiral stationed in London; whenever they
sailed from Queenstown on specific duty, however, they sailed under
orders from Admiral Bayly. Any time, however, I could withdraw these
destroyers from Queenstown and send them where the particular
necessities required. My position, that is, was precisely the same as
that of General Pershing in France. He sent certain American divisions
to the British army; as long as they acted with the British they were
subject to the orders of Sir Douglas Haig; but General Pershing could
withdraw these men at any time for use elsewhere. The actual supreme
command of all our forces, army and navy, rested in the hands of
Americans; but, for particular operations, they naturally had to take
their orders from the particular officer under whom they were stationed.


III

On May 17th a second American destroyer flotilla of six ships arrived at
Queenstown. From that date until July 5th a new division put in nearly
every week. The six destroyers which escorted our first troopships from
America to France were promptly assigned to duty with our forces in
Irish waters. Meanwhile other ships were added. On May 22nd the
_Melville_, the "Mother Ship" of the destroyers, arrived and became the
flagship of all the American vessels which were stationed at
Queenstown. This repair and supply ship practically took the place of a
dockyard, so far as our destroyer forces were concerned. Queenstown had
been almost abandoned as a navy yard many years before the European War
and its facilities for the repair of warships were consequently very
inadequate. The _Melville_ relieved the British authorities of many
responsibilities of this kind. She was able to do three-quarters of all
this work, except major repairs and those which required docking. Her
resources for repairing destroyers, and for providing for the wants and
comforts of our men, aroused much admiration in British naval circles.
The rapidity with which our forces settled down to work, and the
seamanly skill which they manifested from the very beginning, likewise
made the most favourable impression. By July 5th we had thirty-four
destroyers at Queenstown--a force that remained practically at that
strength until November. In 1918 much of the work of patrolling the seas
and of convoying ships to the west and south of Ireland--the area which,
in many ways, was the most important field of submarine warfare--fell
upon these American ships. The officers and crews began this work with
such zest that by June 1st I was justified in making the following
statement to the Navy Department: "It is gratifying to be able to report
that the operations of our forces in these waters have proved not only
very satisfactory, but also of marked value to the Allies in overcoming
the submarine menace. The equipment and construction of our ships have
proved adequate and sufficient, and the personnel has shown an unusually
high degree of enthusiasm and ability to cope with the situation
presented."

It is impossible to exaggerate the enthusiasm which the arrival of these
vessels produced upon the British public. America itself experienced
something of a thrill when the news was first published that our
destroyers had reached European waters, but this was mild compared with
the joy which spread all over the British Isles. The feeling of
Americans was mainly one of pride; our people had not yet suffered much
from the European cataclysm, and despite the fact that we were now
active participants, the war still seemed very far off and unreal. The
fact that a German victory would greatly endanger our national freedom
had hardly entered our national consciousness; the idea seemed dim,
abstract, perhaps even absurd; but in Great Britain, with the guns
constantly booming almost within earshot of the people, the horrors of
the situation were acutely realized. For this reason those American
destroyers at Queenstown immediately became a symbol in the minds of the
British people. They represented not only the material assistance which
our limitless resources and our almost inexhaustible supply of men would
bring to a cause which was really in desperate straits; but they stood
also for a great spiritual fact; for the kinship of the two great
Anglo-Saxon peoples, which, although separated politically, had now
joined hands to fight for the ideals upon which the civilization of both
nations rested. In the preceding two years Great Britain had had her
moments of doubt--doubt as to whether the American people had remained
true to the principles that formed the basis of their national life; the
arrival of these ships immediately dispelled all such misgivings.

Almost instinctively the minds of the British people turned to the day,
nearly three hundred years before, when the _Mayflower_ sailed for the
wilderness beyond the seas. The moving picture film, which depicted the
arrival of our first destroyer division, and which was exhibited all
over Great Britain to enthusiastic crowds, cleverly accentuated this
idea. This film related how, in 1620, a few Englishmen had landed in
North America; how these adventurers had laid the foundations of a new
state based on English conceptions of justice and liberty; how they had
grown great and prosperous; how the stupidity of certain British
statesmen had forced them to declare their independence; how they had
fought for this independence with the utmost heroism; how out of these
disjointed British colonies they had founded one of the mightiest
nations of history; and how now, when the liberties of mankind were
endangered, the descendants of the old _Mayflower_ pioneers had in their
turn crossed the ocean--this time going eastward--to fight for the
traditions of their race. Had Americans been making this film, they
would have illustrated another famous episode in our history that
antedated, by thirteen years, the voyage of the _Mayflower_--that is,
the landing of British colonists in Virginia, in 1607; but in the minds
of the English people the name _Mayflower_ had become merely a symbol of
American progress and all that it represented. This whole story appealed
to the British masses as one of the great miracles of history--a
single, miserable little settlement in Massachusetts Bay expanding into
a continent overflowing with resources and wealth; a shipload of men,
women, and children developing, in less than three centuries, into a
nation of more than 100,000,000 people. And the arrival of our
destroyers, pictured on the film, informed the British people that all
this youth and energy had been thrown upon their side of the battle.

One circumstance gave a particular appropriateness to the fact that I
commanded these forces. In 1910 I had visited England as captain of the
battleship _Minnesota_, a unit in a fleet which was then cruising in
British and French waters. It was apparent even at that time that
preparations were under way for a European war; on every hand there were
plenty of evidences that Germany was determined to play her great stroke
for the domination of the world. In a report to the Admiral commanding
our division I gave it as my opinion that the great European War would
begin within four years. In a speech at the Guildhall, where 800 of our
sailors were entertained at lunch by the Lord Mayor, Sir Vezey Strong, I
used the words which involved me in a good deal of trouble at the time
and which have been much quoted since. The statement then made was
purely the inspiration of the moment; it came from the heart, not from
the head; probably the evidences that Germany was stealthily preparing
her great blow had something to do with my outburst. I certainly spoke
without any authorization from my Government, and realized at once that
I had committed a great indiscretion. "If the time should ever come," I
said, "when the British Empire is menaced by a European coalition, Great
Britain can rely upon the last ship, the last dollar, the last man, and
the last drop of blood of her kindred beyond the sea." It is not
surprising that the appearance of American ships, commanded by the
American who had spoken these words seven years before, strongly
appealed to the British sense of the dramatic. Indeed, it struck the
British people as a particularly happy fulfilment of prophecy. These
sentences were used as an introduction to the moving picture film
showing the arrival of our first destroyer division, and for weeks after
reaching England I could hardly pick up a newspaper without these words
of my Guildhall speech staring me in the face.

Of course, any American admiral then commanding American naval forces in
European waters would have been acclaimed as the living symbol of
Anglo-American co-operation; and it was simply as the representative of
the American people and the American navy that the British people
received me so appreciatively. At first the appearance of our uniforms
aroused much curiosity; our tightly fitting blouses were quite different
from the British sack coats, and few people in London, in fact, knew who
we were. After our photographs had appeared in the press, however, the
people always recognized us in the streets. And then something quite
unusual happened. That naval and military men should salute my staff and
me was to have been expected, but that civilians should show this
respect for the American uniform was really unprecedented. Yet we were
frequently greeted in this way. It indicated, almost more than anything
else, how deeply affected the British people were by America's entrance
into the war. All classes and all ages showed this same respect and
gratitude to our country. Necessarily I had to attend many public
dinners and even to make many speeches; the people gathered on such
occasions always rose _en masse_ as a tribute to the uniform which I
wore. Sometimes such meetings were composed of boy scouts, of schoolboys
or schoolgirls, of munition workers, of journalists, or of statesmen;
and all, irrespective of age or social station or occupation, seemed
delighted to pay respect to the American navy. There were many evidences
of interest in the "American Admiral" that were really affecting. Thus
one day a message came from Lady Roberts, widow of the great soldier,
Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, saying that she was desirous of meeting the
"American Admiral." I was very glad to go out in the country and spend a
Sunday afternoon with her. This charming, white-haired old lady was very
feeble, and had to spend most of her time in a wheel-chair. But her mind
was bright as ever, and she had been following the war with the closest
attention. She listened with keen interest as I told her all about the
submarines, and she asked innumerable questions concerning them. She was
particularly affected when she spoke about the part the United States
was playing in the war, and remarked how much our participation would
have delighted the Field-Marshal.

I have already given my first impressions of Their Majesties the King
and Queen, and time only confirmed them. Neither ever missed an
opportunity to show their appreciation of the part that we were playing.
The zeal with which the King entered into the celebration of our Fourth
of July made him very popular with all our men. He even cultivated a
taste for our national game. Certain of our early contingents of
soldiers encamped near Windsor; here they immediately laid out a
baseball diamond and daily engaged in their favourite sport. The Royal
Family used to watch our men at their play, became interested in the
game, and soon learned to follow it. The Duke of Connaught and the
Princess Patricia, his daughter, had learned baseball through their
several years' residence in Canada, and could watch a match with all the
understanding and enthusiasm of an American "fan." As our sailors and
soldiers arrived in greater numbers, the interest and friendliness of
the Royal Family increased. One of the King's most delightful traits is
his sense of humour. The Queen also showed a great fondness for stories,
and I particularly remember her amusement at the famous remark of the
Australians--perhaps the most ferocious combatants on the Western
Front--about the American soldier, "a good fighter, but a little rough."
Of all the anecdotes connected with our men, none delighted King George
so much as those concerning our coloured troops. A whole literature of
negro yarns spread rapidly over Europe; most of them, I find, have long
since reached the United States. The most lasting impression which I
retain of the head of the British Empire is that he is very much of a
human being. He loved just about the same things as the normal American
or Englishman loves--his family, his friends, his country, a good story,
a pleasant evening with congenial associates. And he had precisely the
same earnestness about the war which one found in every properly
constituted Briton or American; the victories of the Allies exhilarated
King George just as they exhilarated the man in the street, and their
defeats saddened him just as they saddened the humblest citizen. I found
in His Majesty that same solemn sense of comradeship with America which
I found in the English civilians who saluted the American uniform in the
street.

As an evidence of the exceedingly cordial relations existing between
the two navies the Admiralty proposed, in the latter part of May, that I
should assume Admiral Bayly's command for several days while he took a
little vacation on the west coast of Ireland. Admiral Bayly was the
Commander-in-Chief of all the British forces operating on the Irish
coast. This command thus included far more than that at Queenstown; it
comprised several naval stations and the considerable naval forces in
Irish waters. Never before, so I was informed, had a foreign naval
officer commanded British naval forces in time of war. So far as
exercising any control over sea operations was concerned, this
invitation was not particularly important. Matters were running smoothly
at the Queenstown station; Admiral Bayly's second in command could
easily have kept the machine in working order; it was hardly likely, in
the few days that I was to command, that any changes in policy would be
initiated. The British Admiralty merely took this way of showing a great
courtesy to the American navy, and of emphasizing to the world the
excellent relations that existed between the two services. The act was
intended to symbolize the fact that the British and the American navies
were really one in the thoroughness of their co-operation in subduing
the Prussian menace. Incidentally the British probably hoped that the
publication of this news in the German press would not be without effect
in Germany. On June 18th, therefore, I went to Queenstown, and hoisted
my flag on the staff in front of Admiralty House. I had some hesitation
in doing this, for American navy regulations stipulate that an Admiral's
flag shall be raised only on a ship afloat, but Admiral Bayly was
insistent that his flag should come down and that mine should go up, and
I decided that this technicality might be waived. The incident aroused
great interest in England, but it started many queer rumours in
Queenstown. One was that Admiral Bayly and I had quarrelled, the British
Admiral, strangely enough, having departed in high dudgeon and left me
serenely in control. Another was that I had come to Queenstown, seized
the reins out of Admiral Bayly's hands, thrown him out of the country,
and taken over the government of Ireland on behalf of the United States,
which had now determined to free the island from British oppression!
However, in a few days Admiral Bayly returned and all went on as
before.

During the nearly two years which the American naval forces spent in
Europe only one element in the population showed them any hostility or
even unfriendliness. At the moment when these lines are being written a
delegation claiming to represent the "Irish Republic" is touring the
United States, asking Americans to extend their sympathy and contribute
money toward the realization of their project. I have great admiration
for the mass of the Irish people, and from the best elements of these
people the American sailors received only kindness. I have therefore
hesitated about telling just how some members of the Sinn Fein Party
treated our men. But it seems that now when this same brotherhood is
attempting to stir up hatred in this country against our Allies in the
war, there is a certain pertinence in informing Americans just what kind
of treatment their brave sailors met with at the hands of the Sinn Fein
in Ireland.

The people of Queenstown and Cork, as already described, received our
men with genuine Irish cordiality. Yet in a few weeks evidence of
hostility in certain quarters became apparent. The fact is that the part
of Ireland in which the Americans were stationed was a headquarters of
the Sinn Fein. The members of this organization were not only openly
disloyal; they were openly pro-German. They were not even neutral; they
were working day and night for a German victory, for in their misguided
minds a German victory signified an Irish Republic. It was no secret
that the Sinn Feiners were sending information to Germany and constantly
laying plots to interfere with the British and American navies. At first
it might be supposed that the large number of sailors--and some
officers--of Irish extraction on the American destroyers would tend to
make things easier for our men. Quite the contrary proved to be the
case. The Sinn Feiners apparently believed that these so-called
Irish-Americans would sympathize with their cause; in their wildest
moments they even hoped that our naval forces might champion it. But
these splendid sailors were Americans before they were anything else;
their chief ambition was the defeat of the Hun and they could not
understand how any man anywhere could have any other aim in life. They
were disgusted at the large numbers of able-bodied men whom they saw in
the streets, and did not hesitate to ask some of them why they were not
fighting on the Western Front. The behaviour of the American sailors was
good; but the mere fact that they did not openly manifest a hatred of
Great Britain and a love of Germany infuriated the Sinn Feiners. And the
eternal woman question also played its part. Our men had much more money
than the native Irish boys, and could entertain the girls more lavishly
at the movies and ice-cream stands. The men of our fleet and the Irish
girls became excellent friends; the association, from our point of view,
was a very wholesome one, for the moral character of the Irish girls of
Queenstown and Cork--as, indeed, of Irish girls everywhere--is very
high, and their companionship added greatly to the well-being and
contentment of our sailors, not a few of whom found wives among these
young women. But when the Sinn Fein element saw their sweethearts
deserting them for the American boys their hitherto suppressed anger
took the form of overt acts.

Occasionally an American sailor would be brought from Cork to Queenstown
in a condition that demanded pressing medical attention. When he
regained consciousness he would relate how he had suddenly been set upon
by half a dozen roughs and beaten into a state of insensibility. Several
of our men were severely injured in this way. At other times small
groups were stoned by Sinn Fein sympathizers, and there were many
hostile demonstrations in moving-picture houses and theatres. Even more
frequently attacks were made, not upon the American sailors, but upon
the Irish girls who accompanied them. These chivalrous pro-German
agitators would rush up and attempt to tear the girls away from our
young men; they would pull down their hair, slap them, and even kick
them. Naturally American sailors were hardly the type to tolerate
behaviour of this kind, and some bloody battles took place. This
hostility was increased by one very regrettable occurrence in
Queenstown. An American sailor was promenading the main thoroughfare
with an Irish girl, when an infuriated Sinn Feiner rushed up, began to
abuse his former sweetheart in vile language, and attempted to lay hands
on her. The American struck this hooligan a terrific blow; he fell
backward and struck his head on the curb. The fall fractured the
assailant's skull and in a few hours he was dead. We handed our man
over to the civil authorities for trial, and a jury, composed entirely
of Irishmen, acquitted him. The action of this jury in itself indicated
that there was no sympathy among the decent Irish element, which
constituted the great majority, with this sort of tactics, but naturally
it did not improve relations between our men and the Sinn Fein. The
importance of another incident which took place at the cathedral has
been much exaggerated. It is true that a priest in his Sunday sermon
denounced the American sailors as vandals and betrayers of Irish
womanhood, but it is also true that the Roman Catholics of that section
were themselves the most enraged at this absurd proceeding. A number of
Roman Catholic officers who were present left the church in a body; the
Catholic Bishop of the Diocese called upon Admiral Bayly and apologized
for the insult, and he also punished the offending priest by assigning
him to new duties at a considerable distance from the American ships.

But even more serious trouble was brewing, for our officers discovered
that the American sailors were making elaborate plans to protect
themselves. Had this discovery not been made in time, something like an
international incident might have resulted. Much to our regret,
therefore, it was found necessary to issue an order that no naval men,
British or American, under the rank of Commander, should be permitted to
go to Cork. Ultimately we had nearly 8,000 American men at this station;
Queenstown itself is a small place of 6,000 or 7,000, so it is apparent
that it did not possess the facilities for giving such a large number of
men those relaxations which were necessary to their efficiency. We
established a club in Queenstown, provided moving pictures and other
entertainments, and did the best we could to keep our sailors contented.
The citizens of Cork also keenly regretted our action. The great
majority had formed a real fondness for our boys; and they regarded it
as a great humiliation that the rowdy element had made it necessary to
keep our men out of their city. Many letters were printed in the Cork
newspapers apologizing to the Americans and calling upon the people to
take action that would justify us in rescinding our order. The loss to
Cork tradesmen was great; our men received not far from $200,000 to
$300,000 a month in pay; they were free spenders, and their presence in
the neighbourhood for nearly two years would have meant a fortune to
many of the local merchants. Yet we were obliged to refuse to accede to
the numerous requests that the American sailors be permitted to visit
this city.

A committee of distinguished citizens of Cork, led by the Lord Mayor,
came to Admiralty House to plead for the rescinding of this order.
Admiral Bayly cross-examined them very sharply. It appeared that the men
who had committed these offences against American sailors had never been
punished.

Unless written guarantees were furnished that there would be no hostile
demonstrations against British or Americans, Admiral Bayly refused to
withdraw the ban, and I fully concurred in this decision. Unfortunately
the committee could give no such guarantee. We knew very well that the
first appearance of Americans in Cork would be the signal for a renewal
of hostilities, and the temper of our sailors was such that the most
deplorable consequences might have resulted. We even discovered that the
blacksmiths on the U.S.S. _Melville_ were surreptitiously manufacturing
weapons which our men could conceal on their persons and with which they
proposed to sally forth and do battle with the Sinn Fein! So for the
whole period of our stay in Queenstown our sailors were compelled to
keep away from the dangerous city. But the situation was not without its
humorous aspects. Thus the pretty girls of Cork, finding that the
Americans could not come to them, decided to come to the Americans;
every afternoon a trainload would arrive at the Queenstown station,
where our sailors would greet them, give them a splendid time, and then,
in the evening, escort them to the station and send a happy crowd on
their way home.

But the Sinn Feiners interfered with us in much more serious ways than
this. They were doing everything in their power to help Germany. With
their assistance German agents and German spies were landed in Ireland.
At one time the situation became so dangerous that I had to take
experienced officers whose services could ill be spared from our
destroyers and assign them to our outlying air stations in Ireland.
This, of course, proportionately weakened our fleet and did its part in
prolonging the war.




CHAPTER III

THE ADOPTION OF THE CONVOY


I

All this time that we were seeking a solution for the submarine problem
we really had that solution in our hands. The seas presented two
impressive spectacles in those terrible months of April, May, and June,
1917. One was the comparative ease with which the German submarines were
sinking merchant vessels; the other was their failure materially to
weaken the Allied fleets. If we wish a counter-picture to that presented
by the Irish Sea and the English Channel, where merchant shipping was
constantly going down, we should look to the North Sea, where the
British Grand Fleet, absolutely intact, was defiantly riding the waves.
The uninformed public explained this apparent security in a way of its
own; it believed that the British dreadnoughts were anchored behind
booms, nets, and mine-fields, through which the submarines could not
penetrate. Yet the fact of the matter was that the Grand Fleet was
frequently cruising in the open sea, in the waters which were known to
be the most infested with submarines. The German submarines had been
attempting to destroy this fleet for two and a half years. It had been
their plan to weaken this great battle force by "attrition"; to sink the
great battleships one by one, and in this way to reduce the fighting
power of the fleet to such a point that the German dreadnoughts could
have some chances of success. Such had been the German programme, widely
heralded at the beginning of the war; nearly three years had now passed,
but how had this pretentious scheme succeeded? The fact was that the
submarines had not destroyed a single dreadnought. It was certainly a
profitable study in contrasts--that of merchant ships constantly being
torpedoed and that of battleships constantly repelling such attacks.
Certainly a careful study of this situation ought to bring out facts
which would assist the Allies in solving the most baffling problem of
the war.

Yet there was no mystery about the immunity which these great fighting
vessels were enjoying; the submarine problem, so far as it affected the
battle fleet, had already been solved. The explanation was found in the
simple circumstance that, whenever the dreadnoughts went to sea, they
were preceded by a screen of cruisers and destroyers. It almost seemed
as though these surface craft were serving as a kind of impenetrable
wall against which the German U-boats were beating themselves in vain.
Yet to the casual observer there seemed to be no reason why the
submarines should stand in any particular terror of the destroyers.
Externally they looked like the least impressive war vessels afloat.
When they sailed ahead of the battle squadrons, the destroyers were
ungraceful objects upon the surface of the water; the impression which
they conveyed was that of fragility rather than of strength, and the
idea that they could ever be the guardians of the mighty battleships
which sailed behind them at first seemed almost grotesque. Yet these
little vessels really possessed the power of overcoming the submarine.
The war had not progressed far when it became apparent that the U-boat
could not operate anywhere near this speedy little surface vessel
without running serious risk of destruction.

Until the reports of submarine fighting began to find their way into the
papers, however, the destroyer was probably the one type of warship in
which the public had the smallest interest. It had become, indeed, a
kind of ugly duckling of the Navy. Our Congress had regularly neglected
it; year after year our naval experts had recommended that four
destroyers be built for every battleship, and annually Congress had
appropriated for only one or two. The war had also found Great Britain
without a sufficient number of destroyers for the purpose of
anti-submarine warfare. The Admiralty had provided enough for screening
the Grand Fleet in cruising and in battle, but it had been called upon
to divert so many for the protection of troop transportation, supply
ships, and commerce generally that the efficiency of the fleet had been
greatly undermined. Thus Britain found herself without enough
destroyers to meet the submarine campaign; this situation was not due to
any lack of foresight, but to a failure to foresee that any civilized
nation could ever employ the torpedo in unrestricted warfare against
merchant ships and their crews.

The one time that this type of vessel had come prominently into notice
was in 1904, when several of them attacked the Russian fleet at Port
Arthur, damaging several powerful vessels and practically ending Russian
sea power in the Far East. The history of the destroyer, however, goes
back much further than 1904. It was created to fulfil a duty not unlike
that which it has played so gloriously in the World War. In the late
seventies and early eighties a new type of war vessel, the torpedo boat,
caused almost as much perturbation as the submarine has caused in recent
years. This speedy little fighter was invented to serve as a medium for
the discharge of a newly perfected engine of naval warfare, the
automobile torpedo. It was its function to creep up to a battleship,
preferably under cover of darkness or in thick weather, and let loose
this weapon against her unsuspecting hulk. The appearance of the torpedo
boat led to the same prediction as that which has been more recently
inspired by the submarine; in the eyes of many it simply meant the end
of the great surface battleship. But naval architects, looking about for
the "answer" to this dangerous craft, designed another type of warship
and appropriately called it the "torpedo boat destroyer." This vessel
was not only larger and speedier than its appointed antagonist, but it
possessed a radius of action and a seaworthiness which enabled it to
accompany the battle fleet. Its draft was so light that a torpedo could
pass harmlessly under the keel, and it carried an armament which had
sufficient power to end the career of any torpedo boat that came its
way. Few types have ever justified their name so successfully as the
torpedo boat destroyer. So completely did it eliminate that little
vessel as a danger to the fighting ships that practically all navies
long since ceased to build torpedo boats. Yet the destroyer promptly
succeeded to the chief function of the discarded vessel, that of
attacking capital ships with torpedoes; and, in addition to this, it
assumed the duty of protecting battleships from similar attack by enemy
vessels of the same type.

It surprises many people to learn that the destroyer is not a little
boat but a warship of considerable size. This vessel to-day impresses
most people as small only because all ships, those which are used for
commerce and those which are used for war, have increased so greatly in
displacement. The latest specimens of the destroyer carry four-or
five-inch guns and twelve torpedo tubes, each of which launches a
torpedo that weighs more than a ton, and runs as straight as an arrow
for more than six miles. The _Santa Maria_, the largest vessel of the
squadron with which Columbus made his first voyage to America, had a
displacement of about five hundred tons, and thus was about half as
large as a destroyer; and even at the beginning of the clipper ship era
few vessels were much larger.

Previous to 1914 it was generally believed that torpedo attacks would
play a large part in any great naval engagement, and this was the reason
why all naval advisers insisted that a large number of these vessels
should be constructed as essential units of the fleet. Yet the war had
not made much progress when it became apparent that this versatile craft
had another great part to play, and that it would once more justify its
name in really heroic fashion. Just as it had proved its worth in
driving the surface torpedo boat from the seas, so now it developed into
a very dangerous foe to the torpedo boat that sailed beneath the waves.
Events soon demonstrated that, in all open engagements between submarine
and destroyer, the submarine stood very little chance. The reason for
this was simply that the submarine had no weapon with which it could
successfully resist the attack of the destroyer, whereas the destroyer
had several with which it could attack the submarine. The submarine had
three or four torpedo tubes, and only one or two guns, and with neither
could it afford to risk attacking the more powerfully armed destroyer.
The U-boat was of such a fragile nature that it could never afford to
engage in a combat in which it stood much chance of getting hit. A
destroyer could stand a comparatively severe pounding and still remain
fairly intact, but a single shell, striking a submarine, was a very
serious matter; even though the vessel did not sink as a result, it was
almost inevitable that certain parts of its machinery would be so
injured that it would have difficulty in getting into port. It therefore
became necessary for the submarine always to play safe, to fight only
under conditions in which it had the enemy at such a disadvantage that
it ran little risk itself; and this was the reason why it preferred to
attack merchant and passenger ships rather than vessels, such as the
destroyer, that could energetically defend themselves.

The comparatively light draft of the destroyer, which is about nine or
ten feet, pretty effectually protects it from the submarine's torpedo,
for this torpedo, to function with its greatest efficiency, must take a
course about fifteen feet under water; if it runs nearer the surface
than this, it comes under the influence of the waves, and does not make
a straight course. More important still, the speed of the destroyer, the
ease with which it turns, circles, and zigzags, makes it all but
impossible for a torpedo to be aimed with much chance of hitting her.
Moreover, the discharge of this missile is a far more complicated
undertaking than is generally supposed. The submarine commander cannot
take position anywhere and discharge his weapon more or less wildly,
running his chances of hitting; he must get his boat in place, calculate
range, course, and speed, and take careful aim. Clearly it is difficult
for him to do this successfully if his intended victim is scurrying
along at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour. Moreover, the
destroyer is constantly changing its course, making great circles and
indulging in other disconcerting movements. So well did the Germans
understand the difficulty of torpedoing a destroyer that they
practically never attempted so unprofitable and so hazardous an
enterprise.

Torpedoes are complicated and expensive mechanisms; each one costs about
$8,000 and the average U-boat carried only from eight to twelve; it was
therefore necessary to husband these precious weapons, to use them only
when the chances most favoured success; the U-boat commander who wasted
them in attempts to sink destroyers would probably have been
court-martialled.

But while the submarine had practically no means of successfully
fighting the destroyer, the destroyer had several ways of putting an end
to the submarine. The advantage which really made the destroyer so
dangerous, as already intimated, was its excessive speed. On the surface
the U-boat made little more than fifteen miles an hour, and under the
surface it made little more than seven or eight. If the destroyer once
discovered its presence, therefore, it could reach its prey in an
incredibly short time. It could attack with its guns, and, if conditions
were favourable, it could ram; and this was no trifling accident, for a
destroyer going at thirty or forty miles could cut a submarine nearly in
two with its strong, razor-like bow. In the early days of the war these
were the main methods upon which it relied to attack, but by the time
that I had reached London, another and much more frightful weapon had
been devised. This was the depth charge, a large can containing about
three hundred pounds of TNT, which, if it exploded anywhere within one
hundred feet of the submarine, would either destroy it entirely or so
injure it that the victim usually had to come to the surface and
surrender.

I once asked Admiral Jellicoe who was the real inventor of this
annihilating missile.

"No man in particular," he said. "It came into existence almost
spontaneously, in response to a pressing need. Gunfire can destroy
submarines when they are on the surface, but you know it can accomplish
nothing against them when they are submerged. This fact made it
extremely difficult to sink them in the early days of the war. One day,
when the Grand Fleet was cruising in the North Sea, a submarine fired a
torpedo at one of the cruisers. The cruiser saw the periscope and the
wake of the torpedo, and had little difficulty in so manoeuvring as to
avoid being struck. She then went full speed to the spot from which the
submarine had fired its torpedo, in the hope of ramming it. But by the
time she arrived the submarine had submerged so deeply that the cruiser
passed over her without doing her any harm. Yet the officers and crew
could see the submerged hull; there the enemy lay in full view of her
pursuers, yet perfectly safe! The officers reported this incident to me
in the presence of Admiral Madden, second in command.

"'Wouldn't it have been fine,' said Madden, 'if they had had on board a
mine so designed that, when dropped overboard, it would have exploded
when it reached the depth at which the submarine was lying?'"

"That remark," continued Admiral Jellicoe, "gave us the germinal idea of
the depth charge. I asked the Admiralty to get to work and produce a
'mine' that would act in the way that Admiral Madden had suggested. It
proved to be very simple to construct--an ordinary steel cylinder filled
with TNT; this was fitted with a simple firing appliance which was set
off by the pressure of the water, and could be so adjusted that it would
explode the charge at any depth desired. This apparatus was so simple
and so necessary that we at once began to manufacture it."

The depth charge looked like the innocent domestic ash can, and that was
the name by which it soon came to be popularly known. Each destroyer
eventually carried twenty or thirty of these destructive weapons at the
stern; a mere pull on a lever would make one drop into the water. Many
destroyers also carried strange-looking howitzers, which were made in
the shape of a Y, and from which one ash can could be hurled fifty yards
or more from each side of the vessel. The explosion, when it took place
within the one hundred feet which I have mentioned as usually fatal to
the submarine, would drive the plates inward and sometimes make a leak
so large that the vessel would sink almost instantaneously. At a
somewhat greater distance it frequently produced a leak of such serious
proportions that the submarine would be forced to blow her ballast
tanks, come to the surface, and surrender. Even when the depth charge
exploded considerably more than a hundred feet away, the result might be
equally disastrous, for the concussion might distort the hull and damage
the horizontal rudders, making it impossible to steer, or it might so
injure the essential machinery that the submarine would be rendered
helpless. Sometimes the lights went out, leaving the crew groping in
blackness; necessary parts were shaken from their fastenings; and in
such a case the commander had his choice of two alternatives, one to be
crushed by the pressure of the water, and the other to come up and be
captured or sunk by his surface foe. It is no reflection upon the
courage of the submarine commanders to say that in this embarrassing
situation they usually preferred to throw themselves upon the mercy of
the enemy rather than to be smashed or to die a lingering and agonizing
death under the water. Even when the explosion took place at a distance
so great that the submarine was not seriously damaged, the experience
was a highly disconcerting one for the crew. If a dozen depth charges
were dropped, one after the other, the effect upon the men in the hunted
vessel was particularly demoralizing. In the course of the war several
of our own submarines were depth-charged by our own destroyers, and from
our crews we obtained graphic descriptions of the sensations which
resulted. It was found that men who had passed through such an ordeal
were practically useless for several days, and that sometimes they were
rendered permanently unfit for service. The state of nerves which
followed such an experience was not unlike that new war psychosis known
as shell-shock. One of our officers who had had such an adventure told
me that the explosion of a single depth charge under the water might be
compared to the concussion produced by the simultaneous firing of all
the fourteen-inch guns of a battleship. One can only imagine what the
concussion must have been when produced by ten or twenty depth charges
in succession. Whether or not the submarine was destroyed or seriously
injured, a depth-charged crew became extremely cautious in the future
about getting anywhere in the neighbourhood of a destroyer; and among
the several influences which ultimately disorganized the _moral_ of the
German U-boat service these contacts with depth charges were doubtless
the most important. The hardiest under-water sailor did not care to go
through such frightful moments a second time.

This statement makes it appear as though the depth charge had settled
the fate of the submarine. Yet that was far from being the case, for
against the ash can, with its 300 pounds of TNT, the submarine possessed
one quality which gave it great defensive power. That was ability to
make itself unseen. Strangely enough, the average layman is inclined to
overlook this fairly apparent fact, and that is the reason why, even at
the risk of repeating myself, I frequently refer to it. Indeed, the only
respect in which the subsurface boat differs essentially from all other
war vessels is in this power of becoming invisible. Whenever it descries
danger from afar, the submarine can disappear under the water in
anywhere from twenty seconds to a minute. And its great advantage is
that it can detect its enemy long before that enemy can detect the
submarine. A U-boat, sailing awash, or sailing with only its
conning-tower exposed, can see a destroyer at a distance of about
fifteen miles if the weather is clear; but, under similar conditions,
the destroyer can see the submarine at a distance of about four miles.
Possessing this great advantage, the submarine can usually decide
whether it will meet the enemy or not; if it decides that it is wise to
avoid an encounter, all it has to do is to duck, remain submerged until
the destroyer has passed on, entirely unconscious of its presence, and
then to resume its real work, which is not that of fighting warships,
but of sinking merchantmen. The chief anxiety of the U-boat commander is
thus to avoid contact with its surface foe and its terrible depth
charge, whereas the business of the destroyer commander is to get within
fighting distance of his quarry.

Ordinarily, conditions favour the U-boat in this game, simply because
the ocean is so large a place. But there is one situation in which the
destroyer has more than a fighting chance, for the power of the
submarine to keep its presence secret lasts only so long as it remains
out of action. If it makes no attempt to fight, its presence can hardly
ever be detected; but just as soon as it becomes belligerent, it
immediately reveals its whereabouts. If it comes to the surface and
fires its guns, naturally it advertises to its enemy precisely where it
is; but it betrays its location almost as clearly when it discharges a
torpedo. Just as soon as the torpedo leaves the submarine, a wake,
clearly marking its progress, appears upon the surface of the water.
Though most newspaper readers have heard of this tell-tale track, I have
found few who really understand what a conspicuous disturbance it is.
The torpedo is really a little submarine itself; it is propelled by
compressed air, the exhaust of which stirs up the water and produces a
foamy, soapy wake, which is practically the same as that produced by the
propeller of an ocean liner. This trail is four or five feet wide; it is
as white and is as distinct as a chalk line drawn upon a blackboard,
provided the weather is clear and the sun is in the right direction.
Indeed, it is sometimes so distinct that an easily manoeuvred ship,
and even sometimes a merchantman, can avoid the torpedo which it sees
advancing merely by putting over the helm and turning out of its
course. But the chief value of this wake to the submarine hunters is
that it shows the direction in which the submarine was located when the
torpedo started on its course. It stands out on the surface of the water
like a long, ghostly finger pointing to the spot where the foe let loose
its shaft.

As soon as the destroyer sees this betraying disturbance, the commander
rings for full speed; and one of the greatest advantages of this type of
vessel is that it can attain full speed in an incredibly short time. The
destroyer then dashes down the wake until it reaches the end, which
indicates the point where the submarine lay when it discharged its
missile. At this point the surface vessel drops a depth charge and then
begins cutting a circle, say, to the right. Pains are taken to make this
circle so wide that it will include the submarine, provided it has gone
in that direction. The destroyer then makes another circle to the left.
Every ten or fifteen seconds, while describing these circles, it drops a
depth charge; indeed, not infrequently it drops twenty or thirty in a
few minutes. If there is another destroyer in the neighbourhood it also
follows up the wake and when it reaches the indicated point, it circles
in the opposite direction from the first. Sometimes more than two may
start for the suspected location and, under certain conditions, the
water within a radius of half a mile or more may be seething with
exploding depth charges.

It is plain from this description that the proceeding develops into an
exceedingly dangerous game for the attacking submarine. It is a simple
matter to calculate the chances of escaping which the enemy has under
these conditions. That opportunity is clearly measured by the time which
elapses from the moment when it discharges its torpedo to the moment
when the destroyer has reached the point at which it was discharged.
This interval gives the subsurface boat a certain chance to get away;
but its under-water speed is moderate, and so by the time the destroyer
reaches the critical spot, the submarine has advanced but a short
distance away from it. How far has she gone? In what direction did she
go? These are the two questions which the destroyer commander must
answer, and the success with which he answers them accurately measures
his success in sinking or damaging his enemy, or in giving him a good
scare. If he always decided these two points accurately, he would almost
always "get" his submarine; the chances of error are very great,
however, and that is the reason why the submarine in most cases gets
away. All that the surface commander knows is that there is a U-boat
somewhere in his neighbourhood, but he does not know its precise
location and so he is fighting more or less in the dark. In the great
majority of cases the submarine does get away, but now and then the
depth charge reaches its goal and ends its career.

If only one destroyer is hunting, the chances of escape strongly favour
the under-water craft; if several pounce upon her at once, however, the
chances of escaping are much more precarious. If the water is shallow
the U-boat can sometimes outwit the pursuer by sinking to the bottom and
lying there in silent security until its surface enemy tires of the
chase. But in the open sea there is no possibility of concealing itself
and so saving itself in this fashion, for if the submarine sinks beyond
a certain depth the pressure of the water will crush it.

While the record shows that the U-boat usually succeeded in evading the
depth charges, there were enough sunk or seriously damaged or given a
bad shake-up to serve as a constant reminder to the crews that they ran
great danger in approaching waters which were protected by destroyers.
The U-boat captains, as will appear, avoided such waters regularly; they
much preferred to attack their merchant prey in areas where these
soul-racking depth charges did not interfere with their operations.

It is now becoming apparent why the great battle fleet, which always
sailed behind a protecting screen of such destroyers, was practically
immune from torpedo attack. In order to assail these battleships the
submarine was always compelled to do the one thing which, above all
others, it was determined to avoid--to get within depth-charge radius of
the surface craft. In discharging the torpedo, distance, as already
intimated, is the all-important consideration. The U-boat carries a
torpedo which has a much shorter range than that of t

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