THE VICTORY AT SEA

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

THE VICTORY AT SEA

G. Vandyk Ltd. photographers

Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims
U.S. Navy

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

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 manœuvre 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 rôle 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 rôle 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 manœuvre 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 manœuvres 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 manœuvre 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 manœuvres.

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 attaché 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 manœuvring 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 manœuvred 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 the destroyer; it was seldom effective if fired at more than 2,000 yards, and beyond that distance its chances of hitting became very slight. Indeed, a much shorter distance than that was desirable if the torpedo was to accomplish its most destructive purpose. So valuable were these missiles and so necessary was it that every one should be used to good advantage, that the U-boat's captain had instructions to shoot at no greater distance than 300 yards, unless the conditions were particularly favourable. In the early days, the torpedoes which were fired at a greater distance would often hit the ships on the bow or the stern, and do comparatively little damage; such vessels could be brought in, repaired in a short time, and again put to sea. The German Admiralty discovered that in firing from a comparatively long distance it was wasting its torpedoes; it therefore ordered its men to get so near the prey that it could strike the vessel in a vital spot, preferably in the engine-room; and to do this it was necessary to creep up within 300 yards. But to get as close as that to the destroyers which screened the battleships meant almost certain destruction. Thus the one method of attack which was left to the U-boat was to dive under the destroyer screen and come up in the midst of the battle fleet itself. A few minutes after its presence should become known, however, a large number of destroyers would be dropping depth charges in its neighbourhood, and its chances of escaping destruction would be almost nil, to say nothing of its chances of destroying ships.

The Germans learned the futility of this kind of an operation early in the war, and the man who taught them this lesson was Commander Weddingen, the same officer who had first demonstrated the value of the submarine in practical warfare. It was Otto Weddingen who, in September, 1914, sank the old British cruisers, the Hogue, the Cressy, and the Aboukir, an exploit which made him one of the great popular heroes of Germany. A few months afterward Commander Weddingen decided to try an experiment which was considerably more hazardous than that of sinking three unescorted cruisers; he aspired to nothing less ambitious than an attack upon the Grand Fleet itself. On March 18th a part of this fleet was cruising off Cromarty, Scotland; here Weddingen came with the U-29, dived under the destroyer screen and fired one torpedo, which passed astern of the Neptune. The alarm was immediately sounded, and presently the battleship Dreadnought, which had seen the periscope, started at full speed for the submarine, rammed the vessel and sent it promptly to the bottom. As it was sinking the bow rose out of the water, plainly disclosing the number U-29. There was not one survivor. Weddingen's attempt was an heroic one, but so disastrous to himself and to his vessel that very few German commanders ever tried to emulate his example. It clearly proved to the German Admiralty that it was useless to attempt to destroy the Grand Fleet with submarines, or even to weaken it piecemeal, and probably this experience had much to do with this new kind of warfare—that of submarines against unprotected merchant ships—which the Germans now proceeded to introduce.

The simple fact is that the battle fleet was never so safe as when it was cruising in the open sea, screened by destroyers. It was far safer when it was sailing thus defiantly, constantly inviting attack, than when it was anchored at its unprotected base at Scapa Flow. Indeed, until Scapa Flow was impregnably protected by booms and mines, the British commanders recognized that cruising in the open sea was its best means of avoiding the German U-boats. No claim is made that the submarine cannot dive under the destroyer screen and attack a battle fleet, and possibly torpedo one or more of its vessels. The illustration which has been given shows that Weddingen nearly "got" the Neptune; and had this torpedo gone a few feet nearer, his experiment might have shown that, although he subsequently lost his own life, crew, and ship, he had sunk one British battleship, a proceeding which, in war, might have been recognized as a fair exchange. But the point which I wish to emphasize is that the chances of success were so small that the Germans decided that it was not worth while to make the attempt. Afterward, when merchant vessels were formed into convoys, a submarine would occasionally dive under the screen and destroy a ship; but most such attacks were unsuccessful, and experience taught the Germans that a persistent effort of this kind would cause the destruction of so many submarines that their campaign would fail. So the U-boat commanders left the Grand Fleet alone, either because they lacked nerve or because their instructions from Berlin were explicit to that effect.

II

Having constantly before my eyes this picture of the Grand Fleet immune from torpedo attack, naturally the first question I asked, when discussing the situation with Admiral Jellicoe and others, was this: "Why not apply this same principle to merchant ships?"

If destroyers could keep the submarines away from battleships, they could certainly keep them away from merchantmen. It is clear, from the description already given, precisely how the battleships had been made safe from submarines; they had proceeded, as usual, in a close formation, or "convoy," and their destroyer screen had proved effective. Thus logic apparently indicated that the convoy system was the "answer" to the submarine.

Yet the convoy, as used in previous wars, differed materially from any application of the idea which could possibly be made to the present contest. This scheme of sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself. As early as the thirteenth century, the merchants of the Hanseatic League were compelled to sail their ships in convoy as a protection against the pirates who were then constantly lurking in the Baltic Sea. The Government of Venice used this same device to protect its enormous commerce. In the fifteenth century the large trade in wool and wine which existed between England and the Moorish ports of Spain was safeguarded by convoys, and in the sixteenth century Spain herself regularly depended upon massing her ships to defend her commerce with the West Indies against the piratical attacks of English and French adventurers. The escorts provided for these "flotas" really laid the foundation of the mighty Spanish fleet which threatened England's existence for more than a hundred years. By the time of Queen Elizabeth the convoy had thus become the all-prevailing method of safeguarding merchant shipping, but it was in the Napoleonic wars that it had reached its greatest usefulness. The convoys of that period were managed with some military precision; there were carefully stipulated methods of collecting the ships, of meeting the cruiser escorts at the appointed rendezvous, and of dispersing them when the danger zone was passed; and naval officers were systematically put in charge. The convoys of this period were very large; from 200 to 300 ships were not an unusual gathering, and sometimes 500 or more would get together at certain important places, such as the entrance to the Baltic. But these ships, of course, were very small compared with those of the present time. It was only necessary to supply such aggregations of vessels with enough protecting cruisers to overwhelm any raiders which the enemy might send against them. The merchantmen were not required to sail in any particular formation, nor were they required to manœuvre against unseen mysterious foes. Neither was it absolutely essential that they should keep constantly together; and they could even spread themselves somewhat loosely over the ocean. If an enemy raider appeared on the horizon, the escorting cruiser or cruisers left the convoy and began chase; a battle ensued, the convoy meanwhile passing on its voyage unharmed. When its protecting vessels had disposed of the attackers, they rejoined the merchantmen. No unusual seamanship was demanded of the merchant captains, for the whole responsibility for their safety rested with the escorting cruisers.

But the operation of beating off an occasional surface raider, which necessarily fights in the open, is quite a different procedure from that of protecting an aggregation of vessels from enemies that discharge torpedoes under the water. As part protection against such insidious attacks both the merchant ships and the escorting men-of-war of to-day had in this war to keep up a perpetual zigzagging. This zigzag, indeed, was in itself an efficacious method of protection. As already said, the submarine was forced to attain an advantageous position before it could discharge its torpedo; it was its favourite practice to approach to within a few hundred yards in order to hit its victim in a vital spot. This mere fact shows that zigzagging in itself was one of the best methods of avoiding destruction. Before this became the general rule, the task of torpedoing a vessel was comparatively easy. All it was necessary for the submarine to do was to bring the vessel's masts in line; that is, to get directly ahead of her, submerge with the small periscope showing only occasionally, and to fire the torpedo at short range as the ship passed by. Except in the case of very slow vessels, she could of course do this only when she was not far from the course of her advancing prey when she first sighted her. If, however, the vessel was zigzagging, this pretty game was usually defeated; the submarine never knew in what direction to go in order to get within torpedoing distance, and she could not go far because her speed under water is so slow. The same conditions apply to a zigzagging convoy. This explained why, as soon as the merchant vessel or convoy entered the submarine zone, or as soon as a submarine was sighted, it began zigzagging, first on one side and then on the other, and always irregularly, its course comprising a disjointed line, which made it a mere chance whether the submarine could get into a position from which to fire with any certainty of obtaining results. A vessel sailing alone could manœuvre in this way without much difficulty, but it is apparent that twenty or thirty vessels, sailing in close formation, would not find the operation a simple one. It was necessary for them to sail in close and regular formation in order to make it possible to manœuvre them and screen them with destroyers, so it is evident that the closer the formation the fewer the destroyers that would be needed to protect it. These circumstances make the modern convoy quite a different affair from the happy-go-lucky proceeding of the Napoleonic era.

It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest hostility to the convoys has always come from the merchant captains themselves. In old days they chafed at the time which was consumed in assembling the ships, at the necessity for reducing speed to enable the slower vessels to keep up with the procession, and at the delay in getting their cargoes into port. In all wars in which convoys have been used it has been very difficult to keep the merchant captains in line. In Nelson's day these fine old salts were constantly breaking away from their convoys and taking their chances of running into port unescorted. If the merchant master of a century ago rebelled at the comparatively simply managed convoy of those days it is not strange that their successors of the present time should not have looked with favour upon the relatively complicated and difficult arrangement required of them in this war. In the early discussions with these men at the Admiralty they showed themselves almost unanimously opposed to the convoy.

"The merchantmen themselves are the chief obstacle to the convoy," said Admiral Jellicoe. "We have discussed it with them many times and they declare that it is impossible. It is all right for war vessels to manœuvre in close formation, they say, for we spend our time practising in these formations, and so they think that it is second nature to us. But they say that they cannot do it. They particularly reject the idea that when in formation they can manœuvre their ships in the fog or at night without lights. They believe that they would lose more ships through collisions than the submarines would sink."

I was told that the whole subject had been completely threshed out at a meeting which had been held at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, about six weeks before America had entered the war. At that time ten masters of merchant ships had met Admiral Jellicoe and other members of the Admiralty and had discussed the convoy proposition at length. In laying the matter before these experienced seamen Admiral Jellicoe emphasized the necessity of good station-keeping, and he described the close formation which the vessels would have to maintain. It would be necessary for the ships to keep together, he explained, otherwise the submarines could pick off the stragglers. He asked the masters whether eight merchant ships, which had a speed varying perhaps two knots, could keep station in line ahead (that is, in single file or column) 500 yards apart, and sail in two columns down the Channel.

"It would be absolutely impossible," the ten masters replied, almost in a chorus.

A discouraging fact, they said, was that many of the ablest merchant captains had gone into the navy, and that many of those who had replaced them could not be depended on to handle their ships in such a formation.

"We have so few competent deck officers that the captain would have to be on the bridge the whole twenty-four hours," they said. And the difficulty was not only with the bridge, but with the engine-room. In order to keep the ships constantly the same distance apart it would be necessary accurately to regulate their speed; the battleships could do this because they had certain elaborate devices, which the merchant vessels lacked, for timing the revolutions of the engines. The poor quality of the coal which they were obtaining would also make it difficult to maintain a regular speed.

Admiral Jellicoe then asked the masters whether they could sail in twos or threes and keep station.

"Two might do it, but three would be too many," was the discouraging verdict. But the masters were positive that even two merchantmen could not safely keep station abreast in the night-time without lights; two such vessels would have to sail in single file, the leading ship showing a stern light. The masters emphasized their conviction that they preferred to sail alone, each ship for herself, and to let each one take her chances of getting into port.

And there the matter rested. I had the opportunity of discussing the convoy system with several merchant captains, and in these discussions they simply echoed the views which had been expressed at this formal conference. I do not believe that British naval officers came in contact with a single merchant master who favoured the convoy at that time. They were not doubtful about the idea; they were openly hostile. The British merchant captains are a magnificent body of seamen; their first thought was to serve their country and the Allied cause; their attitude in this matter was not obstinacy; it simply resulted from their sincere conviction that the convoy system would entail greater shipping losses than were then being inflicted by the German submarines.

Many naval officers at that time shared the same view. They opposed the convoy not only on these grounds; its introduction would mean immediately cutting down the tonnage 15 or 20 per cent., because of the time which would be consumed in assembling the ships and awaiting escorts and in the slower average speed which they could make. Many ship owners and directors of steamship companies expressed the same opinions. They also objected to the convoy on the ground that it would cause considerable delay and hence would result in loss of earnings. Yet the attitude of the merchant marine had not entirely eliminated the convoy from consideration. At the time when I arrived the proposal was still being discussed; the rate at which the Germans were sinking merchantmen made this inevitable. And there seemed to be two schools among Allied naval men, one of which was opposed to the convoy, while the other insisted that it should be given a trial. The convoy had one irresistible attraction for the officer which seemed to counterbalance all the objections which were being urged against it. Its adoption would mean taking the offensive against the German submarines. The essential defect of the patrol system, as it was then conducted, was that it was primarily a defensive measure. Each destroyer cruised around in an assigned area, ready to assist vessels in distress, escort ships through her own "square" and, incidentally, to attack a submarine when the opportunity was presented. But the mere fact that a destroyer was patrolling a particular area meant only, as already explained, that the submarine had occasionally to sink out of sight until she had passed by. Consequently the submarine proceeded to operate whenever a destroyer was not in sight, and this was necessarily most of the time, for the submarine zone was such a big place and the Allied destroyer fleet was so pitifully small that it was impossible to cover it effectively. Under these conditions there were very few encounters between destroyers and submarines, at least in the waters south and west of Ireland, for the submarines took all precautions against getting close enough to be sighted by the destroyers.

But the British and French navies were not the only ones which, at this time, were depending upon the patrol as a protection against the subsurface boat. The American navy was committing precisely the same error off our Atlantic coast. As soon as Congress declared war against Germany we expected that at least a few of the U-boats would cross the Atlantic and attack American shipping; indeed, many believed that some had already crossed in anticipation of war; the papers were filled with silly stories about "submarine bases" in Mexican waters, on the New England coast, and elsewhere; submarines were even reported entering Long Island Sound; nets were stretched across the Narrows to keep them out of New York Harbour; and our coasting vessels saw periscopes and the wakes of torpedoes everywhere from Maine to Florida. So prevalent was this apprehension that, in the early days of the war, American destroyers regularly patrolled our coast looking for these far-flung submarines. Yet the idea of seeking them this way was absurd. Even had we known where the submarine was located there would have been little likelihood that we could ever have sighted it, to say nothing of getting near it. We might have learned that a German U-boat was operating off Cape Cod; we might have had the exact latitude and longitude of the location which it was expected that it would reach at a particular moment. At the time the message was sent the submarine might have been lying on the surface ready to attack a passing merchantman, but even under these conditions the destroyer could never have reached her quarry, for as soon as the U-boat saw the enemy approaching it would simply have ducked under the water and remained there in perfect safety. When all danger had passed it would again have bobbed up to the surface as serenely as you please, and gone ahead with its appointed task of sinking merchant ships. One of the astonishing things about this war was that many of the naval officers of all countries did not seem to understand until a very late date that it was utterly futile to send anti-submarine surface craft out into the wide ocean to attack or chase away submarines. The thing to do, of course, was to make the submarines come to the anti-submarine craft and fight in order to get merchantmen.

I have made this point before, and I now repeat the explanation to emphasize that the patrol system was necessarily unsuccessful, because it made almost impossible any combats with submarines and afforded very little protection to shipping. The advantage of the convoy system, as its advocates now urged, was precisely that it made such combats inevitable. In other words, it meant offensive warfare. It was proposed to surround each convoy with a protecting screen of destroyers in precisely the same way that the battle fleet was protected. Thus we should compel any submarine which was planning to torpedo a convoyed ship to do so only in waters that were infested with destroyers. In order to get into position to discharge its missile the submarine would have to creep up close to the rim that marked the circle of these destroyers. Just as soon as the torpedo started on its course and the tell-tale wake appeared on the surface the protecting ships would immediately begin sowing the waters with their depth charges. Thus in the future the Germans would be compelled to fight for every ship which they should attempt to sink, instead of sinking them conveniently in waters that were free of destroyers, as had hitherto been their privilege. Already the British had demonstrated that such a screen of destroyers could protect merchant ships as well as war vessels. They were making this fact clear every day in the successful transportation of troops and supplies across the Channel. In this region they had established an immune zone, which was constantly patrolled by destroyers and other anti-submarine craft, and through these the merchant fleets were constantly passing with complete safety. The proposal to convoy all merchant ships was a proposal to apply this same system on a much broader scale. If we should arrange our ships in compact convoys and protect them with destroyers we would really create another immune zone of this kind, and this would be different from the one established across the Channel only in that it would be a movable one. In this way we should establish about a square mile of the surface of the ocean in which submarines could not operate without great danger, and then we could move that square mile along until port was reached.

The advantages of the convoy were thus so apparent that, despite the pessimistic attitude of the merchant captains, there were a number of officers in the British navy who kept insisting that it should be tried. In this discussion I took my stand emphatically with these officers. From the beginning I had believed in this method of combating the U-boat warfare. Certain early experiences had led me to believe that the merchant captains were wrong in underestimating the quality of their own seamanship. It was my conviction that these intelligent and hardy men did not really know how capable they were at handling ships. In my discussions with them they disclosed an exaggerated idea of the seamanly ability of naval officers in manœuvring their large fleets. They attributed this to the superior training of the men and to the special manœuvring qualities of the ship. "Warships are built so that they can keep station, and turn at any angle at a moment's notice," they would say, "but we haven't any men on our ships who can do these things." As a matter of fact, these men were entirely in error and I knew it. Their practical experience in handling ships of all sizes, shapes, and speeds under a great variety of conditions is in reality much more extensive than naval officers can possibly enjoy. I learned this more than thirty years ago, when stationed on the Pennsylvania schoolship, teaching the boys navigation. This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life, for it brought me in every-day contact with merchant seamen, and it was then that I made the discovery which proved so valuable to me now.

It is true that merchant captains had much to learn about steaming and manœuvring in formation, but I was sure they could pick it up quickly and carry it out successfully under the direction of naval officers—the convoy commander being always a naval officer.

The naval officer not only has a group of vessels that are practically uniform in speed and ability to turn around quickly, but he is provided also with various instruments which enable him to keep the revolutions of his engines constant, to measure distances and the like. Moreover, as a junior officer, he is schooled in manœuvring these very ships for some years before he is trusted with the command of one of them, and he, therefore, not only knows their peculiarities, but also those of their captains—the latter very useful information, by the way.

Though it was necessary for the merchantmen, on the other hand, to bring their much clumsier ships into formation with perhaps thirty entirely strange vessels of different sizes, shapes, speeds, nationalities, and manœuvring qualities, yet I was confident that they were competent to handle them successfully under these difficult conditions. Indeed, afterward, one of my most experienced destroyer commanders reported that while he was escorting a convoy of twenty-eight ships they kept their stations quite as well as battleships, while they were executing two manœuvres to avoid a submarine.

Such influence as I possessed at this time, therefore, I threw in with the group of British officers which was advocating the convoy.

There was, however, still one really serious impediment to adopting this convoy system, and that was that the number of destroyers available was insufficient. The British, for reasons which have been explained, did not have the necessary destroyers for this work, and this was what made so very important the participation of the United States in the naval war—for our navy possessed the additional vessels that would make possible the immediate adoption of the convoy system. I do not wish to say that the convoy would not have been established had we not sent destroyers for that purpose, yet I do not see how otherwise it could have been established in any complete and systematic way at such an early date. And we furnished other ships than destroyers, for besides providing what I have called the modern convoy—that which protects the compact mass of vessels from submarines—it was necessary also to furnish escorts after the old Napoleonic plan. It was the business of the destroyers to conduct the merchantmen only through the submarine zone. They did not take them the whole distance across the ocean, for there was little danger of submarine attack until the ships had arrived in the infested waters. This would have been impossible in any case with the limited number of destroyers. But from the time the convoys left the home port there was a possibility that the same kind of attack would be launched as that to which convoys were subjected in Nelsonian days; there was the danger, that is, that surface war vessels, raiders or cruisers, might escape from their German bases and swoop down upon them. We always had before our minds the activities of the Moewe, and we therefore deemed it necessary to escort the convoys across the ocean with battleships and cruisers, just as was the practice a century ago. The British did not have ships enough available for this purpose, and here again the American navy was able to supply the lack; for we had a number of pre-dreadnoughts and cruisers that were ideally adapted to this kind of work.

III

On April 30th I received a message from Admiral Jellicoe requesting me to visit him at the Admiralty. When I arrived he said that the projected study of the convoy system had been made, and he handed me a copy of it. It had been decided to send one experimental convoy from Gibraltar. The Admiralty, he added, had not yet definitely decided that the convoy system should be adopted, but there was every intention of giving it a thorough and fair trial. That same evening at dinner I met Mr. Lloyd George, Sir Edward Carson, and Lord Milner, and once more discussed with them the whole convoy idea. I found the Prime Minister especially favourable to the plan and, in fact, civilians in general were more kindly disposed toward the convoy than seamen, because they were less familiar with the nautical and shipping difficulties which it involved.

Naval officers were immediately sent to Gibraltar to instruct the merchant masters in the details of assembling and conducting vessels. Eight-knot ships were selected for the experiment, and a number of destroyers were assigned for their protection. The merchant captains, as was to be expected, regarded the whole enterprise suspiciously, but entered into it with the proper spirit.

On May 20th that first convoy arrived at its English destination in perfect condition. The success with which it made the voyage disproved all the pessimistic opinions which the merchant sailors had entertained about themselves. They suddenly discovered, as I had contended, that they could do practically everything which, in their conferences with the Admiralty, they had declared that they were unable to do. In those meetings they had asserted that not more than two ships could keep station; but now they discovered that the whole convoy could sail with stipulated distances between the vessels and keep this formation with little difficulty. They were drilled on the way in zigzagging and manœuvring—a practice carried out subsequently with all convoys—and by the time they reached the danger zone they found that, in obedience to a prearranged signal, all the ships could turn as a single one, and perform all the zigzag evolutions which the situation demanded. They had asserted that they could not sail at night without lights and that an attempt to do so would result in many collisions, but the experimental convoy proved that this was merely another case of self-delusion. Naturally the arrival of this convoy caused the greatest satisfaction in the Admiralty, but the most delighted men were the merchant captains themselves, for the whole thing was to them a complete revelation of their seamanly ability, and naturally it flattered their pride. The news of this arrival naturally travelled fast in shipping circles; it completely changed the attitude of the merchant sailors, and the chief opponents of the convoy now became its most enthusiastic advocates.

Outside shipping circles, however, nothing about this convoy was known at that time. Yet May 20th, the date when it reached England safely, marked one of the great turning-points of the war. That critical voyage meant nothing less than that the Allies had found the way of defeating the German submarine. The world might still clamour for a specific "invention" that would destroy all the submarines overnight, or it might demand that the Allies should block them in their bases, or suggest that they might do any number of impossible things, but the naval chiefs of the Allies discovered, on May 20, 1917, that they could defeat the German campaign even without these rather uncertain aids. The submarine danger was by no means ended when this first convoy arrived; many anxious months still lay ahead of us; other means would have to be devised that would supplement the convoy; yet the all-important fact was that the Allied chiefs now realized, for the first time, that the problem was not an insoluble one; and that, with hard work and infinite patience, they could keep open the communications that were essential to victory. The arrival of these weather-beaten ships thus brought the assurance that the armies and the civilian populations could be supplied with food and materials, and that the seas could be kept open for the transportation of American troops to France. In fine, it meant that the Allies could win the war.