The Victory At Sea

III

But of course baseball and dancing were not the serious business in hand; these Americans had come this long distance to do their part in laying the mighty barrage which was to add one more serious obstacle to the illegal German submarine campaign. Though the operation was a joint one of the American and British navies, our part was much the larger. The proposal was to construct this explosive impediment from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway, in the vicinity of Udsire Light, a distance of about 230 nautical miles. Of this great area about 150 miles, extending from the Orkneys to 3 degrees east longitude, was the American field, and the eastern section, which extended fifty nautical miles to Norway, was taken over by the British. Since an operation of this magnitude required the supervision of an officer of high rank, Rear-Admiral Joseph Strauss, who had extended experience in the ordnance field of the navy, came over in March, 1918, and took command. The British commander was Rear-Admiral Clinton-Baker, R.N.

The mines were laid in a series of thirteen expeditions, or "excursions," as our men somewhat cheerfully called them. The ten mine-layers participated in each "excursion," all ten together laying about 5,400 mines at every trip. Each trip to the field of action was practically a duplicate of the others; a description of one will, therefore, serve for all. After days, and sometimes after weeks of preparation the squadron, usually on a dark and misty night, showing no lights or signals, would weigh anchor, slip by the rocky palisades of Moray Firth, and stealthily creep out to sea. As the ships passed through the nets and other obstructions and reached open waters, the speed increased, the gunners took their stations at their batteries, and suddenly from a dark horizon came a glow of low, rapidly moving vessels; these were the British destroyers from the Grand Fleet which had been sent to escort the expedition and protect it from submarines. The absolute silence of the whole proceeding was impressive; not one of the destroyers showed a signal or a light; not one of the mine-layers gave the slightest sign of recognition; all these details had been arranged in advance, and everything now worked with complete precision. The swishing of the water on the sides and the slow churning of the propellers were the only sounds that could possibly betray the ships to their hidden enemies. After the ships had steamed a few more miles the dawn began to break; and now a still more inspiring sight met our men. A squadron of battleships, with scout cruisers and destroyers, suddenly appeared over the horizon. This fine force likewise swept on, apparently paying not the slightest attention to our vessels. They steamed steadily southward, and in an hour or so had entirely disappeared. The observer would hardly have guessed that this squadron from Admiral Beatty's fleet at Scapa Flow had anything to do with the American and British mine-layers. Its business, however, was to establish a wall of steel and shotted guns between these forces and the German battle fleet at Kiel. At one time it was believed that the mine forces on the northern barrage would prove a tempting bait to the German dreadnoughts; and that, indeed, it might induce the enemy to risk a second general engagement on the high seas. At any rate, a fleet of converted excursion steamers, laying mines in the North Sea, could hardly be left exposed to the attacks of German raiders; our men had the satisfaction of knowing that while engaged in their engrossing if unenviable task a squadron of British or American battleships—for Admiral Rodman's forces took their regular turn in acting as a "screen" in these excursions—was standing a considerable distance to the south, prepared to make things lively for any German surface vessels which attempted to interfere with the operation.

Now in the open seas the ten mine-layers formed in two columns, abreast of each other and five hundred yards apart, and started for the waters of the barrage. Twelve destroyers surrounded them, on the lookout for submarines, for the ships were now in the track of the U-boats bound for their hunting ground or returning to their home ports. At a flash from the flagship all slackened speed, and put out their paravanes—those under-water outrigger affairs which protected the ships from mines; for it was not at all unlikely that the Germans would place some of their own mines in this field, for the benefit of the barrage builders. This operation took only a few minutes; then another flash, and the squadron again increased its speed. It steamed the distance across the North Sea to Udsire Light, then turned west again and headed for that mathematical spot on the ocean which was known as the "start point"—the place, that is, where the mine-laying was to begin. In carrying out all these manœuvres—sighting the light on the Norwegian coast—the commander was thinking, not only of the present, but of the future; for the time would come, after the war had ended, when it would be necessary to remove all these mines, and it was therefore wise to "fix" them as accurately as possible in reference to landmarks, so as to know where to look for them. All this time the men were at their stations, examining the mines to see that everything was ready, testing the laying mechanisms, and mentally rehearsing their duties. At about four o'clock an important signal came from the flagship:

"Have everything ready, for the squadron will reach 'start point' in an hour and mine-laying will begin."

Up to this time the ships were sailing in two columns; when they came within seven miles of "start point," another signal was broken out; the ships all wheeled like a company of soldiers, each turning sharply to the right, so that in a few minutes, instead of two columns, we had eight ships in line abreast, with the remaining two, also in line abreast, sailing ahead of them. This splendid array, keeping perfect position, approached the starting point like a line of racehorses passing under the wire. Not a ship was off this line by so much as a quarter length; the whole atmosphere was one of eagerness; the officers all had their eyes fixed upon the stern of the flagship, for the glimpse of the red flag which would be the signal to begin. Suddenly the flag was hauled down, indicating:

"First mine over."

If you had been following one of these ships, you would probably have been surprised at the apparent simplicity of the task. The vessel was going at its full speed; at intervals of a few seconds a huge black object, about five feet high, would be observed gliding toward the stern; at this point it would pause for a second or two, as though suspended in air; it would then give a mighty lurch, fall head first into the water, sending up a great splash, and then sink beneath the waves. By the time the disturbance was over the ship would have advanced a considerable distance; then, in a few seconds, another black object would roll toward the stern, make a similar plunge, and disappear. You might have followed the same ship for two or three hours, watching these mines fall overboard at intervals of about fifteen seconds. There were four planters, each of which could and did on several trips lay about 860 mines in three hours and thirty-five minutes, in a single line about forty-four miles long. These were the Canandaigua, the Canonicus, the Housatonic, and the Roanoke. Occasionally the monotony of this procedure would be enlivened by a terrible explosion, a great geyser of water rising where a mine had only recently disappeared; this meant that the "egg," as the sailors called it, had gone off spontaneously, without the assistance of any external contact; such accidents were part of the game, the records showing that about 4 per cent. of all the mines indulged in such initial premature explosions. For the most part, however, nothing happened to disturb the steady mechanical routine. The mines went over with such regularity that, to an observer, the whole proceeding seemed hardly the work of human agency. Yet every detail had been arranged months before in the United States; the mines fell into the sea in accordance with a time-table which had been prepared in Newport before the vessels started for Scotland. Every man on the ship had a particular duty to perform and each performed it in the way in which he had been schooled under the direction of Captain Belknap.

The spherical mine case, which contains the explosive charge and the mechanism for igniting it, is only a part of the contrivance. While at rest on board the ship this case stands upon a box-like affair, about two feet square, known as the anchor; this anchor sinks to the bottom after launching and it contains an elaborate arrangement for maintaining the mine at any desired depth beneath the surface. The bottom of the "anchor" has four wheels, on which it runs along the little railroad track on the launching deck to the jumping-off place at the stern. All along these railroad tracks the mines were stationed one back of another; as one went overboard, they would all advance a peg, a mine coming up from below on an elevator to fill up the vacant space at the end of the procession. It took a crew of hard-working, begrimed, and sweaty men to keep these mines moving and going over the stern at the regularly appointed intervals. After three or four hours had been spent in this way and the ships had started back to their base, the decks would sometimes be covered with the sleeping figures of these exhausted men. It would be impossible to speak too appreciatively of the spirit they displayed; in the whole summer there was not a single mishap of any importance. The men all felt that they were engaged in a task which had never been accomplished before, and their exhilaration increased with almost every mine that was laid. "Nails in the coffin of the Kaiser," the men called these grim instruments of vengeance.

IV

I have described one of these thirteen summer excursions, and the description given could be applied to all the rest. Once or twice the periscope of a submarine was sighted—without any disastrous results—but in the main this business of mine-laying was uneventful. Just what was accomplished the chart makes clear. In the summer and autumn months of 1918 the American forces laid 56,571 mines and the British 13,546. The operation was to have been a continuous one; had the war gone on for two years we should probably have laid several hundred thousand; Admiral Strauss's forces kept at the thing steadily up to the time of the armistice; they had become so expert and the barrage was producing such excellent results that we had plans nearly completed for building another at the Strait of Otranto, which would have completely closed the Adriatic Sea. Besides this undertaking the American mine-layer Baltimore laid a mine-field in the North Irish Channel, the narrow waters which separate Scotland and Ireland; two German submarines which soon afterward attempted this passage were blown to pieces, and after this the mine-field was given a wide berth.

Just what the North Sea barrage accomplished, in the actual destruction of submarines, will never be definitely known. We have information that four certainly were destroyed, and in all probability six and possibly eight; yet these results doubtless measure only a small part of the German losses. In the majority of cases the Germans had little or no evidence of sunken submarines. The destroyers, subchasers, and other patrol boats were usually able to obtain some evidences of injury inflicted; they could often see their quarry, or the disturbances which it made on the surface; they could pursue and attack it, and the resultant oil patches, wreckage, and German prisoners—and sometimes the recovered submarine itself or its location on the bottom—would tell the story either of damage or destruction. But the disconcerting thing about the North Sea barrage, from the viewpoint of the Germans, was that it could do its work so secretly that no one, friend or enemy, would necessarily know a thing about it. A German submarine simply left its home port; attempting to cross the barrage, perhaps at night, it would strike one of these mines, or its antenna; an explosion would crumple it up like so much paper; with its crew it would sink to the bottom; and not a soul, perhaps not even the crew itself, would ever know what had happened to it. It would in truth be a case of "sinking without a trace"—though an entirely legitimate one under the rules of warfare. The German records disclosed anywhere from forty to fifty submarines sunk which did not appear in the records of the Allies; how these were destroyed not a soul knows, or ever will know. They simply left their German ports and were never heard of again. That many of them fell victims to mines, and some of them to the mines of our barrage, is an entirely justifiable assumption. That probably even a larger number of U-boats were injured is also true. A German submarine captain, after the surrender at Scapa Flow, said that he personally knew of three submarines, including his own, which had been so badly injured at the barrage that they had been compelled to limp back to their German ports.

The results other than the sinking of submarines were exceedingly important in bringing the war to an end. It was the failure of the submarine campaign which defeated the German hopes and forced their surrender; and in this defeat the barrage was an important element. That submarines frequently crossed it is true; there was no expectation, when the enterprise was started, that it would absolutely shut the U-boats in the North Sea; but its influence in breaking down the German moral must have been great. To understand this, just place yourself for a moment in the position of a submarine crew. The width of this barrage ranged from fifteen to thirty-five miles; it took from one to three hours for a submarine to cross this area on the surface and from two to six hours under the surface. Not every square foot, it is true, had been mined; there were certain gaps caused by the spontaneous explosions to which I have referred; but nobody knew where these openings were, or where a single mine was located. The officers and crews knew only that at any moment an explosion might send them to eternity. A strain of this sort is serious enough if it lasts only a few minutes; imagine being kept in this state of mind anywhere from one to six hours! Submarine prisoners constantly told us how they dreaded the mines; going through such a field, I suppose, was about the most disagreeable experience in this nerve-racking service. Our North Sea barrage began to show results almost immediately after our first planting. The German officers evidently kept informed of our progress and had a general idea of the territory which had been covered. For a considerable time a passage-way, sixty miles wide, was kept open for the Grand Fleet just east of the Orkney Islands; the result was that the submarines, which had hitherto usually skirted the Norwegian coast, now changed their route, and attempted to slip through the western passage-way—a course that enabled them to avoid the mine-field. When the entire distance from the Orkneys to Norway had been mined, however, it became impossible to "run around the end." The Germans were now obliged to sail boldly into this explosive field, taking their chances of hitting a mine. Stories of this barrage were circulated all over Germany; sailors who had been in contact with it related their experiences to their fellows; and the result was extremely demoralizing to the German submarine flotilla. The North Sea barrage was probably a contributory cause of the mutiny which demoralized the German fleet in the autumn of 1918.

I think I am therefore justified in saying that this enterprise was a strong factor in overcoming the submarine menace, though the success of the convoy system had already brought the end in sight, and had thus made it practicable to assign, without danger of defeat, the tonnage necessary to lay the barrage and maintain and augment it as long as might be necessary. The Germans saw the barrage not only as it was in the autumn of 1918, but as it would be a few months or a year hence. We had started a steady stream of mines from hundreds of factories in the United States to our Scottish bases; these establishments were constantly increasing production, and there was practically no limit to their possible output. We had developed a mine-laying organization which was admittedly better than any that had been hitherto known; and this branch of the service we could now enlarge indefinitely. In time we could have planted this area so densely with explosives that it would have been madness for any submarines even to attempt a passage. To be sure, the Pentland Firth, between the Orkneys and Scotland, was always open, and could not be mined on account of its swift tides, but besides being a dangerous passage at best it was constantly patrolled to make it still more dangerous.

The loyal devotion to duty and the skilful seamanship which our officers displayed in this great enterprise were not only thoroughly in keeping with the highest traditions of the navy, but really established new standards to guide and inspire those who will follow us. These gallant officers who actually laid the mines are entitled to the nation's gratitude, and I take great pleasure in commending the work of Captain H. V. Butler, commanding the flagship San Francisco; Captain J. Harvey Tomb, commanding the Aroostook; Captain A. W. Marshall, commanding the Baltimore; Commander W. H. Reynolds, commanding the Canandaigua; Captain T. L. Johnson, commanding the Canonicus; Captain J. W. Greenslade, commanding the Housatonic; Commander D. Pratt Mannix, commanding the Quinnebaug; Captain C. D. Stearns, commanding the Roanoke; Captain Sinclair Gannon, commanding the Saranac; and Captain W. T. Cluverius, commanding the Shawmut.

This splendid squadron, of which the flagship was the San Francisco, was organized by Captain R. R. Belknap and, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, was placed under his direct command; and he was therefore responsible for all preparations, tactics, general instructions, special instructions for each mine-laying "excursion," the intricate navigation required, and in fact all arrangements necessary for the successful planting of the mines in their assigned positions.

FOOTNOTE:

CHAPTER X

GERMAN SUBMARINES VISIT THE AMERICAN COAST

It was in the summer of 1918 that the Germans made their only attempt at what might be called an offensive against their American enemies. Between the beginning of May and the end of October, 1918, five German submarines crossed the Atlantic and torpedoed a few ships on our coast. That submarines could make this long journey had long been known. Singularly enough, however, the impression still prevails in this country that the German U-boats were the first to accomplish the feat. In the early autumn of 1916 the U-53—commanded by that submarine officer, Hans Rose, who has been previously mentioned in these pages—crossed the Atlantic, dropped in for a call at Newport, R.I., and, on the way back, sank a few merchant vessels off Nantucket. A few months previous the so-called merchant submarine Deutschland had made its trip to Newport News. The Teutonic press, and even some Germanophiles in this country, hailed these achievements as marking a glorious page in the record of the German navy. Doubtless the real purpose was to show the American people how easily these destructive vessels could cross the Atlantic; and to impress upon their minds the fate which awaited them in case they maintained their rights against the Prussian bully. As a matter of fact, it had been proved, long before the Deutschland or the U-53 had made their voyages, that submarines could cross the Atlantic. In 1915, not one but ten submarines had gone from North America to Europe under their own power. Admiral Sir John Fisher tells about this expedition in his recently published memoirs. In 1914, the British Admiralty had contracted for submarines with Charles M. Schwab, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company. As international law prohibited the construction of war vessels by a nation in wartime for the use of a belligerent with which it was at peace, the parts of ten submarines were sent to Canada, where they were put together. These submarines then crossed the Atlantic under their own power, and were sent from British ports to the Dardanelles, where they succeeded in driving Turkish and German shipping out of the Sea of Marmora. Thus a crossing of the Atlantic by American-built submarines manned by British crews had been accomplished before the Germans made their voyages. It was therefore not necessary for the two German submarines to cross the Atlantic to prove that the thing could be done; but the Germans doubtless believed that this demonstration of their ability to operate on the American coast would serve as a warning to the American people.

We were never at all deceived as to what would be the purpose of such a visit after our entrance into the war. In the early part of 1917 the Allies believed that a few German U-boats might assail our coast, and I so informed the Navy Department at Washington. My cables and letters of 1917 explained fully the reasons why Germany might indulge in such a gesture. Strategically, as these despatches make clear, such attacks would have no great military value. To have sent a sufficient number of submarines to do any considerable damage on the American coast would have been a great mistake. Germany's one chance of winning the war with the submarine weapon was to destroy shipping to such an extent that the communications of the Allies with the outside world, and especially with the United States, would be cut. The only places where the submarine warfare could be conducted with some chance of success were the ocean passage routes which lead to European ports, especially in that area south and south-west of Ireland in which were focussed the trade routes for ships sailing from all parts of the world and destined for British and French ports. With the number of submarines available, the Germans could keep enough of their U-boats at work in these areas to destroy a large number of merchant ships. Germany thus needed to concentrate all of her available submarines at these points; she had an inadequate number for her purpose; to send any considerable force three thousand miles across the Atlantic would simply weaken her efforts in the real scene of warfare and would make her submarine campaign a failure. The cruises of submarines on the American coast would have been very much longer and would have been a much more serious strain on the submarines than were the shorter cruises in the inshore waters of Europe. As has already been explained, the submarine did not differ from other craft in its need for constant repairs and careful upkeep, except that perhaps it was a more delicate instrument of warfare than any other naval craft, and that it would require longer and more frequent periods of overhaul. Any operations carried out three thousand miles from their bases, where alone supplies, spare parts, and repair facilities were available, would have soon reduced the submarine campaign to comparative uselessness; each voyage would have resulted in sinking a relatively small amount of shipping; a great number of submarines would be out of commission at all times for repairs, or would be lost through accidents. The Germans had no submarine bases in American waters and could establish none. Possibly, as the newspaper writer has pointed out, they might have seized a deserted island off the coast of Maine or in the Caribbean, and cached there a reservoir of fuel and food; unless, however, they could also have created at these places adequate facilities for repairing submarines or supplying them with torpedoes and ammunition, such a place would not have served the purpose of a base at all. Comparatively few of the German submarines could have made the cruise to the American coast and operated successfully there so far away from their bases for any considerable time. In the time spent in such an enterprise, the same submarine could make three or four trips in the waters about the British Isles, or off the coast of France, and could sink four or five times the tonnage which could be destroyed in the cruise on the Atlantic coast. In the eastern Atlantic, the submarine could seek its victims in an area comprising a comparatively few square miles, at points where shipping was so dense that a submarine had only to take a station and lie in wait, and be certain, within a short time, of encountering valuable ships which it could attack successfully with its torpedoes. If the U-boats should be sent to America, on the other hand, they would have to patrol up and down three thousand miles of coast, looking for victims; and even when they found them the ships that they could sink would usually be those engaged in the coastwise traffic, which were of infinitely less military importance than the transports which were carrying food, munitions, and supplies to the Allies and which were being sunk in the eastern Atlantic.

Anything resembling an attack in force on American harbours was therefore improbable. Yet it seemed likely from the first that the Germans would send an occasional submarine into our waters, as a measure of propaganda rather than for the direct military result that would be achieved. American destroyers and other vessels were essential to the success of the whole anti-submarine campaign of the Allies. The sooner they could all be sent into the critical European waters the sooner the German campaign of terrorism would end. If these destroyers, or any considerable part of them, could be kept indefinitely in American waters, the Germans might win the war. Any manœuvre which would have as its result the keeping of these American vessels, so indispensable to the Allies, out of the field of active warfare, would thus be more than justified and, indeed, would indicate the highest wisdom on the part of the German navy. The Napoleonic principle of dividing your enemy's forces is just as valuable in naval as in land warfare. For many years Admiral Mahan had been instructing American naval officers that the first rule in warfare is not to divide your fighting forces, but always to keep them together, so as to bring the whole weight at a given moment against your adversary. Two of the fundamental principles of the science of warfare, on land and sea alike, are contained in the maxims: Keep your own forces concentrated, and always endeavour to divide those of the enemy. Undoubtedly, the best method which Germany could use to keep our destroyers in our own waters would be to make the American people believe that their lives and property were in danger; they might accomplish this by sending a submarine to attack our shipping off New York and Boston and other Atlantic seaports, and possibly even to bombard our harbours. The Germans doubtless believed that they might create such alarm and arouse such public clamour in the United States that our destroyers and other anti-submarine craft would be kept over here by the Navy Department, in response to the popular agitation to protect our own coast. This is the reason why American headquarters in London, and the Allied admiralties, expected such a visitation. The Germans obviously endeavoured to create the impression that such an attack was likely to occur at any time. This was part of their war propaganda. The press was full of reports that such attacks were about to be made. German agents were continually circulating these reports.

Of course it was clear from the first, to the heads of the Allied navies and to all naval authorities who were informed about the actual conditions, that these attacks by German submarines on the American coast would be in the nature of raids for moral effect only. It was also quite clear from the first, as I pointed out in my despatches to the Navy Department, that the best place to defend our coast was in the critical submarine areas in the European Atlantic, through which the submarines had to pass in setting out for our coast, and in which alone they could have any hope of succeeding in the military object of the undersea campaign. It was not necessary to keep our destroyers in American waters, patrolling the vast expanse of our three thousand miles of coastline, in a futile effort to find and destroy such enemy submarines as might operate on the American coast. So long as these attacks were only sporadic—and carried out by the type of submarine which used its guns almost exclusively in sinking ships, and which selected for its victims unarmed and unprotected ships—destroyers and other anti-submarine craft would be of no possible use on the Atlantic coast. The submarine could see these craft from a much greater distance than it could itself be seen by them; and by diving and sailing submerged it could easily avoid them and sink its victims without ever being sighted or attacked by our own patrols, however numerous they might have been. Even in the narrow waters of the English Channel, up to the very end of the war, submarines were successfully attacking small merchant craft by gunfire, although the density of patrol craft in this area was naturally a thousand times greater than we could ever have provided for the vast expanse of our own coast. Consequently, so long as the submarine attacks on the American coast were only sporadic, it was absolutely futile to maintain patrol craft in those waters, as this could not provide any adequate defence against such scattered demonstrations. If, on the other hand, the Germans had ever decided to commit the military mistake of concentrating a considerable number of submarines off our Atlantic ports, we could always have countered such a step by sending back from the war zone an adequate number of craft to protect convoys in and out of the Atlantic ports, in the same manner that convoys were protected in the submarine danger zone in European waters. This is a fact which even many naval men did not seem to grasp. Yet I have already explained that we knew practically where every German submarine was at any given time. We knew whenever one left a German port; and we kept track of it day by day until it returned home. No U-boat ever made a voyage across the Atlantic without our knowledge. The submarine was a slow traveller, and required a minimum of thirty days for such a trip; normally, the time would be much longer, for a submarine on such a long voyage had to economize oil fuel for the return trip and therefore seldom cruised at more than five knots an hour. Our destroyers and anti-submarine craft, on the other hand, could easily cross the Atlantic in ten days and refuel in their home ports. It is therefore apparent that a flotilla of destroyers stationed in European waters could protect the American coast from submarines almost as successfully as if it were stationed at Hampton Roads or Newport. Such a flotilla would be of no use at these American stations unless there were submarines attacking shipping off the coast; but as soon as the Germans started for America—a fact of which we could always be informed, and of which, as I shall explain, we always were informed—we could send our destroyers in advance of them. These agile vessels would reach home waters about three weeks before the submarines arrived; they would thus have plenty of time to refit and to welcome the uninvited guests. From any conceivable point of view, therefore, there was no excuse for keeping destroyers on the American side of the Atlantic for "home defence." Moreover, the fact that we could keep this close track of submarines in itself formed a great protection against them. I have already explained how we routed convoys entering European waters in such ways that they could sail around the U-boat and thus escape contact. I think that this simple procedure saved more shipping than any other method. In the same way we could keep these vessels sailing from American ports outside of the area in which the submarines were known to be operating in our own waters.

Yet the enemy sent no submarines to our coast in 1917; why they did not do so may seem difficult to understand, for that was just the period when a campaign of this kind might have served their purpose. During this time, however, we had repeated indications that the Germans did not take the American entrance into the war very seriously; moreover, looking forward to conditions after the peace, they perhaps hoped that they might soon be able once again to establish friendly relations. In 1917 they therefore refrained from any acts which might arouse popular hatred against them. We had more than one indication of this attitude. Early in the summer of 1917 we obtained from one of the captured German submarines a set of the orders issued to it by the German Admiralty Staff. Among these was one dated May 8, 1917, in which the submarine commanders were informed that Germany had not declared war upon the United States, and that, until further instructions were received, the submarines were to continue to look upon America and American shipping as neutral. The submarine commanders were especially warned against attacking or committing any overt act against such American war vessels as might be encountered in European waters. The orders explained that no official confirmation had been received by the German Government of the news which had been published in the press that America had declared war, and that, therefore, the Germans, officially, were ignoring our belligerence. From their own standpoint such a policy of endeavouring not to offend America, even after she became an enemy, may have seemed politically wise; from a military point of view, their failure to attempt the submarine demonstration off our coast in 1917 was a great mistake; for when they finally started warfare on our coast, the United States was deeply involved in hostilities, and had already begun the transportation of the great army which produced such decisive results on the Western Front. The time had passed, as experience soon showed, when any demonstration on our coast would disturb the calm of the American people or affect their will to victory.

In late April, 1918, I learned through secret-service channels that one of the large submarines of the Deutschland class had left its German base on the 19th of April for a long cruise. On the 1st of May, 1918, I therefore cabled to the Department that there were indications that this submarine was bound for our own coast. A few days afterward I received more specific information, through the interception of radio despatches between Germany and the submarine; and therefore I cabled the Department, this time informing them that the submarine was the U-151, that it was now well on its way across the Atlantic, and that it could be expected to begin operations off the American coast any time after May 20th. I gave a complete description of the vessel, the probable nature of her cruise, and her essential military characteristics. She carried a supply of mines, and I therefore invited the attention of the Department to the fact that the favourite areas for laying mines were those places where the ships stopped to pick up pilots. Since at Delaware Bay pilots for large ships were taken on just south of the Five Fathom Bank Light, I suggested that it was not unlikely that the U-151 would attempt to lay mines in that vicinity. Now the fact is that we knew that the U-151 intended to lay mines at this very place. We had obtained this piece of information from the radio which we had intercepted; as there was a possibility that our own cable might fall into German hands, we did not care to give the news in the precise form in which we had received it, as we did not intend that they should know that we had means of keeping so accurately informed. As had been predicted, the U-151 proceeded directly to the vicinity of this Five Fathom Bank off Delaware Bay, laid her mines, and then, cruising northward up the coast, began her demonstration on the 25th of May by sinking two small wooden schooners. These had no radio apparatus, and it was not until June 2nd that the Navy Department and the country received the news that the first submarine was operating. On June 29th I informed Washington that another U-boat was then coming down the west coast of Ireland, bound for the United States, and that it would arrive some time after July 15th. Complete reports of this vessel were sent from day to day, as it made its slow progress across the ocean. On July 6th I cabled that still another U-boat had started for our coast; and the progress of this adventurer, with all details as to its character and probable area of operations, were also forwarded regularly. From the end of May until October there was nearly always one submarine operating off our coast. The largest number active at any one time was in August, when for a week or ten days three were more or less active in attacking coastwise vessels. These three operated all the way from Cape Hatteras to Newfoundland, attempting by these tactics to create the impression that dozens of hostile U-boats were preying upon our commerce and threatening our shores. These submarines, however, attacked almost exclusively sailing vessels and small coastwise steamers, rarely, if ever, using torpedoes. A number of mines were laid at different points off our ports, on what the Germans believed to be the traffic routes; but the information which we had concerning them made it possible to counter successfully their efforts and, from a military point of view, the whole of the submarine operations off our coast can be dismissed as one of the minor incidents of the war, as the Secretary of the Navy described it in his Annual Report. The five submarines sunk in all approximately 110,000 tons of shipping, but the vessels were, for the most part, small and of no great military importance. The only real victory was the destruction of the cruiser San Diego, which was sunk by a mine which had been laid by the U-156 off Fire Island.

CHAPTER XI

FIGHTING SUBMARINES FROM THE AIR

The Allied navies were harrowing the submarines not only under the water and on the surface, but from the air. In the anti-submarine campaign the several forms of aircraft—airplane, seaplane, dirigible, and kite balloon—developed great offensive power. Nor did the fact that our fighters in the heavens made few direct attacks which were successful diminish the importance of their work. The records of the British Admiralty attribute the destruction of five submarines to the British air service; the French Admiralty gives the American forces credit for destroying one on the French coast. These achievements, compared with the tremendous efforts involved in equipping air stations, may at first look like an inconsiderable return; yet the fact remains that aircraft were an important element in defeating the German campaign against merchant shipping.

Like the subchaser and the submarine, the seaplane operated most successfully in coastal waters. I have already indicated that one advantage of the convoy system was that it forced the U-boats to seek their victims closer to the shore. In our several forms of aircraft we had still another method of interfering with their operation in such quarters. In order to use these agencies effectively we constructed aircraft stations in large numbers along the coast of France and the British Isles, assigned a certain stretch of coastline to each one of these stations, and kept the indicated area constantly patrolled. The advantages which were possessed by a fleet of aircraft operating at a considerable height above the water are at once apparent. The great speed of seaplanes in itself transformed them into formidable foes. The submarine on the surface could make a maximum of only 16 knots an hour, whereas an airplane made anywhere from 60 to 100; it therefore had little difficulty, once it had sighted the under-water boat, in catching up with it and starting hostilities. Its great speed also made it possible for an airplane or dirigible to patrol a much greater area of water than a surface or a subsurface vessel. An observer located several hundred feet in the heavens could see the submarine much more easily than could his comrades on other craft. If the water were clear he could at once detect it, even though it were submerged; in any event, merely lifting a man in the air greatly extended his horizon, and made it possible for him to pick up hostile vessels at a much greater distance. Moreover, the airplane had that same advantage upon which I have laid such emphasis in describing the anti-submarine powers of the submarine itself: that is, it was almost invisible to its under-water foe. If the U-boat were lying on the surface, a seaplane or a dirigible was readily seen; but if it were submerged entirely, or even sailing at periscope depth, the most conspicuous enemy in the heavens was invisible. After our submarines and our aircraft had settled down to their business of extermination, existence for those Germans who were operating in coastal waters became extremely hazardous and nerve-racking; their chief anxiety was no longer the depth bomb of a destroyer; they lived every moment in the face of hidden terrors; they never knew when a torpedo would explode into their vitals, or when an unseen bomb, dropped from the heavens, would fall upon their fragile decks.

I have said that the destructive achievements of aircraft figure only moderately in the statistics of the war; this was because the greater part of their most valuable work was done in co-operation with war vessels. Aircraft in the Navy performed a service not unlike that which it performed in the Army. We are all familiar with the picture of airplanes sailing over the field of battle, obtaining information which was wirelessed back to their own forces, "spotting" artillery positions, and giving ranges. The seaplanes and dirigibles of the Allied navies performed a similar service on the ocean. To a considerable extent they became the "eyes" of the destroyers and other surface craft, just as the airplanes on the land became the "eyes" of the army. As part of their equipment all the dirigibles had wireless telegraph and wireless telephone; as soon as a submarine was "spotted," the news was immediately flashed broadcast, and every offensive warship which was anywhere in the neighbourhood, as well as the airplane itself, started for the indicated scene. There are several cases in which the sinking of submarines by destroyers was attributed to information wirelessed in this fashion by American aircraft; and since the air service of the British navy was many times greater than our own, there are many more such "indirect sinkings" credited to the British effort.

The following citation, which I submitted to the Navy Department in recommending Lieutenant John J. Schieffelin for the Distinguished Service Medal, illustrates this co-operation between air and surface craft:

Besides scouting and "spotting" and bombing, the aerial hunters of the submarine developed great value in escorting convoys. A few dirigibles, located on the flanks of a convoy, protected them almost as effectively as the destroyers themselves; and even a single airship not infrequently brought a group of merchantmen and troopships safely into port. Sometimes the airships operated in this way as auxiliaries to destroyers, while sometimes they operated alone. In applying this mechanism of protection to merchant convoys, we were simply adopting the method which Great Britain had been using for three years in the narrow passages of the English Channel. Much has been said of the skill with which the British navy transported about 20,000,000 souls back and forth between England and France in four years; and in this great movement seaplanes, dirigibles, and other forms of aircraft played an important part. In the same way this scheme of protection was found valuable with the coastal convoys, particularly with the convoys which sailed from one French port to another, and from British ports to places in Ireland, Holland, or Scandinavia. I have described the dangers in which these ships were involved owing to the fact that the groups were obliged to break up after entering the Channel and the Irish Sea, and thus to proceed singly to their destinations. Aircraft improved this situation to a considerable extent, for they could often go to sea, pick up the ships, and bring them safely home. The circumstance that our seaplanes, perched high in the air, could see the submarine long before they had reached torpedoing distance, and could, if necessary, signal to a destroyer for assistance, made them exceedingly valuable for this kind of work.

Early in 1918, at the request of the British Government, we took over a large seaplane base which had been established by the British at Killingholme, England, a little sea-coast town at the mouth of the Humber River. According to the original plan we intended to co-operate from this point with the British in a joint expedition against enemy naval bases, employing for this purpose especially constructed towing lighters, upon which seaplanes were to be towed by destroyers to within a short flying distance of their objectives. Although this project was never carried out, Killingholme, because of its geographical location, became a very important base for seaplanes used in escorting mercantile convoys to and from Scandinavian ports, patrolling mine-fields while on the lookout for enemy submarines and making those all-important reconnaissance flights over the North Sea which were intended to give advanced warning of any activity of the German High Seas Fleet. These flights lasted usually from six to eight hours; the record was made by Ensigns S. C. Kennedy and C. H. Weatherhead, U.S.N., who flew for nine hours continuously on convoy escort duty. For a routine patrol, this compares very favourably indeed with the flight of the now famous trans-Atlantic NC-4.

I can no better describe the splendid work of these enthusiastic and courageous young Americans than by quoting a few extracts from a report which was submitted to me by Ensign K. B. Keyes, of a reconnaissance flight in which he took part, while attached temporarily to a British seaplane station under post-graduate instruction. The picture given by Ensign Keyes is typical of the flights which our boys were constantly making: