Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/112

94 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 manoeuvring 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 manoeuvring 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 manoeuvring 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 manoeuvres 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 beer established had we not sent destroyers for that purpose, yet I do not see how otherwise it could