Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/116

98 by a fine squadron of American ships, kept the German surface vessels penned in their harbours and in this way left the ocean free for the operations of the Allied surface craft. I have already said that, in April, 1917, the Allied navies, while they controlled the surface of the water, did not control the subsurface, which at that time was practically at the disposition of the Germans. Yet the determining fact, as we were now to learn, was that this control of the surface was to give us the control of the subsurface also. Only the fact that the battleships kept the German fleet at bay made it possible for the destroyers and other surface craft to do their beneficent work. In an open sea battle their surface navies would have disposed of the German fleet; but let us suppose for a moment that an earthquake, or some other great natural disturbance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa Flow. The world would then have been at Germany's mercy and all the destroyers the Allies could have put upon the sea would have availed them nothing, for the German battleships and battle cruisers could have sunk them or driven them into their ports. Then Allied commerce would have been the prey, not only of the submarines, which could have operated with the utmost freedom, but of the German surface craft as well. In a few weeks the British food supplies would have been exhausted. There would have been an early end to the soldiers and munitions which Britain was constantly sending to France. The United States could have sent no forces to the Western Front and the result would have been the surrender which the Allies themselves, in the spring of 1917, regarded as not a remote possibility. America would then have been compelled to face the German power alone, and to face it long before we had had an opportunity of assembling our resources and of equipping our armies. The world was preserved from all these calamities because the destroyer and the convoy solved the problem of the submarine and because back of these agencies of victory lay Admiral Beatty's squadrons, holding at arm's length the German surface ships while these comparatively fragile craft were saving the liberties of the world.