Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/132

114 no other objective than the junction point of a certain meridian and parallel, and reach the designated spot at a certain hour. Such a feat demanded navigation ability of a high order; and the skill which our American naval officers displayed in this direction aroused great admiration, especially on the part of the merchant skippers; in particular it aroused the astonishment of the average doughboy. Many destroyer escorts that went out to meet an incoming convoy also took out one which was westward bound. A few mishaps in the course of the war, such as the sinking of the Justicia, which was sailing from Europe to America, created the false notion that outward-bound convoys were not escorted. It was just as desirable, of course, to escort the ships going out as it was to escort those which were coming in. The mere fact that the inbound ships carried troops and supplies gave stronger reasons, from the humane standpoint, for heavier escorts, but not from the standpoint of the general war situation. The Germans were not sinking our ships because they were carrying men and supplies; they were sinking them simply because they were ships. They were not seeking to destroy American troops and munitions exclusively; they were seeking to destroy tonnage. They were aiming to reduce the world's supply of ships to such a point that the Allies, would be compelled to abandon the conflict for lack of communications. It was therefore necessary that they should sink the empty ships, which were going out, as well as the crowded and loaded ships which were coming in. For the same reason it was necessary that we should protect them, and we did this as far as practicable without causing undue delays in forming outward-bound convoys. The Justicia, though most people still think that she was torpedoed because she was unescorted, was, in fact, protected by a destroyer escort of considerable size. This duty of escorting outward-bound ships increased considerably the strain on our destroyer force. The difficulty was that the inbound convoy arrived in a body, but that the ships could not be unloaded and sent back in a body without detaining a number of them an undue length of time and time was such an important factor in this war that it was necessary to make the "turn-around" of each important transport as quickly as possible. The consequence was that returning ships were often despatched in small convoys as fast