Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/152

134 Express to commanding officers and men of the United States ship Fanning their Lordships' high appreciation of their successful action against enemy submarine.

I added a telegram of my own, ending up with the words, which seemed to amuse the officers and men: "Go out and do it again."

For this action the commanding officer of the Fanning, Lieutenant-Commander Carpender, was recommended by the Admiralty for the D.S.O., which was subsequently conferred upon him by the King at Buckingham Palace. Only one duty remained: the commanding officer read the burial service over the body of poor Franz Glinder, the German sailor who had been drowned in his attempt to swim to the Fanning. The Fanning then steamed out to sea with the body and buried it with all the honours of war. A letter subsequently written by Kapitan Amberger to a friend in Germany summed up his opinion of the situation in these words:

"The Americans were much nicer and more obliging than expected."

So far as convoying merchant ships was concerned, Queenstown was the largest American base; by the time the movement of troops laid heavy burdens on the American destroyers Brest became a headquarters almost equally important.

In July, 1917, the British Government requested the co-operation of the American navy in the great work which it had undertaken at Gibraltar; and on August 6th the U.S.S. Sacramento reached that port, followed about a week afterward by the Birmingham flying the flag of Rear-Admiral Henry B. Wilson. Admiral Wilson remained as commander of this force until November, when he left to assume the direction of affairs at Brest. On November 25th Rear-Admiral Albert P. Niblack succeeded to this command, which he retained throughout the war.

Gibraltar was the "gateway" for more traffic than any other port in the world. It was estimated that more than one quarter of all the convoys which reached the Entente nations either rendezvoused at this point