Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/200

182 demands were made upon the British navy in northern waters that it could not spare many vessels for this work; the Italian navy was holding the majority of its destroyers intact, momentarily prepared for a sortie by the Austrian battle fleet; the Otranto barrage, therefore, important as it was to the Allied cause, was necessarily insufficient. The Italian representatives at the Allied Council made a strong plea for a contingent of American subchasers to reinforce the British ships, and the British and French delegates seconded this request.

In the spring of 1918 I therefore sent Captain Leigh to southern Italy to locate and construct a subchaser base in this neighbourhood. After inspecting the territory in detail Captain Leigh decided that the Bay of Govino, in the island of Corfu, would best meet our requirements. The immediate connection which was thus established between New London and this ancient city of classical Greece fairly illustrates how widely the Great War had extended the horizon of the American people. There was a certain appropriateness in the fact that the American college boys who commanded these little ships—not much larger than the vessel in which Ulysses had sailed these same waters three thousand years before—should have made their base on the same island which had served as a naval station for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and which, several centuries afterward, had been used for the same purpose by Augustus in the struggle with Antony. And probably the sight of the Achelleion, the Kaiser's palace, which was not far from this new American base, was not without its influence in constantly reminding our young men of the meaning of this unexpected association of Yankee-land with the ancient world.

By June 30, 1918, two squadrons of American chasers, comprising thirty-six boats, had assembled at Plymouth, England, under the command of Captain Lyman A. Gotten, U.S.N. The U.S. destroyer Parker, commanded by Commander Wilson Brown, had been assigned to this detachment as a supporting ship. The area which now formed the new field of operations was one which was