Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/227

1917-18] We had entered the war late; we had entered it in a condition of unpreparedness; our naval forces, when compared to those which had been assembled by the Allies, were small; we had not been engaged for three years combating an enemy using new weapons and methods of naval warfare. It was not unlikely that we could make some original contributions to the Allied effort; indeed, we early did so; yet it was natural to suppose that the navies which had been combating the submarines so long understood that game better than did we, and it was our duty to assist them in this work, rather than to operate independently. Moreover, this question as to whether any particular one of our methods might be better or might be worse than Great Britain's was not the most important one. The point was that the British navy had developed its own methods of working and that it was a great "going concern." The crisis was so pressing that we simply did not have the time to create a separate force of our own; the most cursory examination of conditions convinced me that we could hope to accomplish something worth while only by playing the game as it was then being played, and that any attempt to lay down new rules would inevitably decrease the effectiveness of our co-operation, and perhaps result in losing the war. We can even admit, for the sake of the argument, that the Americans might have created a better organization than the British; but the question of improving on their methods, or of not improving on them, was a point that was not worth considering; long before we could have developed an efficient independent machine the war would have come to an end. It was thus our duty to take things as they were, to plunge immediately into the conflict, and to make every ship and every man tell in the most effective way and in the shortest possible time. Therefore I decided that our forces should become, for the purpose of this war, virtually a part of the Allied navies ; to place at the disposal of the Allies our ships to reinforce the weak part of their lines; to ignore such secondary considerations as national pride, naval prestige, and personal ambitions ; and to subordinate every other consideration to that of defeating the Hun. I have already described how in distributing our subchasers I practically placed them at the disposal of the Allied