Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/258

240 layman as sheer cowardice. But in this attitude the Germans were undoubtedly right.

The business of their submarines was not to fight warships; it was exclusively to destroy merchantmen. The demand made upon the U-boat commanders was to get "tonnage! tonnage!" Germany could win the war in only one way: that was by destroying Allied shipping to such an extent that the Allied sea communications would be cut, and the supplies of men and munitions and food from the United States shut off. For this tremendous task Germany had an inadequate number of submarines and torpedoes. Only by economizing to the utmost extent on these vessels and these weapons could she entertain any hope of success. Had Germany possessed an unlimited quantity of submarines and torpedoes, she might perhaps have profitably expended some of them in warfare on British "H-boats" and American "L-boats"; or, had there been a certainty of "getting" an Allied submarine with each torpedo fired, it would have been justifiable to use these weapons, small as was the supply. The fact was, however, that the Allies expended many torpedoes for every submarine sunk ; and this was clearly a game which Germany could not afford to play. Evidently the U-boats had orders to slip under the water whenever an Allied submarine was seen; at least this was the almost invariable procedure. Thus the Allied submarines compelled their German enemies to do the one thing which worked most to their disadvantage: that is, to keep submerged when in the same area with our submarines; this not only prevented them from attacking merchantmen, but forced them to consume their electric power, which, as I have already explained, greatly diminished their efficiency as attacking ships.

The operations of Allied submarines also greatly diminished the value of the "cruiser" submarines which Germany began to construct in 1917. These great subsurface vessels were introduced as an "answer" to the convoy system. The adoption of the convoy, as I have already explained, made it ineffective for the Germans to hunt far out at sea. Until the Allies had put this plan into operation, the relatively small German U-boats could go two or three hundred miles into the Atlantic and pick off almost at will the merchant ships, which were then pro-