Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/260

242 U-boats from hunting in groups or flotillas. All during 1917 and 1918 the popular mind conjured up frightful pictures of U-boat squadrons, ten or fifteen together, lying in wait for our merchantmen or troopships. Hardly a passenger crossed the ocean without seeing a dozen German submarines constantly pursuing his ship. In a speech which I made to a group of American editors who visited England in September, 1918, I touched upon this point. "I do not know," I told these journalists, "how many submarines you gentlemen saw on the way over here, but if you had the usual experience, you saw a great many. I have seen many accounts in our papers on this subject. If you were to believe these accounts, you could only conclude that many vessels have crossed the ocean with difficulty because submarines were so thick that they scraped all the paint off the vessels' sides. All of these accounts are, of course, unofficial. They get into the American papers in various ways. It is to be regretted that they should be published and thereby give a false impression. Some time ago I saw a letter from one of our men who came over here on a ship bound into the English Channel. This letter was written to his girl. He said that he intended to take the letter on shore and slip it into a post box so that the censor should not see it. The censor did see it and it eventually came to me. This man was evidently intent on impressing on his girl the dangers through which he had passed. It related that the vessel on which he had made the voyage had met two or three submarines a day; that two spies were found on board and hanged; and it said, 'When we arrived off our port there were no less than eighteen submarines waiting for us. Can you beat it?'"

Perhaps in the early days of the war the German U-boats did hunt in flotillas; if so, however, they were compelled to abandon the practice as soon as the Allied submarines began to operate effectively. I have already indicated the circumstances which reduced their submarine operations to a lonely enterprise. In the open sea it was impossible to tell whether a submarine was a friend or an enemy. We never knew whether a submarine on the surface was one of our own or a German; as a result, as already said, we gave orders to attack any under-water boat, unless we had absolute knowledge that it was a