Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/264

246 to destroy a swarm of hornets—such was the favourite simile—was to annihilate them in their nests, and not to hunt and attack them, one by one, after they had escaped into the open. What the situation needed was not a long and wearisome campaign, involving unlimited new construction to offset the increasing losses of life and shipping, and altogether too probable defeat in the end, but a swift and terrible blow which would end the submarine menace overnight.

The naval officers who expressed fears that, under the shipping conditions prevailing in 1917, such a brilliant performance could not possibly be carried out in time to avoid defeat, merely gained a reputation for timidity and lack of resourcefulness. When the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, in 1915 declared that the British fleet would "dig the Germans out of their holes like rats," his remarks did not greatly impress naval strategists, but they certainly sounded a note which was popular in England. One fact, not generally known at that time, demonstrated the futility of the whole idea. Most newspaper critics assumed that the barrage from Dover to Calais was keeping the submarines out of the Channel. That the destroyers, aircraft, and other patrols were safely escorting troopships and other vessels across the Channel was a fact of which the British public was justly proud. Yet it did not necessarily follow that the submarines could not use the Channel as a passage-way from their German bases to their operating areas in the focus of Allied shipping routes. The mines and nets in the Channel, of which so much was printed in the first three years of the war, did not offer an effective barrier to the submarines. This was due to various reasons too complicated for description in a book of this untechnical nature. The unusually strong tides and rough weather experienced in the vicinity of the Straits of Dover are well known. As one British officer expressed it at the time, "our experience in attempting to close the Strait has involved both blood and tears"—blood because of the men who were lost in laying the mines and nets, and tears because the arduous work of weeks would be swept away in a storm of a single night. In addition, at this stage of the war the British were still experimenting with mines; they had discovered gradually that the design which they had