Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/269

1917-18] warfare, but which are as essential to its prosecution as the more spectacular details.

I wish to emphasize the fact that, in laying such a barrage, it was not our object to make an absolute barrier to the passage of submarines. To have done this we should have needed such a great number of mines that the operation would have been impossible. Nor would such an absolute barrier have been necessary to success; a field that could be depended upon to destroy one-fourth or one-fifth of the submarines that attempted the passage would have represented complete success. No enemy could stand such losses as these; and the moral of no crew could have lasted long under such conditions.

Another circumstance which made the barrage a feasible enterprise was that by the last of the year 1917 it was realized that the submarine had ceased to be a decisive factor in the war. It still remained a serious embarrassment, and every measure which could possibly thwart it should be adopted. But the writings of German officers which have been published since the war make it apparent that they themselves realized early in 1918 that they would have to place their hopes of victory on something else besides the submarine. The convoy system and the other methods of fighting under-water craft which I have already described had caused a great decrease in sinkings. In April of 1917 the losses were nearly 900,000 tons; in November of the same year they were less than 300,000 tons. Meanwhile, the construction of merchant shipping, largely a result of the tremendous expansion of American shipbuilding facilities, was increasing at a tremendous rate. A diagram of these, the two essential factors in the submarine campaign, disclosed such a rapidly rising curve of new shipping, and such a rapidly falling curve of sinkings, that the time could be easily foreseen when the net amount of Allied shipping, after the submarines had done their worst, would show a promising increase. But, as stated above, the submarines were still a distinct menace; they were still causing serious losses; and it was therefore very important that we should leave no stone unturned toward demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt that warfare as conducted by these craft could be entirely put down. The more successfully we