Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/286

268 American coast would have been very much longer and would have been a much more serious strain on the submarines than were the shorter cruises in the inshore waters of Europe. As has already been explained, the submarine did not differ from other craft in its need for constant repairs and careful upkeep, except that perhaps it was a more delicate instrument of warfare than any other naval craft, and that it would require longer and more frequent periods of overhaul. Any operations carried out three thousand miles from their bases, where alone supplies, spare parts, and repair facilities were available, would have soon reduced the submarine campaign to comparative uselessness; each voyage would have resulted in sinking a relatively small amount of shipping; a great number of submarines would be out of commission at all times for repairs, or would be lost through accidents. The Germans had no submarine bases in American waters and could establish none. Possibly, as the newspaper writer has pointed out, they might have seized a deserted island off the coast of Maine or in the Caribbean, and cached there a reservoir of fuel and food ; unless, however, they could also have created at these places adequate facilities for repairing submarines or supplying them with torpedoes and ammunition, such a place would not have served the purpose of a base at all. Comparatively few of the German submarines could have made the cruise to the American coast and operated successfully there so far away from their bases for any considerable time. In the time spent in such an enterprise, the same submarine could make three or four trips in the waters about the British Isles, or off the coast of France, and could sink four or five times the tonnage which could be destroyed in the cruise on the Atlantic coast. In the eastern Atlantic, the submarine could seek its victims in an area comprising a comparatively few square miles, at points where shipping was so dense that a submarine had only to take a station and lie in wait, and be certain, within a short time, of encountering valuable ships which it could attack successfully with its torpedoes. If the U-boats should be sent to America, on the other hand, they would have to patrol up and down three thousand miles of coast, looking for victims; and even when they found them the ships that they could sink would usually be those engaged in the coastwise traffic, which were of infinitely less military