Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/288

270 cured to create the impression that such an attack was likely to occur at any time. This was part of their war propaganda. The press was full of reports that such attacks were about to be made. German agents were continually circulating these reports.

Of course it was clear from the first, to the heads of the Allied navies and to all naval authorities who were informed about the actual conditions, that these attacks by German submarines on the American coast would be in the nature of raids for moral effect only. It was also quite clear from the first, as I pointed out in my despatches to the Navy Department, that the best place to defend our coast was in the critical submarine areas in the European Atlantic, through which the submarines had to pass in setting out for our coast, and in which alone they could have any hope of succeeding in the military object of the undersea campaign. It was not necessary to keep our destroyers in American waters, patrolling the vast expanse of our three thousand miles of coastline, in a futile effort to find and destroy such enemy submarines as might operate on the American coast. So long as these attacks were only sporadic—and carried out by the type of submarine which used its guns almost exclusively in sinking ships, and which selected for its victims unarmed and unprotected ships—destroyers and other anti-submarine craft would be of no possible use on the Atlantic coast. The submarine could see these craft from a much greater distance than it could itself be seen by them; and by diving and sailing submerged it could easily avoid them and sink its victims without ever being sighted or attacked by our own patrols, however numerous they might have been. Even in the narrow waters of the English Channel, up to the very end of the war, submarines were successfully attacking small merchant craft by gunfire, although the density of patrol craft in this area was naturally a thousand times greater than we could ever have provided for the vast expanse of our own coast. Consequently, so long as the submarine attacks on the American coast were only sporadic, it was absolutely futile to maintain patrol craft in those waters, as this could not provide any adequate defence against such scattered demonstrations. If, on the other hand, the Germans had ever decided to commit the military mistake of concentrating a considerable number of submarines off our Atlantic ports, we could always have