Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/31

1917] the battlefield; but the obvious fact, to their eyes, was that our armies could never get to the front in time. The submarine campaign, they said, would finish the thing in three or four months; and certainly in that period the unprepared United States could never summon any military power that could affect the result. Thus from a purely military standpoint the entrance of 100,000,000 Americans affected them about as much as would a declaration of war from the planet Mars.

We confirmed this point of view from the commanders of the occasionally captured submarines. These men would be brought to London and questioned; they showed the utmost confidence in the result.

"Yes, you've got us," they would say, " but what difference does that make ? There are plenty more submarines coming out. You will get a few, but we can build a dozen for every one that you can capture or sink. Anyway, the war will all be over in two or three months and we shall be sent back home."

All these captives laughed at the merest suggestion of German defeat; their attitude was not that of prisoners, but of conquerors. They also regarded themselves as heroes, and they gloried in the achievements of their submarine service. For the most part they exaggerated the sinkings and estimated that the war would end about the first of July or August. Similarly the Berlin Government exaggerated the extent of their success. This was not surprising, for one peculiarity of the submarine is that only the commander, stationed at the periscope, knows what is going on. He can report sinking a 5,000 ton ship and no one can contradict his statement, for the crew and the other officers do not see the surface of the water. Not unnaturally the commander does not depreciate his own achievements, and thus the amount of sunken tonnage reported in Berlin considerably exceeded the actual losses.

The speeches of German dignitaries resounded with the same confidence.

"In the impending decisive battle," said the Kaiser, "the task falls upon my navy of turning the English war method of starvation, with which our most hated and most obstinate enemy intends to overthrow the German people, against him and his allies by combating their sea