Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/314

296 navigating the difficult Pentland Firth. In most of the narrow passages Allied submarines lay constantly in wait with their torpedoes ; a great fleet of airplanes and dirigibles was always circling above ready to rain a shower of bombs upon the under- water foe. Already the ocean floor about the British Isles held not far from 200 sunken sub- marines, with most of their crews, amounting to at least 4,000 men, whose deaths involved perhaps the most hideous tragedies of the war. Bad as was this situation, it was nothing compared with what it would become a few months or a year later. American and British shipyards were turning out anti-submarine craft with great rapidity; the industries of America, with their enormous output of steel, had been enlisted in the anti-submarine campaign. The American and British shipbuilding facilities were neutralizing the German campaign in two ways: they were not only constructing war vessels on a scale which would soon drive all the German submarines from the sea, but they were building merchant tonnage so rapidly that, in March, 1918, more new tonnage was launched than was being destroyed. Thus by this time the Teutonic hopes of ending the war by the submarine had utterly collapsed ; if the Germans were to win the war at all, or even to obtain a peace which would not be disastrous, some other programme must be adopted and adopted quickly.

Disheartened by their failure at sea, the enemy therefore turned their eyes once more toward the land. The destruction of Russian military power had given the German armies a great numerical superiority over those of the Allies. There seemed little likelihood that the French or the British, after three years of frightfully gruelling war, could add materially to their forces. Thus, with the grouping of the Powers, such as existed in 1917, the Germans had a tremendous advantage on their side, for Russia, which German statesmen for fifty years had feared as a source of inexhaustible man-supply to her enemies, had disappeared as a military power. But a new element in the situation now counterbalanced this temporary gain ; that was the daily increasing importance of the United States in the war. The Germans, who in 1917 had despised us as an enemy, immediate or prospective, now despised us no longer. The army which they declared could never be raised and trainedwas actually being raised and trained by the millions.