Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/316

298 this time the American army in France numbered about 300,000 men ; it now became the business of the American navy, assisted by the British, to transport the American troops who could increase these forces sufficiently to turn the balance in the Allies' favour.

The supreme hour, to which all the anti-submarine labours of the preceding year were merely preliminary, had now arrived. Since the close of the war there has been much discussion of the part which the American navy played in bringing it to a successful end. Even during the war there was some criticism on this point. There were two more or less definite opinions in the public mind upon this question. One was that the main business of our war vessels was to convoy the American soldiers to France ; the other emphasized the anti-submarine warfare as its most important duty. Anyone would suppose, from the detached way in which these two subjects have been discussed, that the anti-submarine warfare and the successful transportation of troops were separate matters. An impression apparently prevails that, at the beginning of the war, the American navy could have quietly decided whether it would devote its energies to making warfare on the submarine or to convoying American armies ; yet the absurdity of such a conception must be apparent to anyone who has read the foregoing pages. The several operations in which the Allied navies engaged were all part of a comprehensive programme; they were all interdependent. According to my idea, the business of the American navy was to join its forces whole-heartedly with those of the Allies in the effort to win the war. Anything which helped to accomplish this great purpose became automatically our duty. Germany was basing her chances of success upon the submarine; our business was therefore to assist in defeating the submarine. The cause of the Allies was our cause; our cause was the cause of the Allies ; anything which benefited the Allies benefited the United States; and anything which benefited the United States benefited the Allies. Neither we nor France nor England were conducting a separate campaign; we were separate units of an harmonious whole. At the beginning the one pressing duty was to put an end to the sinking of merchantmen, not because these merchantmen were for the larger part British, but because the failure to do so would have meant the elimination of Great Britain from the war, with