Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/317

1918] results which would have meant defeat for the other Allies. Let us imagine, for a moment, what the sequence of events would have been had the submarine campaign against merchant shipping succeeded; in that case Britain and France would have been compelled to surrender unconditionally and the United States would therefore have been forced to fight the Central Empires alone. Germany's terms of peace would have included the surrender of all the Allied fleets; this would eventually have left the United States navy to fight the German navy reinforced by the ships of Great Britain, Austria, France, and Italy. In such a contest we should have been outnumbered about three or four to one. I have such confidence in the power and purpose of America as to believe that, even in a single-handed conflict with Germany, we should have won in the end ; but it is evident that the problem would have been quite a different one from that of fighting in co-operation with the Allies against the Germanic foe.

Simply as a matter of self-interest and strategy it was certainly wisdom to throw the last ounce of our strength into the scale of the Allied navies; and it was therefore inevitable that we should first of all use our anti-submarine craft to protect all shipping sailing to Europe and to clear the sea of submarines. In doing this we were protecting the food supply not only of Great Britain, but of France and our other Allies, for most of the materials which we sent to our European friends were transported first to England and thence were shipped across the Channel. Moreover, our twelve months' campaign against the submarine was an invaluable preliminary to transporting the troops. Does any sane person believe that we could have put two million Americans into France had the German submarines main- tained until the spring and summer of 1918 the striking power which had been theirs in the spring of 1917? Merely to state the question is to answer it. In that same twelve months we had gained much experience which was exceedingly valuable when we began transporting troops in great numbers. The most efficacious protection to merchant shipping, the convoy, was similarly the greatest safeguard to our military transports. Those methods which had been so successfully used in shipping food, munitions, and materials were now used in shipping soldiers. The section of the great headquarters which we had developed in London