Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/325

1918] south of Brest the waters were so shallow that the submarines could operate only with difficulty ; it was a long distance from the German bases; the shipping consisted largely of coastal convoys; much of this was the coal trade from England; it is therefore not surprising that the Germans contented themselves with now and then planting mines off the most important harbours. Since our enemy was able to maintain only eight or ten U-boats in the Atlantic at one time it would have been sheer waste of energy to have stationed them off the western coast of France. They would have put in their time to little purpose, and meanwhile the ships and cargoes which they were above all ambitious to destroy would have been safely finding their way into British ports.

The fact that we had these two separate areas and that these areas were so different in character was what made it possible to send our 2,000,000 soldiers to France without losing a single man. From March, 1918, to the conclusion of the war, the American and British navies were engaged in two distinct transportation operations. The shipment of food and munitions continued in 1918 as in 1917, and on an even larger scale. With the passing of time the mechanism of these mercantile convoys increased in efficiency, and by March, 1918, the management of this great transportation system had become almost automatic. Shipping from America came into British ports, it will be remembered, in two great "trunk lines," one of which ran through the English Channel and the other up the Irish Sea. But when the time came to bring over the American troops, we naturally selected the area to the south, both because it was necessary to send the troops to France and because we had here a great expanse of ocean which was relatively free of submarines. Our earliest troop shipments disembarked at St. Nazaire; later, when the great trans -Atlantic liners, both German and British, were pressed into service, we landed many tens of thousands at Brest; and all the largest French ports from Brest to Bordeaux took a share. A smaller number we sent to England, from which country they were transported across the Channel into France; when the demands became pressing, indeed, hardly a ship of any kind was sent to Europe without its quota of American soldiers; but, on the whole, the business of transportation in 1918 followed simple and well-defined lines. We