Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/47

1917] the Admiralty discussed the question of releasing those destroyers, or a part of them, for the anti-submarine campaign; yet they always decided, and they decided wisely, against any such hazardous division. At that time the German dreadnought fleet was not immeasurably inferior in numbers to the British; it had a protecting screen of about 100 destroyers; and it would have been madness for the British to have gone into battle with its own destroyer screen placed several hundred miles away, off the coast of Ireland. I lay stress upon this circumstance because I find that in America the British Admiralty has been criticized for keeping a large destroyer force with the Grand Fleet, instead of detaching them for battle with the submarine. I think that I have made clear that this criticism is based upon a misconception of the whole naval campaign. Without this destroyer screen the British Grand Fleet might have been destroyed by the Germans; if the Grand Fleet had been destroyed, the war would have ended in the defeat of the Allies; not to have maintained these destroyers in northern waters would thus have amounted simply to betraying the cause of civilization and to making Germany a free gift of victory.

Germany likewise practically immobilized a considerable number of British destroyers by attacking hospital ships. When the news of such dastardly attacks became known, it was impossible for Americans and Englishmen to believe at first that they were intentional; they so callously violated all the rules of warfare and all the agreements for lessening the horrors of war to which Germany herself had become a party that there was a tendency in both enlightened countries to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. As a matter of fact, not only were the submarine attacks on hospital ships deliberate, but Germany had officially informed us that they would be made! The reasons for this warning are clear enough; again, the all-important role which the destroyers were playing in anti-submarine warfare was the point at issue. Until we received such warning, hospital ships had put to sea unescorted by warships, depending for their safety upon the rules of the Hague Conference. Germany attacked these ships in order to make us escort them with destroyers, and thereby compel us to divert these destroyers from the anti-submarine campaign. And, of course, England