Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/66

48 inevitable, and there were many invitations to dinners and to clubs that could not be ignored. Our officers made a state visit to Cork, going up in Admiral Bayly's barge, and returned the felicitations of the Mayor and his retinue.

Naturally both the Americans and their ships became objects of great interest to their new allies. It was, I think, the first time that a destroyer flotilla had ever visited Great Britain, and the very appearance of the vessels themselves aroused the greatest curiosity. They bore only a general resemblance to the destroyers of the British navy. The shape of their hulls, the number and location of smoke pipes, the positions of guns, torpedo tubes, bridges, deckhouse, and other details gave them quite a contrasting profile. The fact that they were designed to operate under different conditions from the British ships accounted for many of these divergences. We build our destroyers with the widest possible cruising radius; they are expected to go to the West Indies, to operate from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and in general to feel at home anywhere in the great stretch of waters that surround our country. British destroyers, on the other hand, are intended to operate chiefly in the restricted waters around the British Isles, where the fuelling and refitting facilities are so extensive that they do not have to devote much space to supplies of this kind. The result is that our destroyers can keep the sea longer than the British ; on the other hand, the British are faster than ours, and they can also turn more quickly. These differences were of course a subject of much discussion among the observers at Queenstown, and even of animated argument. Naturally, the interest of the destroyer officers of the two services in the respective merits of their vessels was very keen. They examined minutely all features that were new to them in the design and arrangement of guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and machines, freely exchanged information, and discussed proposed improvements in the friendliest possible spirit. Strangely enough, although the American destroyers carried greater fuel supplies than the British, they were rather more dainty and graceful in their lines, a fact which inspired a famous retort which rapidly passed through the ranks oi both navies.