Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/70

52 Allied shipping; if the sinking should keep up at this rate, it meant losses of 1,000,000 tons a month and an early German victory.

In looking over my letters of that period, I find many references that picture the state of the official mind. All that time I was keeping closely in touch with Ambassador Page, who was energetically seconding all my efforts to bring more American ships across the Atlantic.

"It remains a fact," I wrote our Ambassador, "that at present the enemy is succeeding and that we are failing. Ships are being sunk faster than they can be replaced by the building facilities of the world. This simply means that the enemy is winning the war. There is no mystery about that. The submarines are rapidly cutting the Allies' lines of communication. When they are cut, or sufficiently interfered with, we must accept the enemy's terms."

Six days before our destroyers put in at Queenstown I sent this message to Mr. Page: Allies do not now command the sea. Transport of troops and supplies strained to the utmost and the maintenance of the armies in the field is threatened.

Such, then, was the situation when our little destroyer flotilla first went to sea to do battle with the submarine. Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, who now became the commander of the American destroyers at Queenstown, so far as their military operations were concerned, had spent fifty years in the British navy, forty years of this time actually at sea. This ripe experience, combined with a great natural genius for salt water, had made him one of the most efficient men in the -service. In what I have already said, I may have given a slightly false impression of the man ; that he was taciturn, that he was generally regarded as a hard taskmaster, that he never made friends at the first meeting, that he was more interested in results than in persons all this is true ; yet these qualities merely concealed what was, at bottom, a generous, kindly, and even a warm-hearted character. Admiral Bayly was so