Hunting the German Shark the American Navy in the Underseas War

HUNTING THE GERMAN SHARK CHAPTER 1 THE AMERICAN NAVAL FORCES IN EUROPEBN WATERS IT is now more than a year since the first units of the American Fleet sailed away from our shores and mere promptIy lost to view in those mists of secrecy with which the British Admiralty then camouflaged its sea operations. Now and then a flash of information blazed out of the war fogs-as when the British First Sea Lord announced in Parliament early in 1918 that be- tween forty and fifty per cent. of U-boats were being sunk. But of the manner in which they came to their ends we were not informed. Generally speaking, that policy of silence was good at the time. Whether they were sunk by shell-fire, mines, torpedo, collision with each other or with sunken rocks, or through internal defects of their own, he could not tell. He knew only that after two and a half voyages, on the average, they did not return and we have good reason to know that the mystery that surrounded their fate seriously impaired the moral