It is the boast of Germany that she will win the present war by sinking not only all of the ships of the Allies, but those of any other country which may trade with them.

Now, the United States demands the freedom of the seas for every American citizen and for every ship that flies the stars and stripes and to make good this demand is what brought us into the war.

If Germany could destroy all of the merchantmen of the Allies—and we are now one of them—as she wants to do, she would doubtless be the victor. She hopes to but will never be. The blockade by her submarines is growing more and more serious and many plans and schemes have been put forth to outwit, offset, or to break it down by destroying her destroyers.

There are at the present time[35] only about thirty million tons of shipping[36] in the world which can be used to supply the Allies of Europe with munitions of war. The German U-boats are picking off ships, both neutral and otherwise at the rate of half a million tons a month, and at this rate of destruction shipping cannot last more than a few years. Hence the great need of breaking the blockade and of doing it quickly.

Schemes for Outwitting the Submarine.—Many plans have been thought of and tried out to get the best of the tough old submarine and so defeat it; and among these are:

(1) To build ships that are so heavily armored that they can withstand the attack of torpedoes.

(2) To build ships which have a light enough draft and are speedy enough to outdodge and to outrun the swift torpedo.

(3) To outrig the ships below the water-line with nets which prevent the torpedoes from striking the hulls hard enough to explode them.

(4) To fit the ships with wireless ears which will detect the presence and determine the position of the submarine before it gets within torpedoing range and so give them a chance to escape.

(5) Any number of other impracticable schemes.

Now, you may ask why these schemes are useless. Among the reasons are these, (a) steel armor has yet to be made that will withstand the violent explosive power of the torpedo, (b) ships with a draft light enough and a speed great enough to get out of the way of a torpedo could not be used as freighters, (c) nets on ships make them slow and unwieldy, and as soon as they were used the torpedoes were fitted with steel cutters which enabled them to go through as easily as before, (d) the art of wireless has not yet advanced to the point where it is possible for a ship to detect the presence and position of a submerged submarine, (e) every other scheme that has been put to the acid test has had a glaring fault in it.

Plans for Destroying the U-Boats.—Now, the right way to break the German blockade is to destroy the U-boats, and plans along this line have been devised and carried out with better success.

The submarine can be destroyed in several ways. Among the most important are (1) by laying mine-fields; (2) by arming merchantmen with rapid-fire guns; (3) by destroying the base-ships which mother the submarines; (4) by hunting them down with submarine chasers, and (5) by dropping bombs or shelling them from aircraft.

Laying Mine Fields in Harbors.—This plan is very good for protecting harbors against submarine attacks; but as nearly all the merchantmen are sunk from 200 to 300 miles off the coast, the use of mines for the protection of shipping is very limited.

Arming Merchantmen with Guns.—Arming merchantmen has met with some success, but as a matter of fact it is a very uncertain means of protection, and the large number of armed ships which are sunk weekly shows that the plan is weak.

As a merchantman, or freighter, is usually a slow craft, and a submarine can easily out-maneuver it even when the submarine is on the surface, and when she is submerged she cannot be seen, it must be clear that ordinary rapid-fire guns cannot easily hit her.

Destroying the Mother Ships.—To destroy the base-ships is, though it may sound like a paradox, one of the best and at the same time one of the least practical plans of getting rid of the submarines that infest a certain zone.

It must be clear if the base-ships are destroyed that the submarines they mother would speedily come to an end. Knowing full well that the Allies would try to find out her bases, both on land and sea, Germany has hidden most of them well, and those that are not hidden are protected by guns of such caliber[37] as to prove a source of danger to even a fleet of first line dreadnaughts.

Since the bases are too hard to find and too hard to destroy when once found, other easier and more practical plans have been devised, tried and found fairly successful.

Kinds of Submarine Chasers.—And now we come to a class of naval craft to which the name submarine chaser has been given, and she has proved to be the best and most practical plan yet worked out to kill off the submarine.

There are two very different kinds of submarine chasers, and these are (1) boats which travel on the surface of the water, and (2) craft which travel through the air. The first kind only, though, is called a submarine chaser, while the second kind may be either a dirigible balloon or a warplane.

The 80-Foot Submarine Chaser.—The submarine chaser is simply a boat whose success as a destroyer depends on four factors, and these are (a) how fast she can go; (b) how light her draft is; (c) how well she is armed, and (d) how fast she can be built.

Two kinds of these chasers have been built, and both have shown their real worth. The first is known as the 80-foot submarine chaser. 550 of these noble craft have already been built for England and sent over to operate against the U-boat in British waters.

They are powered with gasoline engines and are built just about like the high-speed pleasure boats that are now so common here on this side of the Atlantic, that is, they have a three-quarter cruising cabin and cockpit as shown in Fig. 64.

They are very seaworthy, and the powerful gasoline engines installed in them give them speed enough to outrun the fastest submarines that have yet been built. Each one carries a rapid-fire gun of the 3-inch type.

The 110-Foot Submarine Chaser.—The only fault with the 80-footer is that its small size makes it impossible to store away enough fuel to give it a large cruising radius, and so a new type of submarine chaser is being built which is 110 feet long. Its general appearance is shown in Fig. 65.

This boat is powered with steam engines and oil-burning boilers which drive the chaser at the very fast[190]
[191]
[192] speed of 25 knots. The craft is armed with a battery of two 3-inch guns mounted on the fore and aft decks. The large size of this chaser makes it easy for it to cruise for long distances, while its speed is 8 knots faster than that of the fleetest submarine and this makes it a foe that is truly to be feared.

How the Chaser Chases a Submarine.—The way a submarine chaser chases a submarine is like this: each chaser is given a certain area of seaway to patrol. This she does, and if she is lucky she will soon see the periscope of an enemy submarine poking its hood above the water to take a peek around the horizon.

This is the signal for the chaser to bear down on that periscope at full speed, the gunners doing their level best to hit the periscope or any other part of the submarine which shows itself above water.

As it takes time for the submarine to dive or to get her own guns into action, the chaser stands a pretty good chance of either crippling or even sinking her. Further, the submarine cannot use her torpedoes on the chaser, for the latter craft is so short and has such a shallow draft that her hull does not offer much of a target for a torpedo, even though she were standing still, and much less when she is bearing down on the submarine at full speed.

Every once in a while a chaser is able to surprise a submarine when she has come to the surface for a breather and to recharge her storage batteries. When this happens it is simply another case of the cat eating the canary.

If the submarine is within two miles of the chaser she cannot get ready to dive and she must either get her own guns in action or else she must try to outrun the chaser, getting ready to dive as she runs and trusting to the Kaiser that she may not be hit in the meantime.

This last course proves disastrous to the submarine nine times out of ten, and so she usually gets her guns into action and a regular little sea battle is fought right then and there.

Shooting the Guns of the Chaser.—Having found, chased, and caught the submarine, the next thing to do is to put her out of commission. On the guns with which the chaser is armed, and on her gunners, depend to a large extent the success or the failure of the attack.

A gun which had a long range and a flat trajectory[38] was quick in action, and rapid-firing, was thought to be all that a gun should be for submarine execution; and it was all right for shooting at conning towers and similar targets which showed themselves above the water-line, but it was useless for a gun of this kind to try to hit anything that was even a few feet under water.

The reasons for this are somewhat deep and scientific but if you will read carefully, look at the diagrams shown in Figs. 66 and 67, and do a little thinking as you go along you will be able to visualize the whole thing—that is, to see it.

Now, the way this gun was made was to rifle the barrel of it, and this gave a turning motion to the projectile when it was fired, that is, it spun around on its long axis, and the trajectory was flat, which means that the path of the projectile in its flight from the gun to its target was only slightly curved.

Both of these things made the projectile deviate from its course the instant it struck the water, or ricochet (pronounced rik-o-shÁy) as it is called; that is, it bounced from the water in exactly the same way that a flat stone skips along when you throw it close to the surface of a pond or lake.

The right kind of gun to use on submarine chasers is not rifled, and the projectile should be given a trajectory, or path, that is much the same as that of an arrow; the result is that a shot can be fired at a submarine which is submerged to a depth of 20 feet or so and be effective because the curve of the path is such that the projectile drops straight, or nearly straight, down on the submarine and penetrates the water as shown in Fig. 67.

Submarine Air Chasers.—Besides the submarine chasers just described, there are two other kinds that have shown great possibilities as destroyers of undersea craft. These are (1) the airship, or dirigible balloon, and (2) the airplane, and it is more than likely that in the near future, should the war keep on, the latter craft alone will be used for submarine chasers.

Where a boat chaser cannot see a submarine at all when she is submerged, an airplane can fly directly over her, follow her every movement, and see her when she is at a considerable depth. (See Fig. 68.)

As the airplane is much more steady in the air than a submarine is on the water and as the former is much quicker and speedier than the latter, a battle between these two very different kinds of craft is an unequal one with the odds greatly in favor of the warplane.

A Way to Lift the U-Boat Blockade.—Here, then, is a real, ready way that the submarine can be destroyed and Germany’s blockade lifted. To put an end quickly and for all time to the U-boat menace, the United States ought to build several thousand airplanes at once and arm these with bombs and rapid-fire guns like the Lewis[39] and send this fleet to patrol the seas.

If this were done there wouldn’t be enough U-boats left in a month’s time to flag a Norwegian fishing trawler. So the thing for your Uncle Sammy to do is to build a great fleet of airplanes, and in the shortest possible time.

There is still another way to break the blockade, and this will be described in the next chapter.