Foreword

THREE A DAY IN LATE SPRING, TWO A DAY IN EARLY SUMMER, AND one a day as autumn approached, has been the record of ships shattered by torpedo or gunfire in our waters in 1942. For months, ship after ship has been sinking into the Western Atlantic, from the world of cold fogs off Canada to the old pirate haunts of the Caribbean and points south. Some, for a while, were even going down within sight of our very beaches. Distant seas, in the meantime, have been yielding a still further toll. Three new vessels a day are at last being launched by shipyards from Portland around to another Portland and beyond. So have gone the first months of that grim race in our second World War, with the tonnage gained thus far barely equal to the tonnage lost.

Such a balance is not enough. If our war effort is to count for victory, the rate must speedily be many more new ships a day and far fewer lost. Freighters cannot win a war, but their lack perhaps can lose one. "We must regard this struggle at sea," so Churchill has said, "as the foundation of all the efforts of the United Nations. If we lose that, all else is denied us."

The seas which have long served as protective moats to keep Britain and America secure from armed invasion have lost that power in this age of mighty aircraft. And those same seas on their own part impose grave shipping demands when those nations try to meet the enemy overseas on his own ground. The sea lanes to be traveled are not simply the three thousand miles of the normal Atlantic crossing as in the last war. Instead, they stretch in ship-consuming distances through dreary Arctic wastes, across the wide Pacific to lands down under, or halfway round the world to the cradles of civilization. The sinews of war in this mechanized age bulk larger than ever before in the far too

scanty holds of ships. Even if the builders keep pace with the submarines, the United Nations are desperately hard-pressed to move men and munitions beyond the seas, while their strategists are sadly handicapped as they must perforce cut their plans to fit the meager tonnage. And as yet cargo planes are not available in sufficient numbers to bring relief.

Dark as the picture has been, one comforting fact remains as this book goes to press: our nation has been through black days before on the sea lanes and has won through them to victory. In war after war, from its very earliest days, the United States has had to fight its way by sea. Things could not have looked much worse than they did after Bunker Hill, when Washington found he had almost no gunpowder. Plenty was to be had in France or Holland; and although the mighty Royal Navy stood between, it was brought across the sea in ample quantity. Forty years later, the situation in our coastal waters was far worse than it is today. British warships blockaded our ports so closely that we were almost completely cut off from access to the sea. Pirates have threatened butchery or slavery; Confederate raiders have sallied into our very harbors and have made bonfires of our squareriggers from Sandy Hook to the Straits of Sunda; U-boats have shown their deadly effectiveness off our coasts a quarter of a century ago, as well as today. All those past perils placed our sea lanes in jeopardy for months on end; yet every time our seafaring nation fought its way through to make true its pledge of freedom of the seas to American vessels.

The origin of this volume goes back to the finding of a little manuscript notebook in which a New York merchant jotted down the insurance rates paid on voyages during the Revolution. That aroused curiosity in the subject and suggested a study of similar war-risk fluctuations in other conflicts as a barometer of sea power. Our particular gratitude goes to the publishers for recommending the wider scope of this volume. In the collaboration, all the research and much of the original draft was the work of the first author.

The book falls into two parts, one dealing with the "old wars"

between 1775 and 1865, and the other with the two World Wars of this century. Each section starts with a general description of shipping conditions. The first part then proceeds chronologically from the Revolution through the Civil War. In the second part, however, it has seemed preferable to use a topical arrangement instead, in order to compare more clearly the fairly similar situations in each war. Consequently, the final chapters will treat in succession America's offerings of strategic cargoes, shipping conditions on the North Atlantic, conditions on the more distant sea lanes, and, finally, the efforts to secure adequate tonnage. This account has been carried into the summer of 1942. With the concentration upon merchantmen and cargoes, there has been no room to follow the intricacies of naval strategy or the fine points of neutrality and international relations.

It is a novel and nerve-racking experience to leave a story in mid-flight and to know that as the galleys come from the press the story will continue to be unfolded in the daily newspapers. Obviously the full story of present happenings is not yet available,

nor have we been free to relate at this time much that has come to our notice, although some of it would add materially to the story. Remembering how suddenly the seemingly well-controlled situation on the seas went bad in two brief months last winter, we know that the picture may change again in the few weeks before this book is launched. Yet whatever happens, the American experience of the past on our dangerous sea lanes will throw light on the darkened situation brought about through current happenings.

So many have been helpful in the preparation of this work that only a few can be mentioned here, though our gratitude goes out to all. The staffs of Princeton University Library, Harvard College Library, the National Archives, New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania have all given generous assistance. The other members of Dr. Edward Mead Earle's Military Studies Group of the Institute of Advanced Study and Princeton University spent two sessions discussing the