England wants to starve us! We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and torpedo every English or Allied ship which nears any harbor in Great Britain, thereby cutting off large food supplies.

The U-boats did more than anything else to draw the United States toward war; to the British, they were a godsend in that respect because they distracted attention from the less dramatic but more thorough interference with American cargoes at Kirkwall and the Downs. There is neither room nor need here to follow play-by-play the intricate steps by which President Wilson and the State Department met the submarine situation-from our first announcement in February, 1915, that Germany would be held "to strict accountability," down to the final declaration of war in April, 1917.

Early in 1915, the Germans ended the six months of tranquillity on the Atlantic by proclaiming a war zone around the British. Isles. They hoped to frighten away neutral shipping with the warning that it might inadvertently "suffer from attacks intended to strike enemy ships," because of "misuse of the neutral flag ordered by the British government." That very week, in fact, the Lusitania, on one of her last crossings, took advantage of that time-honored ruse to fly the Stars and Stripes as she neared home waters. The submarine campaign of 1915, however, came to little in comparison with the terrible efficiency of the attack launched just two years later, when there would be no pretense of sparing neutrals.

The U-boats were at their new work in earnest by the end of February, but at that time Germany had only about twenty-one seagoing ones available. Some of these lurked in the Channel, and some in the northern waters between Ireland and Scotland, but their chief hunting grounds were the "Southwest Approaches" where the main sea lanes converged. The ocean floor along the south coast of Ireland and the southwest tip of England was soon littered with the shattered hulls of freighters and liners, but judged by later standards these losses were small. Not

until May did the monthly totals approach the damage that had been caused by the surface raiders in distant seas during the previous autumn; even in August, at the highest, the total was only 185,000 tons.

For the moment, the United States felt no serious concern over the wastage of tonnage and loss of cargoes. The underwriters did not raise the rates on belligerent ships between New York and Liverpool, which had been 1⁄2 of 1 per cent at the beginning of the year, beyond 14 per cent during the first ten weeks of the campaign, while neutral shipping was considered twice as safe. American attention at the outset was focused upon individual cases involving American vessels or the loss of American lives, and neither were numerous.

In fact, as far as our shipping was concerned, the U-boat lagged behind other methods of commerce destruction. One American vessel had been sunk by a raider, three had been destroyed by mines, one had even been attacked by a seaplane, before a U-boat torpedo hit the new tanker Gulflight in May, 1915. On her way from Texas, she blundered into a gun fight off the English coast between a British patrol boat and the U-30, which loosed a torpedo. The crippled tanker, however, managed to make port with two of her crew killed and her captain dead of heart failure. So, too, did the freighter Nebraskan after she was torpedoed later that month. In fact, only one American vessel was actually sunk by a submarine that year-the small ex-British steamer Leelanaw. The fourth American victim of 1915 was the auxiliary sailing ship Pass of Balhamas, recently transferred from British registry and with Archangel her intended destination. She had the rare experience of being captured, but not sunk, by a U-boat, and was sent into a German port. She was, moreover, at the time of her encounter with the submarine already in charge of a prize crew: the British were taking her into Kirkwall! A yet more thrilling future lay in store for her. When she returned to the high seas, she was Count von Luckner's raider Seeadler.

Washington was much more concerned about the loss of American lives-that was the basic reason for protesting more

vigorously against U-boat sinkings than against British seizures. As soon as the submarine campaign had been announced, the German ambassador at Washington urged the State Department to warn American passengers against sailing on belligerent vessels. Secretary Bryan was inclined to agree with him, but was overruled; the government upheld the right of an American to sail wherever he wanted to go. Since the State Department would do nothing, the German embassy in a public advertisement in the newspapers warned Americans of the dangers of sailing on belligerent liners. This notice, denounced by the American press as “insolent," first appeared in some fifty papers the first of May. It apparently did not worry the 149 Americans and 1,108 other passengers who chose to sail from New York aboard the fast crack Cunarder Lusitania, instead of transferring to an older, slower American liner leaving that same day. A series of blind chances led the Lusitania to her tragic fate six days later. Had Captain Turner, warned of the presence of submarines by an Admiralty wireless, utilized the full power of his engines—some of the fastest afloat-to steer a zigzag course away from the dangerous Irish headlands, probably no submarine could have caught his ship. Had Lieutenant Schweiger of the U-20-on his way back to Germany from the Irish Sea, short of oil and with only two "not very good" torpedoes left-not happened to notice the great liner, all would probably have gone well. But Captain Turner slowed down, at just the moment the U-20 was close at hand, to take his bearings on that foggy day, and the starboard side of the Lusitania presented a too tempting target. She sank in eighteen minutes; a speed that amazed everyone, for the Titanic, with her hull slashed by an iceberg, had stayed afloat two hours, and the bulkheads of many a small torpedoed freighter had kept her up for some time. The cases of cartridges in the Lusitania's cargo could scarcely have been the cause. Confusion of the worst sort reigned on the decks of the stricken liner; there had been no lifeboat drills and even their launching was bungled. In her final plunge, she carried down 1,195 of the 1,959 passengers and crew; 94 of the 125 children were lost, and

124 of the 149 Americans. A shudder of horror and indignation swept the United States, undoing months of zealous German propaganda.

For a year and a half after the Lusitania, the “main line" was not seriously molested. For a while, the Germans refrained from torpedoing passenger liners, even though some of them were openly carrying considerable quantities of munitions. In the summer of 1915, when the sinkings of that year were at their heaviest, the White Star liner Arabic was sunk with the loss of two Americans among the forty-four victims, and in the spring of 1916 German-American diplomatic relations were complicated by the deaths of more Americans in the torpedoing of the French Channel steamer Sussex. Ordinary little freighters by the dozen, some of them laden with American munitions or grain, went down during that summer of 1915, but by fall the sinkings tapered off and were not serious again until October, 1916, when the average monthly toll rose to 175,000 tons for the next four months. Altogether during much of 1915 and 1916, most of the shrapnel, high explosives, and wheat from American ports reached England safely.

The submarines were not idle during that lull on the North Atlantic; they had shifted their activities elsewhere. The quiet waters and narrow bottlenecks of the Mediterranean made it an ideal field for operations. The Germans even sent down a considerable amount of submarine parts by rail to the Adriatic coast, where they were assembled. By the fall of 1916, war-risk rates to the Mediterranean were three times as high as to England; and Britain began to send much of its shipping by the longer but safer alternate route around the Cape of Good Hope. Of the three American vessels sunk by U-boats to the end of 1916, two were lost in the Mediterranean trade.

But with the end of 1916, the comparative calm of the sea lanes was gone. The storm broke with the German decision to use their U-boats to the limit to put England out of the war. The terrific waste of life at Verdun and the Somme in 1916 had

gained almost nothing for either side. Jutland had kept the High Sea Fleet still cooped up in the North Sea. And in Germany, the relentless British blockade was compelling "women and children, the sick and the aged, to suffer for their country pain and privations which endanger the life of the nation." Von Tirpitz persuaded his government that his submarines could win the war quickly and cheaply. By this time he had 115 of them, more efficient in every way than the earlier ones, and more were on the ways. Also, the earlier squeamishness about neutrals was now

over.

In its new campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, Germany announced that every vessel of any sort found in the waters around England and France or in the Mediterranean would be sunk. The one exception was permission for the United States to dispatch one ship each week to Falmouth, England, provided several minutely specified regulations were followed. Three days later, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany.

The U-boats went to work with deadly effectiveness. They laid mines close inshore to drive the shipping out to sea away from the protection of the patrol boats; and there sank them by the score. From Fastnet, that “rugged lonely rock with its tall lighthouse," off the tip of Ireland, on past Kinsale, and off the end of Cornwall, they cruised in tireless relays. Although they centered their efforts as usual here, where Britain's sea lanes converged, the northern route and the approaches to France were not much safer. The losses hit 540,000 tons in February and did not drop below that again until September. Not only were the Germans successfully sinking a considerable part of the British merchant marine with its cargoes of precious foodstuffs beneath the waves, but this time they were frightening off many neutral cargo carriers. The dauntless Norwegians stuck to the dangerous work, but most others dared not risk their ships.

Even some Americans kept their vessels home until permitted by Congress to arm them. That permission was granted in March, after being delayed by a Senate filibuster, and once more