in Germany that public opinion in the United States would not allow the Navy Department to send over to European waters such destroyers and other vessels of value in anti-submarine warfare as were available at once or would be available as time progressed.  The German Staff may have had in mind the situation during the Spanish-American War when the fact of Admiral Cervera’s weak and inefficient squadron being at large was sufficient to affect adversely the naval strategy of the United States to a considerable extent and to paralyze the work of the United States Navy in an offensive direction.

Very fortunately for the Allied cause a most distinguished officer of the United States Navy, Vice-Admiral W.S.  Sims, came to this country to report on the situation and to command such forces as were sent to European waters.  Admiral Sims, in his earlier career before reaching the flag list, was a gunnery officer of the very first rank.  He had assimilated the ideas of Sir Percy Scott of our own Navy, who had revolutionized British naval gunnery, and he had succeeded, in his position as Inspector of Target Practice in the United States Navy, in producing a very marked increase in gunnery efficiency.  Later when in command, first of a battleship, then of the destroyer flotillas, and finally as head of the United States Naval War College, his close study of naval strategy and tactics had peculiarly fitted him for the important post for which he was selected, and he not only held the soundest views on such subjects himself, but was able, by dint of the tact and persuasive eloquence that had carried him successfully through his gunnery difficulties, to impress his views on others.

Admiral Sims, from the first moment of his arrival in this country, was in the closest touch with the Admiralty in general and with myself in particular.  His earliest question to me was as to the direction in which the United States Navy could afford assistance to the Allied cause.  My reply was that the first essential was the dispatch to European waters of every available destroyer, trawler, yacht, tug and other small craft of sufficient speed to deal with submarines, other vessels of these classes following as fast as they could be produced; further that submarines and light cruisers would also be of great value as they became available.  Admiral Sims responded wholeheartedly to my requests.  He urged the Navy Department with all his force to send these vessels and send them quickly.  He frequently telegraphed to the United States figures showing the tonnage of merchant ships being sunk week by week in order to impress on the Navy Department and Government the great urgency of the situation.  I furnished him with figures which even we ourselves were not publishing, as I felt that nothing but the knowledge given by these figures could impress those who were removed by 3,000 miles of sea from the scene of a Naval war unique in many of its features.

Meanwhile the British Naval Commander-in-Chief in North American waters, Vice-Admiral Sir Montague Browning, had been directed to confer with the United States Navy Department and to point out our immediate requirements and explain the general situation.