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TRAPPING THE PIRATE
U-BOAT
By ANTHOTSfY M. RUD
T O date there have been three
general means suggested and
tried for nullifying the disastrous
work of the German
undersea fleet. They are :
1. The building of nets, either with
or without explosive accessories, of sufficiently
great extent to seal the Straits
of Dover and stop up the 250-mile
stretch of water that
intervenes between Scotland
and Norway, or by
blocking off a portion
of the North Sea itself,
by plugging the entrances
of Wilhelmshaven,
Zeebrugge, the
Elbe River and the
Baltic Sea.
2. By allowing the
submarines free range,
and then by means of
huge "mosquito fleets"
and squadrons of destroyers
and a r m e d
merchantmen, make the
U-boat mortality greater
than the shipping loss
involved, thus draining
Germany's resources at
a faster rate than she
could retaliate with
upon the Allies' grain
and m u n i t i o n carriers.
3. By combining the activity stated
above with a plan for constructing
merchantmen of a type that could
evade U-boats successfully—in short,
the Simon Lake 5,000-ton submarine
freighter.
Up to the present moment, the first
two projects have been worked upon in
a small way—with small success. Allied
shipping has been setting sail steadily
for Davy Jones' Locker at the rate of
six millions of tons gross a year. True,
the astounding and appalling rate set
during the fifth week—that of fifteen
millions a year—has diminished, but
from the low water mark—three million
tons a year—which was established soon
after, the destruction records have
mounted steadily week by week, until
The "Submarine Swatter"—a Makeshift Method of Making Germany's
Piratical Undersea Warfare Expensive
now they threaten to raise the average
appreciably.
One is apt to deprecate the losses,
since they are not now as large as they
were at one time, but this is indeed the
height of folly. If Germany continues
her operations as successfully in the
future as she has done in the past, Great
Britain will be starved into submission
just as surely as there is a rock at
Gibraltar! The English press denies
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