It was one of these floating mines which sank the cruiser San Diego July 19, 1918, off Fire Island. The battleship Minnesota struck one of them at night, September 29th, at 3:15 a. m., twenty miles from Fenwick Island Shoals lightship. Though the explosion, under her starboard bow, seriously damaged the hull and flooded the forward compartments, the Minnesota proceeded to port under her own steam, arriving at 7:45 p. m. at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was docked and repaired.
The British steamship Mirlo was blown up off Wimble Shoal buoy, near Cape Hatteras, at 3:30 p. m., August 16th. The ship, which was loaded with gasoline, took fire, and one explosion after another occurred, breaking the vessel in two. The San Saba, formerly the Colorado, was sunk off Barnegat, October 4th. Struck amidships, the vessel practically broke in two, and sank in fire minutes. The Chaparra, a Cuban steamer, was blown up ten miles from Barnegat Light, October 27th.
The U. S. cargo steamer Saetia (Lieutenant Commander W. S. Lynch), bound for Philadelphia from France, was sunk by a mine on November 9th, two days before the armistice. The ship was ten miles southeast of Fenwick Island Shoals when an explosion occurred under No. 2 hatch, which shattered the vessel and sent it down. Besides the crew there were aboard 11 army officers and 74 soldiers. All were rescued.
Enemy mines, scattered, as they were, over a thousand miles, would undoubtedly have taken a much greater toll of shipping if the Navy had not been so energetic in sweeping mines and destroying them whenever they appeared.
Summarizing the entire operations of German submarines which were assigned to American waters, 79 vessels were sunk by gunfire or bombs. Of these 17 were steamers, the others being sailing vessels, most of them small schooners and motor boats. Of the 14 steamers torpedoed, but two were American, the Ticonderoga and Lucia, both of which were sunk far out in the Atlantic, hundreds of miles from our shores. Of the seven vessels mined, one, the Minnesota, got to port under her own steam, and another, the tanker Herbert L. Pratt, was salvaged, both being repaired and put back into service. Several vessels sunk or bombed by submarine were later recovered and repaired, including the big steamer Frederick R. Kellogg.
Only nine American steamers were lost by submarine activities in American waters—the Winneconne, 1,869 tons; Texel, 3,210; Carolina, 5,093; Pinar del Rio, 2,504; O. B. Jennings, 10,289; Merak (ex-Dutch), 3,024 tons, all destroyed by direct attack; and the San Diego, 13,680 tons displacement; the San Saba, 2,458, and the Saetia, 2,873 gross tons, sunk by mines—a total tonnage of 45,000.
In their chief mission of preventing transportation to Europe, the U-boats failed utterly. The flow of troops, supplies and munitions to France and England was not for a moment interrupted. In fact, it was precisely this period in which it was increased, and we transported to Europe over 300,000 soldiers per month.
Not one troop-convoy was even attacked. So well were all convoys protected by naval escort that the submarines avoided them. Furthermore, they avoided all naval vessels and when one was sighted, the "sub" instantly submerged, usually when the man-of-war was miles away. This made it difficult for our ships even to get a shot at them.
They had thousands of miles of water to cruise in, and could choose their own field of operations. Driven from one point, they shifted to another, often disappearing for days, then emerging in some locality hundreds of miles from where they were last seen. If the U-boats were generally able to elude for months the thousands of British, French and American patrol and escort craft in narrow European waters, how much more difficult it was to run down the few, on this side of the ocean, who could range from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico.
Though we needed the best and all the patrol craft we could get, not one of our destroyers or any other vessel was recalled from Europe. In fact, more were sent over to reinforce them. Operating for months with submarines of the largest type, the Germans failed to achieve any real military success, and while they sank many small craft and a substantial amount of ocean shipping, and cut a few cables, their raids on the American coast had no effect whatever upon the trend of the war.