"When will you be ready to go to sea?" was about the first question he asked. He naturally supposed that, after a long and stormy voyage, they would ask some time for rest and repairs.
"We are ready now, sir," Commander Taussig replied; "that is, as soon as we finish refueling."
"I will give you four days from the time of arrival," the Admiral said. "Will that be sufficient?"
"Yes," was the answer, "that will be more than ample time."
Four days later they were all at sea, hunting submarines. Before the month was out they were swearing by Admiral Bayly, and he was calling them "my boys."
"Things were looking black," Commander Taussig said. "In the three previous weeks the submarines had sunk 152 British merchant ships. The night before we entered the harbor a German submarine had planted twelve mines right in the channel. Fortunately for us they were swept up by the ever vigilant British mine-sweepers before we arrived. The day following our arrival, one of the British gunboats from our station was torpedoed and her captain and forty of her crew were lost. Patrol vessels were continually bringing in survivors from the various ships as they were sunk."
The convoy system had not then been instituted, the British depending on patrol. This was trying duty, searching for the U-boat that might be anywhere within four or five hundred square miles, for the ocean was strewn with wreckage for three hundred miles from shore.
The Queenstown "area" comprised twenty-five thousand square miles, and yet this wide zone of trans-Atlantic shipping, west and south of Ireland, had been left almost unprotected. "Sometimes only four or five British destroyers were operating in this great stretch of waters," said Admiral Sims, "and I do not think the number ever exceeded fifteen."
Soon after the Americans arrived, the few British destroyers at Queenstown were withdrawn. Urging the sending of all floating craft available, Sims had informed us in his cablegram of April 28th:
Yesterday the War Council and Admiralty decided that coöperation of twenty-odd American destroyers with base at Queenstown would no doubt put down the present submarine activity which is dangerous and keep it down. The crisis will be passed if the enemy can be forced to disperse his forces from this critical area.