As a consequence of this combination of destructive agencies the British Admiralty was enabled to announce at the close of the war that more than 150 German submarines had been destroyed.
The names of the commanding officers of the German submarines which had been disposed of were given out by the government in order to substantiate to the world the statement made by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on August 7th, and denied in the German papers, that "at least 150 of these ocean pests had been destroyed." The statement included no officers commanding the Austrian submarines, of which a number had been destroyed, and did not exhaust the list of German submarines put out of action.
The fate of the officers was given, and of these the majority (116) were dead; twenty-seven were prisoners of war, six were interned in neutral countries where they took refuge, and one succeeded in returning to Germany.
Further light on the subject of German submarines was given on September 18, 1918, by Senator William H. Thompson of Kansas in a speech in which he told the Senate:
The submarine is no longer a serious menace to transportation across the seas. It is, of course, an annoyance and a great hindrance, and as long as there is a single submarine in the waters of the sea every effort must be made by the allied powers to destroy it, for it is an outlaw and must not exist. The truth is that Germany never had more than 320 submarines all told, including all construction before and since the war.
We have positive knowledge of the destruction of more than one-half of these submarines, and we also know that it is practically impossible for Germany to keep in operation more than 10 per cent of those remaining. It is therefore reduced to a negligible quantity so far as its ultimate effect upon the result of the war is concerned.
1 saw a reliable statement in France to the effect that there is one ship of some character leaving the eastern shores of America for the war zone every six minutes, and it is only a few vessels which are ever torpedoed, estimated at about one per cent. This is less than the loss by storm and accident in the earlier days of transportation and is not much greater than such loss now. We must bear in mind that we read only of the ships which have been torpedoed and see but little account of the hundreds of ships which pass over the ocean safely and undisturbed. Three hundred thousand soldiers are conveyed across the Atlantic every thirty days, and an average of about 500,000 tons of freight carried to the French coast. There are warehouses in only one of the many ports of France with a capacity of over 2,000,000 tons.
It is to the navy that the credit for the destruction of this outlaw seagoing craft is due. The navy is and has been the backbone of this war, the same as it has been of almost every great war in history. Without the allied navy the submarine would have perhaps accomplished its nefarious purpose in starving the European allies and in preventing them from securing the necessary munitions of war to defend themselves. It has utterly failed in this respect. The Allies are amply supplied with food, and there are provisions enough on hand now, if every ship should be sunk, to last the Allies and armies for months. The destroyer is the ship which has brought Germany to her knees in submarine warfare and will keep her there. We have not enough destroyers, and it is for this reason we are obliged in this great transportation problem to run risks which would not be taken under ordinary conditions. If every ship was escorted by a sufficient number of destroyers I doubt if there would be a single ship of any consequence sunk, except by the merest accident.
Upon the same subject, Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the British Admiralty, on October 14th, reviewing the British effort in the war said that during 1918 the casualties of the British on the western front equaled those of all the Allies combined. The British navy, he said, since the beginning of the war had lost in fighting ships of all classes a total of 230, more than twice the losses in war vessels of all the Allies.
In addition to these, Great Britain had lost 450 auxiliary craft, such as mine-sweepers and trawlers, making a total of 680. He revealed the fact that the effective warship barrage, which had been drawn between the Orkneys and Norway against German submarines and surface craft, was, during the later months of the war, maintained largely by ships of the United States.