While there have been few of the picturesque battles on the seas, which the world has long regarded as a necessary adjunct to a successful war, the work of the British Navy has proved through the period of the conflict to be one of the most powerful and effective assets of the Allied forces. Through the operation of the British fleet, later augmented by an American war fleet, the German ships have been corked up in their home ports and chased from the seas.
The first naval battle of the war was an engagement between portions of the British squadron in the Pacific and a superior German force. The engagement occurred off the coast of Chili in November, 1915. Two British vessels were lost and a third badly damaged. However, a few months later, the German squadron, in command of Admiral von Spee, was met off the Falkland Islands by a second British squadron, and in the engagement four of the German vessels were sunk and a fifth damaged. This vessel was later sunk.
The most important naval engagement was the battle of Jutland in May, 1916, when Admiral Beatty met a German fleet in the North Sea. The German boats made a dash from the Kiel canal and engaged the British off the coast of Denmark. Both England and Germany claimed victory, the former declaring that Germany lost eighteen ships, while the German Government claimed that the British lost fifteen vessels. Berlin admitted a loss of 60,720 tons and 3966 men, while England conceded a loss of more than 114,000 tons and 5613 men. But the English fleet which engaged the German fighting ships was but a small portion of the force on guard outside of Helgoland and the Kiel Canal, and the effect was to keep the German navy from venturing forth again.
These are the main events which had punctuated the action of the world's fighting machines at the close of August, 1917, when America was preparing to thwart the German U-boats in their destruction of the world's shipping, and had under actual call to arms more than 1,000,000 men, a minor part of which had been safely landed in France.
WORLD'S AWFUL MARITIME LOSS.
In the three months prior to August the German underseas boats had sunk 464 vessels, or an average of 426,000 tons of shipping a month, while America, working with her fleets in conjunction with the British Navy to foil the submarine in its endeavors, was also building more than 12,000 cargo-carrying craft and submarine chasers with which to flood the traffic lanes of the sea.
Likewise, contracts had been awarded for 10,000 flying machines with which to drive the "eyes of the German army," as the air machines are called, from the heavens. Finally, as the Allies in the closing days of August were driving the German hordes back under avalanches of shells, 629,000 of the youth of America, called to fight under the conscript act, were preparing to move to camps in a dozen different sections of the country to train themselves for invading foreign countries and facing the brutal Teutons. Likewise, some 20,000 picked men were training to officer these civilian forces, and half a million men of the National Guards of the various States, formally mustered into the service of the country, were moving by orders of the Government to points whence they would find their way to the side of the loyal French soldiers and the sturdy English, Scotch, Canadian, Australian and virile Italian fighters.
The records of three years show that the American ambulance drivers; daring thousands of our countrymen who fought with the French and English because they believed the war was a just one, and without compulsion; scores of Red Cross nurses, and aviators who hunted the Teutons in the air, all Americans, have had their names written high in the roster of heroes. Americans have always been pioneers and history makers, and they are making history now.
With the approach of cold weather, and following months of intensive training under the direction of French and English soldiers, the American expeditionary forces began actual participation in the great world war as a unit. Previously their achievements were principally in connection with the French aviation corps and ambulance sections.