CLOSE TO DISASTER.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 January 1921, Page 12

CLOSE TO DISASTER.

HOW WE NEARLY LOST Y'HE WAR. .. ADMIRAL SIMS’S STORY. How close the Allies were to disaster in the spring of 1917 and how little the public realised it has been emphasised by none more vividly than by America’s supreme naval commander in European waters after the entry of our cousins into the war, Admiral W. S. Sims. The picture the Admiral draws in his new book, “The Victory at Sea,” is startling. On his arrival in London, he says the Admiralty placed before him “facts . and figures which it had not given to the British Press.” He adds: “These documents disclosed the astounding fact that, unless the appalling destruction of merchant tonnage which was taking place, could be materially checked, the unconditional surrender of the British Empire would inevitably take place within a few months.” Lord Jellicoe showed him figures which proved that tjie losses through the submarine warfare were three or four times as large as those which were then being published in the Press. Admiral Sims says that the statements published were not false, but they were inconclusive, and intentionally so. Lord Jellicoe told him:— . “It is is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue.” The following passages are illuminating:— “The newspapers for several months had been publishing stories that submarines in large numbers were being sunk; and these stories I now find to be untrue. “They had also published accounts of the voluntary surrender of German Üboats; but not one such surrender, Admiral Jellicoe said, had ever taken place; the stories had been circulated merely for the purpose of depreciating enemy moral.” Even members of the Government, he says, believed that captured U-boats were stowed away at naval yards. “Could Germany have kept 50 submarines constantly at work on the great shipping routes in the winter and spring of 1917—before we had learned how to handle the situationnothing could have prevented her from winning the war.”