r the Allied cause a most distinguished officer of
the United States Navy, Vice-Admiral W.S. Sims, came to this country to
report on the situation and to command such forces as were sent to
European waters. Admiral Sims, in his earlier career before reaching the
flag list, was a gunnery officer of the very first rank. He had
assimilated the ideas of Sir Percy Scott of our own Navy, who had
revolutionized British naval gunnery, and he had succeeded, in his
position as Inspector of Target Practice in the United States Navy, in
producing a very marked increase in gunnery efficiency. Later when in
command, first of a battleship, then of the destroyer flotillas, and
finally as head of the United States Naval War College, his close study
of naval strategy and tactics had peculiarly fitted him for the
important post for which he was selected, and he not only held the
soundest views on such subjects himself, but was able, by dint of the
tact and persuasive eloquence that had carried him successfully through
his gunnery difficulties, to impress his views on others.

Admiral Sims, from the first moment of his arrival in this country, was
in the closest touch with the Admiralty in general and with myself in
particular. His earliest question to me was as to the direction in which
the United States Navy could afford assistance to the Allied cause. My
reply was that the first essential was the dispatch to European waters
of every available destroyer, trawler, yacht, tug and other small craft
of sufficient speed to deal with submarines, other vessels of these
classes following as fast as they could be produced; further that
submarines and light cruisers would also be of great value as they
became available. Admiral Sims responded wholeheartedly to my requests.
He urged the Navy Department with all his force to send these vessels
and send them quickly. He frequently telegraphed to the United States
figures showing the tonnage of merchant ships being sunk week by week in
order to impress on the Navy Department and Government the great urgency
of the situation. I furnished him with figures which even we ourselves
were not publishing, as I felt that nothing but the knowledge given by
these figures could impress those who were removed by 3,000 miles of sea
from the scene of a Naval war unique in many of its features.

Meanwhile the British Naval Commander-in-Chief in North American waters,
Vice-Admiral Sir Montague Browning, had been direc