TAL MOTOR BOAT 136

CAPTIVE MINE-LAYING SUBMARINE 144

A MINESWEEPER 160

A PARAVANE 176

MORSE SIGNALLING 184

MOTOR LAUNCH OF THE NAVAL PATROL 216

A MONITOR 280

[Illustration: PLAN OF 55 FEET COASTAL BOAT, CARRYING TWO 18-INCH
TORPEDOES]

SUBMARINE WARFARE

OF TO-DAY

CHAPTER I

THE TASK OF THE ALLIED NAVIES

THE hour was that of the Allies' greatest need--the last months of the
year 1914. On that fateful 4th August the British navy was concentrated
in the North Sea, and the chance for a surprise attack by the German
fleet, or an invasion of England by the Kaiser's armies, vanished for
ever, and with this one chance went also all reasonable possibility of a
crushing German victory.

Although during the years of bitter warfare which followed this silent
_coup de main_ the German fleet many times showed signs of awakening
ambition, it did not, after Jutland, dare to thrust even its vanguard
far into the open sea. Behind its forts, mines and submarines it waited,
growing weaker with the dry-rot of inaction, for the chance that fickle
Fortune might place a single unit of the Allied fleet within easy reach
of its whole mailed-fist.

With a great and modern fleet--the second strongest in the
world--awaiting its chance less than twenty hours' steam from the coast
of Great Britain, it quickly became evident that the old Mistress of
the Seas would have to call upon her islanders to supply a "new navy" to
scour the oceans while her main battle squadrons waited and watched for
the second Trafalgar.

Faced, then, with the problem of a long blockade, a powerful fleet in
readiness to strike at any weak or unduly exposed point of land or
squadron, and with similar problems on a decreasing scale imposed by
Austria in the Adriatic and by Turkey behind the Dardanelles, the work
of the main battle fleets became well defined by the commonest laws of
naval strategy.

All this without taking into account the widespread menace of submarines
and mines, and, in the earlier stages of the war, the rounding-up of
detached enemy squadrons, such as that under Von Spee in South American
waters, and the protect