equal. The British navy was a tremendous one and it was operating just
off their own shores; officers and men were regularly going ashore by
the thousands and to their friends and families, if to nobody else, they
talked of what was going on; and it does not take long for thousands of
bluejackets to spread the gossip in a country where no spot in it is
more than forty miles from tide-water, whereas our nearest Atlantic
ports were three thousand miles from our base of operations in Europe,
and it was another three thousand miles to our west coast.

It also had to be pumped into the admiralty over there that possibly the
American and British publics did not hold to quite the same ideas about
their respective navies. It was possible that the 110,000,000 people of
the United States looked on our navy as not altogether the property of
the officers and men in it; possibly our 110,000,000 people over here
looked on the navy as their navy, that they had a right to know
something of what it was doing; and so (this item had to be pointed out
to one of our own topside officers, too) as that same public were paying
the bills of the navy, no harm perhaps to let them in on a few things
or, this being the twentieth century, they might take it into their
heads some day to have no navy at all.

It took the foregoing talk and something more before I could get the
permission of the British Admiralty to cruise on one of our own
destroyers over there. This isn't so much a criticism of the British
Admiralty as to show that their point of view differs from ours; and to
show that it was not Washington which was holding up news of our navy
over there.

As to what they have been doing! They have been doing great work. I
cruised over there on one of our destroyers. She was five years old, yet
one day during an 85-mile run to answer an S O S call she exceeded her
builder's trial by half a knot. Incidentally, she saved a merchantman
which had been shelled for four hours by a U-boat and her $3,000,000
cargo; also she ran the U-boat under--one of the new big U-boats with
two 5.9 deck guns. On the same day two other destroyers of our group
took from a sinking liner 503 passengers without the loss of a life. One
of these destroyers lashed herself to the sinking ship the more quickly
to get them off; and as the liner went down our little ship had to use
her emergency steam to get away in time. A fourth destroyer of ours got
the U-boat which sank the