In the House of Commons not long ago a definite statement that the trend
of the submarine war was favorable to the Allies was made. The one
specific item given was that from January 1 to April 30, 1917, the
number of unsuccessful attacks upon British steamships was 172, a weekly
average of 10. Last year in the ten weeks from the end of February to
the end of April there were 175 unsuccessful attacks, or a weekly
average of 18. This statement was not exactly illuminating. For of
itself a decline in the weekly number of unsuccessful attacks would
imply an increase in the effectiveness of the U-boat--which we know is
not so. What the House of Commons statement really meant, of course, was
that the number of _successful_ attacks had been declining as well as
the number of unsuccessful attacks--or, in other words, that the German
sea effort as a whole was declining. The U-boats are not hitting out as
freely as they did a year ago. This argues that there are fewer of them
than there were in 1917. For actual tonnage losses we have the word of
the French Minister of Marine that the sinkings for April, 1918, were
268,000 tons, whereas in April of the previous year they were 800,000
tons, an appalling total.
"The most conclusive evidence we have seen of the failure of the enemy's
submarine campaign is the huge American army now in France, and the
hundreds of thousands of tons of stores brought across the Atlantic,"
said James Wilson, chairman of the American labor delegation, upon his
return to England last May from a visit to France and to the American
army.
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