Word: convoying
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This opinion was enough for one veteran Roosevelt-hater, flashy, pompous Correspondent John O'Donnell of the New York Daily News, who wrote a dispatch that certain "Senators" (he meant Mr. Tobey) now knew that the President had permitted the "escorting" of British ships to convoy rendezvous, using the Neutrality Patrol of Navy and Coast Guard boats. Next morning Mr. Roosevelt authorized Secretary Stephen T. Early to announce: "The President . . . thought the author of the story had very cleverly woven the longtime historic policy of the United States into a story which is a deliberate...
This was a challenge to put up or shut up. The New Hampshireman produced his "proof": two letters from unnamed persons-one a relative of a boy allegedly in the Navy who had said he had been on convoy duty, another a man who said he knew of a young girl whose fiance had told her he was leaving on convoy duty. Senator Barkley said with measured deliberation that Navy Secretary Frank Knox and Admiral Harold R. Stark had authorized him to say that "not a single ship, American or foreign, carrying any war materials from any place...
...left, Alexandrians heard soon enough where they had gone. The Navy announced its greatest success since the Battle of Cape Matapan: in the narrow channel between Sicily and Cape Bon, across which the Axis had run its forces and supplies for the Libyan attack, a cruiser squadron caught a convoy consisting of two ships laden with motor transport, one ammunition ship, and two ships thought to be carrying troops, all protected by three Italian destroyers. The British swept in, slapped aside the flimsy protection, and sank the whole convoy forthwith. The British lost one destroyer, the 1,870-ton Mohawk...
Differences. In World War I, the British did lick the submarine menace. After the terrible losses (394,700 tons) of April 1917, the worst month of unrestricted submarine warfare, the convoy system was devised. And it worked. Of all the British ships convoyed across the Atlantic in 1917 and 1918, 99.08% reached their destinations safely. Destroyers learned how to spot and sink U-boats. By the end of the war, destroyers and their depth charges had reduced the rate of sinkings by 71%. The striking difference between this record and that of World War II is the result of strikingly...
...Britain had to keep her battleships together at Scapa Flow in case of a sortie by the Germans. In this war, because Germany has few battleships and because the Italian Fleet has proved so impotent, Britain has been able to disperse her Fleet and use much of it in convoy duty. But battleships, with less speed than destroyers, are not a weapon to use against submarines. The use of battleships in convoy is chiefly to keep surface raiders at a distance...