Call to Arms

Anyone who thought that U-boats off the U.S. East Coast had been worsted needed only to read a Navy announcement last week to know how serious the situation was: the Navy, which as late as a month ago pooh-poohed the idea of using small craft for anti-submarine patrol, made a public appeal to fishermen and yachtsmen for 1,000 such boats—in addition to 1,200 others which already have been quietly taken into service.

These small craft, mostly of wood or wood-and-steel construction, cannot successfully fight a submarine. (Already one such patrol craft, the converted fishing smack YP-389, has been sunk by submarine shellfire.) Few are big enough to carry depth charges or adequate guns. Few are fast enough to drop a depth charge and get away far enough to keep their own sterns from being blown off. Their only real use is to report U-boat movements by radio—if the Navy can supply them with radios—and to rescue survivors.

Equally indicative of the desperate shipping situation is the fact that wooden sailing schooners built in the Caribbean (TIME, p. 66, June 29) are being used to bring in cargoes from Latin America.

By this week the unofficial total of sinkings in U.S. waters was 323. The total tonnage sunk was still a secret, but no one denied that sinkings in May were greater than in any previous month of World War I or II, and that the tonnage sunk in June would be greater.

All the ships rapidly sliding down U.S. ways do not come near keeping pace with such losses.