The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-09-15
submarine war was to be carried on
 with any success. .5

lavish building programme can solve | the difficulty. |
 When we have plenty of submar- ines, all as large and powerful as that | one you and I have navigated, wei
 shall be able to send them out in | groups, of which groups some vessels will be complementary to the others Suppose, for instance, a group of six undersea boats had one fast Ves- | sel for observation and two more l armed with torpedoes and destructive |
 guns. The other three might be store
 ships, which could pass most of their time on the bottom using little oil ex- cept for the journey to and from SUD- | ply bases. could signal to them by wireless when
 they needed stores, and arrange a
 meeting place. And the store ships
 could come up whenever they wanted
 to refresh their air supply.
 | We elaborated this idea, and before1 the war actually began we experi-
 mented with one of his store ships, |
 which was built on roomier lines than
 the fighting submarines, and had less speed but a greater storage capacity. | have no doubt, from internal evil
 dence of the methods of the submar-
 inc raiders, that his plan of working
 them in small squadrons, of which
 only half are fighting U-boats is now being carried out with success.
 Once I asked Steinerink how many submarines Germany actually had in
 commission, in case of sudden out break of war. I 'The navy admits owning forty three,'' he said, and of those only
 twelve, are big enough to go far away from the coast. The others are trif- ling affairs of from 200 to 400 tons displacement, and only useful for har- Dor defence.''
 That is not many" remarked. Il He laughed ironically.
 !. eff we built '100,'' he sneered Eng land would reply by building three II times as many. We prefer to get , ready the parts and the engines, and
 Our way is to provide the docks and ], yards for the quick building of sub marines, and to occupy them for the
 time with the construction of com , mercial shipping"
 "How fast could fhey be built, in case of need ?'
 We could turn out four submar-
 ines, of various sizes every week from the day when war started; and in a t years time could expand our arrange , ments for the building of one every Fl : Germany will never be concerned in
 a war which will last so 1ong-we , should have a thousand submarines
 at sea at the conclusion of the affair.
 That would settle any naval power or g any combination of naval. powers, in- e cluding England, t that could be t brought against us.'' fl It was in 1913, too, that I helped
 Commander Steinbrink in the trial of
 o I Ihumorously christened Mother
 Goose" fl When I'tel1 you that the chief con- . tents of Mother Goose were eighty
 floating mines, all fastened to an end- l. less chain which dropped them one n by one out of her stern, you will un-
 derstand what a rich humorist the
 same Commander Steinbrink could O be, when it pleased him.: ;: i.e- f Mother Goose went on her frs, n trial in November, 1913, and proved
 that she could lay a mfnefield with l. out mourning observation of, any kind o She and several like her were. busy l. between, Heligoland and -Wilhelmsha. a ven at the end of July, 51914, some I days before the Czar of Russia mo
 b1l1zed his army, or the world dream d ed .that.~it was beginning the mos
 appalling war of all times. # One other device we tested at tn, if same time. It was sboat-shapet = mine, fitted with a submarines peri # scope, and loaded with an enormou ,t charge of T.sN. T., when actual, zt equipped for it's real purpose Thi o internal machine was lowed by a sub a merged. submarine at the end of ; ' long steel rope, and was buoyed S, IF accurately that the periscope shove, above the water and left a ripple ex . actly like the war of a real submar 1s inc. 1 6 Mister Englishman," said Stein s brink, as we ploughed along with ou q decoy in two, very obvious in the cain ts sea in which we were exper1ment1ns W will soon find out that one way O
 lighting submarines is to sink then l. by ramming. When he tackles one O those things and hits it at full spec ,- he will never get the chance t 1T change his mind. There is enougl IF explosive, in that. little boat-mine t 1o shatter big battleshfp to smither us eens. We thing of, everything, Axel. ln must tell of one other experimen
 which we carried out with our favor i- lte U-boat, the 21. It happened i III the calm waters of the Baltic, on on xs I1ne day in the spring of 1914 Id We. left .Kiel late at night, with "a strange passenger on board, youn of man who had obviously never befor I'd traVeled on a submarine, though tn h- strange and sudden submersion neve
 seemed to make him nervous Pc 21 could submerge in less tha , thlrty seconds - ,1 AS dawn was breaking we slowe .1 down, and the crew dragged up on t ,o the superstructure a mass of materia n which they put together on the wa
 ter under the direction of our strans ,, passenger. x 1v In a remarkably short time the ma ,v ter1al revealed itself as that of a hy ot dro-aeroplane; and in spite of lack c of experience they put it together in re
 markably short time. 4.
 ofI Our passenger looked it all oye] 5a gave finishing touch here and ther, if ana then set his engines going. Soo ,b ne was skimming along the surfac ,n or the sea at great rate; as W re watched, his machine rose from tn nv water into the air, and circled abov ,a us Tn graceful curves. he Ihen he headed for the nainIan ,str oIr Germany, out of sight to tn
 south. In a very few minutes he ws ,s Just speck above the horizon. 1oy-