Subs Southward

The best recent news of the U-boat war came last week from London. Britain's Production Minister Oliver Lyttelton reported that after a long upward curve Allied sea losses had decreased in July.

How much they decreased, Mr. Lyttelton did not say. Why they decreased, he did not say--and perhaps did not wholly know. But U.S. naval censors at last permitted the press to report one of the reasons for the drop, in one area where sinkings had been appallingly high. The reason: the Navy was convoying coastal shipping in the Western Atlantic, from Maine to Florida.

This did not mean that the U-boat had been licked, even in the area where U.S. convoys were heaviest. Many a ship, unconvoyed, had been sunk in the same period. The U-boats had shied away, but they might return at any time. The convoy system was reaching southward through the Caribbean toward the South Atlantic, but in those areas and in the mid-Atlantic, sinkings of unconvoyed ships were still high. Moreover, convoying at best achieves a Pyrrhic advantage: convoys sacrifice efficiency for safety. The ships make fewer and slower trips, lose time at each end of their runs waiting for the next convoy to assemble.

There were signs that the U-boat packs were veering southward to seas teeming with shipping to Africa (see p. 25). Brazil reported a Nazi surface raider off South America and London forecast an immediate increase in submarine attacks in the South Atlantic. The U.S. had a breather in the war against the submarines. It could not yet hail victory.

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