Bottom Blows

On its barnacled cargo bottoms the U.S. was still taking a nasty booting from the Axis. The kicking around, started five months ago, had sunk some 250 ships, disrupted coastal shipping, raised a great hue & cry in the press for sterner anti-submarine measures by the Navy.*

"There is no use building ships in 60 days for the Germans to sink in twelve minutes," gloomed Pundit Walter Lippmann. "There's no use building ships without providing the means to protect them.''

Spurred by public apprehension, the House Naval Affairs Committee behind closed doors heard Navy's side of the situation from naval bigwigs, afterward announced: "Chairman Vinson and the Naval Committee feel that they may properly communicate to the country a feeling of confidence in the Navy and in its conduct of anti-submarine warfare. . . . Unfortunately the only types in which [the shipbuilding program] is not well ahead of schedule are those most needed in combatting submarines. ... It does not pay to be unduly optimistic. However . . . in the past few weeks the submarine has largely withdrawn from our eastern seaboard and is operating farther at sea."

* For news of such measures see p. 62.

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