Dcccmbci" iS, ID 1 5. 
LAND AND WATER. 
SUBMARINE ACHIEVEMENT. 
By ARTHUR POLLEN. 
MANY months had passed without our 
receiving any news whatever of naval 
operations in the Adriatic when, on 
December 8th, the Austrians an- 
nounced that the Novara, accompanied by some 
destroyers, had sunk iive steamers off San Gio- 
vanni di Medua, five large and five small sailing 
vessels. During the same operations, the French 
submarine Fresnel was claimed to have been sunk, 
the commander, second officer and twenty-six 
men being taken prisoners. It was announced on 
the same date that on the 23rd November a 
steamer armed with three guns had been sunk by 
a destroyer flotilla, and that a two-funnelled 
Italian cruiser had been sent to the bottom off 
Valona on December 5th. A Reuter telegram 
from Paris said that there was an official announce- 
ment by Montenegro on the 6th December that 
nine vessels of the Austrian Cattaro squadron 
had been bombarding Durazzo and had sunk 
several Montenegrin, Albanian and one Italian 
sailing vessel. A later telegram from Rome greatly 
discounts the bag claimed by the Austrians, but 
though the damage done has certainly been ex- 
aggerated, the fact of the Novara's raid does 
not seem to be disputed. 
The Novara is the latest and probably the 
fastest of the Austrian cruisers. Her designed 
speed is 27 knots. Italy possesses three cruisers 
of about the same displacement, and they are 
nominally a knot faster. But vessels of this speed 
can evade each other without any difficulty in so 
large an area as the Adriatic. What is clifficult 
to understand in this story of the attack on San 
Giovanni, is that so many vessels should have been 
in this port discharging war material without 
adequate warship protection. But we are so 
entirely without information as to the course of 
events in the Adriatic that there is no material 
for comment and it is useless to speculate. But it 
is obvious that if Italy intends to intervene in the 
Balkan field by penetrating Albania and Monte- 
negro from the sea, her navy will have to be ready 
to defend the expeditionary forces and their 
supplies. 
SUBMARINES IN THE STRAITS. 
The cruise of the Novara suggests that the 
Italian seamen were caught off their guard. The 
Austrian Navy has been so long supine, that it 
may have been thought impossible that any ship 
would ever emerge. But there has certainly been 
no lack of enemy submarine activity. From the 
2nd December to the 9th, the casualties in the 
Mediterranean averaged one a day. It will 
evidently tax the naval resources of the Allies 
to bring this campaign under. The importance of 
a satisfactory arrangement with Greece cannot in 
this matter be exaggerated. The Spetzai incident 
emphasises this. Every Greek ship is evidently 
closely scrutinised by enemy spies. Indeed, in 
cutting off the submarines' suppHes lies almost the 
sole hope of dealing with this menace satisfactoril}'. 
And it seems to be notorious that it is from Greece 
that most of the supphes ate obtained. It is safe 
to assume that the Italian and French, navies are 
doing all that is possible to help in the anti- 
submarine campaign. But we should remember 
that to deal with this menace in home waters we 
have had to mobilise many hundreds of craft of 
all kinds, and there are not craft of this character 
available either to France or to Italy. When one 
remembers that the coast from Jafta to the 
Dardanelles is hostile, that three-quarters of the 
North African coast is either hostile or neutral, 
that Spain at one end, and Greece and the Greek 
Islands at the other, afford almost infinite oppor- 
tunities for supply and refuge, it must be realised 
how greatly the factor of numbers in the patrolling 
craft must influence the result. For this reason it is 
hardly to be expected that the danger will be got 
under at an early date. 
On the other hand, if the stories are true that 
AUicd reinforcements are landing continuously at 
Salonika, it would seem as if the local defence 
could be made entirely — or at any rate almost — 
complete on any one route. In this the campaign 
seems to be following a course parallel to our North 
vSea and Channel experiences. The ships, British, 
AlUed and Neutral, which have been successfully 
attacked in home waters numbers now nearly 400. 
And in the early days of the campaign, a very large 
proportion of the losses were incurred in the close 
neighbourhood of the transport routes. Yet 
amongst these victims, there has not been a single 
troop ship nor 90 far as is known, a single War Office 
supplv ship. Unfortunately in the Mediterranean, 
there were at least three points of embarkation to 
protect before the Italians decided to take a hand 
in the Balkan Campaign. There must now be four 
or even five. All this adds to the difficulty. 
PROBLEMS OF THE 
MEDITERRANEAN. 
Take it for all in all then, the submarine 
raises in the Mediterranean a series of problems 
that are both larger in scale and more complicated 
in character than have been raised hitherto. But 
though this is so there is absolutely no reason for 
taking wrong and exaggerated views of its 
functions. That there is a danger of such views 
being taken is illustrated by an admirably written 
and very skilfully argued paper by Mr. David 
Hannay in the current Blackwood. To a great 
extent Mr. Hannay goes over familiar ground. He 
takes the Scott prophecy- [as the high-water mark 
of the submarine claim, and shows how the ex- 
perience of 16 months of war has at any rate 
falsified the dictum that " the introduction of 
vessels that swim under water has entirely done 
away with the utility of ships that swim on the 
top." In spite of all its mysterious powers, and in 
spite of its undoubted successes, the submarine 
has not dominated the sea. Its most conspicuous 
failure indeed has been in the field where its 
successes have been greatest. The majority of 
trading ships travel slower than a modern sub- 
marine's submerged speed. Modern boats on the 
surface can overhaul e\ery ship except a score 
or so of the fastest liners. Yet even when 
our organised means of defence were in an embryo 
state the success of the attack on trade, though 
