This concentration of effort was not merely to express itself in a new intensity of submarine and mine warfare, resulting from a hitherto unheard-of ce-ordination and cooperation of the most diversified tineans of attack—submarine, aerial arid surface against Allied shipping. During the World War the German submarine campaign broke down, in the last resort, because the submarines were left alone in their attack on the Allied convoys. The main body of the German Fleet had indeed given them its indirect support and its assistance in passing through the British mine fields in the Heligoland Bight, but it completely failed to ce-operate with them directly by sending out cruisers through the British lines of blockade to overwhelm the weak convoy escorts, normally composed only of some six to eight destroyers, which sufficed to keep the submarines down.
Things were to be very different this time. Ca-ordination of submarine and surface attack was to be the basic strategy. While the submarine would again force the Allied shipping togéthier into convoys, German surface raiders, breaking through the British blockade into the open Atlantic, would come swooping down on them and annihilate whole conveys, escorts and all. The spear-point of this attack was to consist of the three pocket-battleships. Swift chough to evade the bulk of the Allied warships, they were, with to PERUS any Allied min at wer any Allied man-of-war which. they were likely to meet on escort duty.
How great was the confidence which German naval experts placed in them, and how sure they were of the success of that strategy, is nowhere shown with more brutal tion of special escort cruisers, with a relatively low speed but strong protection and armament, did not appear to him sufficient. "Against heavy cruisers with 8-inch guns, still more against armoured ships of the 'Deutschland' type, such escort cruisers would be of very little value. If such dangers were to be faced older battleships would be needed, as was the case with the Norwegian convoys in 1918.... The less we have to reckon in future with the clash of large battle fleets, as at Jutland, the more trade warfare is going to predominate in naval war."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.