Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator

Don't think for a moment that Germany was the only country that had a fleet of submarines. The reason that her U-boats came to be so well known was because they had torpedoed the _Lusitania_ and sunk helpless ships right and left no matter who was on them or what they carried.

England and France had fleets of submarines, too, but as their warships had blockaded Germany's ports there was nothing to torpedo. And when we declared war on the Kaiser, Uncle Sam began to build submarines just as he did chasers, merchant ships and everything else. Except airplanes, did you say? There was no such fizzle made of building submarines as for a time was made of building airplanes in the beginning of the war. Within a short time after we got started our Navy Department was able to turn out a brand-new submarine every two weeks. Think of it! Once the kind and the size of the submarine we needed had been agreed upon by our naval experts, that is, _standardized_ as it is called, machines and jigs were made by which each part was stamped out of a solid sheet of metal, and this was done, not in one or a dozen factories, but in hundreds of factories scattered all over the country and each of which made a single part.