Nor must the navy's aid to the American army coal trade go without mention in these pages. Early in the autumn of 1917, the army coal situation in France became serious, and the navy was asked, in order to avoid a crisis, to send some colliers to the rescue. Accordingly, between the 5th of October and the 1st of December, 1917, navy colliers made thirty trips between Cardiff and the French ports, during which time they carried for the army 90,000 tons of coal. Later it was decided to place the whole of the army coal trade under the supervision of the navy; a base was established at Cardiff, under Rear-Admiral Philip Andrews, and, by the end of the war, there were fifty-five colliers in actual commission for this purpose. Meanwhile, in America, as in England, though its activities were being curtailed, there had been no disposition to underestimate the serious nature of the submarine menace, and new methods of defeating it were being constantly thought out. Perhaps the most notable of these was the construction and large-scale employment of sub-chasers, the first of these coming into use during the early summer of 1918. These were 110-feet gasoline boats, each of them displacing eighty tons, and each carrying a 3-inch, a Y gun (for throwing depth-charges to a distance), and a dozen depth-charges. Each was manned by a crew of two officers and twenty-three men; and each was equipped with the very latest and best of American listening devices. They were thus able to detect submerged submarines up to a very considerable distance, and were particularly effective at night, when {273} they drifted noiselessly, with their listening devices manned. By day they patrolled, stopping at intervals to listen; took their share of the ordinary convoy-work; assisted torpedoed vessels to reach port; and destroyed drifting mines. By the first of July, 1918, there were more than seventy of these at work, and, by the end of the war, a hundred and twenty. Thirty-six of them were based on Corfu, and formed part of the barrage across the Straits of Otranto. Another detachment operated from Plymouth and a third from Queenstown; while the closing days of the war saw a fourth working from Gibraltar. Hunting as a rule in threes, the following account, selected at random from many of a like nature, will illustrate best, perhaps, with its official brevity, the sort of work performed by these American chasers. It relates the story, not of a red-letter day, but of a few exciting minutes, spent by three Queenstown sub-chasers on an October afternoon in 1918.