Although the Germans gave no opportunity to the British and Allied fleets to enter into a real naval battle, the British were active in the Helgoland Bight, and were carrying out operations with various kinds of light forces in the North Sea, the average number of such operations being no less than five daily. The number of German surface crafts destroyed in the Bight during the year ran into three figures. A British torpedo-boat destroyer was sunk on September 8, 1918, as the result of a collision during a fog. There were no casualties. Eight days later, on September 16, 1918, a British monitor was sunk as she was lying in a harbor. One officer and nineteen men were killed and fifty-seven men were missing and were presumed to have been killed. In the latter part of September, 1918, a part of the British fleet again, as it had done many times before, bombarded successfully the German defenses and points of communication on the Belgian coast. This operation was carried out in cooperation with extensive military operations on the part of the Allied forces on the Flanders front. Still another British torpedo gunboat was sunk on September 30, 1918, as the result of a collision with a merchant vessel. One officer and fifty-two men were reported missing, presumed to have been drowned. That the Swedish navy suffered the loss of one of its boats during the month of September, 1918, became known when it was announced on September 25, 1918, that the Swedish gunboat _Gunhild_ had been sunk by striking a German mine in the Skagerrak, with the loss of the chief officer and eighteen men. On October 17, 1918, the British navy at last came into its own. It will be recalled that by that time the Germans had been forced by the unceasing attacks along the western front, described in another part of this volume, to withdraw from the Belgian coast. Shortly after noon of the 17th, Vice Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, commanding the British Dover Patrol Force, landed at Ostend after Royal Air Force contingents working with the navy had landed at Ostend and had reported it clear of the enemy.