This month I've started to compile some document scans and other information to send to naval historian William Still, author of the impressive book, Crisis at Sea: The United States Navy in European Waters in World War I.
Having covered the war time period (quite thoroughly) in this work, the author is now working on a book on the post-war period, and is interested specifically in the North Sea minesweeping operations, which of course involved quite a few submarine chasers.
If you haven't seen Bill Still's book, take a look. While the portion pertaining to the duties of submarine chasers is only a tiny part of the book (it's over 700 pages), I was pleased to see a fulsome account of activities not just around England but also in the Mediterranean, typically glossed over.
--Todd Woofenden, editor
More Data on French Chasers
The list of short entries on the U.S.-built submarine chasers sold to France is now three-quarters finished. C1 through C75 are posted. The rest should be posted sometime this month.
Marc Terraillon is also working on translating more pages from the French typescript on the convoys of chasers in the French navy crossing the ocean.
Thanks to Marc Terraillon, Franck Le Bel and Yves Dufeil for compiling this information and translating it to English for The Subchaser Archives.
Lines Drawings
Added to the collection of specifications and drawings are a set of scans of lines drawings, submitted by Jack Hudock.
These should be of interest to model builders, especially those doing scratch-built or large scale projects.
Drawings include bow and stern lines, hull sections and a chart of offsets.
Hull Number Collection: SC 17
Added to the Hull Numbers Collection is a nice image of submarine chaser SC 17.
This is an early photo, showing the chasers with a Hotchkiss deck gun mounted forward, and a Davis gun amidships. Later most of the forward deck guns were replaced with Poole deck guns, and the Y-gun would have been mounted where the Davis gun is located in this photo.