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Show ALLIED WARSHIPS OFF ATLANTIC COAST 'Commerce Protectors' Are Heavily Armed and Completely Com-pletely Disguised. BOSTON", Dec. 26. The presence on this side of the Atlantic of a formidable fleet of allied warships was indicated definitely today. The vessels are known officially as commerce protectors. They are heavily armed and disguised. For obvious reasons their exact disposition disposi-tion Is not revealed, but the arrival recently re-cently in American waters of this newest unit of the British and French admiralties was made known from a source that hardly hard-ly can he mistaken. , For some days skippers of transatlantic transatlan-tic and coastwise steamers have been bringing to New England ports reports of strange appearing craft that were making mak-ing their way westward. They made no reply to signals and could not be approached. ap-proached. They steered a vagrant course-and course-and were described variously as of the fashion of merchantmen, transports, light cruisers and even of submarines. Pieced together these reports fitted In with the suspicion now apparently confirmed of shipping men. It is said the first arrived safely at Halifax, N. S-, a few days ago, but nothing then became known generally about it because of the strict censorship maintained. The commerce protectors are described as large and powerful, but capable of fair speed. Thev were designed, it Is said, to meet the German U-boat danger and in anticipation antici-pation of an attempted raid off the Canadian Ca-nadian coast similar to that made by the U-53 off Nantucket on October . At that time shipping men figured that there was not an allied warship withiir 500 miles of the spot that Captain Hans Rose deliberately selected in which to operate. The British admiralty, it. is said, determined deter-mined to make impossible another such raid and the fleet of commerce protectors was the fruition of the plan then formulated, formu-lated, The arrival of the disguised warships war-ships was followed almost immediately with the announcement hy the British premier, Liloyd George, of the plan for the nationalization of British shipping. It Is understood that the commerce protectors will not only lie in wa.it for submarines at strategic points, but that they have been provided in sufficient number to act as" convoys for merchant vessels through the zones in which undersea boats would be most likely to operate. |