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Show Winning The U-Boat Battle Prime Linister Churchill recently re-cently exploded one of the current cur-rent war stories that has been played up rather strongly in the past few weeks. Americans are familiar with "revelations" that U-boats were about to win the war and that ship sinkings were about to paralyze para-lyze the war effort of the United States. Lr. Churchill declared that Allied Al-lied ship losses for thepast two months were the lowest sustained sustain-ed in such a period for over a yeer. He added that new ships, built in this country, Canada and Great Britain, in the past six months exceeded U-boat losses by 1,250,000 tons. This figure represents 125 ships of 10,000 tons each, or again of more than twenty such vessels a month, despite the depredations depreda-tions nf the Tl-hoats. With new ships coming out of the yards faster than ever, there is confidence in his prediction ' that the shipping situation will be better at the end of 1943 and ! even better at the end of 1944, if : the war lasts that long. Concerning the destruction of U-boats, the Prime Linister assured as-sured the members of Parliment that the "rate of killing" from January to October, 1942, was the best seen that far in the war, and added that the three months since November has seen the rate of killing improve nearly half as much again. The first year of the war. he said, saw each operational U-boat U-boat sink 19 ships. This figure dropped to 12 in the second year of the struggle and to lYz in the third year. Even with la"rge encouraging figures, which reveal that the battle against the U-boat is not being lost, the decision has been made to increase the construction construc-tion of escort ships, at the ex pense of some new cargo vessels. This seems to be wise in view of the intimation that before any Anplo-American full-scale effort can be made to draw German troops and planes from Russia, the problem of the U-boat must be met so as to make aggressive action possible on a more tremendous tre-mendous scale. |