As battleships and
cruisers are arranged in "squadrons" under admirals so destroyers are
arranged in "flotillas" under commodores, who rank between admirals and
captains.
A new kind of light craft--a sort of dwarf destroyer--grew up with the
war. It is so light that it forms a class of its own--the
featherweight class. Its proper name is the Coastal Motor Boat, or the
C.M.B. for short. But the handy man knows it simply as the Scooter.
The first scooters were only forty feet long, the next were fifty-five,
the last were seventy. Everything about them is made as light as
possible; so that they can skim along in about two feet of water at an
outside speed of nearly fifty (land) miles an hour. They are really
the thinnest of racing shells fitted with the strongest of lightweight
engines. They are all armed with depth charges, which are bombs that
go off under water at whatever depth you set them for when attacking
submarines. The biggest scooters also carry torpedoes. The scooters
did well in the war. Whenever the hovering aircraft had spotted a
submarine they would call up the scooters, which raced in with their
deadly depth charges.
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