United States in World War I 11 approximately 10,000 fresh soldiers were arriving in France daily. In 1917, Congress gave US citizenship to Puerto Ricans when they were drafted to participate in World War I, as part of the Jones Act. In the end, Germany miscalculated the United States' influence on the outcome of the conflict, believing it would be many more months before US troops would arrive and overestimating the effectiveness of U-boats in slowing the American buildup. The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland and submarines to help guard
Battle of the Barents Sea Battle of the Barents Sea The Battle of the Barents Sea was a World War II naval engagement on 31 December 1942 between warships of the German Navy ("Kriegsmarine") and British ships escorting convoy JW 51B to Kola Inlet in the USSR. The action took place in the Barents Sea north of North Cape, Norway. The German raiders' failure to inflict significant losses on the convoy infuriated Hitler, who ordered that German naval strategy would concentrate on the U-boat fleet rather than surface ships. Convoy JW 51B comprised fourteen merchant ships carrying war materials to the USSR — some 202