Editing Cape Cod Canal (section)

===Public takeover and expansion===
[[File:CapeCodCanalEastEndAerial.jpg|thumb|Aerial photo of the Cape Cod Canal looking west with [[Scusset Beach State Reservation]] at right]]

On July 25, 1918, the Director General of the [[United States Railroad Administration]] took over jurisdiction and operation of the canal under a presidential proclamation.  Four days earlier, the German U-boat {{SMU|U-156||2}} surfaced {{convert|3|mi|km|0|spell=in}} off [[Orleans, Massachusetts]] on July 21, 1918, and [[U-boat Attack on Orleans, Massachusetts|shelled]] the tugboat ''Perth Amboy'' and her string of four barges. The canal remained under government control until 1920, during which the [[United States Army Corps of Engineers]] re-dredged the channel to {{convert|25|ft|m}} deep. 

In 1928, the government purchased the canal for $11.4 million as a free public waterway, and $21 million was spent between 1935 and 1940 increasing the canal's width to {{convert|480|ft|m}} and its depth to {{convert|32|ft|m}}.<ref>{{harvp|Reid|1965 |pp= 85–86}}.</ref> As a result, it became the widest sea-level canal of its time.<ref>{{cite web |url = http://www.nae.usace.army.mil/recreati/ccc/Navigation/navigation.htm |access-date = May 23, 2009 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090618002030/http://www.nae.usace.army.mil/recreati/ccc/Navigation/navigation.htm |archive-date = June 18, 2009 |title = Cape Cod Canal at Army Corps of Engineers website }}</ref>  The southern entrance to the canal was rebuilt for direct access from Buzzards Bay rather than through Phinney Harbor. Before construction began, the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] built a huge scale model of the canal (9 feet to a mile, roughly {{frac|1|587}} actual size) to study the hydraulic effects of tidal currents on the enlarged and rerouted canal.<ref>{{cite magazine |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=lNsDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA567 |title = Model of Cape Cod Canal Helps Study of Channel |magazine = [[Popular Mechanics]] |date = April 1936 |page = 567 |via = [[Google Books]] }}</ref>