THE TRANSATLANTIC FERRY
On the first day of the armistice, before Washington knew its exact
terms or could form an estimate of how great a force we should have
to maintain in France pending the conclusion of permanent peace,
General Frank T. Hines, the Chief of the Embarkation Service, which had
administered the great work of transporting the 2,000,000 men of the
A. E. F. to France and had carried nearly half of them across the ocean
in its own ships, placed before the Secretary of War a plan for the
return of the troops.
It can be said that the outlook for the speedy repatriation of the
overseas soldiers was not bright. It had taken nearly seventeen months
to transport the expedition to Europe, and more than half of the men
had crossed in the ships of other nations. England had been the chief
contributor of tonnage to our overseas movement prior to November
11. To build up on the western front the numerical superiority that
was the chief factor in the victory, the British Empire combed the
seas for suitable passenger ships, cut her own civilian requirements
to the minimum, and devoted to our transport service every ton of
troop-carrying capacity she could procure. France and Italy had each
supplied a few vessels.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
KITCHENS AT LE MANS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
STREET IN LE MANS AREA NO. 5]
With the immense fleet thus assembled the War Department transported
men across the Atlantic with an intense concentration of effort never
before known. First in the determination that the Germans should not
conquer, later in the assurance that we ourselves should win, the
Department shipped the troops over with scarcely a thought of how they
were going to get back again. Future events were to be allowed to take
care of themselves.
Now such events had come to pass. England, faced with the sudden
necessity of returning her own colonial soldiers to their native lands,
and looking ahead, too, to the restoration of her all-important foreign
commerce, immediately withdrew her tonnage from our service. France
and Italy did likewise. The magnificent “bridge of ships” on which the
American Expedition had crossed the Atlantic melted away, and 2,000,000
Americans found themselves partially marooned in a strange land.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
CASUALS ON TRANSPORT LEAVING BREST]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
BOARDING TRANSPORT FROM LIGHTERS, BREST]
Yet not completely marooned. The fleet of American-flag troopships
assembled during the war had on the day of the armistice a one-trip
capacity of 112,000 military passengers. Operated in armed and
guarded convoys, this shipping could not quite average one round-trip
transatlantic voyage a month; its transporting capacity under war
conditions was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 troops a month.
The armistice did away with the need of steaming in convoy and allowed
the transports to be operated by the much more efficient system of
individual sailings. Under such conditions the monthly capacity of the
American-flag fleet was about 150,000 men. This capacity was to be
discounted somewhat by the fact that practically all of the vessels had
reached a point of having to be retired for a season of reconditioning
and repair. It was evident that, unless this fleet were aided, it would
take it, under the most favorable conditions, over a year to bring home
the A. E. F.; and it was likelier that, actually, the spring of 1920
would be at hand before the last of the overseas soldiers set foot once
more on their native soil. General Hines’s plan provided for such aid.
It discounted in advance the subsequent fact that the Allies withdrew
their passenger ships, and turned to our own resources for increased
transport capacity.
It appeared that we should have considerable tonnage available for
such use--tonnage released by the armistice from other service. For
one source, there was the Navy. Its battleships and cruisers variously
had been protecting the coast, convoying transports, and holding
themselves ready in the combined Grand Fleet to meet the expected
German naval attack in force. These duties had come to an end. The
Hines plan contemplated the temporary conversion of a number of war
vessels into troop carriers by the installation of berths and messing
accommodations. Although all foreign tonnage was to be withdrawn at
once, the Transportation Service hoped to secure some additional
capacity by chartering passenger vessels from foreign owners under new
arrangements.
The most promising source of new capacity, however, lay in the fleet of
army cargo transports which, on the day of the armistice, represented
about 2,500,000 deadweight tonnage[2] in the aggregate. The armistice
immediately rendered a great part of this tonnage no longer necessary
to the Government in the maintenance of a vast overseas supply service.
The A. E. F. was thereafter to exist on a garrison basis, requiring
only the ordinary garrison supplies of food and clothing. The great
cargoes of ordnance and aircraft, of raw steel and semi-finished
materials for the French and English munitions plants, of horses and
mules, of railway and engineering supplies--the tonnage which had
laden the cargo fleet in the past and had heaped up at the Atlantic
terminals--were to cross the ocean no more. It was proposed to take
the best of the cargo transports and convert them immediately into
troopships.
The War Department adopted the entire plan, and the first act of the
Transportation Service was to begin a survey of the cargo fleet to
determine what vessels were most suitable for conversion. Only the
larger and faster boats would serve, and of course they had to be ships
with holds adapted to the installation of troop quarters. Specialized
vessels, such as tankers and ore carriers, would not do.
For the Transportation Service the armistice was but an episode. It
merely changed the character of its work and added to the volume of
it. The peak of the operations curve, so far as troop transportation
was concerned, was not reached until eight months after the armistice
had been in effect. The thousands of troops in the Transportation
Service yearned for discharge and home as ardently as did the rest of
the Army; yet these men realized that it would be months before their
work could end. Meanwhile they would have to see hundreds of thousands
proceeding to demobilization camps as rapidly as steamships and trains
could carry them, with never a thought of the transportation men who
had made their early discharge possible.
The resulting drop in morale was one difficulty which the
Transportation Service faced at the outset of its labors in
demobilization, but one which it met and solved successfully. Another
more concrete one had to do with the operation of troopships. Early in
the war the Army had turned over to the Navy the task of operating most
of the troopships at sea, principally because the military authorities
found themselves unable to compete with the high wages of the munitions
industries in securing civilian crews for vessels. The Navy, with the
uniform it offered and its appeal to patriotism, had no such trouble;
and consequently it assumed the operation of the troop transports and
manned them with bluejackets. These young Americans enlisted for danger
and adventure and had no stomach for the work of operating a collection
of prosaic ferry-boats across the now safe Atlantic. The Navy
Department, seeing that it could not hold them in service, notified
the War Department to take back its ships. This the Transportation
Service did, hiring civilian crews and placing them aboard the troop
transports at a rate that relieved the Navy of the work entirely by the
summer of 1919, except that the Navy continued to operate three or four
troopships with crews made up of men serving under term enlistments.
While the Transportation Service was contemplating the conversion of
many of its cargo carriers into troopships and the consequent use
of the vessels for a number of months to come, it was subjected to
pressure from the owners of some of these same ships, who demanded that
the Government give them up. Practically all of its cargo tonnage the
Army held under charter from private ownership, the charters running
during the emergency. After the armistice the vessel owners naturally
desired to get back into the race for foreign commerce. It was to the
interest of the United States that the military tonnage be so employed
at the earliest possible time, but the early return of the overseas
expedition was even more important, and it received the priority.
Another obstacle in the way of carrying out the Service’s
demobilization plan swiftly and efficiently was the congested condition
of the American shipyards, practically all of which were engaged to the
limits of their capacities in new construction for the Emergency Fleet
Corporation. This congestion not only hampered the project to convert
the cargo vessels into troop carriers, but it also strung out the
necessary work of overhauling the regular troop transports already in
commission. For over a year these vessels had been driven mercilessly
through fair weather and foul, with never a let-up for the general
repairing and reconditioning which every ship needs at intervals. Large
forces had been carried on all of them as part of the crews to keep
the vessels going somehow by making emergency repairs whenever needed.
Only conditions as they existed before the armistice warranted such
abuse. The armistice occurred opportunely for most of these vessels,
and particularly for the ex-German liners. War or no war, they had
about reached the point where they had to be drydocked, regardless of
the effect upon the overseas movement. After the armistice it would
have been folly to set this tonnage at another great task without first
putting it in good condition. To do the work the Transportation Service
had at its disposal only its own repair yards at New York and the
drydock and ship repair yard of the Newport News Shipbuilding Company.
Because of this limitation the shipping was tied up longer than would
normally have been necessary.
The survey conducted by the Transportation Service immediately after
the armistice designated fifty-eight cargo transports for conversion.
They were the largest vessels of the cargo fleet, and conversion
equipped them to carry, on the average, 2,500 troops on each. Thus
the project added 125,000 accommodations to the trip capacity of the
troop-carrying fleet as it existed on the day of the armistice--more
than doubling it in size. By December 13 the survey was complete and
the marine architects were drawing the conversion specifications for
the individual vessels; and on that day the Service awarded the first
of the contracts, that for converting the _Buford_ (which later carried
the exported radicals to Russia and gained fame as the “Soviet Ark”).
The cost of remodeling the _Buford_ was $70,000, and the contractor
completed the work in twenty-eight days. By the end of the year twenty
conversion contracts had been placed. Others followed at intervals
until April 29, 1919, when the last of them was signed. Before June 1
all fifty-eight ships were in service as troopships.
In spite of adverse conditions in industry the ship contractors made
extraordinarily good time in remodeling these vessels. Such conversion
was practically a rebuilding job. It meant tearing out practically the
entire interiors of the hulls and rebuilding to provide troop quarters,
galleys, mess rooms, and sanitary facilities. The average time for
completing this work was forty-one days and the average cost was more
than $161,000. The total cost was about $9,000,000.
It will be seen that the project, because of its expense if on no
other account, was a bold step for the Transportation Service to take.
The cost of conversion per passenger accommodated was about $72--more
than the cost of a single steerage passage across the Atlantic on a
commercial liner. Looked at in a broader way, however, the expenditure
of the $9,000,000 was really an economy, for it enabled the Government
to bring home and discharge several hundred thousand soldiers weeks and
even months sooner than would otherwise have been possible.
This single act of converting the cargo transports into troop carriers
did more than any other one thing to expedite the return of the
A. E. F.; yet the aggressiveness of the Transportation Service did not
end there. Under the terms of the peace treaty Germany agreed to turn
over to the Allies under charter most of the remnant of her formerly
great passenger-carrying merchant fleet. For nearly five years these
vessels had swung at their moorings in German harbors and rivers. At
her pier in the river Elbe was the _Imperator_, the largest ship in
the world, exceeding in size her sister ship _Vaterland_, which had
become the U. S. Transport _Leviathan_. The Allied Maritime Transport
Council, which had allocated world tonnage in the struggle against the
submarine, decided to divide this fresh German tonnage equally between
Great Britain and the United States, giving us all the larger vessels
because we possessed harbors that could accommodate them. The smaller
ships England was to use in repatriating her Australian troops.
General Hines, the chief of our Transportation Service, took part in
the proceedings in London, securing from the Council ten large German
vessels. At once a U. S. navy board, headed by Admiral Benson, chief of
the Bureau of Operations during the great struggle, went to Germany to
put the allotted ships in condition for service. Repairs were quickly
made, and presently all ten ships, propelled by machinery unfamiliar to
American sailors, sailed out of the German harbors and into the harbor
at Brest, manned from bridges to firing rooms by Yankee bluejackets and
their officers.
From the London conference General Hines went to see various shipping
concerns in European Allied and neutral countries and secured by
charter thirty-three passenger ships in all--thirteen from Italian
owners, twelve from Spanish and Dutch ownership, and eight from French
interests.
Long before this event the Navy had taken fourteen of its battleships
and ten armored cruisers and by the installation of berths and other
accommodations had turned them into passenger boats capable of carrying
28,600 troops at once. These vessels added to the homeward movement
more than a division of troops a month.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
TROOPS ON BATTLESHIP READY FOR MESS]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
WARSHIPS WITH TROOPS DOCKING AT HOBOKEN]
Thus was the Atlantic rebridged after the armistice and with a
structure even broader and more capacious than the one on which the
expedition had crossed to France. On June 23, 1919, the troopship
fleet reached its greatest expansion. On that day it consisted of 174
vessels with trip accommodations for 419,000 troops. It could have
transported the entire A. E. F. in five trips, with room to spare.
It was greater in capacity than the combined facilities at our disposal
before the armistice, yet practically all of it sailed under the Stars
and Stripes. In number of ships it was four times as large as the troop
fleet which the Army held in charter and ownership on November 11. It
outnumbered by forty vessels the combined fleet both of American and of
Allied troopships at our disposal before the armistice. Yet on the day
of the armistice we seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of ocean
shipping!
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EMBARKING FOR UNITED STATES]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
MESS ROOM ON CONVERTED CARGO TRANSPORT _OHIOAN_]
Always courageous and swift in action, the Transportation Service
was one of the first of the war department bureaus to anticipate the
armistice and the consequent demobilization. On November 1, ten days
ahead of the armistice, upon the confidential intelligence that the
German Government had ordered its fleet out to give battle to the
Grand Fleet of the Allies, and further assured that the defeat of
Germany on land was in sight, the Transportation Service stopped the
overseas movement of all combat troops. Primarily this action was
taken to avoid a disaster to our troop transports, a disaster almost
bound to occur if in the expected forthcoming naval engagement any of
the German warships were by chance able to slip through the Allied
cordon and reach the Atlantic. After the armistice the anticipatory
act of the Transportation Service proved to be of material benefit
in demobilization, for it had kept away from France at least four
divisions of troops, diminishing by so much the work of bringing back
the expedition.
On the fifth day of the armistice General Pershing named thirty
divisions that were to conduct the advance of the Army of Occupation
to the Rhine and hold open the communications, designated the
supply troops to support the divisions, and released the rest of
the Expeditionary Forces for return to the United States as soon as
transportation facilities could be provided. This order freed nearly
half the expedition for demobilization. A million men were thus ready
to return home at once.
While the authorities in France were preparing for the embarkation
to come, there was at hand a job in overseas transportation to which
the Transportation Service could turn with such troopships as were
available for immediate use. In England on the day of the armistice
there were stationed more than 70,000 American soldiers, most of them
members of the air service squadrons undergoing training in the British
aviation camps. Their embarkation through the large British seaports
offered no particular difficulty. On our own regular transports and in
such space as the Army could secure on British commercial liners, this
whole force was set down in the United States within six weeks after
the armistice began.
The embarkation of the A. E. F. in France may be said to have started
about the middle of December, simultaneously with the appearance of the
order establishing the three embarkation ports and the embarkation area
at Le Mans. From then on week by week the embarkations of home-coming
troops steadily increased in number. In January the first of the
converted cargo transports joined the troopship fleet. A little later
some of the chartered foreign tonnage appeared in the service. About
that time, too, the Navy began adding its increment of war vessels
fitted out as troop carriers. In the late spring we secured the German
tonnage. In June, 1919, the American troop sailings reached a maximum
never before attained in any military or civilian movement. In that
month 368,300 American soldiers embarked on transports in France,
and 343,600 landed on American soil. The movement exceeded by 60,000
men that of the greatest month in the transport of the A. E. F. to
France. In taking the forces to France we had been assisted by the
merchant marines of the principal Allies to the limit of their combined
capacities, but we brought back the expedition single-handed.
This great record was made possible not only by the utilization of
all tonnage that could be adapted to such service, but also by the
operation of the shipping at its highest efficiency. The drop in
morale among the _personnel_ of the Transportation Service in the
first disheartening weeks of the armistice was soon offset by the
spirit of the transportation men in early 1919 when they realized the
great value of the service they were rendering to their comrades of
the expedition and to the country at large. When it bore into their
consciousness that they were exceeding all expectations in delivering
troops from France to the United States, they fell to with a spirit
unexcelled even in the days when every soldier set down in France was
so much added insurance of a speedy end to the war. Ship vied with ship
to cut down steaming time, and the ports competed with each other in
dispatching vessels to sea.
Under such circumstances all records for shipping efficiency fell. In
1918, with every energy bent upon the attainment of maximum efficiency,
the average turn-around, or round voyage across the ocean and back,
of the American troop transports was something over 36 days. In 1919
during the return movement it dropped to 32.6 days.
The oil-burning transport _Great Northern_, which was bought outright
by the War Department in the spring of 1918, proved to be the fleetest
thing that ever plied the Atlantic. Leaving Hoboken on June 24, 1919,
with a few passengers, a few days later she landed them at Brest, took
on 2,999 troops by moonlight, and recrossed to Hoboken--all within
twelve days, five hours, and thirty minutes. No other vessel, military
or commercial, ever equaled this speed. The _Great Northern_ also
established the record of eighteen transatlantic cycles at the average
rate of twenty-three days for each; and in the whole war enterprise
she transported more troops per ton of capacity than did any other
troopship. She was closely crowded for honors, however, by her sister
ship _Northern Pacific_.
The vessels alone could not write such records except through the
coöperation of the port organizations on both sides of the Atlantic.
Before the armistice the capacities of the ports, especially of those
in France, were a sharper limitation upon the expansion of American
power at the front than was the shortage in ocean shipping. After the
armistice the improvement in shipping efficiency was attained largely
by speeding up the loading and unloading of transports in port. On May
17 the transport _Maui_ at Brest took aboard 3,612 troops and sailed
for America in three hours and thirty-five minutes after arriving.
These soldiers had to be carried out to her in lighters, and they
boarded her at the rate of sixty-five a minute. On the same day the
transport _Cape May_, one of the converted cargo vessels, arrived at
Bordeaux and sailed on the same tide with a load of 1,928 troops,
having been dispatched in one hour and nineteen minutes. These were
extreme instances, but they were indicative of the efficiency of the
port machinery.
At first the Transportation Service would fix no schedule for the
return of the expedition, except the general one that it hoped to bring
back the last man before January 1, 1920. By the beginning of spring,
1919, the situation looked so much better that the Service brought out
a schedule showing the probable troop-carrying capacity available in
the French ports by months, and estimating this capacity for several
months ahead. The schedule promised a gradual increase until the
shipping reached a goal of 250,000 embarkations a month. On the basis
of this schedule the command of the A. E. F. fixed priorities for
embarkation and published both the schedule and priority dates, to the
excitement of the men of the expedition, most of whom were then still
in France. To be sure, the authorities promised nothing definitely and
informed the soldiers that the schedule would be met “if practicable”;
yet the men of the A. E. F. banked on the Transportation Service to
fulfill its predictions.
The goal of 250,000 embarkations a month was the extreme maximum which
the Service thought it might attain if everything went right. Yet three
months later, when embarkations approached 400,000, the goal had been
passed by 50 per cent. The actual performance brought 300,000 overseas
soldiers home two months ahead of schedule, and 300,000 others beat the
schedule by one month. Here was the equivalent of 900,000 men returned
and discharged from service one month earlier than the nation had any
reason to expect. The cost of maintaining such a force in arms for one
month is approximately $66,000,000, a saving which must be set down to
the credit of the administration that made it possible.
The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time wasted.
Although the embarkation officers in France did their best to send
out with each soldier a complete record of his service, in the press
of the work it was not always possible to attain this ideal. It was
unjust to hold back a soldier from embarkation because his records
were incomplete; yet before he could secure his discharge his papers
had to be in perfect shape. The Transportation Service, through its
debarkation camps in the United States, took it upon itself to perfect
the individual records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work
on the ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News
the Service trained a force of traveling _personnel_ adjutants for
assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started out from
France the _personnel_ adjutant aboard opened an office, and from
that moment until the ship docked he was busy from morning to night
smoothing up the service records. He also compiled the papers which the
debarkation camps would need and instructed the troops in the procedure
to be followed after landing.
Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself obliged to bring
home in first-class accommodations many more persons than it had
carried to Europe in that style. Thousands of officers had crossed
before the armistice in commercial liners, and so had crowds of red
cross and other welfare workers. Numerous soldiers had acquired
wives in Europe. Military regulation gave these women and their
husbands accompanying them the right to occupy first-class quarters
on transports. After the armistice several congressional committees
and hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace
negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both directions.
The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in France awaiting
first-class transportation to America there were 32,000 persons over
and above the capacity of such accommodations in sight for several
months to come. To have brought them all back in the state to which
they were entitled would have made necessary the full operation of the
entire transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the return
movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the Service adopted the
expedient of bringing home several thousand junior officers quartered
in the troop spaces of certain of the larger and faster vessels.
Although some outcry arose over this treatment, the majority of the
officers were too glad to get home at all to be critical of the mode of
their transportation.
Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the result
of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst accident occurred
shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, when, during a blinding
rainstorm, the great transport _Northern Pacific_, with a load of 2,500
troops, two-thirds of whom were sick and wounded men, went aground on
the Long Island shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea
was rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the
beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue for the time
was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship’s machinery was out of
commission, and she was lightless and unheated. It took three days to
rescue the passengers; yet, despite the severity of the experience, no
person on board suffered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged
the ship’s hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more
serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine practice such
an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. The Navy, as in the
instance of the broken machinery in the interned German ships, resorted
to the electric welding torch for repairing the broken stern-post,
saving several months in time and perhaps $50,000 in money.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
SAILING DAY AT ST. NAZAIRE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
TRANSPORT _MAUI_ LOADING AT ST. NAZAIRE]
The A. E. F. sold most of its property in Europe. The cargo transports
brought home about 850,000 tons of military freight--a small fraction
of the property held by the expedition at the time of the armistice.
The goods were sold abroad at a loss, the average recovery being
considerably under that received from the sale of similar goods in
the United States. Yet it was good policy to do what was done. Europe
needed the supplies and we needed the ship-space for other purposes.
If the materials had been returned to the United States for sale,
out of the proceeds would have had to be deducted the transportation
cost; and the Government was little, if anything, out of pocket by the
transaction.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
SOUVENIRS OF HIS SERVICE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
EMBARKING AT ST. NAZAIRE]
Among the materials freighted home were 100,000 tons of road-making
machinery. This the War Department turned over to the Department of
Agriculture to be used in the construction of highways in the United
States. The cargo transports also brought back large ordnance stores,
principally artillery, much of it of British and French manufacture.
The shipments included a large number of captured German cannon,
brought back for distribution among American communities as war
trophies.
While the returning troop movement was at its height the Transportation
Service was winding up its war business and returning to a permanent
peace footing. This program consisted principally of disposing of
its vessels and its shore establishments. On November 11, 1918, the
Service was operating 580 vessels with a total deadweight of nearly
4,000,000 tons. At the end of 1919 the army fleet consisted of only
the few transports actually owned by the Government through purchase,
construction, or seizure from Germany or Austria.
Most of its vessels the Army held under charter from private owners.
The best interests of the United States required the return of these
ships to their ownership just as soon as the Army could do without
them. The cargo boats were first to go. In February, 1919, the
Transportation Service began turning them back--redelivering them, it
was called--at the rate of three ships a day. In July, when the peak of
the overseas troop movement had passed, the Service began disposing of
its chartered troopships (including the converted cargo transports),
redelivering the last of them in December.
The Government faced tremendous costs in these transactions. The
charters provided that the Army must restore the shipping to its owners
in its original condition, ordinary wear and tear excepted. Nearly
every ship had been remodeled to a greater or less extent to make it
more serviceable to the Army. All the domestic shipyards and repair
yards were glutted with work, and it was evident that it would be a
long time before the Transportation Service could recondition the
vessels. Meanwhile the Service would have to maintain all of this idle
shipping at a heavy continuing expense.
Instead of reconditioning the ships, therefore, the Transportation
Service adopted the policy of returning vessels as they were, at
the same time compensating the owners with lump-sum settlements for
damage done by war service. In most instances the owners were glad
enough to accept such an arrangement. To protect the Government in the
settlements, joint boards of vessel survey, each consisting of an army,
a navy, and a United States shipping board official, were set up at all
the ports where ships were to be redelivered. Expert marine surveyors
under their direction made detailed examinations of all the ships.
With these surveys in hand, and with the complete history of each ship
and of the service it had undergone while in the War Department’s
possession, the survey boards were able to arrive at a close estimate
of the amount of the Government’s financial liability in each case.
The owners also employed their expert surveyors, and out of the two
examinations grew negotiations which arrived at compromise settlements.
In December, 1918, the Service redelivered ships of approximately
189,000 deadweight tons. In January the redelivered ships aggregated
461,000 deadweight tons; in February, 470,000; and in March occurred
the heaviest redelivery, amounting to approximately 532,000 deadweight
tons. Redeliveries crossed the two-million-deadweight-ton mark shortly
after the middle of April. By June most of the cargo transports had
been restored to their owners, except those which had been converted
into troop carriers. On June 15 the Army began dispensing with the
use of battleships and cruisers, the last of the twenty-four being
withdrawn on August 1. The break-up of the troop fleet began in earnest
on August 1, and by the first anniversary of the armistice most of the
chartered troopships had gone back to commercial work.
Many questions of admiralty law arose in connection with the
restoration of the transports to the merchant marine. The legal branch
of the Transportation Service on the day of the armistice consisted
of but two lawyers. By that time a large number of maritime claims
awaiting adjudication had accumulated, and it was recognized that such
claims would multiply during the progress of negotiations leading to
the redelivery of the vessels. With much difficulty the Service built
up a force of twenty admiralty lawyers. In fact, the War Department,
after the armistice, was so badly in need of lawyers for use in the
liquidation of war business, that for several months it was forced to
maintain the rule that no man of legal training should be discharged
from the military service.
In breaking up the fleet of troop transports the Transportation Service
found opportunity to create for the War Department a large permanent
reserve of troopships without expense to the Government for their
maintenance. The German and Austrian ships seized by the Government at
the outset of the war became in large part the property of the Army.
Most of these vessels were admirably adapted to war service, but they
were too large and too costly in operation to justify their continuance
in the transport service of the peace-time establishment. Consequently
the Transportation Service turned thirteen of them over to the Shipping
Board under an agreement providing for their charter to private
operators, subject to their recall by the Army in the event of another
war. These ships can accommodate approximately 50,000 troops at once.
All of the special military fittings have been classified and stored
away ready for use again, if it ever becomes necessary.
When the war traffic ended, the Transportation Service found itself
in possession of enormous port facilities. Prior to the armistice
the Government had seized or leased over seventy steamship piers
at various Atlantic and Gulf ports; but even such facilities being
entirely inadequate to the vast amount of shipping contemplated, the
Government began the construction of seven great port bases located at
Boston, Brooklyn, Port Newark, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and
New Orleans. Not one of these projects was complete on November 11.
One of the early demobilization questions to be settled was what to do
with these installations. Should the Government abandon them and set
down as loss the millions spent, or go ahead with their erection and
perhaps make the whole enterprise profitable by leasing the facilities
to American commerce? The latter course was chosen. The contractors
completed the construction at a total cost of $143,000,000. As the new
piers became ready for use the Transportation Service turned back its
leased piers to their owners. Then, as the military traffic dwindled,
the space in the base terminals was leased to private ship operators.
These terminals, among the largest and finest in the United States, are
now rendering an important service to our foreign trade, but on terms
ensuring their instant availability to the Government in the event of a
future emergency.[3]