EXPANSION IN THE NAVY
Our entrance into the war found the Navy ready for immediate service.
The almost universal popular sentiment against an army of large size
that had been growing in strength for a generation or more had not been
manifest against the support of a navy comparable with the navies of
other nations. Recognition of the necessity of a better defense for
the long coast line of the United States had led Congress in 1916 to
sanction the strongly urged plans of the Secretary of the Navy and
authorize one of the largest ship-building programs ever undertaken
by any nation. This Act of Congress with the ample appropriation that
accompanied it laid the basis for a program of naval preparedness and
enabled the Department of the Navy to make itself ready to meet the
state of war which was threatened by unfolding events. For it not only
authorized the building of 156 ships, including ten super-dreadnaughts
and six battle cruisers, but by authorizing the enlargement of the Navy
personnel and the creation of a big Naval Reserve and a Flying Corps
and providing machinery for the expanding of the service as desired
it made possible the putting of the Navy upon a tentative war basis
during the months immediately preceding our declaration of war. By the
first of April, 1917, its plans had been drafted and its preparations
made and it was ready for action. Indeed, its work had already begun,
for in the previous month it had provided guns and gun crews for the
arming of American merchantmen under the order of President Wilson,
made in response to Germany’s notice of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Upon the declaration of war on April 6th, the fleet was at once
mobilized and a flotilla of destroyers was equipped for foreign service
and sent overseas, where the first contingent arrived at a British
port on May 4th, 1917. The second reached Queenstown on May 13th, and
before the end of the month both were engaged in the work of hunting
submarines in coöperation with the British and French navies. Early in
June units of the naval aeronautical corps landed upon French shores
and inside another month the vanguard of the American Expeditionary
Forces, convoyed by the Navy, arrived in France. Battleships and
cruisers quickly followed the destroyers across the ocean and took
their places with the British Grand Fleet, on watch for the appearance
of the German navy from behind its defenses at Heligoland.
While it was thus quickly making itself felt in the prosecution of
the war, the Navy Department at once entered upon a great program of
development, expansion and training. It had in commission when war was
declared 197 vessels. When the armistice was signed there were 2,000
ships in its service. In the same time its personnel had expanded
from 65,777 to a total of 497,000. In addition to the cruisers and
battleships on the ways, 800 smaller craft were built or put under
construction during our nineteen months of war. Formerly the building
of a destroyer required about two years. But the great importance
of that type of vessel and the urgent need for more of them speeded
production to the fastest possible pace and at the end of the war
destroyers were being built in eight months and in some cases in even
less time. In one instance a destroyer, the Ward, at the Mare Island
Navy Yard, was launched in seventeen and one-half days from the laying
of its keel and within seventy days was in commission. The end of the
war found the American Navy with more destroyers in service or under
construction than the navies of any two nations had possessed before
the outbreak of the war in 1914. In the first nine months of 1918 there
were launched 83 destroyers, as against 62 during the entire nine
preceding years.
The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of effort upon
types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore construction
of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and every vessel that
could be effectively used was put into that service. Submarine chasers
to the number of 355 were built for our own use together with fifty
for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was worked out in the
Navy Department and preparations were made to produce it in quantity.
The manufacturing plant had to be built from the foundation. Work
upon the plant was begun in February, 1918, and the first boat was
launched the following July. Its tests were successful and two had been
put in commission when the armistice was signed while work was being
speeded upon over a hundred more, of which part were for one of our
co-belligerents. After the destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by
naval officers of our own and other nations the best weapon for the
extermination of the submarine.
Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a
thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many new
small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats needed
for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers and other
auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines built by the
navy were completed and put into service during the war.
Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar
expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of
implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the
Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships,
two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun
a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added
five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the
simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could
be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest
ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training
of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which turned out its
first flying machine seven months after work started upon the factory.
A little later it was producing a machine a day. Naval aviation schools
were established and production was speeded in private plants of sea
planes, flying boats and navy dirigibles and balloons.
The navy’s bureau of construction and repair undertook the work of
making seaworthy again the hundred and more German ships in our harbors
when war was declared which had been seriously injured by their crews,
under orders from the German government. So much damage had been done,
especially to the cylinders, that the enemy had thought, according to
memoranda left behind, it probably could not be repaired at all and
certainly not within a year and a half. Officers of the navy, in the
face of opposition by engine builders and marine insurance companies,
determined to make the repairs by means of electric welding, the use of
which on such an extensive scale was unprecedented. The experiment was
successful and these great ships were in service within six months, the
navy’s engineering feat having thus saved a year of time and provided
means for the transportation of half a million troops to France.
The naval gun factory at Washington was enlarged to double its output.
The navy powder factory and the Newport torpedo station had their
capacity greatly increased and a large new mine-loading plant was
constructed. A big projectile factory was begun in the summer of 1917,
and the buildings were finished, the machinery installed and the plant
in operation in less than a year.
Within a year and a half the work of the ordnance bureau of the
navy increased by 2,000 per cent, its expansion including the gun,
powder and projectile factories mentioned above. Plants for various
purposes taken over by the bureau from private industry increased
their output at once by large percentages, in one case, in which the
product was steel forgings, 300 per cent. The depth bomb proved one
of the most efficient means of fighting the submarine. It contains
an explosive charge fitted with a mechanism which causes explosion at
a predetermined depth under the water. An American type was developed
and within a few weeks was being manufactured in large quantities,
while manufacture of the British type was continued for their navy.
A new gun, called the “Y” gun, was devised and built especially for
firing depth charges. It made possible the throwing of these bombs
on all sides of the attacking vessel, thus laying down a barrage
around it. A star shell was developed which, fired in the vicinity
of an enemy fleet, made its ships visible, our own remaining in
darkness. Anti-submarine activities made necessary an enormous increase
in the manufacture of torpedoes and torpedo tubes, which grew by
several hundred per cent and far surpassed what had been thought the
possibility of production.
The ordnance bureau of the navy developed a new type of mobile mount
for heavy guns which, by the use of caterpillar belts, made them as
mobile as field artillery although the weight and muzzle velocity
of the huge projectile rendered impossible the use of a wheeled gun
carriage. The entire gun and mount, weighing 38 tons, can be readily
transported by this means over any kind of ground. Immense naval guns,
originally intended for use on battle cruisers, were sent to France
with railway mounts especially built for them by the navy. Their
important and successful operations overseas are described in the
chapter on “The Navy on Land.”
Smoke producing apparatus, to enable a ship to conceal herself in a
cloud of smoke, was evolved of several kinds, for use by different
types of vessels. A shell that would not ricochet on striking the
water, when fired at a submarine, and so glance harmlessly away
in another direction, was an immediate necessity, brought about by
the conditions of sea warfare. After many experiments a shell was
devised that on striking would cleave the water, to the menace of
the submarine’s hull, and, equipped with a depth charge, was soon in
quantity production. A heavy aeroplane bomb which united the qualities
of a bomb with those of a depth charge and did not explode on striking
the water was another development of the navy ordnance bureau, which
also devised a nonrecoil aircraft gun which, after much experiment,
was installed on our seaplanes and put into quantity production.
Its success meant the passing of an important milestone in aircraft
armament. An American device for detecting the sounds made by a
submarine gave highly important aid to that phase of the war. The Navy
Department equipped our own submarines, destroyers and chasers with
them and furnished them in large numbers to the British navy.
Not only was there need for an immense production of mines and depth
charges for ordinary uses, but the decision by the British to carry
out the American Navy Department’s plans for a mine barrage across
the North Sea, whose story is told in more detail in the chapter on
“Working with the Allied Navies,” made necessary the production in
enormous quantities of a new type of mine. Combination of the best
types already in use and experiment with new features resulted in a
satisfactory product of which large quantities were made and shipped
abroad. All this need for high explosives caused a critical shortage
and the supply of TNT, the standard charge for mines, aerial bombs and
depth charges, was almost exhausted, because of the scarcity of toluol,
its principal ingredient. In this menacing situation the navy’s bureau
of ordnance began making exhaustive experiments which finally proved
that xylol, the near chemical relative of toluol, could be used in its
place. The resulting high explosive, to which was given the name TNX,
proved to be the equal in every way of TNT and the building was ordered
of a plant for the distillation of xylol which would make possible
the production for the following year of 30,000,000 pounds of high
explosives.
Armament had to be furnished for merchant ships, 2,500 of them,
equipment for destroyers and submarine chasers, and all the multitude
of requirements for ships on distant service and for the repair ships
that accompanied them. All this increase in ships and plants and
personnel called for an enormous increase in the amount of materials
and stores it was necessary to provide for them. The greatest total
of supplies bought for the Navy in any one pre-war year amounted to
$27,000,000. But the greatest total for a single day during the war
amounted to $30,000,000.
Among the giant tasks which the Navy undertook during the war was the
building of an enormous structure in Washington for the housing of
the Navy Department, of several immense storehouses, of which one in
Brooklyn is said to be one of the largest storehouses in the world, the
installation at Annapolis of the greatest high-power radio station yet
erected, and the completion of the powerful radio plant at Pearl Harbor.
The Medical Department of the Navy increased under war conditions
from 327 doctors to 3,074, dentists from 30 to 485, women nurses from
160 to 1,400, and Hospital Corps members from 1,585 to 14,718. Three
hospital ships were added to its equipment, it had numerous hospitals
and dispensaries scattered through Great Britain and France and its
hospital service at home was enlarged from 3,000 to 17,000 beds.
The inventive ingenuity of the American people was apparently much
attracted towards the problems of sea warfare in this conflict,
for they began to send ideas, suggestions and devices to the Navy
Department even before the United States became a belligerent. After
that date the Consulting Board of the Navy, which has charge of such
matters, was almost snowed under by these suggestions. During our
participation in the war the Board examined and acted upon 110,000
letters, of which many included detailed plans or were accompanied
by models of the contrivances which their writers hoped to have
adopted. Most of them were either worthless or already known, but a
comparatively small number were found valuable.
At the beginning of our war activities our naval roster listed over
65,000 officers and men, with 14,000 more in the Marine Corps. A year
and a half later the Marines numbered 70,000 and in the Navy there
were a little more than 497,000 men and women, for a goodly number of
patriotic women had enlisted in order to undertake the duties of yeomen
and so release able bodied men for active service. The total permanent
personnel of the Navy, officers and men, had grown to 212,000. This
rapid expansion had made necessary intensive training for both men and
officers that was carried on with never ceasing activity at training
stations on shore and on ships at sea in both home and foreign waters.
In small-arms training alone a force of 5,000 expert instructors was
built up who trained an average of 30,000 men per month.
How all this immense expansion in ships, men, stores, facilities and
production measures against the previous history of the Navy appears
in this fact: In the almost century and quarter since the Navy was
established in 1794 until and including 1916 its expenditures totaled,
in round numbers, $3,367,000,000, an amount which exceeded its
expenditures in the next two years alone by only $34,000,000.
[Illustration: CONVOY OF TROOP SHIPS ENTERING THE HARBOR OF BREST]