OPERATING AN OCEAN FERRY
The United States had to carry on its share in the war from a base
three thousand miles distant from the battle zone and to transport
troops, munitions, supplies across an ocean infested by submarines
intent upon sinking as many of them as possible. It was a task so
unprecedented and so difficult that before it was attempted it would
have been thought, in the dimensions it finally assumed, utterly
impossible. The enemy was so sure it was impossible that he staked all
his hopes and plans upon its failure.
In this stupendous enterprise the British Government gave much
invaluable assistance. Without its help the task could not have been
discharged with such brilliant success, for this country did not have
enough ships--no one country had enough--for such an immense program
of transportation. But the two nations combined their resources of
shipping and naval escort and with some help from the French and
Italian Governments the plan was carried through with triumphant
success.
With the incessant call from Britain and France of “Hurry, hurry,
send men, and more and more men, and hurry, hurry” speeding our
preparations, the need for transport facilities for men, munitions and
supplies was urgent. And those facilities were meager indeed. When war
was declared we had two naval transports, of which one was not quite
completed and the other proved unseaworthy. There was no organization
for transport service, because none had ever been needed. For the first
transport fleet, that sailed in eight weeks after the war declaration,
the Government chartered four cargo vessels, nine coast liners and a
transatlantic passenger ship and at once began to prepare them for
their new uses and to engage and alter other ships for the transport
service. They had to be overhauled and made seaworthy, staterooms had
to be ripped out and in their place tiers of bunks built in, big mess
halls made ready, radio equipment, communication systems, naval guns
and other defensive facilities installed, ammunition stored, lookout
stations built, ample quantities of life boats, life rafts and life
preservers provided.
Work upon the big German liners in American ports that had been seized
upon our declaration of war to repair and refit them for use as
transports was undertaken by the navy and carried forward with speed
and zeal. Under orders from the German Government their officers and
crews had injured them in many ingenious ways to such an extent that
they did not believe the ships could be made seaworthy again in less
than a year and a half, at the least. Cylinders had been ruined, valves
wrenched apart, engine shafts cracked, boilers injured, pipes stopped
up, ground glass put into oil cups, acid poured upon ropes and into
machinery, bolts sawed through and all manner of mischief done that
would injure without destroying the seaworthiness of the ships.
For all of this reconstruction and refitting work there was
insufficient skilled labor, indeed, insufficient labor of any sort,
because the needs of the fighting forces were drawing men by the
hundred thousand into the training camps and the equally urgent needs
of the ship-building program, the munitions manufacture, the coal
mines, the hundreds of factories that were turning their attention
to the vital necessities of warfare, were draining the labor supply.
There were insufficient numbers also of trained personnel to officer
and man the huge transport service that would be necessary. Training
for this work was carried on in schools on shore and on ships at sea,
and civilian officers and crews were taken into the service. Sailors
from the navy yards turned to with a will for mechanical labor in the
repairing and refitting of ships, their zeal compensating, in some
measure, for their lack of skill.
The British Government gathered up all the ships it could spare, taking
risks with its own supply of food and raw materials, and sent them
to take part in this enterprise upon whose success depended the fate
of the Allied cause. The seized liners were ready for service long
ahead of the time in which any one had thought they could be repaired,
the first of them taking their trial trips within five months of the
declaration of war and the remainder becoming ready for service at
various times within the next four months. So much more efficient had
the engineers of the navy made them that the utmost speed the Germans
had been able to get out of several of them was increased by two or
three knots. The French and Italian Governments supplied a few ships,
and the United States Shipping Board furnished scores of merchant
ships, as they became available under its program of ship-building and
taking over of sea-going vessels. Later in the war period a number of
vessels were obtained from Holland.
It was agreed between the War and Navy Departments that the Army should
take charge of the work of operating docks and providing and loading
cargoes and that in the hands of the Navy should lie the responsibility
of providing more tonnage when necessary and of equipping, keeping in
repair, operating and escorting the transports. To the Navy therefore
belongs the credit of having operated with marvelous success for a
year and a half an ocean ferry service of enormous proportions across
3,000 miles of submarine infested seas. To call it a ferry service is
no exaggeration. For the convoys started so promptly from American
shores, moved with such precision across the Atlantic, discharged their
passengers and left upon the homeward trip in such good time that
the ships came and went upon almost as sure a schedule as that of a
ferry across a river. In all, seventy-six groups of transports sailed
with troops, the size of a group ranging all the way from a single
unescorted ship to as many as fifteen troop ships escorted by from one
to four or five cruisers, destroyers and converted yachts. The famous
Leviathan, with her capacity for carrying from 9,000 to 11,000 men,
made ten such trips, most of them unescorted, her own guns, the skill
of her gun crews, the care with which watch was kept and her speed and
maneuvering ability being thought to give her ample protection. Trip
after trip the Leviathan took with the greatest regularity, steaming
down New York Bay with her decks brown with khaki-clad men, speeding
across the Atlantic, unloading on the other side and returning to her
dock in the New York port promptly in sixteen days. And in eight days
more, just as promptly, would she be ready for another trip.
From a beginning that was next to nothing, for it lacked merchant
ships, organization, officers, crews, there was developed a cruiser
and transport fleet of 42 transports and 24 cruisers with a personnel
of 3,000 officers and 42,000 men. There was a fleet of cargo carrying
ships in steady service numbering 321 and aggregating 2,800,000
tonnage, nearly one-third of which were supplied by the United States
Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation and officered and manned by
the efforts of the Navy Department. At the end of hostilities there had
been transported across the Atlantic in the seventeen months from the
first sailing over 2,000,000 troops, of which 911,000 had been carried
by U. S. naval transports and 41,500 by other United States ships,
while British and British leased ships had carried 1,075,000 and French
and Italian ships 52,000. In the summer of 1918 as many as 300,000
per month were carried overseas. Of the entire army of 2,079,880 men
American ships carried 46¹⁄₄ per cent and British ships 51¹⁄₄ per cent,
while 2¹⁄₂ per cent sailed in French and Italian ships. Of the total
strength of the naval escort guarding these 2,000,000 troops 82³⁄₄
per cent was furnished by the United States, 14¹⁄₈ per cent by Great
Britain and 3¹⁄₈ per cent by France. All the troops carried in American
ships were escorted by American warships, cruisers, destroyers and
converted yachts, and American destroyers gave a large part of the
safe conduct through the danger zone to the troops that were carried by
British, French and Italian ships.
The enemy had counted confidently upon being able to paralyze American
transport of troops and supplies by submarine activity and his undersea
vipers were constantly speeding back and forth and up and down through
the eastern waters of the Atlantic and even as far as its western
shores. But no troop transport on its heavily laden eastward trip was
ever lost and none at all under American escort. Only three troop
ships, all told, were sunk by submarines, and these were westward bound
and the loss of life was very small. The first convoy of troop ships
twice battled with submarines and many others were attacked, while the
naval officers who did convoy duty saw the undersea boats upon almost
every voyage. By submarines and raiders there were lost during our war
period 130 cargo carrying ships but under the guarded convoy system
these losses steadily decreased.
In a convoy the troop or merchant vessels sailed in echelon formation
with destroyers or cruisers steaming in front and at the rear while a
destroyer ranged in zig-zag course along each side. Naval gun crews
manned each ship and on each one, in addition to the watches kept on
board the escorting vessels, keen eyes constantly swept the surrounding
waters, every moment of the day and night. At night all lights were
dimmed, so that not a ray of even a lighted match on deck was ever
visible, and the great black hulks rushed onward through the darkness,
never knowing at what moment they might collide with one another or
with one of the escorting vessels. But so skillfully navigated were
they that all such dangers, though they were very real, were escaped.
No greater feat was achieved by our fighting forces than this of
ferrying across the Atlantic an army of 2,000,000 troops, with their
food, equipment, and munitions, and the material necessary in enormous
amounts for the creating and carrying on of the Service of Supply.
It was an arresting achievement not only because of its unparalleled
bigness and its audacity and success but also because of its vital
importance. Without it the war could not have been won. And the credit
for the achievement belongs to the American Navy. Our co-belligerents
gave vitally important aid. But the American Navy suggested, developed,
organized, supervised, operated and was responsible for the entire huge
system. Into its success went many factors, not the least of them the
foresight and watchfulness and careful planning of the officials of
the Navy, from the Secretary down to the junior officers on the troop
ships. There was constant study of the submarine peril and of means
to lessen it, and it was, by autumn of 1918, almost eliminated by the
combined efforts of the associated nations. There were the zeal and
diligence of officers and crew alike and the consequent high morale,
the skill of the gun crews, who never ceased from the effort to make it
better still by daily target practice, and that constant attention to
detail which leaves no loophole anywhere through which success might
dribble and slide away. And finally there were the skill, courage,
devotion and audacious spirit of the naval officers whose ships
escorted the convoys back and forth across the ocean. All these and
other factors combined to make possible an achievement that stands out
commandingly even in a war compact of big things and huge achievements.
[Illustration:
_By Permission of Mid-Week Pictorial, New York Times Co._
MINE BARRAGE ACROSS THE NORTH SEA]