hundred miles away, that was sure! Even if mines were found there after
they reported it swept clear, what would that prove? The Huns were
laying mines all the time, weren't they? So--war days are hard enough
anyway--why not ease up now and again?
They eased up. Many a snug little place there was along the coast where
a crew could go ashore and have a pleasant time for a day or two. There
were reports to fill out, but what were reports? Ship a clerk in the
crew and who would know? Surely not some aide at the naval base who
spent his busiest hours taking the admiral's niece to tea fights!
The British public will probably stand more from their lawfully ordained
rulers than any other public on earth. They stood for a good many ships
being mined on that coast before they began to ask the why of it.
The powers returned with facts and figures, percentage tables, and so
on, of ships departing and ships arriving; proving clearly that the
number of ships lost was no more than was to be expected. Whereupon the
British public took to writing letters to the press. British politicians
take letters to the press seriously; a new man, the admiral we have been
talking of, was sent to take charge of the district.
He got down to business. He fitted out a 30-knot despatch-boat and away
he went! All along that coast he pounced in on little harbors where
mine-sweepers should be found working outside, but where he found them
working mostly inside at little sociable gatherings where there was a
dance or the like going on in front and a little something nourishing to
drink in back. Our stern and efficient admiral lit into them like a gull
into a school of herring. Out by their gills he hauled them, and pretty
soon the B. P. began to read less of percentages and more of results.
One of the first results was that some trawler skippers lost their jobs,
and new skippers took their places. This was at the time that rewards of
five pounds or so were offered the skippers bringing a mine into port.
That five pounds looked pretty good to one of the new skippers; and when
one night at a pub a discharged skipper confided to him where there was
a nest of German mines, out he goes into the gray dawn to be there
first. He's there first, and sure enough it's a grand little spot for
mines. He hooks into one, lashes it under his quarter and goes scooting
back to harbor, which happens to be the naval base.
Proudly and noisily he steamed along, shouting to everybody he met of
his good luck, and asking the course to the admiral's ship. Everybody he
met gave him the course and also the full width of the channel as he
passed. He ran alongside the flag-ship, hailing loudly for the admiral
as he steamed up.
The admiral was not on board, but his aide was, and the aide came on to
have a look over the side. He saw the mine bouncing up and down between
the mine-sweeper's quarter and his own ship's side. Shove off--"get away
from us!" yelled the aide. "Suppose you press one of those little
feelers and blow us all to pieces--get away, I tell you!"
The mine-sweeper skipper looked up--"Feelers, sir?"--and then looked
down at the mine. "Feelers, sir? Oh-h, you mean them little 'orns
stickin' out on 'er? Bly-mee, sir, I thought I'd knocked 'em all hoff
afore I lashed her alongside. But 'ave no fear, sir, there's only two of
'em left, and I'll bloomin' well soon"--he reaches for an oar and went
bouncing aft--"bloomin' well soon knock them hoff, too, sir!"
THE UNQUENCHABLE DESTROYER BOYS
One day last summer a group of our destroyers were sent across the
Atlantic. It was a night-and-day strain for all hands--watching out for
raiders, watching out for U-boats, watching out for everything, and
grabbing snatches of sleep when they could.
Arriving at their naval base, every skipper of the little fleet felt
pretty well used up. But every worth-while skipper thinks first of his
men. One we have in mind passed the word to his crew that whoever cared
to take a run ashore to stretch his legs and forget sea things for a
while, why--to go to it. And stay till morning quarters if they wished.
As fast as they could clean up and shift into shore clothes they were
going over the side. Our young captain felt then that perhaps there was
a little something coming to himself; so he turned in, and he was
logging great things in the sleeping line when the anchor watch, who was
also a signal quartermaster, woke him up with:
"Signal from the admiralty, sir."
"Read it."
The S. Q. M. read it--an order to proceed at once to an oil dock and
take oil.
It was nine o'clock at night when our skipper had come to moorings. It
was now one in the morning, and he knew he could have slept for another
week; however, orders were to oil up.
He turned out and mustered what remained aboard of his crew. There were
about a dozen. He sent three to the fire-room, three to the engine-room,
one here, another there, himself took the wheel, and with his signal
quartermaster acting as a sort of officer of the deck, set out to find
the oil dock.
He had never seen that harbor before that night, but he sheered close in
to every ship's anchor light he saw and hailed for the course to the oil
dock. Most of them did not know, but one now and then passed him a word
or two, and so he bumped along and by and by made the oil dock.
Officers who have business with it will tell you that the naval
organization of the British is pretty complete. Our young skipper found
everything ready for him now. Men ashore made fast his lines, connected
up his pipes, filled his tanks--all in good order. Sister destroyers
were oiling up with him, and with tanks filled they all bumped their way
back to moorings, again without sinking anything along the way.
It was then daylight, and right after breakfast they all had to report
to the admiralty, so no use trying to sleep any more. Arrived at the
admiralty, the officer in command complimented them on their safe run
across, and then went on to say that of course they had had a trying
passage, and naturally their ships, especially engines and boilers,
would have to be overhauled--all very natural and proper--and of course
the needful time for overhauling, and for officers and crew--two, three,
four days, whatever it was--would be granted; but (they knew the need)
the question was: How long before they would be ready to go to sea?
The young destroyer commanders had discussed that and other
possibilities in the reception-room outside, so when the senior of the
group looked from one to the other of his colleagues they had only to
nod, for him to turn to the admiral and say:
"We are ready now, sir."
Which remark should become one of the historic remarks of this war.
At this time--at the gates to the North Sea, the English Channel, the
Irish coast--the U-boats were collecting frightful toll. In the
Mediterranean they were running wild. Five ships from one convoy in one
day--three of them big P. & O. liners--was one of their records in the
Eastern Mediterranean.
To the natural question, Why haven't you checked them? almost any young
British naval officer felt like saying: "Check 'em? Try it yourself and
check 'em! You go out there and keep your ship zigzagging full speed
night and day for three years and see how you like it! Go out there in
rough weather and fog with not a minute's let-up, and see if you get to
where the fall of a bucket of a dark night will make you jump three feet
in the air or not! Our ships were not built, and our chaps were not
trained, to beat their rotten game."
So things were when our fellows took hold, and hearing no word from them
for a long time and then but a meagre one, it may be that many a citizen
on this side was saying to himself:
"Well, they're gone, that little flotilla, swallowed up in the mists of
the Atlantic, and that is all we know about them. And now I wonder what
they're doing over there? Are they doing great work or are they tied up
to a dock at the naval base, and their officers and crews roistering
ashore?"
I can say from several weeks' observation later that they were not doing
too much roistering ashore. Before leaving this side I found no evidence
that anybody in Washington wished to suppress the record of what that
little fleet was doing. Secretary Daniels and Chairman Creel of the
Committee on Public Information believed with me that our little fellows
over there were doing things worth recording. This fact is set down here
because many people last summer believed there was too much suppression
of the news of our fighting forces; and suspicion of suppression breeds
distrust. Our fellows perhaps were not doing well. If they were doing
well, wouldn't we be told more?
But they have ideas of their own on these matters over on the other
side, and it is the other side which has most to say of what shall or
shall not be given out for publication. In a previous chapter I have
reported the answer of the British admiral in charge to my request to be
allowed to cruise on an American destroyer. The reply was a flat and
immediate: "No." They did not allow British writers on British ships;
why should they allow an American writer on an American ship?
It had to be explained that despite what they allowed or did not allow,
English papers did publish praiseful items about the deeds of the
British navy; and even if they did not publish such items, conditions
governing publicity in the United States and the British Isles were not
equal. The British navy was a tremendous one and it was operating just
off their own shores; officers and men were regularly going ashore by
the thousands and to their friends and families, if to nobody else, they
talked of what was going on; and it does not take long for thousands of
bluejackets to spread the gossip in a country where no spot in it is
more than forty miles from tide-water, whereas our nearest Atlantic
ports were three thousand miles from our base of operations in Europe,
and it was another three thousand miles to our west coast.
It also had to be pumped into the admiralty over there that possibly the
American and British publics did not hold to quite the same ideas about
their respective navies. It was possible that the 110,000,000 people of
the United States looked on our navy as not altogether the property of
the officers and men in it; possibly our 110,000,000 people over here
looked on the navy as their navy, that they had a right to know
something of what it was doing; and so (this item had to be pointed out
to one of our own topside officers, too) as that same public were paying
the bills of the navy, no harm perhaps to let them in on a few things
or, this being the twentieth century, they might take it into their
heads some day to have no navy at all.
It took the foregoing talk and something more before I could get the
permission of the British Admiralty to cruise on one of our own
destroyers over there. This isn't so much a criticism of the British
Admiralty as to show that their point of view differs from ours; and to
show that it was not Washington which was holding up news of our navy
over there.
As to what they have been doing! They have been doing great work. I
cruised over there on one of our destroyers. She was five years old, yet
one day during an 85-mile run to answer an S O S call she exceeded her
builder's trial by half a knot. Incidentally, she saved a merchantman
which had been shelled for four hours by a U-boat and her $3,000,000
cargo; also she ran the U-boat under--one of the new big U-boats with
two 5.9 deck guns. On the same day two other destroyers of our group
took from a sinking liner 503 passengers without the loss of a life. One
of these destroyers lashed herself to the sinking ship the more quickly
to get them off; and as the liner went down our little ship had to use
her emergency steam to get away in time. A fourth destroyer of ours got
the U-boat which sank the liner. That was the record of one little group
of destroyers in one day; and it is detailed here because the writer
happened to be present when these things happened.
When our fellows first went over they had to learn a few things from the
British. We had first to get rid of some childish ideas about depth
charges. We brought over a toy size of 50 to 60 pounds. They showed us a
man's size one--300 pounds of T N T, a contraption looking so much like
a galvanized iron ash-barrel with flattened sides that they call them
"ash-cans."
These ash-cans do not have actually to hit the U-boat; to explode one
anywhere near is enough. When our fellows let go one of them, the ship
has to be going 25 knots to be safe. One of our destroyers was making 11
knots one night--the best she could do under the weather conditions--and
an ash-can was washed overboard by a heavy sea. Our destroyer's stern
came so near to being blown off that her crew thought sure she was gone;
she had to feel the rest of the way most carefully to port.
This U-boat hunting has been found so wearing on men's nerves that the
British Admiralty has a law that our destroyers must remain in port
after every cruise for periods that average about two-thirds of their
time at sea. Once our destroyers are back to port and tied up to
moorings, a U-boat might come up and sink a ship at the harbor entrance
and our fellows not allowed to up-steam and at 'em. It was only after a
hard experience against U-boats that they evolved this law to save men
from breaking down.
It is a dangerous, hard service on one of the roughest coasts in the
world--a coast where for seven months or so in the year wind and sea and
strong cross tides seem to be their daily diet; a service where for days
on a stretch it is nothing at all for destroyer crews not to be able to
take a meal sitting down, not even in chairs lashed to stanchions and
one arm free hooked around a stanchion; a service where officers live
jammed up in the eyes of the ship and never think at sea of taking off
their clothes, and where they sleep (when they do sleep) mostly by
snatches on chart-house or ward-room transoms.
And for watches: eight hours in every twenty-four, night and day
watching of their convoy, of their colleagues, of periscopes. (The
prospect of collision with their close-packed convoy and themselves is a
bad chance in itself.) On a destroyer convoying ships the officer of the
deck has to stand with one eye to the compass ordering, say, two hundred
changes of course in every hour. And one watch-officer of every
destroyer has the extra job of acting as chief engineer of the ship; and
when a watch-officer had to go aboard a torpedoed ship, or to go in the
crow's nest in a critical time, to spend hours, it may be, the time so
spent is in addition to his regular eight hours.
If he is the executive officer he must also act as navigator; and as it
is important to know just where the ship is any moment of the day or
night, the navigator does not figure on sleep in any long stretches.
About twenty waking hours out of twenty-four is his portion. As for the
skipper: Every single waking hour of his is a heavy strain. I went to
sea with the commander of the alert, intense type. Most of them are of
that type, but this one particularly so, with eyes, ears, nerves, and
brain working always at full power. Three hours in twenty-four was a
pretty good lay-off for him.
Lively? Our destroyers are about 11-1/2 times as long as they are wide;
which does not mean that they cannot keep the sea. They can keep the
sea. Put one of them stern-on to a 90-mile breeze and all the sea to go
with it, give her 5 or 6 knots an hour head of steam, and she will stay
there till the ocean is blown dry. But they are engined out of all
proportion to their tonnage, with their great weight of machinery deep
down; which means that they roll. Oh, but they do roll! Whoopo--down and
back like that! Most any of them will make a complete roll inside of six
seconds. Ours was a 5-1/4-second one. When she got to rolling right, she
would snap a careless sailor overboard as quickly as you could snap a
bug off the end of a whalebone cane. There is one over there which
rolled 73 degrees--and came back.
Take one of them when she is hiking along at 20 knots, rolling from 45
to 50 degrees, and just about filling the whale-boat swinging to the
skid deck davits as she rolls! See one dive and take a sea over her
fo'c's'le head and smash in her chart-house bulkhead maybe! Their outer
skin is only 3/16 of an inch thick. See that thin skin give to the sea
like a lace fan to a breeze! Watch the deck crawl till sometimes the
deck-plates buckle up into V-shaped ridges! See them with the seas
sloshing up their low freeboard and over their narrow decks, so that men
have to make use of a sort of trolley line to get about. A man is aft
and has to go forward, say. He hooks onto a rope loop, the same hanging
from a fore-and-aft taut steel line about seven feet above deck, and
when her stern rises he lifts his feet and shoots and fetches up
Bam!--up against the fo'c's'le break. He is forward and wants to go
aft--he hooks onto the loop, waits for her bow to rise, lets himself go
and there he is--back to her skid deck.
That sounds like rough work. Sometimes it gets rougher than that, and
then you hear of the wireless operator who was held in his radio shack
for forty hours. He got pretty hungry, but he preferred the hunger to
coming out and being washed overboard.
But let a machinist's mate tell you in his own way of the night he was
standing a fire-room watch--this with all due respect to the chart-house
bulkhead, the trolley line, the buckling decks, and the radio operator
who was confined--this night he was on watch in the fire-room. Was it
rough? He thought so. When he looked down at his feet, there were the
fire-room deck-plates folding in and out like a concertina.
Destroyer crews do not loaf overmuch around deck. They can't. They live
below decks mostly, strapped in when it is rough to a stretch of canvas
laced to four pieces of iron pipe, set on an angle down against the
ship's sides, and called a bunk. Even strapped in so they are sometimes,
when she has a good streak on, hove out into the passageways. It was a
young doctor of the flotilla who said that, except for their broken arms
and legs, his ship's crew were disgustingly healthy.
Our officers over there volunteer for this service, and for every one
who went, there were a dozen who wanted to go. And there is a lot of
difference between men who go to a duty because they are ordered to go,
and men who go because they want to go. These officers and men--there is
no beating them, except by blowing them off the face of the waters. And
even then they are not always beaten. One of our destroyers was cut down
one night by collision. (With so many ships being crowded into a small
steaming area, collisions are sure to happen.) All hands had to take to
the rafts in a hurry. It was about two in the morning, one of those
summer nights in the North when the light comes early. They watched her
going under. Her deck settled level with the sea, and as it did so a
young irrepressible one sang out: "What do you say, fellows, to having a
race around the old girl before she flops under?" Away they started,
four or five gangs of them, paddling their life rafts with their hands
around the sinking ship at two in the morning.
That is youth; and there is no beating youth. We have had stories of our
soldiers singing a song that has become very popular since we entered
the war. We have been told of them singing it under the most varying
conditions: as they camped on the granite blocks of the Hoboken
water-front; as they climbed over the gangways of ships bound across;
debarking from ships in European ports; singing it from behind the drawn
shades of coaches rolling across France. There were even those who sang
it while waiting to step into the life-boats on a torpedoed troop-ship;
but for light-hearted courage has any one beaten that destroyer lad who
was torpedoed one night last winter?
When the torpedo struck his ship the two depth charges astern were
exploded also. Two 300-pound charges of T N T they were. The little ship
seemed to be lifted out of the water. There was just time to throw over
a few life rafts and take a high dive after the rafts. There was no time
to get an S O S message away before the ship went down; so there they
were--a November night in northern waters, more than half their crew
known to be dead, their ship sunk, no other ship near and no hope of one
coming near. It was about as tough a case as men could be expected to
face and hope to live. But there was a boy there--he was jouncing up and
down in the water to keep warm, and jouncing up and down he was singing
(from out of the dark they heard him), singing cheerfully:
"O boy, O boy, where do we go from here!"
It is the thing spoken of in the early part of this book. Material is a
great thing; but personnel has it beaten a dozen ways. Paul Jones with
his capable seagoers in his little sloop-of-war could raise the devil
with the enemy. Paul Jones with a line of battleships and forty crews of
men without spirit would not have caused them ten minutes' loss of
sleep. That singing lad in northern waters was worth a dozen guns.
Our destroyers went over there at a time when the U-boats were sinking
more tonnage in one month than Great Britain was building in four; and
because of U-boat activities the loss of ships in the usual marine ways
was far beyond normal. To the weary British our fellows brought a fresh
vigor, a new aggressiveness.
Only half a dozen were in that first group, but other groups followed,
and groups are still following. They have not driven the U-boats from
under the seas, but they have made it possible for merchant ships to
live in that part of the ocean they are covering.
Somebody has broken into print somewhere to say that Germany has trouble
getting U-boat crews; that men have to be driven into U-boats to man
them. What a queer idea of human courage people who say such things
have! There are always volunteers, probably always will be--plenty of
volunteers for any dangerous service. If the U-boat crews were the kind
that have to be driven to sea, there would be no great harm in them. But
they are not that kind. They have courage, and they have skill, and
because they have courage and skill they are dangerous.
After a year of the U-boat drive England saw a danger of being some day
starved out; and with England starved out, our army might as well have
stayed on this side last summer; but though the drive is still on,
England is not yet starved out, for much of which comfort they can thank
the officers and men of our little destroyer flotilla.
At a time when England was worn and weary with the U-boat game, our
fellows went over to hearten them up; and they are still heartening them
up; and, besides heartening them up, they are getting the U-boats
regularly. How many they are getting I could not say, even if I knew;
but one of our vice-admirals has publicly stated that they once got five
in one day. And with malice toward none, let us hope for more days like
it.
THE MARINES HAVE LANDED----
It was a little girl at home, not old enough to read long words, but
able to read a picture, as she put it; and there was a print of a
company of marines leaving one of our navy-yards, and she said: "The
marine soldiers going away--more trouble somewheres, isn't there, papa?"
Which caused her papa to recall that from where he was born and lived
the first years of his life he had only to look out of his top window
and across the harbor to see a big navy-yard; and while he was still too
young to read a paper, he had seen marines boarding ships and marching
off to trains; and just as sure as he did the older people would read
from that night's or next morning's paper of trouble somewhere abroad.
And always they went without any fuss. Most of us would have more to say
about going to the office of a snowy morning than do the marines on
leaving for some far-away country, from where, as they know by past
records of the corps, quite a few of them are never coming back. They
were the original efficiency boys. They slung their rifles, hooked on
their packs and went; and that ended that part of it.
But after they were gone people living near naval quarters waited for
the next word; and that next word so often came in the form of one
laconic sentence, the same cabled back by the topside naval officer or
some American consul, that we used to wonder if they had a rubber stamp
for it--that laconic, reassuring sentence! When our country erects a
memorial structure to the United States Marine Corps, she should chisel
over the main front:
_The Marines Have Landed and Have the Situation Well in Hand_