At first there was a shortage of the small vessels required for minor
naval duties. Some 800 craft of various kinds have been taken over and
converted into the types needed, thus providing the large number of
vessels required for transports, patrol service, submarine chasers, mine
sweepers, mine layers, tugs, and other auxiliaries. Hundreds of
submarine chasers have been built besides the new destroyers put into
service. There are now four times as many vessels in the naval service
as there were a year ago. The destroyer fleet now building in record
time is at least as large a fleet of this type of craft as England is
believed to have.
The United States battle fleet has grown to twice the size of the
peace-time fleet. As schools in gunnery and engineering they are
training thousands of gunners and engineers required for the hundreds of
vessels added to the navy and the many merchantmen furnished with arms
and gun crews. Target practice in past years had been devoted mainly to
practice with the big guns. Special attention during the past year has
been devoted to the guns of smaller calibre, effective against
submarines.
When war was declared there were under construction, or about to be
started, 123 new naval vessels:
Battleships 15
Battle cruisers 6
Scout cruisers 7
Destroyers 27
Submarines 61
Fuel ships 2
Supply ship 1
Transport 1
Gunboat 1
Hospital ship 1
Ammunition ship 1
Most of these have now been completed and the few remaining are well
under way. Meantime contracts have been placed for 949 new vessels,
including submarine chasers designed here which have done good service.
Altogether there have been added to the navy since April 6, 1917,
vessels to the number of 1,275, aggregating 1,055,116 tons.
When the Government seized the 109 German-owned ships lying in American
ports, the German engineers believed that their vessels had been damaged
beyond repair for a year at least. Within six months the ships were in
running order and have since carried numbers of American troops and huge
quantities of supplies to the fighting lines in France. The damage was
repaired by navy artificers and engineers under the jurisdiction of
naval officers.