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.