General Hines, the chief of our Transportation Service, took part in the proceedings in London, securing from the Council ten large German vessels. At once a U. S. navy board, headed by Admiral Benson, chief of the Bureau of Operations during the great struggle, went to Germany to put the allotted ships in condition for service. Repairs were quickly made, and presently all ten ships, propelled by machinery unfamiliar to American sailors, sailed out of the German harbors and into the harbor at Brest, manned from bridges to firing rooms by Yankee bluejackets and their officers.
From the London conference General Hines went to see various shipping concerns in European Allied and neutral countries and secured by charter thirty-three passenger ships in all—thirteen from Italian owners, twelve from Spanish and Dutch ownership, and eight from French interests.
Long before this event the Navy had taken fourteen of its battleships and ten armored cruisers and by the installation of berths and other accommodations had turned them into passenger boats capable of carrying 28,600 troops at once. These vessels added to the homeward movement more than a division of troops a month.
Photo by Signal Corps
TROOPS ON BATTLESHIP READY FOR MESS
Photo by Signal Corps
WARSHIPS WITH TROOPS DOCKING AT HOBOKEN
Thus was the Atlantic rebridged after the armistice and with a structure even broader and more capacious than the one on which the expedition had crossed to France. On June 23, 1919, the troopship fleet reached its greatest expansion. On that day it consisted of 174 vessels with trip accommodations for 419,000 troops. It could have transported the entire A. E. F. in five trips, with room to spare. It was greater in capacity than the combined facilities at our disposal before the armistice, yet practically all of it sailed under the Stars and Stripes. In number of ships it was four times as large as the troop fleet which the Army held in charter and ownership on November 11. It outnumbered by forty vessels the combined fleet both of American and of Allied troopships at our disposal before the armistice. Yet on the day of the armistice we seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of ocean shipping!