Many observers of our own and other nations bore witness to the fine character of the American soldiers back of the fighting lines, among their fellow soldiers of the other armies and the civilian population. Their cheerfulness, high spirits, good nature and simple, human helpfulness gave new heart to the soldiers of the Allies with whom they fraternized and made warm friends of the people in the cities, towns, villages and countrysides with whom they came in contact. The Secretary of War, after several weeks of intimate study of our army in France, said that it was “living in France like the house guests of trusting friends.” And the Chairman of the Commissions on Training Camp Activities, after two months of investigation in all the American camps in France declared, as the result of this long and intimate association, that the question Americans should consider was not “whether our troops overseas were worthy of us and our traditions but whether we were worthy of our army.”
PART ONE: SECTION II. BY SEA
CHAPTER IX
EXPANSION IN THE NAVY
Our entrance into the war found the Navy ready for immediate service. The almost universal popular sentiment against an army of large size that had been growing in strength for a generation or more had not been manifest against the support of a navy comparable with the navies of other nations. Recognition of the necessity of a better defense for the long coast line of the United States had led Congress in 1916 to sanction the strongly urged plans of the Secretary of the Navy and authorize one of the largest ship-building programs ever undertaken by any nation. This Act of Congress with the ample appropriation that accompanied it laid the basis for a program of naval preparedness and enabled the Department of the Navy to make itself ready to meet the state of war which was threatened by unfolding events. For it not only authorized the building of 156 ships, including ten super-dreadnaughts and six battle cruisers, but by authorizing the enlargement of the Navy personnel and the creation of a big Naval Reserve and a Flying Corps and providing machinery for the expanding of the service as desired it made possible the putting of the Navy upon a tentative war basis during the months immediately preceding our declaration of war. By the first of April, 1917, its plans had been drafted and its preparations made and it was ready for action. Indeed, its work had already begun, for in the previous month it had provided guns and gun crews for the arming of American merchantmen under the order of President Wilson, made in response to Germany’s notice of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Upon the declaration of war on April 6th, the fleet was at once mobilized and a flotilla of destroyers was equipped for foreign service and sent overseas, where the first contingent arrived at a British port on May 4th, 1917. The second reached Queenstown on May 13th, and before the end of the month both were engaged in the work of hunting submarines in coöperation with the British and French navies. Early in June units of the naval aeronautical corps landed upon French shores and inside another month the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Forces, convoyed by the Navy, arrived in France. Battleships and cruisers quickly followed the destroyers across the ocean and took their places with the British Grand Fleet, on watch for the appearance of the German navy from behind its defenses at Heligoland.
While it was thus quickly making itself felt in the prosecution of the war, the Navy Department at once entered upon a great program of development, expansion and training. It had in commission when war was declared 197 vessels. When the armistice was signed there were 2,000 ships in its service. In the same time its personnel had expanded from 65,777 to a total of 497,000. In addition to the cruisers and battleships on the ways, 800 smaller craft were built or put under construction during our nineteen months of war. Formerly the building of a destroyer required about two years. But the great importance of that type of vessel and the urgent need for more of them speeded production to the fastest possible pace and at the end of the war destroyers were being built in eight months and in some cases in even less time. In one instance a destroyer, the Ward, at the Mare Island Navy Yard, was launched in seventeen and one-half days from the laying of its keel and within seventy days was in commission. The end of the war found the American Navy with more destroyers in service or under construction than the navies of any two nations had possessed before the outbreak of the war in 1914. In the first nine months of 1918 there were launched 83 destroyers, as against 62 during the entire nine preceding years.
The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of effort upon types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore construction of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and every vessel that could be effectively used was put into that service. Submarine chasers to the number of 355 were built for our own use together with fifty for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was worked out in the Navy Department and preparations were made to produce it in quantity. The manufacturing plant had to be built from the foundation. Work upon the plant was begun in February, 1918, and the first boat was launched the following July. Its tests were successful and two had been put in commission when the armistice was signed while work was being speeded upon over a hundred more, of which part were for one of our co-belligerents. After the destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by naval officers of our own and other nations the best weapon for the extermination of the submarine.
Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many new small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats needed for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers and other auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines built by the navy were completed and put into service during the war.
Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships, two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which turned out its first flying machine seven months after work started upon the factory. A little later it was producing a machine a day. Naval aviation schools were established and production was speeded in private plants of sea planes, flying boats and navy dirigibles and balloons.
The navy’s bureau of construction and repair undertook the work of making seaworthy again the hundred and more German ships in our harbors when war was declared which had been seriously injured by their crews, under orders from the German government. So much damage had been done, especially to the cylinders, that the enemy had thought, according to memoranda left behind, it probably could not be repaired at all and certainly not within a year and a half. Officers of the navy, in the face of opposition by engine builders and marine insurance companies, determined to make the repairs by means of electric welding, the use of which on such an extensive scale was unprecedented. The experiment was successful and these great ships were in service within six months, the navy’s engineering feat having thus saved a year of time and provided means for the transportation of half a million troops to France.