How all this immense expansion in ships, men, stores, facilities and production measures against the previous history of the Navy appears in this fact: In the almost century and quarter since the Navy was established in 1794 until and including 1916 its expenditures totaled, in round numbers, $3,367,000,000, an amount which exceeded its expenditures in the next two years alone by only $34,000,000.
Convoy of Troop Ships Entering the Harbor of Brest
CHAPTER X
OPERATING AN OCEAN FERRY
The United States had to carry on its share in the war from a base three thousand miles distant from the battle zone and to transport troops, munitions, supplies across an ocean infested by submarines intent upon sinking as many of them as possible. It was a task so unprecedented and so difficult that before it was attempted it would have been thought, in the dimensions it finally assumed, utterly impossible. The enemy was so sure it was impossible that he staked all his hopes and plans upon its failure.
In this stupendous enterprise the British Government gave much invaluable assistance. Without its help the task could not have been discharged with such brilliant success, for this country did not have enough ships—no one country had enough—for such an immense program of transportation. But the two nations combined their resources of shipping and naval escort and with some help from the French and Italian Governments the plan was carried through with triumphant success.
With the incessant call from Britain and France of “Hurry, hurry, send men, and more and more men, and hurry, hurry” speeding our preparations, the need for transport facilities for men, munitions and supplies was urgent. And those facilities were meager indeed. When war was declared we had two naval transports, of which one was not quite completed and the other proved unseaworthy. There was no organization for transport service, because none had ever been needed. For the first transport fleet, that sailed in eight weeks after the war declaration, the Government chartered four cargo vessels, nine coast liners and a transatlantic passenger ship and at once began to prepare them for their new uses and to engage and alter other ships for the transport service. They had to be overhauled and made seaworthy, staterooms had to be ripped out and in their place tiers of bunks built in, big mess halls made ready, radio equipment, communication systems, naval guns and other defensive facilities installed, ammunition stored, lookout stations built, ample quantities of life boats, life rafts and life preservers provided.
Work upon the big German liners in American ports that had been seized upon our declaration of war to repair and refit them for use as transports was undertaken by the navy and carried forward with speed and zeal. Under orders from the German Government their officers and crews had injured them in many ingenious ways to such an extent that they did not believe the ships could be made seaworthy again in less than a year and a half, at the least. Cylinders had been ruined, valves wrenched apart, engine shafts cracked, boilers injured, pipes stopped up, ground glass put into oil cups, acid poured upon ropes and into machinery, bolts sawed through and all manner of mischief done that would injure without destroying the seaworthiness of the ships.
For all of this reconstruction and refitting work there was insufficient skilled labor, indeed, insufficient labor of any sort, because the needs of the fighting forces were drawing men by the hundred thousand into the training camps and the equally urgent needs of the ship-building program, the munitions manufacture, the coal mines, the hundreds of factories that were turning their attention to the vital necessities of warfare, were draining the labor supply. There were insufficient numbers also of trained personnel to officer and man the huge transport service that would be necessary. Training for this work was carried on in schools on shore and on ships at sea, and civilian officers and crews were taken into the service. Sailors from the navy yards turned to with a will for mechanical labor in the repairing and refitting of ships, their zeal compensating, in some measure, for their lack of skill.
The British Government gathered up all the ships it could spare, taking risks with its own supply of food and raw materials, and sent them to take part in this enterprise upon whose success depended the fate of the Allied cause. The seized liners were ready for service long ahead of the time in which any one had thought they could be repaired, the first of them taking their trial trips within five months of the declaration of war and the remainder becoming ready for service at various times within the next four months. So much more efficient had the engineers of the navy made them that the utmost speed the Germans had been able to get out of several of them was increased by two or three knots. The French and Italian Governments supplied a few ships, and the United States Shipping Board furnished scores of merchant ships, as they became available under its program of ship-building and taking over of sea-going vessels. Later in the war period a number of vessels were obtained from Holland.