The grave surgeon saw the joke was on him, and led the hearty laughter at this original greeting. Another recruit from a Western state, hearing of the various detentions and occasional surgical operations supposed to precede acceptance, hung over the place where he supposed his appendix was located this placard: "I have had my appendix removed." He probably thinks to this day that this saved him from an operation.
"I never knew what patriotism meant before I learned it by service in the Navy."
That remark was addressed to me by an upstanding, clear-headed youth in naval uniform as the mine-sweepers were welcomed back to New York after they had finished the worst job assigned to the navy, that of sweeping up the mines in the drab days after the armistice.
He was bronzed by the wind and the sun of the North Sea. His muscles seemed made of steel. Exposure had given a vigor of body that made you feel that he could do anything.
"Tomorrow," he went on, "I am going back to my job in civil life, but I am a different man. Before the war I think I loved my country and I suppose the flag meant something to me. But I felt no passion of patriotism. It was a matter of course. But the Navy has taught me such reverence for the flag that I have a thrill every time it is raised, and somehow my country became something more than land and water and houses. It seems something holy to me. And that's what my naval service did for me," he added as he passed to his place at the banquet table.
Such inculcation of love of country was the best by-product of the war.
How was it that the regulars in the Navy were able to train so rapidly the recruits that poured in after war was declared? How did they attain the efficiency which led to the promotion of ten thousand of them to warrant or commissioned officers?
The answer is that the Navy had been organized as an educational and industrial, as well as a fighting, institution. Officers and men had gone to school, they were subjected to frequent examinations, and promotions were given from ascertained fitness rather than from the outgrown policy of seniority. Post-graduate schools enabled officers to qualify as experts. Vocational and grammar schools for enlisted men had kindled ambition and given mental as well as physical and naval training. The war, therefore, found the Navy not only fit to fight, but its officers and men equipped to train quickly the half-million young men who enlisted in 1917-18. The Navy had years before instituted educational preparedness—professional, vocational, elementary—as a part of its policy. And the test of war proved that no other form of preparedness produced better results.
In 1913 I issued orders which established a school on every ship in the Navy, the officers instructing the men in reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, geography, grammar and history, as well as in naval and technical subjects. Nearly every enlisted man who availed himself fully of this instruction afloat received promotion, and all of them became more proficient.
The war proved that vessels manned by seamen having trained minds as well as trained hands are superior to ships with uneducated crews. Neither speed nor armor wins battles. It is intellect, education, training, discipline, team-work, courage.