Our Navy at war

by Josephus Daniels

"The use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station, is strictly prohibited, and commanding officers will be held responsible for the enforcement of this order."

Josephus Daniels,
Secretary of the Navy.

This was recommended by the Surgeon General of the Navy. If not universally popular when it was promulgated, when war came it was recognized that it had contributed to the fitness of the naval personnel. The zone system of excluding drink and houses of ill fame from training places, laws prohibiting the sale of liquor to any man in uniform, war-time prohibition, and finally the ratifying of the national prohibition amendment to the Constitution evidenced the progressive steps taken for protection of men in uniform.

With the coming of war, plans made long before were put into effect. Permanent hospitals were enlarged and temporary hospitals built to make ready for the large expansion in personnel. The bed capacity within eight months was increased from 3,850 to 15,689, and before the end of the war to over 19,000. Four hospitals were established in Great Britain. One was at Strathpeffer, Scotland, in easy communication with the Grand Fleet and the bases established by the North Sea mining groups. It was magnificently located and splendidly equipped, and proved of great service to the British Navy as well as our own. Another at Leith was near one of the North Sea bases, and a third was established at Queenstown, the chief base of our destroyers operating with the British. Early in the war two base hospital units were sent to Brest. Dispensaries and hospitals were established in the Mediterranean at Corfu, in Italy, France, Gibraltar and the Azores. Three hospital ships were in service commanded by medical officers, who, as President Roosevelt wisely said, should always be in command of hospital ships.

When the armistice was signed the Navy was ready to bring back from France 30,000 sick and wounded men per month. Wherever men of the Navy and Marine Corps were on duty in Europe, naval medical officers were with them with all equipment needed. The personnel of the Medical Corps increased from 353 doctors to 3,093; from 34 to 485 dentists; woman nurses from 160 to 1,713; members of the Hospital Corps from 1,585 to 16,564. Into the Medical Reserve came many of the ablest men in the profession. To the regulars and the reserves, the woman nurses and the hospital corps, went out the gratitude of the men wounded and ill to whom they administered unselfishly. Private John C. Geiger, a Marine, who lost his right foot as a result of a wound in Belleau Wood, voiced the feeling of all fighting men when he said:

But I want to give credit to those hospital corps men of the Navy, who worked with the Marines. Those fellows deserve a gold medal qr the highest award they can receive. Why, before we could reach our objective, they were right out on the field picking up and tagging the wounded. They didn't mind the danger and did their duty without protection of any kind. They were unarmed and could not shoot a German if they did run across one.

With the arrangements by which the Navy was to man the transports, a new and unexpected duty, it became necessary for the Medical Corps to expand its personnel and undertake a service that called for discretion and judgment as well as medical skill. Never in the history of troop movements have troops been so well taken care of, their health protected in every possible manner, the sanitary precautions provided, and such attention and elaborate provision made for the care of the sick and wounded. The larger transports were indeed combined transports and hospital ships.

This transport work was taken over and performed entirely by the Medical Department of the Navy without extra appropriation and without expense to the Army. Every contingency was met. The provisions were ample for the care of sick troops in transit, and there were returned on naval transports, 151,649 Army sick, wounded and insane; 4,385 Navy; and 3,625 Marines from the expeditionary forces in France.

The Navy always put the man before the gun. If a member of the Navy did wrong, we sought to save him. Two thousand men, punished for offenses committed, were restored during the war, and most of them made good. This was possible by the restoration of morale through the Mutual Welfare League organized in naval prisons. It was an experiment that contravened all former military methods, and was inaugurated by Thomas Mott Osborne. Desiring to substitute modern penology for the methods in vogue, I requested Mr. Osborne to become head of the naval prison, and he was commissioned as lieutenant commander in the Reserves. In the League he gave a large measure of self government to prisoners. He used discipline as a means of helping young men to find themselves, and its success was most encouraging. Too much honor cannot be given him.

"Treat men as pawns and nine-pins," said Emerson, "and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart you shall lose your own." It was that spirit, as well as the disuse of bread and water and solitary confinement and other ancient punishments, which made naval discipline the pattern for dealing with military offenders.