There the fleet remained until it was ordered north, on March 20th. "I feel sure that if this force had engaged an enemy on its cruise north in the spring of 1917, the victory would have been ours," said Admiral Henry B. Wilson, commander of the flagship, and Admiral Joseph Strauss, in command of the Nevada, declared: "In April, 1917, we could have gone out in mid-ocean and engaged the German fleet and come out successfully. Our ships were superior; our guns were superior; I believe our morale was superior."
Upon the arrival of the fleet, Yorktown became the center of battle training. During the entire war this base was one of the busiest places in America. Every ship was carrying on intensive training day and night—training gunners, engineers, firemen, deck officers and crews, armed guards for merchant vessels, men of every rank and rating to man transports, destroyers, patrol craft, and all the many vessels put into European and trans-Atlantic service. In addition to new men in their own crews, the special training squadron of older battleships trained more than 45,000 officers and men for service in other vessels.
When the bugle sounded, they all wanted to get into action. They had looked for the declaration of war as the signal to weigh anchor and set sail for Europe. As the destroyers and patrol craft went overseas and the cruisers plunged across the Atlantic escorting troop-ships and convoys, those who were left behind envied those who had received such assignments. But teaching recruits, tame and tiresome as it was, was their job, most necessary and useful. Until they had their heart's desire and were ordered abroad, they stuck to it with the vim and determination with which they afterwards entered upon the U-boat chase. That was the spirit that won.
Three thousand miles across the seas the men on the British Grand Fleet were likewise eating their hearts out because the enemy dreadnaughts, after the one dash at Jutland, were hugging the home ports, denying to Allied naval forces the chance for which all other days had been but preparation. All naval teaching for generations had instilled into American and British youth the doctrine that, whereas battles on land might continue for months, domination of the sea would be lost or won in a few moments when the giant dreadnaughts engaged in a titanic duel. German naval strategy, after the drawn battle at Jutland, defeated all naval experience and expectation. Hiding behind their strong defenses, never venturing forth in force, they imposed the strain and the unexciting watchful waiting which more than anything else irks men who long to put their mettle to the test by a decisive encounter.
The acme of happiness to the fleets at Yorktown and at Scapa Flow to which all looked, both before and after the American division joined the British Grand Fleet, was a battle royal where skill and courage and modern floating forts would meet the supreme test. It was not to be. The disappointment of both navies was scarcely lessened by the knowledge that they had gained a complete victory through successful methods which a different character of warfare brought into existence. They wished the glorious privilege of sinking the ships in an engagement rather than permitting the Germans later to scuttle them. Admiral Beatty voiced the regret of both navies in his farewell address to his American shipmates, when he said: "I know quite well that you, as well as all of our British comrades, were bitterly disappointed at not being able to give effect to that efficiency you have so well maintained."
The sense of disappointment at the drab ending was heightened by the belief entertained that there had been times when the bold and daring offensive would have compelled a great naval battle. In Germany, fed up for years on the claim of naval superiority and stuffed with fake stories of a great German victory at Jutland, there had been demand that their navy make proof of its worth by giving battle instead of rusting in home ports. Men of the navies that had produced Nelsons, and Farraguts and John Paul Joneses and Deweys grow restive under inaction. They knew that the existence and readiness of the two great fleets and of the French and Italian fleets held the German High Seas Fleet in behind shore protection, rendering impotent the force Von Tirpitz had assured Germany would sink enemy ships. But the dreary program of blockade carried on during four long years was not to their liking. It succeeded, but it was not the finish for which they had trained. They longed to the very end for the real fight, the daring drive, the bringing of their big guns into play, the final combat which could end only with annihilation of the enemy's fleet.
Whatever may be said of the wisdom of the ancient prudent doctrine of "a fleet in being," I shall always believe that, if, at the opportune time, such fighting sailors as Beatty and Carpenter, Mayo and Rodman and Wilson, could have joined in a combined assault, they would have found a way or made one, to sink the German fleet, in spite of Heligoland and all the frowning German guns.