U.S.S. Corsair hereby detached duty European Waters. Proceed Brest with Secretary of Navy and report to Admiral Halstead. Load any personnel for which space is available and then proceed New York, touching at Azores if necessary. Transfer any flag records to U.S.S. Chattanooga before leaving Plymouth.
Escorted by the American destroyer Conner, the Corsair made a fast and comfortable run to Brest. The passengers were the Secretary and Mrs. Daniels; Rear Admiral David W. Taylor, Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair; Rear Admiral Robert S. Griffin, Chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering; Rear Admiral Ralph Earle, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance; Commander Stewart E. Barber, Pay Corps, who was officially attached to the Corsair; Commander Percy W. Foote, personal aide to the Secretary; and Private Secretary May.
Brest Harbor was a familiar panorama to the few men aboard the Corsair who had shared the toil and excitement of those early months of patrol work offshore, almost a year before. Now, however, the transports were crammed with troops homeward bound, and there was no more convoying the “empty buckets” out of Saint-Nazaire and Bordeaux and Quiberon Bay, nor was there any chance of a brush with the persistent U-boat which had been dubbed “Penmarch Pete.”
The Corsair undertook her good-bye courtesies and ceremonies, one of them a luncheon party on board, at which the guests were Rear Admiral A. S. Halstead who succeeded Admiral Wilson as commander of the naval forces in France; Major General Smedley D. Butler, commanding the embarkation camp at Brest; Vice-Admiral Moreau and Rear Admiral Grout of the French Navy and Mme. Grout; and Commander Robert E. Tod, Director of Public Works at Brest.
THE HOMEWARD-BOUND PENNANT. “WE’RE OFF FOR LITTLE OLD NEW YORK, THANK GOD”
Not much time was wasted in port. Two days after arriving, on May 10th, the bunkers were filled with coal, and there was precious little cursing over the hard and dirty job which had so often caused the crew to agree that what General Sherman said about war was absurdly inadequate. It was different now. Every shovel and basket of coal meant steam to shove the old boat nearer home. That homeward-bound pennant trailed jubilantly from the masthead, a silk streamer of red, white, and blue, one hundred and eighty feet long, into whose folds had been fondly stitched the desires, the yearnings, the anticipations of every man in the ship. Only a few of them had stood, with bared heads, on the Corsair’s deck when she had been formally commissioned as a fourth-rate gunboat of the United States Navy in May of 1917, and the bright ensign had whipped in the breeze.
Many of that company had seen service in other ships and some were civilians again, but memory was apt to hark back to the Corsair with a certain affection and regret. And wherever they were to be, these youthful sailors would feel a thrill of pride and kinship at sight of a Navy man and they would kindle to the sentiment:
“But there’s something at the heart-strings that tautens when I meet
A blue-clad sailor-man adrift, on shore leave from the fleet.”