The Corsair in the war zone

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The owner’s cabins and the library aft were occupied by the commissioned officers. Although the rugs and panels and much of the furniture were removed and the ship had a bare, business-like aspect, the officers found a certain luxury in the fact that there were bathrooms enough to go round. They ate in the forward house on deck and the library served as an office, with gun supports extending from the wide divans to the deck above. The rough-and-ready transformation must have seemed almost brutal to those of the crew who, for many years, had striven for perfection of detail in maintaining the Corsair as a yacht. As a fighting ship the gleaming black of the hull and the mahogany houses were covered with sombre gray paint.

A naval crew was put aboard as soon as the quarters were ready. For the most part they were eager and youthful volunteers who had chosen the Navy because it seemed to promise speedier action than the Army. They had lost no time in enlisting, many of them preferring the humble station of a bluejacket to the delay incident to studying for a commission at Plattsburg. The lack of seafaring experience was atoned for by unbounded zeal and enthusiasm. Their sublime ignorance was unclouded by doubts. They yearned to fight German submarines and expected to find them.

It was a democracy of the forecastle in which social distinctions were thrown overboard as so much rubbish. The yachts recruited many of their men from the universities, from offices in Wall Street and Broadway, and as sweating “gobs” with blistered palms they rubbed elbows or bunked with youngsters of all sorts and were proud of it. Princeton was strong aboard the Corsair, and more than a dozen of her sons, as a stentorian glee club, enlivened the Bay of Biscay with praise of Old Nassau. The older officers of the regular service disliked this new word “gob” as undignified and untraditional, but the Reserve Force adopted it with pride as the badge of their high-hearted fraternity.

COMMANDER THEODORE A. KITTINGER, U.S.N., COMMANDING U.S.S. CORSAIR

The Corsair was fortunate in the officers assigned for the hazardous employments of the war zone. Lieutenant Commander Theodore A. Kittinger, U.S.N., was in command of the yacht, having been transferred from the destroyer Cushing which had taken part in the long and arduous training that had whetted the flotilla personnel to a fine edge.

The service record of Commander Kittinger helps one to realize how varied is the experience and how rigorous the training of a naval officer, even in time of peace. Graduated from Annapolis in 1901, he served first in the battleship Alabama, of the North Atlantic Squadron, as junior watch and division officer, on deck and in the engine-room. As an ensign he was in the converted yacht Vixen in 1903 when she cruised in Caribbean waters and kept an eye on the attempt of the former Kaiser to meddle in the affairs of Venezuela. Then shifted to the China station, the youthful officer was in the monitor Monadnock and the cruiser New Orleans during the anti-foreign riots and the Russo-Japanese War.

Sent home to join the armored cruiser West Virginia, Lieutenant Kittinger was an assistant engineer officer in 1906 and again made the long voyage to the Far East and the Pacific. He became gunnery officer of the same ship before the tour of sea duty ended and he was appointed assistant inspector of ordnance at the Naval Gun Factory, Washington. In 1910-13 he was senior engineer officer of the battleship Minnesota, visiting Europe and then to Cuba and Vera Cruz. Again ashore, he was in charge of the smokeless powder works at Indian Head and executive officer of the station of the Naval Proving Ground, going from there to the Fore River Shipyard as naval inspector of machinery. Then came two years of sea service in a destroyer.

As executive officer of the Corsair, Lieutenant Commander Porter was an uncommonly experienced and capable seaman and navigator and, of course, knew the ship from keel to truck and what she could do in all weathers. Third on the list was Lieutenant Robert E. Tod as navigating officer. He was one of the foremost yachtsmen of the United States, a commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club, and a licensed master mariner who had sailed his own large vessels without the aid of a skipper. The gunnery officer, Ensign A. K. Schanze, was a graduate of the Naval Academy who welcomed the opportunity to return to the Service. The chief engineer of the Corsair, J. K. Hutchison, who had been in her for several years, decided to stand by the ship through thick and thin, as did his assistants, A. V. Mason and W. F. Hawthorn. This was true also of Lieutenant R. J. McGuire who had been the first officer of the yacht and of Boatswain R. Budani and a number of the enlisted force.

The day’s work of making the Corsair ready for sea, the unaccustomed drudgery and the uncertainty which filled the ship with rumors, are reflected in the letters and diaries of the youthful seamen whose motto was, “We don’t know where we’re going but we’re on our way.” One of them wrote as follows: