TRANSPORTING TWO MILLION AMERICAN SOLDIERS TO FRANCE
I
In March, 1918, it became apparent that the German submarine campaign had failed. The prospect that confronted the Allied forces at that time, when compared with the conditions which had faced them in April, 1917, forms one of the most impressive contrasts in history. In the first part of the earlier year the cause of the Allied Powers, and consequently the cause of liberty throughout the world, had reached the point almost of desperation. On both land and sea the Germans seemed to hold the future in their hands. In Europe the armies of the Central Powers were everywhere in the ascendant. The French and British were holding their own in France, and in the Somme campaign they had apparently inflicted great damage upon the German forces, yet the disintegration of the Russian army, the unmistakable signs of which had already appeared, was bringing nearer the day when they would have to meet the undivided strength of their enemy. At the time in question, Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro were conquered countries, and Italy seemed unable to make any progress against the Austrians. Bulgaria and Turkey had become practically German provinces, and the dream of a great Germanic eastern empire was rapidly approaching realization. So strong was Germany in a military sense, so little did she apprehend that the United States could ever assemble her resources and her men in time to make them a decisive element in the struggle, that the German war lords, in their effort to bring the European conflict to a quick conclusion, did not hesitate to take the step which was destined to make our country their enemy. Probably no nation ever adopted a war measure with more confidence in its success. The results which the German submarines could accomplish seemed at that time to be simply a matter of mathematical calculation. The Germans estimated that they could sink at least 1,000,000 tons a month, completely cut off Great Britain's supplies of food and war materials, and thus end the war by October or November of 1917. Even though the United States should declare war, what could an unprepared nation like our own accomplish in such a brief period? Millions of troops we might indeed raise, but we could not train them in three or four months, and, even though we could perform such a miracle, it was ridiculous to suppose that we could transport them to Europe through the submarine danger zone. I have already shown that the Germans were not alone in thus predicting the course of events. In the month of April, 1917, I had found the Allied officials just about as distressed as the Germans were jubilant. Already the latter, in sinking merchant ships, had had successes which almost equalled their own predictions; no adequate means of defence against the submarine had been devised; and the chiefs of the British navy made no attempts to disguise their apprehension for the future.
Such was the atmosphere of gloom which prevailed in Allied councils in April, 1917; yet one year later the naval situation had completely changed. The reasons for that change have been set forth in the preceding pages. In that brief twelve months the relative position of the submarine had undergone a marked transformation. Instead of being usually the pursuer it was now often the pursued. Instead of sailing jauntily upon the high seas, sinking helpless merchantmen almost at will, it was half-heartedly lying in wait along the coasts, seeking its victims in the vessels of dispersed convoys. If it attempted to push out to sea, and attack a convoy, escorting destroyers were likely to deliver one of their dangerous attacks; if it sought the shallower coastal waters, a fleet of yachts, sloops, and subchasers was constantly ready to assail it with dozens of depth charges. An attempt to pass through the Straits of Dover meant almost inevitable destruction by mines; an attempt to escape into the ocean by the northern passage involved the momentary dread of a similar end or the hazard of navigating the difficult Pentland Firth. In most of the narrow passages Allied submarines lay constantly in wait with their torpedoes; a great fleet of airplanes and dirigibles was always circling above ready to rain a shower of bombs upon the under-water foe. Already the ocean floor about the British Isles held not far from 200 sunken submarines, with most of their crews, amounting to at least 4,000 men, whose deaths involved perhaps the most hideous tragedies of the war. Bad as was this situation, it was nothing compared with what it would become a few months or a year later. American and British shipyards were turning out anti-submarine craft with great rapidity; the industries of America, with their enormous output of steel, had been enlisted in the anti-submarine campaign. The American and British shipbuilding facilities were neutralizing the German campaign in two ways: they were not only constructing war vessels on a scale which would soon drive all the German submarines from the sea, but they were building merchant tonnage so rapidly that, in March, 1918, more new tonnage was launched than was being destroyed. Thus by this time the Teutonic hopes of ending the war by the submarine had utterly collapsed; if the Germans were to win the war at all, or even to obtain a peace which would not be disastrous, some other programme must be adopted and adopted quickly.
Disheartened by their failure at sea, the enemy therefore turned their eyes once more toward the land. The destruction of Russian military power had given the German armies a great numerical superiority over those of the Allies. There seemed little likelihood that the French or the British, after three years of frightfully gruelling war, could add materially to their forces. Thus, with the grouping of the Powers, such as existed in 1917, the Germans had a tremendous advantage on their side, for Russia, which German statesmen for fifty years had feared as a source of inexhaustible man-supply to her enemies, had disappeared as a military power. But a new element in the situation now counterbalanced this temporary gain; that was the daily increasing importance of the United States in the war. The Germans, who in 1917 had despised us as an enemy, immediate or prospective, now despised us no longer. The army which they declared could never be raised and trained was actually being raised and trained by the millions. The nation which their publicists had denounced as lacking cohesion and public spirit had adopted conscription simultaneously with their declaration of war, and the people whom the Germans had affected to regard as devoted only to the pursuit of gain and pleasure had manifested a unity of purpose which they had never before displayed, and had offered their lives, their labours, and their wealth without limit to the cause of the Allies. Up to March, 1918, only a comparatively small part of this American army had reached Europe, but the Germans had already tested its fighting quality and had learned to respect it. Yet all these manifestations would not have disturbed the Germanic calculations except for one depressing fact. Even a nation of 100,000,000 brave and energetic people, fully trained and equipped for war, is not a formidable foe so long as an impassable watery gulf of three thousand miles separates them from the field of battle.
For the greater part of 1917 the German people believed that their submarines could bar the progress of the American armies. By March, 1918, they had awakened from this delusion. Not only was an American army millions strong in process of formation, but the alarming truth now dawned upon the Germans that it could be transported to Europe. The great industries of America could provide munitions and food to supply any number of soldiers indefinitely, and these, too, could be brought to the Western Front. Outwardly, the German chiefs might still affect to despise this new foe, but in their hearts they knew that it spelt their doom. They were not now dealing with a corrupt Czardom and hordes of ignorant and passionless Slavs, who could be eliminated by propaganda and sedition; they were dealing with millions of intelligent and energetic freemen, all animated by a mighty and almost religious purpose. Yet the situation, desperate as it seemed, held forth one more hope. If the German armies, which still greatly outnumbered the French and British, could strike and win a decisive victory before the Americans could arrive, then they might still force a satisfactory peace. "It is a race between Ludendorff and Wilson" is the terse and accurate way in which Lloyd George summed up the situation. The great blow fell on March 21, 1918; the British and the French met it with heroism, but it was quite evident that they were fighting against terrible odds. At this time the American army in France numbered about 300,000 men; it now became the business of the American navy, assisted by the British, to transport the American troops who could increase these forces sufficiently to turn the balance in the Allies' favour.
The supreme hour, to which all the anti-submarine labours of the preceding year were merely preliminary, had now arrived. Since the close of the war there has been much discussion of the part which the American navy played in bringing it to a successful end. Even during the war there was some criticism on this point. There were two more or less definite opinions in the public mind upon this question. One was that the main business of our war vessels was to convoy the American soldiers to France; the other emphasized the anti-submarine warfare as its most important duty. Anyone would suppose, from the detached way in which these two subjects have been discussed, that the anti-submarine warfare and the successful transportation of troops were separate matters. An impression apparently prevails that, at the beginning of the war, the American navy could have quietly decided whether it would devote its energies to making warfare on the submarine or to convoying American armies; yet the absurdity of such a conception must be apparent to anyone who has read the foregoing pages. The several operations in which the Allied navies engaged were all part of a comprehensive programme; they were all interdependent. According to my idea, the business of the American navy was to join its forces whole-heartedly with those of the Allies in the effort to win the war. Anything which helped to accomplish this great purpose became automatically our duty. Germany was basing her chances of success upon the submarine; our business was therefore to assist in defeating the submarine. The cause of the Allies was our cause; our cause was the cause of the Allies; anything which benefited the Allies benefited the United States; and anything which benefited the United States benefited the Allies. Neither we nor France nor England were conducting a separate campaign; we were separate units of an harmonious whole. At the beginning the one pressing duty was to put an end to the sinking of merchantmen, not because these merchantmen were for the larger part British, but because the failure to do so would have meant the elimination of Great Britain from the war, with results which would have meant defeat for the other Allies. Let us imagine, for a moment, what the sequence of events would have been had the submarine campaign against merchant shipping succeeded; in that case Britain and France would have been compelled to surrender unconditionally and the United States would therefore have been forced to fight the Central Empires alone. Germany's terms of peace would have included the surrender of all the Allied fleets; this would eventually have left the United States navy to fight the German navy reinforced by the ships of Great Britain, Austria, France, and Italy. In such a contest we should have been outnumbered about three or four to one. I have such confidence in the power and purpose of America as to believe that, even in a single-handed conflict with Germany, we should have won in the end; but it is evident that the problem would have been quite a different one from that of fighting in co-operation with the Allies against the Germanic foe.
Simply as a matter of self-interest and strategy it was certainly wisdom to throw the last ounce of our strength into the scale of the Allied navies; and it was therefore inevitable that we should first of all use our anti-submarine craft to protect all shipping sailing to Europe and to clear the sea of submarines. In doing this we were protecting the food supply not only of Great Britain, but of France and our other Allies, for most of the materials which we sent to our European friends were transported first to England and thence were shipped across the Channel. Moreover, our twelve months' campaign against the submarine was an invaluable preliminary to transporting the troops. Does any sane person believe that we could have put two million Americans into France had the German submarines maintained until the spring and summer of 1918 the striking power which had been theirs in the spring of 1917? Merely to state the question is to answer it. In that same twelve months we had gained much experience which was exceedingly valuable when we began transporting troops in great numbers. The most efficacious protection to merchant shipping, the convoy, was similarly the greatest safeguard to our military transports. Those methods which had been so successfully used in shipping food, munitions, and materials were now used in shipping soldiers. The section of the great headquarters which we had developed in London for routing convoys was used for routing transports, and the American naval officer, Captain Byron A. Long, who had demonstrated such great ability in this respect, was likewise the master mind in directing the course of the American soldiers to France.
In other ways we had laid the foundations for this, the greatest troop movement in history. In the preceding twelve months we had increased the oil tankage at Brest more than fourfold, sent over repair ships, and augmented its repair facilities. This port and all of our naval activities in France were under the command first of Rear-Admiral Wm. B. Fletcher, and later Rear-Admiral Henry B. Wilson. It was a matter of regret that we could not earlier have made Brest the main naval base for the American naval forces in France, for it was in some respects strategically better located for that purpose than was any other port in Europe. Even for escorting certain merchant convoys into the Channel Brest would have provided a better base than either Plymouth or Queenstown. A glance at the map explains why. To send destroyers from Queenstown to pick up convoys and escort them into the Channel or to French ports and thence return to their base involved a long triangular trip; to send such destroyers from Brest to escort these involved a smaller amount of steaming and a direct east and west voyage. Similarly, Queenstown was a much better location for destroyers sent to meet convoys bound for ports in the Irish Sea over the northern "trunk line." But unfortunately it was utterly impossible to use the great natural advantages of Brest in the early days of war; the mere fact that this French harbour possessed most inadequate tankage facilities put it out of the question, and it was also very deficient in docks, repair facilities, and other indispensable features of a naval base. At this time Brest was hardly more than able to provide for the requirements of the French, and it would have embarrassed our French allies greatly had we attempted to establish a large American force there, before we had supplied the essential oil fuel and repair facilities. The ships which we did send in the first part of the war were mostly yachts, of the "dollar-a-year" variety, which their owners had generously given to the national service; their crews were largely of that type of young business man and college undergraduate to whose skill and devotion I have already paid tribute. This little flotilla acquitted itself splendidly up and down the coast of France. Meanwhile, we were constructing fuel-oil tanks; and as soon as these were ready and repair ships were available, we began building up a large force at Brest—a force which was ultimately larger than the one we maintained at Queenstown; at the height of the troop movements it comprised about 36 destroyers, 12 yachts, 3 tenders, and several mine-sweepers and tugs. The fine work which this detachment accomplished in escorting troop and supply convoys is sufficient evidence of the skill acquired by the destroyers and other vessels in carrying out their duties in this peculiar warfare.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a great organization had been created under the able direction of Rear-Admiral Albert Gleaves for maintaining and administering the fleet of transports and their ocean escorts. Also, as soon as war was declared the work was begun of converting into transports those German merchant ships which had been interned in American ports. The successful completion of this work was, in itself, a great triumph for the American navy. Of the vessels which the Germans had left in our hands, seventeen at New York, Boston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia, seemed to be adapted for transport purposes, but the Germans had not intended that we should make any such use of them. The condition of these ships, after their German custodians had left, was something indescribable; they reflected great discredit upon German seamanship, for it would have been impossible for any people which really loved ships to permit them to deteriorate as had these vessels and to become such cesspools of filth. For three years the Germans had evidently made no attempt to clean them; the sanitary conditions were so bad that our workmen could not sleep on board, but had to have sleeping quarters near the docks; they spent weeks scrubbing, scraping, and disinfecting, in a finally successful effort to make the ships suitable habitations for human beings. Not only had the Germans permitted such liners as the Vaterland and the Kronprinzessin Cecilie to go neglected, but, on their departure, they had attempted to injure them in all conceivable ways. The cylinders had been broken, engines had been smashed, vital parts of the machinery had been removed and thrown into the sea, ground glass had been placed in the oil cups, gunpowder had been placed in the coal—evidently in the hope of causing explosions when the vessels were at sea—and other damage of a more subtle nature had been done, it evidently being the expectation that the ships would break down when on the ocean and beyond the possibility of repair. Although our navy yards had no copies of the plans of these vessels or their machinery—the Germans having destroyed them all—and although the missing parts were of peculiarly German design, they succeeded, in an incredibly short time, in making them even better and speedier vessels than they had ever been before.