What America did

Our entrance into the war found the Navy ready for immediate service. The almost universal popular sentiment against an army of large size that had been growing in strength for a generation or more had not been manifest against the support of a navy comparable with the navies of other nations. Recognition of the necessity of a better defense for the long coast line of the United States had led Congress in 1916 to sanction the strongly urged plans of the Secretary of the Navy and authorize one of the largest ship-building programs ever undertaken by any nation. This Act of Congress with the ample appropriation that accompanied it laid the basis for a program of naval preparedness and enabled the Department of the Navy to make itself ready to meet the state of war which was threatened by unfolding events. For it not only authorized the building of 156 ships, including ten super-dreadnaughts and six battle cruisers, but by authorizing the enlargement of the Navy personnel and the creation of a big Naval Reserve and a Flying Corps and providing machinery for the expanding of the service as desired it made possible the putting of the Navy upon a tentative war basis during the months immediately preceding our declaration of war. By the first of April, 1917, its plans had been drafted and its preparations made and it was ready for action. Indeed, its work had already begun, for in the previous month it had provided guns and gun crews for the arming of American merchantmen under the order of President Wilson, made in response to Germany’s notice of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Upon the declaration of war on April 6th, the fleet was at once mobilized and a flotilla of destroyers was equipped for foreign service and sent overseas, where the first contingent arrived at a British port on May 4th, 1917. The second reached Queenstown on May 13th, and before the end of the month both were engaged in the work of hunting submarines in coöperation with the British and French navies. Early in June units of the naval aeronautical corps landed upon French shores and inside another month the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Forces, convoyed by the Navy, arrived in France. Battleships and cruisers quickly followed the destroyers across the ocean and took their places with the British Grand Fleet, on watch for the appearance of the German navy from behind its defenses at Heligoland.

While it was thus quickly making itself felt in the prosecution of the war, the Navy Department at once entered upon a great program of development, expansion and training. It had in commission when war was declared 197 vessels. When the armistice was signed there were 2,000 ships in its service. In the same time its personnel had expanded from 65,777 to a total of 497,000. In addition to the cruisers and battleships on the ways, 800 smaller craft were built or put under construction during our nineteen months of war. Formerly the building of a destroyer required about two years. But the great importance of that type of vessel and the urgent need for more of them speeded production to the fastest possible pace and at the end of the war destroyers were being built in eight months and in some cases in even less time. In one instance a destroyer, the Ward, at the Mare Island Navy Yard, was launched in seventeen and one-half days from the laying of its keel and within seventy days was in commission. The end of the war found the American Navy with more destroyers in service or under construction than the navies of any two nations had possessed before the outbreak of the war in 1914. In the first nine months of 1918 there were launched 83 destroyers, as against 62 during the entire nine preceding years.

The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of effort upon types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore construction of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and every vessel that could be effectively used was put into that service. Submarine chasers to the number of 355 were built for our own use together with fifty for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was worked out in the Navy Department and preparations were made to produce it in quantity. The manufacturing plant had to be built from the foundation. Work upon the plant was begun in February, 1918, and the first boat was launched the following July. Its tests were successful and two had been put in commission when the armistice was signed while work was being speeded upon over a hundred more, of which part were for one of our co-belligerents. After the destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by naval officers of our own and other nations the best weapon for the extermination of the submarine.

Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many new small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats needed for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers and other auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines built by the navy were completed and put into service during the war.

Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships, two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for the training of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which turned out its first flying machine seven months after work started upon the factory. A little later it was producing a machine a day. Naval aviation schools were established and production was speeded in private plants of sea planes, flying boats and navy dirigibles and balloons.

The navy’s bureau of construction and repair undertook the work of making seaworthy again the hundred and more German ships in our harbors when war was declared which had been seriously injured by their crews, under orders from the German government. So much damage had been done, especially to the cylinders, that the enemy had thought, according to memoranda left behind, it probably could not be repaired at all and certainly not within a year and a half. Officers of the navy, in the face of opposition by engine builders and marine insurance companies, determined to make the repairs by means of electric welding, the use of which on such an extensive scale was unprecedented. The experiment was successful and these great ships were in service within six months, the navy’s engineering feat having thus saved a year of time and provided means for the transportation of half a million troops to France.

The naval gun factory at Washington was enlarged to double its output. The navy powder factory and the Newport torpedo station had their capacity greatly increased and a large new mine-loading plant was constructed. A big projectile factory was begun in the summer of 1917, and the buildings were finished, the machinery installed and the plant in operation in less than a year.

Within a year and a half the work of the ordnance bureau of the navy increased by 2,000 per cent, its expansion including the gun, powder and projectile factories mentioned above. Plants for various purposes taken over by the bureau from private industry increased their output at once by large percentages, in one case, in which the product was steel forgings, 300 per cent. The depth bomb proved one of the most efficient means of fighting the submarine. It contains an explosive charge fitted with a mechanism which causes explosion at a predetermined depth under the water. An American type was developed and within a few weeks was being manufactured in large quantities, while manufacture of the British type was continued for their navy. A new gun, called the “Y” gun, was devised and built especially for firing depth charges. It made possible the throwing of these bombs on all sides of the attacking vessel, thus laying down a barrage around it. A star shell was developed which, fired in the vicinity of an enemy fleet, made its ships visible, our own remaining in darkness. Anti-submarine activities made necessary an enormous increase in the manufacture of torpedoes and torpedo tubes, which grew by several hundred per cent and far surpassed what had been thought the possibility of production.

The ordnance bureau of the navy developed a new type of mobile mount for heavy guns which, by the use of caterpillar belts, made them as mobile as field artillery although the weight and muzzle velocity of the huge projectile rendered impossible the use of a wheeled gun carriage. The entire gun and mount, weighing 38 tons, can be readily transported by this means over any kind of ground. Immense naval guns, originally intended for use on battle cruisers, were sent to France with railway mounts especially built for them by the navy. Their important and successful operations overseas are described in the chapter on “The Navy on Land.”

Smoke producing apparatus, to enable a ship to conceal herself in a cloud of smoke, was evolved of several kinds, for use by different types of vessels. A shell that would not ricochet on striking the water, when fired at a submarine, and so glance harmlessly away in another direction, was an immediate necessity, brought about by the conditions of sea warfare. After many experiments a shell was devised that on striking would cleave the water, to the menace of the submarine’s hull, and, equipped with a depth charge, was soon in quantity production. A heavy aeroplane bomb which united the qualities of a bomb with those of a depth charge and did not explode on striking the water was another development of the navy ordnance bureau, which also devised a nonrecoil aircraft gun which, after much experiment, was installed on our seaplanes and put into quantity production. Its success meant the passing of an important milestone in aircraft armament. An American device for detecting the sounds made by a submarine gave highly important aid to that phase of the war. The Navy Department equipped our own submarines, destroyers and chasers with them and furnished them in large numbers to the British navy.

Not only was there need for an immense production of mines and depth charges for ordinary uses, but the decision by the British to carry out the American Navy Department’s plans for a mine barrage across the North Sea, whose story is told in more detail in the chapter on “Working with the Allied Navies,” made necessary the production in enormous quantities of a new type of mine. Combination of the best types already in use and experiment with new features resulted in a satisfactory product of which large quantities were made and shipped abroad. All this need for high explosives caused a critical shortage and the supply of TNT, the standard charge for mines, aerial bombs and depth charges, was almost exhausted, because of the scarcity of toluol, its principal ingredient. In this menacing situation the navy’s bureau of ordnance began making exhaustive experiments which finally proved that xylol, the near chemical relative of toluol, could be used in its place. The resulting high explosive, to which was given the name TNX, proved to be the equal in every way of TNT and the building was ordered of a plant for the distillation of xylol which would make possible the production for the following year of 30,000,000 pounds of high explosives.

Armament had to be furnished for merchant ships, 2,500 of them, equipment for destroyers and submarine chasers, and all the multitude of requirements for ships on distant service and for the repair ships that accompanied them. All this increase in ships and plants and personnel called for an enormous increase in the amount of materials and stores it was necessary to provide for them. The greatest total of supplies bought for the Navy in any one pre-war year amounted to $27,000,000. But the greatest total for a single day during the war amounted to $30,000,000.

Among the giant tasks which the Navy undertook during the war was the building of an enormous structure in Washington for the housing of the Navy Department, of several immense storehouses, of which one in Brooklyn is said to be one of the largest storehouses in the world, the installation at Annapolis of the greatest high-power radio station yet erected, and the completion of the powerful radio plant at Pearl Harbor.

The Medical Department of the Navy increased under war conditions from 327 doctors to 3,074, dentists from 30 to 485, women nurses from 160 to 1,400, and Hospital Corps members from 1,585 to 14,718. Three hospital ships were added to its equipment, it had numerous hospitals and dispensaries scattered through Great Britain and France and its hospital service at home was enlarged from 3,000 to 17,000 beds.

The inventive ingenuity of the American people was apparently much attracted towards the problems of sea warfare in this conflict, for they began to send ideas, suggestions and devices to the Navy Department even before the United States became a belligerent. After that date the Consulting Board of the Navy, which has charge of such matters, was almost snowed under by these suggestions. During our participation in the war the Board examined and acted upon 110,000 letters, of which many included detailed plans or were accompanied by models of the contrivances which their writers hoped to have adopted. Most of them were either worthless or already known, but a comparatively small number were found valuable.

At the beginning of our war activities our naval roster listed over 65,000 officers and men, with 14,000 more in the Marine Corps. A year and a half later the Marines numbered 70,000 and in the Navy there were a little more than 497,000 men and women, for a goodly number of patriotic women had enlisted in order to undertake the duties of yeomen and so release able bodied men for active service. The total permanent personnel of the Navy, officers and men, had grown to 212,000. This rapid expansion had made necessary intensive training for both men and officers that was carried on with never ceasing activity at training stations on shore and on ships at sea in both home and foreign waters. In small-arms training alone a force of 5,000 expert instructors was built up who trained an average of 30,000 men per month.

How all this immense expansion in ships, men, stores, facilities and production measures against the previous history of the Navy appears in this fact: In the almost century and quarter since the Navy was established in 1794 until and including 1916 its expenditures totaled, in round numbers, $3,367,000,000, an amount which exceeded its expenditures in the next two years alone by only $34,000,000.