The first onslaught of the U-boats was appalling. A fourth of the merchantmen leaving British ports that April never returned. In thirty days the Allies lost almost nine hundred thousand tons of cargo space.
Optimistic British propaganda, filling the American newspapers with accounts of imaginary victories, so overreached its aims that nobody in authority in Washington knew the extent of the peril. President Wilson had a general inkling of the situation, but from another angle.
Like so many Americans, his knowledge of naval warfare stemmed from boyish enthusiasm for American successes in the War of 1812. He saw American merchantships fighting their way across the Atlantic in the name of the freedom of the seas. He was much preoccupied with the arming of merchantmen. Obviously the first prerequisite for keeping the sealanes open was close cooperation with the British Admiralty.
From what reports he could get the British Admiralty seemed opposed to the idea of conveying merchantships. Ambassador Page, who had cried wolf so long that there was a tendency at the State Department to write off his messages as wartime hysterics, sent a particularly urgent cable on the shipping situation. This time it was listened to.
“The main thing,” the President was writing Josephus Daniels as early as March 24, “is no doubt to get into immediate communication with the Admiralty.”
The wordy North Carolinian, whom some naval officers claimed was more interested in saving his sailors from the Demon Rum and improving their educational opportunities than he was in the problems of combat, reluctantly picked the head of the Naval War College at Newport, recently appointed Rear Admiral Sims, as the man most likely to get along with the Britishers. According to some accounts it was the aristocratic young New York politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving in the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, which had furnished his famous cousin Theodore a springboard into national politics, who urged Sims’ appointment.
Sims had the reputation of being a desperate anglophile. He was called to Washington, warned against letting the British pull the wool over his eyes, and ordered to proceed to London immediately. Since war had not yet been declared, the admiral must travel incognito. He was not even to take his uniform.
On March 31, entered in the passengerlist under the name of Mr. V. J. Richardson, with his aide disguised under another alias, Admiral Sims sailed for Liverpool on the U.S.S. New York of the American Line. The captain and crew were immediately aware that there was something special about this loquacious civilian. The last man in the world for a secret mission, Sims had the reputation of being the most indiscreet officer in the American service. He had a smiling manner that kept belying the dignity of his neatly trimmed gray beard, of the type affected by flag officers in the Royal Navy, and the impressiveness of his massive physique. Now a handsome genial outgoing man of fiftynine, he had managed throughout a stormy career to get away with saying what he thought and more than he thought, on every topic under the sun.
Like General Pershing, Admiral Sims was a discovery of Theodore Roosevelt’s.
William Sowden Sims was the son of a Canadian engineer who moved to Pennsylvania as superintendent of a coal and iron company, and became a United States citizen. Young Sims grew up a goodlooking high-spirited youth, with more taste for practical jokes than for organized study. When the local congressman, in some way beholden to his father, offered him an appointment to Annapolis, he barely scraped his way in after a couple of tries at the examinations.
In 1876 the navy was still in the period of transition from sail to steam and from wooden ships to ironclads. Only an intermittent student, Willy Sims had a sharply inquiring mind. Seaduty gave him time to read. As a subaltern he plunged into Buckle and Darwin and Huxley.
He became an enthusiastic student of Henry George. For publicspirited Americans it was an age of reform. Everybody must pitch in to make a better world. The reforming zeal that carried T.R. into state and national politics carried Sims into the study of naval organization and the new techniques of warfare on the seas.
His first cruise as a cadet was on the old frigate Constellation. He served on the Swatara, described as a thirdrate shiprigged sloop of war, when she still had muzzleloading smoothbore guns. His first ironclad was the four thousand ton Philadelphia of the “Great White Fleet.” In the late eighties, as a lieutenant junior grade, he took a year’s leave to board in a Paris pension and study French. He read French books and haunted the theatre and took fencing lessons. He returned to seaduty with a reputation for dandyism and breadth of culture.
He first attracted notice at the Navy Department by the excellence of his reports while on the China station during the Chinese-Japanese War in 1895.
When the Intelligence Department sent him to the Paris Embassy as naval attaché, he spent two years investigating every navy yard in Europe. Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary in those days. The department sent Lieutenant Sims a formal appreciation of his report. At the bottom of it was scrawled “Not perfunctory. I wish to add my personal appreciation of it. T.R.”
Sims went back to seaduty as a full lieutenant on the China station convinced that the American Navy had much to learn about the construction of ironclad fighting ships and was dangerously backward in gunnery. In Hong Kong he struck up a friendship with a Britisher who was applying Sims’ sort of inquiring mind and a talent for invention to the improvement of marksmanship in the Royal Navy.
In a series of reports on the British advance in the art of gunnery, Sims tried to puncture the complacency of the bureaus at the Navy Department The reformer was on the rampage. When his reports brought no action he risked his career by writing directly to Theodore Roosevelt, whom Czolgosz’s bullets had recently made President.
T.R. was not a man to worry about channels. Instead of turning young Sims in to his superiors, he wrote him a frank reply saying he doubted if things were as bad as Sims thought. When months passed and nothing further happened, Lieutenant Sims, who was passionately convinced of the rightness of his position, wrote the President again. All of a sudden ordered to report to Washington, he returned home full of forebodings of a courtmartial for insubordination. Instead he found himself appointed inspector of target practice for the Bureau of Navigation.
He hadn’t been too long in Washington before he was lunching at the White House. Sims was a great talker. He had a sailor’s fund of stories and anecdotes. There was an innocent candor about his conversation as there was about his personal life. An active and muscular man he delighted in feats of strength. He and T.R. were two of a kind. They hit it off immediately.
With the President’s backing Sims was able to impose his theories of central fire control on the Bureau of Navigation. After the Russo-Japanese War he plunged into a controversy with another friend of T.R., Captain Mahan, the historian of seapower. Mahan interpreted the accounts he’d read of the Battle of the Sea of Japan as proof of his contention that guns of mixed caliber gave a ship more firepower than the all big gun ordnance Sims and his friends in the Bureau of Navigation were advocating. The British put an end to that argument by producing the Dreadnaught. Sims reported to the Navy Department that the Dreadnaught made all the navies of the world obsolete from the day she was launched.