Destroyers were constantly in need of repair. Steaming at twentyfive knots through heavy seas they took a terrible pounding. The crews had to have rest. At times there were only as few as four at sea to patrol the whole region. Too bad, Sims was told, but convoys were impracticable.
Sims was a stubborn fellow. His reasoning was that the Grand Fleet was continually protected by destroyers, wasn’t that a convoy? Although at first sight it might seem that a mass of ships steaming slowly together would prove an easier target for a submarine than ships proceeding singly at top speed, in practice the opposite had turned out to be true.
Sims began to point out that when ships steamed in convoy the submarine commander had to come where the patrol ships were. Otherwise, no matter how carefully you divided the sea into squares, he could always be where the patrol ships weren’t.
The area to be patrolled amounted to something like twentyfive thousand square miles. It would take a destroyer to a square mile to do a proper patrol job. Where would they get twentyfive thousand destroyers?
“Is there no solution to the problem?” Sims asked Jellicoe.
“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe answered without the slightest expression on his smooth round face.
When Sims began to ask questions among the lesser ranks in the Admiralty offices at Whitehall he found solutions aplenty. There was a Commander Reginald Henderson who had directed the shuttle service of colliers carrying English coal to France. His day to day experience had proved to him that convoys worked. The younger officers backed him up.
The final argument of the admirals, who’d be damned if they’d convoy merchantmen, was that the merchant skippers wouldn’t stand for it. These crude old salts would never be able to steam all night in formation without lights, just hadn’t had the training for that sort of service. What with the bad coal they were getting and the fact that the Royal Navy had taken all their best officers and engineers, they would never be able to keep their engines throttled down to a set speed. Ships that made twelve knots would be endangered by having to wait for ships that only made six or eight. There would be collisions in the dark. A submarine coming up in the middle of a great huddle of freighters could sink as many as she pleased.
Sims was a crusader. He traded on the respect the British admirals had for him as one of their own kind, a dreadnaught man before dreadnaughts and a fire control man before fire control. Though he affected the blunt old seadog who said the first thing that came into his head, when need be he could be pretty tactful about what he blurted out. Admiral Beatty was a convoy man but it was mostly Sims’ influence that made it possible for the Sea Lords to execute a dignified retreat.
He found himself teaming up with Lloyd George who had been talking convoys for some time. Forever optimistic, the Prime Minister was for trying everything. He already suspected he might have guessed wrong about Nivelle’s offensive, although the disastrous consequences of that wrong guess were not yet apparent. He was all for giving convoys a try. “We shall get the best of the submarine, never fear,” he told Sims, with a cheerful wave of the hand that the American found bracing amid the prevailing gloom.
At Lloyd George’s insistence Henderson was allowed to prepare a memorandum. On April 30 the Prime Minister, threatening to overrule them in their own sanctuary, called on the Sea Lords at the Admiralty. That night, meeting Sims at dinner at the Waldorf Astors’, the Prime Minister gave him the news that the Sea Lords had consented, oh so reluctantly, to let a single convoy be tried out. “You are responsible for this,” he told Sims.
While he was crusading for convoys in the handsome old salons of the Admiralty, where he was shown the long table where Nelson had sat and the windvane over the fireplace he’d kept his single eye on, Sims was crowding the Atlantic cable with pleas for destroyers from America, destroyers right away. Page, happy at last to find a man who saw the peril as he saw it, backed him up valiantly.
On May 4 the first division of six destroyers from Sims’ old flotilla steamed into Queenstown. The Germans, who seem to have known the date of their arrival before Sims did, were ready for them with a string of mines across the harbor entrance, but the sweepers managed to clear a channel.
The first convoy from Gibraltar arrived in British ports May 20 without the loss of a ship. The next day the Admiralty appointed a board to set up a convoy system. Overnight practical shipping men were converted to convoys. The merchant skippers picked up the knack of steaming a zigzag course in convoy with very little trouble. Proceeding at night without lights lost its terrors. Shipping losses for the month of May dropped to roughly six hundred thousand tons. In June, they rose again, but after that the decrease was continual.
The spring of 1917 was unusually cold and stormy. May was a bad month on the Atlantic. The men on the U. S. destroyers, based on the York River in Virginia and on Guantanamo Bay, were in a storm of excitement. Crews had been weakened during the preceding months by the detaching of gunners for service on merchantships. New men fresh from the farm kept turning up who had to be trained.
In every navy yard destroyers were being overhauled for distant duty. Orders would come giving some ship four days to put to sea. Navy yard workers, accustomed to taking their time, were flustered by the sudden wartime pressure. Accidents occurred. In Philadelphia the hasty scaffolding shoring up two destroyers in drydock collapsed and the destroyers fell in on each other and crushed like a bug a little tender being repaired between them. Somehow, higglety pigglety, destroyer after destroyer was readied for seaservice. Under sealed orders they steamed out of the great estuaries of the Atlantic coast. Usually the commander was instructed to open his orders at some point off Cape Cod.
Proceed to Halifax for instructions from the British Admiralty as to Atlantic crossing to Queenstown Ireland to join the command under Admiral Sims.
As Admiral Sims’ name went through the narrow ship lurching over the long rollers, in the cramped wardroom and the crew’s skimpy quarters, spirits rose. Admiral Sims was considered a great man to serve under.
When the destroyer, cruising at fifteen knots to ease the strain of the huge Atlantic seas, reached the danger zone pulses quickened. The newly rigged crow’s nest and observation points were manned. Lookouts were told to keep their eyes peeled.
Like as not it would be rainy and there would be fogbanks off the land. These were crowded waters. Smoke smudges were always on the horizon. A freighter would go lumbering through the surging seas or a twostack liner would be seen streaking for safety under full steam. Every oddlooking foreign sailing ship might be a submarine in disguise.
Wreckage aplenty. To heated imaginings every floating bottle or drifting spar would seem a periscope, a hatchcover would be a conning tower. A porpoise breaking the surface of a wave might set off the alarm for battle stations. Many a destroyer wasted ammunition on a whale.
On the bridge the officers would be edgy. As dusk dimmed the great expanses of tossing waves under the cold lash of rainsqualls men would doubt their own judgement. Were they reading right the position of the minefields on the chart they’d been furnished in Halifax? The coast was shadowy. Through a rent in the mist the far hills broke away. Was that the harbor entrance? A lighthouse with no light in it.
The commander would ring the engine room for full speed. Forts and patrol boats had a way of firing on ships attempting to enter harbors after sunset. At last they were following a patrol boat that showed a tiny light astern to an indicated anchorage. The anchors plunked. As the engines quieted the deck stopped shaking. It was silent in the smooth bay. All around them through the gloaming they could see the dim green hills of Ireland.