“America … is the prize amateur nation of the world. Germany is the prize professional nation. Now when it comes to doing new things and doing them well, I will back the amateur against the professional every time, because the professional does it out of the book and the amateur does it with his eyes open upon a new world and a new set of circumstances … Do not stop to think about what is prudent for a moment. Do the thing that is audacious … because that is exactly the thing the other side does not understand … So gentlemen, besides coming down here to give you my personal greeting and to say how absolutely I rely on you and believe in you, I have come down to say also that I depend upon you, depend on you for brains as well as training and courage and discipline.”
No such novelties in naval warfare as the President was hoping for appeared; but, as the summer advanced, the destroyers proved themselves.
Destroyer service in the Irish Sea and the adjacent Atlantic was a punishing business. Fine weather was rare. Often the wind blew half a gale lashing up steep and spiteful seas. The rain never seemed to stop. The narrow little ships driven at such speed by their powerful engines pitched and lurched continually. Half the time decks were awash. Salt water sloshed down companionways and seeped into bedding. To eat men had to prop themselves in corners. A coffee mug set for a moment on a table would be tossed in the air. Many a night the ship plunged and shook so that there was no sleeping. It was all a man could do by bracing himself carefully to stay in his bunk.
Repairs were endless. Steering engines jammed. Generators died. Guns and torpedo tubes needed continual attention. Every operation was made twice as difficult by the vibration of the hull slamming through the great weight of the seas.
Action when it came was short. Something that might be a periscope, seen through the heavy rain, would broach ahead. Battle stations would sound and the destroyer would bound at full speed over the waves. Over would go the ashcans at the place where the periscope was figured to have been. While the ship cruised in a circle every eye would search the waves for an oil slick or bits of wooden deck that might indicate a hit.
“Sept 7 Real excitement at 5:30 PM” a young lieutenant on the U.S.S. Cummings entered in his diary. “The alarm went off and we headed for a perfect periscope and conning tower awash and apparently under way at 6000 yards on the starboard bow. We opened fire with #1 gun and fired about 14 shots making 2 hits. #2 gun fired once and #4 which is on the fantail fired once and made one hit. We were only 500 yards away when we discovered it was a capsized wreck with the spar sticking up through the bottom. Everybody terribly disappointed.”
Convoy service would have been a hopeless game of blind man’s buff if the wireless room hadn’t furnished the ships with ears. There skinny young men in earphones, with cigarettestained fingers and a look of strain on their faces, spelled out the dots and dashes of the Morse code. Their scribbled flimsy kept the officers on the bridge informed of every event over a great radius of stormy seas. Through the newly invented radio direction finder, Sparks could spot, with some accuracy, the part of the ocean his messages came from. An SOS, the last stutter from the wireless of a sinking merchantman; reports of hairbreadth escapes or frustrated engagements were retailed from wireless room to wireless room. The news seeped down through the ships until the lowliest oiler in the engine room knew the location of the latest sighting of a periscope. To many a destroyer crew Sparks was the most important man on board.
Night and day the warzone was full of stuttering communications. German submarines particularly kept up an incessant chatter back and forth from ship to ship and with the Admiralty back home. Perhaps it relieved the desperate solitude of their crews, but the urge to communicate proved many a submarine’s undoing.
Allied wireless operators got to know the commanders, Old Hans or Fritz or Franz von this and that, as well as if they’d met them in a pub. Some were decent fellows who gave the crews of sunken ships a break by reporting their position even at risk to themselves. Others were murderous swine who shelled open boats.
At Whitehall a special intelligence room was devoted to sorting out the reports that came in night and day, in code and out of code, from escort ships and convoys. British Naval Intelligence kept track of the departure of submarines from Bruges, and out between the long jetties at Ostend and Zeebrugge. The movement of U-boats became predictable. Since their speed was known, once a submarine was approximately located even an unprotected convoy could be detoured out of its way.
The direction of the whole system was centered in what became known as the Convoy Room at the Admiralty in London. The position of assembling merchantships was plotted on a huge chart on the wall where each convoy was represented by a wooden cutout of a ship. Timetables like railway timetables were instituted, and trunk lines through which the converging ranks of ships were routed for protection as they approached the danger zone. Convoys left New York every eight days, Hampton Roads every sixteen days. Others were dispatched from Gibraltar or Dakar or Halifax or Sydney, Nova Scotia. Ocean traffic was handled the way freight trains were handled in a railroad system. Little circles showed the position of every submarine known to be at sea.
Each convoy sailed under a convoy commander who received code messages giving his ships their instructions. At his command they began their zigzag course: fifteen minutes thirty degrees to port, fifteen minutes thirty degrees to starboard, fifteen minutes straight ahead on the indicated course. He alone knew the latitude and longitude of the spot in the ocean where their escorts would meet them. The eastbound convoys were timed to meet the escorting ships that had just brought out the westbound ships.
Under varying conditions of wind and sea on the stormy Atlantic there was no avoiding occasional failures in the timetable. The dangerous moments came when convoys had to cruise around waiting for their destroyers. Then sinkings were inevitable; but the U-boats had to fight for every ship they got, and rarely escaped without a chase from an escort ship dropping ashcans, now made more effective by the American invention of the Y-gun, which made it possible to shoot them overboard in pairs at either side of the destroyer’s wake.
By August 1, ten thousand ships had been convoyed in and out of the British Isles with a loss of only one percent. The odds had changed. Thirtysix extra American destroyers were enough to tip the scales. U-boat crews began to lose their verve. The blockade of Germany continued. The blockade of Britain had failed.
Late in the fall of 1917, even after Jellicoe had retired, a wornout and disappointed man; long after subordinates, assisted by American officers, and by practical steamboat men from the Ministry of Shipping, had proved the success of the convoy system, the Sea Lords, sitting at the long table in the Admiralty boardroom where Nelson had sat, would occasionally discuss the question of whether convoys were really a proper protection for merchantmen against submarines.
Chapter 14
INNOCENTS ABROAD
AT the beginning of May 1917 Major General John J. Pershing was still in command at Fort Sam Houston, grimly busy with the unrewarding daily chore of keeping the peace along the Mexican border. Pershing at this stage of his career was not a happy man. Intimates told of his staring for minutes on end every morning, with fixed expressionless face, at a photograph of his dead wife and the little girls. Though a stiff somewhat unapproachable officer, and in his late fifties, he still betrayed occasionally the frustrated yearning for female companionship his fellows had noticed when he was a West Point cadet.