Mr. Wilson's War
Page 33
Meanwhile at fortyseven Sims married a young lady whom he’d met years before on his diplomatic tour of duty in Europe, when her father was minister to St. Petersburg, and followed his friend T.R.’s example by rapidly producing a large family: three pretty little girls and two handsome boys. Whenever he wasn’t at sea the commander devoted himself to their upbringing.
One of T.R.’s last acts, before so reluctantly handing the presidency over to William Howard Taft, was to see that Sims was given command of a battleship. A skillful and popular commander, his ship became known as the “cheer-up ship.”
In the course of his duty on the Minnesota the Atlantic fleet made a fraternal visit to England. Officers and enlistedmen were entertained at Guildhall by the Lord Mayor of London. The officers sat on a dais and drank champagne while the men drank beer at deal tables in the body of the hall.
The luncheon culminated in toasts and speeches extolling the kinship between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. Full of the spirit of the occasion, Commander Sims sent his cap sailing into the middle of his crew and called for a cheer that would raise the roof off old Guildhall. Then, in his speech of thanks to the Lord Mayor and City of London for the entertainment, he declared that if ever the integrity of the British Empire should be seriously threatened, the English could count on the assistance of every man, every ship, every dollar and every drop of blood of their kinsmen aross the sea.
Commander Sims’ speech, received in England as no more than was due, raised a storm in the American press. The German language papers roared. President Taft was besieged with demands that Sims should be courtmartialed. Enemies in the Navy Department were out for his hide. The President agreed with his Secretary of the Navy that Sims was too valuable an officer to cashier. He let him off with a public reprimand.
When his tour of duty on the battleship came to an end Commander Sims was relegated to the academic calm of the Naval War College at Newport.
Newport gave him leisure to study and think on naval tactics. He became passionate for destroyers. Leaving Newport with the rank of captain he was put in charge of the Atlantic destroyer flotilla. With the outbreak of war in Europe the words of his Guildhall speech were beginning to seem more and more prophetic. Sims threw himself into the practical management of destroyers under combat conditions at sea. As usual he was idolized by his command. The flotilla became “Sims’ Flotilla.”
In January 1917 Sims went back to the War College as president with the rank of rear admiral. In spite of Josephus Daniels’ conviction that he was too pro-British, when war became imminent, the controversial Admiral Sims was the obvious man to represent the United States with the Board of the Admiralty in London. His orders were merely to find out what was going on and to report.
An American on the Board of the Admiralty
Sims arrived in England three days after Congress declared war. He had his first taste of the noisy side of the business when the New York ran into a floating mine in the Mersey and was considerably damaged.
The passengers were taken off by an excursionboat full of drunken vacationers from the Isle of Man. The Britishers weren’t letting the war interfere with the Easter Bank Holiday.
A flag officer met Sims at the dock and hurried him to London by special train. He was immediately taken to the Admiralty to see his old friend John Jellicoe, now a full admiral and, as first Sea Lord on the Board of the Admiralty, in direct charge of naval operations. With hardly a word Jellicoe handed him a paper with the actual figures of the sinkings by submarine. Sims, who’d been reading the newspapers, was, as he put it, “fairly astounded.”
“It looks,” he said, “as if the Germans were winning the war.”
“They will win, unless we can stop those losses,” said Jellicoe.
Sims spent the next few days rooting the facts out from reluctant officials. At the beginning of the war the Allies could dispose of twentyone million tons of shipping, six million tons more than was considered absolutely essential for the supply of the British Isles and the armies in the field. Up to February of 1917 shipbuilding had been not quite keeping up with losses. Now in February and March onethird of the margin of safety had been wiped out. If sinkings kept up at the present rate, by October there would be less tonnage available than was necessary to carry on the war.
It was generally agreed that the best weapon against the submarine was the fast torpedoboat destroyer. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack by destroyers on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur the innovators in the Royal and the United States navies had been begging for more destroyers.
Against submarines, destroyers were almost the perfect weapon. Their speed and shallow draft made them almost immune to torpedoes. The destroyers’ torpedoes could be more quickly aimed and had longer range than those on the submarines. If the submarine was caught on the surface the destroyer could ram it with its sharp heavily reinforced bow. Even the oldest types had great firepower.
The development by the Royal Navy of effective depth charges greatly added to the destroyers’ efficiency against submarines. These ashcans, as they were called, were mines set to be exploded by the pressure of the water at any desired depth. They could be dropped over the destroyer’s stern. Within a radius of a hundred feet they were usually fatal, but even when they exploded at much greater distance they could damage fragile machinery or at least give the submarine crew a shaking up they never forgot.
When Sims asked the Britishers why more destroyers couldn’t be detailed to protect merchant shipping they explained patiently that there just weren’t enough destroyers. Their antisubmarine patrol was pieced out with converted yachts, trawlers, drifters, tugs, anything that could keep afloat long enough to drop an ashcan when a U-boat was sighted or suspected.
The Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow had first priority for destroyer protection. Then came hospital ships. Sims learned of the ingenious devilment that lay behind the German announcement that they would sink hospital ships. The Germans knew that the British would not face abandoning sick and wounded men to drown. Destroyers needed to protect valuable cargoes had to be detailed to the hospital ships. The third priority went to the Channel crossings where by continuous patrol an immune zone had been created where no submarine dared venture. Fourth was the lifeline to India through the Mediterranean.
Well, the American asked, if convoys worked in the Channel, why wouldn’t they work in the Irish Sea, and on the Atlantic approaches? Just weren’t enough destroyers, the Britishers repeated. In spite of a speededup building program there were only ten or fifteen destroyers left to protect the merchantmen that brought in the food, the petroleum products, the rubber and the munitions on which Great Britain’s survival depended.
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.
The Convoy System
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 Command under Admiral Sims
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.
Old Frozen Face
The first thing the Americans discovered was that instead of being under Sims’ direct command they were under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly and, in fact, part of the Royal Navy.
Admiral Bayly had the reputation of knowing his destroyers, but was a martinet of the old school. He was reputed to hate Yankees, particularly. He’d once been Naval Attaché in Washington and had left there, virtually by request, imbued with a profound distaste for everything American. Since the war began he had been further embittered by being removed from command of the first battle squadron of the Grand Fleet, where he’d flown his flag on the superdreadnaught Marlborough. Detailed to the Channel fleet he had the humiliation of losing the Formidable by torpedo to a submarine, while engaged in routine target practice off the Devon coast, and had been relegated to the antisubmarine patrol at Queenstown.
Winning Admiral Bayly’s heart for the American destroyer crews was as important a victory for Sims as was his putting over of the convoy system.
Their relationship couldn’t have started out worse. Bayly was ordered to London, where he was at odds with most of his superiors, to meet Sims when Sims first arrived; and so Sims put it, the old tartar “was as rude to me as one man can be to another.”
Sims swallowed his pride and went to Queenstown full of honeyed words to prepare for the American destroyers which were already on their way. Sims admired Bayly for his seamanlike qualities: he told all and sundry that personal feelings must be subordinate to the needs of the service.
Bayly, a childless old bear, had one soft spot in his heart, and that was for the spinster niece whose loving care offered him what few amenities his life contained. Sims, who had as much of the blarney as any Irishman, managed from the first to get into the good graces of Miss Violet Voysey and of her little spaniel Patrick. Soon Miss Voysey was declaring that she loved Americans, and particularly her American admiral. The two of them began to club together to rescue Uncle Lewis from the results of his own churlishness.
Back in London Sims put it up to the Admiralty board that Bayly was one of the ablest men in their navy as well as one of the most snappish. At that he had just gripes. He hadn’t had a leave since he’d undertaken the particularly worrisome and exacting command of the antisubmarine patrol, and he was treated as a subordinate by the naval authorities in London.
The First Lord, Sir Edward Carson, eventually agreed. Bayly got his independent command and immediate leave. Bayly made the retort courteous by asking Sims to take over his command when he went off for his short rest late in June. Sims flew his flag from the destroyer tender Melville and, for five days, personally directed the patrol work, in which convoy protection was little by little taking the place of the old hit or miss system.
When Sims went back to the Admiralty, where he had virtually become an additional Sea Lord, he left his own right hand man Captain Pringle as Admiral Bayly’s Chief of Staff. Captain Pringle knew as much about destroyers as Sims did and he was even more adept at fitting square pegs into round holes. Captain Pringle, Admiral Sims and Miss Voysey became a sort of triumvirate to keep old Bayly’s rude remarks from ruffling the feelings of the men under his command; and also to keep from Bayly’s ears the fact that the Americans called him “old Frozen Face.”