The convoy issue quickly created tension in the Navy Department over the extent of the American naval effort. President Wilson, Secretary Daniels, and Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson favored convoying, but they were not so sure as Sims that the U.S. Navy had no other mission than to fight U-boats. Examining the location of most of the sinkings (the eastern Atlantic) and the meager force of fifty-one modern American destroyers, Sims cabled, “We cannot send too soon or too many.” The Navy Department, examining its deployments to the Pacific and planning to hold a balanced fleet in American waters, decided to retain most of its vessels in the western Atlantic. Sims, however, kept up the barrage of cables until his escort force grew. From the first six destroyers that arrived in Ireland in May, Sims’s antisubmarine force climbed to thirty-six toward year’s end and to sixty-eight in 1918.
With Sims aligning himself with Admiralty positions, the Navy Department often found itself at odds with its impatient field commander. For example, Sims emphasized the protection of the merchantmen bringing critical supplies to England. The Navy Department, on the other hand, stressed using American vessels outside British control to protect the troop transports sailing directly to France. Largely under Navy escort and using high-speed passenger liners, the stream of transports reached France without an inbound loss and only three outbound losses while merchantmen continued to sink. Committing the major American effort to troopship protection increased the burden on the British economy, but the Wilson administration regarded American troops as more important than Kansas wheat, Texas oil, Argentine beef, and British sailors. It was the sort of choice imposed by a hard war. In the face of the submarine menace and the Allied need for troops, the United States had to find more ships. One of the nation’s major contributions was its creation of an emergency merchant fleet that doubled the prewar American tonnage. By 1918 the federal government had become the largest American shipper, accumulating a fleet of 1,700 vessels. The government merchant fleet of 3 million tons was but a fraction of the Allies’ some 15 million tons; the American fleet, however, was absolutely critical for carrying the AEF and its supplies to France. Under the direction of the War Shipping Board and Emergency Fleet Corporation, the government confiscated, bought, and chartered 700 vessels. It built 1,000 bulk cargo carriers in record time. This new fleet either plied the Atlantic or shuttled men and supplies across the English Channel—and lost 200,000 tons in the effort. The American emergency fleet, however, did not appear overnight, and shipping shortages and cargo priorities bedeviled all military planners well into 1918.
Swelling the convoys required a larger Navy escort fleet. It also required a dramatic change in Navy shipbuilding policies, and in July 1917 the Navy Department suspended its 1916 capital-ship program and turned its resources to building antisubmarine warfare (ASW) vessels. Characterized by aggressive contracting and technical virtuosity, the Navy’s management of its shipbuilding and procurement programs showed such spectacular successes that they proceeded with minimal WIB participation. They also captured raw materials and skilled manpower the War Department needed in 1917. In any event, the ASW vessels flowed down the ways and into the war. The destroyer force grew by fifty-one new, swift four-stackers of 1,200 tons. Construction time for destroyers fell from a year to an average of seventy days. Light cruisers and converted yachts also performed escort duties. The wonder of the wartime Navy, however, was the “splinter fleet” of 400 wooden subchasers. Modeled after New England fishing vessels and manned by wartime sailors without maritime experience, the subchasers probed the waters from the North Sea to the Adriatic with acoustic sounding gear, searching for U-boats lurking along the shipping lanes. By the Armistice the ASW fleet numbered nearly 800 vessels. Although Admiral Sims continued to believe that too few American warships arrived in European waters, the Navy Department’s material mobilization was one of the bright spots in the American war effort.
The ASW fleet demanded men as tough and durable as their vessels, since convoy duty meant long days at sea in weather and living conditions that tested the most phlegmatic sailors. The Navy found such men throughout American society. The junior officers came from abbreviated Academy classes, the merchant marine, and Navy officer candidate schools created on the Plattsburg model. From an officer corps of 4,400 the Navy expanded to 23,000, of whom only a few thousand held regular commissions. The enlisted force grew from 56,000 to almost 500,000. Since the Navy Department until August 1918 kept the administration convinced that it should be excluded from the draft, volunteers (true and draft-inspired) composed the bulk of the enlisted Navy. Given the popularity of the Navy, its reputation as a school for vocational training, and its demand for a wide variety of technical skills and the ratings such skills justified, the Navy probably recruited more than its share of highly motivated, trained young men.
Service aboard convoy escorts or in gun crews on merchantmen did not exhaust all the possibilities for service against the Germans. Some sailors found their way to Europe aboard the eight battleships added to the British Grand Fleet; other sailors served heavy railway guns in France. The antisubmarine war, however, dominated American naval deployments. Despite Sims’s protests over diverting resources from the convoy escort squadrons, President Wilson and his naval advisers sympathized with the Admiralty’s desire to strike at the U-boat bases. Wilson set the tone of the ASW offensive: “We are hunting hornets all over the farm and letting the nest alone.” Offensive operations centered on two alternatives: using mines to sink or discourage U-boats sailing to and from their bases and launching direct attacks upon the bases themselves, principally those in Belgium.
Navy Department planners chose to create a North Sea mine barrage between Scotland and Norway as the principal American ASW offensive. The whole scheme rested upon the inventors’ ability to produce a mine that did not depend upon direct contact with a U-boat to explode. To cover a field 250 miles long and 15 to 35 miles wide would require an estimated 400,000 contact mines, whose cost to manufacture and to plant exceeded the field’s likely value. It was also unlikely to be planted in time to affect the submarine war. In 1917, however, inventors created a mine that could be detonated by electrical impulses from a 70-foot antenna. Any U-boat that brushed these copper wands would find its voyage rudely interrupted. Although the unit cost of each electrical mine was much higher than that of a contact mine, the planners decided 100,000 of the new mines could cover the projected field, thus making the campaign (in theory) cost-effective. A joint American-British task force began operations in the summer of 1918 and had planted 70,000 mines by the time the war ended. The results were controversial. The mines sank four subs and may have sunk four others; they may have damaged others; and they may have complicated sub operations and demoralized German crews. But the submarine menace had largely passed as a decisive influence by the time the North Sea mine barrage became effective.
Lukewarm about the prospects of the North Sea mines, the Admiralty in 1917 mounted a series of blocking operations against the Belgium submarine bases, but these direct naval and amphibious attacks proved ineffective. Disappointed, American naval planners turned to the alternative of bombing the German bases. Naval aviation was already contributing to the antisubmarine campaign, largely by providing aircraft and dirigibles for scouting duties. When the United States entered the war, the Navy Department began an ambitious program to build 700 aircraft; six months later the planned force had expanded to 1,700 aircraft. The naval aviation force eventually reached more than 2,000 planes and 37,000 officers and men, 19,000 of whom reached Europe. The initial purpose of this force was convoy protection and related reconnaissance duties, but in November 1917 the Navy Department placed the bombing offensive first on its list of priorities. This decision eventually required the Navy to switch its planned force from seaplanes to land-based bombers, principally British-built DeHavilland biplanes. Slowed by earlier Navy programs and disputes with the Army over the allocating of aircraft, the Northern Bombing Group did n
ot begin operations until the autumn of 1918. Composed of a night wing of Navy pilots and a day wing of Marine aviators, the group eventually flew 5,691 sorties against Continental targets. The ASW flights, on the other hand, numbered 22,000. The Northern Bombing Group’s contribution came too late to influence either the naval or the land campaign. But the entire Navy aviation effort proved the usefulness of aircraft to all sorts of wartime operations. It also created a group of aviators ready to expand their programs within the peacetime Navy.
Relying primarily on escort convoys, the Navy accomplished its wartime mission, which was to ensure that the American army and supplies and raw materials from the Western Hemisphere reached the Allies. From beginning to end, however, the naval war was Great Britain’s to win or lose. Its surface control uncontested after 1916, the Royal Navy carried the burden of the antisubmarine war, and its escorts and subhunting patrols dispatched the vast majority of the 132 U-boats sunk in 1917–1918. American escorts and aircraft participated in only five kills, while Allied submarines alone sank eighteen of their German counterparts. On the other hand, the Navy’s principal mission was to escort Army troopships. Confounded by the aggressive escorts and the transports’ high speeds, U-boat commanders instead sought slower merchantmen, whose cargoes and numbers could be more easily replaced. Like the Army, the Navy required more than a year to hit full mobilization for a war for which it had not prepared. Despite conflicts between Sims and the Navy Department over the course and speed of the Navy’s war effort, the Navy joined the antisubmarine war as rapidly as it could. Looking past the war to the postwar naval balance in both the Pacific and Atlantic, the Navy Department had no intention of abandoning its goal of “a Navy second to none.” Meanwhile, the Navy fought well a naval campaign it had not foreseen and had not shaped.
Forming an Army in France
Assessing the erratic state of America’s mobilization in January 1918, an official of the Chamber of Commerce admitted to his colleagues that “we are at sea without a chart.” Matching the chill of winter, storms of public dissatisfaction swept over Washington, threatening to bury the Wilson administration in political disaster and Allied condemnation. The president fought back. During the same month that the evidence of failed mobilization mounted, Wilson announced his Fourteen Points. But the idealistic words did not sweep away the fact that the Allied cause was in crisis. From Europe came discouraging news: Allied intelligence sources confirmed that the German army had begun to shift more than forty divisions to its western army and to retrain and reequip it for major offensive operations. With an estimated 200 divisions available on the Western Front, the Germans for the first time since 1914 enjoyed a clear superiority in numbers. Moreover, they had perfected new tactics. By using short, intense bombardments, they could penetrate enemy lines with fast-moving infantry battlegroups, whose assignments were to avoid strong-points and disrupt enemy command and supply arrangements. These tactics produced unit disintegration. Tested in Russia and Italy, the new tactics promised battlefield victory. Dominated by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, the German high command decided a land campaign was the only hope for victory in 1918, the last year before the Americans would influence the war. Aware of the German plans, the Allies clamored for a greater American effort.
Embarrassed by the gap between its public promises and its actual performance in 1917 and threatened by a series of congressional investigations, the Wilson administration intensified its direction of the wartime mobilization. It also increased its efforts to crush dissent and encourage patriotic commitment by manipulating opinion. In 1917 the government thought largely in terms of preventing the Germans from collecting information on the war effort; the Espionage Act of 1917 and government control of overseas communications, as well as censorship actions at home, did not bear heavily on the public. The administration, however, also created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), directed by publicist George A. Creel. When it hit its stride in 1918, the Creel Committee bombarded the public with anti-German and pro-American propaganda notable for its multimedia virtuosity and its loose connection with truth. CPI writers, cartoonists, and moviemakers applied their considerable skills to such topics as Teutonic “barbarism,” American altruism, and governmental competence. In 1918 the positive appeal of CPI propaganda did not seem a sufficient counter to the antiwar efforts of native-born radicals, alien dissenters, some labor leaders, and draft evaders. No longer confident that the anti-German vigilantism of 1917 would sustain the war effort, Congress in May 1918 passed a Sedition Act characterized by a generous definition of seditious activity. Enforced enthusiastically by Justice Department agents, the Sedition Act gave the 1918 mobilization a vicious edge.
At the core of the flagging mobilization remained the administration’s reluctance to centralize economic regulation and force the War Department to reorganize itself and cooperate with the War Industries Board. Under congressional and public pressure, Wilson and Baker partially overcame their fears of industrial self-regulation, corporation-military collusion, and profiteering. The German offensive of March 1918 destroyed the procrastination. Faced with forming a larger AEF than anticipated in 1917, the government delegated enhanced executive authority to a new chairman of the WIB, Bernard Baruch; and a new chief of the War Department General Staff, General Peyton C. March.
Using new broad authority to reorganize the executive branch, granted by Congress in the Overman Act (May 1918), Baruch and March made the WIB and War Department more effective organizations. The key reorganization occurred in the War Department, where March merged the logistical planners of the General Staff with the managers of the Army bureaus. Headed by Major General George W. Goethals, the hard-driving engineer who had completed the Panama Canal, the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division of the General Staff brought much-needed efficiency and energy to the Army’s war effort. On its own part the WIB moved aggressively to determine supply priorities, fix prices, plan procurement and shipping schedules, mollify labor and farmers with improved wages and profits, and reassure industry that it would retain the major voice in economic regulation. Relieved of most fears of nationalization and antitrust prosecution, American corporations began to produce much-needed military supplies.
The revived mobilization brought more men into uniform and changed the Selective Service system. In early 1918 the organization of the Army remained marked by equipment shortages and personnel turnover. No sooner had the situation improved than the draft calls escalated. From a January low of 23,000 the draft calls climbed to 373,000 in May and averaged around 275,000 a month for the rest of the war. The War Department feared that it would run short of men, while the WIB became concerned that the draft would strip the economy of skilled labor, whose absence could only be partially offset by hiring women war workers. One solution was to assign registrants to five general categories of priority for call-up; introduced in May 1918, the classification of registrants by national category eased the burdens of the local boards by making equity issues more manageable. It did so by adjusting local draft quotas to the number of men in each classification, not the total number of men registered. Classification alone, however, did not produce more men. In 1918 the government held two more general registration periods to catch men not registered in 1917. When the first 1918 registration produced less than a million new registrants, Congress extended the age limits of draftables down to eighteen and up to forty-five. Drafting teenagers was not popular with mothers, the schools, and the churches, but its threat probably made drafting twenty-year-olds easier. If, however, the war had continued into 1919, the Army would have had to fill its ranks from the 13 million younger and older men who registered in September 1918.
Facing the prospect of a German offensive in 1918, Allied leaders coveted the masses of new American soldiers. In December 1917 and January 1918, they eyed the thirty-seven divisions still assembling and training in the United States and examined the AEF’s plans for bringing this force
to Europe. They did not like what they saw The Allies wondered whether the United States could equip and ship an independent army; they doubted that American commanders and staffs could organize and direct such a force against the skilled Germans. Moreover, they feared that they could not stop the Germans without American troops. Essentially, the Allies wanted to amalgamate American units—from battalions of 1,000 to divisions of 26,000—into the existing structure of the French and British armies. This policy would prevent the diversion of American troops into all the supporting units an independent field army required. The Allies had powerful weapons with which to negotiate amalgamation, for the British had shipping and the French military equipment. These resources were interrelated. To ship a full American division with all its organic equipment (including guns, trucks, and wagons) required four times as much shipping as was needed to bring the men and their personal weapons and equipment. With time of the essence and shipping scarce—and the American military procurement program in disarray—the Allies urged a change in the War Department’s shipping plans.
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