Castles of Steel (148 page)

At the Navy Department, Mahan’s principles were sacrosanct, but views began to change when America’s two most senior American admirals—Admiral Henry T. Mayo, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and then Benson himself—traveled to the British Isles. Mayo arrived in London on August 29, 1917, for discussions at the Admiralty followed by a visit to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. There, Beatty was at his hospitable best, briefly hauling down his own Commander-in-Chief’s flag from
Queen Elizabeth
and hoisting the four-star flag of his American guest. Beatty’s private description of Mayo was less generous; to Eugenie, he characterized the American admiral as “a dear old cup of tea who never did anything wrong in his life; an impeccable old gentleman—that’s no use now, is it?” Back in London, Mayo heard Jellicoe ask again for American battleships and, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, responded favorably. Now only Benson blocked the way.

On November 7, the Chief of Naval Operations arrived in London, where three days of discussions at the Admiralty produced another conversion. On November 10, Benson cabled Secretary Daniels, recommending the sending of four coal-burning American dreadnoughts to the Grand Fleet. Benson went further: if conditions warranted, he was willing in the spring to send the entire U.S. battle fleet to Europe. Benson’s abrupt reversal stemmed from more than a sudden attack of Anglophilia. He could see that the presence of American battleships would give the navy a greater voice in Allied naval strategy and would enhance the prestige and morale of the U.S. fleet. He also recognized that if America’s powerful battleship fleet remained idle throughout the war, it might be difficult to extract money from Congress to build future dreadnoughts. On November 25, Battleship Division 9 of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet—
New York, Wyoming, Florida,
and
Delaware
—sailed from Hampton Roads for Scapa Flow.

Antagonism between the American and German navies went back to June 1898, when an American naval squadron commanded by Commodore George Dewey had a potentially dangerous confrontation with a German force under Vice Admiral Otto von Diederichs in Manila Bay. In the months preceding this episode, the kaiser had announced, “I am determined, when the opportunity arises, to purchase or simply to take the Philippines from Spain.” In May 1898, the German consul in Manila told Berlin that the time had come to choose a German prince to become king of the Philippines. Then war broke out between Spain and America. Dewey caught the Spanish Far Eastern Squadron at anchor, quickly annihilated it, and, lacking troops to land and seize the Philippine capital, established a blockade of Manila. A German flotilla, larger than Dewey’s force, appeared and was responsible for minor infractions of international blockade regulations. When Dewey insisted on stopping German warships crossing his blockade line, Diederichs sent his Flag Lieutenant to the American flagship
Olympia
to protest. Dewey lost his temper. “Why, I shall stop each vessel whatever may be her colors!” he said. “And if she does not stop, I shall fire at her! And that means war, do you know, Sir? And I tell you, if Germany wants war, all right, we are ready.”

In the years that followed, Dewey and Diederichs each became the senior officer of his respective navy. Each was convinced that war between the two countries was possible, but German contingency planning was far more thorough. After defeating the U.S. fleet off the east coast of the United States, Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Newport News were to be occupied, after which the Germans would move up Chesapeake Bay toward Washington and Baltimore. “Unsparing, merciless assaults” would follow against New York City and Boston. Long Island was to be the springboard for attacks on New York, and Great Gull, Gardiner, Fishers, Plum, and Block islands were given special consideration. Brooklyn would be seized and Manhattan bombarded in an operation for which “2 to 3 battalions of infantry and 1 battalion of engineers seem fully sufficient.” There was no thought of penetrating farther inland; these blows to America’s seaboard population centers were considered enough to bring the nation to terms.

The American war plan against Germany at the turn of the century never imagined the German army being landed on American soil. Instead, American planners expected a German naval assault in the Caribbean aimed at acquiring naval bases in the West Indies and colonies in South America. To meet this threat, the American Atlantic Fleet would concentrate in the Caribbean where the decisive battle would be fought. Given the problems a German fleet would face in crossing the Atlantic and in coaling upon arrival, the Navy Department—and especially Dewey—was confident of an American victory.

This irrelevant strategy had not been updated since the outbreak of war in Europe, and in April 1917 the U.S. Navy was wholly unprepared for the battles it was about to fight.

It was afflicted with a serious imbalance in warship types. It possessed fourteen modern dreadnought battleships, but only seventy-four destroyers. These were far too few to screen the dreadnoughts and still look after the navy’s twenty-three predreadnoughts, its ten armored cruisers, and its twenty-five light cruisers. No provision whatever had been made for destroyers doing convoy duty for merchant ships. This discrepancy was not entirely the navy’s fault. For years, the Navy Department had asked Congress for money to build four new destroyers to accompany the construction of each new battleship; every year Congress had appropriated money for only one or two. In 1917, the latest American destroyers were among the best in the world, but only fifty-one of the seventy-four in commission were modern. More new ships were under construction, but the same imbalance persisted: six dreadnoughts, ten light cruisers, and only ten destroyers.

The American navy’s construction plans, like those of the German navy, had been victimized by the
Dreadnought
revolution. No president believed more passionately in sea power than Theodore Roosevelt, and during his eight years in office, the United States had laid down thirteen battleships. All became instantly obsolete with the commissioning of Jacky Fisher’s HMS
Dreadnought.
And when, at the end of his presidency, Roosevelt painted his new predreadnoughts white and sent them around the world to parade American naval power, the Great White Fleet served mainly to advertise its own obsolescence. Immediately, the Americans, like the Germans, responded to the British dreadnought by building their own. By December 1917, when Benson sent the battleships to Scapa Flow, fourteen American dreadnoughts were in commission.

Even so, the four dreadnoughts sent to Europe were not America’s most modern. They were coal burners rather than oil burners and their selection was due, not to Benson’s reluctance to send his latest ships, but to the Royal Navy’s candid admission that, while it had ample coal, it could not pro-vide fuel oil for America’s new oil-burning battleships. In speed and armament, the four American ships sent were the equivalent of most of Beatty’s ships.
Delaware,
the oldest, was commissioned in 1910, carried ten 12-inch guns, and was capable of 21 knots.
Florida,
completed in 1911, and
Wyoming,
completed in 1912, carried twelve 12-inch.
New York,
commissioned in 1914, and her sister
Texas,
which stayed home, were the last coal-burning dreadnoughts in the U.S. Navy. The ten 14-inch guns of
New York
and
Texas
had leap-frogged the armament of the British 13.5-inch-gun battleships; they, in turn, had been leap-frogged by the British
Queen Elizabeth
s and
Resolution
s with their eight 15-inch.

Off the Newfoundland Grand Banks, the four American battleships bound for Europe encountered a ninety-mile-an-hour Atlantic gale. Gigantic seas battered the ships, crushed lifeboats, and sprang deck hatches. Tons of water poured into
New York,
putting her down by the bow with eight feet of water in her forward storerooms. When the storm-scarred ships entered Scapa Flow on the morning of December 7, 1917, a young American lieutenant on
New York
saw “a glorious golden dawn . . . hills blending with clouds, purple and gold. . . . When our anchors plunged into the flow, three mighty cheers went up from Beatty’s
Queen Elizabeth.
” Beatty himself was watching and raised his hat in salute. A few days later, this same American officer “climbed to the crest of a little island called Flotta to look over the great land-locked harbor. Spread out below me, swinging aimlessly to the whims of the eddying currents, lay the Grand Fleet.” And when his ship first sailed from Scapa Flow, “I came on deck in the morning in blazing sunrise and beheld a sight never to be forgotten. The Grand Fleet stretched before me, belching dense volumes of black smoke.”

The American battleships were placed under the operational control of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet and designated the 6th Battle Squadron. British flag signals, radio codes, tactical maneuvering orders, and fire-control methods were adopted and Royal Navy signalmen were lent to the American battleships to teach British methods. Less could be done to help American gunnery. Target practice in Pentland Firth revealed the difference between the veteran British and the novice American ships. The Americans’ rate of fire and their accuracy were “distinctly poor and disappointing,” Beatty told the Admiralty. Nevertheless, he said, they were “desperately keen” and he would try not to hurry them too much.

The American battleships and their crews, accustomed to the long blue swells of the Pacific, the cobalt waters of the Caribbean, and even the gray storms of the North Atlantic, were unprepared for the character of the North Sea. “It is not that it blows any harder in the North Sea than in many other parts of the world,” Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, the commander of the American battleship force, wrote to Benson, “but that it seems to be almost continually blowing, shifting rapidly from one point of the compass to another and kicking up a rough cross sea. In addition there is a great deal of snow, hail, sleet and rain, often coupled with fog and mist.” In the Pentland Firth, with a strong tide running against the wind, the strong tidal currents and heavy seas pushed battleships a quarter mile out of position. The upper and main decks even of dreadnoughts were repeatedly smothered. “I have seen the largest battleships apparently sucked under until only the superstructures on the upper deck were visible when they would slowly rise from their submergence and the water pour off their decks as it might from some huge turtle . . . [coming] to the surface.”

Personal relations between the British and American sailors were excellent. Rodman, a tall, blunt-spoken Kentuckian, noted for his amiability, his earthiness, and his excellent hand at bridge, had graduated sixty-first in a class of sixty-two from Annapolis, served with Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay, and earned a high reputation for seamanship. Beatty did his best to make the Americans feel welcome. When the fleet was in the Firth of Forth, Rodman and his senior captains were frequent guests at Aberdour House. At Scapa Flow, the Americans were allotted space for a baseball diamond. On the Fourth of July, Beatty gave the American battleships two days off and sent them to a separate cove in the Flow to celebrate. The Commander-in-Chief sent greetings on “this greatest of Liberty Days,” and many Grand Fleet admirals boarded
New York
to help celebrate. In relays, 200 men at a time from each American ship were allowed to go ashore. Most congregated at the Temperance Hotel in Kirkwall. Privately, Americans complained that British ships were “too cold for men brought up in American homes. They are likewise poorly ventilated by our standards. They do not go in for laundries and other labor-saving devices such as motor-driven dough mixers and potato peelers.” But British ships had one convenience American sailors envied: rum for the men and whiskey for the officers, both prohibited on ships of the U.S. Navy.

On February 5, Beatty wrote to Ethel, “I am sending old Rodman out on an operation of his own which pleases him and gives them an idea that they are really taking part in the war. I trust they will come to no harm.” The following day, February 6, the 6th Battle Squadron took its first turn at escorting a convoy to Norway. The four American battleships left the “lavender, snow-powdered hills” of Scapa Flow with a squadron of British light cruisers and screening destroyers, all under Rodman’s command. At sea, wrote the young American officer, “the atmosphere was crystal clear, seeming to magnify each star a dozen times.” In the middle of the night, “the north burst into a brilliant arc of light, and moving streamers. A magnificent display of the
aurora borealis
followed, rolling its curtains of delicate fire across a surface of reflected brilliance. Against this arc, our ships stand out silhouetted sharply black.” Next day, the rising mist revealed “the coast of Norway: against a wall of snow-capped mountains backing up its jagged cliffs.” Having delivered the convoy’s thirty merchant vessels and while waiting to pick up a return convoy, Rodman’s ships were attacked by submarines—or so they believed. Three of the four battleships reported seeing periscopes and torpedo wakes.
Wyoming
’s captain was unconvinced that submarines had been present, and a British destroyer reported porpoises. Rodman, however, was certain that his ships had been attacked and officially reported two torpedoes fired at
Florida
and two at
Delaware.
After the war, German naval records revealed that no U-boat had attacked battleships that day off the Norwegian coast.

Returning to Scapa Flow, the 6th Battle Squadron was augmented by the arrival of the battleship
Texas, New York
’s sister. This addition resulted from Rodman’s request for a fifth battleship so that his division could maintain a constant four-ship strength and still allow for repair and refit.
Texas,
trying her gunnery, proved inferior to the four ships that had spent two months with the Grand Fleet. Although
Texas
had won an Atlantic Fleet gunnery trophy, Rodman grumbled, “she was not ready to fire under wartime conditions.”