Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  By midsummer there were thirtysix American destroyers, tendered by two motherships and assisted by a group of converted yachts, operating out of Queenstown. Similar bases for antisubmarine and convoy work were established at Brest and Gibraltar. From the supreme menace to Allied hopes the German submarines were gradually being reduced to a dangerous nuisance.

  As early as June 8, Page, whose letters accurately reflected the state of morale among ruling circles in England, was writing the President: “Praise God our destroyers are making the approach to these shores appreciably safer … Admiral Sims is the darling of the kingdom.”

  Hunting Hornets All Over the Farm

  Meanwhile Woodrow Wilson, beset with everincreasing problems he felt no man could handle but himself, stewed with impatience whenever he thought of the great British fleet, lying idle it seemed to him, at Scapa Flow, under the protection of flotillas of destroyers that would be better employed defending the merchantships that were the lifeline of the armies in France. July 5 he let his impatience show in a confidential message to Sims.

  “From the beginning of the war I have been greatly surprised at the failure of the British Admiralty to use Great Britain’s great naval superiority in an effective way. In the presence of the present submarine emergency they are helpless to the point of panic. Every plan we suggest they reject for some reason of prudence. In my view this is not a time for prudence but for boldness even at the cost of great losses. I would be very much obliged to you if you would report to me, confidentially, of course, exactly what the Admiralty has been doing, and what they have accomplished, and add to the report your own comments and suggestions … Give me such advice as you would give … if you were running a navy of your own.”

  The President had immediately backed up Sims in the matter of convoys, but he didn’t yet feel satisfied with the results. He wanted more protection for merchantmen. He was looking forward to the execution of a project for fencing the U-boats into the North Sea with a barrage of mines across its entrances which he and Franklin Roosevelt, the increasingly active Assistant Secretary of the Navy, spent hours conferring about during the summer months. Most especially Wilson wanted an attack on the German submarine bases in Heligoland Bight and back of Ostend and Zeebrugge.

  Early in August he stole a weekend from his overloaded desk to slip out of Washington on the Mayflower, in the company of Edith Wilson and some of her Bolling relatives, for a private visit to the Atlantic fleet. The trip was strictly off the record. The ships were forbidden to fire the twentyone gun salute. He addressed the fleet’s officers collected for the purpose on the flagship Pennsylvania. Those who heard his speech likened it to a pep talk the coach might deliver to his team between the halves at a football game:

  “This is an unprecedented war and, therefore, it is a war in one sense for amateurs. Nobody ever before conducted a war like this and therefore nobody can pretend to be a professional … Now somebody has got to think this war out. Somebody has got to think out a way not only to fight the submarine but to do something different from what we are doing.

  “We are hunting hornets all over the farm and letting the nest alone … I am willing to sacrifice half the navy Great Britain and we together have to crush out that nest, because if we crush it the war is won. I have come here to say that I do not care where it comes from, I do not care whether it comes from the youngest officer or the oldest, but I want the officers of this navy to have the distinction of saying how this war is going to be won … I am ready to put myself at the disposal of any officer in the Navy who thinks he knows how to run this war … We have got to throw tradition to the winds … Every time we have suggested anything to the British Admiralty the reply has come back that virtually amounted to this, that it had never been done that way, and I felt like saying: ‘Well nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.’

  “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.”

  Convoy Service

  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.

  Perhaps ambition kept him going. Up to the day when the declaration of war against Germany gave fresh impetus to his military aspirations, he had toyed with the notion of resigning from the service and taking up the law or business, so that he might really amount to something in the world.

  A letter from Major General Bell, under whom he had served in the Philippines, gave his ambition a sharp spur. The rumor was already abroad in army circles that if the President decided to send an expeditionary force to Europe, out of the five commissioned major generals, it was Pershing who would be picked to command it. In spite of his being Pershing’s senior in rank, his old friend Bell was asking for an assignment under him in France.

  General Pershing’s French

  Pershing had hardly read Bell’s letter before a wire came in from Senator Warren. Their mutual bereavement had tightened the bond between the two men, and Pershing knew that his fatherinlaw, who was still chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, would do anything possible to further his career. The wire asked how well Pershing spoke French. It was followed by an explanatory letter. Secretary Baker had invited the senator to drop in to his office the other morning and asked him, in an elaborately offhand way, if he happened to know whether Pershing spoke French. The senator, to gain time to find the right answer, said he wasn’t sure but he was sure his wife would know. He’d ask her and report back.

  Even before Pershing could wire the senator that he’d studied the language in France for several months ten years before, a coded message from General Hugh Scott, Chief of Staff in Washington, was placed on his desk, ordering him to pick regiments to form a regular army division for service in France.

  A few days later he was in Washington standing rigid in his khaki uniform with its stiff choker collar before Secretary Baker’s desk in the War Department. “I was surprised,” Pershing wrote, “to find him much younger and considerably smaller than I expected. He looked actually diminutive as he sat behind his desk, doubled up in a rather large office chair.”

  When the little man started to speak the impression was different. In a few short sentences Baker told Pershing he had given the subject of a commander in chief in France careful thought and had chosen him upon his record. “I left Mr. Baker’s office with a distinctly favorable impression of the man …”

  Very Difficult Tasks

  Immediately the general settled into a small room in the War Department to assemble a headquarters detachment to take to France. To head his staff, in spite of his conviction that only West Pointers could make really good officers, he chose Major James L. Harbord, who had risen from private to first lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry at a time when promotions from the ranks were hard to come by. He combed the army bureaus for talented young men. According to civilians called in later to activate the moribund services of the War Department, he carried off every army officer with brains in Washington City.

  He knew he owed a debt of gratitude to Colonel Roosevelt. To sooth T.R.’s hurt feelings he promised to find posts in France for his three sons who were rearing to go overseas. He held at arm’s length a mass of applications for service from all sorts and conditions of men.

  Before the month was over Pershing discovered that he was expected to command, not merely the 1st Division, but the entire expedition to France. The question of general officers immediately arose. Hugh Scott and Tasker Bliss admitted they were too old for service in the field. His friend Bell, he decided reluctantly, was not in good enough health. Leonard Wood he did not want for reasons too numerous to mention. As the only ranking regular army general with the troops abroad Pershing would be in a position to run his own show.

  One afternoon Secretary Baker took him to the White House to call on President Wilson. The President was so preoccupied with a discussion of the shipping situation he hardly seemed to notice Pershing at first. Then he gave him a sharp gray glance through his noseglasses and his pale lips smiled. “General,” he said, “we are giving you some very difficult tasks these days.”

  Pershing answered stiffly that difficult tasks were what West Pointers were trained to expect. It was disappointing, he noted afterwards, that the President didn’t outline his policy in relation to the demands for manpower for their own armies that the French and British missions in Washington were already making. Talk lagged. The general was instructed to convey the President’s best wishes to the heads of state in England and France. The time had come for him to take his leave. He rose and made another set speech: he appreciated the honor and realized the responsibilities entailed. He would do his best.

  “General,” the President, who
was always a little ill at ease with militarymen, answered with equal formality, “you were chosen entirely upon your record and I have every confidence that you will succeed; you shall have my full support.”

  The President was as good as his word. When Secretary Baker sent Pershing his formal orders, the general found himself designated “to command all the land forces of the United States operating in continental Europe and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including any part of the Marine Corps which may be detached for service there with the army … You will establish, after consultation with the French War Office, all necessary bases, lines of communication, depots etc., and make all the incidental arrangements essential to active participation at the front …”

  The fifth paragraph assumed particular importance in the minds of Pershing and his staff: “In military operations against the Imperial German Government, you are directed to cooperate with the forces of the other countries employed against that enemy; but in so doing the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.”

  That was Newton D. Baker’s answer to the campaign the British and French missions under Balfour and Joffre were conducting to have American levies drafted as replacements into their own war machines. When the general appeared in the Secretary’s office to say goodby, Baker, so Baker remembered later, said he would give him only two orders, one to go to France and the other to come home; but that in the meantime his authority in France would be supreme. “If you make good, the people will forgive almost any mistake. If you do not make good, they will probably hang us both on the first lamppost they can find.”