The Old Navy

by Daniel P. Mannix

  I saw Philo McGriffin a few years after the Sino-Japanese War. In the war Japan had quickly annihilated the Chinese Fleet in the Battle of the Yalu River in September 1894. Within a year, Japan had captured the key cities of Wei-hai-wei and Port Arthur. China was forced to acknowledge the independence of Korea, cede Formosa and the Pescadores Island to Japan, and pay a heavy indemnity. The empress announced that Li Hung-chang was responsible for the disaster and sent him into exile. The war had an even more disastrous effect for China, for it revealed the country’s weakness so vividly to the world that the European powers threw aside all restraint and moved in on the wretched land from all sides.

  At the end of the war, Philo returned to this country and came to see us in Washington. He was a different person from the jolly, optimistic young man I remembered. He was shrunken, nervous, and bitter. He told us that in the battle the Japanese Fleet, composed of lighter and faster vessels, commenced circling and pouring in a paralyzing fire. In a few minutes the Chinese ships, those that were still afloat, commenced a retiring movement that was very like a flight. The captain of the Chen Yuen was killed so Philo took command and tried to fight it out alone.

  Father said in amazement, “God, but you showed sand!” a popular term for courage.

  Philo shouted at him, “Don’t say SAND to me!”

  He explained that his shells even when they struck the Jap ships, did not explode. Meanwhile his ship was the target of the entire enemy fleet. Nearly all his crew were killed, and he himself was wounded and had both eardrums ruptured by the detonation of the Jap shells. Finally he followed the retreating Chinese ships to Port Arthur and later to Wei-hai-wei.

  Here he had a chance to examine his unexpended ammunition. His shells had been filled with sand instead of gunpowder.

  The Chinese Fleet attempted a last stand but their position was made hopeless by repeated destroyer attacks and the fire of their own forts, now in enemy hands. Admiral Ting sent a message inviting him to a dinner on the flagship.

  Admiral Ting’s card. Admiral Ting commanded the Chinese Navy at the Battle of the Yalu.

  “I sent back a message that this was no time for dinners,” McGriffin told us. “I was going ashore and I intended to find out who had loaded our shells with sand and kill the villain if it was my last act. Ting sent back a flowery reply saying he understood perfectly and as I was not Chinese there was no reason for me to attend the dinner. I didn’t see what my not being Chinese had to do with it, but later I found out.”

  Wei-hai-wei fell and the boarding parties from the Jap Fleet scaled the sides of Ting’s flagship. Gaining the deck they hurried aft to the admiral’s cabin where they found the door locked. Peering through a porthole set in the upper panel they could just make out, in the gloom of the room, a group of men who appeared to be quietly sitting in a circle. A blow from a boarding axe split the door from top to bottom and they forced their way inside. There they were, the Chinese admiral and all his captains waiting for them. The snarling order of the Jap officer being ignored, he flashed the light of his lantern in Admiral Ting’s face; as he did so one of the silent figures slipped from its chair to the floor. The Chinese officers had refused to survive the destruction of their fleet; sappuku, the “happy dispatch”.

  McGriffin went on, “I spent some time trying to find out who had doctored those shells. I realized some of the palace eunuchs would know. They knew everything as they seem to be the only people the empress trusts. Of course, they had to be bribed. You take that for granted. Finally, one of them told me it had been done secretly by the empress’ orders. Li Hung-chang didn’t know anything about it at the time but after the Yalu, he found out the truth and dared to reproach the empress to her face. I think this is why she had him exiled. She told him irritably, ‘Sand looks just like gunpowder and it’s a lot cheaper.’ She used the money she’d saved to build a marble houseboat in a lake at the Summer Palace she was building. I think she still believes that guns are only meant to frighten the enemy by making a loud noise, like the firecrackers the Chinese used when she was young.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Mother asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m going up to New York tomorrow and perhaps something will turn up. I’m sorry I didn’t commit sappuku with Admiral Ting and his staff. They must have thought I let them down.”

  After he left, Father said, “Some day we will have to fight Japan. I know it.”

  Mother objected and pointed out that Japan was on the other side of the world. Father shook his head.

  “I know we’ll have to fight her. Too bad we won’t have China to help us but the country will be dismembered and cut up among the Europeans in a few years.”

  A few days later we heard that Philo had shot himself in his New York hotel room on February 11, 1897. He had gone to join his Chinese friends as an honorable man should do.

  I little thought then that in a few months I would take part in what has been called “the biggest naval battle since Trafalgar” and see an engagement far larger and bloodier than the Yalu.

  Rear Admiral Mannix’s medals. They include: Sampson Medal with 4 clasps (Spanish-American War); Spanish Campaign Medal; Cuban Pacification Medal; West Indies Campaign; Mexican Service Medal; Victory Medal with mine-laying clasp; Mine-laying Medal; Distinguished Service Medal.

  Chapter 2

  Washington and Annapolis 1885-1898

  When we first saw this here campus

  Plebes we were as green as grass

  Now as gay and festive bilgers

  Tread we o’er the verdant pass.

  — From an ancient Lucky Bag

  Hardly had we arrived in Washington when Father was ordered back to the Asiatic Station as Marine officer of the old Brooklyn. During the cruise, the Brooklyn visited Japan, Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines. I have before me a letter he wrote Mother dated March 30, 1888. Although Father was shrewd in many of his observations, he was not infallible as this letter shows.

  I would really like to know why we were ordered to make this cruise if it was not to get us away from the womenfolk of Japan. We have steamed 6,000 miles without any apparent result except the loss to the government of the wear and tear to the ship and boilers which are not strong at the best and the expenditure of 8 or 10 thousand dollars for coal. The United States has not a cent’s worth of interest in any of these Dutch possessions, not even a poor missionary to look up and encourage.

  A few years later, most of these islands would be part of America’s new empire.

  After Father left, Mother and I found ourselves alone in a city that was nearly as strange to us as Taku had been. I was sent to the local public school and promptly became involved in the same sort of trouble I had been in in China. The first problem was my clothes which were cut in a different manner than the American style and made me look like a “dude”. Then there was my way of speaking, intoning the words as the Chinese do. Worst of all was my “cholera band” — in those days all Europeans in the Orient wore broad flannel bands under their clothes supposed to ward off fever. I really went through hell and had to endure countless “beatings up” before I learned to conform.

  Mother was worried that I would forget my Chinese which I was only too eager to do as I knew what would happen to me if my schoolmates ever suspected I was able to speak a “heathen tongue”. Mother was sure America’s relationship with China would grow over the years and being able to talk the language would be an important asset to me. She used to talk Chinese to me whenever she could, but I always answered in English or rather in American as the language spoken in the Washington public school was hardly the tongue of Oxford or Cambridge. When she insisted, I would reply angrily, “People will think we’re Chinese.” The Chinese were despised in America at that time as cheap labor, opium-smoking villains, and laundry men. In a few months I had completely forgotten my Chi
nese, and years later when I returned to China I couldn’t remember a word of it.

  Mannix and his sister, Romaine, when he was in Washington.

  When Father finally returned in 1889 he was ordered to assume command of Marine Headquarters near the Navy Yard. In those days the Marine Corps was small, less than two thousand men. The uniform was also very different from the present one. Officers and men wore Napoleonic shakos, the men with a round button-like affair on top and the officers with a tall plume of feathers. Even then the “Corps”, small as it was, had the same esprit and clannishness that has always marked it. If someone said sneeringly to one of the old timers, “What have the Marines ever done?” the crushing reply would always be, “WHO CAPTURED JOHN BROWN?”

  The commandant of the Navy Yard was Admiral Meade. He was one of the “hard-boiled” military leaders who feel that to be efficient one must be profane and generally disagreeable. I remember that one evening he was giving a dinner dance and wanted the Marine Band to play at the event. Instead of asking Father, as courtesy demanded, he went over Father’s head to the Navy Department. As a result, Father received an order to send the Marine Band to the Navy Yard on a certain date. Father was tempted to refuse and he spoke to the band leader, John Philip Sousa.

  Sousa, while he wore an officer’s uniform, really had no actual rank. The men used to salute him but only through courtesy. It was his ambition to be given the rank of second lieutenant, surely a modest enough ambition. For some reason, the Navy Department constantly opposed it. The present leader of the band has the rank of captain of Marines. Meade’s peremptory manner of demanding his services was an insult to Sousa as well as Father, but rather to Father’s surprise, Sousa said he would be delighted to play for the admiral. In fact, he was looking forward to it.

  On the date in question when festivities were at their height, there was a crash of drums and brasses that shook the house and through the door marched the entire band of a hundred pieces with Sousa at the head wearing his bearskin shako and waving his baton. The band was followed by a drum and bugle corps of eighty more pieces playing, as they used to say of Sousa in Vienna “with hands and feets”. Admiral Meade couldn’t make himself heard against that racket but his gestures and the apoplectic tinge of his features gave a hint to Sousa who, his dignity unimpaired, gave the signal for “countermarching”. The band turned itself inside out and marched proudly back to “Semper Fidelis”. Shortly after this, Sousa resigned from the service and organized his own band. Whether his encounter with Admiral Meade had anything to do with his decision, I don’t know.

  That summer (1894) Washington was invaded by Coxey’s Army. Coxey was an Ohio horse-dealer who led several thousand unemployed on a march to the nation’s capital to demand redress. Washington was, to put it mildly, in a panic. All liberty was stopped at the barracks; the men’s equipment (“light marching order”) was laid out by each man’s cot; ball cartridges were distributed, canteens filled and “iron rations” stowed in haversacks. I was wild with excitement expecting a big battle and so, I suspect, did Father.

  When the army finally arrived, a more pitiful aggregation of footsore, dusty, weary tramps could not be imagined. They dragged themselves as far as the capitol grounds where they were promptly arrested by the police for “walking on the grass”, to Father’s great relief as he had no desire to order his men to fire on such wretched creatures.

  I would be sixteen in September and old enough to enter the Naval Academy at Annapolis. I received my appointment from President Cleveland but I still would have to pass the entrance examinations. During the summer I attended a cramming school named Emerson Institute that specialized in getting would-be midshipmen through these exams. The exams were pretty much the same year after year so by collecting the old examination papers, our instructors could tell fairly accurately what questions would be asked. Beyond this, they had few academic qualifications. One of their main tasks was to keep the students in order for they were a tough lot.

  Earliest known picture of Mannix, taken at the Emerson “cramming” school in Washington. He is in the second row, second from left, seated.

  Our English professor was named Jimmie Something-or-other. He was a retired pug and his conversation was full of “deses” and “doses”, but his school spirit was tremendous. Once a little businessman who had a shop in the same building burst into our classroom during an English session and screamed, “Professor, your pupils have invaded my shop, wrecked my goods, insulted my daughter, and stolen — ” With a roar like the Bull of Bashan, the Professor of English Literature bounded to his feet and bellowed, “Get out of here, you — — — ” The little man fled like a rag on the wind. Professor Jimmie turned to us and, in a dovelike coo, whispered, “Say, youse fellers didn’t do dat, now did ya?”

  Due at least in part to Professor Jimmie’s inspiration I passed the tests and in the autumn of 1895 found myself a midshipman. From then on my parents were relieved of my presence. I very seldom saw them again. The United States Navy took over my life.

  The Academy was very small then, not more than two hundred cadets organized in one battalion of four companies. Now there are double that in one class and men graduate without meeting all of their own classmates, while in my day every midshipman knew everyone in all four classes.

  The hazing was strict. The plebes were required always to say “sir” to any upperclassman; when they walked upstairs they were obliged to keep very close to the wall; in the mess hall they were not permitted to put their hands on the table, nor their backs against the backs of the chairs; they were not permitted to walk in “Lover’s Lane” nor to sit on any of the benches in the Academy grounds; they could not attend the hops; and they were assigned certain “duties” by the upperclassmen; for example, one of my classmates was required each day at dinner to intone, “Only two hundred and ninety-seven more days” (before graduation).

  However, the system, silly and sometimes cruel as it was, had its good points. NEVER did an upperclassman lay a finger on a plebe. There was none of the paddling that disgraced many universities and, I am ashamed to say, was introduced into the Academy many years later in direct violation of the Articles of War. If a plebe offended in some way he was usually punished by being required to “stand on his head”. In this process he put his hands and head on the ground and then proceeded to kick his heels in the air twenty, fifty, or a hundred times depending on the nature of the offense. Nor were the plebes entirely helpless. If a plebe felt that he was being unfairly treated, he could refuse to obey. Then a man of his weight in the upper class would be selected to fight him. These fights would be carried out with all the formality of a duel with seconds, referee, and timekeeper.

  Even so, it was unwise to try and “buck the system”. Although hazing was illegal, the upper-classes had a certain legal control over the plebes. The cadet officers and petty officers could report a plebe for countless small offenses such as “Shoes not shined”, “Late at muster”, “Blouse unbuttoned”, and so on. Also, rooms were regularly inspected and a cadet could be reported for “Bed not properly made”, “Dust on bookshelves”, “Chair adrift” (the two kitchen chairs in each room were required to be pressed against the table, one on each side; if there was one inch of clearance the chair was “adrift”). To be reported for any of these offenses meant demerits and a certain number of them meant dismissal. If a plebe got the reputation of being a troublemaker, he could be forced out of the Academy.

  Of course the plebes were required to do all the heavy and unpleasant work at drill. For example, we had Artillery Drill in which the heavy 3-inch field pieces were hauled all over the grounds by means of “drag ropes” with sixteen or twenty men to each gun. The plebes were always put on the end of the drag so, while they were straining every muscle to keep the heavy guns running along, the upperclass-men behind them were frequently taking things very easy. Then, if the order was “Sectio
ns right about: in battery”, the plebes had to dash at full speed around the circumference of a big circle; the upper-classmen, being near the gun, had to take only a few steps.

  Being tall, I was on the end of the drag for my entire plebe year and, just as I expected to be relieved, a new drill officer came to the Academy. A humanitarian, he sympathized with the poor plebes and refused to put them on the end of the drag where they belonged. As a result my class had TWO years of it instead of only one.

  That spring we witnessed the graduation of the senior class. There were just forty of them. A great deal is written and said nowadays about the “bloated military” living off the poor taxpayers. I don’t know what the current figures are, but in those days the attrition rate, especially among junior officers, was high. Within five years, ten of the class we saw graduate that June were dead; one quarter of the class. Darwin Merritt was lost on the Maine shortly after he graduated when she was destroyed in Havana Harbor. Breckenridge was swept overboard from a destroyer during the Spanish-American War; Worth Bagley was killed on the torpedo boat Winslow at Cardenas, Cuba; Newt Hall as a captain of Marines fell at our legation in Pekin during the Boxer Rebellion; and Davidson was killed in a turret explosion on the battleship Missouri.

  Although we didn’t realize it we were witnessing the end of an era — the era of Sails and Spars; of Wooden Ships and Iron Men. To the old-timers in the Navy who ran things, it seemed incredible that the time would ever come when sails would be completely abandoned. Even the warships of the period still retained their masts and carried sails and spars so if the engines failed, the ships could proceed under sail as they had done since the beginning of seafaring. Each summer the cadets took a cruise on a full-rigged ship across the Atlantic to Funchal, Madeira, off the West Coast of Africa. I took two of these cruises on the Monongahela. Her only means of propulsion was her sails; there was no machinery of any kind on board. There was no steam or electricity to do the heavy work; it was all done by the muscles of the crew.