It had been our original intention to remain several weeks in Vladivostok but, lest our presence be taken advantage of by the revolutionists to involve Russia with a friendly power, it was wisely decided to curtail our visit so at daylight the next morning we put to sea again.
On the way back to the United States, we stopped at Guam. Guam is beautiful with a natural coral breakwater that protects the anchorage and the swimming is wonderful, but it is the most isolated and lonely spot I have ever seen. A man on duty in Guam who wrote a letter to the United States was lucky to receive a reply in six months.
I didn’t meet anyone in Guam who had applied for duty there and who wasn’t eager to escape from the place. All of them had offended some superior who had sent them there much as a nobleman who had offended the king in seventeenth century France ended up in the Bastille with a “lettre de cachet”. I talked to one man, a second lieutenant of Marines, who had served under a martinet of a colonel who had made his life miserable. There was a fancy dress ball and the colonel attended in a domino that made him look much like a clown. The second lieutenant also attended dressed as an out-and-out clown and armed with a slap stick. He encountered the colonel and the opportunity was too good to miss. The following dialogue ensued:
Lieutenant: “Why, hello, clown!” (WHACK!)
Colonel (through gritted teeth): “You know perfectly well who I am.”
Lieutenant: “Oh, no, I don’t clown. (WHACK!) You don’t mind my calling you a clown, do you, clown?” (WHACK!)
The next day the lieutenant received his orders for Guam for an indefinite tour of duty. Also, he was given such a murderous fitness report that his chance of promotion was ruined. These fitness reports put a power almost of life and death in the hands of a superior officer. At the end of a tour of duty, your commanding officer must submit a report on each officer under him to the Navy Department. These reports are intended to weed out the incompetent and unfit but virtually no decent officer will give a man a bad fitness report for it is enough to ruin him. When I reached command rank, I never gave a man under me an unfavorable report even if I was convinced of his inadequacy. I could have misjudged him and perhaps the poor fellow had had a run of bad luck. A fitness report can easily be used by a vindictive officer to destroy any younger man to whom he had taken a personal dislike as he needs give no reason for his opinion.
I did not foresee it, but a few years later I was to be the victim of such an attack for a matter over which I had absolutely no control.
Chapter 10
Destroyer Service 1910-1914
The Light Cavalry of the Seas
After returning to the United States, I received my first regular command, the destroyer Jarvis. For my remaining years of active duty all of the sea service, except that performed during World War I, was with destroyers; first in command of single ships, then in command of a division of five ships, and finally in command of a destroyer “mother ship” at Constantinople, commanding a destroyer squadron of twenty-two ships, nearly three thousand officers and men. I think that I can call myself a “destroyer man”.
The Jarvis was built by the New York Ship Building Company, and I saw her keel laid and inspected her every day until she was completed. I felt that in more than one way she was my ship. She was one of the first of the new oil-burning destroyers and her trial runs were witnessed by a number of high-ranking officers who were interested in such an innovation. These old-timers had never been on such a small vessel, and we encountered some heavy seas. When we returned to port, I heard the following conversation between two mess attendants:
“Yah, you was seasick!”
“I has a right to be seasick. All them captains was seasick!”
He was right. Destroyer duty is a young man’s job.
As their name suggests, destroyers were developed to destroy the torpedo-boats, which had become a serious menace to the battleships and large cruisers. The torpedo-boats were so small, fast, and maneuverable that they could dash in under the fire of the larger vessels, launch their deadly torpedoes and escape in spite of the searchlights and rapid-fire guns of their big victims. Soon, however, the duties of the destroyers greatly broadened. Their duties became almost precisely the same as those of the light cavalry of a land army. They were “the eyes of the fleet”.
Each ship carried four officers and a hundred men. Their armament consisted of three double torpedo tubes and five semi-automatic 3-inch guns. They had no armor protection for that would slow them down. They were capable of doing thirty knots (about thirty-four miles an hour). Modern destroyers are four times the size of these early ships and much more seaworthy. The Navy had twenty-five of these new crafts and they were generally referred to as “floating coffins” by the rest of the fleet.
Even so, the destroyers were perhaps the most versatile of all warships. They could be used for scouting, protecting larger ships from night attacks, attacking enemy ships with torpedoes, and because they drew only ten feet of water, they could patrol the enemy’s coast, run up rivers, capture merchant vessels and fire on troops and field batteries ashore. I saw all of these actions.
Without question, service on a destroyer involves more hardship than any other kind of naval work except perhaps submarine duty. Many officers, including myself, have gone to sea for years in the larger vessels without ever feeling even slightly uncomfortable yet, after joining the Destroyer Flotilla, they have on frequent occasions been violently and unblushingly seasick. It is a common saying that a man doesn’t know what “seagoing” really is until he has tried it on a destroyer. It makes one appreciate the tremendous hardships that Columbus, Cabot, and the other early navigators must have endured when they crossed the Atlantic in their cockleshells.
Let me give you one example. The entire Atlantic Fleet cruised from Guantanamo, Cuba, to the Isthmus of Panama while the canal was being constructed. The usual cruising speed of the destroyers was twenty knots, but as it was advisable for all units of the fleet to arrive at the same time, we were obliged to steam at the same speed as the battleships: twelve knots. All the way across the Gulf of Mexico we rolled between thirty and forty degrees on a side and there was not a moment’s cessation of this rolling. We could see the people on the nearby battleships standing on their perfectly steady decks gazing at us in awed amazement and evidently thanking what gods there may be that they had been intelligent enough to get duty on the big ships. We anchored in Colon Harbor and all that night, even with our anchors down, the rolling continued as there was a heavy swell coming in from the gulf. Early the next morning we were able to run up the old French canal and all hands from captain to cabin boy turned in and had their first sleep in four days.
On our return, the Jarvis had to come north before the other vessels in order to hold certain steaming trials. Course was set for Cape Maysi on the eastern end of Cuba and orders given to make twenty knots speed.
As everything was running smoothly I went below to get a few hours sleep. About two o’clock in the morning I awoke to find that the ship was rolling and pitching very heavily. She would go flying up in the air, pause for an instant, and then descend with dizzy suddenness, landing on top of a wave with a crash that made her quiver from stem to stern. It wasn’t unlike coming down in an express elevator and being stopped too quickly. Realizing that we were no longer in the lee of Cuba I jumped out of my bunk, but hardly had my feet touched the deck, when I was thrown the entire length of the room flat on my face and the next instant the heavy swivel desk chair came down on top of me cutting a gash six inches long in one shin. Struggling to my feet with violent seasickness, I managed to get my clothes on and climbed up on the bridge.
Here I found that after passing Maysi our change of course to the north had brought wind and sea directly ahead and the ship was receiving tremendous blows from the high waves as she forced her way through them. Speed was reduced to fifteen knots, bu
t just as the change was made an enormous green sea came over the bridge drenching us to the skin and smashing the glass in the binnacle and the top of the chart board.
All day we labored through it and late in the afternoon sighted Watling’s Island (which, by the way, was the first land seen by Columbus in 1492) and, passing through the Crooked Island Passage, set course for Cape Hatteras. The weather kept getting worse all the time and seas constantly swept the forecastle; several of the hatch covers were forced open and water came in to such an extent that the ship had to be headed off (turned away from the wind) and volunteers sent to close and secure the hatches.
Galley fires were kept alight with the greatest difficulty; we subsisted mainly on hardtack and coffee, drinking the coffee from the spout of the pot; it was impossible to use a cup as the wind would blow the hot coffee into our faces. Anyone attempting to use the toilet did so at his peril. The ship would poise herself on the crest of a wave and then make a Lucifer-like descent and simultaneously a water spout very like Old Faithful, except it was icy cold, would fly upward from the toilet bowl and woe to the unhappy one who happened to be in the line of fire. There was a flap on the outboard discharge but we discovered later that the violence of the sea had knocked it off. As a natural sequence there was about two feet of water swishing around the floor of the toilet room with — well, I won’t gild the lily by entering into any further descriptions.
For three days neither sun nor stars had been visible; hence we were by no means certain of where we were as no observations could be taken. Finally our dead reckoning showed that we should be within fifty miles of the Diamond Shoals Light Vessel, which is just off Cape Hatteras. From the appearance of the water we could tell that it was rapidly getting shallower and, as there are some very dangerous shoals off Hatteras with only a few feet of water on them, we were very anxious to know our exact position.
There is only one way of ascertaining a ship’s position in thick weather at sea and that is by taking soundings. Orders were given to start the sounding machine. This machine is a large steel reel on which is wound about five hundred fathoms of strong wire with a heavy lead on the end. The men sent aft returned and reported that the sounding machine had been washed overboard. Its steel legs, riveted to the deck, were still there but were broken off short by the force of the waves. The ship was then hove to and an effort made to find the depth of water by lowering a long line with several leads on the end. We kept drifting to leeward so fast that the line stood out straight from the ship’s side and no sounding could be taken.
Meanwhile darkness was rapidly approaching and our position was becoming more and more dangerous. Just then the sun showed itself for about three seconds and, snatching a sextant, I managed to take a very doubtful altitude which placed us FIFTY MILES beyond our dead-reckoning position. Hardly had this discovery been made when a sharp-eyed quartermaster pointed to a dim object well on the port hand and, heading for it, we discovered, to our extreme relief, that it was Diamond Shoals Light Vessel.
This fixed our position absolutely and we headed up the coast for the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Hardly had we dropped the light vessel astern when a terrific downpour of rain commenced drenching us to the skin and entirely obliterated all the shore lights and other aids to navigation. It was bitterly cold and I had to decide between wearing a sweater drenched with ice water or wearing no sweater at all. I decided on the ice water. All around us we could hear whistles and fog bells getting louder and louder as we approached the entrance to the bay. Finally I decided that further progress would be foolhardy and we let go the anchor, veered to sixty fathoms, and rolled out the night, bitterly cold and drenched to the skin. With the rising sun we discovered that we were directly in the entrance to Chesapeake Bay and at six o’clock got underway and proceeded to the Norfolk Navy Yard. For five days we had not taken off our clothes or sat down to a meal.
There was no report ever made of this trip for there was nothing to report. It was all in the day’s work.
I recall one other incident of destroyer duty where we were saved from disaster by a miraculous piece of luck. We were at Guantanamo, Cuba, when we received orders to report to San Juan immediately. We made a night run at thirty knots and at dawn saw ahead two long, low islands with a narrow passage between them. We had a navigator on board who had a very good opinion of himself and he told me that we were to proceed through the passage at full-speed. “It is marked on the chart and there is plenty of water,” he explained.
I demurred but he said, in the wearily, condescending tone one uses with a petulent child, “I assure you, sir, the passage is well marked, I have carefully checked our position, and there is no possibility that I am mistaken.” He was so sure of himself and as time was important, we continued at thirty knots.
As we drew closer, I noticed a curious-looking bird that was swimming back and forth across the passage, catching fish. As I have always been interested in natural history and as I had never seen a bird quite like it, I called for a telescope so I could examine the unique specimen more closely. As soon as I had the glass on him, I realized that the bird was not swimming; he was WALKING to and fro on the bottom! I must have broken all records for ringing full speed astern. As it was, we barely hove to in time.
I then spotted an old fisherman leisurely rowing along the shore off one island. I shouted and held up some bills, whereupon he just as leisurely rowed alongside. In my best Spanish I asked him where we were. He gave us the names of the islands. We were some twenty miles from where we should have been. There were two other islands identical to the ones before us, with a deep passage between them at the other position. I gave him fifty dollars and we departed with the fisherman calling down the blessings of all the saints in heaven on us.
Later, my navigator sent me fifty dollars in an envelope. I was so relieved at our narrow escape that I returned it to him. We never mentioned the matter again. I did not record the incident in his fitness report although I was tempted.
In 1910 I was stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. I had applied for duty at the New York Yard but it was refused. At first, I was greatly disappointed as I had always regarded Philadelphia as a “dead” town but I soon changed my mind. The Philadelphia girls are delightful. I don’t think I have ever seen such charming girls. Also, there is an air to the old city which reminded me of Europe. There was a true society such as I had never encountered anywhere else in America, many of the families tracing their ancestry back before the Revolution and often living in houses that were old before Benjamin Franklin and Washington visited what is now called Independence Hall. As a commissioned officer, I naturally had the entrée everywhere.
After my duties at the Yard were over for the day, I would generally drop in at the Bellevue-Stratford for tea and nearly always one or two young ladies whom I had met could be found there. Afterward, we would have supper and then attend an opera, usually at the Academy of Music. I remember that season I saw Thaïs, Pagliacci, Traviata, Rigoletto, Faust, La Bohème, Tales of Hoffman, and Samson and Delilah. I especially remember Mary Garden in Griseldi. On the lighter side, we saw The Dollar Princess and Fra Diavolo. As I have always loved music, it was a wonderful time.
Some of the girls were lemons, but most were true queens. Even among the society debutantes there were a number of warm bodies and I was very seldom queered. Looking through the diary which I kept at the time (and which I still have) I note that on January 25th I attended a tea at the home of Anna Gilpins. It was a tea that was to have important results for me. There were a number of attractive girls there, including a Miss Mary Perkins (who was called Polly). I see by consulting my diary that I marked her name with an X as she was the most charming.
Polly Perkins.
A few days later I went to call on Polly at her home 2005 DeLancey Place. The house, like all the houses on the block, was a brownstone building, very old, that breathed quiet elegan
ce. The whole block seemed indeed to belong to another age; red brick pavements and old trees every few yards, the street so narrow two carriages had trouble passing. I met her parents. Her father was a slender, elegant old gentleman, almost stone deaf; her mother a large woman of great dignity. Polly’s grandfather on her mother’s side had been John Armstrong Wright, who had made a fortune in the iron and coal business at the time of the Civil War. Freedom Forge, which he built near Altoona, was regarded as a show place. Charles Penrose Perkins, her father, was prominent in Philadelphia society. He showed me a deed, written on parchment, and dated 1710 in which the Penroses were granted a tract of land along the Schuylkill River. The Perkins had one other child: Rowan Perkins, a big, blond, good-natured young man, slightly older than Polly, who was twenty.
Polly was the most striking girl I had ever seen. Tall (she was only an inch shorter than I and I am six feet), and magnificently proportioned with lovely blue eyes and brown hair. She had a great sense of humor and was fond of telling amusing stories, often purely the products of her lively imagination, which delighted people. Wherever we appeared together, heads would turn for we made a handsome couple. As she had never wanted for anything in her life, she was inclined to be somewhat headstrong and spoiled but in such a pretty, gay girl I found these traits made her even more attractive.
Although many houses were lighted by electricity, the Perkins were conservative and still used gas. In each room there was an L-shaped gas bracket which threw up a fan-shaped flame, yellow at the top and dark green below. Under each bracket hung a lighter, consisting of two long wires held together by a spring. When the spring was squeezed, the wires rubbed against each other and produced a spark. In the evening, maids brought in kerosene lamps with colorful Tiffany shades.
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