Our navy at work; the Yankee fleet in French waters as seen by Reginald Wright Kauffman

Front matter

0^ o V

Admiral Wilson

The Yankee Fleet in French Waters as Seen

Preface

Whatever the faults of this book, there is in it no error, no misstatement and no omission justly chargeable to any lack of facilities on the part of the author, or to any restraint on the part of the officers and men by whom those facilities were supplied. Than that accorded me, nobody could have had a better opportunity for observing the wonderful work of our Navy along the French coast.

The courtesy shown me began with the moment of my arrival at the town that serves as the headquarters-port, and has not since ceased. In addition to personal kindnesses and verbal instructions, I was given a "blanket" set of credentials that were headed by the following letter :

U. S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters;

U. S. S. , Flagship.

, France ;

From : Commander U. S. Naval Forces in France.

To: All Forces.

Subject: Accredited Correspondent.

1. Mr. Reginald Wright Kauffman is visiting U. S. Naval Bases on the coast of France in the capacity of an accredited correspondent. The Commander U. S. Naval Forces in France desires that he be given every opportunity for acquiring information for publication.

Chief of Staff.

PREFACE

That brief missive opened every door — or ought I to say "every porthole" ? It was sufficient to take me to sea in troopship-convoying destroyers and submarine-hunting converted-yachts and up in the air in observation-balloons and hydroaeroplanes. It, and the good will that preceded and followed it, secured me opportunities to live with, and work with, for months together, officers of every grade and men of every rating, and there was almost no restriction put upon what I cared to report thereof.

"The only thing that you may not write about,*' said Admiral Wilson, in a conversation elsewhere referred to, "are dates of sailing and the names of ships in active service. Don't hesitate to find fault if you feel so moved. The Navy has nothing to hide, and if there is anything wrong about it, we want it known."

"If you write with discretion and ordinary common sense," said the chief base-censor to me, "I shall have nothing to delete."

Such words as these, and the scope of the facilities accorded, were not only welcome ; they were also surprising. I found that a journalist working with the Navy was in the position of a guest of a gentleman in that gentleman's house.

It will be seen, therefore, that all the faults of this book are mine alone. It is true that the chapters on the office-work, the destroyers and the "Suicide

PREFACE

Fleet" were written abroad and censored — or, rather, passed uncensored — over there. Much of the rest of the volume was, however, written after my return home; in that portion I have tried to conform — and I am assured that I have succeeded — with the Navy's censorship-rules, a necessary and in almost every particular a reasonable body of precept ; but it is possible that, although the entire text has since been "passed" by the departmental censor at Washington as free from any matter which might be dangerous in enemy-hands, I may have been latterly guilty of some purely technical slips that the Navy Department had not the time to correct, but that Commander Tisdale, the base-censor in France, would, in our personal interviews, have had opportunity to call to my attention. It is for these, if they exist, that I beg indulgence.

Of my gratitude to the American Naval Forces based on France, and of my admiration for them, this book is an Imperfect expression; so little has been written of them that three-quarters of America is ignorant of their work; and yet, but for them — and for the similar duties performed in lesser degree by their brothers convoying such of our troops as go to Europe by way of England — we could not, to-day, have or maintain an army on the western front. Another debt of thanks that I hasten to acknowledge is one for permission to rewrite and

PREFACE

republish some parts of this sketch that previously appeared in the London Spectator and other magazines — ^and in a syndicate of newspapers that I represented during a part of the present war — a syndicate formed iDy the Philadelphia North American and from time to time including, in addition to that journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Post, the Chicago Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the New York World, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

R. W. K.

Columbia, Pennsylvania. 3d October, 1918.

Part Five Admirals All

XV Fire! 224

XVI The Pluckiest Man Alive 234

XVII The Soul of the Sailor 243

NoWy Mr. Wall of Wall St., he built himself a yacht, And he built that yacht for comfort and for speed; He didn't mean that it should go Beyond a hundred miles or so; He wanted something made for show, Where he could drink and feed.

Then Uncle Satn'l went to war and hadn't any boats, Or not enough to guard the stormy green,

And so he said to Mr. Wall:

'Til take your six-feet-over-all

And set it out to get the call Upon the submarine.'*

"A cruising- fighter? Never!" (The experts chorused that.) *^ She'll sink before she's half-way out to France;" But Sam cut out her bathtubs white, He painted her a perfect fright And loaded her zvith dynamite: Says he: 'Til take a chance."

''Good night!" said Wall of Wall St.; the experts said it, too; But Uncle Sam was sot and sibylline; His little plan, it zmrn't a josh, Wall's boat's as dry's a mackintosh; She fights, b'gum; what's more, b'gosh, She gits the submarine!

— Easter-Eggs.

Chapter I Sailing With The Suicide Fleet

THERE was a broad streak of moonlight splashed across a leaden sea, and, all around that vast ampitheatre, circular walls of ebony. Nothing but the gently rippling waves cut by a single road: the whole world seemed as it must have been when, before man, the light of the night first came upon the darkness that brooded over the face of the waters.

Slowly a black shape lumbered into the illuminated track, moving with the clumsiness of an antediluvian monster. A prow poked forward, a funnel followed : the whole hull of a merchant steamer was there.

Then something else appeared — a mere stick dancing upright in the little waves with the monster between it and the moon. Appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

The monster gave a frightened scream; the scream of a jangled bell. It tried to turn away and run; it was in mortal terror of that fragile stick among the waves. The stick danced with a glee demoniac : it seemed to laugh at the monster.

What followed, followed swifter than the telHng; it happened in exactly thirty seconds. A tiny boat — a boat not one-fifth the size of the terrified monster; a boat grotesquely painted like a harlequin — pounced out of the darkness, blazed twice from fore and aft at the stick, twisted as a coin on edge twists when flicked by a human finger, jumped directly over the stick as the stick dove below the water; passed over the spot where the stick had been — and something glinted from the stem of the little boat, and, just as she raced clear, there came a detonation that shook the rescued monster as a rat is shaken by a terrier, and churned the silver sea into hissing suds.

Bubbles came up. A thick scum of oil appeared where the demon stick had danced. But the stick did not come up again.

"The United States Patrol Squadron Based on the Fleet in European Waters" — the Easter Egg Flotilla — the Suicide Club — had saved another cargo-ship and sunk another German submarine.

That is one example, and one only, of the sort of work that has been done by one division of our Navy of which the American public has had little news : the originally christened "Mosquito Fleet Abroad,"

wherewith I early had the privilege of sailing. Every "gob" — that is to say, every sailor — knew this fleet and wondered at its work — and nobody else was, for a long time, permitted to know; yet there is not a pilot along the French coast but will tell you that, within six months after the arrival of the Mosquito Flotilla, the S. O. S. calls were reduced by more than half.

Where these sea-wasps operated, how their explosives were composed and how discharged, when and by what means they received news of the submarines' movements — these are matters that, if published, might give aid to the enemy. But enough may be told to make clear the courageous work of a branch of the service that deserves as much publicity and praise as has been given to soldiers, tanks and aeroplanes.

The job of the Suicide Club was to convoy transports and supply-ships through the dangerous areas, and to chase that craft which makes its reputation by blows below the belt ; but, though they had a twofold duty, they faced, constantly, dangers manifold. Yellow dirigibles might hover above them and their wards for a few miles of their course or all of it, hydroaeroplanes and tug-towed observation-balloons might lend the aid that regulations allowed: peril was unremitting; their orders were to hunt peril. Was a given field reported swept of mines? The "eggs" that a Boche mine-layer *'lays" can be placed deep in the seas and governed, by soluble caps, to rise twenty- four hours later. Was this course or that known to be clear of submarines? Then it was in the other, the infested course, that the Suicide Club was most required.

There is nothing heroic in their appearance ; there is everything grotesque. To obtain the lowest visibility, they are painted hysterically, as if by some futurist in eternity. Perhaps the largest is of seven hundred tons gross, measures one hundred and thirty feet on the water and draws but thirteen feet. Certainly most of them were once the swiftest and most seaworthy pleasure yachts in America, in W'hich refrigerating-plants have given place to ammunition-rooms and ladies' boudoirs to sleeping quarters of sooty men.

It was to such a boat that I was invited, not one of the Poga-boats, otherwise known as "Spit-kids" — which is Navy for the happily obsolete cuspidor — but to quite the smallest vessel in which it has even been my fortune to sail the high seas — yet we carried, or crowded, seventy men. Moreover, in rough weather we had a roll of forty-seven degrees, and if you don't believe it, you should come aboard and watch the inclinometre.

"Four-Stripes" (it is thus irreverently, but no less loyally, that the crew, with an eye to his insignia, speak of their Captain, just as they call a lieutenant-commander "Two-and-a-Half," and a junior lieutenant "Dot - and - Carry - One") — Four - Stripes showed all that was to be shown, from the "pills"

with which the submerged submarine is treated — pills known by the initial letters of their component explosives — to the bridge, whereof I was given the freedom. He told me of torpedoed steamers' boats with dead men in them — not always dead from exposure; of many men in life-preservers picked up after almost incredible hours in the water; but he spoke only under compulsion of his own experiences, and he mentioned with a smile the reason for isolating some rescued sailors from his crew :

''They weren't very clean men," he explained. "They were covered with what our boys call shirtsquirrels."

The chief quartermaster approached the navigator :

'Twelve o'clock, sir, and the chronometre is wound." He didn't say "the chronometre is round," as the traditional green man does.

The announcement was repeated to the Captain. "Make it so," said he.

"Sound eight bells," said the navigating officer to the chief quartermaster.

One of the forecastle men came up to me:

"Mess-gear set, sir. Will you take chow with us, sir?"

I took it, and I have rarely eaten a better cooked meal, or a more enlightening one. We fed in a dark hole among updrawn canvas bunks ; when anything went wrong, it was "pardon me," and there was some discussion of the technical veracity of Kipling's sea-verse; but the immediate vocabulary was entirely local. Can you, gentle reader, translate 'Tut a fair wind behind the lighthouse?" I can — now; it means "pass the salt-cellar." And, though you may understand ''spuds" and guess that "red lead" is catsup, which it hugely resembles, and that "shoestrings" are — or is — spaghetti, I venture to doubt that your perspicacity would divine that "slumgullion" is beef stew; "railroad hash," a mixture of "spuds" and large lumps of beef; "canned Bill," canned corned beef; "Mulligan," shredded Bill and onions, and that "fish-eyes" are tapioca pudding.

You think that these men spun wild yarns of adventure for my credulous ears? They didn't; they are living adventure — what they talked about was coaling ship.

"On a boat like this," said one of them, "every man's a 'swipe' " — by which he meant a coal-passer — "for we have to coal by hand. We do it each time we come into port. Passing coal! Some of us were more used to selling bonds, but we're all on to the job by now. We started in the first day aboard. The barges come up, one on each side, and on each side there are four men shovelling into the baskets, four men passing the baskets overhead to the deck — you have to heave them three feet above your head — two passing on deck and two dumping; twenty- four in all. We coaled from 7 :30 a. m. to lip. M. one hundred and seven tons, and we did it

WITH THE SUICIDE FLBET 7

at an average rate of two hundred baskets in nine minutes, too. Get on to my eyes ; don't I look like a movie-idol ?'*

I had noticed this before: at the lids* edge, at the lashes' roots, each man's eyes were delicately blacked as if by a makeup-pencil. It was the residium of coal that none can remove.

"When you're all in from passing coal, and black from hair to toenails, you quit and swab-up the decks ; Field-day, we call it, scrubbing-up ships and clothes ; 'piping down' ; I had some sympathy for the Dutchman before I got on this job, but after coaling ship for the first day, they'd got my angora; it was *Kill the kaiser' for me."

Who are these boys? The strangest of mixtures. Most of them were bred to the sea, but though all are good sailors now, some, at the start, were amateur yachtsmen, and one or two didn't know, as they put it, "which the sharp end of the ship was." Eighty per cent, of our crew were old hands, but we had a Philadelphia policeman and a Texan ranger: our first boatswain's mate had his sheepskin from Cornell ; there was a Lehigh senior in the forecastle and a Harvard postgraduate assisting in the radio-room.

"She has a good roll," I sputtered to one of the men on watch as I "went up topside," which is to say, as I clambered to the bridge.

"Yes, sir," was that common seaman's answer. "She always had that reputation as a yacht. My parents told me so : they used to cruise in her."

A moment later, below me, a petty officer was shouting to a grimy gob :

"Hey " (and the tars name was that of one of

America's best-known yachtsmen) ; **that you with them dirty shoes muddying up this deck ? Go below an' take 'em off !" He turned to me : *'You see, the Black Gang — that's the stokers an' men that works around the ketdes, the engines, I mean — they comes up for a breath o' air in their 'steamin'-shoes,' the shoes they wear at work, an' they're all lousy with oil an' coal."

"Bathing in a bucket !" I heard that yachtsman remark : "Two quarts of water twice a day ! I'll never get used to 5 :30 in the morning and cold water on my feet." But he laughed as he said it, and there wasn't a more able worker aboard.

Another hand put it to me in this fashion :

"So many days afloat, and so many in port, while another section of the fleet's at sea; that's the rule here, and when you're at sea with these boats, you're on the job every minute. It's 'Merry Christmas' get busy,' and 'Knock off work— -and carry pig-iron.' All the time, if there's nothing else to do, you can 'break out' — I mean you can get — a pot of red lead and paint a protecting coat of it over some of the ironwork. When we're in harbour, we have our Rope- Yarn Sunday, which is what we call our midweek half -holiday; but, except for liberty-parties ashore, that's about our limit. Afloat, the limit of work is the limit of endurance ; but that's what we're

The bridge of one of the suicide fleet here for, and even if we don't get any brass bands and cheering crowds in this service, we're not kicking/'

"Rise and shine," "Show a leg," "Up all hammocks," "Heave out and lash to," "Grab a sock" — these are all Suicide Fleet slang for what the soldiers call reveille ; but reveille does not begin the mosquitoman's day, because the day of the Mosquito Flotilla is continuous. Once in the schedule's cycle, a man is in the "Admiral's Watch" — passing an entire night abed — but that luxury is inevitably balanced by the "Admiral's Watch with the Belly Out," which is the watch that runs from midnight until four.

You are convoying merchantmen and transports, and these ply on forever; you are chasing submarines, and the submarine is always at his task ; therefore, your work is endless, and endless the strain of it. In every weather, bridge and decks are lined with lookouts, day and night ; night and day the gun crews stand to their guns, and from sun to sun the stokers shovel and the "greasers" oil; and the long monotony is a monotony of which every slow moment may well be your last. You are there to watch and rescue; there is none that will watch or rescue you.

Scouring the horizon with aching eyes, while the sickening deck heaves under them, while the sun blisters or the icy rain cuts at their faces and eats through sou'wester, sheepskin- jacket and hip-boots — looking, looking, always looking — seated in the close radio-room with the tumult of clashing calls pricking at eardrums and stabbing brain-centres — listening, listening, always listening — penned in the stinking sweat and heat of the clanging, crowded fire-room, where the air is so full of dust that it passes to the lungs in gulps and lumps — with straining naked back tossing in coal — always feeding the never-surfeited fires, always knowing that, at the next toss, the ocean's top may descend and crush them under tons of water: these are the men of the Suicide Fleet. At sea, they never sleep with their clothes off, never work but with their life-preservers bulkily on. Lonely, determined, unpraised, unknown — and then a few days in an alien port, where the Y. M. C. A. was their first hope of social salvation; that registers their emotional experience.

'The minute they get ashore, their one object seems to be to buy everything in sight," an Association worker told me. "They all want to get rid of their 'bunker-plates' (the French five and ten centime pieces), and they're spoiling the town's children by tossing these coppers away. Many of them know the French language, which is complex ; none knows the French money, which is simplicity itself."

One of them on our boat has let me read and make extracts from his diary — they have the lonely man's passion for keeping a journal. "You won't find anything in it," he said; but some things I found that, originally set down in utter unconsciousness of their dramatic values, seem to me to indicate better than anything any outsider could say the spirit of the service. I quote tliem now :

"April 5th. — President Wilson issued a proclamation calling for volunteers for the army and navy. I guess I ought to go. . . .

"May 5th. — Some of our fellows are quitting college to go to the officers' training camps, but I feel as if it would be better to get in right away, even if I do have to go as an enlisted man. . . .

"May 18th.— Biff, 'K' and I came from Philadelphia to New York to enlist in the Mosquito Fleet, which is to convoy boats and chase subs. Biff was the only one to pass the physical exam., and after being rejected, I went back on the afternoon train.

"June 25th. — I came here (New York) to have an operation so as to be eligible for service. . . ."

Another date, at sea: "The engine-room force, with w^hich I am quartered amidships, is a very motley crowd. What most of them lack in real toughness they try to make up in conversation : the really tough ones are the less objectionable, as is usually the case, but they're all made of the right stuff. We had 'abandon ship' drill to-day : I'm stationed on the bridge and in the last boat to go, so if we do get smashed, I'll be pretty sure to have a chance to see all that happens."

Another : "Now I know what real fog-banks are. This morning, when I got up at 3 :30 to take the 4-8 watch, w^e couldn't see fifty feet ahead of us and were in a driving rain. I got into trouble right off the bat. We had been ordered by the flagship to take 'dipsey' soundings every thirty minutes. At 4:15, I got ready to take one by the Lord Kelvin machine, with B — and G — helping. I let the lead go over the side and told B — to pay out the line easily. He promptly let go the handle, and the whole thing (400 fathoms) went overboard before we could check it. We were nearly an hour getting it in, and the wire nearly cut my hands to pieces.

K sighted a German sub this p. m., which

turned out to be a whale."

Another: ''Yesterday Harold R , in the

radio-room, intercepted an S. O. S. signal from some vessel that gave its name in code, and nothing more. As she didn't send her position, we couldn't do anything. This morning, we passed bits of wreckage and four empty life-preservers."

Three entries follow : *'Some storm ! Wind about 100 miles an hour. Maybe she doesn't roll! Eating is surely a problem. The dishes will not stay on the table, and most of the time is spent dodging cups of coffee. It is an interesting game to divert food and drink down one's neck inside instead of out, and eternal vigilance is the price of a stomachful instead of a lapful. . . .

"All but six of the crew have been sick. For three days we have had our meals standing up, hanging on by one hand to a stanchion or post and to a plate of sandwiches with the other. Tables and benches are useless. . . ,

"The attitude of the boys is peculiar. All through the stress and strain of the storm and the uncertainty of our weathering it, the talk was not about the storm, or even submarines, but about food.'*

In port: "The came in to-day. They

picked up seventeen survivors of a torpedoed ship and passed a small boat with four corpses in the bottom. . . . One of my friends is in trouble: he wrote home to his girl and home to his dad, and now comes a letter from his girl saying she got the letter meant for his dad, and what his dad will say, God only knows. That's one of the troubles with having to post your letters unsealed for censorship. If the censor's too tired, he may put them back in the wrong envelopes, and maybe he'll do it anyway just for a joke.

"Another friend has dinner regularly on shore with a French family — two girls and mother. He can't speak a word of French, and they can only muster 'Good luck' when the wine is negotiated, and 'Good night' when adieus are said. The father and two brothers have been killed in the war, and these people are most grateful to all the Americans that are coming to help win it."

Again : "Returning from liberty, there were too many in our whaleboat, so about eight or nine of the men manned the dory. Just past the chateau, a French tug ran the dory down and smashed it. Two of our men, Olkin and Babb, couldn't swim, but Casey got 'Oil Can' and Fass got Babb." ...

At sea again : "Nothing exciting to-day to lessen the monotonous strain of being constantly on the alert. One has to notice the smallest things in the water and report them immediately to the bridge, especially toward dark and dawn, when the subs are most active. Birds have a habit of clustering around a periscope, and sharks often follow Fritz, looking for grub, so everything one sees on the surface must be mentioned at once."

The night of the day on which I read that diary was drawing to a close. We had seen into safety the "one-lunger" — the single-funneled — tramp, which was our particular care, and w^atched it limp to the haven where it would be. ("These days," said Four-Stripes, "they're putting every cripple in the ocean if it can go only on crutches.") Then we turned about and w^orked out of sight of land. Soon a faint gray-pink would flush the east, but now, even from the bridge on which I was standing, there was visible only the leaden sea, splashed by a broad streak of moonlight, against which, as w^e made our way toward it through the darkness, our forward spars and rigging swayed in silhouette.

"Have we any chance of picking up a sub?" I wondered.

Four-Stripes explained that it w^asn't so much a case of picking up as running down; when we heard of a submarine, we must race toward it, and when we sighted it, we must pounce upon the spot where it submerged.

"But I believe they have orders to run at sight of us," he said. "You see, we're so small and so lightdraft as to be a poor mark, and they don't like v/hat they call our S^asser boom-booms.' " There were unpublishable reasons why, just there and then, it was a little difficult to get distress calls. *'But there are three submarines operating somewhere near here," said Four-Stripes, ''and of course we ofhcers are just as anxious as the men to fill our bag with them."

''What's the call?" I asked, "the warning — that you get when one's reported?"

"That's no secret and no code; the subs know it as well as we do : 'Alio, 'Alio, 'Alio — and then the location in plain figures."

A speaking-tube beside him uttered a faint twitter. He bent to it.

"That was the radio-room talking then," said Four-Stripes, as he raised his face to me.

He pulled a signal lever; he issued quiet orders. Our tiny boat spun about in the water ; men darted silently out of hatches until the deck was alive with them, each at his prescribed position. The ship plunged upon a new tack; from prow to stern the water boiled beside us.

"What was it," I ventured, "that the radio-room had to report?"

"Three 'Alios and a location," said Four-Stripes. "We're racing for that location now."

They coal us in Latin, they S7vab up in Greek, They're gun'ale-deep hook-learned, the guys!

You can't understand half the language they speak, They've tortoise-shell specks on their eyes;

But, once up against it, they surely make good, An' I'd hack the hull lot anyzvhere:

In a squall or a scrap, he it well understood. Them kids out o' college is there!

— College Kids.

Chapter II The College Kids And Their Shipmates

I HAVE said that the personnel of the Suicide Fleet was composed of all sorts of men. That is true, but to a great extent it was composed of men, young men or men above the draft age, who might easily have had a higher rank in one branch or other of the service. They might, for instance, have waited and gone to the officers' training camps that were everywhere to open; instead, however, they enlisted as common seamen, and now they are so serving while hundreds of their friends are coming over with commissions in the Army.

There is Vincent Astor, serving as ensign on what was once his own yacht. There is a lad from Tennessee, who, writing his first letter home and describing the ocean to his inland family, said that it was "just the same color as Barlowe's Creek, but wider.'* There is young Farwell, now, if you please, deservedly a lieutenant-commander, once sent home from Annapolis because his sight was too poor, and then giving up a newly-acquired law-practise in order to take war-service on a patrol-ship. I know a promising architect, a Beaux Arts graduate, whom I discovered repainting the water-worn side of the vessel on which he was a member of the Black