From 1907 to 1909 the Great White Fleet of U.S. battleships made its debut on the global stage with an around-the-world cruise. The ships completed their voyage at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on Washington's Birthday in 1909, two weeks before the conclusion of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. During Roosevelt's nearly eight years in office, the Navy commissioned 16 battleships, each armed with four 12-inch guns as the main battery. All were rendered obsolete when the first two U.S. dreadnought-type battleships, the South Carolina and Michigan, joined the fleet in early 1910. Each of the new ones mounted eight 12-inch guns.
In the decade that followed, the Navy commissioned a number of progressively bigger and more modern battleships. New ships with 14-inch guns became known as "superdreadnoughts." Even though the earlier ships were outdated in terms of weaponry, they were still relatively young chronologically. Thus the Navy continued to operate a mix of dreadnoughts and predreadnoughts until after World War I. For the battleship crew members of the 1910s decade, daily life was dramatically different from that experienced by the men and women who operate today's gas-turbine or nuclear-propelled, highly computerized electronic marvels that can launch weapons at great distances from their targets.
Matching individual traits with specific billets in that long-ago era was far less scientific than it is now. For instance, William Badders enlisted as an apprentice seaman in 1918 and went through boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois. During training Badders was part of a group of 300 to 400 young recruits who were lined up on a big parade field. A couple of men walked through the ranks and felt the muscles of the recruits. The ones who appeared strongest were culled out and sent to become firemen third class instead of apprentice seamen. As Badders remembered years later: "They figured we had muscle enough to do the job and would grow up in it. And that was that."
From there he went to a receiving ship in Norfolk and was assigned to the USS Wisconsin, a coal-burning predreadnought. The new men went aboard and were ordered to the forecastle to fill out forms. While this was in process, one of the old-timers in the crew approached Badders and said, "Hey, kid, you don't want to shovel coal on this ship, do you?"
Badders replied, "No, not if I can help it."
The older man said, "Okay, when you fill that form out, you tell them that you took a lot of mechanical training in high school, manual training, that you're mechanically inclined, and all that."
Badders replied, "Maybe that isn't true."
His adviser added, "Nobody's going to check it, and that may get you out of the fireroom and get you a better job."
So the recruit filled out the form in that vein and wound up in an engine room rather than in a boiler room, where his shipmates performed a truly arduous task. As he put it, "I found out later that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, because the fellows shoveling coal on that ship really had to work."
The coal-burning ships were, in the words of one veteran, "coal eaters." The replenishment vessels of the era included colliers in some cases and coal barges in others. (One wag said that the magazine title Collier's Weekly was an accurate description of how often the battleships had to be alongside the replenishment ships.) In the case of barges, crewmen shoveled coal into bags that were then transferred to the battleship and dumped out on deck. Then crewmen used wheelbarrows to move the coal to chutes that led down to the below-decks bunkers where it was stored. The colliers had clamshell buckets that dumped the coal directly onto the deck of the receiving ship, and from there it was transferred below.
Still more shovelers were down in the bunkers. When the black lumps came rattling down the chute, men below used shovels to move them to the sides and corners of the spaces. Coaling a ship was an all-hands evolution that included both enlisted men and officers as worker bees. Members of the ship's band were exempt because they played music during the process to provide a diversion for those who moved the coal. The men who grew filthy doing the heavy work sometimes got their revenge by throwing lumps of coal at the musicians.
The process went on for hours, sometimes in intense heat. On board the Wisconsin in 1916, Midshipman Stuart Murray was on a cruise to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the refueling, the wind was blowing as the sun beat down, covering the men in a sweaty coating of black dust. Even after the men showered, sometimes in salt water, they found it tough to get the residue out of hair, ears, eyebrows, and crevices in the skin. Nearly 30 years later, Murray was well past such concerns. In September 1945 he was commanding officer of the Navy's most modern battleship, the USS Missouri (BB-63), when she served as the site of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.
The firerooms were humid and often beastly hot. Some men passed out because the conditions were so unbearable. While a battleship was operating, crewmen shoveled coal out of the bunkers and onto the deck plates in front of the boilers. Fireman Third Class Charles Herget reported for duty on board the Delaware and was not so fortunate as William Badders had been. He was sent to a fireroom that had four boilers, each of which had four firebox doors. Shipmates were stripped to the waist as they fed fuel into the flames. He soon joined them and many years afterward still recalled his thought process of the time: "Hell can't be any worse than this." Fred Edwards, who made a cruise on board the Michigan in 1920, observed, "Those coal-burners were man-killers, absolutely man-killers."
In time the new men learned that there was an art to handling the shovel so that the coal spread evenly over the grates. Another tool was the slice bar, a heavy piece of steel perhaps a dozen feet long. Firemen used the bar to expose more of the coal to air in order to facilitate burning. Naturally, the faster those on the bridge ordered a ship to go-usually up to around 18 to 19 knots-the more steam was needed and thus a higher rate of passing coal. There was some respite during slower operations, and the fireroom crew could work at a more relaxed pace.
The combustion process produced a residue known as clinkers, pieces of slag from which the energy had been extracted by the burning. An early-morning routine at sea was disposal of this by-product. Men put handkerchiefs over their faces as they used long-handled hoes to rake the clinkers out onto the floor plates. A fireman stood alongside with a hose; when the water hit the hot residue it turned to steam. Men then broke up the cooled clinkers and shoveled them into an ash chute that led to a weather deck outside. The watertight chute covers were opened, and then fire-main salt-water pressure pushed the clinkers overboard, somewhat akin to the process in a garbage disposal.
Naturally, this morning ritual was noisy as the heavy pieces rattled along the metal chute during their journey off the ship. The Michigan's chaplain said that until he had heard the morning disposal process in action he never really appreciated the line in a Rudyard Kipling poem that went, "An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!"
The steam supplied by the boilers went to the engines. In the older battleships these were of the reciprocating type, known as triple expansion. They had huge cylinders with correspondingly large pistons that turned a crankshaft, as in a gasoline-powered automobile. Through reduction gears, the engines turned the ship's propellers. The steam moved through a succession of stages in the engine as more and more energy was drawn from it. The new dreadnought types generally had steam turbines, which took up less space than the reciprocating engines. In 1916, with the commissioning of the Nevada and Oklahoma, new U.S. battleships began to be fueled by oil. The change was a godsend for the fireroom personnel, though the coal burners remained in use for some time afterward.
Habitability was a good deal different than in present-day warships. When men moved from ship to ship, they transported their possessions in seabags that had hammocks lashed around them. Rather than having bunks, men slung their hammocks from pairs of hooks in the berthing compartments and made them taut. They were usually several feet off the deck, and getting into one was something of an art form. Sailors had to grab angle irons and swing themselves up and into the hammocks.
For Ray Tarbuck, on board the Ohio in 1918, it was a challenge, especially after coming off a night watch when the ship was darkened. He had to grope among the hammocks of his shipmates until he found his own and got in. Then, as he remembered years later, it seemed that he had barely gotten to sleep when it was time for reveille.
A master-at-arms, equipped with a wooden stick, would bark the order: "Heave out and lash up; hit the deck." If any crewmen were slow to respond, the master-at-arms would thump the bottoms of their hammocks with his stick. After they had gotten up, the men had to take down the hammocks and stow them around the sides of the berthing compartment in areas known as hammock nettings. They stowed their uniforms in seabags rather than lockers and kept their personal possessions in ditty boxes.
In many cases the berthing compartments were also where the men ate their meals, family style, at eight-man tables. The tables and benches were stored against the overhead between meals. Mess cooks fetched food from the galley and served it. The incentive for good service was that those at the tables gave the mess cooks tips on payday. In addition to the food officially served in the messes, there was a further source of nourishment in the form of purloined canned goods.
In 1918 Midshipman Arthur McCollum made a cruise in the Ohio. When working parties were loading stores, he said, it was easy to let a crate fall down a ladder and break open. He remembered a time when the men of the crew made off with half a dozen cans of pears, a considerable delicacy. Or so they thought till they opened the apparently unmarked cans. Their glee turned to disgust when they discovered they had pilfered sauerkraut instead.
Food varied in quality from ship to ship, though officers generally ate better than enlisted men and certainly in nicer surroundings. Until 1914, when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels outlawed wine messes on board ships, officers could enjoy spirits with their meals. Midshipman John McCrea was on cruise to the Mediterranean that summer on board the predreadnought Idaho and observed a consequence of the change firsthand.
War clouds were gathering that summer, and the potential combatants sought to build up their naval strength. Greece was in the market for battleships and purchased the sister ships Mississippi and Idaho from the U.S. Navy. They were not very capable ships, so the United States was happy to unload them. The transfer ceremony for the Idaho, which was held in the port of Villefranche, France, was not a direct navy-to-navy transfer but went instead through the New York Shipbuilding Company. Midshipman McCrea was in the captain's cabin during the ceremony.
After the Idaho was decommissioned, the shipyard man opened a briefcase and produced several bottles of whiskey. Since the ship was no longer part of the U.S. Navy, the ban against drinking no longer applied, and the officers and midshipmen joined the celebration. Then they transferred to the Maine and returned to the United States. By that time World War I had started.
Two years earlier, McCrea had gotten his introduction to battleship life on board the Massachusetts, a relic from the Spanish-American War. His mentor was a red-bearded boatswain's mate with a Norwegian accent. He worked out of a sea chest that was essentially his office. It contained rope yarn and the tools he used for working with pieces of line as well as patterns for making Sailors' uniforms. The enlisted men bought pieces of cloth from the ship's store and used the patterns supplied by the boatswain's mate for cutting and sewing together their uniforms. They lined the jumper pockets with red silk on the left side and green silk on the right-comparable to the red and green running lights each ship sported to let other vessels discern the direction she was heading. For many years in the U.S. Navy, Wednesday afternoon was essentially a half-day off from normal labors and was known as "rope yarn Sunday."
In his conversations with the midshipman, the boatswain's mate lamented that Sailors weren't what they used to be, explaining, "Too many of them can read and write." In fact, the crews had become comprised of an ever-larger proportion of American-born Sailors. In the past, seamen had often migrated between the Navy and merchant marine and were generally drawn from seaports. By the early 20th century, the Navy was recruiting "landsmen" from interior parts of the nation and training them for the life at sea.
Even so, there were still illiterates in battleship crews during the 1910s. On payday each man received his pay in cash, and the paymaster required a receipt to attest to that fact. Midshipman McCrea sometimes had to serve as witness that a man had indeed acknowledged receipt of his pay by making his "mark" on the paper rather than a signature.
Through the decade of the 1910s, the U.S. Navy operated principally in the Atlantic and was based around home shipyards. Only a relatively small proportion of each ship's crew was married. Pay was meager, so that a junior enlisted man-who was provided with free room and board on ship-would find it difficult to support a wife and children ashore. Another complicating factor was the pace of the annual operating schedules that kept the ships on the move.
In 1911 Ensign Bernard Bieri joined the crew of the battleship Delaware, one of the early dreadnought-type ships. The Fleet routine called for leaving the East Coast ports in January and heading for a three-month winter sojourn in the warmer climate of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There the ships did high-speed engineering runs, carried out gunnery exercises, and sent their landing forces ashore. At the time landing parties were made up of both Sailors and members of ships' Marine detachments. Ships carried wheeled field pieces that could be boated ashore for artillery support of the landing forces. In 1914 the landing parties of several battleships faced a real-world test when they were sent ashore in Vera Cruz, Mexico, because of President Woodrow Wilson's sustained unhappiness with the Mexican government then in power. The landing was triggered by an incident that the United States took as an insult. Spirited urban combat ensued.
During the winter stays in Cuba, there was little normal liberty for the battleship Sailors, though some men did reach the port of Santiago in scheduled boat runs. Instead, the crewmen were encouraged to find their diversions on the naval station. Included were sports such as swimming, tennis, baseball, and hiking. Other forms of recreation included "smokers" on board ship in which crew members boxed, wrestled, juggled, did song-and-dance acts, and provided other forms of entertainment. Sometimes screens were erected on deck so crewmen could watch the silent movies that were a staple of the era.
Competition among ships was fostered, both in the professional areas such as gunnery and engineering, as well as in sporting events. Especially popular were races between whaleboats equipped with oars. Ships picked strong, athletic crew members (many with what would later be called six-pack abs) to man the race boats. Crews practiced regularly, and the races themselves often inspired a great deal of betting. Afterward the winners stored their winnings, in silver dollars, in their locked ditty boxes.
After the battleships had gone through their training period, the vessels steamed north for gunnery exercises off the Virginia Capes, an area then known as the "southern drill grounds." During summers, the ships headed, by divisions, for port visits in New England, and in October they generally gathered for a fleet review in which they were moored in the Hudson River off the west side of Manhattan Island. The vessels often sent crewmen ashore to parade in New York City, which was also a great liberty town.
In the autumn and early winter the battleships went into navy yards for repairs and upkeep. For those families that could afford to do so, train travel on the East Coast brought opportunities for togetherness during the operating seasons. After the shipyard work was concluded, it was time to begin the cycle again with a trip to Guantanamo.
As Bieri recounted many years later:
In those days we were allowed no family allowances. Only on shore did you get compensation for quarters, light, and those sort[s] of things-which wasn't very much. When we got an official change of orders or station, we'd get eight cents a mile for traveling expense to pay our own railroad fare. There was no such thing as having your household effects moved by the government. If you had any, you had to move them yourself. All those things came after the First World War.
He also remembered it as a pleasant time to be in the Fleet because the Navy was so small that after a number of years one would get to know a great many of its officers and enlisted men.
In 1911, J. Bernard Walker, the editor of Scientific American magazine, visited the North Dakota, the sister ship of Bieri's Delaware, to observe operations at sea. In the process he experienced much and made careful notes to share with his readers in a five-part series published that autumn. He was especially impressed by the gunnery exercises, for everything else in battleships, including those coal-fired engineering plants, existed for the purpose of getting the guns into action.
Competition among the ships was keen. Inside the main battery turrets were the gun pointer who controlled the elevation of the guns and the trainer who rotated the turrets to the azimuth on which the targets lay. The targets were large wood-and-canvas contraptions towed by tugboats. Periscopes enabled the crewmen to see what was happening outside.
Crewmen down in the ship's magazines and shell decks sent projectiles and cylindrical powder charges up hoists to the turrets. There the turret crews rammed them into the guns, closed the breeches, and fired. The principal method for igniting the powder and sending projectiles on their way was through triggers in the turret with a foot pedal as backup.
Fire control at the time was still rudimentary, though improving. Each ship mounted two circular cage masts, composed of interlaced metal tubing. The top of each mast contained a platform used by spotters. Selected crewmen developed the skill of being able to spot the fall of shot and estimate the distances by which projectiles missed the targets in range and deflection. They then provided corrections that were used in aiming the guns on subsequent shots.
Compared with present-day naval weapons that can reach out hundreds or even thousands of miles from the firing ships, the range of the battleship guns was puny. In 1912, during a test firing in the Chesapeake Bay, the Delaware's 12-inch guns hit the target ship San Marcos from 16,000 yards under controlled conditions. Accuracy in battle might well have been less. As it happened, though, the ships were never really tested. No U.S. battleships fired her main battery in anger between 1898 and 1942.
Editor Walker provided a vivid account of his experience getting to the North Dakota's foretop:
I went forward and climbed the chain ladder that zig-zags inside the forward cage mast and lets you through a trap-door onto the fire-control platform. Just here, in passing, let me tell you, fellow landsmen, that if you wish for a really novel sensation in climbing, you can get it when swinging 100 feet in mid-air from an abominably flexible chain ladder, from which you look down into the black hell-mouth of a smokestack that is doing its best to destroy your fast-expiring sense of balance by belching at you large volumes of hot furnace gas.
For Midshipman Tarbuck in the Missouri in 1918, gunnery practice was part of the routine. The predreadnought was equipped with 6-inch broadside guns. The loaders and rammers were the stronger, more heavily muscled men in the crew. Tarbuck, who was small, thus found himself as pointer, charged with part of the aiming process. He found it a difficult chore because after the first round was fired during an exercise, the resulting smoke obscured the target he was supposed to be shooting at.
When the turrets were firing, the broadside guns weren't, so he took advantage of one opportunity to try to photograph the main battery projectiles in flight. He particularly remembered the occasion:
I had a bellows folding camera. The guns were trained away from me the last time I saw them-this was the after 12-inch turret, but the ship maneuvered in the meantime and the guns trained around toward me and then fired. I found myself on the other side of the deck with no buttons on my jacket and my camera as flat as a pancake. I crawled to the nearest hatch I could find and then I poked my head out to see if anybody had seen me do such a ridiculous thing.
World War I brought a change to the operating routine that had existed before the war. A division of coal-burning battleships was dispatched to Europe to reinforce Britain's Grand Fleet. Other battleships, both older and newer than those deployed, served as training platforms for gun crews and spent their time in the Chesapeake Bay, near Yorktown, Virginia. Once the war ended, the newer battleships went around to be based in California because Japan was perceived as a growing threat.
In 1921, the United States and other major powers held a naval disarmament conference in Washington. It resulted in the Washington Treaty of 1922, which called for the scrapping of some new battleships already under construction plus the destruction of holdovers from the prewar fleet. Among those on the destruction list were the U.S. Navy's first two dreadnoughts, the South Carolina and Michigan. They had been state of the art in battleship technology in 1910. Both were sold for scrap in 1924, when they were barely teenagers.