Less than a month after the United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, six U.S. destroyers crossed the Atlantic, entered the Celtic Sea gateway to wartime Britain and the battlefields of France, and arrived at Queenstown (today Cobh) in southern Ireland. They were the first of 47 to join the British in protecting Allied shipping from submarine attack. Asked how much time the Americans would need in order to begin patrols, Commander Joseph K. Taussig surprised the British admiral with the now-famous reply: “We are ready now, sir.”
Ready indeed, but they were ill-equipped by modem standards. During this infancy period in antisubmarine warfare, for 18 months these little ships steamed out from their base on the estuary of the harbor of Cork into rain and fog and heavy seas with no instruments to spot a submarine except the eyes of their crews. When they did find one, they were better equipped to hinder or warn it away with gunfire than to position and sink it.
At Queenstown, the U.S. destroyermen learned, tested, and innovated. Under the considerate hand of British Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, an affection and respect grew between the two navies that would survive the frictions of the 1920s and contribute to their forehanded division of naval responsibilities when facing the rise of German and Japanese expansionism in the 1930s.
From the beginning of World War I, U-boats were active in the approaches to England and France, and only seven of them were known to have been captured or sunk in 1914. Construction of large U-boats proceeded at more than 40 per year, the smaller U-B submarines at 25 per year, and mine-laying submarines at about 30 per year. Since 1 February 1917, when Berlin illegally unleashed unrestricted undersea warfare, submarines swarmed the sea. Half of the more than 100 large U-boats hunted south and west of the British Isles and along the French northwest coast. Germany was winning the war at sea and—in part owing to the effects of that effort—on the ground in Europe. Losses of Allied and neutral merchant ships were growing, and the Allies were feeling the pinch of lost supplies by the time the U.S. destroyers arrived.
From a monthly average through September 1916 of 76 ships of about 153,000 tons, losses had swelled to 234 ships in February 1917 at 536,000 tons, in March to 571,000 tons, and in April to 373 ships of nearly a million tons. At that rate, the irreducible minimum of surviving shipping would have been reached by November. The British were holding the bulk of their naval forces, including destroyers, facing the North Sea to meet any further sortie of the German High Seas Fleet (only beaten back, not decisively defeated, at Jutland the year before), but U.S. commitment persuaded London to intensify its effort on the Atlantic approaches.
The little ships at Queenstown, along with new and improved tactics, turned the tide. At first, the transports and cargo ships were sent over dispersed routes, and destroyers carried out barrier patrols to impede submarine access to the sea lanes. Later, as more destroyers arrived—swelling the Queenstown numbers to 37—merchant ships were grouped in convoys and escorted by destroyers. Further afield, minefields and nets were laid to block the German U-boats from reaching open waters. Radio intercepts were productive, although the locations they revealed were sometimes false and too ill-defined to be tracked. Intelligence was collated in a convoy room, and a new plans section analyzed the patterns that would be used to divert convoys or direct force to the danger areas. Tentative trials prepared submarines and aircraft to find and sink a few U-boats such that most others kept a distance and safe shipping was essentially restored. The measure of success for destroyer operations became less the numbers of submarines sunk and more the uninterrupted voyages of ships, troops, and supplies to the Allied peoples and to the war fronts. The Queenstown radius, covering the entry routes into Britain and France through the Celtic Sea, became decisive. Two million soldiers were moved without loss from North America to Europe, and the attrition of cargo ships dwindled away.
Exemplifying this decisive battle for the seas—and carrying its own special measure of drama and tragedy—is the story of the USS Jacob Jones (DD-61). A shadow of what lay ahead for her and her crew had been cast by an extraordinary coincidence in early October 1916. On the 7th, German Kapitanleutnant Hans Rose took his U-53 into the port of Newport, Rhode Island, for the day, interrupting the first long-range, undersea probe along the U.S. coast. Designed to attack ships, the one-year-old, 712-ton U-boat was 214 feet long, could reach 17 knots on the surface and 9 knots underwater, and was fitted with two 3.4-inch guns (for use against unarmed targets on the surface) and four 20-inch torpedo tubes from which her best and longest-running torpedo could kill at 1,050 yards. Escorting visiting U.S. officers on board his ship, Rose met the captain and executive officer of the Jacob Jones, which had been commissioned at Philadelphia only three months earlier and had entered Newport for logistics after operations at sea.
Her skipper, Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, was the brother of Ensign Worth Bagley, a former U.S. Naval Academy football star who had been killed in the Spanish-American War. The executive officer was Lieutenant Norman Scott, seven years junior to Bagley and already a veteran of six years at sea and three in these little ships. At the close of his visit, Rose cruised south and proceeded to punctuate his message to the United States by sinking five steamships, under British, Dutch, and Norwegian flags, just outside U.S. territorial waters. By the end of the war, he sank a total of 210,000 tons, placing him fourth in the hierarchy of German submarine aces.
These images of asymmetrical preparations for war at sea were given light and a corrective impulse by the start of destroyer operations from Queenstown. Making persistent forays into the contested waters, the destroyers patrolled and, from the summer onward, escorted convoys as well. While on escort duty, the Jacob Jones rescued 305 crewmen on 19 October from the torpedoed auxiliary cruiser Oram. On the afternoon of 17 November, in a convoy escort group of five U.S. and two British destroyers, the Jacob Jones helped comer a submerged U-boat sighted by her sister destroyer, the Fanning (DD-37), which launched a depth-charge attack that forced the U-58 into surrender.
In early December, as part of an escort of six destroyers, the Jacob Jones guarded a large troop convoy from west of Ireland into the French port of Brest. The destroyers then left Brest independently to return to Queenstown. En route on 6 December, the Jacob Jones conducted a normal surveillance patrol, took target practice, fixed the ship’s early-evening position south of the Isles of Scilly, and followed a northwest course, zigzagging at 13 knots. All other ships of the independent group were out of sight ahead. Kapitanleutnant Rose in the U-53 was nearby but undiscovered. The two captains were about to cross paths under circumstances far different from their earlier encounter in Newport, in a tragedy ennobled by courage in adversity— and by an act of extraordinary chivalry.
At 1530, through a light mist, Rose sighted the Jacob Jones about six miles to the southwest. The U-53 submerged, its electric motors set at full speed to close from its location ahead. Using his periscope sparingly, Rose approached the attack point and at 1620 fired a 40-knot torpedo from 1,050 yards. The torpedo alternately broached and submerged. After sighting it at 700 to 800 yards away, bearing one point abaft the starboard beam and heading for amidships, the bridge crew put the ship’s rudder over hard left and telegraphed “emergency speed” twice to the engine room. As the ship veered left and gained speed, the torpedo broached clear of the water a short distance away. It submerged about 50 or 60 feet from the ship and—about 32 seconds after first being sighted—struck approximately three feet below the waterline in the fuel oil tank between the auxiliary room and the engine room. The after compartment, fuel tank, auxiliary room, and engine room flooded immediately, and the ship settled quickly so that the main deck was awash up to the after deck house. She then subsided more gradually.
As a result of the explosion, the deck over the after crew space and the fuel tank just forward of it blew clear for a space athwartships of about 20 feet, and the auxiliary room was wrecked. The starboard after torpedo tube blew into the air. No fuel oil ignited, and apparently no ammunition exploded. The depth charges in the fantail chutes were set on ready, but the rising water and heavy damage aft denied access to make them safe. The blast carried away the mainmast and with it the radio antennae, knocking out all electric power and preventing the transmission of an SOS. Alternative efforts to connect the gunsight-lighting batteries to send out a low-power message failed for lack of time as the ship sank. In the interim, a crewman fired two rounds from the No. 4 gun with the hope of attracting attention of some ship nearby. But no other ship was in sight.
Amidst all this devastation, the crew launched boats and rafts, set adrift circular life belts from the bridge, and cast overboard several splinter mats from the outside of the bridge to hold men up until they could reach the rafts. Weighted confidential publications were thrown over the side. These actions consumed the eight-minute interval between the ship’s being torpedoed and her sinking at about 1629. As the Jacob Jones settled rapidly, her captain ran along the deck ordering the officers and men remaining on board to jump over the side. By that time, most of those not killed outright by the explosion had cleared the ship and were floating on rafts or wreckage.
The Jacob Jones sank stem-first and twisted slowly through nearly 180 degrees as she swung upright. From that nearly vertical position—bow in the air to about the forward funnel—she went straight down. Before the ship reached the vertical position, her depth charges exploded, killing a number of men in the water and partially paralyzing or dazing others—including the captain—who were swimming or floating nearby. The survivors joined the rafts and helped one another on board. Of the three rafts launched, one floated off when the ship sank. The motor dory (with hull undamaged and the engine out of commission) floated clear, as did the punt and wherry. The punt was wrecked beyond usefulness, but the wherry, leaking badly, was still of considerable use in getting men to the rafts. The whaleboat was launched but capsized soon afterward, having been damaged by the explosion of the depth charges.
About 20 minutes after the Jacob Jones sank, the U-53 appeared on the surface a mile to the westward of the rafts. The U-boat approached gradually to within some 800 yards, where she stopped and picked up two men from the water. She then submerged and was not seen again. The men in the motor dory picked up Bagley, who then supervised the collection of all survivors onto the rafts and directed the reigning junior officer to keep them together. In an attempt to reach the Isles of Scilly (some 40 miles to the north) and bring back help, Bagley, Scott, and four crewmen manning oars took the inoperative motor dory. With the exception of some emergency rations and a half-bucket of water, all provisions including the medical kit were taken from the dory and left on the rafts. No apparatus of any kind could be used for night signaling.
After the captain and his small crew had rowed 20 hours through cold, inclement weather, steering by stars and wind direction, a small British patrol vessel picked them up at 1300 on 7 December, about six miles south of St. Mary’s Island in the Scillys. The British crew informed Bagley that the other survivors had been rescued. At 2000 on 6 December, the SS Catalina picked up one small raft that had been separated from the others. After a wet, freezing night during which some of the sailors died of exposure or exhaustion, HMS Camellia retrieved the remaining survivors at 0830, 7 December.
Unknown to the Jacob Jones’s complement was that the British launched a rescue mission the evening of 6 December based on a German message alerting the British station at Land’s End that a sinking had occurred. In an unexpected and gallant gesture, Kapitanleutnant Rose had set aside his orders to wage implacable war and placed his U-boat in danger so that he could radio the position where he had just sent the torpedoed Jacob Jones. Out of a total of seven officers and 103 enlisted men on board the ship, two officers and 64 enlisted men died, each accounted for by one or more of the survivors. Through eight minutes of hell and, for the survivors, a solitary, miserable night, many of the men rose to the challenge, having faith in themselves and in their shipmates.
In the grand scope of the war, the loss of the Jacob Jones was in no way decisive, but to the American public it shone as the first sinking of a U.S. warship in the war, an event all the more noteworthy as it happened before U.S. troops were fighting on the bloody battlefields of France. Newspapers across the country reported the event in bold headlines. The first accounts foreshadowed the large loss of life and noted the apparent deaths of the captain, executive officer, and their companions, who were missing from the lists of the rescued. The press noted the coincidences: Bagley’s ship was the first sunk in this war, and his brother was the first to die in the preceding war; Captain Jacob Jones lost his 18-gun sloop to a 74-gun British ship-of-the- line, and his namesake ship was sunk by an invisible German submarine; U.S. naval officers met politely with Rose at Newport, and he returned the civility in the Celtic Sea. Two days later, their landing in the Scillys was noted publicly, and a day later a final toll was rung for the crew of this Queenstown destroyer.
In the aftermath of the event in the Celtic Sea, the survivors of the Jacob Jones gathered in the tender Melville (AD-2) at Queenstown for medical attention and to collect individual experiences to reconstruct the event. A subsequent review by Admiral William S. Sims, Commander, Naval Forces Europe, from 1917 to 1918, ruled that Bagley’s handling of the torpedo attack was everything he expected in the way of efficiency, good judgment, courage, and chivalrous action.
Coincidence or Fate?
More coincidences later surrounded this event. The ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, and her executive officer, Lieutenant Norman Scott, both continued their careers in destroyers. (Bagley already had commanded one and later commanded three others as well as divisions and a squadron of them, and the cruiser Pensacola [CA-24].) The two remained lifelong friends, and their sons became classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy. The date of 7 December, when Bagley rowed with Scott toward the Scilly Islands, seemed fated: In 1920, Bagley’s first son was born on that date, and on that day in 1941, his battleship division and flagship Tennessee (BB- 43) bore the brunt of the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. A year later, on 13 November 1942, Rear Admiral Norman Scott was mortally wounded on the bridge of his flagship, the Atlanta (CL-51), his last heroic role in the ship battles that ultimately repaid the debt owed the Japanese Navy.
In late February 1942—not three months after the U.S. entry into World War II—the second destroyer to bear the name of the ill-fated captain, Jacob Jones (DD-130), was lost to enemy action in the Atlantic, torpedoed while on solitary patrol (like her predecessor) by the German submarine U-578 off Cape May, New Jersey, with heavy loss of life. No other ship has ever been christened Jacob Jones.
W. Bagley