Early in April 1917, with the so-called Great War in its third year in Europe, two Americans, S. W. Davidson and J. V. Richardson, boarded the U.S. steamship New York bound for Liverpool, England. Because of the tense situation between the United States and Germany, the two men were traveling under assumed names: Davidson was actually Rear Admiral William S. Sims—recently detached from his duty as president of the U.S. Naval War College—and Richardson was his aide. Although the United States was still a neutral party, the winds of war were blowing strongly as the ship made her way across the Atlantic. Germany had recently resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, a “red line” for President Woodrow Wilson, and Sims was sent to England to work with the British should the United States choose to enter the war on the side of the Allies.
Sims was trusted for this unusual assignment because he had a well-earned reputation as an innovator who did not let protocol hinder him from pursuing new ideas. Early in his career, he observed British naval gunnery exercises, concluding that the British methods were superior to those being used by the U.S. Navy at the time. As a mere lieutenant, his attempts at reforming U.S. Navy gunnery were ignored, so he wrote directly to President Theodore Roosevelt, appealing to the Commander-in-Chief to consider the reforms. Roosevelt appointed Sims Inspector of Target Practice, a position in which he was able to implement his ideas and significantly improve his Navy’s gunnery procedures. The President apparently did not fault Sims for jumping the chain of command, subsequently making him his naval aide.
Sims later commanded Torpedo Flotilla, Atlantic Fleet, where he introduced important organizational and tactical changes, earning him a plum assignment as the first captain of the battleship USS Nevada (BB-36), the largest, most powerful ship in the U.S. Navy at the time.
With the New York within three days of her scheduled arrival at Liverpool, word came that the United States had indeed declared war on Germany. Two days later, the New York struck a mine, and Sims and his aide finished the voyage on board an excursion boat that was full of tipsy revelers returning from an Easter holiday on the Isle of Man.
On his arrival in London on 10 April, Sims immediately went to the Admiralty to confer with his old friend Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, by then the First Sea Lord. After brief pleasantries, Jellicoe grimly handed Sims a highly classified memorandum that detailed the latest statistics of the German U-boat campaign. In the first quarter of the year, the Germans had sunk 1.3 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping, and the projected toll for the month of April was nearly a million more tons. Jellicoe informed his friend that unless something was done to counter the submarine threat, Britain would be starved into submission and lose the war.
Sims went to work consulting with his British allies to analyze the problem and concluded that a possible answer was to organize the logistics ships into convoys that could be protected by escorting destroyers and other antisubmarine vessels. The idea fell on deaf ears on both sides of the Atlantic as traditionalists saw convoys as purely defensive and lacking the offense needed to defeat the German marauders, and thought that clustering the ships together would merely supply the Germans with larger targets. There also was some speculation that the merchant captains might well lose more ships from collisions in the tight convoy formations than from the U-boats.
After considerable persuasion, the British and Americans decided to give the idea a try. In July, the first convoy departed the United States, headed for the U-boat infested waters around the British Isles. Three dozen U.S. destroyers that had been previously deployed to Britain sortied from Queenstown, Ireland, to meet the oncoming convoys, escorting them through the most dangerous final leg of the journey, refueling at Queenstown, and then heading out for the next convoy. The effect was dramatic: Losses to U-boats immediately declined, dropping from 20 percent losses in March and April to less than 1 percent by summer.
Britain was saved from impending starvation and, equally important, two million U.S. soldiers were safely transported to Europe to join their new allies in the fight. None of the ships loaded with U.S. troops were lost, and only one U.S. destroyer was sunk after being hit by a German torpedo.
The stalemate that had gone on for more than three years was broken, resulting in a victory over the Germans and their allies by November 1918. While many individuals contributed to the success of the convoy operations, it was William Sims (aka S. W. Davidson) who deserves a lion’s share of the credit. Arriving in Britain incognito, he departed a public hero who returned to his previous assignment as president of the Naval War College, where he remained until his retirement in 1922.
