THE SOUL OF THE SERVICE
By Captain E. P. Jessop, U. S. Navy
Motto: "Lest we forget"
At the present time when the influence of our rapid naval expansion during the Great War and the subsequent demobilization of equal rapidity have left the service shaken to its foundations, uncertain as to the future, harassed by present requirements, and bewildered by the general chaos, it would appear to be in order to attempt to restore orderly and logical thinking on the needs of the service with special reference to measures necessary to prevent permanent injury to service morale and service viewpoint from the peculiar kinds of slackness which any war must develop and which the circumstances of this war did develop to a rather marked degree.
The efficiency of the navy must always rest on the attitude of mind of the commissioned personnel to such a degree as to make all other considerations negligible.
It must be thoroughly appreciated that the officers of the navy are the only persons whose interest in the navy is anything more than temporary, since secretaries of the navy come in and go out with the tide of political preferment with all the attendant civilian organization, and the enlisted personnel is eminently transient.
Such being the case, it is to the officers we must look for the vital spark which is to rejuvenate service morale by the necessary tautening up all along the line.
Before beginning with the enlisted personnel it is necessary that we take the necessary measures to ascertain whether slackness does not exist in the officer personnel and eradicate that. Such a procedure must necessarily involve an open discussion of the principles of training which made our officers so remarkably responsive to the almost impossible demands made upon them by our entry into the war.
For years we had been striving to anticipate the requirements of the next war, and had diligently studied methods of foreign services as well as devising new methods of training and organization with an eye single to the improvement of our service and with the star of battle efficiency for point of aim, but always with the knowledge that in all human probability we were falling far short of a truly comprehensive estimate of the situation, which knowledge, however, only acted as a spur to greater endeavor.
The war is over and we now look back on it in an attempt to discover wherein we have failed and wherein we have succeeded in living up to the high ideal of service which has been driving us on for so many years.
A study of the activities of the officer personnel of the regular navy during the war cannot but impress upon one the assurance that, whatever the cause, they measured up to and beyond our most sanguine expectations, spreading their influence over the raw material which was thrust into their hands to use in lieu of the trained men to whom they had been accustomed, in such a manner as to reduce the deleterious effect of lack of training to a negligible quantity.
It therefore becomes evident that our training prior to the outbreak of war was basically right, and our object now should be to return the service to the road it was traveling before the war with the additional asset of actual war experience to draw upon for improvement.
The proportion of officers of age and experience is not nearly the same as it was prior to the war when compared to the present total number, this being strikingly brought out by the recent general order making the Class of Eighteen eligible for promotion to the rank of senior lieutenant. Prior to the war the Class of Eighteen would now be beginning the last year of the ensigns' cruise, and it would have at least a year or two in the junior lieutenant grade to look forward to before being eligible for promotion to senior lieutenant.
It would seem axiomatic therefore that the training period of officers at sea has practically been done away with by force of circumstances, particularly with regard to those attributes which make the all-round efficient officer and which require, for proper indoctrination, close supervision by the older and more experienced personnel.
In order to rearrange our previously established methods to meet the new condition it will be necessary for us to study and determine just what principles of training of the officer personnel were sufficiently well established prior to the war to have a determining effect upon the standard of ability shown during the war, and which of these principles are now affected by the new condition.
To do this properly it would seem necessary for each of us to go back in our minds to our own beginnings in the service and to decide what conditions and experiences were instrumental in giving us individually the various attributes which we consider had to do with the resultant standard to which we think we measure up.
It must be admitted that we may overestimate our own ability and may think we have attributes which we have not, but that should not prevent us from knowing the parts of our early service life which tended to give us the attributes which we think we have and which we know are the attributes which make for efficiency in the naval officer.
There will of course be differences of opinion as to what these high lights in the character of an officer should be, but a starting point must be had, and the list below expresses as nearly as the writer can his opinion of the most important of those qualities:
- Broadmindedness.
- Zeal.
- Intelligence.
- Ingrained sense of duty.
- Willingness to accept responsibility.
- Knowledge of proper use of authority.
- Fairness.
- Good judgment.
- Decision.
- Sympathetic understanding.
- Technical qualifications.
Many of the above attributes are so closely related that it may seem there is some repetition in the list, but it is believed that they are sufficiently different in spite of their close relation to make it necessary to maintain their separation. No attempt has been made to mention them in order of their importance, and in truth, they all seem so essential as to preclude any such arrangement.
Broadmindedness is essentially a product of age, experience and proper association. No young person is broad minded, but on the contrary all young persons are inclined to be intolerant, hypercritical, and more or less self-sufficient and dictatorial when freed from the curb of superior authority.
Our younger personnel have an added incentive to make them tend toward the ultimate in all the above characteristics in that they are chosen men who have been put through a grind such as no other students in the country except those at West Point have to go through and they distinctly feel themselves to be the "survivors of the fittest" and this gives them, or tends to give them, a "wiser than thou" attitude when thrown with the common herd.
Formerly we have had a remedy for this particular ill in the subordination of the junior officer on board ship.
In the old passed midshipman days when the naval babe was not born with a commission in his hand, springing a full-fledged officer from the foam and froth of an academic education, we had quite an opportunity to apply the hypodermic of disillusionment to this inflated self-esteem, but since that period we have had increasingly less of such opportunity, until to-day we have practically none, and what little we do have is lost in the confusion wrought in our simple sailor mind by the blaze of gold on the sleeve of the infant.
One becomes more and more tolerant as the years accumulate on his shoulders, but only when one is thrown closely with his fellows under supervision, since tolerance is the result of age and properly controlled association, a wearing away of the sharp points by rubbing against those of his brethren, and shipboard is the ideal place for that process, when proper subordination is expected and required of youth.
The first two years at sea in the life of the young officer have more to do with his ultimate efficiency than is generally realized, for it is there that a true subordination and a strict sense of duty can be instilled, and must be if the officer is ever to attain his maximum efficiency in the service, and it is a far simpler thing to effect this with one who is still on probation than with one who has passed the probationary period and whose place in the service is practically assured.
It would appear to be possible to effect this by relegating the newly made ensign to the old subordinate position of the passed midshipman during his first two years, but it is not so simple as it looks, due partly to the assured position in the service conferred by the commission, and partly to an inherent service feeling that a commission stands for certain rights and status to which the old passed midshipman never dared aspire, and regardless of how intangible this service feeling may be, yet it has a concrete effect on the attitude of the older officers, and a resultant deleterious effect on the young.
In addition to the above we have the old requirement of three years as ensign discarded and the young men who should just be passing their final examinations for a commission now receiving their commissions as senior lieutenants. That, it is conceded, is a condition brought on by the war, but all our energies must be bent toward the proper training of these officers of relatively exalted rank when compared to old standards, so that the effect of rank may not have a permanently ill effect upon them.
In all fairness it must be appreciated that this not an attack on the younger generation, nor is it an attempt to hold their supposed deficiencies up to ridicule, but it is simply an expression of opinion as to the effect on the service of certain conditions which are different from conditions before the war, with no question of their necessity at the time, but a great question at the present time as to the effect of their continuance.
The first principle of the old training of the passed midshipman was that he was a subordinate for training. All his activities were supervised and passed upon by the senior officers, and this in no casual manner but with the greatest interest and care.
The generally accepted method of accomplishing this supervision was to assign each midshipman to duty as junior officer of a division, and, as far as possible, have all his duties in association with his divisional officer, thus giving that officer a feeling of responsibility for his midshipman and making a community of interest between the officer and the midshipman, which assisted greatly in educating the latter in all those things of character which cannot be taught from books, but which are so large a part of a naval officer's equipment.
To-day we have practically none of such association since the midshipman is gone and we have instead a young man with a commission in his hand and already established in the service. A young man to whom the wardroom is not more sacred than the steerage and to whom entry into the cabin is no longer a matter to quicken the pulse.
The respect and admiration of the midshipman for the senior watch has long since passed and with it one of the most potent influences in character forming and one for which we have no proper substitute.
The insidious effect of the above condition is very strongly shown by the attitude of the younger officers toward civilians, in that the youngster presumes on his uniform much more than is proper and much more than has heretofore been the case. Several distressing incidents in the above regard have occurred recently in which the officer has shown very markedly that he considered his uniform absolved him from the necessity of ordinary politeness, thus showing a total lack of appreciation of the responsibility imposed by the uniform, both as to conduct and to all the other attributes essential to the gentleman and the officer.
It may well be that the incidents which have come to the attention of the writer are not so indicative of a condition as they appear, but the point at issue is whether the present condition in the service does not tend to increase the liability of such incidents.
Any officer who maintains or attempts to maintain his position in the particular community in which he may be temporarily located, by presuming on his uniform, is not an officer whom the service can afford to retain, since he lacks the instinctive element of gentleness which no other trait can replace. By proper association with his seniors in the service the instinct may be planted in the youth where it has not been before, and can be made to grow where it has lain dormant.
On board ship the life of the young officer for the first two years should be considered one of training, not only by the senior officers but by the young officer himself, and the attitude of the older officers should at all times be such as to impress this on the younger mind, not in a humiliating manner but in a way to cause the youngster to see the necessity of such training.
As stated above, broadmindedness is a product of age and proper association and experience and while age arrives without our interference we must arrange for the last two requirements. There is no doubt that it lies within our power to provide these elements of training if we set about doing it in a systematic manner with a complete appreciation of the condition as it exists. We must therefore set ourselves the task of deciding just what kinds of service employment and what kind of supervision are necessary to accomplish the desired result. We eliminate immediately all shore stations and the sea adjuncts of shore stations as possible places for the training of the newly graduated youngster. These are no places for the young officer to learn any of the lessons of importance in the building of proper naval character.
The things which the young man must now learn cannot be taken from books but must be arrived at by absorption from the seniors surrounding him, and he will absorb little unless those seniors take a sympathetic interest in his training, and this they can properly do only where there are sufficient officers to make it unnecessary to give unsupervised authority. Authority he must be given but it must be supervised in order that he may be held up to the proper appreciation of the responsibility attaching to such authority.
This definitely places him in the large ships of the battle fleets for his first training at sea, but even this will not suffice unless his goings and comings are thoroughly supervised and his duty requirements are made as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
Personal convenience, desires and interests are the enemies of a true sense of duty and these are usually well entrenched by the time training in a sense of duty can be properly said to begin, because it must be admitted that nothing more than the most elementary start in this training can be accomplished at the Naval Academy. This statement will not be received with favor without some explanation.
The Naval Academy is a school, and, as is true of all schools where the students live entirely within the academic limits, the atmosphere will in many ways be artificial. This artificiality is particularly present in the method used to grade the midshipmen and give them standing relative to their fellows.
For this purpose every part of their work is passed upon and a definite mark of proficiency assigned which not only places them in their class but determines whether they may remain in the academy. The passing mark, the 2.5, then becomes the alpha and omega of the desires and ambitions of approximately half the class, while class standing, determined by these marks, becomes the objective of those better fitted by reason of greater intelligence, better previous training, or greater ability in the assimilation of knowledge from books.
As a result everything in the midshipman's mind revolves around the 2.5 or class standing and the question of the usefulness of what he is being taught as it touches his future life in the navy seldom enters his head. This is as true of discipline as of any other study.
In addition to the above, until quite recently, there was no system in the application of discipline at the academy. Each discipline officer applied discipline in his own way and the result was so confusing to the midshipman mind that he gave up hope of understanding it and wormed his way through the maze of orders and requirements in the manner of least trouble to himself, and left the further thrashing out of the reasons why until some future time.
In the old days when the midshipman body was small enough to permit closer association with the officer instructor, socially as well as officially, it was possible to teach the midshipmen by example to a much greater extent than is possible at present when the number in each class is so great as to make it problematical whether the individual midshipman really knows all his own classmates.
To borrow a term from our friends the Boche, "Mass Psychosis" will always tend to prevent a proper grounding in discipline and sense of duty in the midshipman at the academy so long as the officers are so few as compared to the numbers of midshipmen and we must therefore recognize the necessity of such training under supervision during the first cruise of these young men in the fleet.
Much criticism is always being leveled at the academy for this circumstance but the greater part of it is unfair on account of conditions shown above and also because there are always some elements of training which require post graduate course, and training in sense of duty is distinctly one of these, and the fleet is the school for this, although it must be pointed out that the more the Naval Academy establishes systematic disciplinary training at the time when the youth is most impressionable the less there will be for the fleet to do later.
There can be no question that, from time immemorial, there has been far too much unsystematic changing of the methods of teaching and applying discipline at the academy. Each new regime has more or less disrupted the methods in this regard, and, since regimes change about once in three years, and the junior positions are constantly changing, the poor young aspirant to naval honors has had quite a time keeping his sails trimmed to the wind, and frequently gets "caught aback" without knowing exactly why. To be more specific, we will take the subject of the relation of the first class to the other classes. This has run the full gamut from complete control to no control, the limit being reached when a first classman was liable to court martial if he attempted to correct a plebe in any manner.
Common sense should suggest that the present rule of commissioning midshipmen direct from the academy makes it absolutely essential that the first classman have training in handling subordinates to the greatest extent possible, and it should not be such a difficult thing to establish for all time the amount of control which is wise and necessary to give to the first classman in order to give him this training and, at the same time, hold him up to the responsibilities which go hand in hand with such authority. It is in holding him up to his responsibilities and in making him feel them that proper training in a sense of duty and relations to subordinates comes, and it is impossible to get this at the academy by any system which does not require control of the lower classes by the first class.
As it is at the academy so it is at sea. Authority under proper supervision engenders responsibilities which teach a sense of duty while authority without supervision breeds rather than diminishes tendencies to dictatorial and intolerant methods in handling subordinates, encourages bullyism, and altogether is far worse than keeping the youngster too subordinate; but there is a happy mean which just answers our purposes and which is perfectly applicable to shipboard life, especially now that the executive has a first lieutenant to take off his hands nearly all of the details of duty with regard to the condition of the ship materially.
The executive has now time to spend in supervising the training of the young officer under his control, to lay out his duties, designate the limits of his authority, and above all to hold him up to the responsibilities engendered by the authority given him.
Perhaps the executives are doing this now; perhaps they are not. Probably some are and some are not, but, regardless of what is, there can be no question as to what should be, and what can be, if it is taken hold of promptly by the whole service.
A strong belief exists that, for a term of years at least, there can be no more important duty for the executive, and it might not be amiss for the service to judge the ability of the executives by the kind of young officer they turn out of their ships, and it might be intimated here that it is highly probable that captains too will be judged by the service on some such basis.
It may be objected that this is again making the ship a school to the detriment of battle efficiency, but on the contrary all the things which go to make a ship efficient for battle are the things which can be best used in the training of the young officer in a sense of duty and in the other characteristics which go to make up the proper officer.
In the writer's own case the executive was by far the strongest force in the training of the midshipmen.
An indefatigable worker himself, he saw to it that there was no lack of proper work for the midshipman. Duty once arranged was as inexorable as death and the income tax. Night and day, winter and summer, week in and week out, a watch in four, with the relief doing boat duty when in port, which meant the market boat in the morning through to the 1 a.m. boat from the Tomkinsville landing. While we rested we worked in our turrets, made out clothing lists, posted up our note books, growled at the first luff, and when all this was done, and not before, we hit the beach for an evening when in port.
We thought we were discontented, but we were not; overworked, but we were not; doing a lot of useless things, but we were not, since sponges could not have absorbed water at a greater rate than Ave absorbed the idea that duty was first; that the customs of the service required this and that; that signals were not signals unless smartly sent, received, and executed; that the proper handling of a small boat may bring intense satisfaction both to the handler and to the spectator, and that nothing adds more to the reputation of a ship than smart boats, In fine, that every duty was important when properly done, both for its immediate effect and on account of the training it gave.
Our grasping the significance of all this was, it is true, much delayed, but we were using the experience thus gained long before we really began to realize its true importance.
He taught us all the things of character laid out in the list above. He was all of them himself and steadily impressed them on us. It is true we did not absorb all of them in full measure because all human beings are not endowed with sufficient soil for such a multitude of seeds to grow in, but within our limitations we got from him all we were able to contain and have been running on that foundation ever since.
From the fleet, as represented by the large ships, the young men should go to the destroyers, and to other small craft, and here we have another suggestion. The approach to the destroyers should be made through the small cruisers and gunboats rather than direct, as a more gradual change from the kind of discipline and duties on the battleship to the comparative freedom of the destroyer; but destroyer work they must have and it would appear that six months to a year in the small cruiser or gunboat would be sufficient, and the only drawback to that would be the objection that too frequent changes would have to be made in the cruisers.
On arrival at the dignity of executive of a destroyer, and before becoming eligible for command, the young man should be sent back to the battleships for a tour of duty. This return to the battleships is just as vital and will be just as prolific of good as any other part of the program for the following reasons:
All the characteristics mentioned in the beginning of this paper with the exception of "technical qualifications" are dependent on the total routing out of intolerance, arrogance, dictatorial attitude and self-sufficiency. Age alone will not cure these defects and it requires the proper experience and association with those who have been through all the varying stages and, who may be termed the post graduates of the system.
In addition, it requires a renewed appreciation of the more formal side of service life as represented in the battleship, a getting back to the more dignified atmosphere, if it may be so expressed, in order to complete and fix in mind for all time a proper service perspective.
In the destroyers the restraining hand of age and experience is to a certain extent lacking, since all the personnel is young, and he who passes through all the stages and becomes commanding officer without going back to the battleships will have a distorted perspective, and will still retain some of the seeds of intolerance which will be more firmly fixed in his character by the authority of command.
There is not any training in the service more prolific of good than the destroyer training, when properly applied, and, conversely, there is none more dangerous, when carelessly applied.
Just how long the young man should remain in the battleship this second tour is largely dependent on the individual. Any young man who shows that the strict discipline and routine of the battle fleet is irksome to him should not be sent back to the boats until all that has been routed out, while the one who shows a proper appreciation of such discipline and routine may be sent back at any time.
Is it too much to say that in the above lies our greatest present problem? Is it too much to hope that the service individually and collectively will seriously consider this question paramount and address itself to the solution with all the enthusiasm and seriousness of which it is capable? Is it too much to suggest that the Personnel Bureau consider this question when gazetting executives to ships, in order that those best fitted by their known characteristics may have proper field for their use?
Would it be amiss to suggest that the Naval Academy institute a series of lectures to enhance service interest among the midshipmen, and that the lecturers be drawn, not from the ranks of the clergy, the Y. M. C. A., or allied interests, but from the fleet, which is the service? That these lectures be not on professional technique, but on the service, its customs, its importance in the national scheme, its honorable place in the nation's history, and, above all, on that indefinable something which lifts it above greed, avarice, self-seeking, all commerciality, and makes us glad to take as our reward for services rendered the approbation of our cloth—in other words the soul of the service?