The peace-time activities of the Navy are based upon the ever increasing necessity of training the personnel. The ships and men must be, theoretically at least, able to begin hostilities at any time and place; which means that the men must be trained to the precision of automatons, and the officers to animated textbooks. For, speaking in general, the day of individuality in naval warfare is dead, and its place is taken by mass handling of applied science—so much so that it is becoming more difficult, year by year, for an officer to know all that he should, and even to keep up with his profession. The textbooks themselves are often out of date before they are off the press. It might be said that an officer goes through his career today hitting only the high spots, and the fantastic possibility looms of the completion of the cycle whereby naval warfare will return the officer to his status of a thousand years ago, when it was not necessary for him to know anything, except to be an officer.
Here is an absurd probability, for our age is chained to the rowing benches of system, and matters maritime must pull its own oar. It is the only way that it may keep afloat and, rightly or wrongly, we must fall into line. So the tendency today is toward more officers, which lightens the burden on the group as a whole, and specialization which entails a perennial shortage of officers.
During ordinary times of peace this is a question of organization combined with intelligent planning and a modicum of Congress baiting, but when war is declared we must have the men, and for this we have the Naval Reserve. There are several classes of reserves, depending for their utility upon the amount of knowledge and training they possess. This is the only true standard for a reserve anywhere. It is equally true of the merchant naval reserve; but with this class it is apparent that a satisfactory solution has not been reached. It is composed entirely of officers of the merchant service, grading from ensign to and including lieutenant commander, according to the berth held at the time of enrollment; and it is separated into two distinct branches, deck and engineer.
Now it is a commonly held theory that these men as a class are the best possible material for immediate conversion into naval officers in the event of war. This is indeed so in the case of the engineer branch. As far as naval purposes are concerned the engineers stand in no great need of training. All marine engineering is fundamentally the same and, should the need arise, the engineers from our merchantmen could be assigned to active duty at once, thereby releasing numbers of commissioned, warrant, and chief petty officers for service in the battle line. But the same reasoning does not hold true in the seaman branch, and it is to this branch that the ensuing observations appertain.
Navigation of late years has become largely a stereotyped affair. The march of science and invention has so mechanized this one-time art that one may push an imaginary lever and read the answer in the upper left-hand corner. It doesn’t matter greatly anyway. A vessel equipped with modern inventions—to name a few: the gyrocompass and pilot, fathometer, radio direction finder, revolution-mile indicator—could be navigated about as well without celestial observations as with them. In other respects, the experience of merchantmen tends toward matters with which the Navy has little to do.
The master’s time is occupied with commercial ship’s business, expense reduction, and the constant effort to shorten the time of his ship in port; the last being a sort of contest between himself, prodded on by the company, on one side, and the mates, engineers, seamen, stevedores, agents, and port officials on the other. The mates are occupied with the care of cargo and the appearance of the vessel. None of this is of particular value in time of war, and as a background for naval training is almost worthless.
It is not very probable that the officers of the merchant reserve would be assigned to duty with the battle fleet in the event of hostilities. As a class they would be more or less useless for a long time, much longer in fact than a group of young, technically educated men. The knowledge required of any naval officer in gunnery, fire control, communications, landing force, and modern warfare in general would find the merchant officer totally unprepared. Some might qualify for first lieutenant, but even this could be argued, due to the vast difference between the routine of the two services. Moreover, it would be impractical to assign lieutenants and lieutenant commanders to billets of junior officers under instruction.
It is also unlikely that another war would create the need of large numbers of unarmed cargo vessels for naval purposes, unless it be that the Navy contemplates taking over the private foreign trade of the nation, in which case international law must be amended and all naval theory of warfare changed. The probabilities are that the best of our passenger and intermediate ships would be taken over, and that the number of naval auxiliaries of all classes would be increased; but the merchant officer does not fit here either. It is true that he would be more at home than on a battleship.
For the mission of a naval auxiliary of any class whatsoever is to carry on at its assigned task to completion, if possible, no matter what the circumstances; and this implies a high degree of discipline, considerable training, capacity for assimilation of punishment, and ability for effective defense. This third requisite is primarily a matter of ship construction, but the other three depend entirely upon the personnel. This may be worse but is certainly never better than its officer section. Reducing the situation to a few words—the effectiveness of a former merchant ship to the Navy in time of war may be said to be composed of one part good construction, with careful attention to detail and regard for as many as possible belligerent contingencies, and three parts officers.
It is not denied that the officers of the present reserve could move the ships against the enemy, even a strong one. The United States is a nation of vast resources, and could perhaps afford heavy losses in ships; but this is scarcely intelligent planning. It would be possible, of course, to have two or three merchant deck officers in the vessel’s complement, for assignment to stations of minor importance, requiring little knowledge at general quarters. But this would mean that the vessel would go into action short of officers, and does not appear to be a very good solution. Moreover, if he could be dispensed with during battle, it seems a reasonable argument that he could be dispensed with entirely at all other times.
It is occasionally argued that hostilities against a weaker nation would render unlikely enemy action against the auxiliaries, in which case any sort of officers would do. But we would scarcely need reserves against a nation too weak to possess at least submarines and aeroplanes. The Navy may have had any number of reasons for its enrollment drive of two years ago among merchant officers, but fear of Liberian steel was not one of them.
There are some 2,000 officers in this reserve, and it would appear bad strategy to place them either in the battle fleet or the active auxiliaries. There remain the inactive auxiliaries, harbor craft, and shore duty. First, inactive auxiliaries are not easily identified in these days of science and guerra al cuchillo. It would be hard to imagine a more inactive vessel than a lightship, and yet Diamond Shoal was torpedoed during the last war. Harbor craft. Well, tugboats require tugboat men, which the most of us are not; and anything else in the harbors would scarcely require officers at all. As to shore duty, the larger percentage of it demands naval men, and the non-maritime part could be better served by experts from civilian life. The only place where these officers might fit in with a good chance for success would be in an ordinary tramp, noncombatant and chartered by the Navy.
Having thus neatly chased our cat home again where it belongs, we pause for a pardonable bit of hand rubbing and are surprised almost instantly by its reappearance, pushed from a cellar window. Merchant ships cannot use these officers either, in time of war.
Nothing better having been evolved to take its place, it is almost certain that the armed-guard system would be revived for noncombatant ships, Navy chartered or otherwise. Comment on this system for naval readers is a waste of time. It is only necessary to point out that under the armed-guard system the petty officer of the gun crew took his orders from his superior officers ashore only. In the event of an attack his authority, for command of the vessel or anything else, was unlimited, or to be exact, limited only by his judgment—a very necessary arrangement, but impossible if the officers aboard were actually his superiors. The Navy would be, therefore, placed in the peculiar situation of having to hunt for men who were not members of the reserve to man its ships.
There is much excellent officer material in the merchant service—men who have had naval training, men who are particularly adaptable to naval training, and men who are natural officers; but they are not by any means in the majority, and it would not be feasible to weed out the unfit after the call to duty in war time. This would involve the costly and time-consuming method of trial and error, and it would be unfair to “chuck a man out on his ear” after he had purchased his outfit and owed a mess bill. Far better to pick and choose beforehand, but in this the Navy Department is handicapped by a total lack of knowledge concerning the ability of the men of the merchant reserve, the present criterion—the only one possible—being length of service in merchant ships. This is on its face a poor one for, speaking in general, any third mate, ensign, would be better equipped for his naval duties than any master, lieutenant commander. At least he could cause less damage.
Naval warfare used to be a rough and tumble business. You “hit the enemy in the face with a holystone”—vide Navy Department records-—“cursing him loudly the while,” and a merchant officer with leather lungs and a liking for a scrap could lead his men over the nettings about as well as anyone else; but that sort of thing passed away with the old navy, however much we may regret it. There is no room in naval warfare today for officers whom you can hear up-wind for a mile. We have voice tubes and telephones. Men cannot be efficiently commanded in routine work by officers who lack even fundamental knowledge of their duties, and successful defense against an energetic enemy under like conditions would be a miracle, nothing less.
The answer to all of this is quite obvious—training; but the answer to that is less clear. A seaman’s time ashore is limited, and he would not care to spend an enforced vacation on a battleship any more than a naval officer would like to cruise about in a tramp. We must remember always that in all save a very few companies vacations are strictly without pay. In addition, it would not be possible to give group training in any event, as few officers could guarantee to be at any designated place at a specified time. And finally he would not do it anyway for he does not get paid. Add to this that there is no particular reason why the companies should enroll their ships in the reserve, and we have a question to break up a peace conference.
The men want a month’s pay per year. That was the bait that induced 90 per cent of the signatures in 1928. And it is not exactly a secret that the companies want something out of it also, but at the present writing the eagle has maintained a stony silence. Reasons, arguments, and excuses have been plethoric; but one of the most likely reasons—although it must be admitted a seldom-mentioned one—is that the Navy already has a rather firm grasp on those ships which it actually desires. As for the men, their present retainer pay closely approximates their naval value.
Of course the stymie can be broken, but only through a training program of some sort; and as no one has made public an attempt at a solution, the following is offered as a target. If the Navy Department really wanted it, and fought for it, there is a very good chance that it could get a month’s pay a year for the merchant reserves. It would not be difficult for the men to get one month’s vacation at least every two years.
(a) Have each officer report to his own or any other navy yard for a period of two weeks’ training every two years.
(b) Detail a regular naval officer to every yard to handle this department, with whatever assistants he might require for instructional purposes.
(c) Have each officer report once every year to his navy yard for the purpose of passing a brief written examination suitable to his grade.
(d) Have the pay of each officer conditional both upon his appearance for this examination and his two weeks’ training.
(e) Have the two weeks’ training period optional for engineer officers.
(f) Make the training period fourteen consecutive days, but allow the officer to report in for same on any date.
(g) Allow any officer found to be reasonably proficient to make a cruise with the fleet or aboard an auxiliary, if he so desires and has the time, for a period of three months in any three years, at regular pay.
(h) Allow all officers access to any non- confidential books of the Navy, and encourage study of the regulations, ship and gun drills, pay and supply instructions, etc.
It is realized that these suggestions leak badly. A navy yard is a poor place to train sea- fighters. The men could not, in the nature of things, learn very much in so short a period. They would likely forget the most of anything that they did succeed in learning between training periods. Worse than all, the vitally important training in target practice and spotting would not be possible. Nevertheless, a program such as this would give personal contact with the officers of the merchant reserve, and allow approximate measurement of the capability of each member.
There is only one reasonable argument against this. Many men would not take the training or appear for the examinations even if paid to do so. Countering this it may be said that there would be no necessity of actually dropping them from the rolls; they simply would get no pay, and would remain in exactly the same status that they now are. And if this arrangement were not possible, much better to drop them and take the loss. A small useful reserve is a more valuable asset to a navy and a nation than a large one on paper.
As to what the various companies should get out of this for enrolling their ships I cannot pretend to say. This is no treatise on economics; but there are a number of measures that might be taken without going to Congress with a bold demand for cash. Tonnage dues might be reduced on naval reserve ships, or favorable income tax consideration might be made, or any number of similar suggestions adopted. A most eminently practicable one would be the remission from naval reserve vessels of compulsory pilotage while in home waters, providing that one of her officers be a regularly licensed pilot for the port to be entered. This last alone is calculated to arouse a great deal of latent patriotism in shipowners.
This article should not be read as an indictment of merchant officers as such, far from it. I am one, and I say it with pride. Speaking in general, our merchantmen are quite competent at their profession, as the records show. What I do say is that large numbers of them would make but indifferent coxswains in the navy; but this remark would apply with equal force to a group of highly successful lawyers, merchants, college professors, or bank presidents.