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During the summer of 1939, the Western world lived in an uneasy state of peace. Hitler's Germany, having repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, had commenced a massive rearmament, followed by reoccupation of the Rhineland and the takeover of Austria and the Czech Sudentenland. Hitler then cast his eyes to the east and Poland. On 1 September 1939, Germany and its Russian ally invaded Poland; two days later, World War II began with Great Britain’s and France’s declarations of war.
In the reserve fleet berthing areas at the destroyer base in San Diego and the back channels of the Navy yards at Philadelphia, lay some 100 decommissioned World War I four-stack destroyers. Some of them had been there since 1922; others had been retired from active service in 1935-38, replaced by new- construction destroyers of the Farragut, Mahan, and later classes. Those decommissioned in 1922 were practically new, some having steamed only a few thousand miles before being retired as a result of the stringency of peacetime naval appropriations. Those retired in the late 1930s had seen hard service in many parts of the world since their commissioning 15 to 20 years earlier. Also in the summer of 1939, some 200 junior officers were enrolled in courses at the U. S. Naval Postgraduate School at Annapolis and the junior course at the Naval War College, following their six- or seven-year initial tours of sea duty in the fleet. The twain were soon to meet.
Reacting to the state of war in Europe, President Roosevelt on 5 September issued a neutrality proclamation and established a combined ship and air neutrality patrol of the U. S. East Coast, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. The fledgling U. S. Atlantic Fleet—then the Patrol Force, U. S. Fleet—was too small to enforce neutrality effectively throughout so large a sea area. Accordingly, on 7
September, the Secretary of the Navy directed the preparation for active service and recommissioning as soon as possible of all priority I destroyers and light minelayers, and also the raising of all priority II and III reserve fleet destroyers to the material condition of priority I, in anticipation of preparation for active service and recommissioning.
Priority I destroyers included some 50 ships that had been decommissioned since 1935, with 22 ships at San Diego and the remainder in Philadelphia Navy yards. War plans assumed that priority I destroyers could be recommissioned in 30 days, priority II in 60 days, and priority III in 90 days, assuming timely arrival of recommissioning crews and adequate funding and base support to ready them for active service.
We student officers ar the Postgraduate School were initially assured that the war in Europe would probably blow over soon and that we should not be diverted from our studies. This assurance was shortlived; on 9 September dispatch orders were issued to all students in the operating engineering and applied communications courses and the general line school, ordering most of us to report for duty fitting out and recommissioning reserve fleet destroyers. The general line students who had just started the one-yeaf courses in July thus became known as the “Seven- seventy Club”—seven years at sea and 70 days ashore. It would be another seven years before most of us would see shore duty again.
Each of these recommissioned destroyers was to be manned by five officers and about 90 enlisted men- Ships designated as division flagships were commanded by a full commander (who also served as division commander) and had one officer more than other ships. Otherwise, the commanding officers were lieutenant commanders. A draft was placed of the active fleet to provide some 1,700 petty officers
an<J a number of non-rated men. Some petty officers ln Fleet Reserve were ordered to sea duty and s°me non-rated men came directly from recruit train- lnS- Because the Navy in 1939 had a strength of 0nly 6,800 officers and 113,000 enlisted men, these transfers not only reduced the manning level of active s tps below 80%, but also seriously diluted the experience level of ships’ companies and their war readiness.
A first glance at “red lead row” in San Diego was ardly reassuring to the outfitting crews. Gray paint .n the ships was faded and rust-streaked, but the arge white bow numbers still stood out plainly. The eserve Fleet berthing area was a popular roosting P ace for thousands of sea birds, so weather decks Were liberally coated with guano. The ships were still . uttoned up,” although some work had been started *n the engineering spaces by working parties from r e base and the destroyer tenders.
The four-stack destroyer was, by today's standards, a remarkably uncomplicated ship. Weighing in at
• 100 tons (1,200 tons for destroyers numbered 3 "^~A47), her 314- by 30-foot hull was driven at
"35 knots by two geared-turbine engines and four ^superheated boilers at 300 pounds per square inch.
nrnps and auxiliaries were mostly reciprocating “up an downers.” The main battery of four 4-inch/50 ‘“er single-purpose guns had no director system; lre control equipment consisted of a coincidence fan£e finder and a mechanically-wound Ford range ^eeper. She carried 12 Mark 8, 21-inch torpedoes in Ur triple mounts, two per side amidships, which s° lacked director control. Customarily, torpedoes Were gyro controlled to fire directly ahead, and the s 'P steered along the desired track line. The antiaircraft armament consisted of a singularly ineffective ■ 'mch/23 caliber gun on the fantail, plus several
hand-mounted .30 caliber machine guns. Radar had not yet been introduced into the fleet when these ships were commissioned. Few, if any of them, had sonar; stern-mounted 300-pound depth charges were the only antisubmarine armament.
The destroyer base (now U. S. Naval Station, San Diego), to which we reported, was commanded by Captain Byron McCandless, a-very senior and thoroughly dedicated naval officer whose enthusiasm for recommissioning “his ships” at times outran practicality. Our first surprise came only a week after we had reported for duty, when he issued orders placing all 22 ships in full commission. At that time, our ship, the McCormick (DD-223), had five officers and two enlisted men attached to her. With some difficulty, we cleared enough guano off the well deck for Captain McCandless to come aboard and read the commissioning order. Raising the colors was a difficult task, because no halyards had yet been reaved. We learned that one reason for this rather premature recommissioning was to capture the first quarter’s operating allotment of several thousand dollars, an incentive perhaps made necessary by the very meager appropriation of about $50,000 per ship for recommissioning. Another reason was the captain’s intense desire to get “his ships” into commission before those on the East Coast.
Our new status as a commissioned ship carried with it the unavoidable requirement of watchstanding. Our ship was completely “dead,” having no shore services of steam, electricity, or water, and we had no personnel for security watches. For supposedly better utilization of precommissioning personnel, the base commander had organized them into working parties rotating from ship to ship to accomplish specific tasks. A day’s duty for the watch officer entailed camping out with candles or flashlights at night and cold canned beans for a meal. This continued for a week or more, until the commanding officers were able to persuade Captain Mc- Candless to assign commissioning crews to each ship.
More surprises were to come. Several days later, the base commander discovered in the Destroyer Force Regulations the requirement that when a certain number of ships of the same unit were in port, a “ready duty” destroyer was to be designated, ready to get under way on 15 minutes’ notice to deal with some offshore emergency. It mattered not that we couldn’t get under way for at least two weeks; all hands nonetheless stayed on board throughout the 24-hour ready-duty assignment, flying the prescribed “R” flag at the yardarm, and, of course, eating more cold beans.
By mid-October the ships had lighted off the boilers, tested machinery, and made themselves reasonably habitable and capable of getting under way. Equipage for recommissioning was supposedly stored in locked cages ashore, where the decommissioning crew had placed it several years earlier, but security was not tight enough to prevent “moonlight requisitioning” by ships or persons unknown over the intervening years. Moreover, not all of it was serviceable, thanks to some “moonlight” exchanges. Because the base commander’s funds were very limited, many requisitions for missing or unserviceable, but nevertheless essential, equipage were returned with the notation “Not essential for recommissioning.” One navigator’s requisition for magnets for compensating the magnetic compass was turned down with the notation “Columbus discovered America without them; why can’t you?” Gyro compasses had been removed on decommissioning and were not yet available for reinstallation.
As the destroyers reported ready for sea, they were ordered in small groups to the Mare Island Navy Yard for docking and installation of sonar domes, and repairs and alterations beyond the capability of the destroyer base. With no gyro and only an unreliable magnetic compass, it was an interesting voyage, piloting from lighthouse to lighthouse. Fortunately, the weather and visibility were good and all ships made the trip safely, although one of our division
mates made her landfall on the Mare Island channel buoy by making physical contact with it and bringing it in on the fantail.
Mare Island was a welcome change from the petty restrictions of the destroyer base. The Navy Department had accorded first priority to the needs of the recommissioned ships, and the shipyard commander, Rear Admiral David W. Bagley, himself a former destroyerman, saw to it that these old destroyers had fl first call on the yard’s resources. By late November, | all the priority I destroyers had left Mare Island for k their assigned destinations, mostly neutrality patrol I assignments in the Atlantic.
As the late Admiral James O. Richardson com-1 mented in his memoir On the Treadmill to Pearl Harbor, “The recommissioning of the destroyers did not go ‘according to plan,’ despite the all-out endeavor of thousands of officers and men who gave their best efforts in long days and nights of work.” Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark said at the time, “The Department assumed that Priority I destroyers I at San Diego could be ready for service in approxi- if mately 30 days, or at least a considerable percentage ' of them could. Instead it has taken 80-90 days.”
Why did it take so long? First of all, the destroyer base lacked the industrial capability to accomplish so large a recommissioning task. Primary reliance had been placed on precommissioning details augmented by personnel from the fleet—a bootstrap operation at best. Also, after a month at San Diego, these destroyers still had to be sent to a Navy yard for docking, and repairs and alterations beyond the capability of the destroyer base. Finally, ships’ companies, hastily assembled as they were, lacked some of the necessary skills—particularly engineering—to recommission their ships in so short a time. Premature commissioning and irritations like ready duty compounded the task. It should be noted that destroyers on the East Coast were recommissioned and joined the fleet in considerably less time, because the work was done primarily by the Navy yards.
What finally happened to these 22 ships? Eight ol them, together with 42 others (mostly priority II destroyers recommissioned in early 1940), were transferred to the United Kingdom in September 1940 in the “bases for destroyers” exchange. The other 14 of the San Diego group saw service throughout World War II after being modified for wartime service. Some were converted to high-speed transports, destroyer minesweepers, or miscellaneous configurations. All those that survived battle were disposed of at the war’s end.