HALF A MILLION RECRUITED AND TRAINED IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS—"ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE WAR," SIR ERIC GEDDES DECLARED—NAVY'S EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM PAVED THE WAY—EVERY OFFICER A TEACHER—NAVAL ACADEMY GREATLY ENLARGED—NO SHIP KEPT WAITING FOR OFFICERS OR MEN.

Half a million men and thirty thousand officers were enlisted and trained by the United States Navy in eighteen months. No navy in the world ever had as large a personnel, or ever attempted to raise and train as large a sea-force in so brief a time. Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the British Admiralty, said:

The dauntless determination which the United States has displayed in creating a large, trained body of seamen out of landsmen is one of the most striking accomplishments of the war. Had it not been so effectively done, one would have thought it impossible.

When the Archbishop of York, Honorary Chaplain-in-Chief of the British Navy, visited Great Lakes, Ill., he was amazed quite as much by the spirit of the personnel as he was by the vast extent of the establishment, the largest naval training station in the world. The Archbishop reviewed the cadets in the administration drill hall, a structure large enough for three entire regiments to maneuver. Thirty thousand blue-jackets were assembled in the hall, with three full regiments, nine thousand men, and a band of three hundred pieces in light marching order. After the preliminary ceremony "to the colors," they passed in review before the Archbishop, playing and singing "Over There." The thousands massed in the center of the hall, sang "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean." Profoundly moved, the Archbishop turned and said to Captain W. A. Moffett, the commandant, "Captain, now I know that we are going to win the war." When, a few days later, he visited Washington, the Archbishop told me that the outstanding thing he had seen in America was the Great Lakes Training Station. "If I had not seen it," he said, "I could not have believed it possible that such a training camp for seamen could be conducted a thousand miles from the ocean."

Like expressions came from members of the various missions and naval officers who came to the United States. That station, situated in the heart of the country, far from the ocean, trained and sent into the navy during the war over one hundred thousand men. It was the vitalizing spirit of the Navy in the Middle West; a center of the patriotic inspiration which swept like a prairie fire and brought young men into the Navy more rapidly than we could house them. Two thousand five hundred enlisted men were under training there when war was declared and in that month 9,027 recruits were received. But Great Lakes never was swamped. No matter what strain was put upon it, the authorities were equal to any emergency.

Between April 6, 1917, and March 11, 1919, 125,000 men were received; 96,779 trained and sent to sea duty, and 17,356 graduated at its special schools. The camp grew to 1,200 acres, with 775 buildings. Nine great drill halls were built in which thousands could maneuver in regimental formation. But bigger than the number of men enrolled or the buildings erected or the great schools conducted was the spirit of the place. From the inspiring leadership of Captain Moffett, who was a genius at organization, to the youngest boy fitted out in naval uniform, pride in the station and the naval service was so contagious that it reached back into the homes from which the youths had come and stirred the whole Middle West with enthusiasm for the Navy.

In the early days of the war, Captain Moffett, who had come to Washington to discuss plans for enlarging the station, said to me: "Mr. Secretary, I have here a requisition for $40,000 for instruments for the Great Lakes band."

It had not been very long since $40,000 was the entire appropriation for the station. The captain's request seemed to me like extravagance.

"Do you expect to win the war, as the Israelites did?" I asked, "by surrounding Berlin and expecting the walls to fall as every man in your band blows his trumpet?"

I demurred at first, but he pleaded for it with such eloquence that I signed the requisition. This enabled John Philip Sousa, enrolled as a lieutenant in the Reserve Force, to train fifteen hundred musicians, the largest band in the world. Bands were not only sent to ships and stations overseas, but toured the country, giving the greatest impetus to the Liberty Loan campaigns. These bands were an inspiration to the entire service. I found later that a British commission had reported that only three things were more important than music. These were food, clothing and shelter.

The three other great permanent training stations, Hampton Roads, Va., Newport, R. I., and San Francisco, were animated by the same spirit as Great Lakes. Their officers and men vied with each other in efficient training of recruits. The same was true of the temporary stations along the coast which came into being to give quarters and instruction to youths who enlisted so rapidly that provision had to be made for them at every available point.

Approximately 500,000 men and 33,000 officers were in the Navy when hostilities ended, and nearly nine-tenths of them had been trained after war was declared. Naval administration did not wait until hostilities began to increase its force. Recruiting was pressed in the closing months of 1916, immediately after Congress authorized a substantial increase, and 8,000 men were enlisted. In January 1917, enlistments went up to 3,512, and there was a larger increase the next month. In March, when the President signed the order raising the Navy to emergency strength—87,000 regulars, plus 10,000 apprentice seamen, and hospital attendants and others, a total of 97,000—we began a vigorous campaign that covered the entire country. When war was declared there were in the Navy 64,680 enlisted men and 4,376 officers, commissioned and warrant. Some 12,000 reserves had been enrolled, the 10,000 Naval Militia were mustered into service and 590 officers and 3,478 men of the Coast Guard were placed under the Navy. This gave us a total force of approximately 95,000.

Within little more than a month after war was declared there were 100,000 regulars, and by June 1st the total force had grown to 170,000. By January 1, 1918, there were 300,000 officers and men on the rolls, including reserves and the Coast Guard. By August we had passed the half-million mark, and when the armistice was signed there was a naval personnel of approximately 533,000. The actual figures of the Bureau of Navigation for November 11, 1918, were 531,198, and for December 1, 532,931. But practically all those shown in the latter report had been enlisted before hostilities had ended. Figures of various branches varied slightly before and after the armistice, but there were in the naval service at its maximum:

It is interesting to compare the above enlistment for the World War with those who served in the Navy in previous wars:

The Navy was called upon to perform many new tasks—to man troop-ships and cargo transports, to furnish guards for merchant ships, to maintain forces ashore, in Europe as well as this country, and to render other services that no navy had previously contemplated. All this required personnel in large numbers. But no matter what the service or requirement, when the call came the Navy was ready with officers and men, regulars or reserves.

During the entire war "we never had a delay of a vessel on account of not having the officers and men," said the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation. "The personnel were actually ready at seaports to put on vessels before the vessels were ready."

Few of the recruits had any previous sea experience. Most of them were from the interior, many had never seen the ocean. But the enthusiasm and energy of teachers and pupils would have surprised Dana, who in his "Two Years Before the Mast," said: "There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life." They knew they were woefully ignorant of the sea, but they had a stimulus Dana's landsmen lacked—the eager desire to fit themselves to fight. That sharpened their capacity so that in a few weeks they learned more than, without such incentive, they could have mastered in a twelve-month.

At training stations naval terms were used for everything. The barracks building was the "ship"; the floor was the "deck"; offenders were tried at the "mast"; requests for leave were to "go ashore," and returning the men "reported aboard." Meals were "chow" and there was slang for every article of food—stews being known as "slumgullion," salt as "sand," coffee as "Java," and bread was called "punk." Recruits soon picked up the lingo of the sea, and found their "sea legs."

Every feature of life at sea was simulated as closely as possible in the stations, and when sent into service, the men felt at home aboard ships. It was no new experience for them to sleep in hammocks. They had slept in them while under training. "Hit the deck, boys," was always the morning order in station as it is on shipboard. Before they had so much as seen a man-of-war or transport, their motto was, "for the good of the ship."

"Do your bit," never found favor in the Navy; we had a better term. As the commanding officer of one station passed a squad at drill, he heard ringing out the words: "Don't just do your bit. The men on this station do their best."

Serious as was the work, recruits, with the spirit of eternal youth, enlivened it by fun, humor and pranks. This was always in evidence. No hardship could dispel it. A story is told of a young Texan, just enlisted and being inspected at Great Lakes. All the recruits were ordered to fall in line and strip for inspection. Sans shoes, sans shirts, sans pants, in fact sans everything in the way of clothing, the boy marched past the doctor. The Texan, with utter lack of the awe which a gold-striped surgeon is supposed to inspire, had secured a paper stencil, used to mark clothing, and using black paint had lettered his bare stomach with the words, "Good morning, doctor." The grave surgeon saw the joke was on him, and led the hearty laughter at this original greeting. Another recruit from a Western state, hearing of the various detentions and occasional surgical operations supposed to precede acceptance, hung over the place where he supposed his appendix was located this placard: "I have had my appendix removed." He probably thinks to this day that this saved him from an operation.

"I never knew what patriotism meant before I learned it by service in the Navy."

That remark was addressed to me by an upstanding, clear-headed youth in naval uniform as the mine-sweepers were welcomed back to New York after they had finished the worst job assigned to the navy, that of sweeping up the mines in the drab days after the armistice.

He was bronzed by the wind and the sun of the North Sea. His muscles seemed made of steel. Exposure had given a vigor of body that made you feel that he could do anything.

"Tomorrow," he went on, "I am going back to my job in civil life, but I am a different man. Before the war I think I loved my country and I suppose the flag meant something to me. But I felt no passion of patriotism. It was a matter of course. But the Navy has taught me such reverence for the flag that I have a thrill every time it is raised, and somehow my country became something more than land and water and houses. It seems something holy to me. And that's what my naval service did for me," he added as he passed to his place at the banquet table.

Such inculcation of love of country was the best by-product of the war.

How was it that the regulars in the Navy were able to train so rapidly the recruits that poured in after war was declared? How did they attain the efficiency which led to the promotion of ten thousand of them to warrant or commissioned officers?

The answer is that the Navy had been organized as an educational and industrial, as well as a fighting, institution. Officers and men had gone to school, they were subjected to frequent examinations, and promotions were given from ascertained fitness rather than from the outgrown policy of seniority. Post-graduate schools enabled officers to qualify as experts. Vocational and grammar schools for enlisted men had kindled ambition and given mental as well as physical and naval training. The war, therefore, found the Navy not only fit to fight, but its officers and men equipped to train quickly the half-million young men who enlisted in 1917-18. The Navy had years before instituted educational preparedness—professional, vocational, elementary—as a part of its policy. And the test of war proved that no other form of preparedness produced better results.

In 1913 I issued orders which established a school on every ship in the Navy, the officers instructing the men in reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, geography, grammar and history, as well as in naval and technical subjects. Nearly every enlisted man who availed himself fully of this instruction afloat received promotion, and all of them became more proficient.

The war proved that vessels manned by seamen having trained minds as well as trained hands are superior to ships with uneducated crews. Neither speed nor armor wins battles. It is intellect, education, training, discipline, team-work, courage.

As a logical result of the schools afloat, Congress later authorized the appointment of one hundred enlisted men annually as midshipmen at the Naval Academy. In the first class after this law made it possible, the honor graduate at Annapolis came from the enlisted personnel. Others have since attained high standing in their class and in the service. The day will come when all appointments to the Naval Academy will be made from the ranks.

The educational system, adopted in the Navy in 1913, became part of the army system of training before the American Expeditionary Force returned from France, and Secretary Baker made such instruction an integral part of the training for men enlisting in the Army.

With the advent of war the educational work of the Navy was greatly enlarged and changed to meet war conditions. In addition to many technical schools the fleet at Yorktown was utilized for intensive training, and prepared over 45,000 officers and men for important and varied duties afloat. The older type of battleships became virtual training schools, devoting particular attention to gunnery, navigation and engineering, qualifying men for various duties requiring experience. When ordered to sea the men who had enjoyed this special training gave full proof of the practical schooling through which they had passed.

It required war to bring appreciation of the school as a necessary part of military instruction. The Navy had started schools for sailors in 1914, but it was not until 1919 that the Army and Marine Corps felt the necessity of such schools, which they then established, though in 1913 General Butler, in command of the Marines at Panama, was teaching them Spanish. "It opened my eyes to what might be done," said Judge Garrison, then Secretary of War, upon his return from an inspection trip, "and I am going to advise Army officers to go down to Panama and learn from General Butler how to teach men in the Army." Upon their return from France General Lejeune and General Butler established schools for the teaching of Marines at Quantico, a plan which is being extended to all Marine bases and attracting a superior type of recruits.

In 1866 General Lew Wallace outlined a plan of education for soldiers, approved by Charles Sumner, declaring that the "military system as respects the rank and file is founded on egregious errors." The chief error was that no system of giving the rank and file the same character of instruction as imparted at West Point was at that time offered in order that they might win commissions. He urged that the hours of service of a private soldier be "so divided as to give him time for study and meditation without interference with his routine of duty." The "proverbial idleness of military life" which then prevailed was due to lack of schools and proper instruction. By the addition of the education and promotion policy suggested, General Wallace said, we would "not only get better military service, but as an act of wisest statesmanship you offer in a constitutional way the coveted opportunity for education to every youth in the land."

The Navy, having given trial to the policy, found that all that General Wallace claimed for it was true, and now that the Army and Marine Corps have established like schools, educational advantages as a part of military duty have become the accepted American policy. The war emphasized the worth of education for military efficiency. While excellent officers were obtained from every source possible, the main dependence for all-around naval officers was upon the Naval Academy graduates. In the test of war they more than justified what was expected of them. In order to secure more officers with Annapolis training, the course for midshipmen was reduced, during the war, to three years and made more intensive, upon the recommendation of Rear Admiral Edward W. Eberle, the able and resourceful superintendent of the Naval Academy. He and his associates, anxious to get into the active fighting, were doing more by the instruction of the increasing number of midshipmen and the zeal with which they inspired all who came under their influence.

Before the war, plans had been adopted and appropriations made for greatly increasing the Naval Academy. A new Seamanship and Navigation Building that cost $1,000,000 was constructed. Four million dollars was expended in enlarging Bancroft Hall, which was more than doubled to accommodate the increased number of midshipmen. In 1912 there were 768 midshipmen at Annapolis. Legislation adopted before the war increased the number to 2,120 in 1917. The enlarged facilities will accommodate 2,400.

Two special courses were established at the Naval Academy in the spring of 1917, one for line officers and the other for men of the supply corps. A total of 1,622 were graduated as ensigns for line duty and 400 as supply officers. They went right into the fleet, and though they had received only a few months' drill, they carried the Annapolis spirit into the service—a spirit of valor and invincibility. The institution at Annapolis, the pride of America and the admiration of all visitors to our country, is easily the greatest naval school in the world.