322 BANQUET. 



rine did not suffer so cruelly, so in, what I am going to say I want rather to speak more of 

 the American merchant marine than of the allied merchant marine in general. 



It happened that, when we entered the war, the British Navy had the German fleet by 

 the throat, so they were powerless to interfere with the development of our reserve force 

 which we should have had in normal times ready to draw upon. The fleet needed every man 

 and every officer in it, and it would have been very poor policy, on the eve of our action, to 

 take officers and men out of the ships to man auxiliary ships, but we were able, through the 

 hold of the British Navy, to increase our Navy from the first of April, 1917, when there were 

 5,000 officers and 63,776 men, to 31,186 officers and 501,300 men at the time of the armistice. 

 This increase in the Navy represents really the increase in the number of men assigned to the 

 merchant marine, because we manned, as you know, those ships with naval crews and naval 

 officers. 



I had the good fortune to serve in the fleet during the first six months of the war, and 

 we had four squadrons for the training of these men for the reserve fleet. The particular 

 squadron I commanded trained the men for the engineers' force, and we developed a new 

 type of personnel in the form of engine driver, the chauffeur rather than the machinist. The 

 three other squadrons were devoted to training the men for gun crews, radio personnel, and 

 deck force. 



At the time we entered the war against Germany, the British and our allied friends had 

 grappled with the problem of the submarine and were just coming to the convoy system as 

 the solution to the problem of getting tonnage across, but prior to that the allied problem had 

 reached the point where they had put one gun on each merchant ship and two trained men 

 to the gun, i. e., they had the pointer and the trainer. The rest of the gun's crew were made 

 up from the merchant crew. We started out on a more ambitious programme of having 

 twenty-one men on each ship for the gun crews and having two guns. 



The sinkings in July and August of 1917 became so terrible that it looked like disaster, 

 and the Allies suddenly resorted to the convoy system. Now in thinking of the convoy system 

 we only think of the Atlantic. All of us have been fed up on this. Since returning from 

 abroad, where I spent a year and a half in the Mediterranean, I have been made Director of 

 Naval Intelligence, the particular business of which is to get all information of use for the 

 next war, but I have also been given charge of the historical section to write up the Great 

 War. I will therefore, from this source, summarize a few facts which are worth your at- 

 tention. 



In the Atlantic ship convoy system, there were 1,474 convoys consisting of 18,633 ships, 

 of which 70 per cent were British bottoms, 27 per cent American bottoms, and 3 per cent 

 French bottoms. Information usually stops at this point, but it is interesting to follow the 

 matter a little further. Out of the total number of ships that crossed, only 15 per cent 

 were troop-ships and the rest were cargo ships. 



Pretty generally, in the newspapers, reference is made only to the passenger-carrying 



