To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history The World Crisis, 1916–1918, he said of Wilson, “What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then what abridgment of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied today; how different would be the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!”
As it happened, America joined the war just in time. Germany’s new campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had succeeded to an alarming degree, although this had been kept secret by British officials. An American admiral, William S. Sims, learned the truth when he traveled to England to meet with British naval leaders to plan America’s participation in the war at sea. What Sims discovered shocked him. German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In Queenstown, U.S. consul Frost saw striking corroboration of the new campaign’s effect: in a single twenty-four-hour period, the crews of six torpedoed ships came ashore. Admiral Sims reported to Washington, “Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are losing the war.”
Just ten days later, the U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of destroyers. They set off from Boston on April 24. Not many of them. Just six. But the significance of their departure was lost on no one.
ON THE MORNING of May 4, 1917, anyone standing atop the Old Head of Kinsale would have seen an extraordinary sight. First there appeared six plumes of dark smoke, far off on the horizon. The day was unusually clear, the sea a deep blue, the hills emerald, very much like a certain day two years earlier. The ships became steadily more distinct. Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower. American flags hung from homes and public buildings. A British destroyer, the Mary Rose, sailed out to meet the inbound warships, and signaled, “Welcome to the American colors.” To which the American commander answered, “Thank you, I am glad of your company.”
On May 8, the destroyers began their first patrols, just a day beyond the two-year anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania.
EPILOGUE
PERSONAL EFFECTS
ONE HOT DAY IN JULY 1916, A HARBOR PILOT WALKED into the ship-news office in Battery Park in Manhattan and invited a group of reporters to accompany him on a brief voyage, by tugboat, up the Hudson River to Yonkers, north of Manhattan, where he was to “fetch out” a ship, that is, guide it downriver to the wider and safer waters of New York Harbor. Ordinarily this was not a voyage the reporters would be inclined to make, but the day was stifling and the pilot said the fresh air would do them all good. The reporters, among them the Evening Mail’s Jack Lawrence, also brought along a good deal of alcohol, or, as Lawrence put it, “liquid sustenance.” As their tugboat approached the Yonkers wharf, the reporters saw that the ship was an old Cunard ocean liner, the Ultonia, docked there to pick up a load of horses for the war. It was a small ship, with one funnel. “She looked so smeared and dirty and utterly woebegone that we hardly recognized her,” Lawrence wrote. The ship’s black hull had been painted gray, in haphazard fashion. “Much of this had chipped off, giving her a peculiar, spotted appearance.”
The day was languid, the river calm, and yet the ship moved with a peculiar side-to-side motion. Lawrence had never seen such a thing and found it “almost uncanny.” This rolling, the pilot explained, was caused by the hundreds of horses within the ship. Sensing movement, all the horses roped to one side of the hull would suddenly rear backward in alarm, causing a slight roll. This in turn would startle the horses anew and cause those on the opposite side to step back. The side-to-side roll became more pronounced with each cycle, to the point where the ship looked as if it were being buffeted by a heavy sea. This, the pilot explained, was called a “horse storm,” and under certain conditions it could bang a ship against its wharf and damage deck rails and boats.
As the tugboat pulled up alongside the Ultonia, the ship’s cargo doors swung open to admit the pilot. The sun blazed. Inside the darkened hold stood one man, shaded by the overhead door. He looked down at the pilot and reporters. He did not smile. Lawrence recognized him at once: Capt. William Thomas Turner. “His old blue uniform was soiled and wrinkled,” Lawrence wrote, but “his cap, bearing the Cunard Line insignia, was still at the familiar jaunty angle. The figure of the man was still erect and commanding.”
The pilot climbed into the ship.