The resulting drop in morale was one difficulty which the Transportation Service faced at the outset of its labors in demobilization, but one which it met and solved successfully. Another more concrete one had to do with the operation of troopships. Early in the war the Army had turned over to the Navy the task of operating most of the troopships at sea, principally because the military authorities found themselves unable to compete with the high wages of the munitions industries in securing civilian crews for vessels. The Navy, with the uniform it offered and its appeal to patriotism, had no such trouble; and consequently it assumed the operation of the troop transports and manned them with bluejackets. These young Americans enlisted for danger and adventure and had no stomach for the work of operating a collection of prosaic ferry-boats across the now safe Atlantic. The Navy Department, seeing that it could not hold them in service, notified the War Department to take back its ships. This the Transportation Service did, hiring civilian crews and placing them aboard the troop transports at a rate that relieved the Navy of the work entirely by the summer of 1919, except that the Navy continued to operate three or four troopships with crews made up of men serving under term enlistments. While the Transportation Service was contemplating the conversion of many of its cargo carriers into troopships and the consequent use of the vessels for a number of months to come, it was subjected to pressure from the owners of some of these same ships, who demanded that the Government give them up. Practically all of its cargo tonnage the Army held under charter from private ownership, the charters running during the emergency. After the armistice the vessel owners naturally desired to get back into the race for foreign commerce. It was to the interest of the United States that the military tonnage be so employed at the earliest possible time, but the early return of the overseas expedition was even more important, and it received the priority.