CHAPTER IV AMERICAN DESTROYERS IN ACTION I Our first division of destroyers reached Queenstown on a Friday morning, May 4, 1917; the following Monday they put to sea on the business of hunting the submarine and protecting commerce. For the first month or six weeks they spent practically all their time on patrol duty in company with British destroyers, sloops, and other patrol vessels. Though the convoy system was formally adopted in the latter part of May, it was not operating completely and smoothly until August or September. Many troop and merchant convoys were formed in the intervening period and many were conducted through the submarine zone by American destroyers; but our ships spent much time sailing singly, hunting for such enemies as might betray their presence, or escorting individual cargoes. The early experiments had demonstrated the usefulness of the convoy system, yet a certain number of pessimists still refused to accept it as the best solution of the shipping problem; and to reorganize practically all the shipping of the world, scattered everywhere on the seven seas, necessarily took time. But this intervening period furnished indispensable training for our men. They gained an every-day familiarity with the waters which were to form the scene of their operations and learned many of the tricks of the German submarines. It was a strange world in which these young Americans now found themselves. The life was a hard one, of course, in those tempestuous Irish waters, with the little destroyers jumping from wave to wave, sometimes showing daylight beneath their keels, their bows frequently pointing skyward, or plunged deep into heavy seas, and their sides occasionally ploughing along under the foamy waves. For days the men lived in a world of fog and mist; rain in those regions seemed to be almost the normal state of nature. Much has been written about the hardships of life aboard the destroyer, and to these narratives our men could add many details of their own. These hardships, however, did not weigh heavily upon them, for existence in those waters, though generally monotonous, possessed at times plenty of interest and excitement. The very appearance of the sea showed that our men were engaging in a kind of warfare very different from that for which they had been trained. The enormous amount of shipping seemed to give the lie to the German reports that British commerce had been practically arrested. A perpetual stream of all kinds of vessels, liners, tramps, schooners, and fishing boats, was passing toward the Irish and the English coasts. Yet here and there other floating objects on the surface told the story. Now it was a stray boat filled with the survivors of a torpedoed vessel; now a raft on which lay the bodies of dead men; now the derelict hulk of a ship which the Germans had abandoned as sunk, but which persisted in floating aimlessly around, a constant danger to navigation. Loose mines, bobbing