What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the warKelly, Florence Finch
History
What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the war
Kelly, Florence Finch
World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
It was agreed between the War and Navy Departments that the Army should
take charge of the work of operating docks and providing and loading
cargoes and that in the hands of the Navy should lie the responsibility
of providing more tonnage when necessary and of equipping, keeping in
repair, operating and escorting the transports. To the Navy therefore
belongs the credit of having operated with marvelous success for a
year and a half an ocean ferry service of enormous proportions across
3,000 miles of submarine infested seas. To call it a ferry service is
no exaggeration. For the convoys started so promptly from American
shores, moved with such precision across the Atlantic, discharged their
passengers and left upon the homeward trip in such good time that
the ships came and went upon almost as sure a schedule as that of a
ferry across a river. In all, seventy-six groups of transports sailed
with troops, the size of a group ranging all the way from a single
unescorted ship to as many as fifteen troop ships escorted by from one
to four or five cruisers, destroyers and converted yachts. The famous
Leviathan, with her capacity for carrying from 9,000 to 11,000 men,
made ten such trips, most of them unescorted, her own guns, the skill
of her gun crews, the care with which watch was kept and her speed and
maneuvering ability being thought to give her ample protection. Trip
after trip the Leviathan took with the greatest regularity, steaming
down New York Bay with her decks brown with khaki-clad men, speeding
across the Atlantic, unloading on the other side and returning to her
dock in the New York port promptly in sixteen days. And in eight days
more, just as promptly, would she be ready for another trip.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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