World War I and the Navy
U-boat threat leads to game-changing innovations
By Rear Admiral Sam Cox, USN (Ret.)
Director, Naval History and Heritage Command
via Military Times
“We are ready now, sir” said Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Taussig, division commander for the first six U.S. destroyers to arrive in Europe (in Queenstown, now Cobh, Ireland) 100 years ago on May 4, 1917, in response to a question from the local British commander on when the U.S. destroyers could commence operations against German U-boats.
American destroyer squadron commander LCDR Joseph Taussig steps off the USS Wadsworth upon the squadron's arrival in Queenstown, Ireland in 1917.It's not exactly what Taussig said, although the gist was correct, but it's what the British press reported. The “quote” became the most famous U.S. Navy rallying cry of the war. It was also a huge boost to British morale at a time when U-boats were sinking British merchant ships at a rate that gravely threatened the entire Allied war effort and Britain’s very survival.
In many respects, however, the U.S. Navy (and the U.S. Army, too) were far from being ready to go to war. The U.S. had tried very hard to stay out of the First World War and the horrific carnage of millions of futile deaths that characterized the war.
The British naval blockade of Germany, which disrupted U.S. trade to Europe, angered the U.S. almost as much as German actions. Even the sinking of the liner SS Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, and the loss of 128 of the 139 American civilians on board, was not enough to overcome intense opposition in the U.S. to going to war.
Only belatedly did President Woodrow Wilson and Congress authorize serious preparations and a massive naval buildup (the Naval Act of 1916), but none of those new ships would be ready by the time the U.S. declared war on April 6, 1917, resulting from the German’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that February.
World War I would profoundly change the U.S. Navy, and naval warfare, ever after. The rapid building program created the second-largest navy in the world. Two U.S. technological innovations early in the war, underway refueling and reliable radio-telephones, were significant in defeating the U-boat threat and revolutionized naval warfare.
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