On April 6, Congress passed a resolution for war and Wilson immediately signed it. Swept up in the excitement of the moment, Franklin and Eleanor hurried over to Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s mansion to welcome Uncle Ted, who had just arrived in Washington to pursue his latest project, recruiting a volunteer Army division, a larger version of the Rough Riders regiment that had catapulted him to fame.
As soon as they arrived at the Longworth’s, Theodore rushed up to Franklin and, grasping him by the shoulders, insisted, “You must resign! You must get into uniform at once!” This was of course exactly what the younger man most wanted to do, but he explained that he was getting no encouragement whatsoever from either Josephus Daniels or Woodrow Wilson, both of whom insisted that their highly effective assistant secretary of the Navy stay precisely where he was.
It is also probably true that much as Franklin wanted to join the military, he was also beginning to recognize that his current civilian job carried with it far more power and authority over naval matters than he could ever hope to obtain as a commissioned officer. It was clear that the long and grueling European war that America had just entered into was a very different sort of conflict than the brief, toy-soldier war with Spain that Theodore had so skillfully stage-managed two decades earlier. It was a war of conscripts rather than volunteers, a war governed by railway schedules and bond issues rather than brave deeds and rallying cries. While it would undoubtedly be good for his future political prospects to end up in uniform at some point, FDR had every reason to believe that for the time being he could do more to win the war from his office in Washington.
Uncle Ted described his plans for raising his own personal infantry division and hurrying off to France and glory. In anticipation of America’s entry into the war, Theodore had been corresponding since February with Secretary of War Baker, outlining his plans, but had received no encouragement from that corner. Now he asked Franklin to arrange a personal meeting with Baker, and FDR was able to set one up for the following day. Baker was respectful and solicitous, but remained vague and noncommittal, and Theodore realized that if he wanted his next great adventure to become a reality, he would have to humble himself as never before in his public life: with Franklin’s help, he arranged a meeting with Woodrow Wilson.
It must have been an interesting confrontation, the meeting of the two men Franklin Roosevelt most admired, both of them fervent Progressives, but of such radically different personalities and prejudices, and possessed of such profoundly deep antagonisms, that the gulf between the loud, pugnacious adventurer and the cold, stiff-necked Puritan idealist was probably unbridgeable. Even though Theodore Roosevelt had left the White House eight years earlier, at age fifty-nine he was still two years younger than Wilson. But he had aged significantly since his disastrous trip up the Amazon, where he had lost the sight of one eye and incurred permanent disabilities from tropical diseases. Wilson listened without comment to his predecessor’s plan. TR estimated he could raise a volunteer division of twenty-five thousand men in a few weeks, then train them with the help of General Leonard Wood, and transport them to Europe before the end of the summer. The president cautioned that the war in Europe was no “Charge of the Light Brigade,” but promised to consider the matter and bring it to the attention of the Army authorities.
After Theodore left, Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, asked the president for his impression of Theodore Roosevelt.
“He is a great boy,” Wilson replied thoughtfully. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. One can’t resist the man.”
But when Wilson described TR’s plan to General John Pershing, who was to lead the American Expeditionary Force, Pershing dismissed it out of hand. The last thing he needed was a rogue division roaming across Europe on its own, commanded by an independent glory-seeker determined to win new laurels. Wilson recognized that it would be imprudent to turn down the ex-president immediately. Theodore Roosevelt was still immensely popular, and millions would have enthusiastically approved his leading his own division. Wilson waited until the end of May before rejecting TR’s proposal.
“It would be very agreeable to me to pay Mr. Roosevelt this compliment, and the Allies the compliment, of sending an ex-president,” he announced, “but this is not the time for compliments or for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war. The business now in hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”
FDR was furious. “We ought to have sent TR over with a hundred thousand men,” he complained bitterly to Daniels.
It was one thing for Congress to declare war on the Central Powers, but it was another thing entirely for the Navy Department to figure out how to wage that war. In those first confused weeks of April 1917, while the Americans awaited the arrival of British and French naval delegations who would presumably help the Americans coordinate their activities with the Allies, most of the admirals in Washington were busy getting their dreadnoughts and cruisers back from Guantanamo and readying them for action.
Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt and Admiral Frederick R. Harris, Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, were studying the feasibility of something that would eventually come to be known as the North Sea Barrage, which would prove to be Roosevelt’s most important contribution to the war effort.
Ever since Germany’s return to unrestricted U-boat warfare in February, the number of merchant ships torpedoed and sunk had increased significantly. The Allies were doing their best to keep their losses secret, but it was becoming increasingly clear to observers in Washington that the losses must be precipitous. Roosevelt and Harris were exploring a way to counter the U-boat menace. Their idea was neither new nor particularly original. Many other officials, both military and civilian, had looked at a map of the North Atlantic and wondered if there wasn’t some way to bottle up the German submarines in their home ports at Ostend and Zeebrugge, Belgium, northeast of the Straits of Dover in the English Channel, in such a way as to make it impossible for them to get to the killing fields west of Britain, in that part of the North Atlantic known as the Western Approaches, where most of the merchant ships were being sunk. Woodrow Wilson, on several occasions, had expressed to Josephus Daniels his surprise at the failure of the Admiralty to use its great naval superiority to somehow stop the U-boats. “Why don’t the British shut up the hornets in their nests?” he asked. The Royal Navy was “hunting hornets all over the farm and leaving the nest alone.”
Roosevelt proposed to solve the problem by blocking the U-boats’ routes out of the North Sea. This would entail building a huge underwater barrier made up of minefields, nets, and other underwater obstacles stretching from Scotland east to Norway in the north, and a similar barrier across the Straits of Dover in the south. If successful, these two barriers, watched over by a fleet of patrol vessels, would bottle up the U-boats in their home ports and effectively neutralize them.
The idea, which was deceptively simple in theory, would depend on the practicality of its execution, which was problematic at best. Admiral Harris, who understood the enormous scope of the plan far better than Roosevelt, and who was familiar with the effectiveness of various anti-submarine devices, drew up a tentative project plan and an estimate of its costs, which were immense. When he studied the huge expenses involved, he was ready to drop the project then and there, but Roosevelt was undeterred. He had witnessed Uncle Ted’s Panama Canal, and knew that, given the money and the will, great dreams could be turned into reality. He had the dream, and the United States Navy would supply the money.
FDR took the plans to the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, where Commander S. P. Fullinwider, in charge of the mines section, was working on a similar idea. Fullinwider explained that his biggest problem had been the lack of an appropriate sea mine. Given the difficult conditions of the North Sea, with its strong currents, its great depth, its high tides, and its frequent storms, no one had ever developed a suitable explosive device that would remain operative long enough to do any good. Fullinwider had already put his people to work on the problem, so far without success.
On April 15, Roosevelt called a conference to consider the plans for the North Sea Barrier that he and Admiral Harris had worked up. Included in the meeting were Josephus Daniels, Admiral Harris, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William S. Benson, as well as Chief of Ordnance Rear Admiral Ralph Earle and various technical specialists. Daniels was immediately excited by the potential of the project, and hurried next door to the White House to get Wilson’s endorsement. The following day, with “the President’s hearty approval,” he sent a cable to Rear Admiral William S. Sims, the chief American naval officer in London. “Is it not practicable to block German coast efficiently and completely, thus making practically impossible the egress or ingress of submarines?” he asked. “The steps attempted or accomplished in that direction are to be reported at once.” Sims’s reply was discouraging. He cabled back that when he had broached the subject to the Admiralty, he was told that the British had considered the possibility of such a barrier earlier in the war, but had rejected it in part because it would be too expensive, and equally important, because the British had not been able to develop a mine that could stand up to the harsh conditions of the North Sea. Sims’s negative response cooled the interest of Secretary Daniels and Admiral Benson, but Roosevelt refused to accept the Royal Navy’s findings. He remained convinced he could overcome any inherent difficulty. All he needed was the right people and the right technology.
It was only when the various British naval missions began arriving in Washington in the following weeks, to establish a working relationship between the two navies, that Americans learned the shocking truth about the U-boat problem. To their astonishment and distress they learned that the U-boats were even more effective than they had feared, and were sinking one in every four oceangoing vessels clearing British ports. More ominous still, only some ten percent of the lost tonnage was being replaced. In April 1917, the month America entered the war, almost 900,000 tons of allied and neutral shipping was lost by enemy action, the vast bulk of it to the submarines. Admiral Jellicoe, First Sea Lord, described it as nothing less than “the greatest danger ever to face the Empire.” The British were reduced to a few weeks’ supply of grain and only ten days’ stock of sugar. But the most serious shortage was that of oil. The Grand Fleet was so short of oil that its ships were forced to operate at half speed and any further constriction in the oil supply would cripple the antisubmarine effort. The British public had been kept in the dark about this dire situation, and the even greater secret that the Admiralty was not even sure how to solve the problem.
Desperate to find some solution to the U-boat crisis, the British had decided to try convoying, using destroyers to guard their merchant ships. Originally they had rejected convoying because it would have resulted in congested harbors, making it impracticable to assemble the convoys, but they hoped to circumvent the problem by arranging for the various vessels to rendezvous in some secret location on the open sea, where destroyers and other antisubmarine vessels would be on hand to guard them. Once assembled, the convoy, with its guardian destroyers, could move off to its final destination. While this was a promising shift in strategy, it meant there was suddenly a desperate need for destroyers to do the guarding.
The British had almost three hundred destroyers in their navy, but many could not be spared for convoy duty. They hoped the Americans could make up the difference. The United States Fleet included about seventy destroyers, most of which were needed to protect their capital ships. The admirals in Washington suggested they might be able to spare a squadron of six destroyers for guarding merchant convoys. When the British protested, the Americans explained they needed to complete their ambitious program of dreadnought construction they had embarked on in 1916. The British countered that the Allies had more than enough heavy warships in the British and French navies. What was needed now were destroyers, which could be built quickly and cheaply. They were perhaps the only means of counteracting the submarine menace. Only after long days of discussion did the British come to understand the American insistence on the larger ships, which arose from the U.S. Navy’s deeply ingrained fear of a future two-ocean war against Germany and Japan. It was precisely that fear, spelled out in chilling detail in the Zimmermann telegram, that had brought the United States into the war.
Roosevelt, who was not willing to put his trust in the convoy system—he still strongly favored his North Sea Barrier—made a private suggestion to Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson’s personal confidant. Perhaps the Americans could be persuaded to postpone their dreadnought program and concentrate on building destroyers if, following the successful end of the war in Europe, Britain would be willing to lend the United States sufficient battleships to provide for American security until such time as her own ships were ready. It was an interesting idea, and might have solved an important issue of American defense policy, but Wilson turned it down, because such an agreement would have to be secret, and he was convinced that such secret agreements between nations were the curse of European diplomacy and in fact, the direct cause of the war then raging.
As the two navies dickered, the mounting number of merchant ship sinkings made it clear that an immediate countermeasure was required, and eventually the British insistence on adopting the convoy system prevailed. The United States reluctantly agreed to suspend its dreadnought program in favor of a massive construction program to build 250 destroyers.
By the middle of May 1917, the convoy system was already being put into operation. The Royal Navy predicted it would solve the problem, but Roosevelt, for one, remained skeptical and never abandoned his determination to build an anti-submarine barrier across the North Sea. In the coming months he would meet stiff opposition, primarily from the Royal Navy, which did not take kindly to the Americans’ temerity in questioning British naval authority, but in the long run he would get his way. It would be FDR’s first major triumph in the halls of power, a harbinger of the skillful infighter who would in time emerge.
Roosevelt knew it was a sound idea, but he understood from the start that his plan had one major drawback—no one had come up with a sea mine sufficient to the needs of the proposed barrier, and, without such a mine, the plan was nothing more than a theoretical exercise.