Richard Warner was sipping a cold beer in the officer’s club at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when the telephone rang. The twenty-nine-year-old Navy lieutenant, just appointed executive officer on the destroyer escort Kendall C. Campbell, reached over and picked up the receiver.
“This is President Roosevelt,” the caller on the other end announced to a startled Warner. “Is Frank there?” Warner replied, “No, sir, he went to the head.” The president told Warner to give FDR Jr. the message that he had found an ice cream machine at the submarine base in New London, Connecticut, for his son’s DE, the Ulvert M. Moore. The president promised to have the machine flown to Norfolk, Virginia, FDR Jr.’s next stop.
Warner, who had just finished a tour of duty as commander of a 110-foot sub chaser, had been rushed up to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in August 1944 to become executive officer of the Campbell after the ship’s captain gave the previous incumbent an unsatisfactory fitness rating. Upon arriving in Brooklyn he met Capt. Robert W. Johnson, who told Warner that the top priority for his new executive officer was to find an ice cream machine for his ship. “I don’t give a damn what you do with the ship,” Johnson told a surprised Warner, “but I want an ice cream machine.”
Thinking this an odd but relatively simple assignment, Warner immediately went ashore and checked the supply depot. He was told that ice cream machines were not part of the standard equipment installed on DEs. So Warner checked the yellow pages and also visited a couple of wholesale companies. No luck. It looked like he was about to fail the first assignment given him by his new skipper and probably would end up getting an unsatisfactory fitness report just like his predecessor.
That evening, Warner was at the officer’s club bar enjoying some liquid refreshments when a tall young officer sat down beside him. The officer was captain of the DE Ulvert M. Moore and his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. Roosevelt had just finished his shakedown cruise in Bermuda and was in the Brooklyn yard for some R&R before heading to the Pacific.
“How are you getting along with your new skipper?” Roosevelt asked Warner, adding, “I understand the Campbell is having a few problems.” Warner said he really did not have a chance to talk with the skipper, except for a brief meeting that morning. “The skipper told me that he didn’t give a damn what I did about the ship, but he wanted an ice cream machine on board.”
FDR Jr. turned to one of his junior officers, also propped up at the bar, and asked, “Have we got one?” The officer went down to the ship and returned a few minutes later reporting no ice cream machine on board. “I’ll call my dad and see what he can do,” Roosevelt said, dialing the White House on the officer’s club phone. Warner said FDR Jr. chatted with his father about his ship and his upcoming assignments before he asked the president about the ice cream machine. “Right here in the office,” President Roosevelt told his son, “there are three or four guys with lots of gold braid on them, but none of them knows anything about ice cream machines.” The president promised to check and get back to his son.
Captain Roosevelt hung up the phone and went to the head. A few minutes later the president called back. Warner recalled President Roosevelt saying, “Just tell him that I’ve got an ice cream machine for him, and it will be in Norfolk when you arrive in a couple of days.” Mustering his courage, Warner spoke up: “Wait a minute, Mr. President, I’m the exec on the 443 and I’m the guy that instigated this thing. We are running buddies and my skipper told me all he wants is an ice cream machine.” Roosevelt interrupted, “Oh, you want one too?” Warner said he did, and when the two ships arrived at Norfolk after escorting the carrier Shamrock Bay from New York, there were two ice cream machines waiting.
“You can’t imagine the service we got,” Warner said, not quite prepared for the VIP treatment they received. The massive ice cream machines were floating on barges with cranes and tow boats. “They came in and cut off half the after-deck house, and cranes hoisted these stainless steel ice cream machines into the back of the two destroyer escorts.” His first mission accomplished, Warner never got so much as a “thank you” from his new skipper, who, he recalled, stayed to himself, ate ice cream nonstop, and had a fondness for New Orleans–style chicory coffee.
Later Warner would discover why the ice cream machine was so important to his new skipper. During the ship’s shakedown cruise in Bermuda, the Campbell had a vintage wooden bucket–type ice cream machine with a hand crank. “The captain had the six mess attendants cranking the machine all the time right by his companionway,” Warner said, noting once in a while some ice cream would make it into officer’s country, but most of it went to the private stash of Captain Johnson. Certainly none ever made its way to the crew’s mess. On the way back from the shakedown cruise, the old ice cream machine mysteriously disappeared. The vessel was searched, the crew was interrogated, and twelve hours of general quarters was enforced. Threats were made of no liberty for crew members once they arrived in New York unless the machine was returned.
The ice cream machine was never found, and most agree it likely was resting at the bottom of the sea. Sticking to his word, Captain Johnson restricted the crew to the ship while in the navy yard, although a good number of them went AWOL. No one ever admitted to tossing the old ice cream machine overboard, but with the modern automatic one now on board, everyone—captain, officers, and crew—would enjoy ice cream just like crews of the larger warships, where such machines were standard equipment. Ice cream machines installed, both ships departed Hampton Roads, Virginia, on 5 October, escorting two oilers to Aruba in the Dutch West Indies and then to Balboa, Canal Zone, passing through the Panama Canal on their way to San Diego, California.
Warner, who grew up in California and enjoyed sailing small boats most of his life, recalled FDR Jr. as a “great guy” who also was a very competent commander and good ship handler; he also remembered morale on Roosevelt’s ship as being “very good.” Of course, Warner said some of that good morale might have been attributed to the amount of special attention given to the Moore, due in no small part to its captain with the famous name. Warner recalled that when they were passing through the Panama Canal, Roosevelt “spent a lot of time loading up the ship with liquor,” which certainly must have pleased FDR Jr.’s officers but made Warner “more than a bit envious.”1
The role played by destroyer escorts in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters was key to the success of the Allies in World War II. Because of bureaucratic bickering, a shortage of materials, and other reasons, they arrived very late to the war, but they were instrumental in protecting convoys and seeking out and destroying both German and Japanese vessels. In fact, Robert E. Sherwood, biographer of one of President Roosevelt’s top aides, Harry Hopkins, said the single outstanding American failure, the avoidance of which might have shortened the war, was the lack of destroyer escorts. Of this, Sherwood said, the postwar opinion was unanimous among those involved in the Roosevelt administration.2
Captain Herbert A. Werner, a German U-boat commander, lends support to that theory. In March 1943 Werner noted that “the U-boat Force sank over 650,000 tons of Allied shipping—and suffered a sharp and puzzling increase in losses.” He attributes the sudden reversal of fortunes for the Germans to the arrival of destroyer escorts, small aircraft carriers, and much-improved radar that had come on the scene, resulting in the destruction of fully 40 percent of the U-boat force within a few weeks, according to Werner. “The Allied counteroffensive permanently reversed the tide of the battle. Almost overnight, the hunters had become the hunted, and through the rest of the war our boats were slaughtered at a fearful rate,” Werner noted.3 Over the course of the war, of the 859 U-boats sent on patrol to the front lines of the war, some 88 percent were sunk, sending more than 30,000 German sailors to their graves at the bottom of the sea.4
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was one of the staunchest proponents for the construction of escort vessels. In a letter penned to FDR on Halloween 1942, Churchill called the U-boat menace “our worst danger,” adding that “the spectacle of all these splendid ships being built, sent to sea crammed with priceless food and munitions and being sunk—three or four every day—torments me day and night.” He continued, “Not only does this attack cripple our war energies and threaten our life, but it arbitrarily limits the might of the United States coming into the struggle.” To be blunt, Churchill warned Roosevelt, the “oceans, which were your shield, threaten to become your cage.”
“I presume,” Roosevelt replied, “that we shall never satisfy ourselves as to the relative need of merchant ships versus escort vessels. In this case I believe we should try to have our cake and eat it too.” The president went on to assure Churchill, “We have increased our escort program recently by 70 for 1943, so that we should turn out 336 escort vessels during the next calendar year. I am asking Admiral King to confer with your representative here and make arrangements about the distribution of these ships.”5
Enter William Francis Gibbs, a self-taught naval architect whose buttoned-down, business-like style would help to change the equation in the Battle of the Atlantic, giving the U.S. Navy the new class of warships, the DEs, which would quickly prove their worth on the high seas. It appeared that the ferocious and highly successful U-boats were finally about to meet their match. Gibbs’ influence over American shipbuilding was monumental throughout the course of the war. In fact, one naval officer said the enormous expansion of American sea power during the war was due to three factors: “the Navy, American industry, and Gibbs.”6
Sporting steel-rimmed spectacles and often wearing shiny clothes with patches to cover holes, Gibbs—known to his friends as William Francis or simply W. F.—was the United States’ foremost naval architect and head of the firm Gibbs and Cox, the largest private ship–designing firm in the world. His firm turned out designs for thousands of wartime vessels, nearly three-quarters of all naval vessels built during the war, including Liberty ships, landing ships, destroyers, cruisers, destroyer escorts, picket ships, mine sweepers, cutters, icebreakers, aircraft carriers, tenders, repair ships, and tankers—some $12 billion worth of ships. At its peak, Gibbs and Cox issued 10,000 blueprints a month and 6,700 purchase orders each day, according to a company history. During the war years the firm designed more than 63 percent of all oceangoing merchant vessels as well. Gibbs centralized purchasing and revolutionized the mass production of ships, designing them to travel faster and farther, and he was hailed by the Navy’s chief engineer as the “greatest influence on naval design since John Ericsson,” who in 1862 designed the Monitor, which stopped the Confederate’s Merrimac during the historic Civil War battle at Hampton Roads.7
All of this came from a man who never took a single lesson on ship design in his life and had no formal training in architecture or engineering. In 1906 Gibbs, born to a wealthy Philadelphia family, attended Harvard University, where he refused to follow the formal curriculum and instead studied economics and science, graduating without a degree. His father, a prominent and successful financier, did not think highly of engineers, regarding them as impractical and unstable. He wanted his son to study law.
In 1911 William Francis enrolled in Columbia Law School, where he did graduate with a law degree, the same year he also took a master’s degree in economics. But Gibbs always had an interest in ships and the sea. Like his older contemporary and later boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gibbs often tinkered with ship designs and sketched his first drawing of a boat at the age of three (FDR sketched his first sailboat in a letter to his mother at the age of five, and FDR also attended Harvard and Columbia Law School, as did William Francis.) Designing ships evolved from a hobby to a passion for this self-taught naval engineer and eventually consumed Gibbs for the rest of his life.
During his college days Gibbs devoured books on marine engineering and naval architecture, which had little to do with his actual class work. His dormitory room was filled with blueprints and engineering drawings of ships. Gibbs daydreamed about ship design.8 After working briefly as a lawyer— and hating every minute of it—William Francis and his brother, Frederic H. Gibbs, joined the International Mercantile Marine Company in 1915 and, with the backing of J. P. Morgan and President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, started to work on the design for a 1,000-foot ocean liner capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in four days. Sadly for the Gibbs brothers, World War I intervened and their plans to design the world’s largest and fastest ocean liner were shelved.9
William Francis quickly rose through the ranks and became chief of construction for the company in 1919. Following the war he and his brother organized Gibbs Brothers in New York City in 1922 (succeeded by Gibbs and Cox in 1929, when Daniel H. Cox, a prominent yacht designer, joined the firm) and, at the request of the Federal Shipping Board, Gibbs undertook a project to convert the mammoth German ship, the Vaterland, into a luxury American ocean liner. After being taken as a war prize by the United States at the start of the conflict, the 950-foot vessel did duty as a troopship, shepherding more than 110,000 U.S. troops to France and Germany, the largest ocean liner ever to fly the Stars and Stripes. Renamed the Leviathan at the urging of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, there was widespread public support for converting the ship into an American passenger liner at war’s end.
Gibbs undertook the assignment with great gusto. He traveled to Germany to secure a copy of the ship’s original plans only to find that its builders, Blohm and Voss, wanted $1 million for a copy of the plans. “I think,” remarked Mr. Gibbs quite cooly, “that we will make our own set of working plans from the Leviathan itself.”10 Gibbs returned to New York and hired one hundred naval draftsmen, who inspected and measured every square foot of the ship, whose overall area totaled 7.5 acres. They even were required to take meticulous measurements of the ship below its waterline, since there was no dry dock in New York capable of handling a ship the size of the Leviathan. After twelve months of extraordinary work, a complete set of drawings of the ship was produced. Down to Newport News the ship went, and one year and $8 million later, a shining new ocean liner was christened, with William Francis Gibbs supervising every detail of its reconversion. The giant ship sailed from Virginia to Boston on its maiden voyage. An exasperated tug captain, obviously overwhelmed by the vessel’s size, was overheard saying, “Where do you tie up a line on this goddamned hotel?”11
In fact, when William Francis once was asked to provide a definition of a super liner, the nation’s foremost naval architect replied, “A super liner is the equivalent of a large cantilever bridge covered with steel plates, containing a power plant that could light any of our larger cities, with a first-class hotel on top.” And who would know better than William Francis? He had just created the largest ship in the world.12
But William Francis was not yet done designing passenger ships of gargantuan proportions. In 1924 he and his firm designed and supervised construction of the largest and fastest passenger liner built in the United States, the SS Malolo, Hawaiian for “flying fish,” the first American liner constructed exclusively from his plans. It was here that Gibbs would earn high marks for designing a ship with extensive safety features, including an arrangement of watertight bulkheads, connected by hydraulically operated sliding doors controlled from the bridge, as well as a strengthened hull that was designed not buckle if hit by another ship. As a boy Gibbs was said to be deeply impacted by the Titanic disaster and insisted on designing a ship that would not sink.13
Although his design of these passenger ships was of herculean proportions, everything else about the complex and secretive William Francis was understated. As head of Gibbs and Cox, he was boss to 2,500 employees yet did not have a private office, desk, leather chair, telephone, or any other executive perks typical for someone in his position. Instead, he worked at a simple drafting table while perched on a wooden stool. Gibbs was nicknamed the “Undertaker” because he often wore a nondescript black suit and tie. It was said he chose this simplified dress because, dressing all in black, he never had to waste time or thought deciding which color tie to wear with which color suit. He was too busy for such foolishness.
Thus his attire was standardized and interchangeable, following the same principle he championed when designing ships: standardize the parts and make them all interchangeable. On the rare occasion that William Francis took time away from his work to relax, engineering was always on his mind. When listening to certain symphonies, especially Bach, the designer said it was like looking through glass at a ship’s machinery in action. He also enjoyed watching jugglers because he valued balance and symmetry, and once said that “designing a ship is like keeping nine balls in the air all at one time.”14
Although regarded as the most important naval architect of the twentieth century, Gibbs shunned ceremony and publicity even though he was married to Vera Cravath, whose father was a prominent New York City attorney and chairman of the Metropolitan Opera for many years. She and William Francis met at a dinner party and married within a month. “She goes her way and I go mine,” Gibbs once told a reporter in describing their relationship, perhaps due in no small part to his intense devotion to his work. He went to the office seven days a week, arrived early, and stayed late working on his ship designs. Every day he ate a simple lunch of dry toast and coffee.15
Conscientious and goal-driven, Gibbs was exactly the type of individual the United States needed to design and coordinate the largest shipbuilding program in the nation’s history. Recognizing the tremendous abilities of William Francis, the Roosevelt administration tapped the naval designer as its new controller of shipbuilding in December 1942. Gibbs agreed to work for no compensation—a so-called dollar-a-year man—and would be directing general policies and coordinating shipbuilding efforts between the War Production Board, the Navy, the Army, and the Maritime Commission. The appointment allowed him to continue supervising Gibbs and Cox by freeing him of any administrative duties in his governmental post.16
Gibbs continued directing its day-to-day activities and supervising all details of ship design—as he had since 1929, and as only he could do. He argued that designing ships is a “distinctly personal” undertaking that depends upon the designer’s skill and experience and cannot be delegated to others, especially with the tremendous number of designs under way. The Roosevelt administration agreed, and the War Production Board issued a press release on 18 December announcing his appointment.17
When Franklin Roosevelt assured Prime Minister Churchill that he would accelerate the production of destroyer escorts in 1943, he may have been confident that the job would be done because he knew William Francis Gibbs would be the man directing it. In what Gibbs and Cox described as the “most complicated and difficult multiple shipbuilding program” the company handled during the entire war, Gibbs, who was said to be able to construct a complete ship in his imagination, and his team went right to work designing the new warship, producing design plans in record time. Although the firm had designed some DEs in 1942 for the British navy, designing an American version in such large numbers and in such a short time frame was, indeed, an undertaking of monumental proportions—but one William Francis relished. Dealing with a shortage of various parts as well as propulsion equipment made the task even more difficult, as designs for four different ships had to be developed in order to meet President Roosevelt’s deadline. He had to use whatever parts were available and design the ships accordingly.
Gibbs designed the ships so they could be mass-produced at a rapid pace. The machinery plans for three of the types of diesel-driven DEs were produced simultaneously and completed in seventy-three, eighty-five, and ninety-eight days, according to a company history. “The procurement problem was enormously complicated due to the five designs of ships and numerous changes in the assignment to yards and numbers at yards,” Gibbs and Cox stated. But it has been argued that this new technique, along with diesel engines, contributed significantly to the superiority of American naval vessels.18
The Navy scheduled 270 DEs for 1943, and a full month ahead of schedule that goal was achieved, due in no small part to the conscientious dedication of William Francis and his staff. In a priority telegram to “The Men and Women of Gibbs & Cox,” Rear Adm. Edward L. Cochrane, chief of the Bureau of Ships and one of the earliest proponents for the construction of DEs, praised the firm and its staff, saying, “You who participated in the design of these ships and the procurement of the necessary components must be commended for the part you have played in helping to make possible a record which emphasizes anew the productive genius of American industry.” Cochrane said that there should be no problem meeting the three-hundred-ship level set by President Roosevelt in 1943. “You may be justly proud of your contribution to the success of the DE program.”19
Cochrane and Gibbs shared more than a desire to carry out the president’s wishes, however. They possessed a similar work ethic, with Cochrane known to work seven days a week and well into the night during the war years, taking plenty of work with him when he left each evening. An inspiring and strong leader, Cochrane was meticulous in his demand for professionalism, insisting on thorough staff work from the more than six thousand people working in the Bureau of Ships. Earning the nickname “the shirt sleeve admiral,” Cochrane frequently would leave off his coat and cap with the gold braid to drop in to drafting rooms and shops to check the progress of his projects. Prior to the United States’ entry into the war, Cochrane, who has been credited with coming up with the first design for a DE, traveled to England to study that country’s submarines as well as its convoy vessels, which focused on antisubmarine rather than antiaircraft configurations. A direct outgrowth of that visit would be his strong support for the mass production of destroyer escorts as a means to stop the German U-boat slaughter in the North Atlantic.20
Another way that Gibbs was able to save time, energy, material, and money was to build scale model ships before the plans for the full-sized vessels were sent to the shipyards. Although building models was not new to the shipbuilding industry, Gibbs’ models, which were one-eighth the full-sized ship, reproduced precisely to scale all aspects of the hull, fittings, pipes, ducts, wires, valves, switches, gauges, and even cooking equipment. Every detail of the completed vessel was faithfully reproduced in the model, allowing engineers and draftsmen an opportunity to visualize all aspects of the proposed ship, and correct problems, before the plans were sent out to the shipyard. First, a temporary model of wood or plastic was constructed; further along in the design process, it was replaced with a finished model of wood, plastic, and metal. Even the engine room was reproduced in exquisite detail.
In fact, Harold Bowen, a strong supporter of Gibbs and head of the Navy’s Engineering Bureau, said that the models were so astonishingly accurate that it was safe for draftsmen to obtain actual dimensions from the models, and that it was easier for the pipe shop to lay out its piping from the model instead of laying out templates in the actual ship. So impressed was the Navy Department, that it actually started to require shipbuilders to provide both models as well as the actual ships, much to the chagrin of some shipbuilders who thought the practice wasteful and expensive.
Because destroyer escorts used four different power plants to propel the vessels, Gibbs had four separate models built, each one having a different engine room. Representatives of the shipyards where the full-sized vessels eventually would be built also came to Gibbs and Cox’s New York City office to study the models, which were used to answer any questions and save valuable time once the plans arrived in the shipyard and production began. As mass production of the full-sized ships got under way, most of the issues already had been addressed and changes made at the scale model stage. Some of the models were as long as twenty-six feet and accurate to one-sixty-fourth of an inch. If there was a bad idea or a mistake in the blueprints, they would likely show up in the model.21
In order to speed the production of destroyer escorts, Gibbs and Cox assumed the role of central procurement agent in addition to designing the vessels, which would be built in a number of private shipyards. According to maritime historian Frank O. Braynard, this was the first time the Navy entrusted the planning, purchasing, and building of a multiple ship program entirely to a private organization. Other “firsts” marked the DE project, including having large prefabricated portions of the ships put together outside the shipyard, where they later would be transported for assembly.
The Shipbuilders Council of America lauded the prefabricated aspects of the new ships, saying that it had helped American shipyards to break world speed records for production. “With a hull put together in thirteen prefabricated sections, some of which weighed 84,000 pounds, the destroyer escort is slightly smaller than the World War I destroyers, and is about 300 feet long with a 35-foot beam,” the council noted, adding, “More than thirty-six skilled trades are needed in the construction of a single destroyer escort vessel. In a great many of the shipyards now constructing them, women workers are shouldering their full share of the precise work that goes into the building of the hardest hitting ship of its class ever made.”22
“The Battle of the Atlantic was at its worst while these ships were being built,” Braynard observes, pointing out that one convoy of sixty ships was attacked by German submarines six days after sailing. Only five of those vessels survived the trip across the Atlantic. Gibbs accelerated procurement of materials and expanded prefabrication of ship sections, cutting construction time from one year to seven months. In fact, the HMS Fitzroy, a destroyer escort built for the British in the Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Hingham, Massachusetts, shipyard set a new national record when it slid down the ways only eight and a half days after its keel was laid. That shipyard also set another record producing ten destroyer escorts in a single month.23
In order to keep the ships rolling out at a rapid pace, Gibbs and Cox determined that many of the available pipes, valves, and fittings met commercial standards but not necessarily the more stringent Navy standards. If it were to meet the accelerated deadlines set by President Roosevelt, the company argued, it should be allowed to use the materials meeting commercial standards, which were more readily available. Gibbs and Cox considered this decision of “extreme importance” in allowing it to maintain the rapid timetable set for destroyer escorts as well as for the construction of landing ships.24
Seventeen shipyards across the nation undertook construction of the DEs, working around the clock and using mostly inexperienced men and women to mass-produce these trim but deadly new warships. Although more than 1,000 were ordered, only 563 actually were constructed because, as U-boat activity in the Atlantic began to subside, some 442 of the planned DEs were cancelled, with resources being diverted to the construction of other vitally needed vessels.25
The course of the war in the Atlantic might have been different if destroyer escorts had been constructed when they first were suggested. Unfortunately the United States had none of these little warships in its fleet when Germany declared war on it and had little ability to protect the merchant ships being torpedoed and sunk by U-boats right off the East Coast. “The Battle of the Atlantic has taken a turn for the worse,” the New York Times asserted in February 1942. “Largely because of increased sinkings off the Canadian and United States coasts.” The article went on to say that Allied resources to battle the Germans and Japanese were stretched to the limit. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a neighbor and friend of FDR back in New York State and a former administrative assistant to the president, stepped in and urged Admiral Stark to start construction of destroyer escorts, which, reluctantly, the general board finally agreed to initiate, even though Navy operations put them in sixth place on the priority list behind all other vessels, except submarines.
Although the cost of constructing a DE was said to be half that of a conventional destroyer, it took some time for regular Navy folks to adjust to the new and unique kind of warship. “Old Navy men who see them for the first time are apt to stare and scratch their heads,” Ashley Halsey Jr. observed in a September 1943 Proceedings magazine article, adding, “The hull is conventional, but the superstructure borders on the weird—something between a submarine conning tower and a tank turret.” Halsey added, “Wheelhouse, bridge, and charthouse are all sheathed in blank steel except for two slit ports and some small portholes. A shielded anti-aircraft gun is about where the wheel should be, and forward of it are two all-purpose guns on stepped-down platforms.”
The DEs’ engines, termed “iron sea horses” by the New York Times, were chosen for the ships because of their toughness, adaptability, and simplicity of operation. Mass-produced at remarkable speed, they were said to be capable of reversing themselves in a matter of seconds, to be able to wheel the vessels around at unbelievable angles, and to have enough speed to outmaneuver U-boats.26
Time magazine, in a February 1943 article, called destroyer escorts “highly efficient” but noted that they were too late in coming to the Battle of the Atlantic. “The destroyer escort situation is worse, since only a handful have been delivered. As a result a single destroyer often convoys 15 hapless merchantmen across the Atlantic v the ideal setup, which would be closer to one escort for every three freighters.” The magazine correctly placed the blame for the delay in building DEs squarely on the shoulders of the Navy brass in Washington. The “main reason for the lag in escort ships has been a series of Washington miscalculations,” Time noted, adding, “First, the Navy underestimated the real job. Then there was a drive for landing barges. The merchant shipping program itself has put enormous train on all ship suppliers. More recently, the synthetic rubber program and high-octane gasoline program collided with the escort program for parts.” Time concluded: “This week it looked as if Washington would give the escort program a real green light. It was too late to stew over past mistakes. The real challenge to business—for on the success or failure of gear maker and instrument maker may rest the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic.”27
Sen. Harry Truman also weighed in on the Navy’s failure to accelerate the construction of destroyer escorts in an April 1943 report on Navy and merchant ship construction, applauding the “magnificent job” by the Navy in building a first-class fighting fleet but stating it was done at the expense of protection of vessels carrying vital cargoes to overseas battlefronts. In Truman’s report, he criticized the Navy for being “slow to realize” the menace of the German submarines. “Some sinkings were unavoidable,” the Truman report stated. “But a large part of the loss would have been prevented had we had an early and large production of sub-chasers and destroyer escorts.” The report concluded, “Such losses will be prevented when more of such ships have been delivered and commissioned.” The senator, who would be tapped the following year to run as FDR’s vice president, admonished the Navy to be “less conventional and conservative in its thinking . . . and spend less time propounding explanations as to why unfortunate situations have occurred.”28
The Roosevelt administration was quick to respond to Truman’s criticism, although one wonders whether FDR—himself a strong proponent for the construction of escort vessels—might privately have agreed with some of the conclusions reached by the senator. Navy Secretary Knox defended the Navy’s action, saying the destroyer escort program had been ready to start but that other needs overshadowed the ability to start turning out the smaller vessels. Knox blamed the delay in moving ahead with DE construction on the need to build invasion barges, by diversions of materials to the synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline programs, as well as on the aircraft program. “It was a matter of stress on different things at different times,” he stated.29
Truman’s report came about a month after Knox’s announcement that “several score” of destroyer escorts already were on the water battling Nazi U-boats, and that several hundred more were on the way. Knox referred to them as a “small destroyer” with enough firepower to shoot it out with submarines on the surface, as well as antiaircraft guns and torpedo tubes for antisubmarine duty. “It is a specialized craft,” the Navy stated, “with a definite job to do.”30
Two months later, Navy Under Secretary James Forrestal told workers at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where eighteen DEs would be built, that the U-boat menace would be eliminated within four to six months thanks in part to the rising tempo of construction of DEs. “Next year,” Forrestal said, “destroyer escorts will become the largest single class of warships in the United States.” He added: “That is the answer which you and workmen like you in other shipyards will give to Hitler and his wolf packs.”
Indeed, six months later Forrestal, in remarks to the employees of Consolidated Steel Corporation in Orange, Texas, where more than 20 percent of the destroyer escorts were being constructed, said the new vessels already were taking a toll on the German submarines. “I cannot tell you in equal detail about the destroyer escorts you have built,” Forrestal told employees. “As you know, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill have put special restrictions on news of the anti-submarine war, and properly so, because we want to keep Hitler guessing about what has hit his wolf packs. But this I can say: Your DEs from this yard have been in the battle of the Atlantic for weeks. They have gone in slugging at the slightest hint of a sub, and I believe you can count on them to bring you some scalps.”31
One can only speculate how differently the Battle of the Atlantic might have been—and how many merchant ships and sailors’ lives might have been saved—if the Navy brass had listened to Cochrane back in 1941, and even to Roosevelt a year earlier. Robert H. Connery, a Naval Reserve commander assigned as historian to Forrestal’s office, stated it very simply in a book coauthored with Robert G. Albion, Navy Department historian during the war years: “The delay in DEs was inexcusable for the need for this type should have been obvious from the submarine experiences of World War I. By mid- 1940, Britain’s desperate need for escort vessels should have brought some action.” Sadly, for Britain and the United States, it did not.32
Despite a continuing institutional bias by some conservative Navy brass against new and novel vessels, such as destroyer escorts, the tough little ships proved their worth as they quickly became critical to the reversal of German supremacy on the Atlantic. Beginning in 1943 destroyer escorts sunk more enemy submarines than any other type of vessel, earning the reputation as the United States’ most important antisubmarine vessel plying the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic. Manned by a “green” crew of valiant young sailors, these warships courageously confronted the perils of an enemy unseen as they swiftly discharged their duties in a daring run along the edge of the abyss.