United States Battleship Division Nine was a division of four, later five, dreadnought battleships of the United States Navy's Atlantic Fleet that constituted the American contribution to the British Grand Fleet during World War I. Although the U.S. entered the war on 6 April 1917, hesitation among senior officers of the U.S. Navy as to the wisdom of dividing the American battle fleet prevented the immediate dispatch of any capital ships for service in the war zone. Following a direct request from the British Admiralty and a series of high level staff meetings, American opinion changed, and Battleship Division Nine joined the Grand Fleet on 7 December 1917. Within that organization, the Division served as the Sixth Battle Squadron.
While serving with the Grand Fleet, Battleship Division Nine was forced to adapt quickly to unfamiliar British methods and standards. New signals and maneuvers were adopted relatively smoothly, while more stringent gunnery standards proved more difficult to achieve. On a personal level, relations between American and British officers and men were notably cordial.
Throughout 1918, the Division participated in all major Grand Fleet exercises and deployments, as well as conducting several detached convoy missions in the North Sea. Following the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, Battleship Division Nine was present for the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918. On 1 December 1918, the Division departed from the Grand Fleet to return to the U.S.
Although Battleship Division Nine's service was limited mainly to convoy duty and the maintenance of the blockade of the German coast, its presence greatly augmented the strength of the Grand Fleet, thus making major combat between the British and German fleets even more unlikely in 1918. By helping to keep the High Seas Fleet effectively blockaded in port, Battleship Division Nine played a role in ensuring Allied control of the oceans.
Background When the U.S. entered World War I on the side of the Allies on 6 April 1917, the war at sea was hanging in the balance. Having resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, Germany had quickly inflicted staggering losses on the British merchant marine to an extent completely unknown to the American government, or indeed to anyone but a select few at the British Admiralty. At the first meeting between representatives of the two navies in April 1917, the British First Sea Lord—Admiral Sir John Jellicoe—had astonished the new American naval envoy—Rear Admiral William S. Sims—by informing him that Allied shipping losses had recently surpassed per month, and that the Admiralty did not see any immediate solution to the problem.
Jellicoe announced that at present loss rates, Britain would be effectively starved into submission by November 1917. After a meeting at Scapa Flow later in July between Sims, Jellicoe, and Admiral David Beatty (commander of the Grand Fleet), the Admiralty requested that the U.S. Navy send four dreadnoughts and six destroyers to join the Grand Fleet. The Admiralty intended that the arrival of the American dreadnoughts would allow it to decommission five ships of the pre-dreadnought , freeing up four thousand officers and ratings to serve on new light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines then under construction.
Despite the endorsement of Admiral Sims, the Navy Department initially rejected the British request. Like other navies of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the U.S. Navy rigidly adhered to the doctrine of Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose first tenet was that under no circumstances should a battle fleet be divided. U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William S. Benson and Admiral Henry T. Mayo—Commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet—were particularly worried that if Britain fell, as developments at sea suggested it might, the U.S. Navy would be left to face the German High Seas Fleet completely on its own.
Having already released precious destroyers for convoy duty, they were unwilling to further weaken the ability of the U.S. to defend itself through the scattering of the all-important battle fleet. Furthermore, Admiral Benson was uneasy about the prospect, ever-present in the early 20th century, of a second war breaking out with Japan. For the moment, the U.S. Navy would send destroyers to Europe, but no battleships.
A series of high level meetings in London, beginning with Admiral Mayo's visit in August 1917 and culminating in a naval mission led by Admiral Benson in November, proved decisive in changing the viewpoint of the Navy Department. Despite Admiral Sims's frequent warnings of the severity of British losses to the U-boat campaign, it was not until both men had seen things with their own eyes that they truly understood the direness of the situation. On 10 November 1917, Admiral Benson cabled Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, recommending the dispatch of four dreadnoughts for service with the Grand Fleet, noting "If, in any encounter, it should be indicated that the outcome would have been more favorable or more decisive had more Allied forces been available, it would be difficult to satisfactorily explain the absence of our ships." On the advice of his trusted aide, Secretary Daniels agreed to dispatch the ships.
The question now came down to which battleships to send. The Admiralty requested that the Americans send coal-burning dreadnoughts, as, due to the submarine blockade, the British were extremely short of the oil needed to fuel the latest classes of American dreadnoughts, the oil-burning and ships. As a result, Secretary Daniels decided to send Battleship Division Nine, made up of the coal-burners , , , and .
Though they were not the newest American ships, they were still formidable; each was capable of a maximum speed and armed with ten or twelve or guns. Furthermore, they were commanded by an experienced and highly capable officer in Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, a 37-year veteran who had been commended for valor at the Battle of Manila Bay, and was known both as an expert seaman and an extremely affable man. Both of these characteristics would serve him in good stead in his new role as joint admiral and diplomat. After nearly five months of hesitation, the departure of the division was finally set for the last week of November.
Crossing the Atlantic The four ships of Battleship Division Nine—accompanied by the destroyer —got underway from Lynnhaven Roads, Virginia on 25 November 1917, bound for the anchorage of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. What should have been an uneventful transit was complicated by weather that began badly and only got worse as the voyage progressed. After battling a vicious 'norwester' that brought sleet, hail, and snow, the division was further buffeted by a severe gale off the Grand Banks that began on 29 November. Captain Henry Wiley of Wyoming would later recall of that storm, "At the height of the gale, it blew as hard as I have ever seen it, and the seas were the worst I could recollect."
Severe storm damage allowed over of seawater to flood the forward compartments of New York, lowering her bow to the point where she was in danger of foundering in the heavy seas. Three days of continuous pumping were required to help keep her afloat. To make matters worse, the high winds—reportedly gusting to — carried away the topmasts on all four battleships, rendering radio communication impossible.
The sheer force of the gale drove Delaware, Florida, and Manley off station in the night of 30 November. Though Florida eventually rejoined the flagship when the storm blew itself out, Delaware sailed on alone to the scheduled rendezvous with the British light cruiser off Cape Wrath, Scotland, where the division would reassemble in the early hours of 7 December. Manley—short of fuel after her fight with the sea—could not rejoin the rest of the force and proceeded directly to her ultimate destination, the naval base at Queenstown, Ireland.
Battered, Battleship Division Nine steamed into the anchorage of the Grand Fleet later that day to the tremendous cheering of the men on the assembled British warships. Wasting no time, Admiral Rodman called upon the commander of the Grand Fleet—Admiral Sir David Beatty—to offer the services of himself, his men, and his ships to the Allied cause. With Beatty's acceptance, the American battleships, while retaining their American designation of Battleship Division Nine, officially became the Sixth Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet.
New standards From the beginning, the battleships of Division Nine faced a hard task in adapting to the new methods and practices they encountered in the Grand Fleet. Any difficulties, however, that might have arisen from this transition based on national pride or rivalry were dissipated in large part by the professional example set by Admiral Rodman himself. As he would later note of his squadron's assimilation: I realized that the British fleet had had three years of actual warfare and knew the game from the ground floor up; that while we might know it theoretically, there would be a great deal to learn practically. There could not be two independent commands in one force if our work was to be harmonious, and the only logical course was to amalgamate our ships and serve under the command of the British commander-in-chief. This cooperative attitude trickled down through the division, and elicited the admiration and appreciation of the British.
The first task facing the Americans was the adoption of an entirely new set of signals, radio codes, and cipher methods. Although the Americans had studied the general British code while crossing the Atlantic, it was some time before they could use it with anything like the proficiency of other ships in the Grand Fleet. To help in the transition, signalmen and radio operators from the Royal Navy were posted to the American battleships to aid their U.S. Navy counterparts. Though learning an entirely new system of signals was, as Admiral Rodman put it, "almost the same as if in reading we had substituted a new set of letters," within three days of their arrival, the ships of Battleship Division Nine were able to take part in fleet maneuvers in the North Sea with no apparent difficulty.
Less successful at first were the efforts of the American battleships to match their British counterparts in excellence of gunnery. Having provided numerous veteran gun-crews to serve aboard armed merchantmen in the previous months, the gunnery complements of Division Nine were badly depleted and filled with inexperienced officers and recent recruits. The inevitable effect of this loss of talent became apparent when, on 17 December 1917, Battleship Division Nine conducted its first full-caliber target practice in nearby Pentland Firth.
The results were relatively poor. Where British battleships by the end of 1917 generally managed a rate of fire per salvo of 40 seconds or less, and an average spread (that is, the distance measured between the closest and furthest shots in a salvo) of , the four ships of the American squadron proved both slow and inaccurate. The rate of fire of Delaware (with an acceptable spread of ) was 108 seconds, and Wyoming and Floridas average spreads were , respectively.
Only the flagship New York managed to match British practice in both categories. In Admiral Beatty's words, the results were "distinctly poor and disappointing", and led him to the initial conclusion that he could not consider the American division the equivalent of a British one. The Americans worked to catch up, however, and with every target practice registered improved results. By the end of June 1918, Admiral Rodman was able to report that "the firing was exceptionally fine, most encouraging and much better than we have ever done previously".
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