American battleships join the Grand Fleet

On 7 December 1917 four American dreadnoughts, New York, Wyoming, Florida and Delaware, entered Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, the main base of the British Grand Fleet. They formed Battleship Division Nine of the Atlantic Fleet under Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, who flew his flag in New York. In the early hours of that day the ships, earlier scattered by a storm, assembled off Cape Wrath in the north of Scotland, and later the same day they entered the base. On the same day Congress in Washington declared war on Austria-Hungary. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 6 December.

Why only now

The British had asked for American battleships as early as the summer of 1917. After a conference at Scapa Flow attended by Admiral William Sims, commander of the American forces in European waters, the Admiralty asked Washington for four dreadnoughts and several destroyers. It hoped that thanks to them it could withdraw several old battleships from service and transfer thousands of sailors to newly built cruisers, destroyers and submarines. The Navy Department at first refused. The American admirals held to the principle that the battle fleet must not be divided, and some of them feared a war with Japan. For the time being, therefore, only destroyers sailed to Europe to fight the submarines.

The change of mind came from the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William Benson, who came to Europe in the autumn with Colonel House’s mission. On 10 November he recommended to the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, that four dreadnoughts be sent to the Grand Fleet. He wrote that if it turned out in some engagement that more Allied ships would have brought a better result, the absence of American ones would be hard to explain. The British asked for coal-burning ships, because the submarine war had left them short of oil for the newest American battleships with oil-fired boilers. That was why the choice fell on Division Nine. Its ships were not the newest, but they made about 21 knots and carried ten or twelve guns of 305 or 356 mm calibre each.

A voyage through storms

The division left Lynnhaven Roads in Virginia, at the mouth of Hampton Roads, on 25 November together with the destroyer Manley. The weather was dreadful from the start. After a blizzard with hail on 29 November, over the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the ships ran into a heavy storm. The captain of Wyoming, Captain Henry Wiley, recalled that he had never seen such a strong wind or such high waves. Over 250 tons of water broke into New York’s forward compartments, and for three days the pumps had to work non-stop to keep the ship afloat. The wind broke the topmasts on all four battleships, so that they could not communicate by radio. During the night of 30 November – 1 December Delaware, Florida and Manley lost contact with the flagship. Florida later found it again, Delaware sailed alone to the appointed rendezvous with the British light cruiser Caroline, and Manley, running out of fuel, headed straight for Queenstown in Ireland.

As the battered battleships entered Scapa Flow, the crews of the British ships greeted them with cheers. Rodman at once reported to the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral David Beatty. He decided not to set up a separate command. As he later wrote in his memoirs, he judged that after three years of fighting the British knew war from practice, not just from theory, and that there could not be two independent commanders in one fleet. He therefore placed himself under Beatty’s orders. The American ships kept their division name, but joined the Grand Fleet as the 6th Battle Squadron.

Learning anew

The Americans’ first task was to master British flag signals, radio codes and ciphers. British signalmen and wireless operators were embarked on the battleships. According to Sims, only four days after its arrival the division put to sea and manoeuvred together with the Grand Fleet. Gunnery proved harder. At the first exercises in December the American ships, which had earlier given up many experienced gunners to armed merchant ships, fired more slowly and less accurately than the British. Only New York matched the British results, and Beatty judged the results of the others disappointing.

The arrival of the division was above all a political signal and a real reinforcement of the superiority over the German High Seas Fleet. American naval histories stress that for the first time US Navy battleships operated as part of a foreign fleet, under the orders of a foreign admiral. In the following months the 6th Battle Squadron took part in all the Grand Fleet’s sorties, and from February 1918 it also covered the convoys to Norway, which in the autumn of 1917 had become the target of German raids. The Americans stayed at Scapa Flow until the end of the war and in November 1918 witnessed the surrender of the German fleet as it sailed into internment.