Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 06.djvu/466

NAVY that should have been supplied many years before. In little more than a month after the declaration of war, a small flotilla of destroyers went abroad and at once took up the task of convoying supply ships and transports through the zone of submarine activity. Other destroyers were sent as rapidly as they could be made ready.

A new type of small, fast, handy craft known as "submarine chasers" was developed and began operations in waters near the coasts of England, France, and Italy. Two divisions of battleships joined the British Grand Fleet. A great number of transports and supply ships were bought, commandeered, and built, manned and officered, by the rapidly expanding personnel of the navy, and enlisted in the work of carrying troops and supplies to European ports under the escort and protection of destroyers and cruisers of the United States navy. The Germans boasted that not a single American soldier would ever live to set foot on European soil, but under the protection of the navy, and under its direction, two million men were transported without the loss of a man. This was the great achievement of the war, in which the army and navy co-operated so perfectly that in little more than a year after the United States entered the war three hundred thousand men were landed in Europe monthly. It may be too much to say that America won the war. But without the American army, the war would have been lost. And the American navy "put the army across."

The United States, which, up to about 1890, was almost negligible as a naval power, and as recently as 1914 was contending with Germany for third place among the naval powers of the world, is now little, if at all, inferior to Great Britain, which, until the beginning of the World War, was the leading naval power of the world by a margin so wide that neither Germany nor any other nation thought of disputing its primacy. The development which has carried the United States to the position it now occupies has come about very largely since April, 1917. When the World War began, in 1914, the United States navy was somewhat superior to that of Germany in the number and power of its battleships, but distinctly inferior in every other respect. It included no battle cruisers or scout cruisers, and the cruisers that it did include were out of date. The destroyers were few and small, and the submarines were in the experimental stage. In 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918, Congress authorized the construction of battleships, battle cruisers, scout cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, all to be of maximum size and power, and a considerable number of auxiliaries, including fuel ships, ammunition ships, repair ships, and hospital ships, all of which types are little less important for an efficient navy than the fighting ships themselves.

The following are the vessels included in the building program authorized in appropriations of the years named. They constitute in themselves a navy more powerful than any that existed in 1914: