The Splinter Fleet
SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE ARMISTICE THAT ENDED THE FIRST WORED WAR, ONE last major naval engagement took place, at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea. The Durazzo raid, on October 2, 1918, had little effect on the course of the conflict, for by that time the Central Powers’ position was eroding rapidly on sea and land. One historian has compared the raid to “using a hammer to swat a fly.” Nonetheless, it gave the U.S. Navy its only opportunity to participate alongside warships of other Allied nations—Italy, France, Britain, and even a few from Australia—in a full-scale naval battle. America was represented on that day not by battleships or cruisers but by a fleet of 11 submarine chasers—tiny, hastily designed and mass-produced boats made of wood.
These 110-foot boats, mocked as the “splinter fleet” by the traditional iron navy, exploded mines and guarded against U-boats while the capital ships of the other Allies shelled the Central Powers’ port facilities at Durazzo (present-day D’fcrres, Albania). Their service earned the American sailors much praise back home, but escorting the battle fleet was not the role for which the boats had been intended. Instead they had been built to search out and destroy the German and Austrian submarines that were choking off Allied supplies headed for Europe.
The splinter fleet owed its birth to, among others, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt, an avid yachtsman, knew that while America’s big shipyards were gearing up to build warships and replace the merchantmen lost to submarines, countless smaller boatyards were not directly involved in the nation’s war effort. He also knew that some of these yards, besides producing private yachts and fishing boats, had been building armed motor launches and patrol boats for the navies of Britain, France, and Russia. If a suitable small warship, made of wood to get around the steel shortage, was designed, it could be mass-produced quickly and cheaply in these boatyards as a stopgap measure until the big ships became available.
The craft would have to be small enough to be produced at boatyards but rugged enough to endure heavy weather in waters ranging from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean. Moreover, they would need to provide a reasonably stable platform for their armaments and underwater listening devices. The Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair turned to an experienced naval architect, Albert Loring Swasey, for help in developing a design. It was not the first time Swasey had come to the nation’s aid, nor would it be the last. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had interrupted his studies at MIT to design naval vessels during the Spanish-American War, and in World War II he would come out of retirement to rejoin the Navy, eventually achieving the rank of commodore.
For the shape of the hull, Swasey found inspiration in hardy craft that were used by fishermen in rough waters. The bow was inspired by Gloucester fishing boats, with the forefoot, where the prow meets the keel, cut away to give it a characteristic high and slim appearance that resisted “digging into and holding” in heavy seas. For the stern, Swasey made the difficult decision to sacrifice the speed that a blunt, flat shape would have provided and instead give the boat a rising end, similar to that of a whaleboat. This shape, with plenty of “dead rise” at both ends, greatly reduced the speed of the craft, but it increased maneuverability in a following sea.
The boats would require a number of features to fulfill their sub-chasing mission. They would need an elevated, exposed steering platform that could mount a machine gun. They would also need room for a three-inch gun in the bow and another in the stern (which was later changed to a depth-charge-firing “Y-gun,” along with racks to hold a dozen depth charges). To threaten subs lying well off the coast, the craft would have to be able to cruise for at least 1,000 nautical miles at 12 knots without refueling.
Swasey’s final design met with a great deal of criticism from Navy brass who thought the sub chasers should be much faster than the unremarkable maximum of 16 to 17 knots his boat promised. The Design Bureau, though, realized that some speed had to be sacrificed for livability and seaworthiness. The hull allowed for maximum stability and maneuverability in heavy seas, and it made the prospect of patrolling for days at a time in rough weather far more bearable.
The biggest hindrance to rapid production was the availability of engines. The initial design called for two gasoline engines capable of producing 300 horsepower at less than 500 rpm. Most heavy-duty engines then being built in the United States ran at much higher rpm’s and were far too likely to break down. Late in the design process, the bureau decided to install three six-cylinder 220-horsepower engines, which were available in large numbers from the Standard Motor Construction Company. This gave the boats three propellers instead of two, a necessary but unfortunate change. The extra 39-inch propeller and its shaft added considerable weight, further crowded the already cramped engine compartment, and lowered the center of gravity by nearly a foot.
Final plans called for the keel and planking to be yellow pine, the deck Oregon pine, and the frames steam-bent white oak. Six of the seven bulkheads would be steel, which would provide stiffening for the wooden hull. The boats would be 110 feet long with a 14-foot-9-inch beam, a displacement of 75 tons, and a maximum draft of 5 feet 11 inches.
The first contracts to build the new type of warship were signed on April 3, 1917, one day after President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war. The contracts called for 355 of them to be delivered no later than January 1, 1918. At boatyards from Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Pensacola, Florida, work began at a furious pace. Many in the Navy doubted that such a large building program, spread out over so many civilian sites (some yards built only two or three boats), would work effectively. Though most of the yards were new to the high-speed pressures of war production, nearly all the boats contracted for were completed in time. The first sub chaser, SC 6 , was commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in August 1917. A total of 440 were eventually built, and 100 of them were sold to France.
As the boats were rising on the slips, the Navy began to assemble crews, which consisted of 2 officers and 24 men. Most of those who served in the splinter fleet were reservists and recreational sailors. The officers were often not much more experienced; many were straight from officer-training school. The Navy sought to offset this inexperience by sprinkling in some seasoned sailors, but in the rest of the Navy the splinter fleet was thought of as a strictly amateur operation.
The hastily trained men were matched with hastily built boats as soon as they were available. The rapid construction often showed in unseasoned wood and leaky hulls. Many crews, arriving eager to get into the fight, discovered that their boats lacked guns or other equipment because the pace of construction had outrun the supply of components.
The Navy had planned to use its sub chasers to defend waters close to America, but Allied shipping losses in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean were so appalling that the boats were immediately deployed to Europe. The first group went in the summer of 1917. In the winter of 1917-18 a group of 36 brand-new sub chasers was ordered to the Adriatic to join the Allies’ Otranto barrage, an ongoing campaign that involved patrolling the narrow gap between Italy and Albania, laying mines, and placing underwater nets to trap submarines. The gap was critical to the Central Powers’ war effort because it was the only entrance to the Mediterranean for Austrian and German submarines.
The first 30 boats made the perilous crossing by way of Bermuda, the Azores, Gibraltar, and Malta. For many crewmen, crossing the stormy winter Atlantic was their first time at sea. The tiny boats were able to travel this great distance because they were accompanied by a large supply ship, the Spanish-American War-era Leonidas , from which they could refuel en route.
The Otranto flotilla assembled at a base on the island of Corfu, in Greece. Mounting only a single three-inch, .23-caliber gun and two machine guns, they were far too lightly armed to challenge enemy destroyers or cruisers. They did, however, possess two of the newest innovations of the war, weapons that, it was hoped, would help win the submarine battle for the Allies. The weapons were the depth charge and the S.C. (for sub chaser) tube, one of a number of underwater listening and direction-finding devices that had been developed in the United States by inventive talent that included Thomas Edison and the future Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir.
The splinter fleet began operations in the Otranto Strait in late spring of 1918. The boats worked in groups of three, maintaining listening positions at assigned points along a 125-mile line south of the strait, between Corfu and the Italian mainland. While on station, they would periodically stop their engines and remain completely silent to allow the men using the tubes to detect submerged submarines. This need to stop and start repeatedly was one reason why reliable low-rpm gasoline engines had been chosen over faster steam- or dieseloperated ones.
By today’s standards, the S.C. tube was almost comically primitive. It consisted of a hollow, inverted T-shaped pipe that stuck straight down from the hull and was fitted at the ends of both arms with rubber “ears”—hollow, watertight bulbs that transmitted vibrations. The operator wore an ordinary doctor’s stethoscope, which was connected to the underwater ears, and could rotate the T by turning a wheel.
When a submarine was detected, the operator turned the wheel until the strength of the sound was equal in both ears. He then gave the bearing to the captain, who plotted it on a chart along with the previous readings. The Navy asserted that a submarine could be detected at distances up to 10 miles with this method, though in truth the effective range was much less.
To increase the method’s accuracy, three boats would team up in a hunt. When the three directional lines were charted, they would form a triangle in which the sub chasers could reasonably expect to find a submarine. Once that location was plotted, the boats raced to it and methodically saturated the area with depth charges, rolling them off the stern and firing them to either side with their Y-guns.
The splinter fleet interrupted this duty on September 29 and crossed the strait to the Italian port of Brindisi, where it rendezvoused with a large group of Allied warships. The combined fleet then set out for the Austrian naval base at Durazzo, arriving the following morning. In the battle some of the wooden warships patrolled the north and south edges of the harbor, while the others positioned themselves on either flank of the large Allied ships, which steamed back and forth, bombarding the port and city with their guns. As the giant battleships and cruisers fired enormous, earsplitting salvos over the heads of the splinter fleet, American sailors did their best to listen for submarines and watch for torpedoes and mines.
The shelling of Durazzo lasted for several hours. The splinter fleet claimed to have positively sunk one submarine, and probably one other, during the action. The only American casualty was a sailor with a severed finger, a machinist’s mate who was commended for bravery when he lost the digit after struggling to hold an engine spring in place while in action.
The splinter fleet’s participation in the last major naval action of the war, especially its widely reported destruction of the enemy subs, ensured that the wooden boats’ sailors, by default, became the American naval heroes of the war. The two purported sinkings were the crowning touch to an already impressive record. Between the time it arrived at Otranto in the late spring of 1918 and the end of the war, the splinter fleet in the Adriatic conducted 37 hunts and claimed 19 kills.
Postwar investigation, however, revealed a very different story: No submarines in any theater of operation could be identified as having been sunk by American sub chasers. In the end they were never an effective counter to the sub threat. Their listening devices were far more likely to detect the propeller and engine noise of distant Allied warships than that of the much quieter submerged U-boats. They may have had some deterrent effect, reducing the effectiveness of submarines by making them stay underwater longer than necessary, but overall, the splinter fleet did little but show the flag and demonstrate America’s commitment to the Allied cause.
Knowledge of the sub chasers’ ineffectiveness was not made public until much later. In the meantime most of them were sold or given to other services such as the Coast Guard (the Navy kept a few, mostly for training purposes), and Americans continued to view the “amateur” fleet as an example of triumphant Yankee ingenuity.
This perception continued long after the war. In 1936 a book written by a splinter fleet sailor ( The Splinter Fleet of the Otranto Barrage , by Ray Millholland) insisted that the American boats had turned the tide of the war and might have sunk even more than the claimed 19 submarines. Millholland went so far as to assert that sub chasers had sunk most of a squadron of long-range subs headed for American ports. Hollywood kept the legend alive with such films as Submarine Patrol (1938) and Thunder Afloat (1939).
The boats had been a quick answer to the submarine threat, a shining example of initiative and teamwork. Despite their lack of effectiveness, they had provided a quick way for an unprepared U.S. Navy to get involved while larger, more substantial ships were built and the Army was organized, trained, and shipped overseas. A similar situation would occur in World War II, when PT boats—built by some of the same companies as the World War I sub chasers—were quickly produced and deployed to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, helping the Navy keep in the fight while new ships were built. Also deployed early was an updated version of the sub chaser, essentially the same size but with much better equipment and weaponry. A few of these were actually converted World War I sub chasers that had, for a second time, been given a chance to help hold the fort until the Yanks could arrive.
