The prestige won at Manila and San tiago carried the navy forward from 1898 to 1917 without the period of de pression which had followed all earlier wars. The building of battleships con tinued, and other ships—cruisers, de stroyers, submarines, and auxiliaries— were added in considerable numbers.
On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the World War, at a moment when the prospects of the Allies were at the lowest ebb, owing to German vic tories on land and still more to the ever increasing efficiency of the submarine warfare at sea. The naval force which the United States threw into the bal ance—counting only ships of modern de sign available for foreign service—con sisted of 12 dreadnought battleships, some 25 destroyers, and 10 submarines. Back of this force and available for the defense of the Atlantic coast, were a large number of battleships, cruisers, de stroyers, and submarines of old, nearly obsolete, design, all of which were uti lized to the fullest extent, Congress and the Navy Department, awakened at last to the fact that the United States was not immune from war, making haste to supply the deficiencies in the naval es tablishment that should have been sup plied 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 trans ports through the zone of submarine ac tivity. 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 sleet. A great number of transports and supply ships were bought, com mandeered, and built, manned and of ficered, by the rapidly expanding per sonnel 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 sol dier would ever live to set foot on Eu ropean 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 hun dred thousand men were landed in Eu rope 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 Ameri can 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 con tending 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 na tion thought of disputing its primacy. The development which has carried the United States to the position it now oc cupies 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 Ger many in the number and power of its battleships, but distinctly inferior in every other respect. It included no bat tle 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 con struction of battleships, battle cruisers, scout cruisers, destroyers, and subma rines, all to be of maximum size and power, and a considerable number of auxiliaries, including fuel ships, ammu nition 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: