FDR - Jean Edward Smith [427]
The 1916 act also provided for a Reserve Officers Training Corps, but there were no organized reserve units until the act was amended in 1920, and even then they were largely paper formations. Department of the Army, The Army Almanac 308–310, 323–324 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).
3. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
4. Robert William Love, 1 History of the U.S. Navy 512–513 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1992).
5. The Navy lost 48 vessels in World War I: 14 to German U-boats, 5 to mines, 16 to collisions, and 13 to other causes generally associated with poor seamanship. The largest vessel lost, the Cyclops, a 19,000-ton collier, “mysteriously disappeared” on April 21, 1918, with the loss of all 293 aboard. For a list of the vessels lost, see The Army Almanac 188.2.
6. “It is perfectly true that I took the chance of authorizing certain large expenditures before Congress had actually appropriated money,” said FDR in 1920. “I felt confident that Congress would pass the emergency appropriations for which we asked.” Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 140 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
7. Time, May 28, 1923.
8. FDR related the incident to Ernest Lindley while he was governor of New York. Given Roosevelt’s penchant for hyperbole, one should approach the quote with caution. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 140.
9. Josephus Daniels recalled that “Around the [Navy] Department it was said that inasmuch as his cousin Theodore left the position of Assistant Secretary to become a Rough Rider … Franklin actually thought fighting in the war was the necessary step toward reaching the White House.” Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace 130 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
10. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 429 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971). All four of TR’s sons volunteered for service as enlisted men, but Pershing chose to allow them to serve in the AEF as officers. “It’s rather up to us to practice what father preaches,” said Quentin, the youngest, who became a pilot and was killed in aerial combat. TR, Jr., won the Distinguished Service Cross and twenty-six years later led the First Division ashore at Normandy. Both he and Archie were wounded in the First World War. Kermit, who served in the British Army, won the Military Cross for gallantry.
11. Daniels, Years of Peace 130.
12. Quoted in Davis, Beckoning of Destiny 460.
13. Cited in Langdon Marvin to FDR, July 17, 1917, FDRL.
14. Arthur J. Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 142–143 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); Love, History of the U.S. Navy 484.
15. Jellicoe’s comment was made to U.S. Rear Admiral William Sims, who had been designated by Daniels to head the American naval efforts in Europe. William S. Sims, The Victory at Sea 9 (New York: Doubleday, 1920).
16. Arthur Marder, the leading historian of naval warfare in the early twentieth century, reported that a “strange dogma had emerged [in the Royal Navy] that to provide warship escorts to merchant ships was to act essentially ‘defensively’ (because it protected ships from attack), which was ipso facto bad, and that to use naval forces to patrol trade routes, however futile the result, was to act ‘offensively’ against the warships of the enemy, and this was good.” Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 157–158.
17. Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy 355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
18. It is Navy lore that Commander Joseph K. Taussig, commanding the destroyer squadron, was