[COPYRIGHTED]

U. S. NAVAL INSTITUTE, ANNAPOLIS, MD.

REBUILDING THE NAVY'S ENLISTED PERSONNEL AND REESTABLISHING ITS MORALE AND SPIRIT By LIEUT. COMMANDER J. C. THOм, U. S. Navy

THE SITUATION TO-DAY

The navy is approximately 40,000 men short of authorized enlisted strength.

Enlistments are barely keeping pace with discharges and disenrollments.

Eighty-five per cent of enlistments are for two years.
Reenlistments are so few as to be negligible.

The navy is rapidly losing all of the older, trained, and experienced enlisted men.

Ninety per cent of the present enlisted force are young and inexperienced recruits, possibly good material, but woefully lacking in training, initiative, judgment, and physical development.

More than fifty per cent of commissioned line officers have been commissioned since the declaration of war, either from the Naval Academy, from the ranks, or from civil life, and these officers are generally unfamiliar with prewar conditions, standards, and training methods.

The prewar chief petty officer, the backbone of the enlisted personnel, has vanished. He is either an officer or a civilian.

The present chief petty officer, while representing the best among the present enlisted force, is inferior to his prewar predecessor by reason of lack of experience and training, and is therefore less competent to train recruits.

THE PROBLEM

How are we to rebuild the enlisted personnel, reestablish its morale and spirit, and regain the high standard of efficiency which existed in the forecastle prior to the declaration of war?

1

A SUGGESTED SOLUTION

Any innovation, however logical, is sure to meet with opposition. Naval officers are human, and when once established, they dislike any disturbance of their daily routine. It is not expected that these suggestions will meet with any marked approval from the forecastle, the steerage, the fourth ward, or the heads of departments. However, all hands will admit that something must be done, and the plan proposed herein, though it may never be adopted, may well be of value in causing a certain amount of thought, discussion, and protest, which may result in a better solution for the problem.

In this discussion the suggestions are made with reference to the deck divisions of the larger ships. Certain modifications will be necessary to suit conditions in other branches, and on smaller ships.

It is an acknowledged fact that the older and more valuable enlisted men can be retained in the service only if the present Congress provide for an adequate increase in pay.

Assuming that Congress will increase the pay of enlisted men, we must also assume that the Bureau of Navigation will offer all legal inducements to persuade ex-service men to return to the service. It is to be hoped that many will reenlist; but even the most optimistic among us must admit that a great many, and among them must be numbered some of the most valuable men, will have become established in civil life, with family and business ties which they will not care to break for the rather doubtful advantage of retaining their continuous service status.

At present we can expect that but a small percentage of the total enlisted personnel will be "old timers," men with two or more enlistments in the service. In fact, the great majority of the enlisted force will be recruits. Even those men who have been in for as much as two years are, in a sense, recruits, for conditions in the service since demobilization began have been such as to preclude any thorough training of recruits, and the rapid loss of the older men has deprived the navy of the valuable services of experienced instructors, who were so largely responsible for the efficiency of the prewar enlisted personnel.

It is not intended to infer that the prewar enlisted man received all his training at the hands of his petty officers. All drills and exercises were, of course, directed by officers, and

officers were likewise largely responsible for the efficiency, or the lack of efficiency, of their divisions as a whole, and of such drill units as gun and boat crews. Nevertheless, it is true that by no means all of the training of enlisted men was received during the periods between drill call and retreat. On the contrary the prewar recruit acquired a great part of his more intimate training and the greater portion of his knowledge of practical seamanship, from his association with the older enlisted men, the ship's petty officers. These experienced men were in great measure responsible for the transforming of recruits into sailormen. Their hours of instruction were not confined to drill periods. They taught by precept and example during the hours devoted to ship's work, to drill, and to play. They were the real backbone of the enlisted personnel and their loss cannot be overestimated.

It is obvious, therefore, that a great deal of the training of recruits must devolve upon the officers and particularly upon those who are now watch and division officers and junior officers.

Unfortunately, practically all of these younger officers are as lacking in experience and training as are the present day petty officers. Study the roster of officers of a modern battleship of the fleet. The senior watch officer is a lieutenant of the Naval Academy class of 1916. In prewar days he would be a junior lieutenant of less than one year. Practically all of the remaning watch officers are reserves, temporary regulars, or the product of the wartime three-year dash at the Naval Academy. They have been at sea, as officers, three years or less; have had no experience with prewar methods, standards, or requirements; and have, through no virtue of their own, been hoisted into billets beyond their capacity-which capacity is, except in rare cases, the product of experience and training alone.

No reflection on these officers is intended. They are of the identical breed, and potentially the same, as their older brothers in the service. It is an indisputable fact, however, that an officer with two years' sea experience cannot be expected to handle a division or take a watch as efficiently as an officer with six or eight years at sea.

A good watch and division officer is the product of experience, training, study, and observation. Like wine, he improves with age, and few of the older officers of to-day will say that when they

graduated from the watch officer class they had no more to learn. about that important duty.

The average Naval Academy graduate has had practically no experience in handling men; and has but the vaguest conception of his duties and responsibilities. If he is taken fresh from his school books, thrust into an officer's uniform with two stripes upon the sleeve, and given a watch and a division, the transition is likely to be too swift for his abilities and his character to keep pace. The sudden increase in rank has been known to cause inflation of the ego, and the change from the rôle of midshipman with attendant restrictions, to that of lieutenant with corresponding authority, often results in the overdevelopment of such qualities as arrogance, indolence and "tougeness."

"As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined." Failure on the part of the older officers in the service to correct any wrong tendencies and impressions on the part of the new fledged younger officers may result, at a later day, in injustice to these officers and to the service.

Since we must rely upon officers for much of the training of recruits that was formerly done by experienced petty officers, and since, in general, the division officers of to-day are proportionately as deficient in training and experience as are the present day petty officers, our first step in rebuilding the enlisted personnel must be the inauguration of a rigid system of training for the younger officers.

If we adopt such a system and carry it out conscientiously, we will, while designedly improving the efficiency of our officers, be simultaneously training our men, for the reasons that if, as an item in his own training, a division officer is held responsible for the appearance of his men and their conduct at drill, he will soon take steps to see that they are above reproach. Of course, an officer is now presumably held responsible for any irregularities on the part of his men, when such irregularities are brought to the attention of the proper authorities. In the past, however, heads of departments have not ordinarily called the attention of the executive or of the division officers to minor infractions, it being generally considered that such action savored of officiousness or of tale bearing. It is, therefore, proposed to assign older officers to specific duty as "trouble hunters" who shall be constantly on the watch for irregularities in order that the attention