SIMS, OF THE SUCCESSFUL INDISCRETIONS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3332, 23 January 1918, Page 59

SIMS, OF THE SUCCESSFUL INDISCRETIONS.

THE STORMY BUT BRILLIANT CAREER OF VICE - ADMIRAL WILLIAM SOWDEN SIMS.

By Robert F. Wilson, in the World's Work.

It is characteristic of Vice-admiral William Sowden Sims that within one hour after the arrival of the American destroyer flotilla off Queenstown the speedy craft at his order were on their way to the submarine zone. Queenstown had planned a grea.t celebration to welcome the American destroyers into the jjfar. Military bands had been provided with the music score of •" The Starspangled Banner "; the official dinners were ordered. The' festivities were planned to continue for several days, after which the Americans could get down to the grimmer business of fighting the enemy. Admiral Sims, who had been in London since the American declaration of war against Germany, arrived at Queenstown just before his flotilla's arrival and observed these gala preparations. At once he set his foot down on the whole affair. He told his expectant hosts that he and his gunners had come to Europe to fight and not to feast, and that at that moment they desired nothing so much as to be directed to a likely hunting ground for U boats. When the low-lying destroyers finally slid into Queenstown Harbour they remained there only long enough for the ship commanders to come ashore and to pay respects to the authorities and get their orders from Admiral Sims. Within the hour they had departed for the hunt. In sending costly ships of wax against the under-water terror, Vice-admiral Sims is following out the American navy's policy that a superior force should never content itself with remaining on the defensive. In the conferences with the British 'Mission American officers are said to have urged an aggressive campaign against the U boats. It has remained for Sims to demonstrate the policy in action. Two Episodes.— Admiral Sims has risen in the navy through his indiscretions. He has twice been guilty of" indiscreet actions —both of an unusual and astonishing sort. One of these, committed when he was still a lieutenant, gave offence to his superior officers. The other shocked the diplomacy of the entire earth. The better known of these two incidents—the famous speech that Sims made in the Guildhall in 1910 —is still fresh in the public memory. It was on the occasion of the visit of the Atlantic fleet to England and France in the autumn of 1910. The cordiality of the welcome given to American officers and bluejackets at that time exceeded any ever before experienced by the modern American navy. Near the close of the fleet's -visit, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Vezey Strong, 'entertained 750 American bluejackets, and their officers at a sumptuous lunheon at the Guildhall. Commander Sims, of the Dreadnought Minnesota, and the officers of his staff, headed the shore party. At the Guildhall a magnificent reception was tendered to them. A Prophecy.—

Commander Sims was greatly moved by this hospitality, coming as it did at the end of two weeks of similar entertainment. The Lord Mayor gracefully toasted the President of 'the United States. When Sims, who was born in Canada, rose to respond with a toast to the King, his pride' in his Anglo-Saxon blood got the better of his diplomacy. " This," he said, referring to the character of. the welcome to the fleet in England, " could not happen in any other country, but is made possible by the strong ties of blood between our two nations. Speaking for myself, I believe that if the time ever comes when the British Empire is menaced by an external enemy, you may count upon every man, every drop of blood, every ship, and everv dollar of your kindred across the sea." ■

Naturally, cognisance of this utterance was ffaken in official quarters in Washington. The anti-British element' in the United States was for court-martialling Sims for his indiscretion; but he escaped with a rebuke and no loss of rank.

It is now apparent that this break, instead of harming Sims's career, has aided it. Aside from his admirable qualifications for his present command—his personal magnetism, his popularity with his subordinate officers and the bluejackets under him, his previous experience in commanding a destroyer flotilla, and the laboratory thoroughness with which his mird studies any problem —it was a subtle compliment to Great Britain to pick this man of all othei's to direct the first naval participation in the war against Germany. In effect America now says that she regrets the reprimand to Sims, and admits that he was entirely right when he declared Anglo-Saxon blood to be thicker than water. A 'Persistent Letter-writer. —

Fortunately as this episode ended, it was .iot nearly so vital to the career of William Sowden Surs as an earlier indiscretion. Back in the year 1901 the bureau chiefs in the Navy Department were bothered by a series of reports, letters, and recommendations emanating in great volume from a lieutenant stationed with the Asiatic fleet. These writings issued from the pen of Lieutenant William -S. Sims.

This upstart lieutenant, out in China somewhere, had 'the effrontery to teil his superior officers in Washington that the gunnery of the American navy was inefficient. The chiefs snubbed Sims by

paying no attention to his burning messages. ,Sims was persistent. He continued to fill the pigeonholes of the department with reports of a new firing and aiming system which he had come upon. He gave the bureaucrats in W ashington full descriptions of the details of this system, and' showed what results he was obtaining with it with the gun crew which he commanded on the U.S.S. Kentucky and also on the U.S.S. Monterey, both ships attached to the Asiatic fleet. The recommendations became more vehement in tone. Finally the Secretary of the Navy himself began receiving a series of letters signed by Lieutenant W. S. Sims, couched in language that just fell short of culpable criticism of his superior officers. These letters were not answered, and it was hoped that such a snub would be a strong enough hint to Sims to desist. —An Appeal to Roosevelt.—

Then came the day when the White House received in the registered mail from the Orient two letters—one addressed to President Roosevelt and the other to Secretary Loeb. These letters were critical of the Navy Department. The harassed officials bore with it no, more. Lieutenant Sims was ordered to return to Washington. Trouble seemed to be in store for him.

But let us see what had been happening out on the Asiatic station. His interest in new things brought him the acquaintance of a young British officer, Percy Scott, then a captain on one of the British cruisers stationed on the Chinese coast. The two officers found that they had much in common. Particularly did they agree in their opinions of the gunnery and marksmanship in their navis, and of the obtuseness and stubbornness of entrenched tradition, both in the Admiralty in London and the Navy Department, in Washington. Scott confided to Sims that he had a device for improving the marksmanship of gun crews and developing gun pointers to a high state of efficiency. Up to. that time ail navies had experienced great difficulty in giving their gun pointers sufficient practice to make them perfect. Ammunition* was too expensive to permit of the practice of firing the big guns daily, but commanders had no method for giving practical gun-pointing practice other than firing at an actual target. Captain Scott had devised a system of target practice which he believed would train' gun pointers to great accuracy without the expenditure of costly ammunition. The equipment consisted of a tube—later called the Morris tube — attached to the barrel of the big gun. This tube fired a small projectile at a near-by miniature target. The gun crew pointed the big gun, but when the trigger was pulled the big gun was silent and from the Morris tube shot forth a small projectile to pierc* the target if the aim was correct. With this device the officer in charge could estimate what would have been ''the effect on a large target had the big gun been fired. The system enabled the gun crew to have constant practice. The Morris Tube.— The more Sims studied Scott's device, the more enthusiastic for it he became. He equipped one of the big rifles on his own ship with a tube and began training a gun crew. At the next target practice his crew easily outshot anything else in the Asiatic fleet. At this point his advice to Washington became most urgent that the system be tried out in the navy generally. When there was apparently no attention paid to his successes with big-gun marksmanship, his chagrin became so great that he committed the indiscretion of writing to the President direct. Lieutenant Sims returned to Washington fully expecting to receive punishment, but hoping that he could secure a practical test of his system and thus secure its advantages for the navy. Sims's brother officers, who grew up' with him in the service, say that his only thought then, as always, Avas for the-service, to Avhich he had dedicated his life. '

Luckily for Lieutenant Sims, Bearadmiral Cameron M'B. Winslow, then the assistant chief 'of the Bureau of Navigation, had been reading over some of Sims's pigeonholed reports and had become convinced that there might be something substantial in the lieutenant's contention. _ Admiral Winslow's first conversation with Sims after the Litter's arrival in Washington not only confirmed his previous judgment, but made him a supporter of Sims's ideas of gunnery. Admiral Winslow now went to the White House to intercede for Sims. —A Test—and a Promotion.—

To understand Mr Roosevelt's attitude it must be remembered that he had been the Assistant Secretary of the NaVy at the time Lieutenant Sims" was naval attache at Paris, and was sending in his messages and reports to the navy. Many of these documents passed through the hands of Assistant Secretary Theodore Roosevelt; he remembered them well. But his opinion of Sims was not altogether flattering. Admiral Winslow, however, secured an audience for Sims at the White House. There the officer explained in detail why his criticisms of the navy were well taken. The President was not impressed.

Sims then proposed for himself a sort of trial by ordeal. He requested that the President order a battleship to engage in target practice under conditions that he should specify. He would set up a target —a larger one, incidentally, than was then in use by the navy—and if, under battle conditions' of steaming and ranges, the gunners on the ship were able to make any decent percentage of hits, he would stand convicted of presumptuous conduct. This proposal struck the fancy of President Roosevelt. The order he g'ave to the Secretary of the Navy was probably as unpopular a ono as tha service ever .received.

The truth was that the navy then had no scientific system of gunnery, and it knew it. Up to that time target practice had been largely a matter of guesswork.

The target, a small triangular affair, was stuck up in a floating barrel or affixed to a buoy, and then the ships steamed off to the proper range and blazed away at it. Targets were not examined afterwards to see if they had been hit. Hits were merely estimated from the ships themselves, and the gunners were usually patted on the back and told that they had done well. •

Mr Eoosevelt ordered not one, but five, of the crack battleships of the Atlantic Fleet to be placed at Sims's disposal. The disturber selected an abandoned lighthouse on an outlying reef and nailed up on it a canvas target, 17ft by 21ft. For five hours, at various distances, the ships sailed back and forth firing at this target. At the expiration of the test an inspection of the target was made. It had not been struck a single time ! Mr Eoosevelt acted instantly on this report, directing that Sims be placed at the head of the office of naval practice with the title of Inspector of Target Practice. The President also promoted Sims to the rank of commander. This was one of the few occasions on which an American President has interfered with the naval authorities in the 'stationing of an officer of as low a rank as lieutenant. —"The Father of Target Practice." — With such a start Commander Sims might easily have become one of the most unpopular men in the navy. But it was just the other way. His modesty, his acknowledged ability, his greed for work, his passion for the mastery of the details of a scientific study, and his personal magnetism combined to make him one of the most popular men of the navy. The seven years following Sims's promotion by President Eoosevelt made his reputation as "the father of target practice." He did much more for American naval gunnery than merely to introduce the Morris kibe. His first effort was to increase the rapidity of big-gun fire, which he did by developing scientific management of all departments of the ship during firing. Commander Sims applied the stop-watch to all the activities on board ship directly connected with hitting a mark in battle. By cutting out all waste motion, standardising movements, and synchronising all the efforts for fightingefficiency from the turret to the conning tower and the engine room, he was able to cut the time of firing a big gun not in two, or in three, but in 10! Where it had taken five minutes to fire a heavy rifle, it now took 30 seconds under the Sims system. \ . The 'bluejackets and the public began to know what records the ships were making in target practice. Eivalry became keen. The gun-pointers became the most cherished and petted members of the ships' companies. Proud as the country was of the record of American gunnery in the naval engagements of 1898, the" fact remains that of every 100 shots fired in the running fight along the Cuban coast only one reached its mark. After a few years of Sims's instruction, that ship which failed to make 50 per cent, of its shots strike a target much smaller than a battleship was in disgrace. The value of Sims's services to the navy in this respect was probably best estimated by Commander Eichard Wainwright, who was in command of the U.S.S. Gloucester when that ship sank the Spanish destroyers in Cuban waters. Commander Wainwright wrote a' letter to Eoosevelt extolling the work of_ Commander Sims, and saying that in any other country Sims would have been appointed to the rank of rear-admiral in recognition of his services. Wainwright added that he, for one, would not take umbrage if Sims were elevated over his head to such a rank.

Incidentally, it is notable that Captain Percy Scott" later returned to England, and became the great gunnery and target practice expert of the British navy, beingknighted for his work and given the rank of rear-admiral.

—An Apostle of Scientific Management.— Mr George Meyer, Secretary of the Navy under President Taft, sent Messrs Frederick W. Taylor and Harrington Emerson, at the head of a committee of efficiency engineers, to the ships of the North Atlantic Fleet to investigate their technical management. The party set out from shore in one of the navy's steam launches on a, rough and foggy sea, bound for the flagship, " where they were to be entertained by the admiral in command. The pilot of the small craft lost his bearings. Presently, when the great grey bulk of an anchored Dreadnought loomed up in the fog, the landsmen decided to take no further' chances with such unfriendly weather, and ordered their pilot to put them aboard the ship that they could see. By chance this proved to be the Minnesota, commanded by Commander Sims.

To entertain his unexpected guests, Sims put the crew through its paces. The engineers were astonished by what they saw. The synchronising of gun operation, fire control, and engine room -was a model exhibition of scientific management —stop-watch work, no waste effort, no lost motion, but every movement standardised and unified to the shortest possible time.

The astonishment and admiration of the civilian experts was complete when Commander Sims showed them the engineering competition rules compiled under his direction in the target practice office, in 1904. Bv these rules all elements of materiel were" eliminated so that the relative efficiencies of the human elements could be compared, no matter what the type of ship, its age, speed, or mechanical equipment. Mr Emerson had recently completed a costly reorganisation of the Santa Fe railway. In this work he had spent several months devising methods for rating and determining the standard cost of operating locomotives, regardless of type or the conditions under which they were run. At an officers' dinner given in the course of this inspection visit, both Mr

Emerson and Mr Taylor confessed with admiration that the navy had antedated their scientific management discoveries by several years. Eeferring to the engineering competition rules, Mr Emerson said : "If I had known that this book existed it would have been worth thousands of dollars to the Santa Fe railway. —Ceaseless Energy and Study.—

Sims's ceaseless energy and tireless study overflowed the work to which he was assigned and extended its benefits to other branches of the navy. He became a student of the human side of the enlisted service and offered many practical suggestions for the improvement of the life of the bluejackets at 4 .-sea. This is in large part the explanation of his great personal popularity with the men in his command. One of the most interesting episodes in Sims's career was his championship in the years 1903-1904 of the all-big-gun ships, the Dreadnoughts. This was two years before we brought out bur first Dreadnought, revolutionising the naval construction policy of the world. —"The U.S.S. Scared-o'-Nothing."—

The progenitor of the Dreadnought idea in the American navy wns Lieutenant Homer C. Poundstone. Poundstone for months had treasured the idea of all-big-gun ships, hoping to win the support of the navy for such a construction change. Meeting discouragement, he sought out Commander Sims. He quickly won Sims's support, and from that moment until American Dreadnoughts were launched Sims urged their construction on evei'y favourable occasion. Poundstone was a good draughtsman, and he and Sims in 1903 and 1904 made sketches and drew plans for a big-gun ship. The navy heads vetoed the plan of the two,officers as often as they brought it up for consideration; but Sims never abandoned the idea. The ship became a great joke around the Nrvy Department. It is a striking coincidence that the name given by these two officers to their battlesnip and the name by which the shin was known in the navy offices was "The U.S.S.. Scared-o'-Nothing." Two years afterward the British Admiralty called its first all-big-gun ship Dreadnought. Commander Sims convinced President Eoosevelt that the Dreadnought was bound to come, and that the United States might just as well be the first to launch one. But even the President could not at once break through the solid opposition of the navy. —The First American Dreadnought.— At Eoosevelt's request Sims wrote out a statement of the technical reasons for the adoption of this type, which, when published, cemented an American naval policy in favour of Dreadnought construction.' xThe battleships Michigan and South Carolina had already been authorised to be built in the old way. The immediate effect of the Sims letter, which was printed as a public"'document, and which had a wide circulation, was to change the plans for these ships so that ttoey slid from the ways of the first American Dreadnoughts. All his life Sims had been rebelling against the established custom when something better was at hand; the first to advocate the new when the new was an improvement. A Canadian by Birth. —

Vice-admiral Sims was born in Port Hope. Ontario, October 15, 1.858. He was appointed to the Naval Academy from Pennsvlvania in 1876, being" graduated in June, 1880. He received the rank of lieutenant in 1893, holding this grade until Mr Roosevelt made him a commander in 1902. He spent the two years from 1894 to 1896 in China. From 1897 to 19C0 he served as naval attache at the American Embassy in 'Paris and Petrograd. Just before President Roosevelt left the White House in 1909 he saw to it that Commander Sims was given the command of a battleship—the Minnesota. Sims is the only man of a rank less than captain who ever commanded a first-class fighting ship in the modern American navy. He left the Minnesota in the spring of 1911, having been promoted to a captaincv. He was on the staff of the Naval WarjCollege until June 4, 1913, when he was given the command of the torpedo boat flotilla of the Atlantic fleet, a command which he held until November 22, 1915.

During the following winter he supervised the fitting out of the new. Dreadnought Nevada, and was given the command of that splendid ship on March 11. 1916. Last August President Wilson made him a rear-admiral.

His next advancement came on February 15, when Secretary Daniels appointed him commandant of the naval station at Narragansett Bay and president of the Naval War College at Newport. He had scarcely taken up these new duties when war broke out between the United States and Germany, and Admiral Sims was sent abroad as special naval representative and observer in England. When it was determined to send American naval vessels to foreign waters Admiral Sims was placed in charge of their operations. On May 24 he was made a vice-admiral.