Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
Aboard a Warship at Vera Cruz
TROUBLE was brewing down in Mexico. Did I say was brewing? Well, what I should have said is that it had brewed, and will keep on brewing until Uncle Sam goes down there and cleans out Villa and all the other bandits and revolutionists.
You say the Monroe Doctrine won’t permit it? Now there you’ve got the best of me; I have a very hazy idea of what the Monroe Doctrine means but I’ve had occasion to observe that whenever a country can’t govern itself or the ruler of some country wants to govern the whole world Uncle Sam just naturally drives a gun carriage through the Monroe Doctrine and settles the affair to everybody’s satisfaction once and for all. He is very like a school teacher who is so much annoyed by a couple of his pupils that are constantly arguing and fighting he finally gets mad himself and licks both of them and then things quiet down and become decent like.
Getting down to cases, though, what I mean is that trouble was brewing between Mexico and the United States. The Mexicans had been fighting a long time among themselves; Madero who had been president of the republic was shot and killed; Huerta, an Indian of Aztec stock, was president at that time and he carried things on with a high hand, while Carranza, a rebel who wanted to be president, was, with the aid of Villa and other revolutionists, doing his best to wrest the government from him.
Your Uncle Sam thought about as much of President Huerta as he thinks now of the bandit Villa and would not recognize him as the head of the Mexican Government. His attitude naturally made Huerta very sore on the United States and, as I remarked before, trouble was brewing, for Huerta had been doing small, contemptible things to aggravate the United States and now he pulled off another low down trick.
It came about like this: in April, 1914, the U. S. S. Dolphin anchored in the bay of Tampico, Mexico, and the paymaster of the ship and some marines went over to town in a launch. Their object in going ashore was to buy some gasoline but before they had gone very far a number of Huerta’s Mexican soldiers arrested them, led them through the streets with a howling mob of greasers after them and then threw them into jail.
Rear Admiral Mayo of the Dolphin soon learned of the predicament of his men and demanded of the Commander of the Mexican army to set them free immediately, if not sooner. The Commander, knowing full well what would happen if he tried to hold the marines, let them go and apologized for the mistake, as he called it.
But the Admiral was not the kind of an officer to let the Army or any other branch of the Mexican Government insult our men and get away with it. He therefore avowed that the Huerta government should salute our flag by firing guns and that this must be done on or before a certain hour.
In the meantime the Admiral communicated the incident to our government at Washington and this was done by sending wireless messages from his flagship to our Darien wireless station at Camento, Panama, and from there it was retransmitted to Arlington. The Darien station which had been completed only a little while before, has a sending apparatus equal in power to the Arlington station but it can send and receive farther than the latter station because all three of its towers are 600 feet high.
Mr. Bryan, who was then Secretary-of-State, got in touch with Mr. O’Shaughnessy, the U. S. chargé d’affaires in Mexico City, and he took up the matter with President Huerta. The erstwhile President of Mexico also apologized profusely, believing that he could in this way get out of saluting our flag. Our government insisted that apologies were not enough but that the Mexican Government must salute our flag as Rear Admiral Mayo had ordered, and this Huerta finally agreed to do.
Knowing the Mexican disposition, whose watchword is mañana (which means to-morrow), and having every reason to believe that there would be a hitch in the proceedings, the Admiral extended the time in which the salute was to be given to May 12.
As before, the 12th went by and the New York papers stated that Huerta had failed in. his promise to salute the flag. I doped it out that there would be big doings down there and, unlike the greasers, I did not let mañana interfere with my patriotic obligations to Uncle Sam, but I went right over to a recruiting station on 23rd Street and enlisted in the Navy as an “electrician for wireless telegraphy.”
At that time a man who wanted to enlist in the Navy as a wireless operator had to have “a working knowledge of telephones, measuring instruments, call bells, etc., and he must be able to connect up same to batteries and make minor repairs to them.” Also “familiarity with ordinary telegraph instruments while an aid in acquiring a working knowledge of wireless telegraph instruments, is not an essential qualification for enlistment as a wireless telegraph operator.”
This is what the enlistment circular I was given to read said but, of course, it was meant for men who knew a little about electricity and nothing about wireless telegraphy to start with. But here I was a full fledged operator, who had worked with Marconi and had helped to install the equipment in the Arlington station!
The circular went on to say that “applicants would be enlisted as electricians, third class, at $30 per mouth. Some come-down for a man who had been a first wireless officer on a transatlantic liner and who had earned, at least on one round voyage, $200 a month, to say nothing of one who had worked with Marconi!
As I read on, the circular further stated “that men detailed as operators will be eligible to be promoted to higher ratings when they qualify as operators and have served the required probationary time under the regulations through the successive grades to chief electricians at $60 per month when they prove their ability to take charge of the wireless telegraph station and interior communication on board ship and have been assigned to duty.”
A man who knew nothing about wireless but wanted to become an operator was given a course of instruction at some naval wireless school or wireless telegraph shore station and when he was proficient enough he was assigned to a cruising ship either in charge of a station or else as an assistant to the electrician in charge.
As expert wireless operators were always in demand in the Navy I was at once assigned to the Alabama as an assistant operator and it was not long before I was rated as a first class electrician.
I joined the Alabama over at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, at New York, where she had been in dry-dock undergoing repairs and the next day we rode down the East River, through New York Bay and out to sea where we joined the North Atlantic Fleet under the command of Rear-Admiral Fletcher.
Surely enough, we got the news from Arlington on the 18th that Huerta had put off saluting the flag though still agreeing he would do so; President Wilson was heartily tired of it all and he finally sent an ultimatum to the sly old fox at Mexico City. This was to the effect that if he did not salute the flag by 6 o’clock of the afternoon of the 19th he (President Wilson) would ask Congress the next day to permit him to send the army and navy to Mexico to force him (Huerta) to do so.
To see that this was done on schedule time we received orders by wireless to sail on the 14th to Mexico. The North Atlantic Fleet was formed of some thirty-six warships, and these were manned by no less than 15,000 blue jackets and marines.
We were soon heading south. Talk about cleaning up Mexico! Why, we had a fleet that could have cleaned up the world, and a mighty pretty sight did she make, too. When we got there the fleet was split up into two squadrons, one going to Tampico and the other, to which the Alabama belonged, going to Vera Cruz, the Atlantic port nearest to Mexico City.
From what I gathered from the officers the purpose of President Wilson was not to make war on poor old war-ridden, moth-eaten Mexico, but simply to blockade the ports of Tampico and Vera Cruz and take over their customs houses until such time as Huerta could see the necessity of ordering the Commander of the Mexican Army to salute.
Two days later when we were steaming at full speed for Mexican waters, I caught the message that Huerta had again agreed to salute and since he knew we were coming I believed that he would do it this time sure and that our next orders would be to steam to northern waters. I was out of luck, that’s all. But we kept right on going just the same.
What Huerta really said was that if his Army fired the salute it would be right, he thought, for our Navy to salute in turn. Huerta was informed that this was always the custom when salutes of this kind were fired and that our Navy would, of course, return it.
We learned by wireless the next day that Huerta had again flopped over and he now wanted the salute to be fired gun for gun, that is, his army would fire the first gun, then our fleet would fire the next one and so on. Not only this but he wanted President Wilson to sign some kind of a paper and tied the whole proceedings in a hard knot with a lot of other strings. These conditions which Huerta wanted to impose President Wilson would not agree to and there was nothing else left for him to do but to back the ultimatum on the day he said he would.
On the way down I had plenty of time to look over the Alabama, to get acquainted with the men and to get my bearings. I can’t tell you here the little things that happened on board but I must say a word about the Alabama.
The battleship, in her day, was the giant of all the sea-fighting craft and her armor, that is, the steel covering that protects her, is a great piece of work. First of all the whole main deck is made of thick sheets of steel called armor plate and this covers the ship from her stem to stern-post just above the water line.
The part of a battleship where a shell hitting her would likely do the most damage is at her water-line and if a shell should hit there and explode it might tear out a big hole when she would quickly fill with water and sink. To prevent this from happening a very thick band of steel armor plate is riveted all the way round her at the water-line.
All the machinery and equipment of the ship including her engines, boilers and machinery, the powder magazines and shell rooms, the pas- sageways through which the ammunition is taken, the wireless room, in fact everything except her guns, is in the hold below this strong deck. Of course there must be some openings in this deck but these are protected by gratings of heavy steel, the bars of which set closely enough together to keep fragments of shells from going through should one hit and explode on deck.
On our battleships the main battery is generally made up of four 10 inch, 12 inch or 13 inch breech loading guns and these are mounted in revolving turrets one of which is forward and one aft. The Alabama had four 13 inch guns in the large turrets and twelve 6 inch guns on the broadsides. I’m telling you that if Huerta had been at Vera Cruz when we got there and taken a look into the muzzle of one of our 13 inch guns he’d have saluted the flag without any more of that mañana business. As it was he was safely out of range of our guns for Mexico City is over 200 miles from Vera Cruz.
In the early days of wireless when every Tom, Dick and Harry was getting up a “new” wireless system the Navy Department tried out all of them. It would not use the Marconi system because the government wanted to buy the apparatus outright while the policy of the Marconi Company was to lease their apparatus.
The favorite type of wireless apparatus used by the Navy Department was known as the Telefunken, a German getup that was a combination of the Slaby-Arco and the Braun-Siemens and Halske systems. The transmitter of our station was one of this kind and consisted of an induction coil with a mercury turbine in-terruptor, an electric motor to run it and the usual key, loose coupled tuning coil and condensers.
The receiver was of a later type and had both a crystal detector and a vacuum tube detector, the latter being the invention of Dr. Fleming of England who has been Marconi’s technical adviser for many years. This detector is really a small incandescent lamp bulb with not only a filament but a metal plate sealed in it. The filament is kept at a white heat by a current from a storage battery.
When the telephone receivers are connected to the hot filament and the cold plate electrodes, the high frequency currents that are set up in the aerial by the incoming electric waves are changed into direct currents and the varying strength of these act on the head-phones. This detector is very sensitive and needs no adjusting.
Many of the messages we sent and received were in straight English but nearly all the important ones, especially those for and from Washington, were in code, the purpose of which was to prevent any one else, except our officers, from reading them and this kind of mes-sage is not very interesting but we know that something is going on anyway.
We anchored off Vera Cruz on the 21st and the natives must have thought from the number of warships that hemmed them in that we were going to blow them to smithereens. A few hours after our arrival we landed a thou- sand marines and they drove back Huerta’s soldiers and captured the customs house.
The chief reason this was done was because our government had got wise to the fact that a couple of German ships were scheduled to arrive at Vera Cruz with a cargo of guns and ammunition for Huerta, and our Commander had received orders on the way down to prevent this by seizing the customs house.
There was not much show of armed resistance on the part of Huerta’s men but in the scuffle that took place four of our men were killed and about twenty were wounded. I made up my mind right then and there that if I ever got a chance I’d blow the sombrero off of some greaser out of pure revenge.
The favorite method of warfare that is waged by the Mexicans is sniping, that is, they hide behind something and take a shot now and then at you. As a result of sniping a few days later the number of our men that had been killed was brought up to eighteen and the number of wounded to 71.
When things had quieted down Hart Douglas, another operator and I got a six hour shore leave. We buckled on our holsters and slipped our revolvers into them with small thought of having a chance to use them. We took a look around the town and all went well for awhile when zip, zip, a couple of bullets whizzed by my ear and Hart dropped with a bullet in his lung.
I whipped out my gun and wheeled around just in time to spot a couple of snipers lying on a near-by roof with their rifles pointing toward us. I emptied the five chambers at them as fast as I could pull the trigger. I got one of them; he raised himself to his feet and pitched headlong into the street. But the other one got me for he drew a bead on my gun arm which, also don’t forget, is my key arm. A couple of marines put poor Hart on a stretcher and carried him over to a field hospital. Another bound up my arm, walked with me over to
the launch and when I got aboard my ship the doctor dressed it.
No more shore leaves were granted the men because two perfectly good operators had gone ashore and two miserable good-for-nothing operators had returned. Hart hovered between life and death for weeks but he finally pulled through though he never will be as good a man as he was. I came along all right but my hand seemed paralyzed from the wrist down and it was many a moon before I could use a key again with my right hand. I guess you see now why I like those greasers so well.
Our marines remained on duty until the end of the month when General Funston arrived from Galveston with about four thousand troops and took possession of the port. It was hard to see what turn affairs would take next for Huerta had an army of 5,000 men not very far from Vera Cruz. But I guess he had heard of General Funston before and he didn’t care about being captured as Aguinaldo, the Philippine leader, was.
Instead of having some small war the diplomats of the A B C governments of South America, as Argentine, Brazil and Chile are called, offered to try to negotiate a friendly settlement between the United States and Mexico. President Wilson, who liked peace and hated war, at once accepted their kind offer and agreed to send representatives to their proposed conference. The following day Huerta agreed to send his representatives to the A B C conference which was to be held in the town of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river.
Finally, when all the representatives met, the first thing that was done was to have an armistice signed by the United States and Huerta’s government. As soon as this was done Huerta’s representatives tried to have the United States withdraw its forces from Vera Cruz and the United States forego the salute for the insult to our flag. The representatives of the United States asked only that Huerta resign.
After deliberating for five weeks the representatives of all the countries agreed that a provisional government should be established in Mexico, and that Huerta should resign; that the United States should not ask Mexico to pay an indemnity nor to ask for a salute or other apology for the insult to the flag at Tampico and that our troops were to remain at Vera Cruz.
In the meantime Huerta was being hard pressed by Carranza on the north and the rebel Zapata on the south and with our troops occupying Vera Cruz it evidently suited him very well to resign. So on the 10th of July Huerta appointed Chief Justice Corbajol to be president in his place.
It was common talk among the blue-jackets on our ship that Huerta had some 3,000,000 dollars deposited in banks somewhere in Europe and that he planned to go there. Be that as it may he handed in his resignation to the Chamber of Deputies a week later and left for Puerto, Mexico, on a special train under heavy guard. From there he sailed for Jamaica and thence for Europe.
Thus it was that Huerta, the Indian descendant of the Aztecs, who always went one way and came back another, got out of saluting our flag and probably saved his life.