The commonly held notion that WW1 was started
out of outrage over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie
at the hands of the Serbian nationalist secret society known as the “Black Hand” isn’t
entirely correct.
In fact, the Emperor Franz Josef himself expressed relief over the assassination because it rid
him of an heir that he deeply disliked.
The Emperor commented that “God will not be mocked.
A higher power had put back the order I couldn’t maintain.”
It wasn’t just the Emperor who was relieved; it was reported by an Austrian newspaper that
the general consensus among the various political circles was that the assassination, though
a tragedy, was for the best.
As far as the Austrian people were concerned, it was noted in said paper, “The event almost
failed to make any impression whatever.
On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine as if nothing
had happened.”
So why go to war over an assassination if nobody cared?
Because, while nobody seemed to much care about the assassination itself, Austria-Hungary
had been looking for an excuse to wage a “preventative war” against Serbia as a state in order
to weaken or destroy them so as to take back territory in the Balkans that had been taken
during the Balkan Wars.
They had not taken it back up to this point because they lacked Germany’s support; without
that support, they feared Russia too much.
(Russia had a treaty with Serbia.)
With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June of 1914, Austria-Hungary
was able to secure the promise from Germany that it would aid in a war with Serbia and
possibly Russia, if Russia chose to enter the fray.
It should be noted here that Austria-Hungary did not really expect Russia to enter the
fight as they expected this to be a very small war that would be over quickly before Russia
would feel obligated to respond.
Now with Germany’s support if Russia did enter the war, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum
to Serbia with remarkably severe terms that Serbia would be sure to reject, thus giving
Austria-Hungary an excuse to go launch a limited war on Serbia to reclaim territory in the
Balkans.
Surprisingly, Serbia responded relatively well to the ultimatum, but they did dispute
a few clauses, giving Austria-Hungary the excuse they needed to go to war.
At this point, the following general series of events happened due to a variety of existing
treaties between various nations, escalating this minor clash into the first “Great War”.
• Russia, bound by their treaty with Serbia, decided to come to Serbia’s aid.
• Germany, with the recent treaty with Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia.
• France, bound by an existing treaty with Russia, now was at war with Germany by association.
Germany then invaded neutral Belgium to have easy access to France.
• Britain, allied with France with an existing treaty, declared war against Germany.
This was unexpected by Germany as they thought Britain would stay out of the war due to the
fact that the treaty with France was loosely worded and not entirely binding.
However, Britain also had a 75 year old treaty with Belgium.
So because of both of these treaties, they decided to declare war on Germany.
• With Britain now warring with Germany, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa were obligated to enter the war as well.
• Japan then honored an existing treaty with Britain and declared war on Germany.
• Austria-Hungary declared war on Japan for declaring war on Germany.
This all brings us to the spring of 1917 when the United States officially entered World
War I.
Short on soldiers and seamen, the military needed volunteers.
While New York City had a population of around 6.5 million at the time, it nonetheless lagged
behind its goal of 2,000 recruits to the United States Navy by under half.
To get around the problem, New York City’s Mayor, John P. Mitchel, decided that he needed
a gimmick to spark young men’s interest and convince them to volunteer for the war.
What better way to draw attention to the Navy than to construct a battleship in the middle
of Union Square?
Teaming up with the Navy on the project, the Mayor's Committee on National Defense raised
approximately $10,000 (about $187,000 today) to fund the ship and hired Jules Guerin and
Donn Barber to design the appropriately named USS Recruit, basing the design loosely on
the USS Maine.
With work rapidly completed by the U.S. Navy, the USS Recruit, also known as the Landship
Recruit, was built on the island of Manhattan.
Construction finished for a “launch” on May 30, 1917, with the ship being christened
by Olive Mitchel, the Mayor's wife.
The wooden battleship mockup measured over 200 feet long and had a beam, or width, of
40 feet.
While not actually armed for battle, the ship featured wooden replicas of two cage masts,
six 14-inch guns inside three twin turrets, and ten 5-inch guns.
It also had two 50-foot masts, an 18-foot tall smokestack, a main bridge, and a conning
tower.
As you might expect, the Recruit was designed such that it contained ample space for the
job of recruiting and training sailors, with multiple waiting rooms and physical exam rooms,
complete with full amenities, as well as space for doctors, officers, and sailors to live
aboard the ship in their separate quarters.
As for the latter, the initial complement was thirty-nine sailors-in-training and their
commander, Captain C.F. Pierce.
The crew maintained a similar routine to the one of a crew at sea.
As reported by Popular Science Magazine in August of 1917,
“The land sailors arise at six o'clock, scrub the decks, wash their clothes, attend
instruction classes, and then stand guard and answer questions for the remainder of
the day.
There is a night as well as a day guard.
From sunup to eleven o'clock all lights of the ship are turned on, including a series
of searchlight projectors.”
In addition to recruiting volunteers for the Navy and training new sailors, the USS Recruit
also served as a public relations tool.
Citizens were invited onto the ship to learn about then modern battleships, and the sailors
aboard routinely answered the public’s questions during their guard duty.
Both patriotic and social events were also held on the battleship with the sailors acting
as hosts.
One patriotic event, according to a contemporary account from The New York Times, was the presentation
of a recreation of Betsy Ross’s American flag.
Other events were just social in nature, such as dances held for New York’s social elite.
There were reportedly even Vaudeville shows held on board.
World War I ended in November of 1918 when both Austria-Hungary and Germany agreed to
an armistice while the terms of peace could be negotiated.
However, the USS Recruit continued its recruitment mission until March of 1920.
So how did it do in its goal of boosting recruitment rates?
In its approximately three year run, it helped the Navy recruit an astounding 25,000 new
sailors (enough to man the USS Maine, which the Recruit was loosely modeled after, a whopping
45 times over).
At this time, the Navy announced that it would move the wooden battleship from Union Square
to Luna Park on Coney Island and maintain it as a recruitment site there.
The New York Times described the “sailing” of the Recruit in an article on March 17,
1920: “Yesterday when 10 o’clock came around
and with it ‘sailing time’ all of the ceremonies were put on.
The crew of eighty men lined up on the quarterdeck and the ship was formally abandoned while
the Stars and Stripes and the commissioned pennant were hauled down.
The ship’s band struck up ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as the colors were lowered to the
deck.”
The ship was then carefully dismantled over the course of a few days, with the pieces
shipped off to Coney Island.
Though The New York Times estimated that it would take just two weeks for the Navy to
complete the move of the battleship, it was never rebuilt.
Out of sight, out of mind, no contemporary news source seems to have bothered to cover
why the ship, which was supposed to be immediately rebuilt, was not.
What happened to the pieces of the dismantled ship is also a mystery to this day.
A search through the Navy archives by us for the period in question likewise turned up
nothing insightful concerning the ship's demise.
Presumably it was simply decided at the last minute that rebuilding and maintaining the
ship was an unnecessary expense given the Navy's recruitment needs at the time.
Whatever the case, while this was the end of the Union Square battleship, it would not
be the end of the name in the U.S. Navy.
The USS Recruit (AM-285) was launched in 1943 and served during WWII before being decommissioned
in 1946 and ultimately sold to the Mexican Navy in 1963.
Following this, another landlocked ship was built, the USS Recruit (TDE-1), at the San
Diego Naval Training Center in 1949.
Built to scale at two-thirds the size of a Dealey-class destroyer escort, the ship was
made of wood with sheet metal overlay and was used to train tens of thousands of recruits
over the coming decades.
It was, however, decommissioned in 1967, funny enough, because it could not be classified
in the Navy's new computerized registry.
However, commissioned or not, it was in continuous service from 1949 to 1997 (with a complete
re-model in 1982) when the base it is on was closed.
While no longer being used, the ship still stands, with some thought to perhaps turning
it into a maritime museum at some point.
Bonus Fact: Speaking of christening ships, it turns out
while today breaking a bottle of champagne over the hull of a ship is considered tradition
before launching a vessel in certain countries, particularly Britain and the United States,
people have been performing ceremonies at launches seemingly as long as humans have
made boats.
Like today, this was essentially for the hope of good fortune on the ship’s voyages.
For instance, one of the earliest known references to a similar practice when launching a ship
goes all the way back about 5,000 years ago when a Babylonian stated, “To the gods I
caused oxen to be sacrificed,” before launching a new ship he’d made.
The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians also called upon their various gods to protect
a new ship and her crew upon its initial launch.
For example, the ancient Greeks, during their launch festivities, would drink wine to honor
the gods and pour water on the ship as a sort of blessing.
The religious aspects of ship christening remained well into more modern times, particularly
in Catholic nations.
For example, there’s an account of a ship christening by the Knights of Malta in the
seventeenth century that describes two friars boarding a new warship, praying, and sprinkling
holy water all around the ship before deeming her seaworthy and sending her out into the
water.
After the Protestant Reformation, kicking off in earnest after Martin Luther’s 1517
“Ninety-Five Thesis”, certain nations in Europe did away with some aspects of the
religious part of the christening.
Rather than use religious leaders for this task, members of the monarchy or military
leaders would take over the christening duties.
For instance, 65 years before the aforementioned Knights of Malta reference, in 1610, the Prince
of Wales was present at the christening of the Prince Royal.
In this instance, there was a standing cup on board the ship, which is just a large and
expensive cup made of some precious metal, usually silver.
The Prince took a ceremonial sip of the wine in the cup before throwing the rest of the
contents across the deck.
The cup was then thrown off the side of the ship to be caught by a lucky observer.
Late in the seventeenth century, the standing cup ceremony was replaced with breaking a
bottle of wine over the bow.
This switch was in part because the cups were extremely valuable and the British navy was
growing rapidly; it just wasn’t practical to continue to give the expensive cups away
every time a ship was launched.
As for the switch from wine to champagne, it’s thought that preferences simply switched
with the times.
Champagne came to be seen as an “aristocratic” choice -for a time in the nineteenth century
being more popular than wine among many elite –and, therefore, considered the best option
for ship christening.
The tradition of using it has stuck around ever since in certain countries.