Naval Training Evolved by Trial, Error

By DAVID F. WINKLER

In the decades leading up to the 20th century, there was no formal training regimen for most sailors enlisted into the naval service. Young men desiring to join the Navy signed up at a recruiting depot and were assigned to a station or receiving ship where they literally learned the ropes. These men were then reassigned to cruising ships to learn additional skills on the job.

With improving propulsion and weapon technologies, several senior officials expressed concern that the Navy’s recruiting and training methods would fail the nation during time of war. Others worried that the large percentage of foreign-born sailors within the Navy’s ranks might flinch under hostile fire.

One attempt to improve on the technical competency and decrease the percentage of foreigners within the Navy’s enlisted force was to recruit 16- and 17-year-old boys for an apprenticeship program. By mid-1875, 260 boys were enrolled. During the last two decades of the 19th century, the number of apprentices increased and the training squadron ranged from one to five ships.

However, the ships assigned to the squadron were among the most obsolete, as typified by the sloop-of-war Jamestown, a wooden sailing ship commissioned in 1844. These ships usually operated from Newport, R.I., where the Navy opened an apprentice training station in the 1880s. The Navy established a West Coast apprentice training station at Yerba Buena Island near San Francisco in 1899.

Every spring, the training ships went to sea to enable the young men to acquire their sea legs. In the 1880s, the apprentices spent 20 months embarked on the training ships before being assigned to the regular fleet. The number of months apprentices served in training ships eventually dropped to 12 in the 1890s.

The apprentice training ship program, however, failed its intended objective of filling the enlisted ranks with highly educated, American-born sailors. Harsh living conditions on the obsolescent ships discouraged re-enlistment at age 21, when the apprenticeship period ended. An examination of 1890 ship muster rolls revealed that only 170 of a force of 7,500 enlisted sailors were graduates of the program.

The poor apprentice retention rate forced a re-evaluation of how the service would recruit and train its enlisted force. The Navy turned to the nation’s heartland for recruits. Young Midwesterners, seeking adventure, readily signed up. The Navy sent them directly to cruising ships, hoping they could assimilate quickly through on-the-job training. Unskilled, the recruits were scorned by veteran deckhands as “hopeless landlubbers” and treated as such.

Recognizing its error, the Navy assigned more ships to conduct underway training. In 1902, the Atlantic Training Squadron consisted of eight ships. Yet the days were numbered for these floating boot camps. A decision to end the apprenticeship program in 1904, and increasing maintenance and manning costs associated with operating the training ships, forced the Navy to re-evaluate its program.

In 1905, the Navy moved recruit indoctrination training ashore. New recruits trained at Newport, Yerba Buena and Norfolk, Va. Needing additional space ashore, the Navy also looked into an abandoned shipyard at Port Royal, S.C., but did not receive the appropriations to develop the facility. Instead, in 1915, the Navy turned it over to the Marine Corps, which still uses the facility — now Parris Island — for basic training.

Part of the reason for not funding the Port Royal site was an ongoing effort to establish a training station in the Midwest. With stringent criteria, a survey board ranked Lake Bluff, Ill., at the top of a list of sites bordering Lake Michigan. The purchase of property by local businessmen for donation to the Navy cemented the selection, and the Great Lakes Naval Training Station opened in 1911.

In retrospect, the Navy’s decision to move indoctrination ashore made sense logistically. In 1916, the Navy estimated that its four recruit training sites could handle a maximum of 6,850 recruits. With the advent of World War I, the Navy expanded the capacity of these four sites and established 13 temporary camps. By the end of the war, the Navy had nearly 125,000 recruits in training.

Dr. David F. Winkler is a historian with the Naval Historical Foundation.

Primary Source: Frederick S. Harrod, Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1899-1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).