Take a boat down the Potomac, thirty miles south of Washington, D.C., round the bend at Sandy Point, and enter Mallows Bay. Press forward through the shallow waters of the little bay, surrounded by tall, forested ; bluffs; thick algae, smelling of age and rot, will swirl about the prow of your boat as it pushes slowly ahead. The silence may be interrupted only by a great heron I fleeing before you. You are entering an eerie, little-known region populated only by great and hoary relics of generations past. It holds the remains of shipwrecks, more than a hundred of them, disguised by a thick green mantle of vegetation and lying about in utter profusion. What are these giant, decaying wooden behemoths? How did they come to slumber in this backwater of the Potomac, more than 65 miles from the Chesapeake Bay and 150 miles from the Atlantic Ocean?

The story begins on April 2, 1917, the day President Woodrow Wilson issued a national call to arms against imperial Germany. Europe had been at war for more than two and a half years, and America’s new allies were reeling from the devastating onslaught of Germany’s campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. Now that the United States had joined the fight, it needed to move almost everything required for waging war—men, arms, and supplies of all sorts—across the submarine-infested Atlantic. The logistics were intimidating. Between 1899 and 1915 the shipyards of America had launched only 540,000 tons of bluewater shipping; now, to maintain a large army in Europe and counter the losses imposed by the submarine offensive, the United States would have to build 6,000,000 tons in 18 months. To do so would require the greatest, most innovative and aggressive shipbuilding program in history, surpassing by 50 percent the total production of the Western world between 1899 and 1915.

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