Background
William Benson was bom in Bibb County, Georgia, on September 25, 1855, the son of a plantation owner.
William Benson was bom in Bibb County, Georgia, on September 25, 1855, the son of a plantation owner.
Benson graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1877, and eleven years later participated in the famous cruise around the world.
In 1905 he commanded the Albany of the Pacific Fleet, making the grade of captain four years later; from 1910 to 1913 he was commander of the battleship Utah. This sea duty had twice been interrupted by service as instructor at the Naval Academy.
The quiet, modest, and fair Benson served after 1913 as commandant of the Philadelphia naval yard, and he was greatly surprised when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels picked him to become chief of naval operations on May 10, 1915. Within the limits permitted him by the forceful Daniels, Benson began to assemble a small corps of aides, carried out a new fleet organization and appointed a board of inspections to ascertain which merchant vessels might be used as auxiliaries by the navy in the event of war.
As early as February 1917, Benson had decreed that the U.S. Navy be developed as a "symmetrical" fleet according to the doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, "with a full realization that we may eventually have to act alone." Deeply suspicious of the British, Benson was preoccupied with defense of the United States and the other Americas rather than with operations in European waters. He informed the Anglophile Admiral William S. Sims in March: "Don't let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It is none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans."
After this inauspicious start, relations between the navy's two chief planners in Europe and at home improved, and by October they were regularly exchanging letters. In November 1917, Benson reluctantly agreed to provide Sims with a planning section in London as well as to dispatch four coal-burning dreadnoughts to European waters. Like Sims, Benson opposed the notion of a North Sea mine barrage from Scotland to Norway, but in contrast to Sims, favored close-in blockade of German ports in the North Sea.
From October to December 1917, Benson visited London as the naval expert of the American War Commission appointed by President Wilson to coordinate joint plans with the Allies, and he ultimately helped establish an Interallied Naval Council. The chief of naval operations returned from London convinced of the need to lay the mine barrage in the North Sea, to close the Straits of Dover to all sea traffic, and to send a division of modern dreadnoughts to Europe.
Early in 1918 Benson struggled unsuccessfully to move the Italians to conduct an energetic offensive in the Adriatic Sea against the Austro-Hungarian fleet at Cattaro and Pola. Wilson sent Benson to Europe in October on special assignment to prepare the naval peace terms, but the admiral's stance in behalf of moderation "practically isolated me from the rest of the group at once." Although an uninspiring war leader, Benson toiled long and hard at Paris in 1919 as the U.S. representative on the committee that drafted the naval provisions of the peace treaties and as adviser to the American Peace Commissioners.
Benson retired on his birthday in 1919 in the grade of rear admiral, and in March 1920, accepted the chairmanship of the U.S. Shipping Board. He died on May 20,1932, in Washington, D.C.
Member commission appointed by President Wilson to confer with Allied Powers in Europe, 1917. Member special mission abroad, October 1918.
Married Mary Augusta Wyse, August 6, 1879. Children: Mistress.