Franklin Roosevelt was made in world war one

Many of those around Franklin Roosevelt were puking their guts out – but he could not have been happier. It was July 1918 and Roosevelt was crossing the Atlantic on his way to Europe on an official trip as assistant secretary of the Navy. Apart from rather forlorn attempts to sleep while the USS Dyer bobbed up and down in the deep North Atlantic swell, Roosevelt revelled in everything he experienced. Roosevelt loved being at sea and he had chosen, deliberately, to travel in a destroyer, the small nimble vessels that did much of the fleet’s dirty work. The destroyer he was on was newly constructed and manned with a green crew – which quickly showed. As the Dyer rose and fell, changing course regularly to trick any German submarines that might be tracking it, many in the crew became green with sea-sickness. Roosevelt, who prided himself on being an excellent sailor with a cast-iron stomach, admitted that things got so bad that the vessel smelled not so much like a warship but ‘like a street in Haiti’.