World War I
When the United States entered World War I on 6 April 1917, Warrington began patrols off Newport to protect the harbor from German submarines. After six weeks of such duty and preparations for service overseas, she stood out of Boston on 21 May, bound for Europe. After a stop at Newfoundland en route, she arrived at Queenstown, on the southern coast of Ireland, on 1 June. There, she began six months of service patrolling the southern approaches to British ports on the Irish Sea and escorting convoys on the final leg of their voyage across the Atlantic to the British Isles. The destroyer operated out of Queenstown until late November 1917 when she was ordered to France.
She reached Brest, her new base of operations, on 29 November and resumed a grueling schedule of patrols and escort missions. Records indicate that she experienced only one apparent brush with a U-boat. On the morning of 31 May 1918, while escorting a convoy along the French coast, she received a distress call from the Navy transport President Lincoln which, earlier that morning, had been torpedoed by U-90 well out to sea. The destroyer parted company with her coastal convoy immediately and raced to rescue the sinking ship's crew. She did not reach the area of the sinking until late that night but succeeded in rescuing 443 survivors just after 2300. Smith took on all but one of the remaining 688 survivors of President Lincoln. That single exception, Lieutenant Edouard Isaacs, had the dubious honor of being rescued by U-90. On 1 June, during the voyage back to Brest, Warrington and Smith depth-charged the U-90. Lt. Isaacs, the captured naval officer who later escaped from a German prison camp, reported that the charges shook the submarine severely. However, no evidence of any success appeared on the surface; and the two destroyers, conscious of the importance of landing their human cargo, abandoned the attack and continued on to Brest. They entered that port the following day, disembarked the President Lincoln survivors, and resumed their patrol and escort missions.
Through the end of the war, Warrington operated out of Brest, patrolling against enemy submarines. However, the threat posed by the U-boats diminished considerably after the failure of Germany's last offensive in July and an Allied offensive had made their bases on the Belgian coast untenable. Late in October, Germany discontinued unrestricted submarine warfare and, early in November, sued for peace.
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