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February 2012
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Volume 26
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Number 1
U.S. Naval Institute I www.usni.org
Our 25th Year!
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DEPARTMENTS
16
SEALs: 50 Years & Counting
24
At War with the Army
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Rescue on Guam Patrol
36
Into Battle on Board the Invincible
44
The Invincible’s Explosive Photo
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A Museum Reborn
52
The Resurrection of John Paul Jones
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The Ugliest Bandage on Iwo Jima
4 On Our Scope 6 Looking Back 8 In Contact
By Dick Couch Heirs to the underwater demolition team legacy, forged in the fires of Vietnam, the sea-air-land men became one of the world’s most elite forces.
By Alan Rems Sometimes you have to remind yourself who the enemy is—witness the often intense interservice frictions of the Pacific war.
By Lieutenant Commander Robert Bernier, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired) It was a vast ocean and a daunting search, but these Cold War reservists knew that the lives of downedplane survivors hung in the balance.
10 Naval History News 12 Historic Aircraft 14 Historic Fleets 64 Book Reviews
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72 Museum Report
COVER: A Navy SEAL with an M-63 A1 Stoner light machine gun exercises caution along the thickly wooded bank of a Vietnam stream in 1968. See “SEALs: 50 Years and Counting,” p. 16. (National Archives)
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Naval History (ISSN 1042-1920) is published bimonthly by the U.S. Naval Institute, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402. To order subscriptions, memberships, books, or selected photographs: 800-233-8764, 410-268-6110; fax 410-571-1703. Subscriptions: Naval Institute members $20 one year; Naval Institute memberships: $49 one year. Editorial offices: U.S. Naval Academy, Beach Hall, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402-5034; 410268-6110; fax 410-295-1049. Periodicals postage paid at Annapolis, MD, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright 2012 U.S. Naval Institute. Copyright is not claimed for editorial material in the public domain. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Naval History, Naval Institute Circulation, 291 Wood Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402. Submissions (please supply contact numbers and return address): Editor-in-Chief, Naval History, U.S. Naval Institute, 291 Wood Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402-5034 (include IBM-compatible diskette);
[email protected]; fax 410-295-1049. The U.S. Naval Institute is a private, self-supporting, not-for-profit professional society, which publishes Proceedings and Naval History magazines and professional books as part of the open forum it maintains for the sea services. The Naval Institute is not an agency of the U.S. government; the opinions expressed in these pages are the personal views of the authors.
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F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 2
By Giles Healy An impulsive auction purchase yielded a surprise gem: the first draft of history, courtesy of a British officer at the 1914 Battle of the Falklands.
By Peter A. Marshall Could an oft-published Jutland image be the debunked Loch Ness Monster photo of World War I naval history?
By William S. Dudley The Naval Academy Museum’s renovation was well worth the time and expense; now more than ever, it’s a naval-history lover’s target destination.
By Captain Patrick Grant, U.S. Navy (Retired) America’s first naval hero deserved a less ignominious fate, and a dedicated few restored him to a place of honor.
By Colonel Charles A. Jones, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired) When a World War II Marine and corpsman reconnected years later, a decades-old oversight was corrected and a Purple Heart awarded at last.
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Contributors
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Lieutenant Commander Robert Bernier, USNR (Ret.), served as a pilot and patrol-plane commander with VP-65 from 1979 to 1991. He finished his 35-year flying career as an international airline captain and is currently helping restore a Marine AU-1 Corsair at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. His magazine articles have appeared in Aviation History and Smithsonian’s Air & Space.
Dick Couch was a surface-warfare officer and SEAL platoon commander in Vietnam. He has written 14 books, including The Sheriff of Ramadi (Naval Institute Press, 2008), and coauthored the novelization of the SEAL movie Act of Valor. Most recently he was embedded with the 75th Ranger Regiment for his forthcoming work Sua Sponte: The Forging of a Modern American Ranger.
Dr. William S. Dudley is the former director of both the Naval Historical Center and Naval History for the chief of Naval Operations. He is the author of Maritime Maryland: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Captain Patrick Grant retired in 1995 after 30 years of Navy service, including active-duty tours in the USS Oriskany (CVA-34) and on the staff of commander, Cruiser Destroyer Force Pacific, during the Vietnam War. In civilian life he was a senior vice president of marketing for an insurance company and is currently a columnist for the Los Angeles Times– affiliated Glendale News-Press.
Giles Healy is a film producer, writer, and travel photographer. He studied history at Leeds University in the 1980s and has maintained a passionate interest in his subject ever since. He lives with his wife and two children in the heart of the English countryside.
Colonel Charles A. Jones, USMCR (Ret.), has three historical interests: Iwo Jima, 7 December 1941, and B-29s. He has researched and written extensively about Iwo Jima and wrote a guidebook for Oahu, Hawaii’s World War II Military Sites (Mutual Publishing, 2002). His article about his father’s B-29 crew was published in the April 2010 issue of Air Force Magazine.
Peter A. Marshall, a resident of Port Chester, New York, has an avid interest in naval and aviation histor y, scale modeling, and book collecting. “The Invincible’s Explosive Photo” is his second published article; his first, “History of the U.S. Navy 7”/45 Gun,” was published in Warship International in 2010.
Alan Rems, a retired certified public accountant, has been a regular contributor to Naval History since his article titled “Halsey Knows the Straight Story” appeared in the August 2008 issue and earned him selection as the magazine’s Author of the Year.
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quarter-century ago, the U.S. Naval Institute recommitted itself to one of its core missions—preserving and celebrating the history of America’s sea services—by launching Naval History. From a single issue published in 1987, we’ve grown to a quarterly and now a bimonthly magazine. While 25 years in print is an auspicious milestone for any publication, Naval History’s longevity pales in comparison with our sister magazine’s. Proceedings dates back to 1874, the year after the Institute was founded by a group of naval officers concerned about the decrepit condition of the post–Civil War U.S. Navy. Beginning with its first issue, Proceedings focused on the present and future of the sea services but regularly included naval history articles. The popularity of those features— as well as a story bank bulging with accepted history submissions—led to the decision to spin off an entire magazine devoted to the subject. Its rich lineage is just one of several factors that differentiate Naval History from most other history magazines. Another is that we’re published by a nonprofit, membership-based organization. Subscribers to Naval History, as well as to Proceedings, are members of the Naval Institute. Along with membership come responsibilities, the foremost of which is helping steer the direction of the organization and maintain the Naval Institute’s vitality by annually voting for its Board of Directors and Editorial Board. The Board of Directors is the Institute’s governing body, while the Editorial Board helps guide Naval History, Proceedings, and the Naval Institute Press. In the words of our CEO, retired Vice Admiral Peter H. Daly, it’s a member’s “right, duty, and obligation” to participate in this process. Biographies of the 2012 board candidates appear on pages 68 through 71 of this issue. r *G ZPV TVCTDSJCF UP Naval History but not Proceedings, you should vote using the ballot enclosed in your copy of this magazine. Mail in your ballot using the provided envelope. r*GZPVTVCTDSJCFUPCPUINBHB[JOFT ZPVSCBMMPUXJMMCFFODMPTFEJOZPVS+BOVBSZJTTVF of Proceedings. r#BMMPUTNVTUCFQPTUNBSLFECZ.BSDIUPCFDPVOUFE r.FNCFSTNBZBMTPWPUFPOMJOFBUXXXBTTPDJBUJPOWPUJOHDPNVTOJ *GZPVBSFOPUB/BWBM*OTUJUVUFNFNCFS QMFBTFKPJOVT(PUPXXXVTOJPSHKPJOUP review the many benefits of membership. In addition to receiving Naval History in your mailbox every other month, membership includes discounts on Naval Institute Press books and Naval Institute Photo Archive prints, and exclusive online access to Naval History and Proceedings content. But most important, by joining you’ll be supporting the Naval Institute’s crucial mission of providing an independent forum for the discussion of present-day as well as historical naval issues—a conversation that takes place in our publications, at our conferences, on our website, and in our blogs.
W
hile Naval History is celebrating its silver anniversary this year, 2012 marks the golden anniversary of the Navy’s Sea, Air and Land Teams. Dick Couch’s “SEALs: Fifty Years and Counting” examines the teams’ World War II roots, their formation in early 1962, and their trial by fire in the Vietnam War. But when discussing the SEALs, it’s virtually impossible to ignore their headline-grabbing present-day exploits, and Mr. Couch continues their story to the war on terrorism and their takedown of Osama bin Laden. Among this issue’s other offerings, Giles Healy’s article, “Into Battle on Board the Invincible,” includes a transcript of the historical treasure he found hidden in a suitcase PGPMEDBNFSBFRVJQNFOUQVSDIBTFEBUBVDUJPO BOEJOi5IF3FTVSSFDUJPOPG+PIO1BVM +POFT u SFUJSFE /BWZ $BQUBJO 1BUSJDL (SBOU EPDVNFOUTBO"NFSJDBOBNCBTTBEPSTTJY year personal quest to locate the remains of one of the Navy’s greatest heroes. Richard G. Latture Editor-in-Chief
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Richard G. Latture
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By Paul Stillwell
The First SPAR
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or about four decades, the top ship commands for Coast Guard captains were “the big white ones,” the high-endurance cutter Hamilton (WHEC-715) and her 11 sisters. Ships of the class were named for secretaries of the Treasury, a legacy from the long era when that department was the parent organization for the service. In March 2011, the decommissioning process for the class began when the Hamilton was transferred to the Philippine Navy. Replacements for these sturdy, longserving ships come in the form of new national-security cutters, a fitting description now that the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security. The new “big white ones” make up the Legend class. Scheduled to be commissioned in March 2012 is the third ship of the type, the Stratton (WMSL752). She was christened by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and named in honor of the Coast Guard’s first female member, Captain Dorothy C. Stratton. Stratton was dean of women at Purdue University in Indiana when the United States entered World War II. In a Naval Institute oral-history interview conducted in 1970, she explained that she decided to enter service as a means of aiding the war effort against Japan and Germany. In the summer of 1942, she received a direct commission as a Naval Reserve lieutenant in the fledgling WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). After initial training, she was assigned duty as exec of a radio operators’ school in Wisconsin. Shortly, she went to the badly overcrowded nation’s capital for a temporary assignment. In her oral history she recalled thinking, “Dear Lord, preserve me from being ordered to duty in Washington during the war.” Soon after her arrival, at the behest of Lieutenant Commander Mildred McAfee, director of the WAVES, Stratton reported to Coast Guard headquarters. There she was interviewed by a roomful of admirals, led by Commandant Vice Admiral Russell Waesche. Stratton went back to duty in Wisconsin but only briefly, for she had made a favorable impression during her interview. On 23 November 1942, President Franklin D.
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Roosevelt signed the law that created the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve. The next day Stratton, as a lieutenant commander, was sworn in as the first director. Her prayer to be spared Washington duty was not answered; she spent the next 3½ years there forming and guiding
U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
Almost 70 years after Captain Dorothy C. Stratton became the first female member of the U.S. Coast Guard, the service will commission the Legend-class national security cutter named in her honor. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
the new entity. There was a critical shortage of housing in the nation’s capital at the time, and her initial lodging was an enlarged closet that had a couch in it. Getting the new women’s reserve up and running posed many challenges. Again Mildred McAfee was helpful, letting Stratton take a dozen WAVE officers to enter the Coast Guard Reserve. The WAVE uniforms were quickly adapted by substituting Coast Guard insignia for Navy, thus following the practice for male Coast Guard uniforms of the era. The new service needed a catchy name as well, and Stratton took that as a personal challenge. As she remembered in her oral history: “I tossed on that hard bed many nights trying to think what we’d call this organization. Sometimes when you just absolutely have to do something, you do it. Suddenly it came to me from the motto of the Coast Guard, ‘Semper Paratus, Always Ready’— SPAR.” Those four words are part of the ship’s crest of the new Stratton.
From the nucleus of a dozen female officers provided by the Navy, Stratton built her branch to formidable numbers by war’s end: 10,000 enlisted women and 1,000 officers. The philosophy at the time was to put women into jobs that would free men to fight. Thus they initially became yeomen and storekeepers and provided crews for loran navigation stations. Officer training for females was conducted at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, the only service academy to train female officer candidates during the war. Significantly, Stratton’s title was director, not commander, for the SPARs did not have a separate chain of command. Her role was to organize, advise, persuade, publicize, recruit, inspire, and support—but not to issue orders. In that vein, she somewhat ruefully quoted Mildred McAfee’s observation after heading the WAVES for a while: “I thought it was very important to keep the reins in my own hands until I discovered that there were no reins.” Stratton remained as director of the SPARs until 1946, by which time women’s accomplishments had made many inroads into previously all-male areas. Once she left the service, she was personnel director for the International Monetary Fund and later national executive director of the Girl Scouts. In retirement she observed ever-increasing opportunities for women throughout society. A separate women’s reserve ended in 1973, as females became eligible for the regular Coast Guard. Subsequently women became cadets at the Academy, were integrated into ships’ crews, became commanding officers of cutters and air stations, and were promoted to flag rank. In June 2006, Vice Admiral Vivien Crea became the first female vice commandant of the service. Three months later Dorothy Stratton, who had started it all, died at the age of 107. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
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In Contact U.S. Navy’s Multicarrier Experience Norman Polmar I take issue with the contention of Jonathan Parshall and Michael Wenger in “Pearl Harbor’s Overlooked Answer” (December, pp. 16–21) that in the U.S. Navy of 1941 “carriers are used for scouting purposes in conjunction with the battle line. They operate solo.” Not so. As early as the late 1920s the U.S. Navy was operating multiple-carrier groups under Rear Admiral Joseph M. Reeves, the service’s first carrier-division commander. He subsequently envisioned employing the Navy’s three carriers together—making them more efficient by loading all fighters on one ship, scout-dive bombers on another, and torpedo planes on the third. (Reeves became commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet, in 1934.) During operations off Hawaii on 17 May 1928—Fleet Problem VIII—the pioneer U.S. carrier Langley (CV-1) launched 35 aircraft in an early morning “attack” that simulated bombing and strafing runs on military facilities. The Army defenders were taken by complete surprise. This was the first of
a series of such exercises. Multiple carriers later participated, and they were invariably successful in making surprise attacks on Oahu and the Panama Canal. These fleet exercises were held on a regular basis, at times several in a given year, until 1940 (Fleet Problem XXI). Multiple-carrier operations continued, and by the late 1930s the Navy was operating four carriers together. In 1940 in Tokyo, Commander Minoru Genda, soon to become the air operations officer for the fast-carrier force that struck Pearl Harbor, by chance saw an American newsreel in which four U.S. aircraft carriers were steaming in formation. At the time, Japanese carriers normally operated in two-ship formations (i.e., divisions), and never did as many as four steam together. Genda pondered what he had seen and concluded that several aircraft carriers could operate in a single formation and could easily form their squadrons into one mass striking force in minimal time. The weak point of such a formation would be the possible discovery of all carriers at the same time by an enemy. However, this could be countered by the massing of defensive fighters and the
Mr. Parshall responds: Michael Wenger and I appreciate Mr. Polmar’s response to our article. He is quite right in pointing out that American carriers had, on occasion, operated together before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He is likewise correct in noting that certain individuals within the U.S. Navy, such as Admiral Reeves, harbored ambitions for developing multicarrier operations. However, it is equally clear that a yawning gap existed between Admiral Reeves’ vision for naval airpower and the prevailing institutional mindset and operational capabilities that actually existed within the U.S. Navy in 1941. If the Navy actually had a demonstrable facility in multicarrier operations beyond the largely theoretical realm of the Fleet Problems, there is precious little evidence of it during the opening years of the war. One only has to look at the galling lack of coordination between the American carrier task forces at Midway to gain a sense of the service’s wretched state of proficiency in this area. Indeed, as late as November 1942, Rear Admiral George Murray (who had been the Enterprise’s skipper at Midway) noted that the U.S. Navy had yet to operate three carriers together in anything but the most simplistic peacetime conditions (see John Lundstrom, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral, p. 235). Other veterans of the 1942 carrier battles, such as Murr Arnold and John Thach, also roundly criticized American capabilities in this area (Black Shoe Carrier Admiral, p. 566, note 45). Thus, while the prewar Fleet Problems may have described a theoretical need for multideck operations, they had not in any way conjured up a usable operational capacity in that area. Mr. Polmar is also correct in noting that Minoru Genda’s original inspiration for multicarrier operations came from a newsreel showing
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great volume of antiaircraft fire of the combined carrier force and escorting ships. Genda’s proposal called for Japan’s six fast carriers to operate in a rectangular formation with 7,700 yards between ships. This so-called “box-type” formation was to be used mainly for attacks against enemy ground and port installations. For operations against an enemy fleet, the six carriers would be formed into an inverted-V or “encircling” formation based on two-ship carrier divisions. This proposal was accepted by the commander of the First Air Fleet. Those formations were adopted, but there was no opportunity to practice them until the rehearsal for the Pearl Harbor attack, just one month before the strike. The box-type formation was used at Pearl Harbor, in the Indian Ocean, and at Midway, all of which were primarily attacks against land targets. This box-type formation did not work well at Midway and was not used after that carrierversus-carrier battle. The inverted-V formation was never used in combat. Under Reeves, the U.S. Navy’s carriers ceased only scouting for the fleet and became a striking arm of the fleet.
four American carriers steaming together. However, inspiration is one thing, but the perspiration necessary to bring that mental seed to fruition is quite another. Likewise, there’s a big difference between merely steaming together for the benefit of a cameraman and actually conducting multideck operations. The Japanese Navy alone had put in the effort necessary to figure out the nuts and bolts of how to make multicarrier operations actually work. They then put that hard-won expertise into practice at Pearl Harbor. The Americans, though, had not yet paid a similar price in perspiration, and it showed in 1941–42. These operational details eventually would be hammered out by the Navy during mid-1943 (over the objections of some admirals, such as William Halsey). But overall, it is clear that—Admiral Reeves’ apparently isolated prescience notwithstanding— America could not match Japan’s capabilities in multideck operations until late 1943, nearly two years after Pearl Harbor had been attacked. In sum, the point of our article was never to argue that absolutely no one in the U.S. Navy had a clue about multicarrier operations. Isolated individuals certainly did. The material point remains, though, that at an institutional and operational level the Navy had yet to grasp the potential of such operations in 1941. The U.S. Navy as an institution—and this very much included its intelligence organs—simply could not give adequate weight to enemy capabilities that it did not itself possess or even really understand. Even more important, while some isolated individuals within the Navy may have appreciated the potential of multicarrier operations, certainly no one within the service had any real notion of how quickly and comprehensively Japanese naval aviation capabilities had matured during U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
the eight months between the formation of First Air Fleet and the attack on Pearl Harbor. The combination of very effective Japanese control over the flow of information coming out of their country and the extraordinarily rapid pace of Kidoˉ Butai’s evolution meant that the U.S. Navy was operating in the dark regarding these capabilities.
FDO’s Perspective on Santa Cruz Captain Elton N. Thompson, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired) I also have comments regarding the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands and John Prados’ article “Solving the Mysteries of Santa Cruz” (October, pp. 42–49). From 24 June until 26 October 1942 I was fighter director officer (FDO) in the combat information center of the USS Hornet (CV8). The Enterprise (CV-6) and Hornet joined up on 24 October, just two days before the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Was this sufficient time to coordinate plans and ensure that communications were adequate? The Japanese carrier Zuiho¯ was sighted by a PBY at 0410 on 26 October and her position reported to the seaplane tender Curtiss (AV-4), but the contact was not reported to the senior U.S. commander, Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid. It was assumed he was guarding the PBY channel. The possibility of an early strike was lost. Matters soon went from bad to worse. Radar (and fighter direction) gave us an advantage over the Japanese. The existing radar equipment (CXAM in this case) could measure ranges and bearings but could not accurately determine altitudes of contacts. A crude “fade chart” coupled with distance at contact combined to suggest altitude. Contacts made at 75 miles clearly indicated that incoming “bogies” were at 14,000–17,000 feet. Fighter direction was under control of the Enterprise, the senior admiral’s flagship. The Hornet picked up the Japanese at about 78 miles, bearing about 270 degrees. We plotted the approach of the Japanese planes while waiting to see how the FDO in the Enterprise was going to respond. He sent a group of his CAP (combat air patrol) south and did not put his other fighters at an altitude matching the incoming planes, nor did he send out CAP to challenge the Japanese at a distance from the carriers in order to give his CAP a chance to shoot down enemy planes, break up their formations, or disrupt their aim. Our pilots shot down many planes but only after they had dropped their bombs and torpedoes. The Enterprise was hidden under a rain squall, but we were in the clear. Relatively unopposed, the Japanese simply overwhelmed us; within a few minN AVA L H I S T O R Y
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utes, we were hit and dead in the water. Just before losing power, Lieutenant Al Fleming, senior FDO in the Hornet, tried to direct some of our CAP, but it was too late. Did the Japanese win the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands? Yes, but at a terrible price. Despite poor fighter direction, our pilots shot down many planes, and antiaircraft fire destroyed many others. Captain Akihito Yoshida, JMSDF (Retired), compared Midway to Santa Cruz as turning points in the war (see “In Contact,” February 2006, pp. 6–7). He pointed out that Japan’s heaviest losses at Midway were in planes and ships, not pilots, but at Santa Cruz the Japanese lost many of their finest pilots and leaders. After Santa Cruz the Japanese had superiority in the number of carriers and surface ships, yet they didn’t engage in carrier action until the middle of ’44. Why? Their “A team” was shattered, and they had to build a new cadre of pilots and aircrews. When the Marianas “Turkey Shoot” took place, the “B team,” though courageous and determined, was not in the same class as the superb group of pilots and airmen with whom Japan had entered the war. Our objective at Coral Sea, the Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz was to deny Japan control of the sea-lanes to Australia and New Zealand. We won that battle.
General Yamashita’s Trial Allan A. Ryan Jonathan Parshall’s article “A Grim December” (December, pp. 22–28) aptly describes General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s conquest of Malaya and Singapore as both deft and aggressive. Yamashita had four divisions available but decided to go with only three, sacrificing firepower for mobility in a brilliant campaign that culminated in the surrender of Singapore, which Winston Churchill glumly called the worst defeat in the history of the British Empire. But the caption to the photograph on page 25 erroneously states that Yamashita was tried and convicted for “war crimes committed in Singapore and the Philippines.” In fact, the 1945 trial focused exclusively on the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in the Philippines. Singapore was never mentioned. The charge and the trial have been controversial ever since. General Douglas MacArthur convened the tribunal—the
first war crimes trial of World War II—in September 1945, charging that Yamashita had lost control of his troops, thereby “permitting” the atrocities. But the evidence showed that Yamashita had ordered his troops out of Manila when the Americans landed on Luzon in January 1945. A subordinate naval officer flatly disobeyed the order and remained in the city; his troops were the ones who committed the atrocities. Yamashita, who had retreated into the mountainous jungles of northern Luzon, had lost communication with Manila during the ferocious battle there and had no information—certainly no clear knowledge— of what was happening. Nonetheless, he was convicted in a monthlong military-commission proceeding conducted by five Army officers, none of whom were lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the charge and the verdict, and Yamashita was hanged in February 1946. Editor’s note: Mr. Ryan’s book Yamashita’s Ghost: Our Enemy, Our Law and the Accountability of Command will be published in 2012 by University Press of Kansas.
The Book Was Much Better Lisle A. Rose In his article “Happy 65th Birthday, Mister Roberts” (December, pp. 54–57), James C. Roberts lauds the film version of Mister Roberts as “bittersweet . . . at times uproariously funny and at times tear-inducing.” It was, in fact, among other things one of the most vicious, stereotypically prejudiced depictions of Navy enlisted men ever presented. I read the book before I enlisted at age 17 in 1954 and found its depiction of the Reluctant’s sailors both realistic and sympathetic; a reaction confirmed when I joined the fleet and my first ship, the USS Warrick (AKA-89), a sister of Mister Roberts author Thomas Heggen’s own Virgo (AKA20). My shipmates were smart, irreverent, and professional. Not all were the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they were decent and productive young people. The film shocked me. Sailors were portrayed as barely literate cretins—credulous and above all childish, far beyond what the circumstances could justify and far different than Heggen’s novelistic depictions. In fact, two of the novel’s chapters, one dealing with a sensitive and innocent young seaman finding love on his first real time ashore, and the other about an older petty officer denied leave to see his seriously ill wife by the spiteful captain, were dropped from the film. The resulting product was an unbridled insult to U.S. Navy enlisted men. If you don’t believe me, watch the film again.
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Naval History News Drake’s Final Resting Place Found?
of having been run aground and burnt to the waterline—just as As befits one of the most legendary ship captains of all time, Sir Drake’s two ships allegedly had been. Francis Drake was buried at sea. At the age of 55, after a lifetime Drake, foremost among the notorious “English sea-dogs” who of privateering, plundering, battling, and exploring, the greatest plundered Spanish treasure ships for the greater glory (and cofEnglish seaman this side of Nelson died of dysentery and went fers) of Queen Elizabeth, was also a brilliant navigator and to his watery grave, in full armor, in a lead coffin, off Portabelo, intrepid explorer. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate Panama, in 1596. the globe (1577–80). In the fight against the Spanish Armada in And two of his ships went 1588, Drake was the vice admidown with him—the 195-ton ral of the English fleet that purElizabeth and 50-ton Delight. sued the Armada up the English D ama g e d i n Dr a k e ’s fin al Channel as the epic invasion exploit, a failed attempt to capattempt fell apart. Through his ture the Spanish port of Las many years of ship-capturing Palmas, they were scuttled to and city-sacking, Drake came avoid Spanish capture. Now, to be feared and detested by archaeologists believe they’ve Spaniards, who called him el discovered the remnants of Draque (“the Dragon,” a play on Drake’s last fleet; could his longhis name in Spanish). lost coffin be nearby as well? While the discovered shipThat was the hope in October, wrecks show promise of being as a British archaeological team Drake’s, what remains of his led by James Sinclair (of Titanic remains remains a mystery. At exploration fame) announced one point, the team thought it the near-certainty of having had zeroed in on the coffin, but located the two wrecks’ remains. it was a false trail. Locating the Exhaustive archival research in iconic sea hero’s eternal resting London had preceded the underplace would be profound—but water quest. Based on site locaalso cause for great caution, care, tion (a cove near the aptly named and respect. Drake’s Point and Drake’s Island) “We have no intention of and artifact content (lead sheathdoing anything to disturb his ing indicative of Elizabethan grave or raising the coffin,” said shipbuilding, plus period-correct Jay Usher of IMDI Eco Olas, ceramic shards) the prelimithe wreck site’s permit holder, nary evidence is “almost overin an interview with the U.K. whelming,” Sinclair told the Telegraph. “It would be for the REUTERS (RICO OLDFIELD) Archaeology News Network. Panamanian authorities, in conFor the marine archaeologists, Off Drake’s Point—Drake’s ship? A member of the British Deeptrek sultation with the British governit was a plum find: more than dive team investigates a section of recently discovered wreckage along ment, to decide what to do if we 80 feet of hull section, nicely Panama’s Caribbean coast. find the site.” preserved and bearing the marks rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr —Eric Mills
Read—World War II Veteran, Navy Cross Recipient, Champion Shooter—Passes Away William Augustus Read Jr., a recipient of the Navy Cross, two Air Medals, and two Purple Hearts, died on 28 October 2011. He was a longtime friend of the U.S. Naval Institute. Born in Boston on 16 May 1918, Read was the son of Admiral William A. Read and Edith Fabyan Read. Three of William Jr.’s uncles—Russell Bartow Read, Curtis Seaman Read, and Duncan Hicks Read—were pioneers of naval aviation. William Sr. also was a naval
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aviator, and in World War II served as a captain on the staff of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Fast-Carrier Task Force. (William Sr. retired as a vice admiral and served as commander general of the Naval Order from 1946 to 1949 before passing away in 1976.) William Read Jr. joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, graduating from the Navy Aerial Gunnery Instructors School in Pensacola. He was a range officer at the Navy Border Field Machine Gun Range
in San Diego and became gunnery officer for Navy Patrol Squadron 101 in the Southwest Pacific. Despite the fact that his having to wear glasses precluded him from pursuing a pilot’s career, Read managed to volunteer for gun duty on numerous flights. And on his 25th such combat mission, he was shot down while volunteerng as a bow-turret gunner. He and other surviving crewmen were able to swim to an island in the Sulu Sea near Palawan Island within U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Japanese territory. He was wounded again in a second crash in which a Japanese plane was shot down and landed on some of the surviving members of the crew. He was missing in action for two months. That remarkable World War II adventure was recounted in the Naval History article “Two Coconuts and a Navy Cross” (February 2010, pp. 34–39).
In addition to his naval career, Mr. Read was renowned for his sharpshooting skill. He won the gold medal in the Olympics in the international skeet veterans class, and is in the Trap Shooting Hall of Fame. Mr. Read is survived by his daughter, Edith Fabyan Read Wey, two grandsons, three great-grandsons, three stepsons, three
step-grandchildren, and two brothers, Peter and Donald Read. He was pre-deceased by his wife, Kathleen Cushman Spence, and five brothers. Mr. Read was buried with military honors at Hillcrest Memorial Park in West Palm Beach. Memorial donations may be made to the Naval Institute Foundation, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402-9987.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Norman C. Delaney’s two-article, two-sided look at the Civil War at sea garnered him Naval History’s highest accolade.
Delaney Named Naval History Author of the Year Dr. Norman C. Delaney was named Naval History’s Author of the Year at the annual U.S. Naval Institute Honors Night in Annapolis, Maryland, on 19 October. Delaney was honored for a pair of complementary Civil War articles. “‘I Didn’t Feel Excited a Mite’” (Naval History, December 2010, pp. 36–41) chronicled the deeds of sailor John Bickford of the Kearsarge, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Union ship’s famous duel with the Confederate raider Alabama. Delaney’s second article offered a view from the other side: “The Alabama’s ‘Bold and Determined Man’” (Naval History, August 2011, pp. 18–25) profiled the exploits of Rebel seaman Michael Maher. Dr. Delaney earned his Ph.D. in history from Duke University. He is the author of John McIntosh Kell of the Raider Alabama
Treasure Salvors Ordered to Relinquish $500 Million in Silver Coins The Tampa, Florida–based Odyssey Marine International was dealt a legal blow in September when an Atlanta appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling that the treasure-hunting outfit had to hand over an estimated half-billion dollars’ worth of silver coins to Spain—concluding the latest round in an onrunning battle over a shipwreck-salvage bonanza dubbed the Black Swan Project. “Black Swan” is the code-name that Odyssey gave to a wreck site it discovered in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar in early 2007. The Odyssey team recovered more than 500,000 silver coins (more than 17 tons’ worth) from the site in addition to hundreds of gold coins, gold pieces, and various artifacts. (See “The Trouble With Treasure,” Naval History, August 2010, pp. 18–25.) Debates over the ship’s identity were concomitant with debates over who had claim to the treasure as rightful propN AVA L H I S T O R Y
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(University of Alabama Press, 1973, 2003) and coauthor of Raiders and Blockaders: The American Civil War Afloat (Brassey’s, 1998). Honors Night also celebrated the accomplishments of four General Prize Award Winners for their contributions to U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: First Prize went to Dr. Milan Vego; Second Prize to Commander Matthew Harper, U.S. Navy; and Third Prize to Captain Kevin Eyer, U.S. Navy (Retired), and Commander In H. Ha, U.S. Navy. The Naval Institute Press Author of the Year Award went to Norman Polmar for his book (coauthored by Michael White) Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129.
erty. Spain, contending that the ship is the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which sank in a battle with the British Gibraltar squadron in 1804, has been vindicated by the latest court ruling. If the wreck is the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals considers that likely, thus its ruling, then the ship and her contents remain the property of Spain under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. A warship, according to the dictates of the act, remains the property of the country she served unless its government says it doesn’t want her. “The entirety of the record evidence supports the district court’s conclusion that the [wreck] is the Mercedes,” wrote Judge Susan Black for the appeals court. “The [wreck] was found within the zone Spain had plotted as the likeliest area of the Mercedes’ demise, and no other naval vessels matching the Mercedes’ type sank within that zone during the same time period.” “While we were surprised by the ruling and are obviously not pleased with
the opinion, there is no near-term economic impact on the company and our day-to-day business operations,” said Odyssey President Mark Gordon in a press release.
Legendary Submariner Remembered with Park Dedication World War II submariner Slade Cutter was honored at Naval Support Activity (NSA) Hampton Roads, Virginia, on 14 October with a dedication ceremony for the new Captain Slade Cutter Athletic Park. In dedicating the 40-acre grounds, Hampton Roads was memorializing not only an officer who amassed one of the great World War II submarine combat records, but a Hall of Fame naval athlete as well. The naming of the park for Cutter was “very appropriate,” remarked Captain
Naval History News continued on page 62
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Historic Aircraft
By Norman Polmar Author, SHIPS AND AIRCRAFT OF THE U.S. FLEET
The King of the Sea
T
he Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King with its many progeny and variants ranks as one of aviation history’s most successful and numerous naval helicopters. Originally designated HSS-2, the aircraft was the first antisubmarine warfare (ASW) helicopter to effectively combine search/location and attack capabilities in a single airframe. The Sea King was developed as a successor the firm’s widely flown S-58 series, with more than 2,300 produced in the United States and England for military and civilian use. In U.S. service this helicopter flew as the H-34 Choctaw, HSS-1 Seabat, and HUS Seahorse.1 Although the Sea King was radically different in design, power plant, and capabilities from the S-58, it was initially designated HSS-2, i.e., the first ASW helicopter (HS) built by Sikorsky (S), the second model. In the 1962 redesignation action, the HSS-1 became the SH-34 and the Sea King the SH-3, the third helicopter in a new designation series. The basic ASW model first flew on 11 March 1959. A large helicopter, the SH-3A had a combat weight of just over 18,000 pounds carrying four Mark 44 homing torpedoes. Twin turbine engines (mounted atop the fuselage) and a large fuel capacity (658 gallons) gave the Sea King both speed and range. Indeed, in 1962 an SH-3A became the first helicopter to break the 200-mph “barrier” for rotary-wing aircraft. And the Sea King established several non-refueled
records on transcontinental and transatlantic flights. The turbines turned five-blade main and tail rotors. Naval variants had folding main rotor blades and on some models the tailboom also folded for shipboard stow-
U.S. NAVY PHOTO (W. M. COX)
The dipping sonar is lowered from an SH-3A Sea King operating from the antisubmarine warfare carrier Hornet (CVS-12) during an ASW mission in the western Pacific in 1969. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
age. The naval helicopters had a “boat” hull, but only the Coast Guard’s HH-3F Pelican was intended for water landings. The land-based aircraft did not have watertight hulls and were fitted with a hydraulically operated rear ramp for loading cargo and troops. The naval variants had fixed landing gear; the land-based helicopters had retractable gear. Unlike the previous HSS-1/SH-34, which could carry either sensors or torpedoes, the SH-3A was fitted with the APN-130 navigation radar and AQS10 dipping (active) sonar. Later ASW variants, with more advanced radar and sonar, also had sonobuoys, magnetic anomaly detection, electronic surveillance measures, and chaff. The Sea King entered U.S. Navy service in September 1961 with helicopter ASW squadrons HS-3 and HS-10 and was assigned to antisubmarine warfare carriers—CVS. With the subsequent demise of those ships, in the early 1970s they began going aboard multimission carriers (CV/ CVN) in eight-helicopter squadrons, later reduced to six aircraft. The British and Canadian navies flew the Sea King from destroyer-type ships as well as their aircraft carriers.2 U.S. Navy development of the Sea King was quickly followed by Air Force interest, with a land-based variant being developed for the cargo (CH-3) and combat search-and-rescue (HH-3E) roles. The latter, named Jolly Green Giants, were used extensively in Vietnam, as were Navy ASW and rescue-configured rrrrrrrrrrrrrr U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
After the Falklands War revealed the Royal Navy’s lack of its own airborne early-warning capability, Sea King HAS.2 helicopters were modified for the AEW role with Searchwater radars. The formerly fixed-wing AEW 849 Squadron was reactivated with the helicopters redesignated AEW.2 in 1985 to provide flights for the ASW carriers.
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U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Sea Kings flying from surface combatants as well as aircraft carriers. The Navy converted 12 Sea Kings to the HH-3A configuration, adding 7.62mm miniguns, extra fuel tanks, armor, and a rescue hoist. A more specialized—but unarmed—rescue variant was the Coast Guard’s HH-3F Pelican. Rescue gear was installed with space for 15 passengers. Navy Sea Kings were also used for another kind of rescue—spacecraft recovery. The United States opted for water recovery over ground landing of its one-man Mercury, two-man Gemini, and three-man Apollo spacecraft. While Navy UH-34s were used for the early Mercury recoveries, the SH-3 was employed for two later Mercury flights, most of the Gemini, and all of the Apollo flights.
U.S. president and other senior executives. The five of these built by Sikorsky had suitable accommodations, enhanced communications, and certain security features. The original VH-3A was succeeded by the more capable and better protected VH-3D variants. The latter—known as “white tops”—remain in service today with Marine helicopter squadron HMX1, based at Quantico, Virginia, with a forward operating base at Naval Air Station Anacostia, Washington, D.C. The last American-built Sea King was delivered in 1975. The estimated 604 American-built Sea Kings were augmented by hundreds built under license in the
provide AEW support to the Navy, but its land-based AEW aircraft could not reach the fleet’s operating areas. Existing Navy Sea Kings were upgraded to the AEW.2 configuration, being fitted with the Searchwater search radar. These have now been redesignated airborne surveillance and area control (ASaC) aircraft. The advanced Sea King ASaC.7 variant was first deployed on board the carrier Ark Royal for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. They provided tactical control for Sea Harriers and other land- and carrier-based aircraft, could detect low-flying aircraft, and could perform surface search. The presidential VH-3D Sea Kings are the only Sea King–type helicopters now
J. M. CAIELLA
Sikorsky SH-3A Sea King Type: Antisubmarine helicopter Special-purpose Sea Kings included nine converted for Length: 72 feet, 6 inches mine countermeasures (RHRotor diameter: 62 feet 3A), one modified for advanced Engines: 2 General Electric T58-GE-6 turbines; helicopters concepts by the 1,050 hp each National Aeronautics and Space Maximum Speed: 153 mph at sea level Administration (NH-3A), one Crew: 4 modified for deicing tests (JCH3C), and two converted to test Armament: 4 Mark 43/44 ASW torpedoes, or beds for the Light Airborne 1 Mark 101 Lulu nuclear depth bomb, Multi-Purpose System (LAMPS, or 4 Mark 14 depth charges designated YSH-3J). The Air Force built three CH-3B verby Agusta, and in Japan by Mitsubishi. sions for drone recovery; these were Total production was just over 1,000 amphibious, similar to the SH-3 but helicopters. without ASW equipment. After the United States, the largest As early as 1962 an SH-3A assigned user has been Britain, which used the to the store ship Altair (AKS-32) and name Commando for troop/cargo aircraft another on the fleet oiler Mississinewa flown by the Royal Marines. And some (AO-144) carried out vertical replenishBritish helicopters have been fitted with ment (VERTREP) of 6th Fleet warships antiship missiles. in the Mediterranean. In 1965 the Altair A major shortfall of the Royal Navy durconducted what was probably the first ing the 1982 Falklands War was the lack of night VERTREP of a carrier. an airborne early-warning (AEW) capabilThe VH-3A Sea King was developed ity. The Royal Air Force was supposed to specifically as a VIP transport for the N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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Arguably the most widely known helicopter to date was SH-3D BuNo 152711, which was prominent in photographs of the recovery of the first five Apollo moon missions. The aircraft is marked for its fourth recovery mission— Apollo 12 on 24 November 1969—and bears three miniature capsule markings. It was lost during a 1975 training mission. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
flown by the U.S. armed forces. The last Navy-flown Sea Kings left the fleet in 1996, being replaced on carriers by the SH-60F Seahawk and, subsequently, by the MH-60R and MH-60S variants. Sea Kings are still flying in other navies, and there is no replacement in the near-term for the Marine presidential transports. Thus, these “kings” are with us well into the 21st century.
1. See N. Polmar, “A Helicopter for All Seasons,” Naval History (October 2002), pp. 12–14. 2. In place of manned helicopters, during that period the U.S. Navy employed the DSN/QH-50 unmanned drone on board surface combatants; these helicopters had no sensors, but were strictly a weapons delivery platform, carrying ASW homing torpedoes or a nuclear depth bomb.
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Historic Fleets
By Robert J. Cressman
‘An Ornament to the Navy’
B
y the flickering light of a globe lantern, Coal-heaver John Sutton, earning his $18 a month (as much as a ship’s cook or a coxswain), entered the starboard-side engineer’s storeroom on board the side-wheel steam frigate Missouri at 1950 on 25 August 1843, looking for a pair of beam scales to be used in coaling the ship. As he pulled down the scales, a wrench fell from the shelf, shattering a large glass vessel below containing turpentine. Coal-heaver William J. Williams, working in the engine room directly below, heard dripping liquid. Knowing that the crew kept a bucket of water in the compartment above, Williams and others berated Sutton “not to be dropping his water here.” Sutton responded that they “need not be afraid,” as he wiped up as much as he could of the turpentine, then reassured his shipmates: “No more [will] be coming down.” Satisfied that he had done what he could, he hastened below to see how much had leaked onto the engine, then headed off to report the breaking of the demijohn to Chief Engineer John Faron Jr. Sutton had just reached the berthdeck ladder, en route to the spar deck, when he heard the word that strikes fear into the heart of a sailor afloat: “Fire!” The splendid warship that lay at Gibraltar that night, alive with activity, had been in service less than three years. Chief Naval Constructor Samuel Humphreys and Naval Constructors Samuel Hartt and John Lenthall had collaborated on her hull design, while Principal Engineer Charles W. Copeland designed the inclined condensing engines for the Missouri and the side-lever engines for her sister ship, the Mississippi. The machinery, 650 horsepower for the latter and 515 for the former, turned paddle wheels 28 feet in diameter and 11 feet across. Each ship was bark-rigged, and could spread 19,000 square feet of canvas. Chief Engineer Charles H. Haswell, who became the Missouri’s engineer officer when she was commissioned, oversaw the building of her engines at the West Point Foundry of Cold Spring, New York. Laid down in 1839 at the New York Navy Yard (the Mississippi would be built at the Philadelphia yard), the Missouri entered her element on 7 January 1841, christened by a Miss Bailey. Costing
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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
The Missouri in her final moments on 26 August 1843. In this painting, based on an “on-thespot” sketch by a Lieutenant G. P. Mends, the listing vessel’s mainmast topples as her crew— which had abandoned ship just a few minutes earlier—looks on in rescue boats off the Missouri and other ships in Gibraltar Harbor. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
$568,806, the Missouri—in time deemed “much [the Mississippi’s] superior in internal arrangement and finish”—was commissioned later in 1841. Both ships operated with the Home Squadron, where operational experience showed them to be “unsuited for cruising in times of peace” and “altogether too expensive” because of their consumption of coal. While they may have been expensive to operate, the Missouri and her sister each carried a main battery of two pivot-mounted X-inch cast-iron Paixhan guns, each weighing 12,000 pounds and capable of firing a 103-pound shell at an effective range of 1,740 yards at 5-degree elevation, and eight VIII-inch Paixhan guns mounted four to a broadside. The latter, also of cast iron, could hurl a 51½-pound shell that could penetrate a target of seasoned white oak 29.2 inches at 500 yards to 14 inches at 1,500 yards. Having accomplished the first transatlantic crossing by a U.S. Navy steam frigate, the Missouri, with U.S. Commissioner to China Caleb Cushing embarked on the first leg of a journey that was ultimately to
take him to the court at Peking, stood in to Gibraltar to “an ovation by the British squadron and other foreign vessels of war in the harbor,” impressing “even the most critical . . . [with] her size and the beauty of her lines.” Captain John T. Newton immediately put all hands to coaling and watering the ship and performing maintenance on the machinery. It was during that upkeep Sutton’s search for beam scales had such disastrous consequences. Coal-heaver Alfred Clum, engaged in covering the engine cylinders, had seen “something like water dripping down” and had “sung out to Sutton” as Williams had done. The spilt liquid “had nearly wet through the canvas and felt . . . around the steam chest”—and fell on Clum’s lighted lamp. A “sheet of flame” shot up and ignited the floorboards of the storeroom above. Williams, going back to his work, heard Clum shout: “Fire!” Sutton hearing the same cry, turned and “immediately . . . saw the flames bursting up through the gratings above the steam chest.” Running topside, he grabbed a bucket. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
J. M. CAIELLA
The Missouri showing off the 19,000 square feet of canvas that she could bring to bear to augment her engines. In 1843 she was the first U.S. Navy steam frigate to cross the Atlantic; tragically, it was her last voyage. rrrrrrrrrrrr
Missouri, Mississippi-class side-wheel steam frigate
son on board was . . . stationed in such a position where he could do the most possible good.” The crew employed pumps, hoses, and Displacement: 3,220 tons bucket brigades to try to stem the Length: 229 feet fire’s relentless advance. With one Beam: 40 feet glance telling him of the severity Draft: 19 feet of the blaze, Newton ordered the after magazine flooded—that preArmament: Two X-inch Paixhan guns caution already “very prudently” Eight VIII-inch Paixhan guns taken with the forward magazine Complement: 257 officers, men, and Marines before his return. Governor Wilson immediately sent two stout boats with Earlier that day, Captain Newton had fire engines embarked, while the British gone ashore with Commissioner Cushing 74-gun ship Malabar dispatched firefightto visit U.S. Consul Horatio Sprague, ing crews. The allied effort seemed to who then accompanied Cushing and gain the upper hand, giving the Missouri’s the Missouri’s commanding officer to tars hope “that the devouring element call upon Sir Robert Thomas Wilson, was conquered.” the governor of Gibraltar. Cushing and Fanned by a brisk breeze, however, Newton then spent the balance of the the blaze broke out afresh, driving both afternoon with Sprague. At 2000, an American and British sailors from their hour before Newton was to return to stations. Seeing “not a ray of hope left to the Missouri, he received the “startling save that noble ship,” Captain Newton intelligence” that his ship was afire. His sought the counsel of his own officers boat having been sent shoreward as the and those from the Malabar who were fire began, the captain, accompanied by on board. All agreed that “there was no Cushing, returned to the ship inside of 20 hope of saving the ship.” Consequently, minutes, with the latter hurrying immediately to his cabin to save the trunk that contained his official papers. “I found the flames raging with violence,” Newton wrote later, “and the officers and crew exerting themselves to the utmost to overcome them. Every per-
Newton ordered all hands to quit [the Missouri] w i t h o u t d e l a y, ” which they did, being picked up by the Missouri’s own boat crews and those from the Malabar and other n arby ships. At 2330, satisfied that everyone had go ten clear, Captain Newton lowered himself down a rope from the starboard wheel-house to a waiting boat. All of the small craft quickly cleared the side in the event that the magazines had not been effectively flooded. At 0300 the forward magazine exploded, blowing off the forward part of the ship. The officers and men of the ship’s complement survived the disaster (albeit with only the clothes on their backs), but the Missouri’s mascot, a bear, driven aft to the spanker boom, perished. In reporting the destruction of the Missouri, Secretary of the Navy David Henshaw lamented the loss of more than just a “costly ship” but “an ornament to the Navy.” A court-martial found both Captain Newton and Chief Engineer Faron guilty of negligence and temporarily suspended them from duty. Ironically, just a year earlier, thenChief Engineer Haswell had sought a “leaden tank in which to keep the spirits of turpentine.” Higher authority refused the requisition. For want of suitable storage for flammable liquids, “an ornament to the Navy” had been more than tarnished—it had been reduced to a blackened hulk.
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The side-wheel steam frigates Missouri and Mississippi were virtually indistinguishable at sea. But perhaps because they were built at different shipyards, some considered the Missouri to be “superior in internal arrangement and finish.” This drawing was made in 1903 by R. G. Skerritt. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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hortly after he took office, President John F. Kennedy directed that all service components develop an expanded capacity for non-nuclear warfare. Specifically, he told Congress, “I am directing the Secretary of Defense to expand rapidly and substantially . . . the orientation of existing forces for the conduct of non-nuclear war, paramilitary operations, and sub-limited or unconventional wars.” As a result of that directive, two new Navy teams were commissioned in January 1962: SEAL Team One (West Coast) and SEAL Team Two (East Coast). The new teams took up residence at the naval amphibious bases in Coronado, California, and Little Creek, Virginia, respectively, where they both reside today. The acronym SEAL came from a contraction of sea-air-land and was first used by the Navy’s Unconventional Activities Committee, whose recommendations led to the formation of the SEALs. The teams were drawn from underwater demolition team (UDT) veterans, but with mission responsibilities that included airborne and land operations as well as traditional maritime activities. Almost immediately the new teams began to train for direct action and reconnaissance missions on land, coming from or under the sea or from the air. Early on, basic UDT training was the same as basic SEAL training, hence the name, Basic UDT/SEAL training, which was shortened to BUD/S training. The rigorous conditioning and the notorious Hell Week remained much the same as it had been during the time of UDT pioneer Draper Kauffman and the Navy frogmen of World War II. All graduates of the four-month BUD/S course were sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for three weeks of Army airborne training. Most returned for duty in one of the UDTs, but a few went straight to a SEAL team. New men and those veterans coming from the UDTs underwent an additional six weeks of training to become operationally qualified SEALs. This new “SEAL training” was an evolutionary, dynamic process. There were no SEAL training manuals. These new SEALs trained their own. Once U.S.
U.S. NAVY (BLAKE MIDNIGHT)
SEAL candidates train in the surf off Coronado, California, in October 2010. While modern SEALS can fulfill nearly a dozen types of sea, air, and land missions, the task assigned to the “father” of the force in World War II was much more focused: “Get rid of those obstacles” on enemy-held beaches. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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involvement in Vietnam was under way, SEALs fresh from combat deployment became cadre instructors and trained those SEALs headed for Vietnam. Today, basic and advanced training for a Navy SEAL takes close to a full a year. Another 18 months of training with a SEAL team is now normal before a new SEAL makes his first operational deployment. Of all special-operations ground-combat components, Navy SEAL training is the longest and arguably, the most difficult. Perhaps the single most-enduring characteristic of BUD/S training is the high attrition rate. Historically, five good men have to begin the process in order to get one qualified, deployable Navy SEAL. A great deal of time, effort, study, and testing has been devoted to this subject, but little has been done over time to make it more efficient. The physical characteristics of those who make it and those who don’t are strikingly similar. But those who successfully complete BUD/S training seem to stand higher in terms of leadership, selfconfidence, self-discipline, self-esteem, and intelligence. They also come from families that have high expectations of their sons. Training is long, rigorous, and painful. Recently, careful attention to recruiting the right men and more sophisticated conditioning methods have resulted in a higher percentage of candidates completing the difficult training. Yet until there is a test for “heart,” or some way to measure who will and will not quit under stress, there will always be a Hell Week and the physical, mental, and emotional crucible that is BUD/S training. The new SEAL teams focused on commandostyle raiding while coming from the sea or through the air. Their training in unconventional and paramilitary warfare involved small-unit tactics for direct-action missions and behind-the-lines reconnaissance. While Vietnam loomed large in their future, that conflict was not the first operational use of SEALs. In the spring of 1962 (a year after the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba), a small contingent of SEALs and UDT men locked out of a submarine off the coast of Cuba near Havana. Their mission was to conduct a beach reconnaissance in the event Marines should ever need to land near the Cuban capital. They were later recovered by submarine after successfully completing their mission.
Vietnam—A Defining Moment While SEALs were created for Cold War–centric contingencies, it was Vietnam that was to define them. The first SEALs arrived in South
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
SEALs storm ashore in the Rung Sat Special Zone of South Vietnam in April 1968. It was in the Rung Sat area in 1965 that SEALS began operating as squads and platoons in a direct-action role against the Viet Cong. The author says it was the Vietnam experience that defined who and what the SEALs are.
Vietnam in late 1962 as advisers. SEAL Team One began regular deployments a year later. Early on, the SEALs worked closely with the CIA out of Da Nang, assisting the agency in preparing agents to slip into North Vietnam on covert missions. Specifically, the SEALs trained South Vietnamese commandos in maritime infiltration techniques so they could enter the North from the sea. So the first mission in Vietnam was a true unconventional-warfare activity—training locals to fight the enemy on his own ground. But those efforts were largely unsuccessful. It soon became apparent to the CIA that there was little hope in generating any meaningful local resistance in North Vietnam. Conversely, the North Vietnamese were highly successful in launching an insurgency in the South, which should have told us something. With the landing of the Marines in 1965 and the escalation that followed, the role of American combatants—and the SEALs—became more one of directaction combat than of unconventional warfare. With the exception of an ongoing advisory effort, the SEALs began operating in squads and platoons in a directaction role in Rung Sat Special Zone—a Viet Cong–infested mangrove swamp between Saigon and the South China Sea. Fourteen- to sixteen-man SEAL platoons began combat rotations into the Rung Sat in 1965 and were soon operating from other riverine bases around the lower Mekong Delta. From 1965 through 1972, as platoons from SEAL Teams One and Two conducted direct-action operations against the Viet Cong, the combined strength of the teams grew to close to 400 active SEALs, but there were seldom more than 120 SEALs in Vietnam at any one time. Most often, SEALs worked for a conventional Army, Navy, or Marine ground-force commander. Early on in the Mekong region, SEALs learned that the key to successful operations was good intelligence. Veteran SEAL petty officers became quite adept at ferreting out information from the local sources. They set up networks and paid informants. For the most part, they had not been trained for that; those intelligence-collection skills were learned on
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the job to better accomplish the mission. And good intelligence led to good missions. Operationally, SEALs were often assisted by Boat Support Unit One (West Coast) and Two (East Coast), the forerunners of today’s Special Boat Teams. On many a SEAL mission, the boat-support sailors would take SEAL elements close to the objective, whence the SEALs would make the final journey to the target in sampans—moving through the night as the Viet Cong did. These missions were developed and launched as unilateral direct-action operations, but SEALs seldom went on a mission without a local guide or a small contingent of Vietnamese scouts. SEAL platoons often operated with a half dozen or more scouts called Kit Carsons—former Viet Cong who had defected under a sanctioned amnesty program. The scouts provided local knowledge—and local intelligence. They lived with the SEALs, and when in the field, they often walked on point or very close to the SEAL point man. When patrolling in hostile territory, SEALs were always concerned with booby traps—small IEDs before they were known as such. When a scout refused to walk down a trail and recommended an alternate route to the objective, the SEALs were only too glad to follow his advice.
Focused on Insurgents, Ready for Anything Most SEAL operations in Vietnam, not unlike presentday SEAL operations in Afghanistan, targeted insurgents. Back then, it was the Viet Cong. The most successful operations were a result of locally developed intelligence on a specific target—an arms cache, an enemy base camp, or a senior Viet Cong leader. As with SEAL operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam-era SEALs operated from relatively secure bases that were under the control of a conventional sector commander. Most operations were conducted at night in enemy-controlled territory, but SEALs then, like now, stood ready for a quick-reaction mission to rescue a downed pilot or a POW. In the final tally, 48 SEALs lost their lives in Vietnam and more than 200 were wounded. Estimates of Viet Cong and U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Forces soldiers and Marines, served as PRU advisers. In the case of the SEALs, there were anywhere from 60 to 120 Nungs for every SEAL adviser or pair of advisers. It was lonely duty for a SEAL, sometimes living day-in-day-out with those rough men in their home villages, with only an interpreter for communication. PRU advisers were always chosen from among veteran SEALs. The PRUs operated in 14 of the 16 provinces in IV Corps—the southern military region of South Vietnam. After being formed in 1967, PRUs and their American advisers killed more than 20,000 Viet Cong and NVA and took thousands of prisoners. Postwar North Vietnamese records confirm that the PRUs were the deadliest and most effective force fielded in South Vietnam. During the decade of SEAL deployment rotations to Vietnam, the operational focus and training within the SEAL teams was all about Southeast Asia. Tactics, weapons, and equipment were designed and developed around direct-action operations in a jungle environment. The SEALs’ mission-preparation and predeployment training was exclusively built around combat in Vietnam. Yet, within certain constraints, the SEALs had a free hand in choosing which missions they would undertake. With that latitude comes a great deal of responsibility. Today in Afghanistan, platoon officers, platoon chiefs, and task-unit commanders have that same latitude and responsibility. While it leads to operational success, it also means those combat leaders must make these life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. It means that they have to balance the importance of the mission against the risk to their men— not easy then and no easier now. In its first ten years of existence, the life of a Navy SEAL was one of continuous combat rotations to Vietnam. Officers might get in two or three combat tours, but enlisted SEALs went back time and again. In spite of the broad unconventional-warfare portfolio handed the SEALs, their training and deployments were all about operations in Vietnam. In short, SEALs became very good jungle fighters and little else. They maintained minimum qualifications in diving and parachuting, but seldom practiced those in an operational scenario. During the late 1970s and early A SEAL candidate participates in underwater training at Little Creek, Virginia, in 1968 at the ’80s, operating budgets were height of the Vietnam War. While Vietnam may have defined modern SEALs, their heritage dates tight. UDTs and SEAL teams to the naval combat demolition units established in 1943 to clear beaches in World War II. shrank to pre-Vietnam levels North Vietnamese (NVA) soldiers killed by SEAL operations run as high a 2,000. (The UDTs also deployed to Vietnam but not in the numbers of SEALs. While their combat roles were mainly restricted to reconnaissance and demolition duties, they suffered12 killed and about 40 wounded.) Three SEALs were awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. To date, two SEALs—one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan—have received the same honor, both posthumously. There were, however, SEAL advisers who conducted business in classic Army Special Forces “by, with, and through” manner. One such enterprise was the Vietnamese SEAL program, the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhia (LDNNs), meaning, literally, “soldiers who fight under the sea.” Those brave South Vietnamese soldiers, when properly trained and led, could be very effective. LDNNs were involved in two of the actions where SEALs were awarded the Medal of Honor, and one LDNN was awarded the Navy Cross, the only non-American to receive our nation’s second-highest decoration in the Vietnam War. Today he lives in the United States and is treated as a respected alumnus of the SEAL community. Perhaps the most successful SEAL operations in Vietnam were conducted by the SEALs who worked with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the PRUs. The PRU program was a CIA-sponsored effort that later became part of the secret Phoenix Program. The PRUs drew their fighters from Vietnamese rural villages and the Nung, tribesmen of Chinese origin who lived in Vietnam. The villagers and tribesmen agreed to fight on the side of the South Vietnamese government so long as they could fight as a unit and their pay was controlled by the CIA. The CIA paid and they fought. Navy SEALs, along with Army Special
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in the number of personnel, if not the team structure; there remained four underwater demolition teams and two SEAL teams. A fifth UDT had been commissioned in the summer of 1968 for duty in Vietnam, but it was decommissioned in the summer of 1971. There was even talk of disbanding the SEALs and the UDTs altogether. Today there are more than 2,000 operational SEALs; at the height of the Vietnam War there were just under 450.
1984: Conversion of the UDTs While the SEALs endured continuous deployment rotations to Vietnam—rotations similar to those experienced by SEALs in Iraq and Afghanistan—the UDTs continued to evolve underwater, focusing much of their time and energy on combat-swimmer operations and the complex business of operating wet mini-submersibles from parent nuclear submarines. Those operations became so specialized and all-encompassing that in 1984, two of the four remaining UDTs were converted to SEAL teams and the other two became SEAL delivery-vehicle teams or SDV Teams. The new SDV teams were manned by fully mission-capable SEALs, but they specialized in underwater and over-thebeach operations. With the conversion of the UDTs and the growth of the SEALs, the current disposition of SEAL/ SDV teams is as follows: SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven are based in Coronado. SEAL Teams Two, Four,
Eight, and Ten are located in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. SDV Team One is in Hawaii. There are two reserve SEAL teams, Seventeen and Eighteen. There currently is no SEAL Team Six. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden was carried out by a SEAL-centric special missions unit of the Joint Special Operations Command. Those in the U.S. Special Operations Command, and the author, avoid discussing the unit and its current designation. Nonetheless, it has been identified in the news media as SEAL Team Six. Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War all saw SEALs deployed in direct-action, special-reconnaissance, or searchand-rescue roles. In all of these conflicts, their work was maritime-related and in support of conventional battle plans or expeditionary warfare objectives. And in each of those conflicts, SEALs worked alone or as a diversion to main-force activity. Through the 1990s, there were isolated engagements with the emerging threat we now broadly categorize as terrorism. Perhaps the most engaging and sustained activities of that period were the operations mounted in support of the oil embargo imposed by the United Nations on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and enforced largely by the U.S. Navy. In an effort to deter the smuggling of oil out of Iraq, and the smuggling in of contraband, SEALs regularly boarded ships bound to and from Iraq. That activity came to be known as VBSS—visit, boarding,
The Forerunners: World War II Frogmen By Dick Couch
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ix months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval power was crippled at the Battle of Midway, and Japan’s advance in the Pacific was finally checked in land and sea actions around Guadalcanal. Then U.S. forces began the long drive across the Pacific to the Japanese home islands. This was to be an islandhopping campaign, and the first of those islands was Tarawa Atoll’s Betio. With insufficient hydrological data, the Marines went ashore in the early-morning hours of 20 November 1943. Many drowned under the weight of their gear as their landing craft beached on underwater reefs well offshore; many more were gunned down as they waded the shallow stretches between reefs and beach. More than 1,000 Marines died on Tarawa and more than 2,000 others were wounded. Amphibious operations are by their very nature risky and costly, but hydrographic intelligence could reduce risk and save lives. Men were needed to go in ahead of invasion forces to survey landing beaches. There was
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a war on; those men had to be found and quickly trained for that important task. The Navy turned to a maverick naval officer named Draper Kauffman. He proved to be the perfect man for the job. The story of the Navy frogman, and by extension, the Navy SEAL, can be distilled from the life of the charismatic Kauffman. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1933, but because of poor vision was unable to pass the commissioning physical. So he entered the ambulance service in France just in time to see its army overrun by the Germans in 1940. After a brief stint as a POW he went to England where he promptly joined the Royal Navy. Midway through his training to become a British naval officer he volunteered for ordnance-disposal work. Soon Sub-Lieutenant Kauffman was crawling through the rubble of London, defusing unexploded bombs. At the time, he was the only American serving in the Royal Navy, and few in Britain served in a more dangerous calling.
A month before America entered the war, Kauffman was repatriated and commissioned in the U.S. Navy. In the summer of 1943, in anticipation of the Pacific amphibious campaign, the Navy tasked Kauffman with solving the problem of removing obstacles from landing beaches. “Get together some men and train them to get rid of those (beach) obstacles,” he was told. “Your orders will allow you to go anywhere you think best to set up a training base. You can have anyone you ask for, in or out of the naval service. This is an emergency and we don’t have much time.” Kauffman chose Fort Pierce, Florida, as his base. Fort Pierce in the summer of 1943 was a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. The new all-volunteer group was called the Naval Combat Demolition Unit (NCDU). The training headquarters was set up in an abandoned casino. Another unit based at Fort Pierce was a veteran naval amphibious outfit simply called the Scouts and Raiders. Their training called for an intensive eightweek physical training regimen. Kauffman U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Afghanistan, then to the cities and villages of Iraq, and now, currently, back to Afghanistan. Prior to 2000 and the war on terrorism, SEALs routinely deployed with units of the Fleet and to theater commanders such as the Pacific Command, European Command, Central Command (the Middle East), or Southern Command (Central/South America). While on those deployments, they were attached to a parent command—afloat or ashore—under a conventional-force command structure. SEAL platoons deSelf-Contained Squadrons Evolve ployed with little command presence and limited logistic or operational support. On the West Coast, for example, Naval The attacks of 9/11, operations in Afghanistan, and the Special Warfare Group One kept two platoons with Central invasion of Iraq quickly drew the full attention and deployCommand and four platoons with the Pacific Command. ment commitments of our military to include Naval Special Since 2000, SEALs have deployed with their own integral Warfare assets. For the SEALs, all deployments became command, control, and support organizations—the SEAL combat deployments, and that’s the way it has been for squadron. A SEAL squadron has three to four standalone ten years. There were maritime operations associated with SEAL task units, each with two SEAL platoons and an intethe initial combat operations in Iraq, but for the most part, grated combat-support package. The task units, with their inSEALs have taken their game inland, to the mountains in ternal intelligence and targeting capability, have dramatically enhanced SEAL and Naval Special Warfare capabilities Rear Admiral Draper Kauffmann in 1961 just four months in the operational before the formation of the first SEAL teams. In 1943 it theaters. The dewas Kauffmann who was tasked with starting the Navy’s ployment of SEALs NCDUs, forerunners of present-day SEALs. search, and seizure, a key element in maritime interdiction strategy. Saddam tried to sneak his oil to market in tankers. SEALs, fast-roping from helicopters, would board the tankers in international waters and detain them. It soon became a cat-and-mouse game, with SEALs swinging aboard at night as tankers made their runs for the territorial waters of friendly Arab states. That challenging and largely successful SEAL mission came to an end with 9/11.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
asked the Scouts and Raiders if they could compress the highlights of their program into a single week. It quickly became known as Hell Week. Kauffman and the assigned officers went through the first Hell Week with their enlisted trainees. That established a precedent that continues to this day; officers and enlisted men suffer and train side by side during the arduous week. Those who survived Hell Week were then trained in demolitions, beach reconnaissance, and hydrographic survey work. Then, as now, N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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they trained in boat crews of six to eight men with an officer in charge. The crews of frogmen worked as teams during training and in combat, just as SEALs do today. Kauffman also set the tone for a special bond between officers and enlisted men. Beginning with the first class, he brought the volunteers into a room, officers on one side and the enlisted men on the other. To the enlisted he said, “I will do everything in my power to see that no officer graduates from this school under whom I would not be happy to go into combat.” To the officers, he said, “I will do everything in my power to see that no enlisted man graduates from this school whom I would not want to lead in combat.” The officers and enlisted men then shared and shared alike in the miseries of Fort Pierce and NCDU training. The NCDUs evolved into the underwater demolition teams, or UDTs, but the mission of clearing landing beaches remained essentially the same. NCDUs suffered a 52-percent casualty rate on Omaha Beach. The three-dozen odd men who graduated from Kauffman’s initial training grew exponentially: Two years later, on the eve of the Japanese surrender, the Navy counted more than 5,000
men in the UDTs—3,000 of them poised for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. At the end of the war, U.S. forces were dramatically drawn down. By 1948 there were four teams numbering just over 200 officers and men. These four teams were the available UDT personnel going into the Korean War. Korea was a confined, regional engagement with none of the massive amphibious operations of World War II. At the Inchon landing in 1950 there were no beach obstacles, as the North Koreans believed the 30-foot tides there would make a landing impossible, but the UDTs served in a reconnaissance role and as wave guides to help steer landing craft to the beach. A new requirement imposed on the UDTs in Korea that had not been part of their World War II tasks was the onshore raid. UDT elements would paddle ashore in rubber boats loaded with explosives and conduct raids on North Korean rail lines, bridges, and tunnels. Those missions were the first over-the-beach operations, a staple of today’s SEAL mission requirements. Many of the procedures developed by those amphibious frogmen laid the groundwork for future littoral-centric SEAL operations.
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SPECIAL OPS FORCES, SEALS,
AND THE BIN
LADEN TAKEDOWN
By Dick Couch
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ike most Americans, I rejoiced on learning of the death of Osama bin Laden. On any number of levels, it’s a good thing that he is dead, and dead “by our hand.” As details of the operation that took his life were revealed, usually by unnamed sources, we learned that this action took place in Pakistan, that his body was brought out, that the operation was conducted by a special operations team, and finally, that the special operators were a team of Navy SEALs. Amid the rush of misinformation about Osama being armed, then unarmed, hiding behind a wife, not hiding, etc., etc., one persistent detail remained—the SEALs got him. Very quickly the national discourse turned to SEALs, which SEALs, and the details of just who these SEALs were and what was their chain of command. Throughout all of this, official DOD, military, Special Operations, and Navy sources were silent. So the media moved into this vacuum and began to characterize the SEALs as the best of the best, the elite of the elite, and that they were from a secret team that reported to a secret command. There were related stories of stealth helicopters and plans for the SEAL assault element to fight their way out of
Pakistan if things had not gone as planned. All the while, official military and Special Operations sources remained silent. Addressing current Navy SEAL operations in the active theaters and around the world is difficult business since much of what they do is classified or at least is restricted information. The tactics, techniques, and procedures that attended the bin Laden operation are being closely held and rightly so. While the details may never be known, there were two key elements that were a part of the operation that are common to all special operations: the element of surprise and the violence of action. With that in mind, here’s a quick overview of Special Operations Forces (SOF), then the Navy SEALs, and finally, to the SEALs who were able to find and kill bin Laden. Our nation has a remarkable and robust Special Operations Force—a force seasoned by more than ten years of continuous combat. Our ground-combat SOF components are the SEALs, the Army Special Forces (Green Berets), the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC). They are brilliantly supported by SOF aviators— the Army 160th Special Operations
Aviation Regiment and the Air Force 1st Special Operations Wing. On the ground, the missions can be roughly categorized as direct action, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense (helping other nations counter terror), and special reconnaissance. All our SOF ground components conduct those missions, but each has its area of expertise—its own specialty or specialties. The SOF Marines have two battalions that specialize in foreign internal defense and one battalion that concentrates on direct action. The Green Berets, with their cross-cultural skills, focus on foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. Our men of the 75th Ranger Regiment are pure raiders. They are a direct action force, but they can also perform as light infantry. Unique among our SOF ground forces, the 75th Rangers can operate as a company, a battalion, and even as a regimental-sized force. Today’s SEALs are generalists. Talented and versatile, they conduct a wide range of special operations in a maritime environment. While most SEAL assets are currently committed to operations in Afghanistan, they are deployed in
NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
Navy underwater demolition team members ready explosive charges on board a fast transport in preparation for an Allied amphibious landing at Balikpapan, Borneo, in July 1945. The first SEAL teams formed in 1962 were drawn from the ranks of UDT veterans and in the early going basic SEAL training was essentially the same as basic UDT training.
with this expanded staffing and combat-support capability in self-contained squadrons was put in place just in time for the heavy combat rotations that followed 9/11. Currently, a deployed SEAL squadron commander reports to his regional special-operations task-force commander. In
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that role, he becomes a task-group commander and directs the activities of his SEAL task units. And when his task-force commander also directs the activities of allied or coalition special-operations forces, he becomes a joint special-operations task-force commander. In addition to the deployed SEAL squadrons, there are deployed special-missions units that are a part of the Joint Special Operations Command. The activity of our special-missions units, who they are, and what they do, is classified. They include Army, Navy, and Air Force tier-one special operations force assets, and they are known to range all across Iraq and Afghanistan. It was an element of these “special” special operators who killed Osama bin Laden. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Iraq, the Philippines, and North Africa to name just a few places. Their mission sets include “unconventional warfare, direct action, combating terrorism, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, information warfare, security assistance, counter-drug operations, personnel recovery, and hydrographic reconnaissance.” (For an excellent overview, visit http://www navsoc. navy mil/) At any given time, anywhere in the world, Navy SEALs can be tasked with those missions. As the need and mission requirements dictate, SEALs may be asked to specialize and refine their skills around one or more of those capabilities. They therefore may become highly proficient at special reconnaissance or personnel recovery. I suspect (as there still has been no official word—and probably never will be) that the SEALs who conducted the operation to get bin Laden were a very proficient directaction team. So rather than resort to terms like elite and special and secret, I think the term “focused” better describes those who were tasked with that very special operation. There are certainly other SOF components that could have conducted the operation and certainly would have liked to have done so. But because of their direct-action focus, and perhaps other considerations— availability, area orientation, and language skills—these SEALs were selected. And
that debacle, the U.S. Special Operations by all accounts, they indeed comported Command (USSOC) was born. Since then themselves admirably. it has both thrived and matured. The success Stepping back from the personnel issues of the bin Laden operation, conducted by a and the tactical excellence of the assault team of Navy SEALs, is but one example of element, keep in mind that a great many USSOC’s tireless efforts to keep this nation people had a hand in getting bin Laden. Credit the unsung intelligence professionals who ran bin Laden to ground. Credit the combat-support teams who contributed to getting that assault element briefed, trained, rehearsed, and on target with bin Laden in residence. Credit the SOF aviators who flew the mission. I would assume there were also non-SEAL special operators with the assault element to deal with certain contingencies and exploit intelligence. So while it was “the SEALs” who are credited with getting bin Laden, their U.S. NAVY (TIM TURNER) daring and professionalism are but emblematic of our Navy SEALS search for enemy forces in the Jaji Special Operations community Mountains of Afghanistan’s Paktia province during at large. In April 1980, the Operation Enduring Freedom in February 2002. United States was humiliated with the failure of Desert safe and to keep our enemies on notice. And One/Operation Eagle Claw, the botched they are most certainly on notice—anytime, attempt to rescue our Embassy legation anywhere. taken hostage in Iran. From the ashes of
A final word on that special-operations task-force, taskgroup, task-unit breakdown: Those are lines of command, communication, and support, but at none of those levels do the commanders or commanding officers own battlespace; they control no territory. SEALs and other special operators live and work in an area or sector of a conventional area commander. That means they do their work and fight on turf that belongs to an Army or Marine Corps owner. Because they do not fall within that commander’s direct chain of command, they must work closely with the conventional-force command in the conduct of their special operations. On first pass, this might seem limiting or restrictive in the conduct of special operations or on the freedom of special-operations units. In some sectors that may have been true, and it is an ongoing concern for the conventional battlespace commanders. But for the most part, the SEALs assigned to those task groups and task units in Iraq and Afghanistan thrive in that environment. In fact, they have nothing but praise for their conventional Army or Marine battlespace landlords. And they reserve their highest praise for the soldiers and Marines with whom they share the battlespace. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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******** As a writer and former “team guy,” it has been my honor and privilege to be associated with the Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL Teams for most of these past 50 years. As a young man growing up in Indiana in the 1950s, I eagerly read The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau, and of those intrepid frogmen who went ashore ahead of the Marines in World War II. I wanted to be one of them. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1967, and a tour on board a destroyer, I found myself in BUD/S training, suffering alongside enlisted sailors who wanted to be frogmen as badly as I did. There were 79 of us in that BUD/S class; 13 of us graduated. I’m proud to have served in the UDTs as well as the SEAL teams. All of us who were in the teams in Vietnam are proud of our heritage. We are immensely proud of the current generation of Navy SEALs. We stand in the shadow of their accomplishments and professionalism. And we are very proud to have played a part in the development of what is now modern Naval Special Warfare. We have a saying in the teams: “The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday.” It may not have been easy, but it certainly was rewarding.
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War Army At
with the
BY ALAN REMS
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Admiral Chester W. Nimitz prized healthy interservice relations. Nevertheless, major conflicts arose within his command that were not easily resolved.
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avy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Ernest J. King and his Pacific Ocean Areas commander, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, were both committed to interservice cooperation. But Nimitz’ zeal was greater, worrying King at times that Nimitz might go too far to accommodate the Army. Relations were best in the South Pacific, where Nimitz’ theater commander for much of the war, Admiral William F. Halsey Jr., forged a particularly close and fruitful relationship with his Army commander, Lieutenant General Millard Harmon. In contrast, significant interservice conflicts occurred in the North and Central Pacific arising from divergent views, doctrinal factors, personalities, and in one case all these and more. Escalating to the highest levels, they provide valuable insights into the critical consequences of command decisions to settle such disputes. The Frigid North No environment of the Pacific War was more inhospitable than the Aleutian Islands. During the first half-year of the Allied campaign there, relations between the Army and Navy were as frigid as the weather. As part of the Midway attack plan, the Japanese mounted a subsidiary operation to lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet to the North Pacific. Aware from intelligence decrypts of Japanese intentions, Nimitz concentrated his main forces at Midway and dispatched a nine-ship force of cruisers and destroyers under Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald to deal with the secondary threat. Despite information that the Japanese would strike the western Aleutians, Theobald positioned his ships far to the east, where he had air protection and theorized the attack would come. While a Japanese task force landed troops on Attu and Kiska islands and withdrew in peace, Theobald’s force floundered hundreds of miles away under radio silence, “as useful as if it
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Admiral Chester Nimitz (left) did his best to keep the peace between the American service branches in the Pacific Ocean Areas. But quick-tempered Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson (right), commander of Army forces in the Central Pacific, was not as committed to tranquil interservice relations. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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had been in the South Atlantic,” according to Nimitz’ biographer E. B. Potter. It was an inauspicious beginning. In a particularly awkward arrangement, naval and air forces were commanded by Theobald, while ground forces were under Army Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. Theobald reported to Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, and Buckner belonged to Lieutenant General John L. De Witt’s Western Defense Command based in San Francisco. Any unresolved disputes between the services—and there were many— needed to be settled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in Washington. Seeking clarification from Nimitz as to who should be considered in overall command, Theobald was told, “The command relationship . . . is to be by mutual cooperation.” In the opinion of Brian Garfield in The Thousand-Mile War, “that decision was one of Admiral Nimitz’s few important mistakes.” If the command organization was less than perfect, it was worse in practice during the earliest months. Possessing one of the best brains and worst dispositions in the Navy, Theobald disliked his assignment and developed an immediate antipathy for Buckner. Buckner, the son of a Confederate lieutenant general, was energetic, high-spirited, and very outspoken. It was a combustible mixture of personalities. Theobald’s mission was to keep the Japanese on the defensive, wearing them down until ground forces were available to retake the islands. A few naval bombardments of Kiska were attempted, causing greater damage through ship collisions than harm to the enemy. Afterward, Theobald was reluctant to risk his vessels for what he considered little purpose, causing Buckner to sneer, “He’s as tender of his bottoms as a teen-age girl.” Theobald then relied on the air forces to carry out the attack, but bombing results were limited in weather that grounded aircraft most days and caused flying accidents that far exceeded combat losses. To mount a more effective air campaign, an advanced fighter base was needed. After the JCS decided on Tanaga, the Army’s preference, Theobald succeeded in reversing the decision and had Adak chosen instead. Striking back, Buckner composed and recited in public a rhyme ridiculing Theobald for his fear of risking his vessels. This so infuriated Theobald he formally severed all social relations with Buckner and sent a copy of the letter with the offending poem to King. When the letter and poem were passed along to General George C. Marshall, who represented the Army on the JCS, he nearly relieved Buckner before adopting a wait-and-see approach. After a tug-of-war developed between Theobald and De Witt about jurisdiction over the
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remote Pribilof Islands garrison, Marshall groaned, “What Theater of Opportunity for Kinkaid and Buckner. When is it that produces so many complete misunderstandings?” General Douglas MacArthur needed a new naval comLater, when another island mander, Kinkaid’s aggressiveness and base was needed, there was reability to work well with the Army newed conflict and again, dewere pivotal in his selection to head spite strong Army objections, the 7th Fleet, popularly known as Theobald got his way in the “MacArthur’s Navy.” Buckner’s enselection of Amchitka. Howergetic performance led to his comever, the unending contenmand of the 10th Army, which he tion finally forced Marshall ably led on Okinawa until becoming and King to make a choice. the highest-ranking American field While Buckner retained the commander killed in the war. high regard of Marshall and After his relief, Theobald was asDe Witt, Theobald’s negativsigned command of a naval district ity and performance had made and then retired. Contentious to the him an embarrassment for end, he wrote a widely read exposé King. Theobald was replaced claiming that President Franklin D. by Rear Admiral Thomas C. Roosevelt deliberately withheld vital Kinkaid, fresh from combat in information from his Pearl Harbor the South Pacific. He was a commanders so the Japanese would perfect choice. commit the first act of war. TheoUnlike Theobald, Kinkaid bald’s 1957 obituary in The New York relished the opportunity to Times largely focused on the book close with the enemy. The without a word about his unhappy fleet was pushed westward into service in the North Pacific. Japanese home waters to interrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr cept supply ships before they In the Aleutians, the lack of a unified reached the Aleutians. One command structure set the stage for foray resulted in the 26 March confrontations between the theater’s 1943 Battle of the Komandorsenior Navy and Army commanders: skis, a marathon gun battle in acerbic but strategically cautious Rear the best tradition of the Navy Admiral Robert A. Theobald (above that turned back a supply conleft), and outspoken and militarily voy and discouraged the Japaaggressive Major General Simon nese from ever trying the same Bolivar Buckner Jr. (left). While again. Kinkaid’s fighting spirit Buckner survived the campaign with his matched Buckner’s, and togood reputation intact, Theobald was gether they forged a close relasacked by Nimitz and sent stateside. tionship that surpassed Nimitz’ expectation of “mutual cooperation.” When Army ground Buckner’s Ode to Theobald troops became available to reIn far Alaska’s icy spray, I stand beside my binnacle take the islands, Kinkaid ably led the campaign. After the Japanese were ousted from And scan the waters through the fog for fear some rocky pinnacle the Aleutians, in testament to the dramatic turnaround Projecting from unfathomed depths may break my hull asunder in relations, King wrote Marshall: “This arrangement And place my name upon the list of those who made a blunder. . . . worked extremely well . . . largely due to excellent cooperation between the responsible commanders The Bering Sea is not for me nor for my Fleet Headquarters. concerned. I have not seen fit to press for a change in In mortal dread I look ahead in wild Aleutian waters Where hidden reefs and williwaws* and terrifying critters this set-up.” Dubbed the “Theater of Military Frustration” by Unnerve me quite with woeful fright and give me fits and jitters. Samuel E. Morison in his History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II, the North Pacific was the * violent squalls that blows in near-polar latitudes ABOVE: NAVAL HISTORY & HERITAGE COMMAND; LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
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Smith versus Richardson Within Nimitz’ command, Army division commanders were relieved on New Georgia, Attu, and Saipan. The first two cases attracted little notice and were quickly forgotten. The third reverberated through the services and the American public and remains controversial even today. Critical to the outcomes was the extent of senior Army participation in the decisions. In the South Pacific, the commander of the 43rd Infantry Division was relieved on New Georgia by the theater’s Army commander, Harmon, who acted as Halsey’s eyes and ears for the ground campaign. In the North Pacific, Kinkaid relieved the commander of the 7th Division on Attu after consulting with Buckner and De Witt. In the Central Pacific, no senior Army representative had a voice in the decision by the Marine amphibious corps commander to relieve the commanding general of the 27th Infantry Division on Saipan. In his outspoken memoir, Coral and Brass, Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith left no doubt why, as commanding general, expeditionary troops, he relieved Army Major General Ralph C. Smith. The official charges were limited to two command infractions and tardiness in an attack on Saipan, but the real causes were more serious and of longer duration. Months earlier, on Makin and Eniwetok, two of the 27th’s regiments had moved very slowly and overcautiously to win lightly held atolls. The consequence at Makin was the disastrous loss of the carrier USS Liscome Bay (CVE-56), torpedoed while standing by in support. Holland Smith diagnosed the problem as “militia-itis”— a tendency for National Guard divisions to be officered by unqualified cronies bound together by social, business, and political connections. Although Marshall recognized the problem and reorganized many Guard divisions, he left the 27th alone, likely because of special political sensitivities with this New York division. During his 19 months as commander before Saipan, Ralph Smith also refrained from shaking up the organization. To Holland Smith, gentlemanly Ralph Smith was too soft for the job. As the only Army division available, Holland Smith had no choice in accepting the 27th as his corps reserve for the Marianas. Fierce resistance quickly required its deployment on Saipan. Division units were first committed to the drive toward Nafutan Point, making very slow progress against light opposition much as on Makin and Eniwetok. Most of the 27th was then concentrated between the two Marine divisions for the main drive near Mount Tapotchau. By the second day of the offensive, the 27th had barely moved despite Holland Smith’s repeated prodding, exposing the flanks of the Marine forces that had meanwhile advanced. The designated Army garrison commander was sent to investigate and based largely on his assurance that he could get the division moving, Holland Smith decided to relieve N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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Ralph Smith. Although he had the authority to act, Holland Smith first obtained the approval of Vice Admiral Richmond K. Turner and then Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, the operation’s supreme commander. In a message to Nimitz, Spruance explained, “No other action appeared adequate to accomplish the purpose.” The usually wise Spruance may not have gotten this one right. Whatever Holland Smith hoped to achieve, he gained little if anything. Command of the division passed successively to the designated garrison commander and then to another Army general, neither of whom had battlefield experience. The Japanese were found to be in greater strength and the terrain was more difficult than Holland Smith had believed, so that a further six days were needed before aptly named Death Valley was won. Meanwhile, Japanese forces broke through a battalion of the 27th operating under corps command near Nafutan Point, creating mayhem at Aslito Airfield until Marines wiped them out. Then, just two days before the island was declared secure, the 27th was struck by the largest banzai charge of the entire war. Despite warnings of impending attack, the division was caught unprepared. Men fled in panic, nearby units remained uncommitted, and the division—as well as Marines caught up in the melee—suffered heavy casualties. Holland Smith expressed his disdain by immediately withdrawing the 27th. In response to the relief of Ralph Smith, a counterattack was mounted by Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr., commanding general of Army forces in the Central Pacific. Although the press came to refer to the fracas as “Smith vs. Smith,” considering Richardson’s leading role it should more accurately have been called “Smith vs. Richardson.” Described by Marshall’s biographer Forrest C. Pogue as having “a temper as quick-triggered as Holland Smith’s,” Richardson was an ex-cavalryman unhappily marooned in a purely administrative job. The situation was of his own making, as Richardson’s reluctance to serve under an Australian commander had so angered Marshall that he lost the opportunity to command forces that grew into MacArthur’s 8th Army. Richardson’s uncooperative attitude left such a poor impression with the War Department that General Dwight D. Eisenhower called attention to it in his memoir Crusade in Europe. Before Saipan, Richardson had tried to convince Nimitz that Marine commanders lacked the background to command large bodies of troops, and proving Holland Smith wrong would provide vindication. Further, when the 27th was first assigned to serve with the Marines, Marshall had cautioned Richardson, “If there remain . . . leaders who cannot be depended upon . . . those leaders must be eliminated now, immediately.” If the 27th did not measure up to Marshall’s expectations, Richardson deserved part of the blame.
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Richardson touched things off on a visit to Saipan. After reviewing the 27th and distributing medals without authority, he loudly complained to Holland Smith, Turner, and Spruance about what he considered high-handed treatment of the Army. Turner responded with his very best invective, and charges of “unwarranted assumption of authority” were lodged against Richardson. Before his descent on Saipan, Richardson had convened a court of inquiry that, without gathering testimony from the Marines’ side, decided Holland Smith was unjustified in ordering Ralph Smith’s relief. King took strong exception to the negative comments about Holland Smith and was prepared to fight it out. However, Marshall’s staff stayed cooler. They agreed with the report that “staff work of Holland Smith . . . was below acceptable standards” and that he was strongly prejudiced against the Army. But they also believed that “Ralph Smith failed to exact the performance expected from a well-trained division.” Marshall then decided the acrimony must stop and persuaded King to join with him in barring all further official discussion. However, the damage was done, and animosity between the services persisted. Meanwhile, the American public was drawn in through newspapers and magazines. Time and Life came down solidly for the Marines, while the powerful Hearst newspapers strongly supported the Army. The Hearst press had long championed MacArthur to lead all U.S. forces in the Pacific, losing no opportunity to disparage Marine methods they claimed made for higher casualties than the more methodical Army approach. After five years, when it seemed the case might finally fade from memory, Holland Smith’s incendiary memoir appeared. The same year, Edmund G. Love ably presented the 27th’s side in a fine
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division history, and in later years additional tendentious studies kept the affair alive. It was unhelpful to the debate that the specific charges lodged against Ralph Smith were relatively minor and explainable, unlike the more pervasive reasons behind his relief. In the end, it was hard to dispute the opinion of Marshall’s staff that there was considerable fault on both sides. Army officers vowed they would never again serve under Holland Smith, and they never did after his elevation to command of all Marines in the Pacific. Holland Smith bitterly resented the absence of support from Nimitz, who refused to be drawn in and removed adverse comments about the 27th from Spruance’s official report. The Pacific commander was himself so bitter about the poisoning of interservice relations that he later would not allow Holland Smith to attend the Japanese surrender ceremony. Although Spruance escaped blame, he must have reflected that it would have been better to delay Ralph Smith’s removal until the campaign rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr TOP AND MIDDLE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOTTOM: U.S. NAVY
When a Marine, Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith (top), relieved the commander of the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, Major General Ralph Smith (middle), of command during the 1944 Battle of Saipan, an interservice firestorm ensued. General Richardson fanned the flames by rushing to Saipan only days after the battle concluded, awarding decorations to 27th Division soldiers though they were not under his command, and chewing out Holland Smith. While Smith kept his temper, Vice Admiral Richmond K. “Terrible” Turner, unleashed his fury on Richardson. Left: After meeting with Turner, an angry Richardson (right) complains to Admiral Raymond Spruance about the vice admiral’s “insulting” behavior. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
was done and the problem could be dealt with more discreetly. Richardson was unable to turn the situation to his advantage and remained stranded behind his desk in Hawaii for the duration. The 27th trained intensively to correct the deficiencies identified during the battle and went on to fight on Okinawa, where the last regimental colonel retained after Saipan was relieved of command. Except for a brief interim assignment in Hawaii, Ralph Smith never again commanded combat troops. As the Army’s foremost French expert, he served as military attaché and performed humanitarian work in France before retirement. On his death at age 104, Ralph Smith was the oldest retired general officer of the Army. ‘Genial John’ and the 7th Air Force Samuel Morison observed that the excellent interservice cooperation in the South Pacific in land-based aviation was not matched in the Central Pacific because of a clash of personalities. That was true, although much more was involved. Unlike the Saipan and Aleutian interservice conflicts, the problems surrounding Central Pacific landbased aviation have been almost entirely ignored by historians. The single in-depth study is an unpublished thesis written by then–U.S. Air Force Major Peter S. H. Ellis at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, titled “Hale’s Handful . . . Up from the Ashes.” From the start of the Central Pacific offensive with the attack on Tarawa, land-based aviation was led by Vice Admiral John H. Hoover. The many duties of Hoover’s command included strategic and closeair support of Spruance’s offensive operations and defense of occupied positions. The principal battle force available to Hoover was the fighters and bombers of the Army’s 7th Air Force, headed by Major General Willis H. Hale. A good friend of Spruance’s, Hoover was known as “Genial John” for being anything but that. As described by Potter, Hoover was hard-nosed and authoritarian, with a reputation for being difficult but efficient. “A perfectionist, harsh and demanding . . . in a calm, almost-silken voice he would blisteringly assail any subordinate whose command failed to meet his exacting standards.” N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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According to Ellis, Hale was “a quiet man, though one who could curl the paint off a Liberator with a whisper.” He was deeply devoted to his airmen and unyielding in his determination to avoid unnecessary casualties. After incurring heavy losses by employing relatively aggressive tactics during the Gilberts campaign, Hale ordered a more cautious approach. Heavy bombers were then flown at high altitudes and in tight formation, while medium B-25 Mitchells operated at increased altitudes to avoid enemy flak. This sharply diverged from the approach Hoover and Spruance wanted—low-level aggressive attacks by individual aircraft on specific targets. Although that method made for greater losses, they believed it shortened campaigns and in the long run saved lives. A less aggressive air campaign also prolonged the fleet’s exposure to attack. In particular, attacking at higher altitudes severely limited aircraft effectiveness against enemy vessels. Memories of Midway still rankled Spruance; during the battle, B-17 pilots made fruitless high-level attacks on the Japanese fleet and then claimed spectacular successes that were trumpeted in the American press. Nimitz had insisted that naval commanders of joint forces allow subordinate units “to accomplish assigned tasks by . . . their own technique as developed by precept and experience.” Hale believed that Hoover was flouting that order and was, as Ellis put it, “micromanaging his forces.” In at least one instance, by enlisting the support of Richardson, whose administrative domain included the theater’s Army Air Forces, Nimitz intervened on Hale’s behalf. Afterward, in combination with his attempt before Saipan to wrest away corps command from rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ABOVE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
The authoritarian commander of landbased aircraft in the Central Pacific, Vice Admiral John H. Hoover (above left), believed 7th Air Force bombers should aggressively attack from low levels. But Army Air Forces Major General Willis Hale (left), the unit’s commander as well as “Genial John’s” subordinate, favored high-level attacks. The dispute eventually spread to include Richardson, Nimitz, the War Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Holland Smith, Richardson tried without success to unseat Hoover from his control of all land-based aviation. When that approach to Nimitz failed, Richardson traveled to Washington with Hale to argue the case before the War Department. In a message to King alerting him what to expect from a situation that pitted Richardson and Hale against Hoover and Holland Smith, Nimitz viewed it as a “clash of difficult personalities [that] will not be removed by changes in organization.” Nimitz hastened to let King know that his own relations with Richardson continued friendly, although anecdotal evidence indicates his true feelings were less warm. In fact, their close proximity in Hawaii may have been one reason Nimitz later moved with a small forward headquarters to Guam and left Richardson behind. Even genuinely genial Nimitz had his limits. Eventually the situation engaged the third service chief on the JCS, Army Air Forces General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold. After much negotiation, the command was reorganized so that Hale was given full operational control over all landbased aviation in the Central Pacific. However, in response to concerns that it would be excessive responsibility for him to continue to command the 7th Air Force, whose resources and span of operations had increased exponentially, Hale reluctantly surrendered that command. No less painfully, he continued to report to Hoover in the admiral’s new capacity as commander, Forward Area. Ellis interprets this compromise, which “sacrificed General Hale,” as a product of Arnold’s interest in firmly establishing the Army Air Forces’ operational control over land-based aviation. Arnold would have anticipated the concentration of air resources in the Pacific after Germany’s defeat that might decisively end the war. Seven months later, Hale’s command was disbanded and he became deputy commander of a new Army Air Forces organization that reported directly to Nimitz. Hoover continued in command of the forward island bases to the end of the war. After two devastating typhoons, Genial John solidified his reputation when he headed a court of inquiry that decided Halsey was primarily responsible for the fleet’s losses in the storms. Off the record, Hoover favored courtmartialing America’s favorite admiral for dereliction of duty. Halsey was saved only by the appreciation of Nimitz and King for his past service. Summing Up Although they enlivened and inflamed all these situations, personality differences were secondary to the substantive issues involved. In the Aleutian and land-based aviation situations, doctrinal differences were important but not more so than individual proclivities. Theobald’s unwillingness to risk his fleet was more a matter of caution than naval doctrine. Kinkaid would probably have acted more boldly but not necessarily more wisely when the Japanese descended on the Aleutians with superior forces.
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Analogously, had MacArthur’s air commander, General George C. Kenney, been in Hale’s position, his aggressive instincts would probably have better satisfied Hoover, especially in his enthusiasm for low-level shipping attacks. But conditions in the two theaters were quite different, especially the very long distances flown in many 7th Air Force missions. It is also difficult to think of dour Hoover and peppery Kenney, never unready to exaggerate results, bonding much better than Theobald and Buckner. Personalities do count. The Saipan situation was more complex. Morison particularly noted the incompatibility of the 27th Infantry Division’s training with the Marines’ style of war, retention of incompetent and overage commanders for fear of political repercussions, and loss of a fighting edge during long garrison duty in Hawaii. Expressing “no doubt that General Holland Smith was right,” Morison avoided the question of whether, in hindsight, that was the best course. Still, the historian was clearly correct in his belief that the 27th “should never have been included in the same attack force with Marines.” The great losers were the rank and file of the division; they deserved better. To his considerable credit, Nimitz stood discreetly apart from partisan conflicts in all these cases, a model of interservice cooperation that all those who exercise high command could usefully follow.
Sources: Larry I. Bland, ed., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall: Volumes 3 and 4: December 7, 1941–May 31, 1943 and June 1, 1943–December 31, 1944 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 and 1996). Thomas B. Buell, The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). Norman V. Cooper, A Fighting General: The Biography of Gen. Holland M. ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Association, 1987). Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II: Vol. 4, The Pacific: Guadalcanal to Saipan August 1942 to July 1944; Vol. 5, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki June 1944 to August 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950 and 1953). Philip A. Crowl, The United States Army in World War II, The War in the Pacific, Campaign in the Marianas (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1960). Peter S. H. Ellis, “Hale’s Handful . . . Up from the Ashes” (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 2000, available electronically from Air University Press). Harry A. Gailey, Howlin’ Mad vs. The Army: Conflict in Command, Saipan 1944 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986). Brian Garfield, The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). Stephen Howarth, ed., Men of War: Great Naval Captains of World War II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Edmund G. Love, The 27th Infantry Division in World War II (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1949). Samuel E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Vol. 4, Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions May–August 1942; Vol. 7, Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls June 1942–April 1944; Vol. 8, New Guinea and the Marianas March 1944–August 1944 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1949, 1951, and 1953). Lewis Morton, The United States Army in World War II, The War in the Pacific, Strategy and Command: The First Two Years (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1962). Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1943–1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1973). E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976).
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Rescue on Guam For these reservists, it wasn’t the typical active-duty stint—but a desperate search for plane-wreck survivors adrift in the Pacific expanse. BY LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ROBERT BERNIER, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired)
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lready hot and muggy in the predawn hours of 19 July 1980, our day began in the barrack’s parking lot as the 12-man aircrew climbed into battered Navy pickups and drove to our P-3 Orion parked on the flight line. We had landed at Naval Air Station Agana, Guam, the day before after island-hopping across the Pacific from our home base in California. It took four days. Massive thunderstorms rumbling across the Marianas had required a diversion to Kwajalein, delaying us by a day. Finally arriving, we were quickly informed by our harried squadron-operations officer that a Pacific Missionary Aviation Beech 18, flying from Yap Island to Woleai Atoll with seven souls on board, was missing. He added: “You’re the only ones available—it’s your job to find them.” At the flight line, each man prepared for the mission ahead. The radio operator picked up crypto codes and tested his radios; the three sensor operators checked out acoustic-detection equipment and radars, while the flight
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engineer and second mechanic geared up to fuel the ship. Lieutenant Ty Thomas, our patrol-plane commander, and Lieutenant Roger Warburton, the crew tactical coordinator, got the latest search info from the tactical support center (TSC) briefers. As the junior pilot, I preflighted the plane. Civilian Cross-Section = Solid Reserve Team Although we were an ad hoc crew brought together for the transpacific flight to Guam, we worked well as a team because of the camaraderie of our unit, Patrol Squadron 65, out of NAS Point Mugu, California. Based within an easy drive of Los Angeles, we reservists tended to be an eclectic bunch. Among us were truckers, lawyers, teachers, engineers, movie-industry stuntmen, and a professional astronomer. We found ourselves on Guam for our annual two-week active-duty requirement with the Naval Reserve. With the Cold War warming up again, squadron crews such as ours would range throughout the western Pacific from bases in the Philippines, Thailand, and Okinawa— some crews on the prowl for Soviet subs, others flying patrols off the coast of Vietnam looking for Vietnamese boat people U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Pilot Robert Bernier of Patrol Squadron 65 described his outfit as “an eclectic bunch” representing a hodgepodge of civilian occupations and backgrounds. But when it came to such a task as saving human lives, they proved to be a tight-knit team. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
and the pirates who preyed on them. Most of us welcomed the chance to temporarily get away from the daily grind of our civilian lives, to find a little adventure. The challenge of this rescue mission was why I had joined the Reserves. Fueled for a 14-hour flight and heavy, we took to the runway before dawn and, accompanied by the roar of the Orion’s four big Allison turboprop engines, lumbered into the night sky. As we climbed south toward Woleai Atoll, the two navigators on board, Roger and Lieutenant Dave Gemmill, prepared a search plan. Weary off-duty crew members found various places to sleep as we flew to the search area. Little was known about the missing plane; the TSC staff informed us that the missionary pilot, Jerry Roquemore, was highly regarded and that an electronic locating transmitter (ELT) was on board.
Patrol
of his passengers, a Woleai fisherman, saw birds that never venture far from land, so Roquemore knew they were close to safety—but what direction? After nearly seven hours in the air and running on empty, he advised Guam radio that he was unsure of his position and would ditch while he still had fuel and engine power. Sharp Eyes on Woleai We were briefed that the plane had splashed down near Woleai Atoll. Lieutenant Roger Warburton, a big, colorful character and undercover cop in civilian life was responsible for implementing our search. From his tactical console in the Orion’s windowless midsection (called the “tube” by aircrew) his job as tactical coordinator was to evaluate information from various sensor operators and, much like a circus ringmaster, synchronize individual efforts—a must when performing the Orion’s signature mission of antisubmarine warfare. Today’s assignment—if successful—would be more rewarding. We arrived off Woleai Atoll just after first light and began flying our search pattern, a ladder-like grid plotted on a navigation chart and aligned along the probable flight path of the lost aircraft. Skies were partially overcast, visibility limited by haze. All bubble windows were manned by sharp-eyed sailors trained to spot submarine periscopes. But something was missing. If there were survivors, we should have been hearing the distinctive whoop of the ELT signal in our headphones. We weren’t. Having participated in three previous search-and-rescue missions that ended in disappointment, I knew that sighting small rafts on the open ocean would be tough. I thought about a search years earlier when I flew in a massive hunt for three Navy aircraft mechanics who had gone for a day’s fishing off Guam and never returned. We searched around the clock for a week, motivated by the sailors’ families who waited anxiously on the ramp as we taxied in from our flights. They counted on us. Surely we could find a 17-foot boat with
The twin-engine Beech 18 had departed Yap Island in rainy, turbulent weather the previous day for the two-hour– plus flight to Woleai Atoll, 400 miles away. When Roquemore, a 46-year-old veteran aviator, did not sight the atoll at his expected arrival time, he began to worry. Navigating by dead reckoning, he realized by observing the whitecaps below that the actual tailwinds were much stronger than forecast, causing him to overfly Woleai. Quickly reversing course, but with no radio beacon to home into—ironically, one was on board, to be placed on Woleai to guide future flights—the pilot commenced a visual search for the tiny atoll barely awash in the sea. Unable to find Woleai, he decided to return to Yap, which had a beacon. He never made it. Low on fuel and with no reliable beacon signal from Yap, Roquemore contacted Guam radio Needle in a very big haystack: The rescuers scoured the surface of the endless sea for any signs of life for a direction-finder fix. from an island-hopping twin-engine Beech 18 (such as the one pictured here) that was thought to have Guam wasn’t able to give splashed down near Woleai Atoll. him a good position. One rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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sailors on board who wanted to be found. We never did. Presently finding nothing in the waters surrounding the atoll, we extended our patrol northwest toward Yap Island, 400 miles away. Without the crucial ELT signal to track, we anticipated a long search; to save fuel and increase our flying time, we shut down and feathered the number-one engine. We knew we were flying through a history book, with The P-3 Orion was used for antisubmarine warfare, a mission involving scrutinizing the ocean wreckage from World War II surface for telltale periscopes. The same eyes-peeled approach was handy when it came to searching still visible throughout this iso- for small life rafts, but the job was daunting and the odds of success long. lated region of the Pacific. The rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr very remoteness that allowed Directed by Roquemore, one of his passengers, Navy Seasunken landing craft or rusting amphibious tanks awash in bee Lieutenant Mike Schaefer, got everybody out onto the the surf to remain in place also made communication with wing after impact. The plane stayed afloat for three minutes, the outside world difficult. Navy briefers had advised that allowing time for the rafts to be inflated and the bleeding although some of the islands we would come across had racontrolled on the injured pilot. Blood would attract sharks. dios, it would take a while to fire up generators that powered Behind our cockpit, the radioman’s teletype machine them. If we needed to communicate, we were to buzz and clattered with an incoming message: A U.S. Coast Guard try calling 30 minutes later. vessel, the USCGC Basswood (WLB-388), was steaming Thinking that some islanders might have heard or seen down from Guam to join the search. the missionary plane fly by, we buzzed islands that resembled Yap Island was now on the horizon and my navigation scenes out of South Pacific, with vibrant blue waters, swaying chart had a frequency for Yap Radio. Not expecting much, palm trees, and neat little thatched-roofed huts on stilts. I dialed in the frequency and gave a call. Maybe someone Over the intercom someone commented that he wouldn’t would answer; maybe they knew something we didn’t. An be surprised to see Mitzi Gaynor waving from a beach below. eager voice promptly replied, “I heard the Navy was out Neither Mitzi nor anyone else answered our radio calls. looking; been hoping you’d call.” A local minister, ReverIncreasing Desperation and a Glimmer of Hope? end Harald Gorges, on his own initiative, was doing what As we flew our search pattern through tropical skies near he could to help by monitoring the frequency. the equator, the compressor supplying cooling air to the After I told him about our lack of success, he responded cockpit failed. It quickly became a hothouse. Before long, the with information we hadn’t gotten from official channels. forward radar, its heat-sensitive electronic guts also located in “They tried coming back but didn’t make it . . . and just the cockpit—fried itself. We were down to an eyeball search. before ditching the pilot reported seeing birds that never After seven hours, our early optimism began to fade. We fly more than 40 miles from land.” should have heard an ELT signal by now. Years later, I would “Any guesses where?” I radioed back. read that psychological studies done on people involved in Without hesitation he replied, “I think they went down search-and-rescue operations show initially there is hope, folto the northeast between Yap and Ulithi,” and added, “An lowed by doubt; when finding nothing, the rescuers question Air Micronesia flight heard an ELT signal near that area the areas they’re searching. We were in the latter stages of about noon.” this process, still determined, but feeling that either there Re-energized by the news, we raced north toward Ulithi. were no survivors or we were looking in all the wrong places. Men Against the Sea But there were survivors. Roquemore, using all the skills Aboard the rafts, the first night adrift had been a stormy of a seasoned bush pilot, had successfully ditched, dropping one, bringing lightning and thick sheets of rain. Shivering with perfect timing and a tail-first thud onto the rough with cold, the survivors struggled to keep the three rafts ocean swells. Lacking a shoulder harness, he had pitched together in the roller-coaster waves. Elected raft captain by forward into the instrument panel during the ditch, breakmutual consent and determined not to lose a man overing his nose and badly cutting up his face.
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board, Lieutenant Schaefer had everyone pile into the largest of the three rafts and lash themselves in. Sunrise brought calmer seas and hopes for a quick rescue. Later that afternoon, after the sun had been blazing down for hours on the cramped and exhausted survivors, with still no rescuers in sight, concern mounted that they might drift past Yap during the coming night. Approaching Ulithi Atoll, we finally began picking up an intermittent ELT signal. Overhead, an Air Force C-130 had joined the hunt. Hopes of quickly finding the survivors were dashed when we realized their ELT was transmitting
in and claim our bragging rights. Mustn’t allow that, better to burn into our fuel reserves. And we knew we were close. The strident WHOOPWHOOP-WHOOP of the emergency signal blared on the speakers. Extra “eyeballs” had crowded into the cockpit, intently scanning the sea and wanting to be the first to sight the survivors. Finally, our flight engineer, Chief Petty Officer Mike Glenn, a laconic man, gestured toward the one o’clock position and calmly said, “Look—there they are.” They were barely a mile away, but we had almost missed them in the haze and ocean swells. ‘It’s Time to Go’ A spontaneous cheer erupted throughout the airplane as Ty banked hard and dove toward the rafts. We roared in low, very
The searchers’ efforts finally paid off as they zeroed in on the survivors, but as the author notes, “We had almost missed them in the haze and ocean swells.” Right: The happy survivors (including pilot Jerry Roquemore, third from left) gathered on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Basswood’s gangway after arriving at Yap Island. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
on a civilian VHF frequency. We could hear the signal, but it was incompatible with our military equipment, so we couldn’t home to it— no swift gallop to the rescue for us. Worse, it sounded loud and clear, and then randomly switched off. Roger’s voice over the intercom betrayed the frustration we all felt: “OK . . . we need another plan . . . let’s huddle.” Listening to the emergency signal, we realigned the search pattern again and again toward the loudest sector. The C-130 flying high overhead—also unable to home to the ELT—assisted by verifying when the emergency beacon switched off, confirming that we hadn’t flown beyond the beacon’s transmitting range and away from the survivors. Were the survivors trying to save their ELT battery? We didn’t know. However tedious and time-consuming, groping our way toward the “noise” might work—if our fuel lasted. We had now been flying at a low altitude for more than nine hours, burning through most of the 30 tons of fuel we had started with, and a glance at the fuel gauges indicated we were pushing it. Still, we had too much emotional energy invested to quit now; we needed to find these people! Besides, the Air Force was circling above, ready to swoop N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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low, on three engines with landing lights flashing, and spat a sonobuoy (floating radio beacon) and smoke marker out the belly. It was our little impromptu victory dance—leaving no doubt in the rafts below that they had been found. We got busy: The radioman flashed the position to the Basswood; she altered course for the pickup. I radioed the C-130 above, while Ty wrapped our Orion around for another pass. Yep . . . there were seven, all waving with real enthusiasm. Roger, concerned about our fuel situation, then stepped into the sweltering cockpit and told us what we already knew: “It’s time to go.” Roquemore had been the first to sight the low flying P-3 on the western horizon. After 27 hours in the rafts, the grateful survivors would spend their second night at sea as guests of the Coast Guard on board the Basswood. Following medical attention, hot meals, and hot showers, the Basswood’s newest celebrities were invited to the ship’s movie: a disaster film—Airport. They politely declined.
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Into Battle on Board the
Invincible
BY GILES HEALY
A spur-of-the-moment purchase included an unexpected historical treasure: a copy of an unpublished letter describing HMS Invincible at the 1914 Battle of the Falklands, written by the battlecruiser’s navigator.
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everal years ago at an auction in Devon, England, I bought a suitcase full of vintage photographic equipment. The purchase was impulsive; I had not had the opportunity to view the contents of the case when the gavel fell, and I secured the lot from an otherwise disinterested room. The equipment, jumbled together among shriveled pill bugs, dated from the 1950s. It included a Russian Zorki complete with a telescopic brass tripod, an 8-mm home-movie camera with ruined film in the spools, a flash housing with blown bulbs, and furred Eveready batteries fossilized in their housing. The suitcase’s soiled cotton lining had elasticized side pockets. In one there was a carefully folded document. The auctioneer had made no mention of this, so it was with some surprise, reading it through, that I realized I had acquired an eyewitness account of the 1914 Battle of the Falklands. Although lacking an addressee, the document is a letter. The blue ink with which it’s typed gives it the appearance of being a carbon copy, perhaps the author’s personal duplicate. As one might expect of a copy, there is no signature, but the name “Lionel H. Shore” is printed at the end. A little digging led to the discovery that Lieutenant Commander Lionel Henry Shore was the navigator of the famous battlecruiser HMS Invincible.
Shore was born in 1882, the second son of Henry Noel Shore, fifth Baron of Teignmouth, and Mary Aglionby Porteus. Lionel followed his father, a retired commander, into a career with the Royal Navy, taking a commission as a midshipman soon after his 17th birthday. In June 1900 he saw active service during the Boxer Rebellion in China. Shore’s account of the engagement at Taku Forts, taken from a letter to his father, was published in The Times later that year. His accomplished prose style may have been the result of his father’s influence; Baron Teignmouth was a celebrated author of works on smuggling, European travel, and the Pacific voyages of HMS Lapwing, in which he had served. The Taku Forts letter, much like the later Falklands letter, is a creditable firsthand account that displays its author’s zeal in the service of his country, as well as his stoicism and good humor, even when relating that he had fallen victim to friendly fire: “I got shot by an idiot of a stoker, carelessly handling a loaded rifle. He was only about ten yards off, the bullet went through the inside of my right thigh, high up, luckily missing the bone and other dangerous parts.”1 The Taku Forts letter probably helps identify Shore’s father as the intended recipient of the missive from the Falklands. Tellingly, perhaps, the Falklands letter has “not for publication” handwritten across the top left-hand corner of the first page. Shore distinguished himself at Taku Forts, earning a very favorable mention in dispatches and a recommendation for early promotion from his commanding officer, Commander Christopher Cradock.2 Shore was duly promoted to lieutenant in 1903, and during the subsequent years his ability as a navigator and pilot singled him out for praise and advancement. He rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in 1911, and commander in 1915. Shore was posted on board HMS Invincible as navigator a few days before the outbreak of World War I, in July 1914. It was his second tour of service in the ship. Completed in 1909, the eighth HMS Invincible was the prototype large armored cruiser. Her designed purpose was to keep the sea-lanes open and protect British mercantile shipping from marauding enemy cruisers. She was fast and heavily armed, capable of dogging, hunting down, and destroying enemy cruisers. She was to be a “greyhound of the seas,” as First Sea Lord Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher put it. In 1912 the rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM; INSET: COURTESY OF GILES HEALY
HMS Invincible steams at full speed in pursuit of the German East Asia Squadron during the 8 December 1914 Battle of the Falklands. The Invincible’s navigator, Lieutenant Commander Lionel Shore (inset), wrote that the sight of his battlecruiser and her sister, the Inflexible, in chase that day “with their great bow & stern waves and their battle flags flying was inspiring to a degree.” N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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Invincible and her class were reclassified as battlecruisers, taking up a support role as part of the battle fleet and forgoing their more swashbuckling, predatory purpose. The British declaration of war on Germany found the Invincible in the final throes of a major refit. Declared seaworthy eight days later, she played a small part in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, the first naval engagement of the war. But the 18 salvoes she fired all missed their mark. British victory at the Bight served as a timely boost to morale; however, any high spirits were short-lived. At the beginning of November news reached the Admiralty of defeat at the Battle of Coronel. Under the command of Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee, the German East Asia Squadron—comprising two powerful armored cruisers, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and three light cruisers, the Leipzig, Dresden, and Nürnberg—outmaneuvered and outclassed a British squadron commanded by now–Rear Admiral Cradock, off Valparaiso, Chile. HMS Monmouth and Good Hope were lost with all hands, including Cradock. Admiral Fisher, who had been recalled from retirement at the outbreak of war and reinstated as First Sea Lord, made the decision to send the Invincible and her sister ship Inflexible to lead the search for the German squadron. The mission would see the vessels revert to the purpose for which he had originally intended them.
Armor (belt): (bulkheads): (barbettes/turrets):
567 feet 78 feet, 8.5 inches 26 feet 17,482 tons 25 knots 41,000 shaft horsepower 8 12-inch/45-caliber guns 16 4-inch/45-caliber guns 5 18-inch torpedo tubes (submerged) 6-inch amidships, 4-inch 7-inch fore, 6-inch aft 7-inch
Y Turret
B
attlecruisers are an enigma. The designation only became official five years after the Invincible, the first of the type authorized,* slid down the ways in 1907. She and her sisters originally were called armored cruisers, and until the official 1912 designation they occasionally were referred to as cruiser-battleships and dreadnought battleships. First Sea Lord Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher, whose mantra was “speed is everything,” was the driving force behind the Dreadnought Design Committee’s directive for an advanced type of armored cruiser. Fisher wanted ships that were fast enough to escape any enemy able to sink them and powerful enough to sink any opponent able to catch them. They were to operate as protectors of Great Britain’s vital sea-lanes—specifically against the specter of fast, armed German ocean liners—and, when needed, as a scouting force and “fast wing” of the battle fleet. When first built, the Invincible class’ obvious strengths were speed and armament. They were indeed the fastest armored cruisers in the world, and their 12-inch main battery outranged and outpowered the typical 5.9- to 9.4-inch weaponry of their intended targets. With battlecruisers’ speed and weaponry trumping all, weight of armor suffered. Typically, a combatant’s armor is designed to defeat the weaponry of a particular enemy. The battlecruisers’ armor was effective against that carried by armored cruisers—as demonstrated by the Invincible and her sister the Inflexible at the Battle of the Falklands. But it could not defeat shells carried by ships of a battle line, as witnessed nearly 18 months later in the North Sea. Some historians point to the flash of bursting shells on volatile cordite charges as the primary cause of the loss of three battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland. They highlight inadequate shell- and powder-handling procedures, magazine safety systems, and ammunition instability, particularly the powder. Ignored, however, is the fact that in each case the battlecruisers’ armor was penetrated. Beyond his overconfidence in speed as protection, perhaps Fisher’s most glaring deficiency was his blindness to the possibility that an enemy might build similar warships. This Germany did, and its “large cruisers,” while slightly undergunned in comparison, were faster and significantly better armored and subdivided. That made all the difference at Jutland. J. M. Caiella
* The Invincible-class was the first class of battlecruisers built. The Invincible was the first named but the last laid down, the second launched, and the last commissioned.
HMS Invincible at the Falklands Length (overall): Beam: Draft (mean load): Displacement (load): Speed: Machinery: Armament:
Battlecruisers: ‘Speed is Everything’
Sources: John Roberts, Battlecruisers (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), and R. A. Burt, British Battleships of World War One (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986)
forward
P Turret
A Turret
J. M. CAIELLA
Q Turret
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Admiral Cradock had, of course, been highly influential in Lieutenant Commander Shore’s advancement after the Boxer Rebellion. Shore had also served in the Monmouth, so it is unsurprising that he commences his account by expressing his satisfaction at being part of the force avenging Cradock’s death and the British ship’s loss. Shore’s account of the Falklands engagement confirms a number of facts about the action, but he is sufficiently security-conscious not to go into details or highlight many of the challenges the Invincible faced. For example, there’s no mention of the problems with funnel smoke flooding the gun turrets, necessitating a change in course to relieve the asphyxiating gun crews. Even so, what we have, though somewhat sanitized, has authority (despite Shore getting the date of the battle wrong; it took place on 8, not 9, December). Shore, as the navigator of the flagship, served virtually directly under squadron commander Vice Admiral Frederick Doveton Sturdee; the lieutenant commander was on the bridge while the ship journeyed south to Port Stanley and in the conning tower during the battle itself. The ultimate endorsement of Shore as a faithful witness is found in the officer’s Royal Navy service record: “Admiral Sturdee reports that he was greatly assisted in compiling report of action with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau by careful records taken during the action by Lt Commander Shore.”3 Also, the official “Scale Plan of Action” carries Shore’s signature.4
The Invincible’s 7,700-mile Mission
H.M.S. Invincible Port Stanley, Falkland Islands December 12
Y
ou will probably have read some details of our fight off these islands on Dec. 9. It was great luck to be able personally to avenge the death of Admiral Cradock who did so much for me, and also the loss of my old ship the Monmouth.5 The whole business was the most wonderful piece of luck in its way, and a great feat for our admiral. On Nov. 11th, less than a month before it came off, we sailed from Plymouth after a few busy days, docking, taking stores, etc. We had previously left Cromarty on the day that the news of the disastrous action off Valparaiso arrived. Vice Admiral Sir Dovetone Sturdee hoisted his flag on board, and we sailed from Plymouth with Inflexible, our sister ship and late flagship in the Mediterranean. Our orders were to seek out and N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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destroy the German cruiser squadron which were so effectually holding up our trade in the S. Pacific & Atlantic, which combined with our defeat off Valparaiso being very damaging to our prestige in those waters. The chief of these cruisers were the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, two powerful armoured cruisers, but of course not equal to us. Admiral Sturdee was appointed commander in chief of the S. Atlantic and S. Pacific, and I had charts for almost every part of the world, as we were prepared for a very prolonged search for the Germans. Within one day of our arrival at our main base in the Falklands the Germans absolutely delivered themselves into our hands, and with the exception of a small
K. ERLINGER
cruiser the Dresden, whom we shall soon catch, were absolutely destroyed. If we had been a day later the positions would have been very much reversed, and we should have found them at the end of our long voyage, in possession of our base. You will doubtless have realised my great luck in finding myself navigator of a flagship for the war, which besides being a commander’s job, means another £90 a year now that I am navigator to a commander in chief. We arrived in St. Vincent, Cape Verde Is. on the 17th, where we coaled the whole night and left next morning. I did not get ashore. A barren looking spot like Aden. We then sailed for the Abrolhos Rocks, which are a group
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of rocks with a lighthouse 30 miles off the Brazil coast just S. of Bahia. This was one of our secret coaling places, as a matter of fact there was a wireless station there in German pay, which reported our every movement. On our way to Abrolhos we made a descent at dawn on the Rocas Reef off the N.E. corner of Brazil in hope of catching the Karlsruhe, a small but very troublesome G. cruiser who has captured any number of our merchant ships and has defied all attempts at capture. She is very fast and has secret bases, probably on the N. coast of Brazil. She has yet to be accounted for. Rocas Reef has a lighthouse and is about 3 miles in extent. We arrived
they were ever to be found. However our arrival and that of our admiral revived them very considerably. We proceeded to organize our Fleet, which now consisted of Invincible and Inflexible, first fleet ships Carnarvon, Kent, and Cornwall, badly manned & insufficient armoured cruisers Glasgow & Bristol, light cruisers, condition good Otranto, Orama, & Macedonia, armed merchantmen; also colliers and supply ships. It must be remembered that we had to carry all our coal and supplies with us. When we got to Abrolhos we found all these ships (which had been
sheep, beautiful colouring, and the finest air that I ever breathed, just like champagne. On our arrival in the vicinity we were saluted by albatross, seals, sea lions, penguins, and numerous strange birds and whales everywhere. The inhabitants of the islands are chiefly Scotch farmers; the population is I think about 3,000. We arrived at Port Stanley on Dec. 7 with the intention of waiting there for a couple of days and then sweeping round the Horn, examining all the straits & harbours, and then up the Chilean coast to Valparaiso, where the Germans were last heard of. They had managed to keep their movements wonderfully secret, and also were reported to get constant information of
there at dawn, ourselves on one side & the Inflexible on the other. We lay off the breakers, which we could just see in the moonlight and hoped to catch the Karlsruhe coaling when daylight came, but nothing was there. We crossed the equator with full ceremonial, Father Neptune coming on board and initiating those who had never crossed the line. On Nov. 26 we coaled at Abrolhos Rocks and met there our previous Atlantic cruisers, not one of which had been capable of taking on the Scharnhorst or Gneisenau, but to this I will refer later in an account of the defeat of Good Hope and Monmouth. We found them all rather down and shaken by recent events, everyone seemed to regard the S. and G. as invincible, that is if
out here since the war started) absolutely out of all stores & comforts & living on salt grub, with no wines, cigarettes, &c. Admiral Sturdee decided that the German cruisers must be searched for round the Horn, and to use the Falklands as base. We sailed from Abrolhos (hot, damp, and muggy climate) on the 28th and swept down to Falklands covering a front of 55 miles. We had to go only 11 knots in order to save coal. We took 9 days, arriving on Dec. 7 after a beautiful passage, getting colder & colder as we drew south. There are practically no seasons in the Falklands, temperature ranges between 40 & 50 all the year round, and with snow at any time. There is no vegetation on the islands but vast pasture for the numerous
our movements. They had no doubt bribed most of the S. American officials pretty freely and the whole of the S. American wireless chain appeared to be staffed by Germans, but as usual we gave them credit for knowing considerably more than they really did. On the Falklands they had been expecting a raid as likely to happen and had taken some precautions. A force of local volunteers had been raised, the entrance to Port Stanley mined, and the battleship Canopus grounded in the harbour and used as a fort. By observation on shore she was able to fire over the hills to seaward. We started coaling at 6 a.m. on the morning of the 8th Dec. with the intention of taking in about 1,300 tons
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and leaving in the evening. It was a beautifully calm & warm day. I was just having breakfast preparatory to landing & taking sights when a signal came from the lookout station on shore that two cruisers were in sight. At first we thought it a false alarm, but as a precautionary measure the coaling was stopped, the collier cast off, and steam raised. But it was soon apparent that the news was true, and the whole German fleet consisting of the Scharnhorst (flagship of Admiral von Spee), Gneisenau, both armoured cruisers; Nurnberg, Leipzig, Dresden, light cruisers; with colliers, transports, and the Seydlitz armed liner with troops were approaching at full speed to capture Port Stanley, quite
and waited for the others. At 9.15 the enemy had evidently discovered that they had walked into the lion’s mouth and were reported making off at full speed. By 10.15 we were under weigh and leaving harbour at full speed all the other cruisers under weigh also. Invincible & Inflexible were by far the fastest ships of our fleet, and we went straight ahead to take on the Scharnhorst & Gneisenau. . . . We soon brought their hulls above the horizon, and then it became evident that we had the situation in hand. We eased down so as not to close any more and sent the hands to clean (they were still in coaling rig) and get their dinners. The time now
We fired very slowly and deliberately as the range was very large, and I don’t think made any hits. When the German admiral saw that an action was inevitable he dispersed his light cruisers to starboard and turned himself to port across our bows and immediately came into action. We replied with a turn to port, and then the real action began (1.30 p.m.) and lasted till 6 p.m. The first German salvoes fell short, but they soon got the range and “straddled” us (kept us within the area of their fall of shot) during the remainder of the fight. I was by this time in the conning tower with the captain. We were repeatedly hit, and occasionally set on fire, but as our guns
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM
Photographs taken from the Invincible show the Inflexible firing her 12-inch guns during the battle and the battlecruiser standing by to pick up survivors of the German cruiser Gneisenau. Shore wrote that “It was a dreadful scene, the temperature of the water was about 35 degrees, and . . . they were all in the last stages of exhaustion and uttering despairing cries for help.” rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
oblivious to the presence of Invincible and Inflexible. By this time, 9.15 a.m., we could see their smoke over the land; the ships were visible from our tops. It was a terribly anxious time waiting for steam. Things were rather to bits below as we were overhauling after our long passage out from home. The Germans were now about 7 miles off, and the Canopus opened fire on their two leading ships, which were some way in advance. It evidently surprised them to find 12-inch shot falling alongside them from an invisible ship, and they, the leading ships, hauled off N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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was noon. When all had fed we (the Invincible & Inflexible) went to action stations and increased to our utmost speed. It was now a beautiful summer’s day with dark blue sea and absolutely clear, and the sight of those two fine ships in chase at 26 knots with their great bow & stern waves and their battle flags flying was inspiring to a degree. We had left our other cruisers far behind by now, and soon got within range of the nearest ships. We opened fire at the Scharnhorst at 15,000 yards and the Inflexible at their nearest cruiser, the Leipzig.
outranged theirs, and also being faster, we were able to keep outside their most effective distance. The action was fought at an average range of about 11,000 yards (5½ miles). We had a bad hit near the conning tower, carrying away one of the tripods of the mast and holing the foremost funnel, it filled the conning tower with sparks, but I am forbidden giving full details of our hits. Our wardroom was completely wrecked by an 8-inch shell, and all the furniture absolutely pulverized. No trace whatever can be found of our big iron stove, which had stood near
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yards away. They were dying all around us, and the water being glass clear we could see their bodies sinking down and the bubbles coming out of their mouths. We had our boats in the water at once and picked up 98 men and 7 officers, but 14 died the same evening, in fact many of them were dead when we got them on board. In the meantime the other cruisers had sunk the Nurnberg & Leipzig, but the Dresden escaped. We swept round the islands for her unsuccessfully and arrived in here (Falkland Islands) on 11th, where we are having a well earned rest. It was a long action, and one got very tired of watching the German guns, and then the long wait till the projectiles arrived, but still it has all ended very successfully, and the Admiralty should be very pleased with us. Beyond our commander getting a bruised heel, we had no casualties at all, which was really rather extraordinary, but they could not pierce our armour, and Invincible sailors crowd the battlecruiser’s foredeck and the roof of her A turret in a photo taken shortly in these modern ships eveafter the Falklands battle. Although the ship’s crew suffered no serious casualties in that fight, nearly 18 ryone is under armour. We months later all but six of her complement perished when she was sunk at the Battle of Jutland. buried all the dead prisoners rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr at sea next morning with military honours, but I’m Our sickbay & canteen were absolutely side from her deck. Almost immediately afraid the compliment was not appreafterwards only her bows were visible, ciated by the other prisoners quite as demolished. All this time we were pounding and then nothing at all except a swirl much as it might have been for they away at them without apparently mak- on the water. We all then went at full told after that when they saw the firing much impression. It is very hard speed for the spot where we saw the ing party they thought they were all to spot hits unless a mast or funnel is last of her, and when we arrived there going to be shot. I don’t [know] when we get home, shot away. About 4 o’clock one of the we found about 300 men still afloat & Scharnhorst’s foremost funnels went, clinging to hammocks, wreckage, etc. It but I think a few days leave are certain and at 4.15 to our great relief she ap- was a dreadful scene, the temperature when we do. I am very lucky to have peared to stop and haul out of line, of the water was about 35 degrees, and been in the only two naval engagements taking a list to starboard. Within a although they had only been about 20 of the war, and this one is the first bigfew minutes she was lying on her side minutes in the water, they were all in ship affair and will be important on that and immediately afterwards had com- the last stages of exhaustion and ut- account alone. Excuse a scrawl but evepletely disappeared with her admiral tering despairing cries for help. These rything is upside down, and we shall be and crew of 800 men. What survivors cries made a continuous droning noise, rather uncomfortable for a bit. Lionel H. Shore there were had to be left to their fate, which could be heard several hundred the point of entry of the shell. There was a large gaping hole through to the next deck and nearly every square of the bulkheads was pierced by splinters. They also wrecked our pantry & most of our cabins; mine has a hole in it and was half full of water after the action, but as it was only a splinter, my gear was not very much damaged.
as we had no time to stop and look for them with the Gneisenau still in action against us. The wind had now risen, and the weather was becoming misty, but it was not until 6 o’clock that she ceased firing and listed over. She then lay flat on her side and through my glass I could see the survivors climbing on to the
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he battle was a resounding British victory. The Invincible and Inflexible proved ruthlessly effective when operating to their designed purpose: swooping down on enemy raiders and armored cruisers, which were unable to outrun or outgun them. Six German ships were sunk, with a loss of 1,871 lives. Ten British lives were lost, but none of the British ships suffered serious damage. After the Falklands conflict the Invincible returned to operational duties with the home fleet. Nearly 18 months later at the Battle of Jutland, she was blown to pieces when a German shell burst through her frail armor, laying bare sloppy procedural practices that saw flash fire reach the magazines through wide-open safety doors. Of a crew of 1,032, there were just six survivors. Commander Shore was not in their number. Among papers deposited at Somerset County Records Office when the family line and their baronetcy had finally become extinct (ably assisted by two world conflicts), is Shore’s “last letter,” written at the beginning of World War I and held by his bank manager, who sent it to the officer’s parents upon Shore’s death in 1916. HMS Invincible Aug. 1914 Dear Daddy and Mother, In case of my end you will receive this from Messrs Hoare. I would like to leave on record my gratitude for your devoted services as parents whom no son ever had better or kinder. Good bye and best love to you both and to Hugh and Noel and Caroline. Yr loving son Lionel. I have nothing to leave, please keep or dispose of my effects as you think fit.6
1. The Times, 3 September 1900. 2. The National Archive, London, catalog reference ADM/196/47. 3. Ibid., ADM/196/47. 4. Ibid., ADM/137/901. 5. Commander Shore’s letters are published with minimal editing; misspellings have been corrected and ship names italicized. 6. Somerset County, England, Records Office, A/AOV94.
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Invincible’s O T O H P E V I S EXPLO
The
BY PETER A. MARSHAL
Is an image of the British battlecruiser blowing up at Jutland an authentic photograph, or is it an expertly executed fake?
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ne of the most recognized World War I photographs— HMS Invincible blowing up at the Battle of Jutland—has fascinated professional and amateur historians since it was first published soon after the conflict. The image endured for 70-odd years without any doubts as to its authenticity as a combat photo. But in the past two decades, serious historians began to question its origins and ask if it’s just too good to be true. At 1830 on 31 May 1916, almost three hours after the first shots of the Battle of Jutland had been fired, the British and German battle fleets were finally coming within range of each other. The Invincible, flagship of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron (BCS), was in the British van leading her sisters, the Indomitable and Inflexible, and pounding away at the opposing battlecruisers Lützow, Derfflinger, Moltke, Seydlitz, and Von der Tann. But at 1834, a salvo of 12-inch shells from the Lützow engulfed the Invincible, and one of the projectiles penetrated her midships Q turret. The shell’s detonation set off charges there,
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and flames instantaneously spread to the ship’s midsection magazine. Cut in half by the resulting explosion, the Invincible became the third British battlecruiser to blow up at Jutland. The photo showing the explosion had fascinated me for many years when, in the summer of 2007, a reader’s question in the current issue of Warship International asked about the image’s origins. I then decided to see if I could shed some light on its background. Little did I realize what a research adventure I was in for. To begin with, like many others who were familiar with the photo, I’d never questioned its authenticity. My goals were to discover who the photographer was, what camera he had used, and from what ship he had taken the photograph. I initially focused my research on the screening ships that accompanied the 3rd BCS into action—two scouting light cruisers, HMS Chester and Canterbury, and four screening destroyers, HMS Shark, Acasta, Ophelia, and Christopher. I reasoned that the photo must have been taken from one of these six ships, most likely from one of the four destroyers.
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But which one? It could only have been taken from a ship at approximately 500 to 1,000 yards off the Invincible’s starboard beam at precisely 1834, the time she blew up. The normal screening disposition of the 3rd BCS’s destroyers was in the form of a semicircle arrayed around the leading ship’s bows, No. 1 off the port beam, No. 2 off the port bow, No. 3 off the starboard bow, and No. 4 off the starboard beam. I was confident that if I could determine which of the four destroyers was in the crucial starboard-beam position when the Invincible blew up, I would have the ship the photo was taken from. A further check of that ship’s records and logbook would hopefully identify the photographer and perhaps even his camera. But the more I researched these ships’ movements, the more I came to the conclusion that none were in that starboardbeam position at 1834. All six had seen extensive earlier action, and the surviving destroyers and cruiser were somewhere astern of the 3rd BCS—and nowhere near the Invincible when she blew up. Further research yielded a tantalizing clue. A map in John Costello and Terry Hughes’ book Jutland 1916 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977) showed two ships of the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, HMS Falmouth and Yarmouth, very close to the Invincible’s starboard
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Invincible’s magazine explosion, but it’s absent from the starboard-beam photo. German testimony: Günter Paaschen and Georg von Hase, gunnery officers in the Lützow and Derfflinger, observed rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr through their rangefinders that when the Invincible blew up, she was surrounded beam at the time of her destruction. by shell splashes from the German batFurther research, however, revealed that tlecruisers’ short and long shots. But the the two light cruisers were far ahead of starboard-beam image shows no shell the battlecruiser’s starboard bow, not splashes or even disturbed water. beam, at the critical moment. Direction of guns: Close examination I was about to abandon the photoreveals that the 12-inch forward, A turgraphing-ship hypothesis when I received ret, guns are pointing ahead, but they some crucial new information from the should be aimed to starboard. Imperial War Museum—documents relatLocation of photographer’s ship: A vesing to Lieutenant Commander John C. sel off the Invincible’s starboard beam at Croome that indicated there were two 1834 would surely have come under fire, photographs of the Invincible blowing up. but there are no records of any such action. At the time of the battle, Croome was When the photo was first puba junior midshipman in the Indomitable, lished in H. W. Fawcett and G. W. W. the battlecruiser directly behind the Cooper’s The Fighting at Invincible. His papers included Jutland (1921), no photogan incomplete combat report rapher credit was given, nor he had written in 1930 that was the ship he was in menstated he had taken “a unique tioned. The introduction of photo” from his ship of the the unabridged edition of Invincible exploding. the book claims, “The phoAccording to the report, tographs of ships in action at the start of the 3rd BCS’s were all taken on 31st May, action against the German 1916,” but MacKenzie battlecruisers, Croome believes that the Invincible received permission to go image is not a photo but a atop his combat station in photogravure, or photo the port-side midships turengraving. A photo negative ret, whose guns could not be was transferred to a copper trained on the German fleet plate that was used to proto starboard, to get a better duce ink copies of the image. view of events. From there he This raises the possibility had a grandstand view. When that the image was doctored enemy shells began to fall during the complicated uncomfortably close, the offiengraving process. cer decided it was high time IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM I am convinced that is to return to whatever protec- Midshipman John Croome snapped this photograph of the Invincible’s demise how the famous image was tion his turret could afford while looking forward from atop the battlecruiser Indomitable’s port-side midcreated. The basis for it him. At that point, while ships turret. looking to starboard, a bright rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr was most likely an operational, noncombat photo of flash caught his eye. Turning an Invincible-class battlecruiser, perhaps astern of the 3rd. Those destroyers were his head, he saw the awesome spectacle of taken during a North Sea sweep. still behind their assigned battlecruisers. the Invincible blowing up and quickly disThe words “faked” and “doctored” in Bow wave: Steaming at 23 or more appearing in a dense column of envelopregard to the Invincible image will carry a knots, the Invincible should be generating ing black smoke several hundred feet high. negative connotation with some readers, an enormous bow wave. The photo shows He raised his camera (he didn’t mention but not with me. When first published, a rather muted wave that doesn’t match what type) and took his shot. The Fighting at Jutland was an important earlier photos of the battlecruiser and her I immediately surmised that Croome’s work that contained some of the earlisisters in action. photo could not be the famous starboardest first-person accounts of the battle to Funnel smoke: As a coal-driven ship, beam image and could only be an astern appear in print. What better way to help the Invincible should be generating volview of the Invincible. Confirmation sell it than to include an extraordinary, umes of dense, black funnel smoke. The arrived a week later when I received a full-page image of the Invincible blowing photo doesn’t show a commensurate package from Iain MacKenzie, curatoup? That the illusion of its authenticity amount of smoke for the speed of the ship rial officer at the Admiralty Library in lived on is a tribute to those anonymous at 1834. Portsmouth, England, that included a photo-lab technicians who created the Explosion cloud: Croome’s photograph photocopy of Croome’s astern image. explosive image. shows a dense, black, tall cloud from the MacKenzie drew my attention to a IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM
For many decades this famous starboardbeam view of the Invincible blowing up at the Battle of Jutland was widely accepted as an authentic combat photograph.
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possibility I hadn’t considered: The starboard-beam photo was a fake. If this were true, it was a superbly executed one that had fooled historians for many decades. The more I pondered MacKenzie’s arguments, the more they made sense. When you examine details of the famous photograph and try to reconcile them with known facts of the 3rd BCS’s action with the German battlecruisers, anomalies emerge—little contradictions that just don’t add up. What follows are Iain MacKenzie’s and my own list of anomalies and observations about the starboard-beam photo: The two destroyers visible ahead of the Invincible: We know that the Ophelia and Christopher were somewhere astern of the Invincible when she blew up. Nor could the mystery ships be destroyers from the 1st BCS, which at 1834 was steaming
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A Museum By William S. Dudley
After a major overhaul, the Naval Academy Museum reopened its doors to a grateful public; now more than ever, it’s a place where U.S. naval history lives.
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f you haven’t recently visited the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, it’s an acquaintance well worth renewing, now that this naval-history enthusiast’s must-see destination has undergone an extensive, multimillion-dollar renovation. The museum, located on the Academy grounds in Preble Hall, was closed for nearly two years (2007–9) while the staff and contracted design and production firms worked to reorganize and interpret the vast material at their disposal. To appreciate the new Naval Academy Museum experience, one must recall the previous arrangement of artifacts, art, and historical panels, with display tables and cases arranged in no particular thematic order. Although some interesting objects were on exhibit—such as the saddle given to Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. for use on Emperor
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JEN MABE
The U.S. Naval Academy Museum’s mission is to “collect, preserve, and exhibit” the ever-unfolding U.S. Navy story. Since its major renovation, it has become more visitor-friendly than ever. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Reborn
Hirohito’s horse, dozens of medals and swords worn by famous naval officers of the distant and more recent past, and beautiful examples of Navy art—it was difficult to say one had actually learned anything as a result of a visit. The renovated presentation of exhibit materials represents an immense step forward in terms of coherence and improved interpretation. The exhibits cover 7,644 square feet divided among 17 major topics, as well as a temporary exhibit space (currently dedicated to “The Civil War, 1861”). As visitors approach the exhibits, the eye is caught by a huge brown flag, under glass, with the words “Dont Give up the Ship” sewn into the fabric. This is the battle flag that Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry ordered made in honor of his late friend, Captain James Lawrence, who was fatally wounded during the battle between HMS Shannon and the U.S. frigate Chesapeake in 1813. This banner sends a thematic message to Naval Academy midshipmen, graduates, and visitors that resonates throughout the exhibit.
‘To Instill . . . Knowledge of History and Heritage’ In the center of the exhibit-hall foyer is a large screen that states the mission of the Naval Academy Museum: To collect, preserve, and exhibit the artifacts and art that are the physical heritage of the United States Navy and the Naval Academy in order: to instill in Midshipmen a knowledge of the history and heritage of the U.S. Navy and the Naval Academy, to supplement the instruction in all departments of the U.S. Naval N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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Academy; to demonstrate to the public the contributions of Naval Academy graduates, the military services and the Nation, and, to motivate in young people the desire to become part of the Brigade of Midshipmen and to begin a career of service to their Nation. The scope of the exhibits runs from the American Revolution to the Space Age. The principal focus is on the graduates of the Naval Academy and how they have performed their duty through times of both war and peace, explored remote areas of the globe, and advanced our scientific knowledge. Several electronic exhibits display interactive scenarios throughout the first deck, illustrating the tactics used in many of America’s major naval battles. The center of the gallery is dedicated to the history of the Academy and shows how it has changed since it was founded in 1845, both as an academic institution and as a military post. Visitors have the choice of walking through the exhibits from present to past, going directly to the Naval Academy exhibit, or moving chronologically from 1775 to the present. If one begins with the early history of the Navy, its origins are explained in text panels and enlivened by portraits such as those of John Adams and John Paul Jones, as well as some excellent ship models of the Bonhomme Richard, the Continental Navy frigate Hancock, a gundalow similar to the Philadelphia from the Battle of Valcour Island, and the Fair American, a privateer brig of 1778. Also on view: a flintlock swivel gun and the swords of Continental Navy Captain Charles Alexander. A text panel describes what is often referred to as “George Washington’s Navy”—fishing schooners from Salem and Beverly, Massachusetts, that were refitted as warships to interdict vessels that were supplying the British in Boston. The wall and alcove exhibits move visitors swiftly from the actions of Adams, who advocated the creation of the Continental Navy in 1775 during the deliberations of the
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Second Continental Congress, to the establishment of the War Department under the Constitution in 1789, and the creation of the Navy Department in 1798 under the first secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Stoddert. Within a few yards, one passes from the exhibit on the Quasi-War with France through the War of 1812 displays, adorned with portraits of Thomas Truxtun, whose Constellation captured the French frigate L’Insurgent in 1799; Edward Preble, who commanded the Mediterranean Squadron (and for whom the Academy building housing the museum is named); Stephen Decatur Jr., a hero of the Barbary Wars who later commanded the frigate United States in her victory over HMS Macedonian; Oliver Hazard Perry, victor of the Battle of Lake Erie; and Thomas Macdonough, whose squadron won the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1814. From these spaces, the displays move into the themes of naval expansion and exploration that characterized the pe-
diplomacy” to punish tribes or governments that had attacked American merchant seamen or whalers or destroyed the property of American citizens. Another display portrays Matthew Calbraith Perry, the commodore whose diplomacy opened formerly isolated Japan and who campaigned for reform in naval schools and advances in naval technology. One of the most interesting exhibits is that of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’ South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838– 42), which involved more than half a dozen vessels, lasted more than four years, covered 85,000 miles in the South Pacific, circumnavigated the Antarctic continent, and explored along the northern Pacific coast of North America. Wilkes returned with a trove of artifacts, relics, plants, botanical drawings, and geographical information that became the core of the Smithsonian Institution’s collections. Of great strategic value were the charts that Wilkes and his officers drafted, based on their extensive coastal surveys and soundings of island groups in the South Pacific; some of those charts were still in use during the amphibious campaigns of World War II. From ‘School of the Ship’ to School on the Severn
The amount of exhibit space dedicated to the growth of the Naval Academy exceeds that devoted to some of the naval campaigns of the early 19th century. The Academy displays depict how, in the early days, naval cadets or midshipmen were expected to “learn the ropes” entirely on board ship. Yet events transpired to bring the Naval Academy into existence. The creation of a naval lyceum at the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard reflected a desire for more formal education for naval officers, as did the esLike other museums, the Naval Academy’s seeks to educate those who pass through, tablishment at the Philadelphia Naval but in addition to the general public, there is a key constituency served by this particular Asylum, a hospital built for sailors in exhibit space: the Midshipmen themselves. Above: Plebes in the summer of 2011 take 1833, of a school where aspiring midtheir inaugural tour of the museum, entering into the deep traditions they are inheriting shipmen could study the mathematics just as they’re entering the Academy. required for celestial navigation, gunrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr nery, and coastal survey. There they met William Chauvenet, a young Yale University graduate riod from 1815 to 1860. Here, panels and maps explain the whose teaching inspired generations of naval officers. He building of several frigates, sloops-of-war, and ships-of-therecommended the expansion of their curriculum from six line and show where they protected U.S. interests on foreign months to two years of study. In 1842 an incident on board stations—the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the eastern the Navy brig Somers ended in the hanging of Midshipman Pacific, Brazil, West Africa, and the East Indies. In support Philip Spencer and two others on suspicion of mutiny during of the expanding economic interests of the United States, a training cruise. (Spencer’s sword is on display at the muduring this era the Navy sponsored exploring expeditions seum.) The scandal that erupted tarnished the old method in search of new resources and markets, as well as lands of training midshipmen on board ship and led to the estabto claim. At other times, its warships conducted “gunboat ROBERT DOANE
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Naval-Art Treasure Trove: Inside the Beverley R. Robinson Collection
lishment of a more formal curricular system. Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, undeterred by Congress’ refusal to authorize the construction of a naval academy, obtained the use of old Fort Severn, an obsolete Army post in Annapolis, and in 1845 converted it into the school for midshipmen that By Robert Doane the Navy needed. The Academy’s first museum, located in ow did the U.S. Naval Academy Museum come to possess the Naval School Lyceum, came into existence in that era. thousands of prints depicting the naval history of Europe The exhibits pertaining to life at the Naval Academy and the Americas from 1514 to 1945? It is thanks to Beverley include a portrait of Captain Franklin Buchanan, the first R. Robinson, an attorney from New York who developed a superintendent; the sword of Captain Richard Aulick, the passion for naval artwork while traveling through Europe. Academy’s first graduate; a panel dedicated to the first seven In 1933 he met Admiral Thomas Hart, superintendent of faculty members; and a model of the Academy as it was in the U.S. Naval Academy, and learned of plans to build a new 1850. When the Civil War broke out, the Navy Department museum for the Academy. Robinson decided to loan his prints sent the midshipmen and faculty on board the Constitution to the museum and left them as a gift on his death in 1951. to Newport, Rhode Island, a temporary “away period” captured in photographs of the building used by the Naval Academy while at Newport. Images of teams and individual athletes illustrate the appearance of organized sports at the Academy, from fencing (1865) to crew (1869) to baseball (1873) to football (1894). Also remembered are famous Academy faculty, such as 1907 Nobel Prize–winner Albert A. Michelson, whose work in physics specialized in measuring the speed of light. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long ordered the total redesign and rebuilding of the Academy, which was accomplished from 1899 to 1907, as illustrated in drawings and photographs. The images of the enormous Bancroft Hall dormitory under construction Since 1951, the Beverley R. Robinson Collection has grown six times its original size are particularly striking. The Academy exhibit features, at its cen- to include more than 6,000 artworks. This Currier & Ives lithograph, depicting the ter, a case containing the mess jacket of April 1861 burning of the Pennsylvania at the Norfolk Navy Yard to prevent her Midshipman J. Paul Reason, the first Afri- capture by Confederates, is one of the collection’s recent acquisitions. can-American Academy graduate to achieve rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr four-star rank, along with a photo of him as In 1973 an endowment was established for the perpetual care naval aide to President Jimmy Carter. The role of female of the collection and to provide for new acquisitions. Today, midshipmen at the Academy dates from their admission in the original gift of 1,044 prints has grown to more than 6,000 1976 and is illustrated by the display of a female officer’s pieces of artwork. Robinson primarily collected scenes of ships and naval service dress-white uniform. Of that class, the text panel battles from the Age of Sail and the Age of Steam. Most notes, 81 women entered, 55 graduated in 1981, and after 20 of the prints are contemporary to the subjects they portray, years, 17 remained in the service. By 2006 there were more the oldest being a map of the New World produced in than 200 women in the entering class. As their numbers 1550. Prints were immensely popular in the 18th and 19th here have grown, so too has the Academy overall. Through centuries because they were more affordable for the general the years, the Academy’s campus of 10 acres increased to public than oil paintings. In an era when newspapers were 338, and the original student body of 50 midshipmen has the predominant form of mass communication, naval prints expanded to a brigade size of more than 4,000. allowed even the illiterate to learn about the important
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BEVERLEY R. ROBINSON COLLECTION, U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY MUSEUM
Their Finest Hours Major naval campaigns and battles through the end of World War II are reflected in superb models, paintings, N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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battles of their time. The potential for big profits meant that printmakers sometimes stretched the truth or ignored it altogether if the facts were not dramatic enough to sell a lot of copies.
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A famous example of this was the invasion scare that swept through Great Britain in 1798. Convinced that a French army was on its way to invade the southern coast of England, the British public, snatched up prints purporting to show a monster craft under construction in Brest that was intended to carry French soldiers across the English Channel. The “French Raft” was entirely fictitious, but that did not stop the printmaker from claiming that it was “accurately drawn from plans presented to the French Directory.” As new prints are added, the scope of the Beverley R. Robinson Collection has expanded to include textiles, recruiting posters, ceramics, and newspapers. Some of the most entertaining images come from newspapers published during the golden age of political cartoons. “The Blockade on the ‘Connecticut Plan’” ridicules the federal government’s efforts to strengthen the U.S. Navy at the start of the Civil War. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles received harsh criticism for appointing his brother-in-law, George D. Morgan, to purchase ships from private owners for federal service. Morgan was accused of taking unusually large commissions for ships that were sometimes barely seaworthy. The artist references the allegations against Morgan and accuses Welles of placing too many restrictions on the Navy’s operations, rendering the blockade of Confederate ports ineffective. Because Beverley Robinson’s original collection was dominated by images of European navies, recent acquisitions have focused on increasing the number of American subjects represented in the collection. “Burning of the U.S. Ship of the Line Pennsylvania, 140 Guns” is a Currier & Ives lithograph depicting the final moments of the largest sailing ship ever made for the U.S. Navy. The most recent addition to the collection is a map of Boston showing the Battle of Bunker Hill. The engraving was made by a printmaker named John Norman and was the first map of the battle to be made in Boston. It reveals such details as the layout of the city’s streets during the Revolution, the British encampment on Boston Common, the landing in Charlestown, and the naval bombardment that took place during the 1775 battle. As new items are added, the scope of the collection continues to expand. Acquisitions from the last three decades include images of the New Steel Navy from the late 1800s, lithographs made during the Spanish-American War, and recruiting posters from World Wars I and II. Today more than ever before, the Beverley R. Robinson Collection offers researchers and visitors a chance to see nearly 500 years of naval history as represented in visual culture. Mr. Doane is curator of the Beverley R. Robinson Collection.
maps, and artifacts, but the most sophisticated exhibits are also accompanied by electronic kiosks and interactive touch-screen computer displays that heighten interest and will engage younger visitors. These include John Paul Jones’ 1778–79 cruise around the British Isles, the War of 1812 battles on Lakes Erie and Champlain, Charles Wilkes’ exploring expedition, the Civil War’s riverine battles, the Confederate Navy’s raiders, the Spanish-American War battles of Manila Bay and San-
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tiago, the World War II Battle of the Atlantic, and the Normandy invasion. The major episodes of the Pacific war are interpreted in exhibits on the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. submarine offensive, the Halsey-Doolittle Raid, and the battles of Coral Sea, Midway, the Solomon Islands, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf, to name only the most important. By comparison, the Navy’s participation in World War I gets more modest treatment, but on display are a portrait and the medals of the first chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William Benson; the medals of Admiral Hugh Rodman, the commander of the battleship division that operated with the Sixth Squadron of the British Grand Fleet; and a touch-screen display and portrait of Marine Corps Major General John A. Lejeune, who commanded the 2nd Division in France. Sections on the Cold War and the Navy in space complete the exhibits. The Navy’s crucial work during the 1950 Inchon landing and in the air war over North Korea receive the attention they deserve, as does the Navy’s participation in the Vietnam War. From the Tonkin Gulf action, shore bombardment, the bombing of North Vietnam, and Swift boats and PBRs (river patrol boats) in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, to the Marines, the SEAL teams, and Navy POWs, the Vietnam naval war is covered, albeit briefly. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
The U.S. Naval Academy Museum is located in Preble Hall on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, 35 miles east of Washington, D.C., via U.S. Route 50 (Exit 24).
The “Technological Battle” exhibit features the work of Admirals Hyman Rickover and William Raborn in the development of nuclear submarines, the Albacore hull, the Polaris program, and fleet ballistic-missile submarines, Visitors must show a valid photo ID as part of the hostile standoff with the Soviet (driver’s license, passport, etc.) at the Union. Close by, the “To the Brink of Nuclear Academy gate. War” exhibit documents the Cuban Missile Admission is free, and the handicappedCrisis of 1962, especially the ships and aircraft accessible museum is open Monday that participated in the naval quarantine of through Saturday from 0900 to 1700, Sunday from 1100 to 1700. Cuban ports, eventually leading to the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. The Naval Academy Museum also is home to the famed Rogers Ship Model Collection The Navy’s investment in space flight (see “Museum Report,” Naval History, April is shown through exhibits about Academy 2009, p. 72), so plan on seeing that as well graduates who participated in these programs when visiting. (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) during the 1960s For more information, call (410)293-2108 and ’70s. Academy astronauts included Alan or visit www.usna.edu/Museum/visitor.htm. Shepard Jr., Walter Schirra, Thomas Stafford, James A. Lovell, Donn Eisele, and William Anders, to name only a few of those alumni who dedicated their later careers to space flight. A poignant story tells of the two Academy astronauts who lost their lives in space disasters: Captain Michael Smith, who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion, and Commander William McCool, the pilot of the Columbia, which disintegrated on returning to Earth’s atmosphere in 2003. As time passes, more individuals and programs will be added, although the future of manned space flight is somewhat uncertain at present as NASA considers new projects and redesigns its space vehicles. A Story Still in the Making
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Since reopening in 2009, the Naval Academy Museum is better than ever. Nonetheless, here are some suggestions for the future: As museum professionals know, successful exhibits require a wealth of artifacts, art, and images. Typically, these are usually lacking for more recent periods, but post–Cold War naval operations beg for coverage here, as one thinks of the Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations in the Middle East, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and the war on terrorism. Also, for increased creature comfort, it would be thoughtful if management would place more benches throughout the exhibits for visitors with physical challenges. Aside from those matters, all who move through the renovated exhibits in Preble Hall will be impressed with the profusion of topics and displays that admirably cover and interpret the history of the Naval Academy and the U.S. Navy. Academy alumni classes, individual alumni, private corporations, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Naval Academy Foundation have made significant gifts to enable this revitalized exhibit to come into being. For these generous acts, we should all be grateful.
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The Resurrection of
John Paul Jones BY CAPTAIN PATRICK GRANT, U.S. NAVY (RETIRED)
The perseverance of an American ambassador to France paid off when the remains of early America’s iconic Navy hero were located in Paris, positively identified, and transported to the U.S. Naval Academy.
JEN MABE
More than a century after John Paul Jones died and was buried in a soon-forgotten grave in Paris, anthropologists used a copy of sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s lifelike bust of the Revolutionary War naval hero to help identify his remains. The U.S. Naval Academy’s white marble version of the bust was created in 1781 for Paris’ Masonic Temple of the Nine Sisters, of which Jones was a member.
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he admiral died on the afternoon of 18 July 1792, anticipating one last commission to challenge his legendary skills as seaman and warrior. Less than two weeks after his 45th birthday, John Paul Jones was found in his Paris apartment lying facedown on the bed, his feet on the floor. Although not a religious man, the position of the body led to speculation that he was attempting to kneel as he took his last breath. Given his Scottish Calvinist upbringing and the unwillingness of American officials to take responsibility, he was buried in a Protestant cemetery on the outskirts of the French capital. It would be 113 years before Jones would return to America and receive the honors and recognition he so craved during the last years of his life. The effort to find and return his remains is a story of dedication and unrelenting persistence by the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter. Far from America Jones’ final years were fraught with frustration, sickness, and solitude amid the chaos of the French Revolution, far from the country he had fought so valiantly to free. Anticipating that American authorities would transport their legendary naval hero back to the United States, the French laid his body to rest in a lead coffin that was filled with alcohol and sealed to preserve the remains. This container was then placed in an outer wooden coffin. Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador to France, displayed his distinct dislike for Jones and shocked French officials with his unwillingness to pay for a proper burial. Morris wrote: “I had no right to spend money on such follies,” and opined that Jones should “be buried in a private and economical manner.” He explained that “I did not agree to waste money of which he [Jones] had no great abundance.” The French had great respect for Jones’ contribution to preserving the freedoms so cherished in America and France. Only through the influence of two friends—American Colonel Samuel Blackden and Major Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, a former aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Lafayette—did he receive a proper burial. Frustrated by the miserliness of Morris, Pierre-François Simonneau, the local precinct’s royal commissioner, agreed to pay for the interment. As a display of religious tolerance in Catholic France, a delegation from the Legislative Assembly was selected to attend the Protestant funeral. Their presence lent irony to the affair, as Jones’ initial support for the French Revolution had turned to horror as its excesses began spinning out of control. Jones had admired and esteemed Louis XVI for the invaluable aid he had provided in support of the American struggle for independence. The king had awarded him the Order of Military Merit and the title chevalier (knight), N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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presented him with a gold-hilted sword, and proclaimed him “the valiant avenger of the rights of the sea.” But by the time of Jones’ death, although France was technically a constitutional monarchy, Louis was a virtual figurehead. The Legislative Assembly honored the naval hero with a military escort and procession. On 20 July the funeral cortege wound its way through the streets of Paris to the Saint Louis Cemetery, led by French grenadiers and followed by the Assembly deputation, representatives of the Protestant community, and Jones’ friends and acquaintances. Gouverneur Morris did not attend, sending instead a lower-level American attaché. In the distance, thunder and lightning provided a solemn aura to the journey, as Parisians lined the streets and hung out of windows in respectful silence as the funeral procession passed. Within three weeks of the funeral, armed Revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace, where Louis and his family were being held. Many of the 600 Swiss Guards who died defending the king, being Protestants, were tossed into a mass grave adjacent to Jones’ burial site. A Frustrating Final Campaign John Paul Jones’ presence in Paris is a story in itself. Following the American Revolution, he had become disenchanted with the unwillingness of the fledgling U.S. Congress to build the standing navy he passionately believed was necessary for the young nation’s defense. Restless in peacetime, Jones yearned to return to the sea and warfighting. Coincidentally, in early 1788 Russia’s ambassador in Paris contacted the naval officer’s friend Thomas Jefferson, then American minister to France, about Jones’ availability. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, was waging a sea and land war against the Ottoman Empire and in dire need of naval expertise. Jones jumped at the opportunity. After his arrival in St. Petersburg, Catherine bestowed on Pavel Ivanovich Dzones the rank of kontradmiral (rear admiral), an honor denied him by Congress for political reasons. The empress had him believe that he would command a fleet and operate independently against the Turks, but he was misled. During the 16 months he served with the Russian navy, Jones participated in two significant sea battles, each critical to the Russian effort to dominate the Black Sea and capture Constantinople. But his skill and courage during the Liman campaign were downplayed and disparaged by his ambitious Russian naval superiors. Jones was recalled to St. Petersburg in late 1788 with the expectation of being given command of the Baltic fleet, but during the trip north he aggravated an existing lung condition that resulted in a severe case of pneumonia from which he never fully recovered. On his arrival in the capital, the admiral became a victim of politics and intrigue at the Russian court and the expressed hatred of British naval officers serving the empress. He left St. Petersburg in August 1789 in
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In 1892 a similar sense of outrage had taken hold of Porter because the remains of his mentor and friend President Grant still lay in what he described as “a little brick hovel” of a tomb seven years after his death and not in a planned memorial structure. He personally took charge of raising the necessary funds and overseeing construction of the famous monument to Grant that sits above the Hudson River. Finding John Paul Jones’ burial location, gaining access to the site, and proving that the recovered remains were those of the admiral proved to be an exercise in detection and persistence that severely tested Porter’s analytical and diplomatic skills. The search for the burial site began in June 1899 with an exhaustive review of writings about Jones in French newspapers and documents. The original certificate of burial had been lost when The Ambassador’s Quest government buildings housing the Just over a century later, in 1897, records had burned during the 1871 Horace Porter—a Civil War brevet brigParis Commune. By careful sleuthing, adier general, Medal of Honor winner, Porter found a copy of the certificate member of General Ulysses S. Grant’s in an 1859 magazine article written staff, and Grant’s secretary during his by French archaeologist Charles Read. first term as president—arrived in Paris. The certificate confirmed the fact that Two years later he began a quest that Jones had been “buried in the cemwould consume six anxious years and etery for foreign Protestants,” specifigreat personal expense. A number of cally the long-since abandoned Saint patriotic Americans, distraught that Louis Cemetery. the remains of their early naval hero Other writings and rumors raised were residing ingloriously somewhere in doubts about the accuracy of the Read a foreign land, had conducted unsucarticle. Speculation as to where Jones cessful attempts to research and locate was interred included Charles DickJones’ final resting place. Porter would ens’ claim that he was buried in the be ably assisted in his search by Colonel Horace Porter earned the Medal of Honor “Congressional” cemetery. An AlexArthur Bailly-Blanchard, second secre- for his cool-headed actions at the Battle of andre Dumas novel located the grave tary at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. in a cemetery that did not exist at the Chickamauga and finished the Civil War The ambassador’s motivation for as a brevet brigadier general on the staff of time of Jones’ death. There were also taking on the task was personal: claims that Jones had been reinterred Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Thirtyadjacent to Lafayette’s tomb in Paris’ four years later, as ambassador to France, he I felt a deep sense of humiliation took up the search for John Paul Jones’ remains. Picpus Cemetery. One account alleged as an American citizen in realizing rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr that the body resided in a churchyard that our first and most fascinating in Dumfries, Scotland, near his birthnaval hero had been lying for more than a century in place. Porter carefully investigated and refuted each claim. an unknown and forgotten grave and that no serious The ambassador spent the next several months reviewattempt had ever been made to recover his remains ing hundreds of periodicals and journals to determine if and give them appropriate sepulture in the land upon any other Protestant cemeteries had existed in and around whose history he had shed so much luster. Paris. No mention could be found of other such burial Knowing that he had been buried in Paris, I resites. Porter determined that Saint Louis Cemetery had solved to undertake personally a systematic and exbeen established in 1720 at the behest of the Dutch, and haustive search for the body. no burials had been permitted without an appropriate certificate issued by the Dutch Embassy. A review of the Porter feared that on Jones’ death, the admiral had been Church of Saint Louis’ meeting minutes revealed that four “snatched from history and relegated to fiction” like “an pages covering the period of Jones’ death and burial had obscure outcast.” been torn out. By searching numerous junk shops and anthe wake of an alleged sexual scandal concocted by his enemies. After wandering from Warsaw to Vienna, Amsterdam, and London, he retreated to Paris in 1790, where he spent his last years in failing health, awaiting recall to service by Empress Catherine or President George Washington. Years earlier Jones had written Secretary of State John Jay of his concern for American seamen captured by the dey of Algiers. His willingness to lead a fleet of American warships against Algiers had resulted in the dey posting a handsome reward for anyone who would bring him the head of John Paul Jones. Within weeks of his death, the formal commission he had sought from the Department of State to negotiate with the dey of Algiers for the release of American citizens reached Paris.
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tiquarian stores, Porter was able to track down the sale of the church’s old records to the Society of the History of Protestantism. The missing pages were found in its possession. The minutes indicated that the funeral oration for the admiral had been given by a Dutch pastor, Paul Henri Marron, and confirmed that all of Pastor Marron’s burials took place at Saint Louis Cemetery. In addition, a bill was found confirming that Commissioner Simonneau had paid 462 francs to bury Jones in an expensive lead coffin and apparently had never been reimbursed. Porter attempted to locate descendants of the commissioner in anticipation of paying them for their ancestor’s generosity more than 100 years before. No living relatives were found.
tish citizen. Given the wartime chaos in France for nearly 25 years following Jones’ interment, no significant effort to remove other remains had evidently occurred. A further concern was the possibility that lead coffins had been dug up during the 1793–94 Reign of Terror and, like many
Zeroing in on a Burial Site Porter had become convinced that the Read article was correct and that Saint Louis Cemetery was the site of Jones’ burial. Using old maps, the ambassador explored the section of Paris called “le Combat,” famous as the location of cock, dog, and other animal fights. The government had sold the old cemetery to private interests in 1796, and the ground was subsequently regraded. The graves lay approximately eight feet below ground level, beneath a courtyard, shacks, and buildings. Under French law, abandoned cemeteries were required to transfer remains to the Catacombs of Paris. Whether the deceased had been removed from Saint Louis Cemetery prior to its being covered was unknown. A check of the Catacombs registry revealed that only one body had been exhumed from Saint Louis, that of Lady Alexandra Grant, a Scotrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ABOVE: JOHN PAUL JONES COMMEMORATION; RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY & HERITAGE COMMAND
Because the cemetery where Jones was believed to have been buried lay about eight feet below ground level, beneath buildings, sheds, and a courtyard, finding the naval officer’s remains required extensive excavation. Above right: Workers sank five shafts, from which they extended galleries, identified on this map by cross-timbering. The solid black icons represent where lead coffins were found. Right: Holding lanterns and a candle, Ambassador Porter (left), U.S. Embassy Second Secretary Colonel Arthur Bailly-Blanchard (center), and mine engineer Paul Weiss (right) were photographed at the underground location where workers discovered Jones’ lead coffin on 31 March 1905. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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lead statues, melted down to make bullets for the French Republic’s army. The next step in finding Jones’ remains posed political, economic, and technical challenges for Porter. Loose soil, poor drainage, and damaged buildings would complicate the project, as would noxious odors and poor ventilation. Only by digging shafts and tunnels supported by elaborate timber shoring could the graveyard be searched. To proceed with excavation, Porter was required to obtain individual agreements with each proprietor and tenant, and according to the ambassador, “This was altogether the most discouraging episode in the history of the undertaking.” Speculation abounded that the United States was willing to pay exorbitant sums to gain the right to tunnel. Given the unrealistic monetary demands of the owners and occupants of the various properties, Porter decided to allow the “excitement to subside,” waiting two years before restarting negotiations. Using an appeal to public sentiment and assurance that the U.S. government had not allocated funds for the project, he obtained permission to proceed with the subterranean excavations in early 1905. The agreement strictly limited access to the grounds to three months. Porter secured the services of Paul Weiss, an accomplished mining engineer, whose professional skill and devotion to the delicacy of the task proved well beyond the ambassador’s expectations. Meanwhile, under the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s sea-power writings, President Theodore Roosevelt had launched an ambitious campaign to strengthen the U.S. Navy. Colorful naval reviews, elaborate ceremonies, and exercises were the order of the day, culminating in the around-the-world cruise of the Great White Fleet in 1907–9, a blatant display of the growing reach of American military might. Aware of Porter’s efforts and anticipating the public-relations value of the project to his crusade for a more powerful American Navy, Roosevelt approached Congress for an appropriation of $35,000 for the recovery. Ironically, indifference to John Paul Jones’ cause lingered into the 20th century, as Congress took its time reacting to the president’s request. Porter theorized that the project may have been perceived as “too Utopian in its nature to receive serious consideration, the remains of the Admiral having been long since relegated to the realms of mystery and given up as lost beyond recovery.” The ambassador decided to avoid further delay and personally advanced the money with no expectation that he would be reimbursed. The first shaft was sunk on 3 February 1905 to a depth of 18 feet. The immediate discovery of many skeletons confirmed that few, if any, remains had been removed from the cemetery. The corpses in this section were not in separate graves, leading to the conclusion that they were the remains of destitute individuals buried in inexpensive wooden coffins that had long since rotted away. Porter suspected
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that very few lead coffins like the one in which Jones’ body had been encased were present, given the expense of such containers. In all, five shafts were sunk and horizontal subterranean galleries extended out from the shafts in various directions. To locate the lead coffins, soundings were made between the galleries using long iron tools. As the excavation continued, a mass grave of skeletons piled helter-skelter was discovered. This was apparently the trench section where the bodies of the Swiss Guards had been tossed. The first lead coffin was discovered on 22 February. An encrusted inscription plate required the skills of a restorer of ancient art objects to decipher the name of the deceased. The nameplate as well as one found on a second lead coffin ruled out either occupant as being John Paul Jones. The Hero Identified and Honored On 31 March a third lead coffin was found. It lacked an inscription plate but according to Porter was “superior in solidity and workmanship” to the first two. The decision was made to open this coffin. Typical of those in use in France at the time of Jones’ death, the mummy-shaped coffin was narrow at the feet, widening to the shoulders, and rounded at the head. A preliminary examination determined that the corpse was approximately 5 feet, 7 inches, the exact height of the admiral. The remains were taken to the Paris School of Medicine for examination. For six days and in the presence of a dozen French and American officials, several renowned French anthropologists would perform tests and comparisons to definitively identify the body. Wrapped in a winding sheet, the body was surrounded by straw. The alcohol that had originally filled the coffin had externally embalmed the remains, which were remarkably well-preserved. The head had been turned slightly to the right and the nose bent, due to the placement of too much straw beneath the head prior to the casket being closed. A linen cap and ruffled linen shirt were the only items of clothing. On the cap was an embroidered letter “J” with a very pronounced loop. When the cap was reversed, the letter appeared to be a “P”. Anthropometric measurements of the head and facial features were performed and compared to a three-quarter-size bust by famed French sculpture Jean-Antoine Houdon that Jones’ contemporaries had regarded as extremely accurate, and to a profile of the naval commander on a congressional medal. A peculiar-shaped earlobe and all other facial measurements were consistent with the features displayed on the bust. Among the unofficial onlookers present while the remains were being measured soon after their removal from the coffin had been John Stone, Ambassador Porter’s 11-year-old nephew. Nearly 60 years later, retired Navy Captain Stone, a 1917 Naval Academy graduate, recalled U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
On 24 April 1906, the anniversary of his victory over the that “there was a feeling of awe in the room.” Approachsloop-of-war HMS Drake, John Paul Jones was ceremoniously ing the corpse, “Uncle Horace said I could feel his hand, honored by President Roosevelt and fellow countrymen, inI think it was his right one. . . . With some reluctance cluding Ambassador Porter, at the Naval Academy. Atop his (really a great deal) I held the hand. It was soft and pliflag-draped coffin sat a wreath of laurel, a spray of palm, and able. I did not hold it long!” Stone added that “When first the gold-hilted sword presented to him by Louis XVI after seen J. P. J. seemed alive. No photograph was made until the capture of HMS Serapis. Final interment in an elaborate about 2 days later—by that time his face had changed crypt beneath the transept of the Naval Academy Chapel due to exposure.” took place on 26 January 1913. Modeled on the tomb of An autopsy revealed that the left lung displayed signs Napoleon, the marble sarcophagus is of the pneumonia Jones had been surrounded by eight black and white diagnosed as having in late 1788. Pyrenees marble columns. Etched in Distinct indications of kidney disbronze on the floor are the names ease were consistent with symptoms of Jones’ major commands and flagthe admiral had displayed just prior ships: the Providence, Alfred, Ranger, to death. The absence of scars or Bonhomme Richard, Serapis, and Ariel. other evidence of battle wounds All except the Vladimir, his flagship was also consistent with the belief during the Russian campaign against that Jones had never been serithe Ottomans, are inscribed for posously wounded in any of his many terity to recall. engagements. Formal documents John Paul Jones was described concurring with lead anthropologist by Empress Catherine as a rogue, G. Papillault’s conclusion that “the by Rudyard Kipling as a pirate, body examined is that of Admiral and more graciously by Winston John Paul Jones” were signed by Churchill as a privateer. And as if all in attendance. Notified of the those descriptions were true, his repanel’s definitive findings, President mains lay unmarked and forgotten Roosevelt immediately dispatched a for more than a century. His final squadron of four cruisers to escort resting place, however, befits his the admiral home. status as the spiritual father of the The body was placed in a new U.S. Navy. lead container that was soldered closed, affixed with seals of the Porter, specialists, and other onlookers who viewed American Embassy, and placed in the naval hero’s remains were astonished by its Sources: an outer oak casket adorned with well-preserved condition, which was attributed to John Paul Jones Commemoration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907, reprint eight silver handles. The lid was se- Jones’ coffin having been filled with alcohol before 1966). This volume contains addresses given at cured using 16 silver screws and the being sealed. The remains had begun to noticeably the 1906 John Paul Jones commemoration at the casket then draped with the Ameri- deteriorate by the time this photograph was taken U.S. Naval Academy and papers and reports, including Horace Porter’s, about the search for and can flag. Placed on a French artil- several days after the coffin was unsealed. identification of Jones’ remains. The 1966 reprint lery caisson ornamented with flags, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr includes Captain John G. M. Stone’s recollections of Jones’ remains. it was escorted to a Paris train staJoseph Callo, John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea tion by 500 American Bluejackets, two companies of U.S. Warrior (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006). William M. Fowler Jr., Rebels Under Sail: The American Navy during the Revolution Marines, and French cuirassiers, horse artillery batteries, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976). infantry, and military bands. The casket was transported to Lincoln Lorenz, The Admiral and the Empress: John Paul Jones and Catherine the Great (New York: Bookman Associates, 1954). Cherbourg, where it was placed aboard the armored cruiser Elsie Porter Mendes, An American Soldier and Diplomat (New York: Frederick A. Brooklyn for the 13-day journey across the Atlantic. Stokes, 1927). The American squadron departed Cherbourg on the eveNathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow, 1992). Robert L. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the ning of 8 July flying the American ensign at the fore and U.S. Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). the French ensign at the main. Arriving at Chesapeake Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century Company, 1897; reprint Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Bay on the morning of 22 July, the squadron was joined Samuel Eliot Morison, John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (Boston: Little, Brown by seven battleships that would accompany the cruisers on and Company, 1959; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989). Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy (New the final leg of the journey to Annapolis, Maryland, and York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). the U.S. Naval Academy. As the Brooklyn passed, four of Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). the battle wagons fired a 15-gun salute. U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
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Ugliest The
Bandage on Iwo Jima By Colonel Charles A. Jones, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired)
When a Japanese shell interrupted a corpsman tending to a wounded Marine, it also put a Purple Heart award on hold for half a century.
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very Marine and sailor who fought in the hell that was the Battle of Iwo Jima has his personal history of horrors seen, hardships endured, and losses experienced. But regardless of how terrible that history was, many Iwo veterans— like warriors throughout time—could find dark humor amid the confusion and carnage of combat. So it was for a Marine and a Navy corpsman, wounded just moments apart in a Japanese shelling, then quickly separated and left to wonder for 45 years what had happened to one another. Only after meeting in 1990 could they laugh at an experience that had been anything but funny at the time. Charlie Adams and Bob DeGeus were members of Fox Company, 2d Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. Adams was an “FM”—a field musician, or bugler, equivalent in grade to a private—assigned to company headquarters. Because buglers were unnecessary on Iwo Jima, he became a jack-ofall-trades. He was a runner and radioman for Fox Company’s commander, Captain Frank Caldwell. He also sealed caves—tossing in satchel charges or guiding tanks to the caves. Adams had several close calls in face-to-face gunfights with Japanese soldiers. He had a reputation as a veritable magnet for enemy fire, no matter where he was. He attributes his survival to “the luck of the Irish” and credits, to some degree, not being used as a stretcher-bearer, which many field musicians were. Carrying stretchers was arduous and dangerous work. Bob DeGeus, a PhM3—pharmacist’s mate third class—was corpsman for the company’s machinegun platoon. When the machine gunners were dispersed to support other elements of Fox Company, DeGeus moved to headquarters as a roving corpsman.
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Company command posts on Iwo Jima were established just about anywhere offering a modicum of protection in the volcanic ash. Typically, as seen in this photo, the company’s SCR-300 radio was the focal point of activity for the commander and his Marines. The central figure in the accompanying story went through three radios on the day he was wounded. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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was in a foxhole with senior corpsman Everett Kellogg. A few feet away, in a foxhole he was sharing with a replacement Marine, Adams was preparing his SCR-300 radio for movement as he did every day—replacing its long antenna with a shorter one. The radio, sitting on the edge of the foxhole, was a prime target for the enemy. Kellogg noted in a 2001 letter that Adams was brave because “carrying that radio around [presented] a special target for Japanese snipers.” As the company prepared for its day, the Japanese began shelling the area. One shell hit to one side of Adams. A second exploded on the other side. A third shell was a direct hit on the radio, leaving Adams holding only the antenna. At some point, the replacement Marine was killed—a fate typical for many replacements. DeGeus, who did not know Adams by name, checked him for wounds, finding one in the wrist area. Adams’ watch had been blown apart, and DeGeus removed pieces of it—gears, springs, and part of the casing—embedded in Adams’ skin. DeGeus applied a bandage and was tying it off when another Japanese round exploded nearby, tearing off the back of DeGeus’ shirt, wounding him in the back and shoulder. A Parting of the Ways Adams, yelling something like “You’re hit, Doc! I’ll get help,” leaped to his feet and ran in the direction of the Japanese lines. The startled DeGeus could only imagine that Adams was disoriented or that perhaps he simply had “gone crazy.” In fact, Adams was running to company headquarters to report that DeGeus had been wounded. That done, he intended to return to the corpsman. But Caldwell, knowing the importance of a radio, instructed Adams to get another, assuring him that DeGeus would receive help. In the meantime, Kellogg had treated DeGeus, who then was evacuated from the island to an attack transport. After surgery on board ship, DeGeus subsequently was treated at naval hospitals on Guam and then in Oakland, California. Adams successfully obtained another radio, but when he returned to company headquarters he found it inoperative: A Japanese bullet had pierced it. Caldwell sent Adams back to get what would be his third radio of the day. Because Adams was requesting a second radio in such a short period of time, the issuing personnel required him to sign for it. He returned with the third radio intact.
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COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Above: Charlie Adams poses beside a photograph of himself under fire on the beach at Iwo Jima, part of a display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia. Right: Adams, sporting his new Purple Heart, with Bob DeGeus at the 5th Marine Division reunion in 2002, where the award was presented. Fifty-seven years earlier Navy corpsman DeGeus had bandaged Marine Adams’ wound on Iwo Jima, but the injury never was officially reported. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
The bandage DeGeus had hastily applied earlier in the day did not hold up. Adams soon discarded it and did not bother to report the wound. DeGeus, himself wounded and evacuated, was unable to report it. Thus Adams never received the Purple Heart to which he was entitled. Reunion Answers a Lingering Question Not until 45 years later did DeGeus learn the name of the wounded man he had treated that day on Iwo Jima. At a 1990 reunion of Iwo veterans in Washington, D.C., DeGeus recognized Adams as the Marine who inexplicably, as DeGeus remembered, had run away after the explosion had torn into DeGeus’ back and shoulder. But the question of a Purple Heart for Adams remained unaddressed for another decade. It surfaced again at the 2001 reunion of the 5th Marine Division in Tucson, Arizona. Several Fox Company men were reminiscing one evening when Adams mentioned in
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jest that the bandage DeGeus had been unable to apply properly was “the ugliest bandage” he had ever seen. The remark was overheard by Al Knickrehm, a retired FBI agent who had been an enlisted replacement in Fox Company. He asked Adams if he had received a Purple Heart. Adams said no. Knickrehm said he believed Adams merited the award, noting, however, that he would need documentation from DeGeus. DeGeus jokingly responded that he would not provide any such statement until Adams apologized for calling the bandage “ugly.” After the reunion, Knickrehm, unbeknownst to Adams, initiated steps to obtain the award. Knickrehm began with a letter on 29 November 2001 to Caldwell, the former company commander, a retired colonel. The letter summarized what he had heard in Tucson, noting his intent to obtain a statement from Kellogg—the corpsman who had treated DeGeus. He also mentioned an 8 November 2001 letter DeGeus had written in which he said that his request for an apology about the “ugly” bandage had been made in good humor. In reality, DeGeus had written, “We all know how serious [Adams’] experiences were on Iwo Jima and I would not want to give the impression that no matter how slight the wounds, they were not insignificant.” He favored a surprise presentation of a Purple Heart to Adams at the 5th Division’s next reunion and offered to write a statement corroborating the incident. After receiving that statement, Knickrehm had called DeGeus and asked him for a detailed account of how he and Adams had been wounded. DeGeus responded with a notarized statement and concluded: “It is my opinion that [Adams] deserves a Purple Heart Medal for wounds to his arm and wrist, acquired on or about D+5 during the Battle for Iwo Jima, February 24 or 25, 1945. I treated his wounds then and there and I’ve seen the scars on his arm and wrist more recently.” Knickrehm forwarded DeGeus’ letter and notarized statement to Caldwell, thinking that a retired colonel’s endorsement would “carry far more weight” in obtaining the award. In December 2001 Kellogg sent Knickrehm a letter about “those harrowing moments when Charlie Adams and then Bob [DeGeus] were injured by artillery fire.” Kellogg included a detailed statement addressed to DeGeus about the incident. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Hubert Hammond applies a field dressing to a wounded Marine combat photographer, Sergeant David Christian, on Iwo Jima. Navy corpsmen faced an overwhelming workload on Iwo, site of one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history. Many corpsmen, like one of the two main figures in this article, fell victim themselves to Japanese bullets and artillery rounds. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Caldwell wrote the Marine Corps on 31 January 2002, forwarding the supporting documentation and requesting the award of a Purple Heart. A surprised Charlie Adams received his Purple Heart at the closing dinner of the 2002 reunion of the 5th Marine Division in Kansas City. Epilogue: Time Takes Its Toll Everett Kellogg died in November 2010. He never talked much about the war. His statement to DeGeus about the events leading to Adams’ Purple Heart provides a clue about why he suppressed his memories: “Your request [for a statement] has forced me to recall those days that I have done my best to forget for more than fifty years.” He also gave voice to the unanswerable question many, if not most Iwo Jima survivors asked: “To this day I cannot understand how or why I survived.” Al Knickrehm died in that same month. Caldwell now lives in Rhode Island. Of the two principals in the saga, Bob DeGeus became a teacher and an artist in Michigan. During the summer of 2010 he sent the author a questionnaire he had completed circa 1995 about his wartime experiences; it included his recollections of bandaging Adams. In an accompanying letter DeGeus noted that earlier in the year he had lost the use of his dominant hand, a sad fate for an artist. N AVA L H I S T O R Y
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Worse, however, he had long battled leukemia. Ever a modest and humble gentleman, in October 2010 he sent a farewell message via email to his family, friends, and the surviving members of Fox Company. But Adams, who had remained very close to DeGeus, did not receive the farewell message. When told over the telephone about DeGeus’ message, Adams responded sincerely and gratefully: “You don’t know how much I appreciate you telling me about Bob.” Bob DeGeus died on 7 September 2011. Charlie Adams, 87, retired after a successful career as a businessman and farmer. He remains active, although recent shoulder-replacement surgery has temporarily slowed him. He remains deeply appreciative of Bob DeGeus’ medical care and understands that the rapid-fire sequence of events precluded a textbook job of battlefield bandaging. He is grateful, too, for the efforts of Knickrehm, the retired FBI agent whose efforts ensured that a fellow Marine was recognized for his wounds. While scars from an exploding wristwatch may still be on Charlie Adams’ arm and tiny pieces of a wristwatch may yet be in his arm, in his mind they will remain the source of lingering memories—memories of a distant, hostile place and time, and of a respected corpsman who risked his life to aid a wounded comrade-in-arms.
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Naval History News continued from page 11
Charles Melcher, commanding officer of NSA Hampton Roads, “given his unique accomplishments not only as an athlete, but also as a naval officer.” Cutter received four Navy Crosses, two Silver Stars, and one Bronze Star. While in command of the Balaoclass submarine USS Seahorse (SS-304), he was credited with sinking the second highest number of Japanese ships in World War II. “His list of accomplishments during World War II is massive, and his personal awards speak volumes about his character and commitment to the United States and the Navy,” said Melcher. Cutter’s first Navy Cross was presented for extraordinary heroism as commanding officer of the USS Requin (SS-481) during her second patrol in enemy waters. He received his second Navy Cross as commanding officer of the USS Seahorse (SS-304) during a war patrol where he was cited for aggressive pursuit and expert evasion of the enemy and the sinking of another five enemy vessels. Cutter was awarded two additional crosses for similar acts of bravery, heroism, and leadership. “They say the name makes a man—and what a name,” said Vice Admiral John Richardson, commander, Submarine Forces, who provided remarks during the ceremony. “Slade Cutter—he was destined for greatness.” A Chicago native, Cutter entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1931, where he was eagerly welcomed
U.S. NAVY (DANNA M. MORRIS)
Captain Chuck Melcher, commanding officer of NSA Hampton Roads, presents Ruth Cutter, wife of the late Captain Slade Cutter, with a commemorative photo during the Cutter Athletic Park dedication ceremony. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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for his athletic ability. Perhaps his most acclaimed sports feat as a Midshipman came in 1934, during a mud-soaked football battle against Army; Cutter kicked the game-winning field goal before 79,000 people, giving Navy its first victory against Army in 13 years. Cutter also won the intercollegiate heavyweight-boxing championship, became an All-American tackle, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. “Slade would have loved the fact that this park will have his name,” said his widow, Ruth Cutter, who was joined by eight other family members from around the country for the dedication ceremony. “I just wish he were here to see it.” N.C. DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL RESOURCES ( KAREN K BROWNING)
Blackbeard’s Cannon Lifted from Sea Floor Archaeologists working off the North Carolina coast in October hoisted from the depths the latest in what is becoming a long line of significant finds from an ongoing shipwreck project: a 2,000-pound, eight-foot cannon caked in a crusty shell of concretion—a cannon from the purported pirate ship of Blackbeard himself. It was the 13th cannon raised from the shipwreck, which was discovered in 1996, is believed to be Blackbeard’s flagship the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and thus far has yielded approximately 280,000 artifacts. Researchers describe it as the largest underwater archaeology effort currently under way in the United States. And because it is presumably the ship of a bigger-than-life figure such as Blackbeard, the project inspires fascination among the public. Over the summer of 2011, more than 100,000 visitors flocked to the Beaufort Maritime Museum to view an exhibition of items from the wreck. Other recent retrievals from the ship include an 11-foot anchor and the remnants of what is believed to have been Blackbeard’s sword—or, to be more precise regarding someone as infamously weaponed-up as he, one of Blackbeard’s swords (see “Shipwreck Yields Possible Blackbeard Blade,” Naval History, April 2011, p. 10). Arguably the most notorious pirate in history, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (or Thatch) captured the 104-foot, 300-ton French slaver La Concorde off Martinique in 1717 and redubbed her the Queen Anne’s Revenge. In May 1718 both the
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The possible wreck site of Blackbeard’s flagship has yielded another piratical prize: a cannon. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Queen Anne’s Revenge and Blackbeard’s ship Adventure ran aground off Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina—evidently a deliberate move by Blackbeard to strand the bulk of his crew and make off with a select few (and the bounteous loot recently acquired). Before the year was out, Blackbeard himself would be dead, felled by five musket-ball wounds and more than 20 sword cuts in a battle off Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, on 22 November 1718. The private firm Intersal discovered what is believed to be the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge in 1996. Statecoordinated research efforts subsequently got under way, and for more than a decade, a North Carolina Office of State Archaeology team has been researching the wreckage. For all the historical riches that the site already has yielded, only about half the shipwreck has been combed through so far. And as the latest 2,000-pound treasure was lifted from the water by a crane,
project director Mark Wilde-Ramsing pointed out to the crowd of assembled onlookers, “The last people who saw this were pirates.”
Diesels for the First Stealth Weapon Submarine Power 1902-1945 by Lyle Cummins
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Book Reviews Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor Ben Hellwarth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. 400 pp. Illus. Notes. Bibliog. Appendices. $28. Reviewed by Captain Don Walsh, U.S. Navy (Retired)
The U.S. Navy’s Sealab Program operations from 1964 to 1970 pioneered experimental deep-diving science and technologies. The program’s results were eventually utilized well beyond the Navy’s interests. This work helped push back the limits of divers’ ability to safely work on the seafloor for long periods of time. Sealab’s “fingerprints” can be found on all present-day deep-diving operations. Author Ben Hellwarth put a great deal of scholarship into this book, as evidenced by his extensive notes. The book combines the work of a diligent investigative reporter with that of a feature writer who loves a good sea story. The Navy’s Genesis Program in the late 1950s was one of the first to test experimental breathing-gas mixtures to extend diver bottom times. The program director was Navy Commander George Bond, a doctor and submarine medical officer. He would spend more than a decade on this work and became known as the “father of saturation diving.” Tests showed that with a change of the gas components in the breathing mixture, animals could live and function at greater depths for prolonged periods. By 1964 human volunteers had made a dive in an onshore test facility to work at 200 feet for 12 days. Practical saturation diving had been born. After six years of Genesis, the next step was to move into the ocean. This began with Sealab I, a small habitat anchored to the ocean floor. Inside, it provided lodging for its dive team, who would remain under full depth pressure for a prolonged time. The divers would live in the dry and then could easily suit up to go outside for work tasks. In this way, lengthy decompression time for returning to the surface was done only once at the end of the divers’ bottom time. The Sealab I mission took place off Bermuda in 1964. The four-man team was at a water depth of 192 feet. Unfortunately the experiment lasted only
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11 days, due to an approaching hurricane. Despite its short duration, this mission proved that functioning divers could be put at depth for long periods. It was the beginning of man in the sea. In 1965 a newly built habitat, Sealab II, was installed on the seafloor off La Jolla, California, at 205 feet. This time there were three nine-man teams of divers, and each team spent 15 days in the habitat. The exception was astronaut/ hydronaut Commander Scott Carpenter,
communications cables. This program was highly successful and was terminated only years later, when Navy Chief Warrant Officer John A. Walker informed the Soviets about it. Arrested in 1985, he is serving a life sentence in a federal prison. While the Sealab Program is his main story line, Hellwarth surrounds it with an account of contemporary developments in the United States and abroad. The work of well-known pioneers such as Ed Link, Jacques Cousteau, and Henri Delauze is discussed. The developing offshore oil and gas industry in the 1970s adopted and perfected this work, with some dives approaching 1,000 feet. Carefully prepared experiments on land actually got divers down to more than 2,000 feet in the 1980s. Ben Hellwarth has produced a fascinating history of man in the sea. It is a book well worth reading, whether you are an aficionado of undersea operations or a casual reader who likes a great sea story.
Captain Walsh, Ph.D. and author of the Proceedings magazine column “Oceans,” was a submarine commander and designated as U.S. Navy Submersible Pilot no. 1. Since 1958 he has been continuously involved with undersea systems design, construction, and operations. He has served as technical adviser for several films, including Raise the Titanic and The Hunt for Red October.
who spent 30 days in the seafloor house. The last mission in the series was Sealab III in 1969. For this the upgraded Sealab II habitat was located near the previous La Jolla site. However, the water depth for this mission was 600 feet. Regrettably, before the mission could be started, there was a fatal accident. This led to delays and the ultimate cancellation of the entire program in 1970. The Navy was then officially out of the man-in-the-sea business. But was it really? In fact, the Sealab III project was also used as a cover for a highly classified black-operations intelligence program against the Soviet Union. The longduration saturation-diving techniques developed by Sealab were used to deploy dive teams from submerged submarines. The ability to work for relatively long periods on the seafloor made it possible to do object recovery and tap seafloor
National Naval Aviation Museum: The Historic Collection M. Hill Goodspeed and Michael Duncan. Pensacola, Florida: Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, 2011. 164 pp. Illus. $20. Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
The Historic Collection, a handsome book of color photography highlighting the central artifacts in the collection of the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, is a perfect gem. It is a superb catalogue of the museum’s arresting exhibits that should be part of every aviation buff’s personal library. Try as I might, in the great tradition of book reviewers everywhere, I can find nothing to fault it. The selection of pieces to illustrate was inspired; the quality of the photography is excellent; the organization (roughly chronological, in five chapters covering the century that U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
spans the birth of naval aviation through to the modern era) is coherent, and the captions are invariably crisp and suitably informative. Well, maybe a dozen or so leather and Nomex flight jackets are a few too many to show, but they’re colorful and superbly personal. (More than two dozen magnifying-glass icons spread about the book cleverly tell readers that the museum’s website has more information about each illustration so marked.) The book is especially good at emphasizing the people of naval aviation in war and peace. Beginning with Ensign William Billingsley, who in June 1913 became the first naval aviation fatality when he fell out of his aircraft to his death, The Historic Collection includes by name many who sacrificed or otherwise contributed to victory and progress on, above, or near saltwater. The photos show, among other curious things, a World War I–era mandolin and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s NASA bite boards. Forced to pick favorites, I’d choose “Pacific Island Home,” picturing a museum diorama that evokes so well a World War II South Pacific air station that it hints at jungle rot; or the eerie “Sunken Treasures,” an F4F Wildcat fighter as discovered on the floor of Lake Michigan; or . . . any of dozens of others. Pick your own. Paired with its predecessor volume, The Aircraft Collection, this book makes a persuasive case that the Naval Aviation Museum is the best of the many Navy museums. All in all, Goodspeed and Duncan have much to be proud of, as does the National Naval Aviation Museum. Publication of The Historic Collection should start (continue?) a stampede of visitors heading for western Florida and the museum. They should be eager to commemorate naval aviation in the best way possible: by learning about the courageous men and women, the brilliant technology, and the powerful economy
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that profoundly changed war at sea and American—not to say global—history.
Andrew Jampoler, naval aviator no. V-20855, got his wings in November 1963. He is the author of Adak: The Rescue of Alfa Foxtrot 586 (Naval Institute Press, 2003, paperback released 2011). Mr. Jampoler’s next book, about Navy Lieutenant Emory Taunt and the Congo in the 1880s, is forthcoming from the Press in 2013.
Deterrence through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy under Pax Britannica Rebecca Berens Matzke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 320 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $45. Reviewed by Howard J. Fuller
Readers of Naval History might be tempted by the reassuring title of this book into thinking that peace and power are synonymous, if not interchangeable, concepts. If the British were able to avoid wars through much of the 19th century (they weren’t) and maintain the respect of other great powers—through dominance—then surely today, naval giants such as the United States can learn from their experience, their good sense. Have a cup of tea, curl up with Deterrence through Strength and the national flag of your choice, and everything will be right as rain. This all sounds rather old-fashioned, and indeed it is. There’s nothing exactly new in this work. Much of it is built directly on the work of eminent British naval historian Andrew Lambert and Professor John Beeler of the University of Alabama. Rebecca Berens Matzke acknowledges their “particular help on the nineteenth-century Royal Navy,” and it is, in fact, the issue of British naval power that is the cornerstone of their (and her) argument. For this to succeed, readers must be willing to suspend their disbelief that the Royal Navy was anything but invincible, and all that hardline prime ministers like Lord Palmerston had to do was brandish it in the face of anyone, including Americans, who naughtily dared challenge British strategic and economic interests. Peace was, therefore, maintained by the threat of war, rather like a Punch cartoon of the period, in which the British lion was best left asleep if you knew what was good for you.
The problem here, of course, is that this worldview is one-sided and remains largely unsupported by historical fact. At the very least it remains an interpretation of past events. According to another view, the schizophrenia of the Royal Navy during this period was that it championed itself as a defensive force, but truthfully all its efforts were to keep it oceangoing, aggressive, and threatening—offensive. This, if nothing else, remains the basis for deterrence. It also exacerbated as many crises as it settled. As such, the Victorians might have read their Thucydides more closely, for the Athenians made just as many enemies through their application of naval power and intimidation as they did friends, and in the end one needs some allies to survive one’s own imperialism. Realpolitik was also up for debate in the 19th century. As historian Muriel E. Chamberlain observed, Palmerston had his critics in England; Richard Cobden’s “almost unanswerable logic” and John Bright’s “radical” belief in free trade and internationalism as a means of preventing conflicts made the Manchester school as important to the Pax as sending a gunboat to out-bully a local bully in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, etc. Unfortunately, Matzke makes no use of Chamberlain and avoids engaging Cobden and Bright at all. Still, there is much to commend here. The breadth and depth of research involved is impressive; any comparative history (in this case, Anglo-American) is valuable. And just because the Pax Britannica is relatively quiet next to the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars or World War I doesn’t necessarily imply that an in-depth study like this one is
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unimportant. On the contrary, the nature of an often-uneasy peace is as important as the manifestation of open war. As such, Deterrence through Strength could have been a useful platform for wellbalanced historical analysis of a human phenomenon that is highly complex as well as brutally straightforward. Instead, what we have are broad brushstrokes, especially when attempting to draw conclusions at the end of the book that are increasingly speculative and conjectural. “Other historians” are often mentioned, but they are kept out of play. Presumably this would have entailed a larger work, and a serious discussion that would probably leave readers feeling vaguely uncomfortable in the knowledge that international relations were/are very rarely a matter of simply ruling the waves. By direct contrast, for example, Jay Sexton’s study Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford University Press, 2005) concludes that “the United States’ need for foreign investment in particular made American statesmen think twice before twisting the British lion’s tail.” Britannia was much more commanding as a partner, when push came to shove. It was a lesson that Columbia took to heart and that, arguably, stands for much of its own global influence today.
Dr. Fuller is Senior Lecturer of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton (UK). He is the author of Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Naval Institute Press, 2008).
Black Sheep: The Life of Pappy Boyington John F. Wukovits. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2011. 249 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $34.95. Reviewed by John B. Lundstrom
One can perhaps know too much about the life of a particular historical figure. That is true in large measure for Colonel Gregory Boyington, the celebrated Marine World War II fighter ace. He himself produced lengthy memoirs that were brutally honest regarding his alcoholism and his disastrous course through life. His military exploits also appear in numerous published recollections of pilots and others who served with him. Aviation historian Bruce Gamble has not only written a groundbreaking biography of Boyington, Black Sheep One (Novato,
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Calif.: Presidio Press, 2000), but also a detailed history of VMF-214, the Marine fighter squadron closely associated with his fame: The Black Sheep (1998). In this present book, John Wukovits, a respected Pacific war historian, turns his hand to chronicling the incredible life and legend of “Pappy” Boyington. Wukovits’ compact, well-paced narrative relates the many twists and turns, the highs and lows experienced by that unique individual. Greg Boyington inspired either devotion or contempt. His life was a train wreck, a constant alternation between accomplishment and profoundly irresponsible conduct. A courageous, bold, exceptionally talented
pilot and, while in VMF-214, a superb leader, Boyington was nonetheless brash and confrontational, with an omnipresent chip on his shoulder. He dared fate to punch back, and it usually did. Holding a degree in aeronautical engineering, Boyington earned his wings in 1937 with the Marine Corps. His drunkenness and riotous behavior proved remarkable within the aviation brotherhood, where a certain degree of wild exuberance was almost expected. Seeking a fresh start, he volunteered in 1941 to fight with the American Volunteer Group (“Flying Tigers”). Over China and Burma between December 1941 and March 1942, he was credited with 3.5 Japanese aircraft, but he always claimed six kills. As Wukovits relates, Boyington’s notorious conduct ensured the AVG never regretted his hasty departure that April for home. Boyington was fortunate to rejoin the Marines. Reaching the South Pacific in
1943 after the Guadalcanal campaign, he bounced around without seeing real action until September, when he took over VMF214. Its pilots, typical eager, green aviators (definitely not the misfits of later legend), warmed to their older, unconventional leader, calling him “Pappy.” In turn Boyington, through his aggressive and inspired leadership, molded his young pilots into a superb squadron flying the gull-winged Vought F4U-1 Corsair. His tactics in fact were based largely on those developed by the naval and Marine aviators who had already bested the vaunted Japanese Zero fighter in 1942 and early 1943. Wukovits does those pioneers a great disservice by stating that “Boyington demystified the Zero.” From September 1943 to January 1944 in fierce combat over the northern Solomons and Rabaul, VMF-214 destroyed 97 Japanese planes, including 20 or more by Boyington (his final score is hotly disputed). This made him, officially at least, the top Marine ace, with 28 kills. Boyington was shot down in January 1944 off New Britain and captured. While in Japanese hands, he did much to sustain and encourage his fellow prisoners. He was awarded the Medal of Honor while listed as missing in action. Boyington returned home in September 1945 to great acclaim; he retired from active duty in 1947. His 1958 autobiography Baa Baa Black Sheep (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons) and the 1976 television series of the same name helped keep his name before the public, as did his many personal appearances. Boyington died in 1988 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Wukovits handles Boyington’s lifelong struggle with alcoholism with fairness and understanding, not excusing the failures but also not dwelling on them. Boyington never surrendered his cynical view of life: “Just name a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum,” as Wukovits quotes him. All of his many shortcomings could not erase his magnificent performance at the head of VMF-214, and it is for that he is properly remembered. Wukovits’ biography offers a fine introduction to Gregory Boyington’s life and points the way to the more specialized sources for those who wish to know more about the leader of the Black Sheep.
Mr. Lundstrom is the author of five books published by the Naval Institute Press, the latest of which is Black Shoe Carrier Admiral (2006).
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USNI 2012 BALLOT I &DQGLGDWH 3URÀOHV The profiles below are provided to briefly inform U.S. Naval Institute members about Board of Directors and Editorial Board candidates. Each has been invited to provide 150 words. This list is arranged alphabetically, but the names on your ballot are listed randomly.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS CANDIDATES RADM Daniel R. Bowler, USN (Ret.) President, The Whitehall Group, LLC Retired Rear Admiral Bowler is a 1970 U.S. Naval Academy graduate and served in the Navy nearly 33 years as a surface warfare officer. He commanded the USS Leftwich (DD-984), Chosin (CG-65), COMCRUDESGRU Five, and the National War College. Following retirement, from 2003 to 2009 he worked for Lockheed Martin Corporation’s Washington Operations office as the Vice President for Naval Systems. He served on the Naval Studies Board in 20067. He was an Associate Member of the Naval Research Advisory Committee from 2008 to 2010. In 2009 he established The Whitehall Group, LLC, a defense consulting company. Rear Admiral Bowler served on the Naval Institute’s Editorial Board from 1996 to 1998. He is a former contributor to Proceedings and has been a member of the Institute since 1970.
VADM Nancy E. Brown, USN (Ret.) Vice Admiral Brown retired as Director, Command, Control, Communications and Computer Systems, the Joint Staff, on 1 October 2009. She has served as an Outside Director of Systematic Software; is on the Armed Forces and Electronics Association Executive Committee; the Board of Advisors, Enlightened, Inc., New Market Veterans, LLC, The EDGE, and Kingfisher Systems, Inc.; is Chair of the Board of Directors, Homeward Deployed; and is a Director of the Naval Institute. Highlights of her career include command of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station, Cutler, Maine, and Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Atlantic, Norfolk. She served on the NSC staff at the White House and was Deputy Director, White House Military Office. In 2004 she deployed to Iraq, becoming the first MultiNational Force–Iraq C6. Returning in April 2005, she was assigned as the J6 for both North American Aerospace Defense Command and United States Northern Command.
VADM Herbert A. Browne, USN (Ret.) After two years’ enlisted service, Herb Browne was commissioned. During 36 years in uniform, he commanded two attack aircraft squadrons; two ships, including the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67); a carrier battle group; and U.S. 3rd Fleet. Ashore, he commanded Naval Space Command. In October 2000, he was Deputy, U.S. Space Command.
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In October 2001, he joined AFCEA International as President and CEO. During his tenure at the helm, VADM Browne charged AFCEA to provide great service to both government and the information technology community. The association membership grew, annual revenue increased 80 percent, and over $6 million in scholarships was awarded to students enrolled in technology curricula. Since retiring from AFCEA in March 2007, Vice Admiral Browne remains active on C4I advisory boards and panels for the Navy (N-6), Air Force Research Lab (VS), MITRE Corporation, Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the National Reconnaissance Office.
CAPT Carl W. Dossel, USN (Ret.) Senior Analyst, General Dynamics Information Technology Will Dossel retired in 2004 after serving 26 years in a variety of operational command and senior staff positions afloat and ashore. An E-2C Hawkeye NFO with 3,500 hours/551 traps, his operational experience spans four squadron tours and eight deployments, including command of VAW-122 and navigator on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). Staff assignments at Service and Joint headquarters included Deputy Director, Strategy and Policy (OPNAV N51B) and Special Assistant to the CNO for Joint Matters. Since retirement, he has provided analytical support to MDA and the Navy across a range of operational, intelligence, and policy matters for integrated air and missile defense. A graduate of The Citadel (BA, Political Science), Naval Postgraduate School, and Naval War College, he has published in and has contributed to a variety of media. He is a life member of the Naval Institute.
CAPT Karl M. Hasslinger, USN (Ret.) Karl M. Hasslinger is Electric Boat’s Director of Washington Operations and is responsible for strategic analysis, government relations, business development, and ballistic-missile defense activities. He joined the company in September 2002 following a 26-year career in the U.S. Navy. A former submarine officer, Hasslinger commanded the USS Hammerhead (SSN-663) before moving to a series of defense strategy billets. He served as a Fellow on the Chief of
Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, as the Strategic Planning Assistant to the Director of Submarine Warfare on the Chief of Naval Operations staff, and as a Military Assistant in the Office of Secretary of Defense—Net Assessment. Hasslinger is a 1975 graduate of Marquette University, where he earned a BS in Electrical Engineering. He is also a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College where he earned a Master of Science in National Security and Strategic Studies, graduating with Highest Distinction.
Mr. Andrew C. A. Jampoler Retired Navy Captain Andrew C. A. Jampoler joined the Naval Institute upon commissioning in 1962. Since then, he has written often for Proceedings and Naval History. Andy’s first nonfiction book, Adak, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2003; his fifth, about the United States, the U.S. Navy, and the Congo in the 19th century, will be published by Naval Institute Press in 2013. In 2003 and 2006 he was recognized as the Naval Institute’s author of the year. He received his wings in 1963 and went on to serve in three patrol squadrons and command a naval air station. Other service included in Vietnam, on the second Strategic Studies Group, and staff assignments in Washington and Hawaii. For a decade after retirement he was a senior executive in the international aerospace industry. Andy holds degrees from Columbia University, New York. He is a director of the Naval Historical Foundation.
Mr. Mark W. Johnson Mark W. Johnson is cofounder and senior partner of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India. He has consulted to the Global 1000 in a wide range of industries, as well as governments and start-up companies. Mark’s most recent work helps companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business-model innovation. This work is the subject of his award-winning book Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, as well as his McKinsey award-winning Harvard Business Review article, “Reinventing Your Business Model.” U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
Mark served as a nuclear-power-trained surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy for eight years and is a veteran of the first Gulf War. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master’s in Civil Engineering from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree with distinction in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Mr. Edward S. Miller
VADM Norman W. Ray, USN (Ret.)
Edward S. Miller is a retired corporate executive and author on strategy. After joining the Naval Institute in 1981 he became a life member, honorary Commodore, and since 2007 a director. He supports the Naval Institute Press by donations and fund-raising.
Dr. J. P. “Jack” London, CAPT USNR (Ret.)
Miller earned a BS in Economics at Syracuse University, Phi Beta Kappa, and attended the Harvard Advanced Management Program. In a 30-year career with a Fortune 500 global mining corporation, he served variously as Senior VP of Planning, of Finance, and of Administration. Later, President Ronald Reagan appointed him Vice President-Finance of the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation.
Active Duty: USNA ’64. Naval aviator, MPA. Test pilot. NAVAIR PM. Commands: VP-56 and NAS Jacksonville. OPNAV staff: Air ASW Branch Head, Navy long range planner; authored Summary Warfare Appraisal and ASW Master Strategy. DON Secretariat: EA to Under SECNAV, EA to SECNAV, Director of the Office of Program Appraisal. NATO: Naval Armaments Officer in U.S. Mission, Deputy Chairman of NATO Military Committee. Highest awards: Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit (3), Air Medal (3).
Dr. J. Phillip “Jack” London is Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board of CACI International Inc, a $3.8-billion information technology corporation (NYSE: CACI) celebrating its 50th anniversary (www.caci. com). Under London’s leadership, CACI has grown from a small 50-person consulting firm to become a worldwide corporation (14,300+ employees/100+offices). London joined CACI in 1972: President/CEO 1984-2007, Chairman 1990 (board member since ’81). Graduate U.S. Naval Academy (’59), U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (’67). Doctorate “with distinction” George Washington University (’71). Twentyfour years USN (active/reserve), naval aviator, aeronautical engineering duty officer, retired captain (’83). Aide to Admiral Jackson D. Arnold, Chief Naval Material, Vietnam War (’69-’71). C.O. NAVAIRSYSCOM Units (’82). Awards include: U.S. Navy League’s (National) Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Award (’07); Washington, D.C. Business “Hall of Fame” (inducted ’10); USN Postgraduate School “Hall of Fame” (inducted ’11). Boards: U.S. Naval Institute; Navy Memorial Foundation; Naval Historical Foundation; others, charities.
CAPT Dave M. McFarland, USN Captain McFarland enlisted in the Navy in 1982. Commissioned through the NROTC program, he holds degrees in Nuclear Engineering and National Security and Strategic Studies. At sea, he served as a Division Officer in the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) and USS Laboon (DDG-58); a department head in the USS Mobile Bay (CG-53); executive officer in the USS Bulkeley (DDG-84); and commanded the USS Laboon (DDG-58). Ashore, he served in the Navy Programming Division (N80), on the Joint Staff in the Program Budget Analysis Division (PBAD), in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Military Assistant to the Executive Secretary, and as Senior Military Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/CFO. He currently serves in Surface Warfare Division (N86).
The Naval Institute Press published Miller’s books on strategy. War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945 won five history prizes. General Colin Powell in Proceedings called it “a magnificent book.” His Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor is a timely study of a national bankruptcy.
Postretirement: NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defense Support, President Raytheon International for Europe, Raytheon Systems Limited Board member, Indra Electronics Board member, Marshall Center Advisory Board member, The SPECTRUM Group International Division head, a U.S. Atlantic Council Board member and Strategy Advisors Group member, Allied Command Transformation Senior Concept Developer, CINCEUR/SACEUR Advisory Group member, member of USNI Board of Directors.
HON B. J. Penn Mr. Penn was commissioned an ensign in the Naval Reserve in 1961 and designated a naval aviator in June 1962, amassing over 6,800 flight hours during his career. His leadership assignments included Executive/ Commanding Officer of VAQ-33, Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Commanding Officer NAS North Island, California, and Chief of Staff Navy International Programs. On 13 September 2001, Mr. Penn was asked to join the Department of Defense as a Political Appointee in AT&L, Industrial Policy. In April 2005, the Senate confirmed him as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Installations and Environment. From March to May 2009, he was the Acting Secretary of the Navy. Mr. Penn is the CEO of Genesis IV, an executive consulting firm headquartered in Northern Virginia. He is Chairman of the Board of Spectra Systems Corporation, a Trustee at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and on the Board of the Naval Aviation Museum.
CAPT Gordan E. Van Hook, USN (Ret.) Senior Director, Maersk Line. Limited Gordan Van Hook currently advises U.S. maritime ser vices on commercial best practices and innovation in energy efficiency, sustainment, sea basing, commercial ship conversions, maritime security, and counterpiracy. In 2009 he led the Maersk crisis action team in Mombasa, Kenya, for the Maersk Alabama incident. A 29-year Navy veteran, he served afloat in destroyers and frigates. He was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” for actions to save USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) after being mined in the Persian Gulf. He commanded USS O’Bannon (DD-987) and Destroyer Squadron 23, serving as Sea Combat Commander for the Nimitz (CVN-68) Strike Group. In his final job in the Navy he served as the Executive Director of the CNO Executive Panel. He has master’s degrees in Information Systems from Naval Postgraduate School and National Security Strategy from Naval War College.
Captain McFarland also serves on the Naval Institute Editorial Board and has served on the Board of Directors for The Alexandria/Arlington Coalition for the Homeless (AACH).
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USNI 2012 BALLOT I &DQGLGDWH 3URÀOHV
EDITORIAL BOARD CANDIDATES CDR Stephen D. Barnett, USN
LCDR Claude G. Berube, USNR
LCOL Douglas G. Douds, USMC
Commander Barnett is currently an Aviation Program Analyst on the Navy Staff. A native of Columbia, Tennessee, he has served in six aircraft squadrons, commanding one of them. He is a designated Naval Flight Officer with over 2,300 flight hours and has served on three staffs and on board the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74).
Lieutenant Commander Claude Berube has been a member of the U.S. Naval Institute since 1994. His active-duty assignments have included: JAC Molesworth/EUCOM, ONI, ESG 5 (2004-5) which included humanitarian relief operations in Sumatra, anti-piracy off Horn of Africa, and maritime interception operations in the Arabian Sea, and USNA. He is the coauthor of three books on naval history, Congress, and maritimesecurity companies and the author of more than 30 articles that have appeared in Naval Institute Proceedings, Naval History, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Orbis, Washington Times, Forbes, and others. He has also contributed to the USNI blog. He has worked for two U.S. senators and as a defense contractor for the Office of Naval Research. Education includes: BA in History/ Soviet Studies; MA in History; MA in National Security Studies (Naval War College); completing doctoral dissertation in military history from University of Leeds. He has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy since 2005.
Marine Lieutenant Colonel Douds, of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, currently serves as a strategist and speechwriter in the Chairman’s Action Group on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He commanded a Marine fighter attack squadron in Iraq prior to earning his Master’s of Strategic Studies degree from the U.S. Army War College in June 2010. As an F/A-18 pilot, he has deployed multiple times, including two carrier deployments to the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf and a western Pacific deployment. He has completed the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Instructor’s course, the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun), was the top honor graduate from the Amphibious Warfare School, and received two bachelor of arts degrees, in Political Science and History, from Wake Forest University. Doug is an avid historian and enjoys hosting educational tours of Gettysburg, where he resides.
LCDR Thomas C. D’Arcy, USCG
Originally from Accident, Maryland, Lieutenant Commander Gosnell graduated from the Naval Academy in 2001 with a BS in Political Science and Spanish minor.
Ashore, he specialized in personnel management, joint requirements, and budget programming and analysis. He served at the Bureau of Naval Personnel as a detailer, directing the assignment of over 1,000 aviators. During his tour on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J-8), he assisted in the evaluation of force structure requirements. He has been awarded the Defense Meritorious Service, Meritorious Service, Joint Commendation Medals, Navy Commendation Medal (4 awards), Navy Achievement Medal (2 awards), and various other awards. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Tennessee State University and an MBA from Troy State University.
FLTCM Scott A. Benning, USN Scott Benning entered the naval service on 22 June 1983. Upon graduation of basic training in Orlando, he attended Storekeeper ‘A’ School in Meridian, Mississippi. His shore tours as a Storekeeper include Naval Ocean Processing Center, Underwater Construction Team One, and Norfolk Naval Shipyard. His sea tours as a Storekeeper include USS Comte de Grasse (DD-974), USS Gunston Hall (LSD-44), and USS Detroit (AOE-4). Selected as a Command Master Chief in 2000, his tours include VF-103, Carrier Air Wing Seventeen, USS George Washington (CVN-73), Naval Station Norfolk, and Commander Navy Region Mid-Atlantic. In July 2009, he was selected to his current position as the Fleet Master Chief for the Chief of Naval Personnel. Fleet Master Chief Benning is a graduate of the Navy Senior Enlisted Academy, the Navy Corporate Business Course UNC. In 2008 he graduated from Southern Illinois University with a Bachelor in Science degree in Workforce Education.
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Senior Watch Officer, Coast Guard National Command Center As the National Command Center’s Senior Watch Officer, Lieutenant Commander D’Arcy monitors the Coast Guard’s worldwide operations and provides strategic awareness to the Commandant, senior staff, and the Department of Homeland Security. A 1998 Coast Guard Academy graduate, he earned a BS in Government. In 2004 he earned his MA in English from the University of Washington. While serving as Coast Guard Academy English instructor, he was a member of the Cadet Candidate Selection Board, the Cadet Sail Training Program, and adviser to the Class of 2008. He is a law enforcement boarding officer, a group facilitator and team leader, a sexualassault victim advocate, and a graduate of the service’s Senior Leadership course. With six years afloat on board three cutters, he successfully screened for assignment as commanding officer and hopes to return to sea in 2012. His decorations include three Commendation Medals, two Commandant’s Letters of Commendation, and several other awards.
LCDR Rachael A. Gosnell, USN
She reported to the USS Shiloh (CG-67) as gunnery officer and deployed in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. After completing Naval Nuclear Power training, she reported to the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), deploying in support of OIF and earning her tactical action officer qualification. In 2009 she reported aboard the newly commissioned USS Stockdale (DDG-106) as the weapons officer and combat systems officer through the maiden training cycle and 7th Fleet deployment. While ashore, Lieutenant Commander Gosnell was stationed in La Maddalena, Italy, as operations officer and base closure team member. Awards include the Navy Commendation Medal (3), Navy Achievement Medal (2), Top Gunner Award, Navy League Award, and various campaign and unit awards. She has a Master’s of Engineering Management from Old Dominion University and is currently in the Political Military Master’s Program at Georgetown University.
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MAJ Marcus J. Mainz, USMC
LT Robert P. McFall, USN
LT John P. Walsh, USN
Major Mainz participated in the Marine Corps PLC program and was commissioned in the Marine Corps February 1999. Following graduation from The Basic School in September 1999, he reported to the Infantry Officer’s Course (IOC). In December 1999 he reported to 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, as a rifle platoon commander, combined anti-armor platoon commander, and as the XO of Weapons Company.
Lieutenant Robert P. McFall assumed duties as a Watch Officer in the White House Military Office (WHMO) in August 2009, where he provides direct support to the military aides to the President and Vice President of the United States.
Lieutenant John “Jack” P. Walsh was raised in Marion, Massachusetts. He graduated in 2006 from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a bachelor of arts degree in Chemistry and was commissioned via the NROTC program.
Rob was raised in Roanoke, Virginia, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2005 with a bachelor of science in American Politics and Law. Upon commissioning and prior to working at the White House, Rob served for four years as a division officer on board the USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81).
Following college, Lieutenant Walsh entered the naval nuclear power pipeline and reported aboard the USS Louisiana (SSBN-743)(Gold) in March 2008. During his time in the Louisiana, he completed five strategic deterrent patrols.
August 2003-6, Captain Mainz served as an instructor at The Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course. August 2006, he attended the Expeditionary Warfare School. February 2007, Captain Mainz reported to 3d Battalion, 7th Marines and assumed command of Company L. He deployed to Ar Ramadi, Iraq, for OIF 6-08. February 2008 he was reassigned as the battalion operations officer. In August 2008 he deployed in support of OIF 8-2, until March 2009. Major Mainz is currently an instructor at the Expeditionary Warfighting School.
Lieutenant Walsh reported to Chief of Naval Operations Foreign Liaison Office in January 2011. As a foreign liaison officer, he currently works to advance the CNO’s international engagement strategy through the planning and execution of CNO Counterpart Visits. Additionally, he is pursuing his master’s degree in Engineering Management at the Catholic University of America.
Rob is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Surface Navy Association (SNA) and was a member of the 2010-11 Center for a New American Security (CNAS) class of Next Generation National Security Leaders. Lieutenant McFall and his wife, Lea, currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.
Lieutenant Walsh has been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal and the Navy Achievement Medal.
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Museum Report
By Donald A. Wambold Jr.
Preserving the History of Military Flight
T
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
to give tours and answer questions, with he Military Aviation Museum Perhaps one of the most fascinating the sound of period music in the backin Virginia Beach, Virginia, exhibits in the museum is a PBY-5A ground lending further ambience. holds one of the largest private Catalina, a flying boat manufactured by Visitors can walk among the aircraft collections of World War II flyConsolidated Aircraft, one of a series of packed in the hangars but must often ing aircraft, including a number of naval aircraft originally intended for use as a weave a path and duck under wings. planes. patrol bomber. These often-forgotten airInformation is displayed on movable Open since May 2008, it is located on craft played a vital role in World War II. posts for the aircraft. The aircraft are 102 private acres occupied by Virginia Accepted into service in 1943, the verflight-capable, but not all are ready to go Beach Airport, which has a 5,000-foot sion here flew patrols out of San Diego, at any given time. grass runway. Each of its aircraft was Norfolk, French Morocco, the Canary The east naval hangar houses an either salvaged or purchased from other Islands, Gibraltar, and the Azores. N3N-3 “Yellow Peril” and an SNJ-2 and collections and, according to the museThe museum’s west army hangar um, carefully restored by includes a P-40E Warhawk, painted military aviation engineers. in the Flying Tigers scheme. This The main 65,000-squareaircraft was recovered from the foot building encompasses frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle. two hangars connected by Others include a P-51D Mustang, a a center welcome and disB-25J bomber, and numerous British, play facility. The eastern Russian, and German planes. side typically houses naval The recently completed World aircraft, while the western War I hangars are adjacent to the hangar generally exhibFighter Factory, the museum’s resits army and air force airtoration and maintenance facility. planes. The Military Aviation Museum Visitors to the main holds special events throughout building are transported the year, including World War I back into history, first viewairshows, a “Symphonic Airshow ing a reproduction flyable Spectacular” with the Virginia 1911 Wright EX Flyer. Symphony Orchestra, and recentThe east naval hangar houses a PBY-5A Catalina (foreground) and an Aichi The Vin Fiz–sponsored EX ly, “Aviation History through the D3A “Val” dive bomber (background) used in the film Tora! Tora! Tora! made the first United States Art Show.” The institution is rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr transcontinental flight, advancing its educational outreach SNJ-4 Texan, the latter of which was with many crashes and repairs. Arranged by beginning a summer aviation camp for stationed at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, duraround the aircraft are artifacts from students 9-14 years of age. ing World War II. An FM-2 Wildcat, World War II, including a German staff Located south of Virginia Beach in exhibited here and manufactured in 1944 car, a BMW motorcycle, British Dingo a rural community known as Pungo, by General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft diviscout car, 25-pounder howitzer, and a the museum is easy to recognize from a sion in New Jersey, was first assigned to Willys jeep. distance by its faded orange-and-white a small training field in Pungo, Virginia, Probably the rarest object is an checkered water tower. and later served with training squadauthentic Fi 103 (V1) German “Buzz rons throughout the Navy. The museBomb.” This is a later version capable Military Aviation Museum um’s FG-1D Corsair was delivered to the of air launching and radio control. The 1341 Princess Anne Road Navy in 1945 but spent most of its time main building also displays aircraft Virginia Beach, VA 23457 in storage and probably has the fewest engines, including a Rolls-Royce Merlin Tel.: (757) 721-7767 flight hours of any Corsair. The museum and a Pratt and Whitney R-2800 18-cylhttp://www.militaryaviationmuseum.org also possesses an example of the Corsair’s inder Double Wasp, which powered the Open 7 days a week except Thanksgiving and Royal Navy rival, the Hawker Sea Fury. F6F Hellcat and the F4U Corsair. The Christmas Hours: 0900-1700 The museum’s Japanese Aichi D3A Wasp has been cut away for a better view Admission: adults $10, seniors and active“Val” dive bomber is one of nine used of its interior. duty military $9, children 6-18 $5, children in the 1970 film, Tora! Tora! Tora! A The second deck hosts a gallery of aviunder 5 and World War II veterans free. TBM-3E Avenger torpedo bomber, built ation paintings, uniforms, and artifacts. in 1945, saw only 1,227 hours of serIt offers an excellent view of the tarmac Mr. Wambold is the research coordinator of the vice, flying antisubmarine patrols from and runway, in addition to having balcoChester County Hall of Heroes project (www.chesco. Norfolk, Virginia, Miami, and the Pacific nies overlooking the aircraft-filled hangorg/heroes). He lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and is a regular contributor to Naval History. island of Palau. ers. Knowledgeable docents are available
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U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E
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