Naval History 2012-04

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April 2012 I Volume 26 I Number 2

U.S. Naval Institute I www.usni.org

Our 25th Year!

26 DEPARTMENTS 4

On Our Scope

6

Looking Back

8

In Contact

10 Naval History News 12 Historic Aircraft

18

The Last Union Survivor

26

Proving the Power of Iron over Wood

34

And the Winner Was . . .

38

Continuing the Monitor Story

42

When the Well Runs Dry

48

A Titanic Centennial

56

The Navy’s ‘Screwballs’

58

The Last Voyage of Andrew Sterett

16 Historic Fleets 68 Book Reviews

12

72 Museum Report

COVER: One hundred-fifty years ago, the ironclads Monitor and Virginia heralded a new age of naval warfare with their 9 March 1862 battle in Hampton Roads, Virginia. (Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia)

Naval History magazine (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: 800-2338764, 410-268-6110; fax 410-571-1703. Subscriptions: Naval Institute members $20 one year; Non-member subscription $30 one year. Editorial offices: U.S. Naval Academy, Beach Hall, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402-5034; 410-268-6110; 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); articlesubmissions@ usni.org; 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 in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to national defense. 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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N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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APRIL 2012

Edited by Robert M. Browning Jr. A combatant in history’s first clash of ironclads lived until 1921. His firsthand account of the 1862 MonitorVirginia duel has never been published—until now.

By John V. Quarstein When the CSS Virginia steamed forth on 8 March 1862, she sounded the death knell not just for the Cumberland and Congress, but for the Age of Fighting Sail.

By Francis J. DuCoin One was sidelined, the other was thwarted, neither delivered a knockout blow; the debate rages eternal over whether the Monitor or Virginia was the victor of their epic showdown.

By Anna Gibson Holloway The “cheesebox on a raft” forever changed naval history. Now, visitors can relive her story at the USS Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia.

By Thomas C. Hone The threat of budget cuts is nothing new to the U.S. Navy, as Admiral Forrest P. Sherman and the other officers who battled for the survival of the post–World War II force could attest.

By John Protasio On an April night a century ago, the largest ship in the world met her watery fate. The memory of the great disaster still resonates in the public’s consciousness.

By Daniel J. Demers Sure, they might have risked triggering an international incident, but these sailors on a weekend pass in 1941 weren’t about to let a Nazi German flag fly with impunity above the streets of San Francisco.

By Terrence S. McCormack He was a rising star of the early U.S. Navy, but Andrew Sterett resigned over a matter of honor, became a civilian skipper, and came to a tragic end.

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Contributors

2

Robert M. Browning Jr. is the chief historian for the U.S. Coast Guard and the author of four books and nearly 50 articles relating to the Coast Guard and U.S. naval and maritime history. He currently is finishing a manuscript on the Union Navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron, made famous by David Glasgow Farragut’s exploits.

Daniel J. Demers is a semi-retired businessman whose hobby is researching and writing about 19thand 20th-century historical events and personalities. He holds a degree in history from George Washington University, and he and his wife live in Guerneville, California.

Francis J. DuCoin volunteers at the USS Monitor Center, frequently lectures on Civil War naval history, and contributed a chapter to Craig Symonds’ book Union Combined Operations in the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2010). He has a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, a doctorate in dental medicine, and  a busy dental practice in Stuart, Florida.

Anna Gibson Holloway is the vice president of Collections & Programs at the Mariners’ Museum, where she also serves as curator of the USS Monitor  Center. The Winston-Salem, North Carolina, native recently earned her Ph.D. in history from the College of William and Mary.  In the past, she has been a musician, a square-rig sailor, and an understudy fire-eater.

Thomas C. Hone is a a recently retired member of the faculty of the Naval War College and a former senior executive in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He and his son Trent are the authors of Battle Line: The United States Navy 1919– 1939 (Naval Institute Press, 2006).

John   Protasio is the author of several books, including the Titanicthemed novel On a Cold April Night (PublishAmerica, 2007) and The Day the World Was Shocked (Casemate, 2011), a nonfiction treatment of the sinking of the Lusitania. A native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he holds a master’s degree in history.

Terrence S. McCormack, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote background material about Andrew Sterett (another Baltimore native) for the official booklet published in conjunction with the christening of the USS Sterett (DDG-104) in 2007. He is currently preparing a full-length biography of Sterett.

John V. Quarstein is the historian for the city of Hampton, Virginia, and worked for 30 years as the director of the Virginia War Museum. His many books include The Monitor Boys: The Crew of the Union’s First Ironclad (2011); Big Bethel: The First Battle (2011); and A History of Ironclads: The Power of Iron Over Wood (2006), all published by History Press.

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U.S. NAVAL I NSTIT U T E NAVAL HISTORY 291 Wood Rd. Annapolis, MD 21402-5034 5FM


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'BY



s virtually anyone with a passing interest in naval history knows, the duel between the Monitor and Virginia—which took place 150 years ago in Hampton Roads, Virginia—was a watershed warfare-afloat encounter. In a glimpse of the future, armored—not wooden—ships battled each other. But often overlooked is the fact that the Battle of Hampton Roads was a two-day affair, and the first day’s fighting, in which the CSS Virginia rampaged through part of a Union squadron of wooden ships with near impunity, was equally momentous. So in planning this issue’s Hampton Roads sesquicentennial package, I wanted to ensure we gave the lesser-appreciated but equally history-altering of the two ironclads, the Virginia, her due. Civil War author, preservationist, and raconteur John Quarstein accomplishes the task, telling the story of the U.S. Navy frigate Merrimack’s transformation into the Virginia and the latter’s brief career in “Proving the Power of Iron over Wood.” During the war, the Confederate ironclad was frequently referred to as the Merrimack— commonly misspelled as “Merrimac”—despite the fact she had been commissioned as the CSS Virginia. Use of the incorrect name, alliteratively pleasing when paired with “Monitor,” became nearly ubiquitous, with even historians perpetuating the mistake (Albert L. Demaree’s Proceedings article 50 years ago, “The Merrimack—Our Navy’s Worst Headache,” parenthetically notes that “Southerners call her Virginia”). In “You Say Merrimack, I Say Virginia,” a sidebar to his article, Mr. BEVERLEY R. ROBINSON COLLECTION, U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY MUSEUM Quarstein explores the history In Monitor & Merrimac, First Fight between Ironclads, artist Julian of the name confusion. Oliver Davidson captured the drama of the 9 March 1862 duel (even The importance of the though he got the name of the Confederate ship wrong). Battle of Hampton Roads wasn’t lost on those who r




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r fought it, and immediately after the events of 8–9 March 1862, participants and onlookers began recording their recollections. Civil War historian Francis DuCoin’s article “And the Winner Was . . .” relies on reports and reminiscences of a crucial turning point and subsequent events during the Monitor-Virginia fight to determine which was the victor. While most Hampton Roads battle recollections have long been in print, Monitor First-class Fireman John Driscoll’s hadn’t been published—until now. In “The Last Union Survivor,” Coast Guard Chief Historian Robert Browning presents the Irish-born Driscoll’s account of the Monitor’s harrowing voyage to Hampton Roads and dramatic duel with the Virginia—a rare perspective of those events from an enlisted man. After Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt had arranged for Driscoll and other Monitor veterans to take a voyage through the Panama Canal in 1916, the aged sailor had his recollections recorded and presented to FDR. The original transcript is now at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. Many thanks to Dr. Browning for editing Driscoll’s account and bringing it to Naval History, as well as to Mr. Quarstein for providing another sidebar, “The Monitor Boys.” Our Hampton Roads coverage concludes with a tour of the USS Monitor Center conducted by its curator, Anna Gibson Holloway. Located at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, the center is both a working laboratory where items raised from the Monitor’s wreck site—including her turret and engine—are conserved, as well as a 20,000-square-foot, high-tech exhibition where many of the ironclad’s artifacts are displayed. And for the latest conservation developments concerning another Civil War vessel, the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, see this issue’s “Naval History News” section. Richard G. Latture Editor-in-Chief

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Richard G. Latture [email protected] ASSOCIATE EDITORS Robin Bisland [email protected] Eric Mills [email protected] Anne Collier Rehill [email protected] Donald Ross [email protected] EDITOR-IN-CHIEF PROCEEDINGS Paul Merzlak [email protected] EDITORIAL PROJECT COORDINATOR Liese Doherty [email protected] DIRECTOR OF DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Kelly Erlinger [email protected] SENIOR DESIGNER Jen Mabe [email protected] PHOTO EDITOR Amy Voight [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Robert J. Cressman, Norman Polmar, Fred Schultz, Paul Stillwell PUBLISHER William Miller [email protected] ADVERTISING SALES Director—William K. Hughes [email protected] Manager—David Sheehan [email protected] Advertising Assistant—Michelle Mullen [email protected] CEO VADM Peter H. Daly, USN (Ret.) [email protected] EDITORIAL BOARD Chairman — CAPT Douglas M. Fears, USCG COL John J. Abbatiello, USAF CDR Stephen D. Barnett, USN LCDR Claude G. Berube, USNR SGTMAJ David K. Devaney, USMC COL Robert W. Lanham, USMC BMCM Kevin P. Leask, USCG MAJ Marcus J. Mainz, USMC LT Robert P. McFall, USN CAPT David M. McFarland, USN LTC John A. Mowchan III, USA CDR Jeffrey W. Novak, USCG CDR John P. Patch, USN (Ret.)

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Looking Back

By Paul Stillwell

Born in 1912

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served as pastor for two small country his year there will be a great churches. Later, he became mayor of deal of hoopla over the 100th Springfield as well. In the early 1950s, anniversary of the sinking of as I was growing up, Dad helped me the British liner Titanic on her assemble a plastic model of the battleship first voyage (see story, p. 48). My father, Missouri (BB-63), named for our state. Carl Stillwell, felt a kinship with that I recall gluing the 5-inch gun mounts event for the rest of his life, because he into the superstructure and hanging tiny was born on 30 March 1912, a little more signal flags over the pieces of thread that than two weeks before the great ship linked bow and stern with the foremast. sank. For years, his mother noted that he Later, when we were assembling a model was the same age as whatever anniversary of the passenger liner United States, he was being observed. borrowed a Life magazine from the library He grew up very much a product of the Depression—creating a habit of frugality that lasted a lifetime. After he graduated from high school in 1930, he worked in a bank in New York City for four years to save money for college. During the summer vacations from undergraduate school at Elmhurst College—and later Eden Seminary—he served as a Merchant Marine officer. I still have his blue blouse with four faded gold stripes on each sleeve. Drawing on his business background, he was purser for Great Lakes cruise ships. As my brother, Mark, and I grew up, we heard his tales of being under way, taking care of passengers, seeing the Northern Lights, and steering the ship for fun when he got the opportunity. In 1941 Dad was ordained as a minister and began work at a church in Dayton, Ohio. With the coming of World War II, he volunteered to serve as an Army chaplain. His application was turned down because it would have meant closing his church. I PAUL STILLWELL remain grateful for that twist of fate; Mayor Carl Stillwell poses in front of the Springfield, otherwise, I might not have been born. Missouri, City Hall in the late 1960s. He did contribute to the war effort in a r




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r limited way. He was an air-raid warden, so we could use its color photos of the charged with making sure neighborhood ship to guide our paint scheme. lights were blacked out at night because Fifty years ago this spring, shortly after the Army’s nearby Wright Field might have I registered for the draft, Dad guided me been a bombing target—as farfetched as into the Naval Reserve as an alternative. that seems in hindsight. The Army sent Brother Mark followed a year later. Dad up a plane to check the effectiveness of the wisely foresaw the advantages of our blackout. The only lights showing were the staying in the reserve until retirement, glowing tips of cigarettes as the wardens and both of us did. My first underway walked their beats. duty, in 1963, was as a seaman apprentice In 1 9 4 5 t he f a mily mo v ed to in the destroyer escort Daniel A. Joy Springfield, Missouri, where Dad became (DE-585) on the Great Lakes. I stood business manager and eventually vice helm watches and learned to steer as Dad president of Drury College. He also

6

had more than 20 years earlier. One of the ports his cruise ship hit was Lake Huron’s Mackinac Island, home of the fabulous Grand Hotel. It was a genuine pleasure to take my family to the island in 2006—two years after Dad died at the age of 92—and figuratively walk in his footsteps. In time, both Mark and I left Springfield to go on active duty in ships of the Pacific Fleet Amphibious Force. Dad was completely supportive of our efforts, and I like to think there was a sense of pride involved. Circumstances had prevented his participation in World War II, but in the late 1960s, circumstances compelled us to take part in the conflict in Vietnam. He urged us to keep in frequent touch but was not demanding about it. His pledge was a simple one: “Every time I get a letter from you, I’ll write one back.” He did. The Fleet post-office system was remarkably efficient in those days when e-mails were nonexistent and telephone calls from overseas were quite expensive and thus brief. When the two of us got home from the war, he presented us with stacks of our letters he had received and saved for us. In the meantime, he forwarded an interesting letter to my ship, the USS Washoe County (LST-1165), which was homeported in Japan and made frequent deployments to Vietnam. The letter had come from the Selective Service System and been delivered to the home address. It informed me that my college deferment had expired and I was therefore eligible to be drafted. I was directed to report to Fort Riley, Kansas, for a preinduction physical. I wrote to the Selective Service folks, told them where I was and what I was doing, and never heard from them again. One memory from that time remains particularly poignant. The airport in Springfield had no jet ways, no Transportation Security Administration. Friends and relatives essentially could go planeside on the tarmac to see people off. As I was preparing to fly away, first to California and then the Far East, I looked out the window of the airplane and saw Dad wordlessly saying good-bye. He was saluting.

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N e w P u b l i c at i o n s F r o m T h e N ava l I n s t i t u t e P r e s s

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In Contact Special Ops and SEALs Sergeant Major Mike R. Vining, U.S. Army (Retired) I have a few comments about Captain Dick Couch’s article “SEALs: 50 Years & Counting” (February, pp. 16–23). I appreciate the difficulty in condensing 50 years of SEAL history into a short, well-done article. My comments have to do with the sidebar pieces. In “The Forerunners: World War II Frogmen,” Rear Admiral Draper L. Kauffman’s first assignment after being transferred from the Royal Navy to the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant  was the estab-

lishment of the Navy’s first Bomb Disposal School at the Washington Navy Yard. In “Special Ops Forces, SEALs, and the Bin Laden Takedown,” Captain Couch characterizes as “botched” the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt of 53 Americans held hostage in Iran. My dictionary says that word means “bungled or unskilled piece of work,” to which I take offense. In my opinion, a better word would be “failed.” I served 30 years in the Army with the last 20 years in the Army’s Tier-1 Special Mission Unit. I am one of the survivors of the EC-130E “bladder

Mister Roberts—The Movie Commander Paul Stillwell, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired) In the February issue, Lisle Rose declared the movie version of Mister Roberts to be an “unbridled insult to U.S. Navy enlisted men” (“In Contact,” p. 9). He is entitled to his opinion, but I disagree. In the 1960s, not all that long after the era depicted in the film, I served at different times as an enlisted man and an officer. I found the film to be amusing rather than insulting. In fact, I took the challenge Mr. Rose posed in his comment. I watched the movie again recently and also reread Thomas Heggen’s classic book on which the film is based. I appreciated James Roberts’ article that illumined the background for the book and the role that his cousin played as eponym and inspiration for the title character (“Happy 65th Birthday, Mister Roberts,” December, pp. 54–57). The book itself is not really a novel. It is a series of beautifully drawn individual vignettes that evoke many of the memories I felt in serving on board ship. Who could forget what standing a midwatch was like, for example? Heggen added humor and a loosely connected plot to make a book of the stories. The movie went a step further, crafting a plot that included many elements not in the book. To be sure, it turned the story into a farce—and I would argue that it is an entertaining one. Many people hatch imaginary plots against overbearing superiors in the chain of command. And for the most part, they remain just that— imaginary. But the movie can also tell us some things about the mores of the Navy of the period and those of today. Even 20 years after World War II, in the area of alcohol abuse, the attitude essentially was that if a man got drunk on liberty, didn’t hurt anyone or cause property damage, he probably wouldn’t be disciplined if he could get up the next day and do his job. Once, as command duty officer of a ship, I was in my bunk one night when two intoxicated chief petty officers came into my room at perhaps 0100, turned on the lights, and began singing Christmas carols to me. The next day they were sheepishly apologetic, and life went on. In more recent years, the Navy has become proactive in dealing with alcoholism, both in terms of prevention and treatment. For many years, the skipper’s word was law on board a Navy ship, even when he was as cruel and capricious and apparently incompe-

8

bird” that was hit by a RH-53D helicopter at Desert One. Eight brave servicemen lost their lives in that rescue attempt. Blame for what went wrong can be pointed at all of the four services. The biggest factor that led to the failure was the downsizing of Special Operations following the Vietnam War. It’s a lesson that I hope we don’t repeat today. I have had the honor and pleasure to work with Navy SEALs during my career, and they have my utmost respect. I count many of them as my friends. They are a national treasure.

tent as was the captain of the Reluctant in Mister Roberts. These days the Navy recognizes the corrosive effect of such an approach. Navy Times periodically reports on cases of relief from command for inappropriate behavior and inhospitable command climate. Finally, both the book and cinematic versions of Mister Roberts provide object lessons on the traits of leadership and the twoway street known as loyalty. Those values are prime assets in our Navy—past, present, and future.

Commander Walter Dunn Tucker, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired) I loved the movie Mister Roberts for both its entertainment value and the fact that I could tell civilian friends that my ship, the USS Betelgeuse (AK-260), was similar to that of Mister Roberts, only larger. The Betelgeuse was blessed with a compatible crew and wardroom and by the fact that there were no international crises that put us in danger during my time on board, May 1955–October 1956. Most shipmates, like Mister Roberts and Ensign Pulver, planned to serve one hitch and then return to civilian life. We performed our duties well and had some great times. Several of my closest friends are shipmates from those fondly remembered days. Naturally, all wasn’t fun and games. I was intimidated when summoned to the office of the commander Service Force, Atlantic, one day after signing a requisition for valuable public-addresssystem parts replacing those that our sailors had dropped into the water when loading cargo at Army Piers in Norfolk. I was mighty relieved when the admiral asked me what we did with our cargo when we got to Barcelona. After I told him, he said: “The real reason you’re here is that Barcelona has the best olives in the world with which to make great martinis. Please bring me ‘umpteen’ cases. This money should cover the cost.” On each of our four trips to the Med we stopped in Naples. On the tenth night there during one cruise, we reported to shore patrol that the grand total of one officer and two other ranks were on liberty. On that night, Naples qualified for the names of ports in Mister Roberts: Tedium, Apathy, Monotony, and Ennui. The movie Mister Roberts is a classic that I have watched and enjoyed many times over the years. What a pity that the writer of the squib in the February 2012 issue of Naval History took it so seriously. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

Postwar Tour of Manila Commander Louis D. Chirillo, U.S. Navy (Retired) The following concerns Allan A. Ryan’s comments about Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s war crimes trial (“In Contact,” February, p. 9) in which he was alleged to have lost control of his troops in the Philippines. Mr. Ryan notes that a subordinate Japanese naval officer refused orders to abandon Manila, and his men committed the atrocities there. The USS Burleigh (APA-95), the ship in which I was assigned, was at anchor in Manila Bay for nearly all of the month of January 1946. The Burleigh was fitted as a reserve command ship and thus had rather elaborate facilities for processing film. Lieutenant R. Hummel, who was exceptionally skilled in both exposing and processing film, was in charge. Since I had access to a jeep, we combined our resources and made a number of forays into thoroughly destroyed Manila and the adjacent countryside. During one such tour through what had been the government area, we met a U.S. Army artillery sergeant who explained that fanatical Japanese “naval troops” disobeyed the order to evacuate the city and conducted a building-by-building defense. He added: “We moved to within a few blocks, so close that we didn’t have to use the gun sight. We just quickly looked through the tube and slammed in another round!” As a consequence, the shell fire undercut structures such as the finance building [above]. But the Manila Hotel [left] was not destroyed in that manner. The sergeant told us that the entire top floor had been General Douglas MacArthur’s home when he was military adviser to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus, on his return the general had ordered that the hotel be left intact, but Japanese naval troops occupied the building and during the attempt to oust them, the building burned.

Sea Kings’ Long Service Sam M. Griffin Jr. Norman Polmar’s chronology of the HSS-2/SH-3A Sea King’s evolution from its introduction in 1961 until its retirement from the Fleet in 1996 (“Historic Aircraft,” February, pp. 12–13) provides a welcome “rest of the story” for pilots who flew the helicopter in its early days. It had a long, productive career with many applications, and Mr. Polmar treats it with the dignity it deserves. However, he is confused when he states, “The naval variants had fixed landing gear; the land-based helicopters had retractable gear.” I left the Navy in July 1963, so I am unfamiliar with the later configurations of the H-3, but I was one of the HS-3 pilots in the HSS-2 Fleet Introduction Program in 1961 and flew it on its first at-sea deployN AVA L H I S T O R Y

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ment. All of the HSS-2/SH-3As of which I am aware—at least through 1963—had retractable gear. The designated ordnance for the initial HSS-2/SH-3As included the Mark 43 torpedo, but I do not recall the Mark 44 being listed. Also, all of the HSS-2/SH-3As of the original group had rescue hoists, so perhaps the mention of a rescue hoist among the additions in the HH-3A conversion refers to a longer-reach or higher-capacity hoist. As an aside, the SH-3A’s boat hull was never intended for routine amphibious use, but rather for emergency landings at sea. But, until inflatable flotation devices were added to the landing-gear sponsons some years later, the top-heavy aircraft was unstable on the water without power to the rotors and nearly always capsized when they stopped.

A little clarification is in order on the SH-3A role in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The first recovery for the SH-3A occurred with Scott Carpenter’s Mercury flight in Aurora 7 on 24 May 1962. The trained recovery team on board the USS Intrepid (CVS-11) was a detachment of Marine H-34s from HMX-1. A Sea King from HS-3 was assigned a press support role only, but the SH-3As were not scheduled to be involved in the actual recovery. Because of the marginal lifting capacity of the H-34 and the high-density altitude of the Caribbean in May, the H-34s carried a reduced fuel load. After Carpenter’s splashdown 250 miles downrange put him out of range of the Marine H-34s, two SH-3A In Contact continued on page 66

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Naval History News Long-Lost WWII Shipwreck Located For 70 years her final resting place remained a lingering mystery of World War II, but HMS Olympus, a Royal Navy submarine that sank in May 1942 with the loss of 89 lives, finally has been found. The Aurora Trust, an American exploration and under-

abouts have been sought for years. “The Aurora Trust maintains an operating base in Malta,” said Aurora director and cofounder Craig Mullen. “Each year we develop an annual  seafloor  survey plan with various Mediterranean countries and have discovered numerous ancient wreck sites in Italy, Croatia, Spain, and elsewhere.” With such

AURORA TRUST

Wreck site . . . and grave site. The 1942 Olympus tragedy comes to some degree of closure with the long-sought discovery of her exact location. This sonar image indicates the sunken vessel is still in good condition. r




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water-archaeology foundation, announced in January that it had confirmed the wreck site. Located in the Mediterranean Sea several miles off the coast of Malta, the Olympus had long eluded searchers, for she lies on a particularly wreck-strewn seafloor amid ships’ remains that have accrued from antiquity to modern times. Nonetheless, the loss of the Olympus was one of World War II’s most poignant naval disasters, and her precise where-

an archaeologically target-rich environment, much time is spent not only on diving, but on the continuing task of cataloguing, grid by grid, just what’s all down there. “When back on Malta, we have a program of routinely surveying a section of the seafloor around the islands on a timeavailable basis, with the objective of ultimately completing a  survey of the seafloor  surrounding Malta out to 350 miles,” Mullen said. “It was in the process of one

of these ‘gratis’ surveys that we discovered the Olympus.” To locate any sunken ship is satisfying enough, but to come to the realization that she is a finally resolved loose end of history can be all the more exhilirating. “The initial feeling is one of excitement and the elation of discovery,” said Mullen. “It comes in three stages: The first is as the side-scan sonar record scrolls across the screen—‘Wow, is that what I think it is?’ The  second is when  the video images sent up from the remotely operated vehicle that’s gliding above the wreck verify the sonar target is, in fact, a lost submarine. “The third stage is the realization that 89 men lost their lives in the sinking. Clearly, most remain entombed, and you come to grips with the fact you are witnessing a long-lost war-grave site.” The Olympus had departed Malta and was bound for Gibraltar when she struck a mine and went down on the night of 8 May 1942. Compounding the tragedy, her complement included the grateful survivors of three other British subs, sunk previously in air raids. Only nine men survived the sinking of the Olympus, and they did so by swimming seven miles back to Malta. Many more are thought to have survived the loss of the sub but to have perished in the attempt to reach shore. “Aurora is cooperating with the Maltese and British governments regarding the site,” Mullen said. His group has not publicly revealed the location of the Olympus; plans are to return to the site and conduct a thorough high-resolution photo survey of the entire wreck, which is upright and in remarkably good condition. “Considering what it represents and  its status as a war grave,” said Mullen, “Aurora has no plans to recover artifacts.” —Eric Mills

A Pioneering Submarine, Fully Visible at Last Seeing the Civil War submarine H. L. Hunley has never been easy. For more than a century, the Jules-Vernesque Confederate vessel was hidden by the depths of the sea. Since her recovery and relocation to Clemson University’s Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2000, she has been obscured by a steel truss mega-structure that was used to lift her from the ocean. On 12 January that changed,

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and the Hunley became completely visible for the first time since 1864. The 50-foot, 17,000-pound truss that had been a view-blocking appendage sitting atop the sub was carefully removed by experts in what was at times a delicate procedure. Though necessary for the Hunley’s safety, the truss also had completely obstructed a full viewing of the submarine until now. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

Enhancing the visitor experience is only one of the benefits of January’s big move. “Separating the truss from the Hunley represents the official beginning of the final conservation treatment of the vessel,” said Lasch Center director Mike Drews. Next, modifications will begin on the Hunley’s 90,000-gallon conservation tank. The tank, which currently holds chilled freshwater to stabilize the submarine as she awaits treatment—needs to be altered in order to accommodate the chemicals necessary for conservation. Scientists hope to have the submarine soaking in the chemical bath by the end of 2012. The solution is designed to slowly leach out the salts that infiltrated the Hunley’s iron during her 136year stay on the ocean floor. Those salts are toxic to iron and threaten the very survival of the historic submarine. After several months of soaking in the solution, the layer of concreted sand, shell, and silt that encases the Hunley will be carefully removed, allowing for a faster pace of conservation. Though it is no longer needed to support the vessel, the steel truss will continue to have a role in the project. “The large steel structure was an integral part of the cutting-edge technological achievement in the Hunley’s recovery,” said South

FRIENDS OF THE HUNLEY

With the removal of the giant steel truss that had rescued and protected her, the view of the innovative Civil War submarine H. L. Hunley is now unimpeded. r




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Carolina Senator Glenn McConnell, chairman of the Hunley Commission. “It will be preserved and placed in the planned Hunley Museum to tell future generations about the technology that encompassed every aspect of the story from the submarine itself, to its recovery, and to its conservation and preservation.” On the evening of 17 February 1864, the Hunley became the world’s first successful combat submarine by sinking the U.S. screw sloop-of-war Housatonic. After signaling to shore that the mission had been accomplished, the submarine and her crew of eight mysteriously vanished. The Hunley finally was located in 1995 by Clive Cussler’s National Underwater and Marine Agency. The submarine was raised in 2000 and delivered to the Lasch Center, where an international team of scientists is at work to conserve the innovative vessel for future generations and piece together clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance.

An Overdue Marker for ‘Gallant John’ The Naval Order of the United States has teamed with the National Park Service to create a wayside marker to be placed alongside the Washington, D.C., statue of U.S. Navy Commodore John Barry (1745–1803). Although the statue has been in Franklin Park on 14th Street NW since its dedication by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, there has been no interpretive marker to explain to the public who Commodore Barry was and why he is relevant to America’s naval story. Born in County Wexford, Ireland, Barry went to sea while still a boy and had

arrived in Philadelphia by 1760. When the Revolutionary War began, he was given command of the Continental Navy brig Lexington. He commanded several other Continental Navy ships, including the frigate Alliance, and won decisive victories over British warships and privateers. In 1794 Barry received an appointment as the senior captain of the new U.S. Navy. He supervised construction of the frigate United States, and during the Quasi-War with France he commanded a squadron protecting America’s West Indies trade.

Celebrated today as a founder of the U.S. Navy, “Gallant John Barry” was a guiding force in shipbuilding and supply, and a mentor to the next generation of U.S. naval officers who would go on to fight in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. His statue was created by sculptor John J. Boyle on a commission from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other patriotic American groups of Irish decent. The new wayside marker is scheduled to be dedicated in Franklin Park on 5 May at 1100.

Bruns Comes Aboard at Navy Museum The Naval Historical Foundation has announced that Jim Bruns has taken the helm as the director of the National Museum of the United States Navy. His appointment fills a two-year vacancy in the head position of the Navy’s flagship museum. Following a 20-year-career with the Smithsonian Institution, Bruns served as president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Historical Society, as chief executive officer of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, and as vice president of Montclair State University. He has assumed leadership of the Navy’s flagship museum at a time of pending change and hoped-for expansion. “At its current location [on the Washington Navy Yard] the Museum is limited in what it can showcase,” Bruns said. “The current facility also is outN AVA L H I S T O R Y

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dated, inadequate, and overcrowded.” In addition to those issues, “Since 9/11, it has become harder to visit because of the Navy Yard’s need to secure its perimeter. Public parking at the current location is also extremely limited.” A recently published Naval History and Heritage Command strategic plan proposes moving the museum to an existing structure located just beyond the western boundary of the Navy Yard, with the goal of opening the new facility in 2015. “This is an exciting challenge, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Bruns. “Few museum professionals are ever asked to run a national museum. Fewer still are ever given the opportunity to create a new national museum, especially one as important as the new National Navy Museum.”

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Historic Aircraft

By Norman Polmar Author, SHIPS AND AIRCRAFT OF THE U.S. FLEET

A Premier Fighter

A

lmost all famous fighter aircraft— those of the United States and other nations—primarily gained their fame by a large number of aerial kills. Not so the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Although considered an outstanding fighter aircraft by most criteria, the F-14 did not have a significant aerial score in U.S. Navy service. Indeed, Navy pilots shot down only five enemy aircraft during the more than three decades that the F-14 was in the Fleet: four Libyan-flown fighters and one Iraqi-flown helicopter. Significantly, and virtually unknown in the West, Irani-piloted F-14s reportedly achieved 150 air kills in the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War. Today, Iran, ostensibly an “enemy,” is the only nation flying the F-14. The Tomcat evolved from a failure. In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara proposed a common fighter-attack aircraft to be flown by the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps— an action that was intended to accrue financial savings in design, procurement, and support. This became the General Dynamics F-111 tri-service fighter (TFX). Subsequently, strategic bomber (FB-111) and electronic attack (EF-111) variants were developed.1 But the Navy’s F-111B variant proved too heavy for carrier service and, following trials, its acquisition was canceled. The Navy turned to Grumman to develop the

U.S. NAVY

Landing signal officers watch as an F-14B Tomcat, assigned to the Swordsmen of VF-32, snags an arresting wire on board the Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) on 14 July 2005. Although no external weapons are mounted, visible under the right wing is a LANTIRN (Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infra Red for Night) pod, and beneath the nose is the large lens of the TCS (tactical camera system) above a tiny position light and the streamlined ALQ-100 ECM antenna. r




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follow-on fighter to the highly successful McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II flown by all three services and numerous allied nations. Grumman had developed some great Navy fighter aircraft—the F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat, and F9F Panther/

The Navy wanted a fighter that could provide long-range fleet air defense against Soviet missile-armed bombers. That role required a large radar/fire-control system and heavy missile payload. Still, because aircraft numbers on board carriers were limited, the aircraft also had to

2

J. M. CAIELLA

The 23rd Tomcat built for the Iranians is shown in current Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) markings, which include its original BuNo 160322 and warning placards still in English. This aircraft reportedly has at least six kills to its credit and was one of two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-14s that in 1978 put an end to Soviet MiG-25R overflights. As depicted, the aircraft carries an AIM-9 Sidewinder and, for illustration purposes, a modified MIM-23 Hawk surface-to-air missile. The Hawk was an aborted attempt begun in 1985 by the Iranians—with Israeli help—to supplement their limited supply of Phoenixes. r




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12

U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

maneuverability and gunfire, and attack roles. The resulting F-14 met these requirements—and more. Grumman initiated in-house studies for a future Navy fighter—designated VFX—as soon as it became evident that the F-111B would not meet the requirements for a carrier-based fighter. The Grumman design team, led by Michael Pelehach, was able to build on fighter experience in Vietnam as well as

the F-14 was 230 mph faster with a 40 percent greater radius of action, range, and endurance. The Tomcat’s ceiling was higher and landing speed was almost 30 mph slower, increasing the safety factor in carrier operations. In a dogfight, the F-14 demonstrated a higher roll rate and

missile-control system that could simultaneously guide long-range Phoenix missiles to six targets. Unique to the F-14, the Phoenix was intended to intercept attacking Soviet bombers at a range of 60 miles. In addition, the fighter could carry infrared-guided Sidewinder and radar-guided

Grumman F-14A Tomcat F-111 and the firm’s XF10F-1 experiJ. M. CAIELLA ence with swing-wing aircraft. The 28th F-14A off the assembly Type: Fighter-attack Grumman and five other contracline—BuNo 158627—was the first Weight: 74,349 pounds max. takeoff tors submitted VFX proposals to the Tomcat delivered to a Fleet unit, Length: 61 feet, 11 inches Navy in June 1968, a month after VF-1, in June 1973. The aircraft Wingspan: 64 feet, 2 inches (unswept) Congress refused further funding carried these markings that September for the F-111B. Grumman was proHeight: 16 feet before the squadron was assigned nounced winner of the competition Engines: 2 Pratt & Whitney TF30-P-412A turbofan; to the Enterprise (CVN-65). It is on 14 January 1969. Moving rapidly, 20,900 lb st each maximum shown carrying a mix of AIM-54 the company had the prototype Max. speed: 1,345 mph at 50,000 feet F-14A ready to fly on 21 December Phoenix, AIM-7 Sparrow, and Crew: Pilot, Radar Intercept Officer 1970. Unfortunately, that aircraft AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. Armament: 1 M61A1 Vulcan multi-barrel cannon was lost on its second flight, on 30 r




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December. The crew ejected safely, Up to 14,500 pounds bombs, missiles, four Phoenixes and two 280-gallon and the problem—a hydraulic failrockets, drop tanks drop tanks, or eight Sparrows and ure—was quickly identified. Flight Sidewinders with the tests resumed on 24 May drop tanks for a mission 1971, with carrier tritime of almost three als on board the USS hours. Forrestal (CVA-59) in A variety of bombs June 1972. could be carried: 14 The basic design proMK 82 500-pound vided a twin-turbofan bombs and two drop fighter with a complex tanks provided a system of variable-geomcombat radius of some etry air intakes. Twin 550 nautical miles in vertical tail fins were a high-flight mission provided to compensate profile, or 400 nautical for the sudden loss of miles in a low-flight thrust in the event of profile. The aircraft an engine failure. The also was fitted with variable-sweep wings an internal M61A1 were automatically U.S. NAVY Gatling gun with 676 controlled for optimum rounds of ammunition. performance through the Flames spouting from the afterburners of its GE F110 engines, a VF-31 The lack of an interaircraft’s entire operating Tomcatter F-14D of the Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) pulls up during a flyby on 19 June 2006. It was one of the final deployments of the aircraft type as it nal gun was a major envelope without pilot shortcoming of Navy– attention. In comparison was removed from service that September. Marine Phantoms. with the F-4 Phantom, r




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Fleet Readiness Squadron VF-124 at Naval Air Station Miramar, California, received the first F-14s in early 1973; Fleet introduction came with fighter squadrons VF-1 and VF-2 embarked in the Enterprise (CVAN-65). They participated in the evacuation of Saigon in April 1975. Although there was no aerial combat, the “Big E” Tomcats strafed North Vietnamese troops during the evacuation. Two F-14 squadrons soon became the standard air-wing component on board U.S. carriers. A total of 33 VF squadrons plus four VX development squadrons flew the Tomcat. The plane was involved in

F-14s also were used in the attack role, beginning on 5 September 1995, when an F-14A from the Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on Serb positions in Bosnia. More strikes followed, but the aircraft’s reconnaissance role was more important than its attack role. With retirement of the Fleet’s RA-5C Vigilante, RF-8 Crusader, and RF-4B Phantom reconnaissance aircraft, the Navy developed the Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance Pod System (TARPS) for F-14s to conduct photo and other “recon” missions. From the late 1970s approximately 65 F-14A and all F-14D variants

U.S. NAVY

With wings fully swept, F-14B BuNo 163227 of VF-211 Checkmates carried a fullPhoenix loadout of six inert missiles on a 24 October 1989 flight. In this configuration, two Sidewinders could also be carried on rails outboard of the pylon-mounted Phoenixes. This load was seldom carried because of the severe weight and drag penalties. r




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a variety of Cold War–era crises around the world. Their first combat occurred on 19 August 1981, when two F-14s from VF-41 on board the carrier Nimitz (CVN68) shot down two Libyan Su-22 Fitter fighters with Sidewinder missiles about 60 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. There was a repeat action on 4 January 1989, when two Tomcats from VF-32 on the John F. Kennedy (CV-67) shot down two Libyan MiG-23 Flogger fighters with Sidewinders and Sparrows. The fifth and final F-14 kill occurred on 6 February 1991 during the Gulf War when a VF-1 Tomcat from the Ranger (CV-61) downed an Iraqi Mi-8 Hip helicopter.

14

could be fitted with TARPS while retaining their combat capabilities. Production of the Tomcat continued through March 1987, with 632 aircraft being delivered to the Navy: 557 F-14A including development aircraft, 38 F-14A+ (redesignated F-14B), and 37 new F-14D variants. (Thirty-two F-14A aircraft were modified to the F-14A+ configuration, provided with upgraded engines and advanced electronics. An earlier upengined F-14B prototype converted from an F-14A was tested, but no production followed.) A planned F-14C all-weather attack-and-reconnaissance design was stillborn. The F-14D variant—of the 55

total, 18 were modified from F-14As—had improved engines and electronics. The Marine Corps at one point planned to fly the Tomcat; however, the Marine leadership decided instead to procure additional F-4s and to proceed with the AV-8 Harrier vertical-takeoff/landing aircraft. Beyond the 632 F-14s produced for the U.S. Navy, another 80 F-14A aircraft were built for Iran. The Iranian government suffered frustration from periodic incursions by Soviet high-performance reconnaissance aircraft, thus their leadership sought F-15 Eagle or F-14 Tomcat fighters as a deterrence, with the latter being selected. The shah’s government ordered 80 F-14A aircraft, with 79 being delivered—with Phoenix missiles—from 1976 to 1979. The Islamic revolution of 1979 caused the last aircraft to be retained by Grumman.3 With the fall of the shah’s regime, the U.S. Navy initiated actions to develop electronic countermeasures to defeat the AIM-54A Phoenix missiles sold to Iran, and to make U.S. missiles invulnerable to Iranian countermeasures. Still, the Islamic Republic’s acquisition of F-14s and Phoenix missiles led to concern for future U.S. air operations. The Iranian fighters are generally credited with 150 air-to-air kills of Iraqi aircraft.4 Reportedly, some are still operational, kept in service in part with Russian assistance and illegally acquired U.S. parts. The U.S. Navy has phased the F-14 out of the Fleet. The last F-14D squadron, VF-213, retired its aircraft on 22 September 2006. Thus, the fighter served the U.S. Navy for just over three decades. While not a record-maker, the F-14 Tomcat was a truly great aircraft. 1. See N. Polmar, “The Aircraft That Couldn’t,” Naval History (June 2004), pp. 14–15. 2. In the 1962 redesignation action the F9F became the F-9, the S2F the S-2, the WF the E-1, and the W2F the E-2. 3. The Iranian procurement and operation of the F-14 are detailed in Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop, Iranian F-14 Tomcat Units in Combat (Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2004). 4. These kills are listed in Cooper and Bishop, pp. 85–88.

Mr. Polmar, a columnist for Proceedings and Naval History, is author of the two-volume Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events (2004, 2008).

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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Historic Fleets

By Robert J. Cressman

More Lives Than a Cat

W

hen one needs ships, it is of ship nomenclature, the Mayflower was Colt 6-mm machine guns, the Mayflower usually too late to build designated as a yacht, PY-1, on 17 July served on the Cuban blockade. After them. In mid-February 1920, and was converted from coal to oil hostilities with Spain ended, the Navy, 1898, as tensions heatin 1923. which had thought so highly of her as to ed the diplomatic climate between the In March 1929, however, President sometimes call her a “cruiser,” deemed United States and Spain in the wake of Herbert Hoover, citing the high cost of the Mayflower “well adapted for special the destruction of the battleship Maine at the ship’s upkeep, ordered the Mayflower service.” Havana, Cuba, the U.S. Navy cast a broad net to acquire suitable vessels to be converted for wartime purposes. A particular yacht of stout Scottish construction—her steel hull being divided into eight watertight compartments—caught the Navy’s eye. Ironically, that attractive ship had been built not for war, but for a pastime of the very wealthy— yachting. Ogden Goelet, the American millionaire and a member of the prestigious New York Yacht Club, had ordered the vessel from the shipbuilding firm of J. and G. Thompson of Clydebank, Scotland. Designed by naval architect George L. Watson, the ship was launched on 6 November 1896 and christened NATIONAL ARCHIVES Mayflower. She completed her The Mayflower, national ensign at the fore and gaff, and presidential flag at the main, steams past builders’ trials in May 1897, clocking the K-6 (Submarine No. 36) and her saluting crew during the Fleet Review at New York City on 3 16.75 knots—quite a feat for a ship October 1911. of that tonnage. That summer, her r




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r owner proudly took her to Cowes, England, where he hosted the prince inactivated, and she was decommissioned President Theodore Roosevelt began of Wales (the future King Edward VII), on 5 June 1929. The Navy rejected four using the ship, then resplendent in white Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King bids from those who sought to acquire and spar color, as the presidential yacht Carlos of Portugal, Grand Duke Boris of her, then decided to retain her, first in 1902. She hosted the first meeting of Russia, American financier J. Pierpont slating her to replace the yacht Niagara Russian and Japanese diplomats at Oyster Morgan, and Thomas J. Lipton, tea (PY-9) as a surveying vessel, then to oufit Bay, New York, in 1905, on the eve of entrepreneur and ardent yachtsman. her to relieve the aging armored cruiser negotiations that ultimately brought Goelet later fell ill and died on board the Rochester (CA-2) as the flagship of the an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Mayflower on 27 August, and she bore his Special Service Squadron. Four years later Roosevelt greeted the embalmed body back to Newport, Rhode The renovation work, ordered on return of America’s Great White Fleet to Island, for the funeral. 2 December 1930, had not yet been Hampton Roads, Virginia, from the deck The Mayflower retained her completed when a fire broke out on of the Mayflower, one of the last times he name when the Navy acquired her board as she lay in the Philadelphia Navy would use the ship while in office. from Goelet’s estate, and she was Yard on the frigid night of 24 January She then served Presidents commissioned at the Boston Navy 1931. The Marines of the Navy Yard William H. Taft (who, as one former Yard on 24 March 1898. To command Fire Department, two 15-man crews, commanding officer remembered, could her, the Navy chose Lieutenant headed dockside with two Packard hosenot comprehend why a ship could Commander Morris R. S. MacKenzie, and-ladder trucks, a La France pumper, not observe the same punctuality as a considered “hardboiled, stern, able, a GMC chemical truck, and a Sauer train), Woodrow Wilson (who pursued just [and] efficient, with little tolerance foamite truck. Despite their efforts, the his courtship of Edith Bolling Galt on for laziness and inefficiency”—just the aggressive blaze resisted containment. board), Warren G. Harding, and Calvin type of captain to work up a new ship The former presidential yacht sank Coolidge—the latter among those chief with war imminent. Painted lead gray ignominiously in 24 feet of water. executives enjoying the experience of and given a respectable battery of two A board of inspection and survey cruising in the Mayflower the most of all. 5-inch guns, twelve 6-pounders and two evaluated the Mayflower on 17 During that time, in the standardization

16

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

When her service in the Spanish-American War concluded, the Mayflower returned to a more refined existence. In 1902, by then resplendent in white and spar, she entered service as Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential yacht. r




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Mayflower-class presidential yacht, 1902

Shipping Administration (WSA) acquired her from Displacement: 2,690 tons the Broadfoot Iron Works of Wilmington, North Carolina, Length: 320 feet on 31 July 1942 and renamed Beam: 36 feet, 6 inches her Butte. The U.S. Coast Draft: 17 feet, 2½ inches (mean) Guard then acquired the Complement: 168 officers, men, and Marines ship from the WSA on 6 September 1943—restoring Armament: Ten 6-pounders her original name. After Two 1-pounders conversion at the Norfolk Two Colt’s automatic guns Navy Yard, the Mayflower was recommissioned there on 19 October 1943, with Lieutenant Commander Fred E. Morton, February 1931 and, in view of an USCG, in command. estimated $210,000 in needed repairs Classed as gunboat WPG-183, the and alterations, recommended she be Mayflower was in service between Boston broken up. She was stricken from the and Norfolk for the Naval Vessel Register on 23 March remainder of World 1931; accepting the board’s suggestion, War II, equipped Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis with a battery of Adams advised that she be sold for one 5-inch gun, two scrap. Bids opened on 28 September 3-inch dual purpose 1931, and on 16 October Adams guns, six 20-mm approved Leo P. Coe’s offer of $16,105 guns, two depthfor the Mayflower’s hulk. charge tracks, and The new owner turned out to be an five depth-charge agent for one Frank F. Parish of Chicago, projectors. Primarily, Illinois, who had the ship towed to however, she plied Wilmington, North Carolina, to be in the waters of reconditioned under the auspices of naval Chesapeake Bay architect Henry C. Gielow Jr. But before as a radar-training that came to pass, Parish lost his fortune ship, an instruction and became a fugitive from the law. The platform for men ship whose decks presidents and royalty who were learning once had trod again became a forlorn the intricacies of a rust-streaked relic. technology unknown Just as a war had led to her acquisition when her naval in the first place, global conflict—World service had begun. War II—led to her reactivation. The War

Decommissioned on 1 July 1946 and returned to the WSA, the Mayflower was cquired on 8 January 947 by Frank M. haw of Montreal, Canada, who envisioned employing her as n Arctic sealer. After reconditioning t Baltimore, one of her boilers burst off Point Lookout, Maryland, in March 1947. Again gutted by fire, she ended up at the end of a towline at Brooklyn, New York, and the Walter Krauss shipyard. Sold to a Panamanian-flag firm, she received new boilers at the Krauss yard and sailed—now as the Mala—for Genoa, Italy, to become a tramp steamer. In 1948, she carried Jewish refugees from Europe into Haifa Harbor. Ultimately, the storied vessel died under scrapper’s torches in 1955. In her long career, the Mayflower had served as a visible reminder of the growing presence of the United States on the world scene and taken part in three wars. All said, she had, in Shakespeare’s words, “done the state some service.”

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r NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Befitting her status as presidential yacht, the Mayflower was fitted out in a luxurious display of the finest in craftsmanship, such as this ornately carved wooden staircase, photographed in June 1900. Note tile inlaid into the wooden deck at the foot of the stairs, and the quality woodwork on the overheads and bulkheads. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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The

Last Union

Survivor EDITED BY ROBERT M. BROWNING JR.

Before he passed away in 1921, John Driscoll left behind one of the few accounts by an enlisted participant of the historic first battle between ironclads.

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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

The epic Civil War clash between the Monitor and Virginia is probably the most famous single-action combat in U.S. naval history. And as with most historic events, shortly after it was over, participants began to record their recollections of the ironclad duel. While many officers left lengthy remembrances, only a few enlisted men wrote about what they had seen and heard. And by chance, the fight’s last Union survivor, John Ambrose Driscoll, left the only substantial enlisted man’s account of the struggle. Born in County Cork, Ireland, Driscoll left his wife, Abigail, and their children behind when he immigrated to the United States. On 15 February 1862, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in New York for a three-year term. Prior experience as a fireman and in a machine shop earned him a rating as a first-class fireman. He was then 23 years old, stood 5 feet 4 inches tall, and had blue eyes and a swarthy complexion. Driscoll shipped aboard the receiving ship North Carolina to await his sea assignment. On 25 February he and several other men boarded the Monitor for duty. After serving in the ironclad for nine months, Driscoll transferred to the side-wheel steamer Connecticut and in June 1863 was discharged from the Navy.1

Driscoll later changed his name to John M. White to evade his wife, who had come to America to search for him. He lived in Connecticut for several years working on engines for a tram railway and also worked as a landscaper in Buffalo, New York. As he grew older, he became famous as one of the Monitor’s surviving crewmen and lectured about her famous battle. In 1916, as a reward for service in the Monitor, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt had several of the ironclad’s survivors, including Driscoll, taken through the Panama Canal.2 Driscoll spent his final years in the New York State Soldiers’ Home at Bath and then in Philadelphia at the U.S. Naval Home. On 13 June 1921, he died of heart disease at the age of 82.3 Driscoll’s interaction with Roosevelt had prompted the veteran to have his reminiscences recorded, and he narrated the following account. Too infirm to write, Driscoll dictated to a stenographer who penned it with only two paragraph breaks and introduced errors throughout the 22-page document. Effectively, this was an oral history, and for the purposes of this article the spelling and punctuation errors introduced by the recorder were corrected to make the manuscript more fluid. We pick up Driscoll’s narrative as the Monitor goes to sea.

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LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: BEVERLEY R. ROBINSON COLLECTION, U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY MUSEUM

More than 50 years after the Battle of the Ironclads, Monitor veteran John A. Driscoll points to the scene of the epic clash in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The first-class fireman who left his wife and children behind when he immigrated to America was stationed at the base of the turret ladder during the fight. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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O

n March the 6th 1862 when the Monitor pulled out of Brooklyn Navy Yard, nothing but gloom surrounded our departure. The weather itself seemed to mock us, it being one of the most dreary mornings I had ever witnessed. Well so I remember that cold, biting rain, which together with a very doubtful send-off, made our position a most unenviable one. It was customary at that time when a craft was going on the blockade for the crew of the receiving ship North Carolina to man the netting and give the departing vessel three cheers as she passed down the bay.4 Also, for the ferry boats and other steam craft to toot their whistles as a parting salute. Not so when the Monitor started out. As we passed the North Carolina, not a head was seen above the rail; not a whistle sounded to cheer us as we went out. Those we passed seemed to think it would be

fate of the Cumberland and Congress would have been different.6 Providence decreed otherwise for on that day the high wind increased the seas and the water gushed down the smokestacks, which were only six feet high, as well as the blower pipes, which were four feet. I was on duty in the fire room, at that time the fire and engine rooms, being both in one. At eight bells (4 p.m.), I was relieved by the next watch. . . . Realizing my need of sleep I retired to aloft under the turret where the hammocks were stowed and then I went to sleep, and that sleep saved me from a terrible fate that befell all the others; eighteen engineers and firemen who were suffocated with gas which came from the furnaces. . . .7 I had scarcely gotten asleep when the belt on the port side blower engine flew off. Engineer R. W. Hands, who was on duty at that time, with the assistance of the crew, shortened and laced the belt. By this time the fan box was Turret

The Monitor Blower pipes

Smokestacks Engine

better to have played the funeral dirge than to have given us the customary cheer, at least that is the way it appeared to us on the Monitor. As we passed into the lower bay we were taken in tow by the powerful ocean tug Seth Low and were accompanied by two schooner-rigged propellers, the Currituck and the Sachem.5 They were no more use to us in case of an accident than two clamshells. At this late date it is impossible for me to remember the exact hours of the day or night when certain incidents occurred, for day or night, it was all the same to us on the Monitor when at sea or when in action. With the exceptions of a few men in the turret and pilothouse we were all in absolute darkness excepting the dim rays of light we got from an oil lamp. But every incident that occurred on the Monitor, not only on the trip from New York to Hampton Roads, but for the entire nine months that I remained on her, is as clear in my mind as if it had occurred yesterday, but let us get back to the story. We soon left Sandy Hook behind, and the New Jersey coast was lost to view. As night approached nothing unusual occurred until early in the evening of the seventh when the gale, which had been threatening all day, commenced to begin with violence. Had the weather remained moderate the Monitor would have arrived at Hampton Roads early in the morning of the eighth instead of as she did on the same night. If she had arrived on the scheduled time, the

20

Galley Boilers

Crew’s quarters and storage compartments

full of water. Consequently, on every attempt to start the engine, the belts would fly off. While attempting to get the port blower started, the starboard belt blew off, and since all draft was cut off, the gas soon filled the engine room, suffocating all who were in there at that time. The other firemen on the berth deck, smelling the gas, rushed in a body to the engine room and dragged out those who were overcome. The last man to be carried out was Chief Engineer Newton.8 The ladder leading to the turret was very close to where I was asleep, and when Newton was being carried up, the noise awakened me, so I rushed like the others to the engine room. The only means of reaching the engine room was by a narrow passage leading from the berth deck and passing between the boilers and coal bunkers. As the pressure of gas was so strong, I was forced to retreat. But by tying a silk handkerchief over my mouth and nose and keeping as close to the floor as possible, I succeeded in reaching the engine room, and it was thick with gas. Like the others, I tried to start one of the blowers but the belt flew off. I rushed into the storeroom. I procured a hammer and chisel and knocked a hole through the sheet-iron box. While I was working, the water from the blower was rushing over me, but it helped to expel the gas from about me. When the water was all out, there was nothing to prevent the fan from starting. Five minutes had not elapsed U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

from the time I entered the engine room until I got the blower started. With one blower started, the gas was gradually expelled. At this time the crew were all up into the turret, while the engineer and firemen were being revived by the use of brandy administered by Doctor Logue on top of the turret.9 I had scarcely gotten one blower started when two seamen came into the engine room. They had wet cloths over their mouths. They informed me that they had been sent by Captain [John L.] Worden with orders to find me and bring me up on the turret, supposing that like the others, I had been overcome by the gas and was overlooked. When I got on top of the turret, Captain Worden with a speaking trumpet was calling to our convoys to keep within hailing distance. I looked ahead and saw the tug Seth Low straining away at the new nine-inch manila hawser, and it was there for the first time I thought that the predictions of some of Wardroom and officers’ quarters

Captain’s cabin and stateroom Pilothouse

tain Worden and said he thought the firing was from the Rip Raps, which statement was confirmed.10 Later on, a little before sundown, being then in smooth water near Cape Henry, the Monitor cast off from the Seth Low, and we proceeded under our own steam. Soon after, we were boarded by a pilot. He informed us that the Merrimack had sailed out, had attacked the sailing frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk the first, and set fire to the second and was at that time  .  .  . no doubt preparing to destroy the balance of the fleet. Many were the expression then made by the crew of the Monitor in the shape of a desire to meet the Merrimack the next day and take revenge. Many of the expressions were more forcible than elegant. Captain Worden tried to engage the pilot to remain for the fight the next day, but he refused to. About 9 o’clock p.m., we came alongside the flagship Roanoke, and Worden reported that he was ready for any duty that was required of him.11 He was ordered to go to the Minnesota and protect her if he could. Samuel Howard, sailing master of the Roanoke, volunteered to pilot her the next day.12 After Captain Worden returned from the Roanoke, we proceeded up the bay. The burning Congress could be seen in the distance, and gloom seemed to have settled all around, and the appearance of the Monitor did not seem to inspire much hope. . . .

K. ERLINGER

the croakers was about to come to pass. I informed Captain Worden of what I had done and the condition of things in the engine room and requested that I get some help from among the seamen. And then I received a glass of brandy, which relieved me of my troubles a great deal. I returned to the engine room, and with the assistance of the seamen given me, I kept the engines going until some of the engineer’s crew came to our relief. When I was relieved I at once laid down and went to sleep. When I awoke it was daylight and we were at the Delaware Capes and in smooth water. The Monitor was not rolling or pitching to any extent at any time. She seemed like a rock with the waves breaking over her, wetting those on “top of the turret” and coming down on the berth deck and galley, making cooking out of the question. We had not even a cup of coffee from Friday morning until Sunday morning; we had cold water and hardtack. We then continued on our way to Hampton Roads. It was now Saturday morning, and nothing unusual occurred until the afternoon of the same day when heavy firing was heard in the distance. The glasses were leveled in the direction it seemed to come from, but nothing could be seen. At last, Quartermaster Moses M. Sterns on top of the turret turned to Cap-

Hampton Roads, 9 March 1862

K. ERLINGER

N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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The Monitor Boys By John V. Quarstein

F

irst-class Fireman John Driscoll was just one of the hundred-odd sailors who served on board the Monitor during her brief life. Referring to themselves as “the Monitor Boys,” the men experienced storms, battles, boredom, poor living conditions, and disaster as they participated in the transformation of naval warfare. Once the Monitor was launched on 30 January 1862, her commander, Lieutenant John L. Worden, had to quickly secure a crew. He estimated that he would need 10 officers and 47 men to manage the ship. Besides Worden, the complement of officers when she set out for Hampton Roads consisted of four engineers, one medical officer, one paymaster, two masters, and one executive officer. The enlisted men were all volunteers. Since the ironclad was such a revolutionary warship and different from any other vessel in the U.S. Navy, Worden did not wish to accept men just arbitrarily assigned to her. Instead, the Monitor’s commander went aboard the receiving ship North Carolina and frigate Sabine at Brooklyn Navy Yard and asked for volunteers. More men volunteered than were needed. The chosen enlisted men would be transferred to the Monitor from early February through 6 March, the day the ship departed New York. Worden needed firemen, coal-heavers, and ordinary seamen. Many of the men lacked naval experience, listing their prewar occupations as farmer, machinist, carpenter, stonecutter, sailmaker, or none. Volunteers with previous sea service included Seaman William Bryan, who transferred from the Sabine. Petty officers were all seasoned sailors. Quartermaster Peter Truscott (Samuel Lewis) had five years of U.S. Navy service. The use of an alias was not uncommon for sailors, as it enabled them to desert with impunity if they were dissatisfied with a posting. Each crew member was assigned a special ship’s number on being transferred to the ironclad. Numbers 1 to 49 were members of the crew when the Monitor left New York, 1 being the first man transferred and 49 the last. John Stocking, the alias of William Wentz, enlisted as a boatswain’s mate on 25 January 1862. He was transferred from the Sabine to the Monitor as ship’s number 43. Most of the other sailors at the Brooklyn Navy Yard thought the Monitor volunteers were foolish or suicidal. That attitude, as well as the low-lying warship’s appearance—her deck virtually awash even in calm water—and the unusual living space below her waterline, prompted several men to desert. George Frederickson noted in the Monitor’s log on 4 March, “Norman McPherson and John Atkins deserted taking the ship’s cutter and left for parts unknown so ends this day.” Coal-heaver Thomas Feeney deserted seven days after he enlisted and the very day he arrived aboard the ironclad.

22

It was about 10 o’clock at night when we came alongside of the Minnesota, anchored, and began making preparations for the next day’s work. About 12 o’clock, the Congress blew up, the fire having reached her magazine. We, whose nerves could stand it, tried to get a little sleep by lying down where we could get a chance, but sleep was not in the question. . . . At 4 o’clock a.m. all hands were up and at work to get ready for the conflict which was to come. Patrick Hannon, William Durst, and the writer, John Driscoll, were sent on deck to screw the iron plates over the deadlights in the deck and to take down blower pipes and smokestacks, four in number.13 (Two of each, composed of four sheet iron plates each angled at the corners and put together with small bolts.) About six o’clock, the quartermaster, on top of the turret, reported to Captain Worden that the Merrimack and her escorts were blowing off steam back of Sewell’s Point. We then went down to breakfast, the first warm meal we had since Friday morning. While sitting on the deck around the mess cloth, Captain Worden came down from the turret. He addressed his crew of thirty-eight men all told besides the officers. 14 He reminded us that we had all volunteered to go with him and that now having seen what the Merrimack had done, and from all appearances was now capable of doing, and that the fate of the Cumberland may soon be ours, that if anyone regretted the step he had taken he would put him on board of the Roanoke. He was answered by every man jumping to his feet and giving three cheers. Well do I remember what we had for breakfast that Sunday morning fifty-four years ago.15 It was something extra. We had canned roast beef, hardtack, and coffee. After breakfast we returned to the deck and finished the work. Meanwhile, the Merrimack escorts steamed out from the forts at Sewell’s Point and proceeded towards Hampton Roads. The Monitor got under way about the same time we had finished the work we were at, excepting one smokestack, when a r




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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Early on the morning of battle, Driscoll recalled, Monitor commander Lieutenant John L. Worden offered members of his volunteer crew the chance to disembark the ironclad. “He was answered by every man jumping to his feet and giving three cheers.” U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

Despite these problems, many volunteered for service on shell from the Merrimack passed over us alighting between board the ironclad out of a sense of duty or as an opportunity the Monitor and Minnesota. It was evidently intended for to find a place in their new nation. Acting Quartermaster the taller vessel. Captain Worden, who was on top of the Hans Anderson was originally from Sweden and Seaman turret, ordered us inside, but as we had the bolts all out, Anton Basting was from Germany, while Coal-heaver we remained and took down the plates. All hands were William (Wilhelm) Durst was a Jew from Austria. Several ordered to our stations, and the second day’s Battle of of the crewmen were born in the British Isles, including Hampton Roads commenced about 8 o’clock. Seamen James Fenwick (Scotland) and Coal-heaver David I was stationed at the foot of the ladder leading to the Robert Ellis (Wales). Two African-Americans were among turret and heard every word that passed between Captain the initial crew. One was 19-year-old William H. Nichols, Worden in the pilothouse and Lieutenant Greene in the born a free man in Brooklyn, who enlisted as a landsman turret for five hours and fifteen minutes that the battle for a three-year term. While Nichols may have been urged lasted. 16 Paymaster Keeler and Daniel Toffey, Captain’s Clerk, acted as messenger between Captain Worden and Lieutenant Greene at the commencement of the fight. Captain Worden gave the order to Mr. Greene to fire slowly and deliberately, not to overexert his men or waste any shot. As the two vessels approached each other, the Merrimack, which was accompanied by two river steamers, the Jamestown and Yorktown, undoubtedly for the purpose of towing the Minnesota off when she surrendered (as they expected she would so as she still lay aground) .  .  .  seemed to ignore the presence of the Monitor and sheered off to the Minnesota. 17 One of the other steamers which was keeping close to the Sewell’s Point shore, came abreast of the On 9 July 1862, hot and weary Monitor sailors, including First-class Boy Siah Hulett Carter Monitor about a mile and a half (right foreground), gather near a makeshift stove on the ironclad’s deck. Sixteen days earlier, a off, and Captain Worden ordered fire had disabled the ship’s galley. Lieutenant Greene “give that r




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steamer a shot as you pass her.” to enlist in an effort to end slavery, others saw service as The order was promptly obeyed, the shot taking effect.18 an opportunity for advancement. George Geer enlisted as She at once turned and put back for Sewell’s Point, fola first-class fireman to earn money ($30 per month) and to lowed by the other, and the Merrimack changed her course learn a steady trade. for the Monitor. After dueling with the CSS Virginia and participating in Both drew up at close range and began firing, the Monithe Battle of Drewry’s Bluff, the Monitor was protecting the tor always managing to keep between the Merrimack and Union Army of the Potomac’s James River flank when several the Minnesota as Captain Worden’s orders were to protect escaped slaves attempted to join the crew. On 18 May an alarm that vessel if he could. The Merrimack tried to pass the sounded on board the ironclad as a small boat approached. Monitor several times and get at the Minnesota, but the Captain William Jeffers, then the ship’s commander, cried, “Boarders!” William Keeler “found the vast array of ‘Monitors’ little cheese box always blocked her path. Captain Worarmed to the teeth confronting the enemy—a poor trembling den was able to do this, not because of the speed of the contraband begging not to be shot.” The escaped slave, Siah Monitor . . . but because [of] her light draft and shortness, Hulett Carter, enlisted the next day as a first-class boy, ship’s which enabled her to turn in a small space and in shalnumber 53. low water, while the Merrimack, owing to her size, was NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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During the summer of 1862, the Monitor Boys endured oppressive heat and were plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Despite occasional, brief clashes with the enemy, the crew suffered enormously from boredom. In September the Monitor received a new captain, Commander John P. Bankhead, and was ordered to the Washington Navy Yard for an overhaul. The ironclad’s bottom was fouled, the ventilation system needed improvement, and her engine required repair. During the refit, the crew was given furlough, but more than a dozen sailors did not return when their leave expired. William Durst was listed as a deserter due to illness; however, he was impressed one night while drinking. His “WD” tattoo resulted in an alias of Walter Davis. Needing to replace the lost men, Bankhead called for volunteers from the unassigned seamen at the yard. Ordinary Seaman Jacob Nicklis did not wish to ship aboard the Monitor “on account of her accommodations they are very poor” but did so anyway because several of his friends from Buffalo, New York, such as Isaac Scott, volunteered. Once her complement was filled and repairs completed, the Monitor returned to Hampton Roads. On Christmas Day 1862, Bankhead received orders to take his ship to Beaufort, North Carolina. Learning of the assignment, Lieutenant Greene warned, “I do not consider this steamer a seagoing vessel.” Jacob Nicklis wrote his father, “They say we will have a pretty rough time going around Hatteras, but I hope it will not be the case.” Those fears were fulfilled when the Monitor foundered and sank off Cape Hatteras during the early hours of 31 December 1862 with the loss of 16 men, including Nicklis. The ship’s surgeon, Grenville Weeks, would write Nicklis’ sister that “[you] have my warm sympathies, and the assurance that your brother did his duty well, and has I believe gone to a brighter world, where storms do not come.” The side-wheel steamer Rhode Island, which had been towing the ship, rescued her survivors and returned them to Hampton Roads. Many of the ironclad’s former crew members would serve in other warships, including monitors, during the remainder of the conflict. But the time they and their former shipmates spent on board the U.S. Navy’s first ironclad would forever define them as Monitor Boys.

compelled to keep in deep water and take a long range to turn in. . . . The battle continued at short range for about one half hour when the Monitor drew off and Captain Worden came down out of the pilothouse and went up into the turret and passing out through one of the portholes onto

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Driscoll, pictured in 1916 wearing a Civil War–era sack coat, was serving in the side-wheel steamer Connecticut when the Monitor sank off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The original copy of his ironclad reminiscences is at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York. r




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the deck, examined every place where she had been hit. His officers protested against his exposing himself, but Captain Worden knew no fear. On his return, as he passed by where Robert Williams and I stood, he remarked we have been hit in some of the weakest parts and were all right.19 As the fight continued at close range, Captain Worden would draw off from time to time to give his men a chance to rest and take some refreshments. This led the people on the Merrimack to believe that the Monitor was getting the worst of it. I shall never forget the appearance of the men in the turret the first time they came down, all stripped to the waist and as black as Negroes except where the perspiration had made streaks on face and body. For two hours the fight continued without any apparent damage to either vessel, when the word came down from Captain Worden: “Well done, you made the iron fly that time. Hit her again in the same place.” As the two lay nearly side-by-side, the next word that came was “Well done, that shot went through.”20 Then a cheer went up from the Monitor’s crew. At one time the order was given on the Merrimack, which was plainly heard on the Monitor, “Boarders away.” Mr. Greene passed the word to Captain Worden. “They are going to board us.” Worden’s answer was “Very well, load with grape and canister.” But no attempt was made to board us. The Monitor could depress her guns so as to sweep her own decks with them. Also, . . . in the turret of the Monitor was stored hand grenades that could be thrown over the tops [of the turret] in case any attempt was made to board her. . . . U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

The Monitor was hit in every convenient point, but she was proof against the enemy’s heaviest fire. The Merrimack, in despair at not being able to damage the Monitor, made a desperate attempt to ram her. To do this, she drew off some distance then coming on with full force. Peter Williams, at the wheel, acting promptly without waiting for orders, put his helm hard-a-starboard, and the Monitor’s head swung off so that the blow was a glancing one, yet with such force as to jar the chimney off of every lamp below and to slightly start one of the deck plates. 21 At the same time, the blow caused the Merrimack to keel [heel] over to starboard, as both vessels were now almost side-by-side. . . . Both vessels now maneuvered for advantage, the Merrimack still trying to get at the Minnesota still aground, the Monitor always beating her off. Captain Worden now made an attempt to damage the propeller of the Merrimack, which was exposed, by running into it. He missed by about two feet. The two vessels drew close together again almost touching. The Merrimack now selected the pilothouse of the Monitor, which had not yet been hit, and delivering a full broadside at the pilothouse, the guns nearly touching it. The charge slightly cracked one of the 9-by-12 bars and slightly lifted the top plate. Worden was looking out through the opening and received the full force of the concussion, as well as the powder and small particles from the exploding shells [sic] in the face. His first words were “Tell Mr. Greene that I am wounded and to come and take command.” When Worden was wounded, Quartermaster Peter Williams, at the wheel, put his helm to starboard and sheered off to the left. The Merrimack sheered off to the right and put for Sewell’s Point where they commenced lightening her. Colonel R. G. Colston, who . . . witnessed the fight from start to finish from his barge, said both vessels seemed to separate as if by common consent.22 That has always been my own statement. But what compelled the course of both vessels to separate was different. When the commander of the Monitor was wounded, both ships had lost their commanders. The Monitor had one lieutenant, a boy twenty-two years of age left in command. On the other hand, the Merrimack when her commander was wounded, left his ship in care of seven lieutenants; [any] one of them was capable of taking command.23 Mr. Greene, as soon as he received word of the wounding of Captain Worden, hastened down out of the turret, passing close to me. As he did so, he was black from powder. When he arrived at the pilothouse and observed the light coming in under the top plate, but the pilothouse was practically uninjured, he returned to the cabin to consult with Captain Worden, but the latter was unconscious. Mr. Greene then returned to the pilothouse and turned the N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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Monitor’s head in the direction of the Merrimack and fired one shot, but the Merrimack was out of range, and the Monitor returned to the Minnesota. As soon as we got on deck, we observed the men on the Merrimack and the crews of the other two ships unloading the Merrimack to lighten her. About 2 o’clock p.m. the Merrimack started for the navy yard. The Monitor then steamed down towards Fortress Monroe. . . . In the meantime, the Merrimack proceeded to Norfolk accompanied by the Jamestown and Yorktown and at once put into the drydock.24 Thus ended the first battle of ironclads, the most famous naval duel between two ships in the history of the world. 1. The last documented Monitor crewman survived until 1927 but did not participate in the Battle of Hampton Roads. John V. Quarstein, The Monitor Boys: The Crew of the Union’s First Ironclad. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011, p. 271; John Driscoll File, Mariners’ Museum; Irwin M. Berent, The Crewmen of the USS Monitor: A Biographical Directory. North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, [1984], p. 20; John M. White [Driscoll] to Frank H. Pierce, 6 September 1886, Frank H. Pierce Papers, New York Public Library. 2. In 1885 Driscoll wrote a series of articles for a local Connecticut newspaper. White to Pierce, ibid.; Berent, The Crewmen of the USS Monitor, p. 20; Victor M. Drake to Commandant Fort Monroe, 7 October 1965, Driscoll File, Mariners’ Museum; Columbus Daily Enquirer, 2 March 1916. 3. Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 June 1921; Drake to Commandant Fort Monroe, 7 October 1865. 4. The ship-of-the-line North Carolina became a receiving ship in 1839. 5. The Currituck and Sachem were screw steamers. The Seth Low, a side-wheel steam tug, was chartered to tow the Monitor to Hampton Roads. 6. Built as a frigate, the Cumberland (24 guns) had been razed into a sloop. The Congress (60 guns) was a frigate. 7. Acting Assistant Paymaster William F. Keeler described the gas as “carbonic acid gas [carbon dioxide], mingled with the steam of the water which ran down the smoke pipes into the fires.” Robert W. Daly, ed., Aboard the Monitor: 1862, The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U.S. Navy to his Wife, Anna (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1964), p. 30. 8. Isaac Newton Jr. was a first assistant engineer. 9. Dr. Daniel C. Logue was an acting assistant surgeon. 10. The Rip Raps was a small island. Fort Wool, on the island, could provide a crossfire on the channel. 11. The Roanoke was a screw frigate. 12. Howard was an acting master and was instead attached to the bark Amanda. Goodwin to Marston, 10 March 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. 31 vols., (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1894–1927), ser. 1, vol. 7, p. 31. 13. Hannon was a first class fireman, and Durst was a coal-heaver. 14. There were 46 enlisted men on board the Monitor. 15. This makes the narrative occur in 1916, just before Driscoll passed away. 16. Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene was the executive officer. The battle lasted in reality about four hours. 17. The Confederate gunboat Patrick Henry was originally named the Yorktown. 18. Other lightly armed Confederate warships in the area were the Teaser, Beaufort, and Raleigh. The latter had to withdraw early due to a problem with a gun carriage. None of the small Confederate warships was damaged by the Monitor. 19. Robert Williams was a first-class fireman. 20. No shot from the Monitor passed through the armor of the Virginia. Other crew members also believed this happened. See Berent’s The Crewmen of the USS Monitor. 21. Peter Williams was a seaman and later was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the sinking of the Monitor nine months later. 22. (Confederate) Brigadier General Raleigh E. Colston, “Watching the Merrimac in the Peninsular Campaign,” Century Illustrated Magazine, vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 763–66. 23. Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan was wounded on the 8th and did not participate in the fight with the Monitor. Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones commanded the Virginia on the 9th. 24. There is no evidence that the Virginia was lightened, and she did not go into drydock.

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Proving the Power of

IRON over

WOOD BY JOHN V. QUARSTEIN

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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

Often overshadowed by her smaller, turreted nemesis, the ironclad CSS Virginia inaugurated a new era in naval warfare.

RAMMING OF THE U.S.S. CUMBERLAND BY THE MERRIMAC, BY ALEXANDER CHARLES STUART, THE ATHENAEUM

From the ruins of the U.S. frigate Merrimack arose the Confederacy’s most successful warship—the CSS Virginia. On 8 March 1862, the steam-powered ironclad forever changed war afloat by destroying the wooden sailing warships Cumberland (above) and Congress.

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hen the CSS Virginia slowly steamed down the Elizabeth River on 8 March 1862, the tide of naval warfare turned from wooden ships to armored, internally powered vessels. Little did the ironclad’s crew realize that its makeshift warship would achieve the Confederacy’s greatest naval victory. The trip was regarded by many to be simply a shakedown cruise. Instead the Virginia’s aggressive commander, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, made the voyage a trial by fire that proved the power of iron over wood. The full story began in 1854 when the steam frigate Merrimack’s keel was laid at Charlestown Navy Yard near Boston. The ship’s most notable feature was her screw propeller, which required her engines to be installed below the waterline, where the propulsion system was protected from shell fire. Launched in 1857, the Merrimack was quickly acclaimed in The New York Times as “a magnificent specimen of naval architecture.” Even though she was considered the “finest vessel of war of her class that had ever been constructed,” the ship rolled badly, which lessened her strength as a gun platform, and her engines were a constant problem. Consequently, she was placed in ordinary on 6 February 1860 at Gosport Navy Yard, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, Virginia. When the secession crisis erupted nearly a year later, Gosport fell into disorder. The yard’s 68-year-old commandant, Flag Officer Charles Stewart McCauley, was rumored to have taken to drink and often was ridiculed as being too old for active command. Upon Virginia’s adoption of an ordinance of secession on 17 April 1861, the yard was surrounded by local proSouthern citizens demanding that Gosport be surrendered to the commonwealth. Despite his orders to get the Merrimack out of the yard, McCauley ordered the naval facility and most of the ships assigned there to be burned and abandoned on 20 April. The morning after the blaze, the Virginians entered Gosport Navy Yard to discover destruction everywhere. Nevertheless, among the rubble, scuttled ships, and

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submerged. Because marine engines could not be quickly charred buildings, the Confederacy was able to find the constructed in the South, Williamson advised reusing wherewithal to create a challenge to the U.S. Navy. The the Merrimack’s condemned engines. Porter agreed that Federals had left with such great haste that their destrucBrooke’s concept could be applied to the Merrimack’s hull, tive work was far from complete. More than five wareand he developed plans and set to work reconfiguring the houses filled with naval supplies survived the flames. The frigate as an ironclad. Federals also abandoned a tremendous array of ordnance, The new ship would have a total length of just over 262 including 1,085 heavy cannon and more than 250,000 feet and a draft of 22 feet. Porter supervised the removal of pounds of powder. Numerous facilities, including the all the Merrimack’s remaining upper works and then cut the foundry, machine shop, granite drydock, and several workship on a straight line from bow to stern at the berth-deck shops remained untouched by the blaze. More important, level. Soon the main gun deck was laid and the casemate the retreating Federals failed to destroy the infrastructure began to take shape. This structure would be the ironclad’s that would enable the Confederacy to construct vessels most distinctive feature, beginning 28 feet from her bow to counter the Federal blockade. The Richmond Daily Enand extending aft 172 feet. The quirer gloated over the abundance fantail continued another 56 feet. of equipment and supplies, claiming The casemate sides were sloped at that “we have material enough to a 36-degree angle to deflect shot, build a navy of iron-plated ships.” but the acute slope allowed only 7 Flag Officer French Forrest asfeet of headroom and a beam of 30 sumed command of the yard on feet. The roof was grated to pro22 April. Only a few years younger vide ventilation to the gun deck; than McCauley, Forrest was known 2-inch iron bars supported rafters as a “blusterer of the real old-tar of yellow pine and white oak. school.” He energetically set himself Three hatches provided access to to the immense task of reorganizing the 14-foot-wide hurricane deck, Gosport. It was quickly discovered and the front of the casemate feathat several ships were not total tured a conical iron pilothouse. losses; the sloops Germantown and The sides of the casemate conPlymouth, as well as the Merrimack, sisted of a 4-inch-thick layer of oak all appeared to be salvageable. The laid horizontally, an 8-inch vertical Merrimack was raised and placed in layer of yellow pine, and a 12-inch drydock, but the question remained horizontal layer of white pine, all what to do with the burned and bolted together. The structure was blackened hulk. then sheathed with two layers of Realizing the South’s material and industrial The Confederacy’s iron plates, 2 inches thick by 6 limitations, Confederate Secretary of the Navy ‘Iron-Armored Ship’ inches wide, the first laid horizonStephen R. Mallory championed unconventional Confederate Secretary of the Navy naval weapons, including the Virginia. This tally and the second vertically. The Stephen R. Mallory understood that daguerreotype was taken in the 1850s, when juncture of the casemate and the the nascent country required a new Mallory represented Florida in the U.S. Senate and hull was an obvious weak point, so type of warship to challenge the chaired the Naval Affairs Committee. Porter devised a displacement that Union Navy. On 10 May 1861 he r




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would submerge the knuckle two told the Confederate Congress: “I feet below the waterline. To help regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matprotect the ship’s hull, a course of one-inch-thick iron plate ter of the first necessity. Such a vessel at this time could extended to a depth of three feet around the vessel and the traverse the entire coast of the United States, prevent all casemate eaves were extended two feet. blockades, and encounter, with a fair prospect of success, While the ship was being reconfigured, Brooke was their entire Navy.” working with Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond on the To achieve his goal, Mallory decided the best option production of rifled cannon as part of his effort to arm was to convert the Merrimack into an ironclad. He asthe Merrimack. He developed powerful weapons that feasigned the project to C.S. Navy Lieutenant John M. tured one or more wrought-iron bands welded around Brooke, Naval Constructor John L. Porter, and Chief the breech to resist the greater pressure of firing rifled Engineer William P. Williamson. Brooke’s conversion projectiles. Brooke also invented explosive shells and, concept featured a sloped casemate with the ship’s ends more important, an elongated, armor-piercing wroughtNAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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iron bolt for both the 7-inch and 6.4-inch versions of his rifled cannon. Because Mallory wanted the Merrimack armed with the finest possible heavy cannon, Brooke proposed that she carry a broadside battery of six IX-inch Dahlgren smoothbores and two 6.4-inch rifles. Two of the Dahlgrens were hot-shot guns, and a special furnace was installed in the engine room to prepare shot for these weapons during combat. A 7-inch Brooke rifle rested on a pivot mount at each end of the casemate, where the structure was pierced by three gun ports. In addition to this armament, a 1,500-pound cast-iron ram was attached to the ship’s bow. Commissioning, Crew, and Commander The Confederates were in a rush to finish the ship; news of the construction of several Union ironclads meant that the South might lose its armored advantage if their vessel was not quickly put into action. The project encountered daily delays, particularly in iron production, but the reconfigured ship finally was launched on 17 February 1862 and commissioned as the CSS Virginia. She appeared to be a

seamen in the South had joined the Confederate Army. Jones assigned the recruitment of sailors to Wood, who was a grandson of former President Zachary Taylor and nephew by marriage to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. His social and political connections helped him glean men from local Confederate units. The ship’s complement of 350 men was not filled until 6 March, when 39 men of the United Artillery Company (Co. E., 41st Virginia Infantry), commanded by Captain Thomas Kevill, volunteered for service. To command the Virginia and the other warships of the James River Squadron, Mallory selected Franklin Buchanan, a 46-year veteran of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Naval Academy’s first superintendent. The Maryland native was an excellent choice, “hailed with great satisfaction” by the ironclad’s crew. “A typical product of the old-time quarter deck,” John Randolph Eggleston, one of the Virginia’s lieutenants, wrote of Buchanan. He was “as indomitably courageous as Nelson and as arbitrary.” Workmen were still completing the conversion when Buchanan arrived at Gosport Navy Yard on 24 February. That day Mallory, who expected great things of both Bu-

NAVY ART COLLECTION, NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

On 11 July 1861, Mallory issued orders for the Merrimack’s conversion into an ironclad, which was launched on 17 February 1862. The casemate that replaced the frigate’s upper works featured 24-inch-thick sloping wooden sides sheathed with 4 inches of iron plate. r




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powerful warship; however, there were several defects. Her ram was poorly mounted, and Porter had miscalculated the vessel’s displacement, which resulted in her riding too high in the water. Ballast was added to lower her. Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones, the Virginia’s executive officer, was still displeased and believed that the ironclad’s hull required additional protection. (The “ap” in Jones’ name is a Welsh patronymic meaning “son of.”) Jones also needed to recruit a crew. He was able to assemble an excellent group of officers, including Lieutenants Robert Dabney Minor, Hunter Davidson, John Taylor Wood, and H. Ashton Ramsay, but most of the available N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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chanan and the ironclad, wrote the commander that the “Virginia is a novelty in naval construction, is untried and her power unknown. . . . Her powers as a ram are regarded as formidable, and it is hoped that you may be able to test them. Like a bayonet charge of infantry, this mode of attack, while most distinctive, will commend itself to you in this present scarcity of ammunition.” The Confederate Navy secretary also suggested that if the ironclad could “pass Old Point [near the mouth of Hampton Roads] and make a dashing cruise on the Potomac as far as Washington, its effect upon the public mind would be important to our cause.”

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Such a bold move could bring victory at a time when the Confederacy was reeling from defeats in Tennessee and along the Carolina sounds. Mallory was convinced “that the opportunity and the means for striking a blow for our Navy are now for the first time presented.” The secretary concluded his letter by stating that “Action, prompt and successful action—now would be of serious importance to our cause.” Mallory’s instructions were not lost on Franklin Buchanan, who on 4 March reported that his flagship, the Virginia, was ready for combat. He selected Newport News Point as his target, but his hopes for a joint army-navy attack were dashed by the unwillingness of Major General John Bankhead Magruder, commander of the Confederate Army of the Peninsula, to cooperate. Undaunted, Buchanan still intended to take his ironclad into action as quickly as possible. A gale forced him to call off attacks on 6 and 7 March, as the Virginia needed calm waters in which to operate. Day of Destiny On 8 March the weather cleared, and Buchanan prepared the Virginia for action. Her casemate was coated with tallow (ship’s grease), which Jones thought would increase the tendency of projectiles to deflect off the structure. Buchanan had his flag officer pendant hoisted, and at 1100 the Virginia steamed away from the quay. As she made her way down the Elizabeth River, accompanied by her gunboat consorts Beaufort and Raleigh, both sides of the riverbank were “thronged with people.” The Virginia’s surgeon, Dinwiddie Phillips, commented, “most of them, perhaps, [were] attracted by our novel appearance, and desirous of witnessing our movements through the water.” He added that “Few, if any entertained an exalted idea of our efficiency, and many predicted a total failure.” Meanwhile, the Virginia’s crew became aware of problems with the ship. “From the start we saw that she was slow, not over five knots,” Lieutenant Wood later commented. “She

steered so badly that, with her great length it took thirty to forty minutes to turn. . . . She was as unmanageable as a water-logged vessel.” As the ironclad entered Hampton Roads, the Federal fleet, including five major warships—the sloop Cumberland (24 guns) and frigates Congress (52), Minnesota (47), Roanoke (42), and St. Lawrence (50)—were visible in the distance arrayed between Newport News Point and Fort Monroe. Undaunted by such a force, Buchanan informed his crew: “Sailors in a few minutes you will have the long awaited opportunity to show your devotion to your country and our cause. Remember that you are about to strike for your country and your homes, your wives, and your children. The Confederacy expects everyman to do his duty, beat to quarters.” Midshipman Hardin Littlepage recalled Buchanan reminding everyone that “many Confederates had complained that they were not taken near enough to the enemy and [he] assured us that there should be no complaint this time, for he intended to head directly for the Cumberland.” Buchanan concluded his exhortations with the admonition: “Those ships must be taken. . . . Go to your guns.” Even though the Federals knew about the Confederate ironclad project, they were surprised by the Virginia’s appearance. As the ship cleared the Elizabeth River, a crewman on board the Congress, anchored near the Cumberland off Newport News Point, noted, “I believe that thing is a-comin’ down at last.” To the Union sailors, the Virginia looked like “the roof of a very big barn belching forth as from a chimney on fire.” Steaming across Hampton Roads, the ironclad headed for the Cumberland. As she passed the Congress, the Virginia delivered a devastating starboard broadside of shell and hot shot into the frigate. She then slammed into the Cumberland’s starboard quarter, losing her ram in the process but leaving an enormous hole in the sloop’s side. Shot and shell from Union warships and shore batteries harmlessly bounced off the Virginia’s casemate while she

You Say Merrimack, I Say Virginia By John V. Quarstein

L

ike so many Civil War engagements, the Hampton Roads naval clash has several names, including the Battle of the Ironclads, the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimac, and the Battle of Hampton Roads. Similarly, the name of the Confederate ironclad that fought in that battle is variously known as the Merrimac, Merrimack, and Virginia. Which is her proper name? In her original incarnation, the ship was the Merrimack. An American Indian word meaning “swift water,” Merrimack is

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the name of a 110-mile river that begins in New Hampshire. On 25 September 1854, John Lenthall, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Naval Construction, selected it as the name for the steam-powered, 40-gun screw frigate being built at Charlestown Navy Yard. The ship was the first of a class of five frigates built during the 1850s each named for an American river: Roanoke, Wabash, Colorado, Minnesota, and Merrimack. One misconception about the Merrimack is the proper spelling of her name. It should

end with the “k,” not with just the “c.” All of the frigate’s plans are marked with the “k” spelling. Furthermore, President Franklin Pierce, a native of Concord, New Hampshire—the seat of Merrimack County and located on the Merrimack River— signed the act approving the appropriation and ship names. But while New Hampshire residents included the “k,” those in Massachusetts, which the river flows through on its way to the Atlantic, didn’t. That circumstance

U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

After nearby Union infantry fired on Virginia sailors and officers as they tried to accept the Congress’ surrender, the ironclad’s infuriated commander, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan (right), took up a musket and opened fire on the enemy soldiers from his ship’s exposed hurricane deck. The rash action resulted in Buchanan missing the next day’s battle against the Monitor. Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones (far right) ably commanded the Confederate ironclad in that fight. r




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exchanged broadsides with the sinking Cumberland. As the Virginia steamed upriver for deeper water to execute a turn, she destroyed two Union transports moored along a wharf. After making the long, slow turn, the ironclad pulled to within several hundred yards of the Congress, which had grounded, and shelled the frigate into submission. But when Union gunners and troops ashore kept up their fire, Buchanan, who sustained a bullet wound, ordered hot shot fired into the Congress, which was soon in flames. Continuing eastward, the ironclad fired into the grounded Minnesota and St. Lawrence before anchoring off Sewell’s Point for the night. The Virginia had inflicted a staggering defeat on the U.S. Navy. Besides the destroyed Cumberland and Congress, Union losses that day included a steam frigate damaged, a sailing frigate slightly damaged, a tug sunk, another tug damaged, two transports destroyed, a transport captured, and 247 men killed. Crossing Hampton Roads the next morning to finish off the Minnesota, the Virginia encountered the Monitor, which

and the fact that it’s easier to spell the name without the “k” is perhaps why many Civil War contemporaries used Merrimac. Once the Confederates raised the Merrimack’s burned hull, they reconfigured her into an ironclad that they christened the CSS Virginia on 17 February 1862. After that date, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory and Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, the ship’s commander, both referred to the ironclad as the Virginia in all their correspondence. But even the ironclad’s executive officer and second commander, Lieutenant Catesby N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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she battled to a draw. Armed with no solid projectiles except hot shot, the Confederate ironclad was unable damage her opponent except for a shell that struck the Monitor’s pilothouse (See story, pp. 34). Robert Minor, who was wounded in the first day’s fighting, wrote: “It was a great victory. . . . The IRON and the HEAVY GUNS did the work.” However, Catesby Jones viewed the two-day battle as only a partial success. He noted that the “destruction of those wooden vessels was a matter of course especially so, being at anchor, but in not capturing the ironclad, I feel as if we had done nothing.” Brief, Influential Post-Battle Career The Virginia’s actions on 8 and 9 March vindicated Mallory’s faith in the Confederate ironclad, and the secretary believed that the ship had won “the most remarkable victory which naval annals record.” While Mallory hoped that the Virginia could strike Northern ports such as New York, Buchanan, who was promoted to rear admiral, thought that

ap Roger Jones, and her chief engineer, H. Ashton Ramsay, called the vessel the Merrimac. U.S. Navy veterans, both had served in the frigate prior to the war, which may explain their continued use of that name. Southern newspapers usually referred to the ship by her rechristened name, but Northern newspapers constantly used Merrimac. Confederate signal officer Colonel William Norris, an eyewitness to the Battle of Hampton Roads, perhaps most eloquently expressed why the ironclad should always be called the Virginia:

And Virginia was her name, not Merrimac, which has a nasal twang equally abhorrent to sentiment and to melody, and meanly compares with the sonorous sweetness of Virginia. She fought under Confederate colors, and her fame belongs to all of us: but there was a peculiar fitness in the name we gave her. In Virginia, of Virginia iron and wood, and by Virginians she was built, and in Virginia’s waters, now made classic by her exploits, she made a record which shall live forever.

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the ironclad was unseaworthy, “by no means invulnerable,” and should be used only to defend Norfolk. Following the 9 March engagement, the undefeated Virginia’s mere presence accomplished that task. Moreover it disrupted Union Major General George B. McClellan’s plans for his Army of the Potomac to march on Richmond by way of the Virginia Peninsula. The senior U.S. Navy officer on the scene, Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, was fixated on the Virginia and rumored to be suffering from “ram fever” or “Merrimac on the brain.” Consequently, he declared the James River closed to Union naval operations and refused to attack the Confederate water batteries on the other side of the peninsula at Yorktown and Gloucester Point. His duty, Goldsborough believed, was to focus on keeping the Virginia in check. Therefore, instead of naval forces outflanking the Confederate defensive line across the lower peninsula, McClellan was forced to besiege it. That delayed the Union march on Richmond by a month, giving Confederates time to redeploy troops to defend their capital. After the Battle of Hampton Roads, the Virginia’s damage was repaired. Because Buchanan’s wound was slow to heal, Flag Officer Josiah Tattnall replaced him as commander of the James River Squadron. The 67-year-old officer had served in the U.S. Navy from 1812 until February 1861. Lieutenant William Parker of the gunboat Beaufort described him as the “beau ideal of a naval officer” and possessing “all the traits found in heroic characters.” Yearn-

ing to battle the Monitor, he steamed the Virginia into the Roads on 11 April, but no engagement ensued. An opportunity for another ironclad battle arose on 8 May when the Monitor shelled Sewell’s Point. But when the Virginia emerged from the Elizabeth River ready for combat, the Monitor retreated. Time was running out for the Virginia. Confederate forces abandoned their lower peninsula defenses on 3 May, leaving Norfolk isolated. During a visit to Fort Monroe to push for a Union advance up the James, President Abraham Lincoln orchestrated the capture of Norfolk on 10 May. The Virginia was left without a port and, because of her great draft, the warship could not be effectively lightened to enable her to steam to Richmond. Consequently, she was run aground off Craney Island and scuttled. Tattnall sadly telegraphed Mallory, “The Virginia no longer exists.” Lamenting the ship’s loss, crew member Richard Curtis reflected that it was “a sad finish to such a bright beginning.” The CSS Virginia was without question the most successful Confederate ironclad. She won the race, albeit for just one day, for naval supremacy in Hampton Roads, thereby becoming the first armored warship in modern history to sink another warship. The Virginia’s brief career ended ingloriously, yet the Confederate ship achieved everlasting fame for her role as one of “the founders,” as Franklin Buchanan wrote, “of ironclad warfare at sea.” Indeed, the Virginia and her antagonist, the Monitor, ushered in a new age of naval design when they fought in Hampton Roads. Although the brilliant SwedishAmerican inventor John Ericsson’s Monitor is generally credited as being the ship design of the future, the Virginia’s ramming of the Cumberland and total destruction of the Congress Spend a day in 1944 as you experience a sea and air adventure aboard Baltimore’s restored Liberty Ship John W. Brown. proved the power of iron over wood.

World War II Afloat!

This exciting six hour “Voyage into History” features: continental breakfast, bountiful luncheon buffet, afternoon snacks and beverages; live big band music of the 40’s; Abbott & Costello; military reenactors; FDR; barbershop music; flybys of wartime aircraft (weather permitting), with the ship’s Armed Guard gunners manning the guns to fight off attacking Axis planes; the ship completely open for tours. View the magnificent 140 ton triple-expansion steam engine as it powers the great ship through the water. Tour museum spaces, crew quarters, bridge, messrooms, troop berthing areas and much more. This is Living History!

Tickets for our 2012 Voyages are $140 each All cruises sail from Baltimore, MD. Saturday 30 June, Saturday 28 July, & Saturday 8 September SS John W. Brown sails at 10:00 AM and returns at 4:00 PM. For information and to order tickets, call: Project Liberty Ship at (410) 558-0164 '"9


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Sources: John Mercer Brooke, “The Virginia or Merrimac: Her Real Projector,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 19 (January 1891), pp. 3–34. John R. Eggleston, “Captain Eggleston’s Narrative of the Battle of the Merrimac,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 41 (September 1916), pp. 166–78. William Norris, “The Story of the Confederate States’ Ship Virginia (Once Merrimac): Her Victory over the Monitor; Born March 7th, Died May 10th 1862” (Baltimore: John B. Piet, 1879). William Parker, Recollections of a Naval Officer, 1841–1865 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883). Dinwiddie Brazier Phillips, “The Career of the Iron-clad Virginia (formerly the Merrimac), Confederate States Navy, March–May 1862,” Collections of the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1887). John V. Quarstein, A History of Ironclads: The Power of Iron over Wood (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2006). John V. Quarstein, CSS Virginia: Sink Before Surrender (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012). John V. Quarstein, “Sink Before Surrender: The Story of the CSS Virginia,” The Battle of Hampton Roads: New Perspectives on the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (New York: Fordam University Press, 2006). John Taylor Wood, “The First Fight of the Ironclads: March 9, 1862,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 1 (New York: Century, 1887), pp. 692–711.

U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

THE SAILOR BOYS OF ’61, BY JAMES RUSSEL SOLEY

The explosion of a shell from the CSS Virginia against the Monitor’s pilothouse incapacitated the Union ship’s commander, Lieutenant John L. Worden, and decidedly altered the course of the ironclad duel. This stylized, early depiction of the incident exaggerates the size of the pilothouse; it was actutally only 32 by 42 inches.

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And the

Winner Was . . . By Francis DuCoin

When a Confederate officer on board the Virginia fired his cannon at the pilothouse of the Monitor, the shot set in motion events that remain murky 150 years later.

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he four-hour duel between the Monitor and Virginia on 9 March 1862 was frustrating for both ships, as neither was able to inflict significant damage to the other. At around midday the Monitor’s commanding officer, Lieutenant John L. Worden, tried to disable the Confederate ironclad by ramming her rudder. He missed, but the attempt put the Union ship’s pilothouse directly under the muzzle of the 7-inch Brooke rifle commanded by Lieutenant John Taylor Wood, who fired. The cannon’s 100-pound shell damaged the structure, breaking one of the 9-by-12inch iron bars of which it was made and dislodging its 2-inch-thick roof plate. Moreover, the Brooke rifle’s blast and projectile’s impact injured Worden, who could no longer command. This was the pivotal moment in the battle. According to the Union version of subsequent events, Worden quickly gave command of the Monitor to his executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, who helped the captain to his cabin, tended to him, and assessed damage. After a slight delay Greene tried to continue the battle, only to discover that the Virginia had retreated out of range. The Monitor had won a decisive victory, and throughout the North she was hailed for saving the blockade, seaboard cities, and the Union. The Confederates saw things differently. The Virginia’s crewmen swore that amid the battle the Monitor broke off the engagement, retreated into shoal waters where the Confederate ship could not follow, and remained there. After waiting up to an hour for the Monitor’s return, the Virginia steamed back to Norfolk only because of the ebbing tide. In the South, the Virginia was acclaimed for her great triumph over the powerful Union Navy and the Monitor.

Greene’s Accounts On board the Monitor there were few eyewitnesses to how the battle ended, and her officers and men left even fewer written accounts. Greene had the most direct knowledge of events, and over the years he wrote different versions of what happened. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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In his official report, dated 12 March 1862, he does not mention any break in the action: We . . . received orders . . . to proceed to Newport News and protect the [frigate] Minnesota from the attack of the Merrimack [Virginia]. . . . At 8:45 a.m. we opened fire upon the Merrimack and continued the action until 11:30 a.m., when Captain Worden was injured. . . . Captain Worden then sent for me and told me to take charge of the vessel. We continued the action until 12:15 p.m., when the Merrimack retreated to Sewell’s Point and we went to the Minnesota.1 Greene’s long letter to his father, dated 14 March, was more explanatory—as well as defensive in tone: At about 11:30 the Captain sent for me. . . . a shot had struck the pilot-house exactly opposite his eyes, and blinded him, and he thought the pilot-house was damaged. He told me to take charge of the ship and use my discretion. . . . The Merrimac was retreating . . . we had strict orders to act on the defense and protect the Minnesota. We had evidently finished the Merrimac as far as the Minnesota was concerned. . . . This is the reason we did not sink the Merrimac.2 This letter was not completed until near the end of April.3 By then Northern jubilation after the battle had become somewhat muted by criticism that the Monitor had not pursued and sunk the Virginia.4 Greene’s most complete narrative was not published until 1885. In it he wrote that Worden was wounded Soon after noon. . . . and directed me to take command. . . . In the confusion of the moment resulting from so serious an injury to the commanding officer, the Monitor had been moving without direction. Exactly how much time elapsed from the moment that Worden was wounded until I had reached the pilot-

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house . . . it is impossible to state; but it could hardly have exceeded twenty minutes at the utmost. . . . and, on taking my position in the pilot-house and turning the vessel’s head in the direction of the Merrimac, I saw that she was already in retreat. . . . I returned with the Monitor to the side of the Minnesota, where preparations were being made to abandon the ship. . . .”5

the ships heading in opposite directions—the Virginia toward the Minnesota and the Monitor away to the northeast. Assistant Paymaster William Keeler, stationed near the pilothouse, helped Worden down, and the captain told him to get Greene from the turret. The executive officer had been unaware of damage to the ship or Worden’s injury. After the turret was turned so that the hatch in the structure’s floor aligned with the one in the deck, Greene descended and came Other Versions of Events forward. Worden told him that he was seriously injured, he Greene’s last account includes most of what happened, feared the Monitor was damaged, and Greene was now in combut not all. Three men were in the Monitor’s dark, 32-bymand. The 22-year-old lieutenant then helped Worden lie 42-inch pilothouse when it was hit. On the left was the down in his stateroom, just a few feet away. pilot, Acting Master Samuel Howard; at the helm was Howard meanwhile had continued to follow Worden’s Quarter Master Peter Williams, who received the Medal last order, steering the Monitor into shoal waters where the Virginia could not follow. The acting master later wrote that he was told Worden had given “over direction of the vessel to Lieutenant Greene” and that he was “to report to Greene every five minutes.”7 Greene remained with Worden, along with a number of the other officers. At one point, concerned for both Worden and his ship, Greene ordered Howard to “move off and make for Fortress Monroe.” 8 Instead of obeying, Howard, unaware that the actual command of the Monitor had been given to Greene, said to Worden: Pictured with other officers on the deck of the Monitor, 22-year-old executive officer Lieutenant Samuel “they want me to move to Fortress Monroe. If we Dana Greene (seated at far right) left behind conflicting versions of events after he took command of do this, the Virginia will the ironclad. “Our orders were to defend the Minnesota but not to follow up the Merrimac,” is what Acting Assistant Paymaster William Keeler (back row, third from left) wrote his wife when she inquired surely destroy the Minnesota. I don’t want to do why the Monitor let the Confederate ironclad escape. it.” Worden replied that r




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Greene “is now in comof Honor for his actions during the battle; and Worden was mand, and you must get your orders from him.” Howard on the right, by the ladder. Miraculously, neither Howard wrote that he then “begged” Greene “not to leave the Minnor Williams was injured, nor was the helm damaged. nesota.”9 But Worden’s face and eyes had absorbed iron fragments, The lieutenant asked Chief Engineer Alban C. Stimers, who powder, and paint from the Rebel blast. Sunlight floodhad supervised the Monitor’s construction, to come forward ing into the pilothouse because of the dislodged roof plate from the turret and assess the damage. He determined that it caused the bloodied and nearly blinded captain to believe was slight and both the pilothouse and helm were serviceable.10 that something was seriously wrong with his vessel, and he Keeler wrote his wife a few days later that a number of immediately ordered, “Put the helm to starboard and sheer officers had gathered around Worden, and “we held a huroff.”6 That turned the Monitor away from the Virginia, with ried consultation & ‘fight’ was the unanimous voice of all. U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE

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Lieut. Greene took Capt. W.’s posishortly after mailing his final account of tion & our bow was again pointed the battle for publication, he took his for the Merrimac.” But she “seemed own life. 11 inclined to haul off.” Final Assessment The “Monitor Boys” wanted to finIn one sense the Battle of Hampton ish the Virginia and were upset at the Roads had two victors. The Virginia time it took Greene to re-engage the was the decisive winner on the battle’s ship. Afterward the disgruntled crew first day, when she defeated the sloop stood on the Monitor’s deck in groups, Cumberland and frigate Congress, and discussing their dissatisfaction in althe Monitor achieved a tactical viclowing the Virginia to escape.12 Some tory on the second by preventing the on board later said that the “officers Virginia from destroying the Minnesota. and crew felt mortified at the little However, during the fight between the they had done . . . and returned to ironclads, the Virginia, with what was their moorings crestfallen.” However perhaps a lucky shot, clearly disabled when Assistant Secretary of the Navy the Monitor, which retired from the Gustavus Fox, who had observed the contest. battle from the deck of the Minne- Acting Master Samuel Howard (pictured in Confusion and indecision on board sota, came aboard greeting them as the 1880s) wrote that after taking command the Union ship delayed her return for conquering heroes who had saved Greene ordered him to pilot the Monitor to so long that the Minnesota’s captain the frigate and the Union, “a great the protection of Fort Monroe, leaving the and the Confederate ironclad’s crew bechange took place” in the crew’s at- grounded Minnesota to the mercy of the lieved the battle was over. The Virginia titude and self-esteem.13 Virginia. Howard claimed he “begged” the had triumphed. The reasons the story of From eyewitness accounts, there lieutenant not to abandon the Union frigate. does not appear to be sufficient evi- r




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the Monitor’s victory over the Virginia were propagated in the North are comdence to support Greene’s claim that plex but understandable. Perhaps as Samuel Howard, the the Monitor was only out of the action for less than 20 Monitor’s pilot, once wrote, “The truth of the engagement minutes and stayed close to the Minnesota. Those on board will never be known”—or agreed upon.17 the Virginia, the captain of the Minnesota, that ship’s log, at least one Union soldier on the northern shore, and even the Monitor’s own log have the Union ironclad out of the fight 1. U.S. War Department, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in for at least 30 minutes and maybe as long as an hour. The the War of the Rebellion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895– 1929), ser. I, vol. 7, p. 25. Monitor’s log states that the pilothouse was struck at 1230 2. Samuel Dana Greene, letter to his parents, 14 March 1862, U.S. Naval Acadand the Virginia started back toward Norfolk at 1300, but emy Museum Library, Annapolis, MD. 3. Although started shortly after the engagement, Greene’s letter mentions events the Union ironclad did not anchor by the Minnesota until that did not occur until 27 April. 14 1700. Greene’s account may have differed from the Moni4. William Keeler to his wife, 30 March 1862, in William Frederick Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862, ed. Robert Daly (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute tor’s log because he did not have access to it.15 Press, 1964), p. 63. In this letter, Keeler addresses this same criticism from his Some of the Monitor’s crew accused Greene of cowardwife. 5. Samuel Dana Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil ice, but there is no record of any of her officers sharing War (New York: Century, 1887–89), vol. 1, p. 727. that opinion. Keeler wrote his wife: “When Capt. Worden 6. Robert L. Preston, “Monitor-Merrimac Conflict Misrepresented In History,” The was hurt, which for a time occasioned some confusion, Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 16 March 1912. 7. Samuel Howard in Philadelphia Press, 21 July 1895, in Frank Pierce Scrapbook, we felt the want of a head, one who was willing to take p. 77, Frank H. Pierce Papers, New York Public Library, New York (hereafter cited the responsibility of our further movements. Of courage as Pierce Papers). 8. Ibid. & willingness to continue the fight there was no want . 9. Ibid. . . we had retreated some distance from [the Virginia] in 10. John M. White to Frank H. Pierce, 6 September 1886, Pierce Papers. 11. Keeler to his wife, 6 March 1862 (completed and sent later), in Keeler, the meantime.”16 The paymaster believed that Greene was Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 38. simply young, inexperienced, and overwhelmed. 12. White to Pierce, 6 September 1886, Pierce Papers. 13. Samuel W. Taylor to Frank Pierce, 12 September 1885, Pierce Papers. In the 1880s Monitor designer John Ericsson made scath14. Log of the USS Monitor, 9 March 1862, National Archives and Records Ading remarks about Greene and his actions, statements actuministration, RG 45, Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records ally aimed at the Navy Department for placing a young, and Library, Washington, DC, vol. 161 PC-30, entry 392, subseries D-110. 15. Acting Master Louis N. Stodder of the Monitor privately held the log from untried officer in such an important position. Greene, 1862 until 1910, when he gave it to the Navy Library. tragically, was haunted by innuendo and scuttlebutt about 16. Keeler to his wife, 30 March 1862, in Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 63. 17. Samuel Howard to Frank Pierce, 25 October 1885, Pierce Papers. his brief command of the Monitor. On 11 December 1884, COURTESY OF THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VA

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Continuing the By Anna Gibson Holloway

Visitors can explore the evolving history of the Navy’s first ironclad at the state-of-the-art USS Monitor Center

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n 9 March 2007, the 145th anniversary of the momentous first clash of armored warships, the Mariners’ Museum and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary opened the doors of the USS Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia. The modern exhibition and conservation facility located at the museum is the principal repository for artifacts recovered from the Monitor’s wreck site and tells both the historical and continuing story of the celebrated “cheesebox on a raft.” The Mariners’ Museum also works with other institutions to place Monitor artifacts on display around the nation. At the heart of the USS Monitor Center’s 20,000-squarefoot exhibition, titled Ironclad Revolution, are many of

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the 1,600 artifacts recovered so far from NOAA’s Monitor sanctuary, 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Numerous artifacts are beautiful in their own right, but paired with historical documents and other archival material from the museum’s library and archives housed at nearby Christopher Newport University, they help us better understand the people who used them and the events surrounding them. An elegant brass gimbal displayed with its fragile lantern pieces shows the beauty and elegance of the interior of the Victorian-era ironclad, while her massive XI-inch Dahlgren guns remind visitors that this ship was meant for brutal war. Accompanying images from a March 1862 Harper’s Weekly as well as letters home from the crewmen describing the ship’s interiors help paint a vivid picture for visitors. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

Monitor Story

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

Located at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, the USS Monitor Center recounts the history of the ironclad and her battle with the CSS Virginia through a wide array of artifacts as well as immersive and interactive exhibits. Visitors can learn about the Monitor’s construction (left) as well as walk the deck of a life-size re-recreation of the ironclad’s exterior (above). r




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Also helping the artifacts tell their stories is a wide array of multimedia films, computer interactives, and a full-scale external replica of the Monitor built by the Apprentice School of Newport News Shipbuilding (formerly Northrop Grumman Newport News). Immersive exhibits allow visitors to enter the gun deck of an early 19th-century frigate, walk inside the casemate of the Confederate ironclad Virginia, visit the Monitor’s wardroom, and stand inside a re-creation of the Union ship’s iconic gun turret. Using computer games, Monitor Center visitors can sail a wooden frigate into battle, watch the frigate Merrimack morph into the Virginia, and, most popular of all, design their own virtual ironclad for review by a skeptical, animated Ironclad Board of the U.S. Navy. Large-format touch screens throughout the galleries introduce visitors to men and women who have played important roles in the Monitor’s past, present, and future. Three major multimedia installations punctuate the gallery experience. In the first, visitors find themselves immersed in a gale off Cape Hatteras on 31 December 1862, watching helplessly as the Monitor’s red signal lantern disappears beneath the waves. They can feel a part of battle action in the 360-degree theater experience of Ironclad Glory, a digital tour-de-force that re-creates both 8 and 9 March 1862 through exquisite digital paintings and a soulN AVA L H I S T O R Y

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stirring original score. Finally, they can agonize alongside the men and women of NOAA and the U.S. Navy as they work together to raise the Monitor’s turret in an interactive theater experience hosted by Law and Order star Sam Waterston. But the true stars of the show are the conservators and the artifacts on which they are working. The relics range from the Monitor’s turret, guns, steam engine, and condenser resting in their huge conservation tanks to the tiny buttons, bottles, boots, and coat pieces that speak to the daily lives of the men from 1862 who dubbed themselves “the Monitor Boys.” The artifacts undergoing conservation—and occasionally, the conservators themselves—are on public view at all times, accessed by on-site visitors by means of a viewing platform or seen by virtual visitors through webcams permanently trained on the active areas of the Batten Conservation Complex. At different times of the year, visitors might be treated to a view into the drained tanks as museum conservators and NOAA archaeologists work on removing marine concretions from the artifacts. Periodically, conservators open up the labs for an even closer view. Over the summer of 2011, the Monitor’s gun turret, which still rests upside-down in its 90,000-gallon tank of deionized water, was the star attraction, as the tank remained drained

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The brass top of a lantern (right) that once helped brighten the dark interior of the Monitor and the ornate gimble (above) from which it may have hung are among the thousands of artifacts raised from the ironclad’s wreckage off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and on display at the center. r




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for several weeks for conservation activities. Though most of the active archaeological work on the turret was completed several years ago, the structure still clung to a few secrets. Discoveries in 2011 included the remains of a wrench, an unfired rifle cartridge, and a series of Roman numerals stamped into the turret’s armor plates. The numerals may have been used as assembly guides for the crews at Continental Ironworks in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, New York, who received the turret plates from Abbott & Sons in Baltimore in early 1862. Most poignant of all the 2011 turret discoveries is a decorative spoon engraved with Third Assistant Engineer Samuel Augee (or Auge) Lewis’ initials. A young officer from Baltimore, Lewis had joined the Monitor in November 1862 as a replacement. He was one of 16 men who went down with the ship on New Year’s Eve 1862. The spoon is one of three pieces of silverware bearing the initials SAL that have been recovered to date. Other pieces of silverware recovered from the turret in years past bear the initials JN and

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NKA and the name G. Frederickson. Seaman Jacob Nicklis, Acting Ensign Norman Knox Atwater, and Acting Ensign George Frederickson also perished with Lewis. In 2002 NOAA archaeologists recovered two sets of human remains from the Monitor’s turret. Since that time, the Mariners’ Museum has been working closely with NOAA to provide archival support in an effort to identify the remains of these two sailors with the ultimate goal of petitioning the U.S. Navy to bury them at Arlington National Cemetery in December 2012. Conservators also fully deconcreted the Monitor’s steam engine in 2011; it now rests on a new support structure that will allow conservators better access to the artifact along with better visitor viewing. Not to be outdone by the turret, the steam engine’s components were also holding some secrets. In the late summer of 2011, conservator Will Hoffman received a surprise when a golden-colored officer’s button popped quite unexpectedly from the Monitor’s engine throttle. So far it is the first officer’s button recovered since the ironclad was discovered in 1973. There may be more surprises in store as conservators begin the monumental task of disassembling the engine for conservation treatment. Shortly after the loss of the Monitor, the vessel’s surgeon, Grenville Weeks, wrote an account of the sinking for March 1863 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The article provides not only the most fitting epitaph for the The USS Monitor Center Located at the Mariners’ Museum iconic ironclad, but the 100 Museum Dr. unofficial mission stateNewport News, Va. 23606 ment for the USS Moni(800) 581-7245 Open Wednesday–Saturday 1000–1700; Sunday 1200– tor Center. Weeks recalled 1700; Mondays that coincide with federal holidays that within two days of the Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas sinking the surviving offiAdmission free for members and ages 5 and under; cers and crew were back at $7 ages 6 to 12; $10 students 13 and up; $11 AAA, military, and seniors (65+); $12 adults Fort Monroe, and the unrewww.marinersmuseum.org/uss-monitor-center ality of what they had been U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

The Monitor’s most iconic and innovative feature— her revolving gun turret—rests upside down in tank of deionized water that is periodically drained to allow conservation work. While a pair of Monitor Center conservators excavate the turret’s roof (far left), another works on one of the structure’s two pendulum port stoppers (above). According to the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, to raise one of the heavy iron pendulums to allow the muzzle of a Dahlgren XI-inch smoothbore to be run out required the exertion of the entire gun crew. r




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through set in, with the week “seeming . . . like some wild dream.” He continued:

Visitors to the center are able to watch the conservators at work. Their recent turret discoveries include a spoon engraved with the initials of Third Assistant Engineer Samuel A. Lewis, who perished when the Monitor sank. Could one of the two sets of human remains found earlier in the turret be Lewis’? r




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One thing only appeared real: our little vessel was lost, and we, who, in months gone by, had learned to love her, felt a strange pang go through us as we remembered that never more might we tread her deck, or gather in her little cabin at evening. We had left her behind us, one more treasure added to the priceless store, which Ocean so jealously hides. The Cumberland and Congress went first; the little boat that avenged their loss has followed; in both noble souls have gone down. Their names are for history; and so long as we remain a people, so long will the work of the Monitor be remembered, and her story told to our children’s children. The Monitor’s story continues after 150 years and is unfolding each day in the conservation labs and archives at the Mariners’ Museum.

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By Thomas C. Hone

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S

ince the end of World War II, the Navy’s budget has gone up and down, with major declines after 1945 due to demobilization and then again in 1949, when the administration of President Harry Truman reduced military expenditures. There were further serious reductions in the early 1970s and after the end of the Cold War in December 1991. Ways in which Navy leaders have responded to these downturns in spending remain relevant in the contemporary world.

Under Secretary of the Navy Robert Work has called the maritime force that invested Okinawa a “sea-based operational maneuver fleet.” By his calculations, it “could lift 13 division equivalents.” Moreover, these ground units could be augmented by “an additional five airborne divisions, giving the U.S. a total of 18 . . . assault divisions out of a combined Army and Marine force structure of 96 divisions.”2 This was an extraordinary capability. Nearly 20 percent of all the country’s ground units could be projected across oceans by sea and by air. World War II had changed the United States from a nation isolated by two oceans into one practiced at projecting force across oceans.

In response to funding cuts, Navy leaders have consistently worked to preserve the service’s essential force structure, its readiness, and its capability to contribute significantly to national defense. By comparison with today’s force, the Navy built during World War II was enormous. In the spring of 1945, the Navy’s Bureau of Ships published the official Ships’ Data, U.S. Naval Vessels. Three volumes listed the service’s combatant ships, amphibious craft, auxiliaries, and district craft. The force was huge—more than 8,000 vessels in commission—and extraordinarily diverse. That fall the Office of Naval Intelligence issued its own count: 1,740 major (battleships, carriers, etc.) and minor (mine craft and patrol vessels) combat ships; 1,263 auxiliaries (tenders, transports, etc.); 3,288 landing craft of various types and sizes; and 1,060 “base and district” craft.1 This force had cooperated with Britain’s Royal Navy in mounting seaborne invasions of North Africa, Italy, and France, and it had worked with Allied naval and air forces in breaking the effort by German submarines to blockade Britain during the war. In the Pacific, thousands of ships had battled enemy forces and transported and sustained Marine and Army ground and air units as they penetrated Japan’s defenses. By April 1945, with the beginning of the invasion of Okinawa, the U.S. maritime force was in the process of parking a joint American military force on Japan’s doorstep—in effect bringing all the elements of national power across the Pacific for a face-to-face confrontation. r




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r NEW YORK TIMES VIA NATIONAL ARCHIVES

After being sworn in as chief of Naval Operations in 1949, Vice Admiral Forrest P. Sherman (far left) shakes hands with Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews (center) and the deposed Admiral Louis Denfeld, whom Sherman replaced. At the time, postwar military reductions were under way. Yet Sherman managed, through skills of diplomacy and irrefutable national-security arguments, to fend off not only further cuts to the Navy’s budget but also aggressive efforts to transfer Navy and Marine aviation functions to the Air Force. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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Postwar Demobilization

The issue facing the country after World War II was whether the United States could afford and was willing to preserve this large maneuver fleet. In one sense, the answer was no. The Truman administration and Congress did not even accept the Navy’s plan to field several modern carrier task forces plus submarines and substantial Marine Corps air and ground forces.3 However, a very large number of amphibious ships and auxiliaries—almost 2,000—was mothballed. Many of these vessels would be useful during the Korean War and through the 1950s. Some even lasted into the war in Vietnam, and the four Iowa-class battleships were activated as late as the 1980s and early 1990s. The sea-based operational maneuver fleet was eliminated as an active force after World War II. There was no obvious need for it—no enemy like Japan to fight. In addition, it wasn’t clear that any navy like the one that had surrounded Okinawa in April 1945 could survive attack by nuclear weapons. But, as noted, elements of it survived in mothballs; just as important, the idea of a transoceanic maritime force that could have a strong military and diplomatic effect at the operational level of war also endured. It would resurface later as the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s.

The Crisis of 1949 The critical 1949 juncture came about because of a dispute about missions. The leaders of the Army Air Forces had emerged from World War II convinced that air power was key to the future security of the United States. To achieve that end, they and their civilian supporters successfully pressed Congress to create the U.S. Air Force in 1947. Supported by W. Stuart Symington, the first secretary of the Air Force, the senior officers of the new service argued that long-range bombardment from the air had replaced any maritime force as the nation’s “power projection” component. As General Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the Air Force, put it: “The development of air power has brought a new concept to military science. Wars are no

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longer decided exclusively by battles between surface forces. Now the emphasis is upon destroying the enemy’s industrial capacity to wage war.”4 In the December 2011 issue of Naval History, Jeffrey Barlow showed that bureaucratic wrangling between the Air Force and Navy had by 1949 become very intense.5 The previous year, in a series of meetings between then–Defense Secretary James Forrestal and the three military service chiefs, the latter could not agree unanimously on the allocation among the services of roles and missions. Despite this lack of consensus, Forrestal granted the Navy permission to construct a large aircraft carrier that could launch jet bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The new ship and its air group seemed destined to take their places in the nation’s developing strategic nuclear arsenal. With the carrier and its bombers, the Navy could, like the Air Force, project power through nuclear attacks. However, Forrestal was replaced by Louis A. Johnson at the end of March 1949, and the new Defense secretary canceled the carrier less than a month later. Secretary Johnson also reduced the Navy’s funding for research and development, and he cut “the Fleet Marine Force by one-fifth and Marine aviation by one-half.”6 Barlow in previous research had detailed the gradual but persistent squeeze on the Navy by simply counting ships and sailors.

the Navy and Marines without their air units. Instead of cuts in spending, these services believed they were facing the elimination of capabilities that were and would remain absolutely essential.7 For this reason, Admiral Louis Denfeld, chief of Naval Operations, publicly opposed Johnson’s fiscal proposals for FY-51 and Johnson’s position with regard to the roles-and-missions debate. In response, Navy Secretary Francis Matthews dismissed the CNO on 27 October 1949. Sherman: Diplomacy and Knowledge

Things looked pretty grim for the Navy, especially for Navy and Marine Corps aviation, when the new CNO, Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, took over at the beginning of November 1949. But things were not as bad as they seemed. Sherman, a naval aviator and the former chief planner for Admiral Chester Nimitz in World War II, was able to develop a good working relationship with Johnson. He drew on that relationship to protect the Navy’s budget and shield Navy and Marine aviation from efforts to shift their functions to the Air Force. Sherman had more going for him than just his personality. He also argued successfully that the Navy had a strong role to play in attacking the Soviet Union in any major war.8 For example, he accepted the argument of the Navy’s critics that the service could best support national strategy by covering convoys to Europe; but, Shrinking Navy as historian Michael Palmer showed, he FY-47 FY-49 put his own twist on it: “The worst place to protect a convoy is at the convoy. The Attack carriers 15 11 worst place to protect a city from air atDestroyers 182 160 Patrol aviation squadrons 42 34 tack is at the city. The best place is at Navy/Marine Corps enlisted personnel and officers 662,000 552,000 the bases from which the airplane or submarine comes. The next best place is en Jeffrey G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950, pp. 161, 223. route—the worst place is at the target.”9 For Fiscal Year 1951, Defense Secretary Johnson proAnother arrow in Sherman’s quiver was the work being done posed to reduce the number of attack carriers to to four. by the Navy Department on technologies developed during Moreover, as far as Louis Johnson and the civilian and World War II. In November 1948, the Navy’s General Board, military leaders of the Air Force were concerned, the Navy a small group of senior officers who advised the secretary of the existed to combat other navies, and the Soviet Union had Navy, conducted reviews of most of them, including sonar, eleconly a submarine force. Therefore, the U.S. Navy existed tronics, welding, cryogenics, guided missiles, automated displays to combat submarines. To wage an effective antisubmafor data received from radars and sonars, closed-cycle submarine campaign, the service only needed enough destroyers rines, oceanographic surveys, air-to-air missiles, and supersonic and submarines to contain the Soviet force. Ships such as aircraft capable of being launched from carriers.10 carriers and cruisers were useful for showing the flag but Spending on research and development during World not fighting the Soviet Union. Because funds for national War II had opened up a number of technological possibilidefense were scarce, the Navy and Marines needed to hand ties, and the board was trying to identify those with the off missions to the Air Force and Army. greatest promise for the Navy in light of the growing conBefore Johnson was nominated and approved by the Senfrontation with the Soviet Union. The good news was that ate as secretary of Defense, civilian and military leaders of real progress was being made in areas such as antisubmarine the Navy understood that funding for Navy and Marine warfare, electronics, missiles, and high-performance aircraft. Corps programs and personnel would decline. But by May Spending in these areas paid off once the country found 1949, senior Navy officers feared that the outcome of the its forces engaged in Korea and committed to supporting intense debate over service roles and missions would leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created in 1949.

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BETTMANN/CORBIS

With the Cold War standoff beginning, a major part of CNO Sherman’s justification for a strong Navy pertained to uncertain Soviet intentions and developing capabilities such as those of their submarines. These three were photographed in 1962, when the Soviet navy’s submarine fleet was its main strength. r




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After World War II, the large maneuver fleet was replaced by a Navy and Marine Corps with the primary missions of antisubmarine warfare and limited amphibious operations. The fleet was sustained by ships taken out of mothballs, some new construction (such as the carrier Forrestal [CV-59] and her sisters), and war-built vessels modernized with the technologies described to the General Board in 1948. Zumwalt and the 1970s When Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was sworn in as the 19th chief of Naval Operations on 1 July 1970, the Navy was being squeezed from two directions. One was the active forces, wearing out from years of heavy use. The other concerned the remnants of the World War II operational maneuver fleet. They had little service life left. Given the need to fund the war in Vietnam, modernize the country’s strategic missile and air forces, and sustain the conventional forces serving with NATO armies in Europe, there wasn’t enough money left to modernize the Navy’s active force and also rebuild the operational maneuver fleet.11 Zumwalt quickly created a team of officers to craft solutions to several problems. These included the need to replace older ships, deal with a stronger and missile-armed Soviet navy, and address personnel issues in the U.S. Navy. His Project Sixty took two months to develop recommendations such as creating effective defenses against Soviet-launched antiship missiles, developing a new torpedo for submarines, and constructing new open-ocean convoy escorts, hydrofoil missile boats, and antiship missiles.12 Project Sixty also addressed the issues of drugs and race relations that plagued the Navy at the time.13 To pay for new technologies and new ships, Zumwalt ordered the decommissioning of older vessels, especially those in reserve. His policy was to get rid of ships that were no longer needed and use the monies that had been allocated to their mainteN AVA L H I S T O R Y

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nance and upkeep for new construction. But new ships cost more—sometimes much more—than those they replaced. The result was a shrinking Navy. In Zumwalt’s four years as CNO, the service went from 769 active warships to 512, and the number of “destroyer types in reserve fell from 267 to 70.”14 To deal with the high and growing cost of modern ships, Zumwalt followed a “high-low” policy of procurement. Some new vessels would have the best technology available and be multipurpose combatants. Other new ones would be low-end, with less capability. The Spruance-class destroyers were at the high end, while the Perry-class antisubmarine frigates were at the low end. This wasn’t a new idea. It had been applied during World War II, when the newest destroyers were high-end and the mass-produced destroyer escorts low-end. Given the growth in cost of combat ships, Zumwalt had little choice but to pursue this concept in his effort to modernize the Navy.15 At the same time, he defended the service’s F-14 fighter program, the construction of another new Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and the Aegis antiair-warfare system. Zumwalt was concerned about the way in which the Soviet navy was moving away from the shores of the USSR. The deployment of substantial Soviet naval forces into the eastern Mediterranean in 1973 during the Arab-Israeli October War led him to call for a larger Navy than President Richard Nixon had in mind. But Zumwalt wanted more ships so they could blunt any effort to disarm and disable the Navy’s carriers with a surprise first strike. Therefore, he supported the development of the Pegasus-class missile-armed hydrofoils and the sea-control ship, a relatively small carrier that could launch helicopters and vertical short-takeoff and landing aircraft such as the Harrier. His argument was that modern naval warfare would begin without warning—with a rapid exchange of missiles. Thus the Navy needed a screen of smaller but well-armed ships to absorb the initial attack, strike blows of their own, and give the big carriers time to organize major attacks against the growing Soviet fleet. Powell’s New Base Force As historian Lorna Jaffe discovered: “When General Colin L. Powell became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1989, he brought to the position his own views on

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the likely shape of the world in the 1990s and a determination to restructure the U.S. Armed Forces to meet this new environment.”16 General Powell had learned a lesson from his experience on the Army staff in the early 1970s, when that service’s budget was rapidly cut by almost half. The reductions left the Army a hollow force, with great deficiencies in training, material, and maintenance. Powell was determined not to allow the end of the Cold War to bring in its wake a sudden and across-the-board slashing of the defense budget. Instead he wanted reductions to be gradual and based on a new concept of American strategy. What Powell had in mind was a logical shift from U.S. forces that were deployed forward to Europe and the western Pacific to a military that could deploy to deal with regional conflicts. Powell and like-minded officers and civilians understood that with the Cold War standoff ending, the United States needed a smaller and more mobile force to keep a U.S. presence in the world, but not one anchored to Cold War garrisons and bases. It was clear by 1990 that the Warsaw Pact was breaking down, and it was just as obvious to Powell and others that Americans would expect reductions in defense spending as a consequence of reduced tensions. Powell’s new approach was to craft U.S. forces around a concept of a “minimum force necessary for the United States to pursue its interests as a superpower.”17 Put another way, he advocated smaller forces that were both more modern and more mobile, arguing that the military services would have to shrink, but that they did not have to lose the military capabilities that gave them advantages in regional conflicts.

At the same time, he suggested that the country could preserve enough of its defense industrial base to “reconstitute” it if necessary, if another nation took the place of the Soviet Union as primary challenger to the United States. Powell’s concept of the minimum force required to protect U.S. strategic interests in the post–Cold War world was eventually accepted in the Defense Department and by thenPresident George H. W. Bush. Over five years, the Army’s manpower would come down from 18 active divisions to fewer than 12—to 535,000 soldiers total. The Navy’s active strength would fall from 587,000 sailors to 509,700; the number of Navy ships would decline from 551 to 451. Judicious Use of a Lower Budget The debate over whether to move to the base force was strenuous, because uniformed leaders feared that reductions in strength would be accompanied by a decreased investment in new weapons and training. They feared the creation of unready and far less-capable military forces. Powell’s counterargument was that any effort to stave off major reductions in defense spending would lead inevitably to hasty cuts that would indeed produce hollow forces. The bad news for the Navy was the immediate reduction in ships, aircraft, and personnel.

Post–Cold War Naval Aviation Cuts Navy pilots Naval flight officers Enlisted personnel Marine Corps pilots Naval flight officers Enlisted personnel

1990

1993

11,018 6,340 118,611 3,626 628 36,918

9,162 5,222 72,182 3,589 581 35,698

Roy A. Grossnick et al., United States Naval Aviation, 1910–1995, appendix 10, p. 594

The good news was that the smaller Navy would be more modern and therefore more capable.18 In 1985 the service had 14 active aircraft carriers, only 3 of which were the nuclear-powered Nimitz type. By 1999 the Navy had 8 Nimitzclass and only 4 conventionally powered carriers. Similarly, in 1985 there were 9 r




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r GETTY IMAGES (SCOTT ALLEN)

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin L. Powell (far left, visiting the USS Wisconsin [BB-64] in the Persian Gulf in 1990) envisioned gradual force reductions that would not leave sudden gaps. Instead, they would result in what he called the base force, or the minimum required to maintain superpower status.

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U.S. NAVY (WADE MCKINNON)

Powell’s vision worked: With cuts in the numbers of ships and personnel came, by 1999, improved capabilities such as those of Aegis-equipped Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers (the Vincennes [CG-49] leads these ships) and Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyers (the John S. McCain [DDG-56] follows the Vincennes). r




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nuclear-powered and 19 conventionally powered guided missile cruisers, but by 1999 most of those 28 had been decommissioned, replaced by 27 newer Aegis-equipped ships of the Ticonderoga class. And in 1985 the Navy had 41 guided-missile destroyers, a number that had dropped by 1999 to 26—but 24 were the more capable Aegis ships of the Arleigh Burke class. Powell’s vision came true for the Navy. The ship count came down, but the new force’s capability was greater. This does not mean the Navy had smooth sailing after the Cold War. In January 1991, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney canceled the A-12 stealth carrier attack-aircraft program, leaving the Navy scrambling to find a replacement. Among the more positive developments, Tomahawk land-attack missiles were repeatedly fired successfully during Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. In the fall of 1992, leaders of the Navy and Marine Corps signed From the Sea, the successor to the Maritime Strategy of the mid-1980s. The latter was a product of the Cold War—an ambitious approach to using these forces to offset the strong army of the Soviet Union. With the USSR dissolved, the Navy and Marines needed a new approach, reflected in From the Sea in terms of how best to use maritime forces to protect and pursue U.S. strategic interests. Lessons for Today The Navy Department’s budget rose during the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam and the final phase of the Cold War. But it declined severely after World War II, fell again when Admiral Zumwalt was the CNO, and dropped after the end of the Cold War. In the final analysis, what has mattered has not been this up-and-down pattern, but the department’s response to cutbacks. The Navy lost its sea-based operational maneuver fleet after World War II, but during the war in Korea and afterward, it sustained U.S. overseas garrisons while the Marines refined their ability to conduct amphibious operations. With the development of the nuclear-powered N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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ballistic-missile submarine force, the Navy also assumed a major strategic-deterrent role. In 2005, CNO Admiral Vern Clark made a very important point to the Senate Armed Services Committee: “The number of ships in the fleet is important. But it is no longer the only, nor the most meaningful, measure of combat capability. . . . In fact, today’s Navy can deliver more combat power than we could 20 years ago when we had twice as many ships and half again as many people.”19 Clark’s point can be put another way: Charting the ups and downs of funding is a lot less meaningful than studying the ebb and flow of capabilities. And Navy and Marine Corps competencies have more than weathered the periodic storms caused by budget cuts. 1. Samuel L. Morison, ed., Table X: The United States Fleet, in United States Naval Vessels, Statistical Section, Office of Naval Intelligence (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1996), part 2, p. 2. Ships’ Data, 15 April 1945, was published by the Navy Department (Washington: GPO, 1945). 2. Robert Work, “Thinking about Seabasing: All Ahead, Slow,” draft paper provided to the author by Under Secretary of the Navy Work, no date, p. 62. 3. Jeffrey G. Barlow, From Hot War to Cold, The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 55. See also Robert W. Love Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, vol. 2 (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1992), pp. 291–92. For Navy shipbuilding policy during World War II, see Joel R. Davidson, The Unsinkable Fleet: The Politics of U.S. Navy Expansion in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), especially pp. 154–71. 4. General Spaatz’s remarks are in “USAF Yearbook, 1947,” a special edition of Air Power History, vol. 44, no. 3 (fall 1997), p. 11. 5. Jeffrey G. Barlow, “Naval Aviation’s Most Serious Crisis?” Naval History, vol. 25, no. 6 (December 2011), pp. 38–43. See also Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950, (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1994). 6. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals, p. 199. 7. For the degree of cuts, see Michael A. Palmer, Origins of the Maritime Strategy: American Naval Strategy in the First Postwar Decade (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1988), p. 48. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 70. 10. “Hearings before the General Board of the Navy,” 2, 4, 8, and 10 November 1948, National Archives, Microfilm M1493, Roll 27. 11. Malcolm Muir Jr., Black Shoes and Blue Water, Surface Warfare in the United States Navy, 1945–1975 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1996), p. 203. 12. Ibid., pp. 208–20. 13. Norman Friedman, “Elmo Russell Zumwalt Jr.,” in Robert W. Love Jr., ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1980), pp. 365–79. 14. Muir, Black Shoes and Blue Water, p. 206. 15. Friedman, “Elmo Russell Zumwalt Jr.,” p. 371. 16. Lorna S. Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force, 1989–1992 (Washington, DC: Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, July 1993), p. 1. 17. Ibid., p. 12. 18. For other reductions, see “Department of the Navy, 1993 Posture Statement,” March 1993, pp. 18–19. 19. Cited in Work, “Thinking about Seabasing,” p. 78.

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I

n all of maritime history—from the age of sail to the advent of the hovercraft, from eras of peaceful exploration and leisure travel to the violent spasms of global conflict— perhaps no single ship has so enthralled the collective human mind as the Titanic. In the century since the ocean liner sank, its enduring grip on our imagination has inspired books, films, intense research, and deep-sea expeditions—not to mention endless speculation and theory. Indeed, there are no signs of that interest ebbing. When salvaged Titanic artifacts go to auction in the centennial month of her sinking, they are expected to fetch in the neighborhood of $200 million. It is more than appropriate, then, to relate anew the drama and tragedy of that frigid, lonely night in the vast Atlantic Ocean.

‘Practically Unsinkable’ The Titanic was launched on 31 May 1911 at 46,328 gross tons and displacing 66,000 tons. The new passenger liner was 175 feet from keel to her four funnels, 92.5 feet in width, and 882.5 feet in length. She was the largest ship in the world. Boasting the most modern luxury accommodations, including a Turkish bath, swimming pool, squash court, gymnasium, and French “sidewalk café,” the Titanic also offered speed. Triple screw, she could make 24–25 knots.1 The most notable feature of this “floating palace” was her safety design. She was constructed with a cellular double bottom and divided into 16 watertight compartments. The bulkheads separating the compartments all were fitted with watertight doors.2 According to Shipbuilder magazine, “the captain can, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors throughout and make the vessel practically unsinkable.”3 The popular press sensationalized that characterization, labeling the ship as simply “unsinkable.” THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY COLLECTION

The majesty of the early 20th century’s maritime marvel is captured in Harley Crossley’s The Titanic at Speed.Tragically for more than 1,500 of her passengers, the ship touted as “unsinkable” was “at speed” for only a few days before breaking up and plunging to the bottom of the Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Lifeboats approach the rescue ship Carpathia in the daylight of 15 April after the Titanic’s sinking in the early morning darkness. Passenger J. W. Barker, on board the Carpathia, may have taken this photograph. In actuality the Titanic had a fatal flaw: The bulkheads did not extend to the top deck of the ship. In some of the middle compartments they ran only as high as “E” deck—the topmost deck being “A.” Thus, if the first five compartments were flooded, the ship would list and the water would overflow into the remaining compartments. Yet this seemed highly unlikely, leading one member of her crew to boast, “God Himself could not sink this ship.” Less than a year after her launch, the Titanic would lie on the floor of the Atlantic, taking with her the lives of 1,502 passengers and crew. An Ominous Start With the ship prepared for her maiden voyage, White Star Line began to muster a crew worthy of this new vessel. The company chose Edward J. Smith as captain. Prior to sailing, there was a shuffle of senior officers on the new liner. Henry Wilde would serve as chief officer on the voyage. Former Chief Officer William Murdock became first officer, and First Officer Charles Lightoller was bumped to second officer in place of David Blair, who was transferred. During that shuffling of officers, the binoculars for the crow’s nest went missing. Apparently Blair, who had re-

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sponsibility for the glasses, had them locked in his quarters before leaving and did not inform Lightoller, who had taken his job. When Lightoller was unable to locate them, the lookouts were deprived of binoculars for the voyage. 4 Sailing day, 10 April, was marked by an incident many regarded as a bad omen. As the mammoth new liner edged out of Southampton Harbor, the suction from her huge propellers drew the moored American liner New York from her dock. The cables attached to the latter snapped like string and the vessel drifted out of control in the Titanic’s direction. To second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley, a science teacher, it recalled an experiment he used in his classes in which a magnet atop a cork in a bowl of water attracts metal on other corks in the bowl.5 Collision seemed certain until Captain Smith stopped the engines. Two tugboats quickly towed the New York back to her pier. The Titanic sailed for Cherbourg, France. The next day she stopped briefly at Queenstown, Ireland, then resumed her maiden voyage to New York City. Among the first-class passengers were business tycoon John Jacob Astor, mining and smelting king Benjamin Guggenheim, railroad giants Charles Hays and John Thayer, the Titanic’s shipbuilder, Thomas Andrews—on board to iron out any bugs—White Star Line managing director Bruce Ismay, and many other U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

affluent figures collectively worth more than $250 million—about $5.5 billion today. Danger: Ice Ahead

lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee stood an uneventful watch. Occasionally the two chatted about the cold, but mostly stood in silence. Then Fleet saw it, a large, dark object directly in the path of the ship. There was no mistaking its identity—an iceberg. Quickly, Fleet rang the crow’s-nest bell three times. He lifted the phone and called to the bridge. “What did you see?” asked Sixth Officer James Paul Moody. “Iceberg right ahead,” answered Fleet.

A few days later, on 14 April, the captain received an iceberg warning from the SS Caronia. She reported ice 42 degrees north latitude, 49–50 degrees west longitude. Later that day another message, this one from the Baltic, also warned of ice. Three minutes later, a wireless warning of ice came from the Amerika. A Jolt from the Sea To the Titanic’s master, Captain Smith, the warnings were of little concern. After all, ships were considerably safer now. When the warning was passed to him by Moody, MurSmith had reflected on that security five years earlier, when doch acted quickly. He had the engines stopped and then commanding the liner Adriatic. Asked if he thought the modreversed. He ordered the watertight doors to be closed. ern ship could remain afloat long enough for the company to The first officer ordered the helmsman to put the helm “a abandon it, he replied: “I will go a bit further. I will say I can hard a-starboard.” not imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. A few seconds later there was a jolt throughout the ship. On I can not conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel the after bridge, Quartermaster George Row noticed a break [the Adriatic]. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.”6 in the rhythm of the engines. He turned and saw an iceberg, which he judged to be jutting about 100 feet out of the water. Moreover, the weather was clear—meaning icebergs Seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer was preparing for bed should be seen in time. Nevertheless, Smith did not comwhen he felt a jar so slight that if he had a bowl of water, pletely ignore the warnings. He informed his employer, he thought, not one drop would be spilt.7 Bruce Ismay, of the Baltic’s alert and consulted his officers. If visibility were to become the least bit hazy, they were to In C-51, Colonel Archibald Gracie was awakened by a slow down. Otherwise he would remain in his quarters and sudden shock and noise from somewhere forward on the the ship would continue making a speed of 21–22 knots. starboard side of the ship. At first Gracie thought the TiAround 1930, one of the Titanic’s wireless operators overtanic had collided with another vessel.8 heard a message from the Californian to the Antillian: “To the Captain, Antillian 6:30 p.m. apparent ship’s time: latitude 42 degrees 3 minutes north; longitude 40 degrees 9 minutes west. Three large bergs five miles to the southward A trove of more than 5,000 artifacts salvaged from the wreckage of the of us.” The message was delivered Titanic goes up for bid at a New York auction house—Guernsey’s—11 April, to the bridge but the ship continthe 100th anniversary of the ship’s departure from Ireland on her maiden voyage. ued at speed. Among the items: jewelry (including the gold bracelet above bearing the diaAt 2140, a message came in from mond-set name Amy), clothing, table china, binoculars, and for the true Titanic the Mesaba noting “much heavy aficionado—a 17-ton slab of her hull. pack ice and a great number of But there is a catch. The collection is being sold as one lot—you have to buy it large icebergs. Also field ice.” The all. So bring your gold card; the appraised value is $189 million, meaning it could position mentioned was directly in sell for more. Additionally, to ensure that the lot is properly conserved and at least the Titanic’s path. Senior wireless in part publicly displayed, a court must OK the winning bid. operator Jack Phillips replied, “R. Tks.” (Received. Thanks.) Some maritime historians believe, however, that Phillips lost that crucial message in a stack of marLawrence Beesley felt “an extra heave of the engines conigrams. and a more than usual obvious dancing motion of the matSoon it was four bells (2200) and First Officer Murdoch tress.” He then noticed the engines had stopped. Beesley relieved Lightoller as officer on watch. No arrangements was under the impression that a propeller blade was lost.9 were made for additional lookouts. Nor was speed reduced Stewardess Violet Jessop was in her bunk reading a prayer by even a fraction of a knot. book when she heard “a low rending, crunching, ripping By 2340, people were turning in for the night. The crew sound.” Then there was “dead silence.” She heard doors was due to rotate in 20 minutes. Up in the crow’s nest, open and voices outside.10

An Auction to Remember

PHOTO: REUTERS (BRENDAN MCDERMID)

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Ten to twelve miles distant, Charles Victor Groves, third officer of the Californian, was on watch. His liner was stopped for the night; Captain Stanley Lord intended to navigate the ice field in the morning. Groves noticed a steamer approaching from the east. From the blaze of light there was no doubt it was a large passenger liner. At around 2340 the other ship stopped. Confusion amid Impending Doom On board the Titanic, First Officer Murdoch pulled the engine-telegraph lever to “Stop.” The officer clearly knew he had failed to avoid the iceberg. No sooner had he stopped the engines than Captain Smith appeared on the bridge. “Mr. Murdoch, what was that?” “An iceberg, sir. I hard a-starboard and reversed engines, and I was going to hard a-port round it but she was too close.” “Close the emergency doors.” “The doors are already closed.” Soon there came in reports of flooding down below. Captain Smith knew that his command was seriously damaged. The commutator revealed the ship was already listing five degrees to starboard. He decided to ask Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, to inspect the damage. Andrews and Captain Smith went below. They took the crew’s stairway, hoping not to attract undue attention. Apply-

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ing their knowledge of the ship, it did not take them long to conclude that the Titanic’s first five compartments were flooded. Andrews then informed Smith that the ship was doomed. The situation was indeed dire. The liner carried just 16 conventional lifeboats and four Englehardt collapsibles. The collective capacity of those 20 vessels was 1,178 people. But there were 2,207 souls on board the Titanic, meaning 1,029 of them would be at the mercy of the sea—at the time a fatally frigid 28 degrees Fahrenheit. A few minutes after midnight, Captain Smith ordered his officers to prepare to abandon ship. He then went to the wireless room and told Phillips and junior operator Harold Bride to “send the call for assistance.” Phillips sent out “CQD”—the standard call of distress in that pre-“SOS” era—and gave the ship’s position. The crew began to uncover the lifeboats and soon encountered several difficulties. Many passengers refused to board the boats. Some men balked at boarding before others. Some women refused to leave their husbands. Others simply would not believe a modern liner such as the Titanic could sink. After all, she was unsinkable—wasn’t she? Finally, after much confusion, a few boats were filled. First Officer Murdoch gave the order to lower Lifeboat 7. Others soon followed. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

LEFT: THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY COLLECTION; ABOVE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A painting titled On the Deck of the Titanic and a photograph of a few of the sunken liner’s survivors on board the Carpathia grahically juxtapose an artistic vision of the carefree pleasures the Titanic was meant to offer with the harsh realities of her maiden voyage. Of her more than 2,200 passengers and crew, just 705 survived. On the after bridge, Quartermaster Rowe became suspicious. He had earlier felt the jolt and seen the iceberg. Now he was seeing lifeboats floating off the side. Rowe phoned the bridge for an explanation. Captain Smith ordered Rowe to gather the ship’s signal rockets, directing him and Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall to “fire one and [thereafter] fire one every five minutes.” Thus the two began firing the rockets in hopes that a nearby ship would come to their rescue. On board the relatively close-by Californian, Second Officer Herbert Stone saw the rockets and, with the ship’s speaking tube, informed Captain Lord. Lord told Stone to hail the other ship using the Morse lamp. Oddly, the captain neither went to the bridge for a firsthand look nor awakened his wireless operator to try to determine exactly what was happening in the distance. Swallowed by the Sea Inside the Titanic’s wireless cabin, Senior Operator Phillips was making better progress. By 0030 he had made contact with the Cunard liner Carpathia. Her wireless operator informed the Titanic that his ship was 58 miles away and was “coming hard.” As time passed, it became more evident to those on board the Titanic that the ship was sinking. Panic broke out. A mob made a rush on Lifeboat 14. Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, who was in charge of the boat, cried, “If any one else tries that, this is what he’ll get!”—firing three shots N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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from his revolver into the air. With no further trouble the boat then was lowered to the sea.11 On the starboard side, Lifeboat 13 was in the process of being lowered when a crew member on board called back, “Any more ladies on your deck?” “No,” replied Lawrence Beesley who was standing nearby. “Then you had better jump,” said the crew member. Beesely clambered aboard and the boat was lowered away.12 The bulk of the passengers, in steerage, were barred from the lifeboats during much of the sinking. Yet the formal report on the disaster said that there had been no discrimination on the basis of class. That “thorough” investigation failed to call a single steerage passenger to testify, though a steward stationed there stated that the men were kept below as late as 0115.13 Some third-class passengers survived. Nine-year-old Frank Goldsmith, along with his mother and father, came to a gate. The man stationed there allowed only women and children to pass. “So long, Frankie,” his father said. “I’ll see you later.” Goldsmith and his mother were led up to a boat.14 At 0140 the Titanic’s eighth and final rocket was fired. Still, there was no response in kind. Giving up, Boxhall took charge of Lifeboat 2. A few minutes later the last few boats were lowered. Now the only ones still on board were two of the collapsibles, stored atop the officers’ quarters. By this time Captain Smith began to relieve his men. He went to the wireless cabin and told Bride and Phillips: “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it’s every man for himself.” The two remained at their post.15

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On the deck atop the officers’ quarters, Lightoller and a few others were trying to lower the two collapsibles. Colonel Gracie and his friend Clinch Smith tried to jump up to that deck, but the weight of their life-preservers stymied their effort. Gracie crouched down, and as a wave rolled in he made a leap. The crest of the water carried him up to the deck, but when he turned, Smith was nowhere to be seen.16 A wave then swept away Lightoller and those working to free the collapsibles. Behind them the forward funnel broke off and crushed several people. At the same time, the falling funnel created a second wave that pushed more people away. Slowly the ship dipped under the water. Within a few seconds she was perpendicular to the Atlantic. The liner broke in two, the forward section sinking while the after part righted itself. But a few moments later it too plunged under the icy Atlantic’s waves. Thus at 0220 on 15 April 1912, the great Titanic sank. Assessing the Blame Above the liner’s grave, hundreds of people struggled in the subfreezing cold of the water. Some managed to reach the capsized Collapsible A. Others, such as Jack Thayer, made their way to capsized Collapsible B.17 Colonel Gracie was clinging to a crate until he saw Collapsible B. He was grateful that Second Officer Lightoller was there to organize the men atop the lifeboat.18 At 0330, an hour and ten minutes after the Titanic had foundered, the Carpathia arrived at the scene and her crew began to pick up survivors. To make certain of the liner’s fate, Carpathia Captain Arthur Rostron asked Fourth Officer Boxhall, “The Titanic has gone down?” “Yes,” was the reply. “She went down at about 2:30.”19 In all, 705 people survived, including Second Officer Lightoller, Harold Bride, Jack Thayer, Colonel Gracie, Frank Goldsmith, and Violet Jessop. Among the 1,502 who perished were Jack Phillips, Thomas Andrews, Clinch Smith, and Captain Smith. At the time it was the worst maritime disaster in history. Many factors, taken in aggregate, caused the tragedy. Ice conditions were abnormal. Visibility was hampered by a lack of moonlight, waves brushing the iceberg, surface haze, and the want of binoculars for the lookouts. Lifeboat regulations were seriously outdated, as witnessed by the Titanic having vessels capable of carrying just a fraction of those on board. No international rules regarding many aspects of maritime communications existed; thus the wireless operator in the Californian—as was customary—had retired for the night around 2330. Interestingly, if First Officer Murdoch had kept the Titanic on course, she would have struck the iceberg head on and probably just two of her compartments would have flooded. Yet he should not be blamed for the disaster. He took what seemed the logical course of action. Any criticism of him would be unfair.

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It would not be unfair, however, to blame Captain Lord of the Californian. Despite being told that a nearby vessel was firing rockets, he did not go to the bridge to see for himself, nor did he rouse the wireless operator to try to make contact with the mystery vessel. Yet some come to his defense. The “Lordides,” as they are called, say there was another vessel firing rockets that night, and it was that ship the watch on the Californian had seen— not the Titanic. But no evidence has ever surfaced to indicate there was any other ship in the area that night firing rockets. Part of the pro-Lord theory holds that the Titanic’s reported position was in error. Lord’s defenders believe the ship sank several miles south of that position. Yet Robert Ballard, the man who decades later discovered the sunken Titanic, concluded that the ship was just one mile south of the position broadcast by her wireless operator that night.20 Another point Captain Lord’s apologists raise is that both Second Officer Stone and Lord himself were of the opinion that the neighboring vessel was a small steamer. They saw no blaze of light such as the White Star liner would have emitted. What is overlooked is that sometime earlier, when the Titanic first appeared on scene, Third Officer Groves had noticed a great deal of light. One member of the Californian’s crew reported seeing a “glare of lights on her after deck.”21 Lord and Stone failed to see a significant glow because by the time they saw the Titanic, she had turned two points to port. Lord’s defenders point out that both the Titanic and the Californian were signaling with Morse lamps, but neither vessels’ officers saw replies. The steamers may have been just beyond the range of those signal lamps, however. The “Lordides” further say that some Titanic survivors reported seeing the Californian move. But the Californian had remained stationary, so it could not have been her— thus some other ship was in proximity to the Titanic, they contend. But other survivors were just as adamant that the other ship had not moved. In fact, during the night the Californian turned in a circle, which may have caused the illusion of movement for some witnesses. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the findings of the official inquires. The Californian saw a ship stop at 2340—about the same time the Titanic struck the iceberg. Between 0045 to 0145 the Californian’s second officer saw rockets. It was about that time the Titanic fired hers. The Titanic sank at 0220, about the same time Stone observed the mysterious neighbor vanish. Even if it had been just a small steamer that had fired rockets that night, it would not excuse Captain Lord’s inaction. The missiles resembled distress signals, yet he failed to respond to them in a seamanlike fashion. A Drama for the Ages After the disaster, reforms were adopted. Atlantic travel routes were shifted south. The International Ice U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

Patrol was established to track icebergs. Regulations were put in place requiring ships to carry an adequate number of lifeboats—and drills became mandatory. Maritime rules were established requiring that radio communications in passenger ships be staffed around the clock. Seventy-three years after the tragedy, Robert Ballard led an expedition to find the lost liner. In September 1985, the ship’s broken halves were discovered lying about a third of a mile apart, the distance between them strewn with debris. But no evidence of a 300foot gash in the Titanic—believed to be the cause of her sinking—was found. Ballard concluded that a series of punctures were made as the iceberg poked the liner along her starboard side. In 1994 a sample of the ship’s steel was recovered. Tests revealed that it became quite brittle in very cold water.22 Why does the Titanic continue to hold our imaginations? It could be because it reveals the arrogance of man and simultaneously his impotence against the forces of nature. Perhaps it is because the sinking was a jarring entry to a young century that two years later saw war on a scale that forever changed our world. Or maybe it is simply because it was a human drama of the highest order—one unrivaled by the greatest fiction, no matter how often revisited. Whatever the case, without question or doubt the story of the

Titanic overshadows all else in the realm of single-vessel marine disasters. 1. Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955), p. 148. 2. Geoffrey Marcus, The Maiden Voyage (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. 5. 3. Ocean Liners of the Past: The White Star Liners Olympic & Titanic (New York: Arco Publishing Company, 1970), p. 26. 4. Patrick Stenson, The Odyssey of C. H. Lightoller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), p. 148. 5. Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the S.S. Titanic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), pp. 11–12. 6. The New York Times, 16 April 1912. 7. John B. Thayer, The Sinking of the S.S. Titanic (Riverside, CT: 7 C’s Press, 1940), p. 14. 8. Archibald Gracie, The Truth about the Titanic (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1913), p. 14. 9. Beesley, Loss of the Titanic, pp. 36–38. 10. Violet Jessop, Titanic Survivor (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 1997), pp. 125–26. 11. Lord, A Night to Remember, p. 63. 12. Beesley, Loss of the Titanic, p. 55. 13. Lord, A Night to Remember, p. 90. 14. Remember the Titanic audiocassette (Riverside, CT: 7 C’s Press, 1974). 15. The New York Times, 19 April 1912. 16. Gracie, The Truth, p. 48. 17. Thayer, The Sinking, p. 25. 18. Gracie, The Truth, pp. 72–76. 19. Arthur Rosron, Home From the Sea (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 61. 20. Robert Ballard and Michael S. Sweeney, Return to Titanic (Washington, DC: National Geographic), pp. 60–61. 21. Leslie Reade, The Ship that Stood Still (New York: Norton & Company, 1993), p. 357. 22. Robert Gannon, “What Really Sank the Titanic,” Popular Science, February 1995, p. 55.

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‘SCREWBALLS’ THE NAVY’S

BY DANIEL J. DEMERS

In 1941, a weekend pass in San Francisco and an impetuous sailor’s good intentions erupted into an international incident with Nazi Germany.

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hen Harold Sturtevant Jr. made a daring rescue of a fellow sailor in 1942, he earned a Navy citation for bravery. In part it praised him “for the promptness, initiative, coolness and speed with which he organized the rescue” of a colleague, who had been buried in their ship’s coal bunker. Yet just 14 months earlier, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had publicly denounced the same Harold Sturtevant as a “screwball.” The 24-year-old sailor had experienced a tumultuous 18 months. Sturtevant, from Haverhill, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Navy in 1938 and was assigned duty as a fireman in the destroyer USS Craven (DD-382). In October 1940, he was placed under psychiatric observation at the Mare Island Naval Hospital as a chronic sleepwalker. A few months later, Sturtevant and fellow psychiatric patient Edward Lackey, 23, received a weekend pass. It was 18 January 1941, a Saturday. The two took the local ferry to San Francisco. There, according to Sturtevant,

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“we were taking a walk and we flipped a coin to see where we’d go.” Strolling up San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, they noticed a commotion at the corner of Market and O’Farrell Streets. Sturtevant recalled that their saunter “brought us to this place and we saw the crowd and the Nazi swastika” flying high atop a ten-story office building. The four-by-eight-foot red, black, and white Third Reich banner had been hoisted by the German Consulate in honor of Germany’s 70th anniversary as a unified nation. Within two hours of the flag’s raising, a crowd estimated at 3,000 had gathered. Traffic was at an impasse. Then, as the throng watched, Sturtevant and Lackey sprang into action. The two sailors climbed the building’s exterior fire escape all the way to the tenth floor. According to Sturtevant, “We clumb up and cut it [the Nazi banner] loose, that’s all and me with no insurance!” The spectacle brought cheers from the crowd, who sang out choruses of “Hip, hip, hooray!” Eight police cars

were rushed to the scene in response to two riot calls. ‘No Ordinary German Diplomat’ The consul-general, who earlier that day had unwittingly set events in motion with his routine order to display the flag in honor of the holiday, was no ordinary German diplomat, to be sure. Fritz Wiedemann had been Adolf Hitler’s commanding officer during World War I, but the tie ran even deeper than that. According to Hitler, Wiedemann in 1917 had saved the future Führer’s life, pulling him free from a collapsed building. Hitler later had appointed Wiedemann his personal adjutant in the early years of the Nazi government—even making provisions for him in his last will and testament. When he was assigned the consular post in San Francisco in March 1939, the American press concluded that he was Nazi Germany’s spy chief in the United States. In his memoirs, Wiedemann described his mixed emotions as the drama in CaliU 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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Sailor Harold Sturtevant Jr., perched precariously on a tenth-floor flagpole, used his pocketknife to cut down a Third Reich ensign displayed by the German Consulate in San Francisco early in 1941. The ensuing international furor eventually led to Sturtevant’s discharge, but he was able to re-enlist after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year. r




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fornia unfolded. On the one hand, he had been infuriated with the desecration of his nation’s flag. On the other, he found the events to be both surreal and comical. Too, he admired Sturtevant and Lackey for their courage in climbing up the fire escape. He had shaken his head in disbelief as Sturtevant inched his way out on the slender flagstaff, pulled out a jackknife and cut the halyards of the German banner. With near-perfect timing, a German vice-consul had leaned out a ninth-story window and snatched the ensign as it fluttered free from the pole—saving it from certain destruction at the hands of the incensed mob below. The two sailors were arrested immediately and charged with malicious mischief. They were released within hours on a writ of habeas corpus filed by the American Legion in their behalf. The veterans’ group argued the pair should be commended—rather than punished—because flying that flag was in violation of California’s Military and Veterans Code. One statute made it a felony to display any “emblem which was an invitation or . . . stimulus to an anarchistic action . . . designed . . . as an aid to propaganda . . . that advocates by force and violence the overthrow of this government.” The American Legion considered it a case in point, given that Hitler’s best-selling book, Mein Kampf, advocated the overthrow of democratic governments, to be replaced by dictatorial National Socialism. Lackey and Sturtevant were released from city jail and turned over to the Navy. Germany Lodges a Protest By Monday the matter had become international. The German government issued a strong protest alleging the incident proved that America was “governed by a democracy which did not know how to deal with gangsters.” The influential German newspaper Der Montag, appalled by reports of the cheering San Francisco crowd, editorialized that the spectacle proved that “only in democratic countries is it possible for a war-mongering clique to win such influences over the masses.” Wiedemann, in his memoirs, wrote that N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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Hitler was so infuriated that he wanted to declare war on the United States right then and there. The sailors were brought before San Francisco Municipal Judge Peter J. Mullin on Tuesday. Sturtevant told the judge he hadn’t known the flag was flying from Germany’s consulate—and that if he had, “we wouldn’t have done what we did.” He continued: “We of the Navy are paid and taught to protect human life. When I saw the crowd there, and saw they were angry about the Nazi flag, I acted as I thought best—I was afraid that if the flag was allowed to continue to hang, it might lead to a riot and somebody’d get hurt.” During the hearing, a Navy physi-

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Nazi Germany’s consul-general in San Francisco, Fritz Wiedemann, seen here posing shortly before returning to Germany in July 1941. Wiedemann had been credited with saving Adolf Hitler’s life in 1917. r




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cian testified that the two had been under psychiatric evaluation for several months. Sturtevant’s problem was his sleepwalking, the doctor noted, but called Lackey “medically and mentally irresponsible and unfit for Navy duties.” Inquiries from the press prompted Secretary Knox to declare that a Navy investigation “discloses that they were screwballs.” Out of the Navy, then Back Judge Mullin found both sailors guilty, sentencing them to 90 days in the city jail. He suspended the sentences based on Navy assurances that the two would face

a court-martial. Lackey was issued a medical discharge within a month. Sturtevant, however, was held in the brig for three months while the Navy conducted its own inquiry. Dismayed at the young sailor’s fate, the American Legion provided private counsel for his defense. The lawyer said Sturtevant indeed was guilty— but of nothing more than “over-zealous patriotism.” Ultimately the Navy quietly discharged Sturtevant. He returned to civilian life, then joined the Merchant Marine and “went to sea on a tanker.” But eight days after Pearl Harbor, Sturtevant was again in the news—showing up at a Navy recruiting station in Boston seeking to re-enlist on 15 December 1941. Two days later he “was back in the good graces of Uncle Sam,” the Associated Press reported, his application for re-enlistment having been accepted. It was just five months after his return to the Navy that Sturtevant turned up in the news columns again when he was cited for heroics in rescuing “a fellow sailor who was buried in a coal bunker aboard a cruiser.” The family name last came to prominence in the news media two months later, in July 1942. This time it was Sturtevant’s 45-year-old father, Harold, who made national headlines: He had volunteered for the U.S. Army in order “to do in a bigger way—the same thing his son did to a Nazi swastika.”

Sources: Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann, Der Feldherr Werden Wollte, Margita Tappe, trans. (Berlin: VelbertKettwig, 1964), p. 238. “Thousands See U. S. Sailor Slash Down German Flag Here,” San Francisco Examiner, 19 January 1941. “Nazi Consulate Ordered Evicted, Lease Cancelled Over Flag Row,” San Francisco Examiner, 19 January 1941. “Flag Rippers Tried Here,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 20 January 1941. “Diplomatic Dispute Looms,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 January 1941. “International Mixup Looms Over Flag Case, San Francisco Examiner, 20 January 1941. “More on Flag Riot, Sailors to Be Sentenced Thursday,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 January 1941. “Nazi Flag Rippers Get Sentences Here Today, Serving May be Held Up, Knox Calls Pair Screwballs,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 23 January 1941. “Sailors Get 90 Days, Suspended Sentence,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 January 1941. “Dooley Will Defend Sailor,” San Francisco CallBulletin, 8 May 1941. “Gob Who Tore Nazi Flag Asks to Reenlist,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 December 1941. “He Tore Down Nazi Flag; Back in Navy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 December 1941. “S. F. Nazi Flag Case, Sailor Involved Now Cited As Hero,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 8 April 1942. “Father of Swastika Ripper Joins Army,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 July 1942.

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By Terrence S. McCormack

A rising hero of the early U.S. Navy resigned before his prime; for him, privatesector seafaring would prove far more perilous.

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. . and distinguished energy of character” probably would have raised him “to the highest honors in the Navy.” 3 Cutting short a bright and promising naval career, Sterett thereupon entered the merchant service, and eventually, attained captaincy of the Warren. Ex-Navy: Like Captain, Like Ship

A Promising Officer, an Abbreviated Career Appointed a naval officer by President John Adams in 1798, Sterett had compiled a gallant fighting record— frequently brilliant and also controversial—during seven years when the Navy was continuously at war. He was third lieutenant overseeing a gun division in the frigate Constellation, which successfully battled the French during the Quasi-War. Promoted to first lieutenant and command of the 12-gun Enterprise, he led that schooner to the Mediterranean in 1801. There, off Malta in the Barbary Wars’ first encounter, the 23-year-old Sterett routed a better-armed Tripolitan corsair without losing a single man. President Thomas Jefferson wrote to him conveying America’s high esteem and asserting that “the enemy cannot meet bravery and skill united.”2 Congress voted to bestow to Sterett a commemorative sword and to give extra pay to his men. Promoted to master-commandant, Sterett was chosen in 1805 to command the new U.S. brig Hornet, about to launch. But first, he wanted to clarify his ranking. He wrote to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith that he was unable to reconcile to the promotion of a junior officer, Stephen Decatur, over him and thus would be forced to resign. Secretary Smith, though hesitant to lose Sterett, defended Decatur’s promotion (awarded to recognize his daring night raid into Tripoli Harbor in 1804) as a matter of policy. Ten days later, Sterett replied that it was not compatible with correct principles of honor to serve under Decatur, and submitted his resignation. The secretary regretfully accepted, and observed that Sterett’s “high reputation . NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Master-Commandant Andrew Sterett (depicted in an 1803 profile-portrait) was poised for big things when he submitted his resignation from the Navy in 1805. His beef? A certain junior officer named Stephen Decatur had been promoted over him. N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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The 396-ton, three-masted Warren, with copper sheathing and a carved figurehead, had been built in 1799 as a Navy sloop-of-war for the Quasi-War. She was acquired in 1801 by a group of three merchant firms, “men of the highest commercial standing in Baltimore” with big plans for their acquisition. The most powerful investor in the venture was S. Smith & Buchanan, the successful partnership headed by U.S. Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland. “General” Smith had been a Cabinet secretary and remained an adviser to the Jefferson administration. He also was older brother to Navy Secretary Robert Smith. The Warren’s principal owner was Lemuel Taylor, a merchant who had been active in Baltimore maritime affairs for at least ten years. Taylor’s ships traded in a world at war, and he lost vessels to English, French, and Spanish privateers. Earlier in 1806 he had joined other local merchants and traders, signing a lengthy memorial to President Jefferson and Congress protesting Britain’s “Essex Decision,” which had legalized expanded attacks on American shipping. Taylor was appointed by the other Warren owners to act for them as the ship’s managing owner, or “husband.” To him fell the day-to-day task of outfitting the vessel to realize the owners’ global-trade vision. Their plan, as generally understood, would send the Warren first to the Pacific Northwest to trade its cargo with the Indians for furs, and then to bargain those furs at Canton, China, for exotic commodities (tea, porcelain, etc.) to bring home. Potentially the exchange of goods at each successive market (Northwest—Orient—Baltimore) could compound profits and bring the investors an enormous return. The Warren had been purchased as ready to “put to sea at small expense.”4 Still, about two months of activity was required before she could weigh anchor. So Taylor, the “husband,” and Andrew Sterett, employed by him as shipmaster, labored together to prepare the ship for her projected 18-month cruise. Sterett apparently advised Taylor in hiring the Warren’s officers. All four were furloughed from Navy service (perhaps with help from Samuel and Robert Smith) and known to Sterett either personally or by reputation. They recently had arrived from Barbary War duty in the Mediterranean. One of them, Master-Commandant Samuel Evans, was hired at 40 dollars per month as the Warren’s first mate and Sterett’s next-in-command. Sterett and Taylor certainly visited the Baltimore’s Merchants Coffee-House, a short walk from the Custom House

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(itself a few doors from Taylor’s office), to plan and discuss Warren business. The Coffee-House, supplied with letter bags for departing ships and stocked with useful periodicals, was the local source for maritime news and business gatherings, sought out by merchants and sea captains alike. The proprietor cultivated his patrons for information and communicated directly with correspondents in Europe. He published the Baltimore Weekly Price-Current (quoted by area newspapers and reprinted all over the country), which included within its pages a comprehensive tally of America’s ships at sea. A waterfront visitor observing the Warren and aware of her owners’ influence might wonder whether a military operation was being planned: Captain Sterett hired a gunner, a gunner’s mate, and an armorer, as well as a drummer and a fifer for the crew. The Aurora, a Philadelphia newspaper, reported that “a large ship [with numerous crew] is fitting out in Baltimore for an expedition” and surmised that it was destined for the West Indies with military stores to

aid the rebellions of either Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela or Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti. The Aurora expressed hope that local customs officers would detain the ship without deference to the owners (obviously alluding to Senator Smith). In response, a Baltimore paper, the American, claimed to have made its own inquiry about the Warren and decided that the Aurora’s report could not be justified.5 However, one prominent Baltimore merchant considered a different angle and wrote to a Boston colleague opining that as the Warren “will be strongly armed, we presume the object is smuggling.”6 A Suspicious Supercargo Taylor and Sterett provisioned their ship for six months, bringing livestock aboard for fresh meat, and stowing casks of drinking water below the cargo hold.They procured shot and powder for 20 guns, and a selection of small arms to fill the ship’s magazine.

THE MARINERS MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VA.

Sterett’s command of the U.S. schooner Enterprise in her victory over the Barbary-corsair 14-gunner Tripoli on 1 August 1801 prompted a congratulatory message from President Thomas Jefferson, who proudly noted that “the enemy cannot meet bravery and skill united.” But in Sterett’s case, bravery went hand-in-hand with a sense of honor so heightened that it was career-killing.

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Among Lemuel Taylor’s responsibilities was the hiring of the ship’s supercargo, an agent of the owners who traveled with the cargo, selling it to best advantage at destination, and buying for return. This individual managed the cargo but had no power to interfere with governing the ship or the crew—that was strictly Captain Sterett’s domain. Taylor soon met up in town with an experienced supercargo named Procopio Jacinto Pollock, who had recently returned from work in Mexico. Pollock was 35 years old, a native of Spanish New Orleans, and the oldest son of a major financier of the American Revolution, Oliver Pollock. The elder Pollock had been the United States’ commercial agent in New Orleans during the Revolution, and had raised Procopio among Spanish Louisiana’s merchant elite. Though residing in Pennsylvania by 1796, Procopio remained interested in Spain’s American colonies and even sought an official introduction to the governor of Havana.7 In March 1797, President George Washington appointed him as consul general to the port of New Orleans, but young Pollock probably never took office and resigned nonetheless in May 1799. In the year prior to meeting Taylor, Pollock had traveled twice to Veracruz, Mexico, while employed as Baltimore merchant Robert Oliver’s supercargo. There he joined the branch of a leading international firm to act as Oliver’s agent. Oliver was less than impressed with Pollock’s work, feeling he had cheated him “out of a large sum of money.” He replaced him in April 1806. After his dismissal, Pollock returned to Baltimore, where his father resided, and was hired by Taylor as the Warren’s supercargo. Oliver’s opinion of Pollock was not solicited by Taylor, but privately he “regret[ted] exceedingly having anything to do with him.”8 Pollock was described as “shrewd,” extremely guarded, and capable of the most refined deception, and he was “well-acquainted with the Spanish character and language.”9 The owners relied heavily on Captain Sterett and supercargo Pollock for the success of the voyage. At age 28, Sterett was several years younger than Pollock, but like him was the scion of a well-todo patriot who had fought in the Revolution. Both sons were well-travelled. And each had been nominated by the nation for important commissions: Sterett the warrior as Navy officer, Pollock the businessman as consul general. Set in motion by ambitious fathers, they had pursued glory, gain, N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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and adventure. The bold undertaking on board the Warren was emblematic of their careers and aspirations. By August’s end, Sterett’s crew numbered 90, including officers and apprentices. The men gladly came prepared with warm clothing for the extreme climes they would encounter. At the Custom House on Saturday, 6 September 1806, Taylor completed the Warren’s registry and obtained her clearance certificate. The big ship was about to sail. The latest Price-Current warned of destructive weather in the Atlantic, and reported on the damaged ships returning home. Lastly, Taylor drew up the owners’ customary “Letter of Instructions”—binding orders to guide the captain at sea, with directions and advice on financial contacts, markets and destinations, and the permissible discretion allowed. Before the ship left the wharf, Taylor delivered Letters of Instructions both to Sterett and Pollock. Back at Taylor’s counting house, a clerk made a copy and filed it. On Monday, newspapers reported that the Warren had cleared for the “North West Coast of America,” and then she was at sea. Mission to Trade—or to Smuggle? The Warren sailed “remarkably fast,” served by a crew “faithful, zealous, and disciplined.”10 No sooner had she stood down the Patapsco River, rounded the new observatory at Bodkin Point, and entered Chesapeake Bay, than skeptics back in town again questioned the advertised purpose of the journey. A concerned Spanish consul in Baltimore, Juan Bautista Bernabeu, wrote to the viceroy in Lima, Peru, warning that the ship was fitted out to conduct illicit commerce on South America’s Pacific Coast—a colonial trade notoriously forbidden by Spanish law. And Robert Oliver, Pollock’s former boss, wrote to a colleague in Veracruz that “Mr. Pollock had sailed lately, supercargo of an armed ship . . . for the purpose we presume of smuggling near Lima.”11 The Warren escaped the gale’s aftermath. In fact, weather conditions of the whole voyage were recalled as “uncommonly fine and fair.”12 The first leg of the journey would take the ship around Cape Horn, a challenge to even the most experienced mariner. In October a sea-captain arrived in Baltimore from Bremen and reported at the CoffeeHouse that on 22 September he had spoken the Warren in the North Atlantic. He specified a location corresponding roughly to the latitude of the Capes of Virginia (at the mouth of the Chesapeake), but at a longitude pushing toward mid-ocean. Sterett was apparently sailing “the old conventional track south, crossing the Atlantic eastward to the Cape Verde Islands to pick up trade winds that would carry the [Warren] toward Brazil. . . .”13 For several months no more was heard in Baltimore of the Warren’s progress. But on 15 December, a ship-to-ship contact occurred that eventually would be relayed back to

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NAVAL WAR COLLEGE MUSEUM; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND, ART COLLECTION

Sterett’s naval career may have been brief, but it was hardly uneventful. He was there for the first naval victory of the young United States, serving on board the frigate Constellation when she bested the French frigate L’Insurgente on 9 February 1799 (above). And his 1801 capture of the Tripoli (right) was the first U.S. victory of the Barbary Wars. But the promising naval hero was fated to die ignominiously while skippering a merchantman engaged in a sketchy enterprise. the Coffee-House. An unnamed vessel spoke the Warren in the South Atlantic at latitude 34 south, just below Brazil near the Rio de la Plata. Nothing was reported of conditions on the Warren, leaving the world to assume the best. However, a major upheaval had occurred on that ship about a week before. One of the seamen, “a mere youth” named Peter Roe, was on the quarterdeck, immediately over the captain’s cabin. Peter heard a great disturbance below: a quarrel pitting Captain Sterett and the officers against Procopio Pollock. Roe listened to the officers protest that Pollock wanted to change the voyage. The supercargo produced a sealed Letter of Instructions from Lemuel Taylor. He broke it open and showed it to the officers. The instructions—radically different from those given to Sterett—ordered Pollock to take exclusive control of the voyage (upon reaching a specified latitude) and directed that instead of going to the Northwest Coast, the Warren was to engage

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in smuggling along the coast of Chile. The captain’s body servant (and second cook), Murray Gibson, also was present at the encounter. He remembered that when shown the letter by Pollock, Sterett stated that “he’d be damned if he would serve under any such orders; before he would do so, he would either blow out the supercargo’s brains, or his own.”14 Word spread, quickly sending the ship into an uproar.  According to Roe, the tension continued over several days, and Captain Sterett showed that his mind was “deranged” but then, at intervals, he would seem in control of his senses. Pollock’s sealed instructions—negating Sterett’s own—also effectively revoked the Shipping Articles the crew had signed and placed them in danger of capture by Spanish authorities in Chile.  A few days after being shown the instructions, Sterett—during one of his unstable periods—attempted to shoot Pollock, but without success. U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

The captain’s disturbed state continued into another week, and the officers decided to take his pistols. Young Roe would sit up at night with Sterett, who frequently complained that he had “been taken in by the owners.” The Warren continued to sail southward. And then Sterett’s demeanor appeared to improve; he seemed to “get better.” “One very fine day,” Captain Sterett shaved and dressed as if he were going ashore. At his request Gibson brought him his writing desk. Sterett wrote a letter, sealed it, locked it in his desk, and gave the key to Gibson. Possessing his pistols again, Captain Sterett then emerged on deck and shot at some birds.  Going below, he took a ball from the ship’s arms chest and slipped it into his pocket. Then he retired to his cabin and locked the door. Two hours later, he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Gibson, who was in steerage, heard the gun’s report and ran to Sterett’s room. He found the captain

lying on a trunk with the pistol in his hand, still pointed to his head.  The ball had entered one temple and passed through and exited the opposite eye. Remarkably, Andrew Sterett lived for another 13 or 14 days “in great pain.” He died on 9 January 1807, a few weeks from his 29th birthday, and before the Warren rounded Cape Horn. Unpleasant Reception at Concepción As soon as Sterett died, Pollock called all hands aft and asked them to choose a new captain. First Mate Samuel N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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Evans was selected. But the Warren’s troubles were not over. Under Pollock’s direction, the new captain steered the Warren around Cape Horn to the Chilean coast and arrived at Concepción Bay on 19 January. Despite the crew’s objections, the supercargo ordered the ship to enter the bay, and the next day they landed at Talcahuano. Pollock went ashore and, after preliminaries, soon lodged at the commandant’s house. The crew was taken captive and imprisoned within a Spanish fort. Pollock arranged with the governor of Concepción to smuggle most of the cargo. It was unloaded from the Warren and stored in a warehouse to which only Pollock and the Spanish authorities had keys. The cargo—silks, lace, and other finery—obviously was not intended for the Pacific Northwest Indians, but would bring a fine price in Chile. Sterett had indeed “been taken in.” The seized Warren, absent most of her cargo, was sent to Valparaiso and condemned by authorities in Peru. In time, Samuel Smith and the owners would petition the king of Spain for restitution. The Warren was absorbed into the Spanish navy and several years later fought actions against Chilean rebels.15 Sterett’s crew remained imprisoned at Talcahuano for about eight weeks and over the next year transferred to two other prisons. Ultimately they were sent to a cell at Guayaquil, Equador, and confined under wretched conditions. Some were released after a few months, and some remained captive there for nearly four years. Treated poorly, still others became sick and died at Guayaquil. Slowly groups of survivors made their way back to the United States. The first 14 arrivals reported Sterett’s death after landing in Newport, Rhode Island, on 11 February 1808. Later returnees included mariners who brought suit for their wages in the U.S. District Court for Maryland against the Warren’s owners. Their case continued through lengthy and complex proceedings, delayed by bankruptcies and assignments of all the owners (including Lemuel Taylor, who began a new life in Cuba), and international negotiation and treaty. Eventually the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Sheppard v. Taylor. The court finally ruled unanimously for the seamen, awarding them wages from the time of their departure from Baltimore in September 1806 until their

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he have been unaware of the various returns to the United rumors impugning the Warren States, with interest from a in Baltimore, and remained igspecified date. The decision norant of his ship’s true destinacame in 1831—25 years after tion and mission? Was he simthey had agreed with Andrew ply the upright Navy hero used Sterett to sail in the Warren. to front a shady operation who Sterett had chosen them well: did not realize that his cargo The Navy midshipmen emwas unsuitable to trade with ployed as the Warren’s officers the Pacific Northwest Indians? returned to duty after coming What other factors influenced home and provided distinhis suicide? Was Sterett’s morguished service to America in tification less about honor and the War of 1812. Procopio Pollock had made Today, Sterett’s memory is kept afloat by the Arleigh Burke– more about not getting a bigger piece of the pie? And, one important connections while at class guided-missile destroyer USS Sterett—the fourth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name of the Old-Navy officer who wonders, why was he unable Concepción, befriending an early to kill Pollock? Did Pollock leader in the Chilean struggle for accomplished much in his abbreviated time in uniform. double-cross even the owners independence, Juan Martinez de who illegally conspired with him and implement his own Rojas, then secretary to the governor of Concepción. (Indeed, private smuggling scheme? The record allows us only to the governor himself was observed dressed in “cassimeres” conclude that the owners had planned a smuggling venture from the Warren’s cargo.) In October 1807 Pollock requested all along—with Sterett the odd man out. permission to move to Santiago, where he worked secretly Notwithstanding our uncertainty, the Supreme Court for Chilean independence. Expelled from Chile in 1808 for justices—contemporaries of Sterett and the Warren and his revolutionary activities, he relocated to Buenos Aires, intimate with the arguments, discussions, and every word Argentina, and there continued to expound propaganda faput forth in Sheppard v. Taylor—concluded that Sterett’s voring independence from Spain in his handwritten Gacetas motives were pure. The court’s opinion provides him this de Procopio. The Gacetas were drawn largely from American noble epitaph: “Captain Sterett, from disappointed and and English periodicals and are credited as an early influence wounded feelings, disdaining himself to engage in an illicit arousing public opinion against Spanish rule. Years later, Poltrade and unwilling to expose his officers and men to its lock ended up owning a large coffee plantation in Puerto Rico perils and consequences, became partially deranged and and died there at an unknown date. shot himself.”17 Postmortem for a Doomed Voyage U.S. NAVY (TRAVIS K. MENDOZA)

Baltimore newspapers first reported Sterett’s death on 22 February 1808, describing it as occurring during “his passage to Lima, Peru, on January 9, 1807, after an illness of 28 days [emphasis added].” 16 That duration apparently included both the deranged “illness” he experienced before pulling the trigger and the 13 to 14 days he suffered afterward. What happened to Sterett’s body is unknown. Despite detailed accounts of the Warren and her crew’s activities from the moment they touched land in Chile, nothing is said of Sterett’s burial, supporting the probability that he already had been buried at sea. Land burial is further unlikely as it would have required shipboard preservation of the body for an uncertain destination. Andrew Sterett left behind a wife and a young daughter in Baltimore and an unfinished record. Today, his naval service and spirit are commemorated by the USS Sterett (DDG-104), a guided-missile destroyer launched in 2007 and now stationed at Naval Base San Diego. It is difficult to judge motive and guilt from incomplete documentation 200 years after the fact. Questions remain concerning Sterett’s role in the Warren plot. How could

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1.“Record in the Case of Sheppard and others versus Taylor and others,” U.S. Supreme Court, January Term, 1830, 2, Case File #1583, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, Record Group 267, National Archives, Washington, DC. [hereinafter cited as “Record in the Case.”] 2. Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Sterett, 1 December 1801, Thomas Jefferson Papers, series 1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827, http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html. 3. Dudley W. Knox, ed., Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers: Naval Operations 1785–1807 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939–1944), vol. 6, p. 164. 4. Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, 30 May 1806. 5. Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 4 August 1806. 6. Robert Oliver to David Parrish, 11 August 1806, Oliver Letterbook, 1806– 1809, Box 13, Maryland Historical Society Library, Baltimore, MD. 7. Executive Minutes of Governor Thomas Mifflin, 13 July 1796, Pennsylvania Archives, series 9, vol. 2, part I (1794–96). Senate Executive Journal, 2 March 1797. 8. Robert Oliver to Matthew L. Murphy, 15 October 1806, Oliver Letterbook. 9. “Record in the Case,” 126; 119. 10. “Record in the Case”, 126. 11. Robert Oliver to Matthew L. Murphy, 15 October 1806, Oliver Letterbook. 12. “Record in the Case,” 125–26. 13. Chester G..Hearn, Tracks In the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans (Camden, ME: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 20. 14. “Record in the Case,” 77, Murray Gibson deposition of 18 December 1826. 15. John J. Johnson, “Early Relations of the United States with Chile,” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 13, no. 3 (September 1944), p. 267. 16. Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 22 February 1808. 17. Sheppard v. Taylor, 30 U.S. 675, 677 (1831).

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In Contact continued from page 9

Over the Line?

helicopters from HS-3 were dispatched to retrieve him, which they did. That, as far as I know, was the beginning of the SH-3A as a NASA recovery vehicle—and the transition from a Marine- to a Navy-support mission. Though gone from the Fleet, the Sea Kings’ continued service as Marine One to transport presidents is accolade enough for their legacy of reliability and functionality. Thank you, Mr. Polmar.

Theodore Kuhlmeier

Honoring Heroes

Bill Lewallen

Michael R. Adams

I enjoyed Donald Wambold’s article on the Military Aviation Museum (MAM) in Virginia Beach (“Museum Report,” February, p. 72). I’m a longtime subscriber to your publication and a thirdyear member of the MAM. It’s about my favorite place to visit in our area and indeed has a large collection of flying warbirds and other historic aircraft, many of which are detailed in the story. One of the museum’s attractions is the drip pans under the engines of the active planes, and the smell of the oil and hydraulics in the hangars. I liked it that the picture accompanying the article was of the Catalina, a beautiful old gal, and the “Val.” My understanding is that the latter isn’t authentic, but a creation for the movie

In “Looking Back” (February, p. 6), Paul Stillwell states that the 12 Hamilton-class cutters were named for secretaries of the Treasury, but not all of them were. The last three (the Munro, Jarvis, and Midgett) were named for Coast Guard heroes. Editor’s note: The Munro was named for the Coast Guard’s only Medal of Honor recipient, Signalman First Class Douglas Munro, who died on Guadalcanal; the Jarvis for Captain David H. Jarvis of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service; and the Midgett for Chief Warrant Officer John Allen Midgett Jr., who served with the U.S. Lifesaving Service and the Coast Guard.

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I have enjoyed your magazine ever since I started to subscribe, but I must say I thought the inclusion in the February article “The Resurrection of John Paul Jones” (pp. 52–57) of a photo of Jones’ “preserved” remains was in bad taste. Shame on the editorial staff.

A Nest for Warbirds

Tora! Tora! Tora! based on an SNJ-4 Texan—a minor point. I realize that column-inches are limited in publications, but I was disappointed that one of the major attractions at MAM wasn’t mentioned. That’s the B-17, one of only a handful still flying. I was there on a cold Saturday this past January when she was flown in from Texas. She’s known as “Chuckie,” the nickname of the previous owner’s wife, and arrived just as the overcast lifted giving us a beautiful sunset. Banking in from the west, the old girl passed over the grass field, gear down and landing lights blazing, escorted by a P-51 and a Spitfire. It was an awesome, throat-swelling sight, the cheering almost drowning out the roar of all those radial engines and the two Merlins. There are other noteworthy planes at MAM, a beautiful de Havilland Dragon Rapide and a Junkers Ju 52 tri-motor among then. The MAM also hosts an annual car show by the Tidewater Region Antique Automobile Club of America. Each May it puts on the “Warbirds over the Beach” show, when everything the MAM has plus all the visiting vintage aircraft are flown. This past May one of only two flying Lancaster bombers came down from Canada for the show. It was something to see it and Chuckie together in the air. Thanks for your great magazine.

U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

MARK YOUR

CALENDAR May 15 – 17, 2012, Virginia Beach, VA Convention Center

Joint Warfighting Conference 2012

Joint Forces’ Inflection Point: What to Hold & What to Fold? Co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, with support from the NDIA Greater Hampton Roads Chapter and the AFCEA Hampton Roads and Tidewater Chapters.

Join us for the sixth annual Joint Warfighting conference and exposition at the Virginia Beach Convention Center. This event offers an East Coast companion to the popular AFCEA-USNI West conference held each year in San Diego, California. It will provide a premier venue for engaging the military professionals and industry leaders who are shaping the nation’s military strategies and warfighting platforms.

Free registration and conference details www.jointwarfighting.org The Joint Warfighting Conference will also feature: Department of the Navy IT East Coast Conference MOAA Military Spouse Symposium

Book Reviews Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamato at Midway Elliot Carlson. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011. 616 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $36.95. Reviewed by Ian W. Toll

To Joe Rochefort “must forever go the acclaim for having made more difference, at a more important time, than any other naval officer in history.” That was the verdict of Edward L. Beach in The United States Navy: A 200-Year History (Houghton-Mifflin, 1986). Yet surprisingly, no book-length biography of Rochefort has ever appeared, until now. Joe Rochefort’s War will be required reading for Pacific war scholars for decades to come. As chief of Pearl Harbor’s Combat Intelligence Unit (better known as Station Hypo), Rochefort gave Admiral Chester Nimitz a detailed and accurate forecast of Japan’s Midway offensive. With that invaluable knowledge, Nimitz set up an ambush of Japanese carriers as they approached the atoll on 4 June 1942. By the following morning, all four of the enemy flattops had been sent into the abyss. But the prickly Rochefort had made bitter enemies of his superior officers in Washington, who had consistently been wrong in their predictions while he had been right. Protected by the veil of wartime secrecy, they connived to obscure Rochefort’s historic achievement, remove him from his post, and deny him the Distinguished Service Medal he so plainly deserved. Rochefort had a hardscrabble upbringing in Los Angeles, the son of an IrishAmerican rug salesman. He dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy during the World War I, lying about his age. His talent and dedication were apparent from the start, and he was promoted to ensign in 1921. That made him a “mustang”—an officer who had risen from the enlisted ranks, a rare creature in that era. Treated as a social inferior by some (not all) of his Annapolis-educated colleagues, Rochefort’s status as an outsider defined him throughout his career. He often ran afoul of superior officers, and his fitness reports sometimes suffered as a result, but

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he found support in high places and managed to climb the ranks. Carlson’s biography provides a very thorough treatment of each stage of his subject’s career, and at times the book offers more detail than a general reader might want to absorb. Rochefort served afloat and ashore, in staff and seagoing jobs. He was a line officer, with wide-ranging experience throughout the service, a breadth of experience that would serve him well in his intelligence roles. He first worked in the emerging field of cryptanal-

ysis at naval headquarters in Washington in the mid-1920s, then lived in Japan as a language student (1929–32). This combination gave him the tools he needed to make his supreme contribution in 1942. The height of Rochefort’s career was the six months between Pearl Harbor and Midway, when he was chief of Hypo. Carlson gives us 181 pages on this period, and his week-by-week narrative is superb. He paints a vivid picture of Rochefort’s basement compound, even including a map showing which analysts sat at which desks. Considering the historic importance of their achievement, that level of detail is entirely justified. After Midway Rochefort was deposed by his rivals in Washington, and Carlson sustains the widely held view that he was the victim of an ignoble power play. But intriguingly, Carlson also raises the

question of whether Rochefort was an “accomplice in his own downfall.” A cantankerous and impolitic man, Rochefort, after his Herculean efforts in the spring of 1942, was apparently exhausted and may even have become a bit unhinged. He was given command of a floating drydock, which historians have often seen as punishment for his past transgressions. But Rochefort liked his duty as captain of the ABSD-2, based in San Francisco Bay and destined for the western Pacific. He lobbied to keep the job, but in April 1944 he was recalled to Washington to serve in a new intelligence post. Heading a unit that analyzed old Japanese radio traffic and provided analysis for long-term war planning, Rochefort excelled to the point that a former nemesis, Rear Admiral Joseph Redman, recommended him for promotion to flag rank. The waters are apparently muddier than briefer treatments of Rochefort’s career have had us believe. This long-overdue biography joins a short list of indispensable books dealing with the codebreaking campaign against Japan, including David Kahn’s The Codebreakers (Scribner, 1967), Wilfred J. Holmes’ Double-Edged Secrets (Naval Institute Press, 1988), and Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton’s And I Was There (William Morrow, 1985). As the most significant new book on the Battle of Midway since Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully’s Shattered Sword (Potomac Books, 2005), Joe Rochefort’s War will be remembered as 2011’s most important contribution to Pacific war scholarship.

Ian Toll is the author of Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (New York: Norton, 2011).

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 Ian W. Toll. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 640 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $35. Reviewed by Elliot Carlson

Aficionados of World War II like to posit a single point upon which the outcome of that conflict hinged, be it the Normandy landings or the Battle of Stalingrad or some other Allied success. Ian W. Toll traces the demise of the Axis to an Allied failure: the events U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

of 7 December 1941. “Pearl Harbor, by giving Roosevelt the license to do what needed to be done, sealed the fate of both Germany and Japan.” He develops this hypothesis in his ambitious, sprawling account of the Pacific war from Pearl Harbor through Midway, very nearly proving his point. While he doesn’t quite show that Germany was doomed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, he leaves little doubt that Japan’s surrender in August 1945 was virtually inevitable given America’s industrial capacity, superiority in numbers, and military muscle. Filled with action though it is, Toll’s story isn’t just a chronicle of naval battles. The book opens with a prologue that recounts the forces that shaped Japanese political life leading up to Pearl Harbor. As in his first venture into U.S. naval history, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (W. W. Norton, 2006), in the current volume Toll blends a vast amount of material about the Pacific war’s first six months into a lively narrative filled with vivid portraits of sailors and many of the principals—American, British, and Japanese. But Pacific Crucible offers little that’s new. Toll makes scant use of the National Archives. He taps the Pacific Fleet’s log (the famous Greybook) and many oral histories and war diaries, but he relies primarily on secondary sources. Even here he doesn’t always exploit the latest research. Few students of Pearl Harbor will accept his view that Japan’s planes were “handled brilliantly” in light of the many flaws in that attack identified by Alan D. Zimm in The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions (Casemate, 2011). Still, Toll finds material for a fresh look at some familiar episodes. Even seasoned readers will welcome his account of Wake Island’s desperate defense (it provided the only instance in the war in which shore batteries turned back an amphibious invasion). And they should more fully appreciate the daring carrier raids launched against the Marshall and Gilbert islands early in 1942. Along with the Doolittle raid against Japan in April 1942, they helped spur Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan to attack the Midway Atoll to lure America’s pesky carriers into battle. After a fast-and-furious sketch of the Battle of the Coral Sea (“American aviators had fought their enemies to a draw”), Toll shifts to the heart of the book: the Battle of Midway, 4–7 June 1942. He captures the drama of this campaign. Toll N AVA L H I S T O R Y

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records in harrowing detail the sacrifices of the U.S. torpedo plane pilots from the carriers Hornet (CV-8), Enterprise (CV-6), and Yorktown (CV-5), although, disappointingly, he strikes one false note. Likening the doomed thrust by the Hornet’s TBD torpedo bombers to the Charge of the Light Brigade is inapt, at best. He gets back on track describing the adroitness and pluck of the dive-bomber pilots who delivered the fatal blows to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s four carriers, compelling Yamamoto to cancel the assault and give the Americans a war-changing victory. After Midway, Toll accurately observes, Yamamoto “would never again muster the forces to mount a sustained offensive against any Allied territory.” Toll gives credit to task force commanders Frank Jack Fletcher and Raymond A. Spruance, and he lauds

to change his mind. The Redmans insisted that Japan’s target was possibly Samoa or the West Coast, if not Hawaii itself. Although it would derail his career, Rochefort didn’t budge in advising Nimitz—who, fortunately, believed Rochefort, not Washington. Nimitz rightly called the U.S. victory at Midway essentially one of intelligence. Pacific Crucible is highly readable and will give the general reader a useful introduction to the major issues, diplomatic events, and naval actions that have come to be synonymous with the Pacific war.

Elliot Carlson is the author of Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011).

The Day the World Was Shocked: The Lusitania Disaster and Its Influence on the Course of World War I John Protasio. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2011. 239 pp. Illus. Map. Notes. Bibliog. $29.95. Reviewed by Colonel John J. Abbatiello, U.S. Air Force

the leadership displayed by Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz. He points out correctly that Nimitz benefitted immeasurably from the foreknowledge of Yamamoto’s plans provided by codebreaker Joe Rochefort and his decrypt team at Pearl. But Toll stumbles on the timing of Rochefort’s famed water ruse that tricked the Japanese into revealing their target. That event occurred closer to the actual attack than this author’s chronology indicates. He properly praises Rochefort for his shrewd assessment of Yamamoto’s impending attack, thereby allowing Nimitz to surprise the Japanese, and in resisting pressure from Washington superiors—notably Joe and John Redman—

When Cunard launched the Lusitania in 1906, she was one of the largest and most luxurious passenger liners ever built. Displacing over 32,000 tons and capable of more than 26 knots, she was able to cross the Atlantic in less than five days. The outbreak of World War I did not deter Cunard from continuing its transatlantic passenger and mail service. On a foggy afternoon on 7 May 1915, Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger and his crew of submarine U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania off the south coast of Ireland. Though her sinking outraged Americans, the ocean liner met her fate almost two years before the United States formally entered World War I. A widely published author, John Protasio previously penned a book surveying famous maritime disasters, making him somewhat of an expert on the subject. Protasio’s monograph about the sinking of the Lusitania not only tells the story of that disastrous day in 1915 but also provides valuable context for this important episode in naval history. Before describing in great detail the Lusitania’s demise, which only took 18 minutes, the author explains the history of the ship’s design and construction, her crew, and her parent company. Protasio also offers a brief overview of the Anglo-German naval race and the opening years of the Great War at sea.

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The author employs published primary sources—in the form of survivor memoirs and contemporary newspaper articles—to offer the reader a close-up view of the reactions of both passengers and crew to the massive explosion and rapid sinking of the great liner. Of the 1,959 souls on board, no fewer than 1,198 passengers and crew died—128 of them American. Britons and Americans alike were of course incensed, but the public reaction in Germany reflected less sympathy and actually lauded Schwieger’s actions as revenge for the “starvation blockade” imposed by the Royal Navy. A number of formal hearings investigated the loss of the Lusitania, and all of them cleared Captain William Thomas Turner, an experienced merchant mariner, of formal blame for his ship’s sinking. Protasio, however, certainly holds Turner responsible for the disaster. Though the Royal Navy could have provided an escort, it chose not to; the standard procedure at this point in World War I was to allow fast liners like the Lusitania to sail without protection due to their high speed and ability to outrun any stalking submarine. Also,

the Admiralty did not think the Germans would commit such an outrageous act as sinking an unprotected passenger vessel. Instead, the Royal Navy provided specific instructions to Turner and Cunard, including the need to zigzag, to sail in mid-channel and avoid coastal areas, and to maintain top speed. Turner, who enjoyed “a brilliant pre-war record, was simply unable to adjust to the new situation” and ignored each of these directives. The author goes on to explain the later sinkings of the liner Arabic and ferry Sussex by U-boats, the Zimmermann telegram, and the launching of the final German unrestricted submarine campaign in early 1917. After three American ships were lost to U-boat attacks in March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson finally asked Congress for a declaration of war. The Lusitania’s sinking therefore did not have a direct impact on America’s entry into World War I, but served as a first and very important step in the march toward war with Germany. Protasio also addresses the cause of the explosion itself, so enormous that a single torpedo could not have achieved such damage to the Lusitania’s hull. The author dismisses some of the more popular theories—such as an explosion of contraband munitions, ignition of a large amount of aluminum powder in the cargo hold, or a bursting boiler—and presents Robert Ballard’s conclusion that coal dust from empty bunkers most likely caused the blast. Ballard and his team dove on the wreck of the Lusitania in 1993. For those readers looking for a top-tobottom review of the Lusitania disaster, Protasio’s book is a perfect fit. His comprehensive approach to the subject will interest historians, sea-service professionals, and the general public. Colonel Abbatiello, an Air Force aviator and educator, completed his doctorate in War Studies at King’s College London in 2004. He is the author

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of Anti-Submarine Warfare in World War I: British Naval Aviation and the Defeat of the U-boats (London: Routledge, 2006) and currently serves on the U.S. Naval Institute’s Editorial Board.

On Seas Contested: The Seven Great Navies of the Second World War Vincent P. O’Hara, W. David Dickson, and Richard Worth, eds. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010. 352 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. $39.95. Reviewed by Jeremy Black

This effective collection of essays provides much detailed information on the French, German, British, Italian, Japanese, American, and Soviet navies during World War II. The range of material covered is very impressive. For each fleet there is a discussion of the back story, including history and mission; the organization, including command structure and doctrine; the material, including ships, aviation, weapon systems, and infrastructure; and a recapitulation covering wartime evolution and assessment. The differences between the fleets were such that the resulting matrix provides dissimilar accounts. Thus the French navy, which succumbed as a result of France’s collapse in 1940 and 1942, and its Italian counterpart, which did better but was brought down in 1943, had a quite different trajectory than did the navies of Germany and, even more, Japan, which fought to the end. The long-range activities of the British and U.S. navies differed from those of the Soviet navy, which is ably covered by Stephen McLaughlin. He relates Soviet naval developments to changes in strategy and doctrine that primarily reflected political considerations. McLaughlin emphasizes the tension between the old school, focusing on command of the sea, and the young school that stressed support for land operations. The disruption attendant on the late-1930s purges is discussed, as it greatly compromised effectiveness during World War II. The purges helped ensure a serious shortage of experienced officers as well as noncommissioned officers, as the latter were promoted to fill gaps. Training regimes were seriously affected, the frequency of accidents rose, and there was less attention to annual maneuvers. As a result, the effectiveness of the navy at combined-arms operations, notably cooperation with aircraft, declined. The purges also affected the shipyards and greatly exacerbated the problems created by Joseph Stalin’s unrealistic assumptions. The consequence was a U N I T E D S TAT E S N AVA L I N S T I T U T E

serious decline in quality, with much of the armor inadequate. Complex gun mountings posed a particular problem. Much of the investment of resources was wasted. For example, as McLaughlin shows, although there was a large submarine force, it was poorly trained and its effectiveness during World War II was limited. As a further reminder of different courses, carrier aviation was important for the British, American, and Japanese, but not for the other powers. The limitations of carriers in the period emerge, as does their lethality, notably in the Pacific. The navies’ diversity makes each essay of great inter-

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est. Several of the authors, notably Mark Peattie on Japan, are leading experts. The major flaw is the absence of an overall conclusion. Instead, the pieces very much seem separate. Linked to this, there is a tendency to take a positive viewpoint on the subject. Thus, Enrico Cernuschi and Vincent O’Hara discuss the achievement of the Regia Marina (Italian navy), while Peter Schenk neglects the degree of Nazi sympathy in the German submarine service—an extent recently highlighted by Holger Herwig. Indeed, the ideological dimension receives scant attention in a volume that is more interested in weaponry and, more helpfully, doctrine. A paperback version supported by a lengthy overall assessment would be welcome.

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Museum Report

By Hans Johnson

Discovering the Navy’s Elite Special Warfare Unit

T

he aquamarine waters and golden sands of Fort Pierce, Florida, are a fitting setting for the National Navy UDTSEAL Museum, which bills itself as “the birthplace of the Navy Frogman.” After all, it was here on the state’s midAtlantic coast, locally referred to as the Treasure Coast, that the frogmen were first trained during World War II. The museum tells the story of the SEALs and the American naval special-warfare units that preceded them. The first stop is the monument created for the site that honors SEALs and their

buggy used in the war on terrorism. A lifeboat from the MV Maersk Alabama, the containership hijacked off the coast of Somalia in 2009, is the latest acquisition. SEALs rescued Captain Richard Philips using this boat. The museum interior is divided into three rooms. In the first, the ship’s store stands by the admissions desk at the entrance and is stocked with books, DVDs, and memorabilia. In the second room the exhibits begin, devoted to World War II. Here one learns about the beginnings of Naval Combat Demolition Unit training at Fort Pierce in 1943. A

retrieved in Iran and captured Viet Cong, Iranian, and Iraqi flags. Mannequins again give the viewer an idea of SEALs in action and how they were equipped in different conflicts. In the center of the room, a motorized rubber raft is available for visitors to climb aboard. The most recent section addresses SEALs’ actions during the 21st century. Another mannequin is dressed in desert fatigues and body armor. A tiny drone circles above it. This exhibit demonstrates how much has changed technologically since World War II and highlights how spectacularly Navy specialwarfare units have adapted to fighting conditions that differ from those envisioned in 1943. For youngsters, there is an area containing two PlayStation2 terminals on which they can play the popular game SOCOM, U.S. Navy SEALs. The museum hosts numerous events, some that feature static displays as well as SEAL demonstrations, including a helicopter assault in the field NATIONAL NAVY UDT SEAL MUSEUM on museum grounds. Just outside the museum’s entrance stands a MK VIII (8) MOD 0 SEAL delivery vehicle (SDV) dating from the An expansion was 1970s, similar to today’s version of the submersible. It holds as many as six SEALs (two crew and four passengers) begun early in 2011 and for conducting clandestine missions. Current SDVs contain significantly upgraded electronics and propulsion systems will be completed in but their exteriors are unchanged. phases this year, with the r




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intention of including more interactive displays. fully equipped mannequin depicts an To this end, the museum already offers a predecessors who sacrificed their lives in Underwater Demoltion Team member continuing-education class on the history the line of duty. Their names are carved with tennis shoes on his feet, carrying of special-warfare units, slated to be held in granite. A nine-foot sculpture by Roy flippers. The history of Navy specialannually. Shifrin depicting a SEAL in action domwarfare units in both the Atlantic and inates. The monument was erected in Pacific is covered in storyboards, photo2010 after it was learned that no such Hans Johnson was an Arabic linguist with the U.S. graphs, and artifacts. memorial already existed. Army and Department of Defense. He is now a The third and largest room covers the The tour begins outside on the musefreelance writer living in southwest Florida. evolution of the units since um grounds. Rare beach obstacles used World War II. This gallery in World War II training are the oldNational Navy UDT-SEAL Museum is arranged chronologically, est items. Additional exhibits include a 3300 North A1A, North Hutchinson Island, Fort Pierce, FL 34949 beginning with the Korean Vietnam river-patrol craft and a Huey Tel: 772-595-5845 War, and contains weapons helicopter. But some artifacts are more http://www.navysealmuseum.com used not only by the SEALs contemporary, including a Swedish-made Open year-round Tues.–Sat., 1000–1600; Sun. noon–1600. Open but also captured from Iranian gunboat captured by SEALs Mondays Jan.–Apr., 1000-1600. the enemy. They include in the Persian Gulf during Operation Admission: Adults $8, Children 6–12 $4, Children 5 and under free a Chinese machine gun Earnest Will in the late 1980s and a dune

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