Results by title
10 books match the query 'Naval operations, American'
America's Sailors in the Great War
Seas, Skies, and SubmarinesLisle A. Rose
University of Missouri Press, 2017
Honorable Mention, 2016 Lyman Awards, presented by the North American Society for Oceanic History
This book is a thrillingly-written story of naval planes, boats, and submarines during World War I.
When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, America’s sailors were immediately forced to engage in the utterly new realm of anti-submarine warfare waged on, below and above the seas by a variety of small ships and the new technology of airpower. The U.S. Navy substantially contributed to the safe trans-Atlantic passage of a two million man Army that decisively turned the tide of battle on the Western Front even as its battleship division helped the Royal Navy dominate the North Sea. Thoroughly professionalized, the Navy of 1917–18 laid the foundations for victory at sea twenty-five years later.
Antisubmarine Warrior in the Pacific
Six Subs Sunk in Twelve DaysJohn A. Williamson
University of Alabama Press, 2005
A commanding firsthand account of the most successful antisubmarine campaign in U.S. Naval History.
The USS England was a 1200-ton, 306-foot, long-hull destroyer escort. Commissioned into service in late 1943 and dispatched to the Pacific the following February, the England and its crew, in one 12-day period in 1944, sank more submarines than any other ship in U.S. naval history: of the six targets attacked, all six were destroyed. For this distinction, legendary in the annals of antisubmarine warfare, the ship and her crew were honored with the Presidential Unit Citation.
After convoying in the Atlantic, John A. Williamson was assigned to the England—first as its executive officer, then as its commanding officer—from the time of her commissioning until she was dry-docked for battle damage repairs in the Philadelphia Naval Yard fifteen months later. Besides being a key participant in the remarkable antisubmarine actions, Williamson commanded the England in the battle of Okinawa, where she was attacked by kamikaze planes.
Williamson narrates his memoir with authority and authenticity, describes naval tactics and weaponry precisely, and provides information gleaned from translations of the orders from the Japanese high command to Submarine Squadron 7. The author details the challenges of communal life aboard ship and explains the intense loyalty that bonds crew members for life. Ultimately, Williamson offers a compelling portrait of himself, an inexperienced naval officer who, having come of age in Alabama during the Depression, rose to become the most successful World War II antisubmarine warfare officer in the Pacific.
Arky
The Saga of the USS ArkansasRay Hanley
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2015
Hard Aground
The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US NavyAndrew C. A. Jampoler
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Three intertwined stories that reveal the challenges faced by the US Navy in its evolution between the Civil War and the First World War
Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy’s strategic and matériel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. These incidents had lasting consequences for how the navy would modernize itself throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. This reconstruction began with barely enough time for the navy’s campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and for its role in the First World War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet. Focus was on battleships and cruisers rather than destroyers and other small combat vessels needed to hunt submarines and serve as convoy escorts.
The second story relates the short, tragic life of the USS Tennessee (later renamed Memphis), one of the steel-hulled ships of the new Armored Cruiser Squadron that was a centerpiece of the navy’s modernization effort. The USS Tennessee was ordered on two unusual missions in the early months of the First World War, long before the United States formally entered the war. These little-known missions and the ship's shocking destruction in a storm surge in the Caribbean serve as the centerpiece of the story. Threaded through the narrative are biographical sketches of the principal players in the drama that unfolded following the ship’s demise, including two of Tennessee’s commanding officers: Vice Admiral Sims, who commanded the US Navy squadrons deployed to Europe in support of the Royal Navy; Rear Admiral William Caperton, who commanded the Caribbean squadron before the Memphis (formerly the Tennessee) was lost; Charles Pond, squadron commander during the wreck; and the American ambassador to the Ottoman court, President Wilson’s enthusiastic supporter, Henry Morgenthau.
Jampoler rounds out this fascinating account with the story of how the USS Tennessee’s destruction prompted fierce deliberations about the US Navy’s operations and chains of command for the remainder of the First World War and the high-level political wrangling inside the Department of the Navy immediately after the war, as civilian appointees and senior officers wrestled to reshape the department in their image.
ON BOARD THE USS MASON
THE WORLD WAR II DIARY OF JAMES A. DUNNMANSEL G. BLACKFORD
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Dunn kept a day-to-day diary during his spare time on board the Mason. Such diaries are a rarity, for the navy (and other armed services) forbade the keeping of diaries, fearful lest secret information fall into enemy hands. The diary chronicles the Mason’s wartime activities, from the first convoy to the final return to the United States. It captures the feeling and meaning of life on board with an immediacy not fully found in retrospective accounts. The diary accurately records the mortal danger Dunn and his shipmates were in while attacking enemy submarines or dealing with extreme weather conditions in the North Atlantic. It conveys the boredom the men encountered while confined on long, tedious convoys and the joy of shore leaves. Here is the daily life aboard ship—the duties and the pastimes that made shipboard life endurable.
Equally interesting, the diary reveals what it meant to be an African American in a white navy within a segregated American society, the shipboard tensions, and the shipboard cooperation and sense of unity. It also portrays the life of an African American onshore in the United States, Great Britain, and North Africa and the love story that unfolded between James and his wife, Jane.
Supplemented by additional sources, including interviews with Dunn, this diary is a personal view into an important part of American history. Like the Tuskegee airmen, the men of the USS Mason paved the way for desegregation in America’s armed forces, contributing to a civil rights movement that changed the face of a nation.
Thunder Below!
The USS *Barb* Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War IIAdmiral Eugene B. Fluckey
University of Illinois Press, 1992
Under the leadership of her fearless skipper, Captain Gene Fluckey, the Barb sank the greatest tonnage of any American sub in World War II. At the same time, the Barb did far more than merely sink ships-she changed forever the way submarines stalk and kill their prey.
This is a gripping adventure chock-full of "you-are-there" moments. Fluckey has drawn on logs, reports, letters, interviews, and a recently discovered illegal diary kept by one of his torpedomen. And in a fascinating twist, he uses archival documents from the Japanese Navy to give its version of events.
The unique story of the Barb begins with its men, who had the confidence to become unbeatable. Each team helped develop innovative ideas, new tactics, and new strategies. All strove for personal excellence, and success became contagious. Instead of lying in wait under the waves, the USS Barb pursued enemy ships on the surface, attacking in the swift and precise style of torpedo boats. She was the first sub to use rocket missiles and to creep up on enemy convoys at night, joining the flank escort line from astern, darting in and out as she sank ships up the column.
Surface-cruising, diving only to escape, "Luckey Fluckey" relentlessly patrolled the Pacific, driving his boat and crew to their limits. There can be no greater contrast to modern warfare's long-distance, videogame style of battle than the exploits of the captain and crew of the USS Barb, where they sub, out of ammunition, actually rammed an enemy ship until it sank.
Thunder Below! is a first-rate, true-life, inspirational story of the courage and heroism of ordinary men under fire.
A Main Selection of the Military Book Club. Winner of the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature given by the Naval Order of the United States, New York Commandery.
Turtle
David Bushnell's Revolutionary VesselRoy R. Manstan
Westholme Publishing, 2010
The Remarkable History and Reconstruction of the First Operational Submarine
At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel designed specifically “for the destruction of vessels of war.” On a quiet September night in 1776, sergeant Ezra Lee maneuvered Bushnell’s strange little craft out from Manhattan and into the midst of the greatest naval fleet ever assembled in the Americas. Lee’s goal was to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a powerful explosive to its hull. Although the mission was unsuccessful, Bushnell’s concept of submarine warfare was considered by George Washington to have been “an effort of genius.”
David Bushnell was raised in the town of Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. More than two centuries later, another Turtle would be launched into the same river within sight of Bushnell’s first forays with his vessel during the summer of 1775. Under the direction of technical arts teacher Frederic J. Frese, students at Old Saybrook High School created a working replica of Bushnell’s submarine, facilitated through an education partnership with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, where Roy R. Manstan was a mechanical engineer and Navy trained diver. With twenty-first century submariners at the helm, the Turtle replica was subjected to a series of operational tests at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.
In Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel, the authors provide new insight into Bushnell’s “engine of devastation,” tracing the history of undersea warfare before Bushnell and the origin of the many innovations Bushnell understood would be necessary for conducting a covert submarine attack. The knowledge gained from testing the Turtle replica enabled the authors to speculate as to what America’s first submariner Ezra Lee experienced that September night and what may have caused the attack to fail.
Twenty-Three Minutes to Eternity
The Final Voyage of the Escort Carrier USS Liscome BayJames L. Noles
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Valor and Courage
The Story of the USS Block Island Escort Carriers in World War IIBenjamin J. Hruska
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Recounts the stories of the USS Block Island CVE 21 and CVE 106 and their crews, many of whom served on both ships in the Atlantic and Pacific theatres
In Valor and Courage: The Story of the USS Block Island Escort Carriers in World War II Benjamin Hruska explores the history and commemoration of the USS Block Island—or, more properly, the Block Islands, as two escort carriers bore that name during WWII. The first, CVE 21, bears the distinction of having been the only American aircraft carrier sunk in the Atlantic Theatre after being torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of North Africa.
Of the CVE 21’s 957 crew members, six sailors were killed and eighteen injured in the strike, and four of the Block Island’s fighter pilots were lost later in the day searching for a safe place to land their planes. When the CVE 106 was commissioned to replace its predecessor, Captain Massie Hughes successfully persuaded the Navy to keep the CVE 21’s crew together in manning the new ship. After resurrection as the CVE 106, the Block Island was assigned to the Pacific theater where it fought until the end of the war. The saga of these two ships and the crew that navigated two very different theaters of war offers a unique lens on naval strategy and engineering as it evolved during WWII, especially as pertains to the escort carrier class—generally underappreciated both in naval studies and in public memory.
Using archival materials, dozens of oral histories, primary sources, and official records, Hruska traces the life of the Block Island from the CVE 21’s construction through its missions in the Atlantic, its work as an antisubmarine hunter, its destruction, and the lasting impact of those experiences on its crew. Hruska’s study juxtaposes traditional military history with an examination of the acts of remembrance and commemoration by veterans who served on the escort carriers, how those practices evolved over time, and how the meanings of personal wartime experiences and memories gradually shifted throughout that process.
Wings of Gold
An Account of Naval Aviation Training in World War II, The Correspondence of Aviation Cadet/Ensign Robert R. ReaWesley Phillips Newton
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Millions of Americans underwent military training during World War II, and contemporary historians and readers have begun to recognize the significance and value of primary sources related not only to combat but also to training and preparedness.