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Despite these victories, the cost to the United States of having a comparatively
weak Navy were quickly driven home. Great Britain was able to send numerous naval squadrons and several armies across the
Atlantic. The United States found its ports blockaded and its trade all but destroyed. The British raided the coast at will.
In the summer of 1814 a small British force captured Washington and burned the Navy Yard and the White House. British victories
on Lake Ontario gave Britain effective control of the Great Lakes. The British, however, had no desire to continue this struggle
and signed a treaty of peace late in 1814. Word of this treaty reached New Orleans late where, in 1815, General Andrew Jackson,
with an American force consisting largely of Tennessee volunteers, blacks, creoles, cajuns and privateers, scored
a major victory over a British army advancing down the Mississippi, killing over 2,000 British troops at Chalmette Field in
a battle lasting 50 minutes, and losing only 7 American dead. Thus was destroyed forever British chances of blocking
our way westward by controlling the Mississippi River.
In 1839, the Navy's first steam powered vessel was built, creating the need for
engineers as well as sailors.
| The U.S.S. Constitution engages H.M.S. Cyane |
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| During the War of 1812 |
In the spring of 1841, our first wagon
trains set out for California and America's Pacific Ocean, from Independence, Missouri. These folks, who composed the trains,
were desperate people on a search for gold or land because they could not pay their debts at home, or, in many cases, crooks
and thieves, or even worse, on a desperate journey from a crime. They referred to the place they had left behind
as 'the States,' from whence the term was coined.
To us, this Association, they are neither crooks nor thieves nor criminals.
They are American pioneers and American patriots.
And they were then, and are today, part of our manifest destiny.
In the period after the War of 1812, the
consensus for a strong Navy survived the peace. In the postwar years the Navy blockaded and bombarded Algiers and kept small
ongoing squadrons in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, off the west African coast, and in the Pacific.
The Navy also
struggled during this period to keep up with rapidly changing technology which was quickly making the men-of-war built during
the War, and all ships like them, obsolete. The Navy experimented with steam-powered propulsion systems, armor plating, breech-loaders,
shell guns, and the telegraph. An engineering-oriented Naval Academy was also established at Annapolis, Maryland, on the site
of the former Ft. Severn, in 1845. President George Washington had asked for it, a long time previously. The Naval
Academy's first class was made up of fifty students, and taught by seven teachers.
During the Mexican War (1846-1848),
the Navy blockaded Mexican ports and supported operations ashore both along the California coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Navy also transported General Winfield Scott's Army to Veracruz in 1847, from where it marched inland to capture Mexico
City, thus ending the War.
The Mexican-American War represented the
first major projection by sea of American military power abroad. Transported and supplied in large part by the Navy, General
Scott's Army, outnumbered five to one in every engagement with Santa Anna's forces, won every battle, took Chalpultepec
Castle, and conquered Mexico City, bringing the war to a close with a speed that amazed knowledgeable military veterans of
the day.
By 1860, four million black Americans, 1/7th of the entire population, were slaves. From the
election of George Washington to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 - a period of 72 years - for 50 of those years,
a slaveholder had been President of the United States, and slavery - free labor - accounted for the millionaire status of
a handful of Southern slave owners. Slavery was the flame that lit the fuse of America's Civil War.
'For I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry caused by their
taskmasters...and I am come down to deliver them....'
During the War Between the States (1861-1865) the Union had a near monopoly on naval power. Naval
officers, more so than Army officers, remained on the Union side.
That statement is not meant to disparage the Army:
The average Union trooper was paid $4.00 a day for his service.
At the beginning, in 1861, so many southerners volunteered for Confederate service that 1/3rd of
them had to be turned away. By the end of the war that would change, as would many things.
When the South seceded in 1861, at the United States Military Academy in New York, the Superintendant
of Cadets asked those Army cadets loyal to the Confederacy to fall out and re-form, which they did. They then paraded off
the Plain at West Point to join the war with the South. As they marched, the story goes, the United States Military Academy
Band played "Dixie" and the Southern cadets did an eyes-right to Old Glory for the last time, as their Union cadet brethern,
to them, for the last time, presented arms.
Over the next four years, at Bull Run, Manasses, Winchester, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg,
Chickamauga, Franklin, Cold Harbor, Forts Henry and Donaldson, Nashville and throughout the forests and hills of
Northern Virginia, most of those young men would die.
(In 1913, the United States Government sponsored a 50-year reunion of Civil War soldiers
at Gettysburg, where 43,000 American boys were killed in 1863, which climaxed with a re-enactment of Pickett's charge by the
now aged Confederate surviving veterans, without arms. A great gasp went up from the aged Union veterans "defending" Little
Round Top, and then they spontaneously rushed forward to embrace their fellow countrymen with brotherly love, and affection.)
The Naval Academy was moved to Newport, Rhode Island in 1861 because of fear of a Confederate
attack. It was returned to Annapolis in 1865.
The
majority of the U.S. Navy's men-of-war also were in northern ports and the absence of Confederate oceangoing sea power
initially gave the Union de facto control of the seas.
| Our Flag restored, Ft. Sumter, April 14, 1865 |
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| While Union ships in the harbor fired in celebration |
Click for Judy's "Battle Hymn"
Union control of the seas allowed the North to blockade
the coastal ports of the South, severely handicapping the Southern war effort.
It is only emerging now, in the early 21st century, that Southerners, given the Union blockade,
were right and left improvising the building and operation of a number of naval submersibles since the first year of the war,
1861, especially in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
One battle, in 1862, caused by the blockade, took place at the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay where a Confederate ironclad, C.S.S. Virginia, was attacking Union blockade ships. The Virginia was
in turn attacked by a new Union ironclad, a true semi-submersible, the U.S.S. Monitor. In four hours of fighting, neither
ship seriously damaged the other, but the Virginia withdrew.
A Swedish-born inventor, John Ericcson, had created the Monitor. Ericcson
actually hated the Navy because he felt it cheated him out of a contractor's payment years before. But he was urged to build
a ship designed specifically to counter the Virginia, which, it was feared, would cruise up the Potomac and shell the White
House.
Confederate commanders had
to maintain tens of thousands of troops to guard against Union forays from the sea. In the critical battles fought along the
Mississippi River, Union oceangoing and inland-water naval forces combined in a classic campaign to cut the Confederacy in
two. By the time General William Tecumseh Sherman marched his 62,000 troops to the Atlantic from Atlanta in 1864, the South
had been cut up at least three ways by Union forces, and its armies were falling apart. General Robert E. Lee signed the instrument
of surrender with Genral Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April, 1865. The costliest war America would
ever fight was over.
| The U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia engage |
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| The first ironclads |
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On April 15, 1865, at 7 in the moring, Abraham Lincoln
died in a boarding house in Washington, our Nation's capital, where he had attended a play across the street at Ford's
Theatre the night before, Good Friday, of gunshot wounds inflicted by the assassin and
well known actor John Wilkes Booth.
His body was carried back to the White House on what was then,
and will forevermore be, known as Black Easter.
He was the 16th President of the United States,
and was 56 years old.
No President of the United States had ever been
murdered.
On his funeral cortege home to Illinois, in Cleveland,
Ohio, 10,000 Americans filed by his coffin each hour.
"Now he belongs to the ages."
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| Lincoln was, after Washington, |
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Joe Johnston, the last Confederate general to surrender to Sherman, served in honoring the cortege of General
Sherman in New York City in 1891, on a day of freezing cold. Ten days later, Johnston died of pneumonia.
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Ulysses S. Grant became a two-term President of the United States. He died in 1885 of cancer of the
throat.
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Robert E. Lee, the greatest general, and most brilliant strategist, of the Confederacy, became president
of Washington College in Virginia at the war's end, which was re-named Washington & Lee University after his death.
He died in 1870.
He is loved and respected, throughout the United States, even today, as a man of honor.
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| Last of the sailing ships recruitment posters |
After
1865 Americans were tired of war and were struggling to reconstruct the nation and the Navy entered a 20-year period of decline.
There was no obvious threat of a European invasion during this time and our Navy was allowed to age into obsolescence. By
1880, in terms of manpower, number of ships, and technology, the Navy was far behind all the major navies of Europe.
During
the 1880s, when Americans looked abroad, they saw a technologically superior Europe on the march with a new imperialism. The
Ottoman and Chinese empires, for example, long the target of U.S. commercial and missionary interest, were under severe and
steady pressure from the European powers and at times appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Europeans were expanding their
political and economic control into the hearts of Africa and Eurasia. In the Western hemishere, the European powers became
increasingly involved in the internal affairs of Central America and South America.
A strong Navy would allow the
United States to prevent European powers from threatening the United States or the Western Hemisphere and a renewed consensus
began growing supporting the development of naval power. Among those who worked to shape this new Navy as an agressive force
to project American power were civilian leaders, such as President Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt
and, most notably, historian and former U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan.
The U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana
Harbor at 9:40 p.m. on the night of February 15, 1898. Costing an impressive $2.5 million to build, the battleship Maine had
been in commision for only 29 months and had originally been sent into Caribbean waters to prevent Americans from the Florida
Keys, called "filibusterers," from invading Cuba in support of the Cuban insurgents' uprising there against Spanish imperial
rule.
The explosion took place as the sailors of the U.S. Navy aboard were retiring to their hammocks for the night, killing
266 of our men, out of a total crew of 392.
| The Maine's explosion was the provocation |
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| which led to the end of Spain's world empire |
The destruction of the Maine was America's first experience with
faceless terrorism, and "Remember the Maine" became a naval, and American, battlecry in a Spanish-American War (1898-1899)
which would redefine the new roles of the U.S. Navy.
Far in the Pacific, Rear Admiral George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron
quickly entered Manila Bay and annihilated the Spanish fleet. In the Atlantic, other Navy squadrons blockaded Spanish naval
forces based in Cuba, and transported U.S. troops to the island. Ultimately the Navy destroyed Spanish naval power in the
western Atlantic, sealing the fate of Spain's now forgotten New World empire.
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| Arlington National Cemetery |
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| Burials of the U.S S. Maine Crew |
| Dewey at Manila Bay |
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| 1 May 1898 |
| The Rough Riders |
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| on San Juan Hill, Cuba |
After the Spanish-American War, the United States continued to expand
its naval forces. In 1907 and 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet of sixteen new battleships on
a global cruise to demonstrate U.S. naval power to the world, and especially to Japan. Under the Administrations of both Roosevelt
and William H. Taft, the United States continued to build battleships. The U.S. Navy had become the Nation's first line of
defense, defending a line now drawn far from American shores. In 1914, when the Panama Canal finally opened, allowing our
Atlantic and Pacific Fleets to become mutually reinforceable, World War I began in Europe.
| The beginnings of the modern Navy |
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| Recruitment poster, 1908 |
| Teddy Roosevelt |
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| was and is the father of the modern U.S. Navy |
The Great War threatened U.S. freedom of
the seas, as German submarines struck at Allied and neutral shipping indiscriminately. Great Britain also exploited its control
of the seas to the detriment of U.S. commerce. In 1916, increasingly frustrated, President Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. Congress
responded to these actions by launching a massive naval building program designed to make the U.S. Navy second to none. The
following year, when the Germans resumed unresricted submarine warfare, the U.S. declared war on Germany. Wilson then sent
the U.S. Navy and the American Expeditionary Forces across the Atlantic in a move that ensured Allied victory in 1918.
| Navy Recruiting Poster |
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| 1917 |
A widespread desire to reduce military expenditures
set into both the Democratic and Republican parties after World War I. This fiscal conservatism was coupled with a desire
for disarmament and, while a series of naval treaties signed in Washington in 1923 ensured parity between the United States
and Great Britain, they also provided for reduced navies and gave Imperial Japan, already casting its eyes on East Asia, veritable
naval dominance in the western Pacific. There was also a debate over the type of ships the Navy should have. Old timers favored
the battleship, while Young Turks argued that technology made them vulnerable and therefore obsolete. These modernists argued,
instead, for destroyers and other smaller warships, and the creation of aircraft carriers to project naval air power, as a
counter to the technological threats then existing and to come. The Association, unlike almost every other staid Navy group
at the time, was firmly on the side of the modernists in its advocacy and, unlike those same groups, also vigorously opposed
the pacifism seemingly prevalent in the country, as well as the fiscal conservatism prevalent in Congress as applied to military
forces.
The Navy's first airfield was built at Annapolis in 1911, and the first naval air station was established
at Pensacola in 1916, but it was not really until the late 1930s, after the threat of Hitler's and Japan's militarism became
apparent, that the U.S. began to re-arm. By 1939, the Navy finally had begun building long-range submarines and carriers armed
with sea-based aircraft whose capabilities approximated those of land-based aircraft.
In the period 1940-41, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to use U.S. naval power to deter war. The Pacific Fleet was moved from California to Hawaii in an attempt to discourage
further Japanese expansion. In the North Atlantic, Roosevelt waged an undeclared naval war against German U-boats.
| U.S. Lend Lease Destroyers |
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| being transferred to the Royal Navy, 1940 |
| The West Virginia burning at Pearl Harbor |
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| December 7, 1941 |
On December 7, 1941, without warning, Japanese
carrier-based aircraft attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Fleet's battleline was all but incapacitated. On December
10, Hitler declared war on the United States and the country immediately faced a two-ocean war.
| "Remember Pearl Harbor" |
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| Recruitment Poster, 1942 |
The initial phases of World War II went poorly
for the United States, and especially the Navy. We were defeated in Bataan, and lost the Philippines. In the Atlantic, U-boats
torpedoed Allied commercial shipping within sight of the eastern seaboard. Victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was essential
if the manpower and the products of the U.S. arsenal of democracy were to be transported to Britain and brought to bear
against the Axis.
| World War II Convoy |
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| Protected by the U.S. Navy |
By the middle of 1943 The U.S. and the Navy had
largely controlled the U-boat threat through technological advances, codebreaking, and the productive capacity of American
shipyards, which turned out new destroyers, tankers, freighters, escorts, and patrol aircraft in huge numbers.
| Crew of the Memphis Belle |
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| Prepare to bomb Tokyo |
| USN WAVES visit the U.S.S. Missouri |
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| World War II |
Once the Atlantic shipping lanes were secure, the Navy was able to
transfer huge land forces to Britain and North Africa which, along with air power, began to crack Hitler's Fortress Europe
with massive amphibious invasions supported by naval firepower, including assaults in North Africa in November 1942, Sicily
in July and Italy in September 1943 , and Normandy in June 1944. 150,000 troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on
June 6,1944, the greatest sea-borne invasion of troops onto enemy-held territory in the history of the world.
In the
Pacific the Navy threw itself into battle with the Imperial Japanese Fleet, gradually making up for the debacle at Pearl Harbor.
With growing strength at hand, its two major commanders- Chester Nimitz and William "Bull" Halsey- opted to seek out a modern-day
Trafalgar - a decisive, annihilative battle against the Japanese Navy. A series of carrier battles fought in 1942 in the Coral
Sea, at Midway, and in the Solomon Islands turned the seemingly inexorable tide of the Japanese advance. Large-scale amphibious
operations, part of an island-hopping strategy, supported by carrier-borne aviation, carried the Americans back across the
Pacific.
By 1943, the Japanese Zero fighter had been far surpassed in quality
and speed, by the United States Navy's Grumman Hellcat.
John Wayne: "Keep Marching, Son"
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| Hellcats prepare to take off |
By 1944, U.S. Navy pilots were at the cutting edge of military airmen
worldwide. By then, the Navy was rotating its experienced naval aviators every two years as trainers for new pilots, and our
rawest airmen had at least two years of training and flying experience behind them. The Japanese, by comparison, were forced
to fly their pilots, new, inexperienced recruits included, until they died in combat, as most of them did.
In 1944 the Battles of the Philippine Sea and
Leyte Gulf virtually ended the threat posed by Japan.
By 1945 the United States was closing in on Japan. U.S. Navy
submarines had devastated the Japanese merchant marine and isolated the home islands from the Asian mainland. Amphibious forces
seized Iwo Jima and Okinawa, strategically placed islands guarding the approaches to Japan itself. From bases in the the Marianas,
USAAF B-29 heavy bombers pounded Japanese cities with massive incendiary raids. Strikes from U.S. Navy carriers, ranging along
the eastern coast of the Japanese main island, Honshu, added to the destruction.
| Marines raise our Flag |
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| Iwo Jima, 1945 |
By the time President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima amd Nagasaki it was over. The Japanese officially surrendered on board
the battleship U.S.S. Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Pearl Harbor had been avenged.
| Sailors killed aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid |
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| are given a burial at sea off Luzon Island, Philippines. |
Bing Crosby's "White Christmas"
| Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signs |
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| the Instrument of Surrender, Tokyo Bay, 2 Septemeber 1945 |
| VJ Day, August 14,1945, Times Square |
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| Manhattan, New York City |
At the end of World War II, both the U.S. and the
Navy found themselves almost immediately entering a Cold War with Stalin's Soviet Union. Of all the Allied Powers during World
War II, only the United States still possessed the economic strength to be a military leader during this struggle, perhaps
the greatest sruggle the Western world was about to face.
By 1949, the Navy had developed a foreward maritime strategy
which would become the core of Allied conventional naval thinking throughout the Cold War. In the event of war, Navy and Allied
carriers would strike hard at Soviet naval and air bases around the periphery of the U.S.S.R. Amphibious units would reinforce
threatened positions or retake lost ones, perhaps conducting raids or invasions against the Soviet Union itself. U.S. submarines,
armed with advanced sonar and eventually powered by nuclear energy, would no longer stalk merchant ships, but would hunt down
Soviet submarines as they left their ports, before they could reach Allied sea lanes of communication (SLOCs).
| USN's first African-American WAVE officers |
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| LTJG Harriet Pickens and ENS Frances Wills, 1944 |
The outbreak of war in Korea in June
1950 further strengthened the hands of U.S. navalists. Most notably during the carrier-supported Inchon amphibious assault
of September 1950, the Navy demonstrated that conventional naval power still had an important role to play in the atomic age.
| Naval scenes |
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| from the Korean War |
| 1st Marine Division lands on Inchon |
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| 15 September 1950 |
| A USMC F-4 Phantom |
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| looses ordnance on the Viet Cong |
Both the second Truman Administration
and the
Eisenhower Administration, in an attempt to lower federal spending, often tried to "pick and choose" among the Service Branches,
pitting one Branch against another, to find a Branch (or Branches) which could provide a "silver bullet" for military spending,
in other words, a Branch which could provide a great national defense at a cheap price, vis-a-vis the other Branches. (This
is all old history and, accordingly, we're not going to name the Branch or Branches which were involved.) In these inter-service
battles forced on the Branches by the politicians, the Navy always seemed to be shortchanged, as demonstrated by the cancellation
of the carrier United States. Many high-ranking naval officers refused to quietly accept these decisions as they applied to
naval force structures, during a period known as the revolt of the admirals.
These were policies (both Democratic and
Republican) which were bound to fail, and which did in fact fail. America cannot have a "great national defense" by favoring
one Service Branch over another in a prioritized effort to lower federal spending. In the election campaign of 1960, Presidential
candidate John F. Kennedy, a decorated World War II Navy hero, criticized the Eisenhower Administration for weakening
America's defense and foreign policies. It was a criticism and argument that resonated with the American public.
One
of the carryovers of military policy from the Eisenhower era was the doctrine of sufficient deterrence based on massive nuclear retaliation by the United States. The Navy was therefore
nuclearized, with missile guidance technology leading to the development of mobile, stealthy, and therefore survivable nuclear
powered submarines (SSBNs) capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as shorter range nuclear
tipped missiles (IRBMs), all later to be armed with multiple warheads (MIRVs).
The height of the Cold War, if not its climax, may
have come in 1962 when President Kennedy sat in the White House. The year previous, Nikita Khruschev, the Chairman
of the Central Committee of the Politbureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had taken Kennedy's mettle in discussions
over Berlin at Vienna, and found Kennedy '"inexperienced," even though Kennedy had told Khruschev he would not hesitate to
use nuclear weapons if the Soviets attempted to take over West Berlin by force. By 1962, Khruschev was placing intermediate
range nuclear ballistic missiles in Castro's Cuba, taergetered at the mainland of the United States. Kennedy told him to take
them out, or we would, regardless of the cost, and placed a unilateral naval blockadeon Cuba, as to incoming Warsaw
Pact ships. Just as the U.S. Navy was about to interdict the first Soviet ship to enter the blockade zone, the Soviets
blinked, and removed the missiles, even though Fidel later told Barbara Walters in an exclusive interiew in 2003 that
he , Fidel, had asked Khruschev to fire the missiles at the U.S. rather than dismantle them. This is the same Castro, we point
out, who sits on the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission as of 2004.
If this was the climax of the Cold War, it was a
climax which shortly became moot. With the advent of naval SSBNs on both sides, submarines capable of firing, from undisclosed
locations close offshore, ballistic nuclear missiles into the heartlands of both protagonists, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.,
the need to station land-based offensive nuclear weapons near the territory of the other side, became an obsolete, and unnecessary,
proposition.
But, in 1962, that was a lesser question. Kennedy
had stood down the Soviet Union, with both sides poised on the brink of a nuclear war. He had showed his mettle, and
America's spine, to the Soviets, and neither they nor the American people would forget it.
The Navy found itself playing a sizable role in the debacle that was known as the Vietnam War. Although military
and naval patriots called for the use of greater firepower to be brought to bear against Communist North Vietnam, these cries
went unacted on in a Washington still fearful of the Chinese invasion of Korea in 1950-51, and the threat of a nuclear conflagration.
| Firefight, Mekong Delta, 1969 |
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| USN Riverine Forces |
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"Vietnam did not have any meaning," one prominent U.S. policymaker of 2004
once wrote in his diary. He also called our effort in Vietnam the "biggest nothing in history" in testimony before Congress in April, 1971.
That is just plain wrong.
Vietnam had the meaning that
the United States would stand aggressively for the spread of freedom in the third world; that we would fight any foe,
oppose any enemy, whatever the cost, to support our friends, regardless of how badly they were outnumbered by the corrupt
and socialistic opponents of liberty.
Whatever it took.
That's the meaning of Vietnam.
That was its meaning then.
That's its meaning today.
There are those who say the
war in Vietnam is over, and we should put it behind us. That's fine. We know where they're coming from.
But it don't mean nothing.
The American Revolution goes
on. The ideas JFK spoke of in his Inaugural Address go on. They are the same ideas we
fought for in Vietnam.
The American Revolution will
never die.
Neither will what we fougt
for in Vietnam, a long time ago.
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16 North Vietnamese Divisions attacked Saigon
prior to its fall in April, 1975. As Free Vietnam saw their country about to fall to a vile Communist dictatorship
that month, as they tried, helplessly to get on the last American Hueys off the roof of our Saigon Embassy, we could hear
all of them, our friends, crying out to us: "Don't Forget Us, America."
...This Association never will, or what we fought for
there, in a faraway land, a long time ago, not because we wanted to, but because we had to.
At the close of the 1960s, President Richard Nixon, who was also a World War II naval veteran, conducted " a retreat from empire," a major retrenchment for a country whose national security consensus had been shaken by
the politically divisive war in Indochina. The Nixon Doctrine formalized the unwillingness of the United States to continue
to "pay any price' or "bear any burden" in international affairs. It looked to local powers, such as the Shah's Iran, to police
the world's troubled regions and to provide the ground forces that might be necessary in a crisis and, accordingly, as part
of the ongoing history of pitting one U.S. Service Branch against another, the Nixon Administration placed a premium
on U.S. air and naval forces. While both theoretical and actual naval roles within Nixon's national security strategy were
in many ways expanded, the old trumpet of fiscal conservatism to reduce federal spending, as applied to the military, was
still heard loudly, and the force structure of the Navy was allowed to age, the victim of neglect, benign or otherwise, and
reduced military spending.
Nixon's "Vietnamization" policy finally resulted in the
fall of Saigon in April, 1975 to Communist forces, giving international communism and the Soviet empire an impetus they never
had before on the world stage, an impetus it took the U.S. another 15 years to finally overcome definitively.
"The fact is we did not lose the war militarily. But
we failed in that we did not make good on our commitment to the people of Vietnam."
- General William Westmoreland, Commander,
U.S. Armed Forces,Vietnam (1964-1969), speaking
in 1985
It is the opinion of this Association that America's wars should never again
be measured in body counts, as we attempted to measure the war in Vietnam by body counts. The Cold War against Soviet
imperialism would not be won by body counts. It would be won on many fronts. But the fact is it was won. And
it was won by the United States.
Jimmy Carter's election to the Presidency in 1976 reinforced the demilitarization of the United States with a passion.
Although a graduate of Annapolis himself, and a former
submarine "nuke," Carter, as well as many of his chief national security appointees, especially DCI Admiral Stansfield Turner, all seemed to harbor not just an anti-war attitude, but also something bordering on a grudge against all the Service
Branches as well as the CIA. Carter's policies seemed to express the notion that military and intelligence community leaders,
with many years of national security and intelligence experience "on-the-ground," who called for forward projections of U.S.
military power abroad, were "rogue elephants," traitors who were challenging his prerogatives as Commander-in-Chief, proving,
in the opinion of the Association that, regardless of your prior Service affiliation, in the words of John le Carre, "A desk
is a dangerous place from which to watch the world." Carter pared U.S. defense budgets to the bone; he reduced U.S. Forces
abroad; economic and military aid to pro-American right-wing regimes was cut; he announced the U.S. would involve itself in
no more Vietnams and no more coups like that in Chile in 1973, in which the pro-Castroite Salvador Allende was overthrown.
He seemed to be fearful of the Soviet Union, and determined that there would be "no more Vietnams," and no U.S. involvement
anytime the Communist puppets of Soviet imperialism started what they called "wars of national liberation." Carter started
attaching U.S. forces to U.N. peacekeeping mission commands; granted Panama "sovereignty" over the Panama Canal; and did nothing
when the openly Communist Sandinistas overthrew the dictator Somoza in Nicaragua in 1979, and when openly anti-American Islamic
fundamentalists, seeking to establish a mullah-run state, overthrew America's old ally, the Shah of Iran, that same year.
[Cf. Carter's statements, if you will, on NBC-TV's "West Wing," 4-24-02, saying he had to fight against the American people
demanding a "bombing" of Iran "after" the hostages were taken in 1979 and that he had to "do the right thing" even though
it was costing him poll position.]
Turner went on PBS-TV's "Newshour with Jim Lehrer"
on 7/12/2004. He said that there were still 'rogue elephants,' part of the culture, in the CIA, and that they all needed
to be fired. In the opinion of this Association, these 'rogue elephants' are the hard working, patriotic case officers
and analysts who reported aggressively the truth about the Taliban and Saddam. In our opinion, Admiral Turner was repeating
lines he learned during the incoming Carter Administration. Turner went on to suggest, in this interview, that an incoming
President John Kerry should fire any new DCI President George W. Bush might appoint (with Congressional approval) prior to
the November, 2004 U.S. Presidential election. In doing so, he advocated a politicization of the position of Director of Central
Intelligence which is, in the opinion of this Association, very bad policy.
After Turner was outted by President Ronald Reagan,
Turner's demoralized CIA went on to aggressively rev up its counter terror branch, and its covert action branch,
and began to aggressively report on the Soviet Union, and its threat. Turner has never forgotten that he was a failure as
DCI, despised by most of the rank and file CIA case officers, and DIA officers, but he is still featured by left-leaning "news'"
programs as a respected commentator. His views on the CIA are, in fact, no more astute, in our opinion, than those of
the first 2,000 names you could take out of the Los Angeles telephone directory.
Carter's anti-military policies
began to cause a great deal of concern, first among military and naval officers, as well as groups like the Association. These
concerns gradually began to resonate with an American public which was becoming fearful Carter was going too far in weakening
the ability of the United States to defend itself against a growing Soviet threat. Carter's popularity in the polls began
to shrink.
Carter's policies came back to bite him when student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized by force
the U.S. Embassy in Teheran in 1979, capturing the Embassy personnel and holding them as hostages in miserable conditions.
Seeing his popularity dropping even further in the polls, against a prospective Republican challenger, no less, Carter loved
to categorize as a warmonger, Ronald Reagan, Carter decided to become a bit of a jingoist himself, in order to salvage his
political fortunes. He devised, and then personally oversaw, a scheme to rescue the hostages in 1980, which involved sending
U.S. commandos, C-130s and Navy helicopters into Iran to extract the captives. Unfortunately for Carter, and for the Nation,
the fact that our Armed Forces had been demoralized, and their force structures allowed to deteriorate, led to a debacle for
this force in the Iranian desert. Three helicopters had to turn back because of sand problems in their hydraulics, and, when
the on-the-ground commander terminated the mission with Carter's approval, another helicopter crashed into a C-130, killing
eight crewmen. The remnants of the assault force then abandoned all the remaining helicopters and flew out in the transports,
leaving the hostages behind, still in captivity.
Carter and his Administration had created the impression
that America's best days were behind her; that America had to disarm and seek accomodation with the Soviet Union; that our
military and intelligence communities were a bunch of 'rogue elephants;' that the tide of world history had turned in favor
of anti-American thug nationalists like the ayatollahs in Iran, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and that "little America,"
in the future, could only act in her national interest if it were in concert with the General Assembly members of the United
Nations, and with their approval.
As a footnote to this History, we
need to note that the Department of the Navy commissioned its newest Seawolf class nuclear powered attack submarine, the U.S.S.
Jimmy Carter, in February, 2005. Ex-President Carter, at the scene, joyfully and exuberantly was seen to accept the commemoration.
The naming of naval vessels is accomplished by reason of political considerations made at the highest levels of the Departments
of the Navy and of Defense.
In a landslide electoral victory in 1980, Jimmy Carter lost the presidential election to Ronald Reagan, who had run on a platform of strengthening the U.S. military, aiding foreign governments and movements combatting communism,
and undermining those regimes with covert action that were too leftist for comfort. Reagan proclaimed that the Soviet Union
was an "evil empire preaching the supremacy of the state over man," and that the United States was back, free of its post-Vietnam
depression syndrome caused by the defeat there of the ideals we represented; that he wanted the United States to be respected
abroad more than he wanted it to be loved, and that it was a new morning for a remoralized American foreign policy.
The
Reagan Administration began a redirection of U.S. national security policy which was matched by an intellectual renaissance
and a new found esprit de corps in the U.S. military. Reagan's strategy was, simply, to consign the Soviet empire to
the ash heap of history where it belonged. When told by his advisors that we could probably bankrupt the Soviet state and
its military machine by increasing our defense spending to levels the Soviets would try to match but fail, Reagan's response,
simply, was: "Make it happen."
The Navy developed the Maritime Strategy, which called for naval forces to seize the initiative from the Soviets in
an initial conventional stage of war, presumably started when massive Soviet armored forces staged a blitzkrieg type invasion
of western Europe.
The Reagan Administration worked hard to rush this policy to maturity. Reagan called for a three-ocean
naval commitment and a six hundred ship Navy with a new strategy, a larger force structure, high retention rates, and capable
platforms and weapons. The Navy entered a period of expansion unmatched in the postwar era.
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Very, very gradually during the aftermath of the Nixon Administration and
into the Carter and Reagan Administrations, within the military of the United States, but not necessarily within the circle
of the political policymakers, a doctrine began to take hold as a result of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. That doctrine is hard
to define exactly, even today, but we will attempt to do so here:
First, we will build up overwhelming conventional force, and we will win resoundingly
and quickly (an "exit strategy") any true conventional conflict. Second, there must be sustainable political will within the
American people in support of any conflict we get into, and it is up to our political leaders to create and sustain that will.
Third, no more long, drawn out guerilla wars in the Third World, like the Vietnam conflict, with large numbers of U.S.
conventional forces.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, these concepts are still worthy of much consideration
as a function of U.S. military startegy.
|
| Ronald Reagan |
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| talks to the troops |
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| President Ronald Reagan |
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| Recruits for the U.S.M.C. |
During the Reagan Administration, Trident-armed SSBNs began patrolling
the oceans as an increasingly critical element of the nuclear deterrent force, and the rejuvenated naval service continued
to conduct its traditional postwar forward presence mission in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the western Pacific.
The Navy supported military operations conducted against Lebanon, Libya, Grenada, and Panama, and between July 1987 and August
1988 fought an undeclared war in the Persian Gulf and its approaches, against Khomeini's Iran, to prevent the Iranian navy
from expanding its power into the waters of the Gulf. During the course of one of these operations in April 1988, the Navy
won its largest surface action (Preying Mantis) since World War II.
And by the way, Reagan's military and naval policies caused the Soviet
Union to bankrupt itself militarily, and those policies, along with the hope Ronald Reagan as President gave Soviet dissidents
by his belief in the freedom of man, caused the self-implosion of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.
| President Reagan |
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| and Soviet President Gorbachev |
The Administration of George Herbert Walker Bush responded forcibly to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, initiating Operation Desert Shield to prevent Saddam's
Iraq from moving further south into the Arabian peninsula and threatening U.S. oil supplies. The forward-deployed forces of
the Navy led the way. Carriers in the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea covered the transfer of USAF interceptors during their
fly-in from bases in the U.S., as well as the initial airlift of transports carrying Army airborne troopers to Saudi Arabia.
Navy prepositioning ships rushed equipment and supplies for an entire USMC brigade from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to
the Gulf. The Navy guarded the sea-lanes over which hundreds of ships during the next six months carried their cargoes to
the Gulf, while the Bush Administration and its allies built up a powerful force in the Arabian peninsula. The Navy also began
maritime intercept operations in support of a U.S.-led blockade and U.N. sanctions against Iraq.
| Saddam's Order Of Battle |
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| For his invasion of Kuwait,1990 |
"Proud to be an American"
In 1991, Desert Shield became Desert Storm. The
Navy supported both the air and ground operations which quickly led to the decimation of the Iraqi army and its forced withdrawal
from Kuwait.
| Desert Storm U.S. Forces Ground Movement |
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| The Liberation of Kuwait,1991 |
At the close of Desert Storm, the Navy remained, and still remains
today, in the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean as a symbol of the U.S. commitment to the security of the region.
Seventeen sailors were murdered on board the Destroyer
U.S.S. Cole when a hole was blown in its side by Al Quaida terrorists as it was anchored in Aden harbor in Yemen, in October
2000, as a forewarning to America of what was to come from these barbarians.
Pictured at the top of our Homeport Page, the Cole was repaired and put out to sea again from Norfolk in April 2002.
Former President Bill Clinton says in his autobiograhy,
My Life, that he warned George W. Bush personally on Inauguration Day, 2001, to put Al Quaida at the top of his
threat list, but that the President-elect was disdainful. That may be, but during his Administration, Clinton did next to
nothing about Al Quaida, even after one of their Egyptian affiliates almost blew up the World Trade Center in 1993. They were
treated as just another bunch of criminal kooks which U.S. law enforcement would get around to suing sooner or later. President
Clinton announced that we could not bomb Usama bin Laden on one occasion because he thought Usama's "women and children
might get hurt."
The Administration of George W. Bush came to power in Washington in 2001 promising a stronger Navy, and a stronger military after what was perceived again
by many as eight years of neglect. Little did that President, or any of us, know what a stronger military would mean, or how
necessary it would become, until Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, followers of Usama bin Laden, who was headquarted in Afghanistan,
hijacked and then flew three American airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, on a date that forever
will be known simply as 9-11-01, a date that will forever live in infamy right alongside Pearl Harbor Day, killing over 3,000
people and causing the twin New York towers to collapse.
| The Attack on America |
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| September 11, 2001 |
"Where were you...?"
| President Bush addresses a military audience |
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| at MacDill AFB in Florida, silhouetted by Air Force 1 |
Today, the Navy serves proudly, and strongly, in all the sea
lanes surrounding the Middle East in the War on Terror, providing air-to-ground strikes against suspected Al Quaida positions
in-country, and preventing Al Quaida forces from escaping by sea. For continued information on the Navy's role in the War
on Terror and National Security affairs, as well as information on the War on Terror itself, see our War on Terror, National Security Affairs and News of the Navy Newstands.
"We have a calling from beyond
the stars to stand for freedom."
- President George W. Bush
9/2/2004
We
close this Brief History of the U.S. Navy by pointing out that America won its independence at Yorktown in 1781 because of
the ability of the French fleet to prevent Cornwallis from being re-supplied or from escaping.
And America truly became
a nation at Chalmette Field in New Orleans in 1815 where regulars and irregulars under General Andrew Jackson, later
to become the seventh President of the United States, killed 2,000 British troops, and prevented Britain from seizing control
of the Mississippi River, and thus from choking by water America's drive westward to its manifest destiny.
So say many things, Patriots, to promote your favorite Branch
of Service, but never say, from our beginnings to today, that our land, air and naval forces have not worked together as one
to build this nation to what it is today: the strongest, and the best, country on the face of the earth.
*********************************
In 1940, our Armed Forces were
ranked 12th in the world. That year, Franklin Roosevelt said we would build 50,000 planes over the next five years. The British,
the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, all laughed. Everybody thought it was a joke.
It was. Over the next five years, we built 100,000 warplanes,
enough to blot out the sun.
And, as to ships, one American shipyard alone built one Navy vessel every 41 days.
Do
not doubt the will of the American people if you shall decide to put their backs against the wall.
********************************
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