A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy

by Thomas J. Cutler

  Jones himself later wrote in his official report that “the battle thus begun was continued with unremitting fury.” And furious it was. Round shot and grapeshot poured into both vessels, smashing into masts and bulkheads, splintering wood into deadly shards, crushing bones, and tearing flesh. Suddenly, two of Richard’s 18-pounders exploded, killing most of their crews, blowing a gaping hole in the deck above, and reducing the ship’s weight of fire to a mere 195 pounds compared to Serapis’s 300. The smell of burning flesh spread about the deck as flames erupted from the explosions.

  Bonhomme Richard and Serapis fighting one of the most famous sea battles in history. John Kilby and the other American Sailors were inspired to fight with “unremitting fury” when they saw the American colors flying at the top of the after mast. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  Undaunted by the setback, Kilby and the others continued to serve the remaining weapons, firing at a rapid rate. Kilby noted how Jones’s leadership strengthened the crew’s commitment to fight on despite all the chaos and carnage around them: “At this time, Jones ordered the helm to be put hard up and to run the enemy on board. It was done. In doing this, her jib-boom ran between our mizzen-shrouds and mizzen mast. Her jib-boom carried away our ensign staff and colors. At this, they gave three cheers. We answered them with one cheer. Jones at the same time cried out: ‘Look at my mizzen-peak!’ at which place was run up the glory of America, I mean the most handsome suit of colors that I ever saw. They were about thirty-six feet in the fly.”

  The inspiring sight of the large national ensign flying from the after mast was further strengthened when Jones personally seized Serapis’s jib stay, which had fallen across Richard’s quarterdeck, and “belayed it to our mizzen cleats,” lashing the two ships together in a deadly embrace. Kilby heard Jones say, “Now we’ll hold her fast by this until one or the other sinks.” When the British commander ordered his men to board Richard, Jones, standing at the gangway with a long pike in his hands, shouted: “Come on. I am ready to receive you.” Kilby and some of the others joined Jones, and together, in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, they repulsed the British sailors and marines trying to come across.

  The fighting continued for some time, with both ships firing into one another at point-blank range. Men fired muskets down from the rigging above, fire raged in both ships, and water rose fast in Bonhomme Richard. The ship’s carpenter, who functioned in those days much as the damage control assistant does today, reported to Captain Jones within Kilby’s hearing that “the ship then had six feet six inches of water in the hold and that she was sinking fast.”

  Alliance at last made an appearance, but instead of coming to the aid of her American ally, she inexplicably fired on Richard, killing a number of men and adding further damage to the already decimated ship.

  As noted earlier in this chapter, it takes a special person to be a Sailor, to remain committed to one’s personal sense of honor, one’s shipmates, one’s ship, one’s Navy, even one’s nation in the face of such adversity. But John Kilby, Richard Dale, William Hamilton, John Paul Jones, and scores of other Sailors of this newly formed U.S. Navy never faltered despite the raging fires, exploding ordnance, rising water, flying shrapnel, flowing blood, and screams of agony. They fought on and on, loading and firing time and again, swinging pikes and cutlasses with all their strength, shoring up damaged bulkheads, slipping in the blood that ran across the decks, manning the pumps in a losing battle with the sea, fighting back fires, choking on great clouds of smoke, ignoring the crushing fatigue that strained their laboring muscles, and suppressing the terrible fear that clutched at their hearts.

  In the midst of all this, though Kilby did not witness it, First Lieutenant Dale later told of a moment that would define the new Navy forever. Noting early on that the odds were in his favor and that Richard was taking a terrible beating, the British captain called across to Jones, asking if he wished to surrender. Jones’s defiant reply echoes across the ages and serves as a battle cry of commitment that has made the United States Navy the greatest in the history of the world. Surrounded by terrible devastation and chaos, John Paul Jones defiantly replied, “I have not yet begun to fight!”

  And he was right. The battle raged on, both sides fighting fiercely. But the advantage in firepower that Serapis had enjoyed had been diminished when the two ships became grappled together. And the top men and Marines in Richard were delivering a withering fire down upon Serapis’s exposed decks, slowly but surely diminishing the size of the opposing crew and wearing away both their ability and their resolve to fight.

  To add to Serapis’s misery, Hamilton climbed into the rigging with a basket of hand grenades and a live match. Shinnying out along one of Richard’s yardarms that stretched over Serapis, he reached a point directly above an open hatch on the enemy ship. With musket balls flying about him, Hamilton coolly lit the fuze on one of the grenades and with great precision dropped it through the gaping maw of the hatchway. The grenade exploded among some powder bags that were scattered about. The magnified detonation killed at least twenty men and seriously injured many others.

  Jones had been concentrating fire on the enemy’s mainmast to make sure she could not escape should the two ships become disentangled. When that great spar began to topple, the British captain at last lost his will to fight and personally tore down his national ensign as a signal of surrender. It was 2230, and the great struggle was over.

  A Most Glorious Sight

  Once the formalities of surrender were concluded, other matters became paramount. Though victorious in her struggle with a superior British frigate, poor Bonhomme Richard was fighting for her life. John Kilby described the aftermath:

  Our ship was on fire within three feet of her magazine. The fire on board both ships was at last conquered, though by much harder work than the fighting during the action. By the time all this was accomplished, daylight began to make its appearance. . . . We then cleared the ships’ decks of the dead and at the rising of the sun, we hove overboard one hundred dead bodies. One hundred more were wounded, between thirty-five and forty of whom died the next day before four o’clock. During this time, we also rigged up jury masts on board the Sea-Raper [Kilby’s name for Serapis]. At four o’clock in the afternoon, our good ship Bonhomme Richard, which had so short a time before carried us through all the dangers of the night, sank. . . . O heavens! It was enough to bring tears from the heart of the most unthinking man! She went down head foremost with all sails set—studding sails, top-gallant sails, royals, sky-scrapers, and every sail that could be put on a ship—jack, pennant and that beautiful ensign that she so gallantly wore while in action and when we conquered. A most glorious sight!! Alas! She is gone! Never more to be seen!

  Jones, too, later described the last moments of Richard in his journal: “As she plunged down by the head at the last, her taffrail rose momentarily in the air; so the very last vestige mortal eyes ever saw of the Bonhomme Richard was the defiant waving of her unconquered and unstricken flag.”

  Commitment

  As we have seen, Sailors must develop within themselves several kinds of commitment. They must remain committed to their shipmates and to their nation when their living conditions are practically unbearable, or when demands are made upon them that most other citizens will never face. They must remain committed even knowing that the odds dictate they are preparing for a test that may never come. And they must be committed to giving their all when and if the day comes that they must meet the kinds of challenges that John Kilby faced and conquered.

  As the hapless Richard went to rest on the ocean floor, Kilby and the other Sailors who watched her go had no idea that their commitment to fight on, even when defeat seemed inevitable, was just the beginning of a tradition—a standard—that would guide those who followed through times of violent war and arduous peace, taking the new Navy to heights unimaginable to those iron men fighting in wooden ships. As these Sailors said farewell to their gallant little ship, it probably di
d not occur to any of them—not even to Jones himself—that their Navy had just begun to fight!

  Part II

  Traditions

  In the more than two hundred years that Sailors of the U.S. Navy have been defending their nation, they have created certain consistencies in the way they do things, and these consistencies have become traditions. Sometimes these traditions manifest themselves in language used, in inspirational sayings, in special customs and ceremonies, or simply in the unique way things are done. Sometimes traditions are merely quaint or colorful, and sometimes they seem to serve no purpose. But some traditions are born of core values and have the power to inspire noble deeds, to overcome hardship and fear, to set standards that ensure greatness. The chapters that follow are about the traditions that make the Navy stronger, that give Sailors an extra measure of confidence, and that help them to achieve victory at sea.

  What’s in a Name?

  4

  It has long been a tradition in the U.S. Navy that when a ship is lost in battle or dies of old age, her name is sometimes given to a newly built ship to carry on the legacy.

  Retribution

  The USS Enterprise moved effortlessly across the black surface of the Arabian Sea, displacing nearly one hundred thousand tons of seawater as she cut a trough through the dark waters. Her great bulk disturbed millions of the tiny bioluminescent sea creatures, causing them to glow and leave an eerie green swath of light to mark her passage. A more sophisticated enemy with satellites or reconnaissance aircraft might have used that glowing wake to locate and attack the ship, but her enemy was neither the Soviet Union nor the Empire of Japan. This latest enemy had no great fleet to oppose her, nor a powerful air force to challenge her mastery of the skies. Yet, an insidious new threat had emerged from the back alleys of the Middle East and the foreboding mountains of Central Asia to strike at the very heart of American power. With hijacked airliners and a fanaticism born of misguided religious fervor, long-festering envy, and irrational hatred, terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center towers and seriously damaged the Pentagon, killing thousands of Americans and other innocent bystanders. Now, less than a month later, USS Enterprise was poised to strike back.

  On the great flat deck of this largest of combatants was the smallest of airfields. In the faint illumination of subdued flight-deck lighting, hundreds of Sailors—whose average age was a mere nineteen and a half years—went about their duties as though it were any other day of routine flight operations. Yellow-shirted petty officers waved their light wands to direct tractor-drivers in blue shirts as they repositioned F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets, while brown-shirted plane captains perched in the cockpits rode the aircraft brakes. Purple-shirted Sailors wrestled with snakelike fuel hoses, while others in green prepared the steam-hissing catapults. Beneath the wings and fuselages of the attack aircraft, aviation ordnancemen in red shirts hoisted the bombs and missiles into the waiting latches on the undersides of the airplanes.

  The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise was among the first Navy ships to strike at terrorists in Afghanistan after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  As one of the 500-pound bombs rolled off an ordnance elevator, a young airman pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and, with a wide smile on his soot-smeared face, scrawled across the side of the weapon, “Hijack this!” A red-shirted chief petty officer squatting beneath a nearby aircraft, his weathered features contorted into a scowl, carefully wrote the letters “NYPD” on one side of a Mark 83 bomb and “FDNY” on the other, in tribute to the courage of other uniformed men and women who had raced into the stricken World Trade Center towers, heedless of the great danger that would soon take their lives. “It’s payback time,” he said, slapping the side of the olive-colored bomb.

  The date was 7 October 2001, and Operation Enduring Freedom was about to begin. Several weeks before, “Big E”—as Enterprise Sailors called their ship—had just completed a six-month deployment and, on 9 September, had headed for home. With her crew happily anticipating the joyous homecoming, she had barely begun the long trek across the Atlantic Ocean when news of the 9/11 terrorist attacks stunned the world. In what will long be remembered as the famous “Enterprise U-turn,” the ship’s captain, without waiting for orders from higher authority, turned the carrier around and headed back for the troubled part of the world that had spawned the terrorist attacks.

  Aviation ordnancemen hoisting precision-guided munitions to the wing pylon of an aircraft that will soon launch and take the war to the enemy. U.S. Navy (Philip A. McDaniel)

  The feelings of many of Enterprise’s Sailors at the time were summed up well by a young third class gunner’s mate from Brooklyn when he told a reporter: “I was ready to go home, but I felt I needed to go back and get whoever was responsible for this. From my building I can see all of Manhattan. When I go home and see the big empty space [where the World Trade Center towers used to be], it will really hit me.”

  Now, in conjunction with other U.S. and allied ships, Enterprise was about to launch air strikes into Afghanistan, a dark corner of the world with a tragic history recently made worse by an oppressive regime known as the Taliban. These Islamic extremists ruled with an iron fist, severely punishing nonbelievers, denying basic rights to women, and keeping the general populace in a state of fear, ignorance, and deplorable poverty. Not only had this oppressive regime done much to hurt the image of Islam, they also had provided sanctuary to some of the world’s nastiest terrorists. The Taliban had permitted al Qaeda and other radical groups to set up terrorist training camps in the desolate areas of the region, and they had provided a haven for the likes of Osama bin Laden, acknowledged perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks and alleged mastermind behind the terrorist attacks on American embassies and the destroyer Cole. In the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, the obvious first target in the newly declared War on Terrorism was Afghanistan.

  As the hour approached for the air strikes to commence, more off-duty Sailors than usual joined the reporters who lined the railing of the observation area known as “Vulture’s Row.” Some of these Sailors had come out merely to get some air before reporting to watch stations somewhere below decks, where night and day were indistinguishable and the only air that flowed came from man-made ventilators. Others had come to Vulture’s Row because they sensed that history was being made, and they wanted to witness it with their own eyes. But most were there because it somehow felt like the right thing to do, as though their collective presence might breathe an extra measure of vitality into the coming launch, might somehow help lift those lethal machines into the air, and might speed them on their way to seek vengeance for a terrible wrong. More than one reporter noted that the faces of these Sailors were set with grim determination as they watched the aircraft taxi up to the catapults amidst the deafening whine of powerful jet engines and the pungent odor of JP5 fuel thick in the night air.

  There was no wild cheering as the first aircraft rocketed down the catapult track and roared into the black sky. There were no high fives as, one after another, Hornets and Tomcats took to the air and headed for the enemy’s territory far to the north. Instead, there was an almost palpable sense of relief as the observers felt the dissipation of the feeling of helplessness that had gripped them since they first stared, horrified, at television screens, watching airliners full of innocent people forced to crash into buildings full of more innocent people. Unlike the vast majority of Americans who could do little more than seethe or grieve, the men and women of USS Enterprise were striking back. And as many would attest, it felt very good indeed.

  Had this been a training exercise in friendlier waters, the strike aircraft from Enterprise would have to have flown from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes region to travel a distance equivalent to that being flown this night. Refueled twice by combinations of Navy S-3 Vikings and Air Force tankers on the way to their targets, the Big E’s aircraft reached Afgha
nistan while the rugged mountains and barren deserts were still enshrouded in darkness. The American fliers rained down bombs, missiles, and rockets on terrorist training camps, airfields, weapons storage areas, and Taliban troop concentrations. Although subjected to antiaircraft fire in various forms, not a single aircraft was lost in the raids, not a drop of American blood was shed. But as the aircraft turned southward for the long return trip, they left behind an assortment of smoldering remains, signaling the coming demise of the Taliban and the beginning of the end for al Qaeda.

  Six hours after their launch, Big E’s brood returned safely to the nest. Again, there were no overt celebrations—simply a strong sense of accomplishment and a realization that this was just the beginning. Indeed, as the crews from this first sortie headed for a belated breakfast and much-needed rest, other sorties were shuttling to and from enemy targets, keeping the pressure on.

  Over the next several weeks, Enterprise’s Sailors displayed the courage needed to carry out their commitment to defend their nation with honor as they ran sortie after sortie into Afghanistan. Along with other ships in the task force, they hammered away at the enemy, keeping him on the run, breaking down his infrastructure, making him pay for his terrible deeds, teaching him that an angered America is a formidable foe indeed. Big E’s attack aircraft flew the length and breadth of Afghanistan, from Kabul to Kandahar to Jalalabad to Herat to Mazar-e-Sharif. They struck at the Taliban’s military academy, artillery garrisons, radar installations, and surface-to-air missile sites. They rained fire and destruction down on mountaintops and guided precision weapons into cave entrances. They attacked terrorists attempting to flee by SUV and by camel. They maintained safe zones where C-17 aircraft could deliver food, clothing, and medical supplies to long-suffering Afghanis. By the time Enterprise was released to go home, her mission planners were having difficulty finding meaningful targets.