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

by Thomas J. Cutler

  A Japanese destroyer was the first to be sunk. Then battleship Fuso was literally blown in two, each half burning furiously and lighting up the strait like beacons in the night. More Japanese ships succumbed as the battle continued, until barely one badly damaged destroyer was able to escape. When dawn illuminated Surigao Strait, the remains of a powerful Japanese naval force littered the waters. It was a temporary monument to a one-sided victory for the U.S. Navy rarely equaled in history.

  From the northern end of Surigao Strait, U.S. battleships and cruisers fired on the approaching Japanese fleet that was trying to attack the landing forces in Leyte Gulf. American destroyers charged down into the narrow waterway in the dark of night to launch their torpedoes. U.S. Naval Institute staff

  A Formula for Success

  In the Spanish-American War, World War II, and many other times in U.S. naval history, good tactics supporting good strategy were key components in the final outcomes. But from the foregoing examples, it should be evident that there is more to the equation of victory. The war words strategy and tactics are rightfully associated with the human brain. But three other words are every bit as essential to victory in war, and they are more appropriately associated with the heart and the soul of the American Sailor—honor, courage, and commitment. These attributes—maintained as guiding principles at all times, whether the nation is at peace or at war, and coupled with the right strategy and tactics when hostilities become necessary—have resulted in a long record of achievement that has not only earned the U.S. Navy an enviable reputation, but also has played an indispensable role in preserving the freedom of this great nation.

  Strange but True

  9

  Morgan Robertson once wrote a novel titled Futility. It was not particularly good literature, but it did have one unusual characteristic that almost defies the imagination.

  It told the story of a fictitious ship, a cruise liner Robertson vividly fabricated, that was the very cutting edge of technology, considered unsinkable and therefore carrying too few lifeboats for her passengers and crew. In the novel, this ship gets under way for her maiden voyage and, on a cold April night, strikes an iceberg and is lost.

  Many will quickly recognize the similarity between this tale and the true story of the sinking of the Titanic. She too struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage on a cold April night. She too was considered unsinkable and carried too few lifeboats. Both ships had three screws and two masts. Both were rated to carry three thousand passengers. Both vessels struck icebergs on their starboard sides. Robertson’s fictitious ship was 800 feet long, had nineteen watertight compartments, and was making 25 knots when she struck the iceberg. Titanic was 882.5 feet long, had sixteen watertight compartments, and was making 22.5 knots when she actually struck the iceberg.

  One might think Robertson was stealing his story line except for the amazing fact that he wrote his story in 1898 and Titanic did not sail until 1912! And if all of those coincidences were not enough, one final fact is that Robertson had named his imaginary ship Titan.

  Sailors are known as a superstitious lot. Through the centuries, many legends have become part of nautical lore. The Flying Dutchman is said to roam the seven seas with a ghost crew, the appearance of dolphins in a ship’s bow wave when she is departing on a cruise is said to be a harbinger of good luck, and whistling aboard ship was once believed to create storms or headwinds. While these beliefs are no more real than bad luck occurring on Friday the thirteenth, there are times when occurrences are difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence. And a few of those coincidences are part of the history of the U.S. Navy.

  Collisions

  During the hotly contested struggle for the Solomon Islands during World War II, when Japanese and American Soldiers and Marines were engaged in heavy fighting on Guadalcanal and some of the other islands in the chain, the Imperial Japanese Navy supported their forces ashore by making frequent sorties down a water passage among the many islands that soon became known as “The Slot.” These sorties—dubbed the “Tokyo Express” by the Americans—led to frequent engagements with U.S. ships in the area and resulted in a number of major naval engagements that proved to be key components in the ongoing campaign.

  On the night of 1 August 1943, fifteen U.S. torpedo boats engaged four of these Tokyo Express destroyers. Unlike many other nights, neither side suffered any losses in the fighting. Later, in another part of the passage, one of the U.S. boats—PT 109—was unfortunate enough to be lying in the path of Amagiri, one of the marauding enemy destroyers. It was a pitch-black night, and neither vessel’s captain was aware of the other’s presence in the darkened Slot.

  A U.S. PT boat, similar to the one on patrol in The Slot on the night of 1 August 1943. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  The fast-moving Japanese ship crashed into the PT boat with great force. The smaller vessel never stood a chance; she was cut in two and her fuel tanks exploded. Two of the American Sailors were killed in the collision and resulting explosion, and several others were badly injured.

  The Japanese destroyer continued on down The Slot, and the survivors were left in the dark waters to fend for themselves. Fend they did. With the fitter men helping the more seriously injured, these PT Sailors swam to one of the many islands that make up the Solomons archipelago.

  They guessed correctly that no one knew they were there. The crews of the other boats out in The Slot that night had seen the explosion and assumed all hands had been lost. Knowing that they—particularly the injured—could survive for just a limited time in the inhospitable jungle on the island, PT 109’s captain devised several plans to try to get them rescued, including swimming out into The Slot in hopes of getting the attention of U.S. vessels on patrol.

  The plan that ultimately worked, causing them to be rescued after a week, was a message carved on a coconut shell and delivered to the U.S. forces by friendly natives in the area.

  The captain, a young lieutenant from a wealthy family in Boston, was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism, and little more than fifteen years later he was elected president of the United States. On his desk in the Oval Office, he kept a small plaque that quoted a Breton fisherman’s prayer: “O God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.”

  John F. Kennedy and ten of his crew escaped death that dark night in the Solomons, but he could not escape it in the glaring daylight in Dallas when he was assassinated on 22 November 1963.

  To honor the felled president and former Sailor, an aircraft carrier was named USS John F. Kennedy and commissioned on 7 September 1968. Seven years later, in an ironic event similar to the collision of the PT boat and the destroyer, the aircraft carrier bearing Kennedy’s name was involved in a terrible collision with the cruiser Belknap. Reminiscent of the ensuing conflagration in The Slot in 1943, aviation fuel poured down from the carrier’s flight-deck refueling stations into the cruiser’s superstructure, causing a horrific fire that burned most of the night and melted Belknap’s superstructure. Heroic efforts saved the ship, but six Belknap Sailors and one from Kennedy died, and many others were seriously injured.

  The coincidence of collision was bizarre in its own right, but even more amazing was that out of 365 possible days in a year that the collision between USS Belknap and USS John F. Kennedy could have occurred, this disaster took place on the night of 22 November 1975—the twelfth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Strange, but true.

  USS Belknap after her collision with USS John F. Kennedy. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  The Triangle

  There is an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the southeastern United States popularly known as the “Bermuda Triangle,” or sometimes the “Devil’s Triangle.” These waters have a long-standing reputation for mysterious happenings, not the least of which are unexplained disasters. No nautical charts show this area under either popular name, and the U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not officially recognize it, but the apexes of this triangle ar
e generally accepted to be Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico. The U.S. Coast Guard is “not impressed with supernatural explanations of disasters at sea,” explaining that “the combined forces of nature and unpredictability of mankind outdo even the most far-fetched science fiction many times each year.” Yet “strange but true” is an apt description for this part of the world, where many vessels and aircraft have been lost without explanation and often without a trace.

  While no one has ever been able to prove any direct correlation, some characteristics of the Bermuda Triangle may be worth noting. The unpredictable Caribbean-Atlantic weather pattern in this area might well play a role; sudden local thunderstorms and waterspouts frequently occur in this area. The topography of the ocean floor varies from extensive shoals around the islands to some of the deepest marine trenches in the world. With the interaction of strong currents over the triangle’s many reefs, the topography is in a state of constant flux, and new navigational hazards can develop rather quickly.

  One of the most interesting facts about this triangle is that it is one of only two places on Earth where there is no compass variation—both gyro and magnetic compasses are perfectly aligned in this area. The other region where this occurs is just off the east coast of Japan. Japanese and Filipino seamen call it the “Devil’s Sea” because it too is known for the mysterious disappearances in its waters. As most mariners know, compass variation in the rest of the world is a factor that must be reckoned with constantly and can sometimes amount to as much as 20 degrees’ difference between true and magnetic north. What, if anything, this lack of variation—a seemingly good thing—might have to do with the strange occurrences in the area is anyone’s guess, but it is a fact that adds to the region’s mysteriousness.

  Whether there are scientific explanations for these strange events or they are merely the kind of coincidence that myths are made of, the Bermuda Triangle was the scene of two incidents involving the U.S. Navy that have served to enhance the legendary stature of this area.

  One of those incidents occurred during World War I and involved a Navy ship with the mythological name Cyclops. The U.S. Navy played a number of important roles in that conflict, known at the time as the “Great War.” Escorted by destroyers, the Cruiser Transportation Force and the Naval Overseas Transportation Service carried more than two million Soldiers and 6.5 million tons of cargo to Europe, dramatically reducing the number of Allied ships lost to German submarines in the process. Naval aircraft, flying from European bases, aided U.S. destroyers in the antisubmarine effort, including the bombing of German bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend. Large U.S. Navy minelayers sowed some sixty thousand mines in the great North Sea mine barrier, which was designed to deny German submarines access to open waters. A division of U.S. battleships joined the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea to contain the German High Seas Fleet; in the Mediterranean, U.S. subchasers distinguished themselves by protecting Allied ships from submarine attack. And, in an unusual development, U.S. naval elements fought ashore in France using huge 14-inch guns that were mounted on railroad cars and served by seaman gunners. In the final analysis, control of the sea approaches to Europe made victory for the Allies possible. Sailors in the U.S. Navy, together with their allies in the Royal Navy, were the instruments of that control.

  Because this was the age when many ships were coal-fired, Navy colliers (coal carriers—forerunners to today’s oilers) played an essential role by ensuring that adequate supplies of coal were available where needed. USS Cyclops was one such collier and, soon after the United States entered the war in 1917, she was tasked with fueling British ships operating in South American waters.

  Returning to U.S. waters early in 1918, Cyclops was in Norfolk, Virginia, when she received orders to carry coal to Brazil and then return to Baltimore with a load of manganese ore. Having safely delivered her coal to Rio de Janiero, she departed Brazil for the return trip on 16 February. After a short stop at Barbados on 3 and 4 March, she was under way again, headed through the Bermuda Triangle en route to a scheduled arrival in Baltimore on 13 March. On board were 306 people, including her crew, an American consul general, and 72 other passengers, mostly Sailors on leave, changing duty stations, or headed home to muster out of the Navy.

  Cyclops never arrived. In those days of limited communications and rather primitive tracking systems, it took a while before anyone realized the ship was overdue. On 23 March, the Navy launched a search operation to find the missing ship. All the ships that could be spared fanned out over the Bermuda Triangle looking for the missing collier. The search continued until 1 June, when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt at last declared Cyclops officially lost and all embarked personnel legally deceased.

  Not a single trace of the 542-foot long, more than twenty-thousand-ton ship and her 306 passengers and crew was ever found. The Navy followed up with an investigation that spanned a decade and is recorded in some fifteen hundred pages of interviews and testimony in the National Archives. Because the nation was at war at the time, an obvious possible explanation for the ship’s disappearance was that a German submarine sank her, but after the war, German records were searched and nothing was found that indicated any such attack took place. Many other theories were officially investigated and many more have been offered, but to this day, the mystery of the disappearance of USS Cyclops has never been solved.

  The Navy again found itself faced with a mysterious disappearance in the infamous Bermuda Triangle shortly after the end of World War II. At about 1400 on the afternoon of 5 December 1945, Flight 19—consisting of five Avenger torpedo bombers—departed from the U.S. Naval Air Station, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on an advanced overwater navigational training flight. The pilots and their crews were to execute “Navigation Problem No. 1,” which was described thus: “(1) depart 26 degrees 03 minutes north and 80 degrees 07 minutes west and fly 091°T, distance 56 miles, to Hen and Chickens Shoals to conduct low level bombing; after bombing, continue on course 091°T for 67 miles; (2) fly course 346°T, distance 73 miles, and (3) fly course 241°T, distance 120 miles; then return to U.S. Naval Air Station, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

  The collier (coal ship) USS Cyclops. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  In charge of the flight and piloting one of the aircraft was a senior qualified flight instructor. The other planes were piloted by qualified pilots with between 350 and 400 hours’ flight time, at least 55 of which were in this type of aircraft. The weather conditions over the area covered by the track of the navigational problem were considered average for training flights of this nature, though there were a few thunderstorms in the area.

  At about 1600, a shore-based radio station intercepted a radio message between the flight leader and another pilot. The message indicated that the aircraft were apparently experiencing some kind of compass malfunction and that the instructor was uncertain of his position and could not determine the direction of the Florida coast. Attempts to establish further communications on the training frequency were unsatisfactory because of interference from Cuban radio stations and a great deal of static caused by atmospheric conditions. All radio contact was lost before the exact nature of the trouble or the location of the flight could be determined.

  All available facilities in the immediate area were called upon to locate the missing aircraft and help them return to base. These efforts were not successful. No trace of the missing airplanes or their crews was found even though an extensive search operation was launched and continued for five days. On the evening of 10 December weather conditions deteriorated to the point that further efforts became unduly hazardous.

  To further compound the mysteriousness of the situation and add to the legend of the “Devil’s Triangle,” a Navy patrol plane, which was launched at approximately 1930 on 5 December to search for the missing torpedo bombers, also was neither seen nor heard from after takeoff. No trace of that plane or its crew was ever found.

  In a twist of fate, in 1991 a salvage ship f
ound five Avengers in six hundred feet of water off the coast of Florida. It appeared that Flight 19 had at last been located. But examination of the planes showed that they were not the same aircraft that had taken off as Flight 19, so the final resting place of the planes and their crews is still one of the many secrets of the Bermuda Triangle.

  In 1977, the now-classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind offered an explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19 that is not likely to find its way into official Navy records. It is likely, however, that reasoned theories and fanciful explanations of the strange happenings in the Bermuda Triangle will continue as long as there are unanswered questions and odd coincidences. Such strange but true occurrences have always added to the mystery of the sea.

  Jinx?

  When the frigate USS United States was commissioned in 1797, she was the first American warship to be launched under the naval provisions of the Constitution of the new nation that had won its independence from Great Britain just a few years before. Built in time to participate in the Quasi-War with France, she captured a number of French privateers and recaptured several American ships that had been taken by the French.