Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 12 i War at Sea

Everything in the United States is done on a grander, bigger and more spectacular scale than anywhere else in the world and it is true of their naval museums too. America is the world’s premier naval superpower and has held the title since the end of the Second World War, in those intervening years the USA has been at war, be it against Russia in the Cold War, against North Korean forces, Communists in Vietnam, insurgencies in the Caribbean, against tyrants in the Gulf or even against terrorism. For a nation that has spent the last eight decades policing the world, it has spent billions producing countless numbers of warships of all types, classes and specialities, the vast majority of these ships end their days being torn apart by scrap…

USS CASSIN YOUNG One of the finest destroyer designs produced was the famed Fletcher-class of which USS Cassin Young is one of just four that survive today. Built by Bethlehem Shipbuilding at San Pedro in California she commissioned into service on the last day of 1943. For almost two years she was in the thick of the fighting in the Pacific playing a significant role in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Battle of Okinawa and the Battle of Cape Engano, during which four Japanese aircraft carriers and a destroyer were sunk. The threat of kamikaze attacks was ever present in the closing stages of the war and on 6 April 1945, she rescued the survivors from two other destroyers that had been sunk. Six-days later it was her turn…

SS JEREMIAH O’BRIEN SS Jeremiah O’Brien is a class EC2-SCI ship that was completed in just 56 days by the New England Shipbuilding Corporation in South Portland, Maine and was launched on 19 June 1943. At the end of the war and with such a vast fleet of Liberty and Victory ships available most were removed from service by 1946 and sold for commercial use or for scrapping. Several were retained as a ready reserve by the US Maritime Commission for potential reuse should another war or crisis require their reactivation. Jeremiah O’Brien was one of these vessels and would spend the next 33 years laid up in mothballs at the National Defense Reserve Fleet in Suisan Bay. Following many thousands of hours of restoration work by the dedicated group…

USS OLYMPIA USS Olympia is perhaps the most evocative American naval memorial as she retains most of her late 19th century features and fittings and is the oldest steel US warship afloat. Built at Union Iron Works in San Francisco she commissioned in February 1895 as a protected cruiser, but her design and construction were anything but plain sailing. In 1887, William Collins Whitney, the Secretary of the Navy, authorised the construction of a pair of coastal defence battleships which would become Texas and Maine, but the following year Whitney managed to convince Congress to build a pair of protected cruisers. The incoming new Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Tracy, however, decided to rethink American naval policy towards one of foreign intervention and battle fleets and not coastal defence. One…

USS TEXAS Construction of USS Texas was authorised on 24 June 1910 with the work being awarded to Newport News Shipbuilding. The first steel plates were laid down on the slipway on 17 April 1911 and she was launched on 18 May 1912. She was commissioned into the US Navy on 12 March 1914. In May Texas was involved in what became known as the ‘Tampico Incident’ when Mexican federal troops detained an American gunboat at Tampico. President Woodrow Wilson ordered that in retaliation US forces should land at Veracruz and seize the customs house. World War One In April 1917 the US joined the fighting and Texas was amongst the first units allocated to the war. Later, on 27 September the battleship ran hard aground on Block Island after…

HUNLEY At 40ft long this small and physically unimposing vessel is perhaps one of the most significant in the history of America’s Silent Service. H.L Hunley, often referred to as just Hunley, CSS H. L. Hunley or as CSS Hunley, played a small part in the American Civil War, but crucially sparked the idea of underwater warfare and became the first combat submarine to sink a surface vessel (USS Housatonic). Tragically Hunley also claimed the lives of 21 crewmen in three separate sinkings such was the primitive nature of submersible technology at the time. Named for her inventor, Horace Lawson Hunley and came under the control of the Confederate States Army at Charleston, South Carolina. She was built and launched in July 1863 at Mobile in Alabama and then shipped…