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 man’s…

USS MIDWAY She was once one of the US Navy’s most powerful warships, but today USS Midway is one of California’s most popular tourist attractions. Her 47 years of active service saw the aircraft carrier participate in virtually every post war campaign including the Vietnam War and 1991s Operation Desert Storm. Built by Newport News Shipbuilding, Midway and her two sister ships were designed during World War Two and were the largest aircraft carriers laid down up until that point. She commissioned on 10 September 1945, just eight days after the Japanese surrender and too late to see operational service in the war in her original axial flight deck layout configuration. Throughout the mid- 1940s she conducted a series of tests and trials including during Operation Sandy of the launch of captured German…

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 the captain and navigator…

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 to experience the…

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 of the two…

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 via rail…