Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH OUR ARCHIVES!
U.S. Navy
If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.
CROATE, 1935
We built a merchant marine despite the opposition of the Royal Navy, went on to develop the most beautiful of all sailing ships, and held our supremacy for years. But how do we measure up today?
AMERICA is in the midst of a revival of interest in things nautical—nineteenth-century nautical.
An extraordinary World War I naval operation is recounted by the commander of a decaying coastal steamer crammed with a terrifying new explosive
When my father, Rear Adm. D. Pratt Mannix 3rd, died in 1957, he had served as a midshipman on a square-rigger and lived to see the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.
An Interview With Edward L. Beach
The captain who first took a submarine around the world underwater looks at the U.S. Navy past and present and tells us what we must learn from the Falklands war
Naval power … is the natural defense of the United States,” said John Adams, who more than any other man deserves to be called the father of the American Navy.
She was the last major American warship sunk during World War II, and her sinking was the single worst open-sea disaster in our naval history. How could it have happened?
On July 16, 1945, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis departed the California coast for the Pacific island of Tinian. On board was a heavily guarded top-secret cargo destined to end the war.
The Japanese planes that came screaming down on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, changed the whole course of history. The United States was plunged into a long, grueling war.
A SUBMARINE COMMANDER TELLS WHY WE ALMOST LOST THE PACIFIC WAR
LIFE ABOARD
The leak was known of old. It can afflict either a ship or a government, it invariably means that something invisible has gone wrong, and in certain cases it ends in disaster.
It became apparent that this influenza was a first-rate killer.
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.
"With half the western world at stake, See Perry on the middle lake.” —Nineteenth-century ballad
In the late summer of 1812 a Great Lakes merchant captain named Daniel Dobbins arrived in Washington.
The famed aviator recalls the dramatic bombing raid he led on Tokyo early in World War II.
“My God! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!” the Admiral told Lanikai's skipper when she finally sailed into port
On March 18, 1941, eighty-two days out of Manila, all sails set, rigging taut, a small, green, weathered schooner entered the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. Atop her afterdeck house a small-caliber, slim-barrelled cannon sat on a brass pedestal.
The Navy and contractor Smith accused each other of fraud. The Navy won—until the President took a hand
The way of the reformer is hard. The way ofthat idealistic David who slings his polished stones at the Goliath of military bureaucracy is trebly hard. He needs a firm heart and strong friends. Franklin W.
The curious sight above takes us back to the recruiting and Liberty Bond drives of World War I, to a time when the engines of war were as popular as “preparedness” itself.
It was a bright day for the Republic, that afternoon of May 15, 1815, when the U.S.S. Constitution victoriously dropped anchor oil the Battery at New York.
The admiral who commanded "the ship that wouldn't die" recalls the hellish and heroic hours after a kamikaze turned the carrier Franklin into an inferno.
The admiral who commanded "the ship that wouldn't die" recalls the hellish and heroic hours after a kamikaze turned the carrier Franklin into an inferno.
Many naval historians dispute whether there ever was a mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy, though they do agree that several near-outbreaks have occurred. In response to an inquiry from AMERICAN HERITAGE, Rear Admiral E. M.
As the debate about rescuing them droned on and on, Lieutenant Greely’s men were dying one by one
It was thirty miles offshore, and stormy, but the daredevil swimmer plunged into the Atlantic with a crisp “Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen!” Our author recalls bold Captain Boyton, a mixture of Jules Verne, Tom Swift, and a bit of Walter Mitty.
Weary of his humiliating job—American pay-off man to the piratical Arab states—this bold Yankee civilian raised his own army and won our strangest foreign war
So the Bible said, but American missionaries found Hawaii a paradise where pleasure reigned, and the sense of sin was difficult to teach
“Come and see the boiling cloud,” said a woman on the ground; aloft, the slender Shenandoah headed straight into the eye of the vicious squall
When American colonists sorely needed friends, a Dutch island governor risked political ruin by saluting the rebels’ flag
Summer was on the wane in wartime Philadelphia, 1776, and the city which had startled the world with the Declaration of Independence was alive with purposeful activity.
Japan’s feudal, shut-in history suddenly came to an end when the bluff American commodore dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay
Throughout the mid-1830’s there raged in American naval circles, as veil as in Congress when defense appropriations came up, a debate on the wisdom of introducing into our sail-driven frigate fleet a revolutionary new method of propulsion—steam. Most captains as well as congressmen were opposed to the innovation. It was costly. It was uncertain. Sailors knew nothing about machinery and did not want to learn. There had even been a near-mutiny when a Navy crew refused to hoist out firebox clinkers from an experimental floating battery designed by Fulton.
Day after day, the sun, the sea, and the sharks cut down the men who clung to the “doughnut” raft: Seaman Heyn’s Story from the Naval Archives
Featured Authors
