A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (27 page)

Determined salvage operations later raised
Squalus,
and she was towed into the Portsmouth Navy Yard on 13 September 1939. Following an investigation into the cause of the disaster, the boat was formally decommissioned on 15 November, then recommissioned with the new name
Sailfish
on 9 February 1940, in time to serve in World War II. During her twelve war patrols,
Sailfish
sank seven Japanese ships, including the escort carrier
Chuyo,
for a total of more than forty thousand tons.
Sailfish
was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation.

It was a remarkable achievement. The Navy had not given up on either its Sailors or its ship. James Lawrence and Oliver Hazard Perry would have been proud.

It should be clear from the preceding chapters that serving as a Sailor in the U.S. Navy—whether for two years or thirty—is a truly unique experience. It is a bit of an understatement to say that men and women who serve in the Navy see, hear, say, and do things they would otherwise never have done. In the remaining chapters, we will see why, no matter what else a person may do in his or her life, those years spent in the Navy will always be remembered as unique.

As with all things that rely on technology, navies have evolved over the years. Oars have given way to sails, which have given way to steam propulsion, which has in turn given way to gas turbines and nuclear reactors. Weapons have evolved from boarding parties and rams to guns, missiles, and supersonic aircraft. That which remains the same throughout all this change is the Sailor who dares to venture into the unknown when new challenges emerge and who uses this ever-changing technology to defend the nation and, when necessary, to achieve victory at sea and to project power ashore.

Gunner's Mate Second Class Joseph Palisano stood on the deck of the destroyer USS
Paul F. Foster
at 0441, 17 January 1991, peering into the predawn darkness that blanketed the Persian Gulf. Suddenly, there was a deafening roar as a Tomahawk missile leaped into the black sky, momentarily turning night into the brightest noonday glare. Like a shooting star, the reflection from the flaming engine traced a path across the dark waters as the weapon soared off in search of its assigned target. In seconds, it was gone, leaving Palisano once again enshrouded in darkness to ponder what he and his shipmates had just done. To no one in particular, he remarked: “There it goes. We just started a war!”

Although one might argue it was the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein who had actually started the war when he sent his armies into an unprovoked invasion of neighboring Kuwait, Palisano was correct that his ship had just fired one of the opening salvos of what had been dubbed Operation Desert Storm, the war to liberate Kuwait.

The largest naval armada since World War II had gathered in the Middle East to strike at the very heart of Iraq; even the capital city of Baghdad was among the many targets that would be hit in the devastating assault. Three aircraft carriers—
Saratoga, John F. Kennedy,
and
America
—launched their strike aircraft from the northern Red Sea. Across the Arabian Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf—where some had deemed it impossible to conduct
carrier operations—
Midway
and
Ranger
proved the skeptics wrong and fired off sortie after sortie. Battleship
Missouri
(upon whose decks the Japanese had surrendered to end World War II nearly half a century before) and her sister
Wisconsin
were there again to fire in anger.

This time, however, it was not gigantic 16-inch guns that served as their main batteries, but a barrage of state-of-the-art guided missiles. They were joined by
Aegis
cruisers
San Jacinto
and
Bunker Hill
and destroyers
Paul F. Foster, Leftwich,
and
Fife,
and together they fired 48 Tomahawks in the first hour. That was just the beginning: in the first two days of the war alone, 216 Tomahawks and 1,100 combat sorties from the carriers had been launched against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

One of the vessels of this powerful striking force made history in those early hours of the war. Like many other ships in the armada, USS
Louisville
had come a long way to fight. Her voyage had been more than 14,000 miles at high speed. But unlike most of the other vessels, she had made the transit
underwater. Louisville
was the fourth ship to bear the name: Her predecessors had been an ironclad steamer that fought in the battle of Vicksburg during the Civil War, a troop transport that carried thousands of Soldiers to Europe during World War I, and a World War II cruiser who fought in several engagements, including the Battle of Leyte Gulf that destroyed the Japanese navy. But this
Louisville
was the first to be a submarine. And on 19 January, she became the first submarine in history to launch a Tomahawk missile in actual combat.

This massive assault from the sea crippled the enemy's infrastructure and weakened their will and ability to fight. After the air war, the ground war began and was over in just a few days. Kuwait was liberated, and Saddam Hussein's bid for mastery in the Persian Gulf region had been thwarted. While this spectacular victory was achieved by a joint effort of all U.S. armed forces with the assistance of a coalition of foreign allies, the U.S. Navy's role was unquestionably vital to the outcome. Without control of the surrounding seas and the power projected from those waters, the war would have been a different one indeed, if it could have been fought at all.

The ships, aircraft, and submarines that accomplished this liberation were representatives of the pinnacle of naval power at the time, incorporating state-of-the-art technology that was a far cry from the sailing frigates who had fought the despots of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli nearly two centuries earlier. Even though Sailors from both eras answered orders with a traditional “aye-aye” and knew the value of a half-hitch, much had changed since the twelve-gun
Enterprise
had captured a Tripolitan ship in a ferocious action off Malta and a party of courageous Sailors had sailed the tiny ketch
Intrepid
into Tripoli's harbor to destroy the enemy fleet berthed there on what turned out to be a suicide mission. Those tiny wooden vessels following the whims of North African winds in the early 1800s bore little resemblance to the great steel ships plying Middle Eastern waters in 1991. The contrast between hundred-yard cannons and Tomahawks flying hundreds of miles into Iraq is almost beyond comprehension. And those brave men in
Intrepid
who made that last sortie into Tripoli harbor would no doubt have gratefully welcomed the assistance of a flock of strike aircraft or a missile-firing submarine.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, as viewed through the periscope of the submarine launching it. USS
Louisville
was the first submarine in history to launch a Tomahawk in combat.
Naval Historical Center

The U.S. Navy of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries is unquestionably the most powerful the world has ever seen. But it did not come to be that way without the imagination, innovation, and outright
genius of some brilliant inventors and the courage of Sailors who, using those inventions, dared to go where no one had gone before.

Seaman Peter Williams would not have been cast as a hero in a Hollywood movie. His slender build, mousy brown beard, and gray eyes were not features that made him stand out in a crowd. But he had proved himself a capable seaman during his first voyage shortly after the Civil War began. He was a quick study and had already learned a healthy respect for the sea. His ship had been seriously damaged in an Atlantic winter storm and was undergoing repairs in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when Williams heard of a strange new kind of ship being built nearby. The rumors had been spreading along the waterfront for some time, and although he was no naval architect and not among the most experienced Sailors in the Union Navy, Williams knew enough about ships to know how they worked. What he was hearing about this vessel did not seem possible.

It was a blustery January afternoon in 1862 when the young Sailor decided to have a look for himself. A chilling wind nipped at his ears as he made his way along the waterfront. A wad of tobacco bulged his left cheek, and he was careful to spit to leeward as he walked. On his right, tall masts skewered the bright blue sky, and to his left, soot-covered brick buildings housed the industrial shops and chandlers' lofts of the Navy Yard. The pungent smell of burning coal wafted on the wind, and across a narrow band of water he could see Cob Dock, a man-made island created over the years by dumping the cobblestone ballast from ships that came in for overhaul.

He was stopped at a gate by an old watchman, an attempt to maintain the secrecy that had long before been compromised. There had even been stories in the newspapers about the strange new vessel that had been designed by the colorful and sometimes difficult John Ericsson. Williams had some difficulty getting past the old watchman, but he succeeded after his persistent (but untrue) assurances that he was a member of the new ship's crew. As he passed by the watchman, the old man said, “Next time bring me a pass so that if you are a spy and blow up the ship, I'll have something to fall back on.” So much for priorities.

Williams snaked his way among piles of metal plating, then got his first look at the mystery ship he had heard so much about. What he saw was even more amazing than what he had heard. Stretched out before him was an extremely low, flat deck—indeed so low that he could barely see any freeboard—broken only by a very large cylinder directly amidships and a
much smaller projection closer to one end of the vessel. None of the things Williams associated with a ship seemed to be there. No majestic hull rising out of the water to support decks cluttered with weapons, capstans, and the like. No towering masts reaching for the heavens, nor webs of lines to awe and confuse a landsman.

Though the ship was teeming with busy people, no one challenged his presence, so Williams boldly went aboard and gave himself a tour. He discovered that the large cylinder amidships was a revolving turret about twenty feet in diameter and nine feet high, housing two 11-inch guns. It was the first time such a design had ever been used in a warship. Williams, whose naval experience had primarily been as a helmsman on vessels with rows of cannons along their sides, had more than once heard a gunner's mate say, “You seamen aim the ship and we'll fire the guns.” He was awed by this new invention that allowed the guns to be trained in any direction—the single exception being dead ahead because of the projection near the bow, which Williams learned was the pilothouse.

As a professional helmsman, Williams was most interested in that pilothouse. It stood just four feet above the deck and reminded him of a log cabin because it had been constructed of nine-inch square logs that were notched and bolted on the ends. Inside, Williams noted there was room for no more than three men. He would later describe it as a “chicken coop.”

As he moved about the strange vessel, he learned that there were two steam-powered engines, one to propel the ship through the water and the other to rotate the turret. Heavy iron plating encased the entire ship, which made Williams feel uneasy about her seaworthiness but reassured him when he thought about riding her into combat.

Williams met an older Sailor named George Geer who told Williams that he was a first-class fireman. He made sure Williams knew that he was
not
one of the “coal-heavers” who would stoke the engines when the ship was under way. His job was to attend to the more complicated aspects of keeping pressure up and steam flowing. Geer explained that the ship's name was
Monitor
; two pistons in one cylinder drove her engines, and she had a forced-air ventilation system that fed air to the boilers and actually moved air throughout the ship for the crew. The smoke from the engines was vented through gratings in the deck aft of the turret, and a detachable stack could be mounted over the gratings to funnel the smoke upward when the ship was not in battle. Peter Williams left the ship very impressed.

As he passed through the gate for the second time, the old watchman reminded him, “Next time bring me something in writing.” Continuing his earlier lie, Williams said, “I'm her quartermaster.” As he headed back through the shipyard, he realized that he liked the sound of that.

Far to the south, near Norfolk, Virginia, another strange vessel was taking shape. She too was clad in iron, and she too had no masts, sails, or associated rigging. She was CSS
Virginia,
and she had been created on the hull of USS
Merrimack,
a steam-and-sail-powered frigate that had been seized when Confederate forces captured Gosport Navy Yard a year earlier. The retreating Union Sailors had set her afire before they were driven out, and her masts and rigging had been destroyed, but her hull and engines remained relatively intact. Unlike
Monitor,
taking shape to the north,
Virginia
had no rotating turret; instead, she had a more conventional array of ten guns aligned along the length of the hull, their muzzles protruding from the armor that was angled upward at a 35-degree slope. Like an ancient Greek galley, she also had a ram protruding from her bow, just below the waterline.