A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (47 page)

Civil war broke out in Nicaragua during the first months of 1926, and U.S. naval landing parties went ashore to establish a neutral zone for the protection of American citizens.

As the fighting intensified and spread, additional coastal enclaves were formed by the Navy to shelter refugees. By January 1927, two light cruisers and seven destroyers had reinforced the U.S. Special Service Squadron.

When the danger points moved inland, three thousand U.S. Marines, supported by planes from Navy Observation Squadron 3, landed at the request of the Nicaraguan government. Once order was restored, Sailors and Marines monitored free elections and organized and trained an efficient National Guard.

Shallow-draft gunboats of the U.S. Navy sailed China's largest river for more than fifty years before being officially organized as the Yangtze Patrol Force in August 1921.

These ships protected U.S. citizens against bandits and warlord forces in a turbulent China. In the mid-1920s, the internal struggle for power was accompanied by many acts of violence against foreigners. Units of the Yangtze Patrol Force, reinforced by destroyers and light cruisers from the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, steamed upriver to protect Americans and national interests.

Numerous confrontations occurred. When the situation stabilized, an uneasy peace returned to the Yangtze valley, and the gunboats resumed anti-bandit activities. In the early 1930s, severe floods along the entire river valley brought the gunboats and additional ships of the Asiatic Fleet into action again, this time in the humanitarian cause of aiding the millions of Chinese left homeless by the catastrophe.

Japanese aggression against China, verified by the move into Manchuria in 1931 and subsequent incidents in Shanghai, surfaced anew in 1937 when a minor clash near Peking erupted into a full-scale invasion.

The area of hostilities spread quickly, and units of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet evacuated American citizens and protected national interests, standing firm against Japan's increasingly belligerent actions toward neutrals. At Shanghai, U.S. ships were endangered by Japanese aerial bombings and artillery fire. On 12 December 1937, Japanese naval aircraft attacked and sank the river gunboat USS
Panay.

After World War II, the U.S. Navy returned to China to repatriate Japanese soldiers and to assist the Chinese central government in enforcing the surrender terms. Seventh Fleet Amphibious Forces provided transport for Chinese Nationalist troops and carried food supplies from Shanghai up the Yangtze to fight near-famine conditions in the interior.

Two days after the start of World War II in Europe, but before the United States was formally involved, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the
Navy to organize a neutrality patrol to report and track any belligerent air, surface, or underwater forces approaching the United States or the West Indies.

With the fall of France in June 1940, Germany gained valuable U-boat bases to press the attack against British lifelines, and possibilities were raised of German occupation of French territories in the Western Hemisphere. Assigned additional responsibilities in defense of this hemisphere, the U.S. Navy began the escort of convoys to Iceland. U-boat attacks on these convoys brought American destroyers into combat. On 31 October 1941, more than a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, USS
Reuben James
was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, becoming the first U.S. naval vessel destroyed by enemy action in World War II.

These operations were a precursor to the Battle of the Atlantic, fought during World War II, on which the survival of Great Britain and the projection of American power overseas depended.

In the first six months following the entry of the United States into the war, the vast majority of merchant ship sinkings were in the western Atlantic. Consequently, the U.S. Navy's role in convoy protection increased markedly once the United States entered the war.

In addition to the increasing requirements for added protection of the trans-Atlantic convoys, the Navy had to protect ships moving fuel and other critical materials and supplies along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Numerous sinkings along the East Coast during the first half of 1942 seriously reduced available shipping and gravely threatened American productivity, making homeland security a high priority. To coordinate the convoy protection activities and to counter these homeland threats, the Navy created the Tenth Fleet.

Coastal convoys were initiated as escorts became available. Escort carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts were formed into Hunter-Killer groups to carry the offensive against the U-boats wherever they might be found. In the South Atlantic, the Fourth Fleet waged relentless war against raiders, blockade runners, and submarines.

Through such actions the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic was defeated.

Stars

One bronze star appears on the American Theater streamer.

 

1. Escort, antisubmarine, armed guard, and special operations.
With America's ability to support the war in jeopardy, all available means were brought to bear to defeat the U-boats, including the use of patrol aircraft and blimps, Naval Armed Guard crews, defensive minefield harbor entrance nets, and even the mobilization of yachts for escort duty.

The war in the Pacific was essentially a maritime war. It was on the sea that Japan depended for materials to sustain it and via the sea it launched its aggressions. In fact, its first attack was intended to destroy the nucleus of the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The vital core of the American military effort was the contest for control of the seas, from which all other operations—sea, amphibious, land, and air—branched and received their support.

When the Japanese conducted a surprise attack on the main U.S. base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, America was unprepared for war. For the next several months, the Japanese achieved victory after victory, taking the Dutch East Indies, the British bastion at Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and various other islands in the Pacific. The few U.S. and Allied warships available offered valiant resistance against overwhelming odds, but for a time they were unable to stop the Japanese onslaught.

In April 1942, American morale was lifted and Japanese confidence shaken when a U.S. carrier task force steamed into the very heart of Japanese waters and launched Army aircraft on a first strike against the home islands.

At last the tide began to turn in May when carrier actions in the Battle of the Coral Sea caused a Japanese invasion force to turn back from its advance on Australia. A month later, the decisive Battle of Midway provided
the turning point in the war when U.S. naval forces sank four Japanese carriers and prevented the invasion of Midway Island.

In the amphibious assault and defense of Guadalcanal, at sea and ashore, the advance of Japan into the South Pacific was halted. Step-by-step amphibious operations were launched from the South Pacific area and west-ward through the mid-Pacific by Admiral Chester Nimitz, and northward from the southwest Pacific by joint forces under General Douglas MacArthur.

New concepts and techniques in mobile logistic support and underway replenishment made a high tempo of sustained operations possible. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll of Japan's warships and devastated the merchant marine, thereby severing its economic lifeline.

The capture of the Marianas, and later Iwo Jima, provided fixed bases for air attacks against Japan, and the Fifth Fleet drastically reduced the power of Japanese aviation in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Operations around Leyte destroyed much of the remaining enemy surface fleet as the recapture of the Philippines began.