Naval History

Before there was Air Force One, there was the presidential yacht. Dating back to the 19th century, America’s chief executives utilized navy ships and other vessels for recreation and entertaining foreign dignitaries. Nearly a dozen different ships acted as the “Floating White ...read more

In early 1862, the Union and the Confederacy were locked in one of the most influential arms races of the Civil War. While their navies still relied on wooden ships, both sides had gambled on building revolutionary “ironclad” vessels that boasted steam engines, hulking cannons ...read more

Under the cover of darkness in the early morning hours of May 19, 1941, the most formidable battleship to have ever been built slipped into the Baltic Sea on its maiden voyage. An ocean-bound castle, the thickly armored Bismarck was the first full-scale battleship constructed by ...read more

1. Drebbel: 1620-1624 British mathematician William Bourne made some of the earliest known plans for a submarine around 1578, but the world’s first working prototype was built in the 17th century by Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch polymath and inventor in the employ of the British ...read more

It began as nothing more than a routine training flight. At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from a Naval Air Station in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The planes—collectively known as “Flight 19”—were scheduled to tackle a three-hour exercise ...read more

1. George Washington was the father of the Navy. Despite having virtually no experience at sea, George Washington was a huge early proponent of the Navy, believing among other things that it would disrupt British supply lines. “It follows then as certain as that night succeeds ...read more

The Potemkin uprising was sparked by a disagreement over food, but it was anything but accidental. Morale in Russia’s Black Sea fleet had long been at rock-bottom lows, spurred on by defeats in the Russo-Japanese War and widespread civil unrest on the homefront. Many navy ships ...read more

The hundreds of Union veterans and recently released prisoners of war who boarded the steamboat Sultana on April 24, 1865, were bloodied, exhausted and starving—but unlike more than 600,000 of their fellow soldiers who fought in the Civil War, they were alive. They had survived ...read more

More than three years into the Civil War, the Union naval blockade of Southern ports had choked most of the Confederacy’s nautical lifelines. Blockade runners, however, still operated out of one major haven along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico—Mobile, Alabama. Ever since his ...read more

Ancient mariners used to gauge how fast their ship was moving by throwing a piece of wood or other floatable object over the vessel’s bow then counting the amount of time that elapsed before its stern passed the object. This method was known as a Dutchman’s log. By the late 16th ...read more

On the clear but chilly night of February 17, 1864, John Crosby stood on the deck of USS Housatonic a little less than six miles and three years removed from the launching point of the Civil War, Fort Sumter. The moonlight shimmered on Charleston Harbor’s still surface as ...read more

1. The Wilhelm Gustloff (1945): The deadliest shipwreck in history On January 30, 1945, some 9,000 people perished aboard this German ocean liner after it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. The Gustloff, named for a Nazi leader ...read more

1. The Mutiny on the Bounty The 1789 mutiny on the Bounty saw a rebellious crew hijack their ship and build their own island community. Commanded by William Bligh, HMS Bounty left England in December 1787 on a mission to collect breadfruit saplings in the South Pacific. During a ...read more

Around 2 p.m. on the afternoon of August 19, 1812, a lookout aboard USS Constitution spied a sail against the cloudy southern horizon. The newsflash brought the frigate’s commanding officer, Captain Isaac Hull, and his charges “flocking up like pigeons from a net bed,” according ...read more

David Farragut (1801-70) was an accomplished U.S. naval officer, who received great acclaim for his service to the Union during the American Civil War (1861-65). Farragut commanded the Union blockade of Southern ports, helped capture the the Confederate city of New Orleans and ...read more