Deeply researched written companions to the American Naval History YouTube channel — the ships, the doctrine, and the decisions behind the battles.
The Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber went to war at Midway, where five of the six that flew were shot down. Three years later, Avengers flying with American carrier fighters and dive bombers put torpedoes into Yamato and Musashi, the two biggest battleships ever built. This World War II naval…
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Battle of Vella Gulf, August 6-7, 1943: six US Navy destroyers ambush the Tokyo Express with defective WW2 American torpedoes, Mark 15s that for twenty months had run deeper than they were set and too often hit without exploding. All four Japanese destroyers were hit. Three sank. The fourth…
18 min read · video
Zero. That is the number of enemy shells that hit the battleship USS Washington on the night of November 14 to 15, 1942, in the strait north of Guadalcanal that would soon be named Ironbottom Sound. Her four escorting destroyers were sunk or crippled inside fifteen minutes. USS South Dakota lost…
21 min read · video
March 1, 1942. The Indian Ocean, south of Christmas Island. USS Edsall (DD-219), a 21-year-old Clemson-class destroyer her own Navy had rated unfit for combat, is sighted 16 miles astern of the Kido Butai, the carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor. Two battleships and two heavy cruisers,…
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November 10, 1942. Casablanca harbor, French Morocco. Tied up against a stone quay, the unfinished French battleship Jean Bart turns her one working turret on USS Augusta, flagship of the American invasion fleet, and fires nine salvos from four 15-inch guns in ten minutes. Two days earlier USS…
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June 4, 1942, 10:22 in the morning, northwest of Midway Atoll. Forty-eight SBD Dauntless dive bombers from USS Enterprise and USS Yorktown roll into seventy-degree dives above the four carriers of Japan's First Carrier Striking Force. Six minutes later, Kaga, Akagi and Soryu are burning. Hiryu…
20 min read · video
February 4, 1942. The Flores Sea, north of Bali. USS Marblehead (CL-12), an 18-year-old American light cruiser with four tall funnels, is steaming in a circle she cannot stop under a sky full of Japanese bombers. Two bombs have hit her, a third has burst close aboard her bow, her rudder is…
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June 4, 1942. USS Nautilus (SS-168), the oldest and largest American submarine at the Battle of Midway, fires five torpedoes, hits nothing that explodes and absorbs 42 depth charges. Two months later her captain receives the Navy Cross for sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier. He did not sink it.
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June 4, 1944. USS Guadalcanal's task group captures U-505, a German U-boat, off West Africa. Nine sailors board the flooding submarine. Keeping her afloat will take far more than a successful boarding.
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USS Arizona sank at Pearl Harbor in 1941. In 1945, three 14-inch guns made for her were firing on Iwo Jima from USS Nevada, a battleship bombed and run aground in the same attack. Arizona never fired her main battery at an enemy. How did her guns get there without her?
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You told us we got WWII naval history wrong. So we checked every claim in the comments on our USS Nevada, USS S-44 and Mark 14 torpedo videos, yours and ours, against US Navy ship histories, action reports and archival photographs.
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December 7, 1941, 6:53 in the morning. USS Ward, a 23-year-old destroyer patrolling off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, radios a report: "We have attacked fired upon and dropped depth charges upon submarine operating in defensive sea area." Ashore, the Fourteenth Naval District's chief of staff…
19 min read · video
December 4, 1943. Twelve minutes past midnight, about 250 nautical miles southeast of Tokyo, in the middle of a typhoon. The American submarine USS Sailfish fires four torpedoes by radar alone at a Japanese aircraft carrier nobody aboard can see. Four years earlier, under the name USS Squalus,…
20 min read · video
July 6, 1943. Kula Gulf, in the central Solomon Islands. Three Japanese torpedoes hit the light cruiser USS Helena, and within minutes she breaks in half. Nearly a thousand men go into the water at night. Most are pulled out before dawn. One group is not. Two days later, 165 USS Helena survivors…
14 min read · video
July 1, 1946. Bikini Atoll. A B-29 named Dave's Dream opens its bomb bay over a lagoon crowded with more than 70 empty warships. The bomb is aimed at one of them: USS Nevada, battleship number 36, painted reddish orange with white gun barrels so the bombardier cannot miss her.
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October 25, 1944. The Philippine Sea, sixty miles east of Samar. At 6:59 in the morning, Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, opens fire on USS White Plains: an escort carrier with one 5-inch gun on her stern, splinter plating for armor and a top speed of 19 knots. Her sailors said CVE…
20 min read · video
In February 1942 a 19-year-old US Navy submarine sank a modern Japanese destroyer with a Mark 10 torpedo, a design from the First World War. In those same weeks of WW2, the brand-new Mark 14 torpedo was failing across the Pacific War, and American submarine captains were being told the fault was…
15 min read · video
On January 24, 1942, just before three in the morning, four American destroyers hit the Japanese invasion anchorage off Balikpapan, Borneo, at 27 knots. Every one had been launched in 1919 or 1920, and the Navy had spent the 1930s trying to scrap them. One hour later, three transports and a…
14 min read · video
On the morning of 10 August 1942, USS S-44 was waiting at periscope depth about 70 miles off Kavieng when four Japanese heavy cruisers came over the horizon, steaming home from the Battle of Savo Island. Thirty-six hours earlier, Aoba, Kinugasa, Furutaka, and Kako had helped sink four Allied…
15 min read · video
On 25 June 1944, USS Nevada closed to within six nautical miles of the Cotentin Peninsula and opened fire on Battery Hamburg, four German 240-millimeter naval guns set in concrete on the cliffs above Fermanville — guns that could shoot roughly six thousand yards farther than anything in the…
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On March 26, 1943, USS Salt Lake City lay dead in the water in front of two Japanese heavy cruisers at the Battle of the Komandorski Islands — and the Japanese fleet turned west and ran.
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May 19, 1944, 1:35 in the afternoon. A sonar operator aboard the destroyer escort USS England reports a sharp, clear submarine contact at 1,400 yards. An hour later, an explosion 500 feet down lifts the stern of the ship out of the water. That was the first. Over the next twelve days, the same…
19 min read · video
On June 15, 1944, USS Texas was handed a fire mission she could not physically execute. Her turrets stopped at 15 degrees of elevation, a limit set when they were designed in 1911, and the target was beyond her maximum range. So her crew flooded the starboard torpedo blister, put a deliberate…
18 min read · video
December 7, 1941: five American battleships lie sunk or shattered at Pearl Harbor. October 25, 1944: those same ships form the battle line that destroys Japan's Southern Force at the Battle of Surigao Strait — the last battleship-versus-battleship gunnery action in history.
13 min read · video
September 27, 1942. The South Atlantic, midway between Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro. The Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins, four months old, still on her maiden voyage, comes out of a rain squall two miles from the German auxiliary cruiser Stier: six 5.9-inch guns, two torpedo tubes, a naval crew of…
18 min read
June sixth, nineteen forty-four. Five fifty-two in the morning. Omaha Beach, Normandy. A thirty-one-year-old American battleship lies at anchor about four thousand yards off the sand, a little over…
15 min read
November 1, 1943. World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic. USS Borie, a 24-year-old American destroyer, tries to ram the German U-boat U-405 in a North Atlantic gale and comes down on top of her instead. For about ten minutes the two ships are locked together, too close for the destroyer's main…
16 min read
June the fourth, nineteen forty-two. Twenty-two minutes past ten in the morning. Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson rolls his Dauntless dive bomber over and points its nose at the biggest ship he has ever…
12 min read
On November 21, 1944, USS Sealion attacked a Japanese battleship formation in the Formosa Strait and put torpedoes into the battleship Kongo. The formation steamed on at the same speed, and Sealion's captain believed he had failed. Two hours and twenty-three minutes later, Kongo was gone.
17 min read