Sometimes, one reader can make our day. Take the letter we received recently from retired Navy Corpsman Charles T. Sweeny from San Mateo, California. He volunteers at the Palo Alto Veterans’ Affairs Hospital in response “to our President’s call,” he wrote, adding, “I would ship over again in the Regular Navy in a New York minute, but the Navy medical department has no billets for septuagenarians!” That is not, however, why Sweeny contacted us.
One day at the VA hospital, one of his favorite patients, Raleigh Peppers, told him about the sinking of his ship, an oiler, at Ulithi in 1944. “His descriptions of the suddenness of the attack and the fire and devastation following were memorable,” wrote Sweeny, “the usual mixture of horror, relief, sadness, and of persistent self-questioning of why he survived.” Peppers was in charge of stewards, and because he happened to be on an upper part of the ship, he is the only one of his group to live through the attack. When the April issue of Naval History arrived with the story titled “The Hunt for the Last Mystery Shipwreck,” Sweeny knew immediately this account of the attack on the USS Mississinewa (AO-59) was the story of Peppers’s ship.
Sweeny brought his magazine to the hospital the following morning and took the photograph on this page. He closed his letter to us by placing an order for six extra copies of the issue, for Peppers’s “children and grandchildren.” We sent them gratis, with our compliments, and received a thank-you note already. To Mr. Sweeny, we salute you for your generosity. To the Peppers family, we hope you find the article interesting and that it helps you appreciate the service of your father and grandfather to his country.
Several weeks ago, our long-time friend, the great historian David McCullough, called in an excited voice and said, “I’m about halfway through a book you’ve got to review. In fact, you should interview the author. And maybe you can even get him to speak at your spring event.” McCullough was referring to Evan Thomas’s new biography, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy, and when he learned we were doing all three, he said, “1 should have known you’d have this covered.” The interview appears here, the review will appear in a future issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, and Thomas was the featured luncheon speaker at the Naval Institute’s 129th Annual Meeting and 13th Annapolis Seminar on 2 April.
Not long after we published an excerpt from Geoffrey Footner’s Naval Institute Press book, From Frigate to Sloop of War, in the October 2002 issue, Dana Wegner requested an opportunity to respond. Wegner led the researchers who compiled Fouled Anchors in 1991 in an attempt to put to rest the controversy surrounding the historic ship Constellation, a major tourist attraction in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Wegner says the ship is a sloop-of-war built in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1853. Baltimorean Footner contends the ship was refurbished several times but what remains is essentially still the U.S. Frigate Constellation, completed in 1797. In this issue, we present Wegner’s rebuttal to Footner in a special technical report. The two men are scheduled to face off in a debate on board the ship on 30 April.