Piece of the Georgia Resurfaces
An initiative to deepen Savannah’s shipping channel has resulted in the recovery of a piece of the Georgia port’s Civil War past. On 12 November archaeologists from the Army Corps of Engineers working with Navy divers raised a loose 64-square-foot section of the ironclad CSS Georgia’s casemate from the bottom of the Savannah River.
The 5,000-pound piece, which was placed on a barge, is being sent to Texas A&M University for testing. “The small portion removed Tuesday will give archaeologists the ability to assess the condition of the remainder of the ship,” the Corps’ Savannah District said in a statement.
The Georgia, laid down in 1862, was 250 feet in length and 60 feet tall, with a 12-foot-high casemate. She was originally intended to be an ironclad gunboat, but her inefficient steam-propulsion system would have made the success of any offensive efforts unlikely (see story, pp. 40–47). Instead, she was used as a floating battery to protect Savannah and Fort Jackson. When Union forces captured Savannah on 21 December 1864, the Confederates opted to scuttle the Georgia, lest the Union Navy repurpose her for its war effort.
Her remains went unnoticed until a dredging operation uncovered them in 1968. Recovery of the parts that still rest on the river bottom is expected to begin in the summer of 2014. “What happened to the [other portion of the] ship is a mystery,” said Robert Neyland, head of the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Naval History and Heritage Command, who was part of the team responsible for the mission to obtain the casemate section. “The area has been thoroughly surveyed and only the casemate armor, a cannon, propeller, artillery shells, two engine cylinders, and a possible boiler have been found. It’s possible that the ship’s hull was destroyed during 1984 dredging or perhaps was removed earlier.”
The team’s ultimate goal is to learn more about the construction of the Georgia, as not much is known about how the ironclad was built. “It will be difficult to reconstruct the hull,” said Neyland. “There are no ship plans, models, or even good images. There is one possible photograph, but that identification is not firmly established. However, the casemate construction can be interpreted.” Archaeologists will then face the difficult task of stabilizing and preserving the iron parts brought up so that they may be displayed in a museum.
—Laural Hobbes
Naval Institute Honors Authors
David Curtis Skaggs has been named Naval History’s 2013 Author of the Year for the article “More Important than Perry’s Victory” (October, pp. 20–28), which takes the bold stance that Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough’s victory on Lake Champlain did more to change the course of the War of 1812 than Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry’s heroic actions at the Battle of Lake Erie. Dr. Skaggs is professor emeritus of history at Bowling Green State University. He is the editor of ten books and the author of four others, including Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage, and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy (2006) and Thomas Macdonough: Master of Command in the Early U.S. Navy (2003), both published by the Naval Institute Press.
The Naval Institute Press 2013 Author of the Year is the team of Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille for Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed. The book is the first account written by any of the principal members of the CIA team that conducted the intense “Ames Mole Hunt” and the first book to provide details of the operational contact with the agents Ames betrayed.
Grimes and the late Vertefeuille were part of the team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction. The authors witnessed firsthand the crumbling of the agency’s network inside the Soviet Union, including the loss of the “Crown Jewel,” a military intelligence general and the highest ranking spy run by the CIA during the Cold War. Television rights to this acclaimed insider account have been sold to Lincoln Square Productions, a division of ABC News, which will produce The Assets, a series slated to air in 2014.
In October Proceedings announced the winners of the 2013 General Prize Award for Author of the Year. Retired Coast Guard Captain Jim Howe and Reserve Lieutenant Jim Dolbow took first prize for their August article “Reinvent the Fifth Armed Service, Quickly.” Second prize was awarded to Navy Commander (now Captain) Dale C. Rielage for “Parsing the Chinese Challenge,” which appeared in September, and Rear Admiral Robert Wray was the third-prize winner for “The Utility of a Three-tiered Navy,” published in June.
The winners will be recognized at the U.S. Naval Institute’s 2014 Annual Meeting on Wednesday, 16 April, at the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Titanic Violin Sold at Auction
$1,449,900 may seem like a pretty sum to spend on a violin—especially one that comes water-stained, cracked, and with only two intact strings—but the price was right for an anonymous British collector of Titanic memorabilia. According to The Telegraph, an instrument that historians, forensic scientists, and Titanic specialists believe was played by the ill-fated ship’s bandmaster as she sank was sold at an auction in Wiltshire, England, in October. The sale exceeded the previous record for a single piece of Titanic ephemera, a 32-foot-long plan of the ship used in the inquiry of its sinking that fetched £220,000 or $354,420 in 2011.
USNI Explores Human Space Flight
On 3 October the U.S. Naval Institute and the U.S. Naval Academy, with support from The William M. Wood Foundation, hosted the 2013 Naval History Conference whose theme was “Past, Present, and Future of Human Space Flight.” The day’s events included keynote speakers as well as panel discussions.
Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas P. Stafford, a veteran of the Gemini and Apollo programs and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, opened the day as the morning’s keynote speaker. From the launch of the Soviet’s Sputnik in 1957 and the first manned space flight in 1961 (by the Soviets) to the creation of NASA in 1958 to the Gemini and Apollo missions, Stafford witnessed—and made—history. Once the Apollo program ended, Stafford went on to head the Astronaut Office and then command the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which was a joint effort between NASA and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The project developed into the first international space mission—and in the middle of the Cold War. Looking back, Stafford reflected, “I cannot emphasize how much the Soviet program pushed our program, but also how much our program pushed theirs.”
Moderated by David Hartman, former host of Good Morning America, the morning panel, “Mercury to Shuttle: Guts and Ingenuity,” explored the development of the United States’ space program from Mercury to the present day. Capturing the spirit of the early space program, Hartman launched the discussion noting that “the period between Kennedy’s 1961 speech and Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon was perhaps the last time in the country’s history when everyone pulled together to accomplish something remarkable.”
Panelists included Captain James A. Lovell, USN (Ret.), veteran of the Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8, and Apollo 13 missions; Captain Robert L. Crippen, USN (Ret.), a veteran of four space-shuttle flights and former president of Thiokol Propulsion and director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center; Colonel Robert Cabana, USMC (Ret.), current director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center; and Captain Ken Ham, USN, chair of the Aerospace Engineering Department at the Naval Academy.
Lovell recalled seeing the earth rise over the moon during the Apollo 8 mission. “It really gave you an impression of how small we all really are,” he said. “You see continents and clouds and water, but that’s it. From that distance it appears that the earth is completely uninhabited, but you know that down there are 5 or 6 billion astronauts striving to survive on the spacecraft called Earth. And I think that’s the sense we wanted to bring back to people.”
Miles O’Brien, science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, moderated the lunch panel discussion, “International Space Station: The Greatest Human Engineering Accomplishment.” Then the day wrapped up with a panel discussion that focused on the commercial space industry’s take.
What does the future hold? Panelist Bretton Alexander, the director of business development and strategy at Blue Origin, LLC, offered the idea that “Fundamentally, we’re on a journey to turn space travel from something that’s dangerous to something that is very safe and popular.”