In 1975 the Navy and Marine Corps celebrated the bicentennial year of their founding. Now it is the turn of the third sea service, the U. S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard dates from the merging of the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life-Saving Service in 1915; the Lighthouse Service joined in 1939, and the Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection was added in 1942. The Lighthouse Service had originated in 1789 and the Revenue Cutter service in 1790, so it is certainly appropriate to have a year-long celebration of the Coast Guard bicentennial. Naval History will commemorate the anniversaries of the versatile service with a four-part series that begins in the autumn issue; each part will explore a major mission area. We kick off the tribute in this issue by publishing some of the paintings commissioned by the service to honor various events from its history. They well reflect the variety of the Coast Guard’s roles. The unusual is commonplace for a service that, among other things, transported the reindeer seen on this issue’s front cover.
Speaking of unusual, this issue’s oral history excerpt recounts the duty of then-Captain A1 Mumma, a naval officer who accompanied the advancing Allied armies in France and Germany during the latter part of World War II in quest of technological secrets. The technology of the German cruiser Prinz Eugen was examined after the ship reached this country with a crew made up of both Germans and Americans. One of the German officers describes the experience. Going back a war earlier, we have an account of the 1918-19 service of U. S. Marines in occupying defeated Germany as a means of demonstrating that the war really was over and the Allies had won.
The Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I and Commander in Chief during World War II was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man with a life-long interest in the Navy and seafaring. We present an article that tells of long-hidden logs of whaling ships. FDR delighted in reading them as a boy and recalled them with pleasure when he was President.
For those who would delve even further into material on naval history, we inaugurate in this issue a new feature, Lieutenant Colonel Skip Bartlett’s bibliographic column on dissertations and articles published in the field.
Also we commend to our readers the upcoming biennial Naval Academy history symposium. Every two years the top professionals in the field get together, and it is always a pleasure to learn from the exchange of ideas during the numerous sessions on a wide variety of subjects. As part of the overall event, the Naval Institute will be sponsoring a reception on 18 October in the Naval Academy Museum. We hope to see many of you there, and we point with pleasure to the fact that there are even more of you than before. With this issue the circulation of Naval History tops 27,000 for the first time.