During my Naval Reserve days, I was fortunate to have a variety of annual training duty periods, some more interesting than others. The ones on board ships were always satisfying, and one two-week period of shore duty remains particularly memorable. In 1972 I was assigned to the Naval History Division (now known as the Naval Historical Center) in the Washington Navy Yard.
The most enjoyable part of my time at the history division—someone had to do it—was picking out photos to go in the projected Volume VI of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The multi- volume encyclopedia was the brainchild of Rear Admiral Ernest M. Eller, the director of Naval History in 1959 when the series started. The volumes marched steadily through the alphabet, combining profiles and photos of U.S. Navy ships back to the 18th century. In the 1972 task, John C. Reilly Jr., the ships history branch’s special projects historian and later long-time head of the branch, introduced me to the vast ship photo collection at the National Archives in Washington. Talk about being turned loose in a candy store, I looked at thousands of images in the process of picking out those for ships with names that began with the letters R and S.
The years passed, and the series was finally concluded with Volume VIII in 1981. I remember that a Naval Academy history professor asked rhetorically at the time, “How did we ever get along without having the whole set?” Over the years, the various books in the set have gotten a heavy workout in the Naval Institute’s reference library, as the volumes’ tattered bindings attest. Many pages were Xeroxed to send to people who wrote in with ship questions. And lots of Navy veterans came in and asked about their former ships. They saw the books and went through folders of photos of the ships in which they had served. Thirty, 40, or 50 years would melt away in a few minutes as the old sailors recalled what duties they had performed when they were young.
Alas, the set could never be complete. During the more than 20 years the eight volumes were in production, new ships entered the fleet, old ones left, and the active ones continued making history every year. What’s more, the quality of the volumes steadily improved as the process was refined. The later books contain much more detailed ship histories than the early ones. In 1991 the Naval Historical Center published a splendid new version of Volume I, covering ships with names that begin with A. There was a plan for publication of a new letter B volume, unfortunately, not yet realized.
The current head of the ships history branch of the Naval Warfare Division is Robert J. Cressman, a historian and author who has been with the Naval Historical Center for many years and has absorbed into his memory bits of history about many ships. Using modem technology, he is able to update the histories of individual ships even when bound volumes aren’t being published. Thanks to a generous grant from Admiral James L. Holloway III, former CNO and chairman of the Naval Historical Foundation, the entire dictionary, except for the letter B, is available in digital form on the NHC Web site at http:// www.history.navy.mil/danfs/.
Cressman and his staff, which includes Tim Francis and Kevin Hurst, plus Mark Evans of the aviation history branch, update individual ship histories as opportunities permit. And the Internet option allows far more detail than appears even in the expanded histories in the later volumes published in hardcover. For instance, the original history of the carrier Enterprise (CVN-65) amounted to only two paragraphs when published shortly after the ship’s commissioning in 1961. Evans wrote the online version, which updates the ship’s history to the present; it runs a dozen pages, broken into six sections. The new format also permits the inclusion of substantially more photos than previously and may, in time, link to the Naval Historical Center’s online collection of ship photos: http://www. history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usn-name.htm.
The task ahead is truly formidable and depends in part on the specific interests and available time of the staff members involved in the project. Just keeping up-to-date with the relatively small active fleet of today is a challenge because not all ships submit their annual command histories, and some of the current operations are still classified. There is also the huge backlog of work to fill in details on many of the histories in the bound volumes. For instance, during periods when a given ship wasn’t in combat, the history might summarize years of peacetime operations with just a few sentences rather than being more specific.
There were also changing practices regarding ships that had only numbers rather than names. All told, the Navy commissioned more than 1,000 tank landing ships. Nearly all of them were originally designated only by their hull numbers. Those that did acquire names had histories in the later volumes of the series but not the early ones. Thus, the LST histories are often quite brief.
The dictionary, both in the bound form and the online version, is an invaluable resource. And maybe one of these years we will have the benefit of the new, improved volume for the letter B as one final addition to the ink-and-paper version.