Captain James E. Wise Jr., 1930–2013
Prolific Naval Institute Press author Captain James E. Wise Jr. (U.S. Navy, Retired), passed away in July. He was 82.
A longtime friend of the Institute and a popular, well-known figure in naval-history circles, Jim Wise was one of those rare individuals who seemed to know everybody and was liked by all. He will be sorely missed.
After graduating from Northwestern University, he became a naval aviator in 1953 and served as an intelligence officer, going on to command various naval intelligence units until he retired in 1975. He later held several senior executive posts in private-sector companies. Following that, he embarked on a career in writing.
Captain Wise was the author or coauthor of many books published by the Naval Institute Press: Women at War; International Stars at War; Soldiers Lost at Sea; The Silver Star; Dangerous Games; Shooting the War: The Memoir and Photographs of a U-boat Officer in World War II; Stars in Blue; Stars in the Corps; Stars in Khaki; U-505: The Final Journey, and others.
Numerous other Jim Wise books from other publishers include Sole Survivors of the Sea (Nautical & Aviation Publishing), Sailor’s Journey into War (Kent State University Press), and James Arness: An Autobiography (McFarland), which Wise helped the Gunsmoke TV star and World War II veteran write. At the time of his death, Wise had three more books in the publishing cycle.
He published many articles in naval and maritime journals, and guested on a variety of TV interview programs. Wise was the recipient of the Naval Institute Press 2008 Distinguished Author Award, the Naval Institute Press 2002 Author of the Year Award, the U.S. Naval Institute 1998 Staff Award of Merit, the 1993 Naval History Author of the Year Award, and other honors.
“A real renaissance man and a longtime and generous Naval Institute supporter, he will be a truly missed friend and mentor,” said Fred Schultz, managing editor of Proceedings and contributing editor of Naval History. He echoed the sentiments of many when he added, “Captain James Wise will forever hold a prominent place in my heart and my memories.”
Financial Turbulence Won’t Ground Aviation Museum
Warplane enthusiasts can rest easy for the time being. Despite reports that the Military Aviation Museum in Pungo, Virginia, may be closing, museum director David Hunt quelled those concerns. “The museum absolutely will remain open, there’s no doubt about it,” he maintained in an interview with Naval History.
The museum, which Gerald Yagen opened in 2008, houses approximately 60 planes and is one of the largest collections of World War I– and II–era aircraft in the world. The funds to purchase the planes, which are each valued between $20,000 and $7 million, came in large part from Yagen’s other business venture—vocational colleges. Unfortunately, the schools are experiencing financial difficulties, and some planes are being sold to provide financial support for the institutions.
Selling planes bought with money from the colleges to now help support the colleges is a payback of sorts. Some reports claim that all are for sale, and to a degree that is true. “That doesn’t mean all of them will be sold. It’s a matter of selling a number of planes to try to recoup money the colleges need,” said Hunt. “How many will we sell out of 60? We could sell eight to ten if they were big-ticket planes. If not, we could sell 12, 15, or 20 planes. At the moment we’ve only sold five, and there is one more that may be sold.”
Sitting on 120 acres of land, the nonprofit museum has a one-mile runway and five hangars housing its inventory. Other storage facilities throughout the United States hold about ten more aircraft. At the moment, the museum’s hangars are full and cannot hold any more planes. According to Hunt: “As planes are sold, there’s a very good chance these offsite aircraft will be shipped to the museum as static displays. However, it’s unlikely the money will be put into those planes to rebuild them to flight condition like the rest of the museum’s aircraft.”
The museum is a popular tourist destination as well as a special-events venue (it played host to two Naval Institute “Remembering Midway” events in recent years). Hunt noted that the museum has approximately 30 events, such as car and air shows, booked for the remainder of the year.
—Maura McCarthy
Shipwreck Reborn as Underwater Art Venue
Austrian artist Andreas Franke has turned an artificial reef made from the hull of a World War II Coast Guard cutter into a fine-art gallery with a naval twist.
Almost 90 feet below the Gulf of Mexico, Franke has hung a dozen magnetized picture frames on the side of the Mohawk, a 1,005-ton cutter sunk in July 2012 to create an artificial reef 28 miles off the coast of Florida.
The images on display are pictures of the ship taken shortly after the Mohawk was sunk, superimposed with models Franke shot in his Vienna studio. “I shot a couple of hundred of images,” the diver/photographer said. “Then back to the boat and back to Europe.”
Franke dressed models in generic sailor garb and posed them getting into fights, handling lines, getting tattoos, and smooching with their sweethearts on the deck. “It’s more a fantasy story,” he said.
Franke got the idea after diving on the SS Thistlegorm, a British armed merchant ship sunk by German bombers in the Red Sea in 1941.
The idea stayed with the artist when he met Joe Weatherby, a Florida-based commercial boat captain turned artificial-reef creator. Weatherby and his company, Reefmakers, had sunk the former Navy radar ship General Hoyt S. Vandenberg as an artificial reef off the Florida coast.
Working with Reefmakers, Franke used pictures of the Vandenberg as a backdrop to create a 2011 underwater exhibition. The Vandenberg exhibition juxtaposed Viennese imagery of ballet dancers and women in refined hairdos lounging on the rust-covered decks surrounded by aquatic wildlife.
So far, turning the reefs into galleries has met with a positive response and has helped bolster the case for turning more decommissioned military ships into artificial reefs, Weatherby said.
“The fish can’t tell the difference between a pile of shopping carts and the USS Arizona, and the veterans hate it when they’re cut up into razor blades.” Decommissioned military ships are most often bought by scrap dealers who recycle the ship’s metal into raw materials for other products.
Weatherby was able to convince the owners of the Mohawk—once a floating museum—to use the ship as a reef when she began to deteriorate.
“The Mohawk is an example of the way artificial reefs should be done,” said Weatherby. “It’s keeping the legacy of the ship alive.”
James Delgado, director of Maritime Heritage for the National Marine Sanctuaries Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, liked the idea of the gallery. “We’re not talking about a ship that was sunk. This is not the Arizona, the Titanic, or the Monitor . . . . Not every wreck on the bottom should be set aside as a museum.”
Delgado said the exhibition made the ships out to be more than things. “These were floating communities. I think [Franke] hit the nail on the head.”
For Weatherby’s part, he’s glad the exhibition has drawn attention to artificial reefs. Not only do ships like the Mohawk draw millions of tourist dollars to Florida communities from divers, but the ships are given a new role in their afterlife.
“Better at rest than toenail clippers,” he said.
—Sam LaGrone
Collins Military History Book Prize Announced
The U.S. Commission on Military History (USCMH) has announced the 2013 Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book Prize in Military History. The prize entails a $1,000 award to the author of any nationality of the best book written in English on any field of military history published during 2012.
Topics in all periods and all aspects of military history, including naval and air warfare, will be considered.
Books for consideration by the Collins Prize Committee must be submitted by 30 December 2013, one copy each to:
• USCMH Collins Prize, c/o Dr. Edward J. Marolda, 15570 Golf Club Drive, Dumfries, VA 22025
• USCMH Collins Prize, c/o Dr. Jeffrey Clarke, 1011 North Van Dorn Street, Alexandria, VA 22304
• USCMH Collins Prize, c/o Dr. Kelly DeVries, 1170 Crab Walk, Charleston, SC 29412.
The Collins Prize will be presented at the USCMH Annual General Meeting, usually held in early November. For more information, contact Dr. Edward. J. Marolda, the Collins Prize Committee chair, at: [email protected] or [email protected].
USS Indiana Prow to be Displayed at Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) has secured the original prow from the battleship USS Indiana (BB-58), which served in the Pacific during World War II and was the last ship to be named for the Hoosier state.
The acquisition means the ship’s prow will be reunited with her mainmast and two of her gun mounts, which have been on display outside the west entrance to the university’s Memorial Stadium since May 1966. A plaque there notes the items were a gift from the U.S. Navy and stand “as a memorial to the sons and daughters of the state of Indiana who have so gallantly served in the armed forces of our nation.”
The university will formally welcome the ship’s prow to its new home with a rededication ceremony on 7 September, when IU hosts Navy in a home football game. Representatives from the university, the U.S. Navy, and the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Martin County, as well as local, state, and federal lawmakers, are expected to be on hand.
“Indiana University is an appropriate home for this treasured vestige of naval history and tradition from the last warship named in honor of our great state,” IU President Michael A. McRobbie said. “The fact that we have an opportunity to preserve a physical piece of this legacy and provide a lasting home for it at the state’s flagship public university is a source of immense pride that I share with all Hoosiers.”
A 35,000-ton South Dakota–class battleship, the Indiana was commissioned in April 1942. She participated in the invasion of the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 and the Marshall Islands in January 1944, and took part in the Marianas campaign in June 1944. Following an overhaul, she returned to the western Pacific in January 1945 in time to participate in the invasion of Iwo Jima. The ship, which earned nine battle stars for her service in World War II, was decommissioned in September 1947 and sold for scrap in 1963.
The Frank Spenger family, whose patriarch collected Navy memorabilia, saved the forward portion of the ship from being scrapped and displayed it for decades in the parking lot of the family’s seafood restaurant in Berkeley, California.
The prow came to the attention of IU officials last year when alumnus Scott Clarke suggested, via a letter to the editor in a Bloomington newspaper, that the university procure the prow and display it at Memorial Stadium. The Spenger family agreed to donate the structure to the university.
Other artifacts from the Indiana are displayed throughout the state, including one of the battleship’s anchors at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum at Fort Wayne and her bell at the Heslar Naval Armory in Indianapolis.
Cache of John Paul Jones Letters Rediscovered
Long-forgotten letters written by John Paul Jones have surfaced at a library in Charleston, South Carolina, where they had lain buried in the archival vaults. “They had completely fallen out of institutional memory,” Rob Salvo, assistant librarian at the Charleston Library Society, told the Associated Press.
The letters came to light after a member of the Charleston Commandery of the Naval Order of the United States approached the library in hopes of renting space for the Order’s upcoming 30 October–2 November conference, the theme of which happens to be “From John Paul Jones to Nuclear Power.” The request struck a chord that inspired a fresh search of the vaults, and the letters—11 in all, totaling 13 pages—once again saw the light of day.
Before their rediscovery, the Jones letters had remained just another needle in the permanent-collection haystack, the only clue to their existence to be found in an old card-catalog entry. “We vaguely knew we had them,” said Salvo. “But we had done nothing to share it, talk about it, or promote it. We hadn’t even looked at the content of the letters that closely.”
Founded in 1748, the Charleston Library Society is the oldest library in the South and possesses a vast collection; its oldest volume is a 1492 Bible, and letters by everyone from George Washington to Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard are housed t here as well.
The Charleston Library Society’s historical committee had obtained the Father of the Navy’s correspondence collection in 1835, courtesy of a donation from Navy captain and Charleston resident E. R. Shubrick. How Jones’ letters had ended up in Shubrick’s possession remains a mystery.
The letters were all written in 1777, many of them addressed to Joseph Hewes, secretary of the Naval Affairs Committee of the Continental Congress. Throughout them, an outspoken personality emerges. “At present we have no Navy System or Board of Admiralty without which we can never have a respectable Navy,” Jones writes. Elsewhere he declares, “I am determined never to draw my sword under command of any man who was not in the Navy as early as myself, unless he has merited a preference by his Superior Services and abilities.”
The Charlteston Commandery of the Naval Order of the United States plans to raise money to restore the Jones letters (the restoration process can cost $300–$400 a page). The letters will be displayed during the Order’s fall conference at the library. They are tangible objects offering a link to the earliest days of American naval history, but they also provide insights into the character of a larger-than-life figure. In one of the letters, Jones pens in bold, clear handwriting, “I would lay down my life for America but I cannot trifle with my Honor.”