Found at Last: Wreck of the Legendary Hornet
The late Paul Allen’s research team on board the R/V Petrel has discovered the wreckage of World War II’s USS Hornet (CV-8), the aircraft carrier that launched the Doolittle Raid and participated in the Battle of Midway before being sunk.
“Wreckage of the USS Hornet was discovered in late January 2019, 5,330 meters (nearly 17,500 feet) below the surface, resting on the floor of the South Pacific Ocean,” the Petrel team and parent company Vulcan announced online.
“We had the Hornet on our list of World War II warships that we wanted to locate because of its place in history as a capital carrier that saw many pivotal moments in naval battles,” Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Vulcan, said in the announcement. “Paul Allen was particularly interested in aircraft carriers, so this was a discovery that honors his memory,” Kraft said of Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Allen, who died last year.
Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Bill Moran, a naval aviator himself, said:
Naval aviation came of age in World War II, and American sailors today continue to look to and draw inspiration from the fighting spirit of ships and crews like USS Hornet (CV‑8). Although her service was short-lived, it was meteoric. In the dark days following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, she and the Doolittle Raiders were the first Americans to punch back at Japan, giving hope to the nation and the world when things looked bleakest. She was there when the American Navy turned the tide in the Pacific at the Battle of Midway, and she was there when America started the long drive to Tokyo in the Solomon Islands.
Previously, Allen and his research team announced the discovery of the carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) and the cruisers Juneau (CL-52) and Helena (CL-50) in March and April 2018. (See “Lexington, Juneau Found in Banner Month for Wreck Discoveries,” June 2018, pp. 6–7; and “Paul Allen’s Winning Season,” August 2018, pp. 22–27.)
The Hornet sank in October 1942 in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, during a fight to push Japanese forces out of the southern Solomon Islands. Three bombs from Japanese dive bombers and two “fish” from enemy torpedo planes set fire to the carrier and irreparably damaged her hull. Two of the attackers crashed into the ship. Other nearby U.S. Navy ships attempted to rescue the crew, and the destroyers USS Mustin (DD-413) and Anderson (DD-411) tried to scuttle the Hornet with torpedoes and gunfire. The carrier still would not sink, and with more Japanese warships approaching, the U.S. destroyers fled the burning ship. Japanese destroyers finally sank the Hornet about 24 hours after the initial bombing of the carrier began.
—Megan Eckstein, USNI News
WWII’s Wasp Discovered
The late Paul Allen’s research team has continued its remarkable string of shipwreck discoveries, announcing in March that it has found the wreckage of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Wasp (CV-7) in the Coral Sea.
On 15 September 1942, three Japanese torpedoes hit the carrier while she was supporting the effort to reinforce U.S. forces fighting on Guadalcanal. The Wasp could not be saved and was scuttled by the USS Lansdowne (DD-486).
Miraculously, the vast majority of the Wasp’s crew survived. Five nearby destroyers, including the Lansdowne, were able to save 171 officers and 1,798 enlisted men, while 26 officers and 167 enlisted men were killed.
—Ben Werner, USNI News
D-Day Memorial Adding Naval Academy Plaque
As part of its 75th-anniversary commemoration of the 1944 Normandy invasion, the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, is slated this June to dedicate a new plaque honoring the U.S. Naval Academy.
The plaque, which will be placed alongside a plaque in honor of the U.S. Military Academy, will read in part:
Thousands of Naval Academy graduates diligently applied the tenets of their mission to make a profound difference in World War II, and on D-Day in particular. Its graduates served, and continue to serve, their nation with great valor, fidelity and sacrifice.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, the largest seaborne assault in history, was by necessity dependent upon overwhelming naval power. No landing would be possible, no victory would be achieved, without command of the sea by the Allied fleets. Aboard the three US battleships, three cruisers, thirty-three destroyers, and other vessels were many officers trained at the Naval Academy. Their leadership contributed mightily to victory and saved many lives on the beaches. With admiration, Major General Leonard Gerow, US Army, Commander of V Corps on Omaha Beach, summed up the soldiers’ gratitude after the battle was over: “Thank God for the US Navy!”
. . . From the Mexican War to the present day, the United States Naval Academy has graduated generations of young men and women trained to lead and maintain the nation’s sea power. Their record of service and sacrifice around the globe in defense of our nation’s Constitution expresses the Naval Academy’s legacy.
Funding for the plaque was provided by the Alumni Memorial Fund, a project established and led by the Naval Academy class of 1969.
Dedicated on 6 June 2001 by President George W. Bush, the National D-Day Memorial was constructed in honor of those who died that day, fighting in one of the most significant battles in history.
Bedford, Virginia, suffered the nation’s severest percentage of D-Day losses in proportion to its size. Recognizing Bedford as emblematic of all communities, large and small, whose citizen-soldiers served on D-Day, Congress warranted the establishment of the National D-Day Memorial there. Located at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the monument receives an average of 60,000 visitors a year.
Naval War College Hosts Conference on WWI, Admiral Sims
One hundred years ago, at the end of World War I, Admiral William Sims returned triumphantly to Newport, Rhode Island, to reopen the shuttered U.S. Naval War College.
In celebration of that milestone, scholars of naval history gathered in the college’s Mahan Reading Room on 14–15 March to examine the naval lessons of the Great War and discuss how they might inform today’s Navy.
The conference’s title—“The Victory at Sea: Naval Lessons of the Great War and the U.S. Navy of the 21st Century”— was a nod to Sims’ Pulitzer Prize–winning 1920 book, The Victory at Sea, about the U.S. Navy’s role in World War I.
Returning to the college as its president in April 1919, after presiding over U.S. naval operations in Europe, Sims is credited with overhauling the school’s curriculum during the interwar period.
Speakers at the conference discussed Sims’ legacy, the revolution in professional naval education after World War I, and the Naval War College’s historical influence as an international forum for scholarship on naval strategy.
“Sims comes back and just his very presence in Newport is really a significant strategic development,” said David Kohnen, director of the college’s John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research and organizer of the conference. “He came back to the Naval War College to teach the U.S. Navy how to think about the future.”
Kohnen said that amid today’s debate about education in the Navy and the recent release of the Education for Seapower report, history shows that leaders of the 20th-century Navy valued learning.
“All of the major, five-star thinkers of the Second World War understood the importance of education, understood the strategic importance of the Naval War College, understood the importance of us studying our trade and our craft.”
Sims’ grandson, Nathaniel Sims, spoke at the event, as did Nicholas Jellicoe, grandson of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, who commanded Britain’s Grand Fleet during the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
Nathaniel Sims, who is a cardiac anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer, talked about what he has learned from his grandfather’s personal papers—including a poem by William Sims that his wife had marked “never publish.”
Nicholas Jellicoe never met his grandfather, who died in 1935, but the pull of history prompted him to help spearhead the 2016 Jutland Centenary Initiative, which aimed to share the story and lessons of the controversial naval battle with new generations.
Jellicoe said he believes most Britons have lost sight of their nation’s naval
history.
“One hundred years later, we’ve gone from a nation which was so thoroughly involved and cognizant of its naval heritage to one that’s almost sea blind,” he said.
Also at the conference, the 2019 Edward S. Miller Fellowship was awarded to Yale University undergraduate Ruth Schapiro. The annual fellowship goes to a promising student of history to conduct research in the Naval War College archives.