While preparing this issue’s Civil War sesquicentennial examination of the Vicksburg campaign, that distant conflict coincidentally came into present-day focus. On 8 March, following a funeral service at Fort Myer Memorial Chapel, two of the 16 Monitor sailors who died when the ironclad sank were laid to rest at nearby Arlington National Cemetery.
As I watched the service, walked with hundreds of others behind caissons bearing the sailors’ remains, and then stood alongside thousands of people during the full-honors interment, I was most impressed by the outpouring of reverence and respect for the two men. It was as if we were honoring servicemen who recently sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan, not two who died in a long-ago war.
In “The Lost Men of the Monitor,” James Delgado recounts the death of these sailors, the surprising discovery of their remains in the overturned ironclad’s turret, their subsequent recovery by archaeologists, and the search to learn as much as possible about them. A seasoned underwater archaeologist, Dr. Delgado is director of Maritime Heritage for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries Program, whose first designated sanctuary was the Monitor’s wreck site.
Longtime Vicksburg National Military Park historian Terrence Winschel’s article, “A Victory Equally Shared,” anchors our coverage of the campaign to capture the Mississippi’s most formidable citadel. He focuses on how the eventual Union triumph was a result of the Army and Navy combining their efforts.
During an era when the concept of a single commander overseeing both Army and Navy elements of an operation was alien, the services rarely worked together well. During the Peninsula campaign, when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox asked Flag Officer Louis Goldsborough if he would serve under Major General George McClellan, the naval officer responded that there is “no principle in war more fully established than that when military and naval forces acted together the commander of neither was to be subject to the orders of the other.”
Civil War Army and Navy commanders therefore needed to be receptive to each other’s ideas and willing to act on their counterpart’s recommendations. During the Vicksburg campaign, Acting Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter and Major General Ulysses S. Grant quickly established such rapport based on mutual respect and trust.
But the relationship between their superiors back in Washington was a different story. “How the Secretary Saw the Campaign,” compiled by Naval History’s staff, uses excerpts from outspoken Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’ Vicksburg-related diary entries to present his views of the campaign and of his Army counterparts—one of whom he characterizes as “dull, stolid, inefficient, and incompetent.”
Elsewhere in this issue, “Corpus Christi’s ‘University of the Air,’” by Norman Delaney, Naval History’s 2011 Author of the Year, examines World War II’s largest naval air station. And Ian Toll’s “Rear-Seat Gunners at Midway” focuses on the 4 June 1942 experiences of three enlisted aviators. After Toll’s first, award-winning book, Six Frigates (W. W. Norton, 2008), he moved on to World War II with Pacific Crucible (W. W. Norton, 2012), the first volume in a Pacific-war trilogy. The second volume, tentatively titled The Conquering Tide, is due out in the fall of 2014.