Behind the Scenes of The Fighting Lady
Major Norman T. Hatch, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
On sailing through the February issue of Naval History I read “On Our Scope” (p. 4) about The Fighting Lady, a film about a noble ship—the Yorktown (CV-10). You wrote that the Navy made the film but that is not exactly correct.
I was a Marine cinematographer for the Corps in the Pacific during Tarawa and Iwo Jima. I was working on some equipment problems when I ran into two Navy pilots who had a considerable amount of 16-mm color film of naval air activities on board carriers and in flight. They were trying to get approval from the higher staff to let them make a motion picture for the public but were getting nowhere.
They showed me their footage and told me about the difficulties they faced. It occurred to me that Louis de Rochemont, the founder and producer of the foremost news program showing on commercial theatrical screens, The March of Time, was then working for 20th Century Fox. It so happens that de Rochemont had been a lieutenant in the Navy during World War I and his then-roommate was now a rear admiral in charge of Navy personnel. Consequently he had a good film relationship with the Navy.
I gave them de Rochemont’s address, and the rest is history. De Rochemont liked their idea, so he used his Navy connections to get on various carriers and make a complete film.
There is no question that the Navy helped in the providing of stock footage. It helped out in telling the story of carriers in the Pacific and provided staff members to be advisers on technical problems. However, The Fighting Lady was produced on a 20th Century Fox lot, and de Rochemont is listed as the producer.
Incidentally, it had great success in its theatrical release. The public had never seen anything like it!
Remembering the Hunley’s Shortcomings
Bill Scanlan Murphy
Brian Hicks’ February article (“One-Way Mission of the H. L. Hunley,” pp. 22–29) shows some of the symptoms that tend to plague objective submarine history—mainly, the tendency to believe (or misread) the propaganda of the time, an understandable wish to romanticize one’s subject, and an ahistorical concept of hydrodynamics.
Firstly, the word “submarine” as used in the latter half of the 19th century did not mean an underwater vessel as such; it usually meant a boat that could be momentarily submerged, usually for just a few seconds, before returning to the surface on a built-in reserve of buoyancy. The press reports of British inventor George Garrett’s tests of the Resurgam in 1879 and Nordenfelt in 1887 consistently refer to the boats spending long periods “submerged,” but Garrett’s own accounts and simple hydrodynamic reality prove this to be untrue. The same is true of the Hunley.
The Hunley’s lack of buoyancy at either end of the hull, plus—crucially—the free surfaces in the ballast tanks, will have meant that the boat would oscillate wildly fore and aft at anything resembling neutral buoyancy. If the boat were actually to go negative, the only thing preventing a steep dive to the bottom (apart from the obvious frantic pumping against steadily increasing inward water pressure) would be the midship hydroplanes, which are in entirely the wrong place to be efficient. The power provided by manual cranking would not provide sufficient flow over the planes to maintain depth. Achieving neutral buoyancy would involve a terrifying “nobody move” ritual of creeping water into, out of, and between the tanks, followed by the fore-and-aft oscillation mentioned earlier.
One has to wonder why James McClintock didn’t ask Mr. Alstitt in Mobile for assistance if he had such a problem with electric motors. Alstitt was testing an electrically powered submersible in Mobile Bay for most of 1863. The problem was a matter of chemistry, not size; the electrical accumulators of 1863 were far too unstable and chemically lethal (especially in contact with seawater) for reliable use in submersibles.
The Hunley was indeed “sleek.” That was the problem. She may have looked like a shark, but she entirely lacked the power of a shark. The first hydrodynamically competent submarines, broadly speaking, did not appear until the 1880s, when the propulsion problem (inseparable from the hydrodynamic issues) slowly became solvable. Irish-American inventor John Holland eventually provided the answers. In between were many nearly forgotten cranks and near-geniuses who all contributed in their own way to the development of the true submarine.
The Hunley’s story is a vital, stirring chapter in military history, but she is at best a disastrous footnote in the development of submarine design. Visiting her in the museum is like visiting Sweden’s Vasa—impressive, moving, and fascinating. But why is she there to be seen?
Responding to the Perry-Elliott Controversy
Commander Tyrone G. Martin, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Jesse Duncan Elliott commanded the Mediterranean Squadron and the Constitution from 1835 to 1838 (“Aftermath of Victory: The Perry-Elliott Controversy,” February, pp. 38–45). During that time, he incurred the wrath of an embarrassed President Andrew Jackson by placing an unauthorized figurehead of “Old Hickory” on “Old Ironsides”; appointed an unauthorized flag captain; required his purser to make purchases from a smuggler; abandoned a wounded junior officer in a Turkish port without support or funds; accepted unauthorized gifts from a foreign potentate, claiming ignorance of departmental regulations; pressured the crew into paying for a silver service, a supposed testimonial of their feeling toward him; authorized the soaking of cats-o’-nine-tails in brine to increase their painfulness; collected artifacts from central and eastern Mediterranean ports for his own account and without permission; transported to the United States, without permission, Arabian horses and Syrian sheep and hogs for his own account, disabling the ship’s main battery in order to create stalls and pens for them on the gun deck, and requiring ship’s company to maintain them; and failed to report a mutiny.
Court-martialed in 1840, Elliott was suspended from service for five years, initially without pay. Should any psychiatrist with a bent for naval history wish to develop a much-needed profile of this officer, the entire reporting of the trial in the Army and Navy Journal may be found at www.captainsclerk.info in the site’s “Newspapers and Magazines” section. Such a study might give some insight into his earlier conduct.
Theodore Kuhlmeier
I thoroughly enjoyed David Curtis Skaggs’ February article (“Aftermath of Victory: The Perry-Elliott Controversy”), but he downplays Elliott’s role in Stephen Decatur’s duel with James Barron. Elliott was not only instrumental in making the duel happen, but also acted as Barron’s “second.” After the shots had been fired and both participants wounded (Decatur mortally), Elliott fled the grounds without assisting or standing by his wounded “principal,” as dueling etiquette required. He had to be chased down and forced to return and fulfill his duties.
Stephen Jurika: A Question Remains
Bob Fish
I enjoyed reading Hill Goodspeed’s February article about Stephen Jurika and his World War II exploits (“Letters from the Precipice of War,” pp. 54–58). Several years ago, the USS Hornet Museum’s research staff made a concerted effort to locate Captain Jurika’s papers to determine the extent of his involvement in the Doolittle Raid. The information, such as presented in your article, is compelling for his being a principal contributor to the raid’s target selection and flight-path determination processes.
Now, the question remains: Why was Jurika assigned as the air intelligence officer to the Hornet (CV-8) in the first place? After he returned from attaché duty in Japan, he reported to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), where he met (among others) Captain Donald Duncan and gave classified reports on his experiences in the Far East. He was then assigned to the Hornet during her commissioning and sea-trial period, months before the war started. In January 1942, it was Captain Duncan who wrote the original plan to raid Japan by launching Army bombers from an aircraft carrier. Jurika met with Duncan during this period to assist in developing this top-secret plan and discuss the potential effects of such a raid. Hence, Jurika helped finalize the details of the overall raid plan and then also significantly helped with its actual execution. Was Jurika’s assignment a serendipitous accident of fate, or foresight by ONI?
Which brings up another great mystery. Captain Duncan’s sister Barbara was married to Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest adviser in the White House (who actually lived there for years). Historians state that the Navy-minded FDR did not know about the Doolittle Raid until just prior to the launch date. It strains credulity to believe that, with his urgent demand for action by the U.S. military in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Duncan-Hopkins-Roosevelt back-channel was not in high gear in these first months of 1942.
Corrections
In Carl LaVO’s article “Operation Blue Nose” (February, pp. 46–52): During Operation Highjump, the Sennet was trapped in Antarctic ice in January 1947, not 1946; in 1908 the Russian Kefal’ became the first submarine to navigate under polar ice, logging four miles; the USS Boarfish’s hull number was SS-327, not SS-315, and the Carp’s SS-338, not SS-327.