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April 1919—A first-time reader might not know who Marine Colonel Dion Williams, author of “War Decorations,’’ is—but the other 5,783 Naval Institute members will. Most Proceedings readers first heard about Williams when Admiral George Dewey sent him and his Oregon Marine detachment ashore to take Cavite, in the Philippines.
That incident, a quarter of a century earlier, must have been on Williams’s mind as he wrote the 43-page (and 15 pages of illustrations) paper. But there is not a hint that he might have been awarded the Medal of Honor for that feat, had he been a private rather than the Naval Academy graduate he was. He makes this ironic point by telling how, in 1902, a severely scalded sailor had jumped overboard to escape the steam of an exploded boiler. Coxswain Joseph Quick and Ensign Joseph Taussig swam to his rescue but, so exhausted was Quick that Taussig had to keep both men afloat until a boat could be lowered. Quick, justly, was awarded the Medal of Honor, but because officers were then ineligible for the award, Taussig was given a lifesaving medal.
The article is rich in images of men who won their medals on wind-swept seas or on vast, empty prairies during the Indian Wars. And by his quoting actual citations, Dion Williams reminds us of how priceless a commodity was true heroism before the flicks and the tube devalued it.
April 1939—The topic of this special issue is the Naval Reserve that came into being when President Theodore Roosevelt cautioned his countrymen in 1901, “there is no surer way of courting national disaster than to be opulent, aggressive, and unarmed.’’
Nearly all the authors are unarmed reservists whose mostly mundane essays (with titles such as “The Value of CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] Duty to Reserve Officers” and “The Com Belt Navy”) stress their Minuteman Mystique while turning a blind eye toward the Axis invasions last month of Czechoslovakia and Albania.
Still, there is much to learn about those days from these yellowing pages.
A Naval Reserve author, for example, praises the facilities on Goat Island near the “newly constructed Bay Bridge” while the Director of the Marine Corps Reserve grouses about his Jarhead reservists having to meet in condemned schools, city hall and post office basement storage rooms, and even in the hulk of a World War I merchant ship. This may be the first expression of the Corps’s justly famous “We have done so much for so long with so little that now we can do anything with nothing.”
April 1959 —On this, the 50th anniversary of Robert Peary’s claim to have discovered the North Pole, Proceedings publishes ‘ ‘Peary at the North Pole’' by Hugh C. Mitchell, who had been a mathematician in the Coast and Geodetic Survey when his computations, charts, and testimony helped to convince Congress that Peary’s claim was genuine. There was not the shadow of a doubt in Mitchell’s mind as, from the deathbed in 1956, he confided that Peary was “a man not only incapable of falsehood himself but intolerant of falsehood in others.”
Among those who remained doubtful was young astronomer/historian Dennis Rawlins, and in June 1970, Proceedings published his “Peary and the North Pole: The Lingering Doubt.” Commander Edward Stafford,
Peary’s grandson, presented a spirited rebuttal which was published in December 1971 as “Peary and the North Pole: Not the Shadow of a Doubt.”
The recent publication of long-suppressed navigational notes made by Peary has given new impetus to all the old doubts. But what might have astonished Hugh Mitchell’s 1959 readers most of all had they known it was that, if Rawlins is right, the North Pole would not be reached over the surface for yet another nine years, until Ralph Plaisted mushed up there in 1968 on his trusty snowmobile.
Clay Barrow
10
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New Naval Institute Press Books
Commander John Alden, U. S. Navy (Retired), well-known to U. S. Naval Institute members as the author of three popular works published by the Naval Institute Press and articles in Proceedings and Naval History, has compiled a truly unique reference that will prove invaluable to researchers, World War II buffs, and veteran submariners. U. S. Submarine Attacks during World War II provides a full chronological listing of all U. S. submarine attacks that damaged or sank their targets in the Pacific, as well as those few that occurred in the Atlantic, and all attacks by British and Dutch submarines in the Far Eastern theater. Alden then matches these officially reported attacks against information he has uncovered from Japanese and other sources to positively identify, often for the first time, specific submarines and their targets. Such a complete and accurate record has never before been published.
Another comprehensive work available to U. S. Naval Institute members this month, compiled by Paul H. Silverstone, lists and describes all the major ships and support vessels that formed the massive U. S. fleet in World War II. U. S. Warships of World War 2 includes a wealth of useful information and nearly 400 photographs of U. S. Navy and Coast Guard ships, from submarine tenders to aircraft carriers. Originally published more than 20 years, ago, the book is now back in print to serve as a companion volume to U. S. Warships since 1945, by the same author.
Be sure to read the exciting excerpt from John Miller’s The Bridge at Dong Ha, which begins on page 84 of this
Proceedings / April