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Essays must be no longer than 3,500 words and should cover geographic and cultural influences on individual or regional navies, their commitments, capabilities, and relationships with other navies. Cash prizes of $1,000, $750, and $500 will be awarded to the authors of the three winning essays. If you do not have 3,500 words for us but would like to enter, please submit a 1,000-2,000-word professional note for possible publication.
Photographers are also invited to participate in the International Navies Photo Contest. We will award cash prizes of $100 each to the winners of the top three entries. The photographs must depict naval subjects, and be received on or before 1 August 1989.
For a complete list of the contests’ rules, contact the Membership Department at (301) 268-6110.
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New Naval Institute Press Books
Paul H. Silverstone’s long-awaited reference Warships of the Civil War Navies will be available in mid-July. The hundreds of Naval Institute members who constantly request books on the Civil War will welcome such a unique work. This book, by a well-known warship expert, is the first single-volume reference to list and describe all the ships that participated in the war. Silverstone spent years collecting the widely scattered information and presents it in an easy-to-use tabular format, often correcting errors that have been repeated in many publications. More than 200 photographs and drawings, some never before published, illustrate the text; extensive appendixes offer additional facts and figures.
July 1919—Rear Admiral Caspar Frederick Goodrich was not your garden variety Proceedings author. He graduated first in his class at the Naval Academy during the somber November when President Abraham Lincoln was reelected and General William Sherman began his merciless march to the sea. One-upping Teddy Roosevelt, who considered the presidency "a bully pulpit,” Goodrich helped create two. A founding father of both the Naval Institute (1873) and the Naval War College (1884), he presided over both of them and used their forums to preach passionately in support of free' dom of speech for the naval officer: “Encourage all, especially the youngsters, to blow off their steam.”
Admiral Goodrich was 71 when recalled to active duty in 1918 to head a wartime Ivy League naval unit. In “The Princeton Naval Unit” he tells us how he transformed schoolboys into naval officers whose acute powers of observation marked them forever after as Princeton men. When he died at Princeton in 1925, he was eulogized as the conscience of two institutions that were then well into their second century of service; as the risk-taker who cut the Spanish cable off Santiago in 1898; as one of only a handful o officers who had commanded both wooden-walled and steel warships with distinction; and as a patient, proud father to all the Navy’s “lads” following the heroic-—but unutterably agonizing—death of his only son as a result ot shipboard fire and explosion in 1907.
July 1939—Of this month’s nine articles, the first and the last are the best- Lieutenant Ernest M. Eller’s byline has come to stand for quality and his opening article, “Naval Strategy,” doesn’t disappoint. The sleeper is the closing article, James L. Denig’s “The Proposed Nicaragua Canal.” What can a University of New Hampshire sophomore know about Nicaragua? More than most readers.
He knows that if the British captain had died (as he almost did) of the tropical diseases that killed 1,500 of his 1,800-man expedition to Nicaragua in 1790, the world would never have heard of Horatio Nelson. Same-same for the U. S. naval officer who headed the three-year survey of Nicaragua0 jungles in the 1880s, Robert E. Peary. Denig’s father and brother are Marines (Pop would become the Corps’s first Director of Public Relations in 1942) and Jimmy is a shavetail reservist. Nicaragua received this author s undivided attention in 1931 when the Denigs survived the earthquake that flattened Managua.
His point? He wants a second canal across the Isthmus. You might, too. after reading his arguments, which are essentially a sorry saga of centuries of treaties negotiated, abrogated, and/or ignored.
July 1959—In “Young Doctor Frankenstein,’’ the solicitous sawbones ns his hunchback manservant “How long have you had that hump?" to wmc Igor replies “What hump?" The Navy has had its own deforming hump since 1947 when it helped Congress write a personnel act that entrapped thousands of officers in a logjam caused by too many bodies and too feW billets. To those ahead of and behind the hump, but especially to those w were the hump—lieutenant commanders and commanders commissioned tween 1942 and 1945—it was the dirtiest four-letter word in the language-^
In “Inside the Hump,” a humper lieutenant commander lashes out at leaders of our Navy from the top on down” for allowing the hump to hap pen. In “Beyond the Hump,” a fellow humper commander, fresh from 1 successive tours in personnel, takes a more sanguine view: sure, the Nav>^ would have to somehow squeeze 8,000 officers into the 2,000 expected v cancies in the grade of captain between 1959 and 1969. He hoped he d one of them but, if not, he would “strive to see this final sacrifice in the light of the over-all good it will do the service.” .
Anybody know what happened to gutsy Lieutenant Commander John ■ , Chastain who sounded off from inside the hump? We all know what happ ^ to the commander who looked “Beyond the Hump”—Elmo R. Zumwa •
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