USS Chincoteague, ‘Sailing Home’

Review by Bill Doughty––

They were dead in the water. Their seaplane-tender ship suffered major damage after a bomb with a delayed action fuse penetrated the super structure and deck. The bomb had detonated in the after engine room, killing Sailors there. Imperial Japanese bombers came back time after time. But “whistling death” Marine Corsairs came to the rescue, chasing the enemy away from the crippled AVP-24, saving the sailors and their ship. (Happy Birthday, United States Marine Corps!)

The harrowing tale is told in “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink” by Frank D. Murphy (Murphy Books, 1995).

Murphy wrote the short autobiography for his grandchildren, but it’s clear he also wrote it for his former shipmates and for his beloved ship.

Murphy in Boot Camp, 1942

Murphy grew up, one of eleven children –– in Sarles, North Dakota –– in another era: no indoor plumbing, shoeshines, fifty-cent haircuts, and hitchhiking. He traveled and worked as a teenager between North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, wanting to escape an abusive father.

After attempting to enlist in the Marine Corps but being rejected due to a heart murmur, or “mummer” as he calls it, he joined the Navy and went to boot camp in 1942.

Murphy describes visiting Pearl Harbor aboard Chincoteague (AVP-24), crossing the Equator, and dropping Marines off at Espiritu before heading to the Santa Cruz Islands and Saboe Bay, Vanikoro Island. He and his shipmates arrived there the day before his 19th birthday.

For the young men who fought in the Pacific, like generations everywhere who go to war, the experience is tattooed on their souls.

Such was certainly the case for Frank Murphy.

“I can still remember those bombs coming out of these bomb bays. They looked like capsules when they first started out at about 30,000 feet. They got bigger and bigger as they got closer and closer. The screaming of those bombs scared me so bad that to this day I hate the sound of sirens and screaming fireworks.”

A squadron of PBYs prepare to take off from an island in the Pacific to attack Imperial Japan.

Murphy explains the important mission of a seaplane tender, to support PBY patrol bombers. The book opens with a moving description of how the “Chinc” rescued an airman from a Peleliu-based B-29 that had gone down in choppy shark-infested waters. A boatswain’s mate from Chincoteague dove into the sea and swam “with the speed of an Olympic swimmer” to rescue the exhausted airman.

The book, which I was lucky enough to find in a Salvation Army store, is signed by the author. Murphy dedicates his tribute to USS Chincoteague “to the 250 crewmen and officers of the USS Chincoteague and especially to those who lost their lives.” 

What Murphy’s thin book lacks in polish, it makes up with its first-person, eyewitness account and love for his shipmates and ship.

Chincoteague serves with USCG in 1964

Murphy includes a brief description of what happened to the Barnegat-class AVP-25 after the war, including stints in the U.S. Coast Guard, Vietnam (as RVNS Ly Thuong Kiet), and Philippines (where it was named BRP Andres Bonifacio). The ship was finally sold for scrap in 2003. Murphy died ten years later in early 2013, nearly ten years ago. His obituary reads, in part, “After six years in the Navy, Frank returned to North Dakota and worked for the Great Northern Railroad, later as a conductor for SP&S in Wishram, WA and the Burlington Northern Railroad in Vancouver, WA. He retired after 36 years. On Jan. 1, 1951, Frank met Carol Mortinson and they were happily married, for 61 years. They enjoyed traveling, especially to Hawaii.”

In “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink,” Murphy includes this poem written in 1942 by another Sailor who served in the war, Sherman Walgren, aboard USS Northhampton. Walgren’s verses must have made their rounds to other ships and WWII veterans, and Murphy undoubtedly identified with the sentiments in the poem.

'Sailing Home'

What is it the billowing waves impart,

and repeat and repeat with each dash

What is the pounding in my heart?

I'm sailing home, at last.

The salt spray stings on the naked cheek,

and the wind sings in the mast,

but it only sings because it knows,

I'm sailing home, at last.

Was it centuries since we sailed away

Out of the harbor there,

or was it only yesterday

I don't know, nor care.

For gone are the lonely nights and the days

mid tropical isles alone

and gone is the hunger countenanced there,

At last I'm sailing home.

And tho the sailor sails the seas

and in distant places roam

There is no "call" that's quite so sweet

as the call "I'm Sailing Home”

–– Sherman Walgren, May 1942, aboard USS Northampton

For a fuller description of the Chinc and its fate, I recommend the Last Stand Zombie Island website. Navy History and Heritage Command has great information, including a damage report of USS Chincoteague. And, of course, Wikipedia has a robust account of the ship’s history.

History Rhymes / ‘Proud Tower’ 2

Review by Bill Doughty––

More than a hundred years ago the United States was a divided government: The House of Representatives balance was 168 to 160, with Republicans holding a “wafer thin” lead. In the Senate, Democrats, mostly from the South, obstructed legislation that allowed “Negroes” to participate in politics. President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, was elected despite losing the popular vote. Ultranationalism was on the rise.

Harrison, according to author Barbara W. Tuchman, “sat on that unstable throne so oddly carpentered by the electoral college system.” Tuchman takes a deep dive into American and European history in her eye-opening book “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914” (MacMillan, 1966).

We read about a number of fascinating characters, including then-Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Republican Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, U.S. Labor Leader Samuel Gompers, British Admiral Sir John Fisher, and French Socialist leader Jean Jaurés. She also touches on the lives, work and impact of other characters, including U.S. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, who was “friendly and easygoing” but less effective than Assistant Secretary Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard President William Eliot, who, like Reed, opposed expanding the Navy and even opposed a standing army; and irascible British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who personified centuries of patriarchy.

Tuchman describes the “cigar and paunch” nobility that ruled Britain as “particularly literate, self-consciously clever and endlessly self-admiring.” Men with land ruled and grew more wealthy; “ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate tea gowns.”

The beginning of the 20th century was a time of cataclysmic change as technology helped accelerate imperialist impulses. In the United States, Congress debated westward global expansion and annexation of Hawaii, called for by Mahan.

We get amazing descriptions of the characters involved. For example, Speaker of the House Reed:

“A physical giant, six feet three inches tall, weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed completely in black, ‘out of whose collar rose an enormous clean-shaven baby face like a Casaba melon flowering from a fat black stalk…’ Speaking in a slow drawl, he delighted to drop cool pearls of sarcasm into the most heated rhetoric and to watch the resulting fizzle with the bland gravity of a New England Buddha.”

Reed

Speaker Reed, of Maine, a veteran of the Civil War, was personally opposed to expansion in the Pacific, but he eventually allowed a vote in Congress. The vote was 209 to 91, “with practically unanimous Republican support.” Opposition to building up the Navy and expanding into the Pacific was swept away by the Spanish-American War.

Reed dealt with issues familiar to us today such as ensuring a representative government, achieving a quorum, opposing the silent filibuster, combatting tyranny, and confronting contested elections in January. Reed’s friend Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

At the turn of the century, opposition to ruling classes grew stronger. People protested gross inequality, poor working conditions, and politicians who prevented others, including women, from voting. Tuchman shows how Victorianism began to die but how Anarchists, Socialists, and Ultra-nationalists came to life. The “chronic war between the Church and the republic” continued to be fought for control of education, personal freedom, and collective civil rights.

In post-Napoleon, post-revolution France, “the nation was at odds with itself,” exemplified with the Dreyfus Affair, involving a Jewish military man and accusations of espionage. “The sudden and malign bloom of anti-Semitism in France was part of a wider outbreak,” Tuchman writes.

Tuchman’s foreword to “The Proud Tower” is a testament to humility; she admits the limitations of her undertaking in covering a period of history so selectively. The same can be said about this review; for this Navy Reads blog, I try to choose books and themes that would be most interesting to military readers, history buffs, and critical thinkers.

As always, reading the entire book offers greater depth, context, and knowledge.

Whiteman

I rescued this book from a used book store in Hawaii, and –– like every other Barbara Tuchman book, especially her landmark "The Guns of August" published 60 years ago –– it did not disappoint. 

The copy I found, by the way, once belonged to an Air Force major (“from the library of …”) who, himself, had salvaged it after it had been discarded by Whiteman Air Force Base library in Missouri.

Somehow the book's origin gives it more relevance. Whiteman AFB’s namesake is 2nd Lt. George Whiteman, who was killed in the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941. Of course, Pearl Harbor is now home to the Battleship Missouri Museum.

History rhymes.

Mahan the Realist / ‘Proud Tower’ 1

Review by Bill Doughty––

In “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914,” (MacMillan, 1966) author Barbara W. Tuchman describes U.S. Navy Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan as “a quiet, tight-lipped naval officer with one of the most forceful minds of this time.” Tuchman paints her description of Mahan this way:

“Well over six feet tall, wiry, thin and erect, he had a long, narrow face with narrowly placed pale-blue eyes, a long, straight, knifelike nose, a Sandy mustache blending into a closely trimmed beard over an insignificant chin. All the power of the face was in the upper part, in the eyes and domed skull and the intellectual bumps over the eyebrows … He had little sense of humor, a high moral tone … So precise were his scruples that when living on naval property at the War College he would not allow his children to use the government pencils.”

Mahan embraced his moment in time and was a driving force in turning the growing power of the United States toward expansion. He told others he could prove he was not anti-semitic: “That Jesus Christ was a Jew,” he said, “covers his race for me.”

Tuchman writes that among history’s many turning points at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, was “the last armed conflict between Indians and whites” at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. (Although not detailed in Tuchman’s book, the “conflict” was, in fact, an atrocity –– the massacre of 300 Lakota men, women and children by the U.S. Army in 1890.)

The massacre was a turning point for the United States. “In that year [then] Captain A.T. Mahan, president of the Naval War College, announced in the Atlantic Monthly, ‘Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward.’”

Mahan saw the Pacific as America’s destiny. Expansion westward, he thought, must continue in the name of Manifest Destiny –– what Rudyard Kipling would call “the White Man’s Burden.”

“The immediate issue was Annexation of Hawaii. A naval coaling base at Pearl Harbor had been acquired in 1887, but the main impulse for annexation of the Islands came from American property interests which were dominated by Judge Dole and the sugar trust. With the support of the United States Marines they engineered a revolt against the native Hawaiian government in January 1893…”

In “The Proud Tower” Tuchman describes the political challenges and opportunities involved in Hawaii becoming a territory of the United States.

It was a time of tumult and war for the U.S. military in Cuba, the Philippines, and China. War continued to flair between other countries, as well.

Japan’s victory over China in 1895 –– not to mention Japan’s success in the Russo-Japanese War several years later –– reinforced Mahan’s published opinions about America’s continued need to look outward to defend its interests in a dangerous world through power. That power could only be achieved with a strong navy, which was “moribund” at the time, according to Tuchman. 

With strong support from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and allies in the U.S. Congress, it wouldn’t be long before shipbuilding in the United States was revitalized.

Meanwhile, Mahan’s classic “The Influence of Seapower on History” “had an effect that was epochal on world history,” according to Tuchman. The book was a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany, and was high on the reading list for naval officers in Japan. She notes that another remarkable book published in that period also influenced the course of history: Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species.”

Darwin’s conclusions about the animal kingdom were twisted to apply to human society so that Darwinism “acquired a moral imperative,” Tuchman writes. “Darwin’s indirect effects reached apotheosis in Captain Mahan. It’s no coincidence that science’s rise in the late 1800s came at the same time as the waning of the influence of religion. People needed to believe in something, Tuchman said, and that something was either nationalism, socialism, or anarchy –– or some combination of the above.

The world also experienced a revolution in art around the turn of the century. Picasso and Braque created expressionist Cubism. Richard Strauss experimented with formless new music with Also Spruce Zarathustra. The title of Tuchman’s book comes from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea,”* written in the mid-1800s. By the first decade of the 1900s, playwrights, composers, painters, and writers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, tinkered with ideas that both reflected society and influencing it.

Mahan, a stubborn realist, continued to be a firm believer in the necessity of war and the right of a nation, at least his nation, to expand its interests through belligerence, even at the expense of others.

Mahan was chosen as a key U.S. representative at the Hague Convention of 1899 in the Netherlands. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia called leading nations to the convention to try to curb a global arms race. Mahan’s “rectitude and assuredness” led to his rejection to proposals to limit the calibre of guns and other restrictions. He even voted against limiting use of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons such as “asphyxiating gas.”

Barbara Tuchman

It’s ironic (thinking of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) to consider that it was Russia that proposed the Hague talks in 1899 and later in 1907. The Hague Conventions wanted to prevent or at least lessen the impacts of war through limitations in armaments, adoption of laws of war, and acceptance of rules of arbitration. To Russian thinkers, the thought was that war had become “impossible except at the price of suicide,” as stated in the six-volume “The Future or War,” published by Ivan Bloch, who believed “Limited war was no longer possible.”

Despite any meager agreements between nations, the “Great War” came to the world as Anarchists, Socialists, Ultra-Nationalists, and anti-Socialists prevailed in their assassinations, bomb-throwing, and revanchism in the second decade of the 20th century, culminating with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Jean Jaurés.

Tuchman laments the loss of the Old World and “much that has since been lost.” Touching on the imagery in Poe’s maritime-themed “The City in the Sea,” Tuchman writes, “Illusions and enthusiasm slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment.”

“For the price it paid, humanity’s gain was a painful view of its own limitations.”

*The City in the Sea

By Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Stavridis’s 50: ‘The Sailor’s Bookshelf’

Review by Bill Doughty––

The FedEx van pulled up in front of my home as I backed into my driveway. It’s a special feeling when a wished-for book arrives. I carefully sliced through the padded mailer and there it was: “The Sailor’s Bookshelf: Fifty Books to Know the Sea” by Admiral James Stavridis, arriving just days before Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. This year’s commemoration comes on the 80th anniversary of the attack on Oahu of Dec. 7, 1941.

Stavridis gives a very personal reflection of some of the favorite books on his bookshelf, and some relate to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Pacific, which he calls “the mother of all oceans.” Others center on Europe and his favorite ocean, the Atlantic. Still others offer a diverse window into the art of reading, the lure of history –– and the terrible yet tempting beauty of the sea.

Some of the books in his collection go back to Stavridis's childhood. Many were influential in his choosing to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy or were part of his life throughout his distinguished careers both in and after the Navy.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander, Europe, gives the keynote speech during the Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association-U.S. Naval Institute (AFCEA/USNI) West 2016 conference. (MC2 Liam Kennedy)

His midshipman cruise in 1972 was to Pearl Harbor.

So was his first cruise as an ensign and anti-submarine warfare officer aboard USS Hewitt (DD-996), in which Stavridis sailed first to Hawaii and then westward across the Pacific in some of the same waters once explored by Capt. James Cook. 

Cook’s voyages come to life in one of Stavridis’s recommendations, “Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.” The book follows Cook’s “three epic cruises in the mid-1700s” when only about a third of the world globe was known and mapped for navigation.

The flag flies at half mast while Marines of 3rd Marine Regiment "man the rails" of the USS Arizona Memorial in 2011. (Maj. Alan Crouch)

In the Explorers section of his book, Stavridis also features James P. Delgado’s “Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage.” Delgado is a maritime archeologist and veteran diver who has explored hundreds of shipwrecks, including USS Arizona (BB-39) and USS Nevada (BB-36), both hit in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Delgado goes far, far north to present a history and heritage of exploration of the Arctic region. Sir John Franklin’s perilous journey in 1845 is at the heart of the story.

Rear Adm. Fiske (NHHC)

Another intrepid explorer of a sort is a “consummate seaman” and commander who invented technology in the late 1800s and turn of the century to help sailors on steam vessels and promote sea control and sea power. Admiral Bradley A. Fiske is author of “The Navy as a Fighting Machine.” Like Alfred Thayer Mahan, who is also featured in this collection, Fiske lobbied for and helped establish the position of Chief of Naval Operations. 

He was a champion for readiness as “a persuasive and thoughtful operational maritime thinker and writer.”

Exactly one hundred years ago, Fiske was president of USNI.

Stavridis writes:

“He was also a prescient strategic analyst. He served as president of the U.S. Naval Institute, the intellectual heart of the naval profession, for eleven years, 1912-1923, thinking, writing, and publishing constantly. As late as 1924 he was commenting on international affairs, correctly predicting the inevitability of a U.S.-Japanese war. He lived to see that dire proclamation come to pass with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in his eighty-seventh year but sadly not quite long enough to see the pivotal battle of Midway in the early summer of 1942 turn the tide in the Pacific.”

Speaking of heroes and Pearl Harbor, Stavridis features a book in the “Oceans” section co-authored by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, along with Professor E.B. Potter, titled “Sea Power: A Naval History.” Nimitz, of course, commanded the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor and led the effort to defeat Imperial Japan in less than four years. In this classic 932-page book, first published in 1960, Potter and Nimitz provide a history of the American and world navies and how naval warfare has evolved to become a fundamental part of national power.

 

Stavridis, who was a student of Potter’s at the Naval Academy, wrote his own book with the same name but “different in tone and style” and in homage to his former professor. Adm. Stavridis’s “Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans” is one of many of his works I’ve featured on Navy Reads over the past decade. 

Stavridis acknowledges he could have chosen to showcase many other books about the War in the Pacific in addition to the Potter-Nimitz “Sea Power.” He considered Samuel Eliot Morison’s multi-volume “History of Naval Operations in World War II” and Craig L. Symonds’s single-volume “World War II at Sea: A Global History."

Lt. Cmdr. Ernest E. Evans, at commissioning ceremonies of USS Johnston (DD-557), Seattle, WA, 27 October 1943. He was Johnston's commanding officer from then until she was sunk in the Battle off Samar, 25 October 1944, and was lost with the ship. (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

The “cornerstone book about the naval war in the Pacific during World War II” he chooses, however, is the captivating “Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign, 1941-1945.” The book centers on the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 and, as the subtitle says, four commanders:

“Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, a swaggering (and deeply racist) commander of the American fleet for much of the combat; the elegant Japanese admiral Takeo Kurita, a battleship force commander who launched a near-suicidal attack on the American forces poised to retake the Philippine Islands; another Japanese admiral, Matome Ugaki, who saw himself as the purest of samurai and led the kamikaze forces at the end of the war; and –– the most appealing of the four –– the relatively junior Navy commander Ernest Evans, captain of USS Johnston (DD-557), a small destroyer that undertook a deeply heroic attack on a far larger Japanese force … In the course of telling the story of the battle, Thomas takes the reader through the vast U.S. maritime strategy to reconquer to Pacific Ocean and its hundreds of atolls, islands, barrier reefs, and littoral nations after the Japanese offensive wave of conquest had swept over much of it in the early days of the war” [in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor]

Pearl Harbor is just one of the many themes touched on in this wonderful collection that also includes diverse works by Rachel L. Carson, Simon Winchester, Thomas J. Cutler, Caroline Alexander, Nathan Philbrick, Herman Wouk, Patrick O’Brian, Sebastian Junger, and Joan Druett.

Throughout the collection, Stavridis shares personal joys and discoveries through reading. He expresses his deep love for the sea, starting in childhood. “What fascinated me then, and still does so many decades later, was the unpredictability of the ocean. It could change color, smell, wave pattern, surface condition, and a dozen other variables in an hour. It was a chameleon…”

The admiral’s curiosity also drives unpredictability in his selection of books in this collection, which features a book of poetry (“Moods of the Sea: Masterworks of Sea Poetry” by George C. Solley and Eric Steinbaugh), a book about art (“Turner & the Sea” by Christine Riding and Richard Johns, about artist J. M. W. Turner, who painted "The Battle of Trafalgar" and "The Fighting termeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up," pictured above), and a book of magical fiction (“Life of Pi” by Yann Martel), requiring the reader to suspend the constraints of science.

“I have always loved magical realism in the world of literature. This is a strain of fiction writing in which things exist in a novel or short story (or even a poem) that cannot quite be squared with the real world. The most famous writer of magical realism, who is especially prominent in the literature of Latin America, is the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez. His extraordinary novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is widely regarded as the classic example of magical realism. Some other authors who deal in this style of writing include Toni Morrison (“Beloved”), Salman Rushdie (“Midnight’s Children”), Haruki Murakami (“IQ84”), Günter Grass (“The Tin Drum”), and Neil Gaiman (“The Ocean at the End of the Lane”). In such novels there are often ghostly visitations, dreamlike sequences, mythological gods, talking animals, imagined events, and unreliable narrators.”

Stavridis is a most-reliable narrator and navigator as he takes us on his voyage to “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” and a journey of self discovery. “I’ve always believed that reading allows an individual to essentially expand their life every time they open a book,” he writes in the book’s preface.

U.S. Navy Airman Benjamin Adams, from Panama City, Fla., reads a book on the fantail of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), July 5, 2017, in the South China Sea. Nimitz was on deployment in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. The U.S. Navy has patrolled the Indo-Asia Pacific routinely for more than 70 years promoting regional peace and security. (MC3 Ian Kinkead)

While he provides ample inclusion of fiction titles, most of the selections in “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” are nonfiction and history. Based on his recommendation, I added this title to my to-read list: “Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World,” a book about the Battle of Lepanto, and a book that had special meaning to Stavridis when he was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

“For a sailor to read ‘Empires of the Sea’ is to almost feel the ships under way and hear the sails snapping in the breeze. You can smell the gunpowder and hear the crack of cannons over the waves and wind. Crowley focuses on the geopolitics as backdrop, but the great strength of this book is a realistic focus on war at sea. It includes descriptions of the sea battles and sieges against the islands of Cyprus and Malta as well as the more or less constant activities of pirates. The centerpiece, of course, is Lepanto, and there is not a better description written. The entire book is truly an engrossing read, and one that keeps the reader’s sensibility under way with every page.”

The subtitle of “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” says “50 books,” but the author can’t help himself. Readers will find hundreds of titles of great books tucked inside “bonus” suggestions, lists, and notes as well as the fifty essays themselves.

                                                                                                                                         (PO2 Patrick Kelly)

Among the recommended reads are titles of books that were read by Pearl Harbor Survivors and other World War II veterans. I’ve had the honor to meet and interview many Pearl Harbor Survivors, most of whom are gone. Before and after and sometimes even during the war they read Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway, all featured in this collection. Stavridis’s “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” is a labor of love.

It is dedicated “To my parents who taught me to love reading, To my teachers who taught me to love writing, To my shipmates who taught me to love the sea, and To my wife and daughters who taught me to love life.”

I will revisit this collection for a future Navy Reads “Bookshelf Part II.”

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RIP Senator Robert J. Dole

American statesman Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas died yesterday, Dec. 5, 2021, after a long bout with lung cancer. Like another of his colleagues, late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, Dole wanted to become a doctor prior to the attack on Oahu and the start of American involvement in World War II. And like Inouye, Dole joined the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor and was severely, nearly mortally, wounded but recovered and dedicated his life to continued public service.

Senator Bob Dole and President Gerald Ford, Oval Office, 1976. (Bob and Elizabeth Dole Archives, KU)

While in Congress, Dole helped bring about the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He helped save Social Security when it came under threat in 1983, and he was a lifelong strong supporter of national defense.

Dole, known for his dry-wit sense of humor, support for the Constitution, and general grace in defeat, was vice presidential running mate to Navy/WWII Veteran President Gerald Ford in the 1976 U.S. campaign; Dole became the Republican nominee for president in 1996. President Bill Clinton presented Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 (pictured below).

Flags are flying at half-staff to honor both Dole and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day on the 80th anniversary of the attack.

Tammy Duckworth: Life’s Whole “Gift”

Review by Bill Doughty

I have a good American friend in Japan who bristles when people call his sons “hah-fu” –– half Japanese, half “gaijin” (foreigner).

“They’re not half,” he explains. “They’re doubles!”

The first chapter of “Every Day Is a Gift: A Memoir” by Tammy Duckworth (Hachette Book Group, 2021) is titled “Half Child.”

As a mixed race child, Tammy Duckworth was bullied by Thai kids (and even her cousins) for being larger and whiter and freckled –– a “half,” a “less-than.” She was called “farang” (“whitey”). But that would be one of the least of the problems she would face –– as presented in her deeply personal story of overcoming discrimination, disability, and disappointment.

Duckworth’s mom is Chinese by birth; mom’s family escaped Mao’s persecutions in Communist China by immigrating to Thailand. Duckworth’s dad is a former United States Marine who became an officer in the Army and eventually a federal civilian worker. The family lived in Bangkok and Jakarta as well as Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the Vietnam War.

Tammy and her family escaped Cambodia in 1975. She remembers vividly watching Operation Frequent Wind on TV from the safety of Bangkok –– the evacuation of Saigon by American helicopters to U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.

Tammy, age 3, in Bangkok

Later, nearly penniless, she and her brother and father came to Honolulu. Like many DoD brats, Duckworth had to move a lot. Eventually she would live in Winchester, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and DeKalb, Illinois.

In “Every Day Is a Gift” Duckworth shares both her adventures and her many difficulties growing up with a patriarchal and domineering father and devoted but sometimes distant mother.

After her father lost his job and the family’s savings, Tammy lived a harrowing life as a teenager in Hawaii. Her first Thanksgiving in the States was at the Waialana Coffee House (which closed down during the COVID-19 pandemic).

As for prejudice and discrimination in her new home, fortunately in Hawaii people embrace the concept of “hapa” for mixed race people, but of course in Hawaii most folks aren’t “halfs” or “doubles”; they’re “multiples.”

Duckworth attended McKinley High School, whose alumni include multi-talented Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and legendary Senator Daniel K. Inouye. In high school she met Inouye, whose arm was blown off by a Nazi soldier in World War II. Tammy had no idea that one day she, too, would be a wounded warrior and, in her case, a double amputee.

Her association with the military started tangentially when she got a temporary position with the U.S. Naval Institute, famous for publishing Tom Clancy’s first blockbuster, “The Hunt for Red October.”

She attended ROTC for a summer at George Washington University and was propelled to enroll full time in ROTC at Georgetown University. That’s where she fell in love with military life in general and the Army specifically. She met her future husband in uniform in a humorous encounter highlighted in the book.

At 23 she pursued international diplomacy studies at Northern Illinois University and found her home.

In the National Guard as an Army Reservist, Duckworth was able to follow her passion, pursue post-graduate studies, and work while serving her country. She says this about the sacrifices and service of Guardsmen and Reservists:

“There are several reasons people prefer the Reserve forces. Some don’t want to give up civilian jobs that pay better than military service. Some don’t want to commit to moving around every two or three years, which active duty servicemembers have to do. Some of them have already served on active duty and enter the Reserves after finishing their commitment.

One thing we all have in common, though, is our desire to serve. Being a member of the United States military is a privilege and an honor. When our country calls us to undertake a mission, we stop up, even if there’s a personal and professional cost to us. Citizen Soldiers do this over and over and over again –– and nonmilitary people don’t even know about it.”

Lt. Col. Duckworth joined the military before women were authorized to serve in combat, but she got as close as she could by becoming a helicopter pilot. She describes flying over the Egyptian desert and passing the Great Pyramid of Giza in Operation Bright Star. She flew low over the Amazon rainforest in Guyana  in Operation New Horizon. And she piloted missions in Iceland to clear glaciers of rusting equipment from World War II in Operation Northern Viking.

But the most harrowing experience, of course, was what happened on Nov. 12, 2004, when Duckworth’s Black Hawk was shot down in the Iraqi desert.

Both of her legs gone. Her arm badly mangled. Shrapnel in her face and body. Her fellow soldiers thought she was dead, but they refused to leave her body behind.

U.S. Army Warrior Ethos comes alive in the aftermath of the shootdown as Duckworth’s teammates extract her nearly lifeless torso and arrange for a medieval to Baghdad, where troops lined up to give blood. She needed 40 units of blood, plasma, and platelets.

Duckworth’s recovery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is told in painful detail –– how she bore a “wall of pain,” learned to walk with two prosthetic legs, and came to terms with her new circumstances after the tragedy in Iraq, where she says, “There’s a piece of me there, both literally and figuratively.”

At Walter Reed she had to have parts of her body surgically removed and used to repair her mangled arm. She showed unimaginable grit and toughness, mixed with typical wounded warrior morbid humor and resolve.

Duckworth’s story is one of superior resilience. “I had no choice but to power through,” she writes. “It made no sense to lie around and feel sorry for myself. I had to accept my situation, then start working to change it.”

Found Haiku in “Every Day Is a Gift”:

When the obstacle

is effort, then there is no

obstacle (at all)

Something bad happens

you can either let it own

you, or you own it

(And) no matter how

grievous the wound, healing is

always possible

I found this book at Barnes & Noble bookstore on Memorial Day. It is a perfect companion book to one recently featured in Navy Reads: James Patterson’s “Walk in my Combat Boots.”

In fact, Duckworth’s missing combat boot is symbolically returned to her by fellow soldiers in a pivotal part of her story.

During her recovery and after meeting Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Barack Obama, Duckworth resolved to enter politics. 

She was influenced personally by wounded warrior public servants Senators Bob Dole and Max Cleland, who helped her confront post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Senator Max Cleland, who lost his legs and an arm in Vietnam, sought treatment for PTSD three decades after his injury, when he lost an election in 2002. I met Max while at Walter Reed, and talking to him helped me to truly understand that the best we can do is take life one day at a time.

In the summer of 2005, when I realized I would never fly for the Army again, that advice from Max helped save me. I was no longer sure what my purpose in life would be, but I had to just take it one day at a time, and be open to whatever came my way.”

Obama, Akaka, and Duckworth

She fought for reforms at Walter Reed and the Veterans Administration, first in Illinois and then in President Barack Obama’s administration. She fought to make a national difference, first as a representative in the U.S. Congress and then as a senator. And she fought to become a parent.

Lt. Col. Duckworth’s struggle to become a mother and her realization that there is no such thing as “work-life balance” can be an inspiration to women and a revelation to men.

In Congress Duckworth was helped by Senators Kristen Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar, among others. The late Senator Daniel K. Akaka honored her by bestowing Hawaiian names for her two daughters.

Her choice to enter politics so she could help people is not surprising.

Early in her life she saw first-hand the need for a social safety net and equal opportunity for people of color. Fifty-four years ago, in June 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that interracial couples, like Duckworth’s parents, could marry.

Her father’s hero was President Ronald Reagan. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Reagan signed the AmerAsian Immigration Act that allowed many Southeast Asian “half-children” into the United States. Of course, they were not “halfs.”

In “Every Day Is a Gift” Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost nearly half her body in combat, shows that every person can be part of a greater whole. She lives the teamwork ethos –– no one left behind.

This is a marvelous and powerful book filled with tears, smiles, revelations, and inspiration. Like “Walk in My Combat Boots,” this book comes with an endorsement from Adm. William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, Ret.): 

“Raw, unfiltered, powerful –– a compelling story of courage and determination against overwhelming odds. Tammy Duckworth is a true warrior who overcame a difficult upbringing, a glass ceiling, and a horrific helicopter shootdown to become one of the most respected senators on Capitol Hill. Nothing can stop her.”