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This collection of biographical essays delves into the careers of thirteen colorful naval leaders who guided the U.S. Navy through four turbulent decades of transition.
Whips to Walls
During World War I, the United States Navy conducted at the Portsmouth, NH Naval Prison what many penal scholars consider the most ambitious experiment in the history of progressive prison reform. Cell doors remained opened, prisoners governed themselves and thousands of rehabilitated prisoners were returned to the fleet. This humanitarian experiment at Portsmouth prison stood in stark contrast to the inhumane flogging of prisoners that had dominated naval discipline until 1850. The Navy’s journey between these two extremes in naval discipline included the development of a much needed naval prison system.When congress abolished flogging in 1850, the Navy was left with few punishment options. Flogging had been a harsh, but very effective and efficient discipline tool. Various conditions of confinement appeared to be the most logical substitute for flogging, but the Navy had few cells ashore and confinement onboard a nineteenth century man-of-war sailing vessel was impractical. Onboard space was limited and all hands were needed to sail and fight the ship. Subsequent naval directives that merely suggested punishments for various offenses led to inconsistent interpretation and application of punishments throughout the fleet. At the same time, courts-martial prisoners were sporadically confined in various marine barracks, navy yard jails, naval station guard houses, prison ships and state prisons. The Navy’s discipline system was in disarray. A naval prison system was needed to consolidate and provide for consistent treatment of prisoners. The Navy’s efforts to gain congressional approval for a prison in the 1870s were unsuccessful. In the late 1880s, the Navy took matters into its own hands and established a prison system centered on makeshift prisons at the Boston and Mare Island Navy Yards. An ever-increasing need for cells, primarily driven by high desertion rates, eventually resulted in the construction of the Navy’s first real prison at Portsmouth, which opened in 1908. A consolidation of naval prisons in 1914 left Portsmouth as the dominant centerpiece of the naval prison system.At this point Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose the most celebrated prison reformer of his era, Thomas Mott Osborne, to assume command of the Portsmouth prison. His reforms at Portsmouth went well until Vice Adm. William S. Sims and others became convinced that too many trouble makers were being returned to the fleet. Under mounting pressure from senior naval officers, FDR personally led an on-site investigation of conditions at Portsmouth prison, which included charges of gross mismanagement and rampant homosexual activity. Although exonerated by FDR’s team, Osborne resigned from the Navy shortly after the investigation. Osborne’s reform initiatives were quickly reversed as the Navy returned to a harsher punishment system more inclined toward deterrence than humanitarian considerations and prisoner comforts.
Armchair Warriors
This book is a history of public information and personal ideas about war and the military over the last century. It examines the interplay between popular media coverage of the nation's wars and the perceptions of ordinary Americans regarding military issues. Davidson studied Americans who produced a wealth of proposals to solve some of the most pressing military problems of their day. His book consists of hundreds of letters sent to those in charge of the armed forces, advising them on issues ranging from grand strategy to individual combat. Davidson sets their letters alongside extracts from the contemporary popular press to illustrate the ways that the media both informed and motivated the public to think about war. This is the first book to look at the ideas of ordinary citizens regarding military matters.
When the Men Go Off to War
Collecting the nationally-recognized poems of Victoria Kelly, When the Men Go Off to War captures the hopes, anxieties, and intimacies of the military spouse during a time of war. Written over the course of her husband’s deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, these haunting poems span vast geographical distances and generations, moving between the literal and the fanciful to find community in the midst of isolation. Kelly blends lyric and narrative elements to evoke themes of loneliness and human fragility with keen insight. But ultimately, When the Men Go Off to War is a heartrending ode to enduring romance, the reclamation of a marriage tested by loss and separation.
Ruff's War
Twenty-five years in the Navy had made Cheryl Ruff an independent, resilient, strong woman – and a master at providing patient care while serving at various Navy hospitals around the world. But nothing prepared her mind, body, soul, and spirit for what she experienced on the frontlines of the Iraq war as a member of the Bravo Surgical Company. Known as the «devil docs,» they followed directly behind the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force as they entered Iraq at the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. Right along with the Marines, Commander Ruff, the only female nurse anesthetist at the front, and the rest of her surgical team learned to endure the brutal conditions of the desert while regularly confronting questions of life and death. Working in temperatures well over 100 degrees in full MOP gear, Ruff and her team set up mobile hospital tents in the sand wherever needed. As Black Hawk helicopters brought in steady streams of the wounded, they found it impossible to maintain standard sterilization procedures, and clean up often amounted to just shovelling the blood-soaked sand out of the tent. During surgery they often wore lighted helmets so they could continue operating if the generator failed and donned gas masks when warnings were issued. These horrific conditions, coupled with the gruesome images of shredded bodies and the cries of wounded children, became Ruff's world. This is her story of the war, up close and personal. It is a story of sacrifice, survival, and courage, movingly written by a woman unconditionally dedicated to the life-saving mission of the United States Navy Nurse Corps.
Edward Preble
Originally published in 1972, Christopher McKee's biography of Edward Preble remains the most authoritative source on this influential early shaper of the U.S. naval tradition. McKee (Grinnell College) documents Preble's rise from obscurity to become Thomas Jefferson's chief administrator, his relationship with Jefferson and the president' policies and strategies during the war, and also the Tripolitan activities and attitudes which confronted Preble as he sought to bring the war to an end. This Classic of Naval Literature work includes illustrations and a new introduction by the author.
Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton
Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organizational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork. The book takes readers inside the mind of James Stockdale, a fighter pilot with a degree in philosophy, who was the senior ranking officer at the Hanoi prison. The theories Stockdale practiced become readily understandable in this book. Drawing parallels between Stockdale’s guiding philosophies from the Stoic Epictetus and the principles of modern sports psychology, Peter Fretwell and Taylor Baldwin Kiland show readers how to apply these principles to their own organizations and create a culture with staying power.Originally intending their book to focus on Stockdale’s leadership style, the authors found that his approach toward completing a mission was to assure that it could be accomplished without him. Stockdale, they explain, had created a mission-centric organization, not a leader-centric organization. He had understood that a truly sustainable culture must not be dependent on a single individual.At one level, this book is a business school case study. It is also an examination of how leadership and organizational principles employed in the crucible of a Hanoi prison align with today’s sports psychology and modern psychological theories and therapies, as well as the training principles used by Olympic athletes and Navy SEALs. Any group willing to apply these principles can move their mission forward and create a culture with staying power—one that outlives individual members.
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral
An abundance of new evidence demanded this reevaluation of Frank Jack Fletcher, the ?black shoe? admiral who won his battles at sea but lost the war of public opinion. A surface warrior?in contrast to a ?brown shoe? naval aviator–Fletcher led the carrier forces that won against all odds at Coral Sea, Midway, and the Eastern Solomons. These and other early carrier victories decided the Pacific War not only because they inflicted crippling losses but also because they denied Japan key strategic positions in the region. Despite these successes, by 1950 Fletcher had become one of the most controversial figures in U.S. naval history and portrayed as a timid bungler who failed to relieve Wake Island in December 1941 and who deliberately abandoned the Marines at Guadalcanal.In this book, author John Lundstrom recalls that Fletcher once remarked,"after an action is over, people talk a lot about how the decisions were deliberately reached, but actually there's always a hell of a lot of groping around," and notes that the goal of his study is to probe and explain the «groping around.» Drawing on new material, Lundstrom offers a fresh look at Fletcher's decisions and actions. The first major reassessment in more than fifty years of the once-maligned naval officer, it provides a careful analysis of the effect of radio intelligence on decision-making in the carrier battles during the first nine months of the war in the Pacific. This new assessment is based on thousands of documents and massive dispatch files and personal papers that no historian has previously used.
The Secret War for the Middle East
It can be argued that the Middle East during the World War II has been regarded as that conflict’s most overlooked theater of operations. Though the threat of direct Axis invasion never materialized beyond the Egyptian Western Desert with Rommel’s Afrika Korps, this did not limit the Axis from probing the Middle East and cultivating potential collaborators and sympathizers. These actions left an indelible mark in the socio-political evolution of the modern states of the Middle East. This book explores the infusion of the political language of anti-Semitism, nationalism, fascism, and Marxism that were among the ideological byproducts of Axis and Allied intervention in the Arab world. The status of British-dominated Middle East was tailor-made for exploitation by Axis intelligence and propaganda. German and Italian intelligence efforts fueled anti-British resentments; their influence shaped the course of Arab nationalist sentiments throughout the Middle East. A relevant parallel to the pan-Arab cause was Hitler’s attempt to bring ethnic Germans into the fold of a greater German state. In theory, as the Sudeten German stood on par with the Carpathian German, so too, according to doctrinal theory, did the Yemeni stand in union with the Syrian in the imagination of those espousing pan-Arabism. As historic evidence demonstrates, this very commonality proved to be a major factor in the development of relations between Arab and Fascist leaders. The Arab nationalist movement amounted to nothing more than a shapeless, fragmented, counter position to British imperialism, imported to the Arab East via Berlin for Nazi aspirations.
Damn the Torpedos!
Captain Fraser learned most every leadership trait he needed to know as a ship captain and as a senior business executive in the first sixty seconds of his induction into the United States Naval Academy.Those sixty seconds taught the leadership traits that were evident in Admiral David Farragut’s infamous order: “Damn the Torpedoes! Full Speed Ahead!” when his attack at Mobile Bay was in danger of failing.Those sixty seconds also taught the leadership basics that were evident in Admiral Chester Nimitz when he ordered the Pacific Fleet to meet the Japanese at the Battle of Midway.Those sixty seconds can also teach business leaders how to lead.Damn the Torpedoes! is a book about how those same sixty seconds taught Captain Fraser how to have more successful military and business careers. When then Midshipman Fraser answered a question about his laundry number by saying: “I don’t know,” he learned during the ensuing push-ups that there are only four answers to a question or order: “No excuse, sir,” “I’ll find out, sir,” “yes or no, sir,” and “aye-aye, sir.”Those four answers teach the four basic traits of leadership: accountability, thinking ahead, ethics, and motivation. Damn the Torpedoes!, through personal and historical stories, shows how those four traits embedded in a sea captain can be used by business and organizational leaders to make their own careers and companies more successful. Examples from the author’s dual career experiences, the Battle of Mobile Bay, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Cape St. George, Desert Shield/Storm, Enron, Tylenol, CNN, Intuit, and Airbnb all show how the four leadership traits are key both afloat and ashore.The book is a unique look at business leadership from a very different perspective than those taken by other books on leadership. It is a book about leadership lessons learned by ship captains over the centuries that can be applied to business.Damn the Torpedoes! is also unique in that the author has had two careers: one as Navy ship captain and the second as president of one of the divisions of Turner Broadcasting. He is qualified to speak authoritatively from experience on those leadership traits of sea captains that can be successfully used by organizational leaders ashore.