Deeply researched written companions to the American Naval History YouTube channel — the ships, the doctrine, and the decisions behind the battles.
In February 1942 a 19-year-old US Navy submarine sank a modern Japanese destroyer with a Mark 10 torpedo, a design from the First World War. In those same weeks of WW2, the brand-new Mark 14 torpedo was failing across the Pacific War, and American submarine captains were being told the fault was…
15 min read · video
On January 24, 1942, just before three in the morning, four American destroyers hit the Japanese invasion anchorage off Balikpapan, Borneo, at 27 knots. Every one had been launched in 1919 or 1920, and the Navy had spent the 1930s trying to scrap them. One hour later, three transports and a…
14 min read · video
On the morning of 10 August 1942, USS S-44 was waiting at periscope depth about 70 miles off Kavieng when four Japanese heavy cruisers came over the horizon, steaming home from the Battle of Savo Island. Thirty-six hours earlier, Aoba, Kinugasa, Furutaka, and Kako had helped sink four Allied…
15 min read · video
On 25 June 1944, USS Nevada closed to within six nautical miles of the Cotentin Peninsula and opened fire on Battery Hamburg, four German 240-millimeter naval guns set in concrete on the cliffs above Fermanville — guns that could shoot roughly six thousand yards farther than anything in the…
13 min read · video
On March 26, 1943, USS Salt Lake City lay dead in the water in front of two Japanese heavy cruisers at the Battle of the Komandorski Islands — and the Japanese fleet turned west and ran.
16 min read · video
May 19, 1944, 1:35 in the afternoon. A sonar operator aboard the destroyer escort USS England reports a sharp, clear submarine contact at 1,400 yards. An hour later, an explosion 500 feet down lifts the stern of the ship out of the water. That was the first. Over the next twelve days, the same…
19 min read · video
On June 15, 1944, USS Texas was handed a fire mission she could not physically execute. Her turrets stopped at 15 degrees of elevation, a limit set when they were designed in 1911, and the target was beyond her maximum range. So her crew flooded the starboard torpedo blister, put a deliberate…
18 min read · video
December 7, 1941: five American battleships lie sunk or shattered at Pearl Harbor. October 25, 1944: those same ships form the battle line that destroys Japan's Southern Force at the Battle of Surigao Strait — the last battleship-versus-battleship gunnery action in history.
13 min read · video