Age of Sail, War of 1812

Action at the Northern End

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY                                              11 SEPTEMBER 1814                                  ACTION AT THE NORTHERN END The heavyweights concentrated at the northern end of the battle line.  Here the headforemost approach of CAPT George Downie in the British flagship CONFIANCE, 37, allowed SARATOGA and Read More

Age of Sail, War of 1812

Action at the Southern End

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY                                              11 SEPTEMBER 1814                                  ACTION AT THE SOUTHERN END As MacDonough had correctly anticipated, HMS FINCH, 11, could not sail close enough to the wind to approach the southern American line.  In falling to leeward however, she Read More

Age of Sail, War of 1812

Battle of Lake Champlain

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY                                              11 SEPTEMBER 1814                                    BATTLE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN To the British, our War of 1812 was only a distant theater of a more global war against Napoleonic France.  And the defeat of Napoleon at Toulouse and his Read More

Civil War, Gunboats, Sailors

RADM George Brown

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY                                               4 SEPTEMBER 1887                                          RADM GEORGE BROWN On the moonless night of 14-15 February 1863, 27-year-old LCDR George Brown of the Union Navy’s Mississippi River Squadron took the sidewheel ironclad gunboat USS INDIANOLA south toward Vicksburg.  His Read More

Humanitarian, Land Ops, Recent 40 years

Operation “Deliberate Force”

                                  30 AUGUST-20 SEPTEMBER 1995                                 OPERATION “DELIBERATE FORCE” The Balkan cease fire brokered by former President Jimmy Carter in 1994 had failed.  United Nations’ efforts at peacekeeping in the war-torn former Yugoslavian republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina had given way to NATO and its Read More

Age of Sail, Sailors

Dreaded Yellow Jack

                                                23 AUGUST 1819                                         DREADED YELLOW JACK On this date, 34-year-old Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812, died aboard the schooner USS NONSUCH, 14, in Trinidad.  He and many of his crew had contracted yellow fever on a Read More

Land Ops, Marines, Submarines, WWII Pacific

Makin Raid

                                              17-18 AUGUST 1942                                                    MAKIN RAID As a diversion to the 10-day-old invasion of Guadalcanal, 222 men of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion embarked on two submarines, USS NAUTILUS (SS-168) and USS ARGONAUT (SM-1), for a raid behind enemy lines.  Commanding the Read More

Submarines, WWII Atlantic

U-604

                                                11 AUGUST 1943                                                          U-604 By November 1941, Britain was hanging tenuously, her economy smothering at the hands of German U-boats.  And on the 16th of that month, Germany’s position got incrementally better with the launch of yet another U-boat, U-604, in Read More

Revolutionary War

The Purple Heart

                                                 7 AUGUST 1782                                             THE PURPLE HEART The oldest decoration ever awarded to a United States serviceman was the Fidelity Medallion.  This award was created by the Continental Congress specifically to recognize the actions of three New York Volunteer militiamen of the Read More