CORRY Controversy

                                                    6 JUNE 1944                                           CORRY CONTROVERSY The morning of 18 December 1941 dawned at the Charleston Navy Yard with palpable anticipation.  Our citizenry was united against the Pearl Harbor attack only 11 days earlier, and this morning our Navy was set to Read More

Operation “Noble Obelisk”

                                             30 MAY-3 JUNE 1997                                    OPERATION “NOBLE OBELISK” The Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy emphasized “selective engagement” in world affairs where US interests were at stake.  And by the mid-1990s, US armed forces had executed a dizzying succession of peacekeeping, non-combatant evacuations Read More

Great Seal Bug

                                                   26 MAY 1960                                               GREAT SEAL BUG On 4 August 1945, as WWII ended, a Moscow school children’s group, the Young Pioneers, presented US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman with a gift of friendship–a 2-foot carved wooden likeness of the Great Seal of Read More

Avenging Captain Perkins

                                            200th ANNIVERSARY                                                    22 MAY 1823                                     AVENGING CAPTAIN PERKINS On 1 March 1823 the American merchant brig Belisarius of Kennebunk, Maine, departed Port au Prince, Haiti, bound for Mexico.  The new-found independence of such former Spanish colonies as Venezuela, Colombia, and Read More

The Mysterious Death of Pete Ellis

                                   100th ANNIVERSARY                                                    12 MAY 1923                           THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF PETE ELLIS After World War I several of defeated Germany’s Pacific island possessions passed to Japan under a League of Nations mandate.  Japan’s subsequent fortification of these islands in defiance of the Read More

Queen’s Creek Raid

                                                    5 MAY 1863                                            QUEEN’S CREEK RAID Evasion by a Confederate blockade runner was no small embarrassment to the Union ships whose job it was to isolate the South.  And when a small cutter was observed running goods up the Piankatank River Read More

Operation “Mincemeat”

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY                                                   30 APRIL 1943                                       OPERATION “MINCEMEAT” When the American 7th and British 8th Armies landed on southern Sicily 10 July 1943 they found lighter than anticipated resistance.  It seems the Germans had concentrated their defenses on the Read More

The Controversy of PE-56

                                                  23 APRIL 1945                                     THE CONTROVERSY OF PE-56 On this day the 62 sailors aboard the Navy’s “Eagle”-class patrol craft PE-56 were carrying out the plan of the day, patrolling for German submarines off the Maine coast.  Duty on board such vessels Read More

Air Raid on Kadhafi

                                                14-15 APRIL 1986                                           AIR RAID ON KADHAFI Before Saddam and bin Laden there was Muammar Kadhafi, and this Lidyan dictator’s continuing support of terrorism in the mid-1980s prompted ADM William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to draft Read More