THE TRUE BLUE SALOON

Frictions between the President of Chile, José Manuel Balmaceda, and the Chilean Congress erupted into civil war in January 1890.  US sympathies leaned weakly toward Balmaceda, but in the main, President Benjamin Harrison was most interested in preventing European powers (particularly England) from exploiting the struggle for their own gains.  Toward this end, Harrison dispatched the protected cruisers CHARLESTON (C-2), BALTIMORE (C-3), and SAN FRANCISCO (C-5) to patrol the Chilean coast.  The insurgents won the initial battles, forcing the weakened Balmaceda government to seek refuge in the American consulate in Valparaiso.  The consulate then became such an object of local anger that on 28 August 1891 a guard of Marines under CAPT William S. Muse had to be landed.  Then in October of 1891, the incumbent government collapsed after Balmaceda committed suicide.  Tensions momentarily eased in the city, and CDR Winfield Scott Schley, whose cruiser BALTIMORE had been standing in the harbor for months, seized the opportunity to send his thirsty sailors on liberty.

In retrospect, Schley’s decision was regrettable as mobs of victorious insurgents with long memories still roamed Valparaiso’s streets.  Neither did Schley organize the customary precaution of a shore patrol.  Nevertheless, on the night of 16 October a liberty party from the BALTIMORE located a likely watering-hole called the True Blue Saloon.  In short order they were hunted down by an anti-American mob who still recalled the US support of their deposed former president.  A brawl ensued in which local police “looked the other way” as Boatswain’s Mate C.W. Riggins and another sailor were beaten to death and sixteen others injured.  The Chilean foreign minister complicated matters with some disparaging remarks about the incident, prompting President Harrison to demand reparations and an official apology.  The new Chilean president, Jorge Montt, was oblivious to US concerns and ignored the request.

In the ensuing months, anti-Chilean factions in America pressed Harrison for a military solution.  By January the absence of any reply had piqued Harrison’s anger.  He ordered Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy to pre-position American warships, and on the 27^th of January requested a war declaration from Congress.  Impressed with the apparent American resolve, five days later the Montt government agreed to pay a $75,000 indemnity to the families of the two slain sailors.  A war with Chile had been narrowly averted.  (One factor that temporarily cooled the crisis was the surprised realization on the part of US planners that the Chilean Navy was materially stronger than our own, having purchased several British-built cruisers during Chile’s recent war with Peru). 

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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Rehabilitation Medicine

Coletta, Paolo E.  American Secretaries of the Navy  Vol 1 1775-1913.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1980, p. 420.

Howarth, Stephen.  To Shining Sea:  A History of the United States Navy  1775-1991.  New York, NY: Random House, 1991, p. 241.

Love, Robert W.  History of the US Navy, Vol 1  1775-1941.  Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1992, pp. 365-68.

Miller, Nathan.  The U.S. Navy:  An Illustrated History.  Annapolis, MD: American Heritage and USNI Press, 1977, p. 203.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 2^nd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1991, p. 100.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  This was not Winfield Scott Schley’s only questionable decision.  He later became embroiled in an embarrassing public controversy with RADM William Sampson, his senior at the Battle of Santiago on 3 July 1898.  Schley’s alleged cowardice and confusing ship movements during that battle became the point of argument between the officers, a shameful public fight that ultimately required the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt.

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                                               10 OCTOBER 1913

                                           THE PANAMA CANAL

At 1401 this afternoon, in a media event, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in the Executive Building of downtown Washington DC.  Two thousand miles to the south, dynamite charges blasted the last construction dike in the Culebra Cut, the final section of the Panama Canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific.  The largest single Federal expenditure to that day, $352 million, had resulted in the removal of 262 million cubic yards of earth, three times the volume of the Suez Canal.  Ten more months of finishing work was necessary before the first grand crossing by the civilian steamer SS Ancon on 15 August 1914.

Between 1883-89, the French tried and failed in an ambitious attempt at a sea-level canal.  Though the route across Panama was only some 40 miles in distance, the terrain featured a central mountain range, the lowest point of which, the Culebra Pass, reached 275 feet above sea level.  There was the raging Chagres River with which to contend, and the jungles were plagued with dreaded diseases.  Unlike the French experience with the Suez Canal, there was no native labor force nor infrastructure in Panama to tap.  Unanticipated costs, both in francs and in human life, ran the French Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique into bankruptcy.  Ironically, they might have succeeded had they listened to Baron Godin de Lepinay of the French Department of Bridges and Highways.  He proposed a plan the Americans would later pursue–the damming of the central highlands to create an artificial lake, with locks ascending from each coast.

In the US previously, Theodore Roosevelt had seen an inter-ocean canal as key to US leadership in the Western Hemisphere.  He endorsed RADM Alfred T. Mahan’s call for a strong Navy with easy mobility from Atlantic to Pacific.  Roosevelt too, had winced in 1898, when the Pacific based battleship OREGON (BB-3) was delayed in reaching the Caribbean during the Spanish American war by having to cruise 67 days ’round the Horn.  In 1902, Roosevelt’s drive led to our purchase the rights to the French excavations.  And, once the political roadblocks had been removed, the able engineer John Stevens was sent south with orders to “make the dirt fly!”

San Diego, the first American port north of the canal, stood as a major benefactor and staged the gala Exposition of 1914-15 to coincide with the canal’s opening.  (Many of the buildings constructed for this exposition still stand in Balboa Park today).  Plans to inaugurate the canal justly with a transit by the aging OREGON complete with retired RADM Charles E. Clark at the helm, fell through.  The first Navy ship to cross was the collier USS JUPITER (AC-3), on 10-12 October 1914.

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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

McCullough, David.  The Path Between the Seas:  The Creation of the Panama Canal – 1870-1914.  Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, pp. 589-615, 1977.

Minter, John Easter.  The Chagres:  River of Westward Passage.  New York, NY: Rinehart & Co. 1948.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History:  An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3^rd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, p. 117, 2002.

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                 MEDICAL SERVICE CORPS BIRTHDAY

The number and variety of casualties Navy Medicine faced in the early years demonstrated the need for a cadre of competent medical professionals such as pharmacists, therapists, medical researchers, and the like.  By WWII these professionals had been splintered into a confusing system of varied individual corps, each campaigning for seniority, and each forced to compete against the others for funding.  Thus by 1947 there was considerable attention given to the potential efficiencies to be gained by allying these small individual corps.

On 20 February 1947 the Army Surgeon General succeeded in introducing House Resolution 1982, a bill proposing to unite the Army’s Pharmacy Corps, Sanitary Corps, and Allied Sciences Corps.  At that moment Congress was already considering two Navy bills, H.R. 1603, a proposal to unite all the Navy’s allied medical scientists into the “Associated Sciences Corps,” and a second bill to restructure the Navy’s Hospital Corps.  When Congress discovered that both military branches were independently seeking similar goals, it was recommended that a joint bill be drafted.

Some minor differences had to be worked out between the separate proposals of the Army and Navy, not the least of which was the need to clarify the Navy’s use of the term “pharmacist.”  The title was then the name for the senior Hospital Corpsman ratings–“Chief Pharmacist,” “Senior Chief Pharmacist,” etc.  The result was H.R. 3215, a bill to revise the Medical Departments of both the Army and Navy.  Under Title II of this legislation the Navy followed the Army’s lead by incorporating allied health professionals into a single Medical Service Corps that was subdivided into Pharmacy, Medical Allied Sciences, Supply and Administration and Optometry Sections.  All previously existing separate ancillary science corps were abolished.  Under Title III of the bill the existing Navy enlisted rates of “Hospital Apprentice,” “Pharmacist Mate” and “Chief Pharmacist” were replaced with our present system of “Hospitalmen” rates.  The legislation also set the strength of this new Medical Service Corps at 4% of the manning of the Navy’s Hospital Corps.  (Title III fixed the Hospital Corps manning at 3 ¹/₂% of the total enlisted Navy and Marine forces).  The senior rank authorized for the new Corps was O-6, and the number of MSC Captains was fixed at 2% of MSC manning.  A further clause barred Medical Service Corps officers from line command.

The resolution passed the House on 2 June and the Senate on 7 July.  On this day Public Law 80-337, the “Army-Navy Medical Services Corps Act of 1947,” was signed into law.

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CAPT James Bloom

Rehabilitation Medicine

Costello, Edward L.  History of the Medical Services Corps (Chap VIII).  Draft copy prepared for the Office of the Army Surgeon General, 1970.

Gray, David P.  Many Specialties, One Corps:  A Pictorial History of the U.S. Navy Medical Service Corps.  Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Co., 1997, pp. 17-70.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  This same year saw another foundational change in the organization of the American military.  A month later on September 18th the 80th Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947 which split the Army Air Corps out as a separate branch (the US Air Force) and united all three branches under the newly coined “Department of Defense.”  James V. Forrestal, who had been Secretary of the Navy, was appointed as the first Secretary of Defense on September 23rd (replacing the former Secretary of War).

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                             TRUST TERRITORIES OF THE PACIFIC

Ferdinand Magellan made the first European contact with South Pacific Micronesia in 1521.  Though Magellan didn’t survive this contact, Spain’s subsequent colonization of the Philippines and their trans-Pacific galleon traffic cemented Iberian control of the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, and the Marianas.  The Spanish suppressed native cultures in favor of Catholicism in a presence that endured until the end of the 19^th century.  Their defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American War ceded the Philippines and Guam to the United States and left the rest of Micronesia open to new European domination.  Germany stepped in, scooping up South Pacific archipelagos in the early 20^th century.

The 1914 outbreak of WWI opened the door for Japan (then on the Allied side) who took over Germany’s Pacific possessions without a fight.  After that war the newly formed League of Nations awarded a mandate for the Marshalls, Carolines, and Northern Marianas to Japan.  But Japan walked out of the League of Nations in 1935 over disarmament disagreements, freeing her from the League’s non-militarization policy.

Then in WWII, the Allies wrested Truk (Chuuk), Kwajalein, Guam, and Saipan from Nipponese domination.  A United Nations ruling this day granted the Micronesian Islands to the United States as Trust Territories.  This provision was temporary–intended as a pathway to independence that was simultaneously extended to former colonies in Africa and Indochina.  Under Trust dictates, the governing nation could establish military outposts, station armed forces, and “close” any portion of the territory to international attention for “security reasons.”  From 1947 until 1951 the Secretary of the Navy exerted, “all powers and jurisdiction” over these Pacific islands.  ADM Louis E. Denfeld, then CNO, was appointed as the first High Commissioner, supported by ADM DeWitt C. Ramsey (CINCPAC) and ADM Arthur W. Radford (VCNO).  Governance passed to the Department of the Interior in 1951, though SecNav retained Saipan and Tinian, the site of Navy and CIA bases.  Then in 1976, the Northern Marianas established a “commonwealth” agreement, granting them status as a bone fide overseas territory equivalent to Puerto Rico, Guam or American Samoa.

Full independence for the others came in the 1980s.  And shortly all entered Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with the United States, a unique status still in effect today under which the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Yap, Pohnpei, Korsea), the Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands maintain independent sovereignty, but are provided US military security, disaster relief, US postal zip codes, and FAA and FCC administration.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  22 JUL 22

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

“Decolonization.”  United Nations publication 80-08146, April 1980, pp. 5-24.

Mack, Doug.  The Not-Quite-States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA.  New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2017.

Richard, Dorothy Elizabeth.  The United States Naval Administration of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands: The Trusteeship Period 1947-1951.  Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1957.

Site visit.  Chuuk (Truk), Federated States of Micronesia, March 1898.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 21: Trusteeship of Strategic Areas.  2 April 1947.  AT: http://www.un.org/ga/ search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/21(1947).

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  While his expedition was still in the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan was killed in a native attack in 1521.  His crew continued their circumnavigation of the globe, returning to Spain in 1523.

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