This entry is a subentry of U.S. Navy.
In the summer of 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the first ships of what became the U.S. Navy. Through the course of the Revolutionary War, each ship and each commission was made to fit an ad hoc need: to defend ports, to interrupt the flow of British personnel and goods, or to fight the enemy's warships at sea. Each of these—along with admirable cooperation from privateers and from the French and Spanish fleets—contributed to Britain's defeat. These operations and John Paul Jones's raids on British coastal communities gave the fledgling service a reputation for valor.
Like the Continental Army, the Continental Navy was all but dissolved after the war. The global wars of the French Revolution and British empire quickly showed the United States the importance of maintaining a navy, if only to protect a neutral's rights at sea. In 1794, Congress recognized this need, authorizing the first heavily armed frigates designed to deter depredations by European nations as well as those of the Barbary pirates. In 1798, it established a Navy Department to administer, procure, train, and direct the new fleet. President Thomas Jefferson had hoped that small coastal defense gunboats would take the place of a blue water navy, but these lacked sufficient deterrence value. By 1812, deterrence failed and war with Britain brought humiliating military defeats in Canada and the United States. Nonetheless, the navy's heroic deeds—particularly those of Oliver Hazard Perry and James Lawrence—ensured its survival for another generation.
Organized by bureaus and rapidly supplemented from the huge merchant marine community and unprecedented expenditures, the U.S. Navy thrived during the Civil War. It developed new gun and steam propulsion technology that made it one of the most modern and effective forces in the world. Critical to the Union strategy, a naval blockade cut off the rebellious states from life‐sustaining trade. Control of the littoral also provided the necessary platform for amphibious assaults of Confederate harbors and eventually for the riverine operations that split the Confederacy. Like the Mexican War, the Civil War saw extensive joint army‐navy operations.
After Appomattox, the navy reduced its vessels from over 700 to 200 mostly hybrid steam/sail frigates that aged quickly in an era of rapid technological change. With an aging, pre–Civil War officer class, relatively unskilled sailors, and increasingly decrepit ships, the navy barely performed its peacetime functions of policing American interests on far‐flung stations and undertaking occasional diplomatic or scientific missions. Between 1882 and 1916, navalists (such as Alfred T. Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt) revolutionized the service, constructing many first‐class steel battleships, training competent sailors, and educating first‐class officers. Against the decrepit Spanish fleet in 1898, the “New Navy” appeared to vindicate itself, winning dramatic victories at Manila and Santiago Bays.
In 1917, the U.S. Navy entered a war for which its battleship‐heavy fleet was ludicrously ill‐suited. Fortunately, in the process of building a large navy, the nation had also created the bureaucracy, education and training systems, and industrial capacity sufficient to adapt successfully to the challenges of convoys, troop transport, and antisubmarine warfare systems. Before it was over, the nation had joined with the Royal Navy to escort over 2 million men and supplies that aided the Allies to victory.
Following World War I, the Republican Party, blaming international naval competition, financial obligations, and Woodrow Wilson's idealism for America's participation in the war, managed a global political and military withdrawal now called isolationism. Successive administrations negotiated arms limitations treaties while Congress consistently kept the fleet below even permitted strength. This pruning proved healthy, as the smaller navy learned to adapt new technologies to enhance capabilities. While the U.S. Marine Corps developed a forward base concept and amphibious warfare capabilities, the navy concentrated on improving gunfire, submarine warfare, and—increasingly—carrier‐based aviation.
In the Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress began building ships to restart the economy as well as to counter the growing militaristic menaces in Germany and Japan. Most critically, Washington started the fast attack carriers that fortuitously avoided the December 1941 raid on the battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. From America's entry into World War II, the armed forces recognized the need for combined and joint operations. Adm. Chester Nimitz divided responsibility for the Pacific with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Admiral Ernest J. King and Adm. Royal E. Ingersoll shared the Atlantic with the Royal Navy, combatting the U‐boat threat and securing the astonishing flow of goods, personnel, and supplies to Britain and the Soviet Union. The amphibious operations in North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and across the Pacific offered the navy and its sister services some of their most daunting military challenges. American submarines established a deadly blockade of Japan. Again, battleships only supported the critical action. Two of the greatest naval battles ever—at Midway and the Philippine Sea—were fought by naval aviation, between commanders who could not see one another.
After World War II, U.S. blue water naval supremacy would remain virtually unchallenged, although the Soviet bloc did pose considerable threats across the globe. During the Cold War, the navy's role in national defense waned and waxed, vacillating with the intensity of operations and the current state of technology. An early bid for nuclear capabilities—the atomic‐bomb‐launching supercarrier—was canceled in 1949. Only with the advent of the Polaris missile‐launching submarine in 1960 did naval ships join the bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles as one leg of a nuclear triad. The surface navy remained centered on the aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, carrier task forces were supplemented by river gunboats for some of the most dangerous operations of the war.
In the decades following the fall of Saigon, the navy continued to move to a high‐low mix. Still, the carrier groups dominated the fleet, particularly after the 1985 introduction of a “maritime strategy”—a forward‐oriented, carrier‐based plan to bring a nonnuclear war to the Soviets. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the U.S. Navy without a credible strategic rival. Nonetheless, the carriers and amphibious capabilities developed in the late eighties were refocused for the expeditions and police actions the United States faced as the only superpower and the only sea power.
[See also Midway, Battle of; Philippine Sea, Battle of the; World War II, Naval Operations in: The North Atlantic; World War II, Naval Operations in: The Pacific.]
Bibliography
- Peter Karsten, Naval Aristocracy: The Golden of Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism, 1972.
- Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan, 1985.
- David Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883, 1988.
- Kenneth Hagan, This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power, 1991.
- Christopher McKee, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815, 1991.
- George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990, 1994.
- Edward J. Marolda, By Sea, Air, and Land: An Illustrated History of the United States Navy and the War in Southeast Asia, 1994.
- Mark Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893, 1995
