The Navy actually predates the United States itself; in 1775 the Continental Congress passed a resolution urging the individual colonies to build and equip fleets, followed on August 26 by a resolution from Rhode Island that there be a single Continental fleet. In the meantime, George Washington had begun to acquire ships, starting with the schooner Hannah which was paid for out of Washington's own pocket. On October 13, the Congress decided to start commissioning its own ships, starting with the Alfred.
By mid-1776, a number of ships, ranging up to and including frigates, were under construction, but their effectiveness was limited; they were completely outmatched by the mighty Royal Navy, and nearly all were captured or sunk by 1781. Privateers had some success, with 1,697 letters of marque being issued.
The most notable American naval hero of the Revolution was John Paul Jones, who defeated the British ship HMS Serapis in the Battle of Flamborough Head. Partway through the battle, with the rigging of the two ships entangled, and several guns of Jones' ship Bonhomme Richard out of action, the captain of the Serapis asked Jones if he would strike his colors, to which Jones replied "I have not yet begun to fight!"
In 1794, the Congress authorized the construction of six frigates which later became famous, especially "Old Ironsides", the USS Constitution, which was launched in 1797. They soon saw use; tensions between the US and France developed into the Quasi-War, which was entirely fought at sea. At the same time, the nations of the Barbary Coast were alternately taking American merchant ships or being paid tribute by the US government.
The Quasi-War was resolved as quietly as it began, but the Barbary problem continued. In the First Barbary War, the Philadelphia was lost to the Moors, but then blown up by an American ruse. The Marines invaded the "shores of Tripoli" in 1805, capturing the city of Derna (the first time the US flag ever flew over a foreign conquest), which was enough to induce the Barbary rulers to sign peace treaties.
Subsequently the Navy was greatly reduced for reasons of economy, and instead of regular ships many gunboats were built, intended for coastal use only, a policy proven completely ineffective within a decade.
In 1807, the HMS Leopard demanded that USS Chesapeake submit to an inspection looking for British citizens to press into the Royal Navy, and severely damaged the Chesapeake when she refused. This was merely the most violent of many such encounters, and in June 1812 the US had had enough, and declared war on Great Britain.
Much of the war was expected to be fought at sea; and after some dithering, the diminutive American navy set forth to do battle with an opponent outnumbering it 50-to-1. After two months, the USS Constitution met up with HMS Guerriere and demolished her in single combat; the Guerriere's crew were most dismayed to see their cannonballs bouncing off the Constitution's unusually strong white oak hull, giving her the enduring nickname of "Old Ironsides". Further single-ship victories followed, and eventually British frigate captains were ordered not to engage their American counterparts.
The Americans also won a victory in the Battle of Lake Erie, but even so the Navy was unable to prevent the British from landing and burning Washington D.C.
After the war, the Navy's accomplishments paid off in the form of better funding, and it embarked on the construction of many new ships, including its first - and only - ships of the line. However, the expense of these large ships was prohibitive, and many of them stayed in shipyards half-completed, in readiness for another war, until the Age of Sail had completely passed. The main force of the Navy continued to be frigates during the three decades of peace.
The first experiments with steam power occurred during this period, and in 1845 the United States Naval Academy was founded.
The Navy played a role in two operations of the Mexican War; it transported the invasion force that captured Veracruz and Mexico City, and its ships helped claim California.
The other notable action of the Navy in this period was the 1853 visit to Japan, which convinced the Japanese to end three centuries of isolation and sign a treaty of friendship with the US; a momentous step with many unforeseen consequences.
The opening of the American Civil War hastened the final end of the sailing Navy; on April 20, 1861, the Union burned its ships that were at the Norfolk Navy Yard to prevent their capture by the Confederates. But not all of the ships were completely destroyed.
The screw frigate USS Merrimack had been so hastily scuttled that her hull and steam engine were basically intact, which gave the South's Stepen Mallory the idea of raising her and then armoring the upper sides with iron plate. The resulting ship was named the CSS Virginia.
Meanwhile, John Ericsson had similar ideas, and received funding to build the USS Monitor. The two met in the storied "Battle of the Ironclads" in early 1862, slugging away at each other for hours, and both apparently tacitly agreeing to a draw. Nevertheless, no wooden ship could have survived the encounter, and naval officers worldwide took great interest in the battle and its implications for the future.
Naval actions in the Civil War mostly consisted of blockades by the North against Southern ports, interspersed with assaults on forts. A number of operations were conducted on the Mississippi River.
In addition, the CSA operated a number of commerce raiders and blockade runners, who played a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Union frigates sent out to stop them. (name some names, like Kearsarge)
After the war, the Navy went into a period of decline. The ships of the Civil War were broken up or sold, and the navy quickly shrank to a force of just 2,000 officers and 10,000 enlisted sailors.
To a great extent, this was to be expected. Much American commerce had shifted to foreign flags to avoid Confederate raiders, and for those American ships still plying the seas, the pax Britannica had made piracy a rarity. But perhaps most importantly, immigration and westward expansion had resumed and was consuming the nation's attention.
Also to be expected, morale was considerably down; officers and sailors in foreign ports were all too aware that their old wooden ships would not survive long in the event of war. One of the low points came in 1879, when the US attempted to intercede in the War of the Pacific war between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia - the Chilean admiral threatened to send the American ships to the bottom of the ocean, and with two new British-built battleships in his fleet, he was well able to deliver on the threat.
At the beginning of the 1880s, a few naval officers were raising the alarm about the vulnerability of the nation, but were criticized or ignored. But by 1897 the Navy included a half-dozen large modern warships, with more on the way - a transformation so sudden that it has come to be called the New Navy.
In 1882, on the recommendation of an advisory panel, the Navy Secretary requested Congress for funds to construct modern ships. The request was rejected initially, but in 1883 Congress authorized the construction of three small steel cruisers (Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta). Increasing interests in overseas locations, including Samoa and Central America (where canal-building schemes were being proposed), and the awareness that other countries were building up their navies provided additional impetus.
Alfred Thayer Mahan's book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, published in 1890, was very influential in justifying the naval program to the civilian government and to the general public. With the closing of the frontier, some Americans began to look outwards, to the Caribbean, to Hawaii and the Pacific, and with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny as philosophical justification, many saw the Navy as an essential part of realizing that doctrine beyond the limits of the American continent.
The tensions of the late 1890s finally broke with the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor. Although the explosion was almost certainly due to an internal fire, the Spanish were accused, and the Navy quietly positioned for attack by assistant Navy secretary Theodore Roosevelt. When the Spanish-American War was declared in April 1898, the Asiatic Squadron immediately left Hong Kong for the Philippines, attacking and defeating the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay. A few weeks later, an Atlantic fleet destroyed the Spanish ships in the Caribbean in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.
The Navy's experience in this war was both encouraging, in that it had won, and cautionary, in that the enemy had one of the weakest of modern fleets, and that the Manila Bay attack was extremely risky - if the American ships had been severely damaged or had run out of supplies, they were 7,000 miles from safety. This realization would have a profound effect on Navy strategy in the next several decades.
By a series of accidents, the New Navy's most ardent political supporter, Theodore Roosevelt, became President in 1901. Under his administration, the Navy added many more ships, and became involved in the politics of the Caribbean and Central America, with interventions in 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1906. (name some names)
The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the launching of HMS Dreadnought in the same year lent impetus to the construction program. At the end of 1907 Roosevelt had sixteen new battleships to make up his Great White Fleet, which he sent on a cruise around the world. While nominally peaceful, and a valuable training exercise for the rapidly expanding Navy, it was also useful politically as a demonstration of US power and capabilities; at every port, the politicians and naval officers of both potential allies and enemies were welcomed on board and given tours.
The cruise had the desired effect, and US power was subsequently taken more seriously. However, the Taft and Wilson administrations failed to capitalize on the Navy's progress, and by World War I the Navy did not have sufficient strength or credibility compared to Britain or Germany to guarantee the neutrality that President Wilson desired.
Despite US declarations of neutrality and German accountability for its unrestricted submarine warfare, in 1915 the Gulflight and more famously the Lusitania were sunk. The US reaction was to contemplate increased funding for the Navy, although the bill went through six months of debate in Congress before being passed. When the war began for the US in 1917, the Navy's role was mostly limited to convoy escort and troop transport, and the laying of a minefield across the North Sea.
After a short period of demobilization, the nations of the globe began rebuilding armaments at a tremendous rate, in preparation for the next war; but widespread revulsion at the prospect of further carnage led to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and its results, the Nine-Power Treaty, the Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armament, and limitations on the use of submarines and poison gas. The naval limitation treaty was especially curious in its prescription of numbers and size ratios for the navies of the treaty nations, and many ships were scrapped to meet those limitations.
One consequence was to encourage the development of light cruisers and aircraft carriers. The United States's first carrier, a converted collier named USS Langley was commissioned in 1922, and soon joined by Lexington and Saratoga, which had been planned to be battlecruisers until the treaty forbade it.
Rivalries continued to simmer, and an additional conference in 1927 failed to agree on limitations to the loopholes that navies were busy exploiting. But the financial crash of 1929 encouraged governments to save money by not building ships, and in 1930 the London Naval Conference produced the Five-Power Treaty, which improved Anglo-American relations, but whose results were soon overshadowed by the nationalist movements that were taking control of countries around the globe.
In reaction the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 set up a regular program of ship building and modernization. The Navy's preparation was helped along by another Navy secretary turned president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The first new battleship since 1921, the Washington, was laid down in June 1940. In the same month an act authorized an 11% expansion in the Navy, and CNO Stark asked for another 70% increase, amounting to about 200 additional ships, which was authorized by Congess in less than a month. At the same time, Lend-Lease gave Britain much-needed destroyers in exchange for US use of British bases.
In 1941, the US Atlantic Fleet was reactivated. The Navy's first shot in anger came on 9 April, when the destroyer USS Niblack dropped depth charges on a U-boat detected while Niblack was rescuing survivors from a torpedoed Dutch freighter. A week later, orders were given to attack all Axis ships within 25 miles of the US East Coast. In October, the destroyers Kearny and Reuben James were torpedoed, and the Reuben James was lost.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise to almost everyone, and tactically it was a clever maneuver; the US Navy was off-balance and was unable to effectively counter Japan's takeover of the Far East. In quick succession the Philippines were occupied, the Battle of the Java Sea was lost, the Dutch East Indies were taken over, Wake Island was lost. But strategically it was a foolish act; the urge for vengeance was strong, and the isolationists silenced.
It also became clear that the era of the battleship had come and gone; while the battleships at Pearl were raised and repaired (with the sole exception of the demolished Arizona), they were mostly used for shore bombardment. The carrier Hornet launched the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo in February 1942, while task forces organized around carriers fought the Battle of the Coral Sea in May and the Battle of Midway in June, checking Japanese advances to the east and south.
When the US launched its first counteroffensive, the invasion of Guadalcanal, the Navy got involved in a series of little-known fights with the Japanese; the disastrous Battle of Savo Island, where four cruisers were sunk, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the Battle of Cape Esperance, and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
Much of the Navy's activity was in support of landings, not only in the "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific, but also in the landings in Europe; Torch, Husky, the landings at Anzio in Italy, Overlord, and Dragoon.
(more name-dropping here)
The reconquest of the Philippines began at Leyte in October 1944. The Japanese fleet came out to resist the landings, resulting in the four-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, largest naval battle in history.
When the Japanese surrendered, a large flotilla entered Tokyo Bay to witness the ceremony conducted on the battleship Missouri.
The immediate postwar fate of the Navy was the scrapping and mothballing of ships on a large scale. This did not last; tension with the Soviet Union came to a head in the Korean War, and it became clear that the peacetime Navy would have to be much larger than ever imagined. Fleets were stationed strategically around the world, and their maneuverings were a standard part of the response to the periodic crises.
The 1950s saw the development of nuclear power for ships, under the leadership of Hyman G. Rickover, and the development of missiles and jets for Navy use. The Navy gradually developed a reputation for having the most highly-developed technology of all the US services; ballistic missile submarines grew ever more deadly and quiet.
An unlikely combination of Navy ships fought in the Vietnam War; aircraft carriers offshore launched thousands of airstrikes, while small gunboats of the "Brownwater Navy" patrolled the rivers. Despite the naval activity, new construction was curtailed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to save money, and many of the carriers on Yankee Station dated from WWII. By 1978 the fleet had dwindled to 217 surface ships and 119 submarines.
Meanwhile the Soviet fleet had been growing, and outnumbered the US fleet in every type except carriers. This concern led the Reagan administration to set a goal for a 600-ship Navy, and by 1988 the fleet was at 588, although it declined again in subsequent years. Several of the old battleships were reactivated after 40 years in storage, modernized, and made showy appearances off the shores of Lebanon and elsewhere.
Revolutionary War
Federal Navy
War of 1812
Bureaucratic Navy
American Civil War
Decline of the Navy
The New Navy
Spanish-American War
Great White Fleet
World War I
Inter-war retrenchment and expansion
World War II
Modern Navy
References