One Century Ago: Naval Station Norfolk Officially Opens

As we turn our attention to the birthday of the United States Navy, October 13, 1775, we should also remember one of the most important milestones in the history of the Navy in Hampton Roads, which took place just one day shy of 142 years later.  Not only is it little-remembered today, but even the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot relegated the story of the event to page three.

The front page of the Saturday, October 13, 1917 edition was dominated by the headline “Dope in favor of Giants, Says Grantland Rice,” concerning the prognostications of the syndicated sportswriter about the ongoing world series championship between the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox (which turned out to be wrong), followed by news of the ongoing world war.  On page three was the headline: 

Formal Opening of Naval Base 

1,400 Sailors March from St. Helena To New Training Station

Simple Ceremonies Mark Great Event 

An early postcard for "Naval Operating Base Jamestown," later known as Naval Operating Base Hampton Roads and now known as Naval Station Norfolk, shows recruits marching across what was then called the Lee Parade Field. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection)

The following is an excerpt of the story:

“Early yesterday morning, a column of 1,400 United States sailors passed through Norfolk, moving from St. Helena to the government reservation at Sewall’s [sic] Point.  Headed by a drum and bugle corps and a band, the men turned into the entrance to the base at about 10:30 a.m., and a little later swung out upon the parade ground, where, awaiting them, were drawn up the ship’s company, stationed at the base, and reviewing officers of the navy, standing before the flag pole.  Following the sailors, a squad of air-men, training at the base, advanced upon the grounds.  The regiment drew long white lines against the green of the field and then, in regimental front formation, with flags flying and band playing, marched toward the reviewing officers.  The line halting and coming to the salute, Rear Admiral A.C. Dillingham delivered over the training station to Captain J.H. Dayton, commanding officer of the base and at St. Helena, orders were read, and the band broke into the national anthem, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted, and the training station at the base was in operation.  As stated by Admiral Dillingham to a Virginian-Pilot reporter, 'The base has begun to function, and is now fulfilling the use for which is was planned.’    

“The simplicity with which the great naval base was placed in operation was impressive.  Not a cog slipped as the wheels of the machinery began to move.  In the passing of only a few minutes the gray-green rows of barrack buildings, that had been empty, were teeming with occupants.  Officers went back to their desks in the administrative buildings, more busy from now on than ever before.  And the government wrote upon the map the name of its greatest factory for the turning out of sailors fully equipped for service.”

Albert Caldwell Dillingham (1848-1925) had been brought out of retirement to establish a naval training station at Sewells Point north of Norfolk, partially due to an influential article of his that appeared in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in 1910, alleging deficiencies in the training of Navy recruits, particularly in Hampton Roads.  At the time, a training station existed across the South Branch of the Elizabeth River from Norfolk Naval Shipyard, but Dillingham, who once commanded one of the receiving ships there, called it woefully inadequate. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

On October 12, 1917, Rear Adm. Dillingham succeeded in what the Virginian-Pilot called earlier that summer, “the fulfillment of the nation’s need- the building of perhaps the greatest naval base in the world, a task that would really cause Hercules to negotiate with Aladdin for the loan of his lamp.”

One Century Ago: Admiral Dillingham Inherits a Mess

As an example of a locality with almost ideal conditions for a training station, I would give the vicinity of Norfolk, Va.... The great possibilities of this strategic locality make it certain, that with the increase of the fleet, the Government will be obliged to have its principal training station and rendezvous there in the near future, and it is apropos of this consideration that is well now, to study plans for the best possible habitation for our men.

Rear Admiral A.C. Dillingham, 1910 

Great leaders don't make a recommendation or proposal unless they are willing to see it through personally.  Such was the case one hundred years ago this month for Rear Admiral Albert C. Dillingham, just after ground was broken at a former exposition site and fairgrounds just north of Norfolk, Virginia, for a huge facility he had envisioned seven years before.  In 1910, he had professed his belief in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that Norfolk would make an ideal site for a permanent new recruit training facility.  Officially, Norfolk was already one of four locations throughout the country where initial recruit training was conducted, but Dillingham, who had recently finished up a tour as commanding officer of the Receiving Ship Franklin opposite Norfolk Naval Shipyard, wrote, "At Norfolk there is officially no training station, there never having been any appropriation for the specific purpose of training at that place, although, as a matter of fact, it is the most important training station in operation."

A postcard marketed at about the time of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition showing the Receiving Ships Richmond and Franklin (the names on the postcard being reversed) at the St. Helena Annex in the Berkeley section of Norfolk, across the South Branch of the Elizabeth River from Norfolk Naval Shipyard. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection)

This seemingly contradictory claim captured the conundrum facing those running the two receiving ships then located on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River.  A decade into the 20th Century, the few hundred new recruits entering the Navy there were still trained much the way they were before the "New Navy" of the 1880s.  Receiving ships were not only too small to train large numbers of recruits, but, like the infamous British prison hulks of the Revolutionary War, diseases spread rapidly among the Sailors living and training there.  The Bureau of Navigation had concluded early in the new century that new Sailors needed more varied and technically sophisticated training than a receiving ship could provide, yet in Norfolk, there was little room to grow.  A shore-based training station had been established near the receiving ships at St. Helena in 1908, during then-Captain Dillingham's tour there.  In 1915, Franklin completed her 38-year tenure as the primary receiving ship of the station, yet when war against Germany was declared two years later, there were still two receiving ships, consisting of the bark Cumberland (IX 8) and former steam sloop Richmond.  With the modest shore station, St. Helena Annex had a maximum capacity of 3,555 men.

This portion of a panoramic series of photographs taken on January 2, 1917, shows the recruit training facilities of the St. Helena Annex, beginning with (from left) the Receiving Ships Richmond and Cumberland, the small boat training pier, parade and training grounds within the center image, concluding at the center right with modest bungalows for recruits. The demands of war that summer quickly overwhelmed the facility, which resorted to tents to contain the overflow of new recruits.  When those quickly ran out, some prospective Sailors showing up in Norfolk were told to go home until new accommodations could be found. (Norfolk Naval Shipyard Archives)    

Dillingham's wish to create a modern training facility finally came true in June, 1917, after President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill authorizing the purchase of the former Jamestown Exposition land and some adjoining properties, including the Pine Beach Hotel, to become Naval Operating Base Hampton Roads.  On the cusp of retirement after serving as a senior military liaison to the government of the Dominican Republic, Dillingham found himself back in Hampton Roads with a mandate to bring his vision to fruition.  Even with $1.6 million in funding and 4,000 construction workers suddenly at his disposal, however, Dillingham's twilight tour would not be a walk in the park.  He had inherited a monumental mess.  

The United States Lifesaving Station, which once stood where Chambers Field is located today, was beyond economical repair by the time it was surveyed on August 2, 1917.  Just ten years before, it was one of the many Jamestown Exposition buildings that merited its own postcard (Inset). (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection) 

The dilapidated fairgrounds were a far cry from the gilded city on Willoughby Bay envisioned by the Jamestown Exposition Company.  Even during the exposition itself in 1907, many of the larger pavilions were not quite finished, and the company went bankrupt shortly thereafter.  The sprawling fairground had in just a decade been reduced to ruin through neglect and by the dramatic storms that sweep across Hampton Roads.  The demise of many of the remaining buildings was also probably hastened by vandals and looters who had ripped everything that they could wrest from them, nailed down or not, by the time they were surveyed during the summer of 1917.  Only the state houses, the majority of which had remained for the most part in private hands, avoided the worst of a destructive decade.  Despite the degradation, housing for 7,500 men had been constructed by August 4, only one month after ground was broken and an epic cleaning and building effort began.

A photograph taken on August 12, 1917 from the overgrown and dilapidated Godspeed Pier that was created for the Jamestown Exposition shows the former exposition auditorium at center and its east and west wings (known as buildings N-21 and N-23 today), while the postcard (inset) created for the exposition shows what its creators intended for them to look like for visitors in 1907.  The Hall of History (now Building N-24) did not appear in the postcard, but it lies just to the right of the East Wing in the photograph. (HRNM Collection) 

The interior of the former Auditorium Building of the exposition, seen here on August 4, 1917, looked like this when Rear Adm. Dillingham made it his headquarters, yet its condition was such that many essential administrative functions still had to be conducted in downtown Norfolk until the buildings could be reconditioned. (HRNM Collection) 

ABOVE: The East Wing of the former Jamestown Exposition Auditorium (now known as Building N-21), seen here on July 18, 1917, shows signs not only of neglect but of vandalism.  The words, "Education Building" can barely be seen above its central bay.  BELOW:  The interior of the East Wing at around the same time, where exhibits from colleges and universities across America were displayed during the exposition, including a college diploma awarded in 1760. (HRNM Collection)  

Among the major buildings not constructed as residences, only the main auditorium of the exposition, where Dillingham made his headquarters, and its adjoining wings, along with the former Hall of History next door and the nearby Pennsylvania Building, which would become an officer candidate school, were not too far gone to be repaired.  The Pine Beach Hotel at the northwestern end of Sewells Point was also retained for a number of years, although it too had sustained fairly extensive damage during the interregnum between corporate control and the federal acquisition of the land.


The photographs above and below were taken roughly one month and five days apart from roughly the same vantage point during the fall of 1917, a testament to the furious pace of construction maintained during Rear Adm. Dillingham's tenure as commander.  Note the United States Lifesaving Station still standing in the background at the far left. (HRNM Collection via National Archives and Records Administration)

Just three months, one week, and one day after ground was broken on the first new recruit barracks at Sewells Point, 1,400 apprentice seamen marched north from St. Helena training station in the Berkeley section of Norfolk across the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth, which represented a Rubicon of sorts from whence recruit training in the area would never be the same.  They marched past the northern reaches of the city along Jamestown Boulevard (now known as Hampton Boulevard) to the former Lee's Parade Ground, where Dillingham was waiting for them.  Taciturn to a fault, the admiral said only a few words before the assembled ranks and members of the press, concluding with the only words he was quoted as saying: "The Base has begun to function."  On Armistice Day, just shy of a year and one month after that, around 34,000 enlisted men were training and serving at the new naval operating base, which consisted of the training station, the new Fifth Naval District headquarters, a new naval hospital, and a submarine station.  As of November 27, 1918, 12,693 recruits were undergoing initial training at NOB Hampton Roads, more than three-and-a-half times the capability of St. Helena before the war began. 

The Naval Operating Base Hampton Roads Training Battalion poses for a group photograph on the former Lee's Parade Ground in December 1917.  Note Building N-42, now the main base gymnasium, in the background to the right. (HRNM Collection) 

Memorialized today by the boulevard that bears his name, sweeping past the historic houses of Admirals' Row, as well as the Pennsylvania House, which later became the birthplace of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, Rear Adm. Albert Caldwell Dillingham was a man of vision who could not only clearly articulate that vision, but could then lead thousands to translate that vision into reality.  In a less than a decade, from conception to completion, he revolutionized the training and development of Sailors in Hampton Roads, and helped transform an ossified institution still entrenched in the age of sail into a system most Sailors of today would still recognize. Despite the fact that what we now know as Naval Station Norfolk did not become a truly functioning "operating base" until after the First World War, Dillingham led the effort to make the training station fully operational well before the end of the war, and it remained that way until after the end of the Second World War.

ABOVE: The former Jamestown Exposition Hall of History, probably the most solidly-built structure still standing when the United States Government bought the property in 1917, was nonetheless still pretty beat-up when this picture was taken between 1918 and 1921.  BELOW: The same building today, known as Building N-24, serves as the main base gym of Naval Station Norfolk. (HRNM Collection/ M.C. Farrington) 

100 Years Ago: One Ship, 43 Dead, Three Medals of Honor, One Court Martial, and Few Answers

USS Tennessee, after the installation of a cage mast and before her renaming as USS Memphis in May 1916. (Detroit Publishing Company Collection/ Library of Congress) 

By all accounts, the morning of Tuesday, August 29, 1916 was uneventful for the roughly 1,000 men assigned to the armored cruiser Memphis (CA-10) as they went about their normal duties while anchored in roughly 45 feet of water half a mile off Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. According to the deck log of the gunboat Castine (PG-6), anchored nearby, the day opened with blue skies, light winds, and barometer readings hovering around 30 inches.

That afternoon, however, swells began coming in from the south and Captain Edward Latimer Beach, commanding officer of the Memphis, ordered that preparations be made for leaving the harbor. Only two of her 16 boilers were lighted at the time the order was passed, so the expected time for getting underway would have been approximately 4:35 pm.  By 4:20, however, waves were breaking completely over the decks of the 502 foot-long vessel, water began pouring through her ventilators into the engineering spaces, and she began dragging her anchor as ever larger waves drove her inexorably closer to the rocky shore.  At 4:23, her keel began striking bottom in the troughs of waves that at their peak reached between 70 and 80 feet high.  

Huge waves dwarf the 212 foot-long gunboat Castine as she makes her escape from Santo Domingo.  From the album of Francis Sargent, courtesy of Cmdr. John Condon, 1986.  (Naval History and Heritage Command Image via Navsource)

As the largest of the waves swept over the cruiser, seawater began pouring directly down her four funnels, 70 feet above her waterline. The boilers that had been lit began exploding, filling the engineering spaces with deadly steam just as seawater rapidly poured in from the ventilation tubes above and welled up from the crumpled bottom of the ship below.  Chief Machinist’s Mate George W. Rudd died at his post in the cruiser’s port engine room, while Lieutenant (later rear admiral upper-half) Claud A. Jones and Machinist Charles Willey were also awarded the nation’s highest honor for their heroic actions that day.  During all this, a motor launch that had been dispatched from Memphis to the port to pick up crew members who had finished playing a baseball game ashore was also swept away.  All aboard were lost, among the 43 Sailors lost that day.  Over 200 were injured.  Despite suffering heavy damage, the gunboat Castine had managed to get underway just after 4 pm.
 

USS Memphis (CA-10) on the rocks at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  She lost more than three-dozen crewmen as she was driven ashore by a succession of huge waves and was battered beyond reasonable prospect of repair.  Left where she lay, the wreck of USS Memphis was sold in 1922, but was not actually broken up until 1938. (Naval History and Heritage Command image via Flickr)

Then and now, many descriptions of the event still describe a tsunami as being what wrecked USS Memphis that day. This is in large part due to the efforts of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., the celebrated author of Run Silent, Run Deep, one of the best-selling memoirs of World War II.  His book about the loss of the Memphis, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the catastrophe in 1966, made it abundantly clear that his father could not have affected the outcome of the loss for which he was court martialed. Beach’s book and other articles he wrote about the event not only kept the memory of the ship’s loss and the sacrifices and heroics of her crew alive, but it kept that memory framed in a specific way.

In 1993, he wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings:

On the afternoon of 29 August 1916 she was riding quietly at anchor in Santo Domingo Harbor in the Dominican Republic. Some of her crew were ashore playing baseball, and a motor launch had just been sent to the recreation field to return them to the ship. At that moment, somewhere on the floor of the Caribbean Sea, there occurred a far-distant earthquake. Without the slightest warning, a tsunami rose abruptly from the peaceful sea. Heavy rollers began heading shoreward.

Later in the same article, Beach added:

The loss of his ship and 43 members of his crew was intensely personal to Dad. He had simply been unable to get up enough steam to get out of Santo Domingo Harbor. A week earlier, when a tropical storm blew up, he had got extra boilers on the line, and the ship under way, in 45 minutes—excellent time from a standing start for a coal-burning warship. But on 29 August he did not have 45 minutes; nor was it a tropical storm.

Following this line of reasoning, the court of inquiry that convened in September 1916 should have arrived at the conclusion that Capt. Beach could have not foreseen this calamity and could not have ordered measures that could have saved the 14,000-ton vessel. Instead, he was convicted at a general court martial in December of, among other things, being “culpably inefficient in the performance of his duty,” and was sentenced to lose 20 places in the captains’ seniority list.  Despite this, the prevailing sense among the higher echelons of the Navy Department's leadership must have been that the loss of the Memphis and the deaths of 43 Sailors was something that could not have been prevented, because Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels overruled the sentence handed down by the tribunal, reducing Beach’s place in line for flag rank to only five places behind where he had been before the incident.

Then, as now, earthquakes were pretty common in the Caribbean, and assuming that one had caused the loss of the Memphis and heavy damage to the Castine would have been reasonable in the immediate wake of the incident.  Nevertheless, the court of inquiry considered this as only one in a range of possible sources for the devastating waves, including tropical storms.  A report on a devastating 1918 earthquake and tsunami in Puerto Rico given by the United States Earthquake Investigation Commission to the House of Representatives in 1919 divulged that monitors in Puerto Rico recorded earthquakes originating in the vicinity of Santo Domingo on April 24 and November 29, 1916, but none during August.  Moreover, seismic monitors in Puerto Rico recorded nothing across the Caribbean between August 11 and October 2 of that year.

Despite sources that continue to suggest that an earthquake caused the waves that destroyed the Memphis, the past is not set in stone, and researchers have come forward since that time to make a persuasive case that the confluence of two passing hurricanes created a series of rogue waves that battered the southern coastline of Hispaniola and doomed USS Memphis. House Resolution 306, passed on June 15, 2015 in preparation for the centennial of the ship's loss, listed its cause as "a highly unusual 75-foot wave event that threw the ship upon the shore of Santo Domingo, resulting in its total destruction…"

Aside from the tragedy itself, which most accounts cast as a 90-minute catastrophe emerging literally from out of the blue, why were the Memphis and Castine at Santo Domingo on that fateful afternoon to begin with? As it turns out, they were ordered to the Dominican Republic on a mission deeply intertwined in a man-made political storm a decade in the making.  With a lead time stretching over months, if not years, the destructive waves of armed conflict breaking out across the country during the summer of 1916 were nearly as unanticipated as the massive waves that broke upon the country’s southern shore the afternoon of August 29.

The public jubilation over the short, successful Spanish-American War in 1898 had by 1902 muted considerably, particularly in the wake of the Philippine insurrection against American rule. As a result, an anti-imperialist coalition in Congress virtually ensured that President Theodore Roosevelt would never secure sufficient support for the establishment of more “protectorates” such as Cuba and Panama, which were bound by treaty obligations to be protected by the United States from internal and external threats. Nevertheless, European powers were threatening to mount punitive expeditions against other countries in close proximity to America that had defaulted on loans.

The Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-03, during which British and German warships blockaded the country, resulting in a showdown with the American fleet, prompted Roosevelt to establish his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which dictated that the United States would act as an “international police power” in the event that European powers once again threatened military intervention to extract concessions over outstanding debt.  Seeking to preserve American hegemony over the hemisphere, Roosevelt undertook a novel approach that would accomplish his political objectives without running afoul of the Congress. The Dominican Republic became the Roosevelt Administration’s first big test case.

In her book Financial Missionaries to the World (2003), Emily S. Rosenberg wrote, “The Dominican model became the first major effort to forge the kind of partnership that would continue to be at the heart of dollar diplomacy: a triangular relationship among financial advisors wishing to practice their new profession of fiscal rehabilitation of foreign countries; investment bankers seeking higher interest rates in foreign markets; and activist governmental officials eager to assert international influence.”

From 1904 to 1907, diplomats worked with bankers and financial advisors, mainly bureaucrats with experience in colonial administration, to forge an agreement of administrative supervision over the Dominican economy, primarily through control over customs collection, in exchange for American loans. Although the rationale for such an arrangement was explicitly nonmilitary in nature, Commander Albert C. Dillingham (who as a rear admiral would take on the task of establishing Naval Station Norfolk in 1917) also served as a prominent liaison between Secretary of State John Hay and the Dominican government as an agreement began to take shape.

Despite objections from senators who chafed at President Roosevelt’s unilateral declaration of a “fiscal protectorate” in the Dominican Republic, the Roosevelt and Taft administrations declared victory and plunged headlong into establishing similar contractual arrangements with Nicaragua, Haiti, and Liberia.  American investment banks, with the support of the American government, were dealing with bankrupt nations the way they had once dealt with failing businesses.  The shortcomings of this approach, however, invariably committed the U.S. Military to stabilizing the situation, sooner or later.  



As the customs receivership in the Dominican Republic matured, the relationship between the American and Dominican governments under the administration of Woodrow Wilson began to resemble an older colonial model. “President Roosevelt entered the Dominican relationship with the idea that a receivership would prevent, not be a prelude to, military involvement there,” wrote Rosenberg. “If the receivership was threatened by debt or disorder, so much prestige was at stake that policymakers had little choice but to bite off more and more of the country’s sovereignty, intervening in ever broader ways to address the problems.”  This erosion of the Dominican government’s sovereignty to American advisors, investment bankers and government officials eroded the legitimacy of President Ramon Caceres’ administration in the minds of many Dominicans.  After his assassination in November 1911, years of political instability followed, and, as would also happen in Haiti and Nicaragua, U.S. Marines were brought in to reestablish order, and, ultimately, new governments, with the support of vessels such as USS Memphis and Castine.

USS Memphis, sent to the Dominican Republic to help quell a political storm far away from the government officials and investment bankers who helped create it, and wrecked by waves generated by hurricanes far over the horizon, was not only one of the largest commissioned vessels our Navy ever lost to natural causes.  For decades, her forlorn, battered hull remained a fixture of Santo Domingo’s oceanfront, a dramatic symbol of the American intervention in the Dominican Republic, outlasting the era of the American foreign policy approach that sent her there.

A sunset view of Santo Domingo taken in 1924.  (Republica Dominicana via Flickr)