Commander Taussig's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Not Fun Voyage to Ireland

Hurry up and wait.

Everyone in the Navy experiences the phenomenon before a deployment, but Lieutenant Commander Joseph K. Taussig was struck with an acute case of this military malady virtually from the moment he received a phone call at his home in Norfolk, Virginia, on the evening of April 13, 1917, informing him that his six destroyers were to depart Hampton Roads for New York in a matter of hours. So urgent were the orders from Washington that 15 of his men were left behind because the division got underway before the expiration of liberty the following morning.  

Artist Bernard Gribble probably patterned his famous painting, "Return of the Mayflower," now in the collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, after press photos of the arrival of the "Special Service Division" at Queenstown, Ireland, on May 4, 1917. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file) 

Greeted with great fanfare after his arrival at Queenstown in Cork Harbor, Ireland, on May 4, Taussig and his men coming to the aid of the beleaguered British were hailed as heroes.  He also achieved instant worldwide fame, uttering one of the first great American sound bites of the Great War.  Newspapers across the Anglophone world printed his upbeat reply to Vice Adm. Sir Lewis Bayly, who had asked him, "When will you be ready to go to sea?" 

"We are ready now, sir, that is, as soon as we finish refueling."

On May 4, 1917, Joseph K. Taussig is captured in mid-salute as he greets Royal Navy Vice Adm. Sir Lewis Bayly (far right) at Admiralty House in Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland after leading Destroyer Division Eight across the Atlantic from Boston on April 24 on his flagship, USS Wadsworth (DD-60), seen approaching the town in the photograph to the right.  The journey had actually begun at the York River near Hampton Roads, Virginia, on April 14. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)  

"Of course you know how destroyers are-always wanting something done to them," Taussig continued.  "But this is war, and we are ready to make the best of things and go to sea immediately." Had Taussig been as brutally honest with the Royal Navy's commander-in-chief of the coasts of Ireland that day about his voyage as he was known to be later in his career, perhaps the headlines would have been a bit different. 

It is unknown whether Taussig commiserated with his subordinates before or during the history-making voyage to Queenstown aboard his flagship USS Wadsworth (DD-60), but he vented his frustrations with his superiors within his diary.  Even one century later, perhaps some of his frustrations might resonate with commanders today.

After arriving at New York Navy Yard about 13 hours after departing Hampton Roads on April 14, leaving 15 of his men behind in the rush, he noted:

It was Saturday night, and of course nobody paid any attention to us.  So, just as I supposed, the great emergency requiring us to sail at daylight was no emergency at all, and it would have been much better had I been given some discretion in the matter and allowed to remain in Hampton Roads until my liberty men returned. But it is the way we have in the Navy.  Somebody somewhere is generally prone to "fly off the handle." 

What made things even more frustrating for Taussig was that only two of his destroyers were allowed to dock upon arrival, and when he enquired as to why, he was informed that his flotilla was not even supposed to be in New York at all and was instead directed to proceed directly to Boston.  He wrote:

There certainly is a lack of communications somewhere.  But what can we expect? Our Navy Department is absolutely unorganized so far as its duty in connection with carrying on a war is concerned.  Evidently things are very much upset at headquarters.  Perhaps someday we will have a real General Staff, but until that day comes we must continue to be buffeted around in all sorts of ways.

The metaphorical buffeting continued after Taussig's arrival in Boston, where yard officials estimated that preparations for "any service that might be required" would take ten days.  Admiral William S. Benson, the Chief of Naval Operations, called from Washington, declaring flatly that "the destroyers must be ready to leave immediately on receipt of orders, but [he] did not say when the orders were coming." 

For nearly three years, the American march towards war was characterized by numerous fits, and non-starts, particularly after the sinking of the British liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915.  Almost two years later, several weeks after the official declaration of war against Germany, nothing had happened.  Unlike the way the war in Europe had begun nearly three years before, American forces did not surge into combat, guns blazing. An entire army would have to be moved from one continent to another before American forces would make a demonstrable impact.  But politically, something, anything, needed to happen, despite the fact that, according to a U.S. Naval Academy history of the war, "[a]pproximately two-thirds of our ships...were not materially ready for instant service and 90 per cent fell far short of the compliment necessary for the efficient fighting of these ships." 

William S. Sims, seen here as a vice admiral

in the garden of the Admiralty headquarters

in London later in the war, was the architect

of the strategy of filling gaps in Royal Navy's

defenses piecemeal, but immediately, rather

than organizing a grand naval force to help

the British, which would have taken much longer. 

Sims learned from Adm. Sir John Jellicoe, First

Sea Lord, that the British did not have that kind

of time. (Naval History and Heritage Command

photograph)

The head of the Naval War College, Rear Adm. William S. Sims, had been clandestinely dispatched to London before the declaration of war, and from there after consulting with the Admiralty he devised an approach both befitting a Navy clearly not ready for large-scale conflict and a uniformed leadership wary of ceding operational control to foreigners.  Sims recommended that the only way to get American naval forces immediately into the war and achieve the greatest impact right away would be "to use its available units to strengthen the weak spots in other Navies and thus effect a more vigorous conduct of the war already so thoroughly underway in all areas."  

In no other area was the Royal Navy in more need of assistance than against U-Boats that at that point were an existential threat to Britain's continued prosecution of the war.  This strategic plan, to buttress the Royal Navy where needed immediately rather than send a large force of American warships, resonated with Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels and led directly to Taussig being tapped to lead the first mission of assistance to the British.  In Taussig's case, however, the many hands up and down the chain of command between Sims and Taussig did not make for light work.  The secrecy practiced at the departmental level made the preparation process all the more difficult for Taussig.  In his diary, Taussig mused that "it would seem that the whole result of this war, which has been going on for nearly three years, depends on whether or not six little destroyers sail from Boston for the English Channel on a certain indefinite date known to no one- not even those who are issuing the orders.  Can you beat it!"

Taussig did as best he could under the circumstances, working as hard as possible, but fully expecting to be ordered to sea before his ships were ready, which is exactly what happened.  On the morning of April 24, a week after arriving in Boston, two officers from Washington arrived with signal books and sealed orders, to be opened 50 miles out to sea.  Taussig's "Special Destroyer Division" was to begin their journey immediately.  Left on the pier were ice machines that they now had no time to install, as well as target practice ammunition, wrecking mines, and pay accounts.  "Some of our lamb's wool-lined jackets did not arrive either," he wrote, "but what I regret most is the non-arrival of a large box of laundry which has been following us from Norfolk."

"I always have the blues when I leave home for a trip," Taussig wrote after getting underway, "but I feel more that way tonight than usual."  In addition to missing his wife and young daughter, the frustrating fortnight he had experienced left him feeling that "the [Navy] department did not treat us right."  Taussig continued:

Instead of nagging us and not giving us any information, I feel sure that the proper procedure in this case would have been for me to be ordered to Washington and get the situation explained to me confidentially.  I feel that the Department kicked us out rather discourteously instead of saying to us, "You fellows are up against a tough proposition.  The Department knows that you will do your best and wishes you success.  Good-bye and good luck." If we had been treated that way I would be in a much better frame of mind tonight.  

This undated photograph taken aboard USS Wadsworth might or might not show conditions aboard the destroyer as she made her initial journey from Boston, Massachusetts to Queenstown (now Cobh) Ireland in 1917.  Joseph Taussig reported in his diary that for six days his destroyers dealt with "half a gale, the wind blowing steadily from SSE," so it is conceivable that this image was from that voyage.  In any event it gives an indication of conditions in the North Atlantic aboard the destroyers that for the rest of the First World War would help the Royal Navy defeat the Kaiserliche Marine. (Naval History and Heritage Command image) 

It is a truism that a kvetching Sailor is a happy Sailor, and despite losing about ten hours conducting repairs en route, Taussig and his gallant crew were happy indeed to have reached Queenstown intact, almost ten days after their departure from Boston.  After all, he wrote in his diary, it could have been much worse, and not just because of the heavy winds that buffeted them for over half the voyage.  Rear Adm. Sims noted that German submarines had laid mines directly off Queenstown the day before Destroyer Division 8's arrival, and they had been discovered just in time. As the windows of Admiralty House shook with the explosions of mines being harvested by Royal Navy minesweepers on the evening of May 3, Vice Adm. Bayly remarked jokingly "that it was a pity to interfere with such a warm welcome as had apparently been planned for our crusaders."  As Taussig and his officers sat down to dinner at Admiralty House after the following evening, the German mines were still exploding in Cork Harbor.  "This again impressed our men," Sims wrote, "with the fact that the game which they had now entered was a quite different affair from their peace-time manoeuvres [sic]"   

Despite the fact that the greatest naval engagement of the war, the Battle of Jutland almost one year before, had forced the Germans to conclude that only the Kaiserliche Marine's submarines could win the war, savage skirmishes continued between surface combatants.  A battle between two British destroyers, HMS Swift and HMS Broke, and six German destroyers early on the morning of April 21 off Dover involved torpedoing at eyeball-to-eyeball range, culminating in Broke ramming one her stricken assailants. For the two minutes the ships were locked together, "a boarding encounter with cutlasses and bayonets, recalling the days when wooden warships came together and the men fought on the decks," ensued.  When it was over, 22 British sailors were killed and 40 were wounded, while 72 of their adversaries perished, along with two of the German destroyers.

HMS Broke rams German destroyer G-85 during a fierce engagement south of Goodwin Sands at approximately 1 in the morning on April 21, 1917.  Her captain, Royal Navy Cmdr. E.R.G.R. Evans, later wrote, "I hit her at full speed almost at right angles abreast after funnel, port side, and she literally tore her side out and bent my stem to port." Not long after the battle, Evans was promoted to captain. (Auckland [New Zealand] Weekly News, July 12, 1917/ Wikimedia Commons)

Captain E.R.G.R. Evans, RN, in 1917.

Upon entering Cork Harbor, the man who commanded HMS Broke during that furious fight, Cmdr. Edward R.G.R. Evans, boarded Wadsworth with a pilot to guide her to her new berth in Queenstown.  He handed Taussig a note written by the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Adm. Sir John Jellicoe, a fellow veteran of the Boxer Rebellion, which said in part:

My experience in China makes me feel perfectly convinced that the two nations will work in the closest cooperation and I won't flatter you by saying too much about the value of your help. 

Just over 123 years after Congress authorized the construction of six frigates to comprise a force that could, in part, protect the nation from the Royal Navy, six American destroyers joined their counterparts in the Royal Navy to face a foe neither had faced together.  The shared struggle at sea during that unprecedented war, and the one that would follow a generation later, built the fraternal bond that still exists between the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, one century later.

Editor's Note: For incontrovertible, encyclopedic proof that the naval war between the Entente and the Central Powers was far from over when Cdr. Taussig arrived, check out the new book, Clash of Fleets: Naval Battles of the Great War, 1914-1918 by Vincent P. O'Hara and Leonard R. Heinz (Naval Institute Press, 2017).

One Century Ago: Execute War Plan Black

President Woodrow Wilson. (Harris & Ewing 
Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and 
Photographs Division)

On the morning of April 6, 1917, the United States House of Representatives voted for war with Germany by a margin of 373 to 50.  Just after noon, the war resolution was sent back to the Senate, which had passed it 82 to 6, two days before.  The Senate then forwarded it to the White House, where at 1:13 pm, President Woodrow Wilson signed it. 

Five minutes later, the following message was transmitted from the communication office of the Navy Department building to every ship and station:

Sixteen Alnav. The President has signed act of Congress which declares a state of war exists between the United States and Germany. 131106                                                      SECNAV

    

Launched from Newport News Shipbuilding on March 16, 1915, USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) is shown in this photograph signed by Raymond A. Spruance, who was serving aboard her when war was declared against Germany in 1917.  He would later achieve worldwide fame for his leadership against the Japanese during the Battle of Midway in 1942. (Naval History and Heritage Command Image) 

The Navy's five flagships, including the Atlantic Fleet's USS Pennsylvania (BB- 38), then received an additional message:

Flag Sigcode. Mobilize for war in accordance Department's confidential mobilization plan of March 21.   Particular attention invited paragraphs six and eight.  Acknowledge.

Josephus Daniels

Henry T. Mayo, seen here before his promotion to vice admiral in 1916 (Navsource/ Bill Gonyo)

Aboard Pennsylvania, which had returned on April 6 to Hampton Roads from the Carribean, Admiral Henry T. Mayo knew exactly what to do.  

Weeks before President Wilson's war message to the Congress on April 2 that percipitated the vote, it was clear that war would be declared against Germany.  Two months had passed since the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, followed swiftly by the breaking of diplomatic relations, and it had been a month since the contents of the Zimmermann Telegram had become public knowledge across the country.  Nevertheless, Wilson had been sworn in for his second term as president on March 5, in part because of the success of the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War."

"I can't keep the country out of war," he confided to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels during the campaign. "They talk of me as though I were a god.  Any little German lieutenant can put us into the war at any time by some calculated outrage."  Yet Wilson publically appeared to adhere to the idea that he could avoid all-out war by pursuing "armed neutrality;" putting defensive weapons upon American merchant vessels.  Behind the scenes, however, Daniels surmised that "it was evident that 'armed neutrality' in itself was insufficient, valuable as it was."

President Woodrow Wilson (left) meets with his cabinet in this undated photograph probably taken during World War I.  Josephus Daniels is seated three places to Wilson's left on the far side of the table. (Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress,  Prints and Photographs Division)

Daniels would later recall March 20, "the Day of Decision," as "the most important cabinet meeting of the Wilson administration, in fact without a doubt the most important of our generation."  During that meeting, Daniels had become the last of President Wilson's 10 cabinet members to vote for war. After the meeting he recalled the Atlantic Fleet to Hampton Roads from training in the Caribbean and convened the General Board, along with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William S. Benson, soliciting every measure that needed to be taken to protect American shipping bound for Europe. Daniels incorporated their recommendations into an amended version of War Plan Black, the official war plan against Germany originally adopted in 1913, and disseminated it to the fleet the following day.  

Officers of the Wadsworth crew, shown here after Joseph Taussig's promotion to commander in May 1917.  The officers in the front row are (from left), Assistant Surgeon Chester O. Tanner, Lt. John H. Falge, Cmdr. Joseph K. Tausig, and Lt.j.g. Ernest W. Broadbent. The officers standing behind Taussig on either side are unidentified. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

On April 6, 39-year-old Lieutenant Commander Joseph Taussig, commander of the six destroyers of Division Eight, Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet, awaited orders at one of the locations specified on Daniels' mobilization plan of March 21, known as "Base Two." 

Taussig had been in command of the Destroyer Wadsworth since her commissioning in Boston on July 23, 1915, and had transferred from Division Six to his present command in Hampton Roads a year later.  

In his diary, Taussig recorded that he had received the mobilization message from USS Pennsylvania at 7:00 pm on April 6, and pondered its meaning:

We are now wondering what the future has in store for us- how will we operate- and how will the fleet take any real active part in the war? It is the general impression that the fleet will remain at home and that the cruisers and destroyers will patrol the coast.  

Only one week later, Taussig would receive a late-night phone call at his home in Norfolk. "Captain, this is [Lieutenant Junior Grade John] Falge. I have bad news for you. We have received orders to leave at daylight for New York to fit out for long and distant service. I think we are going abroad"

Before the Pearl Harbor Attack, the "Sleeping Giant" was Actually Hard at Work in Hampton Roads

Each year the first week of December is one in which the mass media dutifully reminds the American public of the infamous Japanese attack upon American military facilities on the island of Oahu and the over 2,000 Americans who perished on December 7, 1941.  One way to do that is to broadcast documentaries and feature films about it.  One of them, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), has for generations taught the public about the attack.  In an iconic scene near the end of the movie, the architect of the successful attack, Admiral Isoruoku Yamamoto (Soh Yamamura), ruefully opines afterward, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with terrible resolve."

Note that this message that reached Naval Air Station Norfolk on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, is devoid of details.  It gets straight to the point, merely instructing all recipients to "EXECUTE WPL FORTY SIX (Also known as War Plan Rainbow Five) AGAINST JAPAN."  War Plan Rainbow Five, a highly detailed set of instructions on how to respond to a specific attack scenario in a particular geographic area, had been promulgated to the fleet by Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark on May 26, 1941.  On November 27, Stark issued a "war warning" to all American naval forces in the Pacific to "[e]xecute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46." A young naval officer from Tennessee named William B. Wingo was Officer of the Day (OOD) when this message reached NAS Norfolk.  He served another two decades in the Navy, active and reserve, while making Norfolk his home for another half-century.  He died in 1994.  (Courtesy the Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library)

The apocryphal line says less about what Yamamoto really said aboard the Japanese battleship Nagato in December 1941 and more about the beliefs of some Hollywood producers and writers nearly three decades later.  With this in mind it seems that they believed that Americans collectively refused to get involved in the war until after American territory was attacked.   But was America really so "America First" in 1941?  Some academics and reporters seem to think so, 75 years on.  A recent Florida State University news release called the attacks “a brutal salvo that forced the United States into the fray of World War II,” and a national security writer for US News and World Report recently wrote of the attack's significance: “Pearl Harbor was supposed to serve as a lesson that American popular disapproval for going to war should not have allowed its government to fail in preparing for one.”

This widely held assumption about prewar American ill-preparedness ignores abundant evidence that thousands if not millions of Americans had been actively preparing the nation for a war that presidents from Theodore Roosevelt onward to his cousin Franklin knew the nation had to be ready for. And ready, the nation was. You would be hard pressed to find a better example of this prewar preparation than in Hampton Roads, where by mid-1941, one could hardly be blamed for thinking that the nation was already at war.  In fact, local shipyard workers and Sailors had been preparing since President Herbert Hoover ordered a significant part of the Atlantic Squadron transferred from Norfolk to the Pacific in 1931 during his administration’s Asia pivot to counter Japanese expansionism. 

Norfolk Naval Shipyard in 1941 was bustling with activity, just as it had been for several years, with the battleship Alabama (BB-60) under construction and several other battleships, including USS New York (BB-34), undergoing modernization. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Photograph)

The shift of so many ships from Norfolk had hit the local economy pretty hard at first, just as the Great Depression was entering its darkest days.  Rents and the cost of living dropped over 20 percent over the next few years, yet by 1935, they started to rise again, thanks to shipyard and construction  jobs springing up in the defense sector.  Because of the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Vinson-Trammell Act during the decade preceding the Pearl Harbor attack, not to mention the Naval Act of 1938, Norfolk Navy Yard and what is now Newport News Shipbuilding spent the decade making up for the warship tonnage lost as a result of Hoover’s Asia pivot, hiring many thousands in the process.  Norfolk Navy Yard built nine destroyers during the 1930s as its workforce expanded to 7,625 by September 1, 1939, when World War II actually began in Europe.  By 1940, 1,000 employees were being added to the shipyard’s rolls every month.  Newport News Shipyard increased from 6,500 workers in 1935 to more than 10,000 in 1940. 

Still being painted before her first war deployment, USS Indiana (BB-58) is shown here in September 1942 off Old Point Comfort, with Fort Monroe and the Chamberlin Hotel in the background. (Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)

Throughout 1941, the naval expansion was bearing fruit. On February 1, after an 18-year hiatus, the United States Atlantic Fleet was resurrected as a command under Admiral Ernest King. By mid-March, King commanded 159 ships.  By October 20, when the aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8), built at Newport News Shipbuilding, was commissioned under the command of Capt. Marc A. "Pete" Mitscher, the Atlantic Fleet had more than doubled, to 355 ships.  The battleship Indiana (BB-58) was launched in Newport News on November 21, while her sister ship Alabama (BB-60) was only a few months away from launching in Norfolk when news of the Pearl Harbor attack broke over local radio at a little after 2 pm on December 7.  

This aerial photograph of Sewells Point shows the nearly complete landing field at Naval Air Station Norfolk on May 13, 1941, located on 1,041 acres of newly-acquired land between Mason Creek at lower right and the rapidly disappearing Boush Creek (spelled “Bush” on some older maps) in the middle of the photograph, which once separated the new runways from the original Naval Operating Base area and older Chambers Field runways in the background. Newport News can be seen on the horizon. Boush Creek would completely disappear during subsequent construction and the mouth of Mason Creek would be covered by the rapidly expanding air station. The project was spearheaded by the Virginia Engineering Corporation of Newport News, which was awarded on June 29, 1940, the largest construction contract in Norfolk’s history up to that time, ultimately totaling almost $75 million. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Photograph)

As seen from the control tower at Naval Air Station Norfolk (which was still under construction at the time) on May 28, 1941, the first aircraft touches down on the new landing field being built by the Virginia Engineering Corporation of Newport News.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Photograph)

During 1940 and 1941, the Naval Operating Base at Sewells Point was virtually doubling in size with the acquisition of land for a new South Annex. Naval Air Station Norfolk had also added about 1,500 acres of runways to the east of the base in the past year and a half, absorbing even Norfolk's old commercial airport. Between 1938 and 1941, NAS Norfolk had already provided aircrews, material, maintenance, training and repair capability for two carriers built in Newport News during the 1930s, Ranger (CV-4), and Yorktown (CV-5), as well as the aircraft carrier Wasp (CV-7).
 
Among the six battle-weary British warships that paid call in Hampton Roads for vital repairs during the summer of 1941, the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious had arrived for repairs and structural modifications at Norfolk Naval Shipyard on May 12, so British pilots from Illustrious and a sister ship, HMS Formidable, which arrived August 25, were likely some of the first to benefit from the major expansion of the air station’s runways and hangars, as well as its aircraft testing and repair facilities, that were completed that summer. Royal Navy Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived to take command of Illustrious at a ceremony at the yard on August 28, 1941. Norfolk was only one of the locations Lord Mountbatten visited on his speaking tour across the America, professing his belief to the consternation of some senior American military leaders that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to surprise attack. Both carriers left the area for Europe, reinvigorated and ready for battle, shortly after the official American entry into the war.

In addition to the major expansion of existing naval facilities in the area, new bases which still serve the fleet today came into being during the months leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.  Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek had been commissioned on September 2, and Anti-Aircraft training and Test Center, Dam Neck, was completed on November 29, 1941.  Within months, work would also begin on another new facility, Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, which would train members of some of the Navy's first Mobile Construction Battalions, known later as Seabees.

More ships, planes, shore stations and runways meant that more Sailors were needed in a hurry, and recruits were being brought to Hampton Roads in exponentially larger numbers. By 1940, the traditional areas of downtown Norfolk open to Sailors could no longer hold them. The downtown Norfolk YMCA, for example, recorded 213,000 more Sailors entering its doors than it had just a year earlier. In addition to the hordes of single Sailors, Rear Adm. Joseph K. Taussig, who as commandant of the Fifth Naval District led the effort to prepare Naval Operating Base Norfolk for the Second World War, estimated that there were 7,500 married Navy personnel with over 22,000 dependents in the area, not accounting for those who wanted also to bring their families to the area but could not for want of housing.  In response he and Rear Adm. Ben Moreel, head of the Bureau of Yards and Docks (and later the founder of the Seabees), launched the first Navy efforts to construct housing for its own enlisted members on a large scale.

Although the evidence is clear that preparations for war were in full swing by late-1941, it would be no exaggeration to say that, at least for the United States Navy, an undeclared war with Germany had already begun. German U-boats were prowling off the east coast, dodging the neutrality patrols that had been instituted under the order of President Roosevelt in 1939. The destroyer Greer (DD-145) had narrowly missed being torpedoed in September 1941 after chasing a German submarine with the help of British planes. In response, Roosevelt had issued “shoot on sight” orders for all US vessels on patrol. He then ordered that destroyers of the Atlantic Fleet relieve their British counterparts on convoy escort duty to Iceland, escalating the potential for armed hostilities between American destroyers of the new Support Force and German submarines. On October 17, seven Sailors were killed when the Norfolk-based destroyer Kearny (DD-432) sustained a torpedo hit, and on the 31st, USS Reuben James (DD-245) sank into the frigid waters off Iceland after a torpedo attack, taking 115 of her crew with her. Although actual declarations of war would be voted upon by Congress against Japan and the other Axis powers about seven weeks later, it is safe to say that Hampton Roads was already playing the role it would play throughout the war for months, if not years, beforehand.
 
December 7 is a time to remember those who lost their lives in America’s far-flung Pacific outposts after one of the worst tactical intelligence failures in American history, yet should we not also bring to remembrance those who paved the path to victory, and paid the ultimate price, before that fateful morning? Their hard work and sacrifice made it possible to bomb Tokyo a little over four months later and strategically turn the tide of the war only two months after that (something Adm. Yamamoto actually predicted could happen), and place victorious American troops firmly in control of the Japanese home islands less then four years later. Improvement in intelligence collection and analysis deservedly receives credit for the victory at Midway six months after Pearl Harbor, but without the "giant" building, modernization, and expansion programs begun years before the Pearl Harbor attack, much of which were carried out in Hampton Roads, that intelligence would not have been actionable.

Pier side scene taken from USS Ranger (CV-4) at Naval Operating Base Norfolk on September 20, 1941, showing a Grumman J2F-5 "Duck" being hoisted from the pier. Note spare SOC-1 floats (foreground); Grumman F4F -3s in background. Ship at upper right is USS WYOMING (AG-17); unidentified AO is at near right. Also note family members on pier (lower right) and civilian trucks at various points on the pier. Although the largest carrier in the Atlantic Fleet, because of her size and capability, Ranger never joined the fight against Japan. (Naval History and Heritage Command Image)