Hampton Institute and the Navy during the Second World War, Part II: The Compromise

The following is part two of a two-part series on Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, during World War II, halfway through its 150-year history, and the little-known role what was then known as Hampton Institute played in the prelude to full integration in the United States Navy.

Sailors paint and tighten bolts on a landing craft while training at Hampton Institute during World War II. This boat appears to be a LCV type. This photograph was received by the Naval Photographic Science Laboratory on January 13, 1945. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives)

By mid-1940, much of the civilized world was in turmoil, and the American political landscape, not to mention civil society, was not untouched by the slaughter going on in Europe and the Far East. Sooner or later, war would come. This impending crisis was a threat to American citizens of all races, yet African Americans faced limited opportunities to participate in the defense of the nation, either within the private businesses that produced munitions and other war materiel for the military, or within the military itself.

The Hampton Conference

This stunted state of affairs drew the ire of Dr. Malcolm MacLean, who was chosen in July 1940 to became the sixth president of Hampton Institute (HI), one of the nation's oldest educational institutions for African Americans. Only days after officially taking office, MacLean hosted a national “Conference on the Participation of then Negro in National Defense” on November 25 & 26  to discuss the issue of why the burgeoning employment opportunities in the defense sector were passing African Americans by.

Dr. Malcolm MacLean. (Hampton University Digital Archives)

A common refrain that MacLean would sound at that conference and at appearances nationwide during his tumultuous tenure at Hampton Institute revolved around the tremendous waste in human resources that exclusionary and segregationist policies represented. He also compared those policies and the pseudo-scientific rationale behind them with those that he believed would cause the ultimate ruination of the Axis, rhetorically linking the forms of institutional racism maintained in the United States with that practiced by the Nazis.

"Nearly the whole American process of handling its Negro problem is a fundamental violation of both democracy and intellectual freedom. Further, it is an enormous wastage of human resources, a wastage that no nation, certainly no democracy, can afford," MacLean said in 1941 in a speech widely reported by the African American press nationwide. "If there is any one thing that will finally bring about the collapse of the [Nazi] dictatorship, it is the vast draining away of brains and ability from Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium, and occupied France by their slaughter and suppression of brilliant, skilled, and trained Jews and Negroes and others on the basis of a fantastic and exploded theory of race superiority."

Before the conference had even started, MacLean received a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote “It is heartening to know that in this time of stress and strain, when the whole nation is engaged in a mighty effort to gird itself against any challenge which a mad world may hurl at it, you and your associates at Hampton Institute are to hold a two-day conference on the participation of the Negro in national defense.” Roosevelt ended the letter with, "There could be no finer manifestation of the loyalty of the Negro, no more fitting rededication of himself to the cause of America, than the conference which you are holding. We who are at the center of the defense effort in Washington will take new heart from this sterling manifestation of devotion to country. You may be sure that suggestions and recommendations representing the views of your conference will be appreciated by those administering the program of national defense.”

These were no mere platitudes from the president, who was by then grappling with a significant amount of political pressure to do something about the hundreds of defense contractors nationwide that marginalized or flat-out refused to hire African Americans. Under pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the threat of a march on Washington from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, establishing the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC). Not since the dissolution of the Freedmen’s Bureau had the federal government enacted a formal body to protect the civil rights of African Americans by making nondiscrimination a formal policy. Roosevelt would ultimately recruit MacLean to play a key role in the FEPC, and as an indirect result, Hampton Institute stood to benefit.

As president of the institute, MacLean labored not only to expand awareness of the abuse being meted out to skilled African American workers by racist defense contractors, but he was also acutely aware that the institute, still smarting from the financial woes brought on by the Great Depression, would also be left out of the surge of federal investment being made in other institutions of higher learning as a part of the war effort. Regardless of his or her pedagogical predilections, a university president is, after all, its chief fundraiser. "We are and must be wholly aware of the fact that the United States is in the midst of a world war," MacLean wrote in his first annual report to the institute in mid-1941. "Whether we conceive our part in that war as one of defense only or of active participation on an undeclared basis, nevertheless all that we do at Hampton Institute must be thought of and planned in relation to that war..."

The forward magazines of USS Arizona (BB 39) explode after she was hit by a Japanese bomb on the morning of December 7, 1941. Frame clipped from a color motion picture taken from on board USS Solace (AH 5). (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives)

Hampton Institute Goes to War

World War II came early for Norfolk native and Hampton Institute alumnus Irvin C. Anderson. Although he had studied printing for two years at HI, the only occupation offered to him after his enlistment into the Navy in 1936 was that of a mess attendant. After graduating the Cooks and Stewards School at Naval Training Station Norfolk, he shipped off to his first ship, the battleship Arizona (BB 39), where he died on the morning of December 7, 1941. An unknown number of the 5,000 or so African Americans serving in the Navy at that time were Hampton Institute alumni, but it is certain that, regardless of what they had studied at the institute, they were restricted to being Messmen.

During World War II, over 90 percent of African Americans in the Navy worked in the Stewards Branch.  (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

Only one month before the Pearl Harbor attack, two students of HI's civilian pilot training program responded to letters from the Navy's Aviation Cadet Selection Board urging that they apply to be aviation cadets, only to be told in a terse reply that the Navy accepted "applications from Negroes in none but the messman branch." "While the Navy continues its urgent appeal for flyers," wrote a commentator for the Cleveland Gazette, "many hundreds of experienced 'Negro' American pilots, all over the country, continue to train for the day that they may serve in the defense of America." Considering that some Hampton Institute students had already left for the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to receive advanced aviation training, with many going on to become members of the revered Tuskegee Airmen of the Army Air Corps, the Navy's tactical obfuscations were beginning to wear thin.

The FEPC was established to monitor compliance of new policies designed to end exclusionary policies practiced by civilian contractors, yet the Navy’s refusal to abide by similar rules became a sticking point early on, which in turn became the basis for the undoing of the Navy’s own racist policies. Yet the FEPC didn't exactly break the back of the Navy's segregationist system. The Hampton Institute's contribution to winning the war would ultimately become intertwined in the compromise struck between the FEPC, acting on behalf of the Roosevelt Administration, and the Navy.

The FEPC’s first chairman, Mark Etheredge, took the Navy to task over regressive racial policies that had been instituted after World War I, yet Navy Secretary Frank Knox, taking the side of the Navy’s General Board, paraphrased their general opinion that integration would erode the Navy’s warfighting capability, writing, “Experience of many years in the Navy has shown clearly that men of the colored race, if enlisted in any other branch than the messman’s branch, and promoted to the position of petty officer, cannot maintain discipline among men of the white race over whom they may be placed by reason of their rating.”

Relenting to pressure from the White House, on January 16, 1942, Knox asked the General Board to develop a plan to induct and train 5,000 African American recruits for jobs outside the Messman (by then known as the Steward) Branch. After considerable internal debate, particularly within the Bureau of Navigation, which held sway over personnel matters, President Roosevelt was informed that integration would pose an unacceptable risk to efficiency; not because of any inherent deficiency on the part of the African Americans, but because of white resistance to them at the deck plate level. Roosevelt, having been an assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, did not buy the argument. By this time, Roosevelt had appointed Dr. MacLean as chairman of the committee, and it was he who came to an agreement with Knox permitting African Americans to enlist in the general service. Nevertheless, Knox only agreed with the provision that they be trained separately from white recruits.

Looking less than enthused, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox enlists William Baldwin, the first of thousands of African Americans to enlist for the general service in the Navy during World War II, on June 2, 1942.  Until Knox and the Navy Department relented to pressure from the Roosevelt Administration, African Americans could only enlist into the Messman (later Stewards) Branch. (National Archives and Records Administration via Naval History and Heritage Command/Flickr)

On April 21, 1942, Knox approved a plan to begin enlisting 1,000 African Americans a month on June 1, in occupations other than stewards or mess attendants, as well as allowing 900 to enlist in the Marine Corps. On June 18, Dr. MacLean announced that Hampton Institute would be one of the two locations where advanced training for African Americans in the Navy would occur. After eight weeks of basic training at Camp Robert Smalls at Naval Training Station (NTS) Great Lakes (named for an African American naval hero from the Civil War and commanded by Hampton Institute founder Samuel C. Armstrong’s son, Lt. Cmdr. Daniel W. Armstrong), “128 carefully selected men” would undergo 16 weeks of training at Hampton Institute. The schools to be established there were essentially duplicates of Class "A" schools just a mile away at NTS Norfolk and at NTS San Diego.

Seaman George Clinton Fields is congratulated by Lt. Cmdr. Daniel W. Armstrong as he graduates with honors from Camp Robert Smalls, the segregated basic training facility at Naval Training Station Great Lakes in September 1942. Fields' last job before joining the Navy was as a valet to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Armstrong's father was Brig. Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives) 

On September 12, 1942, the U.S. Naval Training School, Hampton Institute, officially opened with Lt. Cmdr. Edwin H. Downes commanding a staff of 11 officers and 28 enlisted personnel. The first 128 basic training graduates that arrived from Great Lakes six days later took their places in the electrician, motor machinist, machinist, metalsmith, and carpentry schools on campus three days after that. In addition, the Cooks and Bakers School that had been based at Naval Training Station Norfolk was moved to the Chamberlin Hotel, which had been owned by the Navy since January 1942, and made part of the HI training program.

Sailors study small craft & automotive electrical systems training at Hampton Institute during World War II. This photograph was received by the Naval Photographic Science Laboratory on 13 January 1945. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives)

Within a year, the student body at HI had grown to nearly 900 at any given time, and the naval staff had grown to 139. In addition, the monthly student quota for the HI program was raised to 187, with 30 going to the Cooks and Bakers School at the Chamberlin Hotel near Fort Monroe. The regular machinist course was discontinued in 1943, but a shipfitter's course was added. Meanwhile, the Navy built a brand-new instructional building featuring a large diesel machine shop, and a large recreational building featuring a gym and auditorium was also added to the campus. A boat house was also built after a coxswain school was added to the curriculum.

Looking northwest from an aircraft flying over Armstrong Field (now known as Armstrong Stadium), the U.S. Naval Gymnasium, which opened in April 1943 (later known as Williams Gym, which was replaced by the Hampton University Student Center), lies across Marshall Avenue, with Phenix Hall located behind it.  In addition to the gymnasium, the building contained a drill hall, an auditorium equipped with a movie projection room, and even a tiled swimming pool.  A young seaman named John Thomas Biggers painted a mural for the building, and another of the works he created while on active duty with the Navy at Hampton Institute was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, catapulting him to national prominence.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection)

Located on Fort Monroe, the Chamberlin Hotel was acquired by the Navy in January 1942 to house transient officers during the war.  The Navy Cooks and Bakers School, which was located at NTS Norfolk from 1933 to 1942, moved here after the establishmant of the U.S. Naval Training School at Hampton Institute in September 1942 and trained up to 100 African American students at any given time in its kitchens. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection)

Malcolm MacLean Goes to War

As president of Hampton Institute and chairman of the FEPC, Malcolm MacLean made the establishment of the Navy school on campus, as well as the investment and construction that came with it, possible. The institute had been spending more than it was making since 1922, but in 1943, the first full year after the establishment of the Naval Training School, Hampton Institute's deficit from the year before was cut by 94 percent.

Despite the success with the Navy school, all was not going well with MacLean's tenure at HI, to the point that he abruptly resigned to join the Navy himself. Only one month after MacLean assumed the presidency of the institute in 1940, columnist L. Baynard Whitney of the Cleveland Plaindealer observed that "Dr. Maclean has already... locked horns with the Status Quo who hate his method, fear his pace, and tremble at the boldness of his vision." After over two years of stiff resistance from the faculty and trustees over a broad range of changes he wished to make at the institute, he resigned in January 1943, taking a lieutenant commander’s commission in the Navy and a posting at the War Department School of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the wake of MacLean’s sudden exit from Hampton, the institute’s board of trustees approved MacLean's pick as his successor, R. O’Hara Lanier, who had been serving as dean of instruction, as interim president. For the first time in its 75-year history, Hampton Institute was led by a black man.

After Secretary Knox's death in April 1944, James Forrestal took a different approach towards African Americans as Navy secretary, and on his watch the segregationist policies of the Navy would come to an end, negating the need for separate "A" schools for them.  By the time the last graduation ceremony was held at Hampton Institute on August 15, 1945, approximately 5,000 Sailors had graduated from the Navy program, including most of the Sailors who manned the destroyer escort Mason (DE 529), which proved that a largely African American crew could perform its duties on par with white Sailors, as well as the man who would become the Navy’s first African American flag officer, Samuel Lee Gravely, Jr.

After the closure of the program, Hampton Institute faced the same type of cutoff in federal funding as it had after the dissolution of the Freedmen's Bureau during the institute's infancy and the discontinuance of training for Native Americans in 1923.  Dr. Ralph P. Bridgman, HI's president at the close of the war, sought to maintain a naval presence at the institute, at least in the form of the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC), something that would happen at many colleges and universities across the nation, but the Navy declined on the grounds that the student body was of insufficient size to warrant it. "Hampton's prexy has already protested [the] Navy's plans to discontinue the Jim-Crow school [at Hampton Institute], and has been informed that you can't preach integration while begging for the practice of segregation," quipped columnist Paul Pentagon in the magazine Headlines and Pictures. 

Although Hampton Institute was turned down in its bid to maintain a postwar Navy presence via the NROTC, they were not alone. In fact, the NROTC eschewed all traditionally African American institutions of higher learning for another two decades, finally establishing a unit at Prairie View A&M in Texas in 1965. Hampton University finally became part of the Hampton Roads NROTC consortium, which also includes Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University, in July 1982.

Now celebrating its sesquicentennial, Hampton University maintains a Navy presence on campus via its NROTC detachment, but it has never approached the level of coordination with the Navy as it had during World War II, after which any pretensions that segregation was good for the sea services were finally extinguished.

At Dawn, They Didn’t Sleep

Members of the Arizona dance band pause at Bloch Arena, Pearl Harbor, during the Battle of Music semifinal held November 22, 1941.  From the left, they are Musician 2nd Class Curtis Haas, Musician 2nd Class Gerald Cox, Musician 2nd Class Ernest Whitson Jr., Musician 2nd Class Frank Floege, Musician 2nd Class Clyde Williams, Musician 2nd Class Bernard Hughes, Musician 2nd Class Alexander Nadel, Musician 2nd Class Charles White, Musician 2nd Class Robert Shaw, Musician 2nd Class Harry Chermucha, Musician 2nd Class William Moorhouse, Musician 2nd Class Emmett Lynch, Musician 2nd Class Wayne Bandy, Musician 2nd Class Jack Scruggs, Musician 2nd Class James Sanderson, and Musician 1st Class Frederick Kinney. (Official US Navy Photo by Tai Sing Loo)

It had been a long, exhausting, but ultimately successful Saturday night for the band members of USS Arizona (BB-39).  Although denied the top spot during a naval band competition ashore at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, they were still authorized by the ship’s captain to sleep in late the following morning. 

It was a sleep that they would never awaken from, the morning of December 7, 1941.  

This story has been told in one form or another for decades.  One version has them winning the competition that evening, with the trophy from that long-ago event residing today at the US Navy School of Music at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  The trouble begins when one looks for the trophy there.  It is not.  The difficulties continue when searching for evidence of the story’s veracity in primary sources, eyewitness accounts or oral histories.  As with many apocryphal stories related to epochal events in our nation’s past, hard evidence remains elusive.   

Despite this lack of contemporaneous evidence, the story has persisted in secondary sources, popping up in dozens of books and television news accounts about the attack.  It even became part of the official narrative given to visitors to the USS Arizona Memorial, where it caught the attention of Molly Kent, a self-described “legal secretary, artist, author, and homemaker for her husband and their 3 children,” who also happened to be the sister of one of the band members, Musician 2^nd Class Clyde Williams.  

“We all looked at each other, because we knew better,” said Kent, 92, from her home in Kansas City.  Her family had seen the original Navy press release quoted by the Associated Press on April 1, 1942, which said, “On Dec. 7 they went to their battle stations, one of the most hazardous on the ship—down below passing ammunition to the guns above.” 

Forty years later, watching the story with her mother, the entire tenor, not to mention facts, of the story had changed. 

And she didn’t like it.  

“I couldn’t stand to have the boys remembered that way,” said Kent.  “If it was true, fine.  I wish that they would have been asleep and farther from their battle station. Then maybe they would have had a chance to survive.” 

She had pondered writing a book about her brother for years.  The experience that day in 1982 crystalized her aspiration not just to tell the band’s story, but to straighten out the distortions she felt were becoming rampant. 

“I wanted to be correct,” Kent said, “even if the truth was not necessarily what I thought.”   

Despite having no background in historical research or journalism, Kent had something in her possession journalists and historians did not: A large collection of official correspondence and private letters her mother had collected over the years since Clyde Williams’ death.  Thanks to the families of other family members, she spent years expanding the trove beyond just those of her brother to everyone in the band.  Along the way she conducted dozens of interviews and making connections, gaining allies in veterans organizations and the Navy musician community.  

They helped her ultimately retrace the band’s steps, from their hometown lives, to auditions at the US Navy School of Music when it was still located at the Washington Navy Yard, five-weeks of basic training at the Norfolk Training Station, back to the School of Music in 1940 and formation from January through May 1941, then their assignment as an ensemble band to USS Arizona, where they arrived on June 17.  

Personal correspondence from the men showed that they, like most of the enlisted crew, were required to sleep in hammocks, which they were only allowed to use from after the evening prayer at 7 pm until 5:30 am.  Tables stowed in the overhead during that time would be brought down to use during the day.  Because December 7 fell on a Sunday, reveille was called at 6 am.  The Japanese planes began the attack by targeting aircraft parked at Wheeler and Hickam fields at 7:55 am, followed by the first radio messages to all US forces in the area that an attack was in progress and that this was not a drill.  Smoke from the attack on the airfield on nearby Ford Island could also be seen from Arizona’s quarterdeck, from where any all hands messages would be passed over the battleship’s announcing system.  First, a fire and rescue call was sounded, followed immediately afterward by Arizona’s air raid alarm as other ships on Battleship Row began taking bomb hits from high-flying bombers and low flying Japanese aircraft began strafing Arizona’s decks.  The shore patrol and other details mustered near the quarterdeck to assume their watches, as well as off-duty personnel waiting to go on liberty, scattered as word was then passed for all hands to get below the armored deck. 

At approximately 7:56, the first 1,763-pound armor-piercing bomb hit Arizona about 70 feet directly aft of the quarterdeck on the starboard side after a glancing blow against the number four turret, setting the captain’s pantry afire and filling the captains and admiral’s spaces with smoke on the second deck directly below.  Had Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh been asleep at the time, perhaps he would have been killed, but he was not there.  If Van Valkenburgh had granted permission for the musicians to sleep past reveille, they would have been safe in their hammocks in the main enlisted berthing amidships, over 200 feet away.  

Under the schedule maintained that morning, the band would have in fact been fairly close to that first explosion.  They would have gathered at the quarterdeck at 7:45 am in preparation for the colors ceremony to be held on the fantail precisely at 8, and according to multiple eyewitness accounts they were assembled on the fantail when the attack began.  Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Tom White, an Arizona survivor, reported in his after action statement that he returned to the ship during the attack using one of USS Nevada’s motor whaleboats and raised the flag.  This seems to suggest that the flag had been attached to the staff at the stern and that the ceremony had begun, but it had not been completed.

Although general quarters was not called until just before 8 am, apparently delayed by that first bomb strike and momentary chaos that followed, eyewitness testimony collected in the weeks and months after the attack make it clear that the crew did not stand around or cower until being told what to do, much less sleep.  Along with other members of the crew who were caught on the main deck, the band dropped what they were doing and rushed to their battle stations at the moment they realized they were under attack.  Musicians aboard other vessels on Battleship Row preparing for colors also reported hurriedly stowing their instruments anywhere they could as they ran, or even throwing them overboard, as they made their way to their general quarters stations.  For the Arizona musicians, their destination would have been the ammunition hoists on the third deck, just aft of the number two turret.   

 A couple of minutes after the first hit, another bomb did strike farther forward on the port side, but it was on the boat deck three decks above the main berthing, over a smaller enlisted berthing area and one of the battleship’s 5-inch guns. 

Yet another armor-piercing bomb hit just off the starboard side of the number two turret at approximately 8:10, touching off the explosion of the forward magazines.  Most of the force was channeled fore and aft by the thick armor belt and plating on the upper deck, pancaking transverse bulkheads foreword and aft of the magazines, killing nearly 1,000 men in an instant, and causing the forward two turrets and forward upper deck to collapse into the void left by the detonation.  By the time that occurred, even taking opening and closing watertight hatches into consideration, the Navy musicians could have reached their battle stations two decks down and under the forward end of their berthing area, where they would have been when the magazines exploded.  

“To a man,” according to the Navy press release, “the Arizona’s band was killed when the battleship’s magazine exploded.”   But even the original press release was not entirely accurate, however, for three of the band members’s bodies were found in the water after the attack.  It is entirely possible that as they were making their way from the fantail to their battle stations up forward, the first bomb struck and the force of the explosion knocked their bodies overboard.  

The destruction was so complete that morning, however, that verifying this narrative beyond a shadow of a doubt is impossible.  Even today, secondary sources, not to mention eyewitness accounts recorded only days after the attack, disagree on the specific details, such as the times bombs struck or when announcements were made.  This provides fertile ground for false stories to germinate.  

As for the naval battle of the bands, formally known as The Battle of Music, 1941, the second semifinal round of the competition did take place on December 6, but Arizona’s band did not compete that evening.  It had won the first round on September 13 against three other bands, but they came in second behind the Marine Barracks Band during the first semifinal round on November 22.  The final round, scheduled for December 20, never took place.

Lastly, the grand prize trophy was ultimately awarded posthumously to the Arizona band after the final round was cancelled.  It is now at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, inscribed with the names of the winning band members:    

Frederick William Kenney

Wayne Lynn Bandy

Oran Merrill Brabbzson

Ralph Warren Burdette

Harry Gregory Chernucha

Gerald Clinton Cox

Frank Norman Floege

Curtis Junior Haas

Bernard Thomas Hughes

Wendell Ray Hurley

Emmett Isaac Lynch

William Moore McCary

William Starks Moorhouse

Alexander Joseph Nadel

Neal Johnson Radford

James Harvey Sanderson

Jack Leo Scruggs

Robert Kar Shaw

Charles William White

Ernest Hubert Whitson, Jr.

Clyde Richard Williams

Special thanks to Molly Kent, author of USS Arizona’s Last Band: The History of US Navy Band Number 22 (Kansas City: Silent Spring Publishing, 1996), Librarian Russ Girsberger of the Naval School of Music, and Volunteer Coordinator Tom Dandes of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum.

Pearl Harbor Battleships, Part II

Today, on the 71st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we present USS California (BB-44), Oklahoma (BB-37), and Arizona (BB-39), three more battleships stationed in Pearl Harbor that also had a direct tie to the Hampton Roads area.  

USS California (BB-44)

USS California in Hampton Roads making preparations

to leave for the West Coast, 1939

Because Mare Island Navy Yard built California and the ship conducted most of her operations on the West Coast, Battleship Number 44's time in Hampton Roads was considerably shorter than the rest.  In 1939, the Navy concentrated the fleet in the Atlantic both for a showing at the World's Fair in New York and for a major fleet exercise ("Fleet Problem XX") in the Caribbean.  California left San Diego to be a part of this fleet concentration. 

After conducting their exercises, the fleet anchored in Hampton Roads.  It was on April 20, 1939, that the Navy unexpectedly ordered the ships to depart the region post haste and return to the West Coast.  In September 1939, the fleet conducted another major exercise off the coast of Southern California. 

The A.P. Wire photo caption reads: "Sailors of the U.S.S.
California, neat and trim for prospective review, lined up on the deck after order for a surprise journey, an immediate return to the Pacific Coast."

USS Oklahoma (BB-37)
USS Oklahoma was built in New York as part of the "Second to None" fleet expansion program.  Upon completion, the Navy assigned her to Hampton Roads for the duration of World War I.  In Hampton Roads, she escorted convoys across the Atlantic to Europe. 

After the war, she remained in the region for several fleet exercises and naval reviews before being sent to Philadelphia for modernizations allowed under the Washington Naval Treaty.  After completing this program, she returned to Naval Operating Base Norfolk.  In 1939, the Navy redeployed her to Hawaii.


USS Oklahoma during the 1927 Naval Review in Hampton Roads

USS Oklahoma in the Elizabeth River, downtown Norfolk, 1939.

USS Arizona (BB-39)
The third ship to present today is USS Arizona.  Battleship number 39 spent much of her post-World War I career in Hampton Roads before being deployed for the first time to the Pacific in the mid-1920s.  Like many of the older battleships, the Navy selected her to be modernized (as opposed to outright scrapping) and sent her back to Hampton Roads.
Between 1929 and 1931, workers at Norfolk Naval Shipyard upgraded  several of Arizona's systems.   The upgrades were similar to ones Yard workers gave to Nevada.  This included two-inches of armor on the deck; anti-torpedo bulges along the side of the ship; a new fire control system; the removal of the old-fashioned cage observation towers; a new steam-launched catapult for the ship's aircraft; and brand new turbines and boilers that had been originally slated for the battleship Washington (BB-47).  Fortunately for historians, a Navy photographer took some very good pictures of the ship during this overhaul. 

Pearl Harbor Battleships, Part I



New York Times announces
contract awards to Newport News
for West Virgina and Maryland.

Despite its physical distance from Pearl Harbor, the Hampton Roads area has long been known for its strong ties to many ships stationed in the Pacific.  When Japan launched its surprise attack against the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the enemy targeted the eight battleships moored near one another.  Many of those battleships were either stationed, built, or overhauled in Hampton Roads before being sent out to the Pacific Fleet in the late 1930s.  Today and tommorow, we will be featuring photographs of those ships in remembrance of their sacrifice.

First are USS Maryland (BB-46) and West Virginia (BB-48).  Newport News Shipbuilding constructed and launched the 33,000-ton Maryland on March 20, 1920, and West Virginia on November 19, 1921. Observers considered them technological wonders of the age.  Not only did they come equipped with the most powerful guns in the Navy's inventory (Mk 6 16-inch/45), but they also came equipped with an all-electric drive that more efficiently linked the ships' fire rooms and boilers with the shaft and propellers.  This resulted in a savings in space and additional control over the speed of the ship. 

Maryland on Newport News'
building ways.

However, like all state-of-the-art technology, the ships were expensive.  Each vessel cost the American taxpayers about $40,000,000 (the Navy's total budget between 1920 and 1922 averaged about $700,000,000 a year, with major reductions on the horizon).  Because of the naval arms limitations talks taking place in Washington, many people feared that both ships would never actually make it to the fleet.  One reporter wrote, "West Virginia (BB-48), the newest addition to Uncle Sam's navy and the seventh of the electric battleships, launched at Newport News last Saturday and destined to grace the scrap pile within a few months under the naval reduction program. If the American plan is agreed to, the new $40,000,000 dreadnought, now 60 percent complete, will never be finished."

But the Navy spared both ships from the Washington Naval Treaty axe and commissioned them into the fleet.  After spending the 1920s in Hampton Roads, the Navy redeployed both vessels to the Pacific Fleet in the 1930s. 

West Virginia (at left) at Newport News Shipbuilding, 1923.  The larger ship at right is
 the giant 54,000-ton SS Leviathan. 



USS Nevada in Hampton Roads, 1927, during a Naval Review

The third ship to mention is USS Nevada (BB-36).  Built in 1914, Nevada was based in Hampton Roads for much of World War I. Under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty, the U.S. Navy needed to decide whether to build new battleships and scrap the old ones, or upgrade the old ones and scrap battleships under construction.  It chose the second option.

Nevada arrived at Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) in 1929 and received a major technological upgrade.  Workers added two inches of deck armor; ten new five-inch guns for anti-aircraft (this was found to be seriously inadequate in the days after Pearl Harbor); retrofitted 14-inch guns to allow them to increase their elevation to 30 degrees; and received new geared turbines that had been originally slated for North Dakota (BB-29).  NNSY workers completed the job by the spring of 1930 and the ship immediately headed for the Pacific.

USS Nevada (far side of picture) at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1930.  
The ship on the near side is USS Arizona (BB-39). 

Robert Foster Collection and USS Shawmut (CM-4)

One of many cartoons collected by BM3 Robert Foster

We recently received several items that belong to BM3 Robert Foster, a sailor who served on board the Norfolk-based mine layer USS Shawmut (CM-4) from 1918 to 1922. Shawmut most famously served in the 1918 North Sea Mine Barrage during World War I. When not laying mines, she served as a seaplane tender for the fleet. The Navy later changed the name of the vessel to Oglala to avoid confusion with USS Chamount (AP-5).

Shawmut at her home pier at NOB Hampton Roads
(now Naval Station Norfolk).

Foster took several photographs of Shawmut's time in the Caribbean, when the vessel was deployed to Panama for the Atlantic Fleet's 1921-22 winter fleet exercises. Foster also took several pictures of the other ships participating  in the exercises, particularly the battleships.  He also collected newspaper cartoons about the Navy (see above) and kept them in a scrapbook.

Shawmut's sailors load up mines while
at the Yorktown Mine Depot
(now Yorktown Naval Weapons Station).

Foster took these images of the Atlantic Fleet's battleships during the 1922 winter exercises. In this set are ships that would be at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: USS Tennessee (BB-43),USS California (BB-44), USS Arizona (BB-39), USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), and the newly built hospital ship USS Relief (AH-1).