Sea Control - Sea Control 439 - The Fantastic Voyage of USS Oregon with Dr. Heather Haley

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Links1. "To Make The Navy Ready to Strike': The Fantastic Voyage of USS Oregon," by Dr. Heather M. Haley, The Sextant, Naval History and Heritage Command, February 27, 2023. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Heather Haley joins us today for the first of two episodes. This one is based on our article, To Make the Navy Ready to Strike, The Fantastic Voyage of USS Oregon. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. We are once again looking for audio editors, so if you're interested in learning how we put these podcasts together, think you're able to learn our basic editing skills, we'll teach you. Drop us a note at seacontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, new york india or the caribbean chances are there's a simsec local chapter near you you can

find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website simsec.org so if you're interested please reach out and get involved finally i want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the simsec podcast network the bilge pumps you can find alex jamie drack and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts and with that kimbers Minton. Hello, our showmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Heather Haley, and we're going to discuss her most recent article, To Make the Navy Ready to Strike the Fantastic Voyage of USS Oregon. So, Heather, welcome. This is the second one you and I are recording back to back here. So I think we're going to publish our first conversation before

on Neptune's commandments and metatraditions, the formation of the USS Alabama. I'm not going to have you reintroduce yourself all over again. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. But we'll just jump right into the questions on another. What was special about Oregon's construction? so USS Oregon the the social aspects around it are really interesting to me as a social historian um it was one of I want to say four of the United States Navy's very first battleships and uh it is BB-3 if I recall correctly um I have written since then so um those those details have escaped me. And it was constructed in California at Mare Island, which we are familiar with now

as a Navy installation. But at the time, it was kind of a relatively new installation, and it was constructed by a civilian shipbuilding company at Mare Island. And one of the reasons that all of these ships were constructed in different um yards was because of um congressional oversight all of these congress persons wanted the the the federal funding to go to their states um and so uh california put in a bid um and california they wanted to ensure congress wanted to ensure that the funding was distributed relatively evenly so you got some money up in rhode island you got some money down in norfolk and you got some money out in california so you're covering all the bases um so that's why it was in california at the time that it departs um to make

its voyage around um south america um to florida how did the navy market itself in its new battleships because it had the oregon and also had uss illinois at that point yeah so and this is like i mentioned before this is the really interesting part to me so a lot of us are familiar with the um world's columbian exposition which occurred um in illinois and of course most of us are familiar you know the great white city um and it's the the purpose of the exposition is to demonstrate the new technologies of the world um it's in some instances unfortunately also a a way to other different groups who are not technologically as advanced as others um but in the um one of the the exhibitions was a mock replica of this type of battleship

and it was the uss illinois it was not navigable um it was made out of um timber and cement and it was cemented into the lake um and you'll have to forgive me i i can't recall which lake it was in um but you could walk along the promenade in within the exhibition and you could see an exact replica of uh of the battleship oregon with its weapons with um you know navigating the inside of the mess halls and you could see the brand new steam engines and where they stored the coal and so on and so forth so if from a modern perspective um from a national security perspective that's horrifying um uh but in you know the the late very late 19th century um this was a way for the united states navy and the united states more broadly to market itself as it is becoming this

you know world power in the you know years immediately prior to um the great white fleet yeah you mentioned at the beginning that you've written since and i i should point out you've written like three things since then here so there's gonna be like one or two things that uh get get forgotten along the way here but uh you know we'll wind up talking with you about those as well. The main explodes in February 1898 and the U.S. declares war on Spain. Why did the Navy feel the need to steam Oregon all the way around to the east coast at that point? Well, it was mostly as a rallying point because Florida, as we are all aware, is 90 miles from Cuba. And so that was the greatest kind of concern was not necessarily that Cuba would invade.

But as I mentioned before, you know, this is the moment in 1898 in which the United States can demonstrate how this actually works. So, and the Oregon departs San Francisco in March of 1898. And this is also a moment in which the Navy needs to learn logistics on an international kind of scale, which they've already kind of experienced to some degree going into, you know, the Philippines and into that region. but in this is the first one of the very first instances when they're going down the west coast um going north to south across the equator through the Straits of Magellan um which is um kind of this little archipelago straight through the tip of South America and then all the way up to Florida so I think it's Jupiter Inlet Florida is where where it ends up in the end um and so

along that journey the navy needs to establish not only um kind of an international presence but needs to establish logistical relations to acquire coal because um oregon is a steam a coal-fired steam engine um that um while it only goes 16 knots which i want to say is an appallingly small mile per hour for for its time that was that was incredibly fast um and ultimately it completes this perilous journey in 66 days um going full bore as fast as it can stopping i want to say twice along the west coast um it makes a very interesting stop in the Straits of Magellan because there were rumors or he had received the the captain had received a telegram that the Spanish had a ship in Brazil uh and it was on its way to you know

come find you and so it kind of the USS Oregon kind of hung out hung around the Straits for a couple of days just to make sure that that did not in fact happen while it recalled and then continued along its way so it's the journey itself was kind of the first of its kind um in the sense of going from west to east even though we're more familiar with the east to west i just finished reading the wager by david grand so for the listeners uh we we are working on bringing him on the podcast and that whole book is about a british sailing vessel uh attempting to get through the straits of magellan and that book is a very uh representative of why it's a big deal to steam a ship through the Straits of Magellan and just how bad that water space is.

But when we think about long trips to battle, the one side most frequently by people who study naval history or naval history adjacent is the Russian Baltic Fleet's journey that culminated in the crushing defeat in Tsushima Strait. So that was a seven-month journey from the Baltic all the way around. 29,000 kilometers is what I found as I was looking online. I would have to do the translation to figure out what that is in nautical miles. But why was the Oregon's trip seven years earlier than that so much more successful? And thank you for the information about the wager.

I'm going to have to read that for sure. I think one of the main reasons is probably timing. While Oregon was a brand new ship, I think it had maybe a month to do a shakedown. uh and i think that was done bremerton washington i think um going from san francisco to bremerton and back um just to you know get its sea legs because this was also not a battleship as as we are accustomed to it was like a coastal battleship so it's not as though it could go out deep into the pacific right that wasn't the that wasn't the intention and so i think um staying along the coast was really helpful um the uh captain did publish his memoir after the fact um which of course

lends itself to romantic kind of romantic tales of uh seamanship um so when you spoke earlier about the the wager and um the kind of perilousness of the journey itself uh actually his memoir lends to that because uh the captain whose name is escaping me uh he he does comment a couple of times of um intense fog because you're in a different hemisphere so it's opposite in terms of weather um although in march it's going to be hopefully the same temperature but it'll be fall-ish in the in the southern and so um but there was immense fog um he talked about uh incessantly about the rock formations and how he's trying to navigate through there and so uh and there's also a really great timeline uh in his in his memoir about documenting how long it took to

get through each of these stretches and getting through the Straits of Magellan was arguably the longest part despite having to stop and wait to ensure that the Spanish weren't um going to uh going to attack them um but offhand I would I would probably say that it was timing um the you know threat of Spain uh potentially uh just the the the state of politics in Cuba and the threat of the caribbean war at large writ at large um which was going to be at the united states kind of economic interest at the time i would probably argue was going to be the kind of defining difference i also don't know what kind of ship was involved um in the baltic fleet journey but this was this was the the latest you know american technology um and you had mentioned

that was seven years earlier. So I imagine that one was also like a trans global voyage. So that was also something to that as well. So I would lend 10 towards just the speed with which they traveled, the ship itself, and of course, the competency of the captain to make the decisions to take it a little bit slower through the Straits of Magellan. What was the result of oregon's journey well ultimately it met up with other vessels in uh south florida and it was not it was more celebrated in the national press because 66 days like that's two just over two months um without the panama canal this is pre obviously pre-panama canal so it has to and it's got to sit here and and identify coaling stations and ensure that it's it's prepared with the

correct provisions because there was a situation in which um they couldn't get fresh water into the um boilers and so uh again in in the like i mentioned before in the romantic literature of the time um the captain discusses how the the crew gave up their fresh water for the boilers so that it would go full steam ahead and things of that nature. But it became heavily publicized in the New York Times and then in other presses, San Francisco Chronicle, as you might imagine, that, oh my goodness, this ship can go from one end of the country to the other through different hemispheres, through other continents,

in this miraculous amount of time. And so it was it was I looked at this less in terms of its resulting impact with the with the state of Spain and its holdings in Cuba and more as this kind of technological kind of marvel. And I would have to say that one of my research interests that kind of came out of this is looking into the shipbuilders themselves, like to what degree are these shipbuilders involved? And then another aspect of this is now after this, there is even more conversation with Congress and with the presidency ultimately to create the canal. where is the canal going to go because there was um this was of course the gilded age and there were a number of different corporations that had interests construction corporations that had interests in various parts of latin america and so nicaragua was another area that was considered to create a canal and so there was you know we go into that a little bit in in this um article

But as we know, ultimately, it lands itself in Panama. So this, you know, there is interest in reducing the time even more with the establishment of a canal, you know, going from one end of the country to the other. And who knows, 30 days, which at the time was absolutely phenomenal. Well, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Heather Haley. Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me on Twitter. My handle is at Gallifreyan. So G-A-L-L-I-F-R-A-E-A-N. And all of you Doctor Who fans out there will know what that means. And as I mentioned before, I'm with the Naval History and Heritage Command, and I am actually just completed a project on commemorating the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948. And as you can tell, I'm really interested in historical context and the social kind of aspect of everything.

And so my my research question for that project was why 1948? Why when there's this exodus in American society generally, why when American women are retreating to suburbia? How did Congress allow women to serve in perpetuity in the services? I look at the Navy as an example. And so be on the lookout for that in the next couple of weeks. We will keep a sharp eye out for that. I have just the host that I think would be fascinated to talk with you about it once it gets published. So thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. I'm gonna be out of here.

I'm gonna be out of here. I'm gonna be out of here.