America's Greatest Achievement at Sea

It's Fleet Week! So we asked six historians to share their thoughts on America's greatest achievement at sea. Their responses are as diverse as the sea itself.

From the canoes paddled by native peoples to the submarines that harness nuclear energy, our maritime heritage has shaped the nation's economy and scientific activity, its warmaking capability, and its arts and entertainments. That history is tied to the history of the vessels themselves. In the 1500s, fur trappers paddled throughout the Upper Midwest, extending trade surely but slowly. By the 1700s, whalers and commercial fishermen were launching new industries in boats designed for the rigors of their work. As the country matured, seamen hoisted sail on a series of majestic wooden ships, carrying American goods first coastally, then inland and ultimately worldwide. In the 1800s, inventors used steam power to propel not only riverboats but the Industrial Revolution. Twentieth-century shipbuilders conceived increasingly sophisticated craft, capitalizing on technological advances right up to the digital age. With submarines and probes, oceanographers have taken seafaring beneath the surface, leading to discoveries in pharmaceuticals, geophysics, and gas and oil exploration.

Without its ships, the United States could not have freed itself from England or maintained its freedom during the War of 1812, and it could not have created the merchant and naval fleets that have helped make it a world power. Yet that nautical heritage has enriched the nation beyond military and economic legacies: The sea has inspired generations of artists, who have enhanced our collective cultural experience through literature, cinema, music, and art. And it has called generations of recreational enthusiasts to its shores, allowing countless Americans to enjoy personal achievements at sea.

Since the overarching theme of U.S. maritime history is accomplishment, selecting one particular success to represent its influence may seem a daunting task. But we found six willing to share their thoughts with us.

The U.S.S. Wasp rams the H.M. Brig Frolic during the War of 1812.

1. Peter Stanford, president emeritus of the National Maritime Historical Society, Peekskill, N.Y., and editor at large of Sea History magazine

"American history—from its origins onward—is deeply rooted in maritime history. But World War II was a crucial time. The terrific effort of the U.S. Navy enabled an oceanic coalition to turn back the ruthless challenge of fascism, an effort that united the world by sea. It's an exciting story that grows out of our national heritage. The world really was lurching toward the catastrophe of a new Dark Ages, and the American-led coalition was a worldwide assertion of freedom's cause. Consider the enormous naval productivity generated by WWII: the advent of fleets of aircraft carriers, the 2,700 civilian Liberty ships that were called into action, to name just two examples. It proved an incredible effort—and it proved just in the nick of time."

"But it was not an achievement in a vacuum. It was the culmination of American involvement with the world, dating back to securing French help in gaining independence during the American Revolution. Seafaring engendered an attitude that allowed Americans to accept their country's intervention in world affairs. It's good to know that our actual experience in seafaring—Americans out there in the world encountering the world, experiencing other cultures—equipped the United States to play a role on the international stage. It would be helpful to have more historical analysis—and just plain thinking—about the role of maritime history in mainstream history because it is vital to the mainstream. We need to show how the sea and our traversing of it have affected people who live on land and those who have shaped the land. I'm suggesting that our maritime history is so pervasive an influence on American culture that many times it's invisible. One example I like is that of Frederick Douglass, the foremost black leader of the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. Reading his unabridged autobiography, I realized that he attained his freedom because he was exposed to the culture of the shipyards along the Maryland shores. He saw British vessels in the harbor and learned that the black men aboard them had been free for generations. Ultimately, Douglass walked to freedom by adopting the tarred hat, clothing, and personal bearing of a free black sailor. In such ways, our nautical heritage has offered the inspiration and opportunity for deeds so fundamentally new and different that they seem to come out of thin air—when in fact they are born of the challenges and disciplines of seafaring."

Liberty WWII ship SS Patrick Henry. Source: United States Library of Congress.

2. Walter P. Rybka, historic ship preservationist, captain of the U.S. Brig Niagara, and program director, Erie (Pennsylvania) Maritime Museum

"To put the question of America's greatest sea achievement into context, I must ask myself whether the achievement is representative of the nation as a whole. Many significant accomplishments strike me as the work of individuals: A handful of designers—John Willis Griffiths and Donald McKay, to name two—drove the clipper ship era in the mid-1800s. In that same time frame, Matthew Fontaine Maury charted current and weather patterns, contributing to our scientific understanding of the oceans. Other accomplishments have not been profoundly different from successes elsewhere. For example, the Colonialists developed a thriving commerce based on water-based transport, but that may have been similar to what coastal peoples in England or France achieved. 
WHAT DO YOU THINK AMERICA'S GREATEST NAVAL ACHIEVEMENT IS? Go to our FORUMS and see what others are saying. 
And to be a "greatest" achievement, the event would have to have an impact on the rest of society. Thus, our most outstanding achievement would have to be the effort to arm, equip, and train American naval forces in World War II, particularly the training. The United States produced a large and successful fleet of naval and merchant ships, and while the shipbuilding effort was significant, it was the training that really mattered—the immense transfer of knowledge necessary to take a professional peacetime navy and rapidly expand it into a force capable of achieving victory on multiple fronts all over the globe. WWII required tens of thousands of raw recruits—who had no familiarity with the marine environment—to learn seamanship, which ordinarily takes years to master."

3. Kevin Hardy, ocean engineer and centennial program director at Scripps Institution of Ocean¬ography, San Diego

"Speaking from my perspective as an ocean scientist, I would have to go with the American contributions to understanding plate tectonics as our greatest achievement at sea. Many researchers gambled their careers—and won—proving that terra firma is not firm but elastic, that the ocean floor is not featureless but continually moving, spreading, or folding under. In the 1950s and early 1960s, American researchers played a leading role in showing that the long-proposed but never-explained continental drift does occur. Those researchers adopted then-cutting-edge tools such as echo sounders and proton magnetometers to reveal that the ocean floor has an intriguing topography of mountains, ridges, escarpments, plains, and trenches. Their efforts may seem like so much basic science, but the work is paying off in valuable ways for our society. A notable example: Plate tectonics enhances our understanding of earthquakes, helping us decide where to place sensors so we can better predict seismic activity and better design and place buildings, bridges, and dams. Plus the improved knowledge of our own planet may have worthwhile analogues in space research; some evidence suggests that Venus is as much alive as the earth. Plate tectonics represents an achievement that has yet to end."

4. John Broadwater, manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Maritime Archaeology Center, Newport News, Va.

"There definitely are many possibilities when contemplating America's greatest achievement at sea. I've considered the defeat of the British frigate H.M.S. Serapis by the U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard (below), a pivotal victory for the American Revolution during which John Paul Jones uttered, 'I have not yet begun to fight.' I've thought about the extensive history of 'Old Iron-sides'—the U.S.S. Constitution."

"But I don't believe ship-to-ship actions qualify for the distinction of most remarkable achievement. So I'd have to choose our recovery after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. We were already fighting a war in Europe, with troops, ships, and other assets already committed in the Atlantic. When Pearl Harbor was devastated, the Japanese wiped out one of our major military facilities. No matter how powerful you are, that's a blow. But we recovered in both oceans by salvaging damaged ships and by building new ships. We amassed an entirely new fleet within a very short time, thanks to American industrial might—the shipbuilding industry working alongside the federal government—allowing us to pursue wars in two arenas while simultaneously building our technological capabilities at home. We had great naval leaders, but I can't discount the impact of American spirit on the achievement. Pearl Harbor terrified everybody, including the military, perhaps especially the military. World War II could have gone either way, but we came up with the goods in the right time frame."

5. Edward J. Marolda is senior historian at the U.S. Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C., and author of numerous works on the history of the U.S. Navy

"When people think of the U.S. Navy, they think of its participation in America's wars and conflicts, but the Navy has been involved in many other aspects of national life. It has played an important role in exploration—including, for example, Lt. Charles Wilkes' expedition to the Pacific and discovery of Antarctica in 1840 and Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd's (seen below) pioneering flight over the North Pole in 1926. The Navy also has contributed to scientific achievement: Adm. Hyman G. Rickover was instrumental in developing nuclear propulsion for the fleet starting in the 1950s, while in the early 20th century, Rear Adm. David W. Taylor pioneered the use of hydrodynamics for designing ships' hulls. And I must mention the naval officers who served American foreign policy as ambassadors in uniform; one of the best examples is Commodore Matthew C. Perry's so-called opening of Japan in 1854. 
Source: United States Library of Congres But the most important achievement of the U.S. Navy in its more than 225-year history has been the establishment of control, now virtually uncontested, over the world's oceans. The benefits to the United States have been many: protection of the American people from overseas threats, defense of those nations of the world that wish to share the blessings of democracy and freedom, and the ability to carry on oceangoing trade with free market countries around the globe."

6. Raymond Ashley, executive director and head curator, San Diego Maritime Museum, and professor of public history, University of San Diego

"It seems to me that the greatest achievement of the United States at sea is the achievement of maritime supremacy itself. I say that philosophically, in the sense that mastery of the sea is not merely a means to the achievement of specific national objectives (such as balance of trade or administration of empire) but is an end in itself and is interwoven inextricably within the fabric of national culture. The great naval historian at Duke University, Theodore Ropp, postulated a thesis further developed more recently by Clark Reynolds and Peter Padfield, that there have really only been four great sea powers in all of history: ancient Athens, the Venetian Republic of the Renaissance, the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, and the British Empire. These have also been the four great democracies; furthermore, their greatest achievements as democracies—in terms of science, technology, art, literature, architecture—also happened to coincide with their achievement of maritime supremacy. Other nations have embraced components of maritime supremacy, notably China, Portugal, Spain, and Japan, but none has subsumed it so completely within its national worldview. Arguably, the United States offers the fifth and perhaps the greatest combination of these attributes—the development of a maritime state that devoted and still devotes enormous maritime resources just in trading with itself. The thesis, then, is that democracy is linked to mastery of the sea. The relationship is fostered by the purpose of maritime mastery, which is to promote and encourage the exchange of people, things, and ideas across vast and formidable distances, combined with the national will to ensure that a maritime state is never deprived of those connections by anyone else. Connectivity is not acceptable to closed authoritarian societies, nor is it easy for a maritime state to forcibly impose hostile occupation over a continental power for any great period of time. Navies and merchant marines are essentially instruments for achieving economic and technological hegemony and not well suited for imposing tyranny."

What is interesting about the American case is that the apogees of naval power and mercantile power did not coincide. In fact, the slow decline of our merchant marine from 1850, when we were close to achieving world dominance, to today, when our own merchant marine provides a negligible proportion of our oceanic trade, coincides almost perfectly with the rise of American naval power. It appears that maritime supremacy is a dynamic construct whose form may change in adaptation to the political and geographic context, but which remains embedded in the notion of national identity and aspiration. That we have been able to make this work so well in so many different ways is perhaps our greatest achievement at sea.