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The Naval Aviation Ready Room Podcast with Ryan Keys
From the Rigging to the Reactor: How the US Navy Learned to Win
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In this Footnotes of History mini-episode of The Ready Room Podcast, retired Navy Captain Tim "Lucky" Kinsella explores the long and occasionally embarrassing journey of how the United States Navy realized that professional officers require a formal education. Moving from 1775 to the modern era, the episode examines the philosophical battle between heroism and regulation, and the institutional resistance to every major technological shift from steam power to nuclear reactors.
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His ship was on fire. It's taken on water. Half his crew is dead. The two ships are locked yardarm to yardarm. And the British captain yelled over if Jones was ready to surrender. And Jones reportedly shouted back, I have not yet begun to fight. His ship sank after the battle. It was so badly damaged, he'd fought so long and so hard that his own vessel gave up the ghost. But yet he won't.
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You know, the big battles, the famous names, the headlines. But what about the stories history forgot? I'm Ryan Keys, host of the Ray Room Podcast, and in this special series, Footnotes of History, retired Navy Captain Tim Kinsella discusses the obscure, the overlooked, and sometimes downright unbelievable chapters of military history. Here's lucky.
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Let's go back to 1845. The United States of America has been a nation for nearly 70 years. It has a president, a Congress, a Supreme Court, a standing army with its own military academy at West Point, which has been turning out trained officers since way back in 1802. And its navy, well, the Navy has been juicing officers for decades by essentially putting boys on wooden ships crewed by salty dogs and just hoping for the best. So today, we're going to go on a long, wild, and occasionally deeply embarrassing journey through the history of how the United States Navy figured out, slowly, painfully, and sometimes at great human cost, that if you want professional officers, you might actually have to educate them. We're going to talk about mutinies, steam engines, ironclads, nuclear reactors, and one of the most consequential bits of legislation in modern American military history. We will go from 1775 all, all the way to the present day. So let's set sail. October 13, 1775. The Continental Congress authorizes the fitting out of two armed vessels as the birthday of the United States Navy. And the first problem is immediately obvious. It's one thing to fit them out, it's another thing to man them. You have decided to fight the greatest naval power on Earth, and you need officers to lead these crews right now. So you take whoever you can get. Merchant captains, privateers, deserters from European navies, men who spent their lives at sea for commercial reasons and now find themselves in charge of warships. Some are extraordinary and some are not. And out of that chaos, two figures emerge who set the philosophical tone for American naval officership for the next two centuries. Actually, I'd say all the way to today. The first should be well known to you. His name is John Paul Jones. Jones was obsessed not just with fighting, but with the character of a naval Officer. In a letter to the Marine Committee of Congress in 1775, he wrote what amounts to the founding document of American naval professionalism. And I'm going to bring in a guest to read this out for you. So, quote, it is by no means enough that an officer of the Navy should be a capable mariner. He must be that, of course, but also a great deal more. He should be as well, a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy and the nicest sense of personal honour. Thank you very much, Sean. I appreciate that. That was my good friend Sean Connery, who just came in to do that, because, of course, John Paul Jones is himself a Scotsman. So, liberal education, punctilious courtesy, the nicest sense of personal honor. This is 1775, and Jones is writing the mission statement for the United States Naval Academy, a full 70 before anyone builds it. That anecdote that captures him best during the 1779 battle between his ship, the Bonhomme Richard and the British Serapis. You know the battle I'm talking about, or at least if you know naval history, you will. It's where his ship was on fire, it's taken on water, half his crew is dead. The two ships are locked yardarm to yardarm. And the British captain yelled over if Jones is ready to surrender. And Jones reportedly shouted back, I have not yet begun to fight. His ship sank after the battle. It was so badly damaged, he'd fought so long and so hard that his own vessel gave up the ghost. But yet he won. That ethos, character and education as inseparable. He burned it into the American naval soul. The second founding figure is Commodore John Barry. Irish, born from County Wexford, the first officer commissioned in the permanent peacetime US Navy in 1794, where Jones gave the officer corps its soul, Barry gave it its skeleton. He understood that heroism alone was not enough. You needed regulations, you needed a system. Barry worked extensively on articles for the Government of the Navy, the foundational document governing discipline and conduct. Ranks, responsibilities, the chain of command, the stuff that sounds dull until your ship is on fire and you need to know whose job it is to do what. A contemporary wrote of Barry, quote, he was distinguished by his coolness and intrepidity in action and by his strict attention to discipline and order, unquote. So by the early 19th century, you have two philosophical pillars. From Jones, the educated officer of character. From Barry, the structured, regulated, professional corps. The question is how you actually produce such people. The honest answer for most of the early republic is you don't. Not systematically the standard method was the midshipman system. A boy of 10, 11, 12 would be put aboard a warship and would learn by doing. It was all up to the captain of that ship to teach those midshipmen navigation by practicing it, gunnery by firing guns, seamanship by climbing, rigging in all weathers, a genuine risk to life and limb. Nelson went to sea at 12. The sea itself was the academy. And there were some formal elements. There was a small school at the Washington Navy Yard and a naval school in Philadelphia. But it was all very patchy, it was inconsistent, and it was entirely dependent on what ship you served on and what captain you happened to find yourself under. So why did this go on so long? Well, there was three reasons. First, there was ideology. Many officers genuinely believed that seamanship could only be learned at sea. You couldn't teach a man the smell of a coming storm in a classroom. Second, there was Republican politics. A permanent naval academy smacked to many years of a self perpetuating military aristocracy that reminded them of the Royal Navy and third and most practically Congress. They just didn't want to spend the money until the Summers. So the summers, what was the Summers? The Summers was a brig commissioned in 1842. A brig is a two masted sailing ship and the Summers was specifically built as a training ship for midshipmen. Her commander was Alexander Slidell. Mackenzie was a respected officer and among his 120 men was a midshipman named Philip Spencer. He was 19 years old, son of the Secretary of War, and by all accounts, a complete nightmare. He was expelled from two colleges, he drank excessively, he gambled, he kept getting second chances because his father was a cabinet secretary. It's a classic case of nepotism, creating a problem the institution then has to manage. So on a voyage back from Africa In November in 1842, Mackenzie received reports that Spencer had been holding secret meetings with crew members. A note was found written in Greek, which Spencer apparently thought would keep it secret. But a lot of people read Greek in those days. And the note outlined what appeared to be a plan to mutiny, seize the ship, murder the officers and turned pirate. Mackenzie arrested Spencer and two enlisted men then at sea. With no legal authority and no formal trial, he convened a corps of his own officers. They found the men guilty and Mackenzie ordered them hanged from the yardarm. On December 1, 1842, Philip Spencer, son of the Secretary of War, was hanged at sea for mutiny. The scandal was enormous. It was in headlines on every paper in the country. The court martial acquitted Mackenzie, but the moral and legal questions were never settled. Herman Melville, the great author, was so disturbed by the case, it directly influenced Billy Budd, a great novella about the agonies of naval justice. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a great movie. Watch it. It's a good one. But here's the thing. The Summer's Affair did what years of reasonable argument had failed to do. It shocked Congress into action. If a dedicated training ship could dissolve into apparent mutiny in a matter of weeks, then what did that say about the system? Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, one of the finest historians America had produced up to that point. While he had been pushing for a naval academy for years, the summers handed him his moment. With considerable political skill and a certain amount of bureaucratic sleight of hand, he used existing army appropriations, bit of irony, repurposed an army post at Fort Severn in Annapolis, another bit of irony, and presented Congress with a fait accompli. The naval school opened in 1845. It became the United States Naval Academy five years later. In 1850. Bancroft wrote that his purpose was to give naval officers, quote, a thorough knowledge of their profession combined with a substantial education. The ghost of John Paul Jones, I'm sure, was nodding somewhere. So here's the delicious irony in it all, though. Just as the Naval Academy was opening its doors to train the officers in the art of sailing warships, the world was changing under everyone's feet. The resistance of naval officers to steam power is one of the great examples of institutional conservatism in history. Almost comically stubborn, early steam engines were genuinely they were just awful bad. They broke down constantly, they consumed prodigious quantities of coal, and paddle wheels were vulnerable to enemy fire. Secretary of the Navy Abel upshur wrote in 1842 that steam vessels were useful auxiliaries, but could never replace sail as the primary weapon of naval war. And there was a cultural dimension as well. Seamanship, reading the wind, handling sails, navigating by the stars was the defining skill of the naval officer. Steam threatened to make it obsolete. You can imagine how popular that was. But the world had a way of not caring about the feelings of naval officers. Trust me, I know. In 1845, the very year Annapolis opened, the British tied the ship HMS Rattler, a screw steamer, stern to stern with the paddle steamer Alecto. In a tug of war trial, both engines at full power, Rattler pulled alecto backwards at 2.8 knots. So then the age of paddle wheel was over overnight. Then came the Battle of Kinburn in the Crimean War in 1855, where wooden warships bombarded Russian iron plated batteries for hours and the shells simply blew, bounced off. France launched the ship La Gloire, the world's first oceangoing ironclad. And in 1859, Britain answered with HMS Warrior. In 1860, you can actually still go see the Warrior at Portsmouth in the uk. It's fantastic. It's so wonderful. It's like stepping back in history and the American Navy. Well, the American Navy was still mostly sailing, but then came the Civil War. On March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad Virginia, rebuilt from the captured Merrimack, steamed into Hampton Roads and devastated the Union wooden fleet. She rammed the Cumberland, pounded the Congress into surrender and shrugged off hours and hours and hours of cannon fire. Over 430 Union dead. It was the worst day for the US Navy since the War of 1812. The next morning, the USS Monitor arrived and fought the Virginia to a standstill. Two bizarre looking iron vessels hammering each other while bewildered wooden warships watched from a safe distance. It looked like science fiction to the people looking on. And after Hampton Roads, no serious person could argue for wood and sail anymore. The question was what iron and steam meant for how you trained officers. The answer was a lot more formal training. Steam engines, armor plate, rifled guns, torpedoes. These were engineering problems. A gentleman mariner who learned his trade in a gale couldn't simply pick up naval engineering as he went along. Annapolis adapted slowly, but conversant wasn't enough. And then here's another question nobody was really asking in 1880, but probably should have been. Do senior naval officers know how to think strategically? Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce. He asked that question and the answer he got was no. Emphatic no. So in 1884 he proposed, and Congress approved, the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode island, the first institution of its kind in the entire world. Not a school for junior officers learning to handle ships, but a school for senior officers learning how to think. And Luce hired as his first lecturer in naval history and tactics a captain named, and you may have heard of this guy, Alfred thayer Mahan. Mahan's 1890 book, the Influence of Sea Power upon History. It changed the world. His argument was that great nations become great through sea power. Controlled the trade routes, and he controlled everything. Britain's dominance was a product of naval supremacy. Mahan wrote, quote, sea power in the broad sense includes not only the military strength afloat that rules the sea or any part of it by force of arms, but also the peaceful commerce and shipping, from which alone a military fleet naturally and healthfully springs the book was so successful that Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered a copy placed in every ship of the Imperial German Navy. The Japanese studied it intensively. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Mahan calling it a very good book and saying he agreed with the general principles, which coming from Roosevelt, was practically a standing ovation. The War College's effect on the Second World War was direct and profound. Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, the commanders of the Pacific Fleet had all attended Newport. Admiral Chester Nimitz said the War College's pre war study of a hypothetical Pacific conflict against Japan was so accurate that the only thing they got wrong was kamikazes. The College had war game, the Pacific War before it actually happened. And that is what decades of serious professional education looks like when it pays off. So the 20th century, it didn't just change naval warfare, it actually complicated it profoundly and irreversibly. And every wave of new technology forced the education question open again. I think aviation is a perfect illustration of that. In November 1910, a naval officer named Eugene Ely flew a biplane off a wooden platform on the bow of the USS Birmingham. Two months later, he landed on a platform built on the USS Pennsylvania, the first arrested landing on a warship. He'd invented carrier aviation before anyone had actually even built a carrier. The Navy bought its first aircraft in 1911 and immediately ran into the same institutional problem it had faced with steam 60 years earlier. This technology required a completely different kind of officer. You couldn't learn to fly by going aloft to reef a topsail. It required formal, dedicated training. And that is why the Navy opens its aeronautics station at Pensacola, Florida in 1914. The pilots who flew at Midway in June of 1942, the men who found and hit the Japanese carriers in minutes and turned the Pacific War. They were the product of that pipeline. Lieutenant Commander John Thatch, who developed a thatch weave, a defensive tactic that let American pilots survive against the superior Japanese zero. He was an Annapolis graduate who had spent years thinking formally about aerial combat. He wrote his tactics down, he taught them. That is professional education in action. But if you want to see where the technical demands of naval officership reach their absolute, almost terrifying apex, well, we need to talk about one man, Admiral Hyman George Rickover. Rickover is one of the most singular figures in American military history. He was born in Poland in 1900. He graduated Annapolis in 1922. He was a terrible fit for the Navy of his era. He was bookish, abrasive, constitutionally incapable of deferring to anyone he thought less intelligent than himself, which was most people he was passed over for flag rank twice, but he kept working. In 1946, he was sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to study nuclear technology. The atomic bomb had just ended the war, and Rickover immediately saw what others hadn't grabbed. Nuclear fission wasn't just a weapon. It was a propulsion system. A submarine powered by a reactor wouldn't need to surface to recharge batteries. It could stay submerged for months, travel under the Arctic ice cap, redefine everything, redefine the very nature of naval warfare. He badgered, he cajoled, and he maneuvered his way into running the Navy's nuclear propulsion program. And in January 1955, the USS Nautilus transmitted four words that made history underway on nuclear power. But the nuclear submarine wasn't just a technological achievement. It was an educational challenge unlike anything the Navy had ever faced. Operating a nuclear reactor is not like operating a steam turbine. The physics are different. The consequences of error are categorically different. If you make a serious mistake with a steam engine, you might lose an engine room. If you make a serious mistake with a nuclear reactor, you lose the ship and possibly contaminate a harbor and maybe lose a city. Rickover built essentially from scratch the most rigorous officer training program in the history of the United States military. And he personally interviewed every single officer who would serve in the nuclear Navy. Everyone. Every single one. That was his guarantee to Congress. And he did that for decades. The Rickover interview became legendary. Chairs with shortened front legs so candidates were constantly sliding forward. Questions designed to be unanswerable, deliberate contradiction and insult. He was looking not just for intelligence, but for character under pressure. He was looking for honesty. On my submarine when I was a young sailor, the engineer there told me that when he went for his interview, Rick over read in his record that he was a cheerleader at the Naval Academy. So he told him to do a cheer. And the officer says, excuse me, sir, he says, do a cheer. He gave him two sheets of paper as pom poms, and this guy had to do a cheer for Rickover right there in his office. Would have loved to have seen it. But there's another story that really captures it perfectly. In 1952, Rickover interviewed a young naval officer named Jimmy Carter, later President of the United States, for the submarine program. Rickover asked about his class standing at Annapolis, and Carter said he graduated 59th out of 820. Rickover asked, did you do your best? Carter started to say yes, and then he paused. He hadn't always done his best. He said, no, sir, I didn't always do my best. Rickover stared at him for a long moment and said, why not? Carter named his autobiography why not the Best? Directly from that exchange, one more quick story. Another officer I knew went in for his interview with Rickover, and Rickover told him to make him mad. So this young officer, young midshipman, I should say, saw a model of the Nautilus on Rickover's sideboard. So he went over, picked up the Nautilus, threw it on the ground and broke it in half. Rickover stood up, yelled at him, kicked him out of the office, and two weeks later he got a letter saying that he got in. So Rickover, he wasn't just screening for technical competence, though. He demanded that absolutely. He was screening for intellectual honesty and the personal integrity that I think John Paul Jones had called for two centuries earlier. The technology had changed beyond all recognition, but the fundamental demand had not. The training he built put officers through a year of nuclear physics, reactor engineering, thermodynamics and material science at graduate school depth. Then they went to a prototype reactor to run it, and then to sea. He reviewed technical documents personally. He descended into shipyards to interrogate welders about their procedures. He would cancel a submarine's commissioning if a single valve was installed backward, because in a nuclear submarine, a backward valve, it could kill 120 men. In over 60 years of operation, the United States Nuclear Navy has never had a reactor accident, not one. Hundreds of thousands of reactor operating hours, zero accidents. And that is not luck. That is the payoff of a professional culture that treats excellence as non negotiable. Rickover wrote in 1954. And this is remarkable For a man often caricatured as a pure technocrat, the aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think than what to think, rather to improve our minds so as to enable us to think for ourselves than to load the memory with thoughts of other men, unquote. How to think, not what to think. John Paul Jones, 1775. Hyman Rickover, 1954. The same idea separated by 179 years and a nuclear reactor. But now there's one last chapter to education, military education. And it takes a disaster or two of them to get there. In 1980, Operational Eagle Claw, the Iran hostage rescue ended in catastrophic failure in the Iranian desert. Eight dead. The mission collapsed partly because army, navy, air force and marine units that had never trained together using incompatible procedures and radios, were expected to execute a complex special operation. And it failed. Three years later, during the invasion of Granada, army officers had to use civilian phone lines to call in naval gunfire because their radios weren't compatible with naval frequencies. One officer reportedly used his personal credit card to call in air support. The Goldwater Nichols Defence Reorganization act of 1986. It changed all that. Buried within a sweeping military restructuring was a provision with profound implications for officer education. For the first time, joint professional military education became a statutory requirement for promotion to senior ranks. You wanted to make flag officer? Well, you had to have attended joint education, studied, worked alongside and genuinely understood the other services. The Naval War College and its sister institutions became mandatory milestones. The effects were felt within a decade. The 1991 Gulf War was executed with a jointness that would have been unrecognizable at Granada. The Air Force, the Navy, the army and the Marines operated from the same playbook. Professional education mandated joint rigorous. It had made the military better at its job. So where does all this leave us today? 250 years of the United States Navy, from John Paul Jones writing about liberal education and punctilious courtesy in 1775 to Goldwater Nichols making joint education a statutory requirement in 1986. From teenage midshipmen learning seamanship in a gale to nuclear submariners mastering reactor physics at graduate school depth, from the summer's mutiny that shamed Congress into building an academy to desert one that shamed Congress into requiring joint education, the pattern is strikingly consistent. The Navy learns the hard way. A crisis exposes a gap. The gap leads to an educational reform. Better officers emerge. They encounter a new kind of warfare, a new kind of world. And the cycle begins again. Jones wanted educated officers in 1775, and it took until 1845 to build the institution to produce them. The Navy resisted steam until the Monitor and Merrimack made resistance embarrassing. It resisted strategic thinking until Luce built a strategic thinking school and hired Mahan to teach in it. It resisted aviation until Eli landed a biplane in a battleship. And it might have resisted nuclear power, too, if Hyman Rickover hadn't been too stubborn, too brilliant and too furious to be ignored. And every time, when the Navy eventually embraced change, reluctantly, under pressure and often at great cost, it produced officers capable of extraordinary things. Nimitzena's war games, the Pensacola aviators who flew at Midway, Rickover's nuclear submariners who have operated the most dangerous machines in human history for 60 years without a single reactor accident. The joint force that dismantled the Iraqi army in 100 hours. In 1991, Admiral Luce wrote, quote, nothing is more fatal to the Navy than being behind the times, not behind the times in material alone, but behind the times in thought. Behind the times in thought. That's the real enemy. Not rival navies, not better technology. The comfortable certainty that what worked before will work again. Rickover said the same thing his own way, stripped of Jones's gentlemanly elegance, but carrying exactly the same the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. Unquote. The same idea 200 years apart. One from a Scottish born revolutionary hero, one from an abrasive Polish born admiral who personally interviewed every officer who ever touched one of his reactors. They didn't always succeed, but they kept trying. And you know what? Trying is the point. Because the day we stopped learning, well, that's the day we're six foot under. So thanks for joining me as we explored the part of history that happened before, the history that everyone remembers. Until next time, my friends.
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Thanks for tuning in to the Ready Rooms miniseries Footnotes of History, hosted by Captain Tim Kinsella, where you experience the obscure, the overlooked and often unbelievable chapters of military history. Don't forget to like subscribe and leave a five star review. Fly Navy.