Hard Aground: The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy

"[Hard Aground] tells three interconnected stories which together highlight many of the challenges that the U.S. Navy faced in its strategic and material evolution following the end of the Civil War and through the First World War, with lasting consequences for how the navy would modernize itself further throughout the rest of the 20th century. One story concerns the reconstruction of the U.S. Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. That rebuilding began barely in time for the navy's campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and for its role in the First World War that followed. During this period, Andrew Jampoler argues, the federal government discovered, much to its dismay, that the Navy had asked for, Congress had paid for, and American industry had built the wrong fleet - battleships and cruisers, big ships with big guns, rather than destroyers and other smaller combat vessels needed to hunt submarines and serve as convoy escorts. It was a fleet that managed to be effective nonetheless, but only by dint of the fact that British and German naval planners had made similar miscalculations, as well. The second is the short and ultimately tragic story of U.S.S. Tennessee (later renamed Memphis), one of the steel-hulled ships of the new Armored Cruiser Squadron that was a centerpiece of this modernization effort. The history of this particular vessel serves as the lens that highlights the key developments recounted by Jampoler in the remainder of the narrative. The U.S.S. Tennessee was ordered on two unusual missions in the early months of World War I, long before the United States formally entered the war. The first was carrying tons of gold coin to England to bail out Americans stranded on the Continent when the fighting started. The second was a mission to the eastern Mediterranean, transporting thousands of desperate refugees from the Holy Land to safety in Egypt when Turkey entered the war. These little-known missions, and the sudden destruction of the ship by a storm surge in the Caribbean off Santo Domingo, are the centerpieces of the story. Threaded through the narrative are biographical sketches of the principal players in the drama that unfolded following the ship's demise. They include two of Tennessee's commanding officers; Vice Admiral Sims, who commanded the U.S. Navy squadrons deployed to Europe in support of the Royal Navy; Rear Admiral William Caperton, who commanded the Caribbean squadron before the Memphis (formerly the Tennessee) was lost; Charles Pond, squadron commander during the wreck; and the American ambassador to the Ottoman court, President Wilson's enthusiastic supporter, Henry Morgenthau. Jampoler concludes with an account of how the vessel's destruction prompted fierce deliberations about the U.S. Navy's operations and chains of command for the remainder of the First World War, and about the high-level political wrangling inside the Department of the Navy immediately after the war, as civilian appointees and senior officers wrestled to re-shape the department in their image"--