"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:"

This line from the Declaration of Independence, which we have just celebrated the 250th anniversary of, comes from the practice of trying certain cases relating to navigation, smuggling and the Stamp Act of 1765 in Vice-Admiralty Courts. These operated under a completely different legal system from that of the standard Common Law, and as you can guess from the quote, didn't have juries. From the perspective of actually getting the law enforced, this made a great deal of sense. In the nascent United States, the Stamp Act was wildly unpopular, as it imposed taxes on various kinds of goods to support British troops stationed in North America after the Seven Years War. Local juries would simply refuse to convict even obvious violations, so the Vice-Admiralty courts where judges from England could deliver verdicts directly were the obvious place to turn. And also an obvious instrument of repressive tyranny that fully justified the Revolution.

But how did it get to the point that there was this entirely separate system of laws that the British could turn to when they needed to bypass local juries? The idea of there being a separate Admiralty law, common among nations, is so old that nobody is quite sure how old it is. Nineteenth-century legal scholars often traced its origins to a code dating to 900 BC on the island of Rhodes, although there's not a ton of evidence that there was a coherent law code dating back quite that far. However, we do have references to a "Rhodian law" in a Roman law text from the third century AD, the idea that if some part of a vessel's cargo has to be jettisoned in an emergency, the loss will be shared among everyone who had cargo aboard. Astonishingly, this principle, known as General Average, continues to be part of maritime law today. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Jackie Fisher, Auxiliaries Part 2, Impressment, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and for 2025, my reviews of Fort Point and Nike Site SF88, Thoughts on the Israel-Iranian War and The Tanker War Part 1.

On Friday, October 13th, 1944, TF 38 was conducting strikes off the coast of Formosa (now Taiwan). It was the second and final day of an operation to wipe out Japanese air strength on the island in preparation for the upcoming landings on Leyte, and they had been reasonably successful all day. But as evening fell, a group of Japanese Betty torpedo bombers attacked, coming in so low that radar failed to spot them. Four went for the carrier Franklin and while all of their torpedoes missed, one crashed onto her deck, bursting into flames before sliding over the side.¹ Eight others bored in on heavy cruiser Canberra,² and while six were shot down by the group's AA fire, one of the torpedoes struck home, detonating at the boundary between the two aft boiler rooms. A mast-high fireball was followed by the usual geyser of water, and violent vertical vibrations ran through the hull. Both boiler rooms flooded almost immediately, leaving no survivors, and fuel oil blown out of the air intakes from boiler 4 covered the deck nearby, but fortunately didn't ignite.

Canberra with 3rd Fleet a few days before being torpedoed

But the bigger problem was that the explosion was directly under one of the bearings for shaft 1, which was ripped from the reduction gearing forward and thrown upwards and inboard, tearing holes in the bulkheads of both the fore and aft engine rooms. Water began pouring into both, filling the aft engine room in 4 minutes and the forward one in 10. Although the boilers in the forward two rooms remained intact and continued to generate power, Canberra was dead in the water. Her rudder was also jammed over, the result of a last-minute attempt to dodge the torpedo, and while the emergency diesel generator would normally have provided power to the steering gear, breakers kept tripping. Eventually, the rudder was put amidships using the ship's roll, opening the hydraulic valves on the steering gear to allow it to swing amidships, then closing them to stop it swinging back. The electrical problems were not helped by numerous leaks in spaces fore and aft of the flooded machinery spaces, as the stuffing glands for electrical cables proved to be less watertight than expected. The leaks were all controlled fairly quickly, thanks to the cruiser's highly-trained damage control team, and only a few spaces saw more than a couple inches of water. Read more...

Old Fort Niagara is a bit of an unusual site for me to cover. Despite being at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario, it's not really a coastal fort, because 20 miles up the Niagara River is Niagara Falls, which is a bit of an obstacle to navigation. Instead, it was established in 1726 by the French to control the portage route between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and dominate trade through the Great Lakes. Things were fairly quiet until the outbreak of the Seven Years War, when the British managed to capture the Fort, and ultimately all of the territory the French had in the northern portion of North America. It was an important position for the British during the American revolution, ensuring they kept a hold on the western Great Lakes. Despite the territory being given to the US at the end of the war in 1783, the British didn't withdraw until 1796, when the Jay Treaty finally convinced them to hand over the forts in the then-western portion of the US.

The fort's parade ground, from one of the towers

Website

The fort's last war was the War of 1812, when it spent a while fighting artillery duels with Fort George, its British counterpart on the other side of the Niagara River before the British managed to capture it. It was returned to the Americans after the end of the war, and while the position was improved a couple of times during tension with Britain in the rest of the 19th century, first when rebellions broke out in Canada in 1837-1838 which saw a stone wall built along the riverfront, and then during the Civil War, which saw a brick casemate wall constructed along the fort's landward side. Since then, things with Canada have been peaceful (so far), and the fort was turned into a museum. Read more...

Ever since I moved to Oklahoma, one of my favorite military museums has been the 45th Infantry Division Museum. Not because it was a brilliant example of the art of making museums, because it wasn't, but it was close and interesting and characterful, an old building bursting at the seams with occasionally random artifacts. There was a sign in it that included the line "today, as we enter the 90s", and that more or less summed up how it was. But a year ago, they closed it to move to a new facility, which they were calling the Oklahoma National Guard Museum.³ I'd been keeping an eye on progress, and made sure to show up a couple hours after it opened on Friday, June 12th, 2026.

The museum's very effective entrance

Website (Outdated)

To cut to the heart of the matter, I like the new museum less than the old one. It's not a bad museum by any means. If I was the state of Oklahoma and mostly wanted a museum as a recruiting tool for my Guard units (and also was trying to shut up the Air Guard's complaints about the pro-Army bias of the 45th Infantry Museum), I would probably be pretty happy with what I'd gotten for my money. The exhibits are generally done fairly well, it's spacious and modern and doesn't have weird dead-end rooms, and everything is freshly painted. A school field trip could go there without having to budget an hour on the back end for search parties. And the sort of corridor of vehicles in front of the building is really well-done, probably the best military museum entrance I've ever seen. Read more...

Back when I was a tour guide, people would occasionally ask me why I referred to Iowa as she. My reply was always the same. "To quote Admiral Nimitz, 'A warship is always referred to as she because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.'" It's a good line, and it almost always got a laugh, and let me move on quickly. Because the one problem is that it's not really true.

Keeping Nimitz in paint

If you ask a linguist, they'll tell you that the use of "she" for ships is a remnant of when English used to be gendered, like most European languages. But English lost that a thousand years ago or so, when Vikings and Frenchmen invaded, each bringing their own gendering system with them, and it eventually just made sense to ditch the whole thing. And that makes sense, as far as it goes, but raises the question of why it was ships that survived with their gender most strongly intact. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

The big event since I was last here was the Naval Gazing meetup in Dayton. Everyone had a great time, and I'm looking forward to next year. I also am curious how much people want me to start posting extracts from my tour script as blog posts versus waiting for me to get the audio we recorded out as a podcast with slides.

Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 3, Battleship Aviation Part 2, A Brief History of the Submarine, FFG(X), Tomahawk Parts one and four, NWAS - Poseidon, my review of Greyhound, Don't Overread Moskva and for 2024 Pentagon Wars and Procurement, Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding, my review of the Western Museum of Flight and my thoughts on Hornet and visitor experience.

And we finally come to the end of the war against both Germany and Japan, rather curiously combined into a single chapter. The start is the last gasp of the Battle of the Atlantic, which now is sharing not only with invasions in Europe but also with an entirely different ocean's war. I feel like noting that while the Type XXI and its successors were a serious problem for ASW forces postwar, the sheer number of escorts available and the inexperience of the German skippers probably made it somewhat less of a threat than it sounded like. As for the Type XXVI, hydrogen peroxide may be a relatively mild substance by the standards of rocket oxidizers, but it's still nasty, nasty stuff to be trapped in a submarine with, and I don't think the Germans would have been able to get it working as their war machine collapses, given the failures of the victorious Allies to make it functional postwar.

Back in the Pacific, we see the battleships getting into the action against the Japanese mainland, as well as the sad tale of Indianapolis, by far the most overdone story of the Pacific War relative to its importance. (I have seen libraries where their entire naval section was three SEAL memoirs and two books on this tragedy.) More fun is the discussion of the massive underway replenishment effort, a subject I've always loved. Read more...

On my last afternoon in Dayton, Nelson said that she was not interested in going back to the Air Force Museum yet again, so we went looking for other attractions in the city, and settled on Carillon Park, Dayton's main local history museum/center. Now, for most places, that's about three rooms about the city's founding fathers and some natural disaster that struck in the town in the 19th century. And, well, there was that, but there was also a lot of stuff related to Dayton's fairly astonishing history of innovation. This is the town that gave us not only the airplane, but also the cash register, the cruise missile, leaded gasoline, the electric car starter, the pull tab for cans, and even freon, as well as lots of smaller stuff.

Website

The main pavilion is focused on Dayton's engineering history, from its status as a manufacturing hub in the mid-19th century to the invention of the cash register by the company that became NCR (they have a really cool display of models sold all over the world) to more modern stuff. It was great, and made me wonder why there isn't a National Museum of Engineering, because that should totally be a thing and I would go there a lot. The exhibits were done well, and cover a lot of subjects in a way that felt accessible without being patronizing, a sadly common problem in science-type museums. Read more...

With the European war mostly closed, we move from the Philippines north into some of the best-known battles of the Pacific War. I don't have a lot to say about Iwo Jima, but was amused by his comment that Okinawa was somewhere "where American forces seem destined to remain until the cold war waxes hot or the communist menace fades." And here we are, six decades later, with the communist menace that he spoke of gone, and yet American forces remain on Okinawa.

I was also intrigued by his comments about the New York Fire Department providing the impetus for the development of fog nozzles, which I don't think came up when I wrote about the subject. I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while nothing Morison says is technically wrong, the framing is extremely weird. The fog nozzle was pushed on Adm. Cochrane at BuShips by Harold J. Burke, who was a member of the New York City Fire department, but was a Lieutenant in the Naval Reserve at the time, and he did go on to run the damage control school with Lt. Thomas Kilduff, who was formerly of the Boston Fire Department. As far as I can tell, there was no particular institutional involvement by either city's fire department in the DC school or program, which would explain why I'd never heard about this.

I certainly appreciate Morison's skillful portrait of the Okinawa landing, and of the destruction of Yamato, although I have to nitpick his comment that "not another battleship was ever built". Both Vanguard and Jean Bart were completed after the war, and I maintain that the battleship remained important for a decade or so after this. I also feel compelled to point out that the effectiveness of the armored flight decks on British carriers is overstated, and that the smaller air wings imposed by said decks meant they were hit about as often as the Americans, despite having far fewer ships.

And then we come to the horror of the kamikaze attacks on the Americans off Okinawa, one of the most brutal battles of the war. I don't have much to add to Morison's account, except to call him out for ignoring the loss of the William D. Porter, a favorite here at Naval Gazing. But with that campaign closed, next week will be our final chapter in the book.