Today is Navy Day, the traditional day when the United States celebrated the greatest Navy on Earth.1 Until 1949, it was traditionally a day of naval reviews and open houses for ships. That year, the Secretary of Defense, as part of his campaign against the Navy,2 ordered USN participation in Navy Day ended in favor of Armed Forces Day.
Iowa and Maryland in Seattle for Navy Day 1945
Today is also the first anniversary of Naval Gazing as an independent blog. It's been a great year. I've enjoyed writing, and reading the comments on the blog. And the degree of engagement has blown me away. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting. It makes this worth it.
A few people deserve special thanks. Said Achmiz has hosted me and dealt with my requests for technical support. Dndnrsn, Nornagest, and LordNelson have proofread and offered suggestions for how to make my posts better. DismalPseudoscience graciously shared his experience at the Mikasa. And a surprising number of people were willing to meet some guy from the internet and follow him around a warship.
There are going to be some changes going forward. I started this to stay sane when I was new to Oklahoma and didn't have a lot going on. That's changed to some extent, and I'm planning to scale back my time commitment somewhat. I'm not going to promise to fill the Friday slot, and minor stuff that was in that slot might migrate to the Sunday and Wednesday ones. But if I come up with something I can write really fast (an hour or so) or if I get guest contributions, I'll put them there. I actually have stuff scheduled for it almost through the end of the year (including a repost of the stuff I did on commercial aviation last year), so the change won't be noticeable for a while.
But long-term, I'd like to open up that slot to my readers. A lot of you have good sea stories or have been to museums/airshows/whatever that I haven't. If you're interested, send me an email at battleshipbean at gmail. I won't totally rule out taking contributions on technical/historical topics either, although I'm going to be somewhat pickier about those.
Another thing I plan to do to partially make up for the gap is to overhaul older posts. I've done this on an ad hoc basis since the beginning, but every week or so I plan to go through the posts that are about a year old and update links (mostly to relevant articles written after the original), add any new tidbits I've picked up since I wrote them and maybe do a bit of general maintenance. I'll probably announce them in the OTs as I go.
A few minor things before I wrap this up. First, I've added a new and hopefully better index and a Top Posts page. Second, I've gotten a lot of good topic ideas from readers, many of which sadly are still languishing on my idea list. If anyone has anything they'd particularly like me to look at, this is a good place to let me known.
But to everyone, thanks for a great year, and I look forward to the next one.
1 October 27th was chosen as it was Theodore Roosevelt's birthday. ⇑
2 Johnson, under the sway of the newborn Air Force, apparently believed that naval forces were obsolete. He also cancelled the supercarrier United States, provoking the famous Revolt of the Admirals. Fortunately, Korea showed the error of his ways before the damage was too great. ⇑
Comments
It's been a year already?!? Thank you for all the education over the last year!
I have really enjoyed this blog, Bean. It is fascinating and always informative, which is hard to find in the world of web 2.0 . Your passion really shows through, and has made it easy to get hooked on some of the aspects of naval warfare that I never gave any though to before. Fire control in particular stands out as one of my favorites: It was a topic I was totally unacquainted with, but your posts on it were informative and written in a way that made the subject very accessible.
It has been a great year for your readers as well, and we certainly hope you enjoy this next one just as much.
Thank you both. I really do need to write more about fire control...