The system of feeding sailors used during the Napoleonic Wars persisted mostly unchanged until the late 19th century. Canning was first developed during those wars, and began to see widespread use in the middle of the century, somewhat improving the typical diet at sea. And while refrigeration went to sea in the 1880s, it was reserved exclusively for cargo. The men who ran the ships wouldn't be able to benefit from it for another decade. One early beneficiary was the cruiser Olympia, which commissioned with a steam-powered icemaker in 1895.

A crew mess aboard USS Olympia

By 1902, the USN had abandoned the traditional mess system in favor of the general mess, which centralized cooking under the ship's staff instead of each mess preparing food and bringing it to the galley to be cooked. This was an attempt to address many of the problems of the old "berth-deck mess", although the men were still divided into messes, who mostly ate in the same spaces they slept in. The mess manual from that year is interesting reading. Some of the points emphasized included that the general mess included every enlisted man except the chief petty officers and the officer's stewards,¹ and that petty officers were to be broken up into different messes to remove the chance of favoritism. Any form of gratuity to the cooks is banned,² and it is emphasized that the general mess is run by the Navy, and not by the men, and that the legal value of rations (30 cents a day) couldn't be drawn by the men and used to buy supplies for their own preparation. This was a common feature of the berth-deck messing system still used by the British, which issued rations almost unchanged from Nelson's day. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval/military related.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, possibly my favorite blog currently publishing, had a good post on the case for the humanities. I'm from a STEM background, and while I don't agree with a lot of pro-humanities arguments (engineering classes aren't just a sequence of math problems), this one hits the nail on the head.

Also, cassander is looking for a defense analyst with experience in the aerospace sector or data science. It’s in Washington DC, and if you’re interested or know anyone who might be, take a look at the job description.

Lastly, I'm still interested in doing a Naval Gazing Zoom meetup, probably the week of the 19th (the moving truck comes about two hours after this post goes live). If anyone else is interested, speak up.

2018 overhauls are Rangefinding, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 2, The Great White Fleet Part 1, , my review of Batfish and Falklands Part 4. 2019 posts updated are dndnrsn's reviews of Bavarian military museums, Rangekeeping Part 2, Impressment, my review of the WWI Museum in Kansas City, and Signalling Parts one and two.

World War II saw a revolution in naval warfare. The big gun gave way to the airplane as the weapon of decision, and radar and amphibious warfare entered the picture. But the last naval battle of the war was something very different, the last action fought under sail.

The USN had been operating in China for decades, and in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, it took the lead in American aid to China's guerilla war against Japan. The resulting Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) had a number of roles. It initially was tasked with setting up a network of weather stations, as the weather over the western Pacific generally forms over China. But many areas were occupied by the Japanese, and SACO ended up training Chinese guerillas to protect the weather stations, which quickly led into wider involvement with the war behind Japanese lines. SACO groups trained saboteurs and ran coastwatcher stations with both American and Chinese personnel that passed Japanese shipping movements to submarines and airplanes. Read more...

Reader Mike Kozlowski has been kind enough to write up a review of Fort Monroe, erected to guard the entrance to Hampton Roads, Virginia.³

From the day it was first garrisoned in 1823, Fort Monroe (originally Fortress Monroe, with construction overseen by one Lieutenant Robert E. Lee) has been known as ‘the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake’ - the centerpiece of one of the most complex sets of coastal fortifications ever built. The largest moated structure on the planet, it was the greatest of the Third System forts and has survived remarkably unchanged to the present. An active US Army post until 2011, it was immediately designated a National Historic Landmark by President Obama and has been maintained as such since. Read more...

I recently decided to watch the movie Pearl Harbor. I wish I could blame alcohol for this decision, but unfortunately I don't drink. It was fairly painful. Major errors so far: why did you label the air base as being on Long Island when you are extremely obviously somewhere in California? Lots of use of an Iowa for battleship backgrounds, almost certainly Missouri. And in the background of many of those shots are what are extremely obvious Knox class frigates. In some cases, it's just the mack, in others, it's the whole ship. This is almost painful to watch. They don't look like ships of that era. Then there was a comment about "I don't understand how two whole carrier divisions can just disappear". The next shot? A bunch of CVNs with extremely obvious angled decks, and at least one Burke. I do not think you understand how this works. Spy camera shots of modern ships. Those ships are named for someone who is still an active-duty Admiral. And the flyover of a redressed Essex as a Japanese aircraft carrier, with planes taking off over the stern. Why? Oh, and the radar screen they show has a PPI. Not at that time. Read more...

During the first half of the 19th century, the US developed probably the most sophisticated and advanced system of coastal defenses in the world, a system which largely failed its test during the American Civil War. But coastal defenses were hardly limited to America, and the events of the Civil War were presaged by another war a decade earlier, on the other side of the world.⁴

Fort Alexander, a sea fort near Kronstadt

When Peter the Great established St. Petersburg in 1703, his intention was to give Russia an outlet to the rest of the world via the Baltic. Unfortunately, sea access works both ways, and one of his first actions was to set up fortifications on Kronstadt, 30 miles to the west of the city, to control the channels leading to his new capital. The Swedish, Russia's main enemy at the time, quickly began their own program of coastal defenses, composed not only of fortifications, most notably Sveaborg outside of modern-day Helsinki, but also a dedicated "archipelago fleet" of galleys and other coastal vessels under separate command from the main navy. After several wars throughout the 18th century, Russia finally took Finland in 1808, capturing Sveaborg after a short siege from the landward side. By this point, in a mental leap peculiar to Russia, the existing defenses of Kronstadt, despite being modernized to keep pace with changing technology, needed forward defenses to protect them, turning the entire Gulf of Finland into a Russian lake. Read more...

I've previously pulled pictures from my collection of Iowa's officer's quarters, enlisted quarters and enlisted mess. Now, it's time to look at the last group of men on the ship, the chief petty officers, who had their own separate quarters, known as the "Goat Locker".⁵

Bunks in the chief's quarters, which are more spacious than those in the regular enlisted quarters

The Goat Locker is a unique institution, referring not only to the spaces, but also to the men (and now women) who occupy them. Chiefs are famous for being the people who make the Navy work, although they allow the officers to believe otherwise. It's forbidden for any non-chief, even the ship's captain, to enter without permission, and all covers (hats) have to be removed. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about anything you want that isn't culture war.

First, the USNI's coronavirus sale is set to end soon, so if you want member prices and free shipping, shop before June 30th.

Second, to partially fill the void that SSC's demise has left in our lives, would anyone be interested in doing a Naval Gazing virtual meetup over Zoom or some other service? If so, I'll set up a time for next week.

Overhauls for 2018 are The Battle of Pungdo, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy-Aviation Part 1, Jackie Fisher, Battlecruisers Part 2, Auxiliaries Part 2 and Did Iowa Move Sideways During a Broadside?, now with new math on rolling. 2019 overhauls are Alexander's review of the Newark Air Museum, Battleship Aviation Part 4, Lord Nelson's review of Soya, The Scuttling of the High Seas Fleet, The Spanish-American War Part 5 and Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 3.

Now that I've covered combat in Aurora, it's time to once again turn our attention to colonization and the economy. My earlier introduction was focused on the mechanics of how to do things, and occasionally skimped on what to do, an oversight I now intend to rectify.

How to manage your construction facilities is a matter of personal taste. There's a lot of options, depending on what you want out of the game, and you'll be in a much better spot to find and fix bottlenecks than I am. I've had games limited by construction capacity, by shipyards, by minerals, and by officers. There's also a couple schools of thought on how to build things. Steve seems to prefer focusing on one or two things at a time, and queuing the next thing to get built behind them. I tend to favor having everything building in parallel at once. Either way can work. Read more...

It was the summer of 2000. I was about to start 2nd grade, and I was already fascinated by the military. I'd already exhausted the military books available in children's section of the Rock Hill Public Library, so I ventured into the adult section. There, I found one of the most important books I would ever read.

I wanted to fly F-16s for the Air Force (who among us wasn't an idiot at some point in our youth?) and discovered a copy of Tom Clancy's Fighter Wing. Here was a book with a long chapter on the F-16, as well as all sorts of stuff on other aircraft and air warfare in general. Both my mom and the librarian were somewhat skeptical that I'd be able to read it, but they let me check it out, and I devoured it. Here was a book written by someone who knew the subject really well, knew how to write, and perhaps most importantly, knew how to talk about the subject to an outside audience. Who else would start a book on the subject by talking about the fundamental forces of flight and how jet turbine blades were built, and then spend the majority of his time on Desert Storm discussing the planning process, not hazardous missions over Baghdad? Read more...