The U.S. Navy History Podcast

Dale Robertson
  • 4.4 (18)
  • History
  • Updated Weekly

Become a Paid Subscriber: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dale-robertson/subscribe History of the United States Navy from the Revolutionary War to Modern times.

  1. 1d ago

    How Sailors Forced the Navy to Take Back a Direct Order

    On September 29, 2016, the U.S. Navy eliminated every enlisted rating title — Boatswain's Mate, Machinist's Mate, Hospital Corpsman, all of it — replacing two hundred and forty-one years of trade identity with rank alone. Eighty-three days later, after a hundred-thousand-signature petition, a fourteen-hundred-sailor town hall at Naval Station Norfolk, and a public feud between chief petty officers in the Navy's own professional journal, Admiral John Richardson reversed it completely. Dale traces the rating system from the 1794 Naval Act through the 1885 chevron badge and the 1893 creation of Chief Petty Officer, to the fastest full policy reversal in modern Navy history — and why the Navy still trusts a name over a number

  2. Aug 30

    Christmas Island, 1942: Mutiny, a Broken Torpedo, and a Battle Fought Underwater.

    On March 31, 1942, a Japanese invasion force found Christmas Island's defenses already gone — its 32-man garrison wiped out three weeks earlier by their own mutinying soldiers. The real fight happened underwater, where USS Seawolf, under Lieutenant Commander Fred Warder, took on Rear Admiral Shōji Nishimura's three-cruiser, eight-destroyer task force alone, firing nine torpedoes across thirty-three hours against the U.S. Navy's own defective Mark 14 design. Dale and Christophe untangle the mutiny, the court-martial that followed India and Pakistan's independence by mere months, and the submarine duel history mostly forgot.

  3. Aug 23

    Unsinkable Sam and the Navy's Other Ship's Cats

    From Matthew Flinders' cat Trim, who circumnavigated Australia in 1801, to Unsinkable Sam, who survived the sinkings of the battleship Bismarck, HMS Cossack, and HMS Ark Royal within six months in 1941, ship's cats served — and died — alongside their crews for nearly the entire history of naval warfare. This episode traces the tradition from its origins in rodent control and shipboard superstition through USS Maine, HMS Prince of Wales, and Simon of HMS Amethyst, the only cat ever awarded the Dickin Medal, to the Royal Navy's 1975 ban that officially ended it. Dale and Christophe ask what these animals actually meant to the sailors who served with them.

  4. Aug 9

    Casablanca, 1942: America's Strangest Naval Battle

    On November 8, 1942, the U.S. Navy fought a battleship duel, three destroyer actions, and a submarine hunt off Casablanca, Morocco — against France. The Naval Battle of Casablanca, part of Operation Torch's invasion of North Africa, pitted the battleship USS Massachusetts and Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt's Western Naval Task Force against Vichy French forces defending a neutrality no one back home had agreed to test. Over eight days, the incomplete battleship Jean Bart traded fire with Massachusetts, the cruiser Primauguet made a doomed sortie, and German U-boats delivered the war's cruelest final twist. Dale and Christophe break down the whole strange, tragic week.

  5. Aug 2

    World War Two's Secret Oil War: Germany's U-Boat Campaign in the Caribbean

    In February 1942, five German U-boats under Kapitänleutnant Werner Hartenstein struck the refineries of Aruba, Curaçao, and Venezuela within a single hour, opening the World War Two Battle of the Caribbean — Germany's bid to sever the Allied oil and bauxite lifeline running through the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Over the next year, U-boats sank nearly 400 ships, accounting for more than a third of everything the Allies lost worldwide in 1942, and dragged Mexico into the war outright. This episode follows the campaign from Hartenstein's opening strike to the last hunted U-boat sunk off Haiti in 1943 — and the men, on both sides, that history forgot to name.

  6. Jul 26

    31-Knot Burke and the Last Night of the Tokyo Express

    On Thanksgiving Eve, 1943, off Cape St. George in the Solomon Islands campaign, Captain Arleigh "31-Knot" Burke's Destroyer Squadron 23 ambushed a Japanese resupply convoy in total darkness — sinking the destroyers Onami, Makinami, and Yugiri, killing 647 Japanese sailors and soldiers, without losing a single American life or ship. The U.S. Naval War College would later call it "an almost perfect surface action." This episode traces how eighteen months of costly night-battle failures in the Solomons finally produced a decisive American victory, why this battle ended the Tokyo Express for good, and why Burke's name still sails the seas today aboard the destroyers that bear it.

  7. Jul 19

    Guadalcanal's Confused Victory — The Night Off Cape Esperance

    On the night of October 11–12, 1942, off Cape Esperance, Guadalcanal, the U.S. Navy won its first surface victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War — two months after the catastrophic defeat at Savo Island. Rear Admiral Norman Scott's cruiser-destroyer force sank the cruiser Furutaka and the destroyer Fubuki and mortally wounded Japanese Admiral Aritomo Gotō, but the "decisive win" was built on a botched turn, a misread radio call, and a solo torpedo run gone rogue. This episode tells the real story behind the headline — and why the false lessons it taught helped set up disaster at Tassafaronga two months later.

  8. Jul 12

    The Fugitive Who Gave America Its Navy

    On September 23rd, 1779, off Flamborough Head, England, Captain John Paul Jones fought the Royal Navy frigate Serapis to a standstill aboard a sinking, undergunned Bonhomme Richard — and won, even as his own ship went down beneath him two days later. This episode traces Jones’s full, complicated life: a fugitive from a killing in Tobago who reinvented himself in America, the raid he led on the very English port where he’d apprenticed as a boy, a stolen victory in Russia’s Black Sea fleet, an unresolved scandal that ended his career, and the 113 years his body spent lost beneath a Paris laundry yard.

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