The U.S. Navy History Podcast

Dale Robertson

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. 6d ago

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. Jul 5

    The Backdoor at Nassau: America's First Fleet Action

    In March 1776, a fleet of eight converted merchantmen — crewed by men who'd never fought together, commanded by a 60-year-old merchant captain, and carrying a Marine Corps that was three months old — sailed a thousand miles from Delaware to the Bahamas on a mission that wasn't even in their official orders. What they found was a British stockpile of gunpowder and cannon guarded by a governor who'd been warned and did almost nothing about it. This episode covers the Raid of Nassau: the first fleet action of the Continental Navy, the first amphibious landing of the Continental Marines, and the operational blunder — an unwatched harbor channel — that let most of the gunpowder slip away in the middle of the night. We follow the raid from Washington's nine-rounds-per-man gunpowder crisis, through the botched dawn assault and the quiet, unopposed landing that followed, to the lopsided fight against HMS Glasgow on the voyage home, and the congressional fallout that ended Commodore Esek Hopkins' career — and, almost by accident, produced America's first whistleblower protection law. In this episode: Why Washington's army had gunpowder for nine shots per soldier — not nine volleys, nine shotsHow British gunpowder ended up sitting undefended in the BahamasThe Continental Navy's first attempted landing — and why it aborted at the last secondFort Montagu's quiet, unopposed surrender and the Marine Corps' first amphibious assaultThe blockade gap that let Governor Montfort Brown ship 80% of the gunpowder to Florida overnightThe lopsided fight against HMS Glasgow, and the death of Lt. John Fitzpatrick — the first U.S. Marine killed in combatEsek Hopkins' court-martial, censure, and dismissal from the NavyHow a petition from ten Continental Navy officers — delivered to Congress by Marine Captain John Grannis in March 1777 — accused Hopkins of torturing British prisoners of war, and how Congress's response led to the first whistleblower protection law in American history (July 30, 1778)Why two of those ten officers, Midshipman Samuel Shaw and Third Lieutenant Richard Marven, ended up jailed in Rhode Island on Hopkins' own libel suit — and how Congress paid for their defenseSeparating myth from record: what John Paul Jones actually did — and didn't do — at NassauKey figures: Commodore Esek Hopkins • Captain Samuel Nicholas (Continental Marines) • Lt. John Paul Jones • Governor Montfort Brown • Lt. John Fitzpatrick • Midshipman Samuel Shaw & Third Lieutenant Richard Marven (whistleblowers) • Marine Captain John Grannis Sources referenced: Continental Congress journals (Nov. 1775–Jan. 1778), Samuel Eliot Morison's biography of John Paul Jones, contemporaneous letters of George Washington usnavyhistorypodcast@gmail.com@usnhistorypod

  4. Jun 28

    The Missile Nobody Saw Coming: WWII's First Guided Weapon Sinks an American Destroyer

    On November 6th, 1943, off Cape Bougaroun on the Algerian coast, German bombers used the Henschel Hs 293 — the world's first operational guided anti-ship missile — to sink the American destroyer USS Beatty and the transport Santa Elena, killing seventeen men in Convoy KMF 25A. It was one of the opening chapters of guided-weapon warfare, and a warning largely unheeded: twenty days later, the same weapon, fired from the same region, would sink HMT Rohna and kill 1,149 men in the deadliest single loss of American troops at sea in WWII. This episode tells both stories, accurately, on their own terms.

  5. Jun 14

    Four Minutes Off Bougainville: How One Pilot Saved the USS Lexington in 1942

    On February 20, 1942, the Action off Bougainville pitted the carrier USS Lexington against seventeen Japanese bombers from Rabaul in one of the early Pacific War's most lopsided air battles. We trace the full chain of events: Vice Admiral Wilson Brown's aborted raid on Rabaul, the morning interception of Japanese scout planes, and the four-minute dogfight in which Lt. Edward "Butch" O'Hare became America's first flying ace of World War II. We follow the ripple effects through the March 10 strike on Lae-Salamaua, and close with O'Hare's full story — heroism, tragedy, and a legacy still hiding in plain sight at one of America's busiest airports.

  6. May 31

    Why the Carrier Gets Too Much Credit for Beating Japan: My Argument for the Submarine

    In this solo personal essay, Dale argues that American submarines — not the aircraft carriers — won the Pacific War against Japan. It's one sailor, one opinion: the carriers won the headlines at Midway, but the boats did the killing, sinking over half of Japan's fleet and strangling the oil that the Yamato and the whole empire ran on. From the Shinano to Archerfish to Nimitz himself. Come agree, or come fight him about it. https://discord.gg/fC5EJDR

  7. May 24

    What Nobody Wants to Admit About the Pacific War: America Prosecuted Karl Dönitz at Nuremberg for a War Crime the U.S. Navy Was Already Committing.

    Why Nuremberg Refused to Sentence Dönitz for Submarine Warfare — And What Fleet Admiral Nimitz's Sworn Testimony Reveals About America's Pacific War? In this solo personal essay, Dale argues that the United States' unrestricted submarine campaign against Japan in World War Two was legally and morally identical to the German U-boat campaign for which Karl Dönitz was prosecuted at Nuremberg — and that the tribunal's own verdict, shaped by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz's sworn testimony, proves it. Fifty-two submarines lost. Over a thousand merchant ships sunk. One verdict that couldn't say what it meant. https://discord.gg/dxSvauDb

  8. May 17

    PT-109: The Boat That Made a President

    On the night of August 1st, 1943, fifteen American PT boats entered Blackett Strait with thirty torpedoes and a solid intelligence picture. By morning, they had hit nothing, lost one boat, and left eleven men in the water. This is the story of that boat — and everything that happened before and after. Dale and Christophe trace the full arc of PT-109: from her keel laid in Bayonne, New Jersey in March 1942, through the brutal Guadalcanal campaign, to the night a Japanese destroyer cut her in half in the dark. Along the way, they dig into the politics that put a medically disqualified young man from Boston in command, the engineering compromises baked into the Elco 80-footer, the catastrophic failure of the Mark 8 torpedo program, and what the Navy's own after-action record says — versus what John Kennedy said privately to a tentmate months later. They also tell the stories that rarely get told: the crew members who died and deserve to be named, the two young Solomon Islander scouts who paddled 38 miles through enemy water with a coconut, and the coast watcher on a volcano who set the whole rescue in motion.

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