The U.S. Navy History Podcast

The Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the World War II carrier clash fought north of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific in August 1942, was the third carrier battle in history, and almost nobody remembers it. Dale and Christophe follow Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Saratoga and Enterprise against Nagumo’s Shokaku and Zuikaku. Commander Harry Felt sinks the light carrier Ryujo, three bombs tear into the Big E, and Chief Machinist William Smith saves her jammed rudder in a 170-degree compartment. Then a B-17 finally hits a ship. It’s the battle that kept Henderson Field American and started the Tokyo Express.

Is the aircraft carrier the next battleship? Dale tests the 2026 drone swarm threat against the battleship's fall, from Billy Mitchell and Prince of Wales to the kamikazes off Okinawa. Black Sea drone boats, the Red Sea, the 2026 Iran war, and China's anti-carrier swarm plan all get red-teamed. The verdict: drones won't sink a carrier, but in the Western Pacific she stands at the battleship's edge.

Operation Desecrate One, the March 1944 World War II carrier raid on Palau in the western Pacific, drove Japan’s Combined Fleet from its last great forward anchorage. Dale and Christophe follow Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s eleven carriers of Task Force 58, the first carrier-laid minefield of the Pacific War, and USS Tunny’s torpedo hit on the superbattleship Musashi. Then the chain reaction: Admiral Mineichi Koga vanishes in a storm, and Japan’s Z Plan washes up off Cebu. Through it all, one survivor of USS Tullibee watches from a Japanese prison tree. The raid nobody remembers, and why it mattered.

The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought May 4–8, 1942, was the first naval battle in history where opposing fleets never saw each other — carriers duking it out entirely through scout planes and radio reports. A Japanese strike force burns its morning hunting the oiler USS Neosho and destroyer USS Sims, mistaken for carriers, while an American strike sinks the light carrier Shōhō in twenty minutes flat. USS Lexington goes down after a delayed gasoline explosion; USS Yorktown limps home to a three-day emergency repair under Nimitz's orders. Tactically inconclusive. Strategically, it's the battle that made Midway winnable a month later.

On September 11th, 2001, while running routine sea trials off the Virginia coast, USS George Washington (CVN-73) became the U.S. Navy's first responder to the attacks on New York and the Pentagon — designated command ship for East Coast air defense within three hours, under Vice Admiral J. Cutler Dawson, and steaming overnight to stand three miles off Coney Island by dawn. Over the next five days her air wings flew 234 armed patrols, without a single accident. Co-host Dale was aboard as a young Machinist's Mate — and for the first time, tells that story himself: asleep when it started, in the hangar bay when the smoke came into view.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.