Typhoon Bearing

The rise of a navy unchallenged in the world...

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This episode tells the story of the the post-Vietnam Navy, an era where we were outgunned and outnumbered by the newly resurgent Soviet Navy. During the Soviet naval building boom between 1966 and 1970, when the US was unable to match it due to the resource drain of the Vietnam War, the Soviets commissioned 209 ships to the US Navy’s 88. The WWII era of ships which had sustained the US fleet since the end of the last world war were at the end of their useful life and were not being replaced. By contrast, the entire Soviet fleet was practically new, built for modern weapon systems and with none of the resource-draining end-of-life maintenance issues that plagued the US Navy. By 1978 the Soviet fleet boasted 740 major warships to the US Navy’s 289. It was a multi-decade effort culminating the The Maritime Strategy to regain parity with the Soviet fleet. 

It was amid this backdrop the late Cold War at sea took place, where the US Navy fought to control the Persian Gulf and its vital oil supplies, and at the same time manage the societal changes which wracked the nation and were reflected in the Navy. The Chief of Naval Operation from 1970-1974, Admiral Zumwalt, issued a series of 121 Z-Grams directly to the fleet which tackled quality of life and racial and gender equality problems plaguing the fleet.

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This episode tells the story of the the Vietnam War brownwater operations, the fighting in the marshes, rivers, the deltas, and creeks of North and South Vietnam. This is also the story of the birth and formative operations of Navy SEAL teams in Vietnam, from daring POW rescue operations, to hostage snatch-and-grab operations taken beneath covering naval gunfire from destroyers offshore. 

This is that story...

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This episode tells the story of the the Vietnam War at sea, of the most intense air battles of the Cold War, of bombardments against the Vietnamese coastline, and the politics  and history behind a war that was unpopular from day one and split the nation in two. 

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Right after the end of World War Two, the Viet Minh, a communist-led anti imperialist party and army led by Ho Chi Minh claimed control of almost all of the country in the power vacuum immediately after the Japanese surrender. A year later, in 1946 the revived French government sent troops back to occupy its former colony of Vietnam and crushed Ho Chi Minh’s new government, forcing his military to abandon the cities for the jungles, mountains, and countryside. Based on anticolonial principles the United States had initially opposed the French recolonization of Indochina but the victory of the communist just north of Vietnam in the Chinese civil war drove the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to support the French in their war against the Viet Minh.

The French were defeated, but we soon took their place. This is that story...

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This episode finishes the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. 

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With the benefit of secret tapes which revealed the tense decision-making of President Kennedy and his advisors, as well as the secret archives of the Soviet Union that opened up after the end of the Cold War we know that General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking officer in the United States military, advised Kennedy to launch massive airstrikes against Cuba with no advance warning in order to disable the Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba before they became operational and a threat to the US homeland. We also now know that some of the missiles were, in fact,  already operational and ready to launch on short notice. The Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis Lemay told Kennedy, quote, “we don’t have any choice other than direct military action.” Of course, with 20/20 hindsight, we did. Had different choices been made then by President Kennedy, you would likely not be listening to this podcast here today. There probably would not be any podcasts at all. There may not be many humans left at all.  October and November 1962 of the Cuban Missile Crisis were probably the most dangerous days in recorded human history. This is the story.

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This episode starts Season 2 of the United States Naval History podcast, covering the Cold War, an era of small wars and big bombs looming over a geopolitical tinderbox balanced between east and west, between totalitarian communism and more or less liberal, more or less democracy. 

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The Korean was a conflict which ripped apart WWII alliances for good and sent American GIs and sailors into direct, meat grinding conflict with their North Korean and Chinese counterparts just five years after the horror of WWII. This episode tells the hot beginnings of the Cold War, of one of the most ambitious and successful amphibious invasions of all time, of the United States Navy’s role in the conflict, and the stories of several veterans who survived the fighting there more than seventy years ago. 

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Buy The Shores of Tripoli game! It's really good! https://www.fortcircle.com/games/

This episode finishes the story of the greatest naval war in world history, stretching across tens of millions of square miles of ocean, involving thousands of warships, dozens of carrier battles, submarine ambushes, bloody beach landings and harrowing night actions on land and at sea.

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Listen to the story of the assassination of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, how American submarine warfare succeeded where German submarine warfare failed, the Gilbert and Marshall Island Campaigns (including the bloody assault on Tarawa), the Mariana Campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and finally bombings and geopolitics which eventually forced Japan to accept surrender. 

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WWII in the Pacific tells the story of the greatest naval war in world history, stretching across tens of millions of square miles of ocean, involving thousands of warships, dozens of carrier battles, submarine ambushes, bloody beach landings and harrowing night actions on land and at sea.

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This episode starts with some background on why the Japanese launched the attack on Pearl Harbor before talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor itself. 

Learn about the Doolittle Raid and hear part of an interview with James Doolittle on the raid's effects. 

Next up is the Battle of the Coral Sea, which first action in which aircraft carriers engaged each other and the first in which the opposing ships neither sighted nor fired directly upon one another.
The Battle of Midway, one of the most consequential naval battles in world history, tuned the tide in the Pacific as three American carriers faced off against four Japanese attacking carriers. 

And finally, the Guadalcanal campaign checked Japanese advances in the South Pacific.   

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Starting more than two years before the United States entered WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this episode tells the story of WWII in the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters, covering the Battle of the Atlantic, the Sinking of the Bismarck, the breaking of the Enigma codes, and all the way up to D-Day, the invasion of northern France on June 6th, 1944.

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After WWI ended in November of 1918, the victorious world powers looked around realized that even the winners were losers. Yea, Britain and France gained a bunch of colonies and protectorates from the defeated Central Powers, and yeah they were theoretically going to get a reparations payday down the road, but HOLY SHIT, if you’ll excuse the language, it was not freaking worth it. France alone suffered over a million killed in action with another more than four million wounded. Europe’s economy was destroyed, governments had taken on mind-boggling amounts of debt to fight the war, and the fundamental problem of Great Power competition which led to the war had not been fundamentally altered.

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The Interwar Period is the roughly twenty-one-year period between the end of WWI in 1918 and the start of WWII proper in 1939. During this period, we obviously had the roaring 20s followed by the Great Depression. This episode will cover four topics: first, the Washington and London Naval Treaties which laid out the sizes and types of navies each major naval power could wield; second, the technological shifts the treaties accelerated, specifically the development of aircraft carriers and naval aviation; third, the war planning the United States was doing during this period, and last just a little bit about what the Marine Corps was doing during this period and how that would prove to be significant during WWII.

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