Navy salutes a history-making tour

NORFOLK

When 16 battleships steamed out of Hampton Roads on Dec. 16, 1907, there was no doubt something momentous was unfolding.

Crowds gathered at Fort Monroe in Hampton to watch the ships pass by. Thousands more viewed the naval parade from Cape Henry.

As the gleaming, coal-powered ships passed before the presidential yacht Mayflower, each offered a thunderous 21-gun salute to the man who’d ordered them to sea: Theodore Roosevelt.

Pacing the deck, Roosevelt could hardly contain his excitement, according to the next day’s edition of The Virginian-Pilot: “To the Secretary of the Navy Metcalf and to others of his guests on board he was constantly exclaiming upon the beauty and grandeur of the surrounding scenes. 'Did you ever see such a fleet? And such a day! Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all to feel proud?’”

Roosevelt made no speech that day. He didn’t have to. For the man who uttered the phrase “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” the fleet’s departure said it all.

Its circumnavigation of the globe, with stops in 20 cities on six continents, marked the debut of the modern, mobile U.S. Navy.

Saturday, the Navy will celebrate the 100th anniversary of what came to be called the Great White Fleet aboard the aircraft carrier that bears Roosevelt’s name.

Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter will host the pier-side party at Norfolk Naval Station. Like Roosevelt, Winter grew up on Long Island. Roosevelt served as an assistant secretary of the Navy, and a portrait of him hangs in Winter’s Pentagon office, above a “standing desk” that reportedly belonged to the 26th president.

“When we take a look at the history of the Navy, one of the seminal events in the evolution of the Navy really was the Great White Fleet,” Winter said. “He brought the U.S. Navy out of a level of almost obscurity, through a period of tremendous technological change and political change.”

Painted bright white, the warships were easily visible from foreign shores. The color made them vulnerable, but no amount of paint could disguise the reality of the 12-inch guns, capable of launching an 850-pound projectile almost three miles.

Among the 14,000 sailors aboard were old men who’d served on wooden ships during the Civil War – and young officers named Nimitz, Spruance and Halsey, whose defining battles would come during World War II.

Roosevelt passed good wishes to officers and enlisted alike, according to news accounts.

“In parting with the officers of the fleet, president Roosevelt was wholly informal and to each he had a cordial hand-clasp, a grasp of the uniformed shoulder and a hearty 'Good bye, old fellow, and good luck,’ spoken in his characteristic manner,” The Virginian-Pilot reported on Dec. 17, 1907.

The president summoned a young seaman from the battleship Louisiana onto the Mayflower and introduced him to the first lady and other guests, then sent him back to his ship with greetings for the rest of the crew.

“I tell you our enlisted men are everything. They are perfectly bully and they are up to everything required of them,” Roosevelt said as the sailor departed, according to the Pilot. “This is indeed a great fleet and a great day.”

The 14-month deployment was a great adventure. The crews visited Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Honolulu and Melbourne, Australia, on the first two legs of the journey. A crowd of 250,000 Australians welcomed them to Sydney. Festive banquets awaited them in Amoy, China, and Yokohama, Japan. On the final leg of the trip, sailors explored what’s now Sri Lanka, rode camels in Egypt, and posed for pictures in front of the Sphinx.

But the cruise was more than an adventure. The fleet spent a month doing gunnery exercises off the Baja peninsula and again in the Philippines.

Roosevelt’s decision to test the fleet was born out of his understanding of naval history. As a young man, he wrote an analysis of the naval battles of War of 1812 that is still considered a classic. He was a devotee of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great naval strategist of the time. Before resigning to serve with the Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had, during his stint as assistant Navy secretary, battled for money to build modern, steel-hulled ships. As president, Roosevelt had noted the Japanese navy’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The Russian ships had sailed successfully from Europe around the tip of Africa and into Asian waters, but they weren’t ready for battle when they arrived.

“I want all failures, blunders and shortcomings to be made apparent in time of peace and not in time of war,” Roosevelt said before the fleet departed, according to the Naval Historical Center.

Outwardly, Roosevelt emphasized the fleet’s message of diplomacy and friendship.

“The warships of America exist for no other purpose than to protect peace against possible aggression, and justice against possible oppression,” he wrote in a 1908 letter to President Alfonso Penna of Brazil.

Winter will emphasize a similar message this weekend in Norfolk, when an expected crowd of 500 people will gather on the Theodore Roosevelt.

“I love the quote from his 1902 message to Congress,” Winter said this week in a phone interview. “'A good navy is not a provocation to war, it is a guarantor of peace.’ He viewed investment in a navy as being part of what we would now refer to as having 'deterrence and dissuasive capability.’”

The Navy secretary’s voice rises when he talks about the service’s rapid transition from sail to steam, from wooden hulls to steel. “The technical transformation was incredible,” said Winter, who has a doctorate in physics.

“The old Navy was more focused on coastal defense, river operations, the Mississippi. These were battleships intended for use wherever, whenever.”

Winter noted that in 1909, the Great White Fleet was in the Mediterranean when an earthquake struck Sicily. Several ships were dispatched to the city of Messina to help search for survivors – a decision echoed in recent years by the Navy’s response to the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in Bangladesh last month after a cyclone.

“A lot of what we talk about now as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief finds its antecedent in what transpired in Messina with the Great White Fleet,” Winter said.

Roosevelt was a lame duck by the time the fleet returned to Hampton Roads on Feb. 22, 1909. He had only two weeks left in office when he came down on the Mayflower for the homecoming.

“The battleship fleet is the topic on every tongue for miles around,” The Virginian-Pilot reported on Feb. 20. “No other subject is worthy of consideration as compared to the importance of the 'boys in blue.’”

Later, Roosevelt declared the cruise of the Great White Fleet “the most important service that I rendered for peace.” Bill Stewart, a retired naval officer who owns a massive collection of Great White Fleet memorabilia and runs an extensive Web site about it, sees a lot of parallels between Roosevelt’s era and the modern Navy.

“We’re going to peacefully coexist with the rest of the planet, but they understand we deal from a position of strength. It’s the same thing we operate on today,” Stewart said. “I think Roosevelt understood the impact it had on the rest of the world.”

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com