A superbly illustrated examination of how the US Navy's most powerful fleet fought the Vietnam War, covering all of its elements from aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers to minesweepers and oilers. The US Navy's Seventh Fleet was at the forefront of America's campaign in Vietnam for a decade, from the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that began it all to the final evacuation of South Vietnam. Its mission was highly strategic, and while its primary role was to provide carrier-based air power over North Vietnam – from Rolling Thunder through Linebacker – the fleet's operations were complex, sensitive, and varied, and required all the capabilities of the fleet. This book is the first overall examination of how US Navy's most powerful fleet fought and operated in Vietnam. Distilled from thousands of declassified secret documents by renowned US Navy specialist Dr Edward J. Marolda, it offers a unique new portrait of how the Seventh Fleet fought the Vietnam War, from the offensive strike power of naval aviation to the vital role of fleet logistics. As well as the carrier operations, he examines the surface combatant fleet's gunfire support role, and its raids against the North Vietnamese coast. Dr Marolda also looks at amphibious warfare, fleet air defense, search-and-rescue, and mining and interdiction operations. Illustrated throughout with archive photos, 3D diagrams and spectacular new artwork, and informed by never-before-translated official documents, publications, and personal accounts from North Vietnamese, Soviet, and Chinese sources, this is the real story behind the US Navy's Vietnam War.

By now the world knows well the exploits of World War II admirals Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and "Bull" Halsey. These brilliant strategists and combat commanders--backed by a powerful Allied coalition, a nation united, gifted civilian leaders, and abundant war-making resources--led U.S. and allied naval forces to victory against the Axis powers. Leadership during the Vietnam War was another story. The Vietnam War and its aftermath sorely tested the professional skill of four-star admirals Harry D. Felt, Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Thomas H. Moorer, Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., and James L. Holloway III. Unlike their World War II predecessors, these equally battle-tested leaders had to cope with a flawed American understanding of U.S. and Vietnamese Communist strengths and weaknesses, distrustful and ill-focused Washington leaders, an increasingly discontented American populace, and an ultimately failing war effort. Like millions of other Americans, these five admirals had to come to terms with America's first lost war, and what that loss meant for the future of the nation and the U.S. armed forces. The challenges were both internal and external. A destabilized U.S. Navy was troubled by racial discord, drug abuse, anti-war and anti-establishment sentiment, and a host of personnel and material ills. At the same time, increasingly serious global threats to US interests, such as the rise of Soviet nuclear-missile and naval power, were shaping confrontations on the postwar stage. Critical to the story is how these naval leaders managed their relationships with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and Secretaries of Defense McNamara, Laird, and Schlesinger. Based on prodigious research into many formerly classified sources, Edward J. Marolda relates in dramatic detail how America's top naval leaders tackled their responsibilities, their successes, and their failures. This is a story of dedication to duty, professionalism, and service by America's top admirals during a time of great national and international adversity.

During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Washington Navy Yard was the most recognizable symbol of the United States Navy in the nation's capital. The shipyard built a number of the Navy's first warships and repaired, refitted, and provisioned most of the frigates, sloops, and other combatants of the fledgling naval service. The masts and rigging of USS Constitution were a common site on the banks of the Anacostia River. Booming cannon became a routine sound in southeast Washington during the mid-19th century as Commander John A. Dahlgren, "father of American naval ordnance," test-fired new guns for the fleet. The Naval Gun Factory's fire and smoke-belching blast furnaces, foundries, and mills gave birth to many of the fleet's weapons, from small boat howitzers to the enormous 14-inch and 16-inch rifles that armed the naval railway batteries in World War I and the Iowa-class battleships in World War II and the Cold War. Rear Admiral David W. Taylor inaugurated a new era in ship development when he used scientific measurements in his Experimental Model Basin to test the properties of prototype hulls. Before and after World War I, the pioneers of naval aviation experimented in the Anacostia and navy yard facilities with various seaplane types, shipboard catapults, and other equipment that would soon revolutionize warfare at sea. The Washington Navy Yard has been a witness to history-to the evolution of the United States of America from a small republic, whose ships were preyed upon by Barbary corsairs and whose capital was burned by an invading British army, into a nation of enormous political, economic, and military power and global influence. The Civil War that so dramatically altered American society swirled around and through the Washington Navy Yard. American presidents, first ladies, foreign kings and queens, ambassadors from abroad, legendary naval leaders, national heroes and villains, and millions of citizens have all passed through Latrobe Gate during the yard's 200-year existence. The Washington Navy Yard has also been the workplace for tens of thousands of Americans, a familiar landmark in the District of Columbia, and a valued member of the Washington community. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, ship riggers, hull caulkers, iron and bronze smiths, joiners, millwrights, machinists, foundrymen, boilermakers, and tool and die makers; skilled workmen and laborers; naval officers, bluejackets, and marines have earned their livings within the walls of the navy yard. Numerous Americans, white and black, male and female, have spent their entire working lives at the yard building warships, manufacturing guns, testing vessel and aircraft models, training sailors, or administering the needs of American combatants steaming in the distant waters of the world. Navy yard workers, as many as 26,000 men and women at one point in 1944, contributed to the success of U.S. arms in the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and Operation Desert Storm. Yard workers, most of them residents of the District, Maryland, and Virginia, over the years have helped local authorities extinguish fires, hold back flood waters, rescue victims of natural disasters, and care for needy members of the surrounding neighborhoods. They have helped federal authorities put together national celebrations to mark the end of the country's wars, repair the Capitol and other government buildings, receive the sacred remains of unknown U.S. servicemen from overseas, stage presidential inaugurations, and welcome foreign dignitaries to American soil. Above all, they have loyally served the United States and the U.S. Navy. This richly illustrated history was written in the bicentennial year to highlight the importance of the Washington Navy Yard and its employees to the nation, the Navy, and the District of Columbia. It touches on the major activities of the facility and on some of the yard's past workers and significant visitors.

When the U.S. Seventh Fleet embarked the last of 50,000 Vietnamese evacuees, got underway from Vietnam's southern coast, and set a course for the Philippines on the evening of 2 May 1975, it marked the end of America's longest war. For more than 25 years, the United States and its allies had fought to preserve the independence of free governments in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but that effort had failed. Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Communist movements and military forces now held sway over the entire Indochinese peninsula. The struggle for Southeast Asia, however, was only one episode in the even longer Cold War that began in 1946 and ended with the collapse of global communism in the late 1980s. The 58,000 Americans who sacrificed their lives in Vietnam marched in the same proud ranks as the tens of thousands of their compatriots who fought and died to achieve ultimate victory in the Cold War. The U.S. Navy was in the forefront of the fight. More than 2.6 million Sailors and Marines served in the combat theater at one time or another. It is the objective of this series, The U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War, to honor the faithful service to their country of those men and women who, in John Paul Jones' immortal words, went in harm's way to fight for freedom. Between 2008 and 2015, the 50th anniversary of the onset of major combat operations in 1965, the Naval History and Heritage Command and the Naval Historical Foundation will collaborate in publishing well-illustrated, engagingly written, and authoritative booklets that detail the Navy's major involvement in the conflict. We have enlisted to the cause distinguished authors and charged them with producing interpretative essays based on research in primary sources and the best secondary works. First in the series, The Approaching Storm covers the global, regional, and ideological stimulants of the conflict, setting the stage for subsequent booklets on the fight for the rivers and canals of Vietnam, naval special warfare, the POW experience, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, Navy medicine at war, coastal operations, the Linebacker bombing campaign, Navy leaders, naval advisors and the Vietnam Navy, sealift and naval logistics, Seabees and construction, naval intelligence, and the seaborne evacuations from Indochina. It is important for this and future generations of Americans to understand that in the war for Southeast Asia our Sailors fought with skill, courage, and perseverance in often trying circumstances. They were sorely tested but never failed to do their duty. This illustrated book describes the U.S. response to Communist movements in Asia after World War II and the U.S. Navy's role in the region as it evolved from an essentially advisory one to actual combat after the Tonkin Gulf attack off North Vietnam in August 1964. Approaching Storm inaugurates the Naval History & Heritage Commands series the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War.

This book focuses on the three prongs of the naval trident that President Nixon wielded during the final years of the Vietnam War: naval air power, naval bombardment, and mine warfare. For much of this period, Navy aircraft sought to hamper the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos-a huge investment in air power resources that ultimately proved fruitless. After North Vietnam's invasion of the South in 1972, however, Navy tactical aviation, as well as naval bombardment, proved critical not only in blunting the offensive but also in persuading North Vietnam to arrive at a peace agreement in Paris in 1973. For the first time in the war, the Navy was also authorized to close Haiphong Harbor and North Vietnam's other ports with naval mines-an operation that still stands out as a textbook example of how mine warfare can inflict a major economic and psychological blow on the enemy with minimal casualties for either side. Thus, naval power was indispensible to ending America's longest war.

U.S. interest in the far east dates from the earliest years of the republic, when American merchant ships sailed across the vast pacific to ply their trade in the ports of China, the Philippines, Indochina, and the East Indies. Warships of the U.S. Navy followed soon afterward to protect those commercial carriers and to promote American diplomatic interests in Asia. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, successor to the Asiatic Squadron and Asiatic Fleet of the 19th and early 20th centuries, began making its own naval history in the early days of World War II. Unique among the nation's naval forces, the fleet has taken part in all the major conflicts and most of the crises and confrontations of the last six decades. It has defended U.S. interests and worked with America's Asian alliances to deter aggressors and maintain peace and stability in the region. The fleet's sailors have provided humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to numerous countries devastated by natural and manmade disasters. The fleet's area of responsibility in the 21st century encompasses 48 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian oceans, an area holding half of the world's population, 35 nations, and many of its most prosperous economies. Much of the world's energy resources and oceangoing trade passes through waters guarded by the warships, aircraft, and men and women of the U.S. seventh fleet, whose motto is appropriately - Ready Power for Peace.

With full color maps, photographs and illustrations throughout.

FULL COLOR reprint of 1998 study from the United States Naval Historical Center. This volume describes in detail the U.S. Navy's role in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, one of the most successful campaigns in American military history. The work describes the contribution to victory of Navy men and women who served afloat in the carrier-based fighter and attack squadrons, the surface warships, amphibious and mine countermeasures vessels, submarines, and logistic and hospital ships. It also relates the activities of American sailors ashore or close inshore who protected the vital harbors of northern Saudi Arabia, provided Marine combat units with medical and construction assistance, flew vital supplies to forward areas, or coordinated all this activity on Navy and joint staffs. Overall, it is a story of Navy men and women, regular and reserve, who unselfishly answered their nation's call to arms when aggression threatened peace in the Persian Gulf.

The Naval History and Heritage Command published this history to enhance our understanding of the pivotal role played by the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific from World War II through 2010. This project is in keeping with the Command's ongoing efforts to provide naval personnel with historical information and analysis that directly support their global mission. No naval command has done more than the Seventh Fleet to defend and promote American interests in Asia. This "fighting fleet" was in the forefront of U.S. forces involved in the Pacific campaigns of World War II and the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and the Arabian Gulf. In the last half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the Seventh Fleet has stood as a bulwark against aggression and partnered with America's Asian allies to maintain peace and stability in this vital region. Whether combating conventional forces, guerrillas, insurgents, pirates, or terrorists, Seventh Fleet Sailors have routinely displayed exceptional courage and dedication, serving also as ambassadors for America's core values of freedom, democracy, free market enterprise, and respect for human rights.

Navy Medicine in Vietnam begins and ends with a humanitarian operation-the first, in 1954, after the French were defeated, when refugees fled to South Vietnam to escape from the communist regime in the North; and the second, in 1975, after the fall of Saigon and the final stage of America's exit that entailed a massive helicopter evacuation of American staff and selected Vietnamese and their families from South Vietnam. In both cases the Navy provided medical support to avert the spread of disease and tend to basic medical needs. Between those dates, 1954 and 1975, Navy medical personnel responded to the buildup and intensifying combat operations by taking a multipronged approach in treating casualties. Helicopter medical evacuations, triaging, and a system of moving casualties from short-term to long-term care meant higher rates of survival and targeted care. Poignant recollections of the medical personnel serving in Vietnam, recorded by author Jan Herman, historian of the Navy Medical Department, are a reminder of the great sacrifices these men and women made for their country and their patients.

Full color and black and white images throughout. Historical study covers the service in the Asia-Pacific region of the U.S. Seventh Fleet during the 20th and 21st centuries. The Fleet saw combat in nearly every major battle of World War II in the Pacific as well as in the Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Today the Fleet acts as a deterrence to aggressor nations in the region, provides humanitarian relief in times of disaster, participates in joint and combined exercises, and conducts counter-terrorism and anti-pirate operations.

Full color and black and white images throughout. Historical study covers the service in the Asia-Pacific region of the U.S. Seventh Fleet during the 20th and 21st centuries. The Fleet saw combat in nearly every major battle of World War II in the Pacific as well as in the Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Today the Fleet acts as a deterrence to aggressor nations in the region, provides humanitarian relief in times of disaster, participates in joint and combined exercises, and conducts counter-terrorism and anti-pirate operations.

Originally published in 1986 by the Naval Historical Center, United States Department of the Navy. 608 pages. maps. ill.

Operation End Sweep: A History of Minesweeping Operations in North Vietnam was written in 1977 by staff members of Tensor Industries of Fairfax, Virginia. Tensor prepared this account under the terms of a contract with the Mine Warfare Project Office of the Naval Sea Systems Command which, in turn, responded to a requirement from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Since the study was a security-classified document, it originally saw limited circulation. Tensor's preface pointed out the importante of End Sweep. That operation represented the U.S. Navy's first major minesweeping campaign since the Navy faced the challenge, in 1950-1951, of clearing extensive enemy minefields laid at Wonsan, Korea. The helicopter mine countermeasures systems developed after the Navy's experience in Wonsan saw their first extensive use in End Sweep. Finally, Tensor's authors noted the special problems posed by the shallow depths of North Vietnam's coastal waters and the sensitivity of the mines involved. Ironically, the U.S. Navy originally laid the mines swept by American naval forces off North Vietnam. The Seventh Fleet's 1972 mine offensive severely hampered Hanoi's ability to import war supplies from abroad and was a factor in encouraging Hanoi to negotiate a peace accord with the United States. The mines posed an equal threat to seaborne commerce once America withdrew from Southeast Asia. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the talks leading up to the Paris cease-fire agreement of January 1973, Hanoi demanded that the United States enter into a separate diplomatic protocol in which America agreed to "render harmless" the mines we had laid in the waters of the Democratic Republic ofVietnam. Over the next six months, as the U.S. Mine Countermeasures Force accomplished this work, and American forces withdrew from Southeast Asia, Hanoi continued to wage war against South Vietnam. During that period the United States viewed the minesweeping operation as a means of attempting to influence North Vietnam's behavior. Dr. Edward J. Marolda, Head of the Naval Historical Center's Contemporary History Branch and a well-known historian of the naval war in Southeast Asia, skillfully revised this document for publication and composed an introduction that places these events in historical perspective. I also wish to acknowledge the major contributions made by Sandra J. Doyle, the Center's Senior Editor, in copy editing the study and overseeing its printing. Operation End Sweep describes a classic mine clearance campaign involving the deployment of men, ships, and specialized equipment halfway around the globe to complete a demanding and politically sensitive naval operation. Considering the continuing importance of mine warfare, the Navy's historians publish this account in the hope that it will be of special interest to today's naval professionals. Dean C. Allard Director of Naval History

Throughout its history, the yard has been associated with names like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy. Kings and queens have visited the yard; its waterfront has seen many historic moments; and some of our Navy's most senior and most notable officers have called it home. Such legendary ships as USS Constitution and USS Constellation sailed from its piers, and the 14-inch and 16-inch guns that armed our Navy's battleships during Word Wars I and II were built in its factories.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a lifelong love for the United States Navy. Inspired as a youth by the U.S. Fleet's dramatic impact on the global stage, and its use overseas by his illustrious cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin quite naturally focused his eyes on the sea. FDR and the U.S. Navy presents the work of prominent biographers and historians who analyzed Franklin D. Roosevelt's long, close, and eventful association with the United States Navy, in war and peace, from the turn of the century to the end of World War II. The contributors show how as President during the 1930s, FDR endeavored with naval leaders, not always successfully, to build a combat-capable fleet and to deter the aggressor nations of Europe and Asia. The essays argue that one of Franklin Roosevelt's greatest achievements was his direction as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Navy and the other American armed forces during World War II, when the very survival of the nation was at stake. This book is the product of a day-long conference, entitled "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Navy," that was held on October 22, 1996 at the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation's Heritage Center on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. It is both a powerful tribute and an important historical work on FDR.

Combat at Close Quarters presents the work of five renowned historians who describe and interpret the U.S. Navy's major combat operations in Southeast Asia, including the Rolling Thunder and Linebacker strikes against North Vietnam, the river war in South Vietnam's Mekong Delta, and the intelligence campaign. The concise, eminently readable test is complemented with over 200 images drawn from Navy archives and private collections, detailed maps, and a select list of the most authoritative works on the subject. The chapters describe not only the actions of the warships, aircraft, and river vessels involved in one of America's longest wars but the professional skill,dedication, and courage of the Navy men and women who went in ""harm's way"" in Vietnam.