BJ Armstrong

Dec 31, 2024 | usni.org | Andrew Blackley |BJ Armstrong

CDR Benjamin "BJ" Armstrong, USN, is a former search and rescue helicopter pilot and associate professor of war studies and naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the author or editor of four books and several dozen articles on naval history and strategy, and the recipient of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement and the Lyman Book Award from the North American Society of Oceanic History.

Nov 1, 2024 | usni.org | Andrew Blackley |BJ Armstrong

What do you do if you find yourself with four twin-14-inch battleship turret assemblies and no place to use them? Call on Winston Churchill, of course. That was the position in which the president of Bethlehem Steel, Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the famous brokerage house), found himself in fall 1914. He was under contract to furnish armor plate and the guns to complete the Greek battlecruiser Salamis that was being built by the AG Vulcan Works of Hamburg, Germany.

Sep 1, 2024 | usni.org | J. M. Caiella |BJ Armstrong |Eric L. Mills |James Young

On the 80th anniversary of the 1944 explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro fully exonerated the African American sailors who were court-martialed. At the outset of an occupation of the Philippines that would last for decades, U.S. personnel took control of the Spanish gunboat Panay. It was beneath an October sky that the swan song of the Imperial Japanese Navy could be heard at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Aug 31, 2024 | usni.org | BJ Armstrong |Andrew Blackley |J. M. Caiella

Commodore George Dewey defeated a Spanish squadron at Manila Bay in May 1898, early in the Spanish-American War. A few months later, U.S. Army forces under Major General Elwell S. Otis took control of the Philippine city. Most of the Spanish squadron had been sunk by the American Asiatic Squadron or scuttled in the battle’s closing moments as Spaniards abandoned ship.

Aug 1, 2024 | usni.org | Andrew Blackley |BJ Armstrong |J. M. Caiella

She is a double-elliptical, high-uffen-buffen, double turreted, back acting, submarine War junk. . . . She is about the shape of a sweet potato that has burst in the boiling. She draws fourteen feet of mud forward, 16’-6” of slime aft, and has three feet of discolored water over the main deck in fair weather.” That is how Lieutenant William S.