A Year at the Naval Academy

Staff Historian Completes Tour as the Class of ’57 Chair of Naval Heritage

Long-time NHF staff historian Dr. Dave Winkler recently completed a year teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy as a member of the history department faculty. He had this opportunity thanks to the generosity of the Class of 1957, which, for their 50 th anniversary gift to the academy, endowed a Chair of Naval Heritage. Dr. Williamson Murray served as the first chair during the 2007–2008 academic year. Subsequent chairs have included Gilbert Andrew, Hugh Gordon, Ronald Spector, Craig L. Symonds, James Bradford, Gene Alan Smith, William F. Trimble, David Alan Rosenberg, Nicolas A. Lambert, and Kathleen Broome Williams. Over the summer, Dr. Winkler will be leaving this chair to fill the Charles Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian. For Pull Together, we asked Dr. Winkler to share some thoughts about his time in Annapolis.

PT: So what were your teaching responsibilities at the Naval Academy?

Winkler: I had a two-course load during each semester: the basic HH104 Introduction to Naval History class that all plebes take and an upper-level course. For the fall upper-level class I leveraged my experience with the NHHC’s Combat Documentation Detachment 206. I turned a report I wrote for Commander Fifth Fleet on the history of the U.S. Navy’s presence in Bahrain into a course on U.S. naval operations in the Middle East post–World War II. In the spring I drew upon my quarter century of experience doing oral history with the NHF to teach a course on oral history methodology, assigning the class to interview members of the Class of ’57 on their experiences during the Vietnam War.

PT: Please talk about the intro course— any surprises?

Winkler: What surprised me about the introduction course was that you were encouraged to approach it with a clean slate—there were no lesson-plan templates to follow. I did use the current text America, Sea Power, and the World, compiled by Knox Medal recipient James Bradford, as well as the naval atlas and concise history produced by another Knox awardee, Craig Symonds. To augment the textbooks, I used many of the 200 historical perspective articles I have written for the Navy League’s Sea Power magazine for the past two decades. I broke the class into Fire Teams, and each Fire Team would present an article as a case study.

Sadly, another thing I discovered was that general knowledge of American history, let alone American naval history, is lacking with many of these incoming midshipmen. Thus at times I had to scale back on discussing specifics in favor of providing broader overviews of the state of the nation during various timeframes between armed confrontations.

PT: Did your experience with the Naval Historical Foundation help with the upperlevel classes?

Winkler: I taught 75-minute classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings over 15 weeks, which meant I had to deliver over 37 hours of quality content to upper-class midshipmen who were mostly history majors. Whereas my predecessors, having taught naval history courses at other universities, could recycle curricula, I was starting from scratch. To compensate, I leaned on many members of Dr. Winkler with Capt. Paul Rinn in front of the Tecumseh statue facing the NHF who were subject matter experts to come in and share their experiences. Capt. Bancroft Hall Andrew A.C. Jampoler, who wrote Sailors in the Holy Land, kicked off my Middle East Ops class with an engaging talk about the 1840s Lynch expedition to the Dead Sea. We used a new text published by Naval Institute Press, Middle East 101, and the coauthors Cdr. Youseff Aboul-Enein Continued on page 16

Staff Historian

Continued from page 15

and Joseph Stanik both came in to discuss their book. Dr. Sal Mercogliano discussed logistics. We had Master Chief Mark Hacala, a corpsman in Lebanon when the Marine barracks was bombed, discuss that grim episode. Steve Phillips, a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College, discussed the 1980s Tanker Wars. The commanding officers of Samuel B. Roberts and Cole, Capt. Paul Rinn and Cdr. Kirk Lippold, respectively, discussed the damage that was inflicted on their respective commands. Dr. Ed Marolda gave an overview of Sword and Shield, the book he coauthored on the First Gulf War. Director of Naval History Rear Adm. Sam Cox briefed the situation in the Middle East post–9/11. I also leaned on USNA faculty with regional experience to include Dr. Mark Folse, who served in Fallujah with the Marines; Lt. Kai Compton, who operated small craft on the Tigress; and the superintendent, Vice Adm. Sean Buck, who had commanded the maritime patrol assets in the region. My Rolodex helped in other ways. When I tasked the class to give country briefs, I told them to present them to me as if I were a flag officer. Then I thought: “Heck, let me bring in real Flag Officers to receive the briefs.” The class appreciated the feedback that former 5 th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Doug Katz and NHF Executive Director Rear Adm. Sonny Masso had to offer.

For the spring oral history class I followed that same script, except I increased the number of guests by hosting roundtables. Basically, there were three groupings. The first was practitioners. Cdr. Paul Stillwell from USNI; Drs. Richard Hulver and Regina Akers from NHHC; Jan Herman, retired from BUMED; and Charles Melson and Dr. Fred Allison, retired from the Marine Corps History Division, discussed their collection efforts. In addition, Laura Orr from the Hampton Roads Naval Museum gave a well-crafted presentation on how she used oral history in the museum’s new Vietnam exhibition. The second grouping included visiting historians who have written scholarly works on the conflict, such as riverine and coastal warfare expert Dr. John Sherwood from NHHC and Air Force historian Dr. Darrel Whitcomb. Finally, I brought in groups of veterans such as brown water veteran Lt. Cdr. Tom Cutler and Capt. Dick Kroulis, who flew with HA(L)-3—the Seawolves. Vice Adm. Robert F. Dunn and Capt. Todd Creekman—names familiar to the NHF membership—brought in colleagues who were veterans of the air campaign and naval gunfire support.

PT: For the oral history class, was there a class project?

Winkler: As I noted earlier, because the Class of ’57 was generous enough to endow my one-year stint in Annapolis, I thought we could do payback by having the class of 15 midshipmen interview 15 members of the Class of ’57 about their Vietnam experience. What is fascinating about the Class of ’57 is that a quarter of the class went into the Air Force, and some opted for the Marine Corps, so we had representatives from three services in the interview pool. So once the interviews were transcribed, the class was assigned 15 periodic segments, and they meshed the 15 transcriptions with other historical sources to write a narrative on “The Class of 1957.” The goal is to publish copies for each of the students and participants for presentation this fall.

PT: Of course, with COVID-19 you were thrown a curveball.

Winkler: Correct. We all departed on spring break expecting to come back. What we ended up doing was to transition to online teaching. Because the oral history class had focused on subject matter experts making themselves available to meet with the class to talk about their experiences, we did not miss a beat when it came to carrying on the conversations. In fact, the online format enabled me to bring on Joe Galloway, the UPI reporter who coauthored We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, to talk about a new book, They Were Soldiers, that focused on oral histories completed with Vietnam veterans in various professions. Another great presentation was given by the team that produced the 2 Sides Project, a PBS documentary that united the now adult children of men who were killed on both sides in the war. The class also enrolled and participated in an online symposium hosted by Columbia University on oral history and pandemics.

With the plebe class I decided to use the online format to expose these future officers to some great lecturers, so our mole at the Air Force Academy, Dr. Chuck Steele, came to discuss Vice Adm. William Sims; Dr. Craig Symonds at the Naval War College covered the Pacific campaign; Dr. Sal Mercogliano discussed logistics in the Korean War; Dr. John Sherwood discussed Vietnam; and for the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s former Navy Secretary John Lehman was delighted to spend an hour with the class.

Dr. John Sherwood posed with Dr. Winkler’s oral history class before classroom instruction ended following the onset of COVID-19.

PT: Any other thoughts about the impact of COVID-19?

Winkler: Well, since I had a class of novice oral historians, I designed a final exam where the students simulated being assigned to NHHC’s Naval Combat Documentation Reserve Unit with a mission to document COVID-19 at the Naval Academy. For the final class of the semester, NHHC Director Rear Adm. Sam Cox joined to discuss combat documentation and briefed up the mission. On the day of the final they opened a packet sent by e-mail that revealed their interviewee. Subjects included a plebe living near a meat-packing town in Iowa, a firstie leaving in Queens, members of the USNA staff including the librarian and the head of food services, and numerous members of the faculty. They spent an hour prepping

The Director’s Cut

Continued from page 5 and intended for use as a kamikaze decoy. A kamikaze also seriously damaged the Pearl Harbor–veteran seaplane tender Curtiss (AV 4) in the Kerama Retto anchorage. (Of note, famous actor Henry Fonda served aboard Curtiss as a combat intelligence officer, giving up the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar Hollywood income.) On June 22, LST 534 was hit by a kamikaze while she was beached. Technically, she sank, but she didn’t go very far and would be raised, making LSM-59 the last commissioned ship sunk before the end of Japanese resistance on Okinawa.

In the meantime, Japanese frustrations with that questions, another 30–40 minutes conducting and recording the interview, and then the rest of the exam period writing the interview abstract. Later in the day we reconvened the class to do a group interview with Coach Ken Niumatalolo, long-time Navy football coach. A theme in the interviews was the sadness surrounding the cancellation of many of the spring activities such as the climbing of the Herndon Monument and the graduation week ceremonies. On the other hand, everyone remarked that overall, the Naval Academy showed remarkable resilience given that it was forced to try something that had never been done in its 175-year history. I’m proud that I was able to play a role in that transition and conclude by saying it was a privilege to teach at what U.S. News & World Report ranks as the #1 public college in the country and build friendships with faculty that will endure for years to come.

country’s Kaiten submarines continued in late June. I-36 survived multiple close calls, and a sacrificial launch of two Kaiten-manned suicide torpedoes probably saved her, but she achieved no hits on her mission. I-165 was even less lucky and was sunk with all hands by a U.S. Navy PV-2 Harpoon aircraft on June 27, 1945. By June 22, 1945, the commander of Japanese forces on Okinawa, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, had committed suicide, and the enormously costly Battle of Okinawa was officially over. Kamikaze attacks went into a lull until late July as both sides prepared for the invasion of Japan.