The U.S. Navy History Podcast

In July 2026, volunteer divers found the WWII wreck of SS Cornwallis 400 feet down in the Gulf of Maine, sunk in December 1944 by U-1230, the U-boat that had just landed two Nazi spies at Hancock Point, Maine. Dale and Christophe trace Operation Elster from Kiel to Frenchman Bay: Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh, a Navy reject turned SS agent; the Boy Scout who followed their footprints in the snow; and Kapitänleutnant Hans Hilbig’s torpedo, which killed 43 Canadian mariners. Built on the Navy’s own 1945 interrogation report and the German U-boat Command’s war diary.

The world's first nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVN-65), is being towed from Newport News, Virginia, to Mobile, Alabama, to be scrapped, and Dale and Christophe use her last voyage to trace the whole 250-year line of the name. Benedict Arnold captures a British sloop on Lake Champlain in 1775. The schooner Enterprise fights the corsair Tripoli and sets up Decatur's raid. William Burrows and Samuel Blyth are buried side by side. CV-6 earns 20 battle stars and is still sold for scrap. Dale, a former Machinist's Mate on USS George Washington, explains what eight reactors meant compared with two. Ships come and go. The name keeps coming back.

On February 23, 1942, early in World War II, the Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced off Ellwood near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled an oil field while FDR spoke to the nation by radio. It was the first enemy shelling of the American mainland in the war. Commander Nishino Kozo's gunners fired seventeen rounds and did about $500 in damage. The panic did far more. The next night, the Battle of Los Angeles left five dead. Dale follows I-17 from Pearl Harbor to her sinking by HMNZS Tui off Noumea, and asks what twenty minutes of bad gunnery really cost.

On November 29, 1944, off the coast of Honshu in the Pacific War, the submarine USS Archerfish sank the Japanese supercarrier Shinano, the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine. Shinano was built on a Yamato-class battleship hull in total secrecy, and she sailed unfinished, with watertight doors missing and compartments never tested. Commander Joe Enright, who had once asked to be relieved for being too cautious, chased her through the night and fired six torpedoes at 3:17 a.m. Captain Toshio Abe kept steaming. Dale, a Navy Machinist’s Mate, goes below decks to show how she was really lost.

The Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the World War II carrier clash fought north of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific in August 1942, was the third carrier battle in history, and almost nobody remembers it. Dale and Christophe follow Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Saratoga and Enterprise against Nagumo’s Shokaku and Zuikaku. Commander Harry Felt sinks the light carrier Ryujo, three bombs tear into the Big E, and Chief Machinist William Smith saves her jammed rudder in a 170-degree compartment. Then a B-17 finally hits a ship. It’s the battle that kept Henderson Field American and started the Tokyo Express.

Is the aircraft carrier the next battleship? Dale tests the 2026 drone swarm threat against the battleship's fall, from Billy Mitchell and Prince of Wales to the kamikazes off Okinawa. Black Sea drone boats, the Red Sea, the 2026 Iran war, and China's anti-carrier swarm plan all get red-teamed. The verdict: drones won't sink a carrier, but in the Western Pacific she stands at the battleship's edge.

Operation Desecrate One, the March 1944 World War II carrier raid on Palau in the western Pacific, drove Japan’s Combined Fleet from its last great forward anchorage. Dale and Christophe follow Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s eleven carriers of Task Force 58, the first carrier-laid minefield of the Pacific War, and USS Tunny’s torpedo hit on the superbattleship Musashi. Then the chain reaction: Admiral Mineichi Koga vanishes in a storm, and Japan’s Z Plan washes up off Cebu. Through it all, one survivor of USS Tullibee watches from a Japanese prison tree. The raid nobody remembers, and why it mattered.

The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought May 4–8, 1942, was the first naval battle in history where opposing fleets never saw each other — carriers duking it out entirely through scout planes and radio reports. A Japanese strike force burns its morning hunting the oiler USS Neosho and destroyer USS Sims, mistaken for carriers, while an American strike sinks the light carrier Shōhō in twenty minutes flat. USS Lexington goes down after a delayed gasoline explosion; USS Yorktown limps home to a three-day emergency repair under Nimitz's orders. Tactically inconclusive. Strategically, it's the battle that made Midway winnable a month later.

On September 11th, 2001, while running routine sea trials off the Virginia coast, USS George Washington (CVN-73) became the U.S. Navy's first responder to the attacks on New York and the Pentagon — designated command ship for East Coast air defense within three hours, under Vice Admiral J. Cutler Dawson, and steaming overnight to stand three miles off Coney Island by dawn. Over the next five days her air wings flew 234 armed patrols, without a single accident. Co-host Dale was aboard as a young Machinist's Mate — and for the first time, tells that story himself: asleep when it started, in the hangar bay when the smoke came into view.

On September 29, 2016, the U.S. Navy eliminated every enlisted rating title — Boatswain's Mate, Machinist's Mate, Hospital Corpsman, all of it — replacing two hundred and forty-one years of trade identity with rank alone. Eighty-three days later, after a hundred-thousand-signature petition, a fourteen-hundred-sailor town hall at Naval Station Norfolk, and a public feud between chief petty officers in the Navy's own professional journal, Admiral John Richardson reversed it completely. Dale traces the rating system from the 1794 Naval Act through the 1885 chevron badge and the 1893 creation of Chief Petty Officer, to the fastest full policy reversal in modern Navy history — and why the Navy still trusts a name over a number