Ship Trivia Quiz

Richard Todd?  At first I thought that was one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands, so I looked him up to be sure before I made some snide comment here.   It wasn't him, but I found some interesting facts nonetheless.

Richard Todd was the man selected by Ian Fleming to play James Bond, but he was already contracted to do another movie. Enter Sean Connery.  He was also the first British officer to meet up with the British troops holding Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, and later played the commander of the troops he met up with, in The Longest Day, opposite someone else portraying him.

Turner Classic Movies has shown Battleship Potemkin in the recent past - I saw it less than a year ago.  It was a very interesting film, and I recommend it to anyone - not only as a historic film, but a film about a historic event.

Will Schoonerbum come up with a nautical Christmas question? 

Schoonerbum wins on all counts.  In addition to coming up with a good answer that I hadn't thought of, he got the one I had in mind. 

As I hoped, this thread has brought up some interesting info.  I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of "Battleship Potemkin" right off the bat.

The movie about the Amethyst incident apparently was released under a number of different titles in the U.S.  I have the impression that it was quite popular in Britain; the star, Richard Todd, was sort of the British equivalent of John Wayne in the early fifties.  I saw it under the rather sensationalized (and not especially appropriate) title "Battle Hell"; it was shown on cable several times, late at night, back in the mid-eighties.  I haven't seen it on any of the cable channel schedules for quite a few years, and so far as I can tell it hasn't been released on commercial VHS or DVD.  (I'm glad I taped it one night.)  I did find a poster on the web:  http://www.impawards.com/1957/battle_hell.html

Contrary to what the poster would have us believe, there's scarcely any action in the movie (other than the first few minutes, when the Chinese shore batteries open up on the Amethyst and she runs aground).  Most of it deals with the diplomatic frustrations of the early Cold War years.  And it's full of nice on board shots and Royal Navy slang. 

Apparently its original British title was "Yangtse Incident."  In that capacity it got an entry in Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtse_Incident_(1957_film) .

Note that the Amethyst was brought out of mothballs (or whatever the British call that condition) to take part - and another ship had to stand in for her in the shots where she had to move.

Good flick; hope it turns up on cable again.  Schoonerbum - your turn.

Hi

It's kinda sad how soon we forget the REAL classic Movies. 

1st, "Battleship Potiemkin", early to mid "20's" silent Russian movie that actually featured that pre-dreadnought battleship.

2nd. "Two Tars", Laurel & Hardy. With their pre-dreadnought battleship in the backgroun{U.S.S. Oregon, with "cage mainmast"}, Laurel & Hardy are first seen getting off their ships boat on the dock. The rest of the movie then moves ashore, but it has a GREAT shot of the Oregon in the harbor.

I hope to sometime do both movies on a "Mighty Wurlitzer" or "Golden Voiced Barton" theatre pipe organ in the future, providing my cancer don't take me first.

OOPS ! ! !     "Two Tars" counts for 2 movies by the way, 1st the SILENT version, then the "talkie version.

SteveH

If you want "a pretty good flick"  you're certainly not thinking of "Under Seige", starring USS Missouri as USS Missouri, and a host of other characters.

Rick

There are some good non-fiction books covering the Yangtse:

Armed with Stings, A. Cecil Hampshire, 1950 covers the history of the Insect Class, built in Word War I, originally, for service in... Iraq!

Yangtze Patrol, Kemp Tolley, 1971, The US Navy in China

Prelude to Pearl Harbor, Roy Stanley, 1982, War in China 1937-41

Gunboat!, Small Ships at War, Bryan Perrett, 2000, covers the Crimea to brownwater operations in Vietnam, including summaries of the stories of Bee, Panay and Amethyst.

Now that is interesting!  I'm pretty sure I tossed up a question about the attack on the USS Panay a while back, and the HMS Bee was part of the answer. 

And I have a nice unread hardcover edition of The Sand Pebbles from the Naval Institute - I really should read it sometime soon. McKenna was an excellent writer!

Since this forum tends to lean towards warships, I would guess that the "Yangtse Incident" from the 1950s is a possible answer. This is the the account of HMS Amethyst escaping from Ta Sha Island and the clutches of Mao's communists in the late 1940s, starring... HMS Amethyst.

The Yangtse is a pretty much forgotten theatre in modern naval history.  Except for notable exceptions, such as this film and Steve McQueen's The Sand Pebbles, the American and British Naval presences on the Yangtse River during the first half of the 20th century has faded from popular memory.

My wife's uncle, who received a DSC for HMS Maori's torpedo attack on Bismarck (which everyone is probably tired of hearing about) commanded HMS Cockchafer in 1937/38 and HMS Cricket in 1938/39, both Insect class gunboats on the Yangtse River.

I'm all for going both ways - schoonerbum with a question, and more movie ideas. And I'm by no means offended - as soon as I thought of Kon-Tiki I was excited about having come up with a monkey wrench.

Hmmm....alumni72 took a tack I hadn't thought of:  documentaries.  If we include those in the discussion, we have to include such flicks as "The Ra Expeditions" and, for that matter, "U.S.S. North Carolina:  The Showboat" (narrated by Glenn Ford) and "The Fighting Lady" (feature-length, filmed on board the second carrier Yorktown - which the script never named).  If alumni72 won't be offended, I suggest we restrict the competition to, for want of a better term, non-documentary features - the kind that have actors in them.  In that context nobody's yet come up with the one I had in mind.  Both Schoonerbum and Subfixer came up with candidates that fit the description, though, so I guess Schoonerbum, having been first, gets to ask the next question.

I wonder, though, if we might keep working on this one for another day or two, and see if anybody thinks of the one I did.  It's a pretty good flick that, I suspect, many Forum members haven't seen and would enjoy if they did.

i'm sure there was at least one ship that "played itself"  in McHale's Navy 

 *edit* ooops broke the rule of actual historic occurance, oh well i'm sure i made some of you want to watch it now, i now i want to

Frankly, I wouldn't mind of this thread turned into a strictly "Ship Movie Trivia" thread, even if only for a while.  Every time we get a movie question I end up having a list of movies I want to see, or see again.

Not sure if I mentioned this for the last one regarding the Cagney movie, but on the Turner Classic movies website you can vote for a movie to be put out on DVD if it isn't already available; they count votes by email address, so if you have more than one (or if your family members do) then you can cast more than one vote.  I don't think they can guarantee that a movie can or will be voted into DVD-dom, but if Turner doesn't have some pull, then I don't know who does.

And now, back to our thread....

I believe that one movie that used the title character in the scripted filming and not just stock footage was the 1966 film  "Assault on a Queen", with Frank Sinatra and Tony Franciosa, written by Rod Serling (imagine, if you will...).

The movie used the Queen Mary as the scripted target and in footage shot of her, and aboard her, for the film.

Here I go again, opening my big mouth when I don't have a question handy in case I'm right.

My first reaction was the USS Arizona in Abbott & Costello In the Navy - but a simple lookup indicates that the ship they were on was supposed to be the Alabama.  I don't think that would have qualified anyway, though, since I get the impression that the film is supposed to be about the ship in question, not simply using her as a prop or a set.

So, how about Kon-Tiki?

I apologize for my tardiness in coming up with a new question.  With well over a thousand posts on this thread, it's getting tougher and tougher.

This is going to be another movie question.  (They seem to be relatively safe.  My non-movie questions have gotten cyber-vegetables thrown at me more than once.)  It's a little complicated, and probably doesn't have only one definitive answer, so please bear with me.

We've all sat through nautical movies in which the ships are awful.  Hollywood seems to take it for granted that any large, grey, floating object can be used to represent any twentieth-century warship.  Hence the U.S.S. Yorktown and Lexington masquerading as Japanese carriers in "Tora Tora Tora" and "Midway," the Missouri popping up several times in "Pearl Harbor," etc., etc.  And heaven knows how many ships the poor old Queen Mary has impersonated.

There have, however, been a few movies in which historically important ships have portrayed themselves.  One came up recently in this thread: "Here Comes the Navy," much of which was filmed on board the Arizona.  Some early scenes in the wonderful, slightly silly epic "Dive Bomber" were shot on board the Enterprise.  (I love the sequence in which the air group takes off from her with yellow wings and color-coded tails and cowlings, and lands a few minutes later in San Diego painted overall grey.  Painting those airplanes in mid-flight must have been a really remarkable achievement.)  And surely among the best of all WWII naval movies is "Pursuit of the Graf Spee."  That one is the only one I've seen in which the participating ships get listed in the opening credits, alongside the actors.  The audience learned before the movie started that the U.S.S. Salem was impersonating the Graf Spee, and H.M.N.Z.S. Achilles (on loan from her new owner, the Indian Navy) portrayed herself.

So here's the question.  Can you name any other movies in which ships have "played themselves"?  I can think of one off the top of my head; I suspect there may be others, and we'll give the next question to anybody who can come up with any of them.

One rule.  The movie has to have been about a genuine, historical even in which the ship in question took part.  That rules out, for instance, "The Final Countdown," in which the U.S.S. Nimitz played herself in a piece of science fiction.

Eaglecentral, you have nothing whatever to apologize for.  The U.S. Navy itself regards October 13, 1775 as its "birthday."  (That may be in an effort to refute the Coast Guard's claim - a perfectly legitimate one, in my not-unbiased opinion - that it's the "senior of the sea services."  The Coast Guard can trace its history back directly to the creation of one of its predecessor institutions, the Revenue Cutter Service, in 1790.)  And anybody who lives anywhere near a Marine Corps base knows that the Marines celebrate their "birthday," usually with considerable late-night enthusiasm, on November 10, because that was the day in 1775 when the Continental Congress (allegedly) authorized the recruitment of the first "U.S. Marines."  That those individuals didn't call themselves any such thing, and that the country had no marines between the end of the Revolution and the creation of the new U.S. Navy in the 1790s, is conveniently ovelooked.

Believe me, if you'd had to teach this stuff as many times as I have during the past 25 years, you wouldn't think of it as remarkable scholarship.  And if the grades the students get on their exams are any indication, I haven't been teaching it very well.  I just got done grading this semester's crop of final exams in the "American Military History to 1900" course.  At least six students (out of twenty-one) identified the Treaty of Paris, 1763 as "the treaty that ended the American Revolution."  (Those six included several ROTC cadets -i.e., future U.S. Army second lieutenants.) 

Things could be worse.  One year one of them wrote:  "Treaty of Paris, 1763:  the treaty that ended the War of 1812."  And I once read, on a final exam in the post-1900 course:  "The Berlin Airlift was General MacArthur sending supplies over the Yalu River to North Vietnam."  Moments like that do make one confident that one picked the right profession.

I'm notoriously lousy at picking trivia questions for this thread - largely because the participants in the Forum are so much more knowledgable than the students I normally work with.  Please give me a day or two; I'll see what I can come up with.

jtilley,

Of course you are right in every respect and I am in awe of your scholarship.

John Adams, whose arguments at the Continental Congress in 1775 directly led to the authorization to purchase and outfit the two ships cited in the original question, said :

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

You have stated the facts of this case correctly.  Your assessment of the difference between a Continental Navy and a United States Navy cannot be refuted.

Therefore, for the purposes of this question, I withdraw all references to the US Navy and request that Continental Navy or other appropriate identification be bestowed upon the small force that Esek Hopkins, as Commander-in-Chief-of-the-Fleet, led to New Providence in the Bahamas to become the first fleet operation of the Continental Navy.

To borrow a phrase from Wyatt Earp, "Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything."  I will try to be more accurate in the future.

jtilly, the next question is yours.

Tom S.

I have to say I have a problem with the verbiage of this question.  I intend no criticism of eaglecentral, but terminology regarding the American Revolution can be more than a little confusing.

The U.S. Navy does indeed mark October 13, 1775, as its birthday, but accepting that label requires some real stretching of history.  Congress didn't found an institution called the U.S. Navy in 1775; there was no United States in 1775.  (So far as I know, the first public use of the term "United States of America" is dated July 4, 1776.)  What Congress did in October of 1775 was simply to authorize the acquisition of some armed vessels to take part in the fighting against the British.  (At that point, from the standpoint of the Continental Congress, what was going on did not constitute a "war."  The official position of the Congress at that time was that the "forces raised in the defense of the public liberty" were attempting to enforce British law, against a "ministerial army and navy" that were violating it.)

If that term "U.S. Navy" is stretched as far as it can be stretched, we probably ought to include the exploits of George Washington's little fleet of schooners, the first of which, the Hannah, he "commissioned" on September 2, 1775 (getting the Continental Congress's approval afterward).  

By the end of the Revolution the organization that superintended the warships financed by the Continental Congress was being referred to as the American Continental Navy.  I obviously can't claim to have read every contemporary document that's associated with this subject, but I've read quite a few.  I've never run into the term "United States Navy," or "Navy of the United States," in any of them.  (The British references to those ships are really amusing.  Sir George Rodney once called a group of Continental warships "vessels belonging to his Majesty's Rebellious and Piratical Subjects arm'd for War.")

The points I've just made are largely semantic.  The bigger argument against calling Oct. 13, 1775 "the birthday of the U.S. Navy" is that, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Congress sold off all its remaining warships and laid off all the officers and crews.  By 1785 the American Continental Navy had ceased to exist.  For the next several years the United States had no navy.  (It didn't have a Marine Corps either - despite the current institution's insistance that it was born during the Revolution.) 

The present day U.S. Navy's actual "birthdate" is a matter of some legitimate argument.  In 1794, during the Washington administration, Congress authorized the construction of six frigates, in reaction to the ongoing troubles with the Barbary Pirates.  Those six ships eventually became the United States, Constitution, Constellation, Congress, President, and Chesapeake, but they had a rocky start.  The Naval Act of 1794 included a provision that construction of the ships was to stop if the government succeeded in negotiating an acceptable treaty with Algiers - which it did.  Later, during the John Adams administration and the worsening of relations with France (following the "XYZ Affair"), Congress authorized resumption of work on the three frigates that were most advanced (the United States, Constitution, and Constellation).  Not long after, Congress created the Department of the Navy.  That's the institution that has existed ever since.

Three dates seem like reasonable candidates for "birthday of the U.S. Navy."  March 27, 1794 was the date on which the Naval Act of 1794 was passed.  From that point onward the federal government was officially operating a naval force - at least on paper.  The U.S.S. United States, the first of the ships authorized by that act, was launched on May 10, 1797; from that point onward the navy has always had at least one warship in the water.  And Congress passed the legislation adding the Department of the Navy to the executive branch on April 30, 1798.

None of this, I'm sure, will convince the USN to quit celebrating its birthday on October 13.  But I think it's pretty clear that the term "United States Navy" didn't get added to the American vocabulary until at least 1794 - and prior to 1797 it certainly didn't mean much.  As a matter of fact, the phrase "Navy of the United States" seems to have been far more common for quite a few years - at least through the War of 1812. 

With all that academic grumpiness out of the way, I imagine the operation eaglecentral had in mind was the cruise of Esek Hopkins's fleet to Nassau in March, 1776.  It could just as well be argued, though, that the first operations of the U.S. Navy didn't take place until the Quasi-War with France.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this makes much difference one way or another.  But the title of this thread is, after all, "Ship Trivia."  And I have to admit that I've long been fascinated by the intricasies of the process by which modern U.S. military institutions were created.

schoonerbumm,

you covered a lot of ground with that innocent question!  I find it fascinating that such a small number of men on such small ships could impact history in the big way they did! 

More history with an easy New QUESTION:

On October 13, 1775 the US Navy was founded when congress authorized the purchase and outfitting of two ships.  Congress later named Esek Hopkins as "Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet.

What was the first fleet operation carried out by the US Navy?

Tom S.

Both vessels were American flagged sloops

---- Eaglecentral is right. The vessel I was looking for was the Fair American. The other possible answer was the Lady Washington.

Each sloop started its journey from, literally,  opposite ends of the earth.

----The Fair American was purchased in China by Simon Metcalfe as a consort to his ship  Eleanore. His son Thomas was given command of the sloop and they departed from China for the Northwest coast of America. The two vessels were sperated in a storm and they both made for the Northwest Coast and a rendevous at Nootka Sound.

----The Lady Washington was commanded by Robert Gray and departed for the Northwest Coast from Boston. Lady Washington was the consort to John Kendrick's Columbia. These two vessels were also seperated in a storm, off Cape Horn. Incidently, this was the same storm that defeated William Bligh in HMS Bounty, a few hundered miles behind Columbia. The two vessels also made for Nootka Sound.

Both vessels were associated with the unification of the Hawaiian Islands and the establishment of the monarchy (famous!, both are the subjects of books, paintings articles)

---- Arriving at Nootka Sound, the Fair American was seized by the Spanish, having no papers and contraband sea otter pelts aboard. The Spanish also attempted to seize Eleanore when she showed up, but Eleanore was faster. Fair American was taken to San Blas Mexico, then released. Thomas Metcalfe sailed to Hawaii and attempted to trade with the natives, while looking for his father's ship. Unfortunately the elder Metcalfe had preceded him, and committed the slaughter mentioned by eaglecentral. Simon Metcalfe also had struck a chief in front of his subjects, a humiliation demanding redress. It was the agreived chief that seized the Fair American and killed all but one of its crew. The vessel was then appropriated by King Kamehameha and used against his enemies.

---- John Kendrick had traded commands with Robert Gray, Kendrick remaining in the Pacific with Lady Washington, while Gray circumnavigated the world (the first American to do so) and returned to Boston. After several years of trading, including showing the American Flag in Japan for the first time, the Lady Washington ended up in Hawaii at the grand finale of Kamehameha's campaigns.

Both vessels were involved in the sea otter trade

Both vessels were the targets of native surprise attacks, one successfull, one repelled

----As mentioned above, Thomas Metcalfe's Fair American was seized by a Hawaiian chief while pretending to trade.

----Off of the Northwest Coast of America, Kendrick in the Lady Washington had caused a chief to loose face. The natives engaged in friendly trade as a ruse, then suddenly attempted to seize the sloop. Kendrick managed to get below to the arms chest and then the yankees cleared the decks and proceeded to slaughter the retreating natives in the water with musketry and swivel gun fire.

Both vessels were commanded by members from two father/son "teams" (obscure fact)

---- The Metcalfe father/son commands were described above.

---- Kendrick brought two of his sons on the Columbia, one acting as fifth officer, John Kendrick Jr. Upon reaching the Northwest Coast, John Jr. converted to Catholicism and joined the Spanish Navy as a second pilot (master's mate). Over the next six years (1788 to 1794), Kendrick Jr. rose in responsibility to command several Spanish vessels, including the frigate Aranzazu.

One vessel was commanded at different times by the son from each family (really obscure fact)

----The two families crossed paths when Fair American was seized by the Spanish and sent to San Blas for disposition. Command of the sloop and prize crew was entrusted to Juan Kendrick, as John Kendrick Jr. was known in Spanish service. On the way to San Blas, the Fair American was damaged in a storm and had to put into Monterey for repairs: the first time an American vessel commanded by an American entered a port in what was to become the west coast of the United States.

One captain from each family was killed in Hawaii, each aboard his own vessel, during the unification wars.

---- As eaglecentral mentioned, Thomas Metcalfe was killed during the seizure of the Fair American.

---- John Kendrick was present at the final battle, where Kamehameha finally established supremacy... with the use of the Fair American and the British vessels Jackal and Prince LeBoo. The role of the Lady Washington in the battle is uncertain, but during the celebratory salutes after the victory one of the guns on the British vessels was still loaded with shot. The discharge tore through Lady Washington's stern and killed Kendrick.

One of the captains has something in common with Mickey Mouse!

---- John Kendrick Sr. has two monuments to him, the modern replica sailing vessel Lady Washington, which currently operates on the west coast and the static replica of Columbia... at Disneyland.

I searched the internet and found two ships that may satisfy this question.

The first and most prominent is the Fair American, a sloop which arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1789.  When one of it's boats was stolen and a sailor killed, Captain Thomas Metcalf ambushed and killed approximately 100 unlucky natives in retaliation.  The natives in turn, attacked and captured the Fair American, killing it's entire crew except for one Issac Davis who managed to be knocked unconscious and was spared.

The other ship, the Eleanora, under Captain Simon Metcalf, was loosely traveling with and working the sea otter trade with the Fair American. Being unaware of the Fair American's fate, they sent a party ashore to explore.  One member of the party, John Young, became separated from his shipmates, and because the natives were unfriendly, he was unable to get back to the Eleanora.  The Captain assumed he had deserted and departed for China without him.

Davis and Young were both detained by King Kamehameha and not allowed to leave.  They became the first european residents of the Hawaiian Islands. Together they served King Kamehameha as advisors and used their knowledge of guns and ships to help him extend his territory and conquor his enemies.

My sources are varied and contradict each other to some extent, however, I think this is the basics of the story.  I couldn't find a Mickey Mouse connection but I'm guessing that either Davis or Young turn out to be related to Annette Funicello?

Aloha, Tom S.

Well, this seems to have fallen off of the page. I didn't think that the answer would be that obscure.

Anyway a few hints, some very general, and some famous, some so obscure that I just realized them.

There are some amazing coincidences between the two possible answers;

Both vessels were American flagged sloops

Each sloop started its journey from, literally,  opposite ends of the earth.

Both vessels were associated with the unification of the Hawaiian Islands and the establishment of the monarchy (famous!, both are the subjects of books, paintings articles)

Both vessels were involved in the sea otter trade

Both vessels were the targets of native surprise attacks, one successfull, one repelled

Both vessels were commanded by members from two father/son "teams" (obscure fact)

One vessel was commanded at different times by the son from each family (really obscure fact)

One captain from each family was killed in Hawaii, each aboard his own vessel, during the unification wars.

One of the captains has something in common with Mickey Mouse!

You're probably right, Alan - after all, they thought "Captain Cook" was an instruction, not a name!

Seriously, though, I thought you were looking for the USS Boston too. I'll have to dig a bit deeper into the history books.

Rick

Subfixer,

The question refers to events well before the end of the monarchy, but as usual, someone may find other valid answers. After I posted the question, it occurred to me that there is a second answer, that I know of. 

Rick,

And the Sandwich Islanders probably would still prefer to think of Europeans as something to put in a sandwich...

I still prefer to think of them as the Sandwich Islands!

Rick

But, it was a most glorious episode...  

...unlike that episode at Trafalgar where, even though a lot of press and a tremendous amount of tradition were created, it took another seven years to settle matters, a kingdom was built from this episode.  ;-)

Looks like nobody wants to play, Alan - or maybe nobody wants to remember one of your less glorious episodes?

Rick

Since we are coming up on Pearl Harbor Day, here is another Hawaiian naval history question (remember Mad Jack Percival Day!).

Long before the raid on Pearl Harbor, another American vessel was involved in a sneak attack in the Hawaiian Islands and was involved in active island warfare, not just self defense, using cannon.

Name the vessel and summarize her unusual story.