The main theme of this thesis is the precise role of the navy department in the struggle to maintain the Union. However, naval operations themselves are not within the scope of this thesis. To what degree did the navy department assist in the successful prosecution of the war? What problems were faced by Welles in the purchase, charter, and construction of naval vessels? What was the relationship between the department and Congress? What evidence of fraud and corruption existed?

Despite the vast material that has been written about the Second World War, most literature mentions battleships in passing, giving little attention to a role that battleships filled- that of naval gunfire support for amphibious landings. The literature regarding the Navy’s older, obsolescent battleships such as the Texas is scarce. Using primary sources regarding the Texas and the evolution of naval gunfire doctrine from the pre-war and wartime periods, this study looks at the involvement of the Texas in the Second World War and how the Navy employed its oldest battleships. The amphibious landings of the war provided a role in which a ship’s speed and range became irrelevant when firing on fixed targets on an enemy beach. This work provides a look at a little discussed, though widely used aspect of the Second World War and helps further discussion regarding the evolution of the US navy.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The purpose of this study is to examine Naval community relations programs and activities overseas in relation to accepted communications and public relations theory, specific problems involved in inter-cultural communications, and their influence on the public relations process. The results of such study were intended to convey the need and importance of planned community relations activity overseas, the nature and complexity of cross-cultural "barriers" and community relations programing, and the extent and nature of current community relations programs and activities overseas. The survey of literature and opinion regarding Navy community relations overseas has indicated a serious need for technically trained or experienced information and public relations personnel at the implementing level of base and unit commands overseas. Informational and public relations responsibilities are assigned as collateral duties to junior officers with little or no training or experience in the field. Their time is often wholly absorbed in maintaining internal relations and communications. Until the relatively small corps of information specialists are augmented by trained. experienced, and capable reserves, supervisory action and assistance in program planning, implementation, and evaluation are necessary to improve the present status of Navy community relations overseas. / 2031-01-01

This work considers the strategic value of the 1935 London Naval Conference to the United States Navy and the American Government. It addresses longstanding historiographical debates on interwar American foreign policy, including the nature of isolationism under the Roosevelt Administration, the degree of Anglo-American cooperation in the 1930s, and the strategic vision of the United States Navy in the Pacific in the interwar period. Taking into account in equal degrees the perspectives of the uniformed naval officers and the civilian diplomats in the State Department, this thesis will argue that American participation in the 1935 London Naval Conference shows a degree of international participation and a commitment to the international order that is often overlooked by historians in this field.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 486-536).

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

No description available.

U.S. naval expansion is considered to be inevitable. When it is discussed at all, especially in recent scholarly works, it merits at most a few paragraphs briefly mentioning that in the late nineteenth century the United States constructed a modern navy. It is portrayed as if U.S. leaders mostly favored greatly expanding the nation’s naval power and that little to no serious opposition existed among government leaders. Naval expansion, however, fundamentally altered U.S. foreign policy. It represented one of the most significant shifts in the Gilded Age, an era often thought of as a forgettable period in U.S. politics with no major political events taking place. If anything, naval expansion should be the single most discussed political decision to come out of this period and President Benjamin Harrison should be remembered for his role in this development. After all, there are few presidential actions from this period that continue to greatly affect U.S. policy today, and Harrison and his fellow naval expansionists deserve more than a footnote in history.

During the South Pacific campaigns of World War II, the United States Navy faced a formidable challenge in waging nighttime surface battles against the Japanese Navy. In a war that emphasized the carrier and battleship, the little destroyer became a key player in these actions. By studying this campaign from the perspective of the destroyers, three key factors emerge that allowed the Americans to achieve victory: innovation in tactics, adaption of technology, and efficient use of resources. The research for the thesis was based upon action reports, oral histories, and other documents obtained from the National Archives, Naval War College, Naval History and Heritage Command Center, and East Carolina University. The Japanese perspective was attained from numerous secondary sources. Innovation in tactics, technology, and resources allowed the Americans to persevere through severe defeats to achieve success against a very skilled Japanese Navy in the seas of the South Pacific.

Given the high-risk nature of military flight operations and the significant resources required to train U.S. Naval Aviation personnel, continual improvement is required in the selection process. In addition to general commissioning requirements and aeromedical standards, the U.S. Navy utilizes the Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB) to select commissioned aviation students. Although the ASTB has been a good predictor of aviation student performance in training, it was proposed that incremental improvement could be gained with the introduction of novel, computer administered performancebased measures: Block Rotation (BRT) and a Navy-developed Compensatory Tracking task. This work constituted an initial validation of the BRT, an interactive virtual analog of Shepard-Metzler’s (1971) Mental Rotation task that was developed with the intention of quantifying mental rotation and psychomotor ability. For Compensatory Tracking, this work sought to determine if data gathered concord with results in extant literature, confirming the validity of the task. Data from the BRT were examined to determine task reliability and to formulate relevant quantitative/predictive performance human models. Results showed that the BRT performance is a valid spatial ability predictor whose output can be modeled, and that Compensatory Tracking task data concord with the psychometric properties of tracking tasks that have been previously presented in the literature.