Once you have served in a vessel, you remember the experience forever, its motion in a seaway, its sounds during the midwatch, its excitement during the call to General Quarters. You are reminded forever of your friends, and of the sacrifice of shipmates during battle, fires, or storms at sea. These experiences become a part of your life, and many veterans end up loving the ships in which they served. This brings them back to see "their" ship or ones like it and to want to preserve them for others to see.
If during your visit to one of these vessels, you begin to sense these connections, you will understand why sailors go down to the sea in ships and why they must return to the sea time after time. If, in modern times, people forget our connection to the sea, they will be ignoring much of what brought our nation into being and made it great.
There are about 120 ship museums across the United States. Many retired ships offer overnight stays aboard the boat and other demonstrations that require more than just a casual visit. I would invite you to return to a time of bravery and adventure and relive the many thrilling stories that played out aboard these ships, even if your time is limited and your stay short. It is important that we support the dedicated efforts of the many volunteers whose work enables us to visit these ships. Naval veterans would want us to maintain and interpret these vessels, as a source of patriotism and inspiration for the naval service.
Something about ships accentuates the human experience, most obviously because of the breadth of activity that has taken place within such small spaces. Crewmen, especially aboard warships, did not have an inch to waste, and the social microcosms of shipboard life come alive in each vessel. You don't have to be a sailor to appreciate their beauty and efficiency. See a ship. Fair winds and following seas to all who do.
USS Constitution
- The queen of all historic American naval ships is "Old Ironsides," so called not because her hull is iron but because her sturdy wood construction consistently deflected enemy shot. Today, the oldest commissioned U.S. Navy ship afloat - she was launched in 1798 - is open to visitors in Boston. Security is especially tight, so allow for it accordingly.
USS Constellation
- The Constellation in Baltimore's Inner Harbor continues to be at the center of a dispute: Is she one of the nation's original frigates or merely the only surviving Civil War-era sloop of war? Because she was reconstructed as a smaller ship in 1854, current experts tend toward the latter. Whichever side you favor, the renovated sloop is still very much worth visiting. A short walk from the Constellation are the World War II submarine Torsk, the Coast Guard cutter Taney, and the lightship Chesapeake. There's also the Liberty ship SS John W. Brown, which makes swing-music cruises in the summer on the Chesapeake Bay.
USS Cairo
- This Union gunboat was the first ship sunk by an electrically detonated torpedo (mine). On December 12, 1862, she went down some seven miles north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the Yazoo River. The ironclad was raised in the 1960s, and today her remains and a museum housing artifacts from the vessel are part of the Vicksburg National Military Park.
Independence Seaport Museum
- The centerpiece here is the cruiser USS Olympia, George Dewey's flagship at the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay. The ship is on the Philadelphia waterfront beside the submarine USS Becuna, which completed five war patrols in the Pacific during World War II. Package plans that include a ferry trip to visit the battleship USS New Jersey, across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, are also available.
Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum
- For deep immersion in naval history, don't miss this one. Included in the collection are the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (World War II's "Fighting Lady"), the destroyer Laffey (known as "the Ship That Would Not Die"), the Cold War submarine Clamagore, and the Coast Guard cutter Ingham. Also on display are naval aircraft, including a flight simulator; a replicated naval support base from the Vietnam War; and a Medal of Honor Museum. The complex, across the harbor from Charleston, South Carolina, is open daily.
Battleship Cove
- With a name like this, how could any naval enthusiast resist? In Fall River, Massachusetts, on Mount Hope Bay, are two World War II veterans - the battleship USS Massachusetts and the submarine Lionfish - the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy (with the Admiral Arleigh Burke National Destroyermen's Museum on hoard), and the Soviet-built missile corvette Hiddensee.
USS Arizona Memorial
- Visitors cannot visit the actual ships that sank at Pearl Harbor, but the Arizona Memorial is a must to get a feel for the enormity of the event. In this vessel alone, 1,177 crew members lost their lives, and many remain entombed here. From the visitor center, the tour includes a short boat ride to the memorial. Also available are tours of the submarine Bowfin and the recently added battleship Missouri, site of the Japanese surrender in 1945.
U-505
- Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry opened a new exhibit in 2005 featuring the German submarine U-505. Forced to the surface by American destroyer escorts in June 1944, the U-boat was captured (the only time that ever happened) and brought back to the United States.
USS Wisconsin and Nauticus
- The battleship Wisconsin, a veteran of conflicts from World War II to Operation Desert Storm, is an exclamation point to the waterfront of downtown Norfolk, Virginia. She's in mothballs now, but the battlewagon is one of the most popular attractions of Nauticus, a museum at One Waterside Drive.
USS Midway
- The aircraft carrier Midway opened recently in San Diego, California. Like the Wisconsin, she fought from World War II to Desert Storm and now contains more than 40 exhibits and 21 restored naval aircraft. She's moored at the Navy pier at 910 North Harbor Drive.
Fred Schultz is senior editor of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings and Naval History magazine.
Thirty-seven years ago, a group of individuals representing a number of former naval vessels established the Historic Naval Ships Association (HNSA). Its purpose is to facilitate the exchange of information and provide mutual support among those who are working hard to maintain their aging vessels physically and financially. The ships of HNSA are located not only in the nation's coastal seaports, but on lakes and rivers far from the sea, in the midst of the United States, as well as in Canada, western Europe and Australia. To visit one of these ships is to experience a time warp, being taken back fifty, sixty, or more years, to a time when these warriors were the latest ships of their type. Many were on the front lines at sea during World War II and continued their service into the Cold War era, serving in the seas off Korea and Vietnam. Taking a tour, your senses reawaken the past. You see, touch, smell, and hear the ship much as it was during its glory days when the crew took her to sea, risked their lives and put her in harm's way for their nation's defense.
