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    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage
    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage
    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage
    Ebook203 pages1 hour

    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage

    By Nelson H. Lawry, Glen M. Williford and Leo K. Polaski

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    Including more than two hundred vintage photographs and illustrations, Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage chronicles the history of the Piscataqua River's naval shipyard and harbor defenses. Long before it became home to one of the U.S. Navy's first federal shipyards, the harbor at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine, was protected by gun batteries, mainly at Fort Point, New Castle, New Hampshire. By the end of World War II, modern concrete batteries mounting guns of ever longer range had been constructed at this and three other forts straddling the river's mouth. These fortifications reflected the increasingly important role of the shipyard, dedicated after 1917 to building submarines that contributed significantly to the World War II victory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439632079
    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage
    Author

    Nelson H. Lawry

    Authors Nelson H. Lawry, Glen M. Williford, and Leo K. Polaski, scholars of American coast defense, have assembled this compelling pictorial history from national archival, local museum, and private photographic collections. Lawry is a columnist and technology historian, and Williford and Polaski coauthored Arcadia Publishing�s New York City�s Harbor Defenses and Long Island�s Military History.

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    • 5/5
      Interesting book on the naval and military history of Kittery and Portsmouth through WWII.

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    Portsmouth Harbor's Military and Naval Heritage - Nelson H. Lawry

    (PP.)

    INTRODUCTION

    The major source of the Piscataqua River is the south- and east-running Salmon Falls (or Newichawannock) River, which centuries after the first European habitation, still serves to demarcate New Hampshire from Maine. Flowing southeastward, the Piscataqua makes a final, southward bend past Great Island into the Gulf of Maine. The lower part of the Piscataqua estuary constitutes Portsmouth Harbor, serving the city of Portsmouth and the town of New Castle, New Hampshire, on its south bank, and the town of Kittery, Maine, on its north bank.

    Historically, the sizable harbor at the mouth of the Piscataqua River has been an important one, first attracting interest from British and French sailor-adventurers in the early 17th century. Because of its proximity to the almost endless virgin forest of immense white pine, Portsmouth served as the Royal Navy’s most important—and for much of the period, its only—North American mast port during several decades overlapping the 17th and 18th centuries.

    During the interval from 1630 to 1633, the colonists erected a small earthwork, with a fort-house and four brass cannon, on the northeastern projection of Great Island, which was soon known as Fort Point. This first defensive work was likely built as protection against pirates, as that period coincided with the depredations by Dixy Bull’s marauding band.

    The construction of a more substantial timber-palisaded work owed to the series of naval wars between Great Britain and the Netherlands. It became even more of a formalized, professionally built fortification during the early 1690s, and was the namesake of the reigning monarchs, William and Mary. Until the end of the 18th century, Fort William & Mary—and after 1720, its counterpart on the Maine side, originally named Fort William—protected the upriver shipyards, which built 10 warships for four different navies.

    Fort William & Mary gained attention in 1774, when American patriots raided it and removed both gunpowder and small cannon. The original site remained the same for successive United States forts of the First, Second, and Third Systems, rebuilt until the end of the Civil War. Early in the 19th century, the names of the two harbor defense works became Fort Constitution (at New Castle) and Fort McClary (at Kittery Point), and the former saw a Martello tower, named Walbach Tower, erected to protect its rear.

    In 1800, the new shipyard for the U.S. Navy was established on Dennetts (or Fernalds) Island on the Kittery side of the river. Capt. Isaac Hull assumed his duties in 1813 as the Portsmouth Navy Yard’s first commandant. During his tenure, the yard constructed the first of three great shiphouses, where sailing men-of-war were initially built, and within decades, their steam-propelled successors. Following the Civil War, the funding for both services diminished to abysmal levels, and amidst talk that the yard would be sold, the garrisons of the harbor forts were replaced by caretaker sergeants.

    Momentous happenings, however, were about to touch both the military and naval branches at Portsmouth. Although delayed for a decade after the Endicott Board issued its report in 1886, the construction of eight modern batteries, of five different calibers, took place at three harbor defense works: Fort Constitution at Fort Point and Fort Stark at Jerrys Point, both in New Castle, and Fort Foster on Gerrish Island in Kittery Point. The larger guns were mounted on the ingenious, complicated, and ultimately range-limiting disappearing carriage. Additionally, the provision was made for planting fields of powerful submarine mines, including the construction of shoreside control and storage facilities.

    Even more affected by the Spanish-American War, the Portsmouth Navy Yard saw, in very close progression, the coming and going of Spanish naval prisoners of war and their marine guards; the conversion of Jenkins Gut between closely adjacent Dennetts and Seaveys Islands into a capacious dry dock; the construction of an enormous cofferdam and the explosive destruction of hazardous Hendersons Point; the arrival and departure of the envoys meeting to negotiate the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War; and the construction, on the site of the Spanish camp, of the Portsmouth Naval Prison, soon to be known as the Castle from its distinctive architecture.

    The yard’s first submarine, L-8, was launched in August 1917, while America was at war. For the first time ever, women—both civil servants and naval personnel—arrived at the shipyard to perform a multitude of jobs. Wartime construction of submarines spilled over into the 1920s, and such building and testing continued during the interwar years.

    The coast defenses were garrisoned during World War I, but unlike such defenses elsewhere, no new batteries were constructed to protect Portsmouth Harbor. Development of the New Reservation was undertaken at New Castle, years later to be renamed Camp Langdon and become the harbor headquarters post. Between the wars, the harbor defenses again were reduced to only caretaker status. But as the world situation became worse, in 1940, the 22nd Coast Artillery Regiment was formed to man Portsmouth’s defenses.

    Disasters impacted the yard in the years before the onset of World War II, including the sinking of one of its boats, USS Squalus, with the drowning of nearly half her crew. More men were saved than lost, and Squalus, recovered, restored, and renamed Sailfish, went on to compile an excellent war record.

    During World War II, the Portsmouth Navy Yard delivered 69 fleet submarines, most of which served in the Pacific and helped decimate the enemy’s navy and merchant marine. All the while, the yard was protected by the harbor defenses, whose members initially manned the old Endicott-era gun and mine batteries, as entirely modern ones underwent construction. The largest was a battery of two 16-inch rifles, reaching 25 miles seaward, built at the new military reservation, Fort Dearborn, in Rye, New Hampshire. A series of 14 fire control stations dotted the coast from Massachusetts to Maine, although soon they were relegated to a backup role by the newly developed fire control radar.

    In 1944, the war was decidedly winding down, and with the danger to the East Coast almost negligible, the 22nd Coast Artillery underwent successive reductions in force. With the number of enemy vessels in the Pacific becoming increasingly scarce, submarine construction at the yard also declined. The postwar years saw the modernization of existing fleet boats, and then the building of entirely new and radical underwater craft: those having nuclear power. But in a world of fission and fusion bombs delivered by ballistic missiles, harbor defense by fixed gun batteries was gone forever, and Pease Air Force Base materialized to confront that terrible new threat.

    Two buddies at Fort Foster in World War II hang onto a Lister bag, which was usually set up in the field for soldiers to fill their canteens from. Here, the Lister bag has been erected near the soldiers’ barracks, probably to give them the delightful experience of sampling the iodine-purified water they will encounter during training and in combat areas. The water was safe to drink but always tasted a bit like canvas. (KM.)

    One

    AT SHORT RANGE

    THE MUZZLELOADING ERA

    The fine natural harbor created at the mouth of the Piscataqua River was attractive for early settlement and commercial development, including the mast trade. The British colonists began fortifications as early as

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