He then served two years at sea to earn his commission as an Ensign on June 5, 1911.Ĭrossing The “T” and Avenging Pearl Harbor Naval Academy in 1905, and during his time as a Midshipman, he participated in swimming, tennis, and won the Sharpshooter’s Medal, en route to graduating 141st out of a class of 174 in June 1909. Jesse Barrett “Oley” Oldendorf was born in Riverside, California on February 16, 1887. And topping it all off was then-Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s battleship fleet at the Battle of Surigao Strait phase of the monumental Battle of Leyte Gulf (a “battle within a battle” if you will) on October 25, 1944. Neither one of them involved the vaunted Iowa-class battlewagons as discussed in a previous 19FortyFive article, the first of these was won by Vice Admiral Willis Augustus Lee and the USS Washington (BB-56) during the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942. Navy can take pride in the fact that it won both of the last two battleship fights, both of which took place against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). Though not the actual last hurrah of battleships as a viable warfighting tool, it did prove to be the one wherein (1) they gave way to carrier-borne aircraft and submarines as the dominant instruments of seapower, and (2) the last time that battleships would engage each other in battle. “ A capital ship for an ocean trip/Was ‘The Walloping Window Blind’/No gale that blew dismayed her crew/Or troubled the captain’s mind … And the gunner we had was apparently mad/For he sat on the after-rail/And fired salutes with the captain’s boots/In the teeth of the booming gale.”Īs sentimental and nostalgic as those song lyrics were, they couldn’t stem the tide of history, as WWII marked the end of the heyday of “capital ships,” i.e.
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