Forgotten Fleet: The Mothball Navy (1st Edition)

Year after year the warships lay quiet and lifeless, like boarded up old houses once full of activity that had outlived their usefulness. The row upon row of mostly now-anonymous vessels, hatches sealed shut, offer a bleak contrast to the drama of their wartime operations. You can almost hear the wind whistling through the masts and superstructures stripped of radars. Below decks there is only the sound of the dehumidifiers, removing moisture from the air, retarding the buildup of rust and deterioration. Berthing areas, repair shops and radio rooms have been frozen in time, looking exactly as they did when sealed decades before. Among them are such well-known ships as the Enterprise and the Midway, as well as little-known ones like the Fall River, and some that were laid up almost as soon as they were completed, like the Oregon City. Here too are the frigates and nuclear submarines of a later age. These are the ships of the forgotten fleet, built for war but resting at peace in coastal parking lots on both sides of the country, their story told for the first time.

The author has a quirky writing style. He spends much of the book showing photographs of fleets of mothballed ships, and then goes to great lengths identifying each vessel. In addition to this exercise, he also digresses from the topic, such as his lengthy discussion of the submarine USS Wahoo (which was sunk during the war, and was never in the reserve fleet). He also has a tendency to repeat himself. Although he obviously wrote the book with great affection, he failed to provide much insight about the Mothball Fleet. I really wanted to like this book, but I'm afraid this tome, like the ships he writes about, will be consigned to mothballs on my bookshelf, rarely used, and then one day quietly discarded.


Response to a "reader"   September 19, 2001
Kermit H Bonner (Ione, California United States)
3 out of 19 found this review helpful

My review of Madsen's book was written long ago, and had nothing to do with "Warship Boneyards". I stick by my comments, and the book I read(Forgotten Fleet)was of very little help to me when I was doing research. One further point: the ships in the mothball fleets were never forgotten, especially by those sailors who used and reused them in combat. Daniel Madsen missed the point and so did the reader who reveiwed his book.

Kit Bonner, Naval Historian and Author