USS Maine (ACR-1)
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The USS Maine was a rank II battleship (originally classified as an armored cruiser ) of the US Navy .
Its explosion in Havana harbor in 1898 is considered to be the cause of the Spanish-American War .
history
The ship was built in 1888/89 at the New York Naval Shipyard .
In the years 1897/98, the Maine was used to safeguard US interests in the waters of what was then the Spanish colony of Cuba . The ship was under the command of Captain Charles Dwight Sigsbee at the time .
After the unrest in Havana , the ship entered the port of the Cuban capital on January 25, 1898 and anchored in a section of the port believed to be safe by the US military. Their presence should exert pressure or demonstrate military superiority ( gunboat policy ); Because of the tense relationship between the United States and Spain , the Maine was armed with full propellant charges and live grenades.
The Maine exploded on February 15, 1898 at 9:40 pm at her anchorage and sank with the foredeck destroyed; 266 men of the crew died. Most Navy Department officers assumed an accident like the one that had happened on the New York , Oregon , Philadelphia , Boston , Cincinnati, and Atlanta ships ; on the other hand, the US government ( McKinley cabinet ) suspected a Spanish terrorist attack with a mine or a torpedo against the Maine . A first commission of inquiry in March 1898, after questioning witnesses and examining the ship, stated that the Maine had been destroyed by a torpedo, but the witnesses had been sworn to secrecy and the details of the investigation remained secret. The so-called "Maine Incident" gave the United States the cause of war against Spain .
Depending on the political orientation, there were different theories for the cause of the explosion in the USA, Spain and Cuba:
- The Maine was torpedoed by the Spaniards in order to disrupt cooperation between the independence movement and the USA.
- The Maine had been torpedoed by the Cuban independence movement in order to provoke the USA to war with Spain.
- The Maine was said to have exploded in a boiler fire that attacked the ammunition depot.
- The Maine was blown up on the orders of the US government in order to have an excuse for the war with Spain.
Another investigative commission from the US Navy and government in 1911/1912 allegedly confirmed the suspicion of a terrorist attack. (Shortly before his death in 1976, an engineer who was involved in the investigation stated that all the blast holes faced outwards.) In order to investigate the ship and to rescue the 70 dead sailors still in the wreck, the Maine in the docks was surrounded with sheet piling and drained . After the investigation was completed, the wreck was towed into international waters off Havana and sunk. The demolished forecastle was destroyed in the course of the investigation.
The "Rickover investigation" in 1976 came to the conclusion that the explosion had taken place inside the Maine . An undiscovered smoldering fire in one of the coal bunkers could have triggered the disaster: In the front coal bunker, the coal spontaneously ignited. As a result of this fire ( coal fire ) in the coal bunker, which had not been discovered for hours , the steel bulkhead to the ammunition bunker next to it was heated so much that the black powder stored there ignited and caused the grenades also deposited there to explode. This led to the explosion of other neighboring ammunition chambers and the total loss of the Maine . In the documentary “Sabotage before Cuba” by R. Erickson (2004, 41 min), the assumption of an internal explosion is historically traced and experimentally substantiated.
Others
Of the fallen in Maine , 229 men are buried in the American National Cemetery in Arlington . Your burial ground is marked by a salvaged Maine mast . The forward mast was also recovered and placed in the park of the Naval Academy in Maryland in memory of the Maine .
In the US Navy therefore for a while the joke was circulating with the question of the “longest ship” in the US Navy; Beginners were told, after the "wrong" answer, that the Maine had to be "the longest ship in the Navy Navy" because its masts were so far apart.
literature
- John Edward Weems: The Fate of the Maine. Texas A&M University Press, College Station 2010, ISBN 978-0-89096-501-6 .
- Edward J. Marolda (Ed.): Theodore Roosevelt, the US Navy, and the Spanish-American War. New York / Houndmills 2001
- Hansen and Dana Wegner: Centenary of the Destruction of USS Maine. A Technical Historical Review. Naval Engineers Journal, Vol. CX (March 1998), pp. 93-104
- Hyman George Rickover: How the Battleship Maine was destroyed. Washington 1976
- Philip Sheldon Foner: The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism 1895–1902. 2 volumes. New York / London 1972 (very detailed study with many sources, especially from US archives)
Movie
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- Guerre de Cuba et l'explosion du Maine à La Havane (F 1898, directed by Georges Méliès )
- Visite sous-marine du "Maine" (F 1898, directed by Georges Méliès)
- Explosion on the Maine ( DFF 1974, directed by Ralph J. Boettner )
Web links
- The Destruction of USS Maine . Center for Maritime History of the US Navy
Footnotes
- ↑ phoenix.de ( Memento from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), download