In October 1921, the Navy assigned USS Olympia to bring the remains of an unidentified American soldier from France to Washington. Olympia was already a museum piece by then. She’d been Dewey’s flagship at Manila Bay in 1898 and was well past her prime. But she got the job.
An old ship for an old promise
Olympia was built by Union Iron Works in San Francisco, launched on November 5, 1892, and commissioned on February 5, 1895. That makes her younger than USS Constitution, the 1797 frigate that still carries a US Navy crew in Boston. She was a protected cruiser from the era when steel hulls were still new and coal was the only fuel that mattered. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey stood on her bridge at Manila Bay and gave the order “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” The Spanish squadron was destroyed by lunchtime.
That made Olympia famous. It did not keep her modern. By the First World War she was a second-line ship. In 1918 she carried an expeditionary force to northern Russia, arriving at Murmansk on June 9 and helping occupy Arkhangelsk. After the armistice she cruised the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. By 1921 she was 26 years old, coal-fired, and short of everything a modern cruiser had.
The Navy picked her anyway. The symbolism was the point. The ship that had made America a Pacific power would carry home the soldier who stood for every American lost in France.
The selection
On Memorial Day 1921, four unidentified American servicemen were exhumed from four American cemeteries in France: Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Somme, and St. Mihiel. Their caskets were brought to the city hall at Chalons-sur-Marne.
On October 24, Army Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a decorated combat veteran, walked around the four identical caskets several times. Then he laid a spray of white roses on the second casket from the right. That was the Unknown Soldier. Nobody would ever know which cemetery he came from.
The next day, October 25, Olympia received the casket at Le Havre. Eight French destroyers and the American destroyer Reuben James escorted her out of the harbor.
A casket on the open deck
Problem was, the casket wouldn’t fit through Olympia’s hatches. There was no way to get it below deck. So the crew lashed it to the open main deck aft, just below the signal bridge and radio house, and covered it against the weather. Then they headed into the North Atlantic.
Marine Captain Graves B. Erskine commanded the honor guard. One Marine stood watch over the casket around the clock, lashed to the ship’s stanchions so he wouldn’t go over the side. Two more waited nearby to relieve him. Captain H. L. Wyman commanded the ship.
They ran straight into the remnants of the Tampa Bay Hurricane of 1921, a storm that had crossed Florida in late October and tracked out into the Atlantic. Along with a second system behind it, it turned the crossing into a fight. By modern standards the hurricane at its peak would have been classified as a Category 4.
For 10 of the 15 days at sea, Olympia fought through 20 to 30 foot seas. Burning coal to push through the storm made the ship lighter, which made the rolling worse. Erskine later said the bridge itself was awash half the time. About four inches of water sloshed around the wardroom.
At the peak, Marine honor guard Frederick A. Laundry recorded that the ship rolled 39 degrees. Ten degrees from going over.
The crew believed each roll could be the end. They had reason. Three years earlier the collier USS Cyclops had vanished in the Atlantic with 306 people aboard, and nobody had found a trace. Every sailor on Olympia knew how an old, overloaded ship could simply stop answering.
Meanwhile, the casket of the soldier who was supposed to represent every American who never came home sat on the open deck, taking the full force of the Atlantic. The Marines kept their watch through all of it.
Up the Potomac
The storm let go before the coast. Olympia made it to the Washington Navy Yard on November 9, 1921. Battleship North Dakota and destroyer Bernadou escorted her up the Potomac. Guns fired salutes from the forts along the river.
The casket was carried ashore and taken to the Capitol, where it lay in state in the Rotunda. Crowds lined up to file past. The soldier had no name, no hometown, and no unit, which meant every family that had lost someone in France could believe he might be theirs. That was the idea behind the whole program, copied from Britain and France, who had buried their own unknown warriors a year earlier.
Two days later, on Armistice Day, November 11, the Unknown Soldier was interred at Arlington. President Warren G. Harding presided. Foreign governments sent their highest awards. Britain’s Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty placed the Victoria Cross on the casket on behalf of King George V. France added the Legion of Honour and the Medaille Militaire.
None of that ceremony would have happened if the 39-degree roll had gone ten degrees further.
Still afloat
The voyage was close to Olympia’s last real job. She was decommissioned on December 9, 1922. In 1957 she was handed to a civilian group, the Cruiser Olympia Association, and became a museum ship.
Olympia still exists. She’s a museum ship at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. She’s the oldest steel American warship still afloat, and one of the oldest steel warships afloat anywhere in the world. Her hull needs millions of dollars in repairs, and the museum has spent years raising money to keep her from going under at the pier.
The museum still marks the voyage. You can stand on the deck where the casket was lashed and see how little there was between it and the sea. For the kind of ship that didn’t survive the water, see the ships that disappeared without a trace.
