Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesMonday, September 7
From the desk
Start with 1776: a one-man oak submarine, two hours fighting current, and Sergeant Ezra Lee drilling into HMS Eagle's hull in the dark. The charge broke loose anyway and blew apart in the East River, harmless but spectacular, the first submarine attack in history ending in near-comedy. Also worth your time: 1945, when Wake Island's Japanese garrison finally surrendered aboard USS Levy, three weeks after Tokyo itself gave up, closing an outpost the war had otherwise forgotten. Sherman's 1864 order to empty occupied Atlanta rounds out the day.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1776Featured · This day in history
A one-man submarine drifts toward Howe's flagship in the dark
By September 1776, HMS Eagle sat anchored off Governors Island as the flagship of Admiral Richard Howe's blockade, the anchor of Britain's naval presence in New York Harbor. Just after 11 p.m. on September 7, Sergeant Ezra Lee climbed into David Bushnell's Turtle, a one-man oak submarine, and spent two hours fighting strong currents to reach the Eagle's hull. His drill likely struck an iron plate near the rudder hinge; the copper sheathing itself, though a popular misconception blamed for his failure, was too thin to have stopped him. With British soldiers rowing out to investigate, Lee cut the charge loose; it drifted off and exploded violently in the East River, throwing water and wood debris into the air.
Washington authorized the mission himself, and though it failed, he later called Bushnell's invention "an effort of genius" in a letter to Jefferson. That endorsement from the nation's top general gave submarine warfare an early American stamp of legitimacy, however small the mission itself had been.
Did you know
QHow much air did Ezra Lee actually have inside the Turtle?
Bushnell built the Turtle to hold roughly 30 minutes of breathable air, but Lee's mission consumed far more time than that cushion allowed. Just reaching HMS Eagle took two full hours of hand-cranking against the current, meaning Lee was operating on borrowed air long before he ever got his drill against the hull. The submarine had no resupply option underwater. That tight margin, combined with the failed drilling attempt, meant Lee had almost no room left to improvise once the iron plate stopped him. He had almost no air left to spare while he searched for a soft spot on the Eagle's hull.
QWhat did the Turtle actually look like from the outside?
Bushnell shaped the hull like "the two upper shells of a Tortoise joined together," a rounded oak shell reinforced with iron hoops and pierced by six small glass portholes to let in light. At roughly 10 feet long, it was small enough for one man to operate alone but required him to work a hand-cranked propeller for forward motion and a separate pedal-powered propeller for depth, all while steering. A 200-pound lead weight served as ballast, meant to be dropped if the pilot needed emergency buoyancy. The design was unlike anything else afloat in 1776, an odd wooden egg built to slip beneath a warship unseen.
QWhose letter first hinted the Turtle might change naval warfare before it ever launched?
A year before Lee's mission, in 1775, Connecticut physician Benjamin Gale wrote to fellow patriot Silas Deane about Bushnell's still-untested invention, predicting "what astonishment it will produce and what advantages may be made... if it succeeds, more easy for you to conceive than for me to describe." Gale had no combat data to go on, only Bushnell's early experiments, yet his letter shows the submarine was generating excitement among American officials well before Washington ever authorized an attack. That early buzz set expectations Lee's actual mission against the Eagle could not fully meet.
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1945military
Nearly four years after the fall, Wake Island is handed back to the United States
Wake Island had been in Japanese hands since December 23, 1941, when its Marine garrison was overrun early in the Pacific war. On September 7, 1945, three weeks after Japan's unconditional surrender, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara formally surrendered the atoll to Brigadier General Lawson H. M. Sanderson aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy. A ceremonial raising of the American flag followed that same day, closing out one of the last Japanese-held outposts of the Pacific war.
Wake's fall in 1941 had become an early symbol of American resistance under siege, its garrison's defiance covered widely at home even as the island was lost. Its recapture on paper, without a fight, four years later, closed quietly: the flag went back up without a fight, three weeks after Japan had already surrendered.
Did you know
QWhat happened to the Japanese commander who surrendered Wake Island?
Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, who handed over the atoll aboard USS Levy in September 1945, was later tried by a U.S. military tribunal and executed for ordering the massacre of ninety-eight American civilian contractors on Wake Island in October 1943, men who had been left behind after the 1941 invasion to perform forced labor for the occupying garrison. The surrender ceremony itself made no mention of that atrocity, which only came to light afterward.
QWhy was USS Levy, a destroyer escort, chosen to receive the surrender rather than a larger warship?
USS Levy was a Buckley-class destroyer escort, a small, fast vessel built primarily for antisubmarine convoy duty rather than fleet actions, and its presence off Wake Island in September 1945 reflected the mundane, mopping-up nature of accepting garrison surrenders across scattered Pacific outposts after Japan's capitulation. Ceremonies like this one did not require a battleship's deck; a modest escort ship with the right officers aboard was enough to make the transfer official.
QWhat did a Navy officer predict about Wake Island decades before Pearl Harbor?
In 1922, nearly twenty years before Japan seized the atoll, Lt. Cmdr. Sherwood Picking argued the island's real value lay in the air: "If the long heralded trans-Pacific flight ever takes place, Wake Island should certainly be occupied and used as an intermediate resting and fueling port." Pan American Airways and later the Navy built the atoll for exactly that purpose. Picking's report sat in Navy files for over a decade before anyone acted on it. By the time the prediction proved accurate, Wake had become a military outpost rather than merely a fueling stop, and that same strategic logic made it worth fighting over twice.
1864military
Sherman orders every civilian out of Atlanta
Atlanta had surrendered on September 2, its mayor handing the city to Union troops after a four-month siege. On September 7, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered the entire civilian population removed from the city he now occupied. No family was permitted to remain; the army needed the city emptied and secured before winter operations. The order emptied a city that had numbered over nine thousand people in 1860; wartime figures for September 1864 are not documented.
Sherman's order previewed the total-war logic he would apply across Georgia that winter: civilians living inside a supply hub were treated as part of the target, not as people to be spared. News of Atlanta's fall and the emptying that followed reached Northern newspapers weeks before the 1864 election, giving Lincoln's campaign the battlefield win it badly needed.
