Craig Symonds – Annapolis Goes to War

To continue our observance of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the death of American Commander-in-Chief Franklin D. Roosevelt, please join us as Roosevelt House welcomes back one of our most popular speakers: the country’s foremost naval historian, Craig L. Symonds. In his seventh Roosevelt House appearance, Symonds will discuss his newest book, Annapolis Goes to War: The Naval Academy Class of 1940 and its Trial by Fire in World War II, a riveting and moving chronicle of the Second World War through the experiences of the young officers—fresh out of the United States Naval Academy—who went on to serve in battle.

Drawn from original research and suffused with deep knowledge, Annapolis Goes to War takes readers inside the powerful story of the young men who, upon graduating from Annapolis, found themselves fighting in the bloodiest war in human history. Among the many consequential and poignant moments captured in the book are the arrival of the students at Annapolis as teenagers at the same time as Hitler re-occupies the Rhineland, a portent of global war; the plebes’ four transformative years at the Naval Academy; their graduation during the week the British Army evacuated Dunkirk; and the next four years in the cauldron of war—including in virtually every significant engagement in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, from North Africa to Normandy.

A story of adjustment, growth, pain, loss, and eventually triumph, Symonds’ new book shows the members of the class of 1940 at the front edge of the war—in battleships, carriers, destroyers, submarines, airplanes, and leading Marine Corps units ashore. Some experienced the war as prisoners of the Japanese. Fifty-six of them died during the course of the war, the greatest wartime loss any graduating class at any of the nation’s service academies ever experienced. Using their diaries, memoirs, and letters, Symonds unforgettably evokes their trials and bonds, their loss of innocence, and their discovery of the meaning of sacrifice.

Craig L. Symonds is Professor of History Emeritus at the U. S. Naval Academy and former Distinguished Ernest J. King Visiting Professor of Maritime History at the U. S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. The winner of the 2009 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln and His Admirals, his most recent books are World War II at Sea: A Global History and Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, which recently earned The Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize. Symonds has also won the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Award (for his 2005 book Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History), the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award for naval literature, and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.