They'll Have to Follow You!: The Triumph of the Great White Fleet

About the book

'Others may do as you have done, but they'll have to follow you!' so proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt to the sailors and marines assembled on the afterdeck of USS Connecticut, flagship of the Great White Fleet. The United States Navy had come of age, as sixteen coal-burning battleships carried the Stars and Stripes to the far-flung ends of the globe in the most extraordinary peacetime demonstration of naval power in modern times. It is a story set in the closing stages of the Golden Age of Imperialism, a time when the Great Powers engaged in a battleship-building binge that not only set the world tottering on the brink of global catastrophe, but foreshadowed the later contest in nuclear arms between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this companion volume to USS Connecticut: Constitution State Battleship, Mark Albertson captures one of the finest moments of the United States Navy. In the first major strategic initiative by the United States in the twentieth century, the Atlantic Fleet Battleship Force circumnavigated the globe, steaming more than 46,000 miles in the most monumental achievement in modern maritime history, a triumph that helped make the United States a global power, and eventually, a super power. Step aboard one of the ships comprising the Great White Fleet and travel round the world in They'll Have to Follow You!