Proud Service Through the Years
Although the Navy Reserve was officially formed in 1915, the American Citizen Sailor is a concept as old as America itself. From the American Revolution to the War on Terror, American Citizen Sailors/Reservists have performed heroically in service to their nation, creating and maintaining a proud heritage and history built on honor, courage and commitment.
- On June 12, 1775, the first Reservists in American history served their country at sea. Throughout the battle for American independence, the small size of the Continental Navy often necessitated the service of Citizen Sailors.
- During the War of 1812, Citizen Sailors raided British commerce on the high seas and outfitted a fleet of barges called the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla in an effort to defend that vital body of water against British invasion.
- During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized an increase in the personnel levels of the Navy, which assumed an important role in the strategy to defeat the Confederacy with a blockade of the South and a campaign to secure control of the Mississippi River.
- The Navy had grown from a force numbering 9,942 in 1860 to one manned by 58,296 Sailors by the end of the Civil War in 1865. A total of 101,207 men from 21 states enlisted during the Civil War. Reservists were an integral part of the daring mission to destroy the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle, which resulted in the awarding of the Medal of Honor to six civilian volunteers.
- The first official use of a reserve source of Navy manpower took place in 1888 when Massachusetts organized a Navy battalion as part of the state militia.
- By 1897, a total of 16 states had organized Navy units as part of their state militia.
- Reservists assisted in the Spanish-American War by providing coastal defense and serving aboard ships, with 263 Officers and 3,832 Enlisted men of various state Navy militias answering the call to arms.
- Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and his assistant, a young New Yorker named Franklin D. Roosevelt, launched a campaign in Congress to appropriate funding for an official federal force. Their efforts brought passage of legislation on March 3, 1915, creating the Navy Reserve Force.
- On August 19, 1916, with the prospect of World War I looming, the Navy Reserve Force was formally organized, with the first official U.S. Navy Reservists hunting enemy U-boats from the cockpits of biplanes.
- By the summer of 1941, two years after the start of World War II, virtually all members of the Navy Reserve were serving on Active Duty, their numbers destined to swell upon the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the ensuing four years, the Navy would grow from a force of 383,150 to, at its peak, 3,405,525 — the vast majority of which were Reservists, including five future U.S. presidents.
- In the 1990s, more than 21,000 Navy Reservists supported Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
- Representing approximately 20 percent of the U.S. war-fighting force, the Navy Reserve has played an integral part, responding to the ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia and the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.