Many Glibs posts leave you with a song.  I’m going to give you some walk-up music to set the mood instead.

Jacob Jones was born near Smyrna, Delaware, just north of Dover, in March 1768.  Orphaned by the age of four, he was raised by a family friend, a physician, and trained in medicine.  Practicing for several years, he turned his attention to law (possibly to gain the approval of the lass he had his eye on, who’s father happened to be the Governor of Delaware).  He married the girl, and was appointed the Clerk of the Delaware Supreme Court.

Alas, his wife Anna died, and Jones, grief-stricken and now without a political patron, turned his attention to military service, becoming a naval midshipman at the astonishingly old age of thirty-one in an era where most mids were in their teens.  Nonetheless, he comported himself well, and was a lieutenant on the sloop of war Philadelphia when the ship moved to the Mediterranean to deal with the country’s annoying Barbary problem.  In late October of 1803, Philadelphia gave chase to a Barbary gunship when she became impossibly grounded on an uncharted sandbar and had to be scuttled.  Jones spent twenty months as a guest of the Bey of Barbary before being released at the end of hostilities.

Jones continued with his new career, and eventually became the commander of the sloop of war Wasp when the War of 1812 kicked off.  In the action that would gain him fame, he attacked a convoy guarded by the HMS Frolic, eventually taking the ship as a prize after a vicious fight.  This would have made Commodore Jones the toast of the navy, except the British ship of the line HMS Poictiers soon arrived at the scene.  Unable to run due to battle damage and realizing that it would be suicidal to fight, Jones struck his colors and began his second stint as a prisoner of war.  He was paroled some time later, and was welcomed home by a grateful people and Congress.  Jones continued to serve in the Navy, holding commands at sea in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and at bases in New York and Baltimore, before passing away in 1850 while serving as commandant of the Philadelphia Naval Asylum.

 

In 1914, the U.S. Navy began expanding its new fleet of “thousand ton” destroyers, fast ships meant to be escorts to the cruisers and dreadnoughts that dominated the seas at the time.  One of the first was named for Commodore Jones.  She was commissioned in February 1916, and was stationed at Newport, RI that summer when the German U-boat U-53 came calling on the still-neutral Americans.  The U-boat’s captain, one Hans Rose, invited the base officers and their wives to look at the boat, while he conferred with the local German consulate.  When the US entered the war in April of 1917, Jacob Jones was detailed to escort duty, shepherding merchant shipping across the north Atlantic while guarding against the U-boat threat.

Jacob Jones didn’t have long to wait.  Less than two months after arriving at her new station at Queensland (now Cobh), Ireland, where she was patrolling the western approach and Irish Sea to prevent another Lusitania-type disaster, she came upon the merchant ship Valetta, which had been torpedoed and was nearly awash.  Jacob Jones rescued the crew of 44.

Just before Christmas 1917, though, Jacob Jones‘ luck ran out.  Coming back from Brest, France under the command of David W. Bagley (USNA, 1904), a man whose family included distinguished military service (his father was a North Carolina officer during “the late unpleasantness,” and his brother Worth [USNA 1895] held the distinction of being the only American naval officer killed during the Spanish-American War), a lookout spied a torpedo wake.  Despite the evasive actions of the Officer of the Deck, the torpedo exploded near the aft end of the ship.  Power was immediately lost, preventing a distress signal from being sent.  The vessel sank by the stern in eight minutes, and depth charges that were always kept armed for quick deployment exploded as the ship went down, hastening its demise and killing men in the water.  Kapitänleutnant Rose (the same one who had called on Newport with Bagley, commanding Jones in attendance), in a gesture of humanitarianism that was rare for the day, surfaced, took two wounded men aboard his sub, and radioed coordinates of the sinking to the British and Irish.  In all, though, 66 of the ship’s compliment of 102 officers and enlisted were killed outright or died of exposure before they could be rescued.  They went down to an unmarked grave, seemingly forever.

 

The navy wasted no time in building another Jacob Jones.  The next version was laid down in February 1917, launching two days after the war ended in November 1918.  She was only in service for a couple of years before being mothballed in 1922.  Recommissioned in 1930, she served as a training ship for Naval Academy cadets on summer tours, and in pre-World War II “neutrality patrols.”

 

In early 1942, with the US now at war and Karl Dönitz’s subs wreaking havoc along the Atlantic seaboard, Jones was tasked with a mobile anti-submarine warfare duty, despite being nearly obsolete.  Steaming south from New York, she was ordered to patrol an area off Cape May and the Delaware Capes.  She came upon the burning wreck of the tanker R. P. Resor, hit by U-578.  The destroyer circled the wreck for two hours, searching for survivors, before resuming her course south.  Despite being blacked out and zig-zagging to foil subs, she was struck on the port side by two torpedoes just before first light.  The first hit her port side amidships, touching off the forward magazine and annihilating the bridge, chart room, and officers’ and petty officers’ quarters.  Seconds later the next hit her forty feet in front of her fantail, separating the screws from the ship and flooding the aft quarters.  Maybe as many as forty men survived the initial carnage, only one of them an officer, who was nearly incoherent.  Nevertheless, the ship stayed afloat long enough for some to make it to life rafts.  As what was left of the stern settled, depth charges exploded, destroying at least one lifeboat and killing its men (sound familiar?).  A few hours later, an army air forces plane discovered the life rafts and radioed their position to the Inshore Rescue Service in New Jersey.  Struggling through heavy seas, they were able to find one life raft, taking twelve men off.  One died on the way back to Cape May.  Two days’ search failed to turn up any other wreckage or survivors.

So a pair of warships named for an officer of long and distinguished service (who managed to be twice a POW).  Both sunk by German submarines, in two different wars, at opposite ends of the north Atlantic.  I don’t know of any other instance where ships of the same name went down in such a coincidental fashion.

Of the principals:

Jacob Jones is interred in Wilmington, Delaware.

David W. Bagley survived the war and continued his naval service.  He had recently taken command of the battleship Tennessee in Pearl Harbor when he got to witness ships all around him sunk by torpedoes.  After the war, fittingly, a destroyer was named for he and his brother.  His sons (named David Jr. and Worth) were also four-star admirals.  Bagley died in 1960.

Hans Rose became the Kaiserliche Marine’s version of the Red Baron, sinking or damaging 81 ships during the war.  He survived World War I and died of natural causes in Berlin in 1969.

The U-578 was lost with all hands somewhere in the Bay of Biscay in August 1942, a little over five months after she torpedoed the second Jacob Jones.

And as for the first USS Jacob Jones, torpedoed somewhere between Land’s End and the southern tip of Ireland?  In August 2022, her wreck was located by British divers after 105 years.  Maybe the men who went down with her can rest easier now that they’re not forgotten to the depths forever.