From 31 July 1893 to 4 December 1894, Belknap served aboard the flagship of the Asiatic Squadron, the protected cruiser USS Baltimore. After spending the winter of 1894–1895 at Tientsin, China, Belknap was attached to the Asiatic Squadron gunboatUSS Monocacy and, with the commander of the United States Marine Corps detachment from Baltimore, CaptainGeorge F. Elliott, was assigned to the American Legation at Peking, China, from 6 December 1894 to 17 May 1895. From 22 May 1895 to 27 July 1896 he was a watch officer aboard the gunboat USS Yorktown, after which he commanded Yorktown's Marine detachment at the American Legation at Seoul, Korea, from 12 May to 17 July 1896.[1][4][7]
On 2 April 1898, Newport joined the North Atlantic Squadron in anticipation of war breaking out with Spain. When the Spanish–American War began on 25 April 1898, Newport was assigned to blockade duty at Mariel on the north coast of Cuba with Belknap aboard.[4][7]
From 1 April 1900 until 1901, Belknap had a second tour on the staff of George C. Remey – by now a rear admiral and the commander of the Asiatic Squadron – serving as aide with the duties of secretary aboard Remey's flagship, the armored cruiserUSS Brooklyn. During this tour, he took part in the Philippine–American War, served off the Taku Forts during operations in China in the summer of 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion, was promoted to lieutenant on 2 July 1900, and visited New Zealand and Australia on the occasion of the opening of Australia's First Commonwealth Parliament by The Prince George and Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, in May 1901.[1][4][6][7][8]
From 1910 to 1911, Belknap was executive officer of the battleship USS North Dakota, and he was promoted to commander in 1911. He was assistant to the chief of the Navy's Bureau of Navigation from 1912 to 1913 and attended the Naval War College as a student from 1913 to 1914.[1][3][4]
In early 1917, Belknap became involved in an insurrection in Oriente Province in Cuba, where supporters of the Liberal Party who opposed the 1916 reelection of the Conservative Party's Mario García Menocal as President of Cuba took control. Belknap's squadron was in the harbor at Santiago de Cuba and, as senior American naval officer there, Belknap attempted to negotiate a local settlement between the two sides to avoid the loss of life and damage to property in the city if open fighting were to break out there. After meetings aboard USS San Francisco, he succeeded in brokering an agreement on 1 March 1917 which the United States Government ratified the next day, but Menocal's central government rejected the agreement and its troops advanced on Santiago de Cuba. On 7 March, Belknap decreed that Menocal's forces would not be allowed to enter the city and, at the request of Liberal officials, sent 400 officers and men from his squadron ashore the next day to patrol the city. By mid-March, however, the compromise Belknap had brokered had collapsed, and the commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet, AdmiralHenry Thomas Mayo, reprimanded him for exceeding his authority in demanding that Menocal's forces not enter Santiago de Cuba. On 25 March, the Americans patrolling the city were withdrawn to their ships and Menocal's troops took control of Santiago de Cuba, with Belknap lamenting that "our Government has made up its mind to let the Cuban Government put the insurrection down irregardless [sic] of losses as a good precedent. It will discourage other revolutions to have this one fail."[1][12]
World War I
Belknap was still in command of the Mining and Minesweeping Division when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. He transferred to duty in the Plans Section of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations that year. In 1918, promoted to captain, he invented and patented a collapsible antisubmarine net and in the spring became commander of Mine Squadron One, which was tasked with laying the North Sea Mine Barrage, a primarily American effort to end use of the North Sea by German submarines as a transit route between Germany and the Atlantic Ocean by laying a dense minefield between the Orkney Islands and Norway. After taking command, Belknap organized and trained the squadron, which was made up of ten large ships capable of carrying a combined total of 6,000 naval mines.[1][3][8][11][13][14]
Under Belknap's command, Mine Squadron One deployed to its bases in Scotland at Inverness and Invergordon in May 1918. He personally commanded the activities of the squadron during its first foray into the North Sea on 2 June 1918, beginning the first offensive mining campaign in the history of the U.S. Navy and one of the largest U.S. Navy contributions to the Allied naval effort during the war. He commanded the squadron on nine more excursions, the last of them in the last week of October 1918, by which time it had laid 56,611 Mark 6 "antenna" mines in 13 groups, with each group consisting of rows of mines 134 nautical miles (248 kilometres) across set at three preset depths of between 10 and 260 feet (3.0 and 79.2 meters), covering an area of 6,000 square miles. The British Royal Navy also contributed, laying 16,652 additional mines along the flanks of the American minefield. The war ended on 11 November 1918 before Mine Squadron One could finish a complete antisubmarine barrier, but the Barrage nonetheless is credited with sinking at least three German submarines and perhaps three more, as well as damaging three or four others. It also had a large psychological effect on German submarine crews, one of which mutinied when ordered to pass through the Barrage.[1][14][15]
In 1925, Admiral Henry Thomas Mayo, who had been the commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet in 1918, said: "The Navy and our country owe to Captain Belknap a debt which can hardly be over-estimated; for it was the knowledge and experience acquired and the doctrine and methods established in the Mine Force under command of Commander [sic] Belknap that enabled the Navy to, first, fit out improvised by very efficient minelaying vessels and, second, to operate them under war conditions in a manner which brought commendation from all."[1]
Later career
From 17 March to 11 April 1919, Belknap was the third of three officers to serve as Acting President of the Naval War College while the college's academic activities were shut down for World War I and its immediate aftermath.[16] In 1919 and 1920 he was commanding officer of Destroyer Submarine Base Squantum at Squantum, Massachusetts. He then returned to the Naval War College as the chairman of its Strategy Department from 1921 to 1923. Upon the commissioning of the new battleship USS Colorado(BB-45) on 30 August 1923, he became her first commanding officer.[1][11][17][18]
Relinquishing command of Colorado in 1925, Belknap became commanding officer of the receiving ship at San Francisco, California. In 1926 he moved on to his final tour, in which he was commanding officer of Naval Training Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Virginia.[1][11][17]
Belknap was transferred to the retired list on 26 June 1926, but remained on active duty, and on 3 May 1927 was promoted to rear admiral by an act of the United States Congress for his World War I service. He relinquished command of the training station on 30 June 1927 and entered retirement.[8][11][17][19]
Belknap had a long and active retirement and was a member of many military orders and societies.
He was elected a Hereditary Companion of the New York Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States on 17 November 1937 and served as the Order's national commander-in-chief from 15 October 1947 to 9 October 1951. He was also a member of the Naval Order of the United States and served as its commander general from 1931 to 1937. In 1897 he became an Hereditary Companion of the Military Order of Foreign Wars and became a Veteran Companion after his service in the Spanish–American War.
He was commander of the New York Chapter of the Military Order of the World War from 1931 to 1935 and served as the Order's national vice commander-in-chief from 1933 to 1936 and national commander-in-chief from 1936 to 1937. He served as president of the Naval Academy Graduates Association of New York in 1943.[1][11][20]
From 1927 to 1928, Belknap was executive chairman of the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary, celebrated in 1930. He also served as chairman of the Army Day Committee in New York City from 1934 to 1946.[1][11]
Belknap also was a very active member of the National Aeronautic Association in Boston. When Amy Phipps Guest offered to sponsor the first solo flight by a woman across the Atlantic Ocean, publisher George P. Putnam joined the search for a female aviator to undertake the journey. When Putnam asked Boston public relations specialist Harold Railey if he had any contacts in Boston who could suggest a candidate, Railey contacted his friend Belknap, who suggested "a young social worker who flies," Amelia Earhart. Earhart went on to achieve fame by becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1928.[21]
Published works
In 1910, G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York City published Belknap's account of his 1909 relief work in Italy, American House Building in Messina and Reggio. In 1920, the United States Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland, published his book The Yankee Mining Squadron about the North Sea Mine Barrage operations he commanded during World War I. Belknap also wrote Introduction to the Life and Letters of Rear Admiral George Collier Remey, U.S.N., 1841–1928, published in Washington, D.C., in 1940.[22][23]
Personal life
Belknap married the former Julia Pomeroy Averill (1875–1971) on 3 or 31[24] March 1900 (sources differ). They had seven children: Averill Belknap (1903–1994), Frances Georgiana Belknap (1904–1996), Emilia Field Belknap (1906–1982), Rexane Belknap (1912–1922), Mary Rowan Belknap (1917–2003), Barberie Ann Belknap (1922–1977), and Marshall S. Edgar Belknap (1931–1931).[1]
Averill Belknap married Andrew Robert Mack (1896–1977), a U.S. Navy officer who eventually attained the rank of rear admiral. Their son Robert Belknap Mack also became a U.S. Navy officer and reached the rank of lieutenant commander before he was lost at sea on 24 September 1957.[1]
Belknap is standing farthest left in this photograph of retired U.S. Navy admirals and other retirees taken in Jamestown, Rhode Island, on 7 August 1928.
^Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS): Commanders-in-Chief Biographies: Rear Admiral Reginald Rowan Belknap, Commander-in-Chief October 15, 1947 to October 9, 1951Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine states "Bureau of the Navigation of the Navy Department 1902–1904, battleship USS Maine, Lieutenant-Commander July 8, 1905, Navigator of the battleship USS Kearsarge and Executive Officer in 1906" in its biography of Belknap. Other sources (noted at the end of this paragraph) do not mention a Maine tour, but state that Belknap was aboard Kearsarge from 1905 to 1906 without mentioning his duties from 1904 to 1905. Apparently Belknap served aboard Maine in 1904–1905, although no other source corroborates a Maine tour and other sources state only a 1902–1904 Bureau of Navigation tour followed by a 1905–1906 Kearsarge tour, raising the possibility that he left the Bureau at the end of 1904 and reported aboard Kearsarge at the beginning of 1905 without an intervening Maine tour.
^Pérez, pp. 53–61. This source refers to Belknap as "Admiral Reginald Belknap" on p. 53, but Belknap did not attain the rank of rear admiral until 1927.
Tamara Moser Melia (1991). Damn the torpedoes: a short history of U.S. naval mine countermeasures, 1777–1991. Naval Historical Center. ISBN978-0-945274-07-0.