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A photo illustration showing a gun tied to four shootings in Albany, New York, an investigative document and surveillance video of one shooting. (AP Illustration)
Pulling a pistol from his waistband, the young man spun his human shield toward police.
“Don’t do it!” a pursuing officer pleaded. The young man complied, releasing the bystander and tossing the gun, which skittered across the city street and then into the hands of police.
They soon learned that the 9mm Beretta had a rap sheet. Bullet casings linked it to four shootings, all of them in Albany, New York.
And there was something else. The pistol was U.S. Army property, a weapon intended for use against America’s enemies, not on its streets.
The Army couldn’t say how its Beretta M9 got to New York’s capital. Until the June 2018 police foot chase, the Army didn’t even realize someone had stolen the gun. Inventory records checked by investigators said the M9 was 600 miles away — safe inside Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
“It’s incredibly alarming,” said Albany County District Attorney David Soares. “It raises the other question as to what else is seeping into a community that could pose a clear and present danger.”
The armed services and the Pentagon are not eager for the public to know the answer.
In the first public accounting of its kind in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found that at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes. Because some armed services have suppressed the release of basic information, AP’s total is a certain undercount.
Government records covering the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, shotguns and automatic assault rifles have vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships, firing ranges and other places where they were used, stored or transported. These weapons of war disappeared because of unlocked doors, sleeping troops, a surveillance system that didn’t record, break-ins and other security lapses that, until now, have not been publicly reported.
While AP’s focus was firearms, military explosives also were lost or stolen, including armor-piercing grenades that ended up in an Atlanta backyard.
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Weapon theft or loss spanned the military’s global footprint, touching installations from coast to coast, as well as overseas. In Afghanistan, someone cut the padlock on an Army container and stole 65 Beretta M9s — the same type of gun recovered in Albany. The theft went undetected for at least two weeks, when empty pistol boxes were discovered in the compound. The weapons were not recovered.
Even elite units are not immune. A former member of a Marines special operations unit was busted with two stolen guns. A Navy SEAL lost his pistol during a fight in a restaurant in Lebanon.
The Pentagon used to share annual updates about stolen weapons with Congress, but the requirement to do so ended years ago and public accountability has slipped. The Army and Air Force, for example, couldn’t readily tell AP how many weapons were lost or stolen from 2010 through 2019. So the AP built its own database, using extensive federal Freedom of Information Act requests to review hundreds of military criminal case files or property loss reports, as well as internal military analysis and data from registries of small arms.
Sometimes, weapons disappear without a paper trail. Military investigators regularly close cases without finding the firearms or person responsible because shoddy records lead to dead ends.
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The military’s weapons are especially vulnerable to corrupt insiders responsible for securing them. They know how to exploit weak points within armories or the military’s enormous supply chains. Often from lower ranks, they may see a chance to make a buck from a military that can afford it.
“It’s about the money, right?” said Brig. Gen. Duane Miller, who as deputy provost marshal general is the Army’s No. 2 law enforcement official.
Theft or loss happens more than the Army has publicly acknowledged. During an initial interview, Miller significantly understated the extent to which weapons disappear, citing records that report only a few hundred missing rifles and handguns. But an internal analysis AP obtained, done by the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal General, tallied 1,303 firearms.
In a second interview, Miller said he wasn’t aware of the memos, which had been distributed throughout the Army, until AP pointed them out following the first interview. “If I had the information in front of me,” Miller said, “I would share it with you.” Other Army officials said the internal analysis might overstate some losses.
The AP’s investigation began a decade ago. From the start, the Army has given conflicting information on a subject with the potential to embarrass — and that’s when it has provided information at all. A former insider described how Army officials resisted releasing details of missing guns when AP first inquired, and indeed that information was never provided.
Top officials within the Army, Marines and Secretary of Defense’s office said that weapon accountability is a high priority, and when the military knows a weapon is missing it does trigger a concerted response to recover it. The officials also said missing weapons are not a widespread problem and noted that the number is a tiny fraction of the military’s stockpile.
“We have a very large inventory of several million of these weapons,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in an interview. “We take this very seriously and we think we do a very good job. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t losses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t mistakes made.”
Kirby said those mistakes are few, though, and last year the military could account for 99.999% of its firearms. “Though the numbers are small, one is too many,” he said.
In the absence of a regular reporting requirement, the Pentagon is responsible for informing Congress of any “significant” incidents of missing weapons. That hasn’t happened since at least 2017. While a missing portable missile such as a Stinger would qualify for notifying lawmakers, a stolen machine gun would not, according to a senior Department of Defense official whom the Pentagon provided for an interview on condition the official not be named.
While AP’s analysis covered the 2010s, incidents persist.
In May, an Army trainee who fled Fort Jackson in South Carolina with an M4 rifle hijacked a school bus full of children, pointing his unloaded assault weapon at the driver before eventually letting everyone go.
Last October, police in San Diego were startled to find a military grenade launcher on the front seat of a car they pulled over for expired license plates. The driver and his passenger were middle-aged men with criminal records.
After publicizing the arrest, police got a call from a Marine Corps base up the Pacific coast. The Marines wanted to know if the grenade launcher was one they needed to find. They read off a serial number.
It wasn’t a match.
CRIME GUNS
Stolen military guns have been sold to street gang members, recovered on felons and used in violent crimes.
The AP identified eight instances in which five different stolen military firearms were used in a civilian shooting or other violent crime, and others in which felons were caught possessing weapons. To find these cases, AP combed investigative and court records, as well as published reports. Federal restrictions on sharing firearms information publicly mean the case total is certainly an undercount.
The military requires itself to inform civilian law enforcement when a gun is lost or stolen, and the services help in subsequent investigations. The Pentagon does not track crime guns, and spokesman Kirby said his office was unaware of any stolen firearms used in civilian crimes.
The closest AP could find to an independent tally was done by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services. It said 22 guns issued by the U.S. military were used in a felony during the 2010s. That total could include surplus weapons the military sells to the public or loans to civilian law enforcement.
Those FBI records also appear to be undercount. They say that no military-issue gun was used in a felony in 2018, but at least one was.
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Back in June 2018, Albany police were searching for 21-year-old Alvin Damon. They’d placed him at a shooting which involved the Beretta M9, a workhorse weapon for the military that is similar to a model Beretta produces for the civilian market.
Surveillance video obtained by AP shows another man firing the gun four times at a group of people off camera, taking cover behind a building between shots. Two men walking with him scattered, one dropping his hat in the street. No one was injured.
Two months later, Detective Daniel Seeber spotted Damon on a stoop near the Prince Deli corner store. Damon took off running and, not far into the chase, grabbed a bystander who had just emerged from the deli with juice and a bag of chips.
After Detective Seeber defused the standoff, officers collected the pistol. A check by New York State Police returned leads to four Albany shootings, including one just the day before in which a bullet lodged in a living room wall. In another, someone was shot in the ankle.
At the request of Albany police, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced the gun’s story. The ATF contacted Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and a review of Army inventory systems showed the M9 had been listed as “in-transit” between two Fort Bragg units for two years before police recovered it.
And the Army still doesn’t know who stole the gun, or when.
The case wasn’t the first in which police recovered a stolen service pistol before troops at Fort Bragg realized it was missing. AP found a second instance, involving a pistol that was among 21 M9s stolen from an arms room.
Military police learned of the theft in 2010. By then, one of the M9s was sitting in an evidence room in the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department, picked up in a North Carolina backyard not far from Bragg. Another M9 was later seized in Durham after it was used in a parking lot shooting.
Another steady North Carolina source of weapons has been Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, where authorities often have an open missing weapons investigation. Detectives in Baltimore found a Beretta M9 stolen from a Lejeune armory during a cocaine bust. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service found in the 2011 case that inventory and security procedures were rarely followed. Three guns were stolen; no one was charged.
Deputies in South Carolina were called in 2017 after a man started wildly shooting an M9 pistol into the air during an argument with his girlfriend. The boyfriend, a convicted felon, then started shooting toward a neighbor’s house. The pistol came from a National Guard armory that a thief entered through an unlocked door, hauling off six automatic weapons, a grenade launcher and five M9s.
Meanwhile, authorities in central California are still finding AK-74 assault rifles that were among 26 stolen from Fort Irwin a decade ago. Military police officers stole the guns from the Army base, selling some to the Fresno Bulldogs street gang.
At least nine of the AKs have not been recovered.
INSIDER THREAT
The people with easiest access to military firearms are those who handle and secure them.
In the Army, they are often junior soldiers assigned to armories or arms rooms, according to Col. Kenneth Williams, director of supply under the Army’s G-4 Logistics branch.
“This is a young guy or gal,” Williams said. “This is a person normally on their first tour of duty. So you can see that we put great responsibility on our soldiers immediately when they come in.”
Armorers have access both to firearms and the spare parts kept for repairs. These upper receivers, lower receivers and trigger assemblies can be used to make new guns or enhance existing ones.
“We’ve seen issues like that in the past where an armorer might build an M16” automatic assault rifle from military parts, said Mark Ridley, a former deputy director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “You have to be really concerned with certain armorers and how they build small arms and small weapons.”
In 2014, NCIS began investigating the theft of weapons parts from Special Boat Team Twelve, a Navy unit based in Coronado, California. Four M4 trigger assemblies that could make a civilian AR-15 fully automatic were missing. Investigators found an armory inventory manager was manipulating electronic records by moving items or claiming they had been transferred. The parts were never recovered and the case was closed after federal prosecutors declined to file charges.
Weapons accountability is part of military routine. Armorers are supposed to check weapons when they open each day. Sight counts, a visual total of weapons on hand, are drilled into troops whether they are in the field, on patrol or in the arms room. But as long as there have been armories, people have been stealing from them.
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Weapons enter the public three main ways: direct sales from thieves to buyers, through pawn shops and surplus stores, and online.
Investigators have found sensitive and restricted parts for military weapons on sites including eBay, which said in a statement it has “zero tolerance” for stolen military gear on its site.
At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, soldiers stole machine gun parts and other items that ended up with online buyers in Russia, China, Mexico and elsewhere. The civilian ringleader, who was found with a warehouse of items, was convicted. Authorities said he made hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Often though, recovering a weapon can prove hard.
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When an M203 grenade launcher couldn’t be found during a 2019 inventory at a Marine Corps supply base in Albany, Georgia, investigators sought surveillance camera footage. It didn’t exist. The warehouse manager said the system couldn’t be played back at the time.
An analysis of 45 firearms-only investigations in the Navy and Marines found that in 55% of cases, no suspect could be found and weapons remained missing. In those unresolved cases, investigators found records were destroyed or falsified, armories lacked basic security and inventories weren’t completed for weeks or months.
“Gun-decking” is Navy slang for faking work. In the case of the USS Comstock, gun-decking led to the disappearance of three pistols.
Investigators found numerous security lapses in the 2012 case, including one sailor asleep in the armory. The missing pistols weren’t properly logged in the ship’s inventory when they were received several days before. Investigators couldn’t pinpoint what day they disappeared because sailors gun-decked inventory reports by not doing actual counts.
ROOM FOR DISCREPANCY
Military officials shied from discussing how many guns they have, much less how many are missing.
AP learned that the Army, the largest of the armed services, is responsible for about 3.1 million small arms. Across all four branches, the U.S. military has an estimated 4.5 million firearms, according to the nonprofit organization Small Arms Survey.
In its accounting, whenever possible AP eliminated cases in which firearms were lost in combat, during accidents such as aircraft crashes and similar incidents where a weapon’s fate was known.
Unlike the Army and Air Force, which could not answer basic questions about missing weapons, the Marines and Navy were able to produce data covering the 2010s.
The Navy data showed that 211 firearms were reported lost or stolen. In addition, 63 firearms previously considered missing were recovered.
According to AP’s analysis of data from the Marines, 204 firearms were lost or stolen, with 14 later recovered.
To account for missing weapons, the Pentagon relies on incident reports from the services, which it keeps for only three years.
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Pentagon officials said that approximately 100 firearms were unaccounted for in both 2019 and 2018. A majority of those were attributable to accidents or combat losses, they said. Even though AP’s total excluded accidents and combat losses whenever known, it was higher than what the services reported to the Pentagon.
The officials said they could only discuss how many weapons were missing dating to 2018. The reason: They aren’t required to keep earlier records. Without providing documentation, the Pentagon said the number of missing weapons was down significantly in 2020, when the pandemic curtailed many military operations.
The Air Force was the only service branch not to release data. It first responded to several Freedom of Information Act requests by saying no records existed. Air Force representatives then said they would not provide details until yet another FOIA request, filed 1.5 years ago, was fully processed.
The Army sought to suppress information on missing weapons and gave misleading numbers that contradict internal memos.
The AP began asking the Army for details on missing weapons in 2011 and filed a formal request a year later for records of guns listed as missing, lost, stolen or recovered in the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry. Charles Royal, the former Army civilian employee who was in charge of the registry, said that he prepared records for release that higher ups eventually blocked in 2013.
“You’re dealing with millions of weapons,” Royal said in a recent interview. “But we’re supposed to have 100% recon, right. OK, we’re not allowed a discrepancy on that. But there’s so much room for discrepancy.”
Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said the service’s property inventory systems don’t readily track how many weapons have been lost or stolen. Army officials said the most accurate count could be found in criminal investigative summaries released under yet another federal records request.
AP’s reading of these investigative records showed 230 lost or stolen rifles or handguns between 2010 and 2019 — a clear undercount. Internal documents show just how much Army officials were downplaying the problem.
The AP obtained two memos covering 2013 through 2019 in which the Army tallied 1,303 stolen or lost rifles and handguns, with theft the primary reason for losses. That number, which Army officials said is imperfect because it includes some combat losses and recoveries, and may include some duplications, was based on criminal investigations and incident reports.
The internal memos are not “an authoritative document,” Kelley said, and were not closely checked with public release in mind. As such, he said, the 1,303 total could be inaccurate.
The investigative records Kelley cited show 62 lost or stolen rifles or handguns from 2013 through 2019. Some of those, like the Beretta M9 used in four shootings in Albany, New York, were recovered.
“One gun creates a ton of devastation,” Albany County District Attorney Soares said. “And then it puts it on local officials, local law enforcement, to have to work extra hard to try to remove those guns from the community.”
Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles; Myers reported from Chicago. Also contributing were Jeannie Ohm in Arlington, Virginia; Brian Barrett, Randy Herschaft and Jennifer Farrar in New York; Michael Hill in Albany, New York; and Pia Deshpande in Chicago.
“Columbiad guns of the Confederate water battery at Warrington, Florida (entrance to Pensacola Bay)” by the United States Department of War 1863-1865
During the secession winter of 1860-1861, members of the Regular Army stationed at federal forts in the south, and civilians in the surrounding localities, were on edge. While some wanted to avoid military conflict, supporters of the newly formed Confederate States of America and its fledgling government believed that they had established a legitimate nation that should control the coastal fortifications within its borders.
Between the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, President James Buchanan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania whose administration was plagued by the sectional divisions of the 1850s, was a lame-duck. Buchanan believed that while secession was not necessarily legal, the federal government could not stop it. The incoming Lincoln administration, and several Regular Army officers stationed in coastal fortifications in the South, however, wanted to retain the forts for the U.S. government since they had always been federal – not state – property, and since surrendering the forts to the Confederacy would violate the oath that soldiers took upon enlistment in the U.S. Army.
Once Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, leading Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis to call for volunteers to defend their banners, the struggles of soldiers in other critical forts across the Southern coast, particularly the Gulf, received coverage in newspapers and figured into Union and Confederate military planning given their importance in defending both shipping and the mainland. Pensacola, Florida’s deep-water harbor with fortifications, commercial lumbering mills, and a significant navy yard that boasted docking, supply, and shipbuilding facilities would be an asset to the power that controlled the town.
The town was also an important railroad hub: It was the southern terminus of the Alabama & Florida Railroad which stretched to Montgomery, Alabama, and the Pensacola & Mobile Railroad which ran from the Perdido River to a junction with the Alabama & Florida Railroad fourteen miles north of the city.
Florida’s Gulf Coast was crucial to the U.S. economy, and its forts comprised the first line of defense against any potential encroachment from European powers. Southern planters and producers transported their goods to port cities along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Pensacola, and Pensacola’s Navy Yard, established in 1826 and its system of fortifications that included Forts Pickens, Barrancas, and McRee watched as ships passed into and out of Pensacola, or sailed on the Gulf’s open waters past the panhandle down to the Florida Keys, and out to the Atlantic for coastal U.S. and/or international trade.
Pensacola was well-defended with three forts: Pickens, McRee, and Barrancas which included the Advanced Redoubt and Battery San Antonio (also known as Water Battery) keeping watch over the harbor. Possession of Pensacola was critical to maintaining control of the Gulf and both Union and Confederate soldiers vied to take or keep possession of this critical town, its defenses, and its military and economic assets all the while staving off boredom, the trials of a tropical climate, and the threat of disease.
With the passage of time, however, these Gulf Coast forts at Pensacola and elsewhere faded from popular memory, overshadowed by active military campaigns. But the U.S. Regular soldiers stationed in the city’s surrounding forts and the Confederate troops who aimed to take them, understood that war could have started at Pensacola and feared that it could become the focus of a sustained active campaign.
Amidst sectional tensions and the secession of the lower-south states, Confederate politicians, civilians, and soldiers coveted control of Pensacola’s forts to bolster their national defenses and wanted its navy yard to help the Confederacy build a fleet from scratch.
The Lincoln administration believed that the federal government was supreme and should retain the forts, which were federally funded and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to Attorney General Edward Bates, the forts that surrounded Charleston, South Carolina were symbolically significant since they stood in the epicenter of secession, but they lacked national economic and defensive significance.
On March 15, 1861, Bates advised Lincoln against provisioning Fort Sumter and recommended that, if Sumter was evacuated, the “more Southern forts – Pickens, Key West, &c – should, without delay, be put in condition of easy defence against all assailants.” He also advised that the “whole coast from South Carolina to Texas” be “as well guarded as the power of the Navy will enable us,” recognizing the economic and military importance of this region.
Bates revised this recommendation on March 29, 1861, telling Lincoln that “Fort Pickens and Key West ought to be reinforced and supplied, so as to look down opposition, at all hazards” whether “Fort Sumter be or be not evacuated.” Bates’s communication, and local dynamics at Pensacola, set the stage for sectional tensions to potentially boil over into war on the Florida Panhandle. Pensacola’s fortifications were crucial to the defense of this strategic commercial and military location.
Despite the Lincoln administration’s outlook and the threat of secession, U.S. officials did not reinforce Pensacola’s forts, leaving troops stationed in them to fend for themselves. On January 8, Florida militia under Colonel William Chase, one of the engineers who designed Pensacola’s defenses, demanded that U.S. troops under command by Lieutenant Adam Slemmer (in the absence of future Confederate Brigadier General and Commissary General of Prisoners, Major John Winder) surrender Fort Barrancas, but Slemmer deterred the would-be assailants with warning shots.
Ultimately, Slemmer thought his position untenable and considered Fort Pickens more secure. Pickens had not been garrisoned since the Mexican War, and only an ordnance sergeant and his wife occupied Fort McRee, which was used to store ammunition. On January 10, 1861, the day that Florida seceded from the Union, Slemmer moved his fifty-one U.S. Regular troops stationed at Fort Barrancas, which overlooked Pensacola Bay, to Fort Pickens after spiking their guns. U.S. troops also abandoned Fort McRee after disabling its guns and tossing its gunpowder into the harbor.
State troops from Florida and Alabama thus held Forts Barrancas and McRee, in addition to the Navy Yard. Slemmer deemed Fort Pickens was more significant, however, since it overlooked the bay and the Pensacola Navy Yard from its location on Santa Rosa Island. U.S. soldiers bolstered defenses at the run-down fort, anxiously anticipating that Florida state troops may attempt to take Fort Pickens as they had two of Florida’s Atlantic forts: Marion in St. Augustine and Clinch at Fernandina.
These men had reason to worry since, lacking reinforcements, they witnessed Confederate troops occupy Forts Barrancas and McRee and watched as they bolstered their lines. On January 15, Confederate soldiers pressured Slemmer to surrender Fort Pickens. Slemmer refused, but not without striking a deal on January 28: In exchange for a Confederate promise not to attack, U.S. troops would not reinforce Fort Pickens.
General Winfield Scott, however, gave confidential orders for U.S. Regular troops under the command of Captain Israel Vodges of the 1st Artillery to head for Pensacola on the sloop U.S.S. Brooklyn. Stephen Mallory, former U.S. Senator who became the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, learned of the destination of Vodges’s men and attempted to get Buchanan to stop them.
Buchanan, however, allowed the ship to sail to Pensacola but promised Mallory that they would not land unless Fort Pickens was attacked. Vodges’s men remained on the Brooklyn until March when, on March 12, Scott and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells, again secretly ordered Vodges and his troops ashore. These orders did not reach Pensacola until March 31, however, and were ultimately scuttled since Captain Henry Adams of the U.S.S. Sabine, anchored off Fort Pickens, considered them an act of war.
Attempts to reinforce Pensacola did not cease, however. Lieutenant David Porter aboard the warship U.S.S. Powhatan soon sailed for Pensacola, and Vodges and his troops disembarked on the night of April 11, shortly before Confederate troops bombarded Fort Sumter, officially starting the war. Additional Union troops, Companies C and E of the 3rd Infantry and Companies A and M of the 2nd Artillery, under Colonel Harvey Brown landed on April 16 and 17 and held the fort into the summer of 1861, bolstered by the U.S. Naval blockade of Pensacola harbor. Brown’s men got to work strengthening the fort’s defenses and unloading supplies from ships.
Meanwhile, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate War Department ordered Davis’s friend, General Braxton Bragg, to command Confederate troops in and around Pensacola. Bragg received these orders on March 7, arrived at Pensacola on March 11, and established his headquarters at Fort Barrancas. Confederate troops established a line that stretched from Bragg’s headquarters to Fort McRee. By the end of March, Bragg commanded approximately 1,100 officers and men and the Confederate War Department requested additional troops, up to 5,000, from the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. By the second week of April, Bragg had 5,000 men in the ranks.
Bragg aimed to take Fort Pickens but lacked sufficient siege guns and would have to rely on surprise. He devised a plan for a nighttime attack on April 11, during which soldiers would row across the bay, climb Fort Pickens’s walls, and storm its Union defenders. This plan was never executed, however. A local reporter for a Pensacola newspaper spoiled the plot, bringing reinforcements from U.S. ships to come to Fort Pickens, forcing Bragg to halt his plans and imprison the reporter.
After this failure, Jefferson Davis hoped that a summertime yellow fever epidemic would force Union soldiers to evacuate the fort, but the disease did not break out in the summer of 1861. Instead, Union and Confederate defenders of Pensacola eyed each other suspiciously, hoping to have the opportunity to trade labor on fortifications for a chance to prove themselves in battle.
The Lincoln administration sent additional naval forces to Pensacola in May when the steam frigate Niagara, under the command of Captain William McKean, arrived at Santa Rosa Island on May 25 after a twenty-day journey. In late June, Colonel Billy Wilson’s 6th New York Volunteers (Wilson’s Zouaves) arrived at Pensacola. By this time, both Union and Confederate forces in and around Pensacola were formidable and both sides coveted ultimate possession of the town and its defenses.
Opportunities for valor came in September and October 1861. On September 2, Union raiders scuttled a drydock at the Navy Yard which Confederates had planned to sink into the channel to obstruct Union offensives. Then on September 14, Union sailors and marines burned the Confederate ship Judah, which was docked at the Navy Yard, and spiked a Confederate Columbiad cannon at a nearby battery. The raid resulted in three Union soldiers killed and thirteen wounded, while Confederates suffered three dead and an unknown number of men wounded.
The Union garrison inside of Fort Pickens feared through October 1861 that Confederate troops would attack Fort Pickens, and they were correct. In retaliation for the burning of the Judah, Bragg ordered a surprise assault on Santa Rosa Island on October 9 by approximately 1,000 troops under Brigadier General Richard Anderson.
During the night of October 8, Anderson’s men boarded barges and sailed across the bay, landing four miles east of Fort Pickens at midnight. Confederate troops marched three miles towards the fort and encountered the camp of the 6th New York, who put up a brief fight before a panicked retreat. Anderson lost the element of surprise with daylight breaking and Confederate troops retreated during and after a skirmish with Union assailants from the Fort Pickens.
The Battle of Santa Rosa Island cost the Union 67 casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), while Confederates suffered 87 casualties.
In late September, Flag Officer William McKean succeeded Flag Officer William Mervine as commander of the Gulf Blockading Squadron and planned a combined attack on Confederate harbor defenses. On October 11, McKean’s flagship, Niagara arrived at Santa Rosa Island, and Union troops prepared to confront Bragg’s men which, by this point, had strengthened to approximately 7,000.
On November 21, the U.S.S. Niagara and the U.S.S. Richmond were prepared to cooperate with Col. Brown in a bombardment of Confederate defenses. On November 22-23, 1861, U.S. guns at Fort Pickens, accompanied by the two U.S. warships, bombarded Fort McRee. Confederates returned fire in an artillery duel that lasted over eight hours and inflicted significant damage to Fort McRee and the Navy Yard, but resulted in minimal casualties.
A quiet December followed this bombardment, but Bragg realized that challenges were forthcoming. After the Battle of Santa Rosa Island and the Union’s bombardment in late November 1861, Bragg faced supply shortages and men reluctant to reenlist as initial terms were short. The Bounty and Furlough Law that the Confederate Congress passed on December 11 inspired some reenlistments since it offered a $50 Bounty and 60-day furlough with transport home if men reenlisted.
On January 1-2, 1862, Union troops unleashed another artillery duel and Confederates reciprocated. The minor affair resulted in the burning of a storehouse at the Navy Yard. After this action, troops at Pensacola settled into a stalemate as Union military focus shifted further west, causing Confederate attention to follow.
Elsewhere on the Gulf, the Union army achieved more significant gains. Troops under Major General Benjamin Butler landed at Ship Island, Mississippi to bolster the blockade of the Mississippi River and serve as a base to target Pascagoula, Mississippi and Mobile, Alabama.
Confederates thus debated abandoning Pensacola – a position that gained more support when Union troops took Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, and as Union troops gained ground in Kentucky, and troops under Flag Officer David Farragut captured New Orleans. Confederate soldiers at Pensacola started to shift west to help combat the tightening Union blockade. In February, Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin directed Bragg to send his troops to Tennessee, and Bragg was transferred to Mobile.
General Samuel Jones took command at Pensacola and was ordered to withdraw as soon as possible. Jones was to salvage guns and munitions for the Confederacy by moving them and supplies to Mobile, and to destroy resources useful to the enemy. By mid-April 1862, only approximately 1,500 of 6,500 Confederate troops remained in Pensacola and the remainder prepared to leave, albeit not without damaging supplies that might have been useful to the Union.
Confederate soldiers thus stripped the Navy Yard of its machinery, destroyed boats, sawmills, lumber, and railroad tracks, while preserving the customs house and commissary storehouse. Finally, on May 9, 1862, Confederate troops evacuated the town of Pensacola and cavalry burned the Navy Yard, storehouses, an oil factory, boats and steamers as civilians fled for safety.
Union soldiers took possession of Pensacola on May 10 and occupied the town and its forts throughout the rest of the war. Rear Admiral David G. Farragut determined that the Navy Yard could be repaired and could serve as a depot for his West Gulf Blockading Squadron and used the Yard as an operational base for the war’s remainder. Fort Pickens also served as a Union base for military operations, as did Fort Barrancas – U.S. troops used these sites to launch operations into West Florida and Alabama and Union troops maintained a constant garrison in Pensacola though their numbers diminished by 1863 as military focus shifted to the Mississippi River.
