Military History | American War Memorial, Gibraltar — Cut Into an 1842 Wall

The United States Navy's Patrol Force operated from Gibraltar from August 1917 until after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 — cruisers, destroyers, Coast Guard cutters and submarine chasers, escorting convoys through the Strait. The Naval History and Heritage Command puts Rear Admiral Albert P. Niblack's command at 41 vessels, 314 officers and 4,600 men. The American Battle Monuments Commission's accounting of the work is in percentages rather than counts: for July and August 1918 it claims 25 percent of the convoys bound for French ports and 70 percent of those leaving the vicinity of Gibraltar for England. The commission was not given ground to build on here. It was given permission to cut a doorway. Paul Philippe Cret designed an archway over a flight of steps, and it was set into the Line Wall Curtain at Prince Albert's Front — a British battery front of 1842, on a line the Gibraltar government's heritage listing traces back to Spanish work shown on a plan of 1627. The stone came out of the Rock. On the seaward face are two gilded bronze seals, the United States above the Navy Department. On the landward face a gilded galley runs under oars, and beneath it, in gold capitals: ERECTED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO COMMEMORATE THE ACHIEVEMENTS AND COMRADESHIP OF THE AMERICAN AND BRITISH NAVIES IN THIS VICINITY DURING THE WORLD WAR. Singular; there had not been a second one. A.D. 1932 is cut at the lower left. The commission's film of the dedication, in October 1937, records the Governor accepting the archway on behalf of the British government. The joint is still legible from the steps: pale regular ashlar where the monument stands, rougher rust-stained blocks either side of it in the wall it interrupts. Gibraltar's buses stop below at a stop called American Steps. 📸 Cover: the arch from the American Steps, with the Operation Torch plaque of 1998 mounted on the older wall at right — photograph by Harry Mitchell, 21 October 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the inscription and the galley relief on the landward face, photograph by Nathan Harig, 24 April 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.