Sea Legs

The old Grumman documentary about carrier aircraft from the 1970s.

Happy Birthday, Brown Shoes

100 years since Eugene Ely made the first arrested landing on a warship (USS Pennsylvania, ACR-4)

Ely wasn't in the Navy, but his shipboard landing is now commonly regarded as the birth date for naval air. The first American aircraft carrier was authorized just after the end of the Great War and was commissioned in 1922.

Last Pilot From the Doolittle Raid.

The last surviving pilot from the Doolittle Raid has died.

Col. William Marsh "Bill" Bower was 93.

Garbage Out, Garbage In

Ships generate a fair amount of garbage and trash (which our cousins in the Royal Navy refer to as "gash"). In port, it was handled as any other business would; it was thrown into a dumpster on the pier.

I don't know how the Navy handles garbage and trash at sea now. Submarines supposedly compacted it and then ejected it overboard, so it would sink. Back in the day, surface ships would just throw it from the fantail; naval ships pretty much left a stream of garbage bags floating in their wakes. [1]

When a ship was at an anchorage, typically a civilian firm would be contracted to come by the ship once or twice a day to pick up the garbage. In some countries, a garbage lighter from a local navy base would do the honors and there would be impromptu trading of goods between the sailors on the warship and the crew of the lighters.[2] The lighters were supposed to take the garbage ashore and then it would be trucked to the local dump.

In Italy, of course, it didn't work that way. The garbage lighters would wait until it was completely dark. Then they would go several miles out to sea and throw all of the shit over the side. This often had one bad diplomatic ramification: Garbage with papers bearing the name of the USS UMPTECLUTCH would then drift ashore onto beaches favored by tourists. The mayor of that town would either complain to his foreign ministry or sometimes just call the local consulate directly and scream at the consular officials about American ships fouling his pristine beaches.

That usually resulted in a cable going to Foggy Bottom, which then was passed along to Fort Fumble. Some desk-bound captain or admiral would then send a message of inquiry to the offending ship, with the message copied to the commanders of the Second Fleet, the Sixth Fleet, the home cruiser-destroyer group, CTF 60, CTG 60.1 (or 60.2) and the home destroyer squadron. That was usually answered with a message that explained that garbage services were contracted through the local consular agent, or "we did what we were supposed to, whaddaya want from us?"

So one time (probably more than one time), there was an American naval ship anchored a mile or so off the coast of an Italian town. Garbage services were arranged as I described above. The garbage was handled by the lightermen as I also described. There were currents that took the garbage from where it was dumped into the Mediterranean Sea (more precisely, the Tyrrhenian Sea) back towards that town.

And back towards that ship.

When the garbage had floated back towards that ship, the garbage bags had taken on water. Some of them had submerged and were floating along about twenty or so feet under the surface. That put them right at the level of the sea chests[3] for the generators, the evaporators and the fire mains. The suction from the sea chests sucked the garbage into the sea chests, where the garbage clogged the inlet screens.

All that stuff kept tripping offline as cooling was lost. The cure was to connect a fire hose to the sea chest and backwash the shit back out. The chief engineer and the captain soon realized that the time might come when all of the firemain pump inlets were clogged at the same time. So the captain ordered that the Sea and Anchor Detail be set, the anchor was hauled up and the ship headed out to sea.

This happened around midnight or so, stranding several dozen sailors ashore. After it was fully light out, the ship came back in, though well away from the garbage current and sent in its boats to retrieve the rest of the crew. The boat crews were told to keep a watch out for garbage so that the sea chests for their engines weren't fouled.

In due course, the sailors who were ashore were recovered and the ship went off to its next mission.

_______________________________________
[1] Classified material was put into burn bags. Stuff classified as "secret" or above was supposed to first be shredded and then burned.
[2] In Muslim nations, a very desired trade good by the lightermen was American porn.
[3] A "sea chest" is the point of salt water inlet for a given system. For generators, sea water was used for cooling the condensers and sea water also cooled the air-conditioning plants. For evaporators, sea water was the raw material for making fresh water. Water for fire-fighting was also sea water.

Now Hear This: Happy New Year!

That is all.

Food, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

see more Very Demotivational

An explanation.

69 Years Ago- The Second Happy Time

69 years ago today, the first of five German U-Boats sailed to begin commerce-raiding operations off the east coast of the United States.

The U-boats were able to sink so many ships with so few German losses that the period from the arrival of the U-boats to about August of 1942 became known as the "Second Happy Time".

The reaction of the US Navy to the U-boat campaign, as well as the local governments in coastal cities, bordered on criminal neglect and dereliction of duty.

The Navy fought the institution of a coastal convoy system, despite the lessons learned during both the First World War and the high losses the British suffered at the onset of the Second World War. The Navy was extremely slow to react and resisted the formation of civilian aerial antisubmarine patrols (a measure that proved to be an extremely effective countermeasure). Until the Navy pulled its collective thumb out of its ass, many merchant vessels were sunk, most with the loss of their crews.

Merchant ships sailing independently tried hopping from anchorage to anchorage, sailing only in darkness. The U-boats were able to see ships operating inshore silhouetted by the lights of towns and cities. Civilian governments resisted the institution of a coastal blackout, because the local governments feared the impact of a blackout on their merchants, preferring to see ships on the horizon burning from U-boat attacks.

Keep in mind that although the film stock from the war shows the U-boats executing torpedo attacks, U-boats sank a lot of ships by surfacing and firing on those ships with their deck guns, because submarines of the day carried maybe 12-20 torpedoes. Surfaced U-boats were vulnerable to air attack; the later formation of the Civil Air Patrol, light aircraft armed with small bombs, forced the U-boats to discontinue surface attacks.

Between the CAP flights, convoying and Navy blimp patrols, merchant sinkings went down and U-boat losses climbed, making operations off the U.S. coast a lot more hazardous for the U-boat crews.

The Troll Under the Bridge, cont.

Navy Times is reporting that CAPT Graf's continuation board recommended that she be forcibly retired with a general discharge.

I read through some of the comments that CAPT Graf was favored because her sister is an admiral. I don't know anything about that.

But a long time ago, I knew one admiral who was so dumb that he should have been watered twice a week and the only reason anyone could figure out that he had gotten so far was that his father and his uncle were both admirals. Maybe a cousin and a brother as well, I've forgotten. There were weekly stories going around the waterfront about what stupid thing that admiral had said or asked in the weekly staff meeting.

So yes, nepotism did exist in the Navy and it probably still does. Idiot offspring who are legacy admissions isn't confined to douchebag sons at Ivy-league universities.

(Original post.)

Thanksgiving at Sea, or "We Sail to Defend, What We Hold So Dear. "The DDGs, Welded to the Pier."

I hope that you are having (or that you had) a nice Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader. Please spare a moment from your day of food (and football) to think of those men and women in the Armed Forces who are away from home on this day, with a special thought to those on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are sailing into uncertain waters off the Korean Peninsula.

I've spent a Thanksgiving or two at sea, it's not terribly uncommon in the Navy. If the cooks are halfway good, the meal is a feast like none other[1] (though cigars and cigarettes were no longer provided). It was a good idea to reflect on one's underway watch rotation before sitting down to eat, as showing up for watch ready to fall asleep from overeating was not a good idea.

On larger ships, a VIP might show up to thank the crew. A DoD or USO entertainment group might perform, which resulted in a sort of "mandatory fun" if not enough sailors showed up to watch the show.[2] Smaller ships were luckier, usually they got to be on their own. Unless it was truly wartime, Thanksgiving was a day of holiday routine; no work was done other than sweepers, watchstanding and cooking. Everyone could sleep in if they didn't have to be up.

I was surfing around, saw the usual press releases, and found this Plan of the Day from a warship's Thanksgiving thirty years ago.

I don't know the story behind it, but it sounds as though the USS Joseph Hewes had to leave for Thanksgiving to cover something that the USS Sellers was supposed to do. Probably one of the crewmen, or more than one, wrote that poem. If I remember correctly, only line officers could qualify for surface warfare pins back then, so it is possible that one of the wardroom rats had a hand in that.

Covering another ship's commitments was a bittersweet thing. The bitter was that it meant more time away from home.[3] If it was over a holiday, your plans, the plans of your shipmates and everyone's families were ruined. The sweet was that there was considerable unit pride in being on a ship that could be told, on very short notice, to get underway and do someone else's job. [4] That was a hard thing to sell to one's family, but it was still true. The reverse was that the waterfront reputation of a ship that was indeed "welded to the pier" was not good. The higher-ups in the squadron and the group could be counted on to lavish the sort of extra attention on that short of ship which nobody on that ship relished receiving.
_____________________________
[1] If the cooks produced a terrible Thanksgiving meal, that may result in the Supply Officer and the chief cook getting fired.
[2] "You will attend and you will have fun."
[3] Between deployments, exercises and in-port duty days, it was common to sleep in your own bed maybe 60-70 days a year.
[4] I have no doubt that copies of that POD were mailed to the USS Sellers.

Lockout and Tagout

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.

A Rifleman Went to War

I picked up a copy of "A Rifleman Went to War" from inter-library loan.

The author, Herbert McBride, was an interesting fellow. He clearly was eager to go to war, somewhere, as he wrote that he tried to get into the Boer War and the intervention into Mexico, both without success. When World War I broke out he had to have been in his early 40s, yet he went to Canada and enlisted. He fought in France until he was medically discharged in 1917 for what appeared to be a combination of battle wounds and shell shock.

Two decades or so before the war, he was living and working in Colorado to get over a case of tuberculosis. Working as a cowboy and for a coal company, he became acquainted with some of the famous gunfighters of the Old West:

From these men I learned many things, the most important of which was the point which they all insisted was absolutely vital: the ability to control one's own nerves and passions--in other works, never to get excited.

(pg. 5)

If you want a cold, unsentimental yet proud look at life in the trenches, then the book is well worth reading.

If you have ever seen the somewhat execrable movie "Enemy at the Gates", you might recall a scene where Vasilii Zaitsev is talking about the unnatural actions of a German sniper in not relocating after reach shot. McBride machine-gunned a German sniper who didn't move after firing; he saw where a litter party was shot down and was able to triangulate back to a likely firing point.

McBride believed that the problems that occurred with the Ross rifle were due to substandard ammunition that was made in the rush to ramp up production for the war. He hinted at a manufacturer on the Hudson River, "National something or other", which unless he was referring to the Watervliet arsenal, I have no clue as to who he meant.

Update: National Conduit and Cable Co., Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

Career-Limiting Move

Running your submarine aground:



(Um, you couldn't figure out a way to try and steady your camera??)

Dear John

Dear John letters were a fact of life in the Navy. Typically, they came roughly mid-way through the deployment. To be fair, it wasn't all the sea duty sailors being broadsided. There were sailors who met someone else and fell in love when visiting foreign ports and who then dumped their stateside spouses. But for this post, let's talk about those who were dumped. Also, for the purposes of this post, I'll refer to the sailors in the male gender and the spouses back home in the feminine gender, though the opposite cases were becoming true (and now are certainly true).

The reasons why the dumpings happened were fairly similar. There were the wives who realized after a few months that their husbands were scum and didn't want them back. There were wives who fell for newer models, an appalling number of whom were other sailors. There were wives who already had new boyfriends lined up and used the deployments to carry out their plans.

The commencement of the breakup was stereotypical: There was the letter. The recipient would react in varying ways: In stoic silence, tears, screams of anguish, smashing fists into bulkheads (never a good thing to do) or smashing things. If the letter came during a port visit, the recipient would find a telephone exchange and try to call home. Those who had the money (usually officers) would try to take leave and fly home. Sleeplessness was common. So was heavy self-medication during liberty ashore.

Where the wives strayed often wasn't unusual. While some husbands were known to regard their marriage vows as being suspended once the ship passed the sea buoy out-bound, the wives, in turn, sometimes became "deployment widows". For example, the Friday night dance at the NAS Oceana Officers' Club was notorious for being a place where single officers, especially airdales, could go to find a deployment widow for some fun and games.[1] Every naval community had a place or three like that, some off-base, some on-base. Probably most of the time, what happened was a short fling. But not always.[2]

Sometimes there wasn't even a Dear John letter. The husband would come back to find his place cleaned out, his bank account emptied and his family gone. That was usually facilitated by a trusting husband who gave his wife a legal power-of-attorney. I knew of one wife and boyfriend who wound up in prison for forging a power-of-attorney to sell the home.

There was one guy who came back from deployment and, like everyone else, was eager for the reunion. What happened was that another one of the wives sorrowfully gave him his car keys and told him that his car was in the parking lot. It was, jam-packed with all of his stuff.

There was another guy who, also eager for the reunion, was met by a process-server with a set of divorce papers.

There was the guy who found out where his soon-to-be-ex was with her new boyfriend. The sailor and a few of his buddies rode up on motorcycles, shot the shit out of the boyfriend's house and rode off.

The ones that were probably the worst to see were the ones where the wife broke the news and took her leave right there on the pier.[3] Those probably set the record for the amount of spirit-crushing that took place. It was bad enough when the sailor had suspicions that the relationship was in trouble. It was terrible when the sailor was deluded or had no clue whatever that his marriage was imploding.

The aftereffects could be, well, interesting. In a good and supportive unit, the dumpee was looked after and helped, under a theory of "there but for the grace of G-d go I". In most commands, however, the attitude was "it sucks to be you". Self-medication with alcohol and other women was common.[4] If things went well, the dumpee would recover and move on. But many times, there was enough self-medicating to hurt one's job performance, or if the captain was a self-righteous prig who regarded any family drama as career-limiting, then the dumpee had better plan on drafting a resume.

Dear John letters and their aftermath probably ended more careers, whether the sailor opted to leave or left after career suicide, than any other factor.

_______________________________
[1] Not just deployment widows, too. Lots of single women came to such places on the hunt for their own "officer and a gentleman" (I cannot tell you how much I hated that particular movie.).
[2] Even the flings could be destructive. I knew of one marriage that ended when the returned husband found a parking ticket in his car; the parking ticked was issued at the Oceana O-Club on a Friday night six weeks after he had deployed.
[3] I've seen it go the other way, as well, when the sailor told the wife right there on the pier that the marriage was over.
[4] In an interesting twist of fate, such sailors often pursued deployment widows for some meaningless sex.

The Future for the US Navy

I had some thoughts on my home blog. You may be interested. Or not.

Nothing Ever Changes

Once again, the Air Force is taking knocks for largely being a bunch of civilians in uniform, with their fine whines of: "It's dusty here!" "Our laundry is damp!" "Do we have to share with the Army?" ("no" on that one)

It was a standing joke back in the day that when the Air Force was given money to build a base, they'd spend all of the money to build the Officer's Club, the EM Club, base housing and one runway (in order to fly in the booze) and then go back to Congress for more money for incidentals such as repair shops and hangars.

It doesn't sound as though much has changed.

Volunteering the Army Way

I posted this over on one of my other blogs, but it seems a shame not to have it here.

Operation Clusterfrak, Not the Video

I don't think that Operation Clusterfuck would have been anything like this:

Watch Conditions

I need to run through this for future posts.

Condition I: Condition I was Battle Stations, everyone on duty. All of the weapon systems and all of the repair lockers were manned and ready and the ship was kept in Condition Zebra. There was a limit to how long everyone could be kept on station, though.

Condition II: Condition II was almost battle stations. Certain weapon systems were manned, usually the AAW missile battery. The divisions that manned the systems were usually in two-section duty (six hours on and six hours off).

Condition IIAS: This was specific to ASW ships, usually the ones with towed arrays. Passive ASW, when done by hand, took a lot of people. On a 1052, there would be at least eight people in Sonar Control. CIC kept their ASW plots manned and a R/T talker on duty for helo ops. The LAMPS Det was in something like Ready 30. Sonar and CIC were in two-section duty.

Condition II manning could be maintained for two months, but it took a hell of a toll on people. Some maintenance had to be deferred. The XO would begin to go batshit because the berthing compartments were half-filled with sleeping men in the morning from the six-hour midwatch, which made cleaning for his inspection difficult.

Condition III: This was the standard condition for wartime steaming with no immediate threat and for at-sea exercises. CIC was manned for air and surface tracking. The TAO watch was manned. The AAW and gun batteries were often lightly manned (enough to get the first shots off), but not for exercises. Officers were normally in three watch sections, CIC would be in two or three. There were any number of voice radio circuits monitored on the Bridge and in CIC.

Condition IV: Peacetime steaming. Depending on the number of qualified OODs, the officer watches may be in four or five sections. CIC was manned for surface tracking and maybe one OS might sit at the air-search radar scope head.

The enlisted bridge watch was normally in four sections for all but Battle Stations. Steam engineers always tried to achieve three watch sections, but two-section duty was very common as the loss of one or two watch-qualified sailors, whether to illness, being sent home for family emergencies or being transferred, was enough to kick the hole watches back to two sections.

Meep, Meep!

ASW, Japanese style:



(H/T)

But, But, I Might Get in Trouble!!!

This is no shit (and all times are approximate):

I was on shore duty for a spell; I was stationed in the DC area. For some reason, the Powers That Be where I worked sent me and a bunch of civilian engineers to a four-hour presentation/lunch at the Little Creek Naval Base in Virginia Beach, VA. We had to all be at work at 0530 to ride a large passenger van down (the conference started at 1000) and the van would take us back to our offices at the end of the presentation.

Most of us snoozed on the way down.

I wish I could tell you what the presentation was all about, not because it was classified, but because I just don't remember. For some reason, we had to ride out in the harbor in a LARC-LX to watch some ship do something worth seeing. It was a nice day, the water was calm, a LARC-LX is one big mother on huge wheels (like a really big DUKW) and we got to eat a buffet lunch after the boat ride. But none of that is important to this tale.

It was an hour or so after we started back to DC that it became clear to me (and others) that the driver of the van was seriously tired. He was having trouble staying in the lane on I-64. I called out to him (I was two rows back) and asked that he make a pit stop as soon as possible, with the excuse that I really had to pee, "and I mean right now."

He pulled into a truck stop and everybody got out. I made a quick run to the head and got back to the van before the driver. I climbed into the driver's seat, buckled up and waited. When the driver came back, he didn't even put up an argument. He got into the right front seat and he was out like a light just after we got back on the highway. He slept until we pulled off the highway towards the facility where we worked.

The van had three lights to monitor mileage, the idea being that you were supposed to drive in such a way as to keep the green light on. I had the yellow or red lights on the whole way back. When we got to the facility, around 1900 or so, the gate guard did a double-take when he saw that I was driving, but he saluted and I drove in to the office building, where we all got out and the driver took the van back to the motor pool.

The next day, one of the engineers buttonholed me and said: "I was really happy that you took over from that driver. I could see that he was falling asleep at the wheel. We could have all been killed."

"If you knew that, then why didn't you volunteer to drive," I asked.

"But I don't have a government driver's license," he protested. He actually seemed scandalized at the idea that he might drive a government vehicle without one.

I looked at him and smiled. "I don't have one, either. But I'm not about to let the lack of a piece of paper get me killed."

The driver, though, must have told what had happened to his boss. For three days later, without my saying a word to anyone, I received a government driver's license through the interoffice mail. The effective date on the license was back-dated to a week before the trip.

The file had been papered.

A Day in Port

This is from memory and it is based on the ships I spent time on. So if your ship differed, feel free to comment.

Sunrise- Topside lighting was turned off.

0600- Reveille. The Petty Officer of the Watch would turn on the 1MC (announcing system) to the common spaces and engineering and announce: "Reveille, reveille. All hands heave out and trice up. The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces.." he would flip on the switch to Officers' Country and add "now reveille."

Of course, some people had been up for awhile. The watches, whether the ship was cold iron (hotel services being provided from the pier) or auxiliary steaming were manned. The cooks had been up for awhile preparing breakfast.

0615- "Early chow". The watchstanders, those who were taking the forenoon watch at 0700, got to eat. Lots of other people did, as well. Most of the officers drifted in by 0630 so they could change into working uniform and grab breakfast. The department heads and some of the division officers received copies of relevant message traffic; you could find them at the wardroom table, eating breakfast and scanning through the pile of copies of radioteletype messages. (Radio Central usually had more than one damn big xerox machine.)

0615- Sweepers. The offgoing duty section was supposed to give a quick cleaning of the ship. If the day was a weekend, it had better be a good one, as the oncoming Command Duty Officer would not release the offgoing duty section until the ship was cleaned to his or her satisfaction. The offgoing duty section hoped like hell that the oncoming CDO was badly hung over and wouldn't have noticed if the ship had sunk at the pier.

0630- Breakfast for the Crew. By now there was a steady parade of ship's company across the Quarterdeck. An officer from the off-going duty section had to eat breakfast on the Mess Deck in order to fill out a report.

0700- Relieve the Watch. The Forenoon watch was the first one for the oncoming duty section.

0700-0715- Expiration of Liberty. The exact time depended on the ship.

0720- Officers' Call. This was where the XO amplified on whatever was in the Plan of the Day. The XO would ask questions of the attendees and discuss anything that was on his or her mind. Depending on what was bugging the XO, this could be a very uncomfortable event.

On smaller ships, all of the officers and the command master chief attended Officers' Call. On larger ships, it was the CMC and the department heads; in that event, the department heads then met with their division officers. Any discomfort from the XO would be passed along.

0730- Quarters. All hands not on watch in port would assemble at their divisional mustering point. Attendance was taken and the Muster Report would later be turned into the Ship's Office. Attention would be called with words ranging from the formal (and prescribed) "Attention to Quarters", to, as I heard one Master Chief say: "Listen Up, You Varmints." The Plan of the Day was read out and then everyone would wait for the division officer to come back from Officer's Call and announce any modifications to the POD.

If the day was a weekend, the ongoing and offgoing duty sections would muster in one location. When the oncoming CDO was satisfied, liberty call would occur for the offgoing duty section.

0745- Turn To. Commence Ship's Work. In other words, get busy. Division officers were expected to be in their spaces for most of the work day. Good department heads toured their spaces as well, for on a warship, the best fertilizer was the farmer's shadow.

0800- Colors. The National Ensign and the Jack were raised. Either the colors bugle call was played (by a recording) or the National Anthem. If you were topside, you stood at attention, faced aft and saluted.If there were more than one nation's warship in port, that anthem was played as well. In a NATO task group, that could be several of them. You really didn't want to be caught topside for morning colors.

0600-0930- CO arrives on board. If the ship had no special inspections or other looming catastrophes, it was a sign of a well-run ship (and a competent XO) that the Captain arrived late and could go home early.[1] The XO would meet with the CO soon after the CO arrived to discuss the daily message traffic and whatever else was going on. The CO would also tour parts of his ship.

1000- XO's Inspection of Messing and Berthing. The XO, the CMC and a yeoman (who took notes) would inspect the berthing compartments, the heads, the galley, the scullery and the messing areas. This was very much a "shit flows downhill" inspection, as the XO would pour hell on the department heads. Department heads would then motivate their division officers, and so forth. After a couple of bad reports, an irritated department head might order the responsible division office to make a personal inspection prior to the XO and report back.[2]

1115- Early Chow (lunch)

1130-1230 Lunch. (Some ships called this "dinner"). The lunch hour was popular for those who wanted to work out or rack out. This hour was damn near sacred, bothering a person at lunch was considered to be an offense. Usually, immediately before lunch, the Officer of the Deck would send the Messenger of the Watch to make the Twelve O'Clock Reports to the Captain. These included the Fuel and Water Report, the Muster Report, the Mazagine Temperature Report and the Chronometer Report. The MOW had a spiel to recite as the reports were handed to the Captain.[3]

1230- Commence Ship's work.

1545- Sweepers.

1600- Liberty Call. This may be delayed on ships that had a lot to do. Individual divisions could let people go earlier or later. Usually the last people off the ship were the engineering officers. [4]

1715- Early Chow.

1730- Supper for the Crew.

Sunset- Colors. The National Ensign and Jack were lowered, the topside lights were turned on.

1830- Muster of Extra Duty Men with the Master of Arms. These were the fuckups who had been awarded extra duty at Captain's Mast. Divisions would request extra-duty men from the Master of Arms. Usually, this involved chipping paint in either the engineering spaces or the topside weather decks for two hours.

1830- Sweepers.

1900 (or so, it could be later)- Movie Call. This was more popular back in the days of real 16mm movies being shown on the ships. In the 1980s, the movies began to be replaced with tapes that were played either where a TV set was installed or on the ship's internal cable television system (SITE TV).

1930- Eight O'Clock Reports- The duty department heads would meet with the CDO to report that the ship had been cleaned. Underway, the meeting was between the department heads and the XO. If a department head was on watch, a division officer would attend. Eight O'Clock Reports were really disliked if one had the midwatch.

2200- Taps. The smoking lamp was extinguished, the interior of the ship was darkened, at least in the vicinity of the berthing compartments and in Officers Country. Before the adoption of privacy curtains, all bunk lights had to be shut off.

[1] The converse was also true. Captains were "bonged aboard" (page down to "boat gongs"), so it was common knowledge when a captain arrived or left the ship.
[2] A division which didn't seem to grasp the importance of complying might end up with their division officer and chief being ordered to attend the XO's inspection. That usually worked wonders.
[3] "Good morning, Sir. The Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports the approach of the hour of twelve o'clock. All chronometers have been wound and compared. Request permission to strike eight bells on time, sir." The CO would reply: "Very well, permission granted. Carry on."
[4] The operations officers often were heard to complain about the commuter traffic on and of the base. The engineers had no idea what their beef was, for traffic was usually light by the time they went home.

The Purge

I alluded to the story I am about to relate nearly two years ago, when I discussed selection boards.

The surface Navy's Department Head School, commonly referred to as the Destroyer School, was located on Coasters Harbor Island, Newport, RI. The school consisted of two parts. First there was the general curriculum, including the Tactical Action Officers segment, and then the students split into groups for the job-specific portion (Weapons, Operations or Engineering). Each class in the 1980s had 100 officers, usually 95% lieutenants in two sections of 50. The course was 20 weeks long and there were two full classes in session at any one time.

This is no shit:

In one of the classes that was in session when the LCDR Selection Board reported out, there was a LT who failed to select. They brought him back to the school in the middle of the night to inventory the classified material in his desk, then they gave him orders to somewhere else. As far as his classmates knew, he was there in class one day and gone the next. Nobody would tell them where he was sent to.

He was a popular young man and his classmates were not happy.

Two days later, they took the class photo, which was on the back cover of the graduation program for each class. The photo was a group photo of everyone standing on the steps in front of the Destroyer School building, three deep. The class left a one-man gap in the front rank and they put a combination cover on the ground in the gap.

The photographer didn't notice or didn't give a shit. The people who put together the graduation program didn't notice. The XO of the Destroyer School did notice on the day before the graduation, when it was too late to change the programs. The CO of the Destroyer School had to settle for a mass chewing out of the entire class at a special assembly.

Which, as is typical for such events, accomplished nothing.

Uniform Disasters- Zoomie Edition

Take a look at this page, which shows, among other things, the Air Force casual informal uniform.

If I saw a Zoomie in that getup, I'd be tempted to ask where I could rent a DVD.

Here I thought the Navy's Battle Dress Oceanic had set a new standard for idiotic uniforms, but one can never count out Uncle Sam's Christian Flying Club the Air Force when it comes to institutionalized insanity.

The Battle of the Atlantic

From "Morning Joe":


The book being flogged there is "a Measureless Peril.

"The Battle of the Atlantic" by Terry Hughes is long out of print, but it is an excellent work on the longest battle of the Second World War.

Damn

Out of work.

And that is all.

Operation Clusterfrak

In January 1987, a number of foreign citizens were kidnapped in Lebanon. There were approximately 3,000 American citizens in Lebanon. The order was given for American warships in the Sixth Fleet[1] to move closer to Lebanon and prepare for an evacuation of all Americans willing to leave.

The experts in that sort of operation are the Marines, who are embarked on amphibious landing ships. They are the ones with the landing craft and the skills to go ashore in a potentially hostile situation, evacuate civilians and kill anyone who gets in the way. The Navy's job is to get the Marines to the beach, to provide fire support from destroyers and airplanes and to drink copious amounts of coffee while doing so.

There was a slight problem: The amphibious ships were conducting an exercise on the Atlantic coast of Spain with their Spanish counterparts. Even if the Marines and all of their gear could re-embark on their ships immediately, it would take at least a week for those ships to get to Lebanon, as amphibs are not fast ships.

There were ships in the Eastern Med, though, a carrier task group, TG 60.2, if I remember correctly.[2], which was comprised of a carrier, two cruisers (a conventional Terrier shooter and a nuke Tartar shooter), some destroyers (both AAW shooters [DDG-37s and DDG-2s] and not [Spruance-class DDs]), and some frigates (both 1052s and FFG-7s). The order was given for those ships to move towards Lebanon and to prepare to evacuate American citizens.

And so was born Operation Clusterfuck, and this is no shit.[3]

First, the ships were told how many evacuees they might have to carry. None of the ships, other than maybe the carrier, had more than a few empty racks in any one berthing compartment. Only a few had the capability to handle mixed-gender passengers. How they were going to do it was left entirely in their hands,[4] which was a real sign that nobody in the stratospheric reaches of the command structure had any clue what to do.

Second, the ships were told that they would have to make their ships' boats available to both transport evacuees to the waiting ships and to patrol the area of operations. Those boats were to be armed and commanded by either a junior officer or a chief. Direction on that was similarly lacking; whether the boats had M-60 machine guns mounted or made do with rifles was up to the ships. The boats did not have machine gun mounts, but between the deck apes, the HTs and the MRs, those ships that wanted to mount machine guns on their boats figured out how.

Third, the ships were required to supply manning for landing parties to control the beach head. Here the ships had some direction, they were told how many sailors and officers to supply. If I remember correctly, most had to supply twenty or so sailors, with a division officer as a platoon leader. The cruisers had to supply more sailors, maybe 30, a division officer and a department head to act as a company commander. Other than "give them weapons", the details were left to the ships.

You have to imagine the head-scratching and expressions of "what the fuck" that transpired throughout the task group. At best, the ship's crews' small-arms training was limited to 30 rounds through a .45, five rounds through a shotgun and 30 rounds through a M-14 on a yearly basis. Nobody had ever trained at sending a landing force ashore. Hell, the only people who had ever seen a landing force were those who had watched either the Sand Pebbles or the Wind and the Lion. (It probably wouldn't have been like this..)

But they drew up their teams. The landing forces from each ship were made up of a real mixture of sailors and officers. Some of the ships drew the teams mainly from the Weapons Department. Others went more widely and selected men based on known familiarity with firearms and temperament. The officers sent were chosen both on their abilities and on whether they had subordinates strong enough to act in their places on the ships.[5] The officer in charge of the planning was either the Senior Watch Officer or the Weapons Officer.

The XOs, Supply Officers, Corpsmen and Master-at-Arms planned for how their ships were going to house, feed and care for civilians. If a berthing compartment was going to be emptied out, then the sailors living in that compartment would have had to hot-bunk with other sailors elsewhere, but it was far more complicated than that. The ships were planning how to deal with injured or pregnant civilians, how to provide care for children and what to do in the event of a lot of casualties.

Off the ships, the shore staffs were trying to figure out where the ships could go (and quickly) to offload the evacuees. The closest friendly port was Haifa, but that was deemed not to be diplomatically practicable.

As the carrier task group steamed closer to Lebanon, a "cordon sanitaire" was declared and published by way of issuing Notice to Mariners. This basically said that any unknown vessel or aircraft which came too close or interfered with a USN ship was liable to be attacked without warning. Warnings were given to aircraft on the guard frequency (121.5MHz), though I was told that at least one small jet that had been chartered by some reporters was almost shot down by one of the missile ships before the jet turned back towards land.

In the end, though, the evacuation plan was never put into effect. I would imagine that somebody probably explained to the Reagan Administration the hazards of sending a few hundred sailors ashore into a potentially hostile situation where the sailors would be doing things for which they were not trained.

[1] A/K/A the Mediterranean Fleet.
[2] There were normally two carrier task groups in the Med, 60.1 and 60.2, so I have a 50% chance of being correct.
[3] My term for it. The blog title differs as at least one blog which blogrolls this one is "fambly friendly" and that blogger has requested that I not use nasty words in the titles of posts.
[4] Probably the first time on record that the "we have plenty of helpful guidance for you, Skipper" staffs, both afloat and ashore, were silent on anything.
[5] Marital status was also taken into account by some ships, a sign that few expected the operation to go very well.

Fleet Organization

First, there are the numbered fleets. 2nd Fleet is the Atlantic, 6th is the Med, 5th is the Persian Gulf area, 3rd is the eastern Pacific and 7th is the western Pacific.

Then there were task forces, which reported to the fleet commander. TF 60 was the carrier force and their escorts. TF 61 was the amphib ships, TF 62 was the Marines on those ships, TF 63 was the logistics fleet. I've forgotten what TF the subs were (other than "sonar contact = enemy").

There were normally two carriers in the Med. Each carrier made up a task group, 60.1 and 60.2. The embarked destroyer commodore was head of the task unit for the their task group, making them 60.1.1, etc. Ships that were split off for independent assignments (which happened to the ASW 1052s frequently) were designated as task elements.

The commander of any of those forces was designated with a C, so the commander of TG 60.1 was known as CTG 60.1. That was a valid naval message address. So if the staff of Cruiser and Destroyer Group 2 was in the Med as the boss of TG 60.1 and you needed to send a message to the admiral, you addressed it to either COMCRUDESGRU TWO or CTG 60.1, depending on whether or not the subject matter was administrative or operational.

This is background for an upcoming post.

Uniform Disasters

I still think that the new Navy working uniform looks stupid.



It makes them look like militia-wannabees.

Good Eats

A long time ago, I was in Barcelona, Spain. This was before they had the Olympics and cleaned the place up. We were supposed to go ashore on the buddy-system, but I had a job with some weird-ass hours, so I just went ashore by myself, whenever the frak I wanted, and nobody said anything to me.

There was a wide plaza up from the waterfront that was called "the Ramblas", or something like that. It was sort of like being on a street with a median that was 100 meters wide; there were outdoor cafes along it. The entertainment was limited to people-watching, which on at least one occasion, included watching some dude slap his girlfriend around until the Guardia Civil showed up and hauled him off.

The Guardia wore some goofy-looking black lacquered hats that looked like pillboxes with a flat piece behind them. Some of the Guardia carried submachine guns. The Police Militare also patrolled the streets and they had SMGs of some flavor. Word was that only a fool messed with any of the Spanish cops.

A lot of the buildings had dark-grey stone facades. Whether the facades were that color because of decades of smoke or that was the natural color, I never knew. When I looked up at the buildings, especially on the side streets, I could see pockmarks from bullet impacts, presumably from street-fighting during the Spanish Civil War.

So anyway, in my meanderings, I found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that, among other things, served half of a chicken, a big plate of steaming hot French fries and a beer for 250 pesetas which, if memory serves me correctly, was about three bucks American.

Maybe my taste buds had been hammered by the long- frozen French fries and blasted chicken that was standard fare in the Navy, but that fresh chicken and fries which that restaurant served up was unbelievably good. I made at least four trips to that little place and each meal was as good as the one before. I never saw anyone from any of the Navy ships in port then at that place and I kept my mouth shut, believe me.

Vernon Baker, R.I.P

Vernon Baker, Medal of Honor recipient, has died. He was 90.

Almost 20 years ago, the Army began investigating why no African-Americans had been awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II. Based on the work of historians and then an Army screening board, they found ten men who should have been considered for the award. Seven men were deemed to have acted with bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Four had been killed in combat, two had died after the war. Only Mr. Baker was left alive by the time his bravery was recognized for what it was.