Merry Xmas, Ops

I can't recall his name exactly (LCDR Orrin Reems or something), for I knew him as "Ops". He opened his home for Xmas dinner for the junior officers in the command who had no family in the home port and who didn't have duty. 

Thanks, Ops. I'll not forget your kindness. 

Merry Xmas, everyone.

104 Years Ago

The USS Memphis, ACR-10 (ACR meant "armored cruiser") was driven ashore by giant waves on this day in 1916. The captain of the ship, Edward Beach, got a feeling that was something was wrong and he ordered additional boilers lit off in order to weigh anchor and go out to sea.

As it turned out, it was a matter of fifteen minutes between the ship sailing safely and being dashed onto the shore. Captain Beach was court-martialed and found guilty of failure to get underway in a timely manner. His punishment was to be dropped twenty names on the promotion list. That was later reduced to five names and, on further review, his punishment was stricken. Beach commanded the battleship USS New York towards the end of the Great War.

If you want to read a vivid description of what happened about the ship, both in the engineering plant and above decks, I heartily recommend the book The Wreck of the Memphis by Edward Beach (the captain's son and a decorated naval officer in his own right). When he researched and wrote the book, there were a number of survivors still around to interview. (I found a copy in a thrift store before the pandemic erupted. Best buck that I've spent in one, though not the best bargain I've ever found.)

Memphis, which spent most of her life as the USS Tennessee, was a fast, well-armored and well-armed cruiser in the day when all ships were driven by large reciprocating engines. The Navy considered modernizing her three sister ships in the 1920, but the result didn't seem to be worth the cost.

Life in the Yards

(Inspired by the fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard)

I've been through one major overhaul, a few SRAs (Shipyard Repair Availabilities) and numerous shorter maintenance periods, which were called "Tender Availabilities", even if there was no destroyer tender involved.

The most challenging is a major overhaul. The ship is in drydock, so in the summer, it is hotter than a baked motherfucker in the ship and, in the winter, it is colder than a carport outside of an igloo. The shipyard workers have little to no respect for the ship. Trash and debris accumulate everywhere if the ship's force isn't driven to be diligent. That's a tall order, as it's hard to motivate the sailors to keep cleaning up other people's shit. Usually the motivation has to devolve into unrelenting harshness, which means that's a job for the XO.

When there is welding or cutting going on, there have to be fire watches, which is usually a task for the ship's crew. The sailor so detailed gets to stand around with a fire extinguisher and watch the yardbird work. If the work is being done to a bulkhead, deck or overhead, then there has to be a fire watch on the other side. If the work is at a corner, then there can be more than one space on the "other side" of the work and all of them have to have a fire watch.

This is in addition to any repair or maintenance work that the repair plan assigned to the ship's force to do. If money is tight, a lot of that work is assigned to ship's force. While this is going on, a lot of the crew may be away, attending training classes (individually or in teams) or sucked away on temporary duty to another ship. There's not much in the way of fun, there's no time at sea, no port visits, just day-to-day life in a dirty industrial environment.

Add to that the security issue: The yardbirds steal anything that is not locked up or welded down. A sailor who leaves his tools at his or her workside to go to the head or catch a smoke will often come back to find all of the tools, if not the entire tool box, has been stolen. The sailors can start treating the yard workers like a pack of unarrested criminals, which also does a number of morale.

One day in the yards, I was the Command Duty Officer. I was making my rounds and opened a door to step out onto the weatherdeck on the 01 level. It was full dark, the lighting wasn't great, and I almost tripped over some piping that some fucking sandcrab left lying on the deck. If I had tripped, it would have thrown me up against the lifelines, which were of a temporary nature, and would probably have resulted in my fall to the bottom of the dry dock, which would have been at least a sixty-foot drop onto the steel floor of the dock. In other words, it would have been fatal.

I was enraged. I threw the piping over the side and down into the drydock. Then I went around the weatherdecks and threw every other obstruction that was not properly marked or guarded (that I could lift) into the drydock.

The next morning, I told the XO what I had done. He wasn't amused, but he got the idea that I didn't much care. The yardbirds were not at all happy and complained to their bosses, who complained to the CO. The CO promised an investigation, which of course, went nowhere.

Confusion to the Enemy

Back around the mid-1980s, the USS Josephus Daniels (CG-27) was preparing to deploy to the Med. As some exercises were going to be held on the way, the Operations Officer thought it might be fun to repaint the hull number to CG-28, which was that of the USS Wainwright. There was zero chance of the two ships being seen together; the Daniels was homeported in Norfolk, VA, the Wainwright in Charleston, SC. A few months after the Daniels deployed, the Wainwright went to the Persian Gulf.

Initially, the confusion was limited to a couple of new sailors, who were wandering around the piers, looking for a big gray warship with the number 27 painted on her bows. Most looked at the white Herculite banner lashed to the gangplank that said "USS Josephus Daniels", but one went to the Shore Patrol and was directed unceremoniously to the ship.

A few weeks later, the Daniels was in an exercise. A submarine got within torpedo range, popped off a green flare to signal firing one, then sent out a target message giving its position and claiming a kill on the Wainwright. The Wainwright responded with a message of her own, giving her position, noting that it was a few thousand miles away, and expressed wonder at the fantastic torpedoes subs now had.

Much hilarity ensued.

Uniform Disasters, 120 years ago.

These are some Navy uniforms from the 1890s:

The admiral, in the front, center, is wearing the "special full dress" uniform. it was heavyweight wool, with those fringed gold epaulets and a cocked hat. As described in the autobiography of Edward L. Beach, Sr., From Annapolis to Scapa Flow, the uniform cost $240.

In 1890, a skilled worker could expect to make about two dollars a day. Various inflation calculators put the value of $240 in 1890 in the vicinity of $6,500-$6,900. I can't imagine having to pop damn near two grand (back in my day) for a single uniform. As it was, the service dress white was not terribly cheap and was rarely worn.

The Hoover and "Analogous Response"

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, there was some brouhaha between the US and the USSR in the late 1970s/early 1980s over the placement of nuclear missiles. The Soviets moved their ICBM patrols into the western Atlantic. That would have given them the ability to make a depressed-trajectory shot, which would have really cut the reaction time available to the Americans.

Needless to say, the Americans were not happy with that. Among other things, TACTASS-equipped ships were sent out to search for and track the Soviet submarines. This operation, in part, took place in the winter.

One does not have to be a naval expert to know that during the winter, the North Atlantic is a challenging place to be.

TACTASS, designated the AN/SQR-18A, attached to the back of the fish of an AN/SQS-35 variable depth sonar (VDS). This is a photo of an apparently Japanese setup:

The fish itself was well-weighted by a goodly amount of lead. The red arrow points to where the towed array was attached. What would happen is the array would be payed out from a reel in a room next to where the VDS fish was housed. The array would then be mated both mechanically and electrically to the VDS fish. Then the fish would be launched. In moderate to heavy seas, this was a wet operation. The side doors, at least, were operated by hydraulics. The crane and cable reel had an operator's station with a waterproof door. Once the array was mated, everyone would leave the room, except for the operator, and the fish would be launched.

As you can see here, the cable between the ship and the VDS fish was faired, with aluminum leading edges and rubber trailing edges:

So now picture that you have a heavy fish being towed by a long cable, which had no elasticity. In a heavy sea, the stern of the ship moved up and down a lot, which jerked on the fish. The cable wouldn't break, but the electrical connections were not as durable, especially the connections between the fish and the array, which itself was several hundred feet long and streamed behind the fish. A fair number of the tracking missions ended with the ship returning to port to replace the towed array, which was shipped on a large cable reel.

Because the weather was often bad enough to preclude the ships from launching their SH-2Fs to localize any contacts, S-3s were sent out to do that work. I don't recall whether or not they flew out from Norfolk and Mayport or if they staged out of NAS Bermuda.

So there was a ship out doing that, and there was a S-3 that was sent out to do its thing. The S-3 told the ship (over secure voice radio) that there was an unknown error in its internal nav system. The ship's ASW officer, who was on watch, asked how large the error was. He was told that it was about a dozen miles or so. The ASW officer advised the S-3 to "mark on top" (fly directly over the ship) and the ship could give them an accurate position so the S-3 could update its navigation picture and thereby greatly reduce the error.

The S-3 refused to do that. They then asked the ship where they should being dropping sonobouys and in what pattern. The ASW officer replied on the order of "I won't know within a hundred square miles of ocean where those buoys are, so it makes no difference to me where you drop them." (The ship was operating on an EMCON [emissions control] plan and it could not use its air-search radar to track the S-3.)

And that was pretty much it. For the rest of the time the S-3 was on station, it flew around, doing something that generated no useful information. When it either ran low on fuel or used up its sonobuoys, it returned to base.

On that ship, the ASW officer wrote the post-patrol report, which was sent off as a radio TTY message. The draft of the report (and all other radio messages) typically was written by hand on a yellow legal pad, either double or triple-spaced. The Weapons and Operations officers reviewed the draft and edited it before it was sent to the CO for his review and approval. This time around, the Captain noticed that the draft was written in the hand of the Weapons officer. When the CO asked why that was so, the Weapons officer said that the ASWO wanted to re-enact the Crucifixion, with the S-3 playing the starring role.

Eventually, with the deployment of the SURTASS ships, the use of the SQR-18A ships for tracking Soviet SSBNs was discontinued.

Vampire Liberty

The Navy kind of, sort of, encouraged sailors to donate blood. The way that they did that was to give people time off for donating blood. At first, at least at my command, a donor got both the day of donation and the following day off. The unofficial term for the time off was "vampire liberty".

That created all sorts of problems, especially if the donor's duty day was the following day. At first, they ran a sign-up sheet where, supposedly, duty section leaders and the division officers and chiefs could check to keep slackers from abusing it.

But that didn't work out so well. The thought was raised to run it by using special request chits, which would go up the chain of command to the Senior Watch Officer, if approved, and the XO, if denied. But even that seemed to be a pain in the ass.

So what was decided was that donors would only get the rest of the day of donation off. Since sailors who were in the duty section were forbidden from leaving the command without permission in the first place, sailors who had duty couldn't donate. Those who wouldn't donate without getting the free time were slackers and goof-offs, anyway. The chiefs knew who they were.