Sub Sunk, 100 Years Ago

Submarine USS S-48 sank by the stern in Long Island Sound during a pre-commissioning test dive on December 7. 1921. A manhole on a ballast tank had not been secured by a workman in the builder's yard in Bridgeport,CT (Lake Torpedo Boat Company). Fortunately, the sinking was in relatively shallow water. Despite chorine gas from the batteries and a host of other problems, the crew was able to shift weight aft and blow ballast tanks, tilting the sub at an extreme angle. That brought the bow out of the water and some of the sailors were able to leave the boat through the torpedo tube.

By then it was night and the crew had to resort to burning oil-soaked mattresses to try to signal a passing boat. It took hours to finally attract the attention of a passing boat, the Standard Oil tug Socony 28. Eventually realizing the scope of the disaster and that going too close could force the bow of the sub under water, the tug's master stood off from the sub and launched its lifeboat. Every man on the tug volunteered to row the lifeboat through stormy seas. In an hour, the tug's crew had made four trips and rescued all 41 men on the sub.

S-48 was raised and repaired. She was commissioned ten months later. The fortunate part of this story was that the sub's captain (a shipyard employee, as the boat hadn't yet been commissioned) opted to conduct the first test dive just after clearing the sea buoy, before proceeding to deeper water off New London for a deeper dive. If the shallow dive had been conducted in the area planned for the second dive, the sub would have been lost with all hands.

As naval budgets waxed and waned, S-48 was repeatedly decommissioned and reactivated. She provided training services (probably by acting as a training target) during the Second World War. She was decommissioned a few days before Japan formally surrendered and was scrapped the following year.

You can read a detailed story about the sinking and the rescue here.

Word!

This is no shit:

SWO Manning, Then and Now

The Navy Times has an article about the shitty retention rates for Surface Warfare Officers. One of the things mentioned in the article is that the Navy sends far more junior officers to ships than there are billets for them to fill.

The Navy, on average, commissions nearly twice as many SWOs each year as it needs to fill junior SWO positions on ships, leaving these newbies to compete for ship driving time or other hands-on experience needed to be a good surface warfare officer, according to both the GAO and several SWOs who spoke to Navy Times.
...
From fiscal 2017 to 2021, GAO found that the Navy commissioned an average of 946 SWO ensigns a year, exceeding the number of required ensigns by about 85 percent.

For example, the destroyer Mustin averaged 18 SWO trainees aboard the ship when it only required six during the first quarter of 2020, while the cruiser Monterey averaged 21 such trainees when it only had eight slots, according to GAO.

I don't know how that can work.

Let's take a typical destroyer back in the day. It might have three or four division officers in each of the three departments. So that was nine to twelve officers. There were three department heads, one XO and one CO. Because of difference in tour length, those officers had about five department head slots available, two or so XO slots and about 1.3 CO slots available. So if half of the baby SWOs stayed in, there would be plenty available to fill the department head pipeline.

The thing was, those baby SWOs all had meaningful jobs. They were division officers, learning how to lead people and manage material. They weren't doing assistant anything. Their primary job wasn't wardroom party planner or ship's PAO or photographer-- if they were, they were major-league fuckups.

"We eat our young" has been the unofficial motto of the SWO community since forever. Now, it seems to be official policy.

No wander morale sucks even worse than it once did.

The Suez Canal

(This is all from memory. Any difference between what I remember and how things are is what it is. Suck it up.)

You've probably read about the M/V Ever Given getting stuck in the Suzed Canal just north of the Red Sea.

The Suez Canal was closed for eight years following the Six Day War, both by ships and bridges destroyed and by mines. Several ships were stuck there (the Yellow Fleet). After the Yom Kippur War, by international agreement, the wreckage and mines were cleared and the Canal was reopened. The first convoy through was largely ceremonial. By tradition, transiting warships lead every convoy. For the ceremonial convoy, the first ship was an Egyptian destroyer. The second ship was the heavy cruiser USS Little Rock, which was a bit of a shock to the Soviet Navy officers there. The USSR regarded Egypt as a near-client state, but it hadn't been the Russians who cleared the Canal of ordnance. When a reporter asked a Russian officer the name of the American warship, he said "the USS Surprise".

Convoys, led by any transiting warhip(s), assemble off Port Said in the Med and Port Suez in the Red Sea. The southbound convoy starts first and sails through the northern part of the canal to the Great Bitter Lake. That convoy anchors there for several hours while the northbound convoy passes by. Then the southbound convoy weighs anchor and finishes the transit.

So this is no shit:

There was an American warship which was transiting south. The first thing that went wrong was that the Captain got confused as to when the ship should enter the Canal. The entrance to the Canal at Port Said was lined with stone seawalls that extended about three miles into the Med. The ship entered the entrance and was ordered to get the fuck back out, as the northbound convoy was approaching. Turning around in that narrow channel was an interesting evolution. On the seawall was a shack that had guards or maybe the Canal pilots. As the ship jockeyed to turn around, the bow of the ship came very close to the guardshack, to the point that the men inside ran down the seawall.

The warship went back out into the Med, the Captain fuming away. Once everything got going, the pilot boarded, along with an electrician. A light had to be mounted to the bow that projected two beams of white light, one to each side. The electrican oversaw the installation by the ship's electrican's mates, then he was escorted to the mess decks, where he spent the transit eating and smoking. Following the electrician were two line-handlers. The Captain had a conniption fit, but the pilot told him that the line-handlers were part of the package. They also spent the transit smoking and eating. Both the electrician and the line handlers were guarded for the entire time they were aboard.

The ship led the convoy down to the Great Bitter Lake at a blistering speed of maybe eight knots. The transit started during the night. As the sun rose, the crew gawked at the wreckage of two wars which lined the Canal. There were wrecked tanks and antiaircraft guns.

When the convoy reached the Great Bitter Lake, all of the ships in the convoy anchored and waited for the northbound convoy sail by. Most of the Bridge crew immediately headed for their racks to get some sleep. Once the other convoy passed, the southbound convoy got underway and finished the transit. At the mouth of the Canal, a boat came by to collect the pilot, the electrian (and his light) and the line-handlers (all of whom left with packs of cigarettes stuffed in their pockets).

The northbound transit, some time later, was like a walk in the park. The attitude was "ok, just another canal transit."

Air Show at Sea

One of the nicer gigs at sea was an "airpower demonstration". These was usually put on for VIs, often foreign muckety-mucks. These are photos from more than one of those.

These seemed to always kick off with a F-14, flying supersonic at masthead height, over the ships astern of the carrier. When the F-14 came abeam of the carrier, the pilot would pull vertical, and, under full afterburner, go straight up to over 20,000', corkscrewing the entire way up.

USS Kitty Hawk (CV-68)

This was a mass flyover, led by F-14s.
Of all of the airplanes seen in these photos, only the E-2Cs are still in the Fleet.

An F-14,with wings extended

A KA-6 with an A-6 on the drogue.

An A-7

The opening act flew directly over the ship that these photos were taken from. The sonic boom concussion broke a fresh water pipe in officer country, soaking a no-load 'JG who was snoozing in his rack during working hours. It was funny enough that even the Chief Engineer wasn't upset at losing the fresh water.

To get an idea of the altitude of the airshow, these photos were taken with a 35mm Nikon with a 50mm lens. Keeping clearances from obstacles was not a big thing at sea.