Neptunus Lex

My father was 25 years old on the 7^th of December, 1941. He was a midshipman at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY. He’d been in the US Army’s field coastal artillery school at Fort Monroe, Virginia two years before. All of his classmates from Fort Monroe ended up going to Bataan after graduation, and if he hadn’t ended up at Kings Point, I mightn’t be here writing to you today because it was no picnic after Bataan, gentle reader. They didn’t call it a “death march” for nothing.

After December the 7^th his studies were cut short - men were needed to sail ships, move equipment, food and people to the fight. So my father closed his textbooks and went to sea after Pearl Harbor - the Murmansk run from New York, carrying tanks and ammunition for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t a milk run. He had classmates from that school that didn’t come back either. He saw some of them die in front of him. A country half our population, with 400,000 dead in three and one half years? Everyone knew someone who didn’t come back. Those were hard times. You had to pull together.

There was a time when I was at the Boat School, plebe year that I was feeling rather sorry for myself that I hadn’t gone to Virginia or Duke - I wasn’t a particularly good plebe, and the upperclassmen were especially fond of pointing that fact out to me. We spoke on the phone, my father and I, and troubled by my evident unhappiness he wrote a letter to me afterwards. Remember getting letters?

I remember this one: He told of a time in the North Sea, the convoy harrassed by dive bombers in the daylight hours and threatened by U-Boats around the clock. He told me the story of an ammunition ship getting hit at night alongside him, the way she went up in a column of fire, the strange fact that years later, he couldn’t remember having heard a sound. He told me of another Liberty ship alongside of his, her bow blown off at 15 knots, the way she steamed right under the sea until at last her fantail lifted in the air, the propellor still thrashing. It was a really good letter. He’s been gone for 24 years, but sometimes when I’m feeling low, I pull it out and read it again. It puts things into perspective.

When I was a kid he told me about coming up on deck during the war, the General Quarters alarm sounding, to man his AA gun when his ship was under air attack and seeing a Stuka dive bomber framed in the hatchway at the top of the ladder, growing larger, screaming as it came, the bomb coming loose, falling towards the ship, towards my father.

“Were you scared, dad?” I asked, maybe 10 years old.

“Scared?” he said with a grunt. “I was terrified.”

You never think of your father being terrified when you’re ten years old. It makes him human in a way he’d never been before. In a way you didn’t really want him to be. In a way he had to be eventually, so that you too could become a man.

It seemed so long ago, the stories he told of that day. For everyone of their generation it was the equivalent of Kennedy in Dallas and Columbia combined. Everyone could tell you exactly where they were that day. What they were wearing. Who they were with. The ones who didn’t make it back, after all was said and done.

It was their 9/11 but no one told them that they had it coming, no one dared. You could get punched in the nose for even suggesting it. It was their war on fascism, and the people whose job it was to share the news with the citizenry felt like they had a stake in winning it too, like it mattered who won. They looked at setbacks - and there were so many, so very, very many - as reasons for concern, rather than reasons for exultation. It was a different time.

Everyone alive that day remembered where they were and what they were doing the moment that a faraway world jumped in through the window and importuned itself upon a country still clawing its way out of the Great Depression. A country inwardly focused, callused by hardship. A country suddenly, comprehensively at war.

When I was a child though, Pearl Harbor was just a name to me, as remote as Gettysburg or Shiloh. But on my first cruise, coming home from the Arabian Sea in the autumn of 1987, the USS Constellation pulled in there to pick up “Tigers” - family members who would sail with us from Hawaii to San Diego. On a whim I joined my roomates and went up to the flight deck in my summer whites to “man the rail” as we entered port. We were young and happy and ready for anything, laughing as we came on deck.

It’s a beautiful port entry, the water absurdly blue and green and white all at once, a warm breeze snapping at your trousers, happy thoughts of future entertainments never far from the forefront of your mind. You see the family housing of Hickham Air Force Base pass close along the starboard side - close! So close you could almost toss a biscuit ashore. And then you see Ford Island loom up to port, and you become thoughtful, remembering your lessons, remembering your parents’ conversations, remembering “battleship row.” Remembering because it had been passed down to you as an admonition, as a warning, as a duty: Remember.

Never forget.

And then you see her on the port quarter, what little there is to see of her above the water from an acute angle: The number 3 barbette of the USS Arizona, the watery graveyard of 1100 men and a mute testament both to perfidy and unpreparedness. Sixty-odd years after she went down, little rainbow pools of oil still bubble to the surface from within trapped spaces and voids, footless passageways embracing the mouldering bones of sailors whose names are known but to God. The old salts say that these are her tears of rage and anguish, her tears of loss and bereavement. They say that she is weeping. They say that she is weeping still.

These melancholy thoughts are interrupted by the trilling sound of a bosun’s whistle on the 5MC, two short blasts - “Attention to port!” The flight deck snaps to attention. One short blast follows - “Hand salute!” A long moment passes in the heat, the sweat suddenly liberated, trickling down your back as your arm goes up and holds, holds. A silent and expectant moment as one great ship glides softly past another, a thousand crewman rendering honors to another thousand from a far different time, from a far different land. The moment stretches, breaks, and at last is over: Two short blasts - “Ready, two!” And finally, three blasts - “Carry on.”

According to immutable naval custom, the junior ship initiates the rendering of passing honors, while the senior ship returns it. But senior though she may be, there will never again be a salute returned from onboard Arizona. No bosun’s pipe echoes across the water. No one mans her rails. My brothers and I took one long look back at the memorial receding behind us, exchanged silent glances between ourselves, saying with our eyes the things we could never allow ourselves to say out loud. Pursed our lips and went below in quiet introspection. It wouldn’t last forever - we were after all, young and careless. But we wouldn’t forget that moment, not ever.

We would remember.

Oh, man. Here’s a pic to warm the cockles of any WESTPAC sailor’s heart.

Fenwick Pier, adventure’s in the air and the first round’s on me. Mikimoto pearls and the White Star Ferry. Victoria Peak and Admiralty. Tailor-made suits. Tsim Sha Shui. Hong Kong side or Kowloon side? High tea at the Peninsula. The American Club. Mad Dog’s pub (”Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the summer sun”) for fish and chips and maybe a Guinness (for strength!) and Dusk To Dawn to see if it lives up to its moniker (and yes, it does). “Shentral” and oh my God, Wan Chai and if your head don’t hurt tomorrow then you’ll have to try again. Safety day on day three: Let’s play golf at Discovery Bay. Last night ashore, and how could I forget Joe Bananas? (Hint: Maybe because it was always off-limits.) Important safety tips: (1) Ask what it costs before you buy. (2) Pay in cash.

Ah, memories.

Here’s an interesting story - with a personal hook - about the USS Wahoo, the famed World War II submarine whose final patrol lasted 63 years:

The Wahoo became one of the most-celebrated submarines of World War II. In a year and a half, Morton’s crew sank at least 19 Japanese ships — more than any other submarine of the time.

Shortly after Wahoo left for her seventh patrol, a brother of one of the crew members came home to find his mother crying -

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she showed me the newspaper. It said USS Wahoo was overdue and presumed lost.” Overdue and presumed lost. The phrase was accurate as far as it went; all the Navy knew was that the Wahoo had not returned to base.

Logue kept looking for his lost sibling:

(He) pored through naval records, made contact with Japanese researchers, traveled to Japan in search of the lost submarine, and helped erect a peace monument there.

And then, an extraordinary thing happened. War records showed that on Oct. 11, 1943, at 9:20 in the morning, an American submarine had been fired upon in the La Perouse Strait.

A Russian expedition came to the strait in August 2006. And there, in 200 feet of water, they found the wreck of a submarine.

Three weeks ago, the U.S. Navy confirmed it is most likely that of the USS Wahoo. 

They’re still on patrol, the crew of the Wahoo. They’re just not lost anymore.

So said Captain James Lawrence, the mortally wounded CO of the USS Chesapeake as he was being carried below. Our infant Navy had grown a bit impetuous perhaps after USS Constitution under Isaac Hull battered HMS Guerriere to bits and after her next CO, William Bainbridge sent whatever bits of HMS Java hadn’t burnt down to the bottom of the deep blue sea not much later.

Chesapeake was another of the American heavy frigates that had given Britania such a case of the hives during the War of 1812, and under Lawrence met the Royal Navy’s Captain Philip Broke of the HMS Shannon shortly after getting underway with a fresh and unworked crew from Boston harbor in the summer of 1813. Lawrence declined the advantages obtaining to the weather gage - including passing up an opportunity to rake her with a broadside from stern to stem - the better to shorten sail and duke it out with Shannon at close quarters, broadside to broadside. No doubt he thought to make short work of the somewhat smaller British frigate.

Broke, however, was a fighting captain as well as a wealthy one, having many times dipped into his own pocket to keep his gun crews plying at their trade more often than the Admiralty would have authorized all on their own. The net result of his largesse was that the gun crews aboard Shannon gave a fair bit better than they got in what ended up being a brutally short action. Broke believed in winning too, none of your gentleman’s duels and doffed caps: He directed his gun crews and marksmen to focus their efforts on the American ship’s quarterdeck, sweeping it clear of officers again and again until the fight had gone out of USS Chesapeake, her officers dead or wounded and her helm shot away. He could well afford to tip it the generous after Chesapeake had struck her colors.

For all of his “don’t give up the ship” rhetoric, Lawrence’s crew couldn’t fight longer than they could be led, nor could they run away to fight another day with a helm that wouldn’t answer. Not long after he was sent below, Shannon’s boarders made short work of what was left on the weather deck of the USS Chesapeake. Lawrence died an honored prisoner a few short days later.

Which all reminds me of a time I was leading a two-ship element of strikers against the Bravo 17 airfield complex at NAS Fallon, Nevada. Must’ve been sometime in the summer of ‘88 or so. The terrain is mountainous in the vicinity of Fallon, which is a strike fighter pilot’s dream because it allows him to run in at low altitude behind the dirt with a bag of knots and a bad attitude, a-hiding of himself from any surface-to-air-missile systems that might seek to shove a warhead into his forehead on the way to the target.

If there’s anything more fun that can be done fully dressed than running around with a wingman at 540 knots carrying hell and death (or 25-pound practice bombs, anyway) a couple of hundred feet above the deck, secure in the knowledge that you are invisible to radar, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.

The problem is that while you can spring upon a target pretty much unawares by using the terrain to your advantage, popping over the last ridge with maybe 45 seconds to go to the target, it can be damned hard to find your precise aimpoint flying that low. It has to do on the one hand with a natural desire to avoid tying the low altitude record and all of the attention span that takes, and on the other hand about the lack of visually significant vertical development on airfield-type targets. A characteristic that - especially when you’re hauling the mail - makes it hard to just lay down a string of bombs willy-nilly and nevertheless find the correct impact point, not to mention the reduced delivery accuracy that comes with not having any dive angle on the jet.

So what is a motivated strike fighter pilot to do? He’ll perform a pop-up maneuver, gentle reader, like he’s been taught. Haul back on the stick at the prescribed distance before reaching a reversal point and, having reached an apex altitude whilst upside down and hopefully acquiring the target visually by looking over his shoulder, pull the nose back down below the horizon at a prescribed g and defined dive angle, putting the target in his sights and moving the jet around in three dimensions, like. With chaff and flares if it do ya. On account of the dreadful vulnerability that’s in it.

You see, once you break the horizon on a pop attack, any properly motivated gomer in your flight path with the presence of mind could lie down on his back with his AK-47, shoot straight up in the air and maybe do you a profound dis-service if his ammunition lasts and you take a 7.62mm round in the wrong spot. Which while we’re on that topic, there aren’t any right spots, but anyways. And all that’s before you get to the MANPADS threat: Man portable air-defense systems - hand-held infrared guided missles like the Stinger or the various Eastern Bloc equivalents. Any one of which, take it in the tookas, could result in a prolonged stay at a Glorious People’s Re-education Center for Yankee Air Pirates, complete with a steady diet of fish heads and pumpkin soup. Which I’m reliably informed, Atkins or no, gets rather tedious after a bit.

So what do you do? Well, having dutifully gone on government time for the duration of the bomb run and coming off target making good time, you keep her moving a bit until you’re out of range. Make it hard on the bad guys. Stay unpredictable until you’re clear.

Which is exactly what I did, beating hell out of myself in the cockpit what with all of my jinking and jiving and running for the deck, the better to hide myself again mere coward that I was, not wanting to be bagged even if it was only a training flight in Fallon, Nevada in the summer of 1988.

Safely clear of the target I eased g and looked around with casual curiousity, wondering how we’d done. Which is the exact point that the Stinger operator on the target centroid got me in his sights and pulled the trigger because it turned out that I wasn’t actually clear, not quite yet. Capturing the whole thing on video tape for my later edification in the debrief. The bastard.

But I learned about flying from that. As I was reminded that we don’t give up the plane ship.

Here’s a note worth bringing out of the comments boxes of a previous post: 

Sir-

While doing some research for a book about the Barbary Wars, I had a chance to do some fairly heavy research on Constitution - the legend about the USN wanting to break her up is actaully somewhat misleading. At the time Constitution was laid up ‘in ordinary’(along with a good chunk of the rest of the Navy) and the leadership in Washington ordered her surveyed - along with all the other laid-up vessels - to see how much it would cost to get her back on the line. A Boston reporter took ’surveyed’ to mean the traditional inspection before an item is disposed of, adn wrote his story accordingly, without bothering the check with the USN. The rest, as they say, is history.
FWIW, President and Chesapeake were both captured by the RN, while Congress and Constellation madde it into the 1850s before they were surveyed due to badly deteriorated hulls. (Both ships were broken up but quite a bit of their material was salvaged and added to new material to build new ships with the same names, which has kept historians going nuts for decades.) United States survived capture by the CSN in 1861 but was burned when the Federals recaptured Norfolk, and even with her record Constitution came close to disintegrating on at least three occasions between the 1840s and the 1930s.

Best regards,
Mike Kozlowksi
SSGT, USAF (Ret)

Thank you, SSGT Kozlowski!

So there you have it: A USAF Staff Sergeant (retired, even!) who knows his naval history better than an active naval officer. Is this a great country, or what?

Yep. Now we can.

After decades of secrecy, Air Force officials acknowledged Nov. 13 that Communist-built fighters were flown at the Tonopah Test Range northwest of Las Vegas, Nev.

From 1977 through 1988, the program, known as Constant Peg, saw Air Force, Navy and Marine aircrews flying against Soviet-designed MiG fighters as part of a training program where American pilots could better learn how to defeat or evade the Communist bloc’s fighters of the day.

Constant Peg was good, clean, old-fashioned fun. The pilots the USAF chose for this program - Air Force and Navy - were among the best their services had to offer, test pilots for the most part. I don’t know how the rest of them did in their careers, but the lieutenant commander I fought against back when I was a lieutenant is a hot-tracking flag officer today. He was a damn good stick back then, so I know that it’s possible to be both a good officer and a good pilot. I also know that while it’s possible, it’s hard. Or at least it was for me, anway.

It was pretty cool to get “read in” to this program - you felt special, trusted. Cooler still was the day your name popped up on the flight schedule for an actual mission. After a high speed tactical intercept - you never quite get over that shot of adrenaline you get hitting the merge with an actual MiG-21 for the first time - came a side-by-side performance comparison and familiarization. For my own part, I only ever flew against the MiG-21 Fishbed, never the -17 or Flogger. Which was OK by me because the Fishbed was far the better performer in a knife-fighting pilot’s favorite room: The “phone booth.”

As an adversary pilot we used the subsonic A-4 Skyhawk as a good slow-speed simulator of the Fishbed, and the F-5 Tiger II as it’s high speed equivalent. But there was nothing like hitting the merge on your full-up, high aspect hop agains the real item, himself doing 1.1 in a flash as he passed your wingline, climbing into a nose high, high g hard turn. We were taught in those days to try and keep the Fishbed at a distance, the better to use our all-aspect weapons. But that was a risky game plan too, for it was a real sportscar - little more than a minimalist cockpit atop an engine - very hard to see beyond three miles or so nose-on and not much more than that in planform. The MiG-21 had been a stern teacher of visual lookout techniques in the air war over Vietnam: It was the jet that had taught our our Vietnam predecessors that losing sight meant losing the fight - knowledge that they had passed down to those of us who followed them, after they got out of the POW camps.

With a clear lane of fire and ROE satisfied the MiG-21 was no real threat against a radar and radar missile equipped Hornet or Tomcat - it was just a high speed missile sponge. But if for some reason the Fishbed survived to the merge for a close-in fight, manned by a pilot who knew what he was doing,  it could be a handful, a highly potent adversary even for its much more expensive and high tech opponents. You didn’t get many mistakes. Even one could be humbling.

That was the point.

So, another program declassified. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell you where they’re keeping Elvis.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. - Sun Tzu

Anyone that goes down to the sea in ships has to love this pic:

Note the sailors “doffing their caps,” against VADM “Rat” Williard’s returned salute as he goes aboard the oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy, the USS Constitution. “Old Ironsides” is a 44-gun heavy frigate that brought our infant navy respectful recognition during the War of 1812 from Britain, far and away the dominant maritime power of the day. 

We’re lucky to have her, as there was a move afoot during the lean post-war years to strike her from the lists and break her up. A young Oliver Wendell Homes took umbrage, dashed off a poem that was immediately published to patriotic acclamation and which saved her for posterity:

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar; –
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee; –
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

The ship still gets underway - and under sail - a couple of times every year for a “turnaround” cruise to put the opposite side to the pier. I’d pay to go on one of those and envy Bostonians the opportunity to compete in that lottery, if for nothing else in particular. She’s only manned to raise five sails when she gets underway although she carries eleven. God alone knows how well she’d wear them after all these years.

And mixing old and new, here’s a pleasing shot of the Navy’s newest jet flying from her oldest carrier:

Anyways, seeing a  Rhino getting through the number is nearly a rare enough thing to devote its own page too. 

Yeah. You could consider that a snark from a grounded Charlie pilot.

In the news from 5^th Fleet, a tradition as old as the sea:

USS ANZIO, At Sea - USS Anzio (CG 68) provided assistance to a vessel in distress in the Arabian Sea, approximately 140 miles off the coast of Pakistan on Nov. 10, while conducting Maritime Security Operations (MSO) in the area.

The 24 person crew of motor vessel SINAA, a 35 meter Iranian-flagged dhow from Kubala, Iran, contacted the Anzio on bridge-to-bridge radio asking for assistance. The motor vessel’s crew said they needed water and fuel.

Anzio received the call during an Underway Replenishment (UNREP) and then proceeded toward the position of the dhow.
According to Ensign Scott Szurovy, the Junior Officer of the Deck, their English was broken, but it was clear that they were in some form of distress. We heard “Navy ship, navy ship, can you help. Water. No English.”

“At first it was thought the dhow might be sinking or have flooding,” said Szurovy.
A 12 person rescue and assistance (R&A) team and one translator boarded the dhow as part of their MSO mission to provide supplies and assistance to the crew. Anzio provided 75 16 ounce bottles of water, 236 gallons of fuel and two days worth of food.

“This was my first time doing anything like this, and it was very exciting, actually a pleasant experience. They were all very appreciative,” said Ensign Patrick King, rescue and assistance officer.

As part of MSO, coalition forces have a long standing tradition of helping mariners in distress by providing medical assistance, engineering assistance and search and rescue efforts.

“The Anzio crew was happy to provide maritime support, and relieved that the dhow contacted us for help. The dhow crew had been out fishing for 25 days and miscalculated their fuel and water consumption. We were pleased to be able to assist them in the way of fuel, food, and water for about 2 days to get them home,” said Capt. Perry Bingham, commanding officer USS Anzio.

Anzio, part of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, departed Naval Station Norfolk on Oct. 3 for a regularly scheduled deployment in support of maritime security operations and entered the Commander, Fifth Fleet area of operations on Oct. 30.

MSO helps to set the conditions for security and stability in the maritime environment and complement the counter-terrorism and security efforts of regional nations. These operations deny international terrorists use of the maritime environment as a venue for attack or to transport personnel, weapons or other material.

Just another day at the office.