From Book 1
Our patrol was finally over when a sister ship from the squadron relieved us and we could head for home. It was going to take us and extra three days by having to go to Midway for fuel, but I sure wasn't going to try my lube oil for fuel trick again anytime soon! We finally made Pearl Harbor on the 14th of January. I had to have blood tests taken for the Wedding License and that normally took 7 days, but a good friend helped rush the tests through the lab and I had to chase the judge before he left for the day, to get the wedding license! His secretary was holding him in the office as I was racing across downtown Honolulu! To make those days just before we got married even more "interesting" My parents flew out of Oakland, California on Tuesday evening and by Thursday afternoon, they were still not there!
Chapter 1 -THE WEDDING
I returned to the ship. Worried and wondering what I should do, who was there I could contact to find out where my parents were.
The Captain was sitting in the wardroom nursing a cup of coffee and he asked me how things were going. When I told him about the missing airplane he asked if he could make some inquiries on my behalf. I agreed and he got busy.
He first called a friend of his who had contacts at the Naval Air Station at Barber's Point on Oahu. They inquired and called him back, "The plane had not reported crossing the Western Sea Frontier, a line 300 miles off the West Coast."
With that information, I called a friend of my parents who had grown up with them and was a rather high official with the FAA there in Hawaii. He got busy and found that the plane was not at any airport in the United States!
To make a long story somewhat shorter, we were finally told that the plane would arrive at Honolulu Airport that evening. It was already Thursday and our wedding was planned for Saturday, time was getting short!
When the plane was landing, I and my "bride to be" were standing at the passenger gate. As we watched, four large sedans with US Government license plates drove up to the accommodation ladder and six or seven men in dark suits boarded the airplane.
A few minutes later, what looked like the entire flight crew was led off the plane in handcuffs, before any of the passengers were allowed to disembark!
When we finally heard the full story, the plane made several trips back and forth between Oakland, California and Orange County Airport in Los Angeles, trying to get enough passengers to pay for the flight!
My Folks had been trapped on that airplane since very early in the morning of the preceding Tuesday!
To make matters even worse, the airplane's radio had gone out and they flew across the ocean without a radio, very much against FAA Rules.
I was told later that the airline lost its certification and the entire flight crew lost their licenses.
The airline never flew again.
My parents had to book a new return flight on TWA, I have no idea if they ever got their money back or not, my Dad was so angry, I was not about to question him about it, EVER!
Saturday rolled around and the Chief Petty Officers on the ship invited me to the Chief's Club for lunch, it was very nice and they plied me with more beers than was good for me.
I got to the hotel where my parents were staying in barely enough time to get changed into my dress white uniform, my Dad nearly choked me trying to hook the collar.
I was driving a friend's car and my folks had my little Morris Minor, Dad couldn't find the reverse so my Mother had to push the car backwards so they could get out of the parking space!
By 6:30 that evening (Saturday) I had said my "I DO" on schedule and, for better or worse, I was a married man.
We had a marvelous reception at the Pearl Harbor Officer's Club before we headed to the Princess Kaiulani Hotel in downtown Honolulu.
We were trying to act so sophisticated as we checked in, when we got to our room and I opened the door, some older lady was already occupying the room and she started screaming bloody murder!
We had to traipse back to the lobby and get another room, all pretense of sophistication was now lost.
The Bellhop set our suitcase on the stand in the new room and opened it, the carpet was covered in rice and both our faces were beet red! The Bellhop had a grin on his face from ear to ear! After spending the night in the hotel, we drove over to Bellows Air Force Base, where we had reserved a beach cottage for a week.
That was our honeymoon!
It was nice just laying around in the warm sun, with no worries and nobody chasing after us for a decision on something.
My new wife was a Nursing Supervisor at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu and there were no telephones in the cottage! We were able to ignore the outside world for a few days.
Her father went home on the Passenger ship SS Lurline and my father went right back on the Monday of the next week on TWA. My Mother spent an additional two weeks staying with friends from their younger days and we took her to several tourist spots while she was there, including Wo Fat's, a place I had learned to love from my Tug Boat days.
She liked it as much as I did and we took her there two more times before she had to leave. She talked about it for many years and always wanted to go back, but they never went back to Hawaii.
Chapter 2 - BACK TO WORK
Finally, we both had to go back to work, the ship was scheduled to sail in a couple of days and I had to do my part to get it ready.
We were living in a tiny apartment down near Waikiki, we called it the "broom closet" as it was hardly bigger than one! It would be July before we could get into Navy Housing, so I became a commuter! The bedroom was so small, one could touch either wall from the bed and the toilet could be used only if you left the door open to stick your feet out! The shower was a CLOSE fit.
The patrol was ordinary and without problems, except for the bitter cold of the north Pacific. We were scheduled for a shipyard overhaul beginning in May and I spent all my time documenting what needed to be overhauled and why.
We were back in port in March and scheduled for the dry dock to inspect the hull.
I was unlucky enough to have broken my leg while swinging down into the Engine Room during heavy weather and was on crutches.
That didn't eliminate my need to inspect the hull myself. If I was going to go to sea in the damned thing, I wanted my own eyeballs on the condition of the hull!
It was not bad, especially considering the ship's age. We had already suspected that some of the plating on the two rudders was missing and we were not wrong. Other than that, there was no serious damage to the hull, the rudders were repaired and the hull sandblasted and repainted, all in three days!
None of us ever imagined that we would be back in that same dry dock in a few short months!
We made one more patrol before our overhaul and we would be in the shipyard for four months, home every night. For a young married man, that sounded like heaven!
At the end of our next patrol, one of our sister ships suffered some kind of casualty and we were not relieved at the scheduled time, it was just short of a panic as we were getting beyond low on fuel.
By the time we got to the fueling dock at Midway Island, I was seriously considering running down lubricating oil into the main engine day tanks again, however, we squeaked by.
I half expected to hear the engines cough and sputter as we pulled into the fueling dock, but the Great Gods that look down on Sailors and fools took pity on us and we made it.
This time, the Captain knew what the situation was and he was wound up like an eight day clock! He had the Bridge Talker give us almost minute by minute updates on how much further we had to go before he would order down "FINISHED WITH ENGINES"!
We finally reached Pearl Harbor and I don't think I was ever so glad to see the "Foxtrot Piers" before.
Three days later, we entered our shipyard overhaul. We would not go back to sea again until September.
The first night alongside the shipyard pier was quiet and eerie, everything on the ship was shut down, even the ventilating fans.
The work began in earnest the following morning, the Shipyard sent a representative who would be my liaison. He seemed like a reasonable man and we did work well together throughout the process.
My biggest concern was the deteriorated tank tops in the bilges, when he saw the broom handle with cement around it, he shuddered. He was muttering, "Only Dogs and Sailors ........."
I had been afraid to pull out the broom handle that one of my sweepers had dropped, so I had left it where it had pierced the tank top and poured cement around it for a seal. When the cement had hardened, I had the broom handle cut off and left it alone.
A whole section of the steel plating had to be replaced in the Main Control Room, it was an unholy mess! All the machinery, piping, wiring and supports for the upper levels had to be removed before the tank tops could be replaced.
Both boiler feed-water pumps were replaced and one boiler had to be re-tubed. They pulled the head on the freshwater distiller to check on the divider plate I had performed emergency repairs to at sea. They did re-caulk the divider plate, I had used reclaimed lead and they backed it up by tamping in lead wool.
The No. 3 Generator Exciter had to be rewound and new bearings installed.
The lube oil in both reduction gears was changed out and the gears checked for wear.
I don't know where the time went, suddenly our four month overhaul was drawing to a close and I was tearing around the ship making sure that everything had been accomplished satisfactorily.
Everyone was busy trying to get last minute items corrected and, above everything else, painted Navy Gray!
The bulkheads in the engine rooms were supposed to be an off-white color and that is what the label on the paint cans said it was, they had been delivered from the Navy Supply System the week before.
But, sure as rain falls from the sky, my engine rooms were PINK! In fact, one sailor described the color as flesh tone PINK! (cleaned up for this story!) It took three coats of white paint; that thrice damned pink kept bleeding through!
We worked all night long as the Squadron Commodore was to visit the ship the next day!
For some time after that, the engine rooms were referred to as the "bordellos"! (My Sailors preferred a more colorful word for that!)
As soon as we were finished with the overhaul, we were scheduled to go into extensive retraining and all kinds of drills to make sure the ship and its crew was operational.
My sister was to be married in September, I am not sure she ever really understood why I was not at her wedding. My wife went, and it was very evident that we were expecting our first child.
I guess we sailors work fast!
We finished all the scheduled work that the shipyard was to accomplish and we moved to a "ready" pier to complete the painting and those items that the Ship's Force were to do.
The last thing was a Completion Conference with the shipyard officials. As soon as everything had been signed off, we made ready to do intensive training intended to make sure the ship and the crew were ready for duty.
The Executive Officer had always been a little "strange" and he did everything he could to make our drills, what he called, realistic!
We were off the coast of Hilo, Hawaii practicing emergency drills. All of a sudden, the ship was rocked by an explosion, and then twice more before someone spotted the Exec throwing something over the side.
He had an armload of grenades!
Just as they caught him, I got a panic call from the Petty Officer in the Forward Engine Room, we were flooding!
One of those grenades had gotten caught up in the sea water suction box and exploded, rupturing the inlet box and the piping.
We stuffed everything we had in the hole, except living bodies, and all we could do was slow the inflow of seawater down. By switching valves around, we were able to use the main engine cooling water pumps to pump water from the bilges, through the engine coolers and back over the side. We were keeping ahead of the inflow, just not quite, the level was creeping slowly higher.
The Captain sent out a message to clear a dry dock on an emergency basis and we headed for Pearl Harbor, the seawater level in the engine room was slowly creeping higher, towards the auxiliary switchboard and the electrical controls for everything in the engine-room!
We found ourselves back in dry dock.
As soon as the ship was down on the blocks, the water in the engine room began to recede. It had gotten up over the lower deck-plates and was lapping at the electrical controls!
I am not sure just what happened to the Executive Officer, I was too busy begging the shipyard personnel to make us a new sea suction box. I did hear "rumors" that a certain part of his anatomy was raw and red!
He stayed with the ship, probably his having been a Naval Academy Graduate saved him, but he sure didn't have much to say anymore.
The shipyard folks worked around the clock to get us out of their dry dock, there was another ship waiting to be docked.
As soon as the repairs were made and determined to be water tight, we headed back out to sea to complete our drills. I flubbed a ship handling exercise, but another officer, who was more experienced, pulled my irons out of the fire.
At last, the Training Inspectors deemed we were ready for duty and we were given a week to make ready for sea.
Everything had to be inventoried and consumables, like fuel oil, lubricating oils, water, foods and living supplies all had to be ordered and brought on board. It was a period of nightmare headaches for an Engineer and also the Supply Officer, neither of us got much sleep!
We were finally ready on September 15th and we sailed the next day.
Chapter 3 - NORTH PACIFIC ICE
The weather was rough and stormy as we ploughed our way out through the Kauai Channel and the entire patrol was plagued by bad weather.
We arrived on station six days after we departed Pearl Harbor and the ship we were relieving headed to the fueling pier at Midway Island. We were more than a week late relieving them because we had to go back into dry dock to repair the main engine sea suction and they were getting low on fuel.
The weather was stormy the entire patrol and I was never able to shut down the main propulsion engines. We were consuming fuel at an alarming rate. We were up in the Arctic Ocean and the stormy weather turned to sleet, snow and ice. Every morning, all hands were out chopping ice from the upper decks.
Fully loaded, our ship weighed in at only1440 tons, so it didn't take much ice on an upper deck to upset the stability of the ship, especially with all that electronic gear so high above the deck!
The storm intensified and the temperature dropped. The folks in the Combat Information Center (CIC) were having difficulty keeping the radar antennas rotating; ice would build up on the supports and jam the antenna.
I had to open the Engine Room air intake ports on the main engines, I was concerned that ice might build up in the engine scavenging blowers and jam, breaking a lobe. It is possible to change a blower at sea, but it was out of the question as long as the seas were so rough.
The problem in doing that, however, was that the temperature of the engine room and adjacent areas dropped precipitously. All the valve wheels and ladder rungs had a coating of ice on them.
About the only good thing that could be said about the cold conditions was the engine intake air was more dense and the engines ran noticeably more efficient.
We had been on station for about two weeks and I was just getting ready to go to bed, I had a mid-watch (midnight to 4:00 am) that night. Just as I was taking off my shoes, the General Quarters Alarm went off.
That is a sound no sailor wants to hear, EVER!
I dove down into the Main Control Room and, as soon as all my areas reported manned and ready, I called the Bridge and reported in. The Captain called down on the Bitch Box that a Marine Fighter Pilot had ditched his plane and he was in the water.
The Captain added, "He has about 6 minutes to live in this cold water!"
We got an "ALL AHEAD EMERGENCY" bell before we had all four main engines on line, I told the Throttlemen to "drag the engines on line by filling the clutches."
That was a definite risk, but better that than to leave the pilot to die in the freezing water!
As soon as the engines caught, the, the Throttlemen in each Control Room crammed the throttles up against the stops.
The mains were howling like banshees in protest. It was obvious the Captain was conning the ship, he was about the best "ship driver" I had ever seen!
We received an "ALL STOP", then an "ALL BACK FULL and immediately ALL STOP".
We were dead in the water, alongside the downed airplane.
When we went to restart, three of the four Main Engines would not turn over! They had run so hot, the aluminum lobes on the scavenging air blowers had fused together!
I had one spare blower on board, but it was a "NO, NO" for the ship's crew to attempt a change out at sea.
I talked with the Captain, being in the Arctic Ocean, with a storm in the making and in the winter with only one Main Engine, was a great deal more dangerous than changing out the blower.
He agreed.
The First Lieutenant loaned me some Seaman from the Deck Crew to help in rigging, and we moved a 3,000 pound blower from its cradle on the bulkhead to a spot near the Main Engine.
With the Seamen's help, we lifted the damaged blower off the engine and swapped it out with the spare blower.
Nobody got hurt beyond some barked knuckles but it took us nearly 24 hours from start to having the engine ready to roll.
It was a mighty relief when the Throttleman rolled the engine and it caught, I never thought I would love the sound of a running diesel engine, but, at that moment, it was the most welcome sound in the world!
We completed our patrol, and everyone on the ship had their ears tuned to the sound of those two Main Engines, had we lost one, we would have been in a "HEAP OF HURT"!
It was a slow trip back to Pearl Harbor, plus we had expended so much fuel, we had to swing by Midway Island to take on more fuel oil.
We nursed those engines all the way back home, every time one of them even burped, we all panicked!
We missed our next patrol, the engines were so old, new scavenging blowers were not readily available and the three damaged blowers were beyond repair.
The new ones had to be shipped from the "mainland" and time was scheduled for the shipyard folks to do the installation.
That meant that our next patrol would be over Christmas, not a happy holiday for a newly married man. My wife and I celebrated our Christmas early by buying a new car. My little Morris Minor died on her as she was going to work, in the middle of the busiest intersection in all of Honolulu.
She was NOT a happy camper!
That patrol was to be my "second to last" patrol, as my time was nearly up. The one good outcome was that we would be scheduled in port in January, when our first child was to be born.
We sailed on November 5th for the North Pacific. For once, the weather was great and the Kauai Channel was smooth as glass.
Had I known what the Fates had in store for me, I would have been more nervous, but as it was, I was looking forward to getting back to Pearl Harbor in time for the birth of our child.
The patrol was absolutely normal, so normal in fact, it seemed almost dream-like. Nothing broke down, the weather was unusually good for that time of year, and our relief ship was right on time! That, alone, should have forewarned us that the hateful God of old ships was on our "case"!
We sailed into Pearl Harbor on January 15th and everything seemed like it was going our way.
(Remember the Fates that order the lives of Sailors and Fools!)
TBC
A young man and his family make their "escape" back to the mainland to begin their life together.