Salty sayings
August 25th, 2009 | Historical Life at Sea Navy Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Naval History and Heritage Command
The Navy’s official acceptance last week of the destroyer Dewey — named for Adm. George Dewey, who commanded the U.S. fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay — means the fleet now has destroyers named for the men on both sides of his famous command. On May 1, 1898, Dewey’s flagship, the cruiser Olympia, commanded by Capt. Charles Gridley, advanced with its squadron into Manila Bay under fire from the Spanish fleet. (The destroyer Gridley was commissioned in 2007.)
The American ships held off opening up with their guns until they had reached the ranges they wanted, at which point Dewey gave his famous order:
Make it Pop-Tarts and khat for Somali pirates
August 25th, 2009 | Pirates | Posted by Andrew Scutro
According to a Somali-born linguist, ship hijackers here are perpetually stoned and not too bright yet rich and popular in the small towns and villages. Flush with ransom money, they have their pick of women despite existing local ties.//Photo via ethiopianreview.com
ABOARD THE CRUISER ANZIO OFF SOMALIA — It’s always a good idea to know some of the local language and culture, no matter what or where. In recent years U.S. forces have had to rely on native speakers in Iraq, Afghanistan and on missions like this one off the Horn of Africa.
A Somali-born linguist (he requests anonymity for protection) has come aboard as Anzio steps up its counterpiracy mission. He shared a few relevant Somali terms:
pirate: burcad badeed (thugs of the sea)
folding stock AK-47: dabalabab
RPG: bazooka
automatic rifle: faal (German-made G3 specifically)
coalition sailors: cridank-bada (soldiers of the sea)
ransom: “There is no word. This is new to us.”
He has nothing but contempt for ship hijackers. “Some of them wouldn’t know the difference between a warship and an oiler. That’s how dumb they are,” he said. “They have money and the small towns and villages welcome them. Everybody helps them. They’ve got multiple wives. The youngest most beautiful girls, they will select them.”
The sudden influx of loaded thugs does not bode well for local suitors. “If she is waiting for a poor boy from the next village, and there’s a pirate, that love is broken.”
The ship hijackers are also boozers with an overpowering taste for the leaf-borne stimulant khat that’s popular in the region. “If they run out they’ll go back . They are under the influence always. Not just khat,” he said. “Some of them are drunk.”
As for chow? “You can’t cook on a skiff, man. But they love Pop-Tarts. They [stick them together and] eat them like a sandwich.”
Somalis point to years of rampant factory fishing off their shores as the genesis of today’s situation but the linguist isn’t the only one with contempt for ship hijackers. The Islamic militants Al-Shabaab operating around Mogadishu will cut off a poor man’s hand for stealing bread and have no tolerance for stealing ships, he said, “Al-Shabaab are bad ass.”
‘Stand and Fight’
August 25th, 2009 | Historical The Middle East | Posted by Andrew Scutro
Navy
ABOARD THE CRUISER ANZIO OFF SOMALIA — We set out from Bahrain on Aug. 16, embarked on this, the flagship for counterpiracy Task Force 151. With extra staff and special personnel, just about every rack is taken, to the point where the junior officers are living in forward ops berthing, former lair of the boatswain’s mates. Two female hospital corpsmen from an embarked surgical team got the medical department racks. This ship does not have the female berthing modification, so there are no enlisted women in ship’s company.
The task force staff is combined with British Royal Navy officers and sailors. There’s also a Somali interpreter from the Midwest and a Coast Guard team from Galveston, Texas.
Military Times photographer Sheila Vemmer has been posting just a fraction of her photos here and here.
The ship is named for one of the most brutal battles of World War II and communications over the ship’s 1MC are often closed with the ship’s motto: Stand and Fight.
Terms like ”hero” and “warrior” and others too long to list here are thrown around with alarming disregard today. But the passageways of this ship are watched over by Medal of Honor recipients from the early 1944 showdown at Anzio. Their efforts, as the allies stood and fought ashore in Italy, were shockingly brave. If you need a reminder about that war, or the Americans who were thrown into it, look up the history of the battle and the MoH citations of men like Pfc. Alton W. Knappenberger, Capt. William W. Galt and 2nd Lt. Ernest H. Dervishian. There are 19 more names, several of them among the 7,000 allies killed in a few months there in 1944.
Toon-smiths, arriving
August 24th, 2009 | Life at Sea Morale The deckplates | Posted by Phil Ewing
Sure, maybe it’s not the same as a visit from the Dallas Cowgirls cheerleaders, but the crew of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard got a much more unusual break from its work on Friday when the ship took aboard eight cartoonists who amused sailors with funny drawings.
The toon-smiths, including Scoop Deck’s shipmate Jeff Bacon, the skipper of “Broadside,” drew pictures for sailors and said thanks for their service, according to a Navy announcement.
“We get to enjoy this great life, and it’s all because of the sailors, Marines, airmen and soldiers who choose to fight for this country,” Bacon said. “It’s probably more gratifying for us than for the sailors and Marines aboard that we get to come out and do what we do.”
Bacon — who is also Navy Times’ senior blogger — makes regular trips to the fleet to absorb fresh deck-plate oxygen that he focuses into “Broadside” and its tougher cousin, “Greenside.”
VBSS Team links
August 24th, 2009 | Carriers merchant ships Naval Academy Science and technology Ships Submarines | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Unidentified vessel, this is U.S. Navy warship; halt and prepare to accept this news and information" // MC3 David Wyscaver
Pilot-ladder climbin’, rigid-hull inflatable boat drivin’, shotgun-carryin’, vessel-inspectin’ links, ordering you to heave to and prepare to be boarded by these interesting tidbits:
- Not everyone in Japan was pleased that the carrier Nimitz is paying a visit this week.
- Kansas City’s business and city fathers are sending donations to help out with the commissioning ceremony of the fast-attack submarine Missouri.
- Who loves football more, the infamous “Buck-nuts” who play along the banks of the old Olentangy, or the midshipmen who ply the tranquil Severn? With the help of some bone-crunching hits, we’re gonna find out Sept. 5.
- Check out this post about seven sweet ship engines, which includes the power plants of today’s warships and civilian vessels.
- Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Sink! Sink! Sink!
Three floating 9/11 memorials
August 21st, 2009 | Ships The greenside | Posted by Phil Ewing
The amphibious transport dock New York visits its namesake city in this Navy illustration // Naval Sea Systems Command
The average American has had plenty of good reasons over the past few years to become familiar with the San Antonio class of amphibious transport docks, but that will probably all be eclipsed as the newest one, the New York, gets closer to commissioning this November. The ship’s bow stem contains 7.5 tons of steel from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, which has earned it a place in e-mail forwards and a “true” listing on Snopes, and possibly the greatest general fame of any Navy warship today.
The Navy took delivery of the New York on Friday at its shipyard in Avondale, La., at exactly 9:11 a.m. – spooky! – organizers swore it was a coincidence — marking another step down the line to the New York formally joining the fleet. It’s only the first of three small-deck gators that will commemorate the victims of Sept. 11, all of which will carry some element from the sites of the attacks, said Katie Roberts, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command.
The Arlington, LPD 24, named for Arlington County, Va., where the Pentagon was damaged by a hijacked airliner, will display metal from the crash site in its interior spaces, Roberts said. The Somerset, LPD 25, named for Somerset County, Pennsylvania — where United Flight 93′s passengers forced down the plane on its way to attack Washington, D.C. — will contain 5 tons of steel in its stem bar from a coal crane that worked near the crash site.
Don’t worry, it only looks like it’s sinking
August 21st, 2009 | Life at Sea Science and technology Ships Video | Posted by Phil Ewing
The Scripps Oceanographic Institute's Floating Resarch Platform, or FLIP, bobbed off Hawaii Aug. 17 as part of an Office of Naval Research project // Navy
The Office of Naval Research needs a lot of specialized gear to do its naval research, and there are few pieces of floating equipment as specialized as the FLoating Instrument Platform, or FLIP, a 355-foot long baseball bat-shaped rig that does its work bobbing vertically out of the ocean.
This thing is pretty cool: Ballast tanks flood at the grip-end of the bat and slowly sink it, lifting up the manned end. And that end of the platform has a bow and a conventional-looking ship’s hull, which can make the platform look like a permanently sinking ship. FLIP’s working spaces are designed to adapt seamlessly to a 90-degree change in orientation, including rotating cabinets, multiple desks, and bulkheads that become decks.
See it in action here:
FLIP is one of a few ships taking part in an ONR program studying Radiance in a DYnamic Ocean, or RaDyO, a five-year project devoted to researching the way light behaves in the ocean. Scoop Deck speculates that the study’s findings may prove useful in improving the way submarines communicate with surface ships or satellites — using lasers, perhaps. But RaDyO’s first official goal is this: “Examine time-dependent oceanic radiance distribution in relation to dynamic surface boundary layer processes.”
Which is what we meant to say.
Talk to the chairman. Just not from your work PC
August 21st, 2009 | Blogs Personnel The deckplates Video Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
"A toast to all the people following me on Twitter!" //MC1 Chad McNeeley/Navy
Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen is all about making connections on the inter-tubes — he’s on Twitter, he’s on the new Defense.gov, he’s on Facebook – he’s the onlineiest chairman in the history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His latest initiative is a kind of virtual all-hands call, for which he wants you — yes, YOU — to submit a video question on YouTube that’ll go into the hopper of questions he will address in his own YouTube responses.
The only problem is, if you’re at work and on the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet or many other Defense Department computer systems, you probably can’t access YouTube. It’s blocked. Maybe that’s something worth asking Mullen about.
If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the pitch for you to submit your question, complete with Mullen’s rockin’, feel-good theme:
Another Spru-can chops into Davy Jones’ AOR
August 20th, 2009 | Diving Historical Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
The destroyer Arthur W. Radford, seen here underway in 2002, is to be sunk as an artificial reef off Delaware // Navy
Naval Sea Systems Command announced Thursday it’s transferring one of the fleet’s best-known Spruance-class destroyers to the state of Delaware so it can be turned into an artificial reef. It’s the beginning of the end for the destroyer Arthur W. Radford, also known as “The Finger.”
Although final details for the transfer still must be ironed out, the basics are in place: The Radford will be sunk in the Atlantic at a spot equidistant from Cape May, N.J.; Ocean City, Md.; and Indian River Inlet Del. The ship will rest on the bottom in about 120 feet of water, NavSea said, which will make it a relatively easy dive.
The Radford is one of the last Spruance-class destroyers, ships that were a mainstay in the surface fleet of the 1970s and 80s, before the arrival of the Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke class. Almost all of them have been sunk as targets or otherwise disposed of. Radford’s career took it around the world for 26 years and included a series of adventures and misadventures detailed on its surprisingly comprehensive Wikipedia page.
The ship earned its nickname “The Finger” after it was outfitted in 1997 with an experimental composite mast, to test the technology later used in the enclosed masts of the Navy’s San Antonio-class gators. In the view of some observers, this made it seem as though the destroyer was flipping you the bird. It won’t take that feature to the bottom, though; the Radford’s composite mast was removed when the ship was mothballed, and other topside features also likely will be cut away before it goes to its final resting place.
Towed away to better health
August 20th, 2009 | Historical Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
The destroyer Laffey -- now being repaired at a North Charleston, S.C. shipyard -- underway in 1962 // Naval History and Heritage Command
We told you in June about how the state of South Carolina was coming to the rescue of the World War II destroyer Laffey, which was in bad shape after years of deterioration. The check must’ve cleared, because tugs pulled the Laffey away from its pier at the Patriots Point museum Wednesday and they were on their way to a shipyard in North Charleson, S.C., where work will begin on patching the holes in the ship’s hull.
The repairs are expected to take about three or four months, and then the Laffey will be back in action, so to speak, available for tours once again.