This Month's Story

Stella and I were having lunch at “Ruby Tuesday.” We always go there whenever we are in Indiana. There is nothing comparable in Blairsville and eating there gives us a welcome change of venue. We had just been served our meal (their burgers are delicious and I always order them) when an elderly couple came in and sat in a booth opposite our table.

I was picking up my burger when I saw that the man wore a billed cap. It read “USS Newport News.” I hesitated a second and then leaned over and asked him if the Newport News was a heavy cruiser. He evidently was a little hard of hearing and didn’t answer me, but his wife did.

“Yes, it is. Why do you ask?”

“Well, years ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think your husband pointed a gun at me.”

I had raised my voice a little so that her husband could hear me. He did and turned to look questionable at me.

“Were you aboard the Newport News during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” I asked.

“Yes I was. I was a radioman. That was a long time ago, October, 1962.”

“Well, I was there then too, but on another ship. If I remember it correctly, you people treated my ship a little rudely.”

Let me go back to that time years ago so all of this makes sense.

Sorry, I have to do this every so often. It’s a little bit like when I say I’m a veteran of the Korean War and people say to me, “Oh yes I remember that war. It was the last big battle of Viet Nam. That was the Korean War, right?” It hurts when this happens, but I never correct them. These same people were never taught to hide under their desk if an atomic bomb was dropped near their school. Now they tell them to hide under their desks if there is a person with a machine gun in the hall.

Anyway, in 1962, I was working for the US Naval Oceanographic Office in Washington, D.C. as a civilian scientist. I had just joined the Office and as a green hand, I was given the extremely boring task of assembling temperatures of the word oceans. These data would later be assembled into individual temperature ocean atlases that are still used today.

I hated it!! It was, to put it as mildly as possible, grueling, mindboggling work.

So when someone came to into our workroom and said that there was a ship in Norfolk that needed another ocean scientist to complete its scientific crew, I raised my hand to volunteer. My supervisor let me go, probably because he was tired of hearing me gripe so much about the work I was doing.

There were no special ships in those days fitted to do oceanographic work and I found the ship I was assigned to was a US Navy minesweeper. Although still in commission, it was manned by a navy crew consisting of navy enlisted men and officers and all the ancient protocol that the navy at that time had. The ship was old and the equipment it had aboard for our use was barely passable.

However, 1962 was a historical time to go to where we were to conduct our ocean survey: a little over a hundred miles off the coast of Cuba.

As an aspect of the Cold War, Cuba and its surrounding seas were about to become a pawn in a lethal game of chess.

The ship left Norfolk with all kinds of evil omens; each indicating that things were going to go bad: a fire in a below deck storage locker that was difficult to extinguish, and a very rough time going past Cape Hatteras (I passed the Cape many times since then, but I believe that particular passing was the worst in my experience. Two days later, word was passed around the ship that President Kennedy was going to make an important announcement concerning the Russian missiles that had recently been spotted by satellites on mainland Cuba.

There was no question that his announcement would be a challenge to the Russians to pull the missiles out of Cuba or there would be war. And we aboard that old World War 2 Minesweeper were heading just there!

According to the scuttlebutt leaked out from the radio room, the speech was scheduled to be at 6 pm. I was working trying to fix a winch when I heard this. It was near 5 pm. The scientific crew (there were four of us) and the duty watch officers were scheduled to eat at the second meal sitting. The first sitting was for the captain and those officers not on watch. Their meal was scheduled for 5 pm. The second less formal sitting was scheduled was at 5:30 or such time as the first sitting progressed.

I asked several crew members if anyone had a radio (remember this was in1962 and radios were not as sophisticated as they are now). They said no, the ship was usually too far out to sea to hear stateside broadcasts. If there were anything important, a shortened version was usually passed along from the radio room to the captain via the wardroom.

I showered and put on clean casual clothes and headed to the wardroom for the scheduled second sitting. I knew there was a feed from the radio room direct to the ward room so that the captain and ship’s officers could be kept immediately informed if any important news relevant to the ship occurred.

When I reached the wardroom, I found the captain and all of the first sitting officers were still in the room, lingering over their coffees. They were loitering there obviously waiting for the president’s speech.

I was amazed and a little angry!

Here we were on the brink of apoplectic war and actually heading for the very center of that conflict and the captain and his senior officers would be the only ones to hear the speech that would be the start of what was to come. The rest of ship’s crew (as well as us in the scientific party) would hear a watered-down version by the captain later over the ship’s loudspeakers.

My wife and children lived in the Washington, D.C. area and any negative lethal response from the Russians as a result of the President’s speech would be aimed at Washington first. Naval protocol be damned, I pushed open the wardroom door and sat on a couch located on the starboard side of the wardroom. I instantly felt the startled glare of the captain. I didn’t move and continued sitting waiting for the same thing he was.

In seconds the familiar voice of Kennedy came over the speaker and the room became still. When the president’s challenging speech was through, I got up, left the wardroom and went to my quarters. I don’t think I ate that night.

I spent the next day getting ready for the start of our ocean stations near Cuba. We would be there at the following day and would commence our survey immediately. We got things ready earlier than I expected and started for the open bridge to watch the sunset. I was tired and relaxed against bridge’s wind shield and watched as the sun sank lower and lower over the coastline to our west.

As I watched, the lookout reported a large ship hull down to our east. I hurried over to the starboard side and saw by the ship’s size and armament that it was obviously a large American warship, probably a heavy cruiser. Only its upper decks were visible. In naval terms, it was hull down, i.e., below the earth’s rim. It must have been at least ten miles away.

As I watched, a signal light started blinking from the distant bridge of what I now realized was indeed, a heavy cruiser. A signalman beside me, read aloud what was obviously the same message that the officer of the deck was hearing on the bridges open radio.

It was a blunt verbal challenge.

“Attention! The ship due west of us: stand and identify yourself!”

In minutes the captain was on the bridge quickly moving to the open bridge staring at the cruiser, confused and startled!

The lookout disappeared below and I moved as far aft of the bridge as possible.

As we watched, the cruiser’s second forward gun battery turned and pointed its 16-inch guns in our direction. Once the battery was aligned, one of the 16-inch guns elevated itself to adjust for distance.

I looked at the signalman standing by his light and he stared at me. One gun!

The USS NEWPORT NEWS

The captain went into the closed bridge and yelled to the radio room and signalman to both reply with the same message. “We are the USS_____ proceeding under orders from the Oceanographer of the Navy to conduct a 100 mile square ocean survey with Lat. __ Long. __ being its northwest corner. We await your instructions.”

The signalman started blinking the message via his signal light as the captain spoke. There was a long pause and then as we watched, the single gun was lowered and the gun battery slowly rotated to it’s fore-aft position.

The signalman read out the cruisers blinking cruiser’s return message: “Proceed as per your orders.”

The cruiser then surged forward at a speed much faster than ours and was soon out of sight.

“What ship was that?” I asked the signalman.

“The USS Newport News.”

So that was what I meant when I told the ex-sailor from the Newport News that the flagship of the blockade of Cuba had treated us rather rudely.

One puny 16-inch gun, indeed! Why not the turret’s full three 16-inch gun battery?