Station HYPO

By Bruce Ames

The 1970s were arguably the height of the Cold War and the Navy was tasked to provide as much a deep-water worldwide presence as possible. This is the story of the USS INTREPID (CVS-11) and our escapades with our Soviet friends in 1971. The USS INTREPID was launched in April 1943 and ready for action in August of 1943. She was one of the new twenty four fast Essex-class aircraft carriers. She would project her might with ninety aircraft against the Japanese with her first action in January 1944 supporting operations at Kwajalein. Damaged by a torpedo in the raid on Truk, she was out of service until June of that year. She then was a key participant in the battles for the Palaus, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. She was struck twice by kamikazes in late 1944. Returning to action in March

1945, she participated in the battles against the Japanese home islands, and again, the battle for Okinawa. She survived the most kamikaze hits of any other carrier in the war. Twenty-six years later this would be an ironic part of this story. The U.S. Navy would call her the “Fighting I” while she would be known to the Japanese as the “Gray Ghost.” In the early sixties she was the recovery vessel for Mercury 7 and Gemini 3. Later in the sixties, INTREPID would serve three tours in Vietnam and be a proud member of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club. After Vietnam she would be converted from an attack carrier (CVA) to an Anti- Submarine mission (CVS) capable carrier.

Our journey would begin in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, 16 April. During the period covered by this article, we deployed TAD a small SecGru detachment on board the INTREPID attached to the Admiral’s Staff. The INTREPID would be the head of what became known as ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare)

Group Four. Our team was made up of personnel from Ft. Meade, DirNavSecGruLant, Northwest and Homestead. Our ASW participated in NATO Exercise Rusty Razor, the bilateral exercises Constellation and Agile Warrior, Operation ITASS, Exercise Alert Lancer, and finally back to the Norwegian Sea for the NATO Exercise Royal Knight. The information on these exercises was declassified in 1983. These exercises and our operating areas were in the Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Barents Sea.

Wherever we went, a little Russian trawler, the NAHODKA, would be shadowing us. With the exception of the helicopter squadron we had on board with their Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings, our ASW squadrons exclusively flew Grumman aircraft. The aircraft types were the A-4 Skyhawk¸ nine passenger C-1 Trader

CODs (Carrier On Board Delivery), E-1B Tracer with its powerful APS-82 radar for long range early warning, and the S-2 Tracer for its ASW capabilities. All of these aircraft were being operated to the maximum for a variety of reasons; prosecution of ASW targets, escort of numerous over flights by the Soviets, aid the ship formation when we were playing chicken with Soviet cruisers and destroyers, and the whole time the little NAHODKA kept trying to work its way into our formation and disrupt operations as much possible.

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the kamikaze hits. One of the shops I had to use as a resource for parts and test equipment was the ET shop, which was pretty much amidships and directly under the flight deck. Twenty six years later I would be in the same space that was totally devastated by a direct hit from a kamikaze killing all in that space.

We would have two aircraft accidents during the cruise. The first was early in the cruise when one of the E-1s landed eighteen feet left of the center line and promptly drove into a port side gun tub. A few feet forward and that plane would have gone directly into the Mirror Landing System. If that had happened, the carrier would be out of operation, probably causing the cancellation of the rest of the cruise. Fortunately, that didn’t happen; the crew all got out safely but the aircraft became a “hangar queen” for the rest of the cruise. Whenever we pulled into port or had VIPs aboard, a tarp was pulled over the airplane, which was parked in a far corner of the hangar deck. The second accident was at the tail end of aircraft ops and one of the helicopters was landing. This was shortly after lunch and I was standing up on “vulture’s row” which on the INTREPID was the 0-6 level watching flight ops. This helicopter was only a few feet off the deck when all of a sudden the body of the copter goes too roughly a 90° angle perpendicular to the flight deck and goes whipping off the port side with the main and tail rotors still spinning. As she is going over the side, her angle is getting increasingly greater until about 100 feet off the starboard side she has turned over 180°, in other words she is upside down at which point it impacts the water with the main rotor still spinning. When the moving rotor impacts the sea, the ocean tries to stop the rotor but the engine has a lot of torque causing the airframe to go spinning in a circle, much like a child’s toy top. The centrifugal force must have been unbelievable inside the helicopter. When the Air Boss saw the helicopter in trouble on initial landing, the ship’s klaxon goes off and the 1MC is squawking “Man Overboard, Man Overboard, all hands man overboard stations.” The man upstairs must have been smiling on that crew as they all got out alive, albeit some with injuries. The plane guard destroyer immediately picked them out of the water. The INTREPID skipper signaled for “all ahead emergency” and put the old Essex-class carrier into a full turn to port. I have been TAD on other carriers and I have never seen one heel so far over to port and stay afloat. The Captain did this to attach a cable to the helicopter as we didn’t want it to sink, especially because it had “special” communications gear installed. The Captain was able to bring the carrier about fifty feet from the upside down helicopter as easily as he would have tied up to a pier. Imagine a huge carrier coming from thirty-plus knots to a dead stop!

That was just fantastic seamanship. As soon as we stopped, the deck crew launched a whaleboat dragging a cable from the carrier to attach to the helicopter to prevent sinking. Now the bad luck sets in. As soon as the whaleboat and cable are in the water, the whaleboat crew promptly wraps the steel cable around the whaleboat’s propeller stopping all forward movement of the craft. By the time the whaleboat crew gets someone in the water and untangles the cable, the helicopter sinks. We remain on station for several hours trying to figure out a way to salvage the helicopter out of four hundred feet of water. I’ve never been able to find out why we didn’t post an escort ship over the spot where the helicopter sank or mark the spot with buoys. About five hours later we are getting everyone back in formation and we start steaming for the horizon and getting back into flight ops. As we head out, the little Soviet NAHODKA was on scene marking the spot with her own buoys. I have never been able to find out if the bad guys salvaged the copter or got any of the comms gear. I have used every research skill I know but have turned up empty handed on the salvage attempt. I have pictures of the helicopter upside down in the water but no further narrative.

I personally had two “interesting” events happen to me on this cruise and they are both antenna related. A little folklore (or a sea story, except this is true) to begin. Our SecGru Detachment used the Supplementary Radio (SupRad) room, which was immediately below the flight deck and the arresting cables, just forward of the arresting cable engine. SupRad was secured by a cipher lock and a huge steel door with a dial lock like one would find on a bank vault. We had a very talented member of our detachment who was going to be a graphics artist when his Navy time was up. He requisitioned paint and promptly painted this vault door blood red and the exact representations of the black spy, white spy from Mad magazine on the door. Once the word got out, it seemed like the passageway outside SupRad had a never-ending parade of ship’s personnel coming to see “our door.” Years later, I would be in New York on business and had time to go see the INTREPID as she was now a museum in Manhattan. I introduced myself as a former crewmember and was able to have the run of the ship, accompanied by a docent of the museum, including a lot of off-limits or off-tour spaces. The docent and I grabbed hardhats and flashlights and headed for SupRad. He told me this was in an un-restored section of the ship and to be very careful as no one had been up there in over fifteen years. As it turned out, he knew how to get on the right deck but no idea as to the location of SupRad. So I got to lead the pack. It was very sad to see how much the ship had deteriorated in the non-restored locations. Cables hanging limply, paint peeling off in massive chunks and rust everywhere. Truly a “ghost ship.” But the SupRad door was still in immaculate condition and the SupRad room was still complete with the receivers, patch panels, tape recorders, etc. The only thing missing was the Crypto gear.

Now on to the events. The first one was early in the cruise. We had a failure of one of our primary VHF antennas used by the SecGru detachment. As it turned out the ship had been altered many times since her launch in 1943 and there were no plans or schematics for this antenna or any of the connections into SupRad. The ET gang was no help. Unless I knew physically the location of the antenna they would not help fix it. I ended up getting one of the Detachment members to “volunteer” to help me on the antenna project, which was to trace the antenna feed from SupRad to the antenna, wherever that was. We literally traced this heavy metal-sheathed cable from SupRad at the back of the ship, going through stuffing tubes, “knee-knockers” and watertight compartments. Can you imagine tracing a single large cable intermingled with a myriad of other shipboard cables on a ship built twenty-eight years earlier, and all of the cables being painted Navy gray, through bulkheads, cable bundles and other impediments? By the time we finished going all the way up the island, I estimate we probably traced this cable snake nine hundred feet. After literally several days of tracing, including all the way up the Island superstructure, we find the antenna mounted on a boom off the main mast. At our next port of call, the ET guys were climbing out on the boom fixing the antenna.

The second event was also antenna related, and thinking back thirty-four years later, I say to myself “That was stupid and dangerous.” There was an immediate need for a quickly fabricated and operational UHF antenna and it could not wait until we hit port again. I requisition a UHF discone antenna and a huge spool of thick metal-sheathed antenna lead. I run the cable out of SupRad and the decision was made to have it mounted on the very outside of the LSO (Landing Safety Officer) safety net. This safety net is exactly as described. A mesh net where in the event of a truly botched landing, the entire LSO team dives off their platform and is saved by the mesh safety net. At least that is the plan. After going through many stuffing tubes and watertight compartments I end up outside on the port side staring up at the LSO safety net. I get a ship fitter to help with the proper banding of the cable for the antenna cable and here we are, welding the short mast for the UHF antenna to the forward part of the net. Seventy five feet above the water, the ship making twenty five knots, in the middle of flight operations and the only thing holding us up from the sea is this net. Quite a perspective being off the ship’s decks and seeing the ocean roll under you while aircraft are doing “controlled crash landings” on the flight deck. Needless to say this is something I would never want to do again and the ship fitter doing the welding used some pretty colorful and salty words. He was one unhappy camper by the time we finished.

The “Harm’s Way” part was pretty exciting for our detachment. We were at the northern tip of Norway and Finland when the entire task force made a high speed feint towards the Soviet Naval complex at Murmansk. By the time we turned back westward, we were twenty minutes from the Russian coast. Our task group received a message from CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt that we were the first American carrier ever to go that far north and east.

However, going that far north and east came at a peril. As we were making the high speed feint, the amount of Soviet submarines tracking us (and us tracking them) along with Soviet cruisers and destroyers coming out to play with us greatly increased in intensity over what we had seen over the rest of the cruise. The little NAHODKA stayed right with us. The number of over-flights also increased in intensity. We were frequently launching our A-4 Skyhawks to escort the Soviet aircraft which included KA-25 Hormone helicopters, long-range deadly TU-95 Bear bombers, Myasishchev Bison and Tupelov TU-16 Badger jet bombers. Along with the ship movements and the over-flights, the Soviet comms and radars being lit off went to a high level pitch. Somewhere I have a picture taken by one of our A-4s of a TU-95 focused on the tail gunner section. The Soviet tail gunner is smiling at our aircraft and holding up a Playboy magazine. On one of the over-flights, a massive TU-16 dropped down in altitude and came roaring down the centerline of our flight deck roughly fifty feet over the height of the island. Our A-4 was right behind it. A superb example of flying that rivaled anything I have ever seen since in any air show. I guess he wanted to show us we were in “their” waters and they were not going to be intimidated by an American carrier group. Any one of the events could have developed into some nervous trigger fingers. And the little NAHODKA continued to bob right along behind us.

Eventually, all interesting things come to an end. We begin steaming for the States and eventually pull back into Quonset Point on 15 October 1971. Several miles out of Rhode Island, we pass the Essex-class carrier USS WASP (CVS-18) on her way out to continue our Navy’s presence in the same area from which we had just returned.

Today, the INTREPID is the centerpiece of an excellent air-sea-space museum at Pier 86 at W46th St and 12th Ave in New York City. I encourage you to visit the museum or at least take the virtual tour on their web site. www.INTREPIDmuseum.org By the way, if you have or look for a copy of the Cruise Book, don’t look for any mention of the Detachment. We officially were never there.

NCVA CRYPTOLOG, Fall 2005