Station HYPO

On the morning of January 14, 1969, the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVAN-65) was conducting routine flight operations in the waters off Hawaii when a single moment of mechanical failure triggered one of the worst peacetime disasters in U.S. naval aviation history. What began as a normal preparation cycle for the ship’s F-4 Phantom II fighters quickly escalated into a chain reaction of explosions, fires, and heroism that would test the crew to its limits.

Did you know that Captain Jack S. Holtwick, Jr., USN is credited with establishing the Communication Technician (CT) rating for the U.S. Navy in 1948?

Every morning over breakfast in early 1942, the infamous German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel received a classified intelligence briefing. The reports detailed British troop positions, supply routes, convoy schedules and operational plans across North Africa — intelligence so precise that Rommel called it “die gute Quelle,” the good source.

This report was prepared as UNCLASSIFIED by Navy personnel with access to classified records and was reviewed by the Naval Security Group and later the NSA to ensure it contained no sensitive information. Archived at the NSG Repository in Crane, Indiana, Special Research Histories No. 186 (January 3, 1980) draws on various historical sources to provide a narrative of a naval activity. It is not an official Navy history, and its completeness and accuracy are not guaranteed.

By Thomas W. Butler

I have said elsewhere in these reminiscences that those of us at Fleet Radio Unit Pacific FRU­PAC on Iwo Jima in August 1945, unreservedly en­dorsed the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.