Colonel J. A. Barton Campbell, U.S. Army Reserve (Retired)
You cannot imagine my astonishment, thumbing through the June issue, to spot a reference to the USS Leary (DD-879) in Robert Anderson’s article, “Education of a Destroyer Sailor” (pp. 48–53). My father, Commander (later Captain) James H. Campbell, U.S. Naval Academy class of 1933, commanded the Leary from 1948 to early 1950. I have a watercolor of the ship in my study that shows her in the older configuration, with twin forward turrets. A photo of the Leary taken during a Med cruise under Dad’s command shows her anchored at Venice, with St. Mark’s Square in the background. My mother always prized the photo, as she met up with Dad in Venice during the cruise that summer.
I was on board the destroyer a number of times. My sole vivid memory is of “going to sea” when the ship was slated for antiaircraft practice. The sound and sight of the 40mm guns was impressive. Regrettably, the weather was bad, and I think the towed target only made a couple of passes. But what an adventure for an eight (maybe nine) year old!
Captain John Henderson, SC, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Thank you so much for Robert Anderson’s article on his education on board the USS Leary. It hit me four-square in the memory locker.
I joined the Leary in Norfolk as supply and disbursing officer in December 1950. The ship had just completed a shipyard availability, emerging as a radar picket destroyer full of antennae.
We deployed to the Mediterranean during the summers of both 1951 and 1952. During the Leary’s second deployment to the Med, I enthusiastically purchased (from an Italian merchant) metal web belt buckles bearing an image of the ship, for sale in our tiny ship’s store (a closet on the Leary’s main deck). My enthusiasm was unceremoniously dashed when we went into a short shipyard availability almost immediately on our return to the states and emerged with a radically new ship’s silhouette. Regrettably, most of the unsold belt buckles joined my predecessor’s Flamingo Panatela cigar dead stock (purchased for a previous captain) awaiting survey and disposal.
Lieutenant Commander Glenn L. Smith, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Thomas Wildenberg’s “Armaments & Innovations” article on the submarine inertial-navigation system (SINS) (June, pp. 11–12) prompted a memory from long ago. In 1963 I was a quartermaster first class serving in the navigation department in the USS George Washington (SSBN-598). On one of the submarine’s early patrols, we had one of our three SINS “crash.” The minimum acceptable operating standard was two SINS up at all times, so fixing the broken system was quite urgent.
Our navigation electronics technicians (ETs) struggled mightily but were completely flummoxed by this new electronic equipment. They troubleshot every component of the offending SINS with no luck. By chance, the ship’s doctor happened to be passing through the navigation center and saw all the ETs gathered around the sick SINS. He asked what was up, and they told him. In a blink of an eye, he said, “Maybe I can help.” He dropped below to sick bay and returned with his stethoscope.
He then had the ETs open all three of the SINS binnacles (covers) and proceeded to listen to each individual component in the three SINS, starting with the two good ones and ending with the sick SINS. After about 15 minutes, he said with certainty in his voice that one particular item in the third SINS was the off-kilter part. The ETs broke out a replacement part and swapped it for the one the doctor identified. They spun up the SINS, and sure enough, it worked perfectly.
Paul Bent
Thanks for the great piece on the original submarine inertial-navigation system (SINS) for fleet ballistic missile submarines. As a navigation electronics technician in the 1960s, I specialized in maintaining the AN/BRN-3 satellite navigation system, the ancestor of the much more famous GPS we all know and love (and have in our pockets) today.
The “Burn 3” was used to reset the SINS periodically by fixing the boat’s precise position using data transmitted from an array of satellites launched for the purpose. The submarine skippers didn’t much like having to breach the surface to get a fix, but it was essential in correcting for even the tiny amount of drift inherent in the SINS stable platform.
And that, of course, led to the most wonderful description of the SINS itself: “A multimillion dollar instrument that, if you tell it where it is, will tell you where you are.”
Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, first lieutenant in the Somers in 1842, probably deserves more than the two sentences Jim Caiella gave him in his very interesting piece on the star-crossed brig, if for no other reason than Gansevoort’s close connection to Herman Melville (“Historic Ships,” June, pp. 14–15).
Gansevoort (1812–68, scion of an old Dutch family in New York, and from a town of the same name) was Melville’s first cousin. He had an impressive more-than-40-year career in the U.S. Navy, with honorable service in the Mexican and Civil wars. Given his own sailing experience (four cruises in whalers and one in the frigate USS United States), Melville probably didn’t need much help from his cousin in telling sea stories, but some think his posthumously published novel, Billy Budd, draws on the Somers mutiny story. If so, the source for that would have been Gansevoort.