The Operators

The studies of the special committee on pay, headed by the General Electric Company President, Ralph J. Cordiner, have provoked little comment from the Navy. On the contrary, the possible outcome of the studies, which go hand in hand with plans for a new rating structure, is the liveliest subject of debate in the Air Force today.

The committee was appointed by the Secretary of Defense to assist the services in resolving a problem that plagues all of them, the low enlistment rate of technical specialists. Service training in some fields is especially marketable in civil life, and it is in those areas that technicians are in short supply.

The principal concern of the Air Force seems to be with the shortage of crew members and maintenance personnel. As most of the flying personnel are officers, it is in the latter group, the men who service the plane on the ground, where the technician shortage is greatest. It is primarily the electronics and engineering personnel who maintain the planes. It is these men who are blessed with the title “technician,” with all its connotations of superior training and skill.

There is a similar group in the Navy whose more marketable skills more readily attune them to the sometimes siren calls of civil life. But this group of sailors is not, generally speaking, prone to feel, nor are naval officers likely to consider, their services as an elite of technicians more valuable to the life of the ship than the petty officers who are primarily operators or technicians in other fields. This attitude may well be due to the fact that all sailors, regardless of their specialty, ride together into battle the mighty machine of war that is their ship. So, if pride in his rating marks a sailor, we can be thankful that pride in his ship and shipmates leaves a greater mark.

With only about 8% of the Air Force flying, and another 30% in direct support of its many wings, it is understandable why officers would feel more keenly the shortage of personnel in these groups, than in the 60% or more of Air Force personnel who are remote from the “hustle and bustle” of the “line,” however valuable and necessary are their services.

The Air Force answer to this problem is to alter the rating structure so that the command duties of enlisted men are completely divorced from their technical duties. There is much to be said for this part of the plan, for it seems that it would place leadership in the hands of the better specialists and leave the purely technical duties to those whose talents incline in that direction rather than to the management of personnel. A similar plan was offered in the Proceedings some years ago in an article entitled, “The Petty Officer,” but, as its title implies, it subordinated technical duties to command duties to a greater extent than even now exists. The difference in the two concepts is that the Air Force plan is designed to reward specialists in the few restricted fields they deem more important and also greatly to reduce or restrict the authority of the noncommissioned officer over the specialist. As explained in the June 21st edition of the Tailspinner, published at Lackland (San Antonio, Texas) Air Force Base, “no NCO would outrank a specialist in the same pay grade, but that a specialist would outrank a permanent NCO of a lower pay grade. Air Force personnel officials believe the new airman grade structure would permit rapid promotion to high pay grades where warranted without requiring promotion to NCO status, and personnel without prior military service could be enlisted directly into one of the top three pay grades according to technical ability. Both NCOs and specialists would occupy housing allocated to pay grades E-5, E-6, and E-7.”

As hitherto stated, the plan discussed in the Proceedings article emphasized command. It reserved pay grade six for all petty officers, and pay grade seven for all chief petty officers. The specialists would work up to pay grade five. They would still be classified. The petty officers would be unclassified, although they would work in their own fields. The specialist would, of course, have military duties but would have command status only after achieving the skill of the specialist plus those qualities of leadership that are inherently desirable in all petty officers.

The discussion at this stage, insofar as the Navy is concerned, seems to be academic. Since the Air Force plan to change its rating structure has the blessing of the Department of Defense, and the pay recommendations to implement it by the Cordiner Committee will unquestionably be applicable to all services, if adopted, it behooves us, however, to examine the possible repercussions to a system of compensation that places the services of the technician above those of the operator or a fellow technician whose services to the ship might be arbitrarily deemed less important.

However valuable the services of the technician, however high his aptitude for the sciences, mathematics, or manipulation of tools, he still is one small part of a great team. There are sixty-two ratings in the Navy. The technical ratings provide the equipment, repair it, maintain it, but it is the operators of this equipment who determine the success of the ship in battle. Fortunately, the technician and operator are combined to a great extent in one man in the Navy. True, some of us are operators more than technicians, but where this occurs you will find that a requirement for a wider if not deeper knowledge or increased military duties and responsibilities compensates.

If the Air Force plan carries for all services and the Cordiner Committee sells the Congress on the extra monies for the technicians, it may well be a boon to the combatant readiness of the Air Force, but it can do incalculable harm to the Navy. As hitherto pointed out, only 8% of the Air Force flies into battle, whereas all sailors take their chances together in their ships. Some may take more risks than others, but this is taken care of in hazardous duty pay. To pay a restricted group of eight to ten ratings a higher gratuity for their services than fifty other shipmates in different ratings, all dedicated to the same mission, to fight the ship, could not help but be prejudicial to good morale. This has been tried before and abandoned by the Navy. At one time, in the days of Engineer-in-Chief Isherwood and up to World War I, engineering ratings received a higher pay than deck ratings. Everyone was overawed in those days by the turbines, boilers, and reciprocating engines, as they are today by the varied electronics and missile devices. So all the good men rushed to the engineering spaces, where it is agreed good men are needed. But in the area of operations, the officers found they could not do it all by themselves. They needed help from competent enlisted personnel, too. So, in the 1916 pay bill, experience dictated that if there was a need for a rating, there was also a need for giving it equal treatment with the other ratings, and all petty officers, regardless of their specialty, were henceforth paid according to their class categories.

It must be remembered that this extra training and knowledge of the technician, and for hypothesis, may we restrict this sacred word to the electronics experts, missile men, jet experts, et al., is received at Navy expense. Throughout all his long periods of schooling, the technician’s pay went on and so did his privileges. He was fed; his liberty was of the best; he was with his family. And yet, insofar as his usefulness to a Navy ship was concerned, he was nothing more than a promissory note. The ships still patrolled in the Formosa Straits. The Sixth Fleet still steamed its endless mission the length of the Mediterranean littoral. So while the technician was becoming learned and educated at naval expense, the operator was at school in the great sea of experience. His school was his ship. Here he learned to steer and navigate, to keep his throttle tuned to that of a sister ship while fueling and provisioning, to run his high line and put the principle of “yard and stay” to work, at twelve knots, so all could eat, and the ship would again be “chock-a-block” with stores and ammunition—and ready for battle. This is no undermining of the technician. He is usually a gifted man. We need him. We appreciate him. But the technician cannot lose a battle by a poor decision. By poor planning he may effect it, but it is difficult to see how he can lose one. His is the tempo of what the poet Shelley called silence, quietness, and slow time. He has time and must take his time as he plies his trade. He can guess wrong and get away with it, with impunity to himself at any rate. Who can gainsay him? The responsibilities of the operator whose equipment he is servicing continue. The technician can only lighten the operator’s load, not relieve him of it.

There is no second chance for the signalman who at thirty knots mistakes “nine turn” for “turn nine”; or for the OOD or captain, who in a critical moment orders “Hard Right Rudder” instead of “Hard Left Rudder”; or for the helmsman who goes left when right is the ticket; or for the navigator who misses a turn in piloting; or for the boilerman on the “checks” who doesn’t keep “half a glass” full; or for the pilot who misses a signal from the LSO with the wires and barriers down; or for the gunner who fires a “squatted gun”; or lastly for the boatswain and his mates whose quick thinking and action spell success or failure for the “Eldredge Moor.” These men are all operators. They have to be right the first time. When they miss, the ship misses, or the task force, or even the country. A former commanding officer of mine, now long retired, once took a lot of slack out of me by saying, “We are both living for that twenty minutes of our lives when to act wrong may mean the loss of all we stand for.” When this officer distinguished himself during the war as the commanding officer of a cruiser, I was not surprised. He was an operator. General Kenny, who commanded the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific in World War II, openly wondered why a certain officer was sent to his command. As the general commented in his memoirs, “He was no operator, and the kids knew it.” The decision of Commander McCluskey to go beyond the “point of no return” with his dive bombers was the decision of an operator. It has been called the great decision of the Battle of Midway.

The operator often has to fall back on the basic resources of the sailor and seaman. If the Loran fails, he still has his sextant, the stars, the sun, sounding lines, and dead reckoning. If the fathometer fails, he still has the leadline. The leadsman’s heave, and then his lyrics, “a quarter less five,” “by the mark seven,” “going ahead slowly,” now so often ignored, have been a song of assurance to captains and navigators down through the ages. It is a sweet sounding tune to the seaman. Let it continue. Or the gyro might suddenly tumble. No matter. The competent navigator will still function with a pocket compass, if he has a will to. If he really is a sailor, the tides, the current, the wind will not unnerve him. He will either make them his friend or neutralize them by his seamanship.

Electronics devices are aids and nothing else. The seaman who relies upon them implicitly may well fall into a trap wired for electronics. The many disasters at sea in recent months should make one think. The whistle, the lookout, and a speed that will permit stopping within one-half the visible distance in a fog are still “musts” in law, prudence, and plain good sense. Radar is merely something extra. Watertight bulkheads avail nothing, if watertight doors and hatches are not closed. There has always been some confused thinking on the true meaning of one blast on the siren. Many associate it with only collision drill. Actually, it has only one meaning: Close all watertight doors! It is actually an order from the OOD to all hands to do just that. At its best it is sounded not at impact or imminence, but when collision is even suspected as a possibility. There is no doubt that a more strict adherence to the principles of damage control, or the presence of a repair party trained along conventional Navy lines, could have saved some or all of the merchants ships that have been lost these last few years.

The faith of the technician in his gadgets is laudable. But the wise operator usually has a ship to worry about, not just a gadget, and must not share this faith blindly. Admiral Rozhdestvenski and his captains of the old Imperial Russian Navy were once so blinded. They were all sailing vessel men, and they were overawed by the specialists they commanded in the steam driven ironclads. Admiral Togo of the Imperial Japanese Navy was not so overawed, and his victory at Tsushima is a monument to his success in taking technical progress in his stride and making it what it must ever remain, the servant of command. Just as her designer showed with mathematics to Captain Smith of the Titanic why his ship had to go down, so, too, the technician must give way to the operator, and, if he wears both hats, give his operational duties precedence.

Several years ago in the Proceedings, the commanding officer of an Essex-class carrier told of his experiences in placing a first line carrier back in commission, and his amazement at the number of line officers on board who were not qualified to stand an OOD watch underway. His efforts to correct this condition made interesting and informative reading and were a tribute to this officer’s leadership. You can take it from one who has worked with junior officers for years, that there has been a marked decline in the interest in a “day’s work in navigation” that was once required of all line officers once a month. One can’t help but feel as he sees successful captains and flag officers handle with finesse their ships and squadrons, that their operational success can be traced to their enthusiasm in learning the ways of the sea as junior officers. Whatever lethargy exists can be blamed on the belief that electronics devices alone will do the job. In most instances, say 90% of the time, they will, but the passing mark at sea is 100%, no more no less.

It is noted with pleasure that the signalman rate is soon to be restored. This is certainly long overdue recognition for a group of operations petty officers whose pride in their calling was second to none. When one looks back on their wizardry, and the wizardry in handling them of the flag lieutenant, or a chief of staff who kept the signal hopper filled with swift mooring board solutions by the deft use of his fingers and hand alone, one still stands in awe. There was no CIC with a panacea for everything in those days. And to complete the picture one can see the silent admiral, moving in with his experience with an occasional quiet word or nod to the chief of staff, and the quick responses of the conning officer to the “execute.” We must not forget the helmsman who could as easily have been a seaman, gunner’s mate, or torpedoman, as a quartermaster, or in the bowels of the ships the boys on the burners and throttles who were part of the operational team. These men, all of them, were operators and still are.

Quartermasters on small ships strive valiantly to match the prowess of the signalman, but their efforts are usually unavailing. True, a QM can learn to use the instruments of visual communications, but his efforts to excel are diluted by his other duties. I have yet to see one who seemed to function instinctively on the signal bridge as the old signalman did. The signalman’s advice on tactics was invaluable. He knew ships not just by their numbers but by differences in physical characteristics: This tanker had a jumbo boom; the Portland’s after stack was lower than the Indianapolis’s; the Idaho’s antenna rig was different. There was not a ship in the fleet these boys couldn’t give you a running summary on. They ran taut bridges and were unexcelled as petty officers. I could not match them, but I realized a profit just by trying to. Like a loxodromic curve I approached but never equalled their ability. But all of a sudden it was decided their days were over, and one of them, much moved, wrote their swan song:

THE LAY OF THE LAST SIGNALMAN^*

(With apologies to The Communicator)

 

On a thickly-wooded sponson, where the last projector stands,

The museum pair of hand-flags hanging idly in my hands,

With my jargon half-forgotten, of my stock-in-trade bereft,

I wonder what’s ahead of me—the only bunting left.

 

The relics of my ancient craft have vanished one by one.

The cruiser arc, the morse flag and manoeuv’ring lights have gone,

And I hear they’d be as useless in the final global war

As the helio, the fog-horn and the masthead semaphore.

 

The mast is sprouting gadgets like a nightmare Christmas tree.

There are whips and stubs and wave-guides where my halliards used to be.

And I couldn’t hoist a tack-line through that lunatic array,

For at every height and angle there’s a dipole in the way.

 

The alert and hawk-eyed signalman is rendered obsolete

By the electrically-operated Optics of the Fleet,

And the leaping barracuda or the charging submarine

Can be sighted as a blob upon a fluorescent screen.

 

To delete the human error, to erase a noble breed,

We rely upon a relay, and we pin our faith to Creed,

So we press a button, make a switch and spin a little wheel,

And it’s cent per cent efficient—when we’re on an even keel.

 

But again I may be needed, for the time will surely come

When we have to talk in silence, and the modern stuff is dumb,

When the signal lantern’s flashing or the flags are flying free—

It was good enough for Nelson, and it’s good enough for me.

F.S.B.

We must not condemn the authorities who eliminated the signal man from the scheme of things. Logic was entirely on their side. It was noted that twenty-one of the requirements for signalman matched those of quartermaster. It was also known that on the smaller ships they were one gang. And as a final clincher, it was pointed out that TBS, UHF, VHF would take over and end their usefulness. But that day has yet to arrive, and the Bureau is to be applauded for reversing itself and restoring a bunch of good fellows to their rightful place in the heat and heart of naval operations.

What the future holds for the signalman is uncertain. It is a fact that since his merger with quartermaster, good signalmen have become a rarity. The merger of these two old rates took place in 1947. By 1956 some signalmen were so bad that you had to meet them on the beach to tell them what you were signalling about. The quartermaster similarly deteriorated. It is not that what was required of these men was beyond the ken of the average man, but that what they had to know had to be immediately applicable and required constant practice. It probably would have been much more workable to have merged the signalman and radioman, and the quartermaster and radarman. All these rates are primarily operational. They get no second chance to correct a mistake themselves. If they are saved from a mistake, it might well have to be by that operator of operators, the OOD, or that chief of operators, “the Old Man.” The restoration of the signalman rating also removes the competition between the Operations and Navigation departments for the best quartermasters. This was always a minor irritant and source of possible friction.

At the same time that the QM and SM rating was merged, several administrative ratings were split in twain. This move cannot be criticized, as the workload was unbearable in some instances. The same yardstick cannot be used to measure the requirements of all ratings. It must be remembered that a mistake in Administration, although it may embarrass, delay, annoy, cannot kill an operation instantly. A mistake by an operator can at the same time make all for naught the efforts of his fellow shipmates on the team. The understanding between operators, administrators, and technicians is based on the fraternal feeling of one shipmate for another. They are all interdependent on each other. No good could come of rewarding one group for their services beyond that of another. It would introduce fission into a service whose forte has always been fusion. It would threaten with a nadir the shipmate spirit which hitherto has known only the zenith. Lastly, the law of the market place, for the first time, would take precedence over a spirited desire to serve. The market place has its rightful place in the free enterprise system it is the Navy’s mission to protect. But the fo’c’sle and hangar deck are not market places, nor are they auctioneering spaces where the services of one sailor can be bid for against another.

As said heretofore, there has been little comment by the Navy on this question of higher pay for technicians or improved opportunities for advancement for them. But the insertion of a few quotes from the June 30th edition of the Air Force Times will indicate the tenor of feeling in our sister service on the subject: A master sergeant asks: “After reading about the specialist plan we wonder why we ever bothered to become non-coms in the first place. Further why should we continue to be NCO’s if the other men (specialists) can take the fast route to the top pay grades. It puzzles us to reason why we should accept responsibilities of NCO’s for the same pay as “irresponsible specialists!” An Air Force Airman Second Class also reminds us “that spirit is needed, too.” As if to endorse this last remark, the head of the special committee on pay, Mr. Ralph J. Cordiner, has this to say: “Pay alone will not do the trick: [it takes] a feeling of belonging. This means pride and continuity in the job, individual rights and dignity. This means status and respect as an individual, not as a number on a time clock. Good Bosses. This means leadership, exemplified in superiors who command respect, and treat employees fairly.”

Inevitably, this problem of holding good men, so-called technicians or otherwise, or in attracting high caliber recruits to the fleet, becomes part of the constant one of enlistment and reenlistment. Presently, a man may be enlisted in the regular Navy as a seaman or airman recruit. In the Naval Reserve he can also be enlisted as a Contraction Recruit. If he is a high school graduate, we can guarantee him a school in one of four programs and even prefix the words high school to his rating to make him stand out as something special. The four programs embrace 54 schools in the Electronics, Aviation, Hospital and Dental fields and a general field which is of wider scope than the others. This program makes a tremendous impression on parents and older persons. It is necessary and enlightened. But, at its best, it is only another tool of the “salesman- recruiter.” In itself it is nice to have as window dressing for the applicants, but it leaves most of them only lukewarm.

It is something else that attracts him to our service. The writer has four years of recruiting duty, one following thirteen years at sea and now another one following six years at sea, upon which to base this observation. As petty officer in charge of four different recruiting sub and branch stations, thanks to the loyalty and energy of his shipmates, he has seen more than average results obtained. For instance, in July, 1956, we went over our quota by 300% at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, recruiting branch station. Our methods might merit examination. Let it be assured that they rested firmly on the keelson of a ship. Schools and programs were given only passing attention. At Woodbridge (New Jersey) High School in May, 1956, the regular and reserve recruiters of Perth Amboy, the latter being from the reserve armory of that city, spoke in relays to different shifts of students over a period of four hours. The greatest stress was placed on the greatest school of all, the ship. We told them—and even repeated it slowly for them—of the Navy oath, and of the many who have died in loyalty and deference to that oath. Of the shipmate spirit that welded all into a great fighting team, of the captain of that team who spoke for all of them. The new carrier Forrestal and the missile ship Boston were at that time much in the news. We capitalized on this. We explained that the captains of these ships had trained for nearly thirty years for these billets. It was pointed out that no civilian mayor had this training.

But we told them the Navy was fun, too. Athletics, travel, adventure can be meaningful if you wrap them up in a few good stories. For instance, we told them how we made fun out of a chore while in Greece by testing our magnetic compasses for moment and sensitivity on the hill of the Acropolis at the site of the Parthenon. This intrigued them. Inevitably the class comedian will be asking you about the distaff side of the human race. You convert this into an asset by quickly telling of the thousands of proud husbands and fathers like his own who man the ships of the fleet. It must be remembered that the boys in high school whom you meet are between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. You will fail to sell them on the Navy if you appear pompous. You are sure to win them if you are sincere, and they are most impressed when you tell them you need them and want them on your team. You pose the Navy as a challenge to their budding young manhood. And does it succeed? On July 30, 1956, we shipped most of the backfield of Woodbridge and Perth Amboy High School teams—arch rivals—together under the buddy plan. We made no special promises to them. Several of them were going into naval aviation. But we stressed that we wanted not just a flyer or servicer of planes, but a sailor who would do his job on a carrier as well as the other sailors on board did. We played favorites with no rate. We wanted operators. We wanted technicians. But we laid no technical or electronics snare for them. We merely appealed to their red blood and red, white and blue hearts. It is a great mistake to think this generation is indifferent to the high points of our history. We have found out otherwise. They get as much of a thrill out of the exploits of John Paul Jones and Stephen Decatur as any of us ever did. Don’t sell this generation short. Let us harness their hearts as well as their heads. Whether they be in true descent, or but one hour adopted, we can safely lay our bets on these sons of those once embattled farmers.

The reenlistment problem appears to be something else, and it is the principal one that the Cordiner committee has been asked to solve. But actually the reenlistment problem is tied to the initial procurement one. In our office at Perth Amboy is a picture of every man we enlisted these past eighteen months. The picture is taken of these men at the training center. They are all smiling, confident, spirited. The training centers do a wonderful job. We recruiters carried the ball about ten yards. The training center has taken it another forty to the fifty yard line. Up to now they are all ours. So it is out in the fleet, between the fifty yard line and the goal, or reenlistment line, that we will win or lose them as career sailors. They will be there for three years and actually the job at sea should be a cinch. Don’t tell me a recruiting office or a training center has more opportunities to show what a high class service we are than a ship.

Our goal should be that of the institutional advertiser, who sells not just a product, but who aspires to make a customer and friend for his firm. We will never do it if we bombard him eternally with the merits of electronics, jets, missile devices, or any other specialty. We must sell him on his worth as a fellow fighting man who will be our shipmate through the years. It is on this spiritual level that we must win our battle to keep these men on our team. This should not be too surprising. Isn’t that how we got them to join the team in the first place? The loyal men of the Fleet Reserve Association, of which I am proud to be a member of twelve years standing, are evidence that if you once sell a man on the Navy, he will be a sailor not for just a day, or an hour, but all his life.

In this respect let us not overlook the value of the Naval Reserve or naval veterans. Within the past two months at Perth Amboy we have enlisted five men at least whose fathers veered them to our service because they liked what they saw while serving with us in World War II. There should be a lesson for us in that. Even if a man for some compelling reason does not stay with us, we have not lost him if he will settle on us as his avocation in Naval Reserve, or even remains our good friend who will some day bring to us his son. And what about his son? He is every bit as good as the bluejacket of a decade or more ago who amidst the debris, the oil, the wreckage of his ship could still shake his fist at the enemy, because the enemy could not fracture his fighting heart. And you will keep this boy the same way you obtained him, not by a bonus to a special elite of them. If one group is worthy of remuneration, they all are. For they all have one mission, and that is to fight that ship to the last. He will need priming occasionally. Don’t we all? But prime him by your leadership. And this is an all hands job. So let us be bold, fair, and unafraid, for we will not be alone. American sailors of two centuries will be looking down upon us.