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A single question bouncing around in a m‘nd as agile as Arleigh “31-knot” ourke’s can prompt a wide-ranging response. Last year, the admiral took part a presentation at the Naval Reserve Center in Washington, D.C., answering Questions from the audience gathered 'here. One question—what did Admiral °urke think about the Navy’s newer classes of ships, such as the Ticonderoga cruisers, Spruance destroyers, and Ol- 1Ver Hazard Perry frigates—touched off ull that follows.
About four or five years ago, when Admiral James L. Holloway III was “°ing a superior job as Chief of Naval ^Perations, I used to heckle him a bit along with Admiral Robert B. Carney, ^ho is a very good friend of mine. So Admiral Holloway said, in effect, “Now, y°u don’t really know what the hell you’re talking about. You are not familiar '''Ph the modern equipment; you don’t now electronics; you don’t know gas turbines; there are so many things—you °n t know what a thruster is, let alone m°dern aircraft. You don’t really know, and you ought to go to sea.” We agreed and said, “Fine, let’s go to sea.”
S°, he gave us permission to go to sea—he was very careful so that we (W°uldn’t get any pay for it. But we went t0 sea in the USS Caron (DD-970), "'hich is a first-class destroyer. She was a |*evv ship, but she had been very well ested, and I found out later that she had *he best set of preliminary tests of any estroyer up to date, which of course is 'vhy we got to ride her.
We went to Norfolk the night before, and we received a briefing from Commander in Chief, Atlantic, and all the other professional experts. During that Pefing, they gave us a schedule of what 'Ve Would be doing the next day. And we the schedule looked fine, we °ught, but could we modify it just a wee bit? They said, “Certainly, anything y°u Want.” So we changed a few of the lngs. Now we’re interfering old men, and we’re liable to get into things, so they Ranted us to stand clear of operations so e Wouldn’t get hurt.
So, to demonstrate antisubmarine war- re operations they asked us to stay on e bridge of the Caron, and they would W'S the Ainsworth (FF-1090) up along- Ue- close aboard, and operate her heli- °Pter. They said that it’d be a better spot than anyplace else to watch the evolution. Fine, fine. The only thing was that as the Ainsworth started to come up alongside, she went dead in the water. And several hours later, she was still dead in the water.
Then we were shown a five-inch rapid-fire gun, the ship’s total gun armament on the bow. They were telling us the number of shells per minute the gun would shoot, and we said, “Well, the number of bullets is important, but the number of hits are what really count, though!” So that was one of the exercises we changed just a wee bit. They were going to approach the target on our starboard bow at high speed and turn hard right, firing until the target was well on our port side, to show how this gun mount would follow through on a highspeed turn. We suggested that we close on the target to a shorter range before we started our turn and opened fire. That was done; so shortly after the Caron started her high-speed turn, the gun stopped shooting. The mount had run up against the firing stops to keep the gun from firing into the ship’s bow structure. During that short period, there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. Of course, the ship’s crew knew this would happen at short range, but they may have forgotten they were demonstrating the ship’s combat capability and that particular maneuver was not a combat-effective one. These picayunish examples are mentioned to emphasize that preprogramming may sometimes not be enough in battle.
On the bridge of the USS Caron (DD-970) with her skipper in 1977, Admiral Arleigh Burke got a look at the fighting capabilities of modern-day destroyers from the deck plates.
So, nobody knows what these modem ships will or will not do. They won’t really know until they go in to battle. But one of the things you active duty people have got to make sure of is that your equipment has to work just like you do; it has to work every time. People get excited in battle; they make mistakes. And if there are going to be any mistakes made any time, they’re going to be made under the tension of your first battle. And people do make mistakes, and they should be corrected automatically. In the old days before computers, corrections were made by other members of the crew. Some people made mistakes, and when something went wrong, other people had to step in and make corrections. Very few people that I know of have ever gone into their first battle, and come out of it feeling that they had done very well. They know they didn’t do very well. This
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^edings / January 1984
happens for two or three times—and then after a while, they don’t get used to it, but they get so that they can think well.
Now, the basis of this long harangue is that the battle is won primarily by people and how well they function. If people can anticipate exactly what’s going to happen, and put it in a computer and program it exactly right and say, “This is what the enemy is going to do” and the enemy does it—which they never did for me— you’ll come out fine. The computers are much more accurate than man’s judgment. The programs are worked out in detail, and if they’re checked and double checked, they ought to be very good programs, and better than any man can do on his feet. But that works only when you’ve been able to foretell exactly what the hell is going to happen—not exactly, but generally.
Navy people on active duty now are more skillful, have better technical education, are much more technically oriented than we were 50 years ago, and spend much more time in training. After a man chooses his specialty, he must concentrate on it. There is no time left for other activities; this requires great devotion to duty, which all of you have. High-tech equipment requires tremendous attention of many expert technicians and that means there must be large numbers of qualified technical experts, or the equipment will not perform properly. Fortunately, the Navy has dedicated and qualified personnel.
After the war—and I’m going to tell another sea story now—I became very good friends with a man whom I had fought against in three good battles, Admiral Kusaka. He was the commander of the Japanese forces at Rabaul on New Britain. Every time I went to Japan I called on Admiral Kusaka. He couldn’t speak English, but I think he could read English and understand it, although Captain Tamagawa (one of the best aides I have ever had) was always there to interpret. I went to call on him several times. We would go out to his place for lunch, and right after we finished eating, he would break out the charts, the photographs, and all the data of his battle reports. He had studied those battles extremely well, and he knew exactly what I had done. He knew more about the maneuvers that I made than I did. I couldn’t remember them, but he had worked on it.
One time he said, “Admiral, why is it that you never followed your own doctrine?” And I said, “I knew you had our prewar doctrine of destroyer attacks, and I knew you had studied them.”
Admiral Kusaka then replied, “But the doctrine was extremely good. We used it, too. Why didn’t you follow it?” So I simply said, “What were the results, Admiral?” That made him pause, because he knew the results were that he had been caught by surprise each time, for he thought differently than we did. He interpreted doctrine as meaning orders that had to be followed without any deviation. So, in a sense, he had preprogrammed us—except that we did not do it that way.
But then he said, “One time we were bombarded at Rabaul”—you had to go down through St. George Channel to do this, and it was a silly thing to do. You should never tangle with shore batteries when you don’t have maneuvering room. That’s a good rule, passed down a couple hundred years ago; it’s still sound. So he asked, “Why did you come down there and bombard the installations in Rabaul? You knew your little five-inch guns wouldn’t do any harm. We were underground.” I explained that we had been caught in one more battle than we had anticipated. We were delayed and there was no way to get the hell out of there except to go through St. George Channel. So I thought we would just shoot anyway and do some good, maybe.
What we had intended to do was to go up to the harbor north of Rabaul—■ Simpson Harbor—where many Japanese merchant ships and men-of-war were anchored. We were going to make a high-speed sweep in Simpson Harbor. A high-speed sweep, with guns blazing and torpedoes all set for short, shallow runs would probably have surprised the Japanese, and we could have sunk every ship in the harbor in a few minutes. Admiral Kusaka said, “You’re a lucky man. The week before that, I had mined Simpson Harbor, and we had no ships in there.” That wise, fine, Japanese naval officer
As I Recall . . .
Operating with
the Little Beavf
Shortly after 1 was commissioned in 1942, I was assigned to the USS Converse (DD-509), a Fletcher-class destroyer. My first job was first lieutenant in the gunnery department, and I also stood bridge watches.
After training hard for combat duty, the ship arrived in the South Pacific in May 1943. I loved that experience— maneuvering ships and changing formations. We used to have destroyer screens around the large combatants, and the Converse would change from one spot to another, whenever the formation reversed course; to me that was an ideal situation. I had a good picture of relative movement with my math background and my ability to work
maneuvering boards. It was a lot of fun.
In the South Pacific, shortly after we got there, then-Captain Arleigh Burke was on the scene. We had heard a lot about him—that he was aggressive, “gung ho,” extroverted, reactive, and anxious to do something. We had taken a licking in the South Pacific in the first days. He was forming a squadron of new 2,100-ton destroyers, Destroyer Squadron (DesRon) 23.
There were eight ships in the squadron. Captain Burke’s flagship was the Charles Ausburne (DD-570), and we had the Thatcher (DD-514), the Dyson (DD-572), the Spence (DD-512), and the Stanly (DD-478), although the
Stanly was not with us too often. There were also the Claxton (DD-571), the Foote (DD-511), and, of course, the Converse. The Converse spent much of the time as flagship of the second division in the squadron, DesDiv 46.
The commander of the second division was Commander Bernard L. Austin, known as “Count.” Actually, Captain Burke called him “Long Count,” because when Austin would get on the TBS—as we called the voice radio in those days—he’d talk for what seemed forever. Sometimes we had communications drills in which we’d count through numbers to test the circuits. Typically, a short count would suffice, but whenever Commander Austin got
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Proceedings / January 1984