A Very Ominous Thing

Navy Vice Admiral William L. Read graduated from the Naval Academy in 1949 and would retire in 1979, with command of Naval Surface Force, Atlantic Fleet, as his final tour. As a commander in 1966, he took command of the guided-missile destroyer leader USS King (DLG-10) and headed to Vietnam, as he recalls in these edited excerpts from his oral history.

Before we deployed, I put in requests for information on the enemy order of battle. We got back sort of nameplate data on the Styx missile and on the chaff round—altitude, where it would explode, etc., but no advice on how to use it.

So, on the way over, we took these data and wrote “The Tonkin Gulf Defense Doctrine,” tailored for our ship. It was a step-by-step guide for the watch officer. “What things are going to happen that would lead you to think an attack is being generated?”

We set up a system of what we were looking for. If you got a fast-moving target on radar, for instance, what do you do to develop it and find out if it really is a target? The Tonkin Gulf Defense Doctrine then got to what defensive measures we would take.

The only defense we had against the Styx missile was direct gunfire, because we were not going to see it soon enough to fire a Terrier and then the mortar. So we developed a system whereby the officer of the deck would put the rudder hard over away from the threat axis. Then the gunner’s mates would fire mortar shells in rapid succession. The idea was to make a string of chaff bursts that would swing as the ship was swinging, so the mortar operator wouldn’t have to change the azimuth. Just lock it and keep firing.

No missiles were fired at the King, Read noted, but the ship did hit a mine. While no one was seriously injured, the blast knocked out almost all the ship’s electronic equipment and a main engine.

From that standpoint, it was a very ominous thing, because it said the ships were so soft that if you gave them a good jolt, you rattled their brains, and they were out of business. In effect, the mine effected a mission kill against the King.

We lost all sonar, all the underwater capability, all the fire control radars, all the search radars, and virtually all communications. A lot of it was simple stuff, a breaker was tripped.

The Navy learned in World War I with its submarines that you have to design the breakers for a certain amount of shock. But those lessons had been lost, because after the war there was a philosophy in Navy shipbuilding and ship configuration that in effect said, if you get tagged, it’s over. The emphasis was on how to defeat the enemy or the weapon that was thrown at you, but if you got hit, there was not much you could do.

The King’s hull was not penetrated, so there was no flooding, but the ship shook “like a dog coming out of the water.”

I was in the combat information center when it happened. A lot of equipment was mounted on bulkheads, so it got a good shaking. I think a lot of the electronic damage was related to that.

The problem with the main engine was that the blast had shaken the main steam line so much that two or three gaskets had failed. We had 1,200-pound steam escaping into the engine room.

The crew cut out sheet metal bulkheads between some officer staterooms with tin snips, made gaskets out of this sheet metal, and inserted these things in the steam line. We put three or four of them in, slugged up the bolts, gave it a test, and by God it held steam. We were back underway with full power.

We had all our capability back in 18 or 20 hours. The radars were the hardest thing, but the electronics technicians were good. That was one of the benefits of being a Naval Tactical Data System ship. We had extra talent in these areas. It was a challenge, but they just wanted to get everything rolling, and they did.