1971 ❖ MOTHBALLED WARSHIPS

 

MOORED TO THE PAST

The mothballed fleet anchored
in Sinclair Inlet, near Bremerton, WA. 
Photo by Barry Sweet 
Dated 5 December 1971
Original from the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society.

"Out in the mists of Puget Sound the ghost fleet, home from war, sleeps with its memories.

Veterans of sea battles that have reddened American history, they are mothballed, technically. But actually they are dead, or dying, robbed even of gender "she" men have always given to the vessels that carried them to sea.

Armed with nothing more lethal than the cutlery in their galleys, the cocooned warships at the naval base here are referred to only by name, sexless, grayng survivors waiting for death. Only their names will live.

The battleships, last of their breed, dinosaurs of the sea: MISSOURI, where the savage war that began for the United States 30 years ago at Pearl Harbor was finally to end, NEW JERSEY, mothballed a second time after duty in Vietnam. 

The carriers: HORNET, an ancient name in the Navy, she picked up an Apollo crew once but now lies flightless, spent, and hulking at the dock; BON HOMME RICHARD, a name written in blood by John Paul Jones.

The cruisers: BALTIMORE doomed to the scrapper's torch along with ROANOKE, PITTSBURGH, QUINCY––she carried President Roosevelt through the German submarine packs of the North Atlantic to a wartime conference in Europe.

And the drones, the faceless trekkers that transported the troops to Iwo and Leyte and Okinawa, the cargo vessels that plied back and forth from Tedium to Boredom with their homely cargoes of shoes and C-rations and toilet paper.

Home now, alone, shackled to the shore, their ports welded shut like blind eyes. The stripped masts of the tanker destroyers stand above them like crosses in a graveyard marking the end of a ship's core, her soul.

The Yard rings with the din of ship's work, but the waterfront where the mothballed ships lie chained and warped to each other is still, with the melancholy of a nursing home. 

"It's kind of sad," said Capt. Alan Dougall, commander of the 185-man caretaking crew of the 102 ships stored here. "It's as if they were tugging at their lines asking, "Why can't we go to sea? That's what we were designed for."

Maybe some will. The Jersey made it, briefly. For years a salt tablet lay symbolically in the watch officer's stand-up desk in the once sweltering engine room, a token gift from the last gang that banked her boilers to those who would one day relight them. But it is chill there, now. Footfalls echo and are gone. So is the tablet, someone's souvenir. 

In the QUINCY's wardroom a naked bulb reflects on a mural, a map of the world drudely painted in reds and blues by an unremembered artist. Artist, where are you now? Duluth? Abilene? 

The artist had painted in voyages that carried QUINCY through World War II from launching in the Massachusetts town of her namesake in the yard once run by John Kennedy's father.

There was D-Day, shelling the coast of France, Toulon and the invasion of southern France; Okinawa and the Kamikazes; Malta with the President. Had he sat late into the night in some blacked-out cabin measuring his future works to Churchill or de Gaulle? There is no plaque to tell, only a curled piece of cardboard warning that once there was "Wet Paint."

The artist noted QUINCY's crew downed a Japanese plane at Okinawa. And the pilot, is he remembered, is he mourned? Ghosts, so many, many ghosts.

A reclining chair in the wardroom was thrown back as if waiting still for the man who left it to stand watch. Other chairs were piled on tables. 

A tag on the safe in the dentist's office read, "This safe is set on 1000." All in the ship are. QUINCY no longer has any secrets.

When alive, at sea, a ship is a fugue of sound: the pulse of the engines deep in the ship; the creak of her bulkheads as she powers through a sea; a bosn's pipe and "now hear this" over the squawk box; voices of sailors bound up with their ship on a nation's purpose.

"Are your lips dry yet?" asks Lt. Cdr. B.R. (Bunny) Love, the fleet's security officer. Dehumidifiers preserve the interiors of the ships that are so tightly sealed they're even dustless.

Love leads the way topside. The salt air has a tang. QUINCY's air is dry, musty, like a tomb's. The hatch clangs shut, steel echoing against steel through the ship. Then silence. QUINCY is alone again.

Will the QUINCY ever sail again?

"That depends on the world situation," says Love.

If there's a need, crews would swarm over the old cruiser sandblasting off her protective oil and paint coating. Electronics would be put back. All the alterations and modernization required for commissioned vessels of her class would be done. 

Divers would free her underwater outlets, sealed with rounded fittings so they can be knocked off without having to drydock. The igloos over her smaller gun mounts would be removed and her weapons installed.

During the Korean conflict, the Navy demothballed ships in 30 to 60 days. But now the enemy of the ghost fleet is time. In the age of missiles, who needs a cruiser, and one pushing 30 years old at that?

But you never know. So the Navy husbands its reserves in graveyards at Vallejo, CA, San Diego, Norfolk, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, Orange, TX, and Pearl Harbor, as well as Bremerton. 

If the cost of potential refurbishing becomes too great, if contingency plans no longer include the possible need for a QUINCY, say, then she goes for scrap.

Meanwhile,  the ships wait, like a forgotten child's toy, a folder in a file cabinet, unremembered except in the minds of the men who knew them.

Former sailors write asking for a souvenir such as the steering wheel or a porthole cover, but things like that are turned over to the naval curator in Washington who stores them dutifully away in case posterity ever wants reassurance that, yes, there was once a QUINCY or a NEW JERSEY or a PITTSBURG. 

" If the ship has teak decks, we even save a couple of pieces of that," Dougal said.

Perhaps the most famous teak of all is the foredeck of MISSOURI, where Japan signed the surrender. There's a plaque marking the spot, and more than 170,000 visitors a year board the queen of the ghost fleet to view it.

But at night she, too, is alone. Her silhouette is broken only by an alarm light to warn the night watchman if she should suddenly start taking water.

Her huge 16-inch guns, that could throw a shell as far as the snowtops of the Olympic mountains in the distance, are capped and point innocently across the Navy Yard toward the town's business district beyond the gate.

Perhaps because of her history, MISSOURI will be allowed to live. As a monument, a relic in the attic, but to stride the sea, as in her days of glory? It's hard to imagine. 

The ships of Bremerton lie moored to the past." 

Words by Sid Moody for the Seattle Daily Times,
published 5 December, 1971,