Thursday, May 9, 2019

OUR ENGLAND

The ship did very very well. It's hard to believe it only served for 2 years. This was back in the days of offline encryption. The amount of decryption that ship's crew had to be doing is staggering.


6 comments:

Brig said...

Thanks for the interesting read. I wouldn't be aware without you pointing the way to background info...

HMS Defiant said...

I believe you to be one of the few to follow the links and read more. There are a gazillion sorties and histories out there. There are also quite a few stories. I wanted you to know that when I do 'fale to spell' it usually is mostly by design.

capt fast said...

from a certain perspective, good things often happen when one is part of a well trained and disciplined team with a clearly defined goal and leaders who went about it in the proper manner. going from a military life to civilian life, it is one of the few things I truly missed.

HMS Defiant said...

I came into the Navy and then sortied dozens of times over the decades. I never so much as once did the battleforce workups, GITMO, team training drills and any, not any certifications and finished as OPS deploying whole squadrons around the world who were all beautifully trained and certified for months before deployment. The little frisson of joy that brought me never stopped. I once put together a scratch unit of men from 16 states and deployed with them 3 days later as a unit to Kuwait. I chose them all, knew about 3/4 of them when I pulled them. We did just fine.

I hope that somewhere there's a guy just like me still in a position to do that tonight when the STU rings and somebody says, "hey, we need help."

I might write about how ASU Bahrain changed over the years I knew it, lived there, worked there, deployed there, served on the staff there but it was unrecognizable the last time I was there. The old stuff was still there, like a relic or like Stonehenge. I'm sure that's all been bulldozed by now but holy cow did al Juffair change as 4000 or more people starting doing the jobs of 80 men.

VADM Ulrich is not known to me personally but I remember when he was COMSIXTHFLT that their SIPR home page changed and had a continuous scrolling message that simply said, "in world war II there were 87 men on the staff of C6F and they were controlling the Med with over a thousand plane flights and 600 ship movements/day and now there are just 15,000 of us to do that for 3 planes and 2 ships a day.

and people told us decades ago that computers were "labor saving devices".

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

I have long been disappointed in the USN. We were promised that there would always be an ENGLAND in the US Navy.

The JOHN C BUTLERshad the best sound systems of the various DE classes. With the amazing job the crew of the ENGLAND did with a BUCKLEY class' sound system, just think what they would have done with a BUTLER?

They might even have gone home unscathed, a 5"/38 has a lot more punch than a 3"/50, and has a proximity fuse.

BADGER PAW SALUTE to the greatest sub hunter of them all USS ENGLAND!

HMS Defiant said...

You are right! Until I left we had an England. It was a cruiser I shared pier space wtih in San Diego. OTOH, when I served with her my main battery was, 3"50s. It is hard to believe how long ago that was.