NOTE: This is a narrative about various places and incidents which may help fill in some of the Prime’s history for the period June 1958 to June 1960. It is not necessarily in chronological sequence. I’m confident of the events described, but since I did not keep a personal journal, perhaps someone with access to Prime’s logs could verify the actual sequence of the events and straighten out any errors.

JOINING THE USS PRIME

I was ordered to report to the captain of the USS Prime in Long Beach in June 1958, just days after commissioning and graduating college. The orders stated that I was to be the engineering officer. However, I was sent directly to a five week prospective engineering officer school at the San Diego Navy Yard. During a portion of the time I was in school, the Prime was in a private shipyard in San Diego, not too far from the Navy Yard. The captain took advantage of that situation to provide me with more time to get acquainted with the ship by having me spend evenings aboard the ship.

When I completed the engineer school and joined the Prime at Long beach, I did not immediately assume the position of engineering officer. The operations officer billet was vacant and the outgoing engineering officer was still aboard, so I served as operations officer for a few months while simultaneously learning from the outgoing engineering officer. When we finally received an operations officer and the outgoing engineering officer had departed, the officer ranks were set for a while.

I was quite surprised when I reported aboard the Prime and found that LCDR Wallace Gabriel was the captain, because he had been one of my instructors at my NROTC unit at Northwestern a few years earlier. I found his approach as captain serious, but not in-your-face stern. He utilized his XO effectively to train the three junior officers in the ways of the Navy, and to keep us in line.

LCDR Gabriel was succeeded by LCDR Randall Young about a year after I reported aboard. One of them had either just attended the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey prior to joining Prime, or immediately after departing Prime. I recall Captain Young had been in the enlisted ranks before obtaining an appointment to the Naval Academy. The two CO’s personalities were quite different, with Captain Young being more hands-on, and with a bit more of a severe manner.

The XO and navigator was LT John Nyquist. I believe he was a Naval Academy graduate, with a father who had been a high-ranking naval officer. None of the three junior officers were Academy graduates and we always felt that the XO viewed us as, well, in a different class.

The new operations officer was Ensign George Gann, in the Navy by way of the Merchant Marine Academy in Monterey. George had the most sea experience among the junior officers, not only because of the MMA, but also because his father had a sea-going sail boat and took the family on long summer sea trips. George’s father was the author Earnest Gann. George and I shared a stateroom aboard the Prime. After his Navy tour, George joined the Merchant Marine. We kept in touch occasionally for several years, but then the correspondence just stopped. Many years later, while reading one of his father’s books, I learned George had died at sea. He was on a ship coming out of Alaska one night during heavy seas, when he and another crew member went to the fantail to secure some drums. A huge wave washed George overboard, never to be seen again.

The first lieutenant and supply officer was Ensign Thomas Eleanor, a graduate of Auburn University. His accent definitely identified him as a Southerner. Tom was inventive with his mess budget, frequently providing us with special meals. After the Navy, Tom moved to Florida.

SHIP’S READINESS

Even though the ship was a few years old when I went aboard and had been through some overhauls, the MSO-class seemed to still be having teething problems. I even heard comments that the division’s mission was to get beyond the breakwater because, occasionally, one of the ships had to be towed back to the pier. The engineering officers who preceded me must have had their hands full.

While a deck hand was chipping paint on the mag reel’s drive motor one day, I noticed one of the motor’s metal feet under the coat of paint was just powder. With a motor of that horsepower, a loose motor could be very dangerous. I put a work order in to the shipyard to repair the motor and filed a recommendation with BuShips to design a fix for all MSO’s. I think the problem was that dissimilar metals in the motor housing and in the motor’s mounting base were reacting with each other, corroding the motor housing.

When I took over as engineering officer, I decided my job was to make sure we could get underway anytime the captain ordered us to. I was very fortunate to have one of the best chief engineman in the Navy (Chief Meyers?), and he was very patient and helpful with this green ensign. The chief had a smooth way of giving advice that seemed like he was just having a conversation, sort of the ‘unseen hand’ of persuasion. And he took care of his engines. For example, as soon as we came into port and were moored at the pier, he had the engine gang tending to the engines, e.g., torquing the heads while the engines were still hot. Nobody went ashore until the engine room was ready to get underway again. He felt one of the best ways to keep the engines running was to change the lube oil regularly, because of the contamination of the oil caused by diesel fuel. When the skipper asked one time why I was spending so much of my department’s budget for lube oil, I reminded him we had never had an engine problem that kept the ship from carrying out orders. But, oh, how the chief fretted when the ship had to undergo the periodic four-hour full-power test runs. He’d look at the exhaust stacks glowing cherry red and keep telling me how stupid the whole thing was, and how it didn’t prove anything, and how it was ruining his engines (as if I had the power to stop the run). His engines. I recall that one of his enginemen, when he left the Prime, took a job as the chief engineer on a tug that hauled barges up and down the Mississippi River. That was a testament to how well the chief trained his crew. I was a lucky engineering officer.

We would occasionally conduct loss of electrical power drills by turning off the main breaker without notice to the engineering gang, darkening the forward engine room except for emergency battle lanterns. The first time I witnessed it I couldn’t believe how few seconds it took for a crewman to go to the emergency generator, fire it up, bring it up to power, then sync the line and restore emergency power (for vital equipment). And, they never had a problem, no matter who was on duty. This exercise may have been a small thing but it showed how well Prime’s petty officers were performing in training their crew.

TESTING PITCH

When I went aboard Prime, the standard practice in preparation for getting the ship underway included testing the pitch control for the variable speed props. Manual controls for the pitch setting were located in the after engine room, but there were also remote controls in the wheel house. The OOD would call for a small amount of pitch (a command from the flying bridge down to the helmsman in the wheel house), then look over the side toward the aft part of the ship to see if a small amount of ripple appeared in the water. The OOD would then repeat the process for the other screw. One day we sailed over to the Seal Beach Naval Ammunition Depot (today, with rockets and such, it has been rename Seal Beach Navy Weapons Station) to take on ammunition. As we were preparing to get underway at Seal Beach for a return to Long Beach, I was hanging around the fantail talking to other crew members and enjoying a pleasant sunny day. Leaning over the after rail, I notice a small amount of ripple from one of the screws, and thought “They’re testing pitch”. But the ripple kept getting stronger and stronger. Pretty soon the ripple was practically a rooster tail behind the ship, and the ship started moving forward down the pier. The shore crew ran over to take the lines off the bollards (probably thinking we were getting underway). But by then the lines were so tight that they couldn’t lift all of the lines off. Soon, the lines started to break a few stands at a time, until all the lines broke and we were heading down the pier. Luckily, only one other ship was at the pier that day, and it was quite a ways forward of us, so the bridge was able to stop the ship before we hit anything. The problem turned out to be a failed pitch indicating repeater in the wheelhouse; it just kept indicating zero pitch, so the helmsman kept trying to add pitch waiting for the repeater to indicate the amount of pitch the OOD had called for. From that day forward, any time the ship was in close quarters, e.g., getting underway or coming into port, we used the manual controls in the after engine room for pitch control. The breaking of the lines sure showed the awesome power of the MSO ships.

TRAVELING TO WESTPAC

When the Prime stopped at Pearl, one of the crew went over on the beach, rented a car, had something to drink, then drove the car into the gate at the base (literally). He was in the brig waiting for court marshal when Prime left for Midway. Upon our return to Pearl on our way back to CONUS, he rejoined the ship because his sentence had been completed.

During the leg from Midway to Japan, Prime ran into a big storm. We had been informed a typhoon was in the area, and the division commander had ordered a course that was supposed to take us fairly safely along the very fringe of the storm. In those days before satellite photography and weather tracking, the information must have been a bit off, because we entered the storm much closer to the eye than expected. Prime was rolling so far over I kept thinking I sure hoped the ship designers knew their business when they designed our ship. At one point, I even went into the wheelhouse just to the check the clinometer, and the angles of roll made me wonder how much farther the ship could roll before the ship would fail to right itself. Things like center of gravity and center of buoyancy ran through my mind. In such heavy seas, Prime had an unusual roll. Sometimes it snapped way over, hung there for a while, and then slowly righted itself. Other times just the opposite, rolling slowly more and more and more, then snapping back. It was as if the bilge keels had no effect.

Also during our trip over to WestPac, a story went around that one of the MSO’s that was part of the minediv already in Westpac that MineDiv72 was to relieve had run aground in the Philippines, so there was a lot of buzz about that MSO captain’s career.

THE DAMAGED PROPELLER

At one point, the ship hit something underwater, but we never knew what it was. The damage resulted in Prime being detached from the rest of MineDiv72, and operating independently for a portion of the WestPac tour. Consequently, Prime never got as far south as the Philippines and Thailand, as the rest of the division did.

When we hit the object, suddenly one screw (I recall it being the starboard one) started shaking badly and we had to slow that screw down so much that we essentially were running on one screw. We limped the rest of the way to Japan on one screw. Prime was ordered to Sasebo in southern Japan for repairs.

When we arrived in Sasebo, instead of immediately going into dry dock, the Japanese shipyard insisted on bringing technicians aboard to verify the problem. We got underway for a short cruise outside the harbor while the Japanese technicians ran all over the ship measuring and recording vibrations. Their thoroughness was rather impressive.

In dry dock, we found the leading edges of one or more of the prop blades were badly bent, so the entire prop was removed to the shipyard’s shop. The shipyard shop removed the bent blades, repaired them, and then reinstalled the prop. The repair was a rather lengthy process, and my visits to the shop to check progress didn’t seem to have any effect on the schedule. In reality, the shipyard didn’t answer directly to Prime, but to the local Navy base which contracted for the repair. As part of the prop repair, the shipyard inspected and made sure the shaft bearings and seals where the shafts exited the hull were in proper condition. I believe the shipyard also replaced the anodes on the hull, but that may have been accomplished at another time.

SHIP’S EMBLEM

While in Sasebo dry dock, I took a sketch of the Prime’s emblem to a Japanese wood carving shop and had them make a ‘plaque’. My intention was to use it as a pattern to cast a brass one that could be hung on the quarterdeck. We ran out of time for that in Sasebo, so I hung the wood one in the wardroom until we could have a casting made. Somehow, the casting was never made during my tour.

TAIWAN

Prime sailed down to Taiwan and moored in the southern port of Kaohsiung. There was a big change in the weather from the cold up in Japan. As usual, I had radioed ahead for fresh water, in addition to fuel. When the water barge showed up, our corpsman threw a few chlorine pills into the fresh water intake pipe before allowing the hose from the barge to be hooked up. About that time, a man on the barge unzipped his pants and took a whiz right onto the barge. Seeing that (not to mention the ‘stuff’ floating in the harbor), our corpsman threw a lot more chlorine tablets into the pipe. For a while after that, our showers sure smelled like chlorine.

While in Taiwan, news came out that the body of a sailor was found floating in the bay in Kaohsiung in an area normally off limits to Navy personnel. Did not hear any details about his death before we left Kaohsiung.

Even though the weather in Kaohsiung was warm, the uniform-of-the-day for Christmas was dress blues. Warm is too mild a description; the temperature and humidity were both about 95. And it was even hotter and stickier below decks, even with the ventilation running. We had some children from a local orphanage aboard for Christmas celebration in the ship’s mess, and it was a great day until at the very end. One of our crew had gone behind the main electrical switchboard in the forward engine room during the celebration and slit his wrist, but then came out where he was noticed by another crew member. Our corpsman tended to him, then transported him over for medical attention (I think he was transferred to another Navy ship with a medical suite that was in the harbor). He had been homesick, and apparently Christmas just drove him over the edge. We left him behind when we departed Taiwan for Hong Kong.

For me, setting sail from Kaohsiung was a particularly important event; that was the first time the captain let me get the ship underway. While he never commented during the process, he stayed in his chair on the bridge throughout until we were at sea that morning. Maybe one of the reasons for his silence that morning was the celebration he and the XO had with some Chinese and US MAG officers the night before we got underway. I had the OD duty that night, and noticed he and the XO were pretty noisy when they came down the pier in rickshaws late that night.

THE PLANE INCIDENT

At one point during the WestPac tour, while we were streaming our gear, a Chinese jet fighter strafed the water just aft of the ship. General quarters was sounded and the captain was on the bridge before the plane returned for a second run over Prime. Then, the jet just as quickly left the area. The shade canopy with a U.S. flag painted on it was installed over the flying bridge, so the jet could clearly see who we were. Afterwards, we decided the pilot was probably just having some fun by using our gear for target practice. No damage occurred.

HONG KONG

In Hong Kong, we moored to a buoy in the harbor. I was introduced to the practice of Hong Kong coming by in small boats begging for the garbage from Prime’s mess; I was told they wanted it as food for their pigs. We were in Hong Kong long enough to buy custom fitted dress uniforms and a nice wool civilian suit at bargain prices, plus time to see some of the island and Kowloon. Macau was off limits to Navy personnel at that time.

KOREA

When Prime sailed across the Sea of Japan from Sasebo to South Korea, it was still winter. The trip was cold and stormy, and there was no way to stay warm or dry on the bridge. At one point I obtained permission from the captain to rotate the two lookouts between the bridge and the warmer wheelhouse in order to keep them sharper. There was a lot of snow on the ground when we arrived in Pusan. Almost immediately, we went out on joint mine ops with the Korean Navy, among some nearby islands that were called Koge Do. The weather in the islands was almost the opposite from our trip over from Japan; weather still cold, but the skies were clear, the sun was warm enough for shirt sleeves top side, and the sea among the islands was like glass.

In Pusan, the tides were very large. At low tide, the brow was slanted steeply up to the pier, and at high tide the opposite. That extreme tide led to a problem. At the time when we were to get underway to depart Korea, the tide was at its lowest. When the bridge went through the prop pitch test, it was obvious that there was a drag on the props, and everything was shut down. We had some diving gear aboard, and our chief warrant officer (I think his name was Smallwood) volunteered to dive down and check out the area around the props. When he surfaced, he reported the ship was setting on a pile of trash, mostly tin cans, and that many of the cans were wrapped around the leading edges of the screws’ blades. Apparently the Koreans had been dumping their trash overboard from ships moored at the pier. After the tide came back in, the chief warrant went back down and cleaned off the props, and we were able to get underway. We also learned that our sonar dome had been so damaged from the ship resting on the trash pile that we couldn’t lower the transponder. The transponder was normally stored in the retracted position, so it wasn’t damaged. However, we were without one of our mine sweeping tools until the dome could be replaced.

BOREDOM

At one point while we were just steaming along, a crewman decided to use a slingshot to see if he could hit an albatross. After several tries, he did, but the darn thing fell on the open bridge, momentarily stunned. As a couple of crew went to pick the bird up, it woke up and started flopping around. The crew members took a couple of good whacks from the bird’s wings before they could toss it overboard. As it drifted in our wake, the bird took to the air again.

When I was on bridge watch, I had the habit of frequently checking the radar PPI for other ships in our area, particularly at night. During a night OOD watch while MineDiv 72 was steaming in a spaced out line abreast formation, with Prime on the port end of the line, I noticed the MSO on Prime’s immediate starboard side was way forward out of position, more on our starboard bow. And it kept moving more towards dead ahead of Prime. I wondered why they were so far out of position, so I radioed the other ship and asked what was going on. They responded that everything was fine. Over most of the four-hour watch that night, I watched the ship gradually circle completely around Prime until it had regained its original station back in the formation. At the next port, I asked the junior officer who had been on watch that night about the crazy station keeping. He said he had just been bored that night.

BEST LAID PLANS

During general quarters, my job was damage control officer and DC Central was located in the wardroom, along with charts of the ship’s electrical and plumbing systems. I had two damage control parties, one forward and one aft. Many times we practiced setting up and doing pretend damage control drills. Members of the parties were skilled seamen who had also been to Navy fire fighting schools. During one long cruise at sea, general quarters sounded and the initial report from the after DC party was that there was a fire in the motor of the desalination plant, which was located in the forward engine room, and that the party was dealing with it. Soon after I heard people running aft down the passageway outside the wardroom, then the DC party reported the skipper and the XO had left the bridge and were on scene. I thought, “Oh crap!”, and joined them. We were on rationed fresh water, including the Master at Arms running the shower handles, until we could obtain a new desal motor.

While one member of the damage control teams was on shore leave in the Los Angeles area with friends, he and his friends witnessed a car wreck in which the driver was unable to get himself out of the car. The crew member and friends jumped on the car and ripped the door open to help the driver out, before the car burst into flames. The way we learned of his actions was not from him, but later from the local authorities. The captain held a ceremony on board to honor the sailor’s actions. I think everyone felt he was the kind of crew member you wanted to serve with.

GENERATOR REPAIR

One of the generators (in the forward engine room) that powered the mag tail wasn’t putting out enough current, so the Prime moved over to the Long Beach Navy Shipyard for repair. The shipyard placed a large brine tank on the pier, as a power load bank, to serve the same function as the ocean does when the ship streams its tail, and hooked up the cables in the mag tail cable reel well area (the tank really boiled when power was applied to the cables leading to the tank, because of the relatively small amount of water in the tank compared with the tail being in the ocean). Apparently the shipyard didn’t utilize any ‘safety lock-out tag-out’ procedures that would have prevented the engine-generator from being started while a workman was connecting or disconnecting the cables in the reel well. An accident occurred. While one workman was applying a wrench to a large terminal nut that secured a cable on the reel well bulkhead, another shipyard worker in the forward engine room fired up the engine-gen set. A flash fire badly burned the worker in the reel well. The 3-foot long wrench he had been using was vaporized down to about half its size. My memory is that when we were streaming our mag tail, the generators were putting out about 2000 amps.

CHARACTERS

Ensign Gann was somewhat of a character, probably more suited to the Merchant Marine than to the Navy. He was married, with an infant child. As was custom when Prime was in port in Long Beach, George spent nights with his family at his Long Beach apartment. Sometimes he would show up back at the ship around 2300 or midnight. When I asked what he was doing there, he said his wife was nursing the baby during the night; “I need my sleep.”

Since I had been the ops officer for a while, I also served as the backup crypto officer. George and I didn’t see eye to eye in that classified business. Instead of performing the monthly inventory of classified pubs himself, he’d turn it over to his chief to do. So, when he would bring me the inventory list to countersign, we always had the same argument about it being his job to conduct the inventory, and then I would go and verify the inventory myself.

When we were in WestPac, in which port I don’t recall, George and Tom went over on the beach together one night while I had the OD duty. Well after I had hit the sack, I woke up to a commotion in the wardroom, then my stateroom door flew open and Tom shoved George in, yelling “And, go to bed”, and slammed the door shut. George didn’t get into his bunk. Instead he kneeled down and peaked through the louvers at the bottom of the door, giggling. As soon as Tom walked away, George bolted out of the room with Tom right on his heels. I jumped into my pants as they went slamming up the ladder. By the time I got topside, they were part way up the mast, George almost naked and Tom holding one ankle trying to pull George down. We finally got George back to the stateroom and into his bunk. Tom said George was planning to climb the mast and dive off the yardarm. Not a good idea; another ship was nested outboard of the Prime.

I never saw George seasick, no matter what the weather. In fact, when George came up to the bridge to relieve me for the mid-watch, he always bounded up the ladder whistling. I bring this up because I was the opposite. If Prime was in port for an extended period, I would lose my sea legs and it would take a day or so to regain them after we got underway. Initially, I carried a bucket for my bridge watches, because fellow crew members wouldn’t be happy with me heaving over the side of the bridge. One of the petty officers had a good time joking with me about my bucket, so I went to the corpsman and got some Dramamine-type pills to avoid the bucket scene. But months later, I gave him fresh ammunition. It was in WestPac at a time of very hot, pounding sunshine. I decided my regular cap wasn’t providing enough sun protection so I obtained a piece of cardboard to use as a shade, and attached a line for a chin strap. After a bunch of razzing, to save what dignity I had left in front of experienced seamen, I got rid of the cardboard.

We received a new sailor in the Engineering Dept. who was right out of boot camp. He was somewhat of a misfit. One day, I walked into the boiler flat (which was isolated from the other engineering spaces) and found the young man shadow boxing while he was supposed to be on watch taking readings. I told the chief about it and the chief said he wasn’t very happy with the man’s general performance anyway. At another time, the same scene in the boiler flat; more shadow boxing. When I examined his readings record, there were blanks where there should have been readings. He assured me he had had proper instructions, and that he would take the readings. I discussed it again with the chief, concerned about possible gun decking. Not too long after that, the First Lt. came to me and said he had a man in the deck gang that wanted to get into the engine gang in the worst way, and could we make some sort of swap. I asked the chief’s opinion, and he said he thought the deck hand involved would be fine, so we swapped the shadow boxer and the deck hand. It wasn’t long before the chief said the new man was fitting right in, almost a natural, and the First Lt. was accusing me of giving him a problem. One day while I was on bridge watch, I received a routine request to dump trash overboard, which I granted. I walked over to the wing of the bridge and saw the shadow boxer emptying a large aluminum garbage can from the mess over the fantail railing. Then he proceeded to tie a line on the handle of the trash can. I wondered what the heck he was doing. Then he started to tie the other end of the line around his waist. I phoned the fantail and told the boatswain who answered essentially ‘stop that man’. The shadow boxer had been told to rinse out the can, so he was going to do it by dragging it in the ocean. That can would have been one hellava sea anchor.

SECURITY TEST

Somewhere up the chain of command, it was decided that the division should, on a rotating basis, have one ship in the division examine another ship’s protection of classified information. When it was Prime’s turn to examine another particular ship (I forgot which ship it was), we devised a scheme to see if we could gain access to the ship’s crypto room. We created a fake letter from the other ship to the Long Beach Shipyard requesting repair of the crypto machine. Then we dressed up a crew member to look like a shipyard worker (someone who we thought the other ship wouldn’t recognize), and gave him a tool box. We waited until a Sunday when the brand new ops officer had the duty to send our ‘repairman’ over to the other ship. He was able to get aboard and meet the ops officer, who accepted the fake letter and opened the crypto room. The crypto room wasn’t much larger than a phone booth, just large enough for the crypto machine, a small chair and a safe for classified pubs. Our man had the ops officer open the crypto machine, and said he’d also need a pub from the pub safe to repair the machine. When our man went in and sat down to begin the ‘repair’, he said he wasn’t allowed to operate the machine with the door open (which actually was a standard requirement). Alone in the room, our man placed a message on the machine that security had been compromised, removed a pub from the safe and placed it in his toolbox, then locked up the machine and the pubs safe. He left the ship after declaring he had repaired the machine. It was my responsibility to visit the captain of the other ship the next day to disclose what we had done, tell him about the note in the crypto machine, and to return the classified pub. Well, I guess we took the assignment too seriously, because neither the other captain nor my own captain was very happy with what we had done. I was it hot water, particularly for removing a classified pub from the safe. Luckily, it did not result any formal disciplinary action against us. But, we had to be vigilant after that to make sure Prime was not victim to something similar.

RUNNING THE RANGE

Like all MSOs, Prime was required to ‘run the range’ at Long Beach periodically, to verify its magnetic signature for mine sweeping operations. Before we would run the range, we would off load any extra magnetic materials that could not be placed in degaussed cabinets; canned goods, personal radios, extra tools, whatever. One time we ran the range and the shore station radioed we had failed because our signature was too high. However, they told us where they thought the offending material was located; they gave us a rib number and which side of the keel to search. That location was in the forward engine room. When the crew lifted deck plates in that area, they found a 3-foot long wrench in the bilge, which must have been left there by a shipyard worker during an earlier overhaul. The wrench was thrown overboard, we reran the range, and passed. I was amazed with how the shore station could identify the problem location so accurately.

ALASKA

While Prime was moored at Kodiak, a major storm was approaching and we were ordered to sea to ride it out. We sailed out but we couldn’t evade the storm, so we positioned the ship heading into the wind. I had the 8-12 OOD watch that morning. All watch long, we were running at full power, but the winds were so strong that we were not only failing to make any headway, but we were actually being blown aft towards the shore. All watch long I kept checking the radar PPI, watching the shore slowly inch closer and closer. I even began to calculate in my head how long it would take for Prime to reach shore. A nervous time, but later the storm abated well before we got even close to shore, so Prime was never in dire straits. But, during that time I was glad we had passed those full-power test runs.

The trip up to Alaska was by open ocean, but we returned via Canada’s Inland Passage. While the scenery among those islands was beautiful and the seas were generally calmer that the open ocean, it was still a nervous time to be on bridge watch. There were hundreds of very large tree trunks in the water, floating nearly invisible just barely above the surface. One crew member called them ‘deadheads’. During my OOD watches, myself and the lookouts constantly had to search ahead so the ship could avoid the deadheads. As hard as it was to see them during the day, it was almost impossible to see them at night, even with the lookouts stationed right at the bow. I asked the ship’s electricians to hook up a couple of spot lights on the bow to shine ahead like headlights on a car, but even with the lights it was still hard to see the deadheads. At one point after dark, a tug with barges approached moving north towards Alaska, and they radioed us to turn off the bloody lights. So much for that idea.

We did have some stormy weather, even in the Inland Passage. The LST traveling with MineDiv72 went aground on one of the islands during stormy weather, and the division commander ordered Prime to pull the LST free. Probably the LST’s large freeboard and flat bottom, plus the high winds contributed to the grounding. Captain Young set a ship’s condition that was essentially general quarters, because of the danger that the Prime, too, may go aground as we approached the LST. He asked me to station myself in the after engine room. The problem was made worse by the fact it was being carried out in darkness. The plan was to back down on the LST, have the boatswains fire a line over and eventually hook up the LST with a heavy tow line. That was a bit dicey in the darkness, with high winds and choppy waters, because Prime was bouncing around like a cork. As usual in that type of situation, the manual prop controls in the after engine room were used to carry out Captain Young’s pitch commands. It was standard operating practice to record each bell command, and the bell commands were coming so fast that the crew operating the controls could hardly carry out one bell before the next one was received. We eventually filled up several sheets of commands that night, but Prime was successful in dislodging the LST. Someone on the bridge that night said that Captain Young was wearing a white scarf around his neck, and the scarf was flying in the wind as the captain moved back and forth across the bridge, making the scene almost surreal.

COMPLETION OF SERVICE

A few weeks before I was to depart Prime, my replacement for engineering officer came aboard, so we had a good overlap. Remembering what I went through in the beginning, I gave him the plans for the ship and some colored pencils and told him to go throughout the ship and trace out all of the electrical circuits and piping lines. He protested some but went ahead anyway and spent days doing it. I told him he may not appreciate it then, but he would eventually. I met him many months after I left the ship, and he told me Prime’s engineering department had won the right to paint an ‘E’ on the side of the bridge. The entire engineering gang must have been doing a good job.