bushwhacking them. We were north of the Arctic Circle off Bear Island when ordered to the Pacific, chop-chop. Captain Kirtland was a true seaman and a great skipper. On one dog watch in the Pacific, the Task Group was changing formation and rotating axis. SOP was to solve maneuvering board problems in CIC as a backup for the Bridge and after checking my solution, CIC Watch Officer Lieutenant Pennebaker had me give the Bridge our recommendation. I did and got 'Bridge Aye.' Twenty minutes later there was little change in our position and since they weren't using our solution, he told me to 'tell 'em again.' I recalculated, did as I was asked and got 'Bridge Aye' again. Minutes passed with little progress. 'Tell 'em again!' 'Bridge from Combat, we recommend course 'xxx' speed' xx.' 'Bridge Aye. We like the way we're doing it.' Whereupon Penny, true Texan that he was, rushed to the PA, hit the lever and demanded, 'Say, is theah anybody up theah knows what theah doin'?' Half a minute later we had the answer. The speaker vibrated, the whole bulkhead vibrated and this voice said, 'YEEEEAAAASSSSSS! This is the captain!' On the watch over, we sat drinking coffee in the Wardroom, feeling some trepidation about repercussions to follow. Then the OOD came in, laughing. 'You guys gave the old man the best laugh he's had in months,' he said. 'When he heard your question, the captain got this grin on his face, went to the PA, got as close as he could and just bellowed at you, then walked away grinning from ear to ear.' Captain Kirtland had lots of an uncommon commodity: common sense. After Sodak bragged about how alert they were in the Gilberts (K rations on Thanksgiving, eaten while stationed at their guns), he decided to experiment. We stayed in Condition Two all night after an air attack about 2330 (one lone snooper as I recall). At Dawn Alert he inspected all battle stations, then announced we were less than 50% effective and would never do that again but, at such time in the future when he sounded 'air attack' we better be at stations before the call ended. When he was relieved by Captain Murphy, we hated to see him go; but at least it was a dramatic departure. We were underway at sea, and he left the ship in style, catapulted from the fantail in one of our mighty Kingfishers. Captain Murphy felt it was a big morale problem not knowing what was going on, and instituted a 'Nightly News' report (press radio news stories plus whatever we could properly tell about our operation) so people would know we're not just cutting grommets in the ocean. I was for this duty and I enjoyed it, even though some of my peers began calling me 'H, V. Kaltenbundy.' During one of our typhoons, I was giving the report on the PA when white water came clear over the bridge. Suddenly, I was the wettest news announcer in history, drenched from head to foot, standing there in the middle of the news saying 'Ulp!' Dramatic no doubt, but it wasn't like that back at KLO in Ogden, Utah! Over in another TG, the cruiser Pittsburgh lost her bow, and in the middle of the watch one of our DD's reported, "Have sighted suburb of Pittsburgh." Then we saw it, or rather, our SG operator did. She was much too close ahead, slightly off our course. There too was the CVL Independence, slightly off our course on the other side, also too close ahead and dead in the water with a fire on her hanger deck. There was no option for us. All 45,000 tons of BB had to go between cruiser bow and burning carrier, which we did, thanks to our SG and the CIC watch. Big as we were, we rolled 29 degrees one way and 25 degrees the other way, and you had to wedge yourself in somewhere or hang on for dear life. USS Alabama Our SG and SK operators sat side by side next to a desk with shortwave radio receiver. On the deck to port was a portable scuttlebutt. We had three operators on watch; two on the gear, relief rotating to keep fresh eyeballs staring at the CRT. After one prodigious roll, even though braced as best they could, they wound up one slot to portone at the other set, one at the desk, and the third on the deck, scuttlebutt upside down in his lap. You have to understand that CIC was never wrong. If we did make some kind of error in a report, we could always say something like, 'As you know, sir, with radar's present technology, if you warp your framistan on the upper flipastoy you get a false echo and that's what went wrong, but now we've calibrated the inner clavicle of the outer harpsichord and it won't happen again, sir.' We weren't very military in CIC. In my watch I was usually addressed as 'Mr. B.' (seldom anything more formal). It was demanding work, with long hours 140 in a very small space, and we might well have got badly on each other's nerves. But I don't remember that as a big problem. The Joe Pot brewed 24 hours a day and practically nobody ever got transferred. Our experienced operators were there forever. (I was a short timer: only 29 months, while some of the guys were plank owners!) Our Air Search radar was the hottest in the Pacific, probably because our own people installed it. We left Norfolk with our new SK crated on the fantail, and our guys put it together at Efate with the help of a repair ship. In any case, we got bogeys first and farther out than anybody else. On Turkey Shoot Day off Saipan and Guam, Joe Cook and Cliff O'Bnen had incoming Japanese carrier planes so far out the Flag didn't believe us (nor our 2nd report or 3rd). Finally, somebody else confirmed, and they decided it was for real (but we knew that from first blip on). It wasn't the only time we had a bogey nobody else did. Once at dusk, we had two or three on different bearings at fringe range. The Night CAP had gone out to intercept, couldn't 'Tally Ho' and were coming back to the TG when our operator said, 'Hey! Bogey's coming right in with them.' I was manning the Fighter Director net and reported, 'Birdman, this is Big Boy. We have bogey, one two-oh-fifteen and closing.' From the Flag came, 'Negative. We have friendlies.' My guy snorted and said, 'So do I but the hell he is.' I tried again, 'Still have bogey, now ten and closing.' 'We identify as friendlies.' 'We have your friendlies and bogey right on their tails.' 'Negative! That's friendly. Cease reporting, cease reporting!' Then, right on cue, Sky Lookout reported, 'Betty one-two-oh and closing.' I had the pleasure of telling the Flag, 'Very well, but we now have visual Betty.' That cotton picking 'Betty' came right over the TG and flew home untouched. From then on we got very little static when we reported bogeys. Today Alabama is sometimes tagged 'The Lucky A.' Not so! To us she was, and will always be, 'The Mighty A.' Of course, she was lucky. She and we had a charmed life. No enemy ever hit her, and she was a kind of rabbit's foot for carriers. Not one was ever hit while in company. Their birdmen were fond of her for another reason: She didn't shoot at friendly planes except once when four Hellcats came out of the clouds directly overhead where they were not supposed to be. Even so, no planes were shot down; but we heard their tail feathers were somewhat ventilated. After overhaul in Bremerton, Captain Goggins became skipper. He brought the crippled Marblehead home after the Java Sea battles early in the war and had not been to sea since. Although he knew full well the world of difference in the Marblehead's 50 Caliber AA and ours, he sounded Air Attack when even one bogey was reported, which got pretty old after a while. From our prejudiced CIC point of view, a single bogey with night fighters intercepting seventy miles away wasn't worth rolling everybody out of the sack in the mid-watch. Now the higher your antenna, the farther away you pick up a bogey. We'd have it, then the carriers would and vector fighters out and, finally, a DD in the screen would report it. Since they didn't have VHF radio, they used the TBS maneuvering circuit, which both Bridge and Combat had. So, when a DD called the Flag, I'd grab the PA, report the bogey and try to talk the Bridge out of an alarm. One night when a DD opened up, I followed that procedure. 'Bridge... Combat. We have bogey seventy miles 3 2 0... fighters intercepting.' A very unmilitary voice replied, 'Well, what should we do?' We had some new Ensigns standing very junior OOD watch, and thinking it was one of them, I growled, 'How the hell should I know? Ask the Old Man. He'll probably want 'Air Attack.'' My voice made my opinion clear. Then my talker to the Bridge began jumping up and down, hissing through his teeth, saying, 'It's the captain, it's the captain, it's the captain!' Then I heard, in a much more military tone, 'What do you recommend?' 'Well, captain, since they're intercepting seventy miles out, we recommend waiting to see whether it's any real threat.' 'Very well, keep me informed.' From then on he asked for Combat's recommendation, just as his predecessors had. You wonder how it will feel to shoot at a real target, but when we fired our first salvos at Japanese held Nauru and its phosphate plant, my only thought was, 'All right, John, this is for you.' Louise's younger brother John had been captured on Wake, and I felt no compunction about the bombardment just, 'This is yours, Johnny.' Years later we were to learn he had been beheaded as a prisoner in retaliation for Japanese pilot losses. It was a mid-watch when we learned they'd had enough. One of the guys was at the shortwave, and about 0130 we heard from Honolulu that the Japanese were ready to quit under certain conditions. Then another BB called the Flag to say they had the word from San Francisco. Of course, the spit and polish flagship had no one listening to shortwave, so they asked if anyone could confirm. I hit the button to say, 'We have it from 141