VERO BEACH, Florida (14 Mar 2004) -- Too wide for the Panama Canal, she was the first aircraft carrier to sail around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. Local U.S. Navy veterans, some of whom were on that 1952 cruise, are remembering the USS Oriskany as she heads for the ocean floor. Ralph Stokes of Vero Beach, was a 31-year-old lieutenant. He found the flight deck on the 888-foot-long ship forgiving while landing big, single-engine TBM Avenger torpedo bombers. "A big ship like that you couldn't miss," Stokes said. Fishermen and scuba divers also should have a hard time missing the ex-Oriskany — after it's sunk, it will be the world's largest artificial reef. It's currently being cleaned and prepared in Corpus Christi, Texas, and officials in Texas, Florida and three other states are waiting for the Navy to announce who gets it. One site is the Gulf of Mexico off Escambia County, where Pensacola is the birthplace of Naval aviation. Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., said Monday the Navy already has selected the site. "We won't announce it to the public until the environmental paperwork is completed," said Dolan, who expected a March 19 announcement. Roger Jeeves was a 21-year-old enlisted man in VS-32, the same hunter-killer anti-submarine squadron in which Stokes flew. Jeeves, also of Vero Beach, still has wallet-size cards from the 1952 cruise on the Oriskany. They testify his membership in the Society of King Neptune and the Imperial Order of Mossbacks — earned by crossing the equator and Cape Horn, respectively. "It was the fastest carrier in the world at that time," Jeeves said of the Oriskany. The May-July cruise to which Jeeves and Stokes were assigned took the Oriskany from Quonsett Point, R.I., to its new home base in San Diego, Calif. Their squadron returned home from San Diego, but the Oriskany steamed into the Korean War. It also served combat tours in Vietnam before being decommissioned in 1976, after 26 years of service. Name part of history The Oriskany was named for a battle in the American Revolution, in which a force of about 800 patriots and 60 Oneida Indians who were marching to the aid of besieged Fort Stanwix in New York were ambushed. Literature from the Oriskany Museum in Oriskany, N.Y., calls the battle "a turning point of the American Revolution," because it indirectly caused the British to lifted their siege of Fort Stanwix. Its capture was critical to a larger British campaign aimed at isolating the New England colonies from the rest of the fledgling nation. At least three other Vero Beach men served as air crewmen aboard the Oriskany, but on different cruises. Tommy Lamson, Jack Kenney and Tom White (no relation to Vero Beach's mayor of the same name) were enlisted men in another anti-submarine squadron, VS-31. | | 888-ft USS Oriskany White was 18 when he joined the Navy in 1950 and became an aviation metalsmith. "I'd do it over tomorrow," White said. "It was a good job and we did it religiously." Flying off aircraft carriers 50 years ago in piston-engine airplanes was different than today's high-tech aviation. A landing signal officer would direct pilots onto the carrier's deck using flags to tell the pilot if his approach was high or low, when to cut the engine's power or throttle up and fly around to try again. Stokes liked landings on the Oriskany. "It was a big, wide ship," he said. "These guys in single-engine aircraft, they were used to landing on (smaller) escort carriers." The squadron patrolled for submarines in pairs, one hunter and the other killer. Hunters would surround a suspected submarine with dropped sonar buoys. Listening to their radio signals told a crewman which direction the sub was traveling. "As the submarine would get closer to one of the buoys, you could hear it," Lamson said. "You'd switch from one (sonar buoy) to another and see which one he was closest to," said Kenney, who was 19 when he joined the Navy. Both Lamson and Kenney were aviation ordnancemen. Their job was to load the buoys, bombs, rockets and torpedoes on planes. Usually the submarines were American, sent to train air crews in attack and sub crews in evasion. The Vero Beach veterans have mixed feelings about turning the carrier into a giant home for fish. "I think they're better off sinking it," White said, noting that metal weakens with age. But Stokes remembers the ship when it was new. "The Oriskany was such a beautiful ship compared to the ones we'd been on," he said. SOURCE - TCPalm |
