The plane provider Kitty Hawk steamed into San Diego within the fall of 1961 with fanfare often loved by royalty, wrote the San Diego Union’s Lester Bell in a narrative saying the warship’s arrival. A swing band on a barge on the mouth of the newly dredged harbor channel performed “California, Right here I Come,” and hearth boats spraying plumes of water escorted it to North Island.
The Kitty Hawk would name San Diego residence for the following 37 years, earlier than spending its final decade of operations in Japan. It was decommissioned in 2009. For the following 12 years, it sat with different retired ships in Puget Sound, Wash.
As is commonly the case, the lads — and, beginning in 1994, girls — who served on the Kitty Hawk by way of the years got here to see it as residence, and plenty of harbored deep attachments lengthy after their service.
I’m one in every of them; I served on the ship as an aviation electronics technician from January 2003 to January 2007, when it was primarily based in Japan. We had been all the time busy and all the time out to sea and the shared struggling cast lasting friendships among the many crew.
Veterans of the large ship tried in useless to have it transformed right into a museum. The Navy was fast to reject the group’s proposal and an enchantment, saying the Kitty Hawk was slated for dismantling. However its longevity additionally might have labored in opposition to it; some potential opponents beat it to retirement — and preservation. There are already 5 current plane provider museums, together with the united statesMidway Museum in San Diego. And different cities produce other kinds of museums constructed round outdated ships, such because the Battleship Iowa Museum in Lengthy Seashore.
With these museums already established, there was little enthusiasm to transform the Kitty Hawk.
So it was that on Jan. 15 the Kitty Hawk was tugged out of Bremerton, Wash., for a gradual tow round Cape Horn on the tip of South America en path to its remaining, ignominious finish: a Brownsville, Texas, ship breaker. Its 60,000 tons of metal might be offered off as scrap.
“Ships are haunted — they maintain the soul of the crew. The attachment of a ship and a crew perhaps transcends rational thought. You make investments your vitality, your emotion, your mates, your useless mates ... what number of massively emotional occasions in a sailor’s life are related to the crew, with the Kitty Hawk?”
Tom Parker, former commanding officer
The contract for the scrapping of the Kitty Hawk was awarded for 1 cent.
Jason Chudy, a retired Navy chief petty officer residing close to Seattle, estimates that about 250,000 sailors served on the provider throughout its lifespan. Chudy is the membership coordinator for the Kitty Hawk Veteran’s Assn., and he was concerned within the effort to save lots of the ship from the scrapper.
“We had been shocked and intensely upset,” Chudy mentioned. “The denial got here again fast. We tried once more, however all got here to naught.”
Cat and mouse
The Kitty Hawk’s keel was laid Dec. 27, 1956, at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, N.J., and was launched at a remaining price of $178 million, or $1.7 billion in 2022 dollars. (Evaluate that with the $13 billion price of the Navy’s newest provider, the nuclear powered Gerald R. Ford.)
The Kitty Hawk’s 48 years of service spanned 10 presidents and several other abroad conflicts. The ship deployed a number of instances to Vietnam, fought within the Gulf Warfare and took part in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
At instances, unrest again residence penetrated the vessel’s hull. In 1972, a race riot erupted on board as Black sailors, annoyed with racist attitudes amongst white crew members, roved the ship beating their fellow sailors with pipes and wrenches. The ship’s government officer — Cmdr. Benjamin Cloud, a San Diego-born airman and son of one of many metropolis’s first Black law enforcement officials — helped quell the violence by assembly with Black sailors. He died in El Cajon in August.
Different Navy ships had comparable incidents within the Nineteen Seventies, however the violence on the Kitty Hawk was the worst instance and led to congressional hearings.
Whereas not collaborating in fight operations, the Kitty Hawk patrolled the western Pacific on the peak of the Chilly Warfare, typically enjoying cat-and-mouse with Soviet and Chinese language submarines.
David Thompson of San Diego was a Navy crewman who hunted submarines on Navy S-3 Viking jets. Though hooked up to an air wing and never the ship itself, Thompson’s squadron operated from the Kitty Hawk from 1979 by way of 1981 and once more from 1993 to 1994.
“This was my first ship and there’s lots of reminiscences,” he mentioned. “In ’81, simply after pulling out of port, I bought to hunt my first Russian submarine. I’ve been on a number of ships and the Kitty Hawk is without doubt one of the most memorable.”
In 1984, after Thompson’s squadron had left the ship, it collided with a Russian submarine because it surfaced close to South Korea.
‘Geriatrics for carriers’
Though not the primary so-called supercarrier, the Kitty Hawk was hailed on the time because the “forerunner of a brand new and significantly improved line of carriers” by Adm. Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations.
The Kitty Hawk was the next-to-last U.S. plane provider constructed to run on diesel gas. The nuclear-powered Enterprise was launched the identical yr and the Nimitz was commissioned in 1975, launching a brand new class of 10 atomic carriers. Two of them, the Abraham Lincoln and the Carl Vinson, are at the moment primarily based in San Diego.
The Kitty Hawk’s diesel energy plant turned one of the difficult facets of maintaining the ship operational, mentioned Tom Parker, a retired Navy captain who was the ship’s commanding officer from 2003 to 2005.
“My chief engineer informed me as soon as the steam plant on the Kitty Hawk is probably the most sophisticated machine ever constructed or maintained by human beings,” Parker mentioned. “We had an issue discovering engineers and had been calling folks again to energetic responsibility to assist man the ship. We known as it ‘geriatrics for plane carriers.’”
Regardless of these challenges, the ship was instrumental within the U.S. response after the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001. The Kitty Hawk, then-based in Japan, was the primary provider to deploy in assist of Operation Enduring Freedom. By mid-October, the ship was within the Persian Gulf working as a staging base for Military Particular Forces. It could once more deploy to the gulf in February 2003 and launched a number of the first sorties in opposition to Iraq that March.
One final look?
The greater than 10,000 veteran-strong Kitty Hawk Veteran’s Membership group on Fb noticed an uptick in exercise when the ship started its remaining voyage, as former crew members began sharing images and tales. Many mentioned they had been in search of a solution to see the ship yet another time earlier than it’s scrapped.
Updates monitoring the ship’s place on its remaining journey are shared steadily within the Fb group. Gordon Shaw, a San Diego veteran of the ship, informed the Union-Tribune he’s contemplating chartering a ship to escort the ship previous San Diego.
Saltchuk Marine, the corporate employed to tow the ship, mentioned the Kitty Hawk will anchor off the coast of Lengthy Seashore on Monday and ought to be seen from the town and from Seal Seashore.
“I’m upset San Diego and the Navy aren’t doing one thing to acknowledge the Kitty Hawk passing by one final time,” Shaw mentioned. “It’s superior to be in contact with [other veterans] and know that their time on the Kitty Hawk was significant and that we now have one thing in frequent.”
Shaw served on the Kitty Hawk from 1974 to 1975. He mentioned he had a low draft quantity, which prompted him to volunteer for the Navy slightly than danger being despatched to Vietnam.
He joined the crew shortly after an engine room hearth took the lives of 5 sailors and injured no less than three dozen others, in line with the Naval Historical past and Heritage Command. Shaw mentioned connecting to different veterans by way of the Fb group made him respect what these sailors endured within the wake of the tragedy.
“These younger guys went by way of some actually laborious occasions by advantage of their jobs and, trustworthy to God, in my thoughts, they're heroes,” Shaw mentioned. “There have been guys that thought the ship was going to sink. These guys saved the ship.”
Stephen Sherman, one other San Diego Kitty Hawk veteran, labored on the ship’s flight deck as a first responder for plane fires. He recalled that on July 11, 1994, an F-14 Tomcat crashed onto the ship’s pitching flight deck, broke in two, and exploded right into a fireball.
The 2 aviators on the jet ejected and landed on the flight deck — one in every of them within the burning wreckage of the jet. Sherman‘s staff jumped into motion. He manned a hearth hose whereas his fellow sailors pulled the person out and, though he suffered burns, he finally recovered, Sherman mentioned.
“It was my first and solely command,” he mentioned. “The ship actually introduced me to San Diego and I by no means left.”
The entire sailors who spoke with the Union-Tribune concerning the Kitty Hawk mentioned they believed it held a novel place within the Navy in contrast with different ships which have been misplaced to the scrapyard. Perhaps it has one thing to do with the sheer variety of lives touched by the ship over practically half a century, instantly or by way of the household and mates of those that served on board.
However Parker, the previous ship’s captain, mentioned there’s extra to it than that.
“Ships are haunted — they maintain the soul of the crew,” he mentioned. “The attachment of a ship and a crew perhaps transcends rational thought. You make investments your vitality, your emotion, your mates, your useless mates ... what number of massively emotional occasions in a sailor’s life are related to the crew, with the Kitty Hawk?”
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