The Flight of the Sparrow

At Alameda the ship loaded on supplies and our other air squadrons, as we were getting ready for our 1963 WestPac cruise. This cruise promised to be very special. Our ship had been invited to Australia to help celebrate the anniversary of the famous World War II Battle of the Coral Sea. The Allied forces had dealt the Japanese Fleet its first major defeat there in the Coral Sea and prevented several key South Pacific Countries from falling to the Japanese.

First we sailed to Hawaii, docked at Pearl Harbor and spent over a week there. Wow, what a place, ideally located so the weather was almost perfect year ’round, this had to be Paradise. I never dreamed that any place on Earth could be as ideal as Hawaii. We spent a lot of time on Waikiki Beach and I actually learned to surf some. At least stand up on the board all the way in a couple of times. We rented a jeep with a surrey on top and cruised the main Island, ate too much fresh pineapple and did the usual touristy stuff. We really hated to leave Hawaii as none of us had ever seen “Paradise” before. We paid homage to the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and headed out into the South Pacific.

On our way down to Sidney, somewhere out in the South Pacific Ocean, we crossed the International Date Line and the Equator at the exactly the same time. This evidently does not occur very often and this crossing qualified every man aboard the ship to be not only a “Shellback”, but also a “Golden Shellback.” It is quite an honor to be a Shellback and virtually unheard of to be a Golden Shellback. It is such an event that the Navy enters all the information about the crossings into every man’s Service Record and the ship spends all day conducting a very special crossing ceremony. First, We (the Landlubbers or Pollywogs) were all hosed down with cold seawater to cleanse us of anything having to do with being hard, solid ground critters.

The ships three mess halls had saved their smelly garbage for several weeks. They had built a 50 ft. long Garbage shoot about forty inches in diameter that every man going through the initiation had to crawl thorough on his belly. This thing was packed with smelly, rotten garbage and they had set it out in the sun for several days. The ship’s Executive Officer, or second in command, a full Navy Captain, had to go through this initiation with us. Our Admiral and our ship’s Captain, made sure that every officer that was not a “Shellback” went through the exact same initiation as the rest of the crew.

This one thing alone gained them complete and total respect from the crew. Too many times we would see the officers held to a different standard, but here, today we were all “Pollywogs” ‘and all of us had to go through this initiation to cross over into King Neptune’s Realm.

The biggest, ugliest and fattest Chief Petty Officer on board ship was selected to play the role of King Neptune. His assistants kept his belly smeared with stinking fish oil and each of us had to pledge allegiance to his Highness and kiss his belly. As you got up close, he grabbed you by the ears and made sure that you got that smelly fish oil all over you, up your nose and if you tried to push away to get some air, you got a good mouthful too. Yuck, I can still taste that stuff!

They had a huge 20 ft. tank setting in the middle of the flight deck, with some God-awful smelling liquid that was a very ugly light robin’s egg blue color with all sorts of weird stuff floating in it, dead fish, something that looked to be octopus or squid parts and no telling what else. They had these 8 Ft., smooth planks attached to the top of the tank with hinges. They laid you down on the plank on your back, with your head toward the tank and they would lift the end of the plank at your feet until you slid into this “Shit” tank backwards and upside down. Then you had to get out without getting pulled back in and drowned. No one wanted to stay in that mess for very long and there was a lot of pushing and shoving to get out.

After you got out of the tank, you were then herded onto the number 3 elevator, where you were washed down again with high pressure sea water from fire hoses, then you had to run between two lines of salty ’ole Shellbacks as they beat you with cut off fire hoses.

If you lived through this, you were free to swim in the ocean as our “Sea Going Bell Hops” stood guard with their M-1 Garand rifles looking out for sharks. The movie “Jaws” had not been made yet and no one had a big fear of sharks, so just about everyone got to swim in the ocean at the Equator. This was a good stop for us, everyone had a good time and no one got hurt, if a man could luck out and get Sea Duty like this all the time, I know a lot more men would ship over, or extend their enlistments and make a career of the Navy, but as we all know too well, these ships can turn into serious instruments of war in a heartbeat!

Hawaii, Australia, The Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Midway, Japan and Hong Kong (British Colony)! What a cruise!

Our crossing was going just fine until some nut decided to jump off the flight deck into the ocean. The fight deck is more than eight stories high off the water and I would think it would be quite a shock to someone’s body to hit in salt water that hard! I know that they fished him out of the water and took him straight down into sickbay. We never heard if he lived or not. But, if I were to bet on it, I’d say he didn’t make it. That was just too far to fall (Or jump) into salt water and live!