The saga of the YP-438 as related by Ellis Sard (June/July issue) must have tugged at the heart of every small-ship sailor in the U.S. Navy. Most of us did not have the series of increasingly frustrating and finally catastrophic events that befell his YP, but we had our moments.
I was an officer aboard the USS APc-42. The designation, in Navy parlance, stood for coastal transport. At 105 feet, the wooden-hulled APc class was said to have the smallest commissioned vessels in the Navy in World War II. Like the YP, we were powered by a single diesel engine that not only was idiosyncratic but also could be downright malevolent.
In April 1946 we were ordered to depart Leyte Gulf in the Philippines and return to the United States for decommissioning. Because of our small size, about a half dozen similar craft were formed into a convoy for the six-thousand-mile voyage. No sooner were we at sea, however, than we discovered that top speed of the slowest vessel was about eight knots. But like Ellis Sard’s engine, the one aboard the APc-42 stubbornly refused to operate at anything but top speed, a breathtaking ten knots. Moreover, the engine had to be stopped before going into reverse, a highly risky decision since it seldom would start again.
As we could not throttle down to eight knots, our only recourse was to make long, sweeping runs ahead of the convoy, turn, retrace our path well astern, and then repeat the maneuver. In this manner I think we crossed the Pacific at least twice to the convoy’s once. The engine gave out at Guam, and we were towed into Apra Harbor for repairs. After a landfall and more repairs at Eniwetok, we managed to make Hawaii and Pearl Harbor.
Entering Pearl, we were told by the control tower to proceed to East Loch for mooring. The harbor was fantastically crowded with warships of every description, and we had no idea where East Loch was. As we headed up the channel at our ungovernable speed of ten knots, a glance astern threw us into near panic. Steaming up behind us, looking as the whale must have looked to Jonah, was the huge aircraft carrier, the USS Saratoga. Not used to acknowledging small craft, the Sara plowed arrogantly on, her 888-foot towering bulk capable of swallowing a fleet of APc’s and spitting us out for matchwood. Efforts to acquaint the tower with our unmaneuverability drew only silence, and even our desperate move of hoisting the ultimate flag signal, “running out of control,” was totally ignored. Fortunately, the East Loch turnoff appeared, and we shot out of the main channel like a scared rabbit.
Three weeks at Pearl and even a cleaned and painted bottom failed to restore the APc-42 to good humor, as we found shortly after departing for San Diego, a two-thousand-mile voyage uninterrupted by any landfalls. First we sprang a leak, forcing us to remove our provisions from the stern lazaret so that we could pump it out. Unforgivably, we left the cases on deck, and a storm promptly washed them overboard, leaving us only with meat from the freezer and several cans of boned turkey and rock candy to tide us over.
Because of the food shortage, the leak, and a fear that we would run out of fuel due to the extra distance we covered to accommodate the slow speed of the convoy, we asked for and secured permission to head for San Diego on our own.
We sailed into San Diego Harbor at dusk one day in late May. Misjudging the distance to our berth, we stopped the engine too soon and suffered the final ignominy of being towed the last twentyfive feet or so by a harbor boat. I doubt that the engine would have started again.
Robert Perrin
Slingerlands, N. Y.
Top Voice
Regarding Mr. Baida’s article “Breaking the Connection” about AT&T (June/July), I believe it is a competent account done in a very short space.
My quoted statement that the “public’s desire for diversity in communications services and suppliers” was challenged as “not persuasive.” Further, the author says that the “decision to break up AT&T was made not by the public, but by government officials acting as representatives of the public.”
I’m not sure we are in disagreement, because that’s how the public makes decisions—through its representatives. But this is more than a quibble, because if we learn anything from the divestiture history, we learn that a series of events, one upon another under no specific or overall direction, culminated in the mindless destruction of a corporate masterpiece.
The Department of Justice embarked upon another of its periodic attacks on the Bell System in 1974 with intent to destroy it. This without knowledge of the President or most of his cabinet. The federal regulatory authorities and the courts introduced competition bit by bit into a monopoly environment despite a decade of warnings that the consequences needed to be understood and that the average telephone user would be injured. A third federal body, the Congress, was unable over a period of years to restate public policy in a way that fitted rapidly changing circumstances. No elected official in Washington—or elsewhere to my knowledge—ever publicly advocated the Justice Department’s position to break up the Bell System. And yet no one in three administrations was able or willing to stop the drift toward what the public and most government officials now consider a disaster.
Unfortunately such drifting is the way some important policy decisions are made in this country. The pressure to change the Bell System was piecemeal and diverse but inexorable. The decision to do it by divestiture was dictated by the need for the company to deal with the Justice Department—the only place in the federal establishment where someone would make a decision and make it stick. If not, the company and its owners were clearly going to be drained by competitors who were and are still being subsidized, reorganized by doctrinaire lawyers who would soon move on and be compelled to answer to no one, and tied down by legislation more dedicated to compromise than to solutions.
There is no joy in “we told you so.” The only job now is to make the situation work again as well as it can. Given time, and a cessation of further government meddling, a competitive scheme may be able to sustain a telecommunication system that functions well and is universally available and affordable.
Charles L. Brown
Chairman of the Board, AT&T
AT&T Up North
In tabulating the accomplishments of AT&T, “Breaking the Connection” omitted a unique and most important project: the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. This was a chain of some sixty radar stations designed and installed by a Bell System project team across Arctic North America, extending three thousand miles from northwest Alaska to the east coast of Baffin Island in eastern Canada. This passive defense system has served to detect attempted transpolar transgressions by alien aircraft since 1958.
In late 1952 the Department of Defense handed AT&T a secret study outlining a plan to detect the intrusion into North American airspace of subsonic aircraft. With it was a directive to design, procure, install, and test within two years a prototype installation to determine the feasibility of such a system.
On the basis of successful test results in 1954, the Defense Department directed AT&T to build the whole North American Segment and complete the job by the end of 1957. Three major construction contractors were employed: one U.S. and two Canadian. Each employed its own civilian airlift subcontractor, but the Air Force transported outsized electronic material and the Navy transported the bulk of heavy material and fuel.
As superintendent of construction, I had a force of 120 Bell System supervisors and inspectors in the field plus Army personnel for field engineering. Manpower of our three general contractors reached a peak of 3,600 in summertime, about half that number working through the Arctic winters. At each site, we constructed buildings, antennae, a power plant, fuel systems, roads, and airstrips, some with hangars. As construction neared completion, several hundred Bell System employees—all volunteers—installed the electronic gear.
AT&T didn’t make a big profit on the DEW-Line. The project was done with the corporate and employee attitude of “in the spirit of service.” It was completed on time and with an outstanding safety record. Only Ma Bell with her full family could have done it.
Markham S. Cheeuer
Cashiers, N.C.
Aftermath of Polio
Geoffrey Ward’s fine story about President Roosevelt’s fight in the aftermath of polio (June/July) must have struck home to many reporters who worked in Washington in those days, including myself. I was a reporter for the United Press, much of the time at the Capitol. When the President delivered a message to Congress, we could look down on him from the press box as he stood at the lectern. With his speech in a folder lying before him, he would grasp the lectern with his left hand. With his right forefinger he followed his script as he spoke. In this way he could look up from his text to keep rapport with his audience and then return to the right spot in his text without stumbling or delay. I heard him on his return from Yalta when he spoke from his chair in the well of the House. He apologized for it, saying he knew his listeners would understand his wish to talk without the encumbrance of ten pounds of iron about him.
These instances, however, did not reveal his plight to me as fully as the day the United Press sent me to accompany the President on a short trip. He wanted, as I recall, to visit a railroad engine that intrigued him. My Associated Press counterpart and I made our way from the press room through the Oval Office to the portico outside. The open-air limousine was there waiting for him. Secret service men were wheeling the President toward it in his wheelchair. It had no armrests, and FDR gripped the seat of the chair to steady himself. As well as I could judge from our distance, the right back seat of the car was specially designed so it could slide forward, then turn right and slide on out the door. The secret service men, one on either side, lifted the President and placed him on this seat. He then slid back to his normal place in the limousine.
The realization that the leader of the free world was in a state of such physical helplessness was an indelible memory.
