Intrepid thinking

This photograph is of the USS Intrepid. Intrepid gained fame recently when she went aground in New York Harbour, not under her own power but while being moved by tugs.

I met the Intrepid in 1971. She was long in the tooth then, having been commissioned in 1943. She was the biggest target in a Hunter-Killer group that the submarine Ojibwa sometimes played with, me a young sub-lieutenant very excited by all this.

To get at her we had to slip through her screen of destroyers, evade sonar-dipping helicopters, and elude aircraft using Magnetic Anomaly Detection gear. On those occasions when we succeeded in all this we fired green flares to indicate that we had enough information for a "firing solution" and had we wanted to, we could have torpedoed her. In fact we went through the drill completely each time, firing what are called water-shots from the torpedo tubes. Usually the captain fired a spread of three or four of these virtual torpedoes before we fired the green flare.

When we fired the flare all hell would break loose. Because, of course, people saw the green flare so they knew exactly where we were. The Intrepid would agreeably play dead for an hour but everybody else went to town on us. Destroyers everywhere, pinging away, dropping teeny-tiny depth charges, two pounds of explosives each, to let us know that we were in big trouble now. From time to time they'd nail us really well. Even if it's only two pounds, a two pound bomb going off underwater just the other side of a pressure hull makes a really big noise.

Usually they didn't get us, though. Nowadays I think we'd be in a lot more trouble, but in those days we could get beneath a temperaure layer and suddenly become invisible to their sonar. Or, if we couldn't do that we could fire a cannister of lithium hydride into the water. This created a huge cloud of hydrogen gas which ships would a) think was us and bomb hell out it while we slipped away, or b) not think was us but not be able to hear us through it, and so off we went.

But the Intrepid was a great deal more than a target for the Ojibwa. During WWII she saw active service in the Pacific Theatre including the Marshall Islands, Truk, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa.

In February of 1944 she was approaching Truk, and a Japanese torpedo plane hit her off the starboard quarter (about 4:30 on a clock face, noon being dead ahead.) The torpedo struck 15 feet below the waterline, flooded several compartments and jammed the rudder hard to port. By using the engines to steer (a very rough-and-ready approach to steering) Intrepid made it to Truk and carried out operations for two days of almost steady combat.

She was a key player in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Desperately hoping to keep control of the Phillipines, the Japanese war command sent its navy into Leyte Gulf from three different directions. There were four major naval engagements that took place, which are collectively known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Intrepid was heroic and her aircraft were up and at'em with huge impact. Then she was struck by a kamikaze with the loss of ten men. She kept going. Some while later she was struck by two kamikazes within five minutes of one another. She never left her station.

Before she was finished in the Pacific she was struck again by a Japanase aircraft, this time without loss of life, nor of grit.

This ship earned her name the hard way. I am glad to have met her.

I didn't truly realize in those days that when we torpedoed her and she played dead for an hour, she was only playing. In real life she'd have fought like a tiger and won.