The USS Kitty Hawk was commissioned in 1961, the first in a class named after her. I have read different reports about her early days. She had engine problems and boiler problems, gaining a nickname as the Shitty Kitty. Later I understand she was called the Chicken Hawk. I do not know why or how that came about.
By the first time I was aboard her (or any other ship) in 1966, I thought she was wonderful. Magnificent in her size with the hundreds of compartments and shops aboard her. Standing on her flight deck in San Diego, she towered over the USS Ticonderoga moored aft of her. She made the Ticonderoga look like a cabin cruiser behind a million-dollar yacht. Any carrier moored behind her always looked small. (That is with the exception of the USS Enterprise, the two of them were so alike I had to look at the flight deck island to tell which was which of course the numbers were different, 63 vs 65.) I did a lot of things on my two cruises aboard her and never came near seeing all she had to show.
I was later on the Enterprise for a cruise and there was not enough difference to make an impression on me. I did not like being away from home on those long cruises, but the first and second Kitty Hawk cruises were exciting with all the flight deck operations around the clock. I often wondered how much could have been left of Vietnam with 3 carriers in the gulf of Tonkin flying air strikes and bombing day and night for years. It turns out the country is still there and thriving, many vets go back with their families to revisit, just as those World War Two vets went back to Normandy in France.
It wasn’t always fun on the Hawk. We spent a week in December at the pier in Yokosuka, Japan with no boilers, hence no heat and believe me Japan gets cold in December. We slept in full uniforms, heavy navy pea coats and multiple pairs of socks and still nearly froze. We had a magnesium fire in the tire shop at the pier at Cubi Point, Philippines. (Magnesium once ignited is impossible to put out. It burns so hot it melts steel and in the fire the magnesium went through from one deck to the ones below and did not stop burning until the magnesium finally played out) We were called all hands to general quarters for a day and a half to fight the fire and the subsequent fires it ignited as it went from deck to deck. Shore Patrol duty was never fun. That ran for nearly 14 hours on one’s feet, walking the streets of Olongapo, Philippines was not fun at all, though some called it stick liberty because you were issued a billy club, but told not to actually use it and if you had to, poke the guy in the stomach or rap him against his knee. That did not seem very effective to me to stop a sailor high on pills or whatever. The worst Shore Patrol was transporting drunks back from Grande Island.
The picture below is of me on Grande Island when it was uninhabited except for sailors on liberty.
Grande was a small then uninhabited island just inside Manila bay. The Kitty Hawk rented it as a recreation facility in port. The way to get there and back was in a World War Two landing craft from the carrier pier. The island offered standard park activities as anywhere else. The difference was everything was free, paid by the navy. That included all the beer any sailor could consume. The trips over on Shore Patrol were ok, the late afternoon trips back were nothing short of disaster. Combine 30 drunken sailors, 1 coxswain (boat driver) and just two Shore Patrol was like throwing fuel on a fire. I had drunks trying to pull me down in the boat to take out their navy frustration by thumping on me, the symbol of what they did not like about the navy. One trip a drunk climbed up on the side bulkhead to vomit and he heaved so hard he went over the side into Manila bay. The coxswain had to slow the boat and turn about to fish him out of the water. Fun fact, Grande Island is now a fancy resort.
Enough memory lane for now.
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