220410 Sentinel, Working Parties

Working and Party are two words that don’t seem to go together.
During my navy time I participated in many working parties.

A working party in the navy was never a party, but always a lot of work. During operations off the coast of Vietnam, we would have at sea replenishments every few days from either a fuel tanker, an ammunition ship or a grocery stores ship. 5500 men consume a lot of food every day. Galleys served food 4 times a day, the last was at midnight for those of us working the 7 pm to 7 am shift.
The fuel tankers were handled by the ship's company so I never was involved in that. The grocery replenishments were pretty easy operations with smaller case lots of caned goods and fresh foods. We could lift them off the pallets and take them to conveyers that moved them to the ship's galley storage.
The picture below is a more modern version of the bomb carts we uesd 56 years ago.

The ammunition working parties were the worst. The ammo came over by high lines from the replenishment ship to the Kitty Hawk. There were pallets stacked high with bombs and other pallets with bomb fins. Most bombs semed to be the 500 pounders. They were placed on small yellow carts, one to a cart with a long handle for pushing and guiding them to the bomb elevators. We would push them over and onto the elevator. No passengers were allowed on the elevator. It went down 5 or 6 decks below the hanger deck where the magazine was located. We sailors had to go down there through each deck using a vertical ladder and small hatches about 30 inches in diameter. I was skinny back then and I had a difficult time going through those hatches. Once down to the bomb magazine we had to move the bombs from the elevator and then park them on the carts in the magazine. One time there were 9 or more of us down there when one of the ship’s generators shut down from an overload. We sat down in the dark and waited. It was so dark down in the bowels of the ship that even after a half hour or so I could not see my hand in front of my face. Luckily there was no one down there that was claustrophobic. That would have made for a crazy incident.