Our rather brief stay in Subic was a bit of a mixed bag. In no particular order I offer some thoughts.
Very few officers but many ratings ventured out of the base into the adjoining “township” that had, over the years, sprung up to provide local workers for jobs within the base…and also to cater for the needs of homesick sailors a long way from Kansas or wherever. Sembawang times 12. A huge difference here was the number of USN Officers who had found a sort of permanent female companion…personally, I think the truth would be closer to “she found him”…all absolutely gorgeous, but suffering from the same limited vocal range of their Indonesian cousins. That is, the only way to talk is in a high pitched yowl that sends dogs running for cover. The USN has since then given the base back to the host country, but I wonder what has happened to all those who depended (in one form or another) on the largesse of the USN people.
I don’t for one moment think I was the only “Brit” to wonder what the RN were thinking when the ships allowed their ships companies to swarm all over this rather staid base (all US bases are..on the surface, at least, models of decorum) dressed in Union Jack shorts and “T” shirts displaying “Englands Invasion Of Germany 1988”..and other quite nasty ones. And they tended to be dirty clothes. I don’t know how they got away with it, but none of the behaviour was much of a credit to the RN. But what’s new. Recall the vandalism I described in South Georgia? The disgraceful behaviour in Djakarta? And this rampaging “mob” also gave a severe beating-up to 2 of our somewhat older ABs (early 30s) just because they were RFA and not RN.
Kind of makes the case for being tied up a long way from them I suppose.
Our “host ship” was the USS “Berkely”, a destroyer. We had their officers (and concubines) over for a “pub-lunch”. As you know, the USN is “dry”, and the American version of beer is, to put it politely, not the same as the UK version. After a few pints of CSB it was obvious that the good ship USS ”Berkely” wouldn’t be a “zero defect organisation” again for a few days or so. Well, we enjoyed it!
The host ship for the “Ark” was USS “New Jersey”. She was tied up just in front of us, but to see her in such a WW2 setting was superb.Anachronistic, certainly, but she so suited those surroundings rather than looking a lot “out of place” like “Missouri” did in Sydney when surrounded by “modern stuff”. Oddly enough, in this sort of setting the ship didn’t seem as visually huge as you may expect. OK, they weigh in at around 60,000 tons, but a lot of that weight is armour, and they are very “fat” ships and have a draught around 30ft.
Our Captain was one of the guests at a CTP held on board by the Captain of the battleship, and during the sort of banal chat that goes on in the course of such poodle-faking the USN Captain was bragging about the size of his guns (as Americans tend to do). Just this once, our Captain stored this in his brain for future reference. Short term. When he made his, regrettably sober, way back “home” he had a pow-wow with the boss of our “rocket men”.
The rocket team worked overnight in darkness to assemble their gear. In the morning the quay was crowded with USN people looking at the back end of what they had assumed was just another “fleet-oiler”. What they saw were six 30ft long “guns”, 2ft in diameter, pointing at 45* up into the sky. The word “flummoxed “ must have been invented just for this. But what most of the spectators didn’t know was this was the reason we were here.
Before we sailed from Subic the New Jersey had decided to give us and the Ark a demonstration of “live firing” from the big guns. Very impressive,with lots of smoke, a huge amount of noise and then vast columns of water appearing appearing over the horizon about 8 seconds after firing. But it all seemed rather “old fashioned”. There was no “sheets of flame” as happens when the ship gives a PR demonstration. Just smoke, and so not as visually impressive. Also, as we were directly astern of her, the bodily sideways shift of the ship was quite discernable.