USS Albemarle, AV 5 Seaplane Tender
My 1st ship was the USS Albemarle, I went aboard her in 1959. The Albemarle was commissioned in 1940 and served for twenty years, seeing action all during WW2. Her main purpose was to patrol the coasts conducting anti-submarine patrols with her squadrons of sea planes. The ship was capable of bringing the large seaplanes on to her fantail for repairs. She was equipped with 2 – 5 inch gun mounts, 20 and 40 mm Anti-aircraft guns. She was decommissioned in 1960 at the Philadelphia Naval Ship Yard while I was aboard.
My second ship was the U.S.S. Randolph, CVS-15, going aboard her in 1960. The Randolph was one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers built during World War II for the United States Navy. The second US Navy ship to bear the name, she was named for Peyton Randolph, president of the First Continental Congress. Randolph was commissioned in October 1944, and served in several campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operations, earning three battle stars. She was struck by a Kamikazee in 1945, killing 27 sailors and wounding 105. Decommissioned shortly after the end of the war, she was modernized and recommissioned in the early 1950s as an attack carrier (CVA), and then eventually became an antisubmarine carrier (CVS). In her second career she operated exclusively in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean. In the early 1960s she served as the recovery ship for two Project Mercury space missions, including John Glenn’s historic first orbital flight. I spent the remainder of my enlistment in the Randolph’s Weather Service, being discharged on February 21, 1961.
She was decommissioned in 1969 and sold for scrap in 1975.
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- USS Albemarle, AV 5 Seaplane Tender
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- Albemarle arriving at pier 7, Norfolk, Virginia
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- Standing Captain’s Inspection on the Albemarle – Upper left, 2nd from rt., Aerographers Mate Roger Graves
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- Enjoying liberty with fellow Weathermen at the Enlisted Men’s Club Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
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- Randolph paying homage to Halifax,Nova Scotia
Hello, my name is Dave Brown. my father served aboard the Randolph from 60-62. he was an aviation machinist. I realize the ship was big, but was wondering if you knew him. he passed away last November and I have been looking back into his past.
Thank You for your time
Dave Brown
Hello Dave, You don’t mention your Father’s name, unless he was a Dave Brown as well. If that was his name, I do not recall knowing him, and as you mention it was a big ship. I was in Ship’s Operation Division in the Weather Service and did not have a lot of contact with the Aviation Machinist’s. Thanks for your inquiry.
Bert Botta
4 Michael Drive, Petaluma, CA 94954
Email: botajet@gmail.com
415-320-9811
7/10/14
Mentor In a Poopy Suit
In June 1957, with the ink still wet on my high school diploma, the U.S. Navy shipped me off to my first duty station, Barin Field, Alabama.
As part of an agreement I made with Uncle Sam as a reserve sailor, I committed to serve two years active duty immediately upon graduation from high school.
One year later, after serving my time at “Bloody Barin” as it was known throughout the Pensacola Training Command, I received orders to report to Antisubmarine Squadron VS39 in Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Barin Field got it’s nickname “Bloody” because of the frequent aircraft accidents among cadet pilot trainees over the years it served as an outlying field of the Pensacola Naval Air Station Pilot Training Command.
After arriving at Quonset Point, I spent a few months finding my niche in the squadron and preparing for my first deployment to the north Atlantic with VS39 aboard the U.S.S. Randolph, an aircraft carrier based out of Norfolk, Virginia.
One of the officers whose aircraft I was assigned to as part of his flight crew was a young Ltjg (lieutenant junior grade) named McGill. He was a couple of years older than me and he was a NavCad (Navy Cadet) graduate. He had also put in a couple of years at Princeton. He busted any image I might have had about aloof Ivy League school kids.
McGill used to tell the enlisted men that he liked going on liberty (Navy term for R&R) with us better than the officers because he had more fun. But I suspect he said that to make us feel better. That’s the kind of guy he was.
When VS39 deployed to the Randolph, it was to qualify our pilots for carrier landings (carquals). We flew S2-F’s, affectionately known as “stuufs”, a Grumman built, propeller driven anti – submarine aircraft with sophisticated (for it’s day) onboard electronic submarine detection and tracking gear.
During the night before McGill’s final early morning launch, someone had spilled a five-gallon bucket of engine oil on the deck. Either no one saw it or they neglected to clean it up.
Once the launch got underway in the black, north Atlantic predawn, McGill was signaled to taxi his aircraft forward to take his position on the starboard catapult. I was standing just aft and off to the starboard side of his aircraft as he reached up to the overhead quadrant and gently rocked the throttles forward on the two big, 2000 horsepower, R2800 radial engines.
As McGill turned his aircraft to line up with the catapult, the prop wash, blown aft from the force of the rotating props and in combination with the carrier completing it’s turn into the wind, forced me into a thirty degree lean against an instant gale force.
His “stuuf” taxied over the oil slick and, as the deck rolled left McGill’s aircraft began a sickening, synchronized, slow motion skid toward the port side of the flight deck. I stood there, frozen in anguished disbelief, while an impotent cry of “Mac..!!” was ripped out of my mouth and blown aft over the boat’s fantail (rear deck)
The aircraft, with McGill and a full crew – copilot and two enlisted electronic countermeasures experts, crammed into their seats amidst thousands of pounds of electronic gear – cart wheeled lazily over the port side of the carrier deck. She took thirty feet of catwalk (the walkway surrounding most of the ship, immediately below the flight deck) with her, landing topside down.
As she completed her roll inverted, her phosphorescent underbelly gleamed in the pre-dawn darkness like the belly of an inverted sperm whale. The frantic churning of her props seemed to act in her fatal favor as she sliced her way through the water’s surface, seeking a frothy grave in the frigid, angry waters of the North Atlantic.
We lost all four aviators. The last time I saw McGill was in a body bag about six hours later as the “angel”, the recovery helicopter, deposited the crew-members’ bodies on the flight deck.
One of the chopper crew members threw McGill’s “poopy suit”, the rubber exposure suit that the Navy required all crewmembers operating flights over cold water to wear, down on the carrier deck shortly after they landed.
His suit was ripped to shreds, except for a piece of his name, McGill, in large black letters on one of the larger pieces.
High Touch Memories
In some strange, inexplicable way McGill helped to heal the insecurity of this teenage, future aviator’s soul. He left an indelible impression on me of what real manhood and leadership was about – his love for life, his passion for flight, his vulnerability, his fun loving, open-hearted, strong yet respectful honoring of younger men.
I’ve never forgotten him.
Maybe that’s why, to this day, I still honor the ground that naval aviators walk on, even though I’ve apparently taken my place among them in the aviation brotherhood.
If one were to hold up to the light the advances in technology over the last fifty years and compare that to the brilliance of McGill’s soul, tech would come in a distant, dim second.
Bert Botta
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