Vic Socotra

07 August 2009

The Day the Music Died

(Far East Network Microphone)

This cycle about Bobbie K. Hubbard will come to an end today, though my memories of him will not. Hubs crossed over the great change in South East Asia, and in his final gesture to eternity, decided to stay there forever in the quiet cemetery in Angeles City, Republic of the Philippines.

There were a lot of things that lingered into the 1970s and 80s from the era after the dropping of the Bombs. Korea and Vietnam notwithstanding, my personal vote for the tipping point of then-and-now goes to Super Typhoon Tip in 1979, when I was assigned to World Famous Fighter Squadron One Five One, permanently embarked in USS Midway.

Hubs was the Leading Chief of the OZ Division, and Vinnie was the Ship’s intelligence officer. The air wing had flown off to Atsugi, the base that General MacArthur flew into, and which was the home for our jets when not underway.

The aircrew and maintenance folks got quarters ashore when we were in port, but the intelligence weenies had a nuclear command and control watch tied to Main Comm on the ship that I can neither confirm nor deny. We ground-pounders in the airwing were stuck, as a group, and could not enjoy the pleasures of the central Kanto Plain as often as our squadron buddies.

We were neither fish nor fowl; not essential to flight operations on the beach, and not exactly ship’s company. I spent a whole career attempting to avoid being assigned to a Ship’s Company, and succeeded.

It was an arrangement that permitted all sorts of mischief when there was nothing going on, but meant that we were confined to our bunkrooms and steel racks when everyone else got a mattress and a window ashore. In this particular case, however, the jets had to scatter before the rising storm of the Pacific, and I would be tied to the steel of the ship.

That storm was considered to be the most intense and largest tropical cyclone ever to form, more intense even than Typhoon Cobra, the 1944 storm described in "The Caine Mutiny" that sank three destroyers of VADM Bill Halsey's TF 38.

The Bull later said the storm was as hard on his task force as a heavy engagement with the enemy, and the ships that survived reported taking 70-degree rolls.

Think about that for a moment, would you? The ships that did not went all the way to 90 degrees, and ultimately beyond that, right-angled to the towering swells. Angry saltwater cascaded down into the stacks and flooded the engine rooms and the lean gray ships foundered, and just kept rolling.

We had no particular fear of anything like Cobra striking us, though of course in retrospect, the awesome force of nature has an inevitability that is perfectly obvious.

Tip formed in the northwestern Pacific in early October as a tropical depression. Over the next week it intensified to storm and then typhoon strength. On the 11th, its pressure dropped 98 milibars, from 996 to 898, and became Super Typhoon Tip. Circulation reached a record-setting diameter of 1,350 miles with gale-force winds extending 675 miles from the eye.

We were sitting in Yokosuka as the storm grew, and were joined by a new escort ship- USS Bainbridge, a nuclear cruiser. The intent had been to ride out the storm in the protected Sagami Wan, but either the magnitude of the storm, or the fact that word began to get around that a nuclear warship was in port, caused us to sortie into the weather.

Bobbie K. Hubbard was there, and it was the first time I saw the plates move across the wardroom table of their own volition, and sheets of green water rise above the bow of the aircraft carrier. The heavy seas carried away the whisker antenna along the catwalks, and Bunkroom 4, located as it was on the level below the flight deck way forward, actually experienced a weightless moment at the top of the arc of movement.

On the 12th, Super Typhoon Tip generated 190 mph winds off the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded for an atropical cyclone at 870 millibars.

Tip slowly weakened as it headed toward Japan, and we escaped the winds and seas as we approached the South China Sea and the relative safety of the Philippines. When Tip came ashore, it caused significant damage to the agricultural and fishing industries, and killed sixty-eight people.

The storm killed something else, too, and it was something that had been in place since 1945. The primary transmitting tower of the Far East Network (FEN) was at Camp Drake, near Tokyo. It broadcast 10,000 watts of rock-and-roll on AM 810, and carried language lessons and all sorts of the daily Americana to keep the troops from getting homesick.

Typhoon Tip knocked down the transmitting tower, and that was the end of broadcasting America to the Japanese. There after, only low-power broadcasts were permitted, and television went to cable, only to be seen on the bases, or by direct satellite delivery.

I can safely say that Tip was the in fact the tipping point of something, and never again did a Japanese person I did not know approach me to ask, in decent American English, what I thought about Casey Kassem’s American Top Forty Count Down.

That was 1979, October 12th, the Day the Music Died.

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