OBS - What happened to....

munroburton wrote:

Theemile wrote:Some of the Edward Saganami As were sold to Alizon. ( The name of Terekov's new Sag-c flagship was passed this way). Honor's Nike was just renamed to "Hancock Station" to open the name for the new Nike Class, but kept in RMN service.

Ah, yes. Found it in AAC - the Reliants were listed for disposal before the war broke out again and saved them from the breakers.

That poor ship was barely fifteen years old.

saber964 wrote:
That's not uncommon in wartime look at how long some aircraft during WWII lasted in front line service. IIRC the TBD Devastator carrier torpedo bombers first flew in 1937 entered service in early 1939 and was obsolete by mid 1942 or the F4F Wildcat fighter entered service in 1940 and was a second line fighter by late 1943.

robert132 wrote:

Fireflair wrote:So I was recently rereading OBS and it occurred to me that Honor is taking over the Fearless but she takes it from the XO. Why?

I've seen any number of change of command ceremonies of ships. In all sorts of conditions; new commissioning, shipyard, deployed, or just resting in port. Every single time the off going CO was there. Even a pre-commission unit has a CO.

We'd send enlisted men off the boat and they'd hi-five their replacement on the pier sometimes, if they were lucky. Usually the Leading Petty Officer would get a bit of time to turn over with his predecessor, though I took over twice without seeing the guy I replaced. Most of the time the chief gets to see his replacement, though sometimes that doesn't happen either. It happened to me once that I took over without seeing the chief I relieved.

I saw one department head get replaced without seeing his replacement. But I never saw the XO or CO change out with out a turn over process during which the off going and on coming officer had time to change places. The only times I've heard of this happening was when the off going CO/XO was injured.

So where was the Fearless's CO? This is a ship that's almost 80 years old, has seen plenty of service. She didn't just come back from battle or anything. And when you're in the yards the CO is busy busy keeping up with paperwork, encouraging the yard dogs to give priority to the refit items he's concerned about. Plus keeping his crew in training, sims, and so forth.

I was career USN also and our current tradition is pretty much as you lay out unless the outgoing skipper was relieved for "cause" (i.e. him was bad boy) or he had to leave the ship ASAP due to medical reasons like injury (USS Fitzgerald's Captain.) The XO sits in the hot seat as "acting" skipper until either relieved by a new Captain or the current skipper returns. I've seen both.

However, the MWW was following to some extent the older (Age of Sail) Royal Navy tradition of the incoming Captain simply "reading himself (herself) in" in front of the crew and sometimes the outgoing Captain reading the orders detaching him from command.

It's the "reading in" that counts and we still see this in today's Navy when the incoming Captain reads his or her orders from BuPers under the authority of the Secretary of the Navy for him or her to assume command of the United States Ship Showboat.

This "reading in" is always done to make the assumption of command legal and as official notification to the ship's officers and through them the crew that they have a new Commanding Officer and who he or she is.

I believe it's scribbled into the Navy regs somewhere.

Fireflair wrote:Yes, I can recall the deck log entries that were required. It isn't just the change of CO that gets logged but arrival of new sailors and officers too. It's a legal record and kept for the life of the ship.

Even with the CO reading his orders and assuming command, I still wonder what happened to the old CO each time Honor's taken over a command. I some how find it difficult to believe that they've got a passel of ships sitting around without CO's.

I can understand if captain Roth (OBS captain mentioned before Honor took Fearless over, I believe) was relieved for protesting the butchery of Fearless's weapons. Though I think that if he'd been relieved for a reason like that, then Honor would have heard about it. I can't imagine that she would be so lazy and unprepared for a command which she was quite clearly looking forward to that she wouldn't have looked up the officers of record and the previous CO.

Back to the other ships where we see the CO's reading themselves in, which seems to happen fairly often, if the RMN is shuffling CO's around so fast they're running from ship to ship, leaving ships to be run by their XO's all the time it's a real manning issue.

Korgano wrote:Actually, in the case of Honor, most of her ships commands come directly from acceptance trials.
Fearless, Nike, Wayfarer, all directly from building. The rest, she was not the CO but squadron and fleet commander.
Nevertheless, in the books is clearly said several times that Adm. Cortez steal personnel from ships that go into repairs and refitting regularly and when they get ouf of yards fill them with what he could get from the ones entering atm. So most likely there was no changes of ships CO other than, deaths, promotions and yard time and in those 3 cases not likely to stay around to pass command.

Korgano wrote:Actually, in the case of Honor, most of her ships commands come directly from acceptance trials.
Fearless, Nike, Wayfarer, all directly from building. The rest, she was not the CO but squadron and fleet commander.
Nevertheless, in the books is clearly said several times that Adm. Cortez steal personnel from ships that go into repairs and refitting regularly and when they get ouf of yards fill them with what he could get from the ones entering atm. So most likely there was no changes of ships CO other than, deaths, promotions and yard time and in those 3 cases not likely to stay around to pass command.