LBJ had not met Captain Schmidt until that morning.
The commanding officer of the Iowa was not a man easily, if at all, impressed by politicians. That said, he was an old-fashioned gentleman whose apparently mild-mannered exterior clearly masked the soul of a workaholic, albeit paternal slave-driving martinet. According the Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations, ‘Battlewagon Schmidt’ was the US Navy’s last ‘great battleship man’. Schmidt was a gunnery expert who had cut his teeth in the ‘battleship navy’ of the 1920s and 1930s, been a senior member of the original design team for the Iowas, Gunnery Officer, then Executive Officer of two of the four ships in the class late in the Pacific War. He had been onboard the USS Missouri when the Japanese Surrender was signed and commanded not one, but two of the leviathans in the years before, during and after the Korean conflict.
The Iowa’s safe transfer up river was the responsibility of the River Pilot and the tug masters but Anderson Schmidt had fired up two of Iowa’s eight Babcock & Wilcox M-Type boilers and reactivated one of the four Engine Rooms. If something untoward happened he was ready.
‘There are four Fire Rooms,’ the lean Richmond-born Virginian had explained, making the entirely reasonable presumption that a Texan Vice-President of the United States of America was unlikely to know his arse from his elbow onboard a Navy ship, ‘or Boiler Rooms, as the Brits call them’, he explained. ‘The Fire Rooms each have two boilers, and each Fire Room is located forward of its respective Engine Room. Iowa has four shafts, each with its own Fire Room and Engine Room. Assuming she’s not been long out of dockyard hands and her bottom is relatively clean, the ship can make twenty-seven knots with just four of her eight boilers lit. If we want to steam faster we need to fire up everything we’ve got!”
Over a thousand of the Iowa’s two thousand three hundred man crew had already reported aboard. As David McDonald had promised, this was an ‘old man’s ship’. Apart from a small cadre of cadets and junior grade lieutenants there were no boy sailors or young men on the Iowa. It was likely that the average age of the battleship’s crew would be in the mid-thirties, perhaps, older. In the rest of the US Navy it was not unusual to find over half a ship’s complement aged under twenty-three years of age.
‘The Chief of Naval Operations wants the old girl in action inside two months,’ Captain Schmidt had smiled, ‘so that’s what Admiral McDonald gets. You can’t train a green kid much in two months. Back in the war,’ the Pacific War of 1944 to 1945 when the four Iowa class ships first came into service, ‘it took us six months to a year to shakedown these beasts. But calling back all my old-timers, well, that’s music to my ears, Mr Vice-President.’
LBJ felt like a Greek God chatting man to man with the distinguished-looking Captain of the battleship. He did not just look Presidential swapping anecdotes with Anderson Schmidt, he looked positively regal and that image would be flashed across America within hours and across the civilized World in days.
‘Tell me about the big guns, Captain Schmidt?’ He had invited his host.
‘Before they put a ship into mothballs the Navy makes a call about whether she’s ever going to return to service,’ the officer had explained, formally affable. ‘With the Iowas they hedged their bets. In the mothballing refit they didn’t lock everything down and hardly any essential equipment was removed. But,’ he chuckled, ‘the main and secondary batteries were inactivated. The best way to test the hydraulics and electrics is to elevate the big guns. Strictly speaking the main battery turrets are three-gun, not ‘triple’ turrets. Each gun can be elevated and fired separately, you see, Mr Vice-President.’
LBJ had not known if the Captain of the Iowa was blinding him with science or simply playing up to the crowd. He had let the man talk.
‘Each main battery gun is sixty-six feet long from muzzle to breech face, of which about forty-three feet protrudes from the gun house. Each gun and breech assembly weighs over one hundred and twenty tons. At maximum elevation — as you see them now — each rifle can propel a two thousand seven hundred pound armour-piercing round over twenty nautical miles. When the Iowas first joined the Fleet it was decided that to aid artillery spotters when the ships were bombarding shore targets, each of the four ships in the class should incorporate dye bags into their respective propellant mixes. The USS New Jersey was assigned blue, the USS Missouri red, the USS Wisconsin green and the USS Iowa orange.’
Captain Schmidt had periodically moved away from the Vice-President to confer with his Navigation Officer, a greying, balding veteran in his late fifties, who was the man actually co-ordinating operations with the Pilot and the tug masters.
‘What you can actually see of both the main battery and the ten dual-purpose twin 5-inch turrets of the secondary battery,’ Anderson Schmidt had continued, ‘is only a small proportion of the workings of the turret. Number One and Three main battery turrets extend down four decks below the main deck, Number Two turret placed between Number One turret and the bridge so as to super-fire over Number One turret, goes down five decks. Each turret weighs in excess of two thousand tons. Each turret can be rotated through three hundred degrees of arc at a maximum rate of transit of four degrees per second. The main battery can be fired beyond the beam, that is, ‘over the shoulder’ with the barrels of either the forward or the after turrets pointing respectively backwards or forwards. We try to avoid ‘over the shoulder’ shoots because the muzzle blast causes havoc in exposed positions in the superstructure. Back in the day the first time we tried it off Iwo Jima it was like being hit by a Kamikaze amidships,’ the grey-haired old warrior guffawed affectionately in fond remembrance.
A question had popped into the Vice-President’s head.
Notwithstanding he was painfully aware of the pitfalls of trying to pretend to know what one was talking about with so many witnesses — each and every one of them aching to see him make a fool of oneself — he had asked a question.
‘I believe the big guns only have a finite number of firings during their service life, Captain Schmidt?’
‘They do indeed, Mr Vice-President. For all their sound and fury they are tender monsters. Using the propellant available in the 1940s — Nitrated-Cellulose, or as we call it in the trade NC — we got about two hundred and ninety full bore, maximum range ‘heavy’ projectile-size shoots, out of each barrel.’ He waved at the elevated barrels of the great naval rifles. ‘After the Pacific War we switched to SPD, that’s Smokeless Powder using Diphenylamine as a stabilizer, which doesn’t burn as fiercely as NC, which was little better than the old-fashioned cordite mixes used by our first generation dreadnoughts. SPD extended barrel life to around three hundred and fifty firings. Lately, we think we’ve cracked how to extend barrel life into the four hundreds. Magical stuff the ‘Swedish Additive’!’