Fleet Plan of the Day
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - Fleet
The mission statement of the Cold War Boats Association includes preserving the history of Cold War submarines and there is a great deal that goes into making that available to our members. The coldwarboats.org website is the primary repository of every Cold War boat related artifact we are able to get our hands on.
This includes commendation letters for the command, command-related correspondence, crew publications, cruise books, physical memorabilia, newspaper articles and clippings, training aid booklets (TABs) where no longer classified, qualification related materials like qual cards and training aids, ship’s brochures published for significant events, envelopes and cachets related to the ship’s post office, recordings of sounds of the boat, watch-bills, and pretty much anything else remotely related to a Cold War Boat.
Where do these items come from? I’m glad you asked. Our main source of these artifacts come you, our registered members. You can upload your photos, scans, and pdfs quickly and easily for preservation on the coldwarboats.org website.
Others are gifted to us by family members of shipmates on Eternal Patrol, and we use our admittedly limited funds to purchase other collectibles as they become available.
Which brings us to our titular topic for today. We have accumulated hundreds of ship’s brochures: keel layings, christenings, launchings, commissioning, change of command, welcome aboard brochures, inactivations, and decommissioning. Our Historical Archivest, Caitlin Downhour, invests a great deal of time scanning these documents so we can post them in the appropriate command’s Logroom Archives under Ship’s Brochures.
Currently we have posted 184 brochures, mostly from fast-attacks and boomers, smoke boat brochures being few and far between.
These include:
- Keel Laying: 1
- Christening: 3
- Launching: 19
- Commissioning: 44
- Welcome Aboard: 50
- Change of Command: 10
- Inactivation: 36
- Decommissioning: 21
To access all of these Brochures, you must be registered and logged in, though a selection are available for public viewing by non-registered guests. You can find them in your command’s Logroom >> Archives >> Ship’s Brochures.
All of them are indexed under Homeport >> Collections by various types, as well.
If you have collected any of these, and would like to preserve and share them with your shipmates and their families, please contact me for details. You can scan and upload them at your convenience, email me digit images, or arrange to send the documents themselves, insured and transported at no expense to you - we will scan them and return them to you promptly.
Don’t let these valuable pieces of Cold War submarine history be lost or hidden. Your name will appear on the website with every item you contribute, and your sponsorship tag will identify you as a Contributor.
Be a part of preserving our legacy.
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - Fleet
Reason One – Contact a Shipmate - This is one of the three primary missions at Cold War Boats - CONNECT. We have established a central point for locating shipmates and being located that protects your privacy, and that of those you reach out to.
It means that both of you have to be registered, so it follows that “Get Registered and Spread the Word” is our ‘connecting’ mantra. We have almost 12,000 names, which sounds like a lot until you realize there may have been more than 500,000 shipmates that served on Cold War Boats between 1946 and 1991.
You can contact other registered shipmates with the click of a mouse. Log in to coldwarboats.org, locate your shipmate on the Master Personnel Roster or any boat’s Master Sailing List, choose Send PM (Private Message) if you want to keep your email address private, or choose Email to, well, send an email, with your email address. Their contact info remains private until they choose to share it with you.
Looking at the calendar this morning, I discovered that I qualify as antique, being older than 50 and just a smidgen this side of 70. You don’t need me to remind you that days are short for all of us. Join us at Cold War Boats, reach out and connect, and never have to say “I regret not reconnecting sooner…”
There is not a moment to lose.
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - Fleet
A major on-going project at Cold War Boats is the gathering of records and documents that allow us to honor each and every shipmate that served on boats during the Cold War from 1946 to 1991 by adding their names to our Master Personnel Roster.
Yesterday, with the addition of the 112 shipmates from the inactivation crew of the USS ANDREW JACKSON (SSBB 619), Cold War Boats surpassed our first milestone of 10,000 names with a total of 10,016.
These names represent those who served in submarines over the 45 years of the Cold War. Some of those are currently registered, many of them are listed as missing, meaning we have no contact information for them, and many more have crossed the bar and are listed as on Eternal Patrol.
All are honored in the ranks of those who served.
So we set out for our next milestone, 20,000, a daunting task, but only a drop in the bucket of the estimated 400,000 names we expect to find.
If you want to make sure you are included, or to see who is currently listed on the commands you served on, visit coldwarboats.org. You must register and log in to see names other than those on Eternal Patrol.
If you would like to help in this endeavor by:
- locating and acquiring Personnel Diaries, commissioning, inactivation, and decommissioning brochures, and other documents, or
- Researching missing shipmates to discover contact information, or obituaries, or
- Participating in data entry for a specific boat, or
- Submitting other information that might add names to the roster,
Then contact me, Brad Williamson, at admin@coldwarboats.org, or our Sailing List Manager, Jim Hart, at sailinglistmanager@coldwarboats.org.
Regardless, if you aren’t currently registered at coldwarboats.org, then get there and make it so.
There is not a moment to lose!
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
It is now the 2nd of September, and summer is effectively over, leaving me wondering how it vanished so quickly. By now, you’ve probably given up hope on REGROUPEX 25, and rightly so. Only four months left in the year, and about half of that will focus on the holiday season, which leaves little room at the inn for a submarine reunion.
Time and circumstances have conspired against us, and it is with some reluctance that I officially ‘pull the plug’ on an east coast REGROUPEX 25. As much as I wanted to make it happen this year, I simply was not able to accomplish the task and deliver the reunion experience you have come to expect.
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 693
A few photos regarding progress on the USS CINCINNATI (SSN 693) memorial from Nick Ferrato of Cincinnati. I’m particularly impressed by the signage “Honoring Cold War Veterans”! It seems that is the first time I’ve seen such a tribute in writing.
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - Fleet
It was just over 48 years ago, probably early June 1977, and I was sitting at a long table down the middle of a barracks in Camp Nimitz at San Diego RTC, doodling on a scrap of paper my admittedly primitive idea for a flag worthy of Company 126. Dozens of other recruits gathered around, some with more artistic talent than myself, fortunately, that would take that seed of an idea and turn it into reality.
We spent a couple of months marching under that flag, and doing some serious behind-kicking in the many competitions that kept boot camp interesting. Everywhere we went, that flag led the way and anchored us to our fragile identity as a cohesive unit labeled simply 77-126.
Then we were gone. Off to our first schools and duty stations, some for storied careers, and others just using the Navy as a stepping stone to other adventures. I’m sure our company commanders AO1 Gilbert and QM1 Whalen didn’t waste any time grieving over our parting, but Sam Gilbert managed to hang onto the 126 guidon, perhaps because there was nothing better to do with it, and it seemed important enough to hang on to it.
Hang on to it he did.
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- Brad Williamson
- POD - Fleet
Today, we remember...
We set aside this day, Memorial Day, to honor those military personnel who died serving in the United States Armed Forces, and that number is so great as to be hard to grasp.
We are grateful, we give thanks, and we acknowledge the sacrifice made by so many, but unless you personally know someone who gave their life serving, the sheer magnitude of numbers renders those we remember nearly anonymous.
Perhaps we focus on those lost only in the submarine community, but even the 3506 submarine officers and men lost during World War II are difficult to hold in your head, and that doesn’t include those lost before or since.
Even bounding our count with the duration of the Cold War, from 1946 to 1991, produces hundreds of names from the well-remembered USS THRESHER (SSN 593) and the USS SCORPION (SSN 589) to the lesser known USS COCHINO (SS 345)/USS TUSK (SS 426) incident, and many others lost one or two at a time.
