USS Iowa - What it's like to actually command a battleship

[Music] [Music] hello everyone and before we get on to the grand old story that never was of task force 34 this video has been kindly sponsored by world of warships legends as you probably know i play world of warships on pc myself world of warships legends on the other hand is the version for all you console players out there it's available for download free on playstation or microsoft store depending on your console of choice of course i recommend not trying to download the xbox version from the playstation store or vice versa although i suppose you could try once in game you can pick your favorite nation from a range of in-game options grab a commander choose a ship that suits your playstyle and head on up that ship's tech tree this month world of warships legends is two years old if you count from the time of the first beta weekend and so there's going to be all sorts of celebrations and activities to take part in and a new class of ships being introduced the dreaded aircraft carriers which will show up in the form of tier 3 tier 5 and tier 7 ships for the us navy and the imperial japanese navy respectively if you want to see the ships that you can command and download the game head over to the link in the video description just below and now on with the show this channel has talked a lot about battleships cruisers carriers destroyers all sorts of funny games but what was it like to command one of these ships what was the job what were the perks what was the fun what was the more serious aspects of it well that's not really something that someone who studies history can tell you in full really you want to know about that from someone who's lived that history someone who's actually commanded one of these great ships but i hear you say surely all the ships that your channel covers will been out of service for 70 years or so the chances of somebody who captained one of them still being around are rather slim well you might think that but remember a few of these ships did actually make it much much further down the line for example the iowa class battleships so why don't we hear from someone who actually commanded one in fact someone who commanded uss iowa herself hello everybody um welcome to this particular uh show we are going to be talking a lot well for those of you who are watching obviously not live but i'm talking live to larry sequest formerly captain of the uss iowa bb61 herself um possibly one of the most well-known warships in the world and currently a museum ship on the us west coast if i'm not mistaken um so i guess i can call like i said i can call you captain or larry please so captain captain larry i guess has kindly volunteered to uh give us a little bit of a rundown of what it was like to run the iowa herself um which is not a perspective you'll get every day so very lucky to to have this so as usual we've got our our 10 questions obviously we're recording this via zoom for because well one flying out to the us is quite expensive and two at the moment um that's even more problematic than it usually is so forgive any errors in the zoom data feed or whatever those are entirely my fault but hopefully that won't be much of a problem so um i guess well first thing um if you'd like to introduce yourself to the viewers and just explain a little bit about who you are and what you what you uh what you did in the navy uh thank you yes and i'm gonna take the hat off now that i've authenticated that my battleship iowa had uh i'm larry sequest a retired navy captain i'm coming to you today from gig harbor appropriately gig harbor washington it's a little seaport village south of seattle on puget sound uh my wife and i she's a re writer we retired here after my 32-year career in the navy i followed that career with eight years in the washington state legislature and i am now working on a book about a democracy strategy of democracy which in part draws on my experience in the navy i was we're going to talk about the seagoing side of my career the other half of my career ashore was largely as a political military strategist in the pentagon sometimes so i guess with the first question we've got there is could you give us an idea of the various ships you served on before you actually took command of iowa well i was a farm boy born in idaho grew up on a farm in oregon so like many farm boys i went to see in my case i enlisted in the us navy because they were about to draft me and i enlisted aboard a diesel boat at the time i was in washington dc and had just finished three years of polar operations on in the anti-arctic and the arctic but i and my first ship was a uss drum is a an old world war teal diesel boat no batteries it was just a training ship in dc and i went to see on a diesel boat in norfolk out of norfolk where i did what all seamen recruits do start tracing pipes once i got a commission uh i by the way truck i i went to boot camp the day after i graduated from college uh and got my real education and then applied for ocs got a commission and my first ship was the cruiser northampton it was the command cruiser that was the alternative national command post that was a good tour of duty for me because i became the assistant navigator got to live on the bridge and really got as a brand new officer got a real good seat going education in navigation seamanship ship handling and what a large ship looked like but from there i became a destroyer sailor went to sea on a briefly my exo said you know you ought to stick around the navy and go go try this destroyer so he sent me to see on an old fletcher class for piper for a couple weeks and despite the stack gas i came back as a dedicated destroyer sailor and so i served as asw officer anti-submarine warfare officer on uh uss d'amato of ram one uh then after school came back as weapons officer on uss o'hare another fram one and then i was fortunate enough as a lieutenant this was during the vietnam years but to get command of a patrol gunboat pg-99 uss beacon we were built in the great lakes commissioned in boston moved through suez canal to san diego and then they started shutting down the war just as we were ready to sail for vietnam so we ended up coming back to norfolk without you so i went to shore for the first time to the pentagon after seven years at sea uh and one command and from there i had three more commands i tell people i had a small medium and large and extra large the beacon after my first spending on tour then i commanded the frigate uh braunstein ff 1037 the spruance class destroyer david r ray and then battleship iowa oh wow so it's uh yeah i guess they're going from a spruance to the iowa you could almost use you almost use your previous ship as a ship's launch for the next one uh indeed but you know i'll tell you drac one of the interesting things that is no matter how big or small the ship the role of the captain is the same and i realize as a four striper with 1600 people in the crew that basically i was doing the same thing with a lot more people than i was with as a lieutenant with the crew of 31 and i think it's very important that we remember that the sea is a very big place and no matter how big the ship looks it's still a pretty small smack speck on that ocean with sailors taking it to sea yeah yeah it's the the sea is always bigger no matter what no matter what you're on so i remember going to see one speaking about big versus small i was iowa we were getting underway from norfolk on seedy tail going out the channel heading toward the what we call vacates the virginia capes operating in the area and i had embarked a young newspaper reporter who was with me on the bridge and i realized as he was standing beside me asking questions that he was looking at me as perhaps the most powerful individual he had ever seen everything was appeared to be under my control giant ship big guns commands going on i spent the next two days while he was at sea with us sending him around the ship so that he could understand that who was actually in charge with sailors on the deck plates and their chiefs their petty officers and chiefs that these our ships are run from the crew up not from the captain down yeah and i suppose that's why that's one of the i suppose even going back to the second world war when i've had a look at the way the us navy ran its ships and developed its command style through that conflict that is one of the one of the things of that distinguishes the us and certain other allied navies from some of the other navies in that it's not a kind of authoritarian almost feudal style the captain has said this therefore thou shalt do this regardless of any other sense there is quite a lot of freedom and obviously not necessarily disrespectful talk back but if an office if a lower ranking officer thinks that that doesn't really seem to be quite the wise decision you might get a very respectful um sir are you entirely sure that that is what you want and sometimes delightfully blood yes it's important to remember but i felt in the american navy that crewman is a fellow citizen he has one vote just like you do he's paying taxes just like you are and in one sense we are all citizens together serving our country yes so um when you took command of the iowa obviously the the middle of the 1980s what was the main role for the ship during its time under your car because it wasn't too recently out of mothballs at that point right and let me start the story as you remember back in the early 80s when president reagan became president and john layman became the secretary of the navy secretary layman had this vision of a 600 ship navy he wanted to grow from 550 to 600 ships and in order to do that and not just build a navy around battles or carrier battle groups he wanted to bring the four battleships back and build battle groups around the battleships that would give you more capital maneuvering you know more capital chips to maneuver was a brilliant idea and the first one brought back was new jersey so new jersey uh the commission was was based on the west coast and as soon as they got that ship back into commission and this connects to my role explain how this would be important to me when new jersey was put into commission she had briefly been restored for a year in vietnam put back in mothballs back out again brand new crew they decided to give the ship and the crew a breathing space to kind of get used to the new ship navy to learn about battleships back in the water again and so new jersey was sent in 83 on a westpac cruise during that westpac i think the date was 23 october 1983 is when the marines were blown up by that terrorist bombing in beirut massive american security crisis so new jersey was sped back across the pacific through the suez canal across the atlantic they changed cos in the in gibraltar flew a new co because the other one had had his time elapsed another guy ready to take over and they plunked new jersey down immediately off the coast of beirut and she sat there doing three knot u-turns for weeks very little firing time throughout that and then suddenly the white house decided they wanted to fire at some bad guys in the mountains above beirut so they ordered battleship new jersey to fire into those hills now that poor crew they were wonderful people but they had not yet even done basic gunnery shakedown and nobody knew exactly what the exact coordinates of those targets were that the white house wanted to fire later on i was able to interview the people involved that firing was wildly inaccurate it embarrassed the navy and i was in the pipeline ready to become the second co of iowa iowa's in the refitting time during this so my instructions from the secretary of the navy himself were to go make sure the battleships could shoot accurately and i had unusually my orders came directly from the secretary so when i got to the ship my last admiral's visit with my type commander in norfolk the admiral said to me larry you do the shooting i will do the counting you have no limits on training ammunition i was one happy sailor i love gunnery so we became we went to sea with some wonderful gunnery people uh now deceased uh commander gene cosmick was the gunnery officer a fabulous uh master chief chuck hill a fabulous gunners mate all the way back to korea new big guns and grace grace great great gradually taught uh you trained the crew got the cosmoline out of the guns and became the most accurate firing battleship in history attempt the end of story now we were assigned to finish this story we were assigned to go to operation ernest will to help escort tankers through the straits of hormuz but we had not yet proven to secretary layman that we had met his instructions to me so i was in the med we were on our way through to schedule to go to the sui suez canal but i had to do a qualifying fire the in the aegean sea the greeks had a little rock a little island called avgonissi and we pulled in on avgonici by that time we had the rpv's pioneers aboard and did a day-long gunnery exercise to demonstrate how accurately we were shooting that report i sent up the chain of command within hours i had a green light that we had met the secretary's criteria the battleships were cleared to go back into action so that put us that was my story basically is to get the ship in commission and to show that these battleships really are what layman and reagan thought they could be and they turned out to be fabulous of course yes yeah i mean certainly i mean even just do you see some of the pictures from the 1980s of the ship sailing with its surface action group and i mean apart from the sheer size of it obviously but quite often um i've heard it says that you can tell which ship is the battleship because it's the best looking ship in the in the squadron absolutely i mean it to be fair it doesn't help that the us navy to be honest they went through that long period of just putting a gigantic block on top of an otherwise fine hull for radar purposes but still the iowa still are a very very unique looking style of vessel and you know drak for the naval historians uh among your viewers and readers it's important to remember that after world war one that the london uh naval treaties imposed a set of building limits on battleships and there was the u.s navy like the brits whereas building little groups of two or three battleships and refining designs we finally declared in the middle 1930s the us did that the japanese had violated the washington london naval treaties with the congo class cruiser we claimed that they had exceeded their tonnage limits that gave us under the treaty 10 000 tons that 10 000 tons on top of the previous classes gave us this brilliant iowa design a superb hull a perfect balance between speed armor installed equipment it was just the sweet spot of capital ship design so you mentioned you've got this wonderful ship you've got a blank check to shoot all the guns right she's um possibly one of the best sentences i could ever think of hearing aboard a ship especially something like that we used to say you know a day without gunnery is a day without sunshine we shoot six days a week and if you want to shoot on sunday just ask we'll do that so so what was it like to conduct a full gunnery exercise on iowa well first of all there are a lot of people involved because we fired so much we would often not put the full crew to general quarters we would button up around the turrets and the magazines and put but you know there were uh upwards of 50 40 to 50 people in each of those three turrets uh counting the crews in the turret magazine people each of those turrets by the way is about 1800 tons of machinery that rotates and they rotate on bulb on roller bearing paths that are just amazingly accurate you know you could lay those guns uh the the the machine machinery is just spectacular by the way the materials of the iowa this quality of the steel this was some of the biggest armor ever cast at the time the ship was built by women largely in brooklyn naval shipyard another interesting thing is what size is a battleship what decided that i mentioned the the treaties the size of battleship is decided by the width of the panama canal it had to be slightly less than 110 feet and it had to get under the brooklyn bridge when it was commissioned so you could you will see that the uppermost part of the of the forward mast has a place where you can add more on top of it that goes under the brooklyn bridge so that's the size of a battleship yeah and um i suppose when you do when you're doing the gunnery obviously you've got these 16-inch 50 caliber guns the main guns um but by the 1980s that's not the only equipment or and all the latest equipment on the ship so what other technology did you get to use during your new technology did you get to use it during your time in command yeah and i want to come back to what your your question was about actually doing a gunnery and doing counterweight with 16-inch guns um so yeah during the refitting for the 80s we added both the tomahawk cruise missiles and with a nuclear weapons capability and the harpoon missiles so what you had was this symphony of firepower again drock if you go back to look at the original design even without the missiles it was brilliant that the design of the main battery plots as secondary battery plots of five-inch uh plotting rooms with those old uh electromechanical computers those old computers could lay those guns more accurately because we tested them side by side than modern digital computers just wonderful machinery and it was really a pleasure i enjoyed being around machinery that was so well designed so well thought through and the intricate relationships uh between three turrets in our case six guns there originally were ten five inch five inch 38 guns i'd grown up with a five inch 38 gun that's the only one i could take apart myself but having all that firepower was really a remarkable thing so here's a way to think about it we didn't think much about sea battles anymore but if you did you could you know you could fire a long-range cruise missile you could you could shoot a harpoon at 60 miles close in start long-range gunnery at 20 miles and then keep going all the way down to 5-inch range with this symphony of firepower our main focus of course was surefire for gunnery itself it is we did wear a hearing protection but and you needed that if you were down on the on the main deck uh what was really important is to unders and when the guns fired uh you could feel like this oven opened you know just there's this flash of of heat a little interesting thing the guns when you fire a three gun turret you fire center left right guns and there is a thing called an agostat an old electrical device that slows down the firing trigger so that if you've got all three guns loaded and connected to plot when plot pulls the trigger the guns will go boom boom boom and that distance we had to adjust when they recommissioned so that the basic idea is center gun fires left gun fires that deforms the turret slightly to the left you need to give the turret time to get back on the gun line or the right gun will shoot to the left of the center and left guns that timing had to be shifted in the modern recommissioning because the shock waves of the center and left gun would overlap itself at the seawiz installations and the shockwave would crush the electronics inside the seawiz radar radome so we retimed that to be center gun 400 milliseconds to the second gun and a thousand milliseconds a second to right gun so it would go boom boom boom so kind of a ripple fire and you could if you fired all three uh turrets simultaneously of course if you look uh you can see those projectiles those are big projectiles small ones were 1965 pounds something like that the heavy weights are up to 24 100 pounds you could see those projectiles on their way out yeah i think that another reason for the timing is to make sure that the projectiles are not running side by side so that they don't collide yeah i've found that quite fascinating when i was especially when i was reading it i mean it was a fraction before the i was time but during the uh the second night action at the naval battle of gradle canal where you had washington firing and yeah a lot of people they think oh well you you fire the guns and you see pictures and you see the flare of the the muzzle blast and then people think oh and that's it you kind of just that and then maybe you see an explosion several seconds later but then with the description from the gunners on washington they were watching their shells arc up through the sky go through the low cloud obviously out of sight and then 10 15 seconds later you see them drop out the clouds at the other end of the the the scale so important to realize it you know you do have these spectacularly good optics both in the directors and on turret two so that the the turrets could actually control themselves optically if they could see the target but mostly you wanted to shoot at ranges where that target was out of sight so you needed radar you needed forward observers we trained the marines to be forward observers and then with the rpv and drac one important thing to understand about major caliber gunnery is quite different from say five incher or smaller guns though this is a statistical gunnery when you're firing lock major caliber guns you're filing statistical patterns so you what you're doing is measuring the standard deviation left and right and four and a half down that gun line so if i were for example firing at a football pitch in the uk down lined up lengthwise with that pitch we could drop every shell in on the grass nothing in the stands and the way we did that is by very carefully managing power powder temperature by knowing the ivs that we got out of every lot we had a little radar velocimeter we measured the speed of every bullet leaving the the barrel and then kept records on that powder lot with those projectiles what what iv initial velocity we would get so gunnery is an art in the science there's there is nothing that you don't calculate in gunnerage what makes it so interesting and you've got this huge crew of people that are working like a symphony orchestra in the turret and then plot and the spotters yeah so what so with with all that obviously also i guess using is that were the pioneer drones used for spotting with the gunnery or were they used for the for other purposes the principal purpose again was that basic mission the directive from the secretary the gun the battleships have to be accurate and i'll tell you as a gunnery guy who grew up looking at my fall of shot through binoculars it's a huge difference to be sitting with the camera on top of the target looking down and seeing the fall of shot drop in and of course the the guys and plot could see that so you could almost have the plotting room officer be his own fire control officer uh we were a little more disciplined that uh you know there was a command about a you know a left and right uh adjustment to to adjust the fire um but that was the purpose of the pioneer again uh interesting see story the secretary after that uh problem the you know the the the the bay right firing uh was in israel and the israelis had invented that was an israeli system they flew the rpv over the secretary during his visit then showed him the video so he liked it and bought it and in typical john lehman's style ordered with this thing we didn't know about it i still remember one day a couple of big steak trucks drove down the pier in norfolk and a lieutenant commander named dana griffith came aboard and he was with the trucks a bunch of big boxes were unloaded by cranes beside the ship he said hi captain i'm dana griffith i'm here with the pioneer system we're going to install that on the ship i'm now yours so we had to figure out where we would put that we found some spot in the admirals officer quarters that we could recon repurpose into being the control center put the put the you know we could launch with these little jado bottles and then we would put up big goal posts with the net between them and they would the the controller would stand with his little remote controller when he took local control and fly the rpv straight at himself into that net so that's what we did is we we built this thing in figured out how to use it we crashed a lot of rpv's uh before we finally got all the bugs out of it and and figured out how to work but the effect was remarkable it completely changes major caliber gunnery to be able to look down on the target in fact i i mentioned this you know the shooting in order to get the green light to go from sec nav that that final day of the qualifying firing in the med when we were up in the aegean at that avgonisi rock we used the rpv to see that fall a shot and when we left not only had we been very accurate but we left that rock quite a bit smaller than it was before i always thought we ought to send a letter to the greeks apologizing for just reducing the size of their island ourselves we were in the landscape rearrangement business fair enough yeah now there were other technologies um another thing we did if i may hear some other things it was not only the rpv's the addition of the missiles when you added all of that strike power from very long range as well as the guns you needed ability to control that so what we did is repurpose the old admiral's cabin on the o2 level as what we called strike it was an upper cic an upper combat information center the lower one the original one was down inside the armored box uh where the you know the radar men worked but we added up there uh this strike center and i built a different kind of command arrangement in which the strike officer was actually controlling the ship in the mission the officer of the deck on the bridge was going where strike told him to take the ship and we were able to do that because we had the first portable or luggable computers and for the navy first time in the surface navy when we would get back in port after a period at c these contractor computer people would come aboard and we would talk through and they would reprogram our computer systems so that we could see the battle space and control missiles airplanes we could see everything from there so that was a an important uh innovation another thing we did is realize that because the battleships were built as self-repair capabilities there were something like 26 shops built into the battleship everything from forge you could cast some steel parts of your own big machine shops we added high-tech electronics shops so i turned that part of the battleship into a repair ship that was actually funded by the type commander and i could take aboard small repair projects from the small boys in company they would fly or send by boat things that needed to be repaired and we would do all that fixing aboard the ship so that was another thing that we kind of invented is to use the battleship as a mobile mobile base a couple of other things as i was thinking zach about innovations this will sound terribly simple but it was important to the crew northampton bunks rather than sleeping on the world war ii canvas bunks six or eight high there were northampton bunks by modern standards still a terrible place to have as your home but better than the world war ii uh quarters and we installed air conditioning that was both a blessing and a problem the designers back in the 30s and 40s were brilliant designers of air handling so that they were very skillful at moving large volumes of air before the world of air conditioning through a ship to ventilate spaces including engineering spaces when we put the air conditioning in the barriers screwed up that was original airflow patterns it took us a year to finally figure out ways we could have both air conditioning and the natural airflow that had originally been designed and by the way another innovation uh down engineering space we were burning a different fuel than where burned the ship was designed for you know the old black oil days of world war ii so it took the engineers they did a brilliant job it took them months and months of work to gradually retune the entire plant so that we could operate at full power and we did indeed run battleship iowa my recollection is that we were going 36 and a half 37 knots we could sustain that for an hour or more as a regular flower test very proud of that i've had to be careful of that number because every time i tell the story the speed gets higher but we did have this uh 65 000 70 000 ton battleship going 37 knots that would have been quite an intimidating sight i could only imagine what the uh what the bow wave must have been like at that point oh very little really uh yeah very little because of the brilliant whole design uh yeah it it's not you're not putting a lot of energy you're not wasting energy and you don't see you're not pushing a big bow there is actually it was a an early precursor uh you know of those that bulbus bow kind of thing but yeah a wonderfully well-designed hydrodynamically designed hull yeah well it has to be to get something that like up moving to that kind of speed [Laughter] yeah i suppose that's been i'm just trying to think translating knots into miles per hour i mean i'm not entirely sure how you'd manage it but yeah that would probably get you a speeding ticket in some areas yeah well i would want to be the person trying to pull it over well interestingly enough we were almost up to the speed that my first command the patrol gunboat which was pyro powered by one j79 jet engine we could do 40 knots in that so what with the the ship obviously all work worked up um what was the reaction of other navies and the general public when you were conducting various port visits with this massive ship that's the size of which most people have probably never seen before well obviously very positive it's a powerful impact it's a beautiful ship and very impressive and a couple of examples in fact beginning since you're in the uk and your first experience as i recall drock was in portsmouth yeah we made a port visit in portsmouth in the fall of 1986 i had to burn down some fuel to lighten to bring the draft up a couple of feet to get into portsmouth harbor but going in there i remember bbc news flew television crews out they were broadcasting our arrival uh from the from the air uh i was careful going in as i recall the british history hms lion the last battleship was towed out of portsmouth and in the toe lion went to ground right underneath this pub that's on the breakers right there at the entrance of portsmouth harbor so i wanted to make sure that i got through the entrance we had a fabulous visit tens of thousands of people visiting us every place we went uh in germany uh we also we did a state visit for example in istanbul you could use the ship as a as a political capital for the country another thing that was very important in honduras for example we pulled into honduras on the caribbean side and with helicopters i flew something like 40 crew two doctors two chaplains a dentist with a portable dental chair up to an orphanage in the mountains above san pedro sulu when you read these days about the hondurans who are trying to escape honduras we were working in exactly that same area painted in orphanage rewired it did a lot of uh doctoring and dentistry work the crew of course was very proud of what they were able to do so it's another example of not only being a pretty face in the harbor but being able to do something significant with the local population that showed the the value of america our values and our crew and i'll tell you the most important thing drought i always to talk to the saw the crew as america's best ambassadors when we put our crew ashore in any port istanbul or or portsmouth this this was america coming ashore good-looking sailors we had this wonderful command master chief bobby scott the single best sailor i ever went to see with you could have put a four-star admiral suit on him and he would be easily able to run the whole navy bobby scott was a fabulous leader for the crew and he was always on the quarter deck no sailor went ashore without bobby scott having said and if the sailor wasn't quite ready to go ashore somehow a wrinkle of bobby scott master chiefs brow that sailor was back to get a second round of touch-up before he went ashore so the as diplomats that kind of using the president presence of the ship was very important as part of america's you know presence around the world one reason why we still want to have battleships yeah they certainly make a statement i should mention by the way something that everyone saw we talked about president reagan on the 4th of july 1986 we did the international naval review the statue of liberty was a hundred years old it had been given to us no the statue was not 100 years old in 86 maybe it was given to us by the french statue of liberty it had been refurbished recommissioned and so the idea was that on the 4th of july we would have an international naval review president reagan would be on board the ship and then later in the day with a laser he would reopen re-light up the statue of liberty we had something i was told like a billion watchers on television around the world for that international naval review of having the president on board dozens of ships from navies all over the world thousands of small boats so that was another place where people really liked the idea of this beautiful ship representing the best of america with america's best sailors on board and uh obviously it's um it's it's not always fun and games and and being able to show off the ship but there's obviously it is a warship so um iowa as i understand was deployed to the persian gulf during the tanker war um a little bit of a switch over from the from the airport visits were there any particular close calls aboard iowa with either iranian or iraqi vessels or aircraft etc during that period the whole thing was one protracted close call i mentioned the shooting at afghanistan getting clearance to go through suez canal um i've got great sympathy for this giant merchant ship that got stuck because i also had a very large ship in a small canal and learned about bank effects and things like that uh we got ourselves through very well thank you thanks to some very fine egyptian pilots um when we went into the persian gulf this was in the november december of 87 into january 88 to february 88. this was deep into that 10-year long iraq iran war the iraqis had already hit one of our ships in the persian gulf i'd spent this is the third time in my career that i've been in the persian gulf on deployment i was there a lot in my younger career and the iranians were meddling with the tanker traffic in and out now as we went in there um it was about the time we were sailing there was one of the incidents where the re revolutionary guard out of bondurabas the islands there the iranian islands had interfered with some tankers and there was the front cover of time magazine as i recall that had a picture of a giant oil tanker and the american frigate trailing for safety following the merchant ship so i said to my crew you are never going to find a picture with iowa following a tanker through straits of hormuz we're there to pre do the protecting not to be protected and so by the way talk about innovation struck the bosun's uh mates remembered the old timers iowa's the class was built with bowel mounted sweep gear so we went down to charleston navy yard where this mine sweeping command was their boneyard found old paravane sweep gear and jury rigged sweep gear on both sides from the bow so we could deploy with j david's applaud deploy our pair of veins and sweep three to 400 feet wide channel from the bow i could put the anchors down sweep gear basically we could protect ourselves now when we got there the way we operated is with the iranians having um it was something like 23 silkworm sites we didn't know which ones had the missiles but they could play hide and seek with these different silkworm sides the revolutionary guard boats zipping around occasionally shooting up a tanker with machine occasionally trying to drop mines our mission was to bring calm to all that and what enabled us to operate was international law says that if you are more than twi you're in international waters able to operate as a warship rotate radiators raid rotate uh train your guns fly helicopters you can be a warship in international waters but if you're in a transit zone you cannot behave like a warship you must peacefully stay on those transit things well there was a thing it called a football as you're going north into from the indian ocean arabian sea up into straits of hormuz ready for a big hard left turn there is a little slice there couple miles wide and east to west four or five miles long that we called the football that is more than 12 miles from iran in oman it's international water so i would peacefully go up the international ceilings get into the football turn ourselves on as a warship and iran would simply shut down all of the rev guards would stay quiet f4 flights stopped everything quieted down during those patrols we would finish a patrol go south uh for a break in the arabian sea around the corner in oman and gradually things would come back up um one of the interesting things was discovering of course the straits of hormuz have been the source or a route for smugglers since we first went to see in long canoes and there were these high-speed boats zipping back and forth between iran and oman i called those gentlemen of commerce they were not targets that was just regular smuggling going on what those people had been doing for thousands of years just with a little bit higher speed craft right now so you had to be very careful about all the airlines and and things like that so we did not have any incidents but i tell you we were on our toes at general quarters all of the time because of those risks something that that really stuck with me as we were finishing the final patrol ready to to leave he succeeded in that mission in there uh the port lookout was a young man probably 19 years old you know six months nine months before he'd been a farm boy in iowa now he was uh you know finishing his tour in the in the persian gulf he said to me as you know captain we were so good they knew we were so good that we didn't have to shoot and that was so that's my answer drock is that highly capable highly skilled they knew how good we were they knew that we were the most accurate firing battleship in history that was in the press and uh what our capabilities were that made a difference yeah so i suppose that's the thing that you don't mess with with someone that you know is immediately going to turn around just like oh you want to play right let's play because we're one only one side's walking away from this one and it keeps things calm you're not spoiling for a fight you're drawing the mission of the american navy is to prevent war so while everyone was obviously visits to ports visits to the persian gulf and such like um were there any especially amusing incidents during the ship's voyages well he talked to anyone crew i recruit person at the crewman i'm sure that he he would have they were all male in my time um in all male cruises at that time i'm sure you'll hear lots of interesting stories uh but i enjoyed every day there there was always something something going on some a cooper a crewman with an interesting story or something funny happening we did all that they did all the usual things of uh you know relative bearing grease and and finding uh you know the male bully watch and because we were a large ship we had people arriving you know every week you'd have a few new crew arriving and so there was always an ample supply of boots aboard the ship for the old-timers to have have fun with a couple of things we did that i enjoyed doing um we we had a refueling gear we were an underway unwrapped ship we call it so on the starboard quarter i had a big refueling rig had more than 2 million gallons of fuel on board and i could refuel ships alongside so we rigged up turret three with a a a small charge in one of the barrels and put a rig so that we could fire a shot line over to the destroyer when they arrived now the normal way as you know when you pass a line from ship to ship there's a monkey fist heaving line a young sailor with a good arm it can be quite accurate with that that monkey fist but we fired that thing over from the barrel of turret three and we did it at sunset so it was getting dusk with a little bit of flame coming out of the barrel scared the hell out of that ship he immediately i was embarrassed to say we enjoyed it but he broke off and did not come alongside for a while and we are reassuring him we were not trying to fire we used to have fun for example we would pass word on the top side speakers because they all would look at the battleship like destroyer sailors you know you're always getting bounced around in every sea and the battleship just rides like a table so we would pass words on the 1mc speaker's top side like the billiard terminal tournament has been delayed for 30 minutes you know it will begin at 16 30. of course these guys over there are bouncing around in the heavy seas these sobs over there actually playing billiards we had we had things like that i wanted to tell you one story particularly since you're a brit we finish our tour in the persian gulf and we're headed back to suez canal you know around uh past aiden uh went to gq to get through that little zone in there of aden in those days and we're heading up the red sea and we end up steaming alongside a couple of british ships that we'd operate a couple of frigates they were headed for the suez canal on basically the sun same timeline so we just fell in together had a couple of days operating together with helos exchange a couple of people and we were doing high line unwraps they'd come along just for young officers giving practice you know always training and seeing so what we did in a little background earlier in my career i had been in the seychelles i said i spent a lot of time in the indian ocean i've been in the seychelles on an earlier destroyer and there was a british royal auxiliary ship in that harbor and they were wonderful the wardrobe brought us over and of course they could drink at sea on the ship we were dry so we were pleased to be the guest of the brits and i remember them putting on a show for us of various kinds of strange people visiting in the ward room so in order to return the favor what we did when this destroyer the frigate the brit the brit came alongside royal navy ship and we rigged the high line we took with my one of the chief boson mates of the folk song he put on captain's eagle on one side and the chaplain's cross on his collar so he was dressed like a navy captain chaplin put his life jacket on jumped on the british uh highline rig where you just stand on a little t-bar zipped over and as he jumped off on the other side he said where the f can i get a beer and took off and i called the other ceo on that one on the on hand sound power data telephone i said captain i'm in so embarrassed we have had this chaplain that i am taking back to the states he's got a screw loose and we're trying to keep him under control my duty is to get him safely back to to the us he's broken loose and he's over on your ship can you send him back to me so the chief runs around the british ship looking for a beer [Laughter] we all enjoyed that oh i could just imagine i didn't seem long enough but we thought that was pretty funny yeah i could just imagine the the the hilarity trying to chase down this i suppose you've got to chase down and supposedly apprehend the person who's extensively got a captain right so it's like handling this excuse me sir you are being detained please come this way i do you know the the royal navy the sailors in the royal navy have a wonderful sense of humor you know if you're around a bunch of brit sailors you're going to have a good time and that was to try to hold up our end of the relationship fair enough yeah so um i suppose one of the big questions when you were coming up through the ranks obviously most of that time the iowas would have been in in mothballs um did you ever think you were going to get to commander ship like iowa though because we didn't even have them um i had always wanted from from very early on had i wanted to be in command my first dream sheet as a young officer you send these little cards into bupers bureau of naval personnel about what you'd like to do and i wrote down command of any ship anywhere no matter how rusty and i was fortunate as i said as a lieutenant to get command of a gunboat and then to stay in command for a total of four times um and you know as it turned out i i made the choice as a force driver that i i did want the normal thing was to go to sea as a squadron commander i really like to be in command and to me i my decision was around a 15 pound co2 bottle the red bottles have to be weighed in a tag marked every month that that co2 bottle is still fit for service i wanted to make sure that those co2 bottles were my co2 bottles not co2 bottles that i was inspecting on somebody else's ship so i was very fortunate to to have the opportunity and i'll confess that i worry today that yo that in our smaller navy with the compressed training schedules that we're not giving young officers these days the opportunity that i had for command after command to keep learning to learn more to talk to other commanding officers to figure out what you could do better next time i think that that experience really pays off and it's important to accrue that that co be experienced uh and i'd like to see i i hope a resurgence of that kind of uh expertise i hope hopefully with the new constellation class frigates coming down the line that'll increase the number of slots open to to officers who can take advantage of that right so when obviously you get command of the ship and it's got all these new systems were there any other systems you'd have liked to have seen added to the ship while it was being modernized that you could have thought you could make use of yeah i'm a real fan of gunnery i would like to see as i still wish that we were going to very long range guns even there the first time i went ashore i was flag lieutenant to the the vice admiral who ran the surface navy i can remember going with admiral king down to dahlgren to the experimental uh gunnery place even in the 70s they knew they could do hundred mile projectiles and i thought we should put a lot more into big gun very long range of projectiles but the navy has gone to the missile side there's a lot of advantage to having guns and the 100 mile range from a ship takes you you there's quite a bit of the world that's inside your fire fire power influence range fair enough yeah i suppose that it's that extra punch isn't it especially if you're doing mostly shore bombardment if you're limited to kind of a hard limit of maybe 20 miles and then minus a bit for the fact you you can't be right on the beach you've got the you've got the harpoon missiles uh which are you know one missile one target uh that idea of having uh you know a sustained bombardment that would be part of that symphony of firepower i think would be useful yeah so um i i'm told that you you had this idea of having a song at 1800 each day on the ship so what what's the story behind that and what was your favorite well you know i had forgotten about this uh i i think that sea shanties had occurred you know the old sea shanties and at one point one of the variations on this was if your group could do a good sea chatty shitty come up and sing it on the the 1mc that the topside speakers another thing we did the ship was so large with a large crew that we we had fun with the idea that it took a while to commute from iraq to quarters in the morning so we had a morning talk show there was an end we had an internal newspaper internal television station and an internal radio system with professional journalists some wonderful people in in that public affairs department brilliant photographers and we were using television and radio so we had a morning talk show was like commuting to work and there were a couple of guys with the usual jokes and they would look at the plan of the day the pod and say well i see why are we doing this let's call the captain then i would get a phone call and on the on the radio the captain why are we doing this today and so we had fun with things like that call the exo and ask why is this happening exo we did things like that we did a lot by the way with the wives families with ombudsmen these days everybody's connected with you know with the internet devices and facebook pages but in those days we really worked hard with 800 numbers we would send a daily message back to be put on an 800 recording to tell the the crew's families where we were they were worried about us being in the persian gulf and within the limits of classification we really worked hard at keeping those families informed i'm just imagining on that commuter talk radio i wonder if it i don't know maybe at some point someone thought about sending someone up to the top of the mast and they're just going right and now we're going to go to our eye in the sky what's the situation on the port side gangway uh well you know sometimes the the visibility we did have an 08 level bridge by the way you could go up to the old white level bridge from the o4 level you couldn't really see the quarters we're going to have the president on board and the nato will review i do we operate the ship from that weight level bridge it's um yeah i mean i hope hopefully i'm obviously at the moment travel between the us and the uk is uh somewhat difficult but i am hoping it's maybe this year hopefully but if not this year then hope maybe next year to actually visit iowa so excellent people like to do that uh pacificbattleship.com is the website the crews down there doing a wonderful job of keeping the ship looking good it's a lot of the internal spaces are open for tours there are museum spaces drak i wanted to go back you mentioned the things like broadcasting from high aloft we used to do reenlistment ceremonies wherever that crewman wanted to be re-enlisted and i have done one re-enlistment at the highest point of the ship there was an electrician who spent a seaman who spent a lot of time way up there on electrical connections and he wanted to be re-enlisted up there it is a long way up to the top of that tower higher than underneath the brooklyn bridge we also once i reenlisted a man on the anchor uh import we lowered the anchor down enough so that we could both climb down on a jacob's ladder and stand down there those giant flukes so yeah we did a lot of unusual enlistments i'll have to i'll have to see if they'll let me up to that top position i mean i'm but to be honest i'm terrified of heights but i'm always up for a good challenge you strap in you put your safety gear on all of that stuff those safety rigs were built into the ship yeah so i guess that leaves us with uh with our final question which obviously a lot of people can tell are going to be asking do you think the iowa class battleships would still be useful today my answer is yes in fact my answer is hell yes uh we're making a mistake in fact the battleships themselves were of such high quality materials you should not look at the battleships in the 1980s as kind of an anachronism pulled out of world war ii if anything the battleships were built 50 years before their time it was only in the 80s and even now where that capital ship with enormous range the symphony of firepower from long-range missiles to shorter range gunneries major caliber guns a crew that can do everything it's got built-in repair expertise doctors dentists 23-bed hospital two surgeries um and this spectacular crew of people who are the best at their business ever you know i had the chiefs mess was about 60 chiefs petty officers 15 to 20 master chiefs the wardroom included 20 or 30 warrants and ldos they were the best in the business so bringing the battleships back would do two things not only would it be very valuable you can see it moving around the world to now as american presence that would be very helpful uh valuables in local stability but it also would be a school of the ship a big ship like that is a finishing school for sailors and with that rich set of senior people who know everything about everything and have been going to see you know since noah was a midshipman there's just an enormous opportunity for young sailors to learn the arts of going to sea so yeah i would love to see the battleships something like them a capital ship back in service that that was a wonderful example of using something that it was a well-designed well-built admit you know the welding was perfect the cable ways electrical cable ways were laid out just perfectly straight just a beautifully well-designed well-built ship that i think still could serve america and if you can't do that at least go visit san pedro yeah i'm i i do want to try and complete the collection of the iowa class um getting to missouri is going to be a little bit interesting because that's over in hawaii but i'll definitely get three out of the four and you know there are battleship sailors already i'm i'm so admiring of all of the my shipmates who are around the country uh just a wonderful group of people who as young men uh you know put their heart and souls into that ship still serving their country excellent we're all proud to be battleship iowa sailors and rightfully so um so i guess well we've run out of questions um so yeah time has flown by so i guess it remains like well thank you very much to captain larry sequest for his his time and his expertise and his knowledge of how it has how it was to operate uh the uss iowa in real life as it were um and uh i guess hopefully you won't be uh too opposed you haven't decided you completely hate me in the last hour and a half so hopefully you won't be too opposed to maybe coming back for a follow-up because i'm sure there's going to be a lot of people in the comments when this video gets published he'll be asking all sorts of fancy questions which hopefully he might be able to shed a bit more light on and i know we've said we're going to talk obviously um about turret 2 and what happened there at another point um but that's that's i think belongs to a separate discussion the battleship just the design of the ship so the things they could do is it's really remarkable so of course i'd look forward to it i'll keep my coffee warm and ready to go excellent thank you that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 584,734

Keywords: wows, world of warships, world of warships legends, USS Iowa, Iowa class, Tanker War, WW2, battleship, Larry Seaquist, USS New Jersey

Id: DEGrj1Vg19U

Length: 74min 10sec (4450 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/macgruff]

Thanks, I love these types of VODs. Drachinifel has a good channel

[u/Pirelli_Hard]

Interview starts at 2:53

[u/AbrahamDeMatanzas]

Thanks