Personal Reflections on Life with Captain Ramsey

Personal Reflections on Life with Captain Ramsey

My guess is that every member of the USS Lauderdale's [APA 179] ship's company who read the Caine Mutiny, or saw the movie, found himself comparing Captain Queeg with Captain Ramsey. To say they were identical types would be both false and unfair. Nevertheless, Ramsey was a very strange bird and in what follows I want to jot down some of my own recollections -- supplemented by some from our shipmates. I suspect that each person who served under his command has his own favorite stories. These are mostly mine. If I am in error about anything, it may be because I misread the events at the time or because I now misremember the facts.

I had trained, if that is the term, at the Beach Battalion training facility at Oceanside, California (adjacent to Camp Pendleton), was assigned to the Lauderdale as a member of its Beach Party, and picked up the ship at Astoria, Oregon in December 1944. Aside from the basic ship's company of about 350, over one hundred were members of the boat group. They were trained to man and maintain the 24 LCVPs and two LCMs we carried. The 45 members of the Beach Party (under LT Donald Campbell) were trained to assist in setting up communications and carrying out logistical planning for a beach landing. Beach Party members were scattered throughout the ship and I was initially assigned to the third division, the aft deck division, under LTJG Marshall P. Stagg. Stagg was a mustang. He had fought in WW I, served on battleships and cruisers in the years before WW II, and was aboard the Lexington when she was hit. He had been a quartermaster. I think he had spent 8 years as a QM 1/c during the promotion freeze years of the depression. He made chief before the war and as the Navy expanded after 1940 he was promoted to Boatswain (Warrant Officer). I don't remember how long before he boarded the Lauderdale he had been commissioned Lieutenant (j.g.). He had very high standards of seamanship and what one might call "proper behavior" of officers and men. It was not that he was a stickler for regulations. He wasn't. But he seemed to feel that the old traditions, which he believed helped provide the structural coherence required for any successful organization, had not only been eroded by the rapid expansion of the wartime Navy, but no longer were attempts even being made to inculcate them. He had become a Bos'n because the chiefs' quarters were being overwhelmed with people appointed as chiefs with no experience, sometimes directly from civilian life and, truth be told, often with no real qualifications.

Stagg arrived in Astoria in charge of a contingent of sailors. As they were marched towards the Lauderdale, the Captain ordered him to make his sailors to unload sacks of flour from a nearby freight car and carry them to the ship. The sailors were, of course, still dressed in their dress blues. I don't know how subtle Stagg's actual refusal of the order was, but the fact is that he refused and the sailors marched on board in their (clean) dress blues without the benefit of flour sacks on their shoulders. As a result, Stagg was confined to his quarters for ten days. I remember Stagg saying, much later, "Bracken, (actually, he always pronounced my name Braaaacken) when they appointed him [Ramsey] they were scraping the bottom of the barrel." It wasn't that I was Stagg's buddy. I wasn't. But sometimes Ramsey's behavior was so bizarre that it was hard to keep quiet. Stagg tried to keep clear of Ramsey and when they did encounter one another, Stagg was the proper junior officer. But Ramsey knew perfectly well that Stagg held him in total contempt, believing him to be an incompetent officer and captain.

One's first impression of Ramsey was of a very fat man who had some difficulty propelling his bulk around the ship. I am always reminded of him when I see the late tv actor, William Conrad, of "Canon" and "Jake and the Fat Man" fame, although Ramsey was heavier. He also gave one the impression of being perpetually angry. He wasn't, of course, but he was in a bad mood enough of the time to make one get out of the way when he hove into view. As I look back over the intervening years, my suspicion is that Ramsey was a sick man both physically and mentally. Rumor had it that he had left the submarine service because he could no longer climb into a submarine! He had attended Annapolis during WW I and that put him at a disadvantage. His schooling at the Naval Academy was of lower quality because of the war. Apparently those who graduated in those years did not do well in their Naval careers. In any case, he had only risen to the rank of lieutenant at the outbreak of WW II.

ENS [later LTJG] Neil November tells me that the Annapolis story is more complicated. Many politically well-connected parents arranged for their sons to go to the Naval Academy in order to avoid active service in WW I. Ramsey was apparently one of those so favored. The next twenty years of his service were not marked with distinction. He was rumored to have been Executive Officer of a submarine which sank while secured to a pier in American Samoa. The Navy apparently planned to hold a group retirement ceremony for those members of the class of 1921 who, like Ramsey, had undistinguished naval careers. The war, however, intervened and as APAs, the largest of the "expendable" ships, came off assembly lines a significant number of them were captained by those who, like Ramsey, would normally have been forced into retirement in 1941 after twenty years service.

The Captain's private quarters were one deck below the wheel house. He had comfortable sleeping facilities, a sitting/working/dining area, and a kitchen. He had both a messenger and a cook on duty around the clock. The account I heard was that when Ramsey spotted a chief officer's steward among the enlisted personnel, a pleasant Filipino whose name I have forgotten, he snared him to serve as his personal cook. In devising a proper ship's company, the Navy had assigned the chief to manage the Lauderdale's officers' mess! I am told the officers' mess never recovered from this decapitation. The chief, whose sleeve was all but covered with gold hash marks (I think there were ten!) was perfectly content in his new role. All he had to do was make sure he had stocks of steaks and other delectables with which Ramsey might choose to stuff himself at any odd time of the day or night. These would be prepared and served up by one of the personal cooks assigned to the Captain. As we sat out three months off Okinawa the Supply Officer, LT Oliver, in Caine Mutiny style, was often dispatched to new arrivals in the anchorage in search of gourmet delights for the captain's table, or so we perhaps unfairly deduced from the small number of goodies with which he returned.

During the year Ramsey was skipper of the Lauderdale, he invited each of his officers to share one meal (known by some as their Last Supper) with him. Officers called to the captain had, again in Caine Mutiny style, to stand on a spot at the entrance to his quarters and wait to be acknowledged before entering. November remembers that Ramsey kept poking his finger into his chest and repeating: "I have a son older than you are." LTJG Alen Wyss, managed to avoid ever having to join Ramsey for a meal. Ramsey may have conspired in this: Wyss was routinely assigned to defend sailors at Captain's Mast and presumably crossed the Captain on more than one occasion.

Ramsey was certainly not unintelligent but he displayed few signs of being able to behave with his officers or men in anything other than an intimidatory style. Perhaps he felt that a skipper should keep a "distance" between himself and his underlings. He succeeded. In the 1960s, when I met [ex-LT/Navigator] Frank Boddy at the University of Minnesota [Boddy was by then a professor of economics and a dean of the graduate school], I was surprised when he told me he had kept in touch on a friendly basis with Ramsey until the latter's death. I was surprised, because so far as I ever noticed, Boddy's interactions with Ramsey were as edgy as everyone else's. Ramsey must have known that he rubbed people the wrong way because on occasion he would try to make jokes with people on the bridge -- but never privately. He seemed to need an audience, no matter how small. On one occasion, quartermaster Bob Irvin returned from a liberty with the partial outline of a woman's head tattooed on his upper left arm. He had apparently thought better of the tattoo and walked out of the parlor before it was completed. Noting this, and suspecting that Bob was still a bit hungover, Ramsey chuckled and said, "Well, you got two -- did you get the third?" (Ramsey had in mind the old line about getting "stewed, screwed and tattooed".)

I was at the helm one morning when Ramsey came into the wheelhouse, looked at me, and said "your razor seems to be slipping." He meant that my side-burns were getting lower than he found acceptable. Although he himself had a mustache, he arbitrarily ruled that only those who came on board with mustaches could leave with them. As a result, Bill Williams (SM 2/c) was obliged to remove his handsome mustache. One of the tasks quartermasters had was keeping charts up to date on the basis of information contained in the weekly Notices to Mariners. In addition, one kept a file in which one listed references to each of the hundreds of charts on board. This enabled us to prepare a chart on short order in case one was unexpectedly ordered to sail into an unfamiliar area. One day I was making the entries with pen and ink and he picked up a piece of blotter paper and attached it with a rubber band to my writing wrist. "It speeds up making entries," he said in a friendly fashion. He was right.

To the rear of the wheel house and adjoining the chart room was a small cabin where a captain could stay if he felt he should be readily accessible to the officer of the deck. There was also a small head. It was three decks down to an enlisted head and on occasion, when we thought Ramsey would not be around, it was used by unauthorized personnel. One time Ramsey told quartermaster Tom Priakos (QM 1/c) that he must not leave, as he put it euphemistically, his cigars in the head! Apparently the ventilation was not good that day. Ramsey smiled as he said it, but he meant it. There were also instructions that enlisted men were not to use the inner stairs (ladders) past the captain's quarters and officers country. The bridge watch used this route when the weather was especially foul.

Ramsey did not like Catholics. He was something less than overjoyed when the Baptist Chaplain was replaced by a Catholic priest. I was told on more than one occasion that while the Navy weekly menu called for one meatless day, and that Friday was usually chosen, Ramsey nevertheless usually selected Thursday. More perplexing was his behavior as we were headed for Okinawa. We had troops on board and their Catholic Chaplain was saying mass on number two hatch, just forward of the bridge. It was probably Easter of 1945. There was a substantial congregation. Ramsey waddled back and forth from one side of the bridge to the other, generally pausing at midships to peer down at the devil's activities on his ship. His mustache twitched, a sure sign that a storm was brewing. His rage became palpable. Finally, when the sanctus bell was rung, Ramsey leaned forward and bellowed: "what in hell are they ringing that goddamned bell for." The priest's back was to the bridge, he hesitated for a second, and then apparently concluding there was a loon loose in the rigging, continued with the mass. Ramsey, meanwhile, retreated to one of the chairs on the wing of the bridge -- and fumed. Those of us on watch kept very low profiles.

The patron saint of gambling on board the Lauderdale was said to be Executive Officer Meyer. In any case, Frank Sugden S1/c, one of the Captain's messenger/orderlies, told me that Ramsey was once making a tour of the decks when he came upon a crap game. Quick as a shot, he grabbed the dice and the money, and pocketed both before the startled sailors knew what had happened. I have no idea how Ramsey selected his messengers. He probably checked through the test scores of unrated seamen. Those he chose were always decent guys of considerable intelligence and despite the fact that they were sometimes viewed as lackeys, none was a sycophant. Officers tended to feel more uncomfortable with them than we did because they (correctly) perceived that the messengers, having daily direct access to the Captain, could convey good or bad impressions about them.

In the normal course of events, deck sailors and their officers saw more of Ramsey than members of other divisions. Nevertheless, he occasionally ventured into other quarters. Herbert Woolsey PhM3/c tells me that in those hectic days at Okinawa, Ramsey found time to inspect the Sick Bay. He purported to be looking for signs of unsanitary conditions. Finding no evidence of the sloppy housekeeping he hoped to uncover, but which he also knew had no reason to expect, he stooped down and poked under all the bunks until he finally came up with a tiny dust fluff ball. It was vintage Ramsey: rather than praising the corpsmen for their high standards of cleanliness, he prescribed extra duty.

Signalmen and quartermasters were on the alert whenever we entered a small port. Ramsey desperately yearned to be able to fly the SOPA pennant (Senior Officer Present Afloat). If no pennant was visible, this involved identifying each ship in the harbor, and then discovering the rank, number, and appointment date of each commanding officer. I don't recall whether Ramsey was ever able to break out his beloved pennant. The trouble was that he was only a commander, albeit probably a fairly senior one, yet even when there was nothing in a harbor but APAs, AKAs and various LSTs, there was a risk that a captain commanding a group might be present. It was a source of endless frustration. Ramsey's life was full of frustrations. Every so many months (I think, three), promotion lists were published. Those being war years, promotions came easily -- at least when compared with pre-war practice. But so long as he was on board the Lauderdale, Ramsey was passed over each time. (He made Captain only at the time of his retirement.) His ensuing "unhappiness" usually lasted two weeks! Ramsey monitored more Navy broadcasts than he was obliged to. This meant that radiomen always seemed to be pounding away on their typewriters transcribing Fox schedules broadcast in five letter code blocks. Officers, in turn, had the pleasure of decoding the texts. Because of a mistake, an equipment failure, or just bad radio reception, a portion of a message might be missed and so the signalmen had to communicate with other ships at the first opportunity and ask for the missing data either by semaphore or flashing (Morse) lights. (We maintained radio silence.) I suppose Ramsey simply wanted to try to keep abreast of the developments in the Pacific theater as well as promotion politics but it also provided one more "make-work" environment.

When we set out from Los Angeles (Long Beach/San Pedro) on what was our first trip across the Pacific, the Navigator was Officer of the Deck and Ramsey was in command. I don't know what went wrong, but perhaps out of excessive caution, he had not yet ordered enough speed to provide proper steerageway for a single propeller ship. In any case, he must have decided we were not going to clear the sea walls which give Los Angeles its harbor and thus be able to thread our way through the large exit/entrance opening. The opening is no trick to find. At either side is an automated lighthouse. But having lost our capacity to maneuver while buffeted by a brisk wind on our port side, and watching the sea wall approach to starboard, Ramsey ordered that the anchors be dropped. It was probably the only option then open to him. Once our drift toward the wall was halted, the engines were put into slow reverse and the order was given to haul in the anchors. This proved easier said then done. As the starboard anchor broke the surface, it instantly became all too evident that it had snared the giant cable which fed the (northern) lighthouse. It was huge, perhaps 6" in diameter, under great tension and hence clearly not something that could simply be lifted off the anchor fluke with a pair of strong hands. With the appearance of the cable, Ramsey went into total panic. He screamed and yelled and actually jumped up and down. Luckily, Bos'n Buckner was on the scene and he personally climbed onto the anchor, secured the cable with several quite heavy pieces of line, and then sought to winch the cable up a few inches so that the anchor would release its grip. Despite the screams from Ramsey, Buckner efficiently carried the task off on the second attempt. The cable fell free and the anchor was hauled back into the hause pipe and secured for sea. I don't know whether we had put the lighthouse out of service!