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An Incident off Hainan during the Cold War

Napajohnb
2006-01-03 20:34:49

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the direction of the island and I immediately switched my equipment to the upper bandwidths, where the fire-control radars operated. Within a matter if minutes I caught a high pitched whine, sounding very much like a mosquito in the earphones and I knew they had us "in their sights". I reported this immediately to the Chief of the CIC (Combat Information Center). He reported the contacts to the officer there and to the captain on the bridge as I consulted my books and another sailor began recording the signals. I matched it in a very short time with the signature of a fire control radar for an Osa or Komar Class patrol boat. These patrol boats carried a particularly nasty missile called the �Styx� with a 99% kill rate and the Chief recommended General Quarters to the Captain. The alarm was sounded. �General Quarters, General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations! � This is NOT a drill!� The GQ alarm was blaring and men were rushing to stations in a sort of controlled chaos. My heart was beating wildly, I was one of two on the ship at that point who knew how grave the threat was.

My general quarters station was not on the EW equipment and I was replaced by a more senior operator and took my battle station behind the surface plotting board. All nervousness past from me as I concentrated on the task at hand of plotting the contacts that I had ID�d as they closed on us. Though each man there did his job as trained, this was shortly after the Pueblo Incident we were all painfully aware how this sort of thing could play out.

The Captain asked the CIC for a threat assessment, wondering if we should turn and face them down. As our armament consisted of a single 5� gun forward and rail mounted machine guns, we were completely out gunned both in range and firepower. On being advised of this the Captain wisely ordered the ship to proceed away from the island at flank speed (about 13 knots) and then I plotted the boats closing on us, at about twice that. They were close enough that had they fired they could not miss, still they closed. Finally after some time (it seemed a very long time) they started falling back and soon they were out of range. Of course we had recorded every aspect of their response and I suspect that their presence had not been unexpected. As soon as the boats were determined to be returning to base, we resumed our northerly course, stood down from General Quarters and began recording their Coastal defenses again, which I found I could do from nearly twice the distance we had been doing it before.

This sort of cat-and-mouse, push-and-run behavior was typical of the cold war. It was nerve-wracking and sometimes dangerous but effective and apparently still going on, though the Cold War is counted over by most people.