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| Bab el-Mandab |
With the current mess in the Red Sea, with Houthis trying to blockade of the Red Sea, I thought my story of an earlier blockade might be interesting. A caveat: these are events from my limited perspective at the time, and my memories are no doubt filtered through the vagarities of time passed and the quirks of remembrance.
When the 1973 Yom Kippur War began, I was on a destroyer sailing with the U.S.S. Enterprise's carrier task force. We were operating in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. Soon, we were ordered to redeploy to the Middle East. We imagined that the north Vietnamese must have been glad to see us finally gone.
We headed south, transited the Straits of Malacca and sailed east across the Indian Ocean. Our first station was to patrol in the Gulf of Oman, off the Strait of Hormuz which leads to the Persian Gulf. We stayed there a couple of days and then headed south to the Gulf of Aden. On the west side of that gulf lies the Bab el-Mandab Strait, also known as the Gate of Tears, which is a chokepoint that leads into the Red Sea.
South Yemen and Somalia had been blockading the strait (modern references say it was Egypt blockading the strait. They had a couple of destroyers in the Red Sea, but they stayed well clear of us). In the image above you'll notice Perim, the small island off the spit of land reaching into the strait. The Yemenis had dug in some tanks on Perim, and they had been occasionally firing on shipping headed to the Port of Eilat in southern Israel.
At the time of the blockade run, the Enterprise had its airplanes off the deck. The plan was, as we transited the strait, if we were fired at we were going to radio that fact. A single plane was then going to do a low pass over the island. It was followed by a couple of planes a minute or so later. If we didn't signal that they had ceased firing (which of course we wouldn't have done), then these following planes would have carpet bombed the island with napalm. The carrier air wing would then split in two, with one portion headed south towards Somalia and the other north into South Yemen to take out their respective air forces.
It is safe to say, that would have escalated things quickly.
I was a radarman, so my post was in CIC (Combat Information Center) which is where the ship was operated from during battle stations. On the starboard side were the radar scopes and plotting tables. I was the watch supervisor of that area. In the center were the status boards. These were clear plastic with range and bearing markers engraved on them. Other sailors, using grease pencils, would mark the location and information about ships and planes in the area to provide a tactical picture to the Combat Officer who would direct any fight. He sat on the port side, above the weapons pit where the guns and missiles were controlled from. Also, in that area was the all-important coffee pot.
The blockade run was scheduled to occur around noon, so it was decided that naval regulations required us to be fed battle rations. We all got a brown bag lunch with sandwiches, an apple and what-not. As a result, as we faced the hazard of Yemeni tank fire and the possible start of a major war, we all sat around eating bologna sandwiches. One of the what-nots in the lunch bag was a hard-boiled egg. This led to us, perhaps inevitably, cracking eggs on each other's heads. It did occur to us that, should things go pear shaped, this detail probably wouldn't help our defense during a court martial, but we were young and full of vinegar. Damn the torpedoes and all that.
Unsurprisingly, the transit through the strait was, with the exception of a single MIG doing a rather distant fly-by, largely uneventful. There was no way the Somalians or Yemenis were going to be crazy enough to challenge a carrier task force, I suspect it was a message to the Egyptians as well, shortly after us a merchant ship, the James, carrying supplies to Israel made the transit safely.
How the times have changed...
