I read that back during the Cold War, there would occasionally be instances where Soviet warships would pull along side and start moving closer and closer. A version of chicken played with warships.
Is there any nation that does that to us now? Russia? China? Maybe one of our allies, like Britain?
I wasn’t at sea for very long, but I haven’t heard of this occurrence. We did have some type of Soviet planes (Bears?) constantly buzzing our ship during UNREP, but I never saw the ships that launched them.
I was a master helmsman for a couple years. This would not happen in today’s day and age. In hostile waters we maintain a .50 cal watch and, depending on our perceived threat level, we have a buffer that usually extends out to 100 yards. At that point you are permitted to open fire. In reality if another ship got that close to us we’d have fighters on the way well before they could start playing chicken.
We do play games like this with ourselves, though. One of my favorites was leapfrog. Since I was the only master helmsman onboard I always got to drive…we were an LPD, and we’d play leapfrog (only sideways) with a destroyer and and LHA. You, along with me when I had a chance to look up from the repeater, would make a mess in your pants if you saw how close we come. Some of our ships are really, really maneuverable.
In a typical underway replenishment, when an oiler is pumping fuel to you, you typically maintain somewhere around a 50 yard distance between the two ships running alongside. However, there is also a rarely performed international style replenishment where it is necessary to come more like 25 yards to the other ship, which is very, very, very close. If the starboard ship went three degrees left for more than five seconds it could be too late to avoid a collision. This is a very challenging feat considering the strength of the venturi effect at such a small range. I miss that job 
Not chicken, per se…but one time when the USS Spadefish was coming into Hampton Roads, a soviet fishing trawler was following them fairly closer, so teh admiral riding tiger up from fort liquordale had Cmdr Murphey [also known as wingnut…] get out the BBQ, and start bringing up burnbags and torching them…and one accidently fell over the side. The AGI was on it very quickly…and they dragged the bag in with a gaff and took it inside.
A few days later the boat and the admiral got pointedly told not to tease the russians…the CTs had spend several hours with the printer and copier, filling it with all sorts of scurrilous jokes, and the contents of the porn locker…the bag was dropped on purpose=)
Though earlier that year the spadefish got pinged because the dive officer was an idiot…nothing like hearing those blocks of wood…
We mostly had roast beef, just frozen stuff at sea once fresh vegtables ran out. 
FWIW the TU-95 Bear is shore based, too large for even our carriers.
I saw them a few times in the early '80s from the Connie. The F-14s sent to intercept could barely fly slow enough to stay at the Bear’s six so a pair of fighters would have to take turns and fly circles to get further behind. I’ve seen them low enough to make out the guy in the blister canopies near the tail. Even more interesting and a little spooky to see a bear in gun camera films.
Just cold war posturing at the command level AFAIK. There was an unwritten rule that harrasment would stop when we flew the Jolly Roger and that only happened when crossing the equator during the intitiation of slimy pollywogs into trusty shellbacks.
Can someone translate aruvqan’s and Padeye’s posts for me? Babelfish has no “militaryspeak” option.
I agree. These posts are completely unintelligible for someone who has no naval knowledge.
I too have been buzzed by bears & badgers out of Cam Ran Bay, but the worst of what the OP described occurred in the Mediterranean during the supremacy of Soviet Admiral Gorshkov, who ordered his captains to cross the bows of US ships whenever and as closely as possible. I mess-cranked under a cook who claimed to have thrown garbage onto Soviet ships in retaliation.
Ah! The storied days of yesteryear! Avast the midwatch and prepare to repel boarders! Mister Enders, more rum!
While close approaches to enemy warships were once quite common, they were outlawed by the Nixon-era Convention on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea. Now ships are prohibited from aiming weapons at each other, coming within x meters, crossing the path of the other guy or interfering with flight operations.
The Convention was a major bit of detante at the time.
:smack:
Sailors who have never crossed the equator are known as polliwogs while those who have are known as trusty shellbacks. Every navy ship that crosses the equator has a ceremony which consists mostly of vile, degrading initiation rites. It’s nasty. Swimming twenty feet through rotting garbage is the good part, then there’s “kiss the royal baby,” augh! After you’ve been through that you get an entry in your service record so you never have to do it again. On the Constellation the XO, the executive officer, second in command of the whole ship had to go through it just like the lowest seaman apprentice. The Jolly Roger is flown that day and I’ve been told the Russians have a similar ceremony so they respect ours by staying away.
Alert five fighters are set whenver there isn’t a CAP, combat air patrol, flying when a carrier is on station. The flight crew is strapped in and a launch crew of at least three or four guys will wait all day if need be to launch the plane in less than five minutes. Pretty good considering the old technology of the F-14 but I’m sure the super hornets can do it faster.
Every fighter has a 16mm film camera mounted under the heads up display that shows what the pilot sees through the windscreen including the target, the gunsight and the status of any weapons. Because of the way it’s arranged the film is projected sideways. Granted I’ve been out twenty years so they may use video now.
Duly inspired, but not to the point of hijackery, I’m going to start a Shellback initiation ceremony reminiscence thread in IMHO.
Thanks for the responses.
I used to have a coffee table book when I was a teenager called “Soviet Military Power” and in it there was a photo of a Soviet ship less than 20 feet away.
Is there a term for this manuever? Or is it just called crossing the bow? You naval folks have fancy names for everything else, I expect one for this as well.
I don’t know what made me think of it, but I just wondered if things like that still happened.
but one time when the USS Spadefish was coming into Hampton Roads, a soviet fishing trawler was following them fairly closer, so teh admiral riding tiger up from fort liquordale had Cmdr Murphey [also known as wingnut…] get out the BBQ, and start bringing up burnbags and torching them…and one accidently fell over the side. The AGI was on it very quickly…and they dragged the bag in with a gaff and took it inside
Hampton Roads - Tidewater Virginia - Naval submarines are based there.
Soviet Fishing Trawler - a soviet military intelligence gathering vessel lossly disguised as a fishing trawler. With all the electronics on them, they must get the best tv reception…also called an AGI
Tiger Cruise - a person not stationed on that vessel going for a ride from one port to another, or from home port, out to make circles in the water and back to home port.
Fort Liquordale - fort lauterdale florida.
Wingnut - something greasy mechanical types call people who are essentially useless…as a wingnut is sort of a useless fastener.
BBQ - navy vessels have barbeques for cooking out on the deck at sea, usually hamburgers and hotdogs, occasionally steaks.
Burn Bag - classified documents are shredded or not, and placed in bags for burning to dispose of them.
gaff - boathook, long pole with a hook on the end for hooking into things in the water and pulling them in.
Better?
If I, a landlubber, might take a guess? I’m going to guess that a burnbag is a bag of garbage disposed of by burning, a fate which is usually reserved for sensitive materials. The Soviet fishing boat following the ship probably had some sort of intelligence-gathering mission, and would therefore consider a dropped bag containing papers intended for burning to be a godsend. Knowing this, the admiral deliberately prepared a burnbag containing no sensitive materials whatsoever, and “accidentally” dropped it for the fishing spies to retrieve, for purposes of embarassing them when they discovered it was porn and dirty jokes.
And Padeye, how would it come to pass that a sailor could rise to the position of XO of a ship without ever previous having crossed the Line? I would expect that an exec would have had experience of many prior cruises, and I would further expect that the typical Navy cruise would likely cross the Line at least once.
And if you have no polliwogs aboard (having perhaps already initiated them earlier in the cruise), do you still fly the Jolly Roger when you cross the Line?
Chronos, it was just a twist of fate that the XO had reached that level of his career without ever crossing the equator. We didn’t go for any operational reason but mainly to visit Perth as a break from being on station in the northern Arabian Sea. IIRC more than have the 5,000 some odd guys on the Connie were 'wogs. I was send home early from my second cruise but I heard that even though the ports down under were cancelled they made a jog south of latitude 0 to have the ceremony.
I think we may have crossed over one other time on the Connie but by tha time some new guys had come on board so they got a mini initiation.
Our station was the Indian Ocean so our tiger cruise was having dads and brothers to ride back from Hawaii to San Diego. Nowadays moms and sisters are invited too.
Actually now that you mention it, my XO was a wog too.
Whoa that’s pretty cool. Its kind of cool to know that they let civilians ride like that. Sounds like fun. Are there a lot of these people? Can you go from San Diego to Hawaii? Do they have to pay?
Not all civillians can tiger, typically male family members [unless it is a 'dependent’s cruise, where the wife and kids can come along, but those are generally only 4 or 5 hour cruises] right after any shipyard work some of the yardies go along for teh shakedown cruise [to make sure the work is done correctly, after all we dont want to kill off our workbuddies…] and military for various reasons.
For the long tiger cruises, IE over 1 day it takes permission from the group command, the boat CO, though mrAru isnt home right now to ask, so I am not sure how far up the command chain you have to request permission=)
I was despised by the weapons officer on the San Juan because I had the temerity to correct him about the ability of one type of missile…and all I had to go by was the Janes listing for it, and the Janes listing for the ChiCom hydrofoil…and we all know that Janes understates speeds and abilities…so I left the rest of the wives and kiddies and hung out in machinery 1 with mrAru and the rest of my A Gang buddies [I am the equivalent of a civillian nuke MM so we can talk about things and have a coherent dialog=) which I attribute to managing to stay married for 15 years=)]
I seem to remember an incident a couple of years ago when some Australian warships very nearly rammed either a Chinese or North Korean warship. The RAN ships were transitting through a strait, exercising the right of innocent passage.
My memory of this incident is so hazy, Google isn’t helping out. Anyone remember?