U.S. Coast Guard Oral History Program
REAR ADMIRAL RICHARD J. KNAPP's, USCG (RET.)
ORAL HISTORY
June 2, 1987
CHRONOLOGY OF REAR ADMIRAL RICHARD J. KNAPP'S COAST GUARD CAREER:
|
1929 |
Born |
|
1947 |
Appointed as a cadet, U.S. Coast Guard Academy |
|
1951 |
Graduated from the |
|
1951-1954 |
Sea duty, USCGC Escanaba; USCGC |
|
1953 |
Promoted to Lieutenant (junior grade) |
|
1954-1957 |
Commanding Officer, Ship Training Detachment No.
5 |
|
1956 |
Promoted to Lieutenant |
|
1957-1958 |
Operations Officer, USCGC Spencer |
|
1958-1959 |
|
|
1959-1961 |
Commanding Officer, USCGC Yeaton |
|
1961-1962 |
Graduated from |
|
1962-1965 |
Staff Assistant to the Comptroller, Coast Guard
Headquarters |
|
1962 |
Promoted to Lieutenant Commander |
|
1965-1966 |
Chief Staff Officer, Coast Guard Squadron One,
Republic of South Vietnam; Commanding Officer, Division 12, Da Nang;
Commander, Task Group 115.3 |
|
1966 |
Promoted to Commander |
|
1966-1968 |
Commanding Officer, USCGC Acushnet |
|
1968-1972 |
Chief, Coast Analyst Branch, Budget Division,
Coast Guard Headquarters |
|
1972-1973 |
Commanding Officer, USCGC Southwind |
|
1973 |
Promoted to Captain |
|
1973-1974 |
Commanding Officer, USCGC |
|
1974-1977 |
Chief, Ocean Operations Division, Coast Guard
Headquarters |
|
1977-1978 |
Deputy Chief, Office of Personnel, Coast Guard
Headquarters |
|
1978 |
Promoted to Rear Admiral |
|
1978-1980 |
Comptroller of the Coast Guard, Coast Guard
Headquarters |
|
1980-1984 |
Commander, Seventeenth Coast Guard District |
|
1984 |
Retired from active duty |
MEDALS & AWARDS
Legion of Merit with Combat Distinguishing Device
Meritiorious Service Medal (2)
This is interview one of an oral history of Rear Admiral Richard
J. Knapp, U. S. Coast Guard, Retired. Ms. Seamond Roberts transcribed
the taped interview for the
June 2, 1987
NARRATOR: Admiral, would you state your full name.
KNAPP: I am Richard J. Knapp, Rear Admiral,
Retired,
NARRATOR: Thank you. Could you tell me a
little about your early education up through high school?
KNAPP: Well, I was born [14 February 1929]
and raised in Passaic, New Jersey, and generally speaking from the time I
could understand such things I had wanted to go to one of the military
academies and learned upon graduation at Passaic High School I looked into
the possibility of getting an appointment to the Naval Academy and they were
all political appointments and at that point in time, I didn’t have
the political pull to get an appointment, and I took the exams for the Coast
Guard Academy and passed and was offered an appointment, and about that same
time, along came my congressman with an appointment to West Point for the
year later, which would have been that I would have graduated from West
Point in 1952, instead of from the Coast Guard Academy in 1951, which I did,
and I guess the primary reason I chose the Coast Guard was because basically
I was marine oriented, and beyond that, I felt that World War II had
finished and there would be no more wars and I didn’t relish the thought
of spending my life on a peacetime Army post and that I felt that the Coast
Guard offered excitement in terms that I was looking for in peacetime, so I
picked the Coast Guard Academy and entered in ’47 and graduated in ’51.
NARRATOR: What would you say accounted for your
early interest in going to an academy?
KNAPP: Oh, I don’t know. I guess I kind of liked the
kind of work we did and I liked to some extent the organization that went
with a service career, the somewhat structure that went with it and the
prospect also of, quite frankly, getting a good education at the government
expense and then having certainly have to serve your obligated time, but
with the option to, you know if you really didn’t like it – and I did
think that would be the case – and it wasn’t at it turned out – of
getting out after your obligated time was served with a good education. But,
my primary reason was not to get the education; the primary reason was to go
and have a career in the service and the academy I would have graduated
from. But, once again, recognizing that if it was truly not what I had
thought it was, obviously having the option of getting out with a good
education.
NARRATOR: What was your inspiration? Was there
family in the military, or did the motion pictures or literature of the day
get you interested? What hooked you?
KNAPP: Well, you know. The family, aside from the fact
that my father had been in World War I in the Army, and an uncle in World
War II, and a couple of uncles in World War II – I can’t put my finger
on just exactly what it was, you know, whether it was the movies or books or
whatever, but somehow I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was, but it
was there. Well, you know, the uniform was I guess – as a kid growing up
in
NARRATOR: Did you attend a public high school and
whether it was public or private, was there any kind of specific emphasis
you had in your pre-college education?
KNAPP: No. Yes, it was a public high school that I
attended and it was the
NARRATOR: What memories come to mind when you
think about the academy?
KNAPP: Well, I guess, the first one having gotten the
appointment and having read and seen the kinds of discipline and things that
would go on in the fourth class or plebe year, I guess my biggest concern
was getting there on time. And, yes, I left my parents, jumped on a bus,
went to New York, got on a train up to New London and pity the poor
conductor, because I kept asking, "Make sure – I’ve GOT to get off
at New London," and my big concern was that I was going to miss that
New London stop and if I got there late, I would lose my appointment. So,
that’s probably the first thing, and then arriving at the academy and not
having a real good idea of how they were phasing people in, but everything
was basically organized chaos, and I found out later, that was, you know,
that was by design. But, for a newcomer, coming into this, it was
interesting. We were greeted there by the second class cadets who were
responsible for our indoctrination and during swab summer and I can remember
that first day seemed almost interminable, but I will never forget it.
NARRATOR: Did the academy prepare you well for
your first assignment?
KNAPP: Yes, I think it did - if not in the details of
some of the jobs that you would get as a junior officer, certainly with the
attitude and the determination to take on just about any job. Now, on the
standpoint, depending on how you look it, but from my point of view, I was
lucky, because when I graduated, we did not have a lot of officers out there
on the ships, and my first assignment was the Escanaba, which was a
255-foot weather ship out of Alameda, California, and so, we were lucky in
that because there weren’t a lot of officers, you got a lot of jobs aboard
ships, so a lot of responsibility immediately. And, so, if you picked up a
department which would be, as in my case was the gunnery department, I would
say that we were very, very well prepared at the academy with the gunnery
courses that we were taught. Or, if I had taken on the communications
department, I would have been equally well prepared from a standpoint of the
education at the academy. But, we also picked other collateral duties that
went along with the main departmental duties, such as it was in my case the
Exchange Officer. Well, obviously, we didn’t do a lot of Exchange work at
the academy, but you certainly learned how to add and subtract and logical
approaches to things and an organized approach, so it was workable. So, you
know are, there are people who say, "Well, we’ve got to tailor our
education at the academy to more nearly reflect the duties that go on, on
board ship," and there you bump into – at least in my opinion – a
philosophical question of whether you are sending folks to the academy as a
college, or you are sending them to the academy as a trade school, and if
you are sending them to the academy as a trade school, then you would more
clearly point toward those actual duties that you do on board ship. If you
are going to treat the academy as a college – college level – then, you
are in the business of developing the character, the attitude, and the
fundamental knowledge to handle anything that does come up on board ship,
and I favor that approach.
NARRATOR: Do you feel like your education prepared
you – well, you mentioned it – prepared you well for your first
assignment? Do you think it did a good job of preparing you for the rest of
your career?
KNAPP: I’d like to think so. Yes. I’d like to
think so. You might get differing opinions from various people whether they
be contemporaries or peripheral people who I have worked for, but I’d like
to think that the answer for that would be "yes."
NARRATOR: You mentioned your work on the cutter Escanaba.
Was that good duty? Was it enjoyable? Was it miserable? What was it like?
KNAPP: Well, it was a little of all of the above.
At that time, it was ’51 and Korea was going on and the West Coast weather
ships were charged with manning weather stations that ranged from what were
then called Man and Uncle, one-third and two-thirds the way between San
Francisco and Hawaii, to Sugar and Victor, where Victor was somewhere in the
area of southeast of Japan, and Sugar was up off the Kamchatka Peninsula up
in the North Pacific, and then station Queen which was basically in the Gulf
of Alaska, as I remember, just south of the Aleutians, and we had these
ships and they were augmented by destroyer escorts that were brought on, but
basically we were logging in some years nine months away from home port, and
a good portion of that at sea. There were times, certainly, when the weather
was really rough, when you would wake up to take your watch at 4 o’clock
in the morning or 3 o’clock in the morning and chase your shoes across the
deck and say, "Why am I doing this?" and add to the feeling of
some sort of accomplishment later on when the situation improved where you
accomplished something and I am not so sure whether it was a feeling of
accomplishment or whether it was analogous to feeling so good when you
stopped banging your head against the bulkhead. You know, it felt so good.
I’d opt in favor of the fact that there was some accomplishment. You were
doing a job you saw that you were part of a system and if you could look at
it that way, it was enjoyable, except that, you know, no one enjoys being
away from home. I was luckier than most because I was single. So, I didn’t
have any real worries at home. I could see other people who had left
families who had some concerns for them, and I guess for those folks, maybe
it wouldn’t be quite as enjoyable. But, from my way of thinking, it was if
not always enjoyable, it was always rewarding because, #1 I was doing the
thing that I had come into the Coast Guard for, which was to go to sea; #2,
hopefully I was learning and preparing myself for when I got moved up to
take command of one of these ships – and you know that is always the
ultimate, at least it was always my ultimate objective – and so, if you
look at it from that perspective, then it was at least always satisfying and
rewarding, if not always enjoyable.
NARRATOR: You mentioned the feeling of accomplishment.
Was that a personal accomplishment or did the crew actually have a good
enough idea of the purpose of the mission to feel an accomplishment in that
sense?
KNAPP: Well, I think the crew did. I think the crew did.
It took some work in terms of morale. The weather stations at that time were
set up to #1, get meterological conditions out at various points and the
purpose of the meterological data taking, if you will, was to provide upper
winds data for aircraft transiting the ocean. See, at that point in time, we
did not have jets and the range of the various aircraft that were flying was
somewhat limited and so there would be some concern for the kinds of winds
that you would have aloft and what was the most favorable altitude for going
from point A to point B. And not only that, but we would provide, sitting in
the grid, a navigational check for those aircraft that were flying
trans-ocean at that point in time. A good portion of the air traffic
involved traffic in support of our operations in
NARRATOR: I understand you were stationed on both
255’s and 311’s. How would you compare the two classes?
KNAPP: Well, they are different. The 255-foot cutter was
specifically designed for patrols and escort duty in the open ocean and they
were originally designed to be about probably, I think, 50 feet longer, and
for some reason or other – and this was before my time, so I don’t know
the exact details – they decided that they weren’t going to build a ship
that long. It was probably budgetary restraints. So, they cut some out of
the middle, as I understand it and we ended up with a 255-foot ship. The
beam was not changed, so the length: beam ratio was basically smaller than
you would have had, and it was kind of round bottomed. The scantlings on the
255 were absolutely first rate. I mean, that was a well-built, heavy ship,
meant for ocean duty. There was a problem. I don’t know if you knew that.
It rolled. I mean, not that there was any problem with stability, but just
the hull configuration was such that it rolled quite a bit and with the kind
of stability built into it – the METAcentric height – it had a snap
roll, so when it rolled almost like a destroyer, but she would snap right
back. If you weren’t used to the motion, you got sick. As a matter of
fact, I never had a history of seasickness, but on my first patrol, I stood
my watches carrying a bucket, because I was not well, and it took a little
while to get used to the motion. But after you got used to the motion, no
real problem. Then, they took the 255’s and in order to try to slow that
roll down, they put on the sides – just below the turn of the bilge –
oversized bilge keels and they would certainly not do anything to stability,
but what they did was kind of inhibit the roll, or at least slow the roll
down, but that helped somewhat. But, basically it was a good – there was
almost no place that normally I would be concerned with taking a 255
anyplace. It was a stiff, rugged ship with very heavy scantlings.
Now, the 311, on the other hand, was a ship that was built primarily to
tend torpedo boats and/or seaplanes in the South Pacific during World War II
and that duty envisioned them being anchored in a lagoon and being the
mother ship for a squadron of torpedo boats or seaplanes. They were
basically seaplane tenders or torpedo boat tenders and the Gresham that I
went on board was I think was the old U.S.S. Willoughby. I could be
wrong, but I think that sticks in my mind. And, you could immediately tell
the difference between the structure on that ship and the structure on a
255. You could look at the hull plating on a 311 and you could see the frame
sticking through like the ribs on a skinny kid, and when you got into a
seaway, the fume tight bulkheads between the staterooms would actually
‘pin’ or I would say pop back and forth to the extent that if you
didn’t put your glass in the toothbrush holder, because if you got into a
rough seaway, that it would pop that thing right out and so it was not
nearly as rugged a ship as a 255. Living conditions were a little bit
better. The staterooms – the officers’ staterooms – were on the main
deck and I think even the crews’ quarters were better laid out than on the
255, but they were, in my opinion, not nearly the ship in terms of open
ocean performance that the 255 was.
NARRATOR: Then between 1954 and 1957, you were the
Commanding Officer of Ship Training Detachment #5. What exactly did you do?
KNAPP: Well, I had served on board the 255 and literally
run that gamut from gunnery officer up through first lieutenant and
navigator. Then, I went CIC officer, operations officer, and from there I
went to the Gresham for engineering training and got my qualifications as an
engineer, but they were short of deck officers at the time and decided to
put more academy officers into engineering, so there was a lack of deck
officers, experienced deck officers, so basically I stood my time between
being an engineer and being the operations officer on board the Gresham.
When I completed my engineering duty, the commanding officer sent a message
to Headquarters and requested that I be reassigned as the operations officer
and back came a set of orders to take over command of STD #5. STD #5 was a
training detachment that specialized in CIC operations – combat
information center operations – and it was comprised of a large vehicle. I
would compare it to say a Greyhound bus. It was not a tractor and a trailer;
it was strictly a large van, built specifically for this purpose. Now, there
was one on the East Coast and I think that was STD #2, and that was the same
arrangement in the trailer, but it was a tractor-trailer arrangement.
Anyway, this was like a huge travel bus and forward had a little driver’s
compartment where I had a driver. I had a crew of three, a chief radarman,
an ET, and a seaman. And, they were charged with taking care of the van, and
as I said, the forward part was a driver’s compartment. Just aft of that
was a small office with a safe for classified publications and some gear for
generation of problems, CIC problems, and after that was a compartment that
had various problem simulation gear that could simulate targets on a radar
and radio transmissions and so on and so forth, and a dead recognition
tracer that we could use to general ship’s tracts, and after that was a
CIC – a combat information center – with the both the DRT plotter, a
summary plot, various radio speaks, just like these folks would have in CIC.
And the whole idea was to have this as a mobile unit that could go anyplace
where there were Coast Guard cutters. It originally started out for only the
weather cutters, when we had all the DE’s in that were in during Korea and
they would go to a port and they would then schedule the CIC teams from
those ships to come in and get training and radar navigation, tactical
maneuvering involving communications and involving maneuvering board
problems that involved ship maneuvers in not only steaming in company, but
anti-submarine screen reorientations and things of this type, plus training
in standardized communication.
We stressed radar navigation procedures and instruction that would
involve ships steaming both singly and in formation, in company, and brought
together both the bridge control and the CIC teams to work out the
interaction between the two. So, basically, it was a very, very inexpensive
way of bringing the school to the students. And when the . . . and as we
kept looking at it, we were limited by time because of the number of ships
that we had, and then with decommissioning of a lot of the DE’s after the
Korean Conflict was over, we were then able to take the remaining weather
ships and increase the course content to two weeks and really do a
comprehensive program for the kinds of things that I described, and, in
addition to that, we set up a one-week program for all the other ships, the
buoy tenders, the then 83-footers, the 125’s, the 213’s like the Yocona,
the Storis, and essentially what that meant is that we covered the
same kinds of things, but not as extensively as we did with the big ships
that were involved in underway training down in San Diego. In other words,
we would give the bigger ships at least a preview and preliminary
instruction for their training down in San Diego with the big training
groups and then the smaller ships we would stress basically the radar
navigation, the ship control, the use of radar, the use of maneuvering
boards, the development of courses and speeds of contacts, how do you
determine the closest point of approach. In other words, things they should
know for running their ships safely and avoiding either bumping into another
ship or putting it aground. And we would do that for a week. So, basically,
that took us to every place that there was a Coast Guard ship. The one item
that I didn’t mention was we even for the larger ships, we even went into
plane ditch procedures. In other words, with the ocean stations, as I
mentioned before, the situation would develop so there was always the
possibility of a plane having to ditch somewhere at sea. And if they would
ditch, or if they could pick their place to ditch, they had the weather
stations right close by, and so a lot of times it would happen at night. So,
there were procedures laid out for laying out a landing lane for the
aircraft to take and vectoring the aircraft back down to a base leg, an
approach course, the final, and just actually vectoring them in, because it
was very typical for them to tell where the water is, and then just kind of
bring them down, and at night we would lay our flares, set up and instruct
the team on how to conduct air control procedures and communications with
the aircraft and then actually have a problem where there would be an
aircraft in trouble. And, we would simulate the problem right from the
aircraft calling and saying he was having engine problems and he had so many
persons on board and the kind of aircraft it was and he would have to ditch,
and then the CIC team would have to go through their procedures to bring him
down safely.
As a matter of fact, a somewhat humorous incident – depending on where
you were sitting – occurred with that just prior to my assuming command of
the unit. And, as a matter of fact, I was at the opposite end. I was onboard
NARRATOR: Jargon?
KNAPP: Well, not the jargon, but the names of airlines
which could reflect an actual airline, o.k.? Like United or Pan Am or so on
and so forth. Unbeknownst to them, as I said, they found out later than a
hatch or something around it was acting as an antenna, and the RCC at
NARRATOR: Did you do all the training?
KNAPP: No, well, no. We shared. We shared the load. We
had basically it was between the chief radarman and myself and the chief
would take the technical aspects of radar, but we could move back and fort.
I did a lot of the tactical maneuvering and communications and if we got a
problem, then our ET would take the radarman through the theory of the
radar, how it works, the basic tuning of the radar in the terms of the
controls that could be used, the sensitivity time control and things of that
type, you know teaching the capabilities of it to make sure, at least to
ensure that these folks were comfortable and on speaking terms with their
gear. So, we kind of split it and for the seaman, he kind of did work around
the unit, so it was shared. I did a lot of the instructing and in fact when
I first went onboard, I did more than I did later because I wanted to learn
this whole thing and be able to do everything that needed to be done in case
something happened to the chief. But, as I said, it was a regular split.
NARRATOR: After STD #5, you were operations officer on
the Spencer, correct?
KNAPP: Yes, yes, that was interesting because I spent
three years on board the STD #5, and that was longer than any CO had spent.
I was the third CO, as I remember, and my relief was ordered in and I had no
orders, and I was back on leave and I said, "Well, I’ll take a trip
to D.C. and see what is going on." So, they were going to send me to
graduate school. They were starting up a new communications engineering
course at
NARRATOR: You had requested graduate school?
KNAPP: I had requested it much earlier, much, much
earlier, but not that one, I don’t believe. Anyway, I had orders to go to
school and having just come off STD #5 where I had been teaching all this
stuff that an operations officer should know, I felt that basically that
this was the first time I knew more than the guys that were working for me
and I really knew what had to be done and how it should be done and I
hadn’t been onboard a 327 yet, so I wanted to check out onboard a 327 as
the operations officer. So, I declined my orders to school and requested
assignment aboard Spencer and got it. And I spent about a year as the
operations officer on weather patrol in the North Atlantic and found out
that those 327’s were probably, at least at that time, the finest ships
afloat in terms of sea keeping and the ability to take what the North
Atlantic (and any place else) had to dish out.
NARRATOR: So, compared to the 255’s and 311’s, they
were superior?
KNAPP: Well, yeah. They were superior I think in that
they wouldn’t take any more than a 255, but they were certainly more
comfortable than a 255, and I would say probably on par with the 255 in
terms of actual sea keeping, but in my opinion, more sea piney in terms of
the ride.
NARRATOR: Were there any more memorable incidents while
you were on Spencer?
KNAPP: Not really. It was generally routine. Routine
weather patrol,
NARRATOR: And then you went to Merchant Marine
Indoctrination School?
KNAPP: Yes.
NARRATOR: Do you remember much about that?
KNAPP: Oh, I remember that intimately because when I
received my orders to go to
Well, like I said, being young, we kind of agitated to get out and there
was no way really of getting out at that point in time, and the powers that
be, the people in charge of marine inspection, knew that we were not
thrilled with being there, but that we did do our work. Anyway, as it turned
out, this was back to prior training again and prior assignments, there was
a big collision. I had been there, oh say maybe eight months. I had been
there almost eight months, making unsuccessful attempts to at least get a
commitment that when I served my four years, I could go back on what I
called general duty. There was a collision between a Grace Line ship and I
want to say, the
NARRATOR: That’s great. While you were hull inspector,
what were your major responsibilities?
KNAPP: Well, the major responsibilities were to go out
and conduct inspections of U.S. merchant vessels and to some foreign vessels
under the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) Convention and if when you looked at
U.S. vessels, you inspected the hull and deck plating, watertight bulkheads,
the operation of watertight doors, the integrity and outfitting of
lifeboats, which was very delicate lifeboats as they were made then of
lightweight METAl and used to have various areas that were always suspect
and one of them used to be the end thwart boxes where they had wooden
thwarts and they would get damp and moisture would collect and stay in the
end of those and it would corrode and you would be looking for that, looking
for the corrosion, or the weak spots in the METAl, and you would have this
hammer, which is one of the reasons as I said that the marine industry
wanted experienced people around – people who been there for awhile.
Because you would get loose with this hammer, and it was almost like with a
chisel on the end, you would kind of tap the bulkhead or tap the lifeboat
and if you got a dead sound, you would tap a little harder, and most of the
time if you were right – if you were good – you would go right through,
telling you that you had a deteriorated spot there and the structure was,
you know, not sound. And, you would have to pop it out and put new METAl in.
And if a fellow wasn’t really experienced or didn’t really know what he
was doing, you could ruin some good lifeboats and put extra work and extra
expense on the marine industry and the same goes with the decks, but not as
much because the decks were always of thicker METAl and the same with the
watertight bulkheads. But, basically you were inspecting for structural
integrity on the hull side and the adequacy and the completeness of the
lifesaving, left preservation equipment onboard the ship. We did not do the
cargo tests. The American Bureau of Shipping used to do that, and so there
were a couple of people on board the ship making inspections.
NARRATOR: You say you took command of the Yeaton?
KNAPP: Yes, the Coast Guard Cutter Yeaton which
was attached to the Third District on search and rescue patrol in Third
District waters and stationed in New London, and actually the Third District
– in the medium endurance cutter which would be categorized as – there
were basically three, and they were almost ideally placed. There was Yeaton
out of
KNAPP: Well, as I said, it was the Agassiz, Tamaroa,
the Yeaton team was I think that was pretty good and quite
effective.
NARRATOR: By that time, the 125’s were getting pretty
old. Did you have any special problems attributable to age?
KNAPP: Yes, yes. And as I said before, it’s a matter
once again of drawing on previous assignments, things that you learned. We
went down to the shipyard at
NARRATOR: Were there any real memorable incidences that
come to mind from that tour?
KNAPP: Not really. You know, they were mostly search and
rescue cases which involved fishing vessels, some assistance to recreational
boaters, but mostly commercial fishermen. The side trawlers out of New
Bedford, Gloucester, Cape May and certainly there would be some where the
weather would be particularly bad and it would be a little bit more
difficult to pick them up and the crew would get a little bit more wet than
normally, but there was nothing really out of the ordinary beyond like I
said, the normal search and rescue, put a tow line on, tow him in, where
sometimes it was rougher and wetter than others, but nothing really beyond
that.
The one memorable incident is that you might want to include was during
my tour onboard Yeaton that the Texas Tower – you are familiar
with the Texas Towers which were set up along the East Coast and they were
basically radar stations and I believe the Air Force manned them and they
were not unlike the offshore oil rigs now, except they were just strictly a
tower with a lot of radar gear aboard them. And
NARRATOR: And from there, you gradually got to graduate
school, right, at
KNAPP: Well, yeah, and there is a story behind that.
Maybe the personnel folks won’t appreciate this, but I concluded that when
I turned down the first set of orders to graduate school – and, as you
know, most of the academy graduates all go to graduate school – when I
turned down that first set of orders to graduate school, I became a real
generalist with no subspecialty, and became available for whatever came
along. In this case, it was merchant marine inspection, and I said,
"Well, maybe . . . Maybe I ought to." Well, you see all I had
really wanted to do was to be a sailor in this outfit, get checked out on
all the ships and get command of my own ship and so on and so forth. Maybe,
I had better put in for grad school and not make the same mistake twice. So,
when I got to the Yeaton, I was going through all the old directives to find
out what I had missed in terms of Coast Guard policy while I was in marine
inspection because you didn’t see a lot of that stuff. Number one, you
were off busy working on merchant ships all day long and number two, you
weren’t on the distribution list for a good portion of it, so to run my
ship and find out what was then current in terms of operating instructions
and policies, I pulled out all the directives and went through them. Well,
in going through the personnel instruction, in one of the personnel
instructions, I came across graduate school and that was when it struck me.
This was in – I relieved in late May – so this had to be in June or July
of 1959. And something told me, "Don’t make the same mistake
twice," maybe you had better put in for graduate school. So, I went
through the graduate school list and at that time, like I said, I didn’t
like the way supply would tell operations what they could and could not do
and also pay masters what they could and could not do, and I saw , let’s
see here we are master of this administration, financial management takes
care of that, George Washington University, one year tour and you are not
out too long. I think I’ll put in for it. So, I applied for graduate
school and by December I had a letter back from Headquarters saying,
"You will go to graduate school as soon as you get off the Yeaton,
and your termination or your relief date on the Yeaton is 1961, you will
report to
NARRATOR: And how did you enjoy that year at graduate
school?
KNAPP: That kind of was in my opinion the toughest
assignment that I’ve had, and it was tough because we were doing – we
were trying to do – in one year what had previously done in two years up
at Harvard. Just about that time that we used to send our people to Harvard
to get an MBA, and around that time people were asking a question,
"Well, can we afford to have our people out of the line for two
years?" and maybe even more importantly, "Can we afford to give
them a set of credentials that makes them more attractive to the outside
world than they are to us and have them just take their degree and leave
us?" O.K.? Let’s (do) something that gives a lot of the same stuff,
but does it in less time. And the result was that they stopped sending to
Harvard – and the other is conjecture on my part as to why you would do
something like that – and it makes a certain amount of sense. So, anyway,
in that year we were going to get an MBA. We were going to write a thesis
and we were going to have comprehensive exams. Well, normally it’s
comprehensives or a thesis, but we had both, and that’s not so tough. The
tough part is that when you got to school – at least the way I felt –
when you went to school, it’s like owning a house. If you were ever not
doing your schoolwork, but sitting there watching a football game, you felt
guilty because something more always had to be done. Even if you thought you
had your thesis complete, another thought would come and you would start off
on something else. So you never felt as though you were doing enough! And
you always – at least speaking for myself – had kind of a guilt feeling,
because I could be doing more. You would do it, but you could have been
doing MORE! And so, besides the absolute requirements of producing certain
things, you also had that nagging feeling that if you didn’t this, but you
did something else that was personal, you felt guilty about it because you
should have been doing that. So, in that respect, it was probably the
toughest year of my life.
NARRATOR: Then, you would have liked to had more time to
do the same?
KNAPP: No! No, not at all. It wasn’t a question of
more time. Even if you did it for two years, even if you stretched out to
two years, you would have that feeling – and I think it is the very nature
of going to school. If you are going to school and you are going to study,
you can never learn too much. So, anytime that you are not learning, anytime
that you are not doing more school work but doing something else, you have
got to feel a little bit guilty. At least, I did.
NARRATOR: I understand.
KNAPP: Don’t get me wrong; it doesn’t mean that I
didn’t watch the Washington Redskins play, but all the time I watched
them, I felt guilty.
NARRATOR: Yes, sir. (Laughing) From there, you went back
to Headquarters as a staff assistant to the Controller?
KNAPP: Yes.
NARRATOR: What was some of the major economic issues
during that tour and did your education at George Washington prepare you
well for that job?
KNAPP: Well, it’s tough. Once again, unless you are
going to a straight technical course, it’s tough to say that your
education at a university level actually gave you the ABC’s of a
particular job. In that sense, it probably didn’t. But in the sense that
it gave you the background – once again, as I said about the academy, the
exposure, the familiarity with the general universe of problems that are
involved in the kind of work that you would be doing – it did! It did
prepare me. Economic problems? My job as the Staff Assistant to the
Controller is a very general type job. It’s a very general type job to the
extent that as a staff assistant, you picked up just about almost anything
that no one else wanted to do, or things that people could not find a nice,
convenient niche for. So, your projects ran you know far and wide. One of
the primary jobs that I had was the responsibility for the administration of
the Coast Guard Travel Manual. O.K.? Now, the Coast Guard Travel Manual was
a direct offshoot of the Joint Travel Regulations (JTR) which were
promulgated by the Department of Defense, and the Joint Travel Regulations
were generated by a group known as the Per Diem/Travel and Transportation
Committee, which was comprised of a representative from each one of the
Armed Forces, and I was the representative from the Coast Guard. But, once
again, the value of meeting people and learning somewhat of the problems,
even if the result is a travel regulation, learning the background that
leads to that gave me a terrific insight into other services. And I did that
for basically three years and it involved going out with the Per Diem
Committee and they also administered housing allowances, the cost of living
allowances, so you get a good feel for the shifts and the impact of shifts
in the economies, the cost of living at various places, budgetary impacts,
what raising a housing allowance in Alaska would do to the budget and so on
and so forth. We checked for adequacy of housing. We made some trips. I made
a trip in ’62 I guess it was with this group and we got to see the various
bases in Europe, including the submarine base up at Holy Loch and so, it was
very, very interesting and that was one of the primary duties. Others had to
do with writing position papers for the Controller on various issues. I
remember one of the issues at that point in time had to do with making
military and civilian travel rates the same and our position was that you
really couldn’t do that. The military was different. You forced a guy to
live in government quarters. You didn’t do that to a civilian and so on,
but that’s a small part of it. The other had to do with the
military/civilian retirement system and Social Security and basically doing
analyses that would show that – There were arguments that military
retirement was so much more expensive than civilian retirement because
civilians contributed to it, o.k., and Social Security and things of this
type and then doing analyses that basically it really wasn’t true. And, in
fact, the government wasn’t even footing their share of the money into the
fund and by year X, the fund was going to be defunct. You were doing those
kinds of analyses and so, once again, it was interesting. It was as
interesting as you wanted to make it. It was probably a good way for someone
coming out of graduate school to get his feet wet, because to a great extent
he wasn’t carrying a lot of responsibility for the policy, but he would be
able to put his thoughts out, have it reviewed by a higher authority, and
accepted or not accepted as policy and so it was I think a good way to break
into the controller business.
NARRATOR: Were there any burning issues of the day for
the Coast Guard economically?
KNAPP: Well. Not really that I got involved in or was
really involved in at that particular point in time. There was always the
question of meshing our . . . I think that the biggest issue of the day was
meshing our supply and support systems with DoD who was then going in for
MILSTRIP, MILSTAMP, MILSTAD and then meshing our systems to work with those.
But, once again, we had certain elements in the supply side and logistics
side that actually handled that. I wasn’t particularly involved in that,
but those were issues that were going on.
Of course, at that time, it was just previous to the establishment of the
Department of Transportation , and I think probably one of the biggest
things is that that was a time when they were started to look at programs
and program budgeting. That was when McNamara was in there. And they started
to take a look at the Coast Guard from the standpoint of programs and,
around that time, we were in terrible shape – as far as I remember – the
currency and/or obsolescency of our equipment. In fact, we were being
criticized by Congress for not coming in and asking for more aircraft, more
ships, and so on and so forth, and I think it was in that spot of time that
we were embarking on the acquisition of the 378’s. That would be 1962.
Yeah, around that time that we were then – and just previous to that we
had been I guess you would say criticized for not asking for that kind of
stuff and I think if you check Admiral
Hayes’ recollection in your records that you will find that it was
just previous to that time that he had served on this task force to look at
Coast Guard programs. Because previous to that, we had budgeted on the basis
of personnel, maintenance, supply. We never talked in terms of what you were
getting for that. It was around that time that we started to shift our
emphasis to say, "What are our programs?" Search and rescue, aids
to navigation, merchant marine inspection, law enforcement and certainly you
would have personnel costs in all of those. But you could see what you were
getting in terms of program output. The shift was then coming where we were
making our shift from merely funding a category of expenditure to funding a
program – with those categories of expenditures in them.
END OF INTERVIEW ONE
INTERVIEW TWO OF THE ORAL HISTORY OF REAR ADMIRAL RICHARD J.
KNAPP,
JUNE 3, 1987
NARRATOR: Sir, what can you tell me about your years in
KNAPP: Well, it really wasn’t years, although from
time to time, it would seem that way. We all had about a one year tour
there. I was finishing up a tour as the Staff Assistant to the Controller
and had orders to take over an executive officer of Yocona in
Astoria, the plan being that I would serve as the executive officer for a
year and relieve the commanding officer, and the President (It was President
Lyndon Johnson at the time) had indicated a desire to interdict the arms and
supplies that were apparently flowing south from North Vietnam to the
guerillas in the south, and he approached the Navy and inquired as to their
ability to interdict. And, of course, naturally they operated mostly with
destroyers being their smallest type vessels, so their ability to get
closely inshore where a lot of the traffic was apparently being run, was
limited. And so, they came to the Coast Guard and Commander Jim Hodgman at
the time was the CNO Liaison and apparently had an interest and thought that
the Coast Guard had a role there and conferred with the Commandant, and
before you knew it, this was probably about April of 1965, the President
asked the Coast Guard, through the then Secretary of the Treasury, how long
it would take for the Coast Guard to get something on scene and the Coast
Guard said, "Probably 60 days from the time you give us the
order." Well, they gave us the order and Commander Hodgman was selected
to be the squadron commander and my orders were cancelled and I was going to
go as the Chief of Staff officer of the squadron. So, we throughout the
Coast Guard, we gathered up 17 WPB 82-foot patrol boats and armed them with
four .50-caliber machine guns and 81-mm mortar modified so that we could
fire in a flat trajectory with another .50-caliber piggyback mounted on
that. We put the 17 patrol boats onboard freighters and headed them toward
Subic Bay in the
So, the spare parts were shipped and everything was en route to Subic Bay
and the squadron personnel were ordered in to Base Alameda which we used as
a staging point for organizing the squadron and setting up tables of
organization and doing what needed to be done in the terms of survival
training for the folks that we sent to the Navy’s survival course and
eventually we started shifting them out towards the Philippines to pick up
their assigned units and the staff moved to the Philippines. As the chief
staff officer, I was doing kind of the day-to-day work. Commander Hodgman as
the squadron commander was out traveling out in the
When we got to the Philippines and started – and that was when
Commander Hodgman came in with guns and materiel and started putting the
squadron together and started putting the crews together with their boats,
making sure that all spares were on board, because we were not going to have
a depot, so we put whatever spares that we thought they needed, and the word
came from the Navy that originally we thought that we were going to have the
squadron out of Da Nang, and the task force commander indicated that he
really wanted it in two places. He wanted one unit, or he wanted some patrol
boats at
So, we organized on that basis and basically Commander Hodgman was the
Squadron Commodore and everything administratively went through him, but
operationally we worked almost directly with Task Force 115. So, sometime in
June I guess it was of ’65, I gathered my eight boats and we had support
of the Navy LST that was going to provide basically our support base for us
until we could get a barge that we had found in Subic Bay and the Navy was
going to modify it, which the barge consisted of some berthing quarters and
machine shops that we would use in Da Nang, where we were going to have the
barge towed into Da Nang, moored at our base, and we would have the machine
shop for doing engine overhauls, storage space for engine spares, and
berthing areas for division staff plus spare boat crews. But until that
happened, we were going to have an LST who would act at the mother ship so
to speak. That was at
In the meantime, Division 11 had still been staging at Subic Bay and
eventually they sailed south with their LST to establish their operations in
the
Basically, the squadron’s job was as I said was interdiction, but it
gradually expanded because of the versatility of the 82-footers and quite
frankly the expertise of our people, both on the boats and in the staff
position, in terms of both manning the boats and then running the
operations, running small boat operations, like they did on the search and
rescue cases, just different missions. Eventually, the boats were filling in
on close inshore fire support and in support of shore based operations. They
worked in terms of vertical envelopment operations where they worked with a
helo carrier that would launch helo’s and send them in behind the lines,
flush them out toward the beaches, and the 82-footers would be there waiting
– those kinds of operations. Plus other certain operations dealing with
insertion and recovery of various kinds of operating teams. In Division 12,
our area of operations was basically from the DMZ, the 17th
parallel, down to roughly Kein An in the south. The Division 11 covered the
NARRATOR: Who manned the swift boats?
KNAPP: Navy.
NARRATOR: What kind of crew?
KNAPP: Well, they had an officer in charge and then
enlisted folks, I don’t remember the exact number, but it was less than
ours. I think we were up to probably 11 or 12 maybe 13 when you could count
the liaison officers. See, we took on board Vietnamese liaison officers who
would do the interpreting and work with us when we boarded junks to search
for contraband or things of this type and they were basically our liaison
type and they were assigned to the boat. They became essentially a part of
the boat crew. It was interesting. It was a time of some confusion, probably
some paradox in terms of the way the war apparently was being run, but I
think it was a very, very interesting time for the Coast Guard. It certainly
was for me. I know it was for Commander Hodgman and eventually the Coast
Guard built a reputation whereby they got to be known as a can-do outfit and
it wasn’t long after I got back, as a matter of fact, in 1966, that they
asked for some more Coast Guard help and this time, they wanted to augment
their destroyer forces and Squadron 3 was formed which was comprised of our
high endurance cutters. At that time, it involved the 255’s, what we had
left of the 311’s and eventual the 378’s. And, once again, the Coast
Guard came up looking pretty good. The 378’s particularly were a hit, an
operational hit as far as the Navy was concerned, because they didn’t have
the armament of course that a destroyer has with the one 5-inch gun, but the
point was that with the destroyer, even though she had high speed, if you
had to get a destroyer from point A to point B, it took sometime to build
the steam up in those high pressure boilers before they could crank up their
30-some-odd knots, whereas if you wanted to get from point A to point B with
a 378, you just fired off the gas turbines and you were up to 30 knots and
on your way.
NARRATOR: Damn.
KNAPP: There was some speculation – I think it’s
probably beyond speculation – that the Navy fashioned some of the new Spruance
Class destroyers or what they call frigates now I guess – back to the
first design was very much that of a 378. And, eventually, the special LORAN
chain was set up to help in the operations, both air and sea, and it got to
be quite an operation. Eventually, you had some interesting people there. As
I said, Commander Hodgman was the original squadron commander and it became
apparent that he was being spread too thin to look after his division and my
division as a squadron commander and still to have to run his operational
responsibilities, so there was brought in an overall squadron commander in
Saigon that was Captain LaPorte and he took over and so that he could be
basically our spokesman with the Navy for both divisions and basically be
the administrative link between the squadron which was still Coast Guard
units and Commander, Pacific Area, who had the overall Coast Guard
responsibility. Commander, Task Force 115 had the operational
responsibility, but we were still Coast Guard units and still responsible
for Coast Guard procedures and things that were required.
When Commander Hodgman was relieved, he was relieved by Commander Jack
Hayes, who later became the Commandant, who was then relieved by Commander
Norm Venski who got to be admiral in the Coast Guard, who was then relieved
by Commander Paul Yost, who is now the Commandant, and it was about the time
that Admiral Yost came in there – he was down at An Toi, down in the Gulf
of Thailand at Division 11 – it was about at that time that the riverine
warfare was heating up and Division 11 was in on the involvement of that and
Admiral Yost played a big part in that. So, it was a time of challenge. It
was a time of great interest. It was a time of great concern, obviously when
you send folks out into a hostile zone such as that was and there has to be
some concern by and for the families that were left behind. But, I would say
overall if you checked what the diaries that are on file back in the
Historian’s office and check operational reports, you would find that by
and large, the Coast Guard once again proved that it was a can-do Semper
Paratus organization.
NARRATOR: Were there any Coast Guard problems that you
ran into in
KNAPP: Coast Guard problems?
NARRATOR: Any problems that were due to the Coast Guard?
KNAPP: Well, no. Shortly after I left, of course, there
was a mix-up in recognition signals and an Air Force jet strafed one of our
boats [the USCGC Point Welcome] and killed several people, but
beyond the fact that you had folks – some folks who really wanted to be
there, and some folks who really were not thrilled to be there – I don’t
remember any – and the fact that they were of course far removed from
their families and the kind of comfort you have by being stationed in
continental United States, I don’t remember any particular problems. We
had logistics problems to start with, as I described. We had our LST and our
barge that we were going to have as our machine shop because the machine
shop capability on the LST was minimal. Finally, the barge appeared, and the
barge really looked like Noah’s
NARRATOR: Could you explain again the confusion over
some kind of recognition signals that you said caused the friendly fire
incident [USCGC Point Welcome]?
KNAPP: Well, apparently . . . I don’t remember the
exact details because it happened after I had left, but there were
recognition signals that were used. In other words, if you were challenged,
there was a challenge and there was a reply, and if you gave the wrong
reply, you were in deep trouble. Well, it never became clear – at least in
my mind – whether or not the recognition signals had been exchanged or
whether they were incorrect or what, but the fact of the matter is that at
night an Air Force jet without checking with his headquarters or our
headquarters to see if we had anything in the area. It came down on an
unknown target and strafed it. The unknown target happened to be one of our
82-footers. Our patrol schedules normally were published and people knew
what area we were in and there was always some question as to whether or not
the proper procedures had been followed by the jet, by the 82-footer, or by
either.
NARRATOR: If the Coast Guard were confronted with
another assignment like
KNAPP: Well, I’d say you do things almost the same. As
a matter of fact, those of us that came back - some of us who came back from
there , came back convinced that the marine counterinsurgency role for the
United States should absolutely and officially and substantially be assigned
to the Coast Guard. We felt that – and I still do feel – we have the
capability. We have the kind of ships that can operate in close. We can
supplement what the Navy does. We are used to operating in remote areas with
a small command control center, operating small boats. We do have a
requirement to be an armed force. We are by Title X an armed force. We have
a requirement to go under the Navy in time of war and what better way than
to have the role assigned to the Coast Guard, so than rather to have to
start from scratch when someone rings the bell, you are continually training
in that mode so that when the time comes, you are able to perform.
NARRATOR: So, from
KNAPP: Well, basically, the Acushnet was a
search and rescue cutter, but what she also performed were duties as the
surface patrol for the International Ice Patrol on occasion, and if there
was going to be a bad ice year, the Acushnet would be detailed to
work and monitor ice berg flow. At the same time also, it was probably the
start of the foreign fishing , of extensive foreign fishing in our – well,
they weren’t our waters then. They would stay outside 12 miles. But, in
waters contiguous to the continental
NARRATOR: Admiral, you mentioned that our fisheries
enforcement was mostly aimed at
KNAPP: Well, no, I don’t remember any seizures. The
basic policy on foreign vessels I remember at the time was where they could
not intrude within 12 miles of the coast. And, there were times when you
would have intelligence vessels out there, but we would root them out, but
to the best of my knowledge, there were no seizures. At least, the Acushnet
made no seizures. You have got to remember at that time people were just
becoming conscious of the economic impact of the vast foreign fishery
systems that were being set up in what is now our 200-mile fisheries
conservation zone. Basically, I’ve forgotten the name of the treaty, INPC
– no, international – there was a treaty that dealt with the size of
nets our people used and it was basically flag/state enforcement and had
certain mesh size that could use and if they used anything less than that,
it was a violation, and that was the kind of thing we were enforcing, plus
ensuring that the foreign vessels did not intrude within 12 miles of the
coast.
NARRATOR: Were there any real memorable incidents while
you were aboard Acushnet?
KNAPP: Oh, yes. We had our share of good, tough search
and rescue cases. Fires? We were on fisheries patrol and naturally the
fishermen were not thrilled with being boarded by the Coast Guard to check
their mesh size and to see if they had liners in their nets or things of
this type, but we were out and we were amongst the U.S. fleet, checking and
all of a sudden one of them called up on the radio and said, "You guys
that are following us. There’s a ship on fire out there." Well, my
immediate reaction was this was a red herring, but I looked out in the
direction that he was pointing, and, sure enough, there was the plume. So,
we headed up at flank speed and got there and it was literally blazing and
we laid the ship up right alongside and let people off and dumped plenty of
water on it and extinguished the blaze and it was still floating and we
tried to get in and de-water, but we couldn’t really de-water all of it.
There was an unknown leak. I had the crew on board – on board my ship
aboard the Acushnet – and wanted to go onboard with the damage
control party. I wanted the skipper or the engineer to go with us and they
would not go and I was concerned about sending our people now that the
property had been saved and there was no lives lost. I was concerned with
risking our peoples’ lives, going into a place that they don’t know
anything about in terms of the layout. So, I didn’t send anyone on board
and got a letter from the skipper of the boat telling me it was his wish
that he just didn’t want us to go onboard and he didn’t want to go
onboard and he doesn’t care if we go onboard or not and it’s fine if we
tow them towards New Bedford I guess or Gloucester and so that was his
instructions and that’s what he really wanted to do. So, I told him that I
was concerned about the safety structure of the vessel. Well, to make a long
story short, towing it in, beautiful calm weather, and the next thing you
know, the fishing boat just went down, behind us with our wire. There was a
wire hanging from a tow line and we broke that off and that was the end of
the boat, but no one was injured and everyone was saved and we had some
other search and rescue cases that I am sure that other skipper from other
ships have had where you could get a particularly rough weather situation
where you have a lull. The funny part about it, this was a stationery lull,
it was spring time, a stationery lull and it just whipped that water up into
a frenzy and we were sent out to find this ship that had lost all
communications and they were in a given area and you really couldn’t see
too well. We couldn’t give air cover because there was no ceiling. So, we
went out and as it would happen, the entire root to the area or the vicinity
of the ship was across the swell, which meant you were in the trough all the
way, and even with boats rigged in, I lost both boats. We just dipped them
in and they never came back up again – just lost both lifeboats. We found
them and we were able to get a tow line on them and tow him in. And it made
the papers and it was something that went around and when I got back to
Portland, the funny part about it there was a warrant who had been with me
in Vietnam, was a chief petty officer, and I liked him very much. His name
was Sprague and as a chief, he was a good tough chief boatswains mate and
now he was a warrant and the first time he saw me when I got back with the
Acushnet and no boats, he said, "Commander, you finally got
yours." He says, "When you were in
We wrapped the Acushnet up. As it turned out, I was the last
skipper to have command of Acushnet in Portland because at that
time, at that stage in time, they were starting with the large data buoys
for transmitting weather information from places were ocean station vessels
formerly had been and they were starting up in the area of Alaska, to go up
to Alaska in what I believe they call the North Pacific Experiment – the
NORPAC Experiment – and the Acushnet was selected to be the vessel to
service that buoy. So, I was called to Headquarters to plan for the trip and
so on and so forth and then went back and sailed the Acushnet –
took a half crew with me – and sent the other half crew out to San Diego
to be ready to meet us and find quarters so that they could relieve and the
other crew come back and get their families, but I sailed around to San
Diego and was met by the relief skipper and I was relieved. Acushnet,
at least for the next couple of years, worked out of
NARRATOR: Now, from Acushnet, you returned to
Headquarters as the Chief of the Cost Analysis Branch. What were some of the
major economic issues during that tour for the Coast Guard?
KNAPP: Well, economic issues. It’s probably a
perennial issue is that you are always facing budget cuts and you are always
being asked to do more with less and at that point in time, the Polar
Class ice breakers were under construction and it was at that time that the
Bureau of the Budget. It was then called Bureau of the Budget but OMB also
as management of the budget and came to be interested in saying, "Well,
you know, basically ice breakers do not do work for the Coast Guard. They do
it for everyone else. They do it for the National Science Foundation. They
do it for the Department of Defense, and yet the funds are all in the Coast
Guard, so why shouldn’t we have the ice breakers funded on the basis of
user charges?" Well, you know while you couldn’t fault their logic,
from the standpoint of practicality and working ice breakers, it was not a
very practical thing to do because you just don’t take your ice breaker,
take the funding away from it, give it to DoD or the National Science
Foundation and for two years they decide on not having anything to do and
all of a sudden, they decide that they want an ice breaker, you just don’t
fire up an ice breaker together with crew to meet the demand. So, we kind of
tussled with them and came up with an alternate scheme whereby we keep the
funding for all personnel and shoreside support plus any programs that
supported Coast Guard roles and missions and the rest of it would then be
taken away from our budget, put in the other agencies’ budgets and they
would pay us an incremental user charge based on days of use. In other
words, the ice breaker would always be there at the dock, would always be
funded and it would be funded for Coast Guard operations, but anything above
Coast Guard operations, they would pay the incremental user charge for fuel,
incremental maintenance, out-of-pocket costs, things of this type. And we
thought that was as reasonable as we could get, given the situation, but it
was about that time that OMB backed off and said, "Well, never mind. We
will just demand that you are not going to build new polar ice breakers on a
one-for-one basis to replace the Wind Class, so we will just demand
an economic analysis and we will put the user charges away." And,
it’s funny, but you know, it seems that things I dealt with in a previous
assignment always came back in a subsequent assignment and when we get to
it, you will find that this whole issue came up again when I was Chief of
Ocean Operations. Of course, it was nice to have worked with it and nice to
have a speaking acquaintance, except that it came from a different sector.
It came from Congress this time. Anyway, there was that; there was that
issue.
The Coast Guard at that time was looking for a better way to budget. By
that time, we had operating programs and we were able to determine the cost
of our operating programs. In other words, as I told you earlier, you know
the concern, when I was with the Controller, you know we would fund for
personnel or we would be funded for maintenance, but it told you that you
did maintenance and had that many people to fund, but it didn’t tell you
what you did with them. It didn’t tell you how much of those personnel
costs went into the search and rescue program, how much of the personnel
costs went into law enforcement, aids to navigation, merchant marine
inspection, and by the time I had gotten there, that had been fairly well
ironed out and we had a good program cost allocation and that was one of the
primary things that my shop did. Beyond that, we were looking for better
ways to manage the funds that we had and were being asked to do more with
less. There were some of us who were concerned that all the money rested in
engineering. This will probably get you at odds with the engineers when they
hear this. But, everything used to rest in what was then Subhead 45 and that
was for vessel maintenance and that was almost literally with the exception
of some money in electronics, basically all the vessels’ money, including
the everyday maintenance, and it was apparent (at least to me) that
commanding officers were not exercising the authority that they really had
and everything was being turned over to their engineering officers, not that
there was anything wrong with them, but it just didn’t give you the break
that you really needed. So, we wanted to split out some money that was
basically the day-to-day operating expenses of a vessel and the commanding
officer was responsible. And, he was responsible for a whole pack of money
that he got, and certainly he would use his department heads to do their
specialty maintenance, but he was in charge. And, we came up with the
concept of Subhead 30 and the Subhead 30 was basically the operating funds
that you got at the start of a business cycle to generally run your unit.
Now, any extraordinary expenses like annual overhaul, you know where your
engines are going to overhauled and it wasn’t something that was done
every year – still stayed in Subhead 45, and remained the responsibility
of the engineers. It was something that . . . in fact, this let the
engineers . . . it put the onus on the commanding officer to be not only the
commanding officer, but a manger of his facility, and I don’t like the
term "manager" because even though being a manager is implicit in
being an officer or a commanding officer, I don’t want to have us start
moving toward the term of "managers" as opposed to
"commanding officers" and "officers." But it gave him
the manager responsibility and he had that responsibility and he had to
manage also the funds that came through from other sources, the old Subhead
45, so that was something that we worked on and it still exists, but they
have changed from the old Subheads to Operating Guides and the reason for
that was that on the Subheads, if you overspent in a Subhead, you were
subject to the Anti-Deficiency Act and subject to prosecution. On the other
hand, if you had just one great big allotment, one big pot of money with
operating guides within, then if you overspent in one Operating Guide, but
underspent in the other, it washed through and it was not subject to the
Anti-Deficiency Act. And that was basically the kinds of things we did.
The economic issues and the issues that really in my opinion affected the
Coast Guard’s operations and the overall future of the Coast Guard came
later.
NARRATOR: From there, you took command of the ice
breakers Southwind and
KNAPP: Well, the Southwind was a Wind
Class ice breaker that we had gotten from the Navy and was stationed in
Curtis Bay, and primarily her area of responsibility was the Eastern Arctic
and that involved resupply missions to Thule, which is the Air Force Base up
on the northwest coast of Greenland, servicing some navigational beacons,
along Sonderstron Fiord and then basically scientific and support work for
the Department of Defense up along the east coast of Greenland, up pretty
high, well north of Spitzbergen, and places like that. During my time on
board, I guess she had been deployed to the Antarctic, but during my
assignment, she did not go to the Antarctic. As it turned out, that became a
split tour because I took command of Edisto about 5-6 months into
my tour and how that happened is that we were scheduled to do the northeast
Arctic resupply of Thule and Edisto was homeported at the time –
which is a sister ship basically to the Southwind – was
homeported in Milwaukee – and she was going to head out and do some of the
scientific work. Well, on her way out, she had (as I remember) an explosion
back in her motor room and was cancelled from the deployment and so we took
the trip to Thule and did the resupply and came around [Cape] Farwell there
and made our port calls at Bergen and headed back up to the ice and did our
research work and then headed down toward Hammerfest, Norway, and Hammerfest
is just about 300 miles west of Leningrad, as I remember, just your north
cape. It is probably the northernmost community in
NARRATOR: Who did you have aboard to do the research?
KNAPP: Well, we had as I remember some scientists on
board, both from the Naval Research – they were Naval Research folks
basically – and plus we had our own technicians too to help them. So, we
went to
NARRATOR: Ugh!
KNAPP: Anyway, like I said, I could not get into him
because they were in the huge massive floe, locked in, and with my four
engines there was no way I could get through the ridges. By this time, I
knew I had a towing contract anyway and I figured the best thing to do was
to maintain my capability to get in, so we stayed in radio contact with them
and I went up to the ice edge as close as I could get, and they tried to
blast themselves out. They really couldn’t and so we waited and what I was
really waiting for was a change in the weather, because in the ice if you
wait long enough, it’s the wind that builds the pressure by driving the
ice up against something that is immovable and so I was waiting for a shift
in the wind to release the pressure on the ice. Well, it turned out, we got
a pretty good storm and I was 10 miles inside the ice edge. They were about
40 miles in. And, I could feel the swells in there, so I called
Well, the temporary repairs that were put on, on the first time around
didn’t hold and when I had to take her back into port and we had to do
more extensive repairs, just to hold the rudder straight, so she wasn’t
shifting. And we started to cross again and ran into foul, foul weather, and
we got her just west of the southern tip of
Regarding the potential shift from Southwind to Edisto,
basically the crew was all going to shift and they had been my crew on that
trip and they were a good crew and I really had no desire to be stationed in
NARRATOR: Were there any particular problems that you
encountered in that first winter patrol?
KNAPP: No, it was just very rough. At that point in
time, also we were in the period of the early 70’s and of course there
were people who quite frankly had come into the Coast Guard to avoid Vietnam
and now Vietnam was over and all the folks that were in the service to go to
Vietnam were being let out and some of these folks felt that they should now
be let out of the Coast Guard, so there was some degree of personnel
problems, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
NARRATOR: Sir, your next assignment was as Chief of
Ocean Operations Division. What were your major problems during that tour?
KNAPP: Well, I don’t like to call them problems –
probably challenges because quite frankly I consider that tour of duty as
probably one of the most interesting tours of duty of my entire career in
the Coast Guard. I came into take charge of the Ocean Operations Division,
which was comprised basically of three branches and the branches were really
– related to the programs which I described to you earlier – you know,
operating programs. We had the ice operations branch which obviously related
to the ice breaker duties that I just described to you. We had the
oceanographic branch which looked at the oceanographic program of the Coast
Guard, and we had the law enforcement branch which related at least at that
time to the fisheries problems that I described to you when I had command of
the Acushnet. In addition to that, there was a power play being put
on at the time by NOAA, the National Ocean Atmospheric Administration.
There was developed up in the Senate, sponsored by Senator Fritz Hollings, I
believe, a little effort called the National Ocean Policy Study, and the
National Ocean Policy Study was looking at, as I remember, taking this from
the Coast Guard, moving things around that would have been not in the Coast
Guard’s best interest as I remember it. And, I was given a staff to look
that over. I was given a Captain to work for me, to monitor the National
Ocean Policy Study for Coast Guard impacts and so we kind of watched that.
But, I said it was the most interesting and it was the most interesting for
a lot of reasons. First of all, at that time, we were just completing the
construction of the Polar Class ice breaker, the Polar Star,
the first one with
Now, in that regard, you asked about economic questions. Well, it was
probably one of the biggest economic questions with biggest economic
potentials that came up while I was in this job, and it came up in a couple
of areas. One of them was in the Ice Operations because at that time they
were conducting – The Corps of Engineers in concern with the Coast Guard
was conducting a
We built the ships and they have been, based on what I know of them,
quite successful – quite successful. The biggest issue at the time was the
fact that people were now becoming really, really concerned with the
operations of the foreign fishing fleets in our overall continental shelf
and what was going on also was the Law of the Sea Conference where they were
trying to establish 200 mile zones by consensus but did not want countries
to do that unilaterally. They wanted to do it through the Law of the Sea.
Well, it was apparent that nothing was happening at Law of the Sea, and it
was also apparent that other countries were looking to establish – and
were in fact establishing – unilaterally 200 mile limits. They called them
economic zones, fisheries zones or whatever. So, we supported it. The Coast
Guard supported basically, as I remember (at least, I personally did)
supported the unilateral establishment of the 200-mile fishery zone, and of
course that was catching on up in Congress too, because people like Senator
Ted Stevens with great interests in
Anyway, we found the use for those vessels. At the same time, and a very
good and meaningful role in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard played a very
significant role in the development of the Act, not negotiating, but taking
part in discussions with Congress, with congressional staff, with the State
Department, with the National Marine Fisher Service, so it was really a team
effort. Originally we started out only looking at the enforcement angle, but
you can’t look at something in isolation because enforcement has a
relationship to treaty writing, agreement writing, and so on and so forth,
so eventually we became involved in the whole operation and it was a very, I
think, significant to me a satisfying team effort by not only various
offices and personnel within the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard in concert
with the Department of State in negotiated the GIFAS, the Governing
International Fishery Agreement, you know that you sign with each country
when they come to fish. The National Marine Fisher Service, who looks not
only to enforcement but the biological aspects of it, and certainly Congress
who was going to be putting the law through and didn’t want to put through
a law that was unenforceable or that was unreasonable, so it was to me,
almost the epitome of a team effort that you are taught about in textbooks
and it worked. Not always without difficulty, but it worked.
Around that time also, strangely enough, in law enforcement people became
aware of the fact that drugs were being sent into
So, like I said, that tour was interesting because it developed and put
into being the fisheries law enforcement, developed and put into being the
drug enforcement, it worked with the ice breakers, developed a role for the
oceanographic use, and to the extent that was necessary looked after our
interests in the ocean policy study and it was dynamic. It was interesting.
We increased our seizures on the fisheries grounds. You asked if we had any
seizures when I was onboard Acushnet and the answer was "not
really," but that did not mean that there were no seizures at the time,
but the seizures were basically for being inside the 12-mile limit.
As we started to put the emphasis on fisheries enforcement, like I said
during my tour in Ocean Operations, we were picking people up for violating
the continental shelf. In other words, if they had creatures of the shelf
onboard – lobsters, things that live on the shelf which we contended was
our property – we seized them for that and seizures went up and the fines
went up and before long if we signaled our intent that we meant business and
in 1976 I think the law was passed – it was not really begin to become
operable until the spring of 1977 I think – and we had our 200-mile limit
which has further been expanded subsequently to a 200-mile economic zone
which takes into account not only the fisheries but pollution and things of
this type.
NARRATOR: What was the status of the Ocean Station
Program?
KNAPP: Well, the Ocean Station Program had died. The
Ocean Station Program had died for the Coast Guard sometime I think between
1972 and 1974, and the worse part about it was no alternate program had been
developed for the use of the HEC’s, which is why there was a very great
concern which said, "Use ‘em or lose ‘em." Because, they are
expensive to maintain and as I said that the fisheries and the law
enforcement, the military readiness which we picked up an increased role in,
were ideal uses for those and I think central to the preservation of the
Coast Guard as I would like to know it.
NARRATOR: In retrospect, was it a good move to cancel
the Ocean Station Program when it was curtailed?
KNAPP: Well, it probably was. You see the Ocean Station
Program was financed through us and a whole group of nations and like I
said, it was a very, very complicated formula that they used and you have
got to remember as I talked about my Ocean Station duty that it was
developed basically in support of military operations, but then as military
operations were replaced by commercial air transport operations, you were
dealing with aircraft of limited range and less sophisticated navigation
systems. First they had was LORAN-A and so you needed some kind of reference
point, but as aviation progressed and the range and the speed and the
dependability of the aircraft plus the increased sophistication of the
navigation systems, you generally gradually eliminated the need for those
Ocean Stations Programs or Ocean Station ships.
NARRATOR: Sir, then in 1977, you became the Deputy Chief
of Personnel. What was the status of women within the service at that time?
KNAPP: Well, we had women in the service, obviously, but
it was only at that time that the impetus was building for a more active
role for women in the service beyond the traditional office work and moves
were being made to put them onboard ships, and I don’t remember the exact
date or under whose watch they went onboard. I know we had to be working
toward putting them at least on the 378’s during my tour in personnel
because we were doing a study and looking at various ships to see which ones
had the capability to take them, which ones had the capability, which ones
didn’t, and it was clear that with the berthing configuration on the
378’s that was one of the easier ones to accommodate women. Of course,
with officers, there was no real problem. We are talking about crew now and
we were looking at buoy tenders to see what the economic impact would be of
modifying buoy tenders to take women, and I remember just as Admiral Hayes
was coming in, which would have been at the end of my year there as the
Deputy Chief of Personnel, that we had finally decided to put them on the
378’s because I believe that Admiral Hayes was involved in developing the
first press release that let that out and that comes to mind, so we were
working on it during that time, and you see it’s progressed even since
then.
NARRATOR: Were there any significant problems generated
by the transition in putting women in more active roles?
KNAPP: Well, you know, I think yes there were. I don’t
have firsthand knowledge because I had at that time probably – I didn’t
serve onboard ship anymore so I was not shipmates with the problem, but I
can remember situations where there were conversations where a particular
woman didn’t want to go someplace, she would have to leave her boyfriend
or husband, but you know, it’s not a lot different that the role reversal,
so I don’t consider that a big problem. There have been you know – well
to say there have not been any problems on board ships because of this is I
think putting your head in the sand. I know a particular case where a woman
on board ship and a woman officer on board ship were taking up with another
married male officer on board that ship and the commanding officer attempted
to take that situation in hand and solve it and the case blew up into a
civil rights case, a discrimination case, and everything which probably
would not have existed had you not had the co-educational nature of the
wardroom, but I think these are the kind of things that you have to expect
and if you don’t expect them, then you are living in never-never land and
so to me – that’s a long answer to your question, but have then been
problems? Sure. Sure, there have been problems, but the question is that you
might not have that same problem in an all-male area, but you would have
other problems, so . . .
NARRATOR: Sir, what do you feel were the most difficult
adjustments in bring women into the service?
KNAPP: Well, I think you have got to define that a
little bit, because you know, we have always had women in the service, but
we haven’t had them in the kinds of operational roles that they are being
placed in right now. I think probably the biggest problem you have is
allowing for and making allowances for the physiological difference between
men and women. You have got to have separate facilities and that is a
problem, but it is workable. You always have the problem of reactionary
views. You know, this never has been and therefore will never be, and it
will never work. That’s a problem. You can get around that through good
leadership. Probably contrary to a lot of practice, I believe that the way
that particular problem is handled is by making no concessions to women –
I mean don’t treat them any different than anyone else – same standards
and let them prove themselves and then they gain the respect of their peers,
their subordinates, their superiors, and everything is gained on a solid
standard basis. It’s when the concessions are made because of a gender or
because of a race, that you compromise the intent of what you are trying to
do. I know when I was Commander of the 17th District, we had some
isolated LORAN Stations – Port Clarence, Attu,
NARRATOR: Do any other challenges come to mind
during your tour as Deputy Chief of Personnel?
KNAPP: No, only the standard ones where so-and-so wants
to go here and so-and-so doesn’t want to go there and it all comes up
through the Officer of Enlisted Personnel, but basically that was it. The
one thing that we tilted with – there were fitness reports- and you know
the fitness report grade creep was going in. People were being concerned
about the really the reliability and the effectiveness of the fitness
reports and we looked at various ways of changing that and well, we got a
new fitness report form. It seems to be working out, but I think the key to
it is to change it from time to time whenever you start seeing a fix
starting to set in – to change it a little bit and establish a new norm
and hopefully get some ground zero truth. But basically, I think that the
Coast Guard has done very well with the officers that we have and the
enlisted men that we have, and I think that’s less the result of the
fitness report system or of any fitness report system and more a result of
the kind of service that we are. First of all, we are relatively small, so
basically in the service, at least in the officer ranks, you know almost
every one of your contemporaries plus or minus a rank or two, either
personally or by reputation, so that adds ground zero truth to a fitness
report. It’s the same in the enlisted ranks and with the kind of jobs we
do and the very close association we have with each other, as opposed to a
very rigidly structured rank-by-rank where no one talks to someone two ranks
below him, I think that helps our set-up considerably.
NARRATOR: You mentioned that you occasionally
heard personal complaints. Do complaints like that often get to the level of
the Office of Personnel or Deputy Chief?
KNAPP: Well, yeah, you get them only because it
was something that was new – because it was women, but you know the real
question was would you have heard that if it were men? And, the answer is
no, so that puts it in proper perspective and appropriate action was taken.
END OF INTERVIEW
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