From our fearless Ready Room Leader, "Spike" Prendergast (composed by Vic
Socotra) comes this great gem:
...The following is the story of the
building…and naming…of NAS Cubi Point, and ends
with the “long secret recipe” for the famous Navy cocktail known as “The Cubi
Special”. Enjoy!
ADM Arthur Radford, Chief of Naval Operations had a dream He was going
to cut a mountain in half, and create a modern operating base on the island
of Luzon on the Bataan Peninsula. The airfield would serve a
deep-water anchorage for deep-draft naval ships. It would be constructed
on land permanently ceded to the United States in its former colony, and
provide an umbrella of strength for the new Republic of the Philippines,
formerly the American colony of the Philippine Islands, or
P.I.
We still called it the P.I. thirty years later
when we visited Radford's Folly, the best long runway in the Far East
Young Arthur Radford could hardly have known
he was a man of destiny when he graduated from Annapolis in 1916. The Great War was raging
overseas, and those magnificent men in their flying machines were driving
technology forward at breakneck speed. At the beginning of the conflict,
the flimsy crates were suitable only for reconnaissance. By the end, they
had become lean and lethal birds of prey.
Radford started in battleships as a deck
officer, USS SOUTH CAROLINA being his first, but he saw that the future of
the Fleet was in the air above the sea. He applied for flight training
and was designated Naval Aviator #2896 in November 1920. He was part of
the great contest between the Army and Navy for dominance of the skies.
The Army was symbolized by pugnacious Billy Mitchell. He was a pistol of
a junior officer who claimed the bomber made the Navy obsolete. He
successfully sank surplus warships at anchor, and declared he had
validated Italian Giulio Douhet's bold assertion that "command of
the air made all other military forces obsolete." It was confused thinking, since one would
have to alight on the ground sometime, but it was intoxicating stuff. It
drove interwar development into all manner of astonishing things. The
Army Air Corps pursued strategic bombers; the Navy great ships of the
air, in the form of the Zeppelins confiscated from Germany
Arthur Radford was part of the great
adventure. In addition to helping to devise the intricate system- of-systems
that evolved to became the modern aircraft carrier, he surveyed the wild
storm-tossed Aleutian Islands from the air and planted naval airfields in
the Caribbean to make sea-power bloom.
Radford was working at the Bureau of
Aviation in Main Navy on Constitution Avenue in the District when war boiled over
in the Pacific. For two years he chafed at the shore assignment, but in
the pivotal year of 1943 he was appointed Commander of Carrier Division
11, and led it into action against the Japanese at Baker, Makin and Tarawa. He was cited for "courageous initiative and aggressive determination," and those are the proper words to
characterize his service through the
conflict.
Even as the war rolled inexorably to its
grim climax, Radford was back in Washington fighting the real war against the Army, and the increasingly bold Generals of the Air. The existing War and Navy Departments were structurally inappropriate to the challenge of the new age. He assigned additional duty on the
Special Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee on Reorganization of the National
Defense to examine possible unification of the Armed Forces before
returning to the fight as Carrier Division SIX for the end of it.
He held a variety of senior posts in the great
demobilization, as the drumbeat of Unification thumped ever louder. As a
consequence, he felt he "just had to say no," and became
ringleader in the Revolt of the Admirals in
1949.
As part of the great reorganization, the Air Force
was established in 1948 to recognize the innovative technical
capabilities of the next-generation long-range bomber and the
Bomb. It was built on the heroic contributions of the
fifty-thousand young airmen who perished in the strategic bombing
campaigns against the Germans and Japanese. The new service had was
smooth, and polished, and it had a welcome message for the taxpayer:
strategic bombing was not only effective, but with the introduction of
atomic weapons and the mighty B-36 bomber, no other military forces need
be funded.
Arthur Radford appeared before the Senate to argue
passionately that tactical aviation was necessary in future conflicts,
and that the next-generation aircraft carrier, the USS United States, was
urgently needed. His arguments failed against the compelling Air Force
vision of the future, and Unification of the services under the
leadership of the Air. Navy training funds were slashed, and the
new Air Force reigned supreme in the new order, at least until sudden
gunfire required the presence of soldiers and Marines in Korea.
Radford was not punished for his part in the
revolt. He was Commander of the Pacific Fleet when the North Koreans
struck, and elevated to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by President
Eisenhower as it ended. His commitment to oppose Communist expansion was
adamant and unwavering. He became convinced as the Pacific Fleet
commander that a major Naval Air Station was required in the Far East. Subic Bay was the natural location for such a facility, a magnificent natural harbor north of the bustle of
metro Manila .
The project required a Herculean effort. Civilian construction companies
refused to bid on the project because of the vast amount of earth to be
moved and the problems of maintaining a vast work force in the dense
jungle terrain. Radford ordered the Navy's Seabees to take on
the project. In five years of round-the-clock operations, Construction Unit Battalion 1, "CUBI," completed the job, which involved twenty
million man-hours and flattening a 1,200 foot mountain to construct an
8,000 foot runway. Some say it was the equivalent level of effort as
building the Panama Canal.
In July 1956, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Radford returned to Cubi Point to commission the new station.
President Magsaysay of the Philippines
joined the U.S. officials in dedicating the field "to the peace and security of the
Free World."
Twenty years later, the Naval Air Station
changed the name of its airfield to Arthur W. Radford Field, and the plaque
that was commissioned may still be there, though it is a FedEx facility
now and the Navy is long gone: "Dedicated in honor of Admiral Arthur W.
Radford, whose foresight in founding U.S. Naval Air Station Cubi Point
has enabled the United States Navy to provide invaluable support to the
Seventh Fleet and to carry out its obligations under the
Philippines-United States Mutual Defense Treaty."
I did not walk around Cubi until 1978, two
years after that. The plaque was still shiny, and the memories of the Vietnam
conflict still fresh and raw. In order to provide for the morale of the
Fleet, 
the shore infrastructure was impressive. The Officer's Club was
legendary, and it was barely necessary to take one of the little black
cabs to travel from Cubi Point to mainside Subic to have a nice dinner,
much less travel out the Gate into the wild west of the Republic, where
absolutely anything was possible for a purely nominal price.
There are two
Navies:
The old one knew the Philippines with a personal intimacy that is embarrassing now,
e.g., tens of thousands of fantastically talented "fallen
angels" and more than a few sailors and Marines dancing with some
"Bennie Boys."
The New Navy is one that has forgotten, and it is
a prim and sterile service, shorn of its rebel Admirals and lush tropical
heritage - - it is well known among the "shellbacks " and all
duly initiated members of the "Ancient Order of the Deep and
"Occult Mysteries of the Far East " that a man who won't f***, wont fight! So help me
Neptune, Rex!
Just after the end of the first Gulf War, looming
Mount Pinatubo blew its stack and buried Clark Air Base in hot ash and
spread a foot of it at Subic Bay. The
Philippine Senate had announced that it would oppose an extension of the
Status of Forces agreement, and the destruction provided a convenient and
expeditious end to the American presence that had continued since the end
of the Spanish-American war. The last American ship out was the
helicopter carrier USS Belleau Wood in 1992, a Marine Corps
amphibious fighting ship!!
The ship carried something precious,
something that links the generations. As the green hills sank into the
sea behind, the Ship's Intelligence Officer placed an envelope in his
safe. It contained the formula that had magical properties which
distorted perception of time and space, and had enabled the long
occupation. Other versions had been
spirited off the Naval Reservation by diplomatic pouch, but they were
corrupted by the State Department.
This is the recipe of the famous Cubi Special Cocktail, served to
generations of happy military visitors to Subic Bay.
By special permission of the Office of Naval Intelligence, it has been
declassified, but on the provision that no endorsement of its consumption
is to be construed thereby, and no expeditions into foreign lands be
conducted under it's power.
The "CUBI Special"
Cocktail*:
· Mix 96 ounces orange
juice
· 84 ounces
pineapple juice
· 6 ounces mango
juice
· 6 ounces cranberry
juice
· 2-4 ounces
grenadine
· Rum to taste. Lots of Rum.
· Add a hand full of
sliced local miniature limes, aka "calemancies"
*'Tho a great drink at any time, it
especially enhances the festive spirit of the "Mongolian
Barbecue": luscious viands of diverse meats, with exotic veggies and
sauces, grilled on flats of metal..., usually prepared by Filipino cooks
at the once great naval clubs around the world, waylaid by Nuevo policies
of the correct!
If mixing in trash cans or other bulk
containers for landing parties of varying size and composition,
proportions may be estimated at:
- 16 parts orange
juice,
- 14 parts pineapple
juice,
- 1 part mango juice,
- 1 part cranberry
juice,
- 1/2 part
grenadine.
- Lots of Rum; (between
10 and 15 parts)
If a quick fix is required, i.e., in a
moving Duty Sedan, an approximation can be made with
- 2 parts orange
juice to·
- one part cranberry
juice and Rum.
For perfectly obvious reasons, notably its
role in the fight against world communism, this is known as a Radford Special.
Copyright 2007 Vic
Socotra www.vicsocotra.com
Recent Comments