The White Plains (AFS-4) was a Combat Stores Ship, (though we used to refer to AFS as Attack Food Ship,) used for underway replentishment (UNREP) of food, general stores and fuel. In addition to ships coming alongside for
their supplies, she also had a helo deck and two UH-46 helicopters which provided vertical replentishment (VERTREP). She was forward deployed (homeported outside the United States) in Japan, later in the Philippines and Guam but I was long gone by the time she left Japan.
Decommissioned:17 April 1995 to be used as a Logistical Support Asset. (I might be wrong, but I believe this to mean that she is being cannibalized to keep the AFS's that were transferred to the Military Sealift Command supplied with spare parts.)
One of the scans I got from Kodak which wasn't too bad was a midwatch rescue at sea of Vietnamese boat people.
Photos and some digression on various topics:
Welcome alongside. Standby to receive shotlines forward, amidships and aft.
All hands topside take cover.
On an AFS the 1MC blared that out 24/7. Ships alongside getting
supplies and fuel, a vertrep with the helos going to other ships farther out, (which meant flight quarters
as well as unrep stations,) duty on an AFS was the polar opposite of a Destroyer Tender which
could only do it's thing when tied up to the pier. This picture is actually a CONREP with our sister
ship Niagara Falls, done somewhere off Diego Garcia (and the Niagara Falls is the ship you
see most of here.) A CONREP takes a completly full ship and transfers everything to an empty
one, and then the ships do a 180, one to give supplies, the other to reload. In this case the Niagara
Falls went back to Subic Bay, and we went to the Persian Gulf. Lucky us, huh?
Back to the 1MC announcements, the one we liked to hear was the song "Sukiyaki", which
was our breakaway song, (execpt for the night when the OOD played "Take this job and shove it",
since he was retiring in a couple of days,) which meant we would have at least a few minutes
of rest. Other ships had breakaway songs too, the Towers played the Lone Ranger part of "the
William Tell Overture" which is way impressive when coming up to flank speed. There was a
thread in the sci.military.naval newsgroup a year or so
ago on the topic of breakaway songs.
The background image is from a shot I took from the White Plains signal bridge through the M-Frames coming into Hong Kong, though by the time I got done playing
around with it in Paint Shop Pro and L-View.....here's the origional and
then the companion photo which looks astern, (back then we still had
the 3 inch 50's, which I'm told were removed later in favor of the CIWS stuff.) Also note the nifty
late 70's look with us in white shirts and black trousers and the combination hats. That didn't last
too long I guess, just most of my enlistment. The word I always heard about that uniform was it
came from the CNO's office during the reign of Admiral Zumwalt, and the basic concept was that
us enlisted types would have more self esteem if our uniforms were similar to the chiefs and
officers. What they discovered instead was that it was disliked by almost everyone, I know one
of the things I liked about the Navy origionally was not ever having to wear a tie (okay we had the
neckerchief but that isn't the same thing,) and the classic bell bottoms, jumper and white hat is
IMHO the sharpest dress uniform around.
