The crew of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) received the 2020 Battenberg Cup Award in a ceremony aboard the ship, June 1, 2021.
The Battenberg Cup is awarded annually to the ship or submarine selected by the fleet commander as the best all-around in the Atlantic Fleet, based on accumulation of crew achievements.
Congratulations to the crew of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) for maintaining the best ship in the fleet. I remember the first time the crew of that boat took the cup.
I reported onboard in July of 2001, when most of the crew were still Plank Owners. She was the newest carrier in the Navy, just settling in from her maiden deployment. My first master chief, like many other senior officers and enlisted onboard at the time, originally joined the Navy during the Vietnam War. Several of our old hands were trained in their early days by veterans of World War Two or Korea. We went into the shipyard on September 5, and watched Nine Eleven go down on the big screen in the aft mess deck. After half a year of planned maintenance, we spent most of 2002 preparing for war. We deployed that December for Operation Southern Watch, but we knew that a full-blown war of regime change in Iraq would be awaiting our arrival.
Because Turkey would not allow our Coalition ground forces to invade Iraq from their territory, our Special Forces operators and the rebels they organized in northern Iraq were cut off from reinforcements. The Truman Battle Group posted up in the northeastern Mediterranean, with the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) Battle Group in the southeastern Mediterranean. Both battle groups were combined as one, whose commander, Rear Admiral John D. Stufflebeem of Carrier Group Two, noted that we constituted “the largest U.S. Navy battle force assembled in the Mediterranean for combat since World War II.”
Our air wing flew a circuit north over Turkish airspace, around Syria, down into Iraq, and back over Jordanian and Israeli airspace. We conducted operations around the clock, not even stopping to replenish our stores. In fact, we pulled off an underway replenishment while simultaneously conducting air combat operations. It was the first time the US Navy conducted such an operation since the Vietnam War. It only took the Coalition three weeks to take Baghdad, but the Truman Battle Group stuck around, hitting targets for a solid month. We lit up the enemy on the first night of the war, and we dropped more ordnance on Iraq than any other battle group. We made history in a number of ways during the war, and on the voyage home. After 89 days without a port visit, we stopped by Portsmouth, England, and went on a “spectacular binge.”
We earned our Battle Efficiency Ribbons in 2002 and 2003, and in 2004 we won the Marjorie Sterrett Battleship Fund Award. It was also in 2004, as we prepared to lead the forces of democracy in the largest naval maneuver of NATO’s history, when the admiral gave our skipper the Battenburg Cup for 2003.
