The Navy's Last Machinists

On the night of 17 May 1987, 2 missiles from an Iraqi aircraft tore into the frigate USS Stark in the Persian Gulf, killing 37 sailors. She reached Bahrain on fire and listing, and the Navy sent the destroyer tender Acadia, a 641-foot repair ship with a crew of about 1,500, to make her fit to sail home. Inside Acadia's machine shops worked a rating most Americans had never heard of, the Machinery Repairman. This documentary follows those seagoing machinists and the ships that carried their shops, from the rating's roots in the steam navy to the tenders the Navy is ordering today. It traces the Navy's enlisted machinists from the first machinist rating in 1866 and the black gang of the steam era, through the warrant machinist of 1899 and the machinist's mate of 1904, to the wartime split between inside and outside machinists. It visits the machinist's mate school the Navy ran at Henry Ford's River Rouge plant in 1941, where sailors apprenticed in a tool and die shop and one of them threw a crankshaft out of a grinder. It also follows the machinist's mate at Pearl Harbor who stayed in a flooding compressor room to keep air going to his battleship's guns. In 1948 the Navy separated the trades, leaving the engine rooms to the machinist's mates and creating the Machinery Repairman for the machine shops. The film then opens the MR's own 1993 training manual: a toolroom secured against the ship's roll, parts made with no drawings, scraping with Prussian blue, valve flanges laid out by hand with a table of constants, gauge blocks accurate to millionths of an inch, and an errata sheet that changed a basic tolerance rule. It covers the Cold War tender fleet at its height. The destroyer tender Yellowstone finished more than 100 jobs in 3 days at Scapa Flow in 1981 and more than 10,000 repair jobs on 30 ships during the Gulf War. As late as 1994 she finished more than 3,400 jobs on a 4-month Mediterranean deployment, sending 45 fly-away teams to ships that needed them. In 1990 the Navy still had 18 destroyer and submarine tenders. After Acadia patched Stark in June 1987, the frigate crossed the ocean on her own engines. Then came the drawdown. In 1993 the Navy ordered maintenance consolidated. Between September 1995 and September 1996 every destroyer tender was decommissioned, the last one only 13 years old, and much of the equipment from the tenders and closed shore repair shops went to the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. In October 2000, the destroyer Cole was bombed in Aden, with 17 killed and a 40-by-60-foot hole in her side. One of her Machinery Repairmen climbed down an escape trunk into a machinery room to search for injured shipmates. The crew fought flooding for 96 hours, and she went home on a heavy-lift ship. The film closes with where the Machinery Repairmen work now: the carrier Gerald R. Ford's machine shop, the inside machine shop at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, and the 2 remaining tenders, Frank Cable and Emory S. Land, both based at Guam and both commissioned in 1979. Frank Cable was being decommissioned in 1996 when the Navy changed its mind and sent her to the Western Pacific, where her divers later helped bring a damaged submarine back after it struck an undersea mountain. It covers the metal printers now going aboard Navy ships, the 2025 argument in Proceedings for bringing back the destroyer tender, and the Navy's July 2026 move to award NASSCO, the yard that built Acadia, the contract for 2 new submarine tenders, with 4.4 billion dollars requested for fiscal 2027. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the machinists, machines and shops that built the trades:    / @tradearchive   Sources Center for Maritime Strategy. "Tending to a Distributed Maritime Operation: The Ongoing Need for More Navy Tenders." September 2023. DVIDS. "Burning and Turning Below Decks: USS Gerald R. Ford's Machine Shop at Work." June 2023. InsideDefense. "Navy to Award AS(X) Sub Tender Production to NASSCO." July 2026. Malin, Charles A. Compilation of Enlisted Ratings and Apprenticeships, U.S. Navy, 1775 to 1969. Washington, DC: Bureau of Naval Personnel, 1969. Naval Education and Training Command. Machinery Repairman. NAVEDTRA 12204-A. 1993. Naval History and Heritage Command. "Acadia (AD-42)." Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Naval History and Heritage Command. "USS Cole (DDG-67)." Stillwell, Paul. "Henry Ford's Sailors." Naval History, April 2001. U.S. General Accounting Office. Navy Regional Maintenance. GAO/NSIAD-98-4. Washington, DC, 1997. U.S. Naval Institute. "Bring Back the Destroyer Tender." Proceedings, February 2025. U.S. Naval Institute. "Let Your Sailors Fix It!" Proceedings, September 2018. UPI. "Forty-Five Members of the Crew of the USS Stark." 29 June 1987. Full numbered source list with links is published with the script.