by Barry Hastings
Let’s start where I left off last time, continuing my (many) complaints against the U. S. Navy.
We’ll pick the tale up with Admiral Hyman Rickover, a 1921 graduate of the Naval Academy, and a brilliant, though irritating man. Like Admiral Sims (see my last), he wasn’t one to hesitate about going over the heads of superiors. Rickover went to influential senators and congressmen, while Sims went directly to President Theodore Roosevelt.
1. Rickover is known as the “father of the nuclear Navy.” Superiors tried for years to keep him down, or force him out, primarily by refusing promotion when due, and every dirty trick they could think of to sully his record. He was (finally) promoted to Rear Admiral by act of Congress and the President, 51 years after first being commissioned. His work resulted in the most powerful fleet in history, based on nuclear-powered carriers, cruisers, frigates, destroyers, and submarines of several new and powerful patterns. Left to Rickover’s superiors, the Navy’s huge fossil-fuel hogs would still be burning oil, and contributing to the earth’s biggest problem – global warming.
2. The turret explosion aboard the nation’s last active battleship (USS New Jersey) ignited a storm. The Navy cited several things they thought might be the cause, and finally settled on blaming a young, gay Gunner’s Mate, saying he’d been rejected by another sailor, and took it out on the ship and it took a long time to clear the air because the Navy didn’t want to admit, publicly or to congress, they’d been firing with propellants (gunpowder) manufactured three decades (or more) before the explosion. When tested, the propellant proved highly unstable — too many times up and down the temperature scale, among other issues. The poor, dead sailor, was finally cleared of any blame in the case. I’ll bet his family has never forgiven, nor forgotten.
3. The Tail Hook Society. Composed of young, aggressive, naval fliers who routinely operate(d) from aircraft carriers, and were (are?) notorious for wild binge-drinking and womanizing weekends – including sexual assault and abuse of female naval officers at watering holes near the nation’s coastal naval flight centers. Young naval officers (like John McCain) cultivated an aura of ‘hot-dogging’ on the ground and in the air, as did submarine officers, and young commanders of anti-submarine and antiaircraft vessels from Destroyer Escorts to Frigates, to Aegis Missile Cruisers. The attitude of these officers meant huge maturity problems for the fleet air arm, submarine (especially attack subs), and the anti-sub surface fleet.
4. The Iran-air Disaster wherein a a navy Aegis (anti-air) guided-missile ship fired on, and destroyed in flight an Iranian civil aircraft, knocking it from the sky, killing everyone aboard. The Navy first said the aircraft was emitting the transponder signal of a military aircraft. That lie was shortly proven patently untrue, and the skipper shown to be too aggressive, in drills, and in real “situations.”
5. The Italian cable car disaster in which hot-dogging naval aviators (maybe Marine Naval Air), flying too low (giving tourists a thrill), cut the suspension cable of an occupied cable car in Italian mountains. Subsequent testimony indicated the buzzings were a common practice of U.S. fliers in the region. Many innocents died.
6. Hawaiian collision of U.S. Submarine and a tour boat loaded with Japanese
tourists. A hot-dogging young sub commander brought, his boat to the
surface in a manner only recommended for emergencies (the reverse of a
crash-dive). Unfortunately, the sub came up directly beneath the tour boat,
killing and injuring many. The sub’s commander apologized, and went to
Japan to do so — the only one of the people responsible for these travesties
who did so. But no victims came back to life.
7. And the most bothersome (to me) because it has never been satisfactorily
resolved. TWA flight 800 had just taken off from New York and was climbing
above and near the coast of Long Island, when without warning it exploded,
and crashed into the sea in flames. A couple of days later the Navy admitted a squadron of naval vessels was holding anti-aircraft drills in the area at time of the event, but said it had nothing to do with the crash.
Despite navy denials, many believe the aircraft was used as a ‘target of convenience’ by naval vessels that night, and an unarmed anti-aircraft
missile was accidentally launched by one of them. The plane was gaining
speed as it climbed, but slow speed, lack of evasive maneuvers, and the
steady course and speed made it a sitting duck for even an unarmed
weapon. The Navy has always denied any involvement, but the Navy record
for truthfulness in similar matters is not one they can take pride in, or one
we can place much trust in.
