Posted on 09/08/2010 5:16:17 AM PDT by Virginia Ridgerunner
The Navy's greatest navigational tragedy took place in September 1923 at an isolated California coastal headland locally known as Honda Point. Officially called Point Pedernales, Honda is a few miles from the northern entrance of the heavily-traveled Santa Barbara Channel. Completely exposed to wind and wave, and often obscured by fog, this rocky shore has claimed many vessels, but never more at one stroke than at about 9 PM on the dark evening of 8 September 1923, when seven nearly new U.S. Navy destroyers and twenty-three lives were lost there.
Just over twelve hours earlier Destroyer Squadron ELEVEN left San Francisco Bay and formed up for a morning of combat maneuvers. In an important test of engineering efficiency, this was followed by a twenty-knot run south, including a night passage through the Santa Barbara Channel. In late afternoon the fourteen destroyers fell into column formation, led by their flagship, USS Delphy. Poor visibility ensured that squadron commander Captain Edward H. Watson and two other experienced navigators on board Delphy had to work largely by the time-honored, if imprecise, technique of dead reckoning. Soundings could not be taken at twenty knots, but they checked their chartwork against bearings obtained from the radio direction finding (RDF) station at Point Arguello, a few miles south of Honda. At the time they expected to turn into the Channel, the Point Arguello station reported they were still to the northward. However, RDF was still new and not completely trusted, so this information was discounted, and DesRon 11 was ordered to turn eastward, with each ship following Delphy.
However, the Squadron was actually several miles north, and further east, than Delphy's navigators believed. It was very dark, and almost immediately the ships entered a dense fog. About five minutes after making her turn, Delphy slammed into the Honda shore and stuck fast. A few hundred yards astern, USS S.P. Lee saw the flagship's sudden stop and turned sharply to port, but quickly struck the hidden coast to the north of Delphy. Following her, USS Young had no time to turn before she ripped her hull open on submerged rocks, came to a stop just south of Delphy and rapidly turned over on her starboard side. The next two destroyers in line, Woodbury and Nicholas, turned right and left respectively, but also hit the rocks. Steaming behind them, USS Farragut backed away with relatively minor damage, USS Fuller piled up near Woodbury, USS Percival and Somers both narrowly evaded the catastrophe, but USS Chauncey tried to rescue the men clinging to the capsized Young and herself went aground nearby. The last four destroyers, Kennedy, Paul Hamilton, Stoddert and Thompson successfully turned clear of the coast and were unharmed. In the darkness and fog enveloping the seven stranded ships, several hundred crewmen were suddenly thrown into a battle for survival against crashing waves and a hostile shore.
46350 - 51st MMS/394th MMS (1972-74)
An interesting tidbit: the Southern Pacific Railroad was instrumental in recovery from this disaster. The telegraph station that provided train operating orders at Surf (which is located very close to the disaster site) had a telephone line to SP dispatch office in Los Angeles, and when a worker at Surf heard about the disaster nearby both telephone and telegraph messages were sent to the Los Angeles office, and SP was quickly able to assemble a rescue train that came down from San Francisco to help the survivors.
Thank you for this fascinating story.
So, when my East Coast USAF buddies in Tech School got orders with me, for VAFB, I suggested THIS was the “Surf City” of Beach Boys fame....
They were “a bit” disappointed when we drove down there, in Feb 1972.
I enjoyed a sci-fi series of novels in the last couple of years of a pair of “4-stackers’ that were transported through a dimensional hole into a different past on Earth, along with some pissed off Japanese in some large WW2 naval vessels, it was called “Destroyermen”.
Damn, just damn.
How much trouble did those guys get into?
Losing one ship will wreck your day....but 7?
After this event the “Running Fix” was born.
The hot-dog squadron commander should have been hanged, drawn, and quartered, and then been severely reprimanded, Running at high speed off that coast in a fog with an onshore wind in the dark on a stormy night. It is well to remember that this is the same Navy that brought us Pearl Harbor a few years later.
Bad Naval career move ping!
One captain, toward the end of the column was running his own fix and backed off. He was also reprimanded, “...failing to follow squadron maneuver orders.”
That’s the Navy way!
My own Dad’s career suffered from similar mindset. On the Island of Malta in 1957, Dad and his crew brought in their P2-B, did the post-flight checklist and secured her to the tarmac.
The next crew took her up with the C.O. aboard; something went wrong and they ended up in the drink. All souls lost.
Who did they crucify? My Dad. His flying days were over.
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