Posted on 11/18/2017 1:47:46 AM PST by beebuster2000
With all the discussion of John McCain, and with the recent spate of Naval accidents, I found it most interesting to re-vist one of the most catastrophic accidents of the last 40 years, the fire on the USS Forrestal, which killed or injured 300 sailors and came close to losing the ship. Like recent Naval accidents, it was a series of unplanned and unforeseen events, combined with training lapses and poor judgements, all combined with insanely bad luck. And like recent Naval events incredible sailor heroism and self sacrifice when it counted.
PS: there has always been rumor about McCain role in the fire, but there is no evidence whatsoever he did anything but narrowly escape from his burning jet, which was parked next to the initial ignited jet struck by the rocket.
It was damn good training and I'm glad to have gone through it.
I never had to fight a real fire (thank goodness) but I thought the training I got at Great Lakes was pretty good training...it could be my faulty memory, but I recall them filling a compartment in a concrete building (with no windows) with burning mattresses and other junk, and we manned hoses and went in to put it out.
I could be conflating it with some other training, but I don’t think they would have people going into a simulated burning compartment like that nowadays and breathing in all that smoke...
Thanks for posting the Youtube link. I was aware of the fire on the Forrestal, but had not seen that.
There is a great book called “Neptune’s Inferno” about the naval battles around the Solomon Islands in 1942 that relays the terrible nature of firefighting and damage control below decks, because there was a lot of it.
Most people don’t know that four times as many men were killed in the naval battles around Guadalcanal than died on land to take it...the Japanese had superior or equivalent naval forces and personnel training at that point, so it was like two well matched boxers slugging it out, not like later in the war when it became quite lopsided.
We were shown the film in boot camp in 1969. And we all received fire training. I now wonder if it was because of the Forrestal fire.
The thing that really impressed me about the toughness of the carrier was the fact that nine 1000 lb. bombs cooked off and didn’t sink her. Granted, they didn’t penetrate the interior and go off, which would have been quite a different matter, but still...
To me, one of the most fascinating things about it was the design flaw they realized after the fact, and apparently retrofitted all existing carriers and changed the designs of the new ones on the boards to remediate: There was no way to deal with the large storage tank of LOX they had to refill the various service equipment that was used to fill the LOX containers in the aircraft.
They came very close to having the large LOX tank stored internally on the ship (somewhere in the levels close to the flight deck) blow up as the fires got closer.
They had no way to get rid of the liquid oxygen. There was an enlisted guy who dogged his door and stayed with the tank the whole time as the fires made the hatch to the compartment too hot to open and the air to fill with smoke because he didn’t get a command to abandon the compartment, and didn’t want to leave his post.
If that tank had gone up, it is very possible (even likely) that it could have sunk the ship.
After that, they created a large hatch in the hull, and placed the large tank on rails so that in the event of a fire, the hatch to the outside could be opened, and the tank rolled off the ship on the rails into the ocean to avoid a catastrophic explosion.
We went through the tear gas training in Navy boot camp.
They learned a lot from the Forrestal fire, many damage control practices were changed or updated to reflect the lessons learned.
Very similar to our disastrous naval engagements in the Solomons where we got our asses kicked (even while dishing it out) and learned many lessons that saved lives and ships as we went forward in the war.
Some were simple lessons, like scraping layers of paint down to a minimum layer (Pre-WWII, it wasn’t just a joke that some ships seemed held together by deep layers of paint, there WERE thick layers. But when fires started early in the war, that paint created poisonous conflagrations that killed men and made it nearly impossible to extinguish them. So after that, the fleet put men to work removing extraneous layers of paint.
They also got rid of a lot of linoleum deck covering, and overstuffed furniture in various compartments as well.
Some changes were doctrinal...I believe that is when they developed fog nozzles, as the found that standard fire hoses could not extinguish flames as well.
They also observed many ships were lost that could have been saved with more perseverance, so Captains were given additional warning not to give up the damage control efforts too early, and to keep at it as long as the vessel could stay afloat)
That I remember as well...I remember being bent over double coughing my lungs out with snots coming out of my nose...
We all would get a hint of what it was going to be like when those who went before us would sit close to us in the chow hall. Then came our turn to ruin people’s lunch.
Hehe...like all the people you thought were the ‘old hands’ who gave you crap and filled you with foreboding about what was ahead, even though they had been there only a few weeks longer than you!
............I remember going through a fire fighting school in San Diego back in 1967.
It must have been weeks before the Forrestal Fire because it was not a real memorable experience and only lasted several hours.
Very rudimentary.
Here is one senaro of how the Forrestal fire got started.
Scroll down the topic “FIRE” and read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire
I was an instructor at great lakes 1979 to 1982 and taught the recruit firefighting school. It is just as you recall. We flooded a concrete compartment with diesel fuel then poured gasoline on top. The instructor stayed in the building and lit it on fire. It was hot smoky and dark. Recruits got a real fire experience from it.
Great. You explained it better than I did. It was great training...
great book called “Shattered Sword” about Midway battle in WW2.
a lot of the book is about the poor firefighting on the UJN Carriers. All four were abandoned and sunk due to fire. Damage Control and Fire fighting was not a priority on the UJN ships. they believed total offense would prevent counter strike. When it came, they sank.
“I am more interested in why McCain was on the very first helicopter off the Forrestal after the fire, when he was not wounded or burned in the fire.”
An acquaintance was serving on the Forrestal when the fire occurred.
His words were that everyone on the ship hated McCain. From his fellow pilots to the flight deck crew, cooks and even people who ordinarily had no contact with him he was the most reviled individual on the ship.
By getting McCain off the ship the officers removed a politically protected imbecile who made any situation worse.
My acquaintance said that McCain being shoved off was the single best thing to come out of the fiasco in the short term.
Many of the ships personnel voiced the regret that JM wasn’t amongst the dead.
The navy learned many lessons from the Forrestal that save lives today.
Sadly they never learned their lesson about John McCain.
Yep. We were still wearing our blue baseball caps. The “old salts” were wearing white hats. We hadn’t earned ours yet. Of course, when we got ours we kept the BS flowing on down hill.
Thanks for that information.
Your friends comments ring true about McCain.
After the Forrestal, he was assigned to the Oriskany.
He was specifically instructed by the more senior pilots at what level to fly, to avoid being shot down.
Of course, he did not listen.
McCain’s version is that he was shot down by a missile—at 3,000 feet.
The truth is, he was shot down by ground fire.
I call him the first Soviet ace of the Vietnam Era. Including the plane he was shot down in, he wrecked five planes in his aviation career.
He might as well have been working for the other side.
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