Posted on 03/03/2025 8:54:02 AM PST by nwrep
Heh, Norm MacDonald was great!
Thank you for that detailed breakdown. With 500 and 1000 lb bombs cooking off I’m surprised the Forrestal (and McCain) lived to fight another day.
I read your posts. Very interesting!
There were big lessons learned from the Forrestal Fire, and one of those lessons is: A US super carrier is a very tough thing to sink using conventional weapons. When you look at WWII and the last major carriers (Wasp Class) that were sunk, they took one or two 500 lb bombs or a torpedo or two, and they were lost. They incorporated lessons into the Essex Class, and those were tough, though they did have their own design flaws that resulted in unnecessary personnel losses later in the war when the Kamikaze campaign took its toll, primarily on the Franklin and the Bunker Hill (ventilation flaws for one)
And to be fair, those bombs did not penetrate the flight deck of the Forrestal, but cooked off on the surface of the flight deck. But no matter how you slice it, that is a tough ship.
And there was a problem that could have been catastrophic for the Forrestal and might well have resulted in the loss of the ship, which was the Liquid Oxygen generation unit back near the Port Quarter (I forget what level it was on)
That unit was surrounded with fire, and there was one guy who was trapped in that compartment housing the unit who was there the whole time, and amazingly survived. The Navy looked at the explosive potential of that LOX generation unit had it blown off, and concluded it might have resulted in damage severe enough to have blown off the stern of the the ship, if not sink it. They changed the design on all future carriers (and I think they retrofitted existing installations) to allow for the entire unit to be rolled out of the ship on rails through an opening in the hull and ejected into the water should it be required.
When I heard that the USS America was sunk several years back, using various ordinance types from torpedoes, to missiles, to conventional bombs, the results were classified (and lessons from it were rolled into the design of the Gerald Ford class). It apparently took four weeks to sink her, and they ended up boarding her and scuttling her, and it is probably also true they deliberately did not try to sink her all at once, but still, it shows that a carrier would be tough to sink with conventional weapons.
All this is not to say a super carrier cannot be sunk or rendered immobile and inoperable, because it surely can, by means a lot less than what it would take to sink it. But they are indeed tough ships.
During the period 1970-1973, Your father and I were in the Subic/Cubi area at the same time, as I was a pilot in the helicopter squadron HC-7. which had a maintenance detachment at Cubi, and, though I was assigned to the parent squadron in Japan (Atsugi), we rotated through that det to and from our deployments to the Gulf of Tonkin.
Small world.
It is indeed!
I was a complete airplane nut as a kid, and incessantly built models of everything on the tarmac up a Cubi...I would go up there as a kid when I was at the beach below, and walk all over the area they had aircraft spotted in, peering into the wheel wells, intakes, and exhausts, and once in a while, a pilot doing a walk around might let me sit in the cockpit, which to a kid, was the best thing ever.
Heh, nobody ever bothered me (how times have changed) until I took a shortcut and walked across the runway at Cubi! Then a jeep with a checkered flag came out and two guys grabbed me by the arms and dragged me into the control tower!
I didn’t see the problem. I looked both ways! They however, were determined to call my parents, and I gave them a fake name and phone number (My dad was the XO, so I would have been in REALLY hot water!)
Interesting times in our lives, but...for different reasons!
Had you wandered just a bit farther you might have found yourself in our area and who knows, I might have been inclined to smuggle you aboard an H-3 for a quick tour.
Good chatting. Enjoy the day.
You bet...I always enjoy talking to folks like you on FR!
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