Posted on 07/13/2017 6:02:04 AM PDT by artichokegrower
Heya TM...did they send you down to take a look at things sometimes because there was no official “diver” available?
Sure did. Sometimes we were the only divers around, for example, to clear a million plastic bags from the intakes off Beirut. Also training ops for limpet mine attacks, or bending shafts with demo, etc.
For example, both the Bismark and the Repulse could have been saved from the followup attacks if their damaged rudders had been blown off by a diving with UDT experience.
Certainly, the explosion to blow off the bent/jammed rudders would be harmful - just like the original aerial torpedo explosions did more damage than just jamming the battleships’ rudders, but the jammed rudder prevented both battleships from any chance of getting away from the immediate area and getting under friendly air cover.
My roommate when I was stationed at NAB Coronado (working at NSGD/NRRF Imperial Beach) was an underwater welder. He said his life expectancy was about 35 years - due to the constant pressure changes.
Lenny Lis - if you’re out there, look your old roomie Eaton up!
Here’s a link to the traffic in the vicinity of the Fitzgerald prior to and including the time of the collision (provided by PavewayIV on another thread): https://youtu.be/m1b58yelh_c?t=25
And here are my comments to PavewayIV from that thread:
To: PavewayIV
The video of their paths is really interesting. You asked someone else to do the math. While I didn’t do the math exactly, I think a case can be made that the Fitzgerald was much, much, closer to the Wan Hei than to the Crystal, but I’ve made several assumptions that you should check.
The data:
1. From the video, the Wan Hai and the Crystal are very close to running exactly parallel, so I assumed they were exactly side by side. (Just before the collision in the video, the Wan Hai position hadn’t been updating, so it appears to be well behind the Crystal, but the next update has it well ahead after the collision. (compare frame 1:05 with 1:06)
2. The video has a time stamp and speed of the ships, but no indication of distances, so I used a ruler to measure the distance traveled in six minutes and got about 1.5 inches on my screen. At approx 20 mph, that meant that 1.5 inches translates to about 2 miles.
3. The Wan Hai is 1.5 inches from the Crystal (on my screen) and is running parallel to the Crystal, and even with it (approximately).
4. The report from the captain of the Crystal had the Fitzgerald at 40 degrees off port at 3 nautical miles distance. I’m assuming that means that it was what it sounds like, 40 degrees left of a line running along the Crystal’s path at a distance of approx 3.5 miles.
So, that’s the assumptions.
Now, draw a 2x2 mile square box with the west corners (from the bottom, labeled A, B, C, and D, i.e., going clockwise from the bottom left. The Crystal would be at point A on the box. The Wan Hai would be at point B on the box, two miles away from the Crystal. The Crystal is moving toward point D, and the Wan Hai toward point C.
On a 45 degree line from A, at a distance of 2.8 miles you would be at point C on the box, and on a line directly in the path of the Wan Hai. At a 40 degree line from A (from the Crystal) a point 3.5 miles out would also lie very close to a point directly in the path of the Wan Hai. Also, the video shows the Wan Hai actually ahead of the Crystal after the turn (frame at 48 seconds, with both ships moving perpendicular to the blue line), so the Fitzgerald would have been almost directly in the path of the Wan Hai and approx two miles away from it.
Here begins the speculation: The Fitzgerald became aware of the Wan Hai, only about two miles away and heading in its direction, but maintaining it’s 80 degree course would take it away from the Wan Hai (in the direction of a line running from A to D.) That line, unfortunately, was the course of the Crystal, which had every reason to believe that the Fitzgerald would eventually maneuver around it. But on the bridge of the Fitzgerald, the Wan Hai was the concern and the threat of the Crystal was never successfully relayed to the bridge. (It’s really difficult to believe it was never detected at all.)
For this to work out, the Fitzgerald, however, would not have continued on the original 80 degree course at a faster speed than the Crystal. It would have had to execute a starboard turn because it hit the Crystal after the Crystal had only traveled about four miles from the turn. That’s not possible if the original course and a faster speed are assumed. But then, a starboard turn away from the Wan Hai’s path would make sense, so it could well have been executed.
P.S. This would be a lot easier to demonstrate with a diagram.
My main speculation has been that more than two ships were likely involved. That’s based on what happened in the Porter collision, where the first ship drew all the attention and the second one encountered was a surprise. Given what I’ve described above, approximately that same scenario appears quite possible.
Not realy, I was Cheng on USS Vogelgesang, DD-862. USS Fitzgerald DDG-62 is a guided missile destroyer.
The OOD, JOOD, CIC watch officer are the responsible officers on watch at the time of collision. The helmsman and lookouts are very junior seamen. They will not be held responsible for the collision, unless it can be proven that the disobeyed an order from the OOD or JOOD.
The Crystal is not a tanker.
You nailed it - nice job.
If those patch sheets are 48 inch wide material that makes the patch 16 feet long. If they are a meter (available material) then the patch is about 13 feet long. Assuming the overlapped the edges by a foot that makes the hole 12-14 feet long. My guess is that we are very lucky we only lost 7 sailors and not many more as the Fitz sank. From what I have read that is about the size of a WW2 torpedo hole.
Right...a container ship. Thanks for the clarification.
The underwater work...is just unreal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMX8BEWMtlw
This is good stuff, Horseman. It seems plausible, though I maintain that the Fitz should’ve been able to easily detect and track both ships. It will be interesting to see the destroyer’s track, superimposed against the others.
DDG-1 was an experimental converted Gearing.
DDG2-24 were the Charles F Adams class.
DDG25-30 didn't actually exist as USN ships, they were notational numbers for Adams DDGs in the Australian, German navies.
DDG31-46 were converted/renumbered Forrest Sherman/Mitscher/Farragut ships
DDG47- was supposed to be the Ticnderogas, but they got upgraded to Cruisers
DDG51- are the Burkes
You are correct that there is only one drydock in the U.S. (really in the world) capable of constructing a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (Newport News Shipbuilding, Newport News, VA.). However both Norfolk Naval Shipyard (east coast) and Bremerton Naval Shipyard (west coast) have a drydock large enough to accommodate a Nimitz class carrier and the facilities to perform significant repairs.
Which is a DDGINO.
That makes sense. As for the plastic bags, I never would have thought that would be a problem, but...yeah. I can completely visualize that issue in my head!
That was what happened to the battleship Hiei sunk in 1942 in the Solomons. She had taken a hit from an American cruiser that disabled her steering gear...she was left as a sitting duck for the Cactus Air Force, steaming in circles within their attack radius.
I read something where the Japanese said the American planes came in on the crippled Hiei like ‘vultures’...
In 1982, Beirut was bulldozering all the garbage in the city straight into the Med, and plastic bags were floating and drifting all over.
When I was a kid living in Yokosuka, Japan, they had an enormous drydock there which was, I believe, big enough to put a carrier into.
I read where it was the same drydock that the IJN Shinano was built in (off a Yamato class hull) and she was sunk by the USS Archerfish.
Right after the war ended, the Archerfish was taken into that very same drydock for some emergency repairs, and there were a multitude of Japanese shipworkers all milling around, eyeing her with an open, sullen hostility...the very same workers who had built the IJN Shinano.
The captain of the Archerfish could see this was an uncomfortable situation, so he had a translator say the submarine was open for anyone who wanted to take a tour, and that broke the tension...they jumped at a chance to see the inside of an American submarine!
On a side note, when I lived in Japan, there was an accomplished plastic surgeon, Dr. Vasquez, living in the same building complex as my family (it was an old, gigantic parachute hangar they had converted into “condos”, probably eight in all). I was good friends with one of his sons.
My mother told me later that Dr. Vasquez was in high demand due to the huge influx of soldiers wounded in Vietnam who needed a plastic surgeon, and they flew them into Yokosuka all day long in those olive colored Hueys with the white square and red cross on the doors, landing at the helipad across from the Sullivans School...I looked up at those all day as they came in...every hour on the hour it seemed. They looked to my ten year old eyes like giant flying tadpoles
They had an enormous german shepherd, even to this day, the biggest one I have ever seen. (It wasn’t just because I was a kid, either, that it looked so big. Both of my parents in later years also confirmed it was a gigantic dog.)
Well, this dog was so big, that to exercise it, they would tie its leash to the side mirror of their Pontiac station wagon and drive around the neighborhood as the dog trotted beside the car. (honest, not making this up)
That dog scared the crap out of me. I generally wasn’t afraid of dogs, but...this beast was so effing big, and when the surgeon’s son (Randy?) and I would walk past him as he was tied up, he would just...look at you. Not like you were a threat...it seemed more like...you were food.
One day, the surgeon was walking the dog, and as they went past that massive (empty) drydock, for some reason, nobody knows why, the dog just took off and began running towards the drydock. Maybe it saw a seagull, or a rat, nobody knows. But the doctor, caught off guard, fell to the ground and was being dragged behind the dog, his wrist entangled in the loop of the leash.
He managed to extricate his hand, and the dog leaped over the edge and disappeared into the drydock! (This was all relayed to me by my parents and the doctor’s son)
The dog was apparently unharmed (I don’t know how, that drydock looked like it must have been 10 stories from the bottom to top) and there was a picture the next day in the Stars and Stripes of this huge drydock with a little speck of a dog all alone inside it at the bottom!
LOL, I am not going to set anyone straight! (Finally able to surf FR again!)
But in looking at that picture from that angle, it sure does look like structural pieces on the Fitzgerald were displaced downward and forward from the downward motion of the Crystal’s hull.
Wow. I heard that hole was something like 12 feet high by 17 feet long...I just paced it off on the floor-that is a massive hole for a ship that size. Pretty amazing she didn’t sink.
Regardless of the apparent softness of the navy personnel, they still make those ships tough up in BIW...
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