Second Time’s the Charm
The second attempt to move the USS Intrepid (CV-11) from her Hudson River pier proved to be as much a nail- biter as the first a month earlier, but the outcome this time was positive. On 5 December, four high-powered tugboats managed to move the historic aircraft carrier about eight feet back and five feet out from her dock before she got stuck in the mud. (This had also happened on the first attempt, on 6 November.) But then, after a struggle of more than 30 minutes, the tugs yanked the 29,000-ton famed ship from Pier 86, where she had been docked for 24 years. The move was designed to allow the Intrepid and her berth to undergo a $60-million, two-year refurbishing.
As the carrier was wiggled free of mud that clung to her propellers and began to clear the end of the pier, Bill White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air &. Space Museum, urged the 920-foot vessel on.
“Come on, baby! Come on, baby!” he shouted. “We’ll see you in Bayonne,” he yelled to employees watching from the pier, referring to the intended destination five miles down the river and across the harbor in New Jersey, where the Intrepid will begin her overhaul. When the ship was finally out in the river, White and tug coordinator Captain Pat Kinnier began jumping up and down, whooping, and giving each other high fives.
“We’re excited,” White said. “It’s a great day.”
The same six tugs from the McAllister Towing and Transportation Co. of Manhattan—with almost 30,000 combined horsepower—that had attempted to budge the ship a month earlier began arriving before daylight. This time, three tugs tried to back the ship out at a slight angle rather than straight back as in November. But despite the dredging of an additional 39,000 cubic yards of mud from around the ship, the same problem surfaced: Kinnier said her propellers were pushing up a mound of mud that stopped the ship.
“We’ve got to break these screws out of the mud,” he said.
When the Intrepid refused to budge after the initial shift, Kinnier and White looked at each other with grim faces and White asked if more tugs could be called in. “I was very worried,” he said later.
But then McAllister executives shifted one tug—the Robert E. McAllister—to the port quarter to wiggle the stern back and forth and then help pull backward; it worked.
On board for the highly publicized trip were 20 former crewmembers, including Marino DiLeo, 70, of Bay Shore, New York. He served on board in 1956 after the Korean War.
Getting the Intrepid moving again was a relief for DiLeo.
“I’m glad because I’m tired of getting calls about, ‘Hey, stuck in the mud,”’ DiLeo said. “It’s gotta go; they called in the Navy, and they got the job done.” The Navy had arranged for the additional dredging at a cost of $3 million.
DiLeo has volunteered on the ship for a dozen years. This is a special time of year for him—during the holidays, he plays Santa Claus for children. His role was different back in 1956. A former helicopter pilot, DiLeo described life on the Intrepid as quick paced.
“It was busy,” he said. “People don’t realize how active and dangerous the flight deck of a carrier is."
The ship made a symbolic stop at Ground Zero, where 16 of the former crewmen unfurled a 50-by-90-foot American flag. Like the move itself, it proved difficult, with the flag refusing to fully unfold. The vets and cadets from State University of New York Maritime College hauled it back up and managed to get it to cooperate on the second try. Then, with their hats off, the veterans manned the rail of the ship facing Manhattan and paused for a moment of silence.
Sixteen cadets and their staff officers from the maritime college at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx were on board to help with the docklines.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Andrew Maksimowicz, 19, of Wantagh, New York, a first-year student. “I grew up on boats on the South Shore. The chance to work on a big ship like this is mind-boggling.”
Lieutenant Commander Tom Spinia, a staff member, said the school participated because it had a long-standing relationship with McAllister. “This fits in, obviously, with our training,” he said.
After pausing for more than an hour in the harbor to wait for a favorable tide change, the Intrepid docked in Bayonne. The carrier required almost 29 feet of water to float after 600 tons of water ballast was removed for the first attempt. Matt Woods, the museum vice president for operations, said that with the extra dredging, there was more than two feet of water between the ship’s keel and the mud at high tide when the tugs began pulling.
The Intrepid, launched in 1943, is one of four Essex (CV-9) -class carriers still afloat. She served during World War II, the Korean, and Vietnam Wars, and as a recovery ship for NASA astronauts. Headed for the scrapyard, she was purchased in 1981 by real estate developer Zachary Fisher and, until this move, attracted 700,000 visitors a year.
White said the ship is supposed to be in dry dock in Bayonne for six to eight months and then go to Staten Island. “She’s going to get a whole new aircraft collection, new exhibits down below. She’ll be a completely brand spanking new museum when she comes back.”
—Bill Bleyer
Naval Institute Honors
In November, the U.S. Naval Institute named Andrew C. A. Jampoler Naval History Author of the Year and honored Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret.) with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his innumerable contributions to preserving the history and spirit of the Marine Corps.
A retired U.S. Navy captain, Andrew Jampoler knows how to thrill readers with a well-written naval adventure story. In 2003 the Naval Institute Press published his exciting Adak: The Rescue of Alfa Foxtrot 586. And two years later the Press published Sailors in the Holy Land, his exotic tale of a U.S. expedition to the Dead Sea. Jampoler’s article in the August 2006 issue of Naval History is equally exotic.
“Journey into the Heart of Darkness” is the story of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Emory Taunt’s 1885 expedition up Africa’s forbidding Congo River. The article is more than a thrilling adventure story; it’s also a compelling portrait of Lieutenant Taunt, a talented officer whose weakness for the bottle continually set back and finally terminated his naval career. Beautifully written, the piece is based on extensive primary research Jampoler conducted at the National Archives. It is longer than the standard Naval History article, but the editors agreed that its high quality merited making an exception and giving it extra space in the magazine.
During his long service in the Marine Corps, Brigadier General Edwin Howard Simmons earned a sterling record as a battlefield commander. He fought on Guam, landed at Inchon, and led the 9th Marine Regiment in Vietnam. A journalist and historian as well as a warrior, General Simmons was editor of Marine Corps Gazette and most notably served for more than 20 years as director of Marine Corps History and Museums. In fact, he is the leading authority on Marine Corps history, and his numerous articles and books have contributed immeasurably to educating the public, as well as Marines, about the Corps and its history and heritage.
More than 30 of General Simmons’ articles, book reviews, and letters to the editor have appeared in the pages of Naval Institute periodicals, beginning with the November 1965 issue of Proceedings, which featured his “The Marines and Crisis Control.”
General Simmons’ significant contributions to Naval History include writing a series of columns in the 1980s about Marine Corps history, and a pair of articles in the December 2005 issue—’’The Great War Crucible” and “Leathernecks at Soissons”—about the Marines’ transformative experience in World War I.
The general’s own experiences as a company commander in the Korean War formed the basis of his novel Dog Company Six, published by the Naval Institute Press in 2000. And in 2003, the Press released an updated edition of his popular account of the Corps, The United States Marines: A History.
Sons Find Missing Father
For more than 60 years the relatives of the 70 crewmen lost on board the USS Grunion (SS-216) during her first patrol in the early days of World War II have had little information about what befell the submarine and her crew. But the tenacity of the sons of the sub’s skipper, the Internet, and a model ship builder have combined to possibly provide substantive answers.
All that the relatives knew of the Grunion’s last days was she had sunk two Japanese submarine chasers and heavily damaged a third in July 1942 near Kiska, one of two Aleutian islands occupied by the Japanese. They also were aware that her last radio message to the sub base at Dutch Harbor, on 30 July 1942, described heavy enemy activity, and Dutch Harbor responded with an order to return to the base. But they did not know if Grunion ever received the command.
Four years ago, Bruce Abele, a son of Grunion’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Mannert L. Abele, received an e-mailed link to a Web site that stated that a Japanese interpreter and model ship builder, Yutaka Iwasaki, thought he knew what had happened to the Grunion. He had discovered and translated an article published in an obscure Japanese maritime magazine written by the “Superintendent” of a Japanese freighter that described a confrontation between a U.S. submarine and his ship, the Kano Marti, on 31 July 1942, about 10 miles northeast of Kiska.
The sub first fired two torpedoes, one missed, but the other knocked out his engines and communications. Two more fired at short range, rebounded off the hull without exploding. The sub, while surfacing to finish off the damaged ship with gunfire, took a direct hit in the conning tower from the freighter’s bow 8'Cm gun and immediately sank.
The Abele brothers—Bruce, Brad, and John—began investigating the identity of the sub in the Kano Maru officer’s report. They hired a marine survey firm, Seattle- based Williamson and Associates, for an expedition in August 2006 aboard a Bering Sea crab boat, the Aquila, to the frigid waters licking the base of Kiska volcano. The boat set out on 2 August and for more than two weeks, carefully towed a sonar probe inside a 240-square-mile grid.
In mid-August, the sonar picked up a 290-foot-long object—believed with 95 percent certainty to be the Grunion— wedged into a terrace on the steep underwater slope of the volcano. Although the sub was 312 feet long, the Williamson team believes the bow may be buried under thick sediment, accounting for the shorter length. Skid marks show the boat slid to rest about 1,000 meters down.
While the Grunion is the only known sunken vessel in the area, and the sonar captured the distinct outline of a submarine conning tower, the Abeles are not ready to declare her found. They are sending out a second expedition next summer, with a remote-controlled underwater camera to positively identify the vessel.
Coincidentally, the USS Mannert L. Abele (DD-733) was sunk with the loss of 73 of her crew also during her first war cruise—off Okinawa on 12 April 1945— after being attacked by at least 18 aircraft and struck by a kamikaze and a rocket- propelled “Baka” suicide bomb.
Ulane Bonnel (1918-2006)
In late September 2006, naval historians in Europe and the United States were saddened to learn of the death of Ulane Bonnel, a leading maritime historian in both France and the United States. Bom in Texas of French descent, Bonnel graduated from West Texas State College in 1940, enlisted in the Naval Reserve, and attended the WAVE officer candidate school at Smith College. She served successively as a recruiting officer, instructor, personnel officer and was ultimately assigned to the congressional liaison unit at the Bureau of Naval Personnel. After active duty, she worked as a specialist in military affairs for the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service.
In 1947, she married Lieutenant Paul Henry Bonnel, Medical Corps, French Navy, and moved with him to France, where he continued his service, rising to the post of Surgeon General of the French Navy, and retiring as a vice admiral. During this time, Bonnel began her study of French naval history at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and wrote her dissertation on French privateering and the United States during the Napoleonic Wars. She earned a doctor of letters degree and published her dissertation in 1961, for which she received an award from the Academie de Marine. Over her career, she published three books and more than 70 articles. Her decorations included Chevalier of the National Order of Merit and of the Order of Arts and Letters, and Officer of the Order of Maritime Merit.
Bonnel achieved great distinction as a scholar and organizer in academic conclaves. She founded the French Commission for Maritime History in 1978 and served as its secretary-general, journal editor, and president. She coauthored the constitution of the International Commission of Maritime History and served several years on its board of directors. She will always be remembered as a benefactor of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., for her assistance in obtaining copies of documentation held in French naval archives for the Center’s Naval Documents of the American Revolution. She was a valuable link between the American and French academic communities, having introduced many U.S. scholars to French scholars and archival sources. She was also a life member of the Naval Historical Foundation.
After the French Navy mine hunter Circe discovered CSS Alabama’s shipwreck off Cherbourg in 1984, Bonnel formed the Association CSS Alabama in Paris to work with the French Ministry of Culture and the Naval Historical Center to recover artifacts from the ship. This became a unique example of international cooperation in naval history and nautical archaeology. She also assisted in the establishment of the CSS Alabama Association in Mobile, Alabama, that continues to preserve, protect, and display the Confederate raider’s artifacts in cooperation with the Naval Historical Center.
Ulane Bonnel will be long remembered for her high standards of scholarship, great energy, dedication to French and American naval history, and many collegial relationships on both sides of the Atlantic.
—William S. Dudley
Yorktown TBDs Examined
On 12 October 2006, divers and other crew members from the USS Safeguard (ARS-50) assisted the Naval Historical Center (NHC) and The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) in a scientific survey of two rare—only 129 were built and none preserved—and historic submerged Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers at Jaluit Atoll, Republic of Marshall Islands.
The aircraft—lost since 1 February 1942—played a primary role at the Pacific war’s outset. Although obsolete, TBDs gained notoriety at the Battle of Midway. There, they suffered horrendous losses, but by diverting the Japanese fighter cover, enabled U.S. dive bombers to do their deadly work and contributed significantly to the critical victory that helped turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.
The Naval Historical Center and the National Museum of Naval Aviation have long been interested in assessing the condition of these two aircraft, according to officials of those organizations. Over four days of diving, the survey team collected data and sampled material from the TBDs for scientific analysis to evaluate their suitability for possible recovery and preservation.
The planes were lost in the first U.S. offensive strikes of World War II against the Japanese headquarters on the Marshall Islands just two months after the Pearl Harbor attack. They were launched from the USS Yorktown (CV-5), but rain squalls and low cloud thwarted a coordinated attack. The two pilots became disoriented over the target and, too low on fuel to make it back to the carrier, ditched together in Jaluit Atoll’s large central lagoon.
The Jaluit Devastators have remained in the same spot ever since, one resting on a coral ledge at only 50 feet and the other on the bottom at 130 feet. The shallower airplane was found and identified in 1997. The deeper Devastator was located in 2002.
The identification of the aircraft was accomplished without disturbing the site. U.S. Navy records show that the TBDs were Bureau Number (BuNo) 0298 (Yorktown aircraft 5-T-7) and BuNo 1515 (5-T-6). BuNo 1515 was part of a late production batch of 15 airplanes ordered in August 1938 that differed from earlier TBDs in a few minor details, most notably, a small bomber’s compartment window on each side of the fuselage just above the leading edge of the wing root was omitted in the later aircraft. These planes display the difference, with the shallower TBD having the windows, thus most likely being BuNo 0298.
The combined TIGHAR and Navy research will now provide the data for preservation and potential recovery and determine if it is feasible and desirable to lift and restore one of the TBDs.
D-Day Memories Shared
Early on 6 June 1944, the pre-D-Day tension on board one LCVP (landing craft, vehicle personnel) loaded with Soldiers was broken by a couple of buckets of cold seawater. Former Coast Guard Coxswain Marvin Perrett told an audience at a recent Naval Order of the United States “Navy at Normandy” symposium that an Army officer in his LCVP, nauseous from exhaust fumes, got sick to the windward side of the Higgins boat. His breakfast, however, ended up on Perrett’s face. A quick-thinking crewman promptly doused the coxswain with two buckets of seawater, a sight that got the nervous Soldiers laughing and “relaxed the tension of the moment.”
Perrett was one of five Sea Service veterans of the Normandy invasion who shared their D-Day recollections at the symposium held in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 October 2006 as part of the Naval Order’s 2006 annual congress. William S. Dudley, former director of the Naval Historical Center, moderated the panel.
Mortimer Caplin, a lieutenant (junior grade) in the 7th Beach Battalion, landed early on D+l to find Omaha Beach littered with hundreds of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ bodies. “It was like a wax museum,” he said. His immediate responsibility became clearing wreckage from a half-mile stretch of the beach and having the bodies moved. A pair of destroyermen—Captain Richard Zimermann, U.S. Navy (Retired), then a lieutenant in the USS Frankford (DD-497) and Taylor Watson, a gunner’s mate second class in the USS Harding (DD-625)—recalled shelling German positions along Omaha Beach. Meanwhile, Richard Ehlert, a motor machinist’s mate second class in the LST-495, told how he later toured a German beach fortification and learned how the enemy “had such a turkey shoot.” On the wall was “a mural of the view from inside the emplacement with the various ranges marked.”
Founded in 1890, the Naval Order’s chief mission is to foster research and writing on naval and maritime subjects and to promote the preservation of historic artifacts and memories of U.S. naval and maritime history. The organization is currently leading the drive to erect a U.S. Navy monument at Utah Beach to honor the service’s participation in history’s greatest amphibious operation—the D- Day invasion of Normandy. To learn more, visit www.navalorder.org, or call 866-794- D-DAY (866-794-3329).
Promising Results
In October, a shipwreck search team seeking the remains of John Paul Jones’ famous ship Bonhomme Richard returned from a month-long expedition off the coast of England. After conducting a detailed analysis of data collected during the search, the team has identified several wreck sites one of which they believe could be the famous Revolutionary War ship. The Naval Historical Center (NHC) is a partner with the Ocean Technology Foundation in the search.
“When we started this project, finding the Bonhomme Richard seemed like the proverbial needle in the haystack,” said Robert Neyland, head of the NHC’s underwater archeology branch, which advises the Navy in matters related to historic preservation of U.S. Navy ship and aircraft wrecks. “However, after our experience surveying last summer and looking at the quality of the data collected, it might be comparable to a needle in a snow ball—one that is melting away through the application of science and technology. We have used computerized drift modeling, state-of-the-art remote sensing equipment, and geographic information systems to manipulate all of the data and pinpoint likely search areas and targets.”
The team will resume the search in 2007.