The centennial debate on the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898, a feature of the Eighth Annapolis Seminar and 124th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute, set the stage rather splendidly for a bicentennial discussion on the same subject in the year 2098. By that time—perhaps!—some of the passion and ego invested in the tragedy may have dissipated.
But not yet. As the arguments unfolded at the U.S. Naval Academy's Bob Hope Performing Arts Center on 22 April 1998, those who believed that an internal coal fire caused the explosion that sank the Maine clung fiercely to their theory in the face of a National Geographic study that rekindled interest in the earlier—indeed, initial—belief that the battleship was the victim of an external mine detonation.
The day after the ship's sinking, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt said, "we shall never find out definitely" the cause of this mystery. He himself believed at that tense moment that it was "an act of dirty treachery by the Spaniards"—a notion that precipitated the Spanish-American War and was instrumental in propelling TR up San Juan Hill and into the presidency.
The sinking of the Maine set in train a series of events that flushed out what was to become an incontrovertible truth: The United States was an emerging world power destined to become a dominant world power. Yet throughout the past 100 years, a question of major historical importance has nagged Americans who bother to think about such things. Thomas B. Allen, moderator of the Annapolis debate, put it succinctly: "Did a mine start the war, or did an accident start the war? If it were a mine, then the Spanish-American War was launched by a mass murder still unsolved. If it were an accident, then the war should not have happened."
So the issue was, is, and will be neither insignificant nor esoteric. That it pops up again and again, a jack-in-the-box ever ready to spring, illuminates not only a pivotal event in U.S. history but a national readiness to change and reevaluate.
The immediate TR-style tendency to blame a Spanish government frantically trying to avert a hopeless war died rather quickly, a victim of its own illogic. If anyone sought such a provocation to war, it was more reasonable to suspect a Spanish die-hard who deplored appeasement of the Americans; or a Cuban rebel eager to draw the United States into the conflict; or, as Castro regime propagandists would have it, an imperialist U.S. government willing to sacrifice 260 of its own sailors. A Navy Court of Inquiry said in 1898 that it "was unable to obtain evidence fixing responsibility . . . upon any person or persons." And that has been the case ever since.
What the 1898 court did conclude, after weighing evidence by experts and divers who examined the wreck, was that a bomb under the bottom of the ship had ignited an ammunition magazine, thus resulting in a mighty explosion. In 1911, a new board of inquiry examined what was left of the ship after she had been raised and decided the cause was indeed a bomb, but it was a smaller contact mine set off at a different location.
From the beginning, the Spanish insisted the cause of the explosion was internal, and they had the backing of other Europeans, especially the British. For 70 years, Americans rebuffed this unflattering reflection on U.S. ship construction expertise. Children were taught the bomb theory until 1976, when the legendary father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, launched a study that concluded, with great firmness and certainty, that the characteristics of the damage were consistent with a large internal explosion. In other words, the Spanish supposedly were right all along. Such was the admiral's prestige that his revisionist view became the official view. And there it remains in the minds of Rickover disciples to this day. Even U.S. history textbooks were revised accordingly over the past two decades.
Such was the situation until the National Geographic Society decided to reopen the question by applying new computer simulation techniques unavailable to the Rickover team 22 years earlier. Advanced Marine Enterprises (AME), a research firm highly respected in Navy circles, found evidence that caused it to revive the mine theory, at least as a plausibility. Its finding triggered a fury of insider debate that prompted Naval History magazine to run a cover article in its March/April edition entitled "What Really Sank the Maine?" The whole issue made it to the top of the agenda of the Naval Institute's Annual Meeting and Annapolis Seminar this year with a 90-minute debate that could have gone on in lively fashion for 90 hours.
The discussion's six major participants, in order of appearance, were:
David Wooddell, Senior Researcher for National Geographic magazine, who presented an overview of the historical record.
Panel Moderator Thomas B. Allen, distinguished author, editor of an abridged version of the controversial AME study published in the March/April Naval History, and, coincidentally, co-biographer of Admiral Rickover.
- Ib Hansen, a chief researcher in the 1976 Rickover study whose rebuttal to the findings of the AME study appeared in the May/June Naval History.
- Captain Shriver Hering, U.S. Navy (Retired), head of the study group for AME who advanced evidence that an underwater mine might have set off the Maine disaster.
- Otto P. Jons, executive vice president of AME, who disagrees emphatically with the findings of his subordinates and champions a slightly different accident scenario.
- Robert Short, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted some of the major investigations that led to the AME revival of the mine theory.
Thus, the debate essentially pitted Hansen and Jons, defending the Rickover findings, against Hering and Short, advancing the AME conclusions. Before the battle was joined, however, Wooddell delivered a strongly worded plea that history be regarded as a constant exercise in revisionism and science as a constant search for truth.
"At several times in our project," he declared, "I was cautioned that we were 'trying to change history'—and 'trying to change perceptions of history.' Perhaps that should occur if the science that went into the [AME] study is good enough. It is not for me to state if we have re-cast history, but I will say about perceptions of history that they ought not to be a popularity contest. . . . Each of these perceptions of history says very different things about our country, about our Navy, and about our national character. So maybe it is important that we ask the question until we feel we have gained more than just a perception."
Wooddell began his review by stating that "serious and responsible questions" still remained in the wake of the Rickover report, and National Geographic thought they should be investigated. So the magazine contracted with AME to examine several different scenarios of explosions in the Maine's 6-inch reserve magazine, explosions caused either by a coal fire or a small underwater mine. In 1898, he noted, "no ship's magazine had ever exploded as the result either of a coal fire in an adjacent bunker or an underwater mine."
Hence, he said, the central questions confronted in the National Geographic study were whether a coal fire could have been the cause without the crew's being alerted beforehand or whether a small black-powder underwater mine could have breached the hull and triggered the explosion in the 6-inch reserve magazine.
AME found that a fire at the bottom of the coal bunker could transfer enough heat through the adjacent steel plate to set off an explosion without the crew's being forewarned. Such was the finding of the Rickover report. But did Rickover researchers consider the effect of a black-powder explosive back in 1976? Did they consider the effect of a black-powder explosion on riveted steel plates, which are subject to different characteristics of failure than welded steel? The answer, Wooddell said, is no.
He reported that the AME team found "a major problem" with the coal-fire theory. A section of the outer bottom—hereafter referred to as Section 1—had come to rest inside the ship. On this evidence, AME's study held that "the force required to move Section 1 inboard was probably caused by an underwater explosion, and that it could have been a small 100-pound black-powder mine." Wooddell added, however, that AME's Otto Jons strongly dissents, contending that a small bomb could not have blown Section 1 inboard.
Hansen, defending the accident-theory conclusions of the Rickover report, said that back in 1975 "it was quickly apparent that the theory of the mine explosion carried very heavy baggage. . . . It is impossible today for anyone, calculation-wise, to prove there was a mine under the Maine able to ignite the magazine. Fortunately, it's much easier to prove there was no mine. . . . If there had been a small mine under the ship it would have caused damage to the bottom of a different nature than seen."
Only a mine of greater size than that envisaged by the AME study could have penetrated the hull, much less ignited the magazine, Hansen insisted. Despite this, he observed, "everybody agrees there was no large mine." He concluded emphatically, without caveat or hedge words: "That's why we say, there was no mine under the Maine."
At that point, Hering put forth his opposing theory. While he said neither a mine nor a fire-induced internal explosion definitely could be ruled out as the cause of the Maine's demise, his group concluded that the latter explanation was "not highly probable"—that, indeed, it had not been "adequately explained or adequately analyzed." In contrast, Hering argued that "the observed structural failures and the position of the structure is consistent with a small black-powder mine"
The AME researcher explained how his group used computer simulations to determine likely damage from a number of different detonation points. But his greatest emphasis was on the flimsiness of the 5/16th-inch and half-inch steel sheeting in the Maine's hull. "It's almost like putting an elephant on top of a cookie sheet," he remarked. "This thing is going to buckle whether its loaded from inside or out." Next, Hering turned to the weakness of rivets under tensile pressure, a phenomenon noted in connection not only with the Maine but with the sunken Lusitania and the Titanic, as well. "The rivet heads are going to pop," he said. "That's what happened on the Titanic."
Having made his case for easy penetration of the Maine's hull, Hering said his research team believed "there was enough kinetic trauma to ignite the powder cases, start the detonation, and continue pushing Section 1 [inboard and over the keel]. This is what we feel would occur if indeed there was a mine." He concluded that his group believed the placement of a mine under the Maine "was simple, and it was feasible."
Hering's boss, Otto Jons, started on a whimsical note, saying that he deserved credit "for not pulling rank" to stop the work of Hering's team. He then challenged his AME colleagues by arguing that the condition of Section 1 and other damaged parts of the Maine could not have looked as they did if a bomb were the initiating cause of the disaster. Jons held that, in the event of an external explosion, one would expect to see plates in the hull separating along riveted seams. Instead, initial impact tore apart steel plating, not at the seams "but in the plating proper." Moreover, no edge deformation was evident at the seams, though this presumably would be the case if the seams were the first to give way. "We are dealing here with omni-dimensional tension (i.e., membrane tension)" he said. "Anybody who has ever popped a balloon knows what that is."
In his adamantly stated conclusion, Jons declared: "I am convinced it was not a mine. . . . Everything is consistent only with internal pressure." He then a got a laugh from the audience by asking: "And who the hell smuggled in a bomb to set it off?"
The final debater, consultant Robert Short, took aim at Hansen and Jons by saying, "I'm amazed that these people can be so positive about the results."
If the cause was a coal fire, Short asked, then where was the evidence of residue from a coal fire? And what about paint, since a long-term fire in a coal bunker would leave different markings than a sudden explosion? "There was no record of that," said Short. And how was it that a substantial number of shells were found in the boiler room farther aft? And how much powder had been loaded into the 6-inch magazine? "There's no record of what was loaded," he said.
Finally, Short contended that the damage to the hull on the port side was greater than that shown by photographs on the starboard side, where the 6-inch reserve magazine was located. This again raised the possibility of a mine, he said, since the equivalent of 100 pounds of TNT detonated seven feet from the hull could have holed it and ignited a munitions magazine.
"Essentially, we have a fire with no evidence, we have shells pushed aft, with no one trying to understand how this happened," he asserted. Short contended that the equivalent of 50 pounds of TNT would hole the outer hull but would not split the seams [this in response to Jons] of the inner hull. He insisted that damage to the Maine's structure, whether initiated from within or without, would have been "nearly the same."
After noting that much evidence has yet to be pursued about the cause of this persistent mystery, Short ended his presentation by declaring that at the present time there is "no way to determine the source of ignition" that destroyed the Maine. He implied that advances in science and ambitious research programs could yield much more evidence, but only if someone is inclined to undertake such projects.
What remains to be done? For starters, an intensive document search needs to be conducted so that a representative batch of 1898-era black powder can be reproduced to check its explosive capabilities. Then, Environmental Protection Agency permission must be obtained to explode this black powder in a relatively shallow body of water in a container replicating the steel plating and rivets used in the Maine. Next, coal industry research on the characteristics of coal-dust-triggered explosions should be examined. Perhaps, too, Spanish and U.S. archives might yield new information through the use of computer information retrieval. And finally, perhaps the U.S. Navy and a post-Castro Cuban government might give scientists permission to extract a piece of the Maine's hull from her watery grave off Havana harbor.
Obviously, much still needs to be done, but only if the nation considers it sufficiently important to determine what really sank the Maine. What the next century may bring, nobody knows, but it could be the stuff of a fascinating bicentennial debate.