Here’s the case of USS Missouri v. shallow water
I liked reading the last part about the fate of the officers involved.
Ex Navy fib? Lemme tell you the difference between an fairy tale and a sea story.
A fairy tale starts out, “Once upon a time . . .”
A sea story starts out, “No shit, there I was . . .”
King George V ran down and sank the ‘Tribal’ destroyer Punjabi in 1942
David Simmons, when I saw you mention the QM/Curacoa collision I was afraid you were going to put the blame on the QM. I’m glad to see you put more blame on the captain of the Curacoa than on the QM.
One other factor in that, though, was that the Curacoa was unsuitable for any kind of escort duty for a fast ship like the QM. Her top speed was such that she had to cease zigzagging, herself, just to maintain position with the QM. I really question what the air threat the QM was facing north of Ireland. I believe that the real reason for having an escort with the QM was to deter submarine attacks, and I wonder what an overaged, undergunned anti-air escort cruiser could have done in that situation.
I really think that a large part of the blame fo that fiasco should be put at those persons in the Admiralty who chose to put the Curacoa on that duty in the first place.
I’d never heard of Honda Point in my Navy time, but that means nothing. Snipes don’t really talk to people who see the sky on a regular basis. So I wouldn’t know what training horror stories they get.
What I do know is that above a certain rank (I believe O-3) any kind of mess-up like that is effectively career destroying. My ship, USS Virginia CGN38, was involved in a collision shortly before I reported aboard. She hit, and overran a Greek fishing trawler out of Corfu, while in a fog. The reports I’d heard (word of mouth only, so take things with a grain of salt, I sure do) indicated that there was a good deal of belief that the trawler had been not following the rules of the road for the conditions, and that as the larger vessel the Virginia could not have realistically avoided the collision.
In spite of that, the Captain’s career ended. The OOD was reprimanded. And the XO, too, I believe took a hit.
The most amusing thing about that tall tale is the idea that precedence is determined by the size of the vessel. In fact, all are governed by the “rules of the road.”
Only when they think you might believe them.
I only recently heard about this, and was shocked that I hadn’t heard about it earlier. Seven Navy ships grounded, and 23 sailors dead, because the squadron leader didn’t trust the radio navigation bearings. I then double-checked a couple of sources that I thought should have had information. Captain Linwood S. Howeth’s classic History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy includes a chapter on The Radio Direction Finder, and this would seem to be the perfect cautionary tale, but he doesn’t mention anything about the incident. The World Almanac has a list of ship disasters, which includes a gun turret explosion of the battleship USS Mississippi a year later, but nothing about Honda Point. So I can only guess that people find it too embarrassing to repeat.