Cover-up aboard the USS Iowa

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul 1999

Chars Thompson, author and producer for 60 Minutes, analyze bi.id 10-year investigation into the Navy td cover-up of the tragedy on an American battleship.

Death on the USS Iowa

The voice on the other end of the line was insistent but measured as he told me about a ongoing cover-up aboard the 46-year-old battleship USS Iowa. The date of the call was April 24, 1989, five days after a 16-inch gun aboard the Iowa exploded, killing 47 men.

The ship was supposed to be undergoing routine training exercises in the Caribbean. Actually, at the time of the accident, Turret Two, where the detonation occurred, was conducting illegal gun powder experiments. The Navy reluctantly disclosed the experiments several months after the men died. The Navy also admitted that just 13 of the 59 sailors in the turret were qualified to operate the guns or handle the powder, some of which dated back to 1937. Twelve Turret Two gunner's mates, who worked in the magazines and powder handling spaces, escaped due to the heroism of two petty officers.

The turret was in dreadful physical shape even before the explosion. For example, a hatch in the center gun room, which was supposed to keep flames from snaking their way down to the powder caches, was juryrigged with a flattened Pepsi can. It generated a shower of sparks whenever it was operated. Valves had been rusted shut for years, and the decks were usually slick with hydraulic fluid. In the weeks before the explosion, a number of Turret Two men, including Senior Chief Reginald Ziegler, a Vietnam combat veteran with almost 20 years in the Navy, had informed their horrified relatives that Turret Two was "a death trap."

The fireball, which surged from the open breech, was later calculated to be between 2500 and 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. It was so powerful that it ripped the reinforced steel door between the center gun room and a compartment to the rear off its hinges and buckled the steel bulkheads segregating the left and right gun rooms. Everyone on the upper deck of the turret died instantaneously. Fire and clouds of deadly cyanide gas billowed downward through shafts and ventilation ducts. The men below had no gas masks, and none of their fire fighting hoses was connected to the main water supply. Rescue workers later discovered dead men kneeling in praying positions, grasping dry hoses, aware they were going to die and knowing there was nothing they could do about it.

Experienced battleship officers estimated that as many as 25 men might have been saved in the lower portion of the turret had the ship's senior officers provided gas masks and saw to it that the fire hoses were hooked up. The gunner's mates from Turret One, the forward-most turret, helped remove bodies from the stricken turret, carted off tainted powder bags, and shored up the crippled center gun to keep the 68-foot-long leviathan from wildly swinging about, killing other crew members. The Turret One men had a dangerous, grisly assignment, and yet they weren't decorated, probably because they became so critical about the Navy's handling of the catastrophe.

Source seeks out journalist who understood naval gunfire

The man who called me said he was a petty officer in Turret One and had spent many hours working in the bowels of Turret Two following the April 19 disaster. The caller had asked a Navy officer in Norfolk if he knew any television reporters familiar with Naval gunfire and was pointed in my direction. A former Navy officer, I had been a gunfire spotter and forward air controller in Vietnam. I had kept up with ordnance and gunnery after the war ended and had been producing military pieces for network television magazines for years, first for ABC's 20/ 20 and then CBS' 60 Minutes.

"You won't believe what they are doing to cover this thing up," the petty officer said. Shortly after the fires were extinguished, he said the Iowa's commanding officer, Captain Fred Moosally, had assigned 250 sailors to make Turret Two "look as normal as possible." The men swabbed the decks, sponged down machinery and slathered on buckets of haze gray paint. Massive steel plates and pieces of equipment were dragged to the stern of the ship and heaved overboard. Some body parts were also tossed into the Caribbean. No pictures were taken and no serious attempt was made to pinpoint where the bodies were found. Captain Moosally refused to allow two professional Navy accident investigators on the nearby aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea to come aboard the Iowa to unravel the mystery of what triggered the explosion.

Ten years of investigating lead to 60 Minutes stories and a book

When Rear Admiral Richard Milligan, who headed the Navy's official investigation, arrived on the Iowa by helicopter the day following the explosion, the clean-up was in high gear. Milligan toured the turret but failed to order anybody to stop throwing evidence over the side. "The news media is the only thing that can keep the Navy honest," the gunner's mate told me. I promised to follow up on everything he told me. For the next 10 years, huge chunks of my life were devoted to dismantling the cover-up. In the process, I produced two stories for 60 Minutes, three follow-ups for that show and wrote a book, A Glimpse Of Hell: The Explosion On The (USS /outa And It Cover-up, for W.W. Norton (1999).