Bombs burst on the flight deck of a mighty aircraft carrier.
The explosions tear through the plane’s tanks, spewing hundreds of gallons of gas that instantly ignite.
Crew members scramble around to contain the fire.
It’s a desperate heroic struggle, but it’s a doomed attempt.
Armed with handheld fire extinguishers and water hoses that only spread the fuel further, they run headlong into the inferno, never to be seen again.
Some run away in vain, burning from head to toe.
Others, pushed to the edge of the ship by encroaching flames, jump down 60 m, 196 ft into the water below.
It’s a hard impact, and some don’t make it.
As the inferno chews its way through the decks, dozens of sailors below are trapped and always creeping ever closer as the smoke and the heat, but there’s no way out.
It all sounds like a scene from the carnage of World War II, doesn’t it? Perhaps a snapshot from Lady G or Guadal Canal as Allied warships harried the forces of the Japanese Empire back to its home islands.
But this hellish picture we’ve just painted happened two decades later in the late 1960s off the coast of Vietnam.
Now the Vietnam War occupies a powerful place in the American psyche, a repository for all the trauma of war and a cautionary tale about the follys of foreign adventurism.
But it isn’t usually associated with large-scale clashes at sea.
In fact, its best known naval confrontation, the Gulf of Tonkan incident in 1964, is famous for not actually happening at all.
At least not like the authorities claimed.
Decades later, US intelligence admitted that a North Vietnamese attack on the American Navy, the flash point that led to America sending its boys to fight and die in Vietnam’s jungles and patty [music] fields, was simply a figment of their imagination.
No, the tragedy we’re talking about today, the biggest loss of life on any US warship since the Second World War, didn’t even happen during a battle or any sort of enemy attack.
It was a lethal and avoidable accident.
And the lessons it taught would change how the Navy operated, saving the lives of many countless more sailors into the future.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs and this is the true story of the terrifying inferno that engulfed the USS Forestall.
Forestall was the first of its kind.
Not just an aircraft carrier, she was something new.
A super carrier.
300 m nearly 950 ft long with a beam stretching over 70 m or 238 ft wide a displacement of nearly 60,000 tons of metal.
Forestall by all measures was the biggest warship afloat.
When she was launched back in 1954, she was the largest ship ever built in the United States.
Navy brass had huge expectations to match.
Foresttol and her class, they said, would assure US naval supremacy through the next two decades at least.
Even before her kill was laid, though, Foresttol was mired in controversy.
There were still people opposed to the idea of making aircraft carriers the Navy’s capital ships.
They argued that aircraft carriers were too vulnerable to submarines and shore-based attacks in the missile age.
Carrier proponents shot back with the vessel types stellar performance during the war.
Only 39 of the 226 carriers used on all sides were sunk.
Just four of these were struck by shore-based aircraft, and all but one of those were from kamicazi planes.
But still, not everyone in DC was convinced.
Over at the legendary Newport News dry docks in Huntington, Virginia, Foresttol was 9 months behind schedule.
During construction, her design was adjusted several times.
The original telescoping bridge was replaced by a conventional island structure and a flight deck was modified to include an angled landing deck and steam catapults.
Foresttol was the first American aircraft carrier to be built with these innovations, but the costs of implementing them added up.
Foresttol surpassed the World War II Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano as the largest carrier yet built, was the first design to support jet aircraft operations.
In fact, the Forestto’s flight deck was so vast that the ocean liners, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, could be placed side by side on top of it with room to spare.
The height from her kee to at the top of her form, meanwhile, was even taller than Niagara Falls.
Miraculously, despite these continual lastminute revisions, the ship was eventually completed ahead of schedule and very surprisingly under budget.
USS Foresttol was launched in December 1954 and she performed well in sea trials hitting a flanked speed sprint of 35 knots.
The next year in October she was officially commissioned.
Her motto first in defense was a nod to her namesake, the first US Secretary of Defense James Foresttol.
He had been a committed Navy man, so much so that he actually opposed the creation of an overarching Department of Defense, preferring to maintain a separate and autonomous Navy department.
Despite his prestigious new appointment, though, he was always at odds with President Harry Truman, and the job also took a heavy toll on him.
Forestall was pressed to resign over his deteriorating mental condition, and he received treatment for depression at the National Naval Medical Center.
There he fell to his death from a 16th floor window.
It was a sad end for a man who had given so much of himself to a navy he had loved.
The warship that carried his name had been designed to honor him.
Over her first decade at sea, the FID, as she was affectionately called by her men, became a symbol of American might in the Mediterranean.
During the Suez crisis, she was deployed to cow the invading British, French, and Israeli forces and press for an immediate resolution.
The next year she sped over to Lebanon where a coup attempt in Jordan once again spiked regional tensions.
But in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkan incident, US attack aircraft carriers in the South China Sea began sustained aerial operations against North Vietnam and communist forces in the South.
USS Forestall was the first of these based in the Atlantic to join in the effort.
On July 25th, 1967, she arrived at Yankee Station, a fixed coordinate 145 km, 90 mi off the Vietnamese coast.
This is where US Navy aircraft carriers launched their missions.
[music] Roaring from Foresttoall’s decks were the Phantoms and Skyhawks of Carrier Airwing 17, a reactivated unit established the year prior purely for operations from Foresttol.
It was made up of 10 squadrons.
Two fighter squadrons with F4s, the Red Rippers, and the Bee Devilers.
Then three attack squadrons equipped with Skyhawks and A6 Intruders, the Clansmen, Gladiators, and Tigers.
and a heavy attack squadron, the Vikings in KA3B Sky Warriors.
The support squadrons included a recon attack squadron in RA5 Vigilantes.
Two early warning squadrons in E2A Hawkeyes and EA1F Skyers, and finally a helicopter combat support squadron, the Fleet Angels and UH2A Sea Sprites.
For 4 days, CFW17’s aircraft plunged into North Vietnamese airspace.
What was then the largest sustained aerial bombing campaign in the US Navy’s history.
It was 3 days into her deployment when Foresttol met the ammunition ship Diamond Head on the night of July 28th.
Forestto’s officers faced a difficult decision.
They just finished their first waves of strikes and they needed to rearm before launching the second at dawn, but Forestto’s ordinance officers were very wary.
Diamond Head carried loads of 1,000 lb 450 kg AN M65A1 Fatboy bombs, but many of these were at least 10 years old and had been sat baking in the heat and humidity in depots across the Pacific.
Foresttol’s men clocked the bomb’s rusting shells, leaking paraffin, and rotting [music] packaging, but they had little choice.
Worse still, the Fat Boy bombs used a composition B filling, an explosive mixture sensitive to improper storage and age.
The leaking paraffin stabilizing agent told the more experienced ammunition handlers that this load was extremely dangerous.
But the tempo of Navy operations was going ahead with ferocious pace.
Foresttol launched 150 sorties against targets in North Vietnam in the days she was at Yankee Station.
They were dropping bombs more quickly than they could be resupplied or even produced.
When Ordinance men reported the rusting, leaking bombs up the chain and even suggested throwing them overboard as a matter of urgency, they were dismayed to learn that this load was all Diamond Head had to give them.
It was either take these vintage explosives or cancel the second wave due to begin the following day.
When the campaign had begun after the Gulf of Tonkan incident, the Navy had used the latest Mark 83 bombs, but these were rapidly running out.
Now, after 3 years of war, they were forced to use surplus ordinance left over from the Korean War, or even earlier.
Captain John Bailing was in a tough spot.
He knew his men were right.
The bombs were in no fit state to be stored aboard his ship.
But the pace of operations must have put a huge strain on him and forced all senior officers.
He decided on a compromise.
The bombs would be taken aboard, but stored only on the flight deck.
That way, an accidental or spontaneous detonation would theoretically cause superficial damage, as opposed to a magazine detonation, which could crack Forestall in half and send her to the bottom in minutes.
Little did he or the others know that the Depo commander, who had overseen the bombs loading at Subic Bay in the Philippines, had automatically assumed they were being loaded to be dumped at sea.
And when he found out they were instead being loaded for active operations, he tried to cancel the transfer, but it was all in vain.
The bombs were stacked in the temporary staging bay called the bomb farm on the flight deck.
It was the first in a chain of events that would see more than 100 men killed.
July 29th, 1967.
Forestall was preparing to send her second strike of the day.
More than 20 aircraft crowded the ship’s aft flight deck while 20 more jostled for position.
The planes were fully armed and fueled and the pilots and the deck crews were making lastminute checks for an 1100 hours launch.
One of the aircraft readying for launch was an F4B Phantom 2 fighter wings slung with Zouri unguided rockets.
The Zouriis carried in pods of four had developed reputation for electrical malfunctions and accidental firings.
harnesses connected the missile’s electrical wiring to the rocket pod.
These were known as pigtails, and they had been usually connected only when the aircraft was attached to the catapult and poised to launch.
But because the bombing campaign in Vietnam had become so intense, and ordinance officers had found that this slowed the launch rate, they began to deviate from standard procedure, connecting the pigtails earlier while the aircraft were in the pack on the flight deck.
As Lieutenant Commander James Bangot switched his Phantom from externally supplied electrical power to the plane’s internal power system, an electrical current surged through one of the three Zouri missile launchers on the port inboard wing station.
And with its pigtail connected, the electrical spike had a route straight into the rocket.
With its safety pin pulled, the Zouri was free to be fired.
And it did.
The rocket shot across the deck totally unexpectedly.
It cleaved off a crewman’s arm in the blink of an eye before striking and rupturing the external fuel tank of an A4E Skyhawk on the other side.
The rocket didn’t explode.
Its safety arming mechanism prevented that.
But its sheer force had punched a hole straight through the drop tank on the Skyhawk, and now 400 gallons of jet fuel gushed out, instantly igniting as it spread under other aircraft nearby.
Shrapnel also punctured the fuel tank of a second A4 just after pouring yet more fuel onto the rapidly growing fire.
Then, as crewmen were just getting an understanding of the chaos unfolding around them, one of those vintage 1,000lb bombs under the A4’s wings dropped into a pool of burning fuel, and it began to cook.
Damage control teams sprang into action.
They knew that in theory the Navy’s new Mark 83 bombs could be directly exposed to a jet fuel fire for a full 10 minutes before detonating.
But then Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier of Repair Party 8 spotted one of those bombs glowing red in the flames.
He charged into the dense oily smoke towards the bomb with no protective equipment and just a handheld fire extinguisher, gambling that he could cool it down long enough to prevent its cooking off as he and his team brought the Inferno under control.
But what he didn’t know was that this was not a Mark 83.
It was one of those antique Korean War 60 series explosives taken on from Diamond Head just a few days earlier.
All it took was a minute and a half for the fire to eat through the bomb’s skin and ignite the unstable comp B inside.
Farrier, fire extinguisher in hand, was killed instantly along with any of those helping him out or who just happened to be standing too close by.
Then it happened again and again.
After two more bombs went up, Farrier’s entire firefighting team was wiped out.
Worse still, heavy winds whipped the flames through the aircraft waiting to take off at the carrier’s stern, exposing more explosives in a deadly chain reaction.
Other crew members, who weren’t trained in firefighting, tried to douse the flames with water and foam, but this only helped spread the fuel rather than put it out.
Across the flight deck, it was a scene of carnage.
Men scrambled around blindly, burning from head to toe.
Firefighters, their clothes and bodies in flames leapt into the sea.
The Inferno chewed through six of the 10 decks below the flight deck.
The heat twisting and collapsing bulkheads reducing tough steel alloys to rivlets of molten metal.
About 50 men who had turned in after the night shift were killed by flash fires while they lay in their bunks.
Water and extinguisher foam from the firefighting efforts above had flooded down bomb blasts into the passages.
It was boiled by the searing white hot plates of the ship, creating steam that blinded anyone attempting a rescue.
Of the 134 people who would die in this fire, 91 of them weren’t on the flight deck at all.
The fire on the flight deck was put out within an hour, but Forestall’s voluminous hull continued to burn.
In all, seven of the 1,000lb bombs exploded in the fire, hurling human bodies and debris as far as the ship’s bow over 300 m away.
The flames continued to rage for 13 hours, fed by some 40,000 gallons of jet fuel that cascaded over the sides and the stern.
Crewman later said they thought their ship had been struck by a North Vietnamese MIG fighter.
Captain Bailing thought there was a real possibility the ship would be lost.
But thanks to the efforts of the carrier’s crew and other ships that came to their aid, the fire was eventually controlled and Forestall was saved.
One of the men on board was future Senator John McCain, who had just climbed into his A4 Skyhawk.
But soon after closing the canopy, he heard and felt an explosion, and suddenly a pool of jet fuel splashed across the deck with a fire following it.
He jumped down, rolled through the flames, and sprinted to safety.
Then another bomb exploded, and was thrown across the deck.
McCain saw his comrades running the other way, headlong into the flames to help however they could.
Two machinists mates driven to the edge, cut off by the blaze, jumped 70 ft down into the water below, but then clambered aboard a rescue helicopter and dashed right back to the fire to keep up the fight.