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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...