DATE: Wednesday, April 23, 1997             TAG: 9704230473

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Military 

SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  107 lines

A FAMILIAR TALE, A TRAGIC ENDING THE COLLISION OF THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE LEYTE GULF CAUSED HEAVY DAMAGE, BUT HISTORY SHOWS US THE TOLL COULD HAVE BEEN FAR WORSE.

Swathed in darkness, the carrier steamed through a choppy Atlantic, its lights extinguished and portholes covered, the smaller ships of its battle group scattered, invisible, around it.

Then, disaster: The flattop turned, slamming into a smaller ship that had been cruising behind it.

A Norfolk headline two days later screamed that the carrier ``was backing full at time of impact,'' and a months-long Navy inquiry revealed that the skipper of the smaller ship could have avoided the collision.

Sound familiar?

The ships were the aircraft carrier Wasp and the high-speed minesweeper Hobson, and their collision, 45 years ago this week, underscores how fortunate the Navy was in last October's much-publicized crash between the Norfolk-based carrier Theodore Roosevelt and the guided missile cruiser Leyte Gulf.

For while accounts of the accidents have much in common, they end quite differently. The T.R. and Leyte Gulf sustained some bent metal, but not a single serious injury among the thousands in their crews.

The collision of April 26, 1952, still ranks among the worst peacetime disasters in Navy history.

The ships were among 22 bound for the Mediterranean from a host of East Coast ports, the Hobson sailing from Charleston, S.C., with 14 officers and 223 enlisted sailors aboard.

The former destroyer was lean and light, its hull low-slung, its guns small, the steel tiers and parapets rising from its deck spindly and thin. Its looks were deceiving: Before its conversion to a minesweeper, the Hobson had seen fearsome action in both theaters of World War II.

On the night of April 26 it was serving as the Wasp's ``plane guard,'' trailing the bigger ship with another destroyer-turned-minesweeper, the Rodman, while the carrier's air wing took off and landed on its flight deck.

The Hobson's crew had reason to be uneasy. Earlier that Saturday the minesweeper, struggling in worsening seas, had pulled alongside the fleet oiler Pawcatuck to take on fuel. ``The Hobson scraped the side of the Pawcatuck and veered off,'' recalled Norfolk resident Earl Whitehurst, a sailor aboard the oiler. ``The second time it attempted to fuel it tore down part of our fueling station. The third time we managed to fuel the Hobson, although it was having problems maneuvering to get into position to receive the fuel.''

As the ships separated, a bluejacket aboard the Hobson became entangled in a line from the Pawcatuck. Whitehurst was exchanging yelled greetings with the man when ``all of the sudden he let out a terrible scream.

``It jerked him through the pipe railing feet-first, with his legs apart, and he was drug in the water with the line still around his ankle,'' Whitehurst said. ``We drug him in the water until the Pawcatuck could be stopped and his body retrieved. He had been split open from his pelvis to his breastbone.''

Shortly before midnight, as the task force practiced steaming with its lights out, the Wasp messaged its plane guards that it planned to turn into the wind to recover its planes.

The Hobson was about 3,000 yards off the Wasp's starboard quarter, the Rodman off to port, when the carrier started turning to its right. The destroyer was expected to turn right, as well: The maneuver, the Navy would later determine, had been designed to end with the Hobson 1,000 feet astern and in position to recover any aircraft that ran into trouble while landing.

Instead, a puzzling decision brought calamity: The Hobson's skipper, Lt. Cmdr. William J. Tierney, ordered left standard rudder - a change in direction that put the ships on a collision course.

The Hobson cut across the Wasp's bow. The Wasp's bridge threw the carrier into reverse, but not in time to keep it from plowing into the minesweeper's side. It lifted the smaller ship, rolled it, broke it in two.

The Hobson sank in four minutes.

On the Wasp, sailors tossed lines and life vests overboard, launched eight small boats, turned floodlights to the water. Fuel oil, life jackets, and oranges from the Hobson's food lockers appeared in the waves.

Of the 237 men aboard, only 61 were pulled alive and blackened with oil onto the Wasp and the Rodman.

The exercise that bred the accident probably would not happen today: Modern carriers generally don't conduct flight operations if they're beyond a couple hundred miles from land, the better to safeguard air crews and their multimillion-dollar craft if they encounter trouble aloft.

Ship-to-ship communications have improved vastly in the four decades since the collision. And with computer-aided navigation and sophisticated radar, the warships of today should find it ever more difficult to run into each other.

So goes the theory, anyway.

A Navy inquiry into last fall's wreck of the Theodore Roosevelt and Leyte Gulf blamed errors made by the warships' human handlers, particularly in shiphandling and their command of traditional signal-light communications.

In the aftermath of the Hobson's sinking, the Wasp - crippled, a 75-foot gash rupturing its bow near the waterline - could not travel forward without flooding. It was forced to back up to port, more than 1,000 miles away, at 8 knots.

Months later, a Navy inquiry placed blame for 176 deaths on Tierney. He was unable to defend himself, having gone down with his ship. ILLUSTRATION: U.S. NAVY

[U.S.S. Wasp]

[minesweeper Rodman]

For complete cutlines, see microfilm

Map

1952 collision between Wasp and Hobson

For complete copy, see microfilm KEYWORDS: COLLISION AT SEA ACCIDENTS BOAT U.S. NAVY

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