Navy recalls bravery at WWII's West Loch Disaster

[David]

AP


HONOLULU – It is a forgotten tale from an almost forgotten saga.

Nearly 2 1/2 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was island hopping through the South Pacific, slowly whittling away at Japan's war-fighting ability.

In an area of the vast naval base known as West Loch, almost three dozen large landing ships brimming with fuel, ammunition and other equipment sat lashed together in preparation for a brutal invasion code-named "Operation Forager."

On May 21, 1944, an explosion rocked one of the vessels. Within minutes, more explosions ripped open several other ships as flames engulfed men and machinery. Before the day ended, 163 were dead and 396 lay wounded. Nine of the landing ships were destroyed and several others damaged.

When the Navy holds a commemoration Thursday of the 65th anniversary of what became known as the "West Loch Disaster," the horror of the day and the bravery it inspired will be remembered — particularly the courage of the 29th Chemical Decontamination Company.

Interviews and a review of dozens of decades-old military documents tell the widely unknown story of the 29th, a nearly all-black Army unit that was handling ammunition on the ship where the first explosions broke out.

The unit arrived at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, in June 1942. Its mission was to decontaminate men and equipment after an enemy chemical attack, but its soldiers also were a handy source of manual labor, such as when brush fires erupted or when dengue fever required insecticide spraying.

So it probably came as no surprise when the orders came down on May 21, 1944, for the unit to unload ammunition from a small Navy assault vessel, known as a Landing Craft, Tank, or LCT, even if they weren't trained for such work.

A test a week earlier showed that mortars could not accurately be fired from other FCTS. So the idea of using LCTs as mortar platforms was scrapped, and the mortar ammo was ordered removed from those vessels.

One of those was LCT 963. It was tied to the top of Landing Ship Tank 353, one of the nearly three dozen LSTs that were to sail to the Marianas and one of 21 that were resting side-by-side in three tight "nests" across a narrow channel from the West Loch Naval Ammunition Depot.

Later testimony before a secret Navy board of inquiry described how every available space on every LSTs was crammed with 50-gallon fuel drums, grenades and ammo. Welders had worked on some of the ships that morning, and while smoking was barred, enforcement was lax, survivors testified.

It was in this environment that some 100 enlisted men and one officer from the 29th backed a succession of heavy trucks into LST 353, raised them on an elevator and slid boxes of mortar ammo down a chute from LCT 963 into the truckbeds.

That afternoon, Tech 5 James Caldwell of the 29th stooped down to pick up a box of mortar ammo when he saw a "bright yellow flame" and heard "a deafening noise" coming from the elevator, according to his testimony before the Navy inquiry panel.

Pvt. James R. Cleveland was inside the LCT when the initial explosion hit.

"I went up in the air, and some rails, metal objects, went up in the air with me," he said. After falling to the deck, "I could see fire all around, just nothing but fire all around me. I thought I was dead."

Tech 5 Clarence Henry Morgan witnessed a "big ball of fire" rise from LST 353 from a vantage point on a small vessel nearby. Minutes later, a larger explosion occurred. "That was when it just seemed like the whole ship blew apart," he recalled.

As LST 353's fuel and ammo exploded, red-hot shrapnel and flames hurtled toward neighboring LSTs, setting off new fires. Some sailors fought the flames; others tried to get their LSTs away from the fire-engulfed vessels. Some escaping ships and arriving rescue vessels ran over men who had jumped into the water.

The explosions threw body parts and chunks of wood and metal hundreds of feet. A few of the LSTs, including 353, start drifting uncontrollably. One would have rammed an ammo ship moored at the ammunition depot dock if another vessel had not managed to steer it away.

The LST 353 ended up across the channel from the ammunition depot dock. Its rusty bow is still there, poking out of the water in an area off-limits to the public but still a symbol of that day's tragedy.

The Navy determined that a mortar round exploded on LST 353, but could not pinpoint why. Careless smoking or a welder's wayward spark could have ignited gasoline fumes, the panel noted.

No one will ever know for sure because the men closest to the initial explosion perished.

In any case, the inquiry concluded, the close berthing of so many ships crammed with so much fuel and ammunition was "extremely hazardous. ... A disaster of much greater magnitude was narrowly averted."

Still, Operation Forager went ahead, pretty much as planned, and the Marianas were captured.

More than a third of the total number of servicemen who perished that day belonged to the 29th.

Some 44 sets of unidentified remains from the disaster lie in 36 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Some of them undoubtedly were from the men of the 29th.

The grave markers once read simply "Unknown," but that was changed a few years ago at the behest of Congress to "Unknown, West Loch Disaster, May 21, 1944."