Freeman, Gregory A.

Hickey, James E.

English

U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons

Naval War College ReviewVolume 55Number 4 Autumn Article 202002Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USSForrestal and the Heroes Who Fought ItJames E. HickeyGregory A. FreemanFollow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-reviewThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in Naval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contactrepository.inquiries@usnwc.edu.Recommended CitationHickey, James E. and Freeman, Gregory A. (2002) "Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes WhoFought It," Naval War College Review: Vol. 55 : No. 4 , Article 20.Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol55/iss4/20Freeman, Gregory A. Sailors to the End: The DeadlyFire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes WhoFought It. New York: William Morrow, 2002.293pp. $25.95Since its release in 1973, the training filmTrial by Fire has been seen by hundredsof thousands of officers and sailors dur-ing mandatory shipboard firefightingtraining—training improved in no smallpart by the lessons learned from theForrestal tragedy. Undoubtedly many(this reviewer among them) have won-dered what it must have been like tohave been on the Forrestal that hot Julyday in 1967 when the crew fought tosave their ship. Through interviews withsurvivors, relatives of victims, and themeticulous mining of official U.S. Navyfiles, Gregory Freeman, former Associ-ated Press reporter turned freelancejournalist, seeks to capture the humanemotions of the day and explore thequestion of why this tragedy happened.Weaving a thoroughly engaging, oftenriveting tale as seen through the eyes ofselected Forrestal sailors, Freeman fullymeets his remit while describing the rolethat chance played that day in selectingwho would live and who would die. Heconcludes, justly, that this was a tragedythat need not have happened, and in doingso he focuses on a causal factor—WorldWar II–era thousand-pound bombs—that has been less fully recognized untilnow.The book is divided into three majorsections. The first six chapters introducethe Forrestal crewmen who play key rolesin Freeman’s story. For the civilianreader, this section will serve as a primerto life in the U.S. Navy in general, and toduty onboard an aircraft carrier specifi-cally.  It is also in this section that thefew flaws in the book are found. Perhapsinvisible to the layman, errors—such ascalling a commander a “high-rankingenlisted man” or stating that “landingwithout killing anybody or causing dam-age usually got you an OK grade” (gen-erations of aviators wish it were so)—will jump out at the informed reader.While small, the errors do distract froman otherwise meticulously researchedbook.The next eight chapters form the heart ofthe book. Here Freeman accelerates thepace, using literary snapshots takenthrough the eyes of the crew members tobuild an appreciation of the tension andfear felt on board the carrier that day. At1051 on 29 July 1967, a Zuni air-to-ground rocket fired from an F-4 Phan-tom near the aft end of the flight deck,knocking off a fuel tank hung beneath anA-4 Skyhawk among Air Wing 17 air-craft preparing for a major strike in Viet-nam. While certainly unexpected, theinitial response to the Zuni launch andthe resultant fire was by the book—a sit-uation that changed dramatically withthe explosion (just ninety-four secondslater) of the first thousand-pound bomb.In stark and realistic terms Freeman de-scribes the efforts over the next twentyhours of Captain John Beling and hiswell-meaning but inexperienced crew toensure that their ship would survive.These 150 pages are exceptionally engag-ing and so successful in capturing thestress and emotion of the crisis that theygrab readers and leave them emotionallyexhausted. In particular, the descriptionof the death of sailor James Blaskis in aremote and inaccessible part of the shipcannot leave a reader unmoved. Onehundred thirty-three other Forrestalcrew members and air wing personnelwere killed; many died heroically.B O O K R E V I E W S 1 2 31Hickey and Freeman: Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and thePublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2002The final three-chapter section dealswith the aftermath. The cause of the firemust be investigated, answers found,survivors treated, the dead buried, andthe ship re-find its soul. Freeman de-scribes well the aftermath of the tragedyand the difficulty finding the truth whensome of the men had become primarilyconcerned with themselves.In the end the official causes were deter-mined. Independently, two shipboardgroups had each bypassed one of twoin-place safety features, confident thatthe other would suffice. Additionally,obsolete and less fire-resistant bombshad been transferred to Forrestal andloaded on the attack aircraft that morn-ing—a point not fully explored previ-ously. While no specific personal blamewas assigned, without the negative syn-ergy created by the convergence of thesethree decisions this would most likelyhave been just another unremarkableand short-lived flight-deck fire.JAMES E. HICKEYCommander, U.S. NavyNaval War CollegeWeir, Gary E. An Ocean in Common: AmericanNaval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environ-ment. College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press,2001. 403pp. $44.95Gary Weir has scored another hit. Usingthe approach he fashioned in Forged inWar: The Naval-Industrial Complex andAmerican Submarine Construction,1940–1961, the head of the Contempo-rary Branch of the Naval Historical Cen-ter has turned his keen analytical mindand sharp sense of political realism tothe linked topics of the U.S. Navy andthe practical science of oceanography.The book is divided into three chrono-logical segments: from World War I to1940, the Second World War, and theCold War up to the administration ofPresident John F. Kennedy. In each ofthese eras the submarine exerted a trans-forming impact on naval strategy andoperations. The revolution began in1914, when the U-boat explosively dem-onstrated the magnitude of its threat tothe security of transatlantic shipping andto the political survival of Great Britain.The German undersea offensive and theresultant Anglo-American antisubma-rine warfare (ASW) forcibly introducedan unwelcome third dimension intocombat at sea, the comprehension ofwhich exceeded the professional andtechnological competence of even thebest-educated American naval officers.The massive, opaque, and largely un-charted subsurface domain could bemastered as a theater for warfare only ifthe Navy enlisted the expertise of ocean-ographers, who themselves representedlittle more than a loosely organizedmultidisciplinary specialty operating onthe fringe of institutional academic re-spectability. If the Navy needed their ex-pertise in order to fight underwater, theoceanographers needed the Navy’s fund-ing in order to prosper in academe.Weir begins his analysis of the subma-rine as the deus ex machina of twentiethcentury, oceanographically determinedmaritime warfare with a New Yorkmeeting on antisubmarine warfarechaired by the inventor Thomas AlvaEdison in March 1917. The specialists atthe gathering, Weir writes, “concludedthat underwater sound and echo rangingoffered the most promising avenue ofexploration for ASW scientists in the wareffort. Physics and physical oceanogra-phy thus immediately became vital to1 2 4 N A V A L W A R C O L L E G E R E V I E W2Naval War College Review, Vol. 55 [2002], No. 4, Art. 20https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol55/iss4/20

Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes Who Fought It

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Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes Who Fought It

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