A DEADLY DISASTER ON THE HOME FRONT
Hampton Roads history: A bustling Naval Station Norfolk is devastated when bombs packed with new, unstable explosives accidentally detonate during World War II.
Outside the cavernous canopy of Hangar #30 at Naval Air Station Norfolk, the giant concrete apron was already crowded with planes and sailors late on the morning of Sept. 17, 1943, when a slow-moving shipment of depth bombs from Yorktown came down the street from the naval base.
Dozens of aircraft stood by in long rows — with many being serviced by the perpetually busy swarm of mechanics and technicians.
Marching past in columns were 200 to 300 sailors led by a company of female WAVES — all headed to the chow hall.
Nothing about this bustling scene was unusual during World War II, when the station averaged 700 flights a day and logged take-offs or landings every two minutes, Hampton Roads Naval Museum historian Clay Farrington says.
Even the sight of the bombladen dollies moving through traffic would have been common at the field that trained so many pilots and carried out countless anti-submarine patrols.
Still, something was already wrong when a Marine sentry spotted a shower of sparks and ordered the driver to halt.
And the desperate dash of an assistant fire chief who tried to douse the smoking bomb simply came too late.
“The explosion was instantaneous. People didn’t have time to run. Many of them fell where they stood,” Farrington says, describing the brutal blast that killed 30 people, wounded more than 400 others and left stunned onlookers gaping at a bomb-battered war zone.
“The barrage of shrapnel shredded every aircraft and building in its path — and it shredded the sailors, too.”
Lethal potential
Assembled at Naval Mine Depot Yorktown, the two dozen AN-Mark 47 bombs that inflicted such devastation were the product of a new wartime plant that specialized in arming ordnance with one of the war’s deadliest explosives.
Originally developed by the British for use with torpedoes, “Torpex” — short for “torpedo explosive” — was both lighter in weight and 50 percent more p ower f u l than TNT, says Williamsburg-based historian Joseph K. Freitus, a Navy veteran and author of “Virginia in the War Years, 1938-1945.”
It also was so unstable that it posed deadly problems.
“The older TNT bombs were generally very safe to handle. You could bang on one with a hammer. You could drive by and roll them off onto the ground to be loaded onto planes with no problem. But not Torpex,” Freitus says.
“It was very difficult to handle — and when they introduced it in Europe they had problems right away. Planes just disappeared.”
Shipped down the York River to the Naval Operating Base, the AN-Mark 47s were unloaded at Pier 2 less than two miles away from an ordnance magazine on the far side of East Field.
Later inquiry would reveal that instead of placing just two cradles of bombs on each dolly, the loading crews stacked a third rack on top, Farrington says.
Adding to the potential for an accident was the condition of the metal brackets that held each bomb in place.
“I’ve seen the pictures taken afterward — and you can clearly see the stress these brackets had been subjected to as they were used over and over again to transport ordnance from Yorktown,” Farrington says, citing images that remained classified for decades.
“When you look at them closely, they don’t give you much confidence. All that rough handling led to what looks like metal fatigue`.”`
Exactly what caused one of the 24 bombs to break loose and fall from its cradle was never determined by the Navy’s post-accident investigation.
But hanging down and dragging along the pavement, the metal casing began to heat up, climbing to such high temperatures that — by the time the threat was discovered — calamity could not be stopped.
“Gurney Edwards is the real hero of this story,” Farrington says, describing the assistant fire chief who rushed over from the newly finished fire station just a few dozen yards away.
“He does not hesitate. He runs right up to this trash-can-sized depth bomb with a fire extinguisher and tries to cool it down.
“But he’s too late.”
Combat zone
Petty Officer 3rd Class Kenneth R. Reightier Sr. was among the sailors marching to noon chow as the disaster unfolded.
“We were looking down the street and I saw a curl of smoke come up from behind the hangar,” he recalled 50 years later in The Virginian-Pilot.
“The next thing I knew was it went off. I mean, `Boom!’ This big column of fire, 50 yards across and 500 to 600 feet high at least.
“Things were floating around, looked like paper. But it was the corrugated sheet metal off the Quonset huts we had used for classrooms.”
So powerful was the explosive force of the 24 bombs — which contained an estimated total of 6,120 pounds of Torpex — that it gouged a crater 5 feet deep and 20 feet long through the thick concrete pavement, according to a Fifth Naval District report.
The sound raised eyebrows as far as 20 miles away in Suffolk and broke windows eight miles away in downtown Norfolk.
At the air station headquarters more than 350 yards away, “practically every pane of glass was shattered” from the massive shock wave, the Navy account reported.
But it was the destruction that spread out in waves from the front of Hanger #30 that transformed the air station into a virtual combat zone.
Nearly 20 buildings had been clawed apart, with the giant hanger, numerous barracks, the chow hall and several other structures wrecked completely.
Nearly three dozen planes were shredded, with five written off as total losses and 15 requiring major overhauls.
The loss of life was still more terrible, with 24 dying outright, three dying within a few days and three more eventually perishing from wounds that an Oct. 4, 1943, Navy report described as “multiple” and “extreme.”
Then there was the enormous toll of more than 400 sailors injured, with wounds ranging from lost and broken limbs to life-threatening lacerations and bleeding, and blasted eardrums.
“When those bombs went off, it was devastating. It looked just as if the Luftwaffe had flown over the station on a bombing run,” Farrington says.
“It was one of the Navy’s worst noncombat disasters during World War II — and certainly the worst here.”
Mass casualties
So swift was the Navy’s response that within minutes Adm. H. Fairfax Leary — commander of the naval base and the Fifth Naval District — was looking on as hundreds of sailors and firefighters battled to put out fires and rescue the wounded.
Among the many heroes who helped stem still greater losses was air station CO Capt. J. M. Shoemaker, who personally led a retreating fire control team back into a fiery hangar and put out a blaze threatening to ignite a magazine filled with machine-gun ammunition, the Daily Press reported.
Soon the surrounding streets were choked with ambulances and trucks that were commandeered to transport the casualties, but even that initial swarm was not enough to deal with the immense number of dead, dying and injured.
Dozens of ambulances dispatched from Norfolk and Portsmouth, where police cordoned off the main routes to the ferry landings in order to clear the way for the emergency traffic to Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the Daily Press reported.
Wailing sirens sounded in Newport News, too, as Army ambulances from the Port of Embarkation rushed to the ferry dock and crossed Hampton Roads to join the rescue effort.
What resulted were streets so jammed that the Navy tried to bypass the congestion with small boats moving the casualties by water.
“The roads here were barely able to handle ordinary, day-today traffic,” Farrington says.
“And they certainly weren’t ready to deal with a mass casualty situation.”
Less than 24 hours after the 11:01 a.m. blast, the Navy established a board of inquiry and “began rounding up eye-witnesses,” the Daily Press reported.
Three months later, the paper learned that two officers had been charged and faced courts-martial.
But “the board’s findings have remained a Navy department secret,” it noted.
By that time the service had suffered another smaller but still fatal Torpex explosion at Yorktown that killed six people.
Debris from that disaster rained down for miles around, and windows shattered as far away as Gloucester Courthouse.
“It’s amazing how long they kept it quiet,” Freitus says, describing the Navy’s secrecy following the catastrophe in Norfolk.
“But it had everything to do with the switch to Torpex and how it was being handled.
“It was dangerous stuff.”