Akron Aftermath

In the meeting room of the House Naval Affairs Committee stands a screen made from panels of the old U. S. S. Illinois, a table fashioned from the windlass top of the Maine, a glass case containing models of airplanes. Atop the glass case rides an 18-in. model of the U. S. S. Akron. The Akron model was almost buried one day last week by the carelessly strewn hats & overcoats of Committee members who sat in silence around the big horseshoe table. Facing the Committee from a small table at the mouth of the horseshoe stood a stocky, curly-haired young man in an open-necked Navy blouse, with the crossed white anchors of a bos'n's mate on his sleeve. He was Richard Deal, survivor of the crash of the Shenandoah and one of three survivors of the 76 who sailed on the U. S. S. Akron's last voyage. Gesticulating now & then with his bandaged right hand, he read from a sheaf of typewritten papers.

Bos'n's Mate Deal detailed what he saw, heard and did from the moment the Akron cast off from Lakehurst at 7:30 p. m. April 3, bound for the New England coast. He related his last conversation with Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett, the most distinguished victim of the disaster:

"He asked me if I was on watch. I said 'Yes, sir. I have the telephone at this station.' He stopped on the first step leading down the gangway [to the control car] and I said 'Admiral, you must like flying on this ship.' He replied 'I am very fond of it; much more so than the other (meaning HTA,* I assume). ... It is much better than the Shenandoah.' I replied 'Yes, sir' and he then proceeded to the control car."

In the hour before midnight the Akron was being buffeted severely by a thunderstorm. Bos'n's Mate Deal went about his business of taking ballast readings, carrying out ominous orders to shift ballast and fuel forward. At his next bit of testimony the committeemen hitched forward in their chairs:

"It was five minutes past twelve when I laid down on my bunk in the outer keel. I happened to be looking up and noticed the No. 7 cell was swishing quite more than usual. While looking at this cell the ship gave a terrific lurch sideways and longitudinal girders 7 & 8 gave way as well as some of the wires. . . . About five or ten seconds before she crashed the lights went out in the keel. I ... heard a noise aft and then water hit my feet. . . ."

The Committee heard the remainder of Deal's story: how he swam to a floating gas tank to which three other men were clinging; how they struggled to keep the open spout of the tank above water; how all hands shouted in unison to attract the lookout aboard the tanker Phoebus; how Machinist's Mate Rutan weakened and slipped into the sea and Radioman Copeland held on only to die later, while Deal and Metalsmith Moody S. Erwin were rescued. The Committee heard; but their minds dwelt on those snapping girders--an indication that the mighty Akron had buckled in the twisting storm before striking the water. And they thought back to a year ago when two men, E. C. McDonald and W. B. Underwood, onetime construction supervisor and mechanic on the Akron construction job, swore that the ship was deficient; that she contained defective duralumin and hundreds of loose rivets.

Just a year before that, another workman had been charged with sabotage. Few people took that very seriously. But the McDonald-Underwood story caused Navy-heckling Representative James V. McClintic of Oklahoma to demand, and get, an investigation by the Naval Affairs Committee. The Committee heard Goodyear-Zeppelin officials and Navy inspectors call the charges absurd. As a final gesture, the Committee set put to take a ride in the Akron. While the ship was being walked out of the dock before the Congressmen's eyes, a perverse wind dashed the Akron's tail against the ground, disabling her for weeks. Nevertheless, the Committee gave the ship a clean bill of health, but not without minority utterances by Representatives McClintic and Patrick J. Boland who said: "When I see girders that snap off like pretzels. I know something is wrong." Last week on motion of Congressman McClintic, no longer a committeeman. the Akron quiz was taken away from Naval Affairs and given to a joint Senate-&-House committee "that won't whitewash the Navy."

When dovetailed with Bos'n's Mate Deal's story, the report of Lieut.-Commander Herbert Vincent Wiley was illuminating. Commander Wiley read his statement to the Committee in a detached, hesitant manner, as if the story were a new and strange one which he had never heard before. Bringing the now familiar events up to the fateful "00:30 [12:30 a. m.] 4, April," he read: "A very sharp gust struck the ship. It seemed to be much more severe than any I have ever experienced in that it was exerted so suddenly ... a maximum force in two or three seconds. 1 noted immediately that the lower rudder-control rope had carried away." Then the upper control rope went. Then the man at the elevator controls calling out laconically "800 feet . . . 300 feet." ... I sighted the waves through the window and gave the order 'Stand by for a crash.' There was no further conversation in the control car after this order. . . . We hit the water . . . much harder than I expected. The water surged in my [starboard] window and must have carried me out the port window."

Naval Court. Wheeling gloomily between two wide oil slicks off Barnegat Lightship--tombstone of the Akron--patrol boats picked up the bodies of Admiral Moffett, Captain McCord (the Akron's master), Commander Berry (last skipper of the Los Angeles). Lieut.-Commander MacLellan and Col. Alfred Masury, Army reserve officer and vice president of Mack Trucks Inc. Also they found the water-soaked logbook of Lieut. Hammond J. Dugan, which was immediately put on an airplane and flown to Lakehurst where sat a Naval Court of Inquiry into the disaster.

The inquiry room was formed by hanging large curtains of green "ground cloth" at one end of the barren gas-cell shop. White airship fabric draped the dais, where sat Rear Admiral Henry Varnum Butler, commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, president of the court.

Large among questions before the court were: Did weather conditions justify the Akron's takeoff? (Commercial passenger planes were grounded that day.) Were proper efforts made to avoid the storm centre? Should life belts have been carried? (Because of their weight they were not part of regular equipment.)

Commander Wiley, who had himself declared an "interested party'' (technical defendant ) in order to attend private hearings and examine witnesses, was firm in defense of Captain McCord's navigation. The weather forecast, he recalled, was for light wind and fog. When lightning was sighted below Philadelphia Captain McCord changed the course from south to northwest. Said Commander Wiley: "Although my own inclination was to go west, he had as much or more information than I and his judgment was just as good as mine. . . ." Later, however, when the ship was heading east at sea, Captain McCord told him that a helmsman had misunderstood one of his orders. Instead of changing course by fifteen degrees, he had changed by fifty. Sometime thereafter the course was changed to west.

Commander Wiley then testified to a significant change of mind. The amazingly severe "gust" which had wrenched the Akron was not a gust at all, he decided, but the shock of the ship's stern striking the water. (He recalled that the "gust'' had blown no wind through the control car.) No second shock was felt. Hence the important deduction that the Akron had been broken not by wind but by water. However, Metalsmith Erwin still insisted that the ship was still flying tail in air when he saw the girders snap. When the tail hit a few moments later, he said it sounded as if someone had "sat on a penny box of matches."

Public Confidence. Lighter-than-air enthusiasts would have welcomed evidence of sabotage, even of mishandling, to offset public conclusion that an airship is not to be trusted in a storm. For the Akron had been accepted as the answer to the stupendous list of airship casualties which had preceded it.

Meanwhile in Akron, Ohio, a record crowd of 25,000 in a single day flocked to the Goodyear-Zeppelin dock to gape at the Macon, which was to be test-flown this week. It appeared certain that the Navy would accept and operate her. But Goodyear-Zeppelin had small hope of contracts for future ships for a long time to come.

A second subject of inquiry by the Naval Court was the crash of the little Navy blimp J3, which used to nestle under the great ventral fin of the Akron, in the Lakehurst dock, like an egg about to be hatched. The J-3 was sent out into dirty weather with a crew of seven in her open gondola, on the report that Akron survivors had been sighted clinging to bits of wreckage off Barnegat. Thrashed by the gale, she was forced to drop into the pounding surf whence a small amphibian of the New York Police picked two officers, three enlisted men. A Coast Guard amphibian picked up the blimp's commander, Lieut.-Commander David E. Cummins, but he was beyond revival. The body of Machinist's Mate Pasquale Bettio was found later.

* Heavier-than-air.

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