The grounding of the Missouri is juicy with...hubris, ineptitude, bad luck, and bad timing.
On the morning of January 17, 1950, the USS Missouri left Norfolk for only the second time under her new captain, CAPT William Brown, and on her way out, was to conduct an exercise where she would steam past some experimental acoustic devices that would record her screws which they were trying to use to identify ships.
Captain Brown ordered the speed increased to 15 knots, which for this area of water was considered quite fast for a ship of that size, and when one of the officers made his opinion known, the Captain ignored him and overrode him.
Down in the chart room, the officers in charge of navigation were puzzled both by the speed and the trajectory of the ship which was (to them) taking them into shoal water. One of the navigation officers looked out the port hole and saw a navigation buoy and knew they were going on the wrong side of the buoy, basically cutting the corner ACROSS the shoals.
Multiple people with more experience in the area realized what was going on and tried to tell Captain Brown, who repeatedly ignored them or that they had no idea where they were.
When the ship hit the mud in the shoals, the angle of the bottom was so shallow, and the mud so slick that nobody even felt the ship going aground. Something amiss was noted when men on the stern saw muddy water being churned up by the screws, and almost simultaneously, the salt water intakes for cooling water for the engines clogged and temperatures began to rise. It all happened so softly and gradually that the ship had gone aground 2500 feet before finally stopping that most of the crew did not even realize they had run aground!
It was that slick mud that served as a "lubricant", and raised the entire ship several feet out of the water, after which it began to settle back, and the sticky mud encased the entire hull, grasping it tightly.
Worse (if possible) she had run aground at an unusually high tide, which as anyone knows, is very bad. To make things even worse, she was fully loaded with both fuel and ammunition which brought her displacement up to 57,000 tons.
She wasn't aground, she was...ashore, by more than two ship lengths worth! Just as bad from a publicity perspective, she was aground in full view of a major heavily travelled roadway. There she would stay for two weeks.
They brought Admiral Homer Wallin in who had been instrumental in the salvage efforts at Pearl Harbor, and his straightforward plan involved the obvious steps:
- Remove as much weight as possible from the battleship
- Lift the ship
- Remove as much sand as possible from around the battleship
- Use the combined power of the area's tugboats to pull the battleship
- Dredge the channel to provide deep water for Missouri to reenter the shipping lane
But after offloading all her fuel, ammunition, food, water, anchors, and even her anchor chains, they were unsuccessful.
They added even more pontoons, and had divers all along both sides of the hull with pressure water hoses trying to dislodge mud adhering to the hull like cement, as tugboats above on port and starboard sides alternately applied pressure to rock the hull from side to side, as tugs fore and aft pushed and pulled at the same time.
I cannot imagine how dangerous that must have been for those divers.
Politically, it became intolerable for the Navy.
An Army helicopter darted in (under full view of the Press and civilians on the side of the highway, watching) and lowered a line with a sign saying something like "Need a hook?" and even the Soviet Union piled on from afar.
Heads rolled. As they should have.
