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Show seeks answers to sub disaster
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Northjersey.com
By MIKE KERWICK
STAFF WRITER
Naval historians are fond of euphemism, employing phrases both poetic ("on eternal patrol") and gentle ("lost at sea") to sanitize disasters. They are convenient paint jobs that cloak the true horror of a ship's sudden, inexplicable disappearance.
Those phrases don't have enough gloss to cover up Capt. John McNish's memories. He was stationed in West Milton, N.Y., when word arrived that the USS Thresher had gone down 220 miles off the Massachusetts coast. For his former submarine, the nuclear vessel he helped ready for sea, a training exercise had turned catastrophic.
"At first there was very little information, other than the ship was in trouble," McNish said. "And as more and more was revealed, it was clear the ship was lost."
McNish rushed to Portsmouth, N.H., where he would help identify fragments of the sub that made their way to the surface. By the time he arrived, the rescue operation was all but over. The final death toll was 129 officers, enlisted men, observers and civilians. It is considered one of the worst disasters in U.S. military history.
At 9 p.m. Monday, 44 years after those chilling moments occurred, PBS will devote an episode of "History Detectives" to the disaster. Host Gwen Wright visited both the New Jersey Naval Museum in Hackensack and the Fort Lee Museum earlier this year. Her goal was to shed some light on the incident, to find the reasons why this nuclear sub never made it home.
"This was not by any means an effort to be accusatory or an effort to not be thoughtful about the families of the men who went down with the ship," Wright said. "But it's very hard for any group to talk about things that are still fairly recent, especially if there was a problem."
The trigger for this story was a collection of drawings a man happened upon in Chicopee, Mass., part of his great-uncle's estate. These were not ordinary drawings, but blueprints of a nuclear sub. Using those documents as a jumping-off point, Wright went looking for answers. There were some people who needed reassurance before they agreed to answer her questions.
"I had never seen the program before," McNish said. "I didn't know what sort of a flavor there was to it. I was immediately hostile about the idea that someone's going to try to pin this one on somebody or make an accusation about somebody on the ship."
Wright talked to McNish about his memories of the sub. She talked to a woman who lost her father when the ship went down. And she extended invitations to the Navy, but found the United States government reluctant to discuss what went wrong. So Wright reached out to retired Navy officials and other experts who had a working knowledge of the submarine.
"My main goal with the show is to encourage Americans to ask questions to think about things that are unclear," Wright said. "Sometimes things are made unclear. How do we look at evidence? How do I share things I do as a historian?"
And how does she provide those answers while maintaining some semblance of sensitivity? There are hundreds of living Americans with ties to that sub who will watch the program on Monday. Bob Miller, one of the Thresher's original crew members, left the sub for a new assignment only 16 days before the disaster.
"We had just gotten out of class," Miller said. "There were four of us staying in some Army reserve base housing out by Pleasanton, Calif., 50 miles from Treasure Island. I was driving that day. I heard it on the radio. I almost lost control of the vehicle.
"Someone else drove the rest of the way."
In the Bronx, the news clocked a 6-year-old girl who lost her brother, Edward Christiansen, on the sub.
"All I remember is we were watching the news and my mother is screaming," said Claudia Richie. "I kind of looked over at her. They were showing the news, and then after that it was like reporter city coming to the house interviewing my mom, Western Union telegrams arriving from all over. I still have some of them in a box of keepsakes."
Miller said he knew 87 of the 129 men on the sub. He watched movies with them. He played cards with them.
"We had one poker game on the Thresher that went on for 37 days without stopping," he said. "Someone would have to go on watch. Someone coming off watch would pick up his seat at the table. There were seven guys in the game at all times for 37 days. A lot of money changed hands. You could make a lot of money and go broke all in the same game."
Miller is convinced the "shock trials" the Navy conducted off the coast of Florida caused the problem. McNish suspects a pipe in the engine room brought down the Thresher.
"It was hard on me for a long time," Miller said. "I kept thinking, if I had been there, maybe I could have done something that would have saved her. But that's totally false. Those guys that were there were really, really well-qualified people. They knew that boat really, really well. If they couldn't do it, I wasn't going to be able to do it."
Wright will comb history for answers Monday night, exploring a submarine whose men are on eternal patrol, a submarine lost at sea.
http://kwsu.org/KWSU_NWPR/AZ_Programs/P ... nw&n=11568
To be shown on PBS
Monday, September 10, 2007
9:00 PM
Repeats
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
2:30 AM and 5:00 AM
Uss Thresher/Pete Gray Cartoon/Manhattan Project Letter
USS Thresher - A contributor in Chicopee, Massachusetts, has a stack of technical drawings and engineering documents he found in his late great-uncle's basement some years ago. A few of the documents bear the numbers and letters SSN-593, an appellation that belonged to the nuclear submarine USS Thresher, an attack class vessel that had been the pride of the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. On April 10, 1963, the Thresher was undergoing deep-sea trials when, along with its nuclear reactor, the vessel and all hands sank 220 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. HISTORY DETECTIVES host Gwen Wright travels to New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts to explore one of the most traumatic events in U.S. Naval history and to determine just how the contributor's great-uncle could've come into possession of documents linked to one of the most secret weapons in the U.S. Cold War arsenal.Pete Gray Cartoon - A comic book collector in Brooklyn, New York, owns several storyboards from a cartoon comic strip dating to the immediate post-World War II period. The strip relates the story of Pete Gray, the first one-armed major league baseball player, who later became an icon for disabled WWII veterans. The contributor is curious to learn the identity of the mystery cartoonist. Because many artists from the golden age of cartoons - the late 1930s through the 50s - often moonlighted in advertising or more "respectable" trades, their identities were often undisclosed. HISTORY DETECTIVES host Elyse Luray heads to Baltimore's Camden Yards and to comics hot spots in New York City to examine how cartoon artists helped reframe popular culture in the mid-20th century.Manhattan Project Letter - A contributor in New York City has a scrapbook of typed and handwritten documents connected with the top-secret Manhattan Project, which developed the United States' first nuclear bombs during World War II. The most intriguing item is a letter dated just after the war. It's a plea for reduced secrecy regarding nuclear affairs in the scientific community on
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Northjersey.com
By MIKE KERWICK
STAFF WRITER
Naval historians are fond of euphemism, employing phrases both poetic ("on eternal patrol") and gentle ("lost at sea") to sanitize disasters. They are convenient paint jobs that cloak the true horror of a ship's sudden, inexplicable disappearance.
Those phrases don't have enough gloss to cover up Capt. John McNish's memories. He was stationed in West Milton, N.Y., when word arrived that the USS Thresher had gone down 220 miles off the Massachusetts coast. For his former submarine, the nuclear vessel he helped ready for sea, a training exercise had turned catastrophic.
"At first there was very little information, other than the ship was in trouble," McNish said. "And as more and more was revealed, it was clear the ship was lost."
McNish rushed to Portsmouth, N.H., where he would help identify fragments of the sub that made their way to the surface. By the time he arrived, the rescue operation was all but over. The final death toll was 129 officers, enlisted men, observers and civilians. It is considered one of the worst disasters in U.S. military history.
At 9 p.m. Monday, 44 years after those chilling moments occurred, PBS will devote an episode of "History Detectives" to the disaster. Host Gwen Wright visited both the New Jersey Naval Museum in Hackensack and the Fort Lee Museum earlier this year. Her goal was to shed some light on the incident, to find the reasons why this nuclear sub never made it home.
"This was not by any means an effort to be accusatory or an effort to not be thoughtful about the families of the men who went down with the ship," Wright said. "But it's very hard for any group to talk about things that are still fairly recent, especially if there was a problem."
The trigger for this story was a collection of drawings a man happened upon in Chicopee, Mass., part of his great-uncle's estate. These were not ordinary drawings, but blueprints of a nuclear sub. Using those documents as a jumping-off point, Wright went looking for answers. There were some people who needed reassurance before they agreed to answer her questions.
"I had never seen the program before," McNish said. "I didn't know what sort of a flavor there was to it. I was immediately hostile about the idea that someone's going to try to pin this one on somebody or make an accusation about somebody on the ship."
Wright talked to McNish about his memories of the sub. She talked to a woman who lost her father when the ship went down. And she extended invitations to the Navy, but found the United States government reluctant to discuss what went wrong. So Wright reached out to retired Navy officials and other experts who had a working knowledge of the submarine.
"My main goal with the show is to encourage Americans to ask questions to think about things that are unclear," Wright said. "Sometimes things are made unclear. How do we look at evidence? How do I share things I do as a historian?"
And how does she provide those answers while maintaining some semblance of sensitivity? There are hundreds of living Americans with ties to that sub who will watch the program on Monday. Bob Miller, one of the Thresher's original crew members, left the sub for a new assignment only 16 days before the disaster.
"We had just gotten out of class," Miller said. "There were four of us staying in some Army reserve base housing out by Pleasanton, Calif., 50 miles from Treasure Island. I was driving that day. I heard it on the radio. I almost lost control of the vehicle.
"Someone else drove the rest of the way."
In the Bronx, the news clocked a 6-year-old girl who lost her brother, Edward Christiansen, on the sub.
"All I remember is we were watching the news and my mother is screaming," said Claudia Richie. "I kind of looked over at her. They were showing the news, and then after that it was like reporter city coming to the house interviewing my mom, Western Union telegrams arriving from all over. I still have some of them in a box of keepsakes."
Miller said he knew 87 of the 129 men on the sub. He watched movies with them. He played cards with them.
"We had one poker game on the Thresher that went on for 37 days without stopping," he said. "Someone would have to go on watch. Someone coming off watch would pick up his seat at the table. There were seven guys in the game at all times for 37 days. A lot of money changed hands. You could make a lot of money and go broke all in the same game."
Miller is convinced the "shock trials" the Navy conducted off the coast of Florida caused the problem. McNish suspects a pipe in the engine room brought down the Thresher.
"It was hard on me for a long time," Miller said. "I kept thinking, if I had been there, maybe I could have done something that would have saved her. But that's totally false. Those guys that were there were really, really well-qualified people. They knew that boat really, really well. If they couldn't do it, I wasn't going to be able to do it."
Wright will comb history for answers Monday night, exploring a submarine whose men are on eternal patrol, a submarine lost at sea.
http://kwsu.org/KWSU_NWPR/AZ_Programs/P ... nw&n=11568
To be shown on PBS
Monday, September 10, 2007
9:00 PM
Repeats
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
2:30 AM and 5:00 AM
Uss Thresher/Pete Gray Cartoon/Manhattan Project Letter
USS Thresher - A contributor in Chicopee, Massachusetts, has a stack of technical drawings and engineering documents he found in his late great-uncle's basement some years ago. A few of the documents bear the numbers and letters SSN-593, an appellation that belonged to the nuclear submarine USS Thresher, an attack class vessel that had been the pride of the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. On April 10, 1963, the Thresher was undergoing deep-sea trials when, along with its nuclear reactor, the vessel and all hands sank 220 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. HISTORY DETECTIVES host Gwen Wright travels to New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts to explore one of the most traumatic events in U.S. Naval history and to determine just how the contributor's great-uncle could've come into possession of documents linked to one of the most secret weapons in the U.S. Cold War arsenal.Pete Gray Cartoon - A comic book collector in Brooklyn, New York, owns several storyboards from a cartoon comic strip dating to the immediate post-World War II period. The strip relates the story of Pete Gray, the first one-armed major league baseball player, who later became an icon for disabled WWII veterans. The contributor is curious to learn the identity of the mystery cartoonist. Because many artists from the golden age of cartoons - the late 1930s through the 50s - often moonlighted in advertising or more "respectable" trades, their identities were often undisclosed. HISTORY DETECTIVES host Elyse Luray heads to Baltimore's Camden Yards and to comics hot spots in New York City to examine how cartoon artists helped reframe popular culture in the mid-20th century.Manhattan Project Letter - A contributor in New York City has a scrapbook of typed and handwritten documents connected with the top-secret Manhattan Project, which developed the United States' first nuclear bombs during World War II. The most intriguing item is a letter dated just after the war. It's a plea for reduced secrecy regarding nuclear affairs in the scientific community on
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