This was Shelton’s nightmare. The fires, the explosions, the flashes of light. The men torn down by explosions and screaming in pain. Shelton was watching his nightmare of the past two nights unfold.
Throughout the Forrestal, thousands of men were experiencing their own personal tragedies and crises amid the bigger chaos surrounding them. In different parts of the ship, men found themselves trapped, wounded, and uncertain as to what they should do to help themselves and their ship. Many responded with the kind of fortitude that leads others to call them heroes, none more so than the three men trapped in port aft steering. One of those men was James Blaskis, Robert Shelton’s buddy who had traded work shifts so he could work in port aft steering instead of on the bridge.
When general quarters sounded, Shelton had been relieved from his station on the bridge. He was supposed to go to his station in the secondary conn, but he quickly realized that he couldn’t get there with the ship sealed for general quarters—not to mention the fires. With no assignment, he stayed in the bridge area for a while, watching in disbelief as the fires raged and the bombs exploded on the flight deck below. As he looked back toward the rear of the ship and realized how bad the explosions had been, he had a stomach-churning realization.
Oh my God. Blaskis.
Shelton realized that Blaskis could be trapped in the steering compartment. He raced down from the bridge area and headed toward that area. He didn’t get far before he reached the infernos of the berthing areas below the flight deck. The smoke and flames were too bad, the fires still at their worst, and there was no hope that Shelton could get to his friend. He reluctantly made his way back to the bridge, thinking maybe he should see if they needed his assistance there.
Maybe Blaskis is okay. The steering compartment is pretty far down. Maybe he’ll be fine.
The port aft steering compartment was a small room in the very rear of the ship, on the left side, several decks down from the flight deck and close to the port rudder that steers the ship. The rudder, of course, was a basic but vitally important part of the ship’s steering control; turn the rudder and you turn the ship. Each side of the rear of the ship had a steering-control compartment that was about eight feet by eight feet and spanned two deck levels. A massive rudder shaft ran right down the middle of the compartment, disappearing through the floor and eventually going through the hull of the ship and connecting to the rudder itself. There were mechanisms attached to the rudder shaft that turned it in reaction to commands from the bridge.
In normal operations, the rudder was controlled electronically from the bridge without any manual assistance in the steering-control room. But as a precaution, each steering-control room always was manned by two electricians and a machinist who were ready to take over steering control if the bridge was not able to do so. They could receive orders from the bridge and then manually make the adjustments to control the rudder in the steering-control room, bypassing most or all of the electronics that normally made the rudder move.
When the fire broke out, Blaskis and the other two men in port steering control were directly underneath it. The big bomb blasts were powerful enough to penetrate layer after layer of steel down to steering control, blasting holes in the compartment and mangling the only access routes in and out of the compartment. The blasts went all the way through the steering compartment and opened the hull of the ship, the very bottom, and seawater was flooding the compartment below the men. Within minutes, Blaskis, Ronald Ogring, and Kenneth Fasth were trapped at their station. By the time general quarters sounded, there was no way for them to leave and no way for anyone else to get in. And within the first few minutes, before the three men even knew what was going on, they were all seriously wounded.
The explosions tore through all the spaces above the port steering compartment, inflicting grave injuries on all three men. They were missing limbs and suffering a number of other injuries, but they still remained conscious and did their best to protect themselves from the jet fuel that rained down into their compartment from above. With little room in which to hide, they tried to avoid the pyrotechnics—flares and similar devices—that fell down from the storage compartments ripped open above them.
Walls of burning jet fuel were pouring right down over them, by them, above them, and around them. The jet fuel was coming down like a waterfall on fire.
Blaskis managed to call damage control on the phone system and report that they were badly injured and trapped. In the identical steering compartment on the starboard side of the ship, the three men working there listened as their counterparts in port steering explained their situation.
“Central Control! Central Control! This is port steering…” Blaskis called. The twenty-one-year-old was in charge of the other two young men.
Soon, a phone talker in Central Control responded and asked for a damage report.
“We got hit bad! The machinist’s mate was hit in the hatch, and the electrician’s mate’s arm is severed. It’s bleeding badly! We need medical help bad!”
The phone talker in Central Control assured Blaskis that a repair team was on the way, but reports from that area had already made it clear that the port steering area was a mess. The officers in Central Control studied the situation for any solution, but the repair parties in that area kept saying there was no way they could get to Blaskis’s steering compartment. The fire was too intense, and the blast damage was too severe.
“Central Control!” Blaskis called again after a few minutes. “The smoke is getting really thick in here! We can’t breathe! Where is the repair party, Control?”
The phone talkers in damage control kept Blaskis on the line, assuring him that help would reach the men soon, urging him to hang on. The dire situation had captured the attention of everyone in the busy room, and several enlisted men took turns on the phone to offer words of encouragement to a sailor they had never met. Just hang in there, they urged, we’ll get to you. Every single person who talked to Blaskis that day was left with one impression—the image of a twenty-one-year-old sailor barely hanging on through his own injuries, but concerned only with getting help for his buddies, the men for whom he was responsible. He never mentioned his own injuries to those in damage control, even though they were quite severe.
As the situation in port aft was becoming clear to those in damage control and on the bridge, Shelton was making his way back topside. When Shelton returned to the bridge, everyone noticed when he walked in. He looked like he’d been through hell, his white uniform covered in black soot and grease, his hair matted, and his face filthy from trying to make it to Blaskis.
“Shelton! How did you get out of port steering?” someone called to him. In the confusion, no one seemed to remember that Shelton had been on the bridge when the fire started. When Rowland had notified the captain that the men were trapped and that nothing could be done, the crew on the bridge had looked at the duty roster to see who was trapped in the steering compartment. It said Shelton.
“I wasn’t there,” Shelton replied, hesitating. “I didn’t go there this morning. Why?”
Shelton understood the answer before they explained. Just as he had feared, his buddy was trapped.
He’s working my shift. That should have been me.
Shelton volunteered to help out on the bridge, and before long a call came in from damage control with an update on the situation. Someone on the bridge asked Shelton if he wanted to talk to Blaskis. His heart raced as he took the phone.
“How you doing there, buddy?” he asked. There was no immediate answer. “Just hang on, okay? We’re going to get you out of there.”
Everyone on the bridge watched, knowing that Shelton was talking to a good friend he might never see again. The men maintained a respectful quiet as much as they could, averting their gaze when Shelton looked up.
There was little communication from Blaskis, and Shelton could tell that his friend was in bad shape. He was near tears when he hung up the phone.
Blaskis stayed on the phone with damage control for almost half an hour, occasionally dropping the phone to administer aid to one of the other men. He applied tourniquets to both of Fasth’s arms, but the bleeding continued. The enlisted men in damage control continued to encourage Blaskis, but then it became clear that there was no way to rescue the men. The repair parties had tried over and over, but the fire and continuing explosions in that area of the ship were just too great. Someone had to tell the men in port steering the truth, so one of the damage-control crew asked Merv Rowland if he wanted to speak to the men.
He did. The old man got on the line with Blaskis, and his paternal instinct kicked in hard. Rowland always looked at the young crew serving under him as surrogate sons, and they looked up to him as a gruff but reassuring authority figure. Rowland’s gravelly voice was uneven as he tried to tell Blaskis that he couldn’t help the men.
“Son, I understand you’ve got a bad situation there.”
“Yes sir, it’s real bad down here,” Blaskis said, coughing through the smoke. “We need some help right away, sir.”
“I understand, but the fire and the damage are too bad right now,” Rowland said, trying hard to encourage the young man without lying to him. “We keep trying, but it doesn’t look like our repair parties are going to make it to you. I’m afraid you’re going to be on your own, son. You’re going to have to do the best you can.”
There was a pause that seemed to last forever for Rowland.
Silence.
And then a quiet, softly spoken response…. “Sir, we’re dying.”
Rowland stopped for a minute, desperately trying to think of anything he could do. He looked at the plotting board again, even though he knew what was there. Fire was everywhere around the trapped men. Damaged compartments. No way in and no way out. He already knew the truth. These men would die where they lay right now.
“Just hang in there, son. We’ll get to you if we can, but it looks real bad right now. I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you.”
Blaskis acknowledged Rowland with a quiet “Yes sir” and then put the phone down. Rowland put down his phone and looked up at the rest of the crew in damage control; they had all been staring at him silently as he talked to the men. Rowland barked an order for the men to get back to work.
Before long, though, Rowland realized that the men’s story might not be finished. Though the men were in terrible shape, Rowland started thinking they might have to play an important role in saving the ship. He started to consider giving important orders to the dying men. As the fire progressed and the magnitude of the damage became clear, Rowland began to worry that the ship could lose steering control. All the worst damage was right back on the fantail, and the blasts had penetrated far down to the hull. The damage to port steering control alone was enough reason to worry.
“If anything happens to the steering engines, the ship will be out of control,” Rowland explained to one of his crew nearby. The crew member understood already, but Rowland had to say it out loud. He had to remind himself why he was going to give those poor dying men their last orders. “If something happens to the hydraulic steering to move the rudders, the only way to move the ship will be two engines on the port head and two engines starboard back, stuff like that. We can’t let it get like that.”
And as Captain Beling reminded Rowland, the steering was especially vital at the moment because the two destroyers were so close alongside. If the carrier lost steering control, a destroyer could be crushed. So Rowland made the decision to have the men in port aft steering transfer their steering control to the starboard aft steering compartment. That way, the undamaged steering compartment on the starboard side could control both rudders if the normal control mechanisms were lost.
In most circumstances, this would not be an extraordinary request. But Rowland already knew that the men in port steering were barely hanging on. They were dying and there was nothing he could do about it, and now he had to order them to perform an important task. And Rowland knew, though it pained him to acknowledge it, that he had to give the order soon if they were to live long enough to carry it out. Rowland picked up the phone and instructed the young men to transfer the steering control.
Blaskis was fading fast by that point, but he acknowledged Rowland’s orders and set about making the necessary changes to the steering control. Despite their terrible wounds and knowing that they would die where they lay, the three sailors responded well when Rowland ordered them to transfer the steering control. The process was slow, partly because they were so severely wounded, but the men did their jobs. Rowland was on the phone with them the entire time, and then soon after completing the task, he listened as each of the three men died from their wounds. Blaskis told him when the other two died, and then Blaskis fell silent.
Rowland put the phone down and couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. They streamed down his face, partly from sheer frustration. There was not a goddamn thing he could do. Not a goddamn thing.
And he cried because he admired the men’s determination. The old man had seen some real bravery in his day, but those three young men struck him as the epitome of navy service.
They were sailors to the end. They never begged for mercy. They never whined. They never whimpered.