DISASTERS: Tragedy for a Leading Lady

The aircraft carrier Leyte lay peacefully in her berth in a Boston navy yard, all but ready to go back to sea again. After four months (and two battle stars) in Korean waters, the “busiest ship in the fleet” had been in the yard for ten months for an extensive overhaul. Most of her 1,400 officers and men were aboard, and helmeted civilian workmen swarmed over her decks. Officers had just completed the weekly stem-to-stern inspection, had pronounced the “Leading Lady” (the crew’s name for the Leyte) shipshape. Then, suddenly, the big ship shook and a dull explosion roared over the yard. It sounded, said Captain Thomas A. Ahroon, “like the rumble of a subway train.” The ship’s clock stopped at 3:15 p.m.

“Let Us Pray.” Dense, black smoke billowed through the port passages and compartments below decks, boiled out of hatches and rose in a pall above the Leyte. A second explosion and a withering blast of heat and flame followed, searing everything in its path. On the third deck, Steward Osie Ward and ten of his shipmates were trapped in the stewards’ compartment. “A big flame came down the hatchway to our compartment,” said Ward. “At first we didn’t react. But a split second later the same thing happened again. One of the men, who was getting ready for a shower, ran up the hatchway and into the flame. The ensign and I pulled him down.” But the .sailor was fatally burned.

“Then we heard a cry from the hatchway and we ran over there and pulled down a burning officer. He was burned beyond recognition. We put blankets around him and he said, ‘I am a Catholic. Get me a chaplain. My blood is type A.’ I told him that all of us were trapped down there and there was nothing we could do. He then told us to use the Morse Code and tap it out on the bulkhead.” The sailors didn’t know the code, so the injured officer taught them how to hammer out SOS with a wrench and a wooden stick. “Then he said, ‘Let us pray.’ He led us in the Lord’s Prayer. He never mentioned his pain once.” After half an hour, rescue workers heard the tapped-out SOS and groped their way to the trapped men. The heroic officer, Lieut. Leonard M. De Rose, a Reserve flier, died later.

Silent Eyewitnesses. Boston firemen and doctors began arriving on the scene a few minutes after the explosion. As night fell, anxious families crowded against police lines, and litter bearers continued to bring charred bodies down the gangway.

After an hour and a half, rescue workers got to the scene of the explosion, in the third-deck forward catapult room. But the only eyewitnesses, nine men who had been making adjustments on the hydraulic machinery, were dead. FBI agents combed the blackened passages for evidence of sabotage. This week a special Navy board of inquiry opened hearings in Boston, and Commanding Officer Ahroon offered his explanation: an explosion of “vaporized or atomized” hydraulic fluid. The board of inquiry withheld its official verdict, pending further investigation, and the Navy added up its losses: 36 dead, 40 injured, one badly crippled carrier.