Talk:USS Iowa turret explosion

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USS Iowa turret explosion is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Misplaced Pages community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

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Date	Process	Result
December 24, 2008	WikiProject A-class review	Approved
January 6, 2009	Featured article candidate	Promoted

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Casus belli

Casus belli does not apply here. It's not a war, it's an accident. The template should be fixed ASAP... I don't know how, just pointing it out. RavenStorm 23:18, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that there isn't a "disaster" or non-aviation accident infobox. Casus belli should read "caused by" but if I change that in the infobox, it won't show. Cla68 00:25, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Anti-homosexual Propaganda and criticism of the inital investigation

I remember after the incident there was a lot of criticism levelled at the US military for what appeared to be a propaganda attempt aimed at twisting the accident into validation of the US navy's policy of not allowing homosexual men to serve aboard ships. The ultimately false (and quite suspicious) initial investigation results were used by various military and political personalities to imply "this is why homosexuals shouldn't serve in the navy".

Various newspapers ran quite a few stories on this and it was quite a big story. Unfortunately the age of the incident means I cannot find direct on-line references to much of the original articles and the wide ranging criticism of the entire investigation but they would make an important addition to the article if correctly sourced. Canderra 23:34, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The Shilt's book, Conduct Unbecoming is listed in the references section and I believe that book explores the issue that you're talking about. I believe that book is a credible source and if anyone wants to purchase it or check it out from the library and then use it as a source for a section in this article, that would be very helpful in this article's development. Cla68 00:28, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I own and recently reread Conduct Unbecoming. The naval investigators had not one but two hidden agendas for producing predetermined spurious results implicating Gunners Mate Hartwig. One was clearly to reinforce their own prejudice against gays and to justify the continued exclusion/expulsion of gays from the Navy. However the other, and possibly more compelling, motivation to frame Hartwig was, "Save the battleships." The investigators realized that if the armaments of their cherished battleships were demonstrated to be unstable and unsafe that the battleships would be taken out of service and "mothballed," which is exactly what happened when the truth came out. Dick Kimball (talk) 19:32, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

If you have a page number about the assertion that the cover up was to protect the battleship program I can use that as a source in the article. Cla68 (talk) 00:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

It's on p. 702 of the copy I own, but it's the paperback and lists no ISBN. "By March , she had heard of a meeting the previous winter, which a number of top officers from the Iowa and the surface fleet had attended. For all the criticism of the Navy's reports, the officers had decided that they must stand behind its conclusions, because to do anything else would risk the continued use of the battleships. Said one captain, 'the future of the battleships rises and falls on this story.'" The "she" is Hartwig's sister, Kathy Kubicina. I don't find anything in the book indicating that there was a conspiracy before the fact. Otto4711 (talk) 13:29, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Gunnery training and experiments

Having been an officer in the US Navy, it has always been my understanding that when any commissioned US Navy vessel (I presume there has to be an exception for shallow-water craft like Swift Boats) runs aground the commanding officer is immediately relieved of his command in disgrace. This occurred in Newport, RI in (I believe) 1970 when a destroyer scraped its sonar turret on the bottom, a fact that was only discovered by the routine underwater inspection by divers. The very next day, that destroyer's captain (a courtesy term, since I believe his actual rank was Commander) was relieved and his career was essentially over. Dick Kimball (talk) 19:22, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Expansion

There's almost nothing in this article about the explosion itself, including the notorious poor condition of the ship including rust, jury-rigs, and aged gunpowder, nor anything about how the sailors died (cyanide gas asphyxiation). The investigation section has nothing about the massive criticism the Navy faced when they tried to peddle the cover-up story, then had to eat crow. Weren't there Congressional hearings, and didn't some flag officers suffer penalties? --Dhartung | Talk 07:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

The references are there and many of them are free web links. This article is on my "to do" list but it will probably be a couple of months before I get to it. If you'd like to get started, please feel free to do so. By the way, few flag officers suffered any penalties in this incident. That's one of the many controversies surrounding it. I think only one flag officer had his promotion canceled because of the cover up. Cla68 (talk) 08:11, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

By "on my to do list", do you mean like bringing this up to FA-class? I ask because if you plan on bringing this up to FA-class then I can take USS Iowa and then with any luck by the end of this year we will have our 1st ships based featured topic. TomStar81 (Talk) 08:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I plan on nominating it for FA once complete. Cla68 (talk) 12:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Casualty list

Several sailors are mentioned in the article, (maybe I didn't read it closely enough), but of those named its hard to tell who died in the incident and who survived. Maybe an external link to a list or something ( for example or maybe an official US Navy list page). The article kind of hints around that Blakey dies, based on his sister's description of their conversation. Thompson, Zeigler and Buch are mentioned and they also died in the explosion. The reason they are mentioned by the source material is probably because they died, but that's not really spelled out in the wikipedia article. Maybe the further reading links have a casualty list, but nothing stuck out to me when I skimmed over them. --Dual Freq (talk) 02:37, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Tom actually provided us with the answer before his break: take a look at this link (pdf) from the rewitten Iowa page, it has a list of all those who died as a result of the blast. It should help the casualty count for this page. 76.243.165.120 (talk) 02:47, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Yikes, that PDF is 20 MB. We probably should link something a bit smaller. Since wikipedia is not a memorial, I suppose a list article is out of the question... --Dual Freq (talk) 02:53, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm still building the story, but almost the entire crew of Turret Two was wiped out, including Ziegler, Buch, and the gun crewmen mentioned already. Only the powder room crew, including Truitt, survived. I'll probably place the names and ranks of those killed in a footnote in the "explosion" section. Cla68 (talk) 03:42, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Commons dumped the Image:USS Iowa (BB-61) ramming powder bags.jpg image, I reuploaded it. Not sure what happened, but it did kick out an error yesterday when I uploaded it. No errors today though. Sorry about that. --Dual Freq (talk) 00:25, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I'll readd it to the article. Cla68 (talk) 00:37, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Another Image

Was this the image you were looking for? Sorry for the delay, unadvertised wikibreak. --Dual Freq (talk) 21:46, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

That's it! Thank you. Cla68 (talk) 00:34, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Article should be deleted

Most of this article quotes Mr. Thompson and his book "A Glimpse of Hell." Mr. Thompson's book has been questioned on its facts and has been found to be in many ways a fabrication. Because of this, he and the publisher were sued by Fred Moosally, who won his lawsuit several years ago. Any material which quotes Thompson should be removed as unreliable. The investigation into the explosion is a part of public record and can be obtained at the Naval Historical Center. Bgoforth (talk) 19:23, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

The threshold for inclusion is "verifiability, not truth", therefore even if elements of Mr. Thompson's book were fabricated as you claim the information can be here if the material can be backed up by second and/or third party sources. Also, the investigation into the exposion was be all acounts very poorly conducted by parts that quite frankly could have cared less about what the outcome was. A check of the public record would therefore be nearly useless, I suspect. The man involved in this rewrite is Cla68, so any objections shoud be taken up with him. TomStar81 (Talk) 01:18, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm mainly using Thompson's book right now to get the article outlined, then I will use the other sources to add more or confirm the material. Moosally did not successfully sue Thompson several years ago. The court dismissed the suit against Thompson, restricting it only to the publisher. As this article shows, the suit was settled out of court with the publisher pointedly refusing to retract anything that was printed in the book. I'll be mentioning the lawsuit in the "Aftermath" section of the article and may quote the backhanded, asteistic "apology" that the publisher provided to Moosally and Miceli. Cla68 (talk) 20:58, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Typo log

Sandy, please record your latest finding of a typo in your typo long > Findings: found". WP:PUNC) (You want to be fair about this typo thing don't you? Or do you only record typos for out group persons? —Mattisse (Talk) 09:17, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Sandy, please record in typo log > The rest of the article uses p. rather than pp. on multiple pages, consistency. Thanks, 09:19, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Samdu.

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