The Terrifying Tale of How This U.S. Aircraft Carrier Nearly Sank

By James Holmes,The National Interest

Seldom does your humble scribe come away incensed from reading history. The saga of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) constitutes an exception. We normally think of Franklin’s history as a parable about the importance of shipboard firefighting and damage control. It’s about materiel and methods, in other words. And these things are important without a doubt. Fighting ships are metal boxes packed with explosives and flammables. Suppressing fire represents a crucial function, which is why the first thing a new sailor does after reporting aboard is qualify in rudimentary damage control.

But a ship is more than a hunk of steel. The hunk of steel plus the crew that lives on board it comprises the ship. Bad leadership marred Franklin’s human component. In the end, then, this is a story with mixed lessons. It is not merely about the material dimension of naval warfare.

USS Franklin lived a short but eventful life, joining the Pacific Fleet in mid-1944. Franklin was the first fleet carrier to absorb a direct strike from a Japanese kamikaze, in the aftermath of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. But the flattop was to endure its worst trial in March 1945, while operating with Task Force 58 off the Japanese seacoast. On the morning of March 19 a “Judy” dive bomber eluded the fleet’s air defenses, dumping two bombs on a Franklin whose decks were crowded with fully armed, fully fueled aircraft preparing to raid sites on Kyushu.

Armor plating shielded the carrier’s innards—in particular the engineering plant—from destruction. The crew eventually managed to restart propulsion, and Franklin made the fleet anchorage at Ulithi Atoll under her own power. In the interim, however, dozens of secondary explosions spanning five hours transformed the flight and hangar decks into something out of Dante. It was a charnel house. The blasts killed the damage-control team while disabling fire fighting equipment on the hangar deck. Ammunition “cooked off,” amplifying the destruction. Aircraft fuselages melted. Rivers of burning fuel sluiced into the hangar deck and beneath from fractured pipes. Over 800 perished out of a crew of around 3,400 sailors and aviators.

Recovery operations were fitful under these circumstances. The crew managed to start a diesel-powered fire pump and organize makeshift fire parties. Cruiser USS Santa Fe came alongside and executed a controlled crash with the flat top so seamen could pass across supplies, render such firefighting aid as they could, and take aboard Franklin crewmen. The carrier survived, returning to New York via the Panama Canal.

This is a Pacific War story rich in insights for practitioners of sea power. For instance, it reveals much about the strategic and operational environment in Eurasian waters today. To wit: a foe with no navy of consequence can still exert influence at sea. It can deploy shore-based implements of sea power to punish a hostile navy cruising off its shores. The Imperial Japanese Navy met its doom at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. It could do little despite a flashy last-ditch effort or two to stem the American advance. But airfields in the home islands could act as unsinkable if stationary aircraft carriers once U.S. Navy task forces came within reach. Japan fielded an array of tactical aircraft along with munitions to arm them and pilots to fly them or, in the case of the kamikaze, crash them into American vessels. Tokyo waged an “anti-access” strategy long before the term was invented.

Franklin’s ordeal also yielded hard-won lessons about naval architecture and shipboard practices, and about firefighting and damage control in particular. These are the standard lessons of the affair. To oversimplify, the chief lesson was: equip ships with more of everything. Assigning more people to a damage-control organization would give it a better chance of withstanding damage. Installing more and longer fire hoses would bolster fire parties’ capacity to get at blazes in remote recesses of the ship. Furnishing more portable pumps would let firefighters do their work should fireplugs fail. More high-capacity foam systems would help control and extinguish flaming fuel. Mounting quick-access “scuttles” on armored hatches would allow crewmen to escape compartments should hatches become jammed or too hot to handle. And on and on.