USS IOWA, Kendall Truitt, Clayton Hartwig and Firepower of a bygone era.

Captain Fred Moosally, USN presenting Seaman Clayton Hartwig with a Duty Award at Norfolk in the summer of 1988.



USS Iowa (BB-61) ("The Big Stick") was the lead ship of her class of battleship, and was the fourth ship of in the United States Navy to be named in honour of the 29th state. USS Iowa is the only ship of the class to have served a combat tour in the Atlantic Ocean during World War II.

During World War II, Iowa served in the Atlantic fleet as a countermeasure against the German battleship Tirpitz. When transferred to the Pacific fleet in 1944, Iowa shelled beachheads at Kwajalein and Eniwetok in advance of Allied amphibious landings and screened aircraft carriers operating in the Marshall Islands. During the Korean War, Iowa was involved in raids up and down the North Korean coast, after which she was decommissioned into the United States Navy reserve fleets, better known as the "mothball fleet". She was reactivated in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan, and operated in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets to counter the recently expanded Soviet Navy.

In April 1989 an explosion of undetermined origin wrecked her #2 gun turret, killing 47 sailors.

Iowa was decommissioned for the last time in 1990, and was initially struck from the Naval Vessel Register in 1995; however, she was reinstated in 1999 to allow her sister ship New Jersey to be donated to her namesake state for use as a museum. Iowa is currently berthed with the National Defense Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay, near San Francisco, California, and is awaiting donation to a not-for-profit entity for use as a museum ship.

At present, Iowa is the only member of her class not open to the public.




At 9:55 AM on 19 April 1989, an explosion ripped through the Number Two 16 inch gun turret, killing 47 crewmen. A sailor in the powder magazine room quickly flooded it, thereby preventing catastrophic damage to the ship. At first, the NCIS investigators theorized that one of the dead crewman, Clayton Hartwig, had detonated an explosive device in a suicide attempt after the end of an alleged homosexual affair with another sailor.

To support this claim naval officials pointed to several different factors, including Hartwig's life insurance policy, which named Kendall Truitt as the sole beneficiary in the event of his death, the presence of certain unexplained materials inside Turret II, and his mental state, which was alleged to be unstable. Although the Navy was satisfied with the investigation and its results, others were unimpressed with the NCIS investigation, and in October 1991, amid increasing criticism over what was seen as a very poor investigation with little or no real forensic proof, Congress relented and forced the Navy to reopen the investigation.

This second investigation, handled by independent investigators, was hampered by the fact that most of original debris from Iowa had been cleaned up or otherwise disposed of by the Navy before and after the first investigation, but the investigation did manage to uncover evidence pointing to an accidental powder explosion rather than an intentional act of sabotage by sailors, homosexual or otherwise.

While Iowa was undergoing modernization, sister ship USS New Jersey (BB-62) had been dispatched to Lebanon to aid the peacekeeping forces by providing offshore fire support. Unfortunately, New Jersey was at the time the only commissioned battleship anywhere in the world, and in an effort to get another battleship commissioned to relieve New Jersey, the modernization of Iowa was stepped up, leaving her in poor condition when she recommissioned in 1984. In May 1988, Captain Fred Mosally, USN replaced Captain Larry Seaquist, USN as captain of the Iowa. Unlike Captain Seaquist, who had placed emphasis on the training and manning of guns, Captain Mosally was more concerned with the maintenance of the missiles on Iowa.

It transpires the Navy had improperly stored the gunpowder used aboard the battleship; it had been placed aboard a barge where sunlight and other elemental factors contributed to its degradation. Powder from the same lot as the one under investigation was tested at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division. Spontaneous combustion was achieved with the powder, which had been originally milled in the 1930s and improperly stored in a barge at the Navy's Yorktown, Virginia Naval Weapons Station during a 1988 dry-docking of the Iowa.

Gun powder gives off ether gas as it degrades; the ether is highly flammable, and could be ignited by a spark. This revelation resulted in a shift in the Navy's position on the incident, and Admiral Frank Kelso, the Chief of Naval Operations at the time, publicly apologized to the Hartwig family, concluding that there was no real evidence to support the claim that he had intentionally killed the other sailors. The captain of the Iowa, Captain Fred Moosally, was severely criticized for his handling of the matter, and as a result of the incident the Navy changed the powder-handling procedures for its battleships.

The incident remains the surface Navy's worst loss of life during peace time operations, surpassing the loss of life incurred from the attack of an Iraqi Air Force jet on the Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigate USS Stark (FFG-31).

The sinking of the Montevideo Maru

On July 1st, 1942 the Montevideo Maru, a passenger ship accutomed to Asian waters, was sunk off the northern coast of Luzon by an American submarine, the USS Sturgeon, under the command of Lt. Cdr Wright, USN.

1,050 Australians were lost in the greatest single maritime tragedy in Australia's history. I don't mean by this to apportion blame to the Americans, nor to the brave crew of the submarine USS Sturgeon who sank her in slack waters with four torpedoes, but I do wish to draw attention to the loss of this ship, and the death of her mainly Australian passengers.

There is a bleak brotherhood among those who have died upon the sea, and those of you familiar with my little blog here will know that I spend a bit of extra time with those nautical losses and sunken ships that help in some way to define a nation in its greatest, most terrible hour, and those scurilous combatants who seek since to obscure the truth, long after the war has ended. There are few nations who define these parameters so perfectly as the Australians and the Japanese, as extant upon their relationship during the 2nd World War.


An excellent description of the sinking and its aftermath can be listened to here.


On 22 June 1942, some weeks after the fall of Rabaul to the Japanese, 1,053 Australians, including 845 prisoners of war and 208 civilian internees, were embarked from that port onto the ship. She was proceeding without escort to the Chinese island of Hainan, when she was sighted by the American submarine USS Sturgeon near the northern Philippine coast on 30 June.

The Sturgeon pursued, but was unable to fire, as the target was traveling at 17 knots. However, it slowed to about 12 knots at midnight; according to crewman Yosiaki Yamaji, it was to rendezvous with an escort of two destroyers. Unaware that it was carrying Allied prisoners of war and civilians, the Sturgeon then fired four torpedoes at the Montevideo Maru, sinking it before dawn of 1 July. According to Yamaji, Australians in the water sang "Auld Lang Syne" to their trapped mates as the ship sank beneath the waves.

The sinking is the worst maritime disaster in Australia's history. Of the ship's total complement of about 1,140 (including 88 crew), there were reportedly only 18 survivors (all crewmen), one of whom died soon afterwards. Among the missing was Reverend Syd Beazley of the Methodist Mission, the uncle of former ALP opposition leader Kim Beazley. Another was grandfather of former Midnight Oil lead singer and current Rudd government minister Peter Garrett. The story is retold in the Midnight Oil song "In the Valley".

"A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY" The sinking of USS ARIZONA

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives: yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a Pennsylvania-class battleship of the United States Navy.

The vessel was the third to be named in honour of the 48th state, though the first since its statehood was actually achieved. She was commissioned in 1916 and saw action in World War I. The USS Arizona is best known for her cataclysmic and dramatic sinking, with the loss of 1,177 lives, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the event that brought about U.S. involvement in World War II. The wreck was not salvaged, and continues to lie at the floor of the harbour. It is the site of a memorial to those who perished on that day.


Captain Isaac Kidd, USN, pictured prior to his promotion to Rear Admiral.

Acts of heroism on the part of Arizona's officers and men were many, headed by those of Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. Fuqua, the ship's damage control officer, whose coolness in attempting to quell the fires and get survivors off the ship earned him the Medal of Honour. Posthumous awards of the Medal of Honour also went to Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first flag officer killed in the Pacific war, and to Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh, who reached the bridge and was attempting to defend his ship when the bomb hit on the magazines destroyed her.

The blast that destroyed Arizona and sank her at her berth alongside of Ford Island took a total of 1,177 lives of the 1,400 crewmen on board at the time—over half of the casualties suffered by the entire fleet in the attack.