Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 193 - The USS Iowa Turret Explosion

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Joe is joined by Alice Caldwell-Kelly to discuss the time the US Navy murdered 47 of its sailors via incompetence and then decided to try to pin the blame on gay people. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/04/19/uss-iowa-first-came-explosion-then-cover.html https://taskandpurpose.com/news/iowa-explosion/ A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the USS Iowa and Its Cover-Up

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Bigger by 10,000 tons than any United States warship afloat, the huge dreadnought Iowa is ready for launching seven months ahead of schedule. The nation's first lady, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, attends the wartime ceremony. The wife of Vice President Wallace sponsors the Iowa, named in honor of her native state. Down the ways, the mighty vessel rides to the sea. Armament and batteries a naval secret, the Iowa is said to be the most powerful capital ship ever launched. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me today is Alice Caldwell Kelly, host of pretty much all of the podcasts that I listen to. How's it going? going pleased to be here yeah it's what kill james bond trash future well there's your problem yeah that's that's the three

of them if i start a fourth one it'll get like too unwieldy even for me i honestly i have to give you props because like i've often toyed around with like starting a second one on after like one of my other weird niche hobbies that i have and every time i think about i'm like no i can't possibly do something else so it's it's not so bad it's just like i got into this by accident like essentially anytime i get bored on twitter i talk to someone and i'm like hey do you want to start a podcast and somehow this has worked out very well for me i kind of started that way i i guessed on hell of a way to die another show we've both been on um and you know share a producer with um years ago because i was you know selling my book

coogans of kandahar and i i was listening to that show my friend nick who like i know in person like i've known him for shit almost a decade now think. And we were drunk late at night watching like really bad, uh, I think formerly history channel documentaries that had been put on YouTube. Like, and we were kind of like doing the mystery science theater bit to it. And another friend of ours,

like you guys should just start a fucking podcast. Yeah. It's podcasting shit easy. Yeah. You can't just start a podcast. And then I realized, yeah, actually you can. just start a podcast and then i realized yeah actually you can yeah the barriers for entry in this are not high it's one of the things i like about it it's interesting that it's a platform where the barrier of entry is zero but the ability to be

whatever you consider successful is actually quite high yeah um this is no like i mean you could get in some fucking network or whatever and actually we just had someone email us to get on a network. And I didn't realize how little they actually pay you. Really? Yeah. And I don't think they listen to the show. No one's going to allow us on the network in our current form. It's not going to happen.

I mean, we're the show that invented the Kandahar dick sucking factory. Nobody's giving us ad money. You know? Yeah. The Kandahar dick sucking factory is brought to you by like i don't know squarespace or whatever yeah do you suck dicks in a factory you know who else sucks dicks in a factory our products and services this week that's right i once reached out to one company to get an ad and they just draped told me no i think it would be funny like

to get to get sponsorship but from a company that like does not jibe with your brand at all like you know a paper towels company or something like the American Red Heart Association or something like that um now uh Alice one of the many shows that you host is about engineering disasters and I've been like trying to figure out some way to shoehorn getting you onto the show. Oh, I don't need a pretext. I'm just happy to come on. Because we've already recorded together for probably like three or four hours. So like, obviously, I'm like, I need to I need to get her over here.

And I was like, I need to find an engineering disaster in the military since the military history. So that's what we do. And Liam and I already talked about the comet probably one of the best military machines ever invented for melting nazis into a homogenate so i had to dig for something else and i came up with what has to be the first cover-up that i found in military history that doubles as a hate crime yeah and that is the uss iowa explosion yeah uh two great tastes that taste great together you're sort of hunt for red october cold war navy cover-up and also a bit of a bit of classic homophobia fantastic and i've made jokes about this in the past uh kind of like offhandedly because i was like i think it was during a bonus episode when i had francis from hell the way to

die on and i was like yeah this is kind of like that time that the navy blew up a boat through uh like negligence and blamed on the gays and that is kind of what like i thought i was simplifying it to be quite honest and it turns out i wasn't no no it's very much just like this explosion it's uh homosexual in nature we've analyzed some of the particles yeah naval investigation services um has determined that has ascertained that the explosion was homosexual in nature and i have to say this is probably the first time and only time in my podcast history that i'll say the fbi ended up being the voice of reason in this situation somehow this happens occasionally like it's the same thing with like the looming tower and like

9-11 stuff as well like you have fbi agents who seem like the sanest people in the room because everyone else in the room is like ice chewing cia guys yeah and i mean naval intelligence or investigative services or criminal investigators or division at like their call in the army or i think it's still ncis or whatever and then marines i don't remember they're all inherently fucking awful at their jobs uh i mean as recent history has panned out well would you would you like to know a little fact about the then nis of course i So, back in the days, before Don't Ask, Don't Tell, someone at the NIS heard the expression a friend of Dorothy to mean a gay man, and then they launched an investigation to discover the identity of this Dorothy, who was like, making sailors and marines gay. And we're unable to find Dorothy.

So that's the level we're dealing with here. I'm kind of unclear of the history behind Friends of Dorothy myself, to be completely honest. It might be the Wizard of Oz. I think it might be like a Judy Garland reference. I don't know. It's pretty like old-fashioned now.

That sounds like something they would do. I mean, in my experience, I was in the army, so we had a dual cid who notoriously pretty much only existed to bust you for drugs now they exist to cover up sex crimes and murder on fort hood mostly also one cid agent recently murdered his wife with a neurotoxin from a pufferfish yes jesus christ yeah yeah uh he got from haiti of all he didn't he had a puffer fish puffer fish toxin guy just incredible so to take us back in time for when the uss iowa and the iowa class battleships were a thing this boat in particular the iowa is a class of ships and the uss iowa is

a ship within that class um and for of course named after the noted ocean going state iowa well like this was there a replacement for the well an augment to the south decosa class another famously like a nautical state so They have to name the ships after states so everybody in them remembers that we still know they exist. Yeah, absolutely. And it was first ordered in 1939 and then launched in 1942 and saw service all the way, kind of, sort of, until 1990. Now, there were ships in the class,

like specifically the Missouri, that fought in the Gulf War. But the Iowa did not for reasons that will become abundantly clear shortly. But this is a really long lifespan for a battleship because, you know, rightfully, when we think of battleships, we think of like World War I and II or dreadnoughts in World War I, but whatever. And like the USS Iowa has some history. It was the boat that FDR wrote in when the USS William Porter kept trying to kill it. Oh, fuck.

Yeah, absolutely. Which we did just do a bonus episode on like, honestly, legitimately one of my favorite ships in the Navy is the Porter. It fought in the Pacific Atlantic. It fought in the Korean war. And if it was eventually awarded 11 Battlestars.

And it also got nicknamed the Big Stick, which of course I have to mention for obvious reasons. You know, Teddy Roosevelt appreciation, of course. Yeah. And the thing about the Iowa classes, right, is that they're fast battleships. And by fast, I mean six knots faster than the previous generation of battleships. That's the only important thing about them, for the purposes of our story, is that they were designed to lead a fast strike force in the Pacific, which, at that point, carriers were still gonna be supportive to a battleship.

Right. That's their only things like we added you know a hundred tons of armor or whatever and engineering works for six more knots in speed and then we're gonna like win the war against japan and then forget about these but history is not done with you yet if you make a fast battle ship uh and you know they're interesting fucking ships like i i was a tank crewman so i understand why people are in love with gigantic metal antiquities that probably don't need to exist anymore i get it confined spaces that you like live in that also inexplicably have like uh you know a large gun attached to them sure yeah and it's fucking awesome like i've no i have have no academic way to explain why it's really cool

other than big cannon goes boom and you feel it in your chest. It feels like your eyes are being peeled out of your head. And we have a battleship. I currently live in Oahu, Hawaii, and we have an Iowa-class battleship here as part of one of the Pearl Harbor memorials. And I don't know how to explain that it's simultaneously massive, but also

smaller than you'd imagine when you see it up close. Yeah, the big thing is the guns, right? Yeah, yeah. They're huge. A modern, like, naval gun, like the one that you have on the foredeck of, like, you know, a frigate or a destroyer or whatever, that's a 5-inch caliber. And the Iowa

class had, I think, like, some outrageous number of 5 inch guns, and then batteries of 16 inch guns. Yes! And those are so powerful that when they reactivated them, one of the concerns was you can't put any radar or any sensitive electronics within 200 feet of the barrel, because the overpressure will just fry it yeah i i have no way to explain how dumb and awesome that is at the same time each turret has almost 50 people in it

and i was in a turret with three people in it i'm like there's too many people in this fucking thing like all right one of you has to get out and walk the only downside is if you get rid of one, it was going to be me because I was almost always the loader and auto loaders are fucking garbage. You need me more than the gunner. Now, as you can imagine, we're talking about like the namesake of battleships, Iowa and all of the ships like it, that their time passed it by, you know, by the 50s. By the time I was fighting the Korean War, it was reduced to a support role it was providing ground fire sure but it was not exactly the heyday of the iowa class battleship battleships were obsolete after pearl harbor like i'll fight people about that like after pearl harbor it's a carrier war and then uh battleships are there as sort of this legacy technology for

senior officers who want to be like knights of the sea and like ride into battle with a cutlass yeah 100 i mean like when i was first enlisting i walked into the navy office i was like i want to be in a fucking battleship but they're like kid is 2005 we don't have those anymore like well i will take my business next door then by korea it was pretty obvious that they didn't really need these anymore uh and that's why by 1958 the iowa and most like it were decommissioned the uss iowa specifically at the philly naval yard and then sent to the naval reserve fleet which always looks very funny to me because they kind of like build giant piers out of dead old ships uh attached by a tug yeah it's it's like

kind of haunting you can see all of these ships just tied up together and uh it's on the west coast i want to say it starts with an s one of the bays out there yeah i believe you're correct i think there's more than one um there's like the reserve fleet um there's a different reserve fleet that's mostly like transport ships um i think it's like one's uh i don't know the name is escaping me but one is like the ready reserve ones that they can turn around within like a month or so and the other one's like no if you need to use these might as well just launch nukes that's like different expectations of longevity right because you think about those and you think about like the aircraft graveyards that they have out in like nevada right where like they take the wings off and they're just rusting right but like if a ship hole is still like you know watertight you've still got like something there that you can you can make use of.

Maybe. Yeah. 50, 50 years after the fact. The Naval Reserve Fleet was established, I believe, after World War One. And during that time, the reserve fleet meant ships were still actively being used just on a much reduced schedule. And it was almost always transport ships. And it was almost always transport ships. Personally, as I've learned doing this show and going through grad school now, logistics is a lot more important than I remember it being when I was a dumb teenager soldier who did not do logistics.

So whenever we start a war, say like Korea or Vietnam or whatever the fuck we end up doing next week, you end up having to activate a whole bunch of logistics platforms and like in korea i think limited scale vietnam we ended up activating a lot of the naval reserve uh fleet mostly transport ships like there's liberty ships in this thing i think until the 90s but generally it's not battleships because like or warships in general um and you know in the reserve fleet it's a lot like the naval reserve in general it's a repository of mostly useless shit that if we ever have to use it something seriously stupid happened so like the simpsons joke america's 26th line of defense between the ohio national guard and the league of women voters yes um and you know there's a reason why that is the case um transport ships are different but when it comes to warships reactivation is a pain in the ass um the reason for this is

pretty obvious most ships are badly out of date when the u.s finally gets around to mothballing them we tend to hang on to shit for way too long and even after you have mothballed them like when you put them in in reserve you can't just like turn the lights off and leave right you strip all of the useful shit out of them first um yeah exactly you know you you turn the light off in the garage and you let the door slowly close as you throw your leather jacket over your shoulder and look emotionally over your shoulder as you watch the ship disappear. Yeah. Yeah. And there is some maintenance that's done to these ships,

but it's almost entirely like enforced by the EPA, uh, because there's still like, they don't necessarily have fuel in them, but they have other fluids like hydraulic fluid and other things that will absolutely leach into the sea. Um, not good for the ocean.

Not that the Navy generally gives a fuck about that. Uh, but they, they have to do maintenance. So they just don't fucking rust into the sea um not good for the ocean not that the navy generally gives a fuck about that uh but they they have to do maintenance so they just don't fucking rust into the water um but yeah everything useful is stripped out uh sitting there for a long period of time being eaten by salt water is generally not good for a boat and as anybody's paid attention to recent history in the u.s navy we tend to have boats that actually don't do well when they're wet so you know now enter secretary of the navy john f lehman it was his notorious 600 ship navy uh idea of the 1980s yeah classic reagan shit uh yeah we're gonna we're gonna confront the soviet union militarily and we're in order to do that we're gonna double the size of the u.s navy because what like i want

to say 300 and you know 310 maybe yeah it was damn near doubling it was a main plank of ronald reagan's 1980 campaign and like most things the u.s navy does it was overpriced pointless and a hilarious failure and i do have to point out here like like alice you already said this is the counter the soviet navy and if there's one thing that i have learned from having family members who have served in it and learning about it myself, the Soviet Navy has only ever been a threat to the people serving in it. Yeah, and especially the Soviet surface fleet. This was in part because the Soviets had introduced the Kirov class, we would call it a battle

cruiser, it's a guided missile cruiser to them. And it's like, nobody in the US Navy in the 1980s was worried about the soviet surface fleet soviet submarines absolutely sure that was one of the things they did very well but i i promise no one was losing sleep about the kirov class uh and yet this was enough justification that in order to like have a hard counter to these boats you have to have um you have to bring back the sort of the legends careful they might roll up the could was it the katuzov on you that's legit like unironically my favorite boat ever because it's a lot like the katuzov is a platypus of naval ships and that it by all means it shouldn't exist and it probably should have died out a long time ago uh like it catches on fire all the time it has to be like escorted by three

or four tugs because it breaks down so often it eats crewmen yeah all of these all of these run on like a bunker sea so you can like there are these photos that like Soviet crewman took in the 80s off of a film camera, of all of these racings lying on the flight deck sunbathing, right? Of the Soviet carrier. And just this plume of black, oily smoke above them, from the engines. So yeah, no, absolutely a joke really pure soviet energy all around yeah yeah yeah and it's really strange to like the reason why the kirov class existed in the first place it was like part of this um like sort of distaste for for large carriers in the in

the soviet navy i i think that's like a a carrier thing in general and i'd like to go off on too much of a carry tangent to be to be fair i don't know a ton about them i just know that they're a gigantic resource pit which is why the u.s has so many of them and i mean obviously it's a prestige thing uh but like you know the only other very dumb countries go out of their way to attempt to build a modern aircraft carrier. Cause I mean, unless you're doing imperialism, there's really no point, right?

Like you, you can, you just have ground-based aircraft and of course, ballistic missiles. And now, you know, space weapons being a thing, or at least we're working on it.

Like there's really no point unless you're going to go, I don't know, like roll a shit up to the Persian Gulf to go do like boogaloo number three yeah no which is exactly what they use the katuza for actually like look we can still use it we pulled it up to syria i think the care of glass may actually be worse because instead of bunker oil i think they may actually have nuclear reactors, which is just wild. Holy shit! Isn't it, um, uh, isn't the two separate of Mazoot? Yes, yes, Mazoot, yes.

Incredible, like shit you wouldn't even use to like, heat your house. Well they have to, the funny thing is they have to pre-heat it, because it's basically tar, right, and so in order to like, even be able to burn it, they have to preheat it, because it's basically tar, right? And so in order to even be able to burn it, they have to heat it up to a point where it's sort of liquid enough first. So it's basically running off of almost solid fuel. Oh, it's beautiful. I love this machine. It's so stupid.

It's like if someone actually invented a Gundam. A Gundam that runs on coal. Now, obviously, 600 ships is a lot of fucking ships. It's a big ass Navy. I don't know if another Navy has ever existed that's been bigger outside of like counting transport ships and liberty ships and shit like that. Yeah, having 600 like warships. That's I think that's probably unprecedented. Yeah. At least since the days that you could build them out of wood and there's a reason for that because even

with the the literal infinity sign of dollars that the department of defense gets in the united states even we weren't able to pull this off uh and what they tried to do it to hit this number which they never would i think they got the 500 and something still it's a ridiculously high number but the way they did it was reactivating the entire iowa class from the reserve fleet which had been floating there since again the late 1950s as well as keep older ships in service for longer way past their service date which kind of sounds like to me if you were going to flex on like your neighbors by i don't know expanding your house but you did it by using like load-bearing drywall the other the other big plank of the 600 ship navy was like building the nimitz class carriers

faster uh but the problem was that they were they were so large and so expensive and so complex that they kind of proved resistant to all attempts to hurry them which is very funny to me and there's like another downside to this that will become important later is when you activate these old ships or keep other older ships in service they're just in money sinks like they cost way more money to maintain because they have a lot more problems. With that, the USS Iowa came out of the reserve fleet, having set up the ocean since 1958, doing nothing. And it would require extensive overhauling since military technology had changed quite a bit since 1958. Yeah, you go from, like, where do we put the computers?

From, this is the computer room, the room where we keep the computer. It's called by Paul. He has a block of ice in a tub and he fans on it. The ship had to be virtually gutted. Having new electronical systems put in, electrical systems, fire radar control systems, a phalanx close in weapon system, Tomah cruise missiles harpoon anti-ship missiles as well as they had they had the ability to launch rq2 pioneer drones which i'm going to assume we're just fucking dog shit because this is the late 80s literally what they did with those was they

launched them with a like a rocket assist and then they they would fly they would spot for naval gunfire come back and then the crew would have to catch them in a net. Oh, that's even dumber than the one I had to use. There was this thing called a Puma. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I don't think so. No, granted, this is well close to a decade ago. My last actually, fuck, it was a decade ago.

I got back from Afghanistan in 2012. So it's a drone that has a camera on it. There's no weapon systems on it that's mostly styrofoam that a soldier can like throw like a fucking football uh and then well one throws it the other one tries to control it with like an actual control thing and what generally happens is it cranes wildly off course because your arm is not the most stable launching platform and then you lose it somewhere in a cornfield somewhere. And it's full of sensitive items that you can't let the enemy capture.

So like every hour. So like, oh, we dropped the Puma again. Everybody has to get their trucks and go get it. Right. Yeah. No, no. It's well done. I don't think they use it anymore.

And we were in kandahar city so like we were surrounded by not exactly skyscrapers but like tall buildings and we threw it and almost nine times in a tent crash into one of the buildings so yeah all of this was actually surprisingly uh not as expensive as you'd imagine retrofitting a full naval ship. It costs half a billion dollars per Iowa class, which, you know, looking at how the U.S. military spends money, that's a budget right there. It's a bargain. Yeah.

On the other hand, in like real terms, it's enough to like have, I don't know, like health care or whatever. But like. Right. Yeah. You get one and you don't get to pick it and it's not the healthcare yeah yeah yeah and it's like you you can see they're kind of trying to follow the the kirov class thing of like okay well we have like a what amounts to a battleship but we use it for for guided missile launches just on the off chance this is a good idea like maybe just in

case the soviets like steal a march on us and on it really did seem like this was uh slapped together by a whole bunch of guys who probably were still in the military during the korean war oh yeah and they had like a picture of an iowa class on the wall and just had sticky notes with new shit on it there was a lot of nostalgia for these like when when they announced that they were recommissioning these um they got a ton of like applications from guys who had served in korea uh who would like uh were trying to rejoin the navy so they could be like assigned to these again yeah and there was um a fair amount of like really old uh non-commissioneded officers who were allowed back in because they realized they had a problem.

No one knows how to use these fucking guns anymore. No. Except for this 75-year-old Master Chief. This will bring us other problems, which will you know, there's a reason why we're talking about this event. It's fine. It's fine. This shit will buff out.

Yeah. Now, not only did they deliver this at a half billion dollars which is actually below budget they delivered this ahead of schedule which if you're new to the show or the 21st century ahead of schedule and under budget in the u.s military are not two things that go together and there's a reason why the iowa was able to do this the way they managed to slide under the gate in regards to delivering costs was simply not repairing the engine or any of the turret mounted 16 inch guns all of which were very very broken yeah you're just in in your in your courses and you're like i can i see waves through the floor should i be should i be able to do that it's it's when they rebuilt uh flanders's house

like careful at the load bearing poster um and there's that it actually got worse somehow so there's a rundown process you have to go through with these ships, which requires a naval board inspection to make a ship seaworthy. They just skipped it. Yeah, I mean, vibes only. Listen, this 90-year-old Master Chief, who won't stop talking about his time with Spruance in the Pacific, he says it's fine.

So, like, yeah. Don't worry, though, Alice. They did take it two years later in 1986. It failed. That's fine. Very much me and law school vibes. And, you know,

unlike me, when I fail something, the Navy didn't quit. They just kept going ahead. Now, just a quick rundown. And this is not an exhaustive list of all the things that were wrong with it. But these are like what I considered the most important things that I could find that was wrong with it as someone who does not understand boats. Now, the ship was unable to achieve the top speed of 33 knots during a full power engine run and when they did the engine stalled and this this was part of the rationale

for getting them back in the first place was that they were the only like old ship they still had that could keep pace with like a carrier or like a modern destroyer yeah and it's also funny if the engine just died like this isn't like my shitty car. We can just like attempt to start it again. There's a guy like climbing up. There was some starting fluids and you just have to like spray that in there and hope for the best. And so other problems included hydraulic fluid leaks in every turret, which totaled to 55 US gallons per turret per week. And I've had it like there's a buckload of hydraulic fluid

in tanks and you don't want that leaking everywhere. It just gives you cancer. It burns your skin. So Cosmoline which I had no idea what that was. I had to look it up. It's an anti-corrosion lubricant. It's this pink-corrosion lubricant.

It's this pink grease. They use it to store rifles long-term, too. Yeah. You normally clean that out and reapply it because it hardens. You want to guess what they hadn't done since 1958? Literally like a fucking Mosin Nagant that you buy off the internet. They just didn't clean the car. Oh, no.

They also had deteriorated bilge piping, which led to bilge pumps, which meant it just flooded and they couldn't pump the water out. Yeah, you're just, like, in this turret and you're, like, at ankle level in, like, a sort of slurry of cosmoline, hydraulic fluid, and, like, seawater. Fantastic. hydraulic fluid and like sea water fantastic that's actually uh how i'm starting my new net my new sex club is like no lights don't worry about the fluids you're fine absolutely absolutely and unfortunately also like my new sex club it had uh horrible wiring problems that constantly started um all kinds of pumps failed uh so occasionally just wouldn't be able to turn there's unrepaired soft patches on high pressure steam lines which occasionally just exploded and the firefighting system which is probably the most important

safety system in any boat was just didn't work. Uh, the valves were all rusted over. Um, so it's, it's, it's a death trap. They, they created a death trap.

Um, now if that wasn't enough, the actual package to fix all of this was quite affordable. It was only like a million dollars. Oh, and as far as, you know, defense spending goes,

that's a fucking steal. So absolutely. They canceled it. Of course. Listen, you have to make those savings somewhere. You got to spend those those million dollars somewhere. You'll really feel them like designing a more efficient shower curtain or something. Yeah.

Have you tried just shoveling it into a fire? This fire just has like U.S. Air Force labeled above it. Now, the Navy itself, that being like admirals that actually had to manage this piece of shit, was like, you know, we need to take this thing out of service like immediately. And everybody agreed, other than the Secretary of the Navy himself, who stepped in to make sure that was not done. That's civilian oversight for you. You elect Reagan and that's what you get you know yeah i don't get me wrong i'm the last person in the history of the show and my life to give credit to general officers for once i was like you know he he nailed it the secretary of the navy

refused and instead used some of the money that was meant to fix everything and just fix the engine and that was considered good enough that was it just get it running again like it's a truck at the end of like a junkyard you know now this didn't stop the crew of the ussio from going out to gunnery practice mind you with all of these problems that i just named and like i said there's a crew of um mostly ncos and very very junior ranking gunnery officers and stuff but mostly the ncos kind of knew what they were doing they didn't have the most experience in this kind of boat but they had enough experience on ships in general and in the navy and dealing with like junior enlisted seamen that they're like this is not a good idea.

This shit's going to kill somebody. Fire control officers are badly inexperienced and ignoring all of the warnings given to them by the junior leaders. And like we talked about earlier a little bit, these guns are so big that you need to make sure that there's nothing nearby them when you fire. Otherwise, they'll just destroy it. Turret 2, which will become the problem turret. Not that the turret itself is inherently worse than any of the other ones.

It's just very unlucky. The cursed turret. Yeah. When it fired during the first gunnery drill with its crew, the fire control officer didn't actually realize it was too close to turret one because there's no safety mechanism in place to stop this from happening for some reason. Oh, of course. You know, because the ship was made in 1939

and nobody gave a shit about safety. No, God no. So the concussion from the 16-inch guns going off shredded turret one's gun bloomers, which I had no idea what that was. I had to look it up. It's like a canvas cover to make sure, like, dirt and debris doesn't get into the turret,

which causes all sorts of hell with the mechanical elements but that's not even the most serious thing that happened it damaged turret one's electrical system uh there's a guy named dan meyer who was a gunnery nco on board in that turret said that shooting of the kansas quote the most frightening experience i've ever had in my life the shockwave blew out the turret officer's switchboard and the leads we had no power we had no lights men were screaming we all thought we were going to die right and i need to remind you they are the lucky turret this is turret one these are these guys are very lucky now no matter what anybody who actually had to work with these guns said anybody of any given given rank outside of officer level was like,

we need to not fucking use these things. Nobody listened to them. This got to the point that in April of 1989, when they're getting ready to go take part in a fleet exercise, Senior Chief Reggie Ziegler told his wife that when he died, and he thought it was going to be soon that he wanted to be buried at sea another crewman specifically in turret 2 told his sister quote i'm not thrilled with some of the things that we're doing on iowa we shouldn't be doing them

something's going to go wrong great that did like absolutely some well there's your problem ass uh like letters to write home there yeah 100 now on april 19th 1989 turret two of the iowa's tapped to take part in a gunnery exercise where they would be doing an experimental kind of shooting which we will get into just of course you just read a date which means it's gonna get worse worse. Yeah. It always does. Now, the person running this experiment was warned ahead of time that the compressed air system in turret two was not working. Now, that didn't mean anything to me because I don't know shit about naval guns. Now, in a tank gun, which is a smoothbore cannon, I guess the same kind of mechanism as a ship's gun. I guess some of them are rifled. Mine was smoothbore. You don't have to

worry about these sort of things. It's all self-contained with propellant and the warhead. But when you have a separate gun charge and a warhead, you have to worry about sparks and debris and things like that. And debris that could burn was one of the biggest health hazards they could have because if something's on

fire in the breach and you load a new powder charge you just created a fucking bomb um so you have a compressed air system that blows in compressed air blows out anything that could be in the barrel out that did not work just have to make extra double sure that there's nothing in the barrel including any air you just have to task the lowest ranking sailor to stick his head up the barrel and go yeah a guy with like a really really like a 16 inch diameter ramrod yeah now this is probably one of the more important safety features they had uh they were warned that it didn't work and the guy running the experiment would simply didn't see this as a problem. Now, to make things worse than they possibly could be,

it was decided that a very, very specific lot number of gunpowder would be used. Now, the reason why is because it was getting old. Now, this lot number, numbered D846, which will unfortunately become very important, dated all the way back to 1942 what the fuck jesus christ that's so and like and of course the most uh sort of like military decision which is this thing is insanely dangerous let's get rid of it as soon as possible by using it and then it's not our problem anymore it's downrange's problem yeah um and

according to naval regulations at the time this actually wasn't considered unsafe and maybe under normal procedure it would have been usable but we're gonna get into why this was a problem now this powder was considered safe as long as you use it as you were supposed to use it, which was using the bags of powder to fire a standard 1900 pound 16 inch shell. Guess what they're not going to do? Because it's an experiment. And therefore, they're going to experiment and they're going to fire something different. Right? Yeah.

something different right yeah now there's a reason for this which makes sense if you have nothing to do with this and if you weren't warned ahead of time which everybody was um every kind of powder lot and powder type has its own kind of characteristics and the person running the experiment who's a master chief fire control man named stephen skelly knew and that is why he specifically used this powder for the experiment because this lot number of powder was known for burning very very fast which would exert more pressure on the shell which is going to be a dummy non-explosive shell this extra pressure would then cause the shell of course to fly further than it normally would meaning he was working on experimentation using these old ass guns to fire further and somehow more accurately than ever before.

Now here's where this immediately crosses the barrier from. Okay. This kind of makes sense to them. You're going to kill someone. Skelly's plan for turret two was not to fire the 1900 pound shell. It was a fire 10, 2,700 pound practice projectiles. Two from the left gun, four rounds each from the center and right guns, all from turret two of the ship.

Each shot was to use five bags of D846 instead of the six bags normally used. He decided that was all he had to do in the name of safety was just subtract a bag. Yeah, it's fine. Just eyeball it. It's fine. And if you're looking at that safety thing, it's like, okay, fine, whatever. Maybe this is fine if you're like, I fucking it or whatever. Or maybe it's a hypothetically, if there wasn't some gigantic warning on the powder bags itself, not to use them that way.

So, Alice, this is where I get to tell you there's a gigantic warning on the powder bags itself that told you not to use them that way. So, Alice, this is where I get to tell you there's a gigantic warning in the powder bags itself that told you not to use them this way. Listen, if everybody read the warnings and the safety directions, nothing would ever get done. So just because it says in big red letters, don't do this, that's obviously, you know, who's going to pay attention to that

and this has to be the most exact warning ever printed on a product uh or material because of me there's a warning now it said quote warning do not use a 2700 pound projectiles okay and and they did but they did yeah um now this will become important later because there were actually other probably more serious problems mainly that problem came down to the crew and the ship itself training and morale within the uss io was dog shit since it'd been reactivated this is mostly because serving on the ship was fucking miserable. These guys all enlisted in the Navy in the 80s and got stuck in the ship from the fucking 30s.

Life sucks. You walk into a Navy recruiting office in the mid 80s, what do you want to be doing? You want to be doing Top Gun shit, right? Yeah, you want to be in a battleship or you want to like, maybe if you really hate yourself, be in a submarine. Yeah, if you want to be in a battleship or you want to like maybe if you really hate yourself being a submarine yeah if you want if you want to like breathe like uh 200 dudes other like farts for like six months you'd be in a submarine but like you don't want to you don't want to be doing

this right you don't want to like be living on some shit that was like austere in the fucking 40s when you're used to ships that are significantly newer and you know not falling apart around your ears um and another problem was because the ship was such a piece of shit they couldn't train like everything's broken all the time so the navy simply didn't train most people uh their training was subpar at best a lot of people simply didn't have any now senior chief ziegler who served inside turret two, rest in peace, homie. Spoiler alert. Where the testing would be going on was worried because his entire crew had virtually no experience.

Many had only fired maybe once. And the center gun's gun captain, Gunner's Mate Second Class Claytonton hartwig who's considered the most senior and that's not a very high rank i should point out had just been taken off duty because he's getting ready to move to a new duty station in the uk so like they had an even newer more inexperienced gun captain in place so ziegler asked hartwig hey man i'm kind of nervous could you take your old spot back and hartwig, is voluntold situation. He didn't really have a say in the matter, so he did. Now, the most important of these turret jobs,

and was the most dangerous, was the rammer man. And this is because, essentially, it boils down to, if you fuck your job up, everybody will die. Maybe a product from when the ship was built, there's simply no safety mechanism in place to make sure you did not kill everybody. For example, it takes a lot of force for the mechanical ram to push

a 2,700 pound shell into position way more than it takes to hit a bag of powder into place in the right depth and positioning. Yeah, you have to hit this explosive with a big hammer and not detonate the explosive. Yeah, and have to hit this explosive with a big hammer and not detonate the explosive. Yeah, and there's a problem inherent with this. Mechanically, there should be

something like, hey, you did not load a shell. This is a powder bag. We're not going to let you move this rammer into place because the weight is so far off or whatever. But there was nothing like that. There's nothing stopping the rammer guy from incorrectly using the rammer arm and smashing into powder bags as hard as he would a shell the only thing

stopping the rammer man from committing mass accidental homicide was simply knowing how to do his job which i i don't know how i can underline this enough that's never the safety you want in place in the military no fucking never at least in the 40s they trained you to do that like i feel like a lot of these things are just because in the design is sort of like like this assumption from the 1930s 1940s navy that like naval gunnery is a core skill uh we have like this sort of basis of technical stuff there that will enable guys to be able to negotiate this successfully without us having to put all of these like safety interlocks and stuff there and then they reactivate it in the 80s when no one's ever seen one of these things except in a museum i think they maybe had

some like mock-ups to train on great fantastic i i've been to like i've seen the dvd and now i know which end the fire is supposed to come out of. And as a consequence, I'm now ready to, like, push the big rammer button. You're probably old enough to remember when, like, self-defense DVDs were sold. It's just like that. I'm a black belt now. It's fine. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, this is where I get to say the line of, this is where it gets worse. Uh-huh. now this is where I get to say the line of this is where it gets worse none of the Iowa's

rammer men especially the one in turret two had any training or experience ramming non-standard five bag loads into the guns now complicating the task as the rammer man was shoveling the bags in he was also supposed to simultaneously operate a lever

to shut the powder hoist door off and lower the powder hoist car. There is no mechanism to do this. There is no safety. You just had to do it all at once. Again, bad idea. Well, it's fine. You can just have, like, essentially a dumbwaiter filled with explosives waiting there just in case.

Because, like, you want to, to like tease the possibility of a sympathetic detonation right yeah and like honestly it boggles my mind i know i keep comparing it to tanks but like literally everything in my tank moved on its own if i smash something into place like i hit the blast doors with my leg it opens i pull the shell out the blast door closes on its own i shove it into the breach the breach closes on its. And I just have to get the fuck out of the way. Yeah, it's like, it's different kinds of dangers, right? It's the difference between, like, operating a motorized thing that, like, crushes your entire arm or whatever,

versus not having that and blowing up the entire thing. Right. Now, all of this is bad already, right? Now, imagine, if you will this none of these devices work correctly of course because that's what happened the iowa's ramming arm was broken and uh someone who was not in the turret at the time and had been pulled off the turret for reasons undisclosed shout out to him for getting out of work yeah it would sometimes quote take off uncontrollably at high speed. There's no way to stop it. What?

Okay. Just, whoop, Rammer's gone. Like, not even attached anymore. You watch this, like, giant steel beam just, like, punch off the ship into the ocean. The Rammer man for that specific gun in the middle was a guy named uh seaman robert w blackerms and uh he had learned that he was going to be a rammer man that day and had never fired during live firing before oh rough first day at work dude and the first and last. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now with that, I get to do the thing where I say on 0 9 50 on April 19th, 1989, the crews of the USS Iowa manned their guns about 260 nautical miles off the coast of Puerto Rico because the U.S. Navy has not done enough bad things to the poor state of Puerto Rico.

That's right. Slowly, the guns of turret two reported that they were loaded and ready to fire until it got to the center gun. Ziegler, now we only know what happened due to secondhand testimony because these things weren't recorded at the time. And also there were no survivors. So Ziegler, using the turret phone, said,

quote, we have a problem here. We're not ready yet. We have a problem here. And then responded, left gun loaded. Good job. Center gun We have a problem here. We're not ready yet. We have a problem here. And then responded, Left gun loaded. Good job. Center gun is having a little trouble. Don't worry. We'll straighten it out. Mortensen, who is one of the officers monitoring

the whole thing over turret two's phone line. They call it a phone circuit for some reason. I don't know. Sounds weird to me. And he was in turret one. Heard another crewman confirm that the left and right guns were loaded. Lawrence, who was at the center gun, then called out, I'm not ready yet.

I'm not ready yet. And they noticed that there's panic rising in everybody's voice. Then in one of the last things anybody heard Ziegler yell out said, quote, oh my God, the powder is smoldering. And then someone else screamed, oh my God, there's a flash. Turret two then exploded. Oh my god, there's a flash. Turret 2 then exploded.

A fireball between 2500 and 3000 degrees Fahrenheit traveled at 2000 feet per second with a pressure of 4000 pounds per square inch blew out from the center of gun's open breach. So everybody's soup at this point inside that turret. Surprisingly

not. Now what really happened? Now these turrets are surprisingly protected from explosive force um now if you weren't in the immediate vicinity of the breach of the gun you probably were not killed immediately now the explosion caved in the door between the center gun room and the turret officer's booth and buckled the bulkhead separating the center gun room from the left and right gun rooms. Everything is separated for blast reasons. How to make an open plan office in one easy step.

Now the, what really killed that, because there's like a lower portion of the turret. You could be in like the shell elevator. What killed those guys was a release of toxic gases, which included cyanide gas from burning polyurethane foam which covered the powdered bags Jesus

unfortunately that powder bag detail will become important later during the investigation now shortly after the initial explosion the heat and fire ignited 2000 pounds of powder bags in the powder handling area of the turret all of this is self contained within turret 2 that's supposed to within like shut off right

but like the guy the the rammer has to like close that off man yeah yeah and not to mention he probably wouldn't have because the breach was open so there's like they weren't getting ready to fire everybody was still working the explosion kicked off another explosion, and then either immediately or within a few seconds, 47 people were killed. Now, firefighting crews responded immediately, as firefighting crews are a very integral part of any Navy ship. And they could barely make entry into the turret because it was burning so hot that the walls were glowing what they called, quote, cherry red. Jesus. It was so hot that firefighting crews had to bail out and they simply had to flood the turret with seawater because they were worried about a third explosion killing the entire ship

once most of the water was pumped out the bodies in the turret were removed without noting or photographing the locations despite everybody knowing a massive investigation is about to happen by that point like i'm curious to what extent you have bodies in a meaningful sense. Are you using a stretcher or are you using a shovel at that point? It seemed if you were on the gun platform immediately behind the breach, you're soup. The people, if you were on the turret elevator on the bottom, you're still mostly a body because people noted who was who on the floor. But if you were immediately around the gun, you're still mostly a body because people noted who was who on the floor um but if you were immediately around the gun you're just fucking gone they probably had to scrape you off and despite everybody knowing pretty obviously there's supposed to be a massive investigation coming up

a cleanup crew supervised by lieutenant commander bob holman uh was told to make turret to quote look as normal as possible. Okay. Everyone just, just like a paper over it. We're going to pretend it's, it's going to be fine. That's actually kind of what happened over the next day. Crew swept, cleaned and painted the inside of the turret,

um, loose or damaged, uh, equipment involved in the explosion was simply broken off and tossed into the ocean. That's just called destroying the evidence really absolutely no attempt was made to record any of this um and this is where things go from tragic and you know malfeasance and incompetence to just homophobic seemingly out of

nowhere um as the military tends to do. Now, the USS Iowa was brought back to Norfolk, Virginia for memorial service on April 24th. And after that service, a sailor named Kendall Truitt, who was on the ship, was very close friends with Hartwig, who was the gun captain of the center gun of Turret 2, who was killed. Now, they were very, very close friends. They'd known each other for years. And he told Hartwig's family that... Hartwig, you know, we were talking a couple weeks before he set out, and he told me he took an insurance policy out

and made me the beneficiary. That makes me uncomfortable. I'll give you the money once I figure out all the paperwork or whatever, which is worth like $100,000, which, you know, for a fucking young sealer, that's a lot of money.'s a lot of money i wouldn't even more in the 80s too right and he told him everything up front he's like hey once i figure everything out i'll give you all the money um and the hartwig apparently uh rationalized this by his dad was in the navy and said this was common

all the time when he did it so that's and tru Truett thought it was very, very weird, but you know, what are you going to say? No. Yeah. Now, however, this is the first time his family had ever heard about this policy worth around, you know,

a hundred thousand dollars. And now this family was already receiving his military life insurance, which I'm not sure about what it was in the eighties, but nowadays it's almost a half million dollars. Wow. It's, it's a lot. Every soldiers were significantly more dead than alive. Myself included. Now this is all going to them. Wow. investigation which began under admiral joseph donnell who then appointed commodore richard

milligan to lead the investigation i know this should have been pretty easily closed because when the first people they talked to was skelly the guy that was running the experiment sure and skelly admitted up front that he knew he shouldn't have not been using that powder um and he's like yeah i know it was clearly labeled but yeah i was doing my experiment. Well, lesson learned. Don't do it again. This was not a formal investigation either. Not yet. Theoretically, Milligan's like the only officer who's ordered to investigate this. Nobody's under oath.

Nobody's Mirandized or whatever. Whatever the UCMJ equivalent is. It's not a criminal investigation. It's just one guy poking around. Yeah, and that should have solved it. But of course it didn't. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing this episode, right? Then came the questioning of Lieutenant Daniel Meyer, who admitted on record to Milligan that he and the commander of the Iowa were very aware of Skelly's experiments and despite the fact they were going

on without any higher supervision or approval from anybody within the Department of the Navy, they were fine with them. This is when Captain Edward Messina, who's honestly one of the bigger bastards here. The absolute the bag man in this one. Yes, literally

the bag man. It's sort of the role that colin powell took earlier in his army career that's sort of the thing that that captain messina is in this story is he he is the guy who like understands the unspoken urge to cover up and actually tells you no you can't do that yeah uh he was he was uh milligan's chief of staff and doing most of the in-person questioning during the investigation. And at this point, when Lieutenant Meyer talked about the experimentation, he ordered the stenographer to stop typing and told Meyer, quote, you little shit. You can't say that. The Admiral doesn't want to hear another word about experiments.

I was never here. was never here. Another person added to Milligan's investigative team was a guy named Captain Joseph Maselli from the Naval Sea Systems Commander NAVSEA. I said before that he's the bag man, but Maselli is quite literally the bag man because

all of the powder used aboard the Iowa had been bagged by NAVSEA under Maselli's guidance as their commander. Now, the idea to use those polyurethane coating was as wear reduction jackets, which was Maselli's idea.

Ah, okay. Now that polyurethane foam turned to, you know, horribly deadly gas that killed about half the people in the turret, that would mean that Maselli had a vested interest in making sure this investigation pointed to literally anything else.

He would do that for fucking years. Now, this leads us back to Truett and the life insurance policy. Milligan had been alerted to Hartwig's family's letters and alerted the local Navy investigative service in Norfolk to ask for their assistance in the investigation. At this point, it officially

turned into a criminal investigation focused solely and only on Truett, despite the fact there's no reason to do that. Just, yeah, we're all going to be punished for the good if weird things we're asked to do, right? Now, Captain Messina told the NIS that Hartwig had been at the center gun because he was a center gun's captain and had been looking into the breach at the time of the explosion now i don't need to

point out that there's fucking no way that anybody could possibly know this and it actually went against the statement that the first people who into the turret said for one they found his body at the bottom of the turret at the elevator because he was probably trying to fix a problem meaning he couldn't have been anywhere near the gun when it exploded otherwise they wouldn't have fucking found his body and they knew his body because he had a very distinctive tattoo that his family also agreed that yet yes that is his body there was no evidence that he was anywhere near there this is just something that messina invented out of thin air then messina told the nis that there was a homosexual relationship

between hartwig and truett explaining the life insurance policy again invented the set of thin air with no evidence it wasn't in fact so the uh sort of like field grade officer the flag officer who like decided to put fucking cyanide in in all the turrets, and it certainly wasn't any sort of command responsibility. Instead, uh, gay dudes? Yeah, and in case anybody's unaware, or maybe they don't remember, you could not be gay and be in the military in 1989. It was literally illegal.

Not to mention being gay in the United States in 1989 was not a great time to be openly gay oh yeah they've had they've had hate crimes of like uh the closest to openly gay sailors you could be at that time yeah i mean it's it's not a great time to be gay also there's no real evidence that they were i don't give a shit if they were obviously but like they literally just invented this now messina's excuse for this is like well i got in contact with truett's high school friend and he said true it was gay and they totally fucked the problem is he invented that guy that man did not exist there was no written statement of any kind other than like messinais like citation trust me bro yeah just just great just going to like high school gossip that you also made up yeah like imagine existing in the in the late

1980s as a gay man and like cops from the navy show up like are you gay you're like yes absolutely um now true was brought in and questioned by the nas and they grilled him for hours mostly just trying to get him to say damn it tell us who she is where is toto now they mostly were just trying to get true to admit he was gay which he did not uh admit to and they also brought in truett's wife because he was married to a woman named Carol. They also began pressing her about questions about his sexual orientation as well as hers. If she ever caught Hartwig and Truett having sex,

asking questions about how often her and her husband had sex, and when they did have sex, what kind of sexual acts they engage in, and whether or not she ever fucked any of Truett's co-workers for some reason. Like, it would have been bleak if he had, like, guessed right and either of them had been gay, but the fact that seemingly neither of them were just makes it that much

worse, right? Like, just hauling this poor woman in and being like, yo, how often does this guy fuck you and did he seem gay when he did? Was he gay when he fucked you ma'am fellas is fucking your wife gay uh and i do have to point out and not not that i'm like a journalist or anything but to be completely fair they were investigated before for being gay it was in 1987 where someone anonymously reported to some level of command that hartwig and true were totally gay and the investigation was declared unfounded pretty rapidly and dropped some weird time when you

had to like waste uh waste a chain of commands time investigating yo these two dudes they're totally gay i mean i was in during don't ask don't tell and also in don't ask don't tell was repealed but by the time i was in nobody actually really gave a shit like i had very openly gay soldiers in my units there was like yeah he's gay just don't say anything all right yeah it's like a sort of a cultural change that sort of predated the the legal one i guess yeah for sure and like i can't imagine like in the heat of don't ask don't tell like at its peak i can imagine a lot of people were getting reported i know a lot of unfortunately a lot of gay people were reported and they did get kicked out, which is fucking disgusting.

But also, I can only imagine how many people people simply personally disliked that they reported for being gay. Oh, absolutely. Had to happen all the time. Soldiers are fucking petty bitches that had happened constantly. And like I pointed out before, I don't know or care what their sexual orientation is. What I do know is none of that fucking matters. Intrude's still alive. He's never come out as gay.

Like, he's not trying to prove a point. It's not like he has anything to benefit from. And even if he was gay, it doesn't fucking matter. It didn't blow up a goddamn battleship. It blew up because he, like, loaded the powder bags that specifically said that you shouldn't use them this way into the breach in a homosexual manner it doesn't make sense it doesn't hold water no and it gets even worse once like science gets involved then with nis convincing themselves that these two are gay they decide that okay we have our result we need to work backwards from there and prove it right as all good investigative science does of course now

they came to the conclusion that turret 2 blew up because hartwig had blown up on purpose with a bomb because truett had broken up with him now if this wasn't insane enough soon info about the investigation began to leak to the washington post and other media outlets who ran with the story openly declaring that truett who i should point out is still in the navy and hartwig were gay naming them both and then pointing out that hartwig was at fault for the explosion despite the guy is fucking dead just dragging these guys through the mud for no fucking reason and reporters who ran with the shit later admitted that all of this is given to them by a source within the nis namely nis agent james

whitener i don't know if he's still alive but if he is i wish you a very good time and he had literally given the entire thing on a floppy disk it's it's at this point that like you can tell it's moving from just a simple cover-up where you blame it on the nearest convenient dead guy into something with its own sort of animating malice, right? And it has its own legs to the point that they know this is a lie.

There's no way they don't. There's no fucking evidence for any of this. The evidence they do scrape up will immediately be disproven. They're like, nah, bro. Doesn't matter. But now the story is out there. The NIS had to find something to back their story up,

even if they just simply made it up, which they tried to do. Now, David Smith, who is on the Iowa and a friend of Hartwig, was brought in for questioning. NIS agents kept Smith

in the interrogation room for almost eight hours. And I do need to point out here, in the military, you really don't have any civil rights. No. You're fucked, quite honestly. So there's nothing he could really do. So he's kept there for eight hours. And according to Smith, it was repeatedly threatened that they would charge him

with 47 counts of accessory to murder, perjury, and obstruction of justice, unless he admitted that Hartwig told him that he intended to blow up turret two. Now, Smith obviously refused. And at 10 p.m., Smith was allowed to return to the Iowa because the NIS officers knew he had a nine-hour guard watch immediately following that. So he's now been up for well over a day.

And then one hour after finishing that watch, Smith was arrested once again, brought back into NIS building in Norfolk and interrogated for another six hours. Jesus. Finally, Smith broke down at this point because that's the point and claimed that hartwig had made romantic advances towards him and shown him an explosive timer like in a mechanical bomb probably at a fucking acme magazine and threatened to blow up turret too just i mean that's one step up from like pulling the guy's fingernails out and

of course what he ends up saying is like yeah he like gaily threatened to blow up the turret right three days later smith recanted his statement because i've never been brought in for military questioning but i do have soldiers who were and after you make your statement you have to be brought back in and then you have to sign your statement affirming that's what you said so he was brought back in to make an affirmation of his statement and he was like whoa fuck no i'm not signing this and he recanted which you're allowed to do like even in the military now that statement was then mysteriously leaked to the media without any note that had been recanted with his name still attached to it right of course yep and then it was leaked to the media without any note that had been recanted with his name still

attached to it right of course yep and then it was forward to the fbi again with no note that had been recanted and was therefore garbage uh now when that did not work and get you know the big guns involved they faked it to explosive samples now this is like really like a full court press on this and you can see it it sort of like, spiral, right? You can see it like, pick up its own momentum. Because like, you just get in on this to the extent that like, this has to be what happened, because if it's not, we might get exposed as having lied about it, so therefore, we're gonna like, you know, we're gonna lie and we're gonna lie and we're gonna lie, and each

lie is gonna get a little bit less plausible but we have to do it anyway it really seems like maselli set them up for what the end goal was and it's like if you guys don't get there i'm gonna fucking take you down with me you're like on it boss no problem yep like all good officers do now the norfolk naval shipyard tested the copper nickel alloy that it was like the rotating band within the center gun. And they stated that they found that there was a chemical trace element, including barium, silicon, aluminum, and calcium. Now, they believe that this was evidence of an electronic timer used in a bomb that would cause the explosion. Now, because this is now like a terrorist investigation, the FBI gets

involved and they forward the shit to the FBI. The FBI took one look at it and it's like, this is fucking garbage. Yeah, just like reading this thing. It's like it's written. It's from the Navy. It's written in crayon. it just says

gay terrorist gay bomb no not that one the new one now the fbi said they did not believe an electronic timing device was present and there was no explosive chemicals found at all and the chemicals found on that internal band likely came from break-free solvent used by the navy uh to break free of the the like the projectile that was stuck in the gun after the exploded because the fucking thing didn't go anywhere and they had to spread you know effectively like wd-40 to get the shit out and that's what the navy had found now when the fbi submitted their test results the the navy then immediately terminated the request for help from the FBI. Great. Fantastic.

Your only role here was to rubber stamp this sort of crayon thing that we sent you. We can't even get the FBI to be on our side during the gay terrorist bombing. What the fuck can we do now? It's not the same bureau it used to be. We used to have a proper bureau that framed gay people for crimes now a different navy testing facility said that again there was no evidence of a timer being present something milligan and maselli were insistent on so instead of changing or admitting they were wrong they simply changed their theory now instead of

using a mechanical bomb hartwig had somehow used a chemical explosive not a timer now this is despite all of their previous evidence to include when milligan pointed out they totally found directions to build a mechanical bomb in hartwig's locker evidence they mysteriously lost would ask for yep and after like coercing the statement from the guy that he was like yeah he showed me a mechanical detonator. Yeah. So now their lie made even less sense. And in July of 1989,

Milligan submitted his report, which is 60 page in total that put all the blame on Hartwig. Though the final report says again, they use the mechanical timer, despite again, there being no evidence and that being subtly disproven. And they have going back on that. They just,

I guess they didn't feel like editing, which an author i can understand this shit sucks uh now this report was accepted immediately without critique by the u.s navy and the u.s government can i say that 60 pages is pretty fucking sparse for like you you read about like technical reports for for disasters and you know they run into the thousands a lot of the time. This is like padding the word count, like using a larger font kind of thing. Yeah, barely submitting a novella, that's what you sent a contract for, Milligan, you fuckin' asshole. I'm just projecting now. Never, yeah, we're not giving you that advance off of this.

Now, pretty much nobody else accepted this um journalists despite the fact they were fully on board with this bullshit investigation this entire time as well as people within the government uh immediately began poking holes in this as well as did the families of all of the dead sailors who are like no my loved ones kept complaining about how much this ship was a gigantic death trap. I feel like that probably had something to do with it. Um, and not to mention like Hartwig's family who kind of sort of started down this whole road with their letter writing campaign was like,

well, how the fuck did you put all this at our kid? Right? No commander of the ship at the end of this investigation or even fucking Skelly gotten any trouble at all. Uh, however, almost immediately john glenn of you know space fame uh who was then a congressman began looking into the investigation

and he had like enough pull to get some weight behind it and this eventually led to another investigation this one conducted by sandia labs away from the u.s navy now specifically when a sandia technician asked for the shells that had been removed from the naval gun so they could you know look at them for the chemical makeup that they said was a bomb right maybe we lost them whoops yep uh we we threw them in a dumpster the dumpster got lit on fire and we shot it in the space tragic accident yeah the dumpster is currently like heading towards the bottom of the marianas trench for some reason in glutonimo bay uh there is just the dumpster is currently like heading towards the bottom of the marianas trench for some reason in guantanamo bay uh there is just a dumpster sitting in a cell and nobody's entirely sure why do not open until 2079 now uh when other components were looked into again they

found no hints of a bomb but they did agree with the fbi that they the navy had found break-free solvent uh which the nas was still insisting was an explosive for some reason that's when uh stephen mitchell who worked in a different testing lab i was coordinating with sandy i pointed out that the propellant pellets within the powder bags like now when i think of gunpowder i don't think of like large pellets but they they were fucking hamster food shit right like charcoal briquettes of gun powder yeah right and they're all stuffed into a bag which is then of course wrapped in a horrible polyurethane case which will then kill you he came up with an idea that like hey these

pellets are probably the problem like if they're hit hard enough within this bag they can spark independently cause a chain reaction and that could be a problem because you're ramming it with the breach open so like if they ram it too hard the pellets burst and it causes a flash fire when the rammer is retracted the fire is just going to rush into the turret and explode and that's probably what happened and you know this might surprise you when i say this has happened before really uh during the uss mississippi decades before i think it was even before world war ii same firing system same powder bag setup and that's what happened and when the sandia lab guy's like well we need your documents on the uss mississippi so we can compare notes the navy's like

you're not getting anything about the mississippi yeah we lost those also it's uh it's taking a trip to cuba uh so sandy labs like well fuck it i guess we'll have to conduct our own tests and then and since they're still working with the u.s navy here to include maselli who is still on the case and still at navsea uh when sandy labs asked maselli we need you to conduct the test to confirm this this pellet theory or to test it he refused he said it's pointless that doesn't work that way that's not how our powder burns so sandy lab said fuck it we built our own test rig we'll do it ourselves just the guiltiest looking motherfuckers you can imagine my t-shirt saying i didn't blow up the ussi was etc etc um so sandy lab built their own they conducted over 400 drop tasks so they they had a rig that weighed the same

amount as the rammer that would hit the bags the same speed they believed it would take to launch a 2700 pound shell saw what happened they stacked five bags of the same kind of powder and the same lot number and the same configuration that it would have been and hit them with a weight equal to that of the speed of the ram we're using the uss iowa it exploded every single time and destroyed their test rig rebuilding my test rig for the 499th time you know i think that that guy might be lying the gay terrorists it's it was such a success rate uh one of the technicians like commented like it was almost like it was meant to do this just not what you want to hear when it comes to like blowing up a battleship on accident works perfectly the uh the button that destroys that destroys the entire ship.

Now, the Navy did not backpedal on their test. However, they did immediately halt further use of 16-inch guns within the fleet, which remained in place until 1990, when all powder had been replaced with a kind that was not apparently manufactured by Acme. And from that is where we get our most likely reason for the explosion. The broken rammer slammed into the powder bags, the force of 2,800 pounds force per square inch, which is way too high.

This caused the powder bags to be shoved into the barrel too far, too hard and too fast, compressing them and causing them to ignite and eventually explode. Yeah. By a guy who had started work that morning. Right. I shouldn't even be here today the most gruesome version of clerks um now after this the navy would launch again their own investigation because they could not possibly believe the second investigation that they

launched themselves again with maselli in charge of it who by all accounts did everything he could to make sure that these powder bags would not explode, but actually caused four more explosions during his own tests. He only did ten. Four of them exploded. And that was like with your finger on the scale trying to be like, don't explode, don't explode,

don't explode. Pretty much, yeah. The Sandia people looked at his numbers and were like, he's using 25% of the amount of force he's supposed to and they're still exploding. Now by July of 1991, the Navy closed their investigation, somehow coming to the conclusion that despite all of this testing and them changing the powder, changing the rammer and changing everything they do to make sure this would not explode again. They simply said, I guess we'll never know what blew up the USS Iowa. Sorry about that gay thing too much time has passed impossible to tell could have been anything um but we weren't we weren't

necessarily wrong we were just don't worry about it and like when confronted like well what about like you dragged hartwig's name to the mud and he's dead true it's still alive you fucking ruined him they're like well we never charge him with any crimes like they're innocent until they're Dragged Hartwig's name to the mud and he's dead. Druid's still alive. You fucking ruined him. They're like, well, we never charged him with any crimes. Like they're innocent until they're proven guilty. So like, you know, they're fine. In 2001, the captain of the Iowa, Captain Mousali, told the Washington Post, only God knows what really happened in that turret. We're never really going to know for sure.

Mash all up, bro. We simply have no idea. Listen, sometimes your time just comes. Takes huge drag on cigarette. It's like fucking the character from I was like, how'd you sleep last night? I don't sleep. I only dream.

Like, man, shut the fuck up. And now the only person punished for this entire thing despite you know the memory of poor hartwig was kendall truett himself of course now the reason for that was despite the fact he committed no crimes was charged with no crimes and never been proven to be gay which is again against the law at the time his petition for re-enlistment which back in the day you actually do i think you actually do have to do that now too you can't just like automatically re-enlist was denied in 1990 so like he was a lifer even through all this he's like yeah my ship sucks the navy fucking sucks but this is my career which is an energy i can respect because that was

definitely me through my second contract now every single lawsuit from the surviving families were dismissed due to the Ferris Doctrine. You cannot sue the government in regards to military affairs, even if they are grossly incompetent on a criminal level for some fucking reason. Every officer and even junior officers all had very long, rewarding careers. They suffered absolutely no repercussions. If that wasn't bad enough, later on, the Navy Reserves sent a letter to the deceased Hartwig's family addressed to him, despite he'd been dead for over a decade,

asking him to join the Naval Reserve. The only lawsuit that was successful was actually in regards to the book that I used as the source for this episode, when the, I believe it was Maselli sued them for libel and they settled out of court macelli at least never made admiral like he retired as a captain so that that puts the navy ahead of of of the army in terms of like your bag man for this stuff doesn't at least then become you know a general officer makes admiral just enough

time to get caught up in fat leonard now alice uh we do a thing on this show called questions from the legion um and that is uh if you donate to the show you can ask us a very unimportant question we answer it uh as a way to kind of cushion the blow from whatever horrible incomprehensible horror we were just talking about um and today of course is tailored to you and someone asked what is the worst uniform you've ever collected the worst uniform i've ever collected oh that's difficult actually i'm gonna go back to my childhood here, right, because after the Soviet Union fell, like, I was born in 1991, so the Soviet Union collapsed a couple of months after I was born. And as a kid, I went to visit Russia with my family, and this was at the point where the sell-off was fully in effect, right?

You could buy pretty much any Soviet implement from, you know, if you wanted a crate full of AKs, I think you could have got them in Moscow fairly easily. But me being a kid, right, I went around the Kremlin, I went around Arbutskaya, and there were guys selling Soviet uniforms everywhere. And so I picked up this, um, like, this Soviet tank crew's parade uniform, in this hideous shade of blue, and I was so,

so happy with this fucking, like, uh, like, petrol blue suit jacket with the black collar tabs on it. And, like, just in the way that you are as a kid. That's my answer. Is yeah, sort of 90's Soviet tank officer parade uniform.

Obviously the tanker in me absolutely wants that uniform. And I know, I've never seen it, but I just know it looks disgusting. They're like, cause they came in like two flavors, right? Like service dress and parade dress or whatever. just know it looks disgusting they're like because they came in like two flavors right like service dress and parade dress or whatever right and like the the the green one looks fine looks good it's like what you imagine like a soviet uniform to look like and then inexplicably just for like you know uh you know mayday parades and stuff they also did a one, and it's just the worst color I can ever imagine a uniform being.

I'm going- by the time this episode comes out, I'll already be in Armenia, but when I go, I'm going to try to get those grotesque berets with the flag on them. Ooh, yeah yeah yeah. I can probably get a couple of those. Actually, there's a lot of fucked berets that would be strongly in the running, and I think the weirdest item that I own to this day is... I got this thrown in with a set of coveralls that I ordered, but I got a beret from Russia that's in camouflage, it's in digital camouflage, and it's not it's it's it's not wool it's or any

kind of fabric it's ripstop nylon so you can't mold this fucking thing it just sits on your head like a chef's hat oh that's incredible that reminds me of what country is that tajikistan's like national police director had a digital pattern peaked cap. That rose. It was simultaneously the worst and best thing I've ever seen. I'm going to have to try to track down some very cursed old relics that I can find

when I'm there. There's going to be a ton. I'll see if I can just buy a tank. Fuck it. Yeah, just ship it back. Let's declare it at customs. It fine alice thank you so much for uh joining me i'm wanting to get you on the show absolute pleasure anytime and you're you're most welcome on all three of the the podcasts i've got two out of three i just needed i need an excuse to talk about James Bond now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, frankly, just pick a movie. Yeah. I guess this is the

place to plug your shows. If for anybody that listens to this show that for some reason does not listen to yours somehow. Yeah, listen to Kill James Bond, listen to Trash Future, listen to Well, There's Your Problem. Follow me on Twitter at aliceavazandum. And thanks for having me. Yeah, anytime.

And until next time uh don't blow up a turret with you in it i guess yeah don't don't don't do that