Sea Control - Sea Control 488 - Disaster at Honda Point with Robert Kolker

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

Links1. "Dead Reckoning," by Robert Kolker, The Atavist Magazine, No. 142, August 2023. 2. Robert Kolker's official website.

Hey folks, it's Jared. We have journalist Bob Kolker on the program this week. He did a deep dive story into the disaster at Honda Point. If you don't know what I'm talking about, stick around and find out. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics.

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hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, showmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Robert Colker, and we're going to discuss his article, which appeared in The Atavist, entitled Dead Reckoning, and it describes the disaster at Honda Point. So, Bob, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, please? Hi, Jared. Thanks for having me on the program.

I'm a journalist and author. I wrote for many years for New York Magazine, and I specialize in research-heavy, narrative-true stories like the Honda Point disaster. Well, thank you again for joining us as we're my listeners. All opinions today are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. But we talked about a little bit of this in our email exchange here. But what is your what is your own relationship with the sea before we get into this story? I'm a complete amateur. I've been on the Chesapeake a lot, actually, with my family. My parents had a boat for a while, and that was our big activity when I was a teenager. But I'm not a military person or a nautical person in general, and so I came into the Honda Point disaster kind of cold, rather amazed by everything that happened. Okay, so my own background is in the Navy surface warfare communities, like we're the ones who drive ships and stuff.

And I've been reading about Honda Point for probably 25 years at this point, because it's just a case study that we go back to over and over and over again as we talk about bridge resource management, which is like the way that we run the bridge of the ship and the way that we communicate amongst ourselves. But how did you actually become aware of what had happened at Honda Point? Because it's pretty obscure if you're not sort of in that community. It is amazing to me what you just said, that it was a touch point for you throughout your training or studies, because some of the Navy historians I interviewed said that it actually was a thing that they kind of half knew about, but that it didn't come out that much, that it had been sort of washed away with history or been eclipsed, I guess, by other things that had happened. And obviously, you know, the Battle of Midway is a little more important than how to pound a point. So it kind of it kind of disappears from view. But what I learned about it was a few years ago, an old editor of mine who is still a good friend of mine was talking with some friends of his and two friends mentioned it to him. They said it was the largest peacetime disaster in Navy history.

They said that several ships all ran aground one after another. They said it happened off the coast of California, and they said that no one talks about it anymore. And so my editor, who always has a nose for news, suggested it to me as a topic, and I kind of half-heartedly wandered on the internet about it. And then one particular issue with the disaster really stuck out at me, and it really had less to do with the currents or radio direction finding technology or even issues of the chain of command and following the leader. What stuck out to me was the thought that the squadron commander, Edward Watson, just as the court-martial is getting started, and it stands to be the

biggest court-martial in Navy history, stands up and to the court and to the media declares that he's responsible and that everyone should blame him. And I thought, how amazing, how interesting. And I guess the cynic in me thought that if this had happened in 2023 and not 1923, that it might have unfolded a little more, a little differently. That maybe someone in that situation would want to muddy the waters a little bit or even hire a crisis PR consultant or might try to find various ways to back out of blame to mitigate their exposure. And so I wondered, is there a difference between then and now? Or was Watson's decision more complex than it seemed? Was he backed into a corner? Did he genuinely believe he was doing the right thing? Or was he sacrificing himself for expediency to help other people? what did the Navy's code and culture have to do with that decision? And how amazing that public perception of Watson changed so drastically before and afterward. He started out as the villain of the disaster. And then as soon as he took the blame, he became the hero.

And then the more I looked into it, I was amazed again, because once the whole case was adjudicated and he received what was seen to be a relatively light punishment, he went from being the hero to back to being the villain again. So to me, all of that was fascinating. It was about what we as humans do in situations like this, these highly visible failures and how we try to find meaning in them. So you mentioned having spoken with a couple of different Navy historians. How did you set about researching this?

Because you did manage to pull together a lot of background detail that I hadn't seen previously. And when I say like, it's a lot of atmospheric stuff that you've kind of brought together here. Again, as I've studied this over the course of 25 years or had it presented to me,

I should say, I'm not like going out there doing my own research, but it's very much about like what the ships are doing from a navigational perspective. You had a lot of color in this story. So can you tell us a little bit

about the research process and how you set about this? There are at least five books about Honda Point, but they all have strengths and weaknesses. One seems rather authoritative, but it was written rather early. And so new information and new insights aren't a part of that book. And it's also the sourcing is unclear. And then still others have terrific first person testimony in full paragraph after paragraph form from people who are on the ships. And so that's very useful.

But then in places where they don't have that, they make up dialogue or they dramatize scenes, stuff that just isn't useful if you're trying to write a nonfiction article. So there was a lot of separating the good stuff from the bad stuff. But my focus at the beginning was Watson himself. And so I did go to the National Archives. It turns out that Edward Watson, the squadron commander, is the son of a very famous Navy admiral who participated in one of the most famous Navy battles ever, the Mobile Bay battle in the Civil War. And so between the two of them, they do have their papers preserved in the National Archives. Most of it is the father, but a lot of the son's Honda Point materials are from there. And so that was exciting to be able

to go treasure hunting there and to look for color. And that really was what I was looking for because the transcript of the court of inquiry and that's available and the books between them all, you can pull technical information out and have insights that is reliable. You just have to take a lot of time to pull out the good stuff and the bad stuff. Well, then let me ask one that's slightly off script is where did the artwork come from for your story to these really striking visual presentation that accompanied everything that you had written? I loved it too. I thought it was wonderful. I was privileged to have this piece run in a publication called The Atavist, which is an online publication that showcases

one big, long piece of nonfiction every month. So they publish just 12 things a year. And that means that they have the time and the care to run something super long like this. This is probably longer than two long magazine articles back to back. And then they also commission their own artwork. And so the artists did a wonderful job, not just with the cover art, but with other illustrations all the way through. Why were these ships on this mission? And what is kind of driving them to take the chances that they're taking here? This is a training exercise in 1923, at a time when the Navy is not doing so great compared to how it was just a few years earlier. The U.S. had won the war, but that was five years earlier, and budgets were being cut.

And there was a White House, the Harding White House, that was in the middle of several different scandals. And the biggest scandal of them all, the Teapot Dome scandal, involved the Secretary of the Navy and land owned by the Navy. So it was not a very proud time for the Navy. And it was unclear exactly what the United States' position in the world was going to be, because while we were more positioned than ever to become a global leader and to be involved in things like the League of Nations, there was also a lot of debate about exactly how much of that we should be doing. So to be in the Navy was to be in a problematic position. Also, the summer before the Honda Point disaster, Warren Harding actually died. He'd been sick for a while, but his death

was precipitated by him actually being on board of a ship that was in a collision with a destroyer that was in Edward Watson's squadron. That's a fun bit of trivia that didn't make it into the finished story. And while the Watson and his people were not at fault, it certainly was not a good thing for them to be a part of. And the fact that the president died a week or two later was not good either. So we're talking about a lot of bad stuff at once. And we're talking about a squadron commander, Watson, who is not young. He's like, I want to say 52. And he's had a long career. He had one command in World War I. And it was at the very end with a battleship. And he never saw battle. And his father is this legend, right? So they get a training exercise to go down

the coast of California. It's a very typical mission. The difference is that they're being allowed to go 20 knots the entire time. It's a speed trial. And because of fuel and because of all the political goings on that I've mentioned, the Navy hadn't asked its destroyers to go 20 knots in years. And so it's, it was a moment to show their stuff. And not only that, it was a competition. Watson squadron was going up against another squadron. There was squadron 11 and squadron 12. And while the record shows that the squadron 12 commander wasn't necessarily as invested in this as a competition as Watson was, Watson clearly was. He said, we're going to go 20 knots and we're going to, you know, people said to him beforehand, what if the equipment

fails? What if we can't maintain that speed for as long as we need to? Sure, we can do it for four hours, but what about 14 hours and what's going to happen? And he said, well, that's what this is for. This is a trial. Let's do it. He's trying to show his leadership. And also what that means is they're going to be aimed for maximum efficiency. And that means that in many instances during the trip, they're going to follow the leader. They're going to have just one ship doing communications with the shore. It's going to be the leading ship, the one that Watson is on, and everybody else is just going to follow by sight. And that becomes more of an issue once visibility completely is obliterated by the weather. How well did you understand what happened

from a navigation standpoint? And then can you explain to listeners how these ships were making their way down the coast? I had to learn this from the ground up, although, I mean, I knew what dead reckoning was, and I understood, you know, what a compass is. But apart from that, I wasn't terribly well versed. And it's an interesting moment technologically for the Navy, because World War I had introduced the first glimmers of radio signals being used in navigation. And most rewardingly for the Navy and for the British Navy, they were able to use radio signals to ping against German submarines as they went to the surface once a day to communicate with home. And so they were able to use the direction of those signals to send ships out to destroy those

German submarines. So everybody knew it was good and everybody wanted to use it. But then there were budgetary concerns. What if we give a gadget to each one of these ships? Can we afford it? Does the Navy even want it? Because they're steeped in a culture of dead reckoning and they don't necessarily want to rely on a gadget. And so 1923 is this huge transition moment where the Navy ships do not have radio direction finding on their ship. The radio direction finding is at various lighthouses up and down the East Coast and the West Coast. And what the ships are given is a gadget with an antenna that can receive signals from the shore. And then the lighthouses then through radio communication, deliver a reading, a compass reading, but it's not reliable.

It's sometimes you get a reciprocal reading because the antenna has two sides and it's a loop. So who knows if you're really going nine, if the bearing is 90 degrees or, you know, or the opposite. And so you're, you're a little annoyed, frankly, if you're a dyed in the wool Navy person and you're on this ship, you're saying, oh, I could do it my way, or I could rely on this gadget that may or may not be right. And that's the moment we're in. The irony is that this technology really is the father or grandfather of radar. And it ends up being what revolutionizes warfare in World War II. But that's, as we know, 15, 16, 17 years away. So what eventually happened to the ships? well um there's no visibility the water is rough they don't realize it but this huge earthquake

that happened to history making earthquake in in japan is actually changing the currents where they're going um so they're not going the rate of speed that they think they're going that's one problem that could be because of the rough water or it could because of the currents they can't see the shore so they can't get a fix to use dead reckoning as often as they'd like to. And there's another shipwreck, a non-Navy ship that needs help further down the way. And that shipwreck creates a clog in radio transmissions because rescue crews are going there. And so they're kind of on their own. And they decide to trust dead reckoning. The short answer is they decide to trust it over radio direction finding they start to get these readings from the shore that

aren't what they think they should be and they decide that the reading the readings are wrong the real short answer to this is that the radio direction finding was correct and that they didn't trust it and they went with their gut and their gut was wrong there comes a point as you're going south down the west coast where you got to hang a left and and go into the Santa Barbara Channel. And they turned left too soon because they thought they had already passed the turn and that they were about to go straight to where this other shipwreck was. They said, we better turn now or else we're going to be caught up in that mess. And we don't want to be caught up in that mess. So they turn left, but they turn left too soon and they go straight into

Honda Point, which is essentially like a little pointing finger that's pointing right out from the west coast and it's it's not friendly coastline it is a bermuda triangle of the west coast i suppose there are other ones you can call up and down there's one up in canada i think that it's a bermuda triangle as well but this is the one down here and there are other shipwrecks there and then because they're following the leader one after another you know seven ships all run of ground before the ones behind them rise up and decide not to go in. Can you explain dead reckoning for the listeners? Because I know what you're talking about, you know what dead reckoning is, but I think we have a lot of folks who are not necessarily mariners who don't actually

understand what dead reckoning is. This is a way for sailors over centuries to figure out their geographic location based on the information they have in front of them, which is where their position on the shoreline, their rate of speed, where they were the last time they checked their position, and quite often their position in the stars, in relationship to the stars and their, you know, compass. And so it's an inference, essentially, based on all the available information. And it's tried and true, and it's still used today, although certainly today there are more accurate means that are available to anyone who has a cell phone. No, we still teach and train to like the six rules of dead reckoning. So that that has not gone away in any way, shape or form. What was the aftermath for the participants in the Navy?

23 people died, which is a horrible tragedy and certainly a terrible thing to have happened. In the years to come, looking back, looking at seven different destroyers, each with around 100 people on it, one could say that it was lucky that there weren't more people dead. I was actually kind of shocked at the low numbers of the casualties. Because again, I started from the navigational perspective, not necessarily from the human perspective. and I was kind of blown away when we got towards the end of the story and you revealed that the casualty number was 23. Yeah, exactly. It's interesting. There are lots of accounts of people keeping their cool.

And there are no real accounts of anybody really losing it, except for, of course, one horribly injured person who died on the ship. But in terms of group operations and reactions and escape, and getting to the shore, there are no accounts of Lord of the Flies situations where people suddenly aren't Navy people anymore. So there was a lot of decorum involved. But immediately afterward, there were questions about the causes. And the Secretary of the Navy even was quoted saying maybe it was bad from the earthquake. There were typhoon level waves near Los Angeles just a day earlier. Maybe that must have had something to do with that. And then other people

said maybe it was the radio direction finding that was the error. And for a while, they pointed the finger at that. But really, in no time at all, the Navy announced there was going to be a court of inquiry. And because of that, the main people, the commanders of all the ships, plus the squadron commander, Edward Watson, weren't commenting for the media and weren't talking to anyone because they knew there would be a court of inquiry. And that created a media firestorm where the New York times, even in their op-ed, Page said, you know, they've been strangely silent and they owe us an explanation. And that's when the finger pointing begins. And by the time the court of inquiry begins, which is essentially like a grand jury proceeding, it's meant to be a private proceeding

that precedes a trial, there's so much pressure on the Navy that they make it public. And it gets reported on every day, like the trial of the century. And from day one, Watson and the other commanders of all the other ships are a target. And Watson knows that if they all go down, that several people who had absolutely nothing to do with it other than following the leader are going to have their careers destroyed. Now, that's one thing. But the second thing on top of all that is that they can't really testify during the court of inquiry because they're potential defendants. And in fact, when the one high-ranking officer of the ship that Watson was on gets up there on the stand and starts to testify, they stop the testimony in the middle and say, nope, you're a defendant now, too, because you said something that implicates you. So let's pause for a minute and think about it.

You're Edward Watson. You have a famous father. You have a family name that needs protecting. You went to Annapolis. You're the best of the best. You've been tested, and you failed the test. And now, not just you, but everyone around you is going to go down for this. And not only that, but you can't have your say. You can't testify on your own behalf before your court-martial, and neither can any of the other people involved. Your hands are completely tied. that what what do you do and what he decided to do was to i guess you would call it wave immunity

although i don't that's the technical term that's the law and order term but in other words expose himself to prosecution by by saying you know you know i i by formally asking the court to testify and at the same time issuing statements to the media one after another saying it's my fault yeah, I didn't trust the radio direction finding, and it was right. Perhaps the current said something to do with it. We had a little wobbly stuff with the radio earlier, and maybe that had something to do with it, but it's my fault. I'm the commander, blame me. And he was rolling the dice there, not just that they would allow him to give his version of what happened, but that also that all of the other people who couldn't testify would also stand up and waive their right,

their immunity as well and ask for their chance to testify. The idea here was to save as many of them as possible from having their careers destroyed. And in a way it worked because the people to be found guilty at court-martial were Watson and his navigator. And I think that's it. Everyone else made it through okay. And to me, that's another interesting thing. Yeah, guilt or innocence, it's about a butterfly effect there. Like when you look on at the people whose careers were saved by Watson's decision, some of them went on to enormously accomplished careers in World War II, perhaps it's saving any number of lives. And so you wonder exactly about the long-term effects of various decisions like that. Well, I'll say just a couple more things on the

subject of dead reckoning so again for the layperson it's sort of an approximate fixing of your position on the face of the earth it's like you have your known position while you can see the lighthouse whatever and you can sort of identify as like okay i'm exactly in this place but where dead reckoning happens is when you lose all your visibility and now you're just steaming along you know the course that you think you're steering and you know that the speed that you think you're going so you continue to plot yourself along and these ships like they lost visibility very early on the transit and they were in a dead reckoning situation for hours and hours like did it span multiple days i don't know it just seemed like it went quite a long time i'd

have to go back and check it but hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of approximating their own position to the point like it's somewhere you're you're in a massive box of uncertainty at this point, because you don't know what all the environmental factors are acting on your ship. So like the level of uncertainty here before they make that left turn to go in the Santa Barbara channels, there's immense and very hard for the people to understand today, given like the technology is readily available to all of us. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have today. I'd like to thank my guest, Bob Kolker. Bob, where can we find you online? What are you working on next? My website is robertkolker.com and my last name

spelled K-O-L-K-E-R. And I am a generalist. I write a lot of narrative nonfiction stories for magazines and books. Sometimes it's about families in crisis. Other times it's complicated yarns like the Honda Point story. So you can check my archive. My next project is a book about a family with a genetic mutation for early onset dementia. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. We will have a link to your website as well as the article on the show notes there. So listeners check that out, but thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

© transcript Emily Beynon © transcript Emily Beynon