I just finished a book about this astounding event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster. The book is "Tragedy at Honda", published by Naval Institute Press.
It's about a destroyer fleet that ran aground during the 20s, whilst making a fast run along the California coast from San Francisco to San Diego. The book goes into detail about the disaster, as well as about the subsequent Navy trials of the officers in charge of the fleet. Basically, they were playing follow the leader, and the leader turned left into the coastal rocks due to navigational errors. The rest of the fleet just followed the leader into the rocks, causing nine of the ships to run aground. Seven sank, and the other two were badly damaged but managed to extricate themselves. It remains one of the worst naval disasters in US peacetime Naval history.
This event, and lessons learned from it, is one that was hammered into us when preparing to become qualified to con a ship.
The ships were in line astern or column formation, and following the flagship (the entire formation was 14 ships of Destroyer Squadron 11, the USS Delphy was the flagship). This was a standard formation for some operations, including high speed transit of a relatively narrow channel.
The Commodore (Cpt Edward Watson) treated the transit as a training opportunity and directed the evolution to be conducted under simulated wartime conditions. He also ordered all ships to stay in close formation, probably to maintain visual separation in the fog.
Yeah, a high speed transit through a designated channel, in the fog. It sounds stupid, but believe it or not sometimes Navy vessels have to do such things, and you have to practice at some point.
Although the Commodore ordered the formation and the ships were following the flagship, so the flagship navigation was at fault, each skipper has a responsibility to the safety of his own ship. So almost all of the ships commanders were court-martialed, although the Commodore accepted responsibility for the event.
The issues at the trials included whether a major earthquake in Japan a few days earlier altered currents on the California coast to such an extent that "dead reckoning", which was being used by many of the ships, was "fooled". I think that this is very unlikely, but at the time it gained some credence.
Dead reckoning was standard operating procedure at the time when there were no visual sightings or queues, such as at night or during fog. Of course sight lines to known points were preferred, but if you can’t see them you can’t take such lines.
This was a transitional Navy, technology was just starting to provide navigation aids that could see in the dark, and most Captains and navigators had little confidence in them, particularly smaller ships like destroyers. It is easy to look back at it in hind-sight and say this was stupid, but now we trust the tech. This was 1923, and the first US Navy navigational radiobeacons went in in 1921. However RDF had been on some US Navy ships since the USS Lebenon in 1906. For most of the Captains of the ships involved they had been using other than radio techniques as primary sources the vast majority of their careers. Remember, these were all destroyer drivers, and the habit of the day was that once an officer entered the destroyer fleet he stayed there. Since RDF was in most common use on larger vessels (cruisers and battleships) the majority of the skippers probably had little confidence in such things.
Prior to 1917 only the largest ships had RDF systems, but in 1917, as a result of German U-boat activity, all destroyer and larger combatants could be so equipped (Model DA). But it was not until the development of the Model DB system in 1922 that people really started to trust them for navigation.
As for the earthquake causing issues, it is undeniable that there was some influence from the earth quake on the local currents. The steamship SS Cuba ran aground in the same area the same day, and potentially suffered the same issue. I have seen the impact of a remote large earthquake on local currents myself, while navigating coastal waters. Small, but there, and back in the day if they had been running DR for a couple of days that small error may have become large. Not sure I really buy it myself, but it is not without some validity.
T!
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