We Will Not Forget 2
These are some of my notes regarding the tragic Forrestal (CVA-59) fire 50 years ago this Saturday, on 29 July 1967.
http://columbuscameragroup.com/abruzi.php4 The fire and aftermath of one of the “high order” explosions was captured by now-retired Rear Admiral Peter B. Booth.
While not the instigators of the fire, the vehicles of so much death and destruction were the Korean War–vintage AN/M65A1 1000-lb. bombs. These were deadly on two accounts.
They had thin-shelled casings, basically thin tubes of steel with rounded nose and truncated conical aft body. As mounted on the A-4 Skyhawks of VA-46 and VA-126, they mounted a “conical fin assembly” for better streamlining, in lieu of the readily recognizable open box fins of World War II.
http://inklingsandyarns.com/xv.php A crewman provided this image of the M65s on the day of the fire. I apologize for not being able to credit him.
They were quite unlike the “modern” bombs of the time, the very streamlined MK 80 series of the MK 81 250-, MK 82 500-, MK 83 1000-, and MK84 2000-lb bombs, which were thick-walled and covered with a coarse ablative surface. Somewhere in my notes I have comparative “cook off” times between the two types of bombs; i.e. how quickly they would explode if engulfed in a fire. I don’t want to quote numbers without looking at the notes, but I do recall the comparative figures. The MK 80s could survive in a fire more than three times as long as the M65s. This means that firefighters would have at least three times longer to knock down the fire. Further, the majority of MK 80s, which cooked off did so with a “low order” explosion. The M65s all went in “high order.” Basically this was the difference between a big pop and really big explosion.
MK 83 1000-lb general purpose bombs.
The other aspect is the explosives they contained. The AN/M65s, constructed in 1953, were loaded with “Comp B” explosive. Unlike modern explosives, “Comp B” became unstable with age and hot, humid storage conditions. At the least these weapons were 14 years old and had been stored in the open in the hot, humid climate of Okinawa.
A plane handler, William Boote, told me: “I remember to this day the feeling I had as I touched one of the 1000-pound bombs and commented to (co-handlers) that I didn’t ‘like the looks of these bombs, and that something bad was going to happen.’”
There were 80 bombs aboard 15 attack aircraft totalling 24 1/2-tons of high explosives for the 11:00 a.m. mission. Eight tons consisted of 16 old 1,000-pound bombs. The seven which exploded did so in a catastrophic “high order” fashion, as they were designed to do against an enemy. The nine others were listed as missing or jettisoned.
This is my dozen-year old crude attempt to depict the bombs as mounted on the aircraft. I have been unable to find any with decent detail that shows the conical fin assembly. The first drawing is based on Navy technical drawings I obtained. The second is from a very small undetailed photograph. The third shows it in its Korean War form. I would gladly appreciate any information that can help me correct this drawing.
