DESRON 11 TRAGEDY 1923
Foreground: USS S.P. Lee DD-310
Background : USS Nicholas DD-311
The first modern-day destroyers, using oil
instead of coal for fuel. 262 (more, by some accounts) of the flush deck four stackers
were built 1918-1922.
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From The South Side Of Pt. Pedernales
Foreground: USS Chauncey DD-296
By Chaunceys Stern: USS Young DD-312
Background On Rocks: Uss Woodbury DD-309 and USS Fuller DD-297
Background On Open Sea: Seven Destroyers At Anchor From DESDIV's 31 and 32
Standing Prior To Their Departure To San Diego At 15:00 Hour, 9 September 1923
DESRON 11 consists of Destroyer Divisions 31, 32, 33 and the flagship USS Delphy. Each division consists of six of the ships.
The ships have been on maneuvers in the Puget Sound area and are returning to home port, San Diego. After a layover at San Francisco, they get underway at 0730 hours on September 8, 1923. The trip spans 427 miles and orders are received to cruise at 20 knots as an engineering study of the boilers and turbines. Only two of the four boilers will be used on each vessel, a fuel conservation measure. Of the 19 ships in DESRON 11, four do not join the formation due to engineering difficulties. Fifteen ships head out to sea through the Golden Gate.
Enroute, the ships engage in gunnery practice and various other maneuvers. Soon, the California coastline is obscured by the ever present fog. The ships plow through the Pacific Ocean at 20 knots on a course of 150 degrees true using the only available means of navigation, dead reckoning. The plan is to turn to port and a new heading of 095 degrees once they reach the Santa Barbara Channel around 9 PM.
The fog thickens along the coast and as night falls, the flagship orders all ships to fall into a single line and "follow the leader", an accepted practice. This means the flagship will make all navigational decisions and the others will simply follow behind her. None of the other ships are allowed to contact shore stations and, of course, no one would dare to question the navigational ability of the flagship. There is a Radio Direction Finding Station (RDF) on Point Arguello, just north of the turn point and the Santa Barbara Channel. Aboard the flagship Delphy, contact with the RDF station is made several times, each bearing showing the convoy to be north of the station. However, early-day RDF sites could not discriminate between a true bearing signal and its reciprocal, that is, the opposite direction.
Aboard the Delphy, nerves are growing tense as the ship approaches the turn point. The coastline is completely covered by dense fog. If the ships miss their turn, they will run aground on the Santa Barbara Islands. A final RDF bearing shows Delphy still to the north of Pt. Arguello, but the navigator rejects this reading as a reciprocal. Had he elected to slow and heave a lead line, he would have known they were far inside the 100 fathom curve. Also, by simply making a 90 degree course change and requesting a new RDF bearing, their location would have been positively known. But the orders are to steam at 20 knots, and no one dares slow for soundings or course changes. The Commodore, believing his ship is now at the entrance to the Santa Barbara Channel, orders a turn to port and new course of 095 degrees. The die is cast. The Delphy disappears almost immediately into the dense fog. She has three minutes afloat remaining.
One by one, as they reach the turn point, the other vessels heel hard over and come up on course 095 as they too make for the all concealing fog. Suddenly there are loud scraping sounds of a ship running over a hard rock reef as the Delphy runs head on at 20 knots into the volcanic wall of Honda Point. Before they can stop, there are seven destroyers aground in about a five acre area. They have run aground one mile north of Point Arguello RDF station. Ships farther back in the queue realize what has happened and turn out to sea, avoiding disaster. Later, survivors would say they thought they had hit one of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. Twenty-three would not survive. Twenty died on the Young, which was ripped open by a submerged rock and flooded instantly, rolling over onto her starboard side in less than a one minute. Three died on the Delphy as it was broken into two pieces by the impact of hitting the mainland.
Confusion was rampant. Where were they? On an island? Two ships, the Fuller and Woodbury struck a jagged volcanic outcropping about 500 yards offshore. Much of their crew spent the night on that small rock, high waves breaking over them. There was crude oil everywhere on the ocean’s surface from ruptured fuel tanks. Men were thrown from their bunks into the cold, oily water in pitch dark and fog. There was a strong following sea and the surf was high, dashing the ships and their crew against rocks and each other.
Honda Point is located on what is now Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), about 15 miles west of Lompoc (pronounced Lom-poke), California. In 1923, Honda Point was part of the Sudden Ranch Company, isolated, desolate, the middle of nowhere. Only a narrow winding dirt road to the Point Arguello Lighthouse and RDF station and the Southern Pacific railroad interrupted the rolling hills, deep ravines and volcanic rock outcroppings. Cold, windy and foggy year round is the normal daily weather here.
A railroad worker heard all the noise from the wrecks and found the disaster. He telegraphed for help from a section house. Eventually the crews were brought high above the shoreline to an emergency camp and rendered first aid.
In November 1923, sealed bids were let to commercial salvage companies to attempt to remove the vessels from the ocean, bit by bit. Because of the almost year round high surf in the area, the removal was nearly impossible. The Southern Pacific Railway, in a brilliant commercial venture, ran sightseeing excursion trains to the site for all to see and wonder how it could have happened. Finally, in a last ditch effort to remove the embarrassing rusting ships’ skeletons, they were dynamited below the waterline. Now, only a couple of boilers parts and some of the Chauncey’s aft gun deck are visible, the latter washed up on the beach.
On September 23, 1973, the fiftieth anniversary of the wrecks, I met with two of the surviving crew members from the ships and we visited the wreck site. It was a very touching and memorable event for the two men and myself. Some months later, the VAFB scuba diving club, of which I was president at the time, located and raised an anchor, because of its location presumed to be from the Chauncey. The anchor was placed on an existing concrete foundation as a memorial to the men and their ships lost here. Today, Vandenberg AFB is a busy space and missile launch center. A couple of miles above (east of) Honda Point is Space Launch Complex Six (SLC-6), originally built as a launch site for the Air Force Space Shuttle, an ill-fated program which was later canceled. The Point Arguello U. S. Coast Guard Lighthouse and LORAN station was still there when I left in 1989, its operations automated, unmanned.
VAFB beaches are strictly Off-limits to diving, snorkeling, swimming and wading. It is an extremely dangerous stretch of ocean where rip tides are as common as the constant fog. Heavy surf pounds the beach almost constantly. Access to the memorial is always limited and sometimes forbidden. But if you ride Amtrak between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, you will pass within a few hundred yards of the worst peacetime naval disaster in U. S. history. If you are on the seaward side of the train and the fog isn’t too thick, maybe you will glimpse Woodbury Rock and the ghosts of sea farers lost there.
References:
Course Zero Nine Five by Lt. Commander Richard B. Hadaway, U. S. Naval Reserve.
U. S. Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, January 1957 issue.
Course 095 to Eternity by Elwyn E. Overshiner ISBN 0-937480-00-2 Copyright 1980.
Tragedy at Honda by Charles A Lockwood, Vice Admiral, USN, Retired and
Hans Christian Adamson, Colonel, USAF, Retired.
Valley Publishers, 1759 Fulton Street, Fresno, CA.
The Last Hours of Seven Four-Stackers by Charles Hice. Copyright1967.
Distributed by The Ohioan Co.
Note: Some of these books may be available
from the Lompoc Valley Historical Society,
or the Lompoc Museum, Lompoc CA.
Regards,
JP Moore
| I am JP Moore, USAF Msgt Ret. I have info about the doomed DESRON 11 which was stranded at Pt. Pedernales, CA in Sept, 1923. Info consists of many original photos of the stranded ships, rescue camp, some underwater photos of the ship’s remains which I shot in 1972 and many newspaper articles. In 1973 I was responsible in part for the raising of a monument to mark the tragic area, using a recovered anchor from DD-296. |
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More Photos
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Photo 10 Photo 11 Photo 12 Photo 13 Photo 14 Photo 15 Photo 16 Photo 17 Photo 18 |
Special Thanks To:
JP Moore for submitting the above photo's and information.
[email protected]
