But the glory days of the former aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk are over, and the decommissioned supercarrier is on its final 16,000-mile journey from Washington state to Texas, where it will be cut up and sold for scrap.
Brownsville, Texas-based International Shipbreaking Limited bought the ship last year for less than a dollar from the US Naval Systems Command, which decommissions warships.
The 1,047-foot-long, 252-foot-wide aircraft carrier is too big to pass through the Panama Canal, so in the coming months, Kitty Hawk will crawl along the coastline of South America and up the Gulf of Mexico to its final destination.
Launched in 1960 and named after the area in North Carolina where the Wright brothers first flew powered aircraft, the Kitty Hawk served the US Navy for almost 50 years before being decommissioned in 2009.
The Kitty Hawk was the last American oil-powered aircraft carrier, a relic of an era before the Nimitz-class nuclear-powered ships.
Soon, all that will be left is a storied and sometimes turbulent history that spans the Vietnam War and the bulk of the Cold War, as well as social upheaval and home transformation.
Race riots and the Vietnam experience
For a decade since the early 1960s, Kitty Hawk was the mainstay of American forces off the coast of Vietnam.
During, its aircraft flew more than 100 sorties a day over Vietnam from the so-called Yankee Station, an area in the South China Sea where US Navy ships were dispatched to strike North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.
The ship and its air wing were later awarded the President’s Prize — award for outstanding heroism — for his actions in Vietnam from December 1967 to June 1968, including supporting U.S. and South Vietnamese forces during the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in the spring of 1968.
Kitty Hawk saw action in her last action over Vietnam in 1972, but on her last mission, the aircraft carrier became a site that Congressional investigators later called “a sad chapter in the history of the Navy.”
According to reports on the Naval History and Heritage Command website, race riots erupted on the ship amid rising tensions after its deployment to Vietnam was extended after entering port in the Philippines.
Accounts of what triggered the incident vary. Some say it was prompted by an investigation into a fight between black sailors in a Filipino bar the night before the departure.
Others say things went like a snowball after the black sailor It was refused an extra sandwich in the dining room when there was no white sailor.
Whatever the reason, the violence was significant.
“The fighting quickly spread throughout the ship, gangs of blacks and whites looted the decks and attacked each other with fists, chains, wrenches and pipes,” David Courtright, now director of the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. , wrote in a 1990 article about black resistance to the Vietnam War.
The riots and racial tensions aboard the Kitty Hawk certainly reflected the stark racial inequalities in American society at the time.
Reports show that black sailors then made up less than 10% of the Kitty Hawk crew of 4,500 people. And only five of its 348 officers were black, according to one Naval History Command report.
A Congressional report on the incident on the night of October 12–13, 1972, states that 47 sailors were injured in the fight, “all but 6 or 7 of them” by White.
While this congressional investigation led to attempts by the military to tackle racial inequality, the subcommittee’s report itself is replete with biased language that reveals just how deep racial bias runs in the US.
“The Sub-Committee is of the opinion that the Kitty Hawk Disturbances consisted of unprovoked attacks by a very small number of men, most of whom were below average mental capacity, most of whom had been on board for less than one year, and all of whom were Blacks. This group as a whole acted like ‘thugs’, which casts doubt on whether they should ever be enlisted in the military,” the final summary of the report says.
However, this incident, along with other incidents on Navy ships, prompted service leaders to re-emphasize programs previously started by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., then Chief of Naval Operations, aimed at improving race relations in the Navy. .
As of December 31, 2020, black sailors made up 17.6% of active duty, according to Navy statistics.
Women, the Soviet submarine and the reconnaissance coup
Retired Captain James Fanell said that by the time he boarded the Kitty Hawk as an air wing intelligence officer in the 90s, race riots were long forgotten.
“Most sailors afloat are not historians, so they look forward to their next port call or operation,” he said.
But in the 90s, another social problem came to the fore – the integration of women into the navy.
Fanell said that when he first went to sea in 1987 on another aircraft carrier, the USS Coral Sea, there were no women on board. “Ten years later, when we went to Kitty Hawk, I had eight female squadron and headquarters intelligence officers working for me out of 11 positions. Quite a dramatic turn,” he said.
Women now make up over 20% of the US Navy personnel.
In the years between the turmoil and the integration of women, Kitty Hawk was involved in a tense Cold War war with a Soviet nuclear submarine that saw an American aircraft carrier get away with a piece of a submarine stuck in its hull.
In March 1984, Battle Group Bravo, under the command of Kitty Hawk, was the naval coordinator for Team Spirit’s annual joint exercise with South Korea.
Operating in open waters about halfway between Japan and South Korea, the Kitty Hawk and her escort played what a Navy officer told The New York Times was a cat-and-mouse game with a Soviet submarine. which was later identified as the K-314, a 5,000 ton Viktor-class boat with a crew of about 90.
According to a report by the Naval History and Heritage Command, US forces tracked down and “destroyed” – or simulated their ability to sink – a Soviet submarine 15 times in the days leading up to the collision.
Then a group of aircraft carriers began practicing “deception techniques” to lose their Soviet tracker, according to a 1989 maritime accident report called The Neptune Papers from Greenpeace/Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
It worked to a certain extent.
Just after 22:00 on March 21, 1984, K-314 surfaced in its path while trying to find the aircraft carrier.
The Russian military site Top War tells what happened next, from the side of the submarine.
“The commander (K-314) ordered an emergency dive to avoid a collision. Shortly after the start of the dive, the submarine felt a strong blow. A few seconds later – the second powerful push. the submarine did not have time to go to a safe depth, and it was shot down by one of the American ships. As we later learned, it was the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.
The 5,000-ton Soviet submarine was no match for the 80,000-ton American aircraft carrier in the collision, said Karl Schuster, a former US Navy intelligence officer who reviewed the Navy’s report of the collision.
“It must have been scary as hell,” he said.
“Everyone on the Kitty Hawk expected the submarine to go deep and hoped to spot it from the other side,” he said, noting that the aircraft carrier could not detect a submarine in close proximity due to the noise of its propellers and underwater noise. . the pressure wave it generates.
“Instead, (sub-commander) apparently overestimated his distance to the aircraft carrier and did not begin to increase depth until it was too late. So he left part of one of his propellers (propellers) in the aircraft carrier’s hull,” Schuster said.
K-314 lost power and was later towed to the Soviet port of Vladivostok.
The Kitty Hawk continued under its own power, with a Cold War trophy—a piece of a Soviet submarine propeller—in its hull.
Also glued to the hull of the aircraft carrier were tiles from the anechoic coating of a Soviet submarine, polymers that allow it to be quieter in the water. Some have described it as a reconnaissance coup for the US military, and the Kitty Hawk crew advertised it by temporarily painting a red submarine “victory sign” on the carrier’s command center, the US Naval Institute said.
Last years
The Kitty Hawk continued to be a vital part of the US Pacific Fleet for more than two decades after colliding with a Soviet submarine.
In the early 1990s, it supported US military operations in Somalia and acted as a base for air strikes against Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein.
In the summer of 1998, the Kitty Hawk moved to Japan with a home port at the Yokosuka Naval Base, home of the US 7th Fleet, where she spent 10 years as the only US Navy aircraft carrier based outside the continental United States. states.
But now Kitty Hawk has no home in the US.
James Melka, a cauldron on an aircraft carrier in the 60s, led the efforts of the Kitty Hawk Veterans Association to turn the ship into a museum, as did other aircraft carriers, including Intrepid in New York, Midway and Hornet in California, Yorktown in South Carolina and Lexington in Texas. .
But the Navy rejected the idea in 2018, according to a report by the United States Naval Institute (USNI) News.
“No one will know … what a Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier is,” Melka told USNI. “They will just see the pictures. They won’t be able to see the real ship and will be able to walk on it.”
Fanell said the memories of the aircraft carrier will be preserved by the hundreds of thousands of sailors who served on its decks.
“I’m just a sailor,” he said. “Think of all the lives she touched and the memories she created.”
With the carrier’s fate sealed, Fanell sent a note to his former shipmates. to remind them of the time spent together and what is about to be lost.
“(It’s) really sad to think of all these memories losing the one thing that tied us all together… the USS Kitty Hawk,” he wrote.
“Life goes on and our memories fade, a little faster when our ships are cut into razor blades.”