Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  But the days after the riot were not routine. Townsend understood that the rebellious faction on board could not be underestimated. He had the ship locked down, effectively putting the men under martial law. No unnecessary gatherings, lights on throughout the ship to discourage skulking in dark passageways, the whole carrier operating under the “condition zebra” that required leaving many hatches and passageways closed off. Normally intended to stop the spread of fire, smoke, and water in an emergency, in these days after the riot condition zebra prevented easy travel by groups. Townsend also ordered increased patrols by officers and masters-at-arms, and, most of all, zero tolerance for any kind of violence. Townsend’s goal was to stop any minor disturbances as quickly as possible so that the violent sailors couldn’t gain the momentum they had on October 12 and 13. The captain knew he had to keep a tight lid on the crew if they were to finish their assignment on Yankee Station. There was no way his ship was going to be pulled off line because the crew was out of order. The violence was over, but the angry crew members were still aboard the Kitty Hawk and they hadn’t gotten much happier in the immediate aftermath of the violence.

  The crew directed much of their continuing anger at Townsend. For several days, the captain’s cabin phone rang periodically; when he picked it up, the voice on the other end would blurt out obscenities and threats.

  “We’re going to get you! You’re dead!” Then the phone would go silent. There was no way to trace who made the call, and though Townsend didn’t fear for his life, he did find the calls disturbing. Others on board, such as Marines Avina and Binkley, also were threatened regularly because they were seen as having committed egregious acts against the black sailors during the riots. Though the serious violence had ended early on October 13 and the lock-down prevented large groups from gathering, many of the crew still witnessed sporadic attacks and were constantly on guard.

  The violence had opened Townsend’s eyes to some of the longstanding problems on the Kitty Hawk and pushed him to make changes that he had been reluctant to order right after coming aboard. The self-imposed segregation on the carrier had to end. In the week after the riot, Townsend ordered his division officers to stop the segregated berthing. No longer would there be any all-black areas. Some compartments remained all white simply because there weren’t enough minority sailors to mix in there. Townsend also ordered that a senior enlisted man must remain in the berthing area between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. to discourage any misbehavior by the lower-ranking sailors.

  Townsend did not change the policy that required nearly all new sailors on the Kitty Hawk to serve a stint as mess cook. He still be- lieved in the egalitarian goal of having everyone serve their fellow crew members.

  On October 13, Townsend transferred Terry Avinger and two other sailors off the ship. Within days they were in the brig in San Diego. The man that Marine Corporal Robert L. Anderson had bitten during the hangar bay melee did seek care in the sick bay, and the bite mark was sufficient to have him detained and later charged. Upon hearing Townsend’s report of the disturbance via the ship’s secure radio transmission, the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) dispatched three legal teams to the Kitty Hawk to investigate the incident, identify those responsible, and prepare charges against them. The Navy teams identified twenty-nine sailors who actively participated in the violence and refusal of orders. CINCPAC urged Townsend to conduct courts-martial on the ship, meting out justice then and there. Anyone found guilty could then be removed from the ship to serve their sentences. Townsend knew why CINCPAC wanted him to go ahead and try the men there: They just want to keep it all quiet back home, to suppress it and avoid publicity. But if I court-martial these men here, there’s no way they’ll be able to get an adequate defense, and these are serious charges. Some of these guys, God didn’t give them much to work with. And now if we just find them guilty and give them dishonorable discharges, we can ruin them for life. They need really good civil attorneys.

  Onboard courts-martial weren’t unheard of, and Townsend himself would have benefited from conducting the trials on board the carrier and dispensing justice quickly and quietly. The more attention the incident got, the worse consequences the captain would face. It was in his own best interest to placate the Navy and save his own hide by court-martialing the men on board. Yet having them court-martialed at sea, with only Navy defense attorneys to depend on, didn’t suit Townsend. He wanted to see the men tried and punished as necessary, but he wasn’t interested in railroading them through just to bring the whole thing to a quick and quiet end. Also, the captain worried about what would happen on his ship if he put the men on trial. Would their buddies flip out and riot again? Would a second riot maybe be even worse? No, Townsend wasn’t going to let CINCPAC push him into this.

  Townsend told CINCPAC that he would detain the men until they could be tried back home. Surely the Kitty Hawk would be called back to San Diego soon. He was right. The orders finally came, and the Kitty Hawk left Yankee Station on October 31, eight days after the United States ended all bombing above the 20th parallel in a goodwill gesture meant to aid the peace negotiations in Paris. The carrier reached San Diego on November 28, ending one of the longest aircraft carrier deployments in U.S. Navy history.

  Once the carrier returned to San Diego, the Navy continued with its investigation of the worst rioting on a Navy ship in modern history. In San Diego, twenty-nine sailors, all but three of them black, were charged with crimes stemming from the riots. After some legal wrangling back and forth and the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), many charges were dropped or reduced. In the coming months, nineteen of the sailors would be found guilty of at least one charge.

  In the end, the charges against Terry Avinger were dropped for lack of a speedy trial. However, he was court-martialed on separate charges related to a disturbance at the North Island naval station in San Diego where he was being held. Found guilty of those charges, he was sentenced to two months of confinement, a reduction in grade, and a forfeiture of $400 in pay.

  The Navy kept the situation under wraps for the most part, with scant information released to the media. Major newspapers and other media reported right away on the disturbance, but details were scarce and the root causes were not yet understood. The riot on the Kitty Hawk was followed on November 3 by a sit-down strike by black sailors on the carrier Constellation, which was conducting exercises off the coast of California at the time. The sailors said they wanted to show solidarity with their black brothers on the Kitty Hawk and also to air their own grievances. Though there was little violence in the Constellation incident, the strikers openly defied the captain and threatened to throw him overboard. In some ways, their rebellion was more clearly mutinous than that on the Kitty Hawk, even though no one was seriously injured. The Constellation incident also received much more media attention than did the Kitty Hawk riot, in part because the relatively peaceful nature of the strike paralleled nicely with civil rights protests back home and allowed reporters to portray the black sailors as heroes rather than violent criminals.

  With two cases of open rebellion and dozens of other instances of disobedience and sabotage, the Navy’s discipline problem caught the attention of Congress. Within a month of the riot, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services called for special hearings on the troubled waters of the Navy and formed the Special Subcommittee on Disciplinary Problems in the U.S. Navy. Chaired by Representative Floyd V. Hicks, a Democrat from Washington State, the subcommittee began its work on November 20, in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC. Its two other members were Representative Alexander Pirnie, a Republican from New York, and Representative W. C. (Dan) Daniel, a Democrat from Virginia. The congressmen wielded great power over the Navy through their positions on the Armed Services Committee, which controlled the purse strings for all matters military and had the power to dictate policy.

  Hicks started the session by reading the House Arm
ed Services Committee’s mandate to the subcommittee:

  “The subcommittee is directed to inquire into the apparent breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Navy and, in particular, into alleged racial and disciplinary problems which occurred recently on the aircraft carriers USS Kitty Hawk and USS Constellation.”

  In his opening statement, Hicks clarified the goal of the subcommittee’s hearings.

  “We cannot overlook the possibility that there may exist at this time an environment of—for lack of a better word—permissiveness, wherein all that is needed is a catalyst. Perhaps perceptions of racial relations in the cases provided that spark.” Clearly the Armed Services Committee did not like hearing reports of sailors refusing orders and interfering with the operation of ships at sea. Was the problem a lack of discipline, a too-soft approach by the officers in charge?

  The congressmen subpoenaed a long list of Navy leaders and witnesses, starting at the very top with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., chief of naval operations. The Constellation officers had to explain the nonviolent sit-down strike by black sailors, and then Townsend, Cloud, Carlucci, and scores of others from the Kitty Hawk had to testify about the riot. The congressmen grilled the witnesses, demanding to know from all the top officers how such events could occur on Navy ships. The testimony was devastating, with many sailors attesting to the poor discipline on the ships and the way the riot on the Kitty Hawk was allowed to continue for hours, the ship in turmoil for even longer.

  Some of the most hard-nosed comments came from a surprising source: the chaplain of the Kitty Hawk. Lieutenant Commander Robert J. Riley was a man of God, but he had no sympathy for the black sailors who had rioted. He cut them no slack, insisting to the committee that the rioters knew exactly what they were doing. Riley, a picturesque figure with an elaborate mustache and goatee, told the committee that he thought the black crew had planned the whole incident, saying that the attacks “went along too smoothly that night, their running around. They had something working.”

  Riley expressed sympathy for the much-maligned masters-atarms, who didn’t do much to quell the violence and sometimes just hid or ran away. Riley pointed out that they had to go up to angry men wielding wrenches and fog foam nozzles, “and you don’t even have a stick. You have a little red hat and a badge.”

  When the questions concerned Townsend’s response, Riley made it clear he did not approve.

  “I don’t know, and I still don’t understand, why we didn’t go to general quarters that night, or why the Marines weren’t brought back out again,” he told the subcommittee. “I think the captain, I know he honestly believes what he did that night was correct. He felt he could go around and pacify this thing.

  “In my talks to him I said, ‘Captain, I don’t see how. You can’t talk to a militant or to people worked up that way. I am an Irishman and in my family I have some IRA members. There is nothing thicker than a thick Mick when he is on the move. You don’t argue with them. They just walk away from you or run right over you.

  “‘That is one of the things we have to understand here, dealing with people like that. It would be nice to talk with these guys, but not when they are screaming and yelling and swinging things. Sometimes we have to use force.’”

  Chief Aviation Ordnanceman Charles M. Johnson, who worked closely with Cloud as a legal officer and missed the opportunity to warn his superiors about the impending violence, told the subcommittee that while he had no evidence, “I have the feeling it was an organized thing.”

  “It is hard to recognize it as a spontaneous solidarity?” Pirnie asked.

  “I don’t believe it was, sir,” Johnson said. “It happened too many places at the same time.”

  Johnson also told the congressmen that he thought there was “outside interference” that aided the rebellion, implying the involvement of black militant or antiwar groups outside the Navy.

  The congressmen also heard from twenty-year-old seaman Charles A. Beck from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who had been seriously injured on the Kitty Hawk. He told his story of being attacked twice. He broke away from his assailants the first time but then he was attacked again, along with other white sailors, by a group of about twenty-five black sailors who said the whites were going to be put on trial for their crimes against the black man. Beck fought back when cornered and then tried to run, but he was caught and severely beaten with chains and dogging wrenches. The attackers split Beck’s head open “on the aft part,” as he described the back of his head, and gave him a concussion and numerous facial cuts. As he slumped to the deck, bleeding profusely, one of the attackers stabbed him in the buttocks with a knife. Beck recounted how he was about to pass out from blood loss and the beatings when the crowd stopped the assault and just walked away, leaving him lying there.

  Representative Daniel asked Beck if he had any opinion as to whether the attacks were premeditated or spontaneous.

  “I would characterize it as premeditated radicalism,” Beck responded. “They tried to terrorize the ship. They completely wanted— I believe that is what they wanted. They tried to terrorize me and they did. They got their job done. I was terrorized at the time it was happening. I was scared for my life the second time I was getting beat.”

  The question of premeditation was important to the subcommittee and to the Navy. A bunch of sailors suddenly going nuts and running amok was bad enough, but a planned effort to disrupt operations or take over the ship was considered far more serious. The subcommittee put Admiral B. A. Clarey, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINPAC), on the hot seat, having to explain the actions of his officers in charge of both the Constellation and the Kitty Hawk. The subcommittee chairman, Hicks, told the admiral that he considered the Constellation incident more serious than the Kitty Hawk’s because even though it was nonviolent, it clearly was a premeditated, organized resistance by the crew.

  “This, it seems to me, was deliberate mutiny on the Constellation. What happened aboard the Kitty Hawk, I don’t know that we have reached any conclusion,” Hicks said. “I have not reached any conclusion as to whether that was a planned situation or not. But I have no doubt in my mind about the Constellation.”

  “Yes sir, certainly that was collective subordination in my view,” Clarey said.

  “Well, that might be a nicer way of saying mutiny,” Hicks replied. “They didn’t exactly try to take over the ship, but they decided that it was going to be run the way they wanted it run. The captain could come down from the bridge when they told him to come down from the bridge.”

  Hicks then referred to how the black sailors from the Kitty Hawk who were then still facing charges had refused to testify before the subcommittee unless they could come together, with their counsel and with assistance from outside groups. Hicks said he had almost acceded to their demands but then was advised not to appease the men; if he did, he would be acting the same way the captains of the aircraft carriers had.

  “It was just a continuation of the same thing. They had the bit in their teeth and they were going to do it the way the riots are [conducted] on the outside,” Hicks said.

  When it came time for Townsend to face the subcommittee, the congressmen had a good feel for what they thought went wrong on his ship. They criticized the captain for not maintaining a clear chain of command, for not calling general quarters to end the violence, and for being too willing to negotiate with the rioters. Some committee members tried to paint a picture of a captain more interested in appeasing the men trying to take over his ship, too eager to talk with them or just hope they would settle down on their own, when he should have brought his fist down and ended the violence with force, quickly and decisively.

  Townsend was calm and cool as he was being questioned, exactly as anyone who had worked with him would have expected. He didn’t like being second-guessed by politicians who had no idea what it was like being responsible for the welfare of 5,000 men in a war zone, but he wasn’t going to be ruffled by their glib aspersions about his abilitie
s as a leader or their outright accusations that he had made bad decisions. Townsend took the opportunity to tell the committee that he knew the riot had its roots in many Navy policies and procedures that could be changed. For starters, recruiters should stop lying to inductees about what they would face in the Navy, he said.

  But Townsend also was blunt in his assessment of the men responsible for the violence on the Kitty Hawk. Because the hearings were held in executive session, meaning no reporters or spectators were allowed, Townsend and the congressmen did not feel much need to sugarcoat their opinions.

  In response to a question about what resources were available to crew members who had grievances, Townsend explained that before the riot, there already were avenues for seeking redress, but “I maintain, sir, this particular case is caused by a group of just plain—I think I can say this since we are in executive session—just plain thugs who simply didn’t use the system.”

  “Plain criminals?” Daniel asked.

  “They never used this system at all, that is the important thing. These people were not at all interested in any kind of system that would be set up to work for them. But the good young blacks, people we should be able to depend on and the people we can get on our side and wean away from their background with the solidarity being presented to us by other blacks, will respond to this system.”

  The subcommittee also questioned Townsend on why he never called general quarters. Wouldn’t that have stopped the riot?

  “I felt it unsafe to do that. I felt we would have had people killed if we went to GQ. I still hold to that.”

  Townsend also had to defend his decision to leave the bridge, saying it was necessary for him to see what was going on in the far recesses of the ship. He also had to explain policies such as those that allowed segregated berthing and required duty as mess cooks as well as his response to earlier incidents of violence or misbehavior. Throughout his testimony, Townsend was self-assured but willing to accept the idea that he could have made some better decisions. Not all of the comments were critical, and Pirnie sometimes came to Townsend’s defense. The big question for the Kitty Hawk captain was what he would do differently next time. What about sending in the Marines?