26. Secret Military History

1972-1012, Race Riot on USS Kitty Hawk.
On the night of October 12, 1972, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk was steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines to its combat station in the Tonkin Gulf. The ship’s complement consisted of 4,483 sailors, aircrew & Marines, 302 of whom were black.
By the early morning of October 13, the ship had endured a sustained race riot that some consider to be the first & only mutiny in the history of the United States Navy.
The Kitty Hawk riot had been brewing for some time. Many of the crew, black & white, were showing the stress of repeated deployments & long combat duty shifts on a hot, crowded warship. Black crewmembers had been allowed to live together in areas that became squalid, where white sailors feared to go & that NCOs did not inspect.
A fresh blow to morale was the cancellation of an anticipated return to San Diego. (A disgruntled white sailor on Ranger, which was supposed to relieve Kitty Hawk, had deliberately thrown a steel rod into a main reduction gear & the damage required a major overhaul.) Disenchantment with the Vietnam War was common among the enlisted men & was shared by some of the officers. To these woes was added a growing resentment among black sailors @ perceived ill-treatment by their white shipmates, the Navy & American society in general.
Racial tensions had flared after black-white bar fights while the crew was ashore on liberty in Subic Bay.
By the time the carrier left for the Tonkin Gulf, many black crewmen were on a hair trigger.
The violence broke out about 8:00 P.M. on the 12th after what would ordinarily have been a minor incident. A black sailor going through the chow line asked for a second sandwich & a white mess attendant refused. The black sailor took a second sandwich anyway & words were exchanged. A group of angry blacks then went looking for whites to attack. Their first victim, a slightly-built cook, was bludgeoned with a hose nozzle & thrown down a flight of stairs.
From then until 02:30 the following morning, rampaging black sailors used improvised weapons to beat & terrorize any whites they met. Bewildered crewmen were jumped in narrow passageways & besieged in berthing compartments. Medics trying to treat the injured had to fend off repeated attacks on the sick bay.
Most of the victims were assaulted @ random & without provocation, but the mess attendant who had refused the second sandwich, James Radford, was found sitting on a couch & given an impromptu trial before a gang of black sailors:
The judge looked @ Radford, waiting for his explanation, but he wasn’t offering one. ‘Hang him,’ the judge said calmly.
With that command, the crowd went wild. They pushed him over a table onto his back. He felt more punches & blows to his body, head, face, everywhere, as he was tossed about the room, off the table, onto the couch, all the while just trying to cover his head with his hands to block the worst of the blows. His efforts were futile. He felt the foam fog nozzle make solid contact with his head & the world started fading out. He felt blood all over him as he got lightheaded.
They tossed him out in the passageway & told him to find his own way to sick bay.
Radford lay there, bleeding & nearly unconscious, his cheek-bone smashed, his jaw broken, his skull cracked open, a huge gash over one eye. His punishment for not serving a black sailor in the mess deck. The savagery of the riot was matched by the confusion of the response. The captain, Marland Townsend, was sleeping & Executive Officer Benjamin Cloud (a black man) was watching a movie when the commotion began; it was nearly 10:00 P.M. before they were informed of a disturbance in the aft mess deck, where rioters were throwing chairs & assaulting the few white mess cooks who hadn’t managed to escape. By that time, a detail from the ship’s Marine contingent already was on its way to the scene.
The captain & the executive officer responded independently & sometimes @ cross purposes. Captain Townsend first went to the bridge & ordered guards posted to the flight deck & hangar bay (protection of the carrier’s aircraft was his first concern), then left his post to investigate the riot himself. His absence & failure to communicate with the bridge eventually caused panicked rumors that he had been captured or killed. Commander Cloud, in the meantime, rushed from hot spot to hot spot & had only sporadic contact with the captain.
At one point, Commander Cloud, frightened by the rumors of the captain’s death, declared an emergency over the ship’s public address system & ordered the “black brothers” & the Marines to go to separate ends of the ship. The captain, who had been roaming the hangar deck alone in search of damage to aircraft, made his way to the damage control center where he used the public address system to countermand Commander Cloud’s announcement. Even crewmen who had been unaware of the riot now knew that the ship was in trouble. The effect on the rioters, who were emboldened to learn that their actions had thrown the command structure into chaos, was the opposite of what Commander Cloud had intended.
The ship had the means to quell the riot but not the will to use them. The Kitty Hawk’s Marines were ready & able to wade into the mob & crack heads with night sticks, but both the executive officer & the captain kept them on a short leash & opted for negotiation.
Commander Cloud who only recently had joined the ship, tried to win the rioters over with appeals to racial solidarity. @ one point, the captain stumbled upon a bizarre scene that proved typical of Commander Cloud’s approach to the crisis:
Townsend had walked in as Cloud was trying to assure the rioters that he could be trusted, that he really was a true black man. Cloud would later admit that his methodology was unorthodox & not very military in nature, but @ the time he felt military discipline had already been lost.
‘For the first time,’ Cloud told the men, ‘you have a brother who is an executive officer. My door is always open.’
Townsend was surprised to hear Cloud talk that way, identifying himself as a ‘brother’ & being so conciliatory to a bunch of hooligans running wild on his ship. & then it got worse. The men continued talking & Townsend could hear some of the sailors shouting ‘Right on!’ & ‘We can trust this brother.’ Several of the men raised their fists in a black power salute & stared directly into Cloud’s eyes, waiting for him to return the gesture, to show that he really was a black man. Cloud raised his clenched fist in a black power salute. The sailors cried out ‘Black power!’ & cheered the XO as a brother.
Townsend was not pleased. No one had acknowledged his presence & now his XO was giving a black power salute with the rioters. What the hell was this?
Commander Cloud would try the racial solidarity card again when he faced 150 black sailors milling angrily in the forecastle. By then it was 12:15 A.M., scores of sailors were injured & the crisis showed no sign of abating. Although his appeasement of the rioters would be criticized in hindsight, there can be no question that Cloud acted with sincerity & great courage:
‘If you doubt for one moment that I understand your problems, if you doubt for one moment that I am a sincere black man.’ His voice trailed off. He looked over the crowd, making eye contact with several men. He could see the contempt in their eyes, the way they looked @ him with disgust & skepticism.
With a sudden burst of resolve, Cloud reached down to a man standing in front of him & took his weapon, a heavy piece of steel about two feet long. With the weapon in hand, Cloud tore off his uniform shirt & tossed it away. He stood bare-chested before the crowd & thumped his chest hard with a fist as he looked @ the other men fiercely. Fury & determination in his voice, he raised the weapon high & shouted.
‘The first man in this crowd that for one moment does not believe my sincerity, I hold this weapon & I bare my back for you to take this weapon & beat me into submission, right here!’
Commander Cloud’s challenge broke the murderous tension in the room. From 1:30 to 2:30, while Commander Cloud mingled with the mob & listened to their grievances, other rioters were persuaded to give stretcher bearers free passage to the sick bay. The riot was over, but 47 men had been hurt & three had to be evacuated for treatment @ onshore hospitals. Remarkably, flight operations resumed later that morning, on schedule.
In the riot’s immediate aftermath, the Navy urged Captain Townsend to conduct courts-martials before the ship returned to San Diego. This became typical of what Captain Townsend viewed as the Navy’s effort to keep the incident quiet. He refused, on the ground that he would be “railroading” the accused if he convened summary shipboard proceedings with only Navy attorneys to conduct the defense & that this could even start another riot. Twenty-nine sailors–all but three of them black–eventually were court martialed, 19 were found guilty.
Captain Townsend & Commander Cloud believed, with apparent reason, that the mayhem of October 1972 sidetracked their careers. Captain Townsend never received the promotion to Admiral that normally would have followed his prestigious command & Commander Cloud ended his career onshore, retiring @ the rank of captain.
For some remarkably undeceived conclusions about racial unrest in the Vietnam-era Navy, a congressional report that explores the Kitty Hawk incident & a racially-motivated strike that took place the following month by crewmen of the carrier U.S.S. Constellation. (The Constellation was on a training exercise off San Diego when a number of crewmen, mostly black, staged a “sit-in” protest & threatened to throw the captain overboard. The dissident sailors were returned to shore, where Naval authorities negotiated with them, acceded to some of their demands & meted out what the congressional report considered token punishments.)
The report was issued after hearings by a special subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, which accumulated 2,565 pages of testimony from 56 witnesses, including 30 members of both ships’ crews. Enlisted personnel facing court-martial charges had declined to testify & the subcommittee chose not to compel their attendance.
Besides finding that the Navy was unprepared to deal with shipboard violence & unrest, the subcommittee had harsh words for the general state of good order & discipline in the Vietnam-era Navy, including the permissive atmosphere encouraged by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. In the subcommittee’s view, the higher ranks of the service had undermined the efforts of commissioned & noncommissioned officers to enforce traditional standards of appearance & conduct, leaving the Navy’s “middle management” ill-equipped to deal with drug use, sabotage & general laxity.
None of this will surprise anyone who served in the military in the later stages of the Vietnam conflict. What is downright startling, however, is the report’s diagnosis of the state of race relations in the Navy. Unlike contemporary politicians’ credulity in the face of every conceivable black complaint, the subcommittee found the rioters’ & strikers’ racial grievances to be largely illusory:
During the course of the investigation we found no substantial evidence of racial discrimination upon which we could place true responsibility for causation of these serious disturbances. Certainly there were many perceptions of discrimination by young blacks, who, because of their sensitivity to real or fancied oppression, often enlist with a ‘chip on their shoulder.’ Those young blacks, who enter the service from the ghetto with a complete black awareness, probably for the first time find themselves immersed in a predominantly white society which, in civilian life, they had come to mistrust. These young men are subject to being easily led–as was the case in the Constellation uprising where about 15 agitators orchestrated the entire affair.
If there was no real discrimination against black Navy personnel, why was there a perception of discrimination? Among other factors, the report cited the recruitment of sailors who failed to meet normal standards for mental aptitude & criminal record:
The Navy’s recruitment program for most of 1972 that resulted in the lowering of standards for enlistment, accepting a greater percentage of mental category IV & those in the lower half of category III, not requiring recruits in these categories to have completed their high school education & accepting these people without sufficient analysis of their previous offense records, has created many of the problems.
In the subcommittee’s view, black sailors from the lower end of the recruiting pool faced no realistic prospect of specialized training & advancement & often blamed their failure to progress on racism. The report attributed the trouble on the Kitty Hawk directly to this mentality:
The subcommittee is of the position that the riot on Kitty Hawk consisted of unprovoked assaults by a very few men, most of whom were of below-average mental capacity, most of whom had been aboard for less than one year & all of whom were black. This group, as a whole, acted as ‘thugs,’ which raises doubt as to whether they should ever have been accepted into military service in the first place.


1972-1012, Race, Riot on the USS Hassayampa.
A group of 12 black sailors aboard the USS Hassayampa, a fleet oiler docked at Subic Bay, told ship’s officers that they would not sail with the ship when the ship put to sea. The group demanded the return of money that had been stolen from the wallet of one of the groups. The ship’s leadership failed to act quickly enough to defuse the situation and later that day, a group of seven white sailors were set upon by the group and beaten. It took the arrival of a Marine detachment to restore order. Six black sailors were charged with assault and rioting.

1972-1115, Race, Race Strike on the Carrier USS Constellation.
A racially motivated strike took place by sailors of the carrier USS. Constellation. The Constellation was on a training exercise off San Diego when several sailors, mostly black, staged a “sit-in” protest and threatened to throw the captain overboard. The dissident sailors were returned to shore, where Naval authorities negotiated with them, acceded to some of their demands and meted out what a congressional report considered token punishments.


1973-0701, Military, Draft Ends, all Volunteer Military Begins
President Richard Nixon created the All-Volunteer Force because of the American public's dissatisfaction with the draft

1973-0712, Accident, Veterans Record Center Burns Down.
The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) on the outskirts of St. Louis caught fire on July 12th, 1973. No one knows what began the blaze, but the lack of a sprinkler system and thousands of paper files contributed to a four-and-a-half-day fire. It’s the worst archival disaster in US history.
17 million veterans lost All their military records. This includes an estimated 80-percent of Army personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960 and 75-percent of AF personnel whose service ended between 1947 and 1964.
6.5 million documents were saved. Since the disaster, the NPRC has worked hard to help veterans and their families recreate the service records which were lost in the fire.
The NPRC handles 5,000 requests each day from veterans or their next of kin who are seeking benefits, burial services, or answers to questions about the past. There are 25 people at the facility devoted to preserving the 6.5 million records that survived the fire and 40 people handling incoming requests.
In most cases, the NPRC can get information from other government agencies and veteran groups for proof of service. If they can pinpoint a date of entry or discharge, they can issue an official document like the one sent to Cohen. If they can’t find any information, then it’s the end of the road for the veteran. It’s as if they never served.


1975-0129, Gender, Stacked and Packed.
WAC’s allowed to fire weapons on a Military range for the first time. It is strictly voluntary, only if they want to.