On May 23rd
in 1968, a nuclear submarine in the United States Navy is missing in
action—except no one seemed to realize it.
Instead, family
and friends of USS Scorpion’s crew would cheerfully gather at a dock in
Norfolk, Virginia, on May 27. They were thrilled and excited to welcome their
fathers, husbands, and brothers back home.
Except the
homecoming didn’t happen. The submarine never showed up.
Scorpion had then
been in service for nearly a decade. She was supposed to get a complete
overhaul in 1967, but she ended up getting only emergency repairs. The United
States was dealing with both the Cold War and Vietnam at the time. The Navy
simply couldn’t afford to be without one of its nuclear submarines.
Some have
wondered if the failure to complete this maintenance ended up being Scorpion’s
undoing. Just a few years earlier, the Navy had lost another nuclear submarine,
USS Thresher. In the wake of that loss, all submarines were supposed to be
getting certain types of repairs and maintenance, known as SUBSAFE.
Scorpion never
received all of its SUBSAFE work.
Indeed, one of
Scorpion’s crew asked for a transfer off the submarine at about this time. “I
didn’t know it was going to sink,” he later told a reporter. “But I was
absolutely uptight after having been on there and seeing the things I had seen.
I was just unable to deal with going to sea again on the Scorpion.”
The crew, he
said, had taken to calling the submarine “USS Scrap Iron” because so much of
her equipment had become so worn down over time.
Scorpion departed
from Norfolk in February 1968. She completed her tour in the Mediterranean Sea,
then began a return trip to Norfolk in mid-May. Two men left the ship just as
she was about to leave on this final journey: One had a family emergency and
another had a health issue.
They were the
only two men to survive what came next.
Scorpion’s trip
home was temporarily sidetracked: She was supposed to conduct surveillance on
some Russian vessels in the area. Scorpion’s last radio contact with an
American base was on May 21. Much of what happened after that is shrouded in
mystery.
Some people claim
that Scorpion was torpedoed by one of the Russian vessels. Did the
American government cover it up, hoping to avert a new World War? Others
believe that Scorpion had already finished its surveillance and was headed
home. They are sure that a “hot-run” torpedo detonated inside one of Scorpion’s
torpedo tubes. Still others hold that a malfunctioning battery exploded or
caused a fire.
Whatever the
cause, parents, wives, and children found themselves waiting on a Norfolk pier
for a submarine that would never come. The 99 men aboard that submarine were
already in a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
One of these men
never met his 2-month-old baby girl. She was waiting on the pier wearing a
pink-checkered dress with simple embroidery across it: “My heart belongs to
daddy.” Another woman was waiting for her boyfriend. He’d recently bought her
an engagement ring, but he wouldn’t live long enough to give it to her.
The families were
eventually told to return home, although they weren’t given much of an
explanation for the absence of the submarine. Later, they heard what had
happened to their loved ones via the evening news: The submarine was officially
missing.
Several months
later, Scorpion would be found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, broken into
pieces.
Her final moments
remain a mystery.
History posts are
copyright © 2013-2021 by Tara Ross.
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