Presentation Date: September 25, 2003
CWO Ray A. McNaught US NAVY (RET)
* WWII, KOREA, VIETNAM, * NAVY Diver: Experimental/Research (with "Swede" Momson), Salvage, Combat Diving in Pacific, * Pearl Harbor II: The Secret Tragedy, * Witnessed H-Bomb Test in Bikini, Aboard USS McKinley with Bob Considine and Other VIPs
* Enlisted at Age 17
* 30 Years Active Duty
* WWII, KOREA, VIETNAM
* NAVY Diver: Experimental/Research (with "Swede" Momson), Salvage, Combat Diving in Pacific
* Pearl Harbor II: The Secret Tragedy
* Witnessed H-Bomb Test in Bikini, Aboard USS McKinley with Bob Considine and Other VIPs
* Many Other Unique Experiences as Career Navy Professional
Ray epitomizes the solid, innovative and courageous patriot who served faithfully for over 30 years in the US NAVY, and to this day, reflects the bearing, fitness and strength of a real doer and leader! His experience adds another special chapter of "living history" to the annals of military history.
Ray McNaught was born in 1923 in Kansas. One of nine children in the McNaught family, he grew up on a ranch, helping tend to 130 wild horses his father had gotten in southern Colorado. In 1932, when the banks closed, Ray’s father lost everything and ended up going to work buying stock for a land-cattle company. Injured by a horse, Ray’s father ruptured his appendix, didn’t see a doctor for more than two weeks and died. At the age of 17, three months shy of finishing high school, Ray decided to enlist in the Navy. After training, Ray was posted aboard a destroyer tender, and after six months was a mess cook, providing service to 20 sailors around two long tables.
“You laid out the flatware and crockery plates, with old big crock cups and bowls to match and then you get the food to serve it to them at the table. I must have really been on that old boatswain mate’s list, for people to take something out on.”
The day came though when McNaught made it into a gunnery division. The gunner was the diving officer on the ship, and one day he requested a gunner’s mate to take over the diving locker and keep the gear in shape.
“I volunteered. And he taught me how to take care of the old helmets and the dresses (diving suits) they wore, and how to patch the canvas and rubber, like an old tire. Those old type helmets had been in use almost 100 years. The bright work always had to be shined on the helmet. Copper and brass. After doing that task for a few weeks, I decided I wanted to become a diver. It was ten dollars extra a month in those days. That was something like a 20 percent raise in pay.”
McNaught says there were three sailors on the ship who qualified for Diver, 2nd Class, and they began on-the-job training. Ray had also been promoted to an E-5 rating.
It wasn’t long before Ray was sent to diving school at the Navy Yard, Washington, D.C. to become a First Class diver. Qualifications included diving to a depth of 300 feet on air and 320 feet on oxygen-helium.
“It was very interesting. In fact, I got more physics there in a six months course than I got in high school and every other source.”
McNaught cites much of the training sequences in the movie “Men of Honor” as reflecting the kind of training required of divers.
“Like putting a pipe fitting together in a square. It didn’t have any left hand threads on it, they were all right-handed... all different sizes and lengths, and you had a certain amount of time to put that thing together. And somebody would invariably take one of those fittings out and put an odd size one in there. And that would cause you a little bit of trouble.”
“The most water I ever saw was in a horse tank, before I went in the Navy. I’d never learned to swim. I got my choice of duty, so I volunteered for the experimental unit. I’d been there for maybe a month and we had some shallow water gear, made from a Mark 3 gas mask. We took the canister out of it and replaced it with a length of 3/4 inch copper pipe with an oxygen hose fitting.”
There were other modifications to the mask, and the exhaust was simply allowed to exit from the mask at the diver’s temples, where the fit was loosest. McNaught says it was an ideal mask for shallow water work.
“We had a .30 caliber cartridge belt, the old web belt. We put small lead weights in those, too. In the water you had just a little negative buoyancy, not much. But with me being unable to swim very well, I had trouble getting under the water.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt used to dock the presidential yacht Potomac on the Anacostia River, in front of the Navy Diving School, where McNaught worked with the Experimental Unit. He says one day when the yacht came in to tie up, some dockside flotation called a “camel” was disturbed by the boat, and it was thought the yacht’s screw may have been fouled or damaged. Ray volunteered to don the shallow water gear and rig it to an air compressor to inspect. He says his inability to swim, combined with the tide going out, made getting under the boat a challenge. The screw proved to be undamaged, but after McNaught’s inspection was completed, the Captain of the diving unit called him into his office.
The Captain said, “You’re supposed to be a Class C swimmer at least before you get into the diving school. How’d you get in there? “
McNaught replied, “Nobody told me.” The incident led to Ray’s visits to the swimming pool every noon hour until he could dog paddle the length of the pool.
McNaught says he was impressed with the Captain’s physical regimen - - “He’d come out of his office every afternoon and he had physical training. You could lift weights, you could wrestle, you could punch the bag... punch each other. He didn’t care as long as you were exercising for about an hour. He’d come out of his office with his trunks on, walking on his hands. And he’d walk up two flights of stairs. That second story in the building was around thirty feet, and he’d walk up those stairs, doing exercises right along with everybody else.”
While McNaught was based in D.C., a military pilot from Baden, North Carolina crashed a bomber into a lake near his hometown, apparently the result of flying under high tension lines. A request went to the Secretary of the Navy for divers to pull the plane and pilot from the water. McNaught says he and five other divers were flown down for the task. They triangulated the plane’s estimated position, sounded the lake’s depth at 160 feet and commenced diving.
McNaught says the diver was down about 90 feet and he said he was on the bottom. That was until the diver took a step and sunk another 70 feet. He’d been on the limb of a tree. The diving team discovered that the Tennessee Valley Authority had created the lake by damming and filling the canyon without cutting trees or tearing down any structures. A saw mill also stood intact at the bottom of the lake.
“The only way we found the airplane was by using about a quarter of a pound of TNT. It would blow debris to the surface. We must have hit the radio shack on the bomber. We got tubes and all different kinds of wiring floating to the surface. And we recovered a big portion of the fuselage, but never the wings or the pilot’s body.”
Among its projects, McNaught’s Experimental Diving unit worked to shorten the time needed to decompress from deep dives, to help divers avoid the bends. Pure oxygen could be used at sixty feet depth to purge the bloodstream of nitrogen bubbles which caused the bends. Normally it took two or three hours of decompression for a 200-300 foot dive. The diving crew had the benefit of three submarine medical officers to boost the safety factor of the experimental diving procedures.
McNaught says he got a case of the bends once, in his knees.
Asked how it felt, Ray said, “Horrendous! They take you into a recompression chamber, run you down to the depth you were diving for a specified time, then bring you out, according to a recompression table.”
“They decided they’d go to eighty feet, when sixty feet was the maximum depth at which you were supposed to be breathing pure oxygen. Because, if you get oxygen poisoning, you go into convulsions. And, that’s what happened to me. At eighty feet I had no indication whatsoever. Normally I’d have a twitch in the eye, or a muscle would twitch, or my stomach would jump up and down. But I had no indication, whatsoever. It knocked me out for about an hour.”
About a month later, McNaught says he made another ‘oxygen run’ at 100 feet.
“That time it knocked me out for about four hours. And you know, on payday a week later, I couldn’t even remember what my pay number was. So, I said, ‘Something’s not right. I’m not doing any more breathing on oxygen... unless I have a hangover.’ ”
Ray says that adding helium to the diving gas mix made a big difference.
“You’d be surprised how much more comfortable you feel at 300, 275, 250 feet with that helium. Of course, you talk like Donald Duck.”
McNaught says he was fortunate enough to be “one of the first guys in the United States” to use scuba gear. That was in 1943, a time when the gear was still being perfected.
“They had a lot of problems with the demand valve. You either got too much air or you didn’t get enough. There used to be an old expression in diving school that as pressure increases, time decreases.”
Ray says that had he known scuba would become a proven technology after the war, he’d have stayed with diving.
McNaught’s next duty came at his choice, not on orders. He packed his bag and headed for the Fleet Ship Salvage Base at Pearl Harbor, and a switch from the diving crew to the diving locker.
At Pearl Harbor, Ray witnessed what he calls the ‘Second Pearl Harbor’. He vividly recalls a number of large landing ships loaded with munitions for the invasions of Saipan and Tinian were docked “upstream” in Pearl - -
“They were combat loaded and waiting for the ‘go’ signal on that invasion. They didn’t want anybody to know they blew up five LSTs and I don’t know how many other landing craft loaded with aviation gas in 55 gallon drums and all the ammunition you need to shoot in two or three different places.”
Ray says that, apparently, little thought had been taken about safety when the ships were loaded, and the mixed, incompatible cargoes became a lethal cauldron.
“The reason you never heard about it is they clapped a ‘Top Secret’ cover on it. When they started blowing up, people on the beach went to work with their fire axes and cut the mooring lines. The LSTs were floating down the harbor, and were blowing up. And when they blew up, they had enough holes in them to sink. Most of the superstructure was blown over the side, and some of the ships sank right on that garbage. Some pieces weighed a ton or two. One LST we were able to raise by ‘dewatering’ the compartments with compressed air and raised it. We towed it into the beach and had beaching gear. With a D-8 Cat for a power source, we had about eight times as much power on the hauling line.
One of the divers trying to save the LSTs and other sailors was Boatswain Mate, 2nd Class Owen Francis Patrick Hammerberg. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a destroyer escort, DE 1015 was named after him. His actions on that day are described in the award citation (below).
“That was the last time I ever put a diving suit on. If you can’t trust the people working top side, you don’t want to be down there in a diving suit. I went back to my rating as a gunner’s mate.”
When the invasion of Okinawa came in April of 1945, McNaught was on board a salvage ship with the invasion task force. The fleet had an early warning system for kamikaze attacks in a picket line of radar-equipped destroyers. McNaught says he was an eyewitness to as many as ninety blips on the radar screen - - reflecting as many suicide planes heading to attack the fleet.
“We went out and picked up a destroyer that had been hit by four or five kamikazes and towed him back to Kerama-Retto, which was a sick bay for ships at Okinawa.
“Every evening, they’d talk over the TBS (talk between ships) radio and say ‘make smoke, wise man, make smoke.’
“They had smoke generators on several landing craft and they’d run them around through the ships and get a big cloud of smoke to keep the kamikazes from being able to see the ships.”
Ray says his salvage ship towed the damaged destroyer to the middle of the smoke bank and then went back to its own anchorage, well concealed.
“But somehow or another, the wind shifted and our bow was sticking out. That salvage tug had a big king post and booms on the front that made it look like an AK-A, a big heavy transport. I guess an inexperienced kamikaze pilot thought it looked like the front of an AK-A and he dove where he figured the bridge would be in the smoke bank. He just went into the water about 50 yards aft of us.
“I heard that old bomb whistling and I was standing on the gun deck. I hit the deck and you couldn’t dig a foxhole on a damned steel deck. You’d just ruin your nail job. I fell right on one of those hand wheels on a hatch... right in my gut. Knocked the air out of me and I thought, ‘My god, I’ve been hit!’ I’m feeling around to see if I can find any blood and I’m feeling that hand wheel... it scared the tar out of me, anyway.
“That was the luckiest day of my life, I guess.”
In 1953, Ray was on board the USS McKinley for the first H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll. By then, McNaught was a Junior Chief in the Navy, and he’d been made the Chief Master at Arms on the McKinley - - the highest ranking enlisted man on the ship.
Ray recalls, “It was an early morning drop and we were supposed to be 50 miles away and we were only 25 miles away.”
Ray remembers that also aboard the McKinley, along with many VIPs who were present for this nuclear weapon test, was syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Considine.
“I got the first draft he made of the dropping of the H-bomb. I scrounged it out of the trash.”
Today, remarkably fit and trim for a man eighty years of age, Ray McNaught can still wear his Navy A-1 uniform. And, he looks back with pride on his years of service on, and under, the sea.
“I retired after almost 31 years, and have been retired for 33 years. I did fairly well for a farm boy. “
Owen Francis Patrick Hammerberg
Boatswain’s Mate, 2nd Class
Congressional Medal of Honor
Citation:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as a diver engaged in rescue operations at West Loch, Pearl Harbor, 17 February 1945. Aware of the danger when 2 fellow divers were hopelessly trapped in a cave-in of steel wreckage while tunneling with jet nozzles under an LST sunk in 40 feet of water and 20 feet of mud, Hammerberg unhesitatingly went overboard in a valiant attempt to effect their rescue, despite the certain hazard of additional cave-ins and the risk of fouling his lifeline on jagged pieces of steel imbedded in the shifting mud. Washing a passage through the original excavation, he reached the first of the trapped men, freed him from the wreckage and, working desperately in pitch-black darkness, finally effected his release from fouled lines, thereby enabling him to reach the surface. Wearied but undaunted after several hours of arduous labor, Hammerberg resolved to continue his struggle to wash through the oozing submarine, subterranean mud in a determined effort to save the second diver. Venturing still farther under the buried hulk, he held tenaciously to his purpose, reaching a place immediately above the other man just as another cave-in occurred and a heavy piece of steel pinned him crosswise over his shipmate in a position which protected the man beneath from further injury while placing the full brunt of terrific pressure on himself. Although he succumbed in agony 18 hours after he had gone to the aid of his fellow divers, Hammerberg, by his cool judgment, unfaltering professional skill and consistent disregard of all personal danger in the face of tremendous odds, had contributed effectively to the saving of his 2 comrades. His heroic spirit of self-sacrifice throughout enhanced and sustained the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country.