In the spring of 1989, an explosion struck the USS Iowa. 47 sailors died. The navy is quick to claim that a gay love drama is behind the misfortune. But probably only one seaman was made a scapegoat.
On April 19, 1989, in the middle of the peace, a gigantic explosion rocked the USS Iowa. The huge battleship was built during World War II and reactivated by US President Ronald Reagan. Now it rears up. The second main tower with its 16-inch guns had exploded. 47 sailors died, eleven crew members who served in the lower floors of the huge tower survived the explosion. The ship was able to call at its home port on its own, but the damage was never repaired. The USS Iowa retired from service.
Suicide and attack
How did the accident come about? The navy management quickly came up with a theory: It was not an accident, but an attack.
The officer Clayton Hartwig was gay and irredeemably in love with his comrade Kendall Truitt. Hartwig was responsible for the middle tube of the three-tier tower. The explosion occurred during a practice shooting off the coast of Puerto Rico. The projectile in the barrel was a training grenade without explosives. It was supposed to be fired with a propellant charge consisting of six sacks weighing around 50 kilograms. With guns of the caliber, the propellant charge and projectile are separate and not connected to one another in a case as with rifle ammunition.
Suspicious life insurance
Because of his unhappy love for the younger Kendall Truitt, officer Hartwig is said to have put a detonator between the sacks. The only reason the ship did not sink was because it succeeded in flooding the tower’s magazine so that the ammunition stores there would not catch fire. Clayton Hartwig was among the dead. His crush, Kendall Truitt, was not in the tower and should certainly not be injured by the explosion. Hartwig had used him as a beneficiary for his life insurance.
Campaign of an energetic woman
The silent and introverted Truitt was appalled and disturbed by the attack and the sensational reports on the “gay drama”. His energetic wife then got him to correct the allegations in public. Truitt vigorously denied that there was a sexual relationship with Hartwig. They were simply different from their rough-hewn comrades. “When we arrived in a port, for example in France, the two of us went on a sightseeing tour,” said Truitt in a TV interview. “The others just went drinking. Behind our backs they said we had to be gay. It’s clear that you’re gay if you’d rather go to a museum than get drunk in a bar.”
His marriage would have disturbed his friend Hartwig, be it out of jealousy or because he wanted to spare Truitt a disappointment. After that, the men’s relationship went downhill. “It wasn’t the same between us anymore,” said Truitt. “He realized that my love for my fiancée was more important to me than he was.”
Truitt never believed in an attack
Truitt considered it impossible that the technically inexpedient Hartwig could have built some kind of detonator on board. Truitt also denied that he could have smuggled the detonator into the barrel. In the tower, the men of the loading crew would stand so close together that a crew member who is not one of them would never have gotten hold of the bags. In the TV interview, he thought a malfunction of the hydraulic loading crane, which would have pushed the sacks into the chamber at too high a speed, was possible. Something like that could have led to an explosion.
No apologies from the Navy
The public relations work of the Truitts and Hartwig’s parents led to an independent investigation. It revealed that the bags could also have self-ignited. The explosion was never really resolved. The Navy later expressed its regret to the Hartwig family, but avoided a formal apology.
Truitt himself was one of the first to enter the flooded tower. He said that they had waded through a soup of extinguishing water and body parts to rescue the injured. He never wanted to serve in Iowa after that. “This ship is a place where he lost 47 crew members,” said his wife Carole in the interview. “He doesn’t talk to me about that. I won’t let him go back. I’m tired of watching my husband cry himself to sleep over the ship every night.”
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