LOGBOOK OF THE USS HOPEWELL, DD-681, COMMANDED BY D H ZWEMKE,

ASSIGNED TO PACIFIC FLEET DURING DOMINIC I OPERATION, 11 May, 1962

TESTED WASH-DOWN SYSTEM OFF SAN DIEGO COAST

Subject Terms: SHIPS; LOGBOOKS; MILITARY PERSONNEL; METEOROLOGICAL DATA


Operation Dominic was a 36-detonation atmospheric nuclear test series. 
The first phase occurred from 25 April through 11 July 1962, the second phase
from 2 October through 3 November 1962.  Shot Swordfish was an underwater 
detonation of a stock nuclear anti-submarine rocket (ASROC) weapon
approximately 370 nautical miles west-southwest of San Diego.  Joe Bruce, 
one of our crew members was there.

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B. J. Freeman

I went on board Hopewell in September of 1962, and Hopewell had already gone through shipyard repairs for all of the damage done as a result of the underwater nuclear blast. Chief Bob Jones told me that the blast wasn't very far away from Hopewell. He said that all generators were knocked off line and all boilers went down! The Hopewell was essentially dead in the water for about 30 or 40 minutes, according to Chief Jones.

The damage was extensive in Engineering. The number one Turbo Generator was badly damaged and the main turbine rotor had to be replaced. I think a couple of forced draft blowers were also extensively damaged too! As for the hull and superstructure, there was nothing really bad that happened there! I believe that the stern tube packing glands were leaking badly too. The ship was in pretty bad shape and Chief Jones said that the ship was never the same afterwards! He simply wanted to get as far away from a Destroyer as he could. He said that he was afraid that the Hopewell was going to sink and take him with it. He also said that he was afraid that an engineering casualty would occur and he would be busted for it! ha...! Chief Jones worried about that ship quite a bit. He was a very conscientious Chief Petty Officer and never said "never" - BJ Freeman MMCA.

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Bruce Barr, ET3

In the summer of 1962, the Hopewell participated in a nuclear detonation of an ASROC Torpedo. All personal on the participating ships had short articles sent to their hometown newspapers. If my recollection is correct, it took the ship(s) approximately 4 – 5 days to make the trip to a place called Christmas Island in the Pacific. On the way there, the navy performed different tests with exploding depth charges at different depths and different distances from the ship to test the effect of these explosions. For those of you that have never witnessed depth charges except in the movies, there is no large spout of water as in most of the movies if the charge is set off at any depth greater than about 50 feet. Anything over 50 feet, and there is a small thud and a slight boiling of the water just above the charge, but no spout. You can assume for movie purposes, that most of those charges were set off at about 20 – 30 feet deep. Also, on the way down to Christmas, we spent much of the time stuffing blankets, pillows and anything else we could use around all of the electronic gear to hopefully help with the explosion impact. I doubt that we would have had time to do this in a real war type situation, but that is what we were told to do. When we reached the designated sight for the test, they set an older decommissioned destroyer at about 200 yards from ground zero, another destroyer at 1000 yards, the Hopewell was stationed at 2000 yards, and I believe there was one other ship stationed at 3000 yards. They attached the ASROC to a large raft, the raft was approximately 25 to 30 feet square, made of boards about 8 – 10 inches thick. The torpedo was hung at a depth of I believe 200 feet deep. The first day there, we spent most of the time completing the preparation of the ships, with the blanket and pillow stuffing. They also installed closed circuit TV stations throughout the ship so that depending on where a person was stationed, they could watch the detonation on TV. There was quite a group of civilian personal that spent some time telling us how we would have to brace ourselves at the time of the explosion and other things we would have to do. The second day there, they began the countdown at 24 hours, and at 20 hours there was some problem and they held the count for 24 hours. The third day, they again began the countdown. Into the forth day, the count reached somewhere in the vicinity of 3 – 4 hours, another problem arose and the count was held for another 24 hours. On the fifth day, they again began the countdown, and on the sixth day, it certainly appeared that we were going to get a blast. I was an Electronics Tech 3^rd class, and myself and a radioman were assigned to the radio shack. Guess where one of the only places on the ship was that there was no closed circuit TV. Anyway, we had been coached that when the count reached 5 seconds, that we were to flex our knees, and have both hands on something to brace ourselves with. The radioman and I did this, and the count continued to zero. I would say it was about 3 – 5 seconds following the zero count, and we felt a very small thud on the ship. Both the radioman and I kind of looked at each other, then kind of laughed and stood up with “Wow, wasn’t that exciting.” About 5 – 10 seconds following that, the ship began to tremble, both the radioman and I were thrown to the floor, much of the gear, transmitters and receivers began to throw sparks and several pieces actually caught fire. Needless to say, it pretty much scared the pants off of us. As soon as the ship settled down, we got up and began to put out the fires and shut down most of the gear in the radio room. Those people that were able to watch this thing on TV, said that the water spout from the explosion went probably 150 to 200 feet in the air. The ship that was stationed at ground zero, was utterly destroyed. It did not sink, but might as well have. The ship stationed at 1000 yards, did not have any personal on board, and it also suffered some severe damage. There were pictures that I was able to see later, the Hopewell, was carried up on a wave from the explosion, so high that the props were totally visible out of the water. We did suffer some major damage, especially to our electronics. You have to remember, that even in 1962, this ship was 20 years old, had been through numerous yard periods and did not have a lot of thickness to the old hull anymore. It took myself, and the only other radio E.T. over two weeks to put all the transmitters and receivers back in operation.

Now, due to the fact that our Captain, Cmdr. Zwemke, was junior captain in this squadron, it became our duty to destroy that raft that the ASROC had been tied to. All the other ships that took part in this took off for San Diego. The first day, the civilian personal and some navy personal, pulled up along side the raft and spent several hours tossing hand grenades on the raft in an attempt to sink it. Check back at the top of this write-up for the size of the raft, and the few splinters that the grenades blew off, did not really cause much harm. The ship then backed off to decide what they were going to do. About 8:30pm that evening, I went to bed. It just happened that my bunk, was the top bunk in the aft compartment, right below the aft 5-inch gun mount. About 9:00pm, I was scared out of my skivvies, and my eyes were filled with dust, when the aft 5-inch fired off a round. I jumped up and went topside, to see what was happening. They had covered the raft with garbage and cardboard, set it on fire, backed off about 200 yards and were trying to hit it with a 5-inch shell to sink it. If my memory serves me correctly, they fired about 5 – 7 shells, did not come close and gave up that idea. The next morning, someone asked if anyone had tested the raft for radioactivity. No one had. They pulled along side the raft again, broke out the Geiger counters, - - radioactivity zero. We pulled the raft up on the fantail to take it back to San Diego with us and dispose of it there.

Now, one of the other ships had gotten a sonar contact of what was presumed to be a sub. Our captain, was told to follow this sub and do his best to communicate with it. There had been no communication, so was presumed to be possibly Russian. We followed this contact for 4 days (delaying our return to San Diego), it finally surfaced – it was about a 60 foot wide, 200 foot long kelp bed!!!!!

Now back to S.D. About two weeks following this exercise, the Captain sent for me to come up to his stateroom. I had absolutely no idea what he wanted, but of course I went. It turned out, that when they had sent all the letters about this exercise to our hometown papers, there was one sent to his hometown also. I am from a small (8,500) town in Northwest Iowa. It turned out that Comdr. Zwemke, was from a smaller (2,700) town about 5 miles from my hometown, and his mother saw both his and my names in the papers, called my mother to tell her that her son was on the same ship that I was on. I did in fact get a letter from my mother a week or so after this asking me if I knew a Darrel Zwemke on my ship. I let her know that I certainly did, and that he was the Captain. I do not really know if my mother knew exactly what the Captain was, but I told her. The reason Comdr. Zwemke wanted me in his stateroom, was that he had called his mother upon returning to S.D., and she had informed him of my presence, and where I was from – so we had a nice chat about small town Iowa, and actually had aquaintenances in common, which is not difficult coming from such a small area.
That was my ASROC experience!!!

Bruce

Earl Ackers was aboard the Agerholm; "I was aboard Aggie during that operation. We were told that we'd be gone from San Diego for about six weeks. Some of the wives splurged on beauty shop visits, etc. - spent all the money they would usually spend on their husbands. When we got back after about a week there was quite an uproar in some homes. One FT2 and his family literally ate beans for the rest of that month. Earl"

Noel,
You asked about Operation Swordfish. On 11 May 1962 Hopewell participated in the only live nuclear ASROC test, Operation Swordfish. It was conducted off San Diego along with Agerholm, Anderson, Baussell (all FRAM I destroyers) a submarine, a fleet tug and Hopewell, a Fletcher class destroyer. There was an LSD as command ship and an aircraft to photograph the blast from above. For the exercise Agerholm was the firing ship, Anderson was back-up firing ship and Baussell, unmanned, was in the tow with target. The submarine was to fire a simulator that Hopewell was to try and track through the blast. The fleet tug was to tow an array consisting of monitoring devices, the Baussell and 2000 yards astern of Baussell, the target and then more monitoring devices. The whole tow was about five miles long. Prior to the exercise we attended the nuclear schools on Coronado. There we saw the films of the blasts at Bikini from outside the ships and inside those that survived. Movies taken inside the ships showed the ships during the underwater blast. The shafts whipped up and down. Reduction gears, turbines and boilers fell off their foundations. If there had been anyone on the ship they probably would have been killed from the missile hazards. They then shock tested Hopewell by having us steam past a barge with explosives in the water. Not bad but lost a few bricks in a boiler. They also installed closed circuit TV on the ship so we could conn with no one on the weather deck or wing of the bridge. This was incase the device went off in the air after it was fired. After arrival in the operating area the Agerholm, Anderson, and the submarine were on the port side of the tow. The Bausell was unmanned and in the tow with power from her emergency diesels so that after the blast the crew could re-board and light off the plant and steam the ship (hopefully). We were on the starboard side of the tow. On signal we closed up the ship and turned toward the target, the Agerholm fired the missile, and the submarine launched the simulator. We watched the firing on TV and when the missile entered the water we opened up the bridge and let people out. We were heading straight at the target when the blast went off and the huge column of water rose and the base surge rolled out in all directions. It got bigger and bigger and seemed to fill the whole horizon ahead. Very unnerving but I figured that we were 4000 yards away and the base surge stopped just short of Bausell who was 2000 yards from the blast giving us 2000 yards lee way. The blast was a long, long blast that shook and shook the ship. The radars and sonar promptly went down so there was no tracking the simulator if it had indeed survived. The Bausell crew re-manned their ship and got the plant lit off and got underway from the tow a little later. We were told to recover the simulator. This entailed going around the tow since we saw what appeared to be something orange in the distance. After getting around to the area where the simulator might be the tow was being broken up and the monitoring devices recovered. We put our whale boat in the water but what they found was the target not the simulator and the boat returned to the ship. We send the boat crew through the decontamination stations. We were told to destroy the target so we closed and the gunners mates lined the rail and tried firing the machine guns at the target but they didn�t make a dent in it. Next they tried dropping some hand grenades on it with no effect. So the ship backed off and tried to fire the 5� at the target. Unfortunately it was getting dark and visibility was dropping and we couldn�t observe the fall of shot. Finally in desperation we pulled up along side the target and lifted it with the torpedo crane pulling it up the side of the ship. As it was hauled up we saw that underneath there were barrels of flotation material and the raft it self was built like a fort. We ended up taking the target (bright orange) back to San Diego, lashed vertically between the main deck and the 01 level. This didn�t make the task group commander happy. The last thing he wanted to see was the target back in San Diego.
Sorry about that!
Pete Watson Cdr.