Wyandotte man among 129 who died in 1963 nuclear submarine accident | News

A Navy man with downriver connections will be remembered later this week in an online memorial honoring the lives of those who died when a submarine sank, killing everyone on board.

Robert Eugene Johnson was born on June 20, 1925 in rural Perry County, Ohio. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to Wyandotte.

He attended Roosevelt High School and joined the Navy in 1942. Johnson trained at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and later graduated from the Navy’s Class A Torpedoman’s Mate School.

He served on a number of submarines during and after World War II. On February 17, 1961, he signed up for service on his first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Thresher (SSN 593).

Johnson, the comrade of the Chief Petty Officer Torpedoman, was named chief of the boat and received the recruited personnel report. He has now entered 20 years of active service in the Navy. His uniform was filled with military ribbons, many with combat detection.



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Wyandotte’s chief petty officer Robert Eugene Johnson was assigned to the USS Thresher.



On April 10, 1963, Johnson and 128 others died aboard the USS Thresher. Two other shipmates from Michigan were Walter Jack Noonis, chief radioman, and Thomas Charles Kantz, second-class electronics technician. Both men were from Detroit.

The USS Thresher has been designated as an attack submarine. The design made it fast, quiet, and deadly at the time. The submarine was brought home from Kittery, Maine.

After its commissioning in August 1961, the submarine went through a series of tests and training attempts in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. While in Puerto Rico, the submarine experienced a nuclear reactor shutdown and challenges for diesel generators. When the thresher was moored in Port Canaveral, Florida, it was cut off by a tug that damaged a ballast tank. Repairs were made at Groton, Connecticut’s Electric Boat Company.

The thresher reentered test training off the coast of Key West, Florida.

The submarine later returned to Portsmouth, Maine for a scheduled six month post-shakedown inspection.

On April 9, 1963, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. John Wesley Harvey, the thresher, left Kittery, Maine with a naval crew and civilian technicians of 129. They set out for the Atlantic Ocean to complete a series of diving tests. The Thresher would be escorted by the submarine rescue ship USS Skylark.

According to the Thresher Base Memorial Organization, the submarine and lark were about 220 miles off the coast of Cape Cod on April 10, 1963. The thresher began a series of deep dives early that morning.

Communication between the two ships was mutilated. The last thresher report the lark received was like “air rushes into an air tank”. Then, around 9:20 a.m., silence.

The thresher was 8,400 feet below the surface of the sea.

By the afternoon, 15 naval vessels were part of the search and rescue team. On the morning of April 11th, despair was given hope and salvation ceased. Adm. George W. Anderson Jr., chief admiral for naval operations, announced at a Pentagon news conference late that morning that the thresher and everyone on board were lost.



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The USS Thresher (SSN 593) can be seen at sea in this undated historical photo.



President John F. Kennedy ordered American flags to be hoisted for the deceased April 12-15.

At the end of June 1963, the Trieste marine submersible located a field of debris scattered over a 33-hectare field of seabed. A photograph of the remains of the thresher was taken in July.

The theories about the loss of the thresher are many.

However, subsequent studies and research by the Navy suggest a significant failure of the thresher’s saltwater piping system, which relied on silver brazing versus welding. This burst pipe would have resulted in a lack of ship control and resulted in a rapid descent to the sea floor. The implosion most likely occurred between 1,600 and 2,000 feet.

After the thresher was lost, the Navy set up a program called SUBSAFE, which ensures safe integrity before a new submarine is deployed.

In 2008, Robert Ballard, using resources from the Navy and the National Geographic Society, located and surveyed the Thresher’s debris field and the USS Scorpion (SSN 589), which was lost in 1968. Ballard then also examined the remains of the passenger ship, HMS Titanic.

A Thresher memorial is located at Arlington National Cemetery, depicting the most significant death of a nuclear submarine.



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The USS Thresher (SSN 593) has a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.



The Thresher Base Memorial Group will offer a video tribute on April 10th. Information about the event and the submarine itself can be found at thresherbase.org.

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