Death in the Night

With a task force of 22 other warships spread across the sea for miles around her, the aircraft carrier Wasp plowed east in mid-Atlantic one night last week, bound for sendee in the Mediterranean. In darkness she launched her planes over heavy seas for a combat exercise. At a little after 10 p.m., the Wasp turned into the wind to take her brood back aboard. With a crump of rending metal, the sheer bow of the 27,100-ton carrier crashed into the starboard side of the 1,630-ton destroyer-minesweeper Hobson.

Like the Wasp (the second carrier* and seventh U.S. naval vessel to bear the name), the 37-knot Hobson was a veteran of many a sea battle of World War II. She was racing along off the carrier's port quarter on "plane guard"--ready for rescue work in case a flyer missed his landing and crashed. Under the impact of the collision the Hobson sank almost instantly, with many of her complement of 14 officers and 223 men asleep or helpless below. Amid a glare of searchlights, the carrier's crew began rescue operations. Other destroyers raced in to help.

But in 24 hours of searching, only 61 of the Hob son's men, many of them dazed and injured, were found. As the Wasp steamed slowly back toward New York, her bow sliced open along the waterline by the impact, 176 men, including the Hobson's skipper, Commander William J. Tierney, were missing and presumably lost--the biggest peacetime casualty list in modern U.S. naval history.

* The first carrier Wasp, then commanded by the late Naval Chief of Operations, Admiral Forrest Sherman, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Guadalcanal in 1942. Left a helpless cripple, she was sunk by guns of the Pacific Fleet.

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