Loss of Nuclear Submarine Forty Years Ago Still a Mystery — Tyrone Native Among Scorpion’s Victims
Denny Watson remembers first hearing about the loss of his older brother Bob’s submarine shortly after coming home from his after-school job at a neighborhood gas station near their Tyrone home. “I was getting a bath and it came in on the radio,” the fifty-six-year-old said, recalling the evening of Memorial Day, May 27, 1968. “Dang! That’s my brother’s sub!”
The sinking of the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) about 400 miles southwest of the Azore Islands, the Portuguese archipelago, five days earlier remains shrouded in mystery — only one of two nuclear-powered submarines lost by the U.S. Navy. Forty years later, the official story is that an on-board accident doomed the sub. The unofficial story of the last days of the 3500-ton, “Skipjack” class, nuclear-powered attack submarine resembles something straight from a Tom Clancy novel.
Denny said neither did the Navy tell his mother, Dorothy Reese (who passed away in 2005), much about what happened to the Scorpion, nor did the family speak much about it as the years passed. “They kept us in the dark for a long time,” Denny said of the Navy’s explanation of why the sub quietly disappeared on its way home following a three-month Mediterranean cruise. Ultimately, the sub was located two miles down in the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundred miles from the Azores.
The first signs that something was amiss — at least to the families of the ninety-nine Scorpion crewmen, including twenty-one-year-old Machinist’s Mate Fireman Robert Westley Watson — came after the submarine failed to return to its home port in Norfolk, Va., that Memorial Day.
Remembering Bob Watson
“Later on they contacted us,” said Denny, who still carries Bob’s senior picture in his wallet. Denny smiled as he remembered how their mother always got mad at his brother for his habit of making goofy faces in photos before pulling out a photo of Bob mugging for the camera with his shipmates.
“Bob always had a smile on that little round face of his,” recalled Howard Reese, a friend of Bob’s. “He was friendly with everybody, and well-liked.” Reese remembered how Bob worked after school — at the same gas station where Denny later worked — and then tinkered with cars in the family’s garage until the wee hours. “He would be up there working on cars until one or two in the morning, then go to bed and get up and go to school and do it all over again,” Reese said.
“If there was anything mechanically wrong with that ship, he would have fixed it to bring it on home,” said friend Don Westley, who recalled how the pair had torn apart and overhauled a ’56 Ford together. It was the time of hot rods, he added, and Bob always was working on cars for people. “He would bend over backwards to help you.”
He also liked to have fun, his friends said, recounting stories of fast cars and good times. Reese remembered how Bob once modified a ’53 Chevy six-cylinder with a manifold that had three carburetors and the resulting power it gave the car. “I can remember times — his mother had a ’54 Chevy convertible — we would put the top down and go riding around town,” Westley said.
“He was a grease monkey,” Denny said. “He was a good guy.”
Reese said he was drafted into the Army right out of high school, and Bob enlisted after a year in trade school. But the two kept in touch through letters. Reese said Bob seemed to enjoy the Navy. “Not so much crazy about the water,” he said. “He loved motors and machinery.”
Reese said he was stationed in Europe when he heard the news. Then he got a letter. “I knew he was on the Scorpion. I saw the headlines. We were a couple of young kids from a hick town out seeing the world.”
Denny, who was sixteen at the time, already was on a path to entering the submarine service like Bob. “I had my physical; I was going to do what he did. I was going to follow in his footsteps,” he said. That changed after the loss of the Scorpion. Denny said the Navy changed his status, and the submarine’s sinking soured his ambitions for a naval career. “It left a bitter taste in my mouth. I also haven’t ate seafood since then.”
Still No Answers
To this day, Denny still doesn’t know the whole story of why the Scorpion sank, only that it was supposed to have been caused by one of its own torpedoes malfunctioning in its tube — then detonating. Or had the Scorpion launched a torpedo that homed back in on the sub? Or had the sub exceeded its “crush depth” — the maximum depth before the vessel’s steel gave way to the relentless pressure of the ocean — because of an unknown mechanical failure?
These were the questions the initial inquest that commenced after the sub was declared lost on June 5 was supposed to answer. After months of testimony, however, the Navy’s official line was a cross between “we don’t know” and “we’re not telling.” It took twenty-five years until the Navy declassified enough of the report to reveal that the initial inquiry suspected the cause to be one of the Scorpion‘s torpedoes and less likely to be a chain-reaction of mechanical problems that ended in an explosion.
“The cause of the sinking of the Scorpion remains unknown,” said Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss. Doss said beyond the initial inquiry, the Navy did a technical review of the sinking and concluded in its June 1970 report that a “cataclysmic event” resulted in the flooding and subsequent sinking of the nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine. Doss also said tests revealed that the sub caused no short- or long-term environmental hazard because of its reactor.
“The Navy still has the deepest respect for the men and the families and is committed to the appropriate and respectful release of as much information as possible,” Doss said of what he described as a periodic review of the still-classified aspects of the inquiries into the Scorpion‘s sinking — the last of which was conducted in 1998.
But to military reporter Ed Offley, who first covered the Scorpion as a news reporter for the Norfolk Ledger-Star on the fifteenth anniversary of its sinking, the official story of a cataclysmic event started looking more like a lie the deeper he dug. “I just forgot to stop,” Offley said. “My motive was to solve a mystery,” he said of his twenty-five-year investigation into the sub’s demise. “It turned out not to be mystery at all — it was a secret.”
When he first wrote about the Scorpion incident, Offley said he came to the conclusion that it was sunk by one of its own torpedoes. But then a co-worker at the paper, a former career Navy man, stopped him in the hall and dropped the bombshell: The Soviets sank the Scorpion!
Years of Research
Offley spent more than two decades sifting through available Navy documents, interviewing former sailors with ties to the incident, and examining the fallout of the John Walker spy ring that came to light in the 1980s. He put together what he called “a mosaic” of what happened to the Scorpion.
Offley’s book, Scorpion Down, which was released in 2007, details why he and others who were involved with the aftermath of the Scorpion tragedy believe the sub’s sinking was no accident. “It was an attack,” Offley said. His 419-page book sheds light on the Scorpion‘s real mission — to spy on a group of Soviet ships near the Azores — and the subsequent cat-and-mouse game with a Soviet sub. It ended with a torpedo hit and, ninety seconds later, the imploding of the sub’s compartments as it passed its crush depth.
Offley said he has no delusions the Navy will ever acknowledge the real cause. “There’s no signed, notarized confession,” he said. “And there never will be.”
When asked why it mattered how the USS Scorpion sank after all these years, Offley pointed to a basic moral obligation to the families: “If you go out and serve your country and get killed, then that person’s family deserves to know what killed their husband, son, or father.”
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