Sunken warship is glimpse of history

By Beth Daley, Globe Staff, 11/9/2003

The Navy ship was making a routine dump of condemned ammunition in deep waters off Boston when a horrific explosion rocked the vessel, raining missiles and rockets onto more than two dozen sailors who desperately jumped from the flames into 50-degree water.

Seventeen men died that foggy day in 1944, many of them from Boston, despite heroic attempts by some of the crew and a passing ship that braved the hail of ammunition to scoop survivors from the sea. Within days, however, the deadly conflagration was a postscript, a local tragedy overshadowed by a world war.

Now, almost 60 years later, a group of five amateur divers have discovered the lost ship's remains 240 feet underwater, its bow completely buried and its bridge ripped off by fishing gear. The deep-sea divers who found it, normally secretive about their discoveries, are going public in hopes of putting to rest any lingering curiosity from loved ones or descendants of those who were on the doomed ship, the YF-415.

''It's sacred ground,'' said Bob Foster of Foxborough, who first discovered the wreck last year and breathes in a mixture of helium, pure oxygen, and air to dive as far down as 300 feet in New England's murky waters. ''We didn't know what we had found at first.''

Despite an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 shipwrecks off New England's coast, only about 10 percent have been definitively identified. While the state Board of Underwater Archeology knows approximately where and when many ships went down, the exact locations are often elusive. Shipwreck seekers like Foster can spend years searching for a wreck, battling poor visibility and water too deep or cold for traditional scuba divers. Many shipwreck seekers tend to watch where fishermen go, because old wrecks tend to be great habitat for cod, haddock, and other species.

When Foster and his friends go ''shipwreck searching,'' they start by looking at navigational charts that show rises or bumps on the ocean floor. The group then steams out on a boat and uses a sonar fish finder to identify strange shapes on the sea bottom, looking for those that show right or sharp angles that may be man-made.

Foster first spotted the YF-415 a year ago in an area 14 miles off Boston known as the ''dumping grounds,'' where old ships were scuttled and waste was dumped overboard. Weather prevented him and the group from diving to check it out until this past July. They thought the wreck was a cargo ship or barge until two members, Captains Heather Knowles and Dave Caldwell of Northern Atlantic Dive Expeditions of Marblehead, armed with powerful underwater lights, discovered a compass stamped ''US Navy.'' Foster then conducted an exhaustive search of declassified naval documents and was able to match up the size and shape of the vessel with the YF-415 in naval records. He alerted the Navy to the find.

Amid those old documents, many stamped ''secret'' and ''confidential,'' Foster also uncovered a play-by-play account of what appears to have been an avoidable tragedy that fell particularly harshly on a group of African-American sailors from the now-defunct Hingham Ammunition Depot. Neither the divers nor the Globe has been able to track down any of the wreck's survivors today.

Shortly after noon on May 11, 1944, after Navy workers had already hoisted two-thirds of the ship's 151 tons of old ammunition overboard, survivors heard a horrible whooshing sound as the explosives caught fire and lit into the air.

Within minutes, other ordnance caught fire and the men, many of whom could not swim, jumped over the side without life preservers as missiles and rockets shot into the sea around them. The explosions continued for close to 40 minutes. By the time the haze cleared, the YF-415 had sunk. A passing naval weather ship plucked survivors from the water, including skipper Louis Tremblay, a former antiques dealer from Marblehead, who was credited with getting men off the ship and helping a severely burned Newport, R.I., man into a preserver.

In all, it appears 11 of the 16 enlisted men from the Hingham depot died that day, and all but three of the ship's crew died. An investigation revealed safety lapses on the ship -- explosives may have been stored too closely to the rockets, and a spark set off a chain reaction.

The newspapers two days later ran the story under a bigger headline of ''Allies win 3 miles in Italy, bag 150 Nazis over Reich,'' but within days, it was forgotten amid news of the war: The Allies were advancing deeper into Italy, and American and British planes ripped across occupied Europe.

''It's still an amazing story,'' said Jack Ahern of Plymouth, one of the divers.

He and the other divers are still investigating the wreck to glean more clues -- diver Donna Chaston is videotaping the wreck -- but their time at the site is limited. The gas mixture they use and the cold temperatures on the bottom -- it can hover around 38 degrees -- mean they only have about 20 minutes at the wreck each dive. While they sometimes keep items from shipwrecks, they are not allowed under naval law to keep anything from the YF-415, or disturb it, because it is considered a war grave. They still won't give out the exact location of the wreck to anyone but the Navy.

''This is something most divers dream about,'' said Foster. ''It's a detective story; it's history. Being the first to actually see this ship in 60 years is amazing.''