SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) --
In its day, the USS Kitty Kawk aircraft carrier was the greatest symbol of American military might in the Indo-Pacific, proven in combat from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf and even surviving a collision with a Soviet submarine.
But the glory days of the former USS Kitty Hawk are over, and the retired supercarrier is now making its final 16,500-mile voyage from Washington state to Texas, where it will be cut up and sold for scrap.
International Shipbreaking Limited of Brownsville, Texas, bought the ship last year for less than a dollar from the US Naval Sea Systems Command, which oversees the disposal of decommissioned warships.
The 319-meter-long, 76.8-meter-wide aircraft carrier is too big to fit through the Panama Canal, so in the coming months, the Kitty Hawk will crawl up the South American coast and through the Gulf of Mexico to its destination. final.
Navy tugs support the USS Kitty Hawk on its final transit from Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton, Wash., to a shipbreaking facility in Texas.
Launched in 1960 and named for the area in North Carolina where the Wright brothers first flew a powered aircraft, the Kitty Hawk served the United States Navy for nearly 50 years before being retired from service in 2009.
The Kitty Hawk was the last US aircraft carrier to use oil, a relic of a time before the advent of the Nimitz-class nuclear-powered ships.
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Soon, all that will be left is a sometimes tumultuous story spanning the Vietnam War and most of the Cold War, as well as the upheaval and transformation of society at home.
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Race Riots and the Vietnam Experience
For a decade, beginning in the early 1960s, the Kitty Hawk was a mainstay of US forces off the coast of Vietnam.
At times, its planes made more than 100 daily sorties over Vietnam from what was called Yankee Station, the area of the South China Sea where American ships sailed to launch attacks against North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces.
A Russian-made Tupolev TU-16 Badger-A surveillance bomber flies with US Navy escort fighters over the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk during Cold War activities over the North Pacific Ocean in January 1963.
The ship and its air wing later received the Presidential Unit Citation, an award honoring extraordinary heroism for actions in Vietnam from December 1967 to June 1968, including support for US and South Vietnamese forces during the Tet Offensive. of North Vietnam in the spring of 1968.
The Kitty Hawk saw its last combat over Vietnam in 1972, but during its final mission the carrier became the scene of what congressional investigators later called "a sad chapter in Navy history."
Race riots broke out on the ship amid rising tensions after her deployment to Vietnam was extended following a port call in the Philippines, according to reports on the Naval History and Heritage Command website.
Accounts of what precipitated the incident vary.
Some say it was sparked when black sailors were investigated for a fight in a Filipino bar the night before the deployment.
Others say things went into overdrive after a black sailor was denied an extra sandwich in the mess hall when a white sailor was not.
Regardless of the cause, the violence was considerable.
"Fighting quickly spread throughout the ship, with gangs of blacks and whites prowling the decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches and pipes," wrote David Cortwright, now director of the Kroc Institute at the University of Washington. Notre Dame, in a 1990 article on black resistance to the Vietnam War.
The riot and racial tensions aboard the Kitty Hawk no doubt reflected the stark racial inequality in American society at the time.
A crew member in position aboard the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1972.
Reports show that black sailors then made up less than 10% of the Kitty Hawk's crew of 4,500.
And only five of her 348 officers were black, according to a Naval History Command report.
A Congressional report on the incident on the night of October 12-13, 1972, said the fight left 47 sailors injured, "all but 6 or 7 of them" were white.
And while that congressional investigation led to attempts by the military to address racial inequality, the subcommittee's report itself is riddled with prejudiced language that reveals just how deep racial prejudice runs in America.
"The subcommittee is of the opinion that the Kitty Hawk riot consisted of unprovoked assaults by a few men, most of whom were of below average mental capacity, most of whom had been on board less than a year, and all of whom were black. . This group, as a whole, acted like hoodlums, raising questions as to whether they should have been accepted into military service in the first place," reads the report's conclusion.
Still, the incident, along with others on Navy ships, prompted military leaders to place a new emphasis on programs earlier initiated by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the then chief of Naval Operations, aimed at improving race relations in the fleet.
As of December 31, 2020, black sailors made up 17.6% of the active military service force, according to Navy statistics.
Women, the Soviet submarine and an intelligence coup
Retired Capt. James Fanell said that when he came aboard the Kitty Hawk as an air wing intelligence officer in the 1990s, the race riot had already been forgotten.
"Most of the sailors on board are not historians, so they are looking forward to the next port call or the next operation," he said.
But in the 90s, another social issue was in the foreground: the integration of women in the fleet.
Fanell said that when he first went to sea in 1987 on another aircraft carrier, the USS Coral Sea, there were no women on board.
"A decade later, when we deployed to Kitty Hawk, there were eight female squad officers and intelligence staff working for me, out of 11 positions. Quite a drastic change," she said.
Currently, women make up more than 20% of the active duty US Army force.
In the years between the mutiny and the integration of women, the Kitty Hawk was embroiled in a tense Cold War encounter with a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine that saw the US carrier walk away with a piece of the sub stuck in her helmet.
In March 1984, Battle Group Bravo, led by Kitty Hawk, was the focal point for the naval portion of the annual joint Team Spirit exercises with South Korea.
When catapult officers reach the end of their tour aboard a carrier, it is tradition to launch their boots off the flight deck.
This "boot shot" was on USS Kitty Hawk in 1970. The Kitty Hawk is currently on her way to the scrapyard after being sold for 1 cent.
#WarshipWednesday pic.twitter.com/JaD3Jjz2Sc
— US Naval Institute (@NavalInstitute) January 19, 2022
Operating in open water, midway between Japan and South Korea, the Kitty Hawk and her escorts had been playing what one Navy official told The New York Times was a game of "cat and mouse" with the Soviet submarine, later determined to be K-314, a 5,000-ton Victor-class ship with a crew of about 90.
US forces had tracked and simulated their ability to sink the Soviet submarine 15 times in the days before the collision, according to a report by the Naval History and Heritage Command.
The carrier group then began practicing "deception techniques" to lose its Soviet tracker, according to a 1989 report on naval accidents titled "The Neptune Papers" by the Greenpeace/Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
It worked up to a point.
Just after 10 p.m. on March 21, 1984, while attempting to locate the carrier, K-314 surfaced in its path.
The Russian military website Top War gives the submarine's version of what happened next.
"The commander [of K-314] ordered an urgent dive to start to avoid a collision. Shortly after starting the dive, the submarine felt a strong thud. After a few seconds... a second powerful push. It was clear that the submarine did not have time to reach a safe depth, and was hit by one of the American ships. As we later learned, it was the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk."
The 5,000-ton Soviet submarine was no match for the 80,000-ton US aircraft carrier in this collision, said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy intelligence officer who saw the Navy report on the collision.
"It must have been really scary," he said.
"Everyone on Kitty Hawk was expecting the sub to go to the bottom and expecting to spot it on the other side," he said, noting that an aircraft carrier can't detect a sub in the vicinity because of the noise of its propellers and the underwater pressure wave that generate.
"Instead, the [commander of the submarine] apparently overestimated his distance from the carrier and did not begin to increase his depth until it was too late. Thus, he left a part of one of his propellers in the carrier's hull," Schuster said.
The K-314 lost power and was later towed to the Soviet port of Vladivostok.
The Kitty Hawk continued under its own steam and with a Cold War trophy, the piece of the Soviet submarine's propeller, embedded in its hull.
The anechoic coating of the Soviet submarine, a polymer that allows it to be quieter in the water, was also glued to the hull of the aircraft carrier.
Some described this as an intelligence coup for the US military, and the Kitty Hawk's crew promoted it by temporarily painting a submarine-shaped "victory mark" in red on the carrier's command center, the US Naval Institute said. United States.
The crew watches a fighter jet land on the USS Kitty Hawk, during a US-led allied air strike against Iraq, enforcing post-Gulf War UN resolutions, on January 19, 1993.
The last years
The Kitty Hawk continued to be a vital part of the US Pacific Fleet for more than two decades after the collision with the Soviet submarine.
In the early 1990s, it would support US military operations in Somalia and act as a launching base for air strikes against Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein.
In the summer of 1998, Kitty Hawk relocated to Japan, homeporting at Yokosuka Naval Base, home of the US Navy's 7th Fleet, where it would spend 10 years as the US Navy's only aircraft carrier. States based outside the continental territory of the country.
But now there is no home for the Kitty Hawk in America.
Leaving Yokosuka Harbor, the USS Kitty Hawk passes a small group of Japanese fishing boats and heads toward Sagami Bay on May 17, 2005.
James Melka, a stoker on the carrier in the 1960s, led an effort by the Kitty Hawk Veterans Association to have the ship turned into a museum, as was the case with other carriers like the Intrepid in New York;
the Midway and the Hornet, in California;
Yorktown, in South Carolina;
and the Lexington, in Texas.
But the Navy rejected the idea in 2018, according to a report by the United States Naval Institute News (USNI).
"No one is going to know [...] what a Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier was," Melka told USNI.
"They will only see images. They won't be able to see the actual ship and be able to walk on it."
Fanell said memories of the aircraft carrier will be kept alive by the hundreds of thousands of Sailors who served on her decks.
"And I'm just a sailor," he said.
"Think of all the lives he touched and the memories he created."
When the carrier's fate was sealed, Fanell sent a note to his former comrades to remind them of their time together and what they were about to lose.
"[It's] really sad in a way to think about all those memories and lose the one thing that ties us all together... the USS Kitty Hawk," he wrote.
"Life goes on and our memories fade, only a little faster when our ships are torn apart to make razor blades."