A board of investigation into the loss of the Macaw convened Monday, 21 February 1944, at Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Bushnell (AS-15), a submarine tender, and two days later reconvened at Midway, the investigators having flown there. The four officers who comprised the board heard testimony from twenty witnesses, including twelve from the Macaw, reviewed various exhibits including weather records and salvage plans, deliberated for several more days, and on 1 March declared 47 findings of fact, 23 opinions, and two recommendations. Among their findings was that Paul Burton had been the “Officer of the Deck”—directly in charge of and responsible for the navigation of the ship—throughout the Macaw’s ill-fated excursion on 16 January 1944.
Two weeks before they convened to investigate the loss of the Macaw, the same four officers had convened aboard the same ship to investigate the grounding of the Flier. The Flier and the Macaw had run aground at approximately the same spot within about two hours of each other, under essentially identical sea conditions, trying to do the same thing, to enter Brooks Channel. Both John Crowley, captain of the Flier, and Paul Burton were found responsible for the respective groundings, but where the Flier panel absolved Crowley of “culpable negligence,” the same four panelists concluded that, in failing to “round up” on the central axis of the channel in attempting to reenter it in order to basically start over in attempting to get a messenger to the stranded Flier, Paul Burton “did not display good seamanship.”
The board members seem to have been somewhat harsher in judging Burton than they were Crowley—this perhaps because of an extenuating circumstance in the form of an escort tug a mere thousand yards or so in front of the Flier as the submarine started its approach to the channel. It was for fear of overrunning that tug that Cmdr. Crowley chose to make his approach at ten knots or two-thirds speed, a strategy that left his sub more vulnerable than it would otherwise have been to the lateral drift that put it on the reef. There were plenty of extenuating circumstances Paul Burton might have cited too—the absence of the buoy marking the east edge of the channel entrance and the reported blockage from view of the rear range light among them—but Burton was not alive to cite them.
The Macaw board recommended that the heroics of the small boat crews in the rescue operation on February 13 be duly recognized, and that no further proceedings be had in the matter. None were. The record of the board’s proceedings appears below. Some of the exhibits submitted to the board are missing here.
Exhibits
Index
Approvals
