2 blasts in warship gun turret kill 48
June 12, 1924: Forty-five enlisted men and three officers were killed and dozens of others injured when nearly two tons of TNT compound exploded in a gun turret on the battleship Mississippi.
The first blast occurred while the ship’s crew was conducting gunnery practice about 45 miles from the Port of Los Angeles. The second came four hours later as the ship dropped anchor in the harbor at San Pedro near the hospital ship Relief.
Both blasts set off the charges of the battleship’s guns. In the second blast, “four members of the rescuing squad were caught behind the mighty recoil of the great rifle,” The Times reported. “They were crushed instantly to death.”
The Times called the accident the “greatest of naval disasters, for it eclipses all three other similar events in the Navy.”
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