Column: Giving the USS Mission Capistrano its proper due

Most Orange County residents have undoubtedly never heard of the USS Mission Capistrano, a U.S. Navy tanker named for Mission San Juan Capistrano.

It served with distinction during three wars and played a major role in locating the wreckage of the USS Thresher, a U.S. nuclear submarine that sank in the early 1960s, resulting in the second worst-ever submarine disaster in terms of loss of life.

Delivering gasoline, diesel and oil to combat ships and carrier-based aircraft while underway on the high seas, the 524-foot Mission Capistrano has been mentioned in only a handful of naval publications and maritime technical journals. There are no histories or photos of the ship in the files in the Sherman Library in Corona del Mar or Mission San Juan Capistrano’s Historical Society.

No newspaper or magazine articles have previously been written about the ship. It’s as if the USS Mission Capistrano will always be a mere footnote in U.S. naval history.

“That’s because tanker ships have never been considered as glamorous and exciting as aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers and submarines,” according to Thomas C. Pinard, a retired Southern California Navy captain and military historian who held positions on land and aboard ships based in Long Beach, San Diego, the Pacific and Atlantic.

But tankers, also called oilers and fuel replenishment ships, “are rightfully considered the ‘bloodlines’ of the Navy,” Pinard said. “They are analogous to the corner gas station. If your car is low on gas, you head to the nearest filling station. If there’s no tanker ship available to supply fuel to combat ships, they can’t leave their piers or they’ll stop dead in the water.”

Duty aboard a tanker can be dangerous.

“There can be a fire or explosion during the transfer of fuel from a tanker to the receiving ship while steaming at sea,” he said. “There’s the possibility of injury or death to tanker crew members manning the heavy hoses transferring the fuel. Cables connecting the ships to one another during fueling operations can become fouled or break, also injuring the crew. Tanker sailors are the unsung heroes of the Navy.”

During its lengthy career at sea, the Mission Capistrano was used as a U.S. Navy-commissioned ship or as a fleet auxiliary vessel operated by the Military Sealift Command and crewed by professional civilian mariners of the Merchant Marine.

The ship, which had a crew of 52, carried an arsenal of weapons including a .50mm cannon, machine guns and rockets. When crewed by merchant mariners, the tanker’s weapons were manned by special units of the Navy Armed Guard.

The USS Mission Capistrano, one of the Navy’s 21 “mission” tankers, was launched at the Marinships Corp shipyard in Sausalito, Calif., on May 7, 1944, and after sea trials was sent to the Pacific where it delivered fuel to U.S. ships until WWII ended. It then served during the Korean War and the first two years of the Vietnam War.

In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, the Mission Capistrano was detached from convoy duty off the coast of Vietnam and sent to the Todd Shipyard in New Orleans. It was converted into a seagoing Navy radio and sonar platform that would enable it to detect the movements and locations of submerged Soviet nuclear submarines. This was after the Pentagon learned the Soviet Union had built a submarine capable of delivering a nuclear warhead that could reach a large American city.

Constructed atop the Mission Capistrano’s main deck at the Todd facility was a 50-foot-high, 30-foot-wide 400-ton tower fitted with 1,440 transducers weighing 200 pounds apiece. When activated, the top-secret system named Project Artemis could locate submarines at great depths.

Following weeks of testing the bulky new equipment, the Mission Capistrano was rushed from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic to join a dozen other hastily-assembled Navy ships, searching not for a Soviet submarine but for the nuclear-powered U.S. Navy submarine USS Thresher that had sunk April 10, 1963 in 5,500 feet of water during a training mission approximately 200 miles east of Boston.

Officials knew that all members the 129-man crew had likely been killed when radio communication with the Thresher’s captain abruptly ended and pieces of the Thresher began floating to the surface. It is the second highest-ever death toll for a submarine, after the French submarine Surcouf, and the highest for a nuclear submarine. President John F. Kennedy ordered that all flags be lowered to half-staff. The nation mourned.

Upon arrival at the estimated scene of the sinking, the USS Mission Capistrano, which had been named the operation’s command and control ship, was able, with its Project Artemis apparatus and the assistance of other research and rescue ships in the search flotilla, to pinpoint the Thresher’s wreckage that lay scattered in six massive debris fields.

Robert Ballard, the noted maritime archeologist who photographed the Thresher wreckage 21 years after the submarine sank, wrote in the introduction of Spencer Dunmore’s 2002 book “Lost Subs”: “The Thresher looked as if it had literally been shredded... crushed by some giant, unseen hand.”

Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, added, “You sensed that something terrible had happened to the Thresher, and that many had died there. All sailors face risks, have always faced risks. But none more so than submariners.”

A Navy board of inquiry subsequently ruled the Thresher undoubtedly sank because of a welding or pipe failure that caused its engine room to flood.

As for the USS Mission Capistrano, it was refitted as a tanker and, in 1972, sold to a commercial firm that changed its name to Mission Exploration and converted it into a floating oil drilling rig. Eight years later, the ship made its final voyage, to a salvage yard in Brownsville, Texas, where, because of old age and obsolescence, it was torn asunder and turned into scrap.

In January 1977, the U.S. Submarine Veterans Assn. dedicated a memorial outside the main gate of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station to honor the crews of the USS Thresher and another submarine, the USS Scorpion, which had sunk in the Atlantic during 1968 routine underwater training losing its 99-member crew. A Navy board ruled that the Scorpion went down because one of its torpedoes likely exploded inside the ship.

The memorial is open year-round to the public free of charge.

The California Legislature voted unanimously in 2000 to designate Pacific Coast Highway between Long Beach and Huntington Beach, a portion of which passes by the Seal Beach Weapons Station, as the “Submarine Veterans of World War II Memorial Highway,” and Caltrans signs noting this designation may be found along the route.

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