page_title: 1950 USS Missouri grounding
section_title: Salvage
hierarchical_section_title: 1950 USS Missouri grounding / Salvage
caption_attribution_description: English: Vice Admiral Homer N. Wallin
context_page_description: The USS Missouri grounding occurred 17 January 1950 when the battleship USS Missouri ran aground while sailing out of Chesapeake Bay. No one was injured, but the battleship remained stuck for over two weeks before being freed from the sand. The ship was so damaged that she had to return to port and enter dry dock for repairs.
  After the battleship was freed, a naval court of inquiry found Captain William D. Brown and a handful of other naval officers guilty of negligence. Brown was moved down 250 places on the promotion list, effectively ending his naval career.
  Missouri was repaired and reentered service with the active fleet shortly afterward. She would go on to serve in the Korean War before being decommissioned in 1954. She entered the Puget Sound Reserve Fleet in Bremerton, Washington, where she remained until being reactivated in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan put forth by then President Ronald Reagan and his Navy Secretary John Lehman.
context_section_description: By 8:30 am a request went out summoning all available tugs to the site of the grounding with the hope that they would be able to free the leviathan before any further damage occurred. An attempt made by Missouri's sailors on the day of the grounding met with failure, as did an initial attempt to pull Missouri back into deep water with sixteen tugboats. Before the tugs could lend any further assistance, the naval brass postponed the attempt, pending the outcome of further assessment. Missouri had traversed the shoal nearly 2,500 feet, and to compound her problem she had run aground during an unusually high tide. To add insult to injury, she had become the butt of a number of bad jokes among the American public, the Navy's rival service branches, and the Soviet Union's Atlantic fleet, who were quick to pounce upon the dreadnought's grounding as material for the naval publication Red Fleet.
  Initially, high-ranking US Navy officials elected to contract a private salvage firm to free the battleship, but Admiral Smith, at the time Commander, Cruisers, Atlantic, and the man who was responsible for issuing Missouri's orders disagreed with this plan. He reasoned that if the Navy got her on to the shoal, then they should be responsible for getting her off the shoal. Ultimately, he won his case for a US Navy salvage effort, but he was explicitly informed by officials at The Pentagon that his career would ride on his ability to successfully get Missouri back into deep water. To better organize the salvage effort, Smith and a number of men on his staff moved aboard Missouri to supervise her return to deep water. Smith's supervision also extended to answering the nearly 10,000 letters sent to the Navy from concerned citizens offering advice on how to get the battleship back into deep water.
  Commanding this salvage effort was Rear Admiral Homer N. Wallin. Wallin was the Navy Yard Commandant at Norfolk, and as a captain he had been instrumental in cleaning up the mess left by the Imperial Japanese Navy after the 7 December 1941 air raid that brought the United States into World War II. In total the salvage team that Wallin commanded successfully resurrected 19 of the 21 ships initially declared total losses and helped to refit those ships to serve in the Second World War. Wallin pledged to assist in the salvage effort, and initiated a five-point plan aimed at getting Missouri off the mud and back into the water:
  Remove as much weight as possible from the battleship,
  Lift the ship,
  Remove as much sand as possible from around the battleship,
  Use the combined power of the area's tugboats to pull the battleship,
  Dredge the channel to provide deep water for Missouri to reenter the shipping lanes.
  Because Missouri had run aground during an unusually high tide, Wallin required a date on which the tide would be roughly comparable to the conditions under which Missouri was grounded in order to free her. The date selected was 2 February. With time as a factor, Wallin took charge of the operation and put his five-point plan into motion. With the assistance of Admiral Smith, Wallin was able to assemble a large salvage force which included submarine rescue ships, special salvage ships, divers, and pontoons to add additional buoyancy for the tug boats when the time came to move Missouri.
  On 19 January, Comber, an army dredge, arrived at the site of the Missouri grounding and began the process of sucking mud out of the intended path through which Missouri would be freed. On 22 January, Comber was joined by the civilian-run dredge Washington in the dredging phase of Wallin's plan. Around the time the dredging began, Missouri's crew began offloading all non-essential items. Both 16-inch and 5-inch shells, powder, food, drink, and other materials were removed from the battleship and placed aboard barges and other ships to help lighten Missouri. At the same time, the Cimarron-class fleet oilers Chemung and Pawcatuck began the process of offloading Missouri's fuel. As the fuel was required to operate the generators aboard Missouri, its absence resulted in 
caption: Admiral Wallin, seen here c. 1951–1953, was singled out for command of the Missouri salvage operation
exif: {}