Gulf of Tonkin VI: Solving the Mystery 2

This is the sixth installment of a continuing piece about my dad's experience. For the previous installments, click here to see part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V.

Solving the Mystery (2 of 2)

"Did you see any boats?"

"Not a one. No boats, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes”nothing but black sea and American firepower. But for goodness' sake, I must be going crazy. How could all of that commotion have built up out there without something being behind it?"

"Have a look at this. This is what Herrick, the commodore on the Maddox, has been putting out, flash precedence, plain language to Washington and the world in general tonight."

I was handed a few sheets of a rough communications log on which were transcribed all the messages from the Maddox since I had left the ship. The document as a whole read like a monologue of a man turning himself inside out. For the first hour or so, it was all assertive. Then every so often a message of doubt, a message expressing reservations, would pop up about sonars not operating properly, about radars not locking on targets, about probable false targets, about false perceptions due to lack of visibility. But still, it mainly reflected the tone of victimized vessels being attacked that is, until I got to the last page and a half; then, as I read down them, everything seemed to flip around. There was denial of the correctness of immediately preceding messages, doubt about the validity of whole blocks of messages, ever more skeptical appraisal of detection equipment's performance, the mention of overeager sonar operators, the lack of any visual sightings of boats by the destroyers, and finally there were lines expressing doubt that there had been any boats out there that night at all. The commodore urged a complete evaluation of the mixup before any further action be taken.

After the program, I wrote to Stockdale. A few weeks later, to my surprise, he called me. "I think I know where you can find your sonarman," he said, and pointed to a passage in Eugene Windchy's 1971 book, Tonkin Gulf. In fact, there were several references to Schaperjahn, identifying him as chief sonarman of the Turner Joy and noting his evaluation of the situation that night.

I called Schaperjahn, with the gratifying result of finding, after 20 years' uncertainty, that I hadn't been substantially wrong and that those who thought I was lying could finally have the full truth. Schaperjahn had not spoken publicly about any of this except for his comments to Windchy, who sleuthed him out in 1970, and he never expected to see his words in print. (However, he read and approved the first draft of this note for the public record.)

Now it's clear why "John White's sonarman" was never found. It hinges on the fact that I made a simple mistake by saying he was on the Maddox when he was actually on the Turner Joy. That error was due to faulty memory, nearly three years after my brief chance meeting with him in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in March 1965, after we'd returned from WestPac duty. Although the complete list of crew members on the two ships was requested by the Senate investigators, reporter Joseph C. Goulden discovered after the hearings that eight sonarmen were missing from the complete list. In his 1969 book Truth Is the First Casualty, Goulden commented that this incident is indicative of the enthusiasm the Pentagon has for inquiries into the Tonkin episode (p. 212). In other words, the Navy Department never pointed out the fact ”clearly known to it” that I'd misidentified Schaperjahn's ship.

John White

to be continued...