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A U.S. Navy submarine running on the surface and lost in pea-soup fog ran aground near Eureka, Calif., in mid-December 1916. Bungled salvage efforts a month later led to the loss of a $7 million cruiser sent from Mare Island to tow the sub back to sea. At the time it was the Navy’s worst peacetime disaster.

The beaching of the submarine H-3, also known as the USS Garfish, and destruction of the USS Milwaukee amounted to a tragic case of “whatever can go wrong will go wrong,” starting with the fog-bound sub. Crewmembers caught a glimpse of a smoke stack and aimed for it, thinking it was the stack of its mother ship, the USS Cheyenne, in safe waters. But it was a shore-side stack of the Hammond Lumber Co., and the 150-foot-long sub ran aground, broadside in dangerous surf at Samoa Beach, just north of the narrow entrance to Humboldt Bay.

The Cheyenne, commanded by Cmdr. W.B. Howe, and three subs, the H-1, H-2 and H-3, had left Bremerton, Wash., earlier in the month and were headed down the Northern California coast – in a hazardous area known as the “graveyard of the Pacific” because its rough seas and foggy weather had caused many shipwrecks. The plan was to enter the bay and get information on its possible future use by Navy submarines.

Coast Guard sailors stationed near the beach managed to rig ropes to the rolling sub and, aided by local residents, pulled the 27 H-3 crew members ashore, one at a time. They used a breeches buoy, a life ring with a leg harness attached to a line that could be drawn back and forth from the sub to the shore. The last man to reach shore was the sub captain, Lt. Harry Bogusch, 14 hours after the vessel ran aground. Several thousand people gathered to watch the rescues.

The Navy then sought bids from salvage companies to get the H-3 back into the water. Mercer-Fraser Co., a Eureka contracting and engineering firm that still exists today, offered to do the work for $18,000, but the Navy thought it was too small an amount to be taken seriously – a big mistake, as it turned out. The only other bid, for $150,000, was rejected as too high. The Navy decided to attempt the salvage on its own, dispatching the Milwaukee from Mare Island where it had undergone a major overhaul.

The officer in charge of the effort to get the H-3 off the beach was Lt. William F. Newton, temporarily in command of the Milwaukee. Ironically, Newton had been in command of the H-3 when it ran aground off Point Sur in June 1915. Never a captain of anything bigger than a sub, he now was responsible for a 426-foot-long, 10,000-ton ship. Despite warnings from local mariners, Newton was determined to use the Milwaukee to tow the H-3 to deep water. To help hold a course straight to sea and overcome a strong southerly current that would sweep any vessel toward land, lines ran from the ship to two smaller Navy vessels, the Cheyenne that was headed seaward and a Mare Island tug, the Iroquois, headed north.

“The plan worked on paper,” says Eureka historian Raymond W. Hillman, who wrote a book about the fiasco, entitled “Shipwrecked at Samoa, California: The Loss of the Navy Cruiser USS Milwaukee.” But the plan failed as the Milwaukee, less than 600 yards from shore, raised anchor and put tension on a heavy steel cable linking the ship to the beached H-3. At that point the Cheyenne’s propeller slashed its Manila tow line to the cruiser, and sailors on the Iroquois, about to run aground, used axes to quickly cut their tow line. But the Milwaukee couldn’t power to sea because the crew had no fast way to release its heavy steel tow cable – a major planning mistake. Leashed inescapably to the sub, the ship swung slowly to the south and into the surf zone. At 4:10 a.m. on Jan. 13, 1917, the cruiser, with a 24-foot draft, was in 12 feet of water, hard aground broadside to the beach and tilting at a 20-degree list – a helpless hulk.

Breeches buoys were used at first to get the crew off the doomed ship, followed by surfboats rowed by Coast Guard sailors and volunteers. It took until 8:30 p.m. to bring more than 400 men ashore.  Lt. Newton was in the last surfboat. The next day, crewmen returned to the Milwaukee to retrieve $128,000 that had been left on a table in the officers’ wardroom. Three days later, 270 men left on a special train for Mare Island, while remaining sailors stayed behind to salvage what they could from the ship. More than a century later, some wreckage from the Milwaukee can still be seen at very low tide.

On Jan. 17, James Fraser of the Mercer-Fraser company got word that the Navy had second thoughts and accepted the company’s bid of $18,000 to salvage the H-3 submarine. By late March, the sub was raised out of the sand, hauled 325 feet from the water line to dry sand and then cradled between two huge logs to hold her upright. A timber track was built and a donkey engine was used to haul the sub across a three-quarter-mile-wide sand spit to a Humboldt Bay launch site. On April 20, the sub was refloated and, after an extensive overhaul, remained in service until decommissioning in 1922. The sub was scrapped in 1931.

A formal Navy inquiry was expected. Besides the high dollar value of the lost cruiser and damage to the H-3, Milwaukee sailor H.F. Parker drowned when one of the surfboats overturned. Also, William Donnelly, a Mercer-Fraser worker, died in a fall from a trestle built from the shore to the Milwaukee to help in the salvage efforts. Historian Lynwood Carranco, who wrote extensively about the disaster, mentioned unverified reports that Lt. Newton was exonerated and Cmdr. Howe was hit with a reduction in grade. But Hillman says any impetus for a major inquiry would have faded with the nation’s declaration of war against Germany in early April 1917 and corresponding U.S. military build-up. Any officers to blame for any Humboldt Bay screw-ups were urgently needed elsewhere in the Navy’s World War I efforts.

— Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of early-day California history. The “Solano Chronicles” columns, running every other Sunday in the Times-Herald and on my Facebook page, highlight various aspects of that history. Source references are available upon request. If you have local stories or photos to share, email me at genoans@hotmail.com. You also can send any material care of the Times-Herald, 420 Virginia St.; or the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734 Marin St., Vallejo.  

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