The 5 thousand tons of the Soviet submarine were humiliated in front of the 80 thousand tons of the US aircraft carrier and without surprise it took the brunt of the collision.Īccording to the Navy report on the crash, everyone on the Kitty Hawk expected the submarine to sink and expected to detect it on the other side. As we later learned, it was the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk,” states the Russian military website Top War. It was clear that the submarine did not have time to reach a safe depth and was hit by some of the American ships. After a few seconds, a second powerful push. Shortly after the start of the dive, the submarine felt a strong blow. “The commander (K-314) ordered the start of an urgent dive to avoid a collision. Just after 10:00 in the evening of March 21, 1984, the K-314 appeared in the path of the aircraft carrier. Then, the group of aircraft carriers began to practice “deception techniques” in order to lose its Soviet tracker. Operating in open water halfway between Japan and South Korea, Kitty Hawk and his escorts had been playing what a Navy officer told the New York Times was a game of “cat and mouse” with the Soviet submarine, which was later determined to be K-314, a 5,000-ton Victor-class ship with a crew of about 90.Īccording to a report by the Naval History and Heritage Command, US forces had tracked and “killed”, or simulated its ability to sink, the Soviet submarine 15 times in the days leading up to the collision. It happened in March 1984, when a Battle Bravo group led by Kitty Hawk was a focal point of the naval part of the annual Team Spirit joint exercises with South Korea. Zumwalt Jr., the then chief of naval operations, aimed at improving race relations in the fleet.Īccording to navy statistics, this racial inequality continues to this day, with only 17.6% of the naval members being black.ĭuring the height of the Cold War, Kitty Hawk had a tense crossing with a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in which the US aircraft carrier took a piece of the Russian submersible stuck in its hull.
Still, the incident, along with others on Navy ships, prompted service leaders to place new emphasis on programs previously initiated by Admiral Elmo R. This group, as a whole, acted as' thugs', raising doubts as to whether they should ever have been accepted into military service in the first place,” the final summary of the report reads. “The subcommittee is of the position that the mutiny in Kitty Hawk consisted of unprovoked attacks by very few men, most of whom had below-average mental capacity, most of whom had been on board for less than a year, and all of whom were black. It was the epicenter of several Hollywood films. And only five of its 348 officers were black.Ī congressional report on the incident on the night of October 12-13, 1972, said that the fight left 47 sailors injured, “all but 6 or 7 of them” were white.Īnd while that congressional investigation led to attempts by the military to address racial inequality, the subcommittee's report itself is riddled with harmful language that reveals just how deep racial prejudice was in the U.S. The unrest and racial tensions aboard the Kitty Hawk certainly reflected the stark racial inequality in American society at the time.Īccording to a report by the Naval History Command, black sailors then constituted less than 10% of the crew of the Kitty Hawk that was 4,500 sailors. “The struggle spread rapidly throughout the ship, with bands of blacks and whites hanging around the decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches and pipes,” David Cortwright, now director of the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in a 1990 article.
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